Beneath the pale expanse of deep sky, a colony of giants stands. They are cranes, faded to a dull yellow. Most of them sleep; a few move slowly. This is the only thing I can see when I look up. The buildings haven’t gone up yet; I can still see before a mountain of concrete covers my line of sight and erases the sky, already pale as it is.
This used to be one of the noisiest markets in the city. Building materials were produced and wholesaled here; the smell of hardware, steel, and sawdust was everywhere. In childhood, it sat along my daily route to school, its particular brand of clamor somehow balancing my suppressed spirit. Browns and grays interwove; workers in iron helmets hauling timber beams moved back and forth. They were not the models of our future that our teachers and parents pointed us toward. On the contrary, we were pressed, in a way that bordered on self-harm, to tie our futures to the upper classes as tightly as possible. I would clutch my school bag and squeeze into the narrow school bus seat, watching through the murky pale-green window as the workers displayed their joy, anger, and hardship. It was direct, unselfconscious display, and it made me a little envious.
Sounds belonging to the earth: the hammer, the saw, the crash, the welding arc, the curses, the laughter.
Then a development plan laid waste to that thriving place. Perhaps they wanted to build a modern, orderly large-scale processing facility or materials market; the old makeshift shops were demolished without exception. The people scattered and were gone, leaving only the sound of the wind. After some time, an outer wall went up to seal off the construction site within.
For the six or seven years that followed, I never once encountered that remembered noise of life. What I saw instead was an endless run of political propaganda boards, and walls, and cranes. The people around me had grown more mechanical in their movements; was this a collapse of perception or the drift of an era? Gradually, life became like silt, the stuff used to build or to bury everything. Over those six or seven years I changed my body, my temperament, my thinking with astonishing flexibility, until my thoughts calcified, until my voice went dark, until day after colorless day, until winter after cold winter.
And then, on a chance walk home one day, I encountered a memory sealed in dust, a memory that stood for a childhood still full of life.