The Corrections

player and basically decent man to whom nothing bad had ever happened and whom you therefore didn’t want to disappoint.
    Denise let him touch her face. She let his big hands get in her hair and tie the knot, let him disable her.
    The wagon’s engine sang of the work involved in propelling a chunk of metal down a road. Brian played a track from a girl-group album on his pullout stereo. Denise liked the music, but this was no surprise. Brian seemed intent on playing and saying and doing nothing that she didn’t like. For three weeks he’d been phoning her and leaving low-voiced messages. (“Hey. It’s me.”) She could see his love coming like a train, and she liked it. Was vicariously excited by it. She didn’t mistake this excitement for attraction (Hemerling, if she’d done nothing else, had made Denise suspicious of her feelings), but she couldn’t help rooting for Brian in his pursuit of her; and she’d dressed, this morning, accordingly. The way she’d dressed was hardly even fair.
    Brian asked her what she thought of the song.
    “Eh.” She shrugged, testing the limits of his eagerness to please. “It’s OK.”
    “I’m fairly stunned,” he said. “I was pretty sure you’d love this.”
    “Actually I do love it.”
    She thought: What is my problem?
    They were on bad road with stretches of cobblestone. They crossed railroad tracks and an undulating stretch of gravel. Brian parked. “I bought the option on this site for a dollar,” he said. “If you don’t like it, I’m out a buck.”
    She put her hand to the blindfold. “I’m going to take this off.”
    “No. We’re almost there.”
    He gripped her arm in a legitimate way and led her across warm gravel and into shadow. She could smell the river, feel the quiet of its nearness, its sound-swallowing liquid reach. She heard keys and a padlock, the squawk of heavy-duty hinges. Cold industrial air from a pent-up reservoir flowedover her bare shoulders and between her bare legs. The smell was of a cave with no organic content.
    Brian led her up four flights of metal stairs, unpadlocked another door, and led her into a warmer space where the reverb had train-station or cathedral grandeur. The air tasted of dry molds that fed on dry molds that fed on dry molds.
    When Brian unblinded her, she knew immediately where she was. The Philadelphia Electric Company in the seventies had decommissioned its dirty-coal power plants—majestic buildings, like this one just south of Center City, that Denise slowed down to admire whenever she drove by. The space was bright and vast. The ceiling was sixty feet up, and Chartres-like banks of high windows punctuated the northern and southern walls. The concrete floor had been serially repatched and deeply gouged by materials even harder than itself; it was more like a terrain than a floor. In the middle of it were the exoskeletal remains of two boiler-and-turbine units that looked like house-size crickets stripped of limbs and feelers. Eroded black electromotive oblongs of lost capability. At the river end of the space were giant hatches where the coal had come in and the ashes had gone out. Traces of absent chutes and ducts and staircases brightened the smoky walls.
    Denise shook her head. “You can’t put a restaurant in here.”
    “I was afraid you’d say that.”
    “You’re going to lose your money before I have a chance to lose it myself.”
    “I might get some bank funding, too.”
    “Not to mention the PCBs and asbestos we’re inhaling as we speak.”
    “There you’re wrong,” Brian said. “This place wouldn’t be available if it qualified for Superfund money. Without Superfund money, PECO can’t afford to tear it down. It’s too clean.”
    “Bummer for PECO.” She approached the turbines, loving the space regardless of its suitability. The industrial decay of Philadelphia, the rotting enchantments of the Workshop of the World, the survival of mega ruins in micro times: she recognized the mood from having been born into a family of older people who kept mothballed wool and iron things in ancient boxes in the basement. She’d gone to school in a bright modernity and come home every day to an older, darker world.
    “You can’t heat it, you can’t cool it,” she said. “It’s a utility-bill nightmare.”
    Brian, retriever, watched her intently. “My architect says we can run a floor along the entire south wall of windows. Come out about fifty feet. Glass it in on the other three