I slid my sunglasses off as I passed through the lofty center room. The grubby skylight two storeys above me dropped morning sunshine grudgingly over someone’s unfinished project: a tapestry woven of dyed jute rope. On it, a young man sat under a tree in a forest, his arms at odd angles and his mouth open. Three other figures could be seen from behind, in the background. Ravens sat in the trees above, and the beginnings of two wolves showed at the working edge of the weave. There was a lot of detail in the thing, considering that it was made of rope, and the finished effect was obviously going to be disturbing.

The tapestry was already twenty feet long, and seemed to be no more than two-thirds done, if that. I wondered where Tick-Tick’s neighbor planned to hang it ultimately. Just then, it was suspended from the railing that ran around the room on the second floor, from an artfully twisted Volkswagen bumper, a wrought-iron garden bench, and a street-sign post whose sign read, “Yellow Brick Rd.” The found-metal balcony rail had been another neighbor’s project two years before.

The elevator was passenger-powered; I stepped into the cage and hauled on the rope. The pulleys it ran over squeaked just enough to let the second-floor inhabitants know someone was coming. By the time I stepped out, the Ticker’s door, further along the balcony, was open and letting out kitcheny sounds.

The Ticker had half the second floor. It was one of those cavernous warehouse rooms that everybody wants, but hardly anybody knows what to do with. Tick-Tick refused to divide hers up with walls; she claimed that the whole point of a space like that was being able to see from one end of it to the other. Since there were windows on three sides, it was a little like living in an open field. Instead of walling them off, she’d defined the “rooms,” or at least, the areas devoted to particular activities, by turning the floor into a series of connected plywood platforms, each one about a foot and a half higher than the last, and devoting a different level to each room. Inside the door, at the former floor level, she had her workbench and tools, the table saw, the drill press, and all the other equipment that was neither too big to get through the back door, nor too dangerous to keep indoors. I think the reason her workshop was the first thing you came to was that Tick-Tick was convinced that ideas are fragile, and when she came flying upstairs in pursuit of the execution of an idea, she was afraid the mere sight of creature comforts would drive it clean out of her head.