Upstairs, Part II

The staircase to the second floor seemed too narrow for two people to ascend side-by-side; presumably the Onion's working girls proceeded ahead of their patrons, winsomely leading them up the bare wood steps worn so deeply with use it seemed my boots might sink through the other side.

At the top, the landing leading to the individual rooms felt even more narrow than the stairs. Nothing in its seclusive interior appeared to have been changed or "updated" in the 90 years since The Onion's red-light heyday: the only thing missing from the last century were the echoes of piano music and the din of bawdy patrons swelling from the shell of the tired saloon downstairs.

That, and the dissociated patter of bleary-eyed girls more concerned with depositing cash in their tills than with the tasks about to be performed for the uncounted time that night.
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Aspen had become boom town by the mid-1880s, attracting thousands of wide-eyed dreamers and prospectors from around the globe, unmarried men and drifters emboldened with dreams of "striking it rich" by subtracting their share from the deep veins of the Mother Lode.

Shaft mining was (and still is) a treacherous, unforgiving way to earn a living, especially for the men who'd surrendered to the economic realities of wildcat prospecting and handed themselves over as menials to break rocks with picks at the end of mile-long tunnels buried thousands of feet underground for the benefit of owners whose profits sometimes seemed more staggering and imposing than the mountains themselves.

Odd assortments of physical artifacts and relics pointing back to the miners' toils, Victorian-era curiosities like rusted lanterns, shovels, stoves, ore carts and loose sticks of dynamite are still found in the original shafts: when the mines closed, cleaning up after themselves hardly seemed financially lucrative or worthwhile. The innominate remains of scores of miners are there too, luckless men who suddenly found themselves trapped beyond reach either by cave-ins, entombed where they fell to explosions, or otherwise fell victim to routine calamities like asphyxiation, floods, or being crushed and ripped apart by machines.

In 1893 President Grover Cleveland repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, effectively kicking the legs out from under silver's value. All but worthless, silver's price plummeted overnight and within weeks dozens of mines (and bordellos) closed forever, forcing thousands of unemployed miners and hundreds of working girls into the streets ... with few options for the future and no direction to follow, beyond the one their boots were already pointing.
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What surprised me was that the tiny rooms upstairs where the ladies entertained still had furniture left over from the day. I remember what appeared to be original Victorian-pattern wall paper clinging to the grimy, stain-smeared walls and the gas light fixtures suspended overhead. How many other men had stood in that same spot, glanced around the room and seen the same things I was seeing now?

All that separated me from that day and a familiarity with the players' names, their faces and the deeds they'd performed was the unforgiving, inviolate rush of time. The air itself felt as though the last participants had merely excused themselves and stepped from the room momentarily, rather than endure my interruption, and might return at any second to resolve whatever unconsummated business they'd left behind.

As my flashlight played across the walls to the ceiling and picked out details a hundred years after the fact, I couldn't help sensing another conceit remained, something imparted and deeply soaked into the setting ... a glimmer of moments of lives uncollected, precious seconds cached and still unclaimed between shadows.
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What shocked me about the rooms wasn't the museum-caliber preservation, but that the rooms upstairs were so physically small, hardly larger than walk-in closets, and nothing at all like what I'd expected.

But then spaciousness and luxury weren't priorities for desperate, lonely men whose lives were spent trading blood for their dreams in gelid caverns so far underground.
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Should I have felt like a voyeur, an intruder standing in the uninvited middle of a performance leftover from last century as I gaped and wondered how many fortunes had changed hands, how many thousands of illicit couplings had occurred, and who'd been the last to trudge upstairs to those rooms?

The stage was still set and the props remained undisturbed and in place: nothing I could see had changed in almost 100 years since the last story had played. Nothing at all ... except that the names, faces and lives of the players had all been either rewritten, forgotten or finally lost forever in the embrace of time.