When I got off the expressway at a 103rd Street, I had the familiar sensation of landing on the moon, or returning to earth after a nuclear decimation. Life probably exists in the oily mud around Lake Calumet. It’s just not anything you’d recognize outside a microscope or a Steven Spielberg movie. You don’t see trees or grass or birds. Only the occasional feral dog, ribs protruding, eyes red with madness and hunger.

The Xerxes plant lay in the heart of the ex-swamp, at 110th Street east of Torrence. The building was an old one, put up in the early fifties. From the road I could see their sign, “Xerxes, King of Solvents.” The royal purple had faded to an indeterminate pink, while the logo, a crown with double X’s in it, had almost disappeared.

Made of concrete blocks, the plant was shaped like a giant U whose arms backed onto the Calumet River. That way the solvents manufactured there could flow easily onto barges and the waste products into the river. They don’t dump into the river anymore, of course—when the Clean Water Act was passed Xerxes built giant lagoons to hold their wastes, with clay walls providing a precarious barrier between the river and the toxins.

I parked my car in the gravel yard and gingerly picked my way through the oily ruts to a side entrance. The strong smell, reminiscent of a darkroom, hadn’t changed from the times I used to drive down with my dad to drop off Louisa if she’d missed her bus.

I had never been inside the plant. Instead of the crowded noisy cauldron of my imagination, I found myself in an empty hall. It was long and dimly lit, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls that went the height of the building, making me feel as though I were at the bottom of a mine shaft.

Following the arm of the U in the direction of the river, I came at length to a series of cubbyholes cut into the interior wall. Their walls were made of that grainy glass used for shower doors; I could see light and movement through them but couldn’t distinguish shapes. I knocked at the middle door. When no one answered I turned the knob and went in.

I entered a time warp, a long narrow room whose furnishings apparently hadn’t changed since the building had gone up thirty-five years ago. Olive-drab filing cabinets and gun-metal desks lined the wall across from the doors. Fluorescent lights hung from an old acoustic-tile ceiling. The outer doors all opened into the room, but two had been blocked shut by filing cabinets.

Four middle-aged women in purple smocks sat at the row of desks. They were working on vast bales of paper with Sisyphus-like doggedness, making entries, shifting invoices, using old-fashioned adding machines with experienced stubby fingers. Two were smoking. The smell of cigarettes mingled with the darkroom chemical scent in acrid harmony.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I was trying to find the personnel office.”