There's renovation going on at the building where I work, up on the seventeenth floor. The hallway's covered with a patchwork of thick cardboard jointed by duct tape; the walls papered halfway up with what looks like butcher paper.

It's unclear what's being done.

On the way out last night I passed two workers near an open door to nothing: some shadowy and dusty space, indistinct, its purpose utterly obscure. The threshold was strewn with mechanical junk - casings, coils, joints - forming a vague trail to a bewildering machine, mounted on stilts, steel-forged, inert.