Faust

Legitimate businesses

Nochnaya in the daytime looks utterly different than at night. Even at noon, there are not many pedestrians. Especially since I'm in a residential area. The ones with a 9 to 5 in the city center went out long before me. Big steppers and cutthroats are up even before they do.

Crossing the Lesnaya, the bustling street is now filled with litter, empty bottles and fresh vomits giving off unbearable smells under the blistering sunlight. A man with his necktie draped down his shoulder like it's a scarf walks by me with bloodshot eyes and an agonizing expression, slowly dragging himself north towards the skyscrapers across Via Martinase.

            When the salty smell of the ocean and chemical waste starts invading my nostrils. I turn right and start heading west. Through four blocks. A group of factory workers in tank tops and unbuttoned shirts are having lunch on a short wall.
Unforgiving sunshine contours their weather-beaten faces. Sweats on their forehead glitter while slowly dripping down. Wrinkles form on the edge of their face as a man with a bloated belly lying on the short wall facing the sun said something in a language I don't recognize.

The foreman squints his eyes as I walk by, letting out a hum. I purposely turned my head and quicken my steps.
       Past experience taught me getting into fights with someone who engages in physical labor is a very very bad idea. Unless you're ready to kill them.

Hot wind from the west. Smoke, the smell of burns from cutting metal, and seawater mix together into a strange scent. Signaling I'm in the right direction.

Walking by a warehouse and three blocks, a brick wall with barbed wires on top replaced the unchanged scenery of concrete buildings and shop windows. It extends from far south to the next crossroad up north.
Though it's lunchtime, the factories behind the walls are less noisy than early morning. But the smell from the shipyard still lingers in the air.

This area by the branch of the great canal is the industrial area of Faust. Being a shoreline city and one of the most important port cities in the world, the demand for workers and wielders in docks, shipyards, and factories of all kinds is enormous.
Dreamers and opportunists from all over the world came here searching for a new world paradise and the next American dream when Faust was built at first. Few succeeded.

Those that failed and didn't choose the life of crime in many gangs of the city. Ended up in the docks. They thought it was just a temporary means to feed themselves and they would be able to get back up and fulfill whatever drives them here in the future.

       Years later, their children or grandchildren grew up in public housing down south. Constantly in fear of his drunken father's footsteps. Stumbling upstairs from the dock after his shift ended. Promising to never be like him, to become a better person. The kids left home...... and asked for a job at the closest construction site.
***

Took a left turn at the crossroad up ahead. Riverside Road looks empty with only one or two trucks passing by and a couple of dock workers sitting on the humped sidewalk. A man in vest is on the phone with his car parked by the empty bridge.

"No! No! Not that motherfucker again. I've told him more times than his fucking wife! To not......."
The man stops whining when I walk past him, leaning on the railing as if he's been looking at the ocean this whole time.

Thirty past noon. Even with sunglasses on, the estuary still shines brightly under the high noon. Glinting. Like shattered glasses on a proscenium stage.
But if you look closely, the color of the ocean doesn't match the one under this bridge. One is deep blue of Prussian, the other is dirty green like cloudy emeralds.