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s to make sure nobody ran off with the construction company’s expensive equipment before morning. Up until then, I’d mainly guarded college campuses, a couple of office buildings.

But 1088 was none of these things . . . yet. 1088 was a work in progress.

Lit mostly by the giant neon crucifix on top of the church across the street—an extra implication of moonlight occasionally smearing down through the clouds, touching its incomplete lines with snail-track grey—1088 looked like a serial killer’s dream house: Stately Dahmer Manor, replete with shallow trenches and stacks of dry cement bags, a bleak theme park of prospective murder and burial scenes. Below, nude walls held up the faceless, backless concrete doll’s house: Above, girders barely made a roof, let alone an upper floor.

“So,” I delicately asked my trainer for the night, former site S.O. Sonny Rehan, “are those holes up there just left . . . open . . . all the time?”

He laughed. “Oh, yeah, man. I wouldn’t even bother going up there. Seriously, I mean. Saracen got no medical plan—you break your neck on patrol, nobody’s gonna care but you.”

Sonny, a gangly young Sikh from Kenya, had spent much of his career with Saracen so far assigned to 1088. And since both his parents also worked for the company (mother staring down potential shoplifters at the Eaton Center, father wrangling illegal immigrants up at the airport), he knew every angle there was, not to mention how they could best be taken advantage of. Now, after two years’ weekend training and a written recommendation from his site supervisor, he was off to fresher fields—the far more lucrative double shifts of Dispatch, where he could spend his time tagging lucky winners for the same shit work he’d finally escaped. But he wasn’t gone yet, and a surfeit of solitude had obviously made him talkative.

“You know that part in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they eat the chilled monkey brains, man?” he demanded, at one point. “We used to do that—my uncles, my Dad and me. Little grey bush monkeys. Hold ’em still, saw off the top of the skull, then just go at it with a spoon while they’re still kicking. Nothing like it, man.”

Sonny gave me the grand tour. He read me the site standing orders, which required me to make a complete patrol every forty-five minutes—checking specifically for squatters, vandals or thieves—before returning to the portable office where I was to sit between said patrols, filling out my Daily Occurrence Report and reading day-old tabloids. He pointed out the “cop button,” conveniently hidden just under the lip of my desk, which had to be pulled out and pushed back in with a special key that looked like a taken-apart can opener.

“How long does it take them to get here?” I asked. “I mean, usually?”

“Five minutes. Probably.”

I looked at him. “Probably?”

Sonny shrugged. “Oh, man, depends.” Adding, cheerfully: “But I never had to push it more than twice, anyways.”

These, then, were the major drawbacks of 1088, according to its most regular custodian:

1. No lights on the upper floors of the building.

2. Permanently open holes in said floors, so big even a novice such as myself would notice them.

3. No interior toilets.

4. No flashlight on site.

This last item frankly amazed me.

“First two months on the site, man, I put in a request at end of every D.O.R.,” Sonny said. “They had to call and tell me personally there were no extra flashlights anywhere.”

“It’s like some bad fucking horror movie.”

Sonny grinned. “Can be.”

* * *

When I look back on how I was with Colin—what I did, what I said, what I allowed to be done . . . it all seems so . . . improbable. Like a fever dream. The shed cocoon of my own sweat, facing from bed sheets hung up to dry: Invisible ink run backwards, wilting from the flame of clear-headed examination.

I tell myself I loved him then, which I know to be true. I tell myself I had no control.

I tell myself it was love, as though that mere fact explains anything.

* * *

I called Colin that first night, before I performed what was to become my normal “patrol”—stepping outside the portable, walking around the building (keeping a careful space between me and it), peering inside and scanning for any moving shadows, before retiring to falsify the D.O.R. My fingers sped through the flat little song of his phone number. He picked up on the third ring.

“House o’ Colin.”

“Hiya.”

What did we talk about? I couldn’t tell you if I tried. Probably the dog we’d bought together. Probably the movie we’d seen last night. I know we didn’t talk about how we were supposed to get married in three months, our agreed-upon deadline, to commit to each other and stay together the rest of our lives—even though my mother couldn’t stand him, and his mother wouldn’t even acknowledge I existed. Except for that one time she’d taken him aside, during our sole joint visit to homey old Brantford, and told him, “You know, Colin—you sleep with trash, you become trash.”