Industrial Park Office

      Last night, you became aware of a fact which few still alive can claim to know: that, somewhere on the Milwaukee District West (MD-W) Metra line between the townships of Roselle and Bartlett, there is an old industrial park. Its proper name is "Cunningham Trace," and it was developed in the late 1970s to house the offices of various Chicago-area manufacturers. The complex contains about twenty buildings in total; each building is more or less identical to the others, as they were all designed with the same obsessive motifs: windowless exteriors; smooth, round recesses set into the façade above each front door which house a rain-streaked orb of dull copper, held out by a rod mounted perpendicularly onto the inner curve of the recess, so that they seem to hover in space; repeating octagons, spiraling out in a deranged Mandelbrot pattern which breaks the footprints of the buildings into diffractory urchins of faceted walls. 

     The architect - one Walter Nicht who became a local celebrity in the city for his signature style, which he called 'Masonic Brutalism' - had spent several years fleshing out this allegedly utilitarian property before simply vanishing one evening and leaving the rest of his team without any further guidance or instructions. None of his fellow engineers possessed the controlled schizophrenia required to see the project through to completion. Before any of the tenants could fully occupy and establish their offices, the venture was scrapped, the site was swiftly abandoned in less than 48 hours, and a looming, dense grass from the prairie upon which the site had been set rapidly reemerged to fence off these buildings from the nearby service road leading away to the interstate.

     You awoke with instructions to travel there. At 5:45 a.m., you sat up in bed, got to your feet, and dressed for a clammy day. As the sun was just removing the caul of night from the sky, exposing the silhouettes of billboard stanchions by the Kennedy Expressway in Old Irving Park, you bought a train ticket from the automated fare vendor and sat blankly upon one of the benches on the platform. The train ride was brief. At that dawning hour, almost no one was in your train car, save for a ragged, toothless black man who sat on the upper deck and gesticulated at something beyond the murky lozenge-shaped windows. Each time he would allude to what was outside, he would perform a mute, convulsive laugh, followed by a scream responding to the dismay of a sudden realization. You ignored him, he ignored you.

     At the entrance to the industrial park, you threaded a path through the prairie grass, which rose above your shoulders. The building you sought was at the far back end of the lot, where the pavement abruptly broke off (the construction had been discontinued before the asphalt could be poured there). 

     The front doors of the office were treated with a tinted film - you could not see anything beyond them. An etched brass plate by the intercom bore the words: "Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America." You kicked through the glass, striping your leg with deep, parallel gashes, and walked in. The lobby was carpeted with a thick mauve fabric meant to simulate the texture of moss; this utterly consumed the sound of your footsteps. 

     You knew where to go. Following a railing of lacquered oak, screwed into the brick outer wall of main work floor, you wound around a pen of cubicles and entered a blinded office by one of the chamber's back corners. 

     In the office, a bare desk stood under a low-hanging lamp, which cast a cone of blistering light onto its dust-blanketed surface. There, you found a square of heavy card stock printed with embossed characters. This is what it said:

"Supreme meat to: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati. An experimental loaf - pulp of the sublime - mother cuts in to excise servings, never finds her way out. The mass is homogeneous - the core is a processed pith and repository for the myth of 'homemade dinner.' For the specialists: three tins, respectively. All must agree to transcribe the full cubic content into manuscript form; as we know from previous trials, disaster is a distinct possibility as this is attempted; previous analysts, after interpreting the slab of a cross-section, have gone into 'event-mode' with their families (which is to say, they have gotten very 'active' with their wives, sons, daughters, and the peripheral neighborhood friends of the latter - so completely active that everyone involved was processed into a black jelly found smeared on the walls; these scenes of dissolution always invariably occurred in the foyer, usually near the key bowl, the shoe rack, or the umbrella urn). This borne in mind, bachelor staff will receive preference as operators moving forward. In urgent prayers, I ask that The Great Transparent One make provision for all of you as we prepare for what is to come. May no one follow us to the place where we are going."

     You folded the card and tucked it into the pocket of your shirt. Once you had returned home and gotten back to bed, you would use this document as a legend - you would follow the trace of its author and his unnamed associates.