Griffintown, Before the Condos

She said she wanted to see the real one, not the Old Port, so I took her to the brick pile off Ottawa Street that was a brewery and then a warehouse and then nothing at all for nineteen years.

You get in at the corner where somebody cut the fence and somebody else bent it back badly.

Inside, sound does something you aren't ready for. It gets bigger and further away at the same time, so that a voice arrives with an amount of room attached to it, and when she asked how old the building was it came back off the concrete like the question of a stranger standing much further off than she was.

"My grandfather worked here," I said, which isn't true. Somebody's did.

Pigeons in the roof, and the constant small noise of them shifting. Glass on the floor in a layer, ground fine by twenty years of people walking on it, so that it crunches like gravel rather than glass, and after a minute you stop hearing it.

She read the walls with her fingers, actually touching them, which I wouldn't have done. Someone had put JE T'AIME in silver over an older tag that said FUCK GENTRIFICATION, and the damp was taking both of them at the same rate.

We went up. The stairs are steel and they're fine; they'll be the last thing to go.

From the roof you can see the Farine Five Roses sign, and the bridge, and, turning, about two hundred cranes standing over the south-west in various stages of doing this to everything else.

She kissed me up there and the sound of it went down into the building and came back multiplied, which is a thing I did not know a kiss could do.

"I don't usually do this."

Everyone says that up there.

They took it down in March. Two towers now, sold out before the hole was dug. I've stopped going down that street, which is easy, because there's no reason to.