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The Gugleman factory complex is a ruin, one hundred buildings sharing ruination, its gates chained shut for almost thirty years. In one corner on a mound are the railed-in gravestones of the Gugleman family, ten crosses but only two standing, together with, off-centre, a crumbling obelisk dedicated to the eighty-four Gugleman workers who died fighting in wars. Many more than that died in accidents here, somewhere about the complex, but there is no monument to them.
Not far away, in his luxurious bungalow, crammed with mementoes of himself and his family, lives the last of the Guglemans, an old man not as very old as he looks. He spends the hours of daylight dictating memos to his nurse - though she never writes down a word - concerning improvements to the Gugleman business and its heart and soul: the factory complex. He thinks that this is still in operation. Twelve times he has been taken to see the ruin, in an effort to convince him he is deluded and that the business is no more. But the delusion has held. He also believes himself to be a great lover: it is a frequent boast. But, if the story told about him is true, he has never had sexual relations with anyone, ever, not once. Some sort of libido, however, he does have: when the working day of chanting memos is done, he stays awake all night watching pornography on a large screen. Memos and pornography make up his entire life.
The workers who once stormed, whistled, winked, toiled and fell in the Gugleman factory complex are all dead now, every last one. The spouses who survived them, who wept over them, are mostly dead also. Some travelled overseas, married new people, providing children for the future of their new country, but none lived long enough to tell these sickly offspring stories about the Gugleman factory complex. It is, therefore, unremembered by those few whose history contains its shadow, ruined and whole, who now cough and limp in other climes for whatever while they will have.
So, as everyone either died or fled from the region where the Guglemans built their factory, and which in its heyday employed almost the entire population, today there are hardly any people here. Just a few old men in the hills, swooped over by owls, outnumbered twenty to one by foxes. The town near the factory complex is boarded up, a ruin also. Hikers, campers, birdwatches never visit, though it is nice wild country. When, two years ago, Herr Gugleman strangled one of his nurses in a frenzy after she kept on insisting to him that Guglemans had gone bankrupt decades ago, the police were called, but none came.
Looking from outer space into the night of this part of the world, where perhaps the factory was once witnessed as a point that blazed hot, in more recent nights only one light might be seen shining: an odd frantic flicker escaping through the squat windows of Herr Gugleman's isolated bungalow. And then, as new day dawns, there is the view of the factory from the hills or the bare highway: from there the nettles which grow tall between the ruined buildings of the factory complex might look like gangs of lanky men in green protective suits dismantling the buildings. Looking now, on this melancholy morning, with the wind making the nettles sway, they seem to be pulling on a rope, pulling, pulling.
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