Ray Kowalski lay in bed and listened to the building settle. It was an old building on Iron Street, three stories of brick that had been divided into apartments in 1948 and into regrets in 1981. The pipes groaned at irregular intervals, the floorboards complained when anyone walked past his door, and the radiator in the corner hissed like an animal that had been trapped and was waiting for someone to finish it off.

He got up. 5:47. The alarm clicked off. He didn't turn it back on.

The apartment was one room with a sink and a hot plate and a bed that had never known a proper mattress. Ray sat on the edge of it and pulled on his socks. They had holes in the toes. He had considered buying new ones. Then he had considered not considering buying new ones, which was the same thing.

He made coffee on the hot plate. The coffee was instant and the water was tap and the cup was chipped and all of these things were true and none of them were surprising. He drank it standing up, looking out the window at the fire escape and the brick wall across the alley and a strip of sky that was the color of dishwater.

Iron Street was not a street so much as a concept that a city planner had once written down on a piece of paper and then forgotten about. It ran from a boarded-up gas station at one end to a vacant lot at the other, with a row of two-family houses in between that were mostly rented to people who could not afford anywhere else. The rent was $180 a month, which was cheap until you subtracted heat and hot water and the fact that the landlord, Mrs. Delacroix, charged extra for everything.

Ray had moved to Iron Street six months ago, after the steel plant closed and the severance package ran out and his ex-wife decided that the strain of watching a man lose his job was too much for their marriage to handle. He had sold the TV. He had kept the tools. He had rented this room.

The ghost on Iron Street appeared on Ray's third night there. He was coming back from the corner store with a six-pack and a loaf of bread when he saw it: a figure standing under the streetlamp at the end of the block. Not walking. Not moving. Just standing, facing the street, shoulders slightly hunched as if the cold bothered him more than it bothered everyone else.

Ray had seen a lot of things in his thirty-eight years. He had seen men lose fingers in the press. He had seen men lose their minds in the layoff line. He had seen men lose their wives and their homes and their names—the last of these being the one that still made him uncomfortable when he thought about it, which was often.

But the ghost on Iron Street was different because it didn't do anything. It just stood there. And by the next night, Ray had learned that it was there every night, between midnight and three, under the streetlamp, standing still in the dark.

He asked Sully about it. Sully was his friend from the plant—Sullivan to his employers, Sully to everyone who knew him, and "hey you" to the men who didn't. They were sitting in the parking lot behind the strip mall, drinking cheap beer from cans that were warm by the time they reached their mouths.

That's the Iron Street ghost, Sully said. Been there a long time.

Is it? Ray asked. Literally?

Sully looked at him for a long moment. You ever see it?

Every night.

You ever go up to it?

No. Why would I?

Sully took a drink. Nobody does. It don't bother nobody. It just stands there.

Ray thought about this. In the steel plant, every piece of equipment had a function. The press pressed. The conveyor moved. The furnace burned. Even the things that broke down had a purpose in breaking—the purpose of being a repair order, which was a different kind of function but a function nonetheless.

A thing that just stands there, doing nothing, was not something Ray's life had prepared him for.

He started paying attention. He noticed that the figure was always the same one—same height, same build, same slight stoop. He noticed that it wore a work jacket, dark and old-fashioned, the kind of jacket that men had worn in the fifties and kept wearing until it fell apart. He noticed that it never moved when someone walked past, which meant either it was very disciplined or it was not very much of anything.

On the eighth night, he was coming home from the加油站 where he worked the night shift—gas, oil, and a deep and abiding sense of futility—and the figure was not there.

He told himself this was fine. The ghost was gone. Case closed. He could go to bed and sleep and set his alarm for 5:47 and repeat the cycle until whatever came next came next.

But the next night, he found out what the ghost was.

It was a man named Frank. Frank had worked at the plant for twenty-two years. Frank had been laid off in the first round. Frank had been evicted in the third. Frank had been drinking himself into the ground since the second.

Ray found him in the vacant lot at the end of Iron Street, curled up under a tarp with a bottle of something and a dog that was mostly ribs and hope. The dog looked at Ray. Ray looked at the dog. Frank snored.

You the ghost? Ray asked, because some questions you ask even when you know the answer.

Frank opened one eye. I'm Frank.

Iron Street calls you the ghost.

Frank made a sound that might have been a laugh. Ghost don't drink. Ghost don't sleep. Ghost don't have nowhere to be.

Ray sat down on the curb. The asphalt was cold through his pants. The streetlamp on Iron Street cast a yellow cone of light onto the empty lot, and inside that light, dust motes drifted like snow in a world that had forgotten how to be snowy.

You should come back to the street, Ray said.

Frank closed his eye again. Not my street no more.

Ray stayed for ten minutes. He didn't offer to help. He knew what helping looked like in a place like this—it looked like a hand extended and then pulled back, because the hand had somewhere to be and the person extended didn't.

The next night, he brought a cup of coffee. Not from the gas station. From the diner on the corner, where the coffee was real and the cup was paper and the act of buying it cost $0.60, which was more than Ray had planned to spend on anything tonight.

He left the coffee on the curb next to Frank and walked away. Frank didn't say thank you. Ray didn't expect him to. On Iron Street, thank you was a currency that had inflated past usefulness.

Some nights, Ray came back with coffee. Some nights he didn't. He had his own problems—rent due on the first, a phone call from his ex-wife that he couldn't bring himself to answer, a letter from the collection agency that he had folded into a smaller and smaller square and kept in his wallet until it was the size of a postage stamp.

He and Frank never talked. They existed in the same space, two men in a vacant lot under a streetlamp, neither of them doing anything about it. Sometimes the dog would whine. Sometimes the wind would move through the broken windows of the houses on Iron Street with a sound like breathing. Sometimes, late at night, the ghost would stand under the streetlamp and Ray would watch him from his window and think about how some things just stand there and don't move, and that's not cowardice and that's not courage. That's just what happens when you've been standing for a long time and the ground beneath you has stopped moving.

On a Thursday in November, the rent went up. Mrs. Delacroix came to the door and said $220 a month, and Ray said he'd think about it, and he did think about it for three days, during which time he bought coffee twice and didn't buy it four other times and Frank stopped appearing under the streetlamp entirely, which Ray noticed but didn't investigate, because some absences you accept the way you accept the weather.

He paid the rent. He stayed on Iron Street. The ghost didn't come back. He imagined, maybe, that it had never been a ghost at all. Maybe it had just been a man in a work jacket, standing under a streetlamp, the way men had stood under streetlamps in towns like this before there were streetlamps, in the dark before the dark had a name.

The alarm was set for 5:47. It stayed that way.