A man turns up at the bus stop now, dressed in a badly fitting gray suit, stained with a layer of food and coffee and desperation. He wears a vintage store thin black tie and an impeccable white shirt and Abbie notes the shoes, black brogues, recently polished, and so the suit itself is incongruous. The suit also smells, like food and coffee and desperation, but also of sweat. Of exertion. Of failed dates. Nerves. And it covers up the soap on the man and so renders his efforts kind of tepid. Mixed. Abbie senses mixed signals from this guy. And he wonders if it’s done on purpose. He doesn’t know. Abbie is not cool enough to know how to read this guy.
Abbie wipes sweat from his forehead. His mood is growing even darker. This man is confusing him, and the music coming from the girl’s earbuds is insipid and the bus is late and the sun is so bright it’s like shitting on his head. And he forgot his sunglasses.
And the surroundings, this empty practically forgotten part of the city, once a hub of a nation’s industry and now a place between past and present, use and disuse, industry and commerce, here and there. The perfect hunting ground for the kinds of things Abbie hunts.
And Abbie turns around to stare at something else, to take his mind off the negative space that he has constructed at this bus stop, and he sees a chimney he hasn’t noticed before. An industrial smokestack rising behind an old building, once a factory of some kind, and now what looks to be on the verge of becoming a lowrise office complex. He picks up his backpack from the hot asphalt and he searches for a way to reach the ancient tower.
