The lift stopped at the floor below, and another resident boarded. He avoided her gaze as they rode to the ground floor in silence, studying the scuffs and peeling plastic where the floor met the wall instead. He exited and surveyed the bleak piazza formed by the horseshoe of stunted towers.Few recalled exactly how or when it had started, and those that did weren't available to ask. It stretched for yards in front of him, all the way to the street, where it tumbled over the small boundary wall and began again in probing shards, a miniature wooden Fallingwater. In recent weeks some of the pieces near the gate had started to coalesce into a little promontory, the beginning of a causeway, and from where he stood the parallel lines of the composite planks converged into an arrow, pointing yearningly, inexorably, to the glass frontage of the chain coffee shop on the other side of the road.
The winter night had left a layer of frost, so he stepped onto the slippery surface gingerly, conscious of limited grip afforded by the flat soles of his smart shoes. It had been, he supposed, a sop to domesticity, a tepid attempt to add a softer edge to post-industrial environments, a presence on the human scale in the midst of the retrofitted warehouses and mills, something that wasn't red brick or fire-escape steel. His block was a new build, a late comer, part of a colonising force washed up on a peninsula formed by the oxbow lake of the ring road's concrete meanders, but it gestured punily towards the same idiom - gallow-like balconies, super-sized refuse bins and an industrial ventilation outlet expelling mist into the frigid morning like a dying breath. Continental living, the glossy brochures had promised. A cafe quarter. But it gave no quarter, an architectonic drift of repurposed lumber, an intractable tract.
He closed the gate behind him, the icy metal stinging his skin as it clanked shut, and he strode out into the street, feigning purpose. But after a few yards it resumed, pavement consumed by tongue and groove, and so the pretence evaporated as quickly as it had started, his paces becoming short and tentative again as he shifted his weight forward, carefully placing his already numbing feet. He passed the entrance to the neighbouring block, numbered one digit lower than his own, but identical in its lowercase branding and assemblage of pleadingly uneven rooflines. The courtyard here was bounded by a penitentiary fence, though whether it was meant to keep people out or to keep people in he couldn't tell. Behind it a pergola stood naked and useless, the six posts and seven crossbeams a strange vertical expression of the timbered dermis, an extrusion of the planar plain.
His eyes turned to the monolith in the distance, as they always did. The looming high rise was located a couple of postcodes away, but it dominated the skyline, a lone citadel dwarfing its neighbours. Its cladding was an echo, or perhaps a presaging, of the crust that was steadily sheathing the rest of the city; the strips, stripes, ridges and corrugations an immense simulacrum of the regular texture and geometry that now choked most of the city's streets, its public realms. It was an incantatory redoubt, a mimic totem, an inscrutable sentinel god surveying its domain.
And then he slipped. His ankle wrenched at a terrible angle, and a fibrous tearing shook through his body, roots rudely unearthed. He gasped and fell to the ground, his strangled cry disappearing into the deserted avenue. Embarrassed, he immediately tried to stand, pushing himself up with his arms and his good leg, but the other protested, unable to bear his weight. And so he sat back down, noticing the tear on the elbow of his pea coat. The tower kept its mute vigil.
* * *
"It's broken," said the doctor, gesturing towards to the x-ray pinned to the light box on the wall.
He grunted in assent, and continued gazing through the window. The hospital's hill top position granted a panorama of the city below. Copper roofs turned teal by the decades contrasted against the gunmetal sky, whilst silver cars glittered and hustled in the fractalline rivulets between. The blight wasn't visible from this distance, but the tower's barcode facade served as a beacon and reminder.
"Quite severely, in fact," the doctor continued, "a spiral fracture of the fibula. Normally it'd require several months in plaster, but we have something a little different we can offer, a new procedure we’re trialling."
He turned his head slowly, reluctant to forego the view.
"It's called a dendronic transplant. We take material from the meristem of a plant and inject it directly into the affected area. It's a new treatment, you understand, but the early results have been very, very promising."
He looked down at his trousers, the fabric flapping limply, the seams sliced. His right shoe sat next to the bed, the laces snaking down to the pale blue floor.
"The host body responds quite remarkably," the doctor expanded, a new zeal in his eyes. "You'll be as good as new in no time, or better really: the tissue will be completely regenerated. Stronger, more robust, more vigorous. A whole new lease of life."
Muffled footsteps echoed down the corridor, and the sounds of the waiting room television leaked in through the door, a voice over intoning dietary advice in a paternal tone.
"I'll schedule you for next week then," he said, opening the frosted glass doors of the wall cabinet, then rummaged through the contents. "But in the mean time you'll need to wear this splint, to keep the joint steady. We make them from reclaimed railway sleepers nowadays." The doctor stepped towards him, smiling reassuringly.
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