This story won second place at the MAYDAY 2024 Short Fiction Contest.
The whole idea, philosophically at least, was for it to look out onto the rest of America, to build a Promethean tower of sorts – a beam with no terminus – just light – just America – god in a building, reaching up and scraping, clawing at heaven, first as mere men, then as the closest thing that men have come to becoming gods on this earth – builders.
Most of the swine just thought it was a big fuckin building.
“You know what they say – it’s lonely at the top!”
“Dumb fuck” the Builder thought.
That’s the problem with foremen – they think that they’re special as soon as they clamber up an inch above the scum they push around, but that’s what you get for building in the Midwest: swine’s swine.
The light, though, would be completed soon – one beam of great American light per great city west of Chicago, caught on the solstice and spread out just as the power of great men is and always has been – one fine beam of greatness shared out at the precise latitude of each.
The East was over by then, in the Builder’s eyes at least. Miami was underwater, Boston was always a shithole and Atlanta was practically in the goddamn woods. Worst of them all, though, was New York, having run itself into the ground years ago, collapsing into itself like a swamp claiming an empty boat whose captain had abandoned it long ago. East was Europe, and Europe was over. A fine run they all had.
West was different; parts of it still defiant against the time and rot that had become this country, for it held to its character, defiant in its fight to remain big and brave and full of gold and wheat and fury. The building was West – boldly and beautifully West.
The idea of 528 floors was a farce from an engineering perspective, but the Builder worked around it. Amazing, the things you can do if just a few smart people can manage to “concur” for long enough. The human mind can convince itself of anything, but it was there now, almost in its entirety – and he looked out onto the endless flat of the prairie as the foreman repeated a dogshit, mouth-breathing joke about taking the stairs. Dumb fuck.
He usually wasn’t this harsh to the workers. They made the buildings happen, and they were to be rewarded for their labors with the knowledge that they did something great, even if that was the newest fine lie told to swine along with all the wonderful others they were told, fine lies ranging from the pictures in the sky to the idea that their dogs really love them. Swine.
Yet, some swine were fatter – one of them couldn’t come up with the term “solstice” while he was installing the twisted glass in the top workshop. He stood there, sausage fingers nestled between his love handles and belt, supervising and reminding the others about how important the piece was without understanding, instead saying “when the sun is just right” or “on the right kinda day” and any other string of words that did not reveal he did not know what a solstice was. It saddened the Builder, quietly of course, not enough to ignore it or truly pity him. But he did pity him.
It enraged Agatha.
“Solstice. It projects light on the solstice.” She articulated.
He gave her a big, hairy thumbs up. “Yes ma’am – you got it.”
“Say it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Say it projects light on the solstice.”
The other laborers looked around uncomfortably.
“It projects light on the solstice.”
She was cold and he loved her. Her features were stretched, but soft, her nose in particular – trickling down her face like a waterfall or long runway, but still smooth enough to make her look and feel truly and entirely divine to him. She wore flowy clothes usually, like cold, arrogant people tend to – further contributing to her overall feathery appeal, of course, until she spoke, her words cutting sharply and quickly like a wiry boxer – always ready to defend if need be. These defenses were usually unneeded, of course, but she applied them nonetheless. When he spoke unkindly to her – and this was rare – it hurt her badly. This made him love her more. In the cold, she clung tightly to him and him to her.
She first saw the designs two years before the first divorce, commenting that 37 was early to begin thinking of a legacy, but he could tell she was secretly enthralled by a blueprint that spanned the entire long wooden table she had commissioned from the Mennonites down the road years prior, imagining Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthday parties that never materialized as they stopped loving each other. The Mennonites had constructed the table right in the room and she watched them pray like an anthropologist watches apes, surely considering them living pieces of Early Modern Europe – her field at Oxford. He said staring was rude. She had sipped black coffee from a stone mug she brought back from a trip to South America where they had slept on a balcony on the invitation of the Perons.
They finished the table, and those missing christmases had passed and as he still looked down at the print and felt a friendly kick in the rear as she walked towards what had been our bedroom. She just looked at him – furious and in love for the arrogance that laid on the table.
Three hours later she left, fastening her Bvlgari back on her wrist with the door to the bedroom open.
“It can never be done, you know.”
He remained silent, following her with his eyes, ever so intently as she got dressed. “What would make you stay?”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – 147 floors in, she paid him another visit, and I was pleased to see I was not the only one who had put on a little weight, but she wore it well. Partners, for a time, but no children. Never children. Not to say it was not possible, but just not practical. Not with books and lectures and philanthropy. She dreaded the idea of cooking dinner, which would have been fine – he made a fine chicken masala – shrimp as well, but it was never really about those things – not about work or being tied down or even the loss of freedom that was children for her. It was the agony she was scared of.
“My students sent me here to beg you not to build.”
“On what grounds?”
“They’re convinced I am the only one that can stop you.”
“On what grounds?” He hissed.
“It’s problematic.”
“You and I know that means nothing.”
He kept looking busy, sad and silent in one of the few places he ever had the upper hand on her, where he had built a palace that she could not leave him in for it was his and his alone. “So that is a no.” She said,
“It wasn’t much of an ask.”
“I’ll blame that on the long flight.”
“Well, good thing it’s a long project.”
She turned and left, and his anger burned, quietly. She had entered his realm, where he was all powerful like mickey as he raised his hands and crashed the waves against each other in the film they watched with a nephew for the one night they ever had a child in either marriage – and now she was there to threaten all of that, to try and push down what he owned, to be god in his universe – no. No she would not, he said. It was a lazy, cocky attempt at a coup e’tat and she knew it. The arrogance. He loved her for her arrogance.
She looked at him through the mirror at the exit of the hall with that silent, slowly lapping rage, the controlled burn you have for someone that you have invested far too much into to ever truly move from, but still must hate. He looked back through the mirror. He looked with forced indifference that, as all indifference, was rage and murder deep down. He folded a swimming pool print into an airplane, letting it fly and skid to her aching feet on the marble. – – – – – – – – – – – – –
His father died on the 278th floor. Perhaps that is poorly phrased – during the 278th floor. She sullied herself with a visit to Kentucky, leaving a replica of his schoolhouse made of matches on the cabinet next to the front door – not eight inches from where he had left the ring box before the first proposal, forced to run through the woods and back down to the river by the house so he could drop down on one knee again. That would have been decades ago by the 278th, and his father had laughed then and fried them each a peach with cinnamon, honey, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream and they listened to John Prine and Joni Mitchell records and were very happy and humble for a short time in the green woods.
But that was then.
During the 278th floor, his father had a stroke in front of the students during a lesson and died a day later in his chair that faced the porch window, having never taught a grandchild of his to read, his greatest wish. The Builder stood next to the chair and looked through the crowned glass window as her hand slid into the small of his back, cold and lovely. They ate peaches raw and buried the pits by the river, never speaking of death, divorce, or legacies. – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Finishing touches came and the city was bankrupt – truly this time, from what they were told. Crime and sloth and avarice ate Chicago – people ate Chicago. He removed the light panel for Los Angeles as well, so now only four beams extended westward on the solstice, and Aggie was sure that everyone on that top floor knew it was the solstice, as she rubbed her new glass
ring that was cut from the San Francisco window. Nobody was to touch the panels without knowing what they meant, without knowing the cost of getting there. She wasn’t being unkind – not in her estimation. She wanted them to understand what they were making. She wanted them to understand what they were a part of. They were lucky enough to know how to read, so read, goddamn it, she thought, they better do it then. The ones who built Notre Dame may not have even truly understood what reading was.
They drove out to the country to see it, having bought a farmhouse years ago that stood just off the path of the Seattle beam. Wheat grew all around it – fine golden wheat and they sat in a Datsun 1966 roadster, patiently waiting for the light that came from a new, fine American god. So many years and so many admissions of love and refusals and “not the right time”s. Murder too, of course. To have their type of money in America is to murder, but they were old now – not grown up – old, and old meant things like legacies and death were to creep up and replace thoughts of students and fried peaches and wind in the woods. Her always long features started
to droop and his hair was all but gone – old. The best years wasted to time and fury – old. But all along he built it – the monstrosity was finished – a legacy cemented in a city that rotted beneath it the whole time – now a lone reminder of what was once possible in a city that gashed open the heart of a continent and spread the light created by a singular great man.
People would sleep in the cold of its shade, and many died making it, with many more dying from the money it took, and the Builder knew it was an abomination to some. He also knew that people did not understand gods or men who had much in common with them.
He was proud of the things he could do. He was proud to build while others suffered. Mostly, though, he was proud of what he did without her.
She was a toy, after all.
And boys put toys aside to craft the world.
“It’s my child, really. Or the closest thing.” He remarked.
“It’s not the closest thing.”
She placed her elbow on the iron rod that ran behind the two seats in the baby blue convertible, resting her ear in her open palm, a small smile creeping under aviator sunglasses she wore on the night the beam was to run right over the car. He chuckled at her suggestion. “And what would be closer? The cave house? The boathouse?”
“You know.”
He paused. He looked out flat towards the wheat that surrounded the car. He did not know. She sighed and took his hand in hers and patted with the other. “
“You remember where I went that Christmas. You never liked deficiencies. It was amazing – at ten weeks they saw the deficiencies.”
“Deficiencies?”
He sat silent. She interjected.
“Profoundly deficient.”
“You would have lived?”
“Yes.”
The timer on her cell phone went off. She grabbed his thigh.
“Oh look – here it comes sweetie!”
The beam strode out bravely from the building, washing over us in the car. It was warm, the light. Just a slight warm, like that of a lightbulb. Not true warm. No fire. No blanket. A dull warm.
‘Was it a boy or girl?”
“Does it matter?”
She looked back at him, coldly as they bathed in the light. A creak emanated from the distance.
“I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to distract you from the big moment.”
The light bounced to her side of the car, jiggling gently. He saw it dash across the steering wheel – his eyes lacking the power to look up at the beast as it began to sway back further towards the lake, then again towards the people. A crack rang out, and the wave of sound rocked the tiny car’s suspension. A wave doused the children who awaited in the street below.
The Father watched his child burn.
Wind blew flames towards him so he could feel the warm.
PATRICK NICODEMUS MILLER is a writer, educator, and graduate student at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. For years he taught 8th grade in Mission, South Dakota and is currently working as a ski instructor at Gunstock, just off Lake Winnipesaukee. He spends most of his time thinking about craft, The Baltimore Orioles, and his retired cattle dog, Huey.
