Domovoi

by M. K. Hobson

  Domovoi

  M. K. Hobson

  Ryan Ceres is a real-estate developer, whose single passion--his love--is renovating derelict buildings and turning them into pristine, gleaming shops, offices, and apartments. The long-abandoned Windsor Machine Works seems like just the project for Ryan, or it would be if it were in a better part of town, but he feels compelled to take it on nonetheless. All seems well, until he comes across the ugly, misshapen, drunken squatter, Winnie, in one the rooms. Because she is not simply a squatter, she is the Domovoi, the spirit of the building, and she doesn't want to change.

  M. K. Hobson is a fabulous writer; her prose is beautiful and focused, and she gracefully brings alive her subjects. This is a story to read again and again, not just to appreciate the subtleties of the story, but simply to delight in Hobson's craft. This is undoubtedly the strongest story in this month's F&SF.

  Patrick Samphire

  Domovoi

  by M.K. Hobson

  “You’re a murderer and a rapist, and there may be no hope for you,” Winnie says to Ryan on a rainy afternoon at the end of the story. “But if there is, I will find it. I will remake you.”

  Ryan doesn’t reply. He didn’t know he was a murderer and a rapist until very recently, so there is nothing to say. Nothing except the obvious words: It was only because I loved you, but Winnie would probably respond to that by breaking his arm, so he does not say it.

  Instead, he stares at the rain dripping through a broken place in the roof. They are in an old warehouse down by the river, a place he bought yesterday. He paid for it with a check from his leather-covered checkbook, probably the last one they will let him write.

  After buying the building, Ryan took the bucket of ashes out of the trunk of his green Lexus. With a shaking hand, he scattered them everywhere, over the floors, the walls, the windowsills. The ash rose up in great billowing clouds, choking him, mingling with his tears to make a gritty paste that he licked off his lips.

  And now, after everything, he and Winnie are both stretched out on a stained mattress that they found by the back door, drinking from a bottle of vodka with a torn label. She looks just as she did when he first met her, immense ass and too-tight tank-top and all. Gone are the gray silk suit, the perfect teeth, the vacant stare. Now she just is what she is, nothing more or less. She has won.

  This is where the story ends, but it is not where it begins.

  The story begins on Ryan Ceres’ 40th birthday.

  * * *

  Ryan Ceres’ birthday is the 40th anniversary of what has been, and promises to continue to be, a perfect life.

  He is a real-estate developer. He drives a green Lexus and he listens to adult contemporary rock. His fingernails are manicured and his hair is the color of fresh honey. His eyes are as blue as the sun shining through ice.

  He is celebrating the anniversary of his birth with his fiancée, a slender redhead in a gray silk suit. They are having dinner at a restaurant on the top floor of the tallest building in town. His fiancée is staring down at a salad that is composed of two delicate leaves of arugula, a lump of herb-crusted goat cheese and a garnet-colored curl of shaved beet. She is heartbreakingly beautiful in a thoroughly banal way.

  Ryan, however, has long since ceased to notice what she looks like. He is staring past her, out the tall black windows at the city below. Like jewels set in rich fabric, his buildings glow up at him. They beam up at him adoringly. They love him and he loves them. They are his real dinner partners. They are the ones with whom he is sharing his birthday dinner.

  He raises his wineglass to the window, blowing them silent imaginary kisses.

  * * *

  At twenty, with a substantial endowment from a bachelor uncle who foresaw greatness in his young nephew’s cobalt blue eyes, Ryan started with old houses. Victorians, bungalows, foursquares, modernes; he fed on plaster dust and linseed oil. When he turned thirty, he went looking for a larger challenge and found it in the red-and-gold heart of Chinatown: the Gorham hotel, built in 1911. Eighty rooms of drunks and addicts. A wreck, a noble heap, a disaster with possibilities. He brought in his men, brutally efficient Russian laborers, and set them to work tearing the place apart.

  In one room they found hundreds of empty methadone bottles wedged under a floorboard, and hundreds of old hypodermics quivering in the ceiling above, flung like the pencils of schoolchildren, a garden of upside-down glass flowers. In another room, a room that smelled of mothballs and old-man liniment, dozens of dust-crumbling girlie magazines had been stuffed behind the wall. Stuffed there to block a draft? To avoid embarrassment? It didn’t matter. His Russians burned them with all the rest of the moldering yellow insulation. They stripped away rotting lath and horsehair plaster and put in smooth fresh drywall and expensive bamboo flooring, and when they were finished, the Gorham Hotel featured eighty ultramodern studios with brushed metal refrigerators and cultured marble cooking islands. Only the best.

  It made him his first million, a million that has expanded and contracted many times since, expanding with capital inflows, contracting to meet expenses, expanding and contracting, like a great beating heart, pushing new blood through old buildings.

  The old bank that he turned into lawyer’s offices. The old department store that he turned into a mini-mall. The old brewery that he turned into a brewpub. And, most recently, the old flour mill, reclaimed from the dull-eyed clowder of Hispanic squatters living in her labyrinthine basements, that he turned into twenty-thousand square feet of quaint little shops selling arugula, herb-crusted goat cheese, and organic beets. The proprietors of these little shops will make good money. Ryan will make nothing. His net profit on the deal is a satisfyingly round figure. Zero.

  Each building he takes on is a little bigger, each rehab a little more lovingly detailed, each project a little less profitable. There is a delicious purity in this that he relishes. It is not the money he desires. The money is nothing, only a tool to purchase goat-cheese and arugula for the empty-eyed cipher sitting across the table from him. The real satisfaction comes from the knowledge that he has made his buildings clean and pure, burned the filth of ages from their bones, scoured them of the unseen impurities time breeds. He has uncovered chimneys full of dead birds; the skeleton of a cat wedged between two wall studs; decaying piles of rat-shit in ancient ventilation ducts. He has exposed obscene secrets and expunged them.

  Quite suddenly, Ryan feels extremely pleased with himself. An erotic charge of satisfaction surges through his body. He looks lustfully at his fiancée, somewhat surprised to find that she is still there.

  Her hair shines, her face is perfect, her nails gleam, her skin is smooth as glass. The relationship between her and the curl of beet she is contemplating is entirely without entropy, a universe which has long since ceased to expand. She is as self-contained as an egg.

  The electricity charging his nerves dissipates abruptly, and his sudden elation is replaced by an equally sudden feeling of irritation. He puts down his fork heavily. The sound of silver on porcelain makes her look up.

  “Why would they put a curl of beet on the salad?” she sneers melodiously. “No one likes beets.”

  “Some people obviously do,” he says, flashing her one of his sandpaper grins designed to smooth out rough patches.

  He’s perfected these grins, he uses them often. It helps to grin, he’s noticed, even when you feel like tearing someone’s throat out.

  Life has apparently taught her the same lesson. A polite, fleeting smile dances across her lips, replaced quickly by a pretty little frown as she returns to her contemplation of the despised curl of beet.

  * * *

  It is Ryan’s 40th birthday.

  He gives his fiancée a good-night peck and doesn’t wait for the elevator doors to slide shut b
efore he turns and walks away. His fiancée must be in bed by 11 p.m. precisely, for she must be at the gym early the next morning to exorcise any fatty demons the arugula and goat cheese may have introduced into her pure corpus. She is utterly composed of routine and habit; if she is not in bed by 11 p.m. precisely, she might start breaking things. The moment his lips leave the cold flesh of her cheek, he ceases to think about her. She ceases to exist.

  He goes back into the restaurant, to its clean elegant bar filled with fresh-looking young people. The counter is made of zinc and there are cobalt-blue vases with yellow gerbera daisies in them. He sits, drinking steadily, the zinc cooling his elbows.

  He thinks about his Russians, his agents of efficiency and order, who are currently working on a project for another developer. He misses them. They just wrapped the flour mill project a week ago, and already he misses them. He misses their sharp staccato conversations, their sublingual grunts, their smell of oniony sweat. They are remaking an old generic family chain restaurant (orange and brown) into a new generic family chain restaurant (brown and orange.) He contemplates going out to the job site the next day and visiting them. But the idea depresses him. The building they are working on has no life, no spark. He longs for the thrill of performing surgery on a kicking patient, not slogging through the dissection of a corpse.

  Depressed, he leaves the restaurant, its zinc bar and gerbera daisies, and rides the elevator down to the street. The valet brings him the green Lexus and he turns on the adult contemporary rock. Loud.

  It doesn’t help.

  * * *

  Later, lying on a dirty mattress and drinking vodka from a bottle, Ryan will dream of this night. He will dream of the wind rushing through his hair like warm fingers, of the ceaseless rhythm of crickets blowing past, of the smell of leather seats covered with dew. For this is the night that he finds her.

  You will remake me, he whispers into her lap.

  But that is later.

  This night, he drives through the town, tapping a finger against his steering wheel, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He drives past many of his buildings, hoping that one will call out to him, invite him back, but none of them do. So he drives into an ugly part of town, a dangerous part of town, a part of town that wasn’t safe or savory even during its best years.

  He drives until pink and gold dawn fingers the hills, until he begins to think that he should go somewhere, to an actual destination. To his fiancée’s home. She has bleached-oak floors in her entryway. She will serve him herbal tea with a shortbread cookie.

  He takes a left. He will drive back and find the freeway.

  Then his breath catches.

  She rises and spreads before him, white stone walls stark in the peach colored dawn. Along her sides, thousands of tiny windows wink at him in the rising light. Some are broken; these stare at him, black and insane.

  She is surrounded by tall weeds. Over the front door, the words “Windsor Machine Works” are spelled out in thin steel letters, stark and streamlined, lush with the tragedy of a brilliant, aborted future.

  Below those letters, there are larger ones, painted on a warped sign nailed across her front door. The sign is old and battered, pocked with birdshot and curlicued with graffiti. But he can still read what it says.

  It says, “For Sale.”

  * * *

  He parks slantways, jumps out of his car. He walks the cyclone fence surrounding until he finds a beaten down place; he tears the leg of his slacks climbing over it, carves an ugly gouge in his calf. No matter.

  She is made of white limestone as supple and smooth as a virgin’s thighs. Her black twisting ironwork is crisp and devilish. The crumpled yellow newspapers crouching at her feet are supplicants satisfied by the simple blessing of her shadow; the glittering shards of broken glass bottles are like jewels, carelessly discarded.

  He climbs onto a low crumbling wall beneath one of the windows. He presses his nose to the grimy glass like a child hoping to see elephants.

  Inside, the building is a vast emptiness of square iron pillars and cement, thousands upon thousands of square feet of space. On the concrete floor, stagnant puddles glimmer, rainbowed with oil, reticulated with webs of settled dust. There are bolts in the cement where huge machines once anchored, straining against their own torque.

  He stands, his cheek pressed up against the glass, closing his eyes. He imagines walls hiding unimaginable decay, steel beams crumbling to dust, tinder-dry insulation chambered with mouse nests, wires wrapped in fraying cloth. He can feel the sunlight as it pounds into her.

  He’s in love. Again.

  * * *

  He buys the Windsor Machine Works building that day.

  A birthday present for himself. It surprises the gals down at the County Assessor’s office to see Ryan Ceres camped on their doorstep when they open the doors. He is unshaven and there are shiny purple hollows under his eyes.

  The gals in the County Assessor’s office tell Ryan that if the building is for sale, they can’t figure out who’s selling it; no one has paid taxes on it since 1963. It seems, in fact, to have no owner at all.

  This greatly puzzles the gals, for they cannot conceive of such an odd thing. It is an offense to their unimaginative natures to think that anything can escape taxation for that long. They chatter about it amongst themselves as they prepare the paperwork.

  Stop talking, he imagines screaming at them. Her secrets are not yours, they are mine, mine, mine . . .

  He blinks, realizes that the gals are staring at him. They are staring at him so hard he wonders suddenly if he’s said something aloud that he didn’t mean to. He wipes a hand across his brow, flashes them his sandpaper smile. They wouldn’t understand.

  Pulling out his leather-covered checkbook (which they understand completely), Ryan writes a check for the entire amount of back taxes, and just like that, the building is his.

  As he’s driving back across town, he is joyful. He is in a state of transcendent bliss. The day is perfect blue, and he has the top down and his sunglasses on. The warm wind is snaking through his hair. Adult contemporary rock blasts out of his speakers. This moment is the absolute peak of his life.

  A sudden thought strikes him. He flips open his tiny titanium phone and presses it to his ear. He calls Jose (his locksmith, always on the move) and arranges to meet him at the building.

  Arrangements made, Ryan flips his phone closed and taps the steering wheel in time to a Celine Dion song.

  When Ryan arrives back at the Windsor Machine Works, Jose is already there, bending over the open trunk of his always-breaking-down Justy. Jose is sorting through picks and tension tools and extractors. Choosing his implements carefully.

  Ryan is flooded with inexplicable anger. The thought of another man sniffing around her doorstep enrages him. What if he’d decided to tamper with her before Ryan had got there? What if he’d decided to put his unkind picks into her unwilling locks?

  “How long have you been here?” Ryan asks casually.

  “Just got here,” Jose tosses off. “‘Bout to leave, though. Bad neighborhood. They shoot you for nothing around here.”

  Ryan imagines punching him in the nose.

  Jose doesn’t speak as he makes the key. When he is finished, he fits the bright new thing into the old door, and turns. The door swings open, releasing a smell of ancient oil and something else, strange and indefinable, like steel shavings rusting in honey.

  “What the hell are you thinking, man?” Jose says. He stands with his hands on his hips, squinting into the gloom. He shakes his head as if trying to shake off raindrops of impending doom. “This place will finish you.”

  Ryan snatches the key away from him with a growl.

  “Get out,” Ryan says. “Get the fuck out.”

  He does not watch or wave goodbye as the Justy clatters away.

  * * *

  He walks past the front desk, pushes open a creaking door, and he is on the manufacturing floor. The gals at the coun
ty assessor’s office say that their oldest records indicate that this building was used to manufacture machine parts during the First World War.

  That whole area was really hopping during the war, one of the gals had said. Ryan imagines women in hobble-skirts, men in baggy canvas twill trousers, paunchy old managers in vests with watch-chains looped from button to pocket. All gone now.

  The manufacturing floor smells like stale urine and pigeon shit. As Ryan walks through the wide door and into the building, the space swells around him, the filtered light through the dust-caked windows cool and blue, the cement floor vast and undulating, like a calm body of water.

  His footsteps echo. On the floor there is a pile of repair manuals from the 30’s for a machine of indecipherable purpose. The manuals look as if they’ve been stored in a bucket of old oil. Blackberry vines thread through broken windowpanes. The iron pillars are cobwebbed with ribbons of rust.

  He thinks about the dump trucks and caterpillar tractors that will soon line up outside. He thinks about how the weeds will be cut away and the rusted pillars pulled down, and the oil-slicked concrete cleaned with foaming buckets of tri-sodium phosphate. He thinks about multi-use dwellings, white space, windows. He thinks about how everything dirty will be made clean, antiseptic, new, smooth. He closes his eyes and spreads his arms and imagines himself expanding, expanding.

  At the back of the room is a set of stairs. He moves over to them carefully, avoiding the puddles and piles of grimy debris. In the rafters overhead, he hears baby pigeons squeaking weakly, and the sound of wings.

  The staircase is a jury-rigged affair. Ryan mounts the stairs, carefully feeling each board for soundness.

  He stops after a few steps, looks back. The door is still open and the warm afternoon sunlight is inviting him back, calling him to come out. But it is hot out there, and in here it is cool. He notices the smell again, the strange smell of honey and steel. He looks up the stairs. At the top there is a hollow-core plywood door with a jagged-edged hole in the center. He imagines rotting construction, thin-walled offices and empty filing cabinets.