Chicago gothic

c-is-for-circinate:

They built a secret machine under City Hall to make the city run, built it in the 1950s out of brick and iron and steam. They feed it promises and money, and that’s not such a price to pay, to keep the machine running, to make the city run. It only devours its own keepers. It only gets that hungry once in a while. Everybody knows it’s the machine that makes the city run. Nobody knows how to turn it off.

You know somebody who knows somebody who knows where Al Capone is buried. There are mobster mansions and legends of old shoot-outs everywhere, if you know where to look, but you don’t go looking. Ghosts are for tourists. You know where to look and you don’t go looking. You don’t ever look.

You can’t trust the weather. You check every morning to find out what season it is. Yesterday, an enormous snowman melted in the eighty degree heat. Today the flowers are all caked in three inches of frost. In January, dead leaves skitter before autumn winds and spring crocuses bloom. In April, you walk around in shorts in the middle of a blizzard. You hold out hope for August. Everybody says that snow in August is a myth, like the ghosts. You’ll wear shorts in August in the snow anyway.

The river flows backwards now, most of the time, because we made it. In August when it doesn’t snow, it rains, enormous clattering thunderstorms with lightning that strikes the tops of buildings again and again and again, fit to flood, and the river remembers what it used to be. It flows backwards into the lake, just for a little while. The lake always remembers.

The top six floors of that building are seventy years old, gray crenelated stone and brick. The ground floor was only just built last week. The elevators are new, but the stairwells are old, with pipes that creak like the old factory machines that used to make bread and fabric and paper. Nobody takes the stairs.

You’ve never gone down to where the stockyards used to be. They say the screams still linger in the air. You wouldn’t know. You don’t want to know.

This city burned to the ground once. It was a sacrifice, a cleansing of all the history before. They slaughtered thousands of animals a week and the streets ran with blood. The mob spread blood and alcohol all around, but in the 1950′s, they built a machine under city hall to run the city and everybody pretends that at least, at least the machine keeps the city from needing blood. When you hear a gunshot, you turn your head and don’t read the paper tomorrow morning.

You’ve never seen the monsters, so they must not exist. They mustn’t. If they do, then they’re down on Lower Wacker Drive or in the dark shadow-areas beneath the L tracks, bound by iron on all sides, or in the old post office, staring out and watching as hundreds, as thousands of cars go by.

You can’t trust the weather. On foggy days, the clouds close in on all sides and disappear the tops of all the new chrome-and-steel skyscrapers. On good days, they all come back when the fog lifts away.

This is the only real city. New York is a story and all the people are made of metal and grime. Los Angeles is a snowglobe fairyland and the people are plastic and suntan lotion covered in shine. Chicago is real. Everything that happens here is real. Chicago is made of blood and cattle meat and stone. Especially blood.