The Bennett Building

The Trouble With Apartment One — Chapter 26

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The Park Row Building at 15 Park Row — 2004 — B. Späth.

THE BENNETT BUILDING

In the wake of the attack, a malignant and ever-replicating cloud had gripped the bottom of the city and swallowed up the skyline—
It invaded every corner, crack, and window frame—insinuating itself into the oldest reaches of the city.
And it claimed the stately Bennett Building on Fulton Street—it cast the morning into twilight—moving through the open doorway, past the columns in the lobby, up the marble staircase, and all along the silence of the tenth floor—and into the small and unassuming office at the end of the hallway...

★ ★ ★

During the course of an eerie and unsettling hour, not yet a year since the day of the attack, I had been stealing alone on foot through the streets of the Finance District—on my way to a reckoning with the city—and at length found myself, with growing apprehension and a dusting of fine gray ash about my shoulders, transfixed by the cast-iron facade of the Bennett Building on the corner of Fulton and Nassau Streets.

★

I’ve been here before, I’m certain, I thought—
I seem to recall its myriad columns, baroque facades, and wrought-iron ornamentation…

★

You found it, I see! said a voice to my left—Holmstrom was precisely on time. We’re going to the tenth floor, he said—as we passed under the vaulted arch of the lobby.
Adorned with tarnished brass fittings, its accordion gates askew, the elevator buckled and groaned—hauling us upward at last to the top floor.
Under the drone of fluorescent light, we approached a door at the end of the hall—with a gold colored sign that said, Punk Magazine, Incorporated.
No one’s been in here since the day of the attack, Holmstrom said, as the door pressed open with a grinding sound...
I averted my eyes at once—before a blast of incandescence. A small and unassuming office slowly revealed itself—yet rendered monumental by the voltage of the sun.

★

For the better part of a year, the room had sealed itself off—incubating beneath the sun’s relentless heat. A petri dish for toxic spores, a greenhouse primed with a foreign soil. Who can say what unnatural things took root?
Indeed, a pale gray powder had collected in the corners—as though the attack itself had drifted through the room. And spiraling stalks of mold erupted from the baseboards—over half a foot in length.

★

We were all ready to relaunch Punk, Holmstrom told me—when the attack shut everything down! Twelve hundred copies are still over there in the corner…

★

The carpet’s thick with poisonous powder, I thought to myself—and every shudder of the door sends more of it down from the ceiling…

★

You can probably pull up the carpet, Holmstrom said—but you’ll have to clear it with Management first.
He passed me the key—wished me luck in a distracted voice—and hurried off on some unnameable errand…
As the door slammed shut behind him, a burning dust came sifting down from the heavens and fell about my head and shoulders…

★

I must arrange for lodgings tonight, I said. I’ll inquire at Cleveland Place—
There may be a berth in Apartment Number Seven—somewhere along the floorboards—
In that luckless zone between the sofa and the window—where I throw the bedding down each night—not an arm’s length away from a howling television set…