Moving forward, steady, keeping relaxed, he had to step over a welder’s bucket. As he did, his trailing leg caught the handle sending the bucket off into space. He snapped his arms outward to regain balance. Steel clanged against steel as the bucket fell. It hit a cross-brace, spun, slammed into a girder. Tony realized he was not alone when, two floors below, the bucket narrowly missed the head of another man.

Tony saw the fellow look up, saw him walking a beam, though he seemed to creep along, stoop-shouldered, with both arms far out for balance ready to grab the girder under him. As the man approached the elevator shaft, Tony moved along the upper beam and shouted, “Hey, wait! Wait up!”

At that moment Tony had one clear look at the man’s face. What he saw he could not like. The face was one he had seen only in a bad dream. Frightened eyes stared at him out of deep sockets. The face issued a greyish-green pallor as though the owner had lived his life in dark shadows. Tony tried to move closer, but when the elevator reached his floor, the person slid the door open and jumped in without responding.

Tony could not imagine why the man was in the building nor why the man reminded him of a dream he did not want to recall.

He shook his head to drive away, at least temporarily, those thoughts and then advanced along the beam to further examine the construction. Welding at various joints appeared solid, but he noted that tools and materials had been abandoned wherever the workers finished the day’s labor. As he shifted carefully about the interior of the structure, he reflected on why his supervisors had assigned him this inspection task. He didn’t mind. In fact, he sensed a return of self-assured calm. The change away from the drafting table came as a relief, and he relished a physical challenge to the body he exercised to keep in good condition.

Tony followed the steel pathways from one area of the building to another. At one point he stopped when he found a sharp chisel which he used to scratch his name, Tony Antonelli, into the blackened steel. He smiled because he knew his name would remain there even after the structure had been covered, the building lived in, and his own time had come and gone.