she found the cornerstone: THE BREVIARY, 1861. The name was familiar—she’d read about it someplace. Her smile broke into a short laugh, and she pressed her fingers inside the crevices of its limestone skin, just to make sure this building was the real deal.
…And it was. Holy cow.
Chaotic Naturalism. She’d studied it in graduate school. Daydreamed about it, and in doodles, tried to make it work, not just in theory, but in application. But she’d never imagined she’d see the genuine item.
Back in the 1850s, a whole fleet of Chaotic Naturalist structures were erected, mostly in eastern Europe. Houses, libraries, city halls—from the lithographs she’d seen, they’d all been gorgeous. They’d also been unsound. Their foundations hadn’t stood flush to the ground, so their support beams never settled right, and over time they’d collapsed. At least a hundred people, probably closer to an unreported 250, had died within their crumbling walls. Some instantly, as roofs had caved; others slowly, trapped in basements like miners, hoping their next breath would not be their last.
True to the Chaotic Naturalist philosophy, The Breviary’s floors differed in height from one story to the next, and its walls didn’t intersect at right angles but were either obtuse or acute. The gargoyles weren’t evenly spaced but appeared at random intervals, like flowers on a vine. Inside buildings like this, dropped marbles rolled in all directions, and the furniture warped, so once a couch lived in a particular space for a few years, you couldn’t move it, or it crumbled.
Supposedly, the last of these buildings had been condemned in 1929. And yet, here was The Breviary. Ten thousand tons of cement and steel, and not a single right angle. How on earth had it survived?
Once she got inside the building, her grin spread even wider. The lobby was grand as a ballroom. Cracked Italian mosaics along the floors depicted blackbirds in flight, and a low-hanging crystal chandelier emitted a sallow glow, like an archeologist’s lantern unearthing a deep-sea relic. Dust specked the air, thick and itchy in her nose. The back of the room was elevated, as if it had once been a stage or pulpit, and behind it were randomly placed, art-deco-era stained-glass windows. This building was neglected; run-down; divine. She leaned into its entrance, cold butterflies cramming her chest, and thought, I can see now, why there are wars, and people kill for things.
At the doorman’s post, she found a slender Hispanic man in blue coveralls whose name tag read EDGARDO. He looked about seventy. “You the lady who wants to see apartment?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I’m the super!” he announced, then hobbled with the help of a knobby cane toward the old-fashioned, iron-cage elevator without shaking her hand. She followed, thinking for a second that he had told her he was super!
They stood in silence while the car ascended. The metal dial slowly ticked the floors: one…two…three. She patted her thighs in three-second intervals, to hurry the thing along. If her boss found out she’d left the office, she’d be up some serious shit creek. At Vesuvius, they worked the first-years hardest. She was lucky most nights to get home before The Daily Show.
Edgardo smiled through brown, chewing-tobacco-stained teeth, so she smiled back. He smelled a little. Like garlic and tuna fish.
“I working here almost a year,” he said. “I’m only one who takes out garbage and cleans. The rest all lazy. Don’t even flush their own toilets. I fix everything!”
She nodded, hoping the toilet part was an exaggeration. “That’s great.” The cage wobbled as it ascended, like the cable attaching it to the top of the shaft was shredded to a single, thin wire.
“Yes. I fix roof and leaks. Exterminate insects—roaches, red ants, everywhere! Everything run-down, but I fix. I am super!” he said.
“Wow, that’s fantastic,” she told him. She didn’t intend the sarcasm; it just happened.
Chastened, Edgardo looked down at his penny loafers. He’d sliced the leather wider, to accommodate shiny, matching quarters. There was something inherently tragic about that to her, like watching a Martian try to put on pants both legs at a time: they have no idea.
“No, really,” she said. “What you do is wonderful. Places like The Breviary get torn down every day, and the world gets worse because of it. People have no respect for quality or history. They’d make houses out of Styrofoam and throw them away every week if they could.”
The elevator creaked past the fifth floor, where she spied dirty beige carpet that might once