The See-Through Building

Tom Reinholt had learned to read a building by its windows at night, and the tower down by the river had been dark for two years, floor stacked on floor of black glass where there should have been the small warm squares of people home from work, and he made himself look at it every time he crossed the bridge because he thought a man in his line of work ought not to look away from the thing his trade had made. It was November of 2010. He was thirty-nine. He had spent the best years of his life learning to put up buildings in a town that had suddenly, all at once, stopped needing any, and he was driving downtown at dusk to watch a hotel be sold on the courthouse steps for the price of a good house.

The little hotel-casino on the river had gone under in October, and now it was going to be auctioned, and he was not going to bid, he had nothing to bid with, but he wanted to see it. He parked and stood at the back of a small crowd on the courthouse steps in the cold. There were maybe two dozen people, most of them there the way he was, to look. The building had cost tens of millions to build not many years back. It sold in a few minutes for less than four million dollars to a company nobody in the crowd seemed to have heard of, and the man who read out the terms did it in the flat voice of a person who had read out a great many of these lately, and then it was over and the crowd came apart and drifted off down First Street past the shuttered storefronts, and Tom stood a while longer looking at the river.

He knew the whole downtown the way you know a body you have lived in. Two blocks over stood the condo tower that had opened straight into the teeth of the thing, twenty-some stories that had sold maybe a quarter of its units, its Chicago bank seized by the government the year before. Down by the water there was the other one, the unfinished tower, nineteen stories of raw concrete and no glass at all, that a developer had simply walked away from, and the men who did what Tom did called it the see-through building, because you could stand on the far bank and look straight through where the walls were meant to be and see the mountains on the other side. At the foot of Virginia Street, under the arch that still said the town was the biggest little city in the world, the tall casino had closed two Novembers back and stood empty with its name still bolted to it. The city’s redevelopment office, the one that was supposed to make things rise, had gone quiet in the spring and stayed quiet.

His own project was not a tower. He had never been that kind of developer. He had put nearly everything he had into a plain three-story building of loft apartments on the edge of downtown, in the flat blocks south of the tracks that nobody wanted then, and he had gotten the foundation in and the first floor framed before his bank stopped returning his calls, and now it sat behind a chain-link fence with the rebar going orange in the weather and a tarp that came loose in every wind. He owed more on the land than the land was worth. Half the town owed more than they were worth. He had read that better than half the mortgaged houses in the whole Reno valley were underwater, more money owed than the house would bring, and he believed it, because he was one of them, and so was nearly everyone he called a friend.

He got back in the truck and did not start it. His grandfather Dennis had run a record store on South Virginia through the years when the record store was the last live thing on a dying street, and Dennis used to say that the trouble with Reno was that it kept betting the whole house on one hand and calling it progress. Before Dennis there had been Clara, his great-grandmother, who had come out on the train for a divorce ninety years ago and stayed to open a dress shop, one small shop, one street, and had made it feed a family for the rest of her life. Four generations of Reinholts on Virginia Street, and none of them until Tom had ever tried to build the street itself, and here was the street, dark from the arch to the river, and here was Tom, thirty-nine and owing money on a hole in the ground.

His phone buzzed. It was his sister Jess, who was twenty-nine and painting in a cold warehouse a few streets from his stalled building, scraping by on nothing, waiting tables at a place that was itself about to close. She wanted to know if he was coming to dinner. He said he would. He did not tell her where he was.

He thought about the see-through building, the nineteen stories you could look straight through, and he thought that this was the honest shape of the thing, a frame with the mountains showing through it, a promise a man had made and could not keep and had left standing there for the whole town to read. He had spent his twenties and thirties believing the way you believe at that age, that you put the money in and the walls went up and the people came, that a town was a thing you could simply decide to build. He did not believe that tonight. He did not know yet what he believed instead.

He could call the bank in the morning and hand them the land, the way the man with the Chicago tower had handed it back, walk away clean and start again at nothing. Or he could hold it, pay what he could not really pay, keep the fence up around the hole and wait for a town that might not come back in his lifetime. He sat in the cold truck with his hands on the wheel and the river going by black and high below the courthouse, and across the water the see-through building stood open to the mountains, and Tom Reinholt turned the key at last and drove up out of downtown toward his sister’s place, still not knowing which of the two things he was going to do, only that he had until morning to decide, and that whichever he chose, the frame would still be standing there tomorrow, empty against the sky, for the town to make what it could of.

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