The fluorescent tube in Building 3 of the abandoned General Motors plant on Flint's west side flickered at 2:17 AM, as it had for six years, since the plant closed and the city condemned the building and nobody had bothered to remove it.

Ray Kowalski saw it because he couldn't sleep and his truck was parked outside the plant and walking was better than sitting in the truck listening to the silence where his son's voice used to be.

He was forty-two years old and he had been obsolete for three years, ever since the plant laid off the "veteran workforce," which was auto industry code for men over forty who made too much money and knew too many things. Ray knew things. That was the problem. He knew how to tune an engine by ear. He knew which parts would fail before the manual said they would. He knew that the quality control inspections were a joke and that the managers knew it and that the workers knew that the managers knew.

He knew a lot of things. None of them kept food on the table.

Ray pushed open the rusted door of Building 3. The door groaned -- a sound like a man waking up from a sleep he didn't want -- and Ray stepped inside.

The building was dark except for the fluorescent tube in the ceiling, which was flickering in a pattern Ray had started to recognize: three fast pulses, a pause, one slow pulse. Repeat. Like a heartbeat. Like a Morse code message from somebody who had nothing better to say.

Ray looked up at the tube. It was an old fixture, the kind with a starting ballast that clicks before the light comes on. The light was dim and yellowish, casting a sickly glow over the concrete floor, the rusted machinery, the graffiti that read "GM left us to die" in spray paint that had faded to brown.

Ray walked toward the machinery. He put his hand on a press that had once shaped car doors. The metal was cold and rough, pitted with rust. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the building was different.

The concrete floor was clean. The machinery was painted green and looked new. The graffiti was gone. Light poured through windows that in Ray's time were boarded up and broken. Through the windows he could see cars -- 1930s cars, flat-fendered and chrome-grilled, parked in a lot that in Ray's time was a weed field.

Ray stood still. He breathed. The air smelled different: oil and metal and human sweat, none of the damp concrete and mold that filled Building 3 in 2010.

A man in a flat cap walked past the doorway. He stopped when he saw Ray.

"You lost, buddy?"

Ray shook his head. He didn't know what to say. He was in a building that had existed for fifty years and had been dead for six, and suddenly it was alive.

The man walked closer, studying Ray's clothes -- the jeans, the flannel shirt, the sneakers. "You one of those actors? Doing some film?"

"No," Ray said. "I just -- I was in this building and then I wasn't."

The man laughed, but it wasn't unkind. "That's one way to put it. I'm Red. Walter O'Connor. You want help, I can give it. You want trouble, I can give you that too."

"Ray."

"Ray. Well, Ray, it's 1937. The auto industry is booming, the unemployment rate is twenty-five percent, and if you're standing in a Fisher Body plant looking confused, you're either a spy or a drunk. Which is it?"

"Neither."

"Then you're a miracle. I don't know what to do with miracles. I'm a union man. We deal in facts."

--

Ray learned quickly. He learned that he was in Detroit, in a Fisher Body plant, in the year 1937. He learned this from newspapers, from conversations, from the radio playing in a drugstore window. He learned that the auto industry was the biggest industry in the world, that Detroit was the city that built the modern world, that every street led to a factory and every factory led to a paycheck.

He learned that he could go back.

He was in the plant at night, sitting on a crate in Building 3, when the fluorescent tube flickered. He looked up. The light warped. The wall rippled. He reached up. His hand went through light like water.

He fell through.

He landed on the concrete floor of Building 3 in 2010. The damp air hit him like a wall. The mold smell. The broken windows. The graffiti. The silence.

He sat on the floor and breathed and counted to ten and stood up and walked out of the building and drove home in his truck and slept for twelve hours.

The next night, he went back.

--

Ray discovered the pattern over the first month. The fluorescent tube flickered only when he was at his lowest -- when he had no money, no work, nowhere to go. It didn't respond to his intentions. It responded to his weight. When he was at his bottom, the light would flicker, and he would fall through, and he would be in 1937, and the building would be alive, and the men would be working, and the air would smell like purpose instead of decay.

In 1937, Ray worked. He helped Walter -- Red -- move crates at the Fisher Body plant. He was assigned to the night shift, which meant he was assumed to be a new hire, which meant nobody asked too many questions about where he came from or what he knew. Ray didn't mind. He liked the work. It was honest physical labor, and it paid twelve cents an hour, which in 1937 dollars was real money.

He saved every cent.

In 2010, he spent nothing. He lived on bread and beans and the occasional meal from Danny's convenience store, where Danny Park -- a Korean-American who had come to Flint in the nineties and opened a store that became the only thing holding the block together -- gave Ray credit when the banks wouldn't.

"You're a weird guy, Ray," Danny said one evening, watching Ray buy a loaf of bread and a can of beans. "You work day labor by day and -- what do you do at night?"

"I walk," Ray said.

"Nobody walks this much for fun."

Ray didn't answer. He paid for his groceries. He walked home. He thought about 1937.

--

Ray kept a notebook. He wrote in it every night, in 2010 or 1937, whichever era he was in when the thought came:

"What I see in both worlds: men who built things that no one needs anymore, women who hold families together with nothing, churches that close and become warehouses, warehouses that become ruins, ruins that become forgotten. Same streets. Same buildings. Same men. Only the cars are different."

He showed the notebook to nobody. It was his private record of a pattern he couldn't unsee: the cycle of boom and bust, build and abandon, hope and disappointment, repeated across seventy years like a record playing on two different turntables at once.

In 1937, the men were proud. They had jobs. They had unions fighting for them. They had a sense that they were building something that would last. Red talked about the union meetings, the strikes, the negotiations. He talked like a man who believed change was possible.

In 2010, the men were broken. They had been laid off. They had lost their pensions. They had watched their children move away and their neighborhoods decay and their city declare bankruptcy. Ray talked to them at Danny's store and at the unemployment office and in the parking lot outside the closed plant. They talked like men who believed nothing would ever change again.

Same streets. Same buildings. Same men. Only the cars are different.

--

Red was arrested in March 1937.

The strike had been going on for three months -- a sit-down strike at the Fisher Body plant, where workers refused to leave their stations until GM recognized the union and agreed to negotiate. It was bold and risky and exactly the kind of thing Red had been planning for years.

Ray was in 2010 when Red was arrested. He had crossed over to visit Danny, who was running low on cigarettes, and he stayed too late. When he returned to 1937 on Thursday morning, Red was gone.

He asked around. A worker he barely knew told him: "O'Connor was picked up Wednesday night. Police broke up the strike meeting. They took a dozen men. O'Connor was one of them."

Ray felt the floor drop out from under him. He knew -- he actually knew, from the future -- that Red would be released in two weeks. He knew that the strike would succeed, that GM would recognize the union, that Red would become a local hero and then gradually disappear from public life, as heroes do, returning to the factory floor and the union meetings and the quiet work of building something that lasts.

But knowing didn't help Red right now. Red was in jail. The other strikers were scattered. The union local was in disarray. And Ray was a man from the future standing in a building that would one day be abandoned, watching history happen to people he cared about with the helpless knowledge of someone who has read the ending.

He went to the courthouse. He sat on the steps and watched the city walk by: men in flat caps and women in aprons, boys selling newspapers, a police car -- actually a car, not a truck -- driving past with its siren silent.

He was a man out of time with nothing to use. He knew the future. The future didn't help.

--

He went back to 2010 and sat in Building 3 and read his notebook.

"What I see in both worlds: men who built things that no one needs anymore."

He turned the page. "Women who hold families together with nothing." Linda. She had held their family together until she couldn't anymore, and then she had left, and Ray had understood too late that holding something together requires two people and he had been holding nothing at all.

"Churches that close and become warehouses." The St. Joseph church on 3rd Street, where Ray had been baptized and confirmed and married and where Linda had taken their son for his first mass, now a warehouse for a company that stored things Ray would never understand.

"Warehouses that become ruins." Building 3. Right here. Right now, in 2010, a ruin. In 1937, a cathedral of industry.

"Ruins that become forgotten." Who would remember this building? Who would remember the men who worked here? Who would remember Red?

"Same streets. Same buildings. Same men. Only the cars are different."

Ray closed the notebook. He put it in his back pocket. He stood up. He walked out of Building 3. He drove to Danny's store. He bought a bottle of water. He walked home. He drank the water slowly, savoring the taste of something clean and simple and real.

--

He went back one more time.

He found Red on a Saturday afternoon, sitting on the stoop of the tenement where Red lived with his wife Sarah and their two children. Red was out on bail. He looked tired but not defeated.

"Ray," Red said. "Good to see you."

They sat on the steps. Detroit was loud around them -- streetcars clanging, vendors calling, children shouting -- but on the stoop it was quiet.

"How are you?" Ray asked.

"Still breathing. That's something. The strike is going well. GM is negotiating. I think -- I think we might actually get recognition."

"You will."

"How do you know?"

Ray almost told him. He almost said: Because I'm from a century where your union exists and your children went to integrated schools and your grandson voted in a presidential primary and the factory eventually closed but the neighborhood survived and the men who built that place are remembered in books and documentaries and a fluorescent tube in an abandoned building flickers at 2:17 AM like a heartbeat from fifty years in the future.

Instead, he said: "I just know. You're a good organizer, Red. You're the kind of man movements are made of."

Red smiled. It was a small, tired, determined smile. "You're a strange man, Kowalski. You talk like you've seen this before."

Ray raised his bottle of water. "To the union."

Red clinked his coffee cup against the bottle. "To the union."

They drank. The streetcars clanged. The vendors called. The children shouted. The city moved around them, building and breaking and building again, in a pattern that Ray now recognized as neither progress nor decline but simply motion -- the motion of a species that refuses to stop trying, even when trying doesn't work, even when the building becomes a ruin, even when the men are forgotten.

--

Ray is forty-three now. He still goes back sometimes. He stops counting.

He works at Danny's store. He drinks water instead of beer most days. He calls his son once a week; his son doesn't answer most times. He sits in Building 3 at 2 AM on a Tuesday.

The fluorescent tube flickers. He doesn't reach for it. He watches it. It flickers three times, then stabilizes.

He stands up. He walks to the counter. He buys a bottle of water. He walks home. The apartment is small. The walls are thin. He sits at his table and opens his notebook. He writes:

"I have seen two centuries of the same thing. I don't know if it gets better. I don't know if it doesn't. But I know this: Red's son will be a teacher. Linda will forgive me, maybe not in my lifetime, but she will. Danny's store will become a restaurant. The factory will be demolished. Something will take its place. I don't know what. I just know the light is still there."

He closes the notebook. He drinks his water. He sleeps.

--

Author Note & Copyright: