“It’s not an emergency.”
“What district, please?”
“I don’t know what district. Isn’t there some kind of anonymous tip line or something?”
It sounded stupid when she said it, but it turned out there was exactly such a thing. The dispatcher Lee eventually got connected to sounded bored and unconvinced when Lee tried to explain to her what she’d seen. Even to Lee, the more she talked, the more fantastic it sounded. But the woman took down the intersection the building was on and promised that someone would check it out.
Lee hadn’t been planning to go back—it was a stupid idea—but she just had to see with her own eyes who they escorted out of the building. If Edie was among the Thrumm kids, then at least Lee would have saved her from something. Maybe they could help her, bring her back to life. And to see the Station Master arrested and taken away in cuffs would be something. When she got there, the building was dark, lifeless-looking. She waited. About an hour later Lee saw a police cruiser silently round the corner and pull up in front of the building. She pulled herself into the shadows. The cruiser stopped in the middle of the street as a cop got out of the passenger seat, and one hand on his holster, the other holding a flashlight, he found the door of the Crystal Castle, opened it, and went in.
Lee waited, one minute, then two, wondering what to expect. Gunshots? A mass exodus? A rush of backup squad cars? But ten minutes later the cop emerged from the building, shut off his flashlight, and got into the car. The cruiser pulled away as silently as it had arrived.
Lee took her time getting to the door, skulking between parked cars, making sure to keep out of the sight line of the Station Master’s window. The lobby of the Crystal Castle was pitch-black, but she could feel its emptiness as soon as she shut the door behind her. Lee felt her way to the stairwell and climbed up to the first floor. The only light was light from the streetlamps that washed in through the windows of the open rooms along the hall. Lee poked into each room that she passed. There were no mattresses, no clothes on the floor or posters on the walls, nothing to indicate that anyone had been here in years.
Lee didn’t know what she’d expected to see in the Station Master’s room, but the stark vacancy of it left her feeling disoriented. Nothing remained of the man’s presence—no bed, no armoire, no chess table, no desk or paintings or books or useless bicycle wheel—and she could feel nothing of him here anymore. Lee began to feel crazy. She was on her way out and was passing her room when she saw the series of cartoon mouse heads on the wall. She remembered the girl’s diary.
She crossed into the room and felt around behind the radiator with her hand until her fingers brushed something hard. The diary was still there. She stuck it into her pocket.
When Lee emerged from the empty building, she looked for Lois. Maybe she had seen them leave. But there was no sign of her at all.
• • •
That night, slouching against the wall of the van and staring at the swaying shadows of the junkyard beyond the windshield, Lee felt as hollowed out as she had in solitary. When she pulled the diary out and opened it, the flier fell out onto her lap. Lee squinted at it in the moonlight. Its date was past, and there was no address, but there was that street name, which the girl had scrawled on the back. The Station Master might have pulled a disappearing act, but maybe he’d left a trail.
Outside the salvage yard looked extraterrestrial in the moonlight. The landscape felt lunar, emptier even than in the van. It began to rain, fat drops that beat against her neck and hands. Near the van was a heap of old bicycles, and Lee dug through them until she found one that was more or less intact. She pulled the bike under the fence and pedaled to the convenience store, where she had taken to buying most of her food.
She bought a bottle of Coke and a package of beef jerky. The clerk stared through her. She’d come in every day, sometimes twice a day for nearly two weeks now, and the same clerk just looked right through her every time. Before leaving, she went to a rack of Philadelphia road maps and pulled one out. She found the street on the back of the card, which looked like an access road off the highway, about six miles north of the city.
• • •
Lee pedaled through sheets of rain that soaked through her clothes before she’d gotten a mile. She rode along the side of the highway, cars honking as they sped past, until she found the overgrown dirt road. She would have missed it had she been driving by in a car. There was no sign, but it was the only access road she’d seen in miles, so she took her chances.
The road wound through a long, wooded area that brought back memories of her escape from the JDC. It opened up to a large dirt lot harboring twenty or so cars parked haphazardly around a tall concrete wall with barbed wire running along the top. A security camera was mounted on a pole high above the wall. It could have been a military complex, except for the undulant electronic beat that seemed to be emanating from the ground itself. The area was surrounded by pine woods, and there were no people, no other buildings, in sight.
As she approached a steel door built into the wall, a floodlight clicked on. Lee dropped her eyes. A voice behind a slot in the door asked for her invite. She kept her head down as she handed the card through a slot. The man ran a blacklight over it, and Lee saw the image of a bicycle wheel appear briefly on the flier. Then he turned it over.
“This invite’s expired.”
“I know,” Lee said. “I missed it. I was just—”
“Sorry to hear that. Maybe you just weren’t meant to come.”
“I came all the way out here by bike. Isn’t there some way—”
“Pull your hoodie down.”
“What?”
“Let me see your face.”
She didn’t like the way he seemed to be leering at her. She pulled the hood off and stared into the slot.
The door opened with a loud, rusty creak. A fat guy with a bushy beard and glasses, spilling off an old metal stool and holding an open book in his lap, nodded his head at her, and she was in.
There was no building, no structure at all, on the other side of the wall. Just a large round concrete slab like a helipad, in the middle of which was an enormous inflatable . . .
Clown’s head.
Its eyes had been modified with colored strobes, which flashed in time to music so loud it made the whole head tremble.
As she walked closer, Lee could see the purpose of the clown’s head: it was covering a concrete-enclosed steel door, which opened onto a staircase. A light, chemical-smelling smoke wafted up from below. Lee looked back once more at the bouncer on his stool. What was she hoping to accomplish here? She had no plan going in, nothing to defend herself with, not even a story if anyone questioned her.
She held the red steel railing tightly. The music, a thumping, droning, ceaseless thing, only got louder the farther down she went, and the smoke thicker. By the time she got to the landing, it felt as if there was no more air, only smoke and the music, which throbbed in pulsing waves that beat against her body. There was another steel door at this landing, and the stairs continued down. Lee tried the door, but it was locked. She followed the music down.
Just as she reached the second landing, three kids stumbled out from a door to her left, laughing and shoving each other. The two boys had mustaches and wore old-fashioned suits. The girl wore a prairie dress with a doily collar. Her hair was short and slicked back beneath a wide-brimmed hat. She turned to smile at Lee as she passed.
The trio headed down a long hall toward the music and disappeared into the smoke. Everything down here was painted the same thick battleship gray. Exposed pipes and wires ran along the walls and ceiling, and the door they’d emerged from had a glass porthole. Like being in a submarine. Lee slipped past them into the room.
When the door shut behind her, the music became a ghost of what it was. She was in a large circular room with a concrete column rising f
rom the center, from which a dozen standing racks came out like huge bicycle spokes. The racks were hung with old clothes.
“Find something dry to put on,” a voice said.
Lee jumped. A man was sitting in a chair directly behind her, leaning back with his hands clasped around one knee. When he stood, she had to step back to look up at him. He wore an antiquated black suit, with a high-collared white shirt and a black tie. He had thick brown wavy hair brushed back from a high forehead.
The man touched her shoulder, guiding her down a rack of old clothes. Flapper dresses and ruched gowns, service uniforms and old suits, top hats and straw boaters and fedoras. Period costumes. Everything looked to be a hundred years old. Avoiding the man’s eyes, she ran her hands along the costumes, briefly pulling out a beaded cabaret dress before putting it back.
“If I might,” he said, and walked to the end of one row and took out a simple white wedding dress. Plain and straight, its only embellishment a curtain of beaded tassels at the hem.
“The Bride,” he said. “No?”
Lee stood absolutely still. She looked down. She was still dripping from the rain, a small pool of water forming around her feet.
He ran a finger along the pale silk. “Here. Allow me.”
He gently set the dress aside, then took hold of her soaked sweatshirt and lifted. He smelled of sandalwood. Edie’d had in her room a book of old black-and-white photos of actors and actresses from the golden age of Hollywood. Most of them looked unreal to her, flat and white as paper. But one of them, Rudolph Valentino, transcended every photograph he was in. He was luminous, otherworldly. This man’s skin was as white as that.
He was part of this, Lee knew. She was so scared she couldn’t do anything but follow the man’s lead. She brought her arms up and let him strip the wet clothes off her body, first her sweatshirt, then her shirt. She pulled off her wet jeans herself. He turned her around and lowered the dress down onto her. When his skin touched her bare back, she felt a pulse of electricity. He zipped her up. The dress fit as if it had been sewn around her.
He turned her around to face him. He had narrow gray eyes. A thick lock of hair had fallen across his forehead. She felt he might lean in for a kiss. Lee didn’t know what to do. Her instincts had shut down. She closed her eyes.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “And the party is full of bachelors.”
When she opened her eyes, he was closing the door behind him. Lee stood there feeling stupid and small.
She poked through a pile of shoes on the floor before her disgust took over and she just pulled the soggy sneakers she’d come in with back on.
• • •
As she squished her way back down the tunnel, Lee passed a man costumed in what looked like an old policeman’s uniform. He turned to watch her. The tunnel was corrugated steel, with a graffiti mural that ran the entire length. The music grew louder and denser as she approached a thick black curtain at the far end. When she pushed through, Lee found herself in a huge round space, like some sort of hangar, crowded with dancing bodies.
Up on a stage a DJ in an old European-looking uniform smoked a cigar and spun records. An antiquated projector splashed a black-and-white film onto the wall behind him, the images moving with the amphetamine speed of silent cinema: a pair of men gallivanting around a wheeled cannon; a bearded man in ballerina dress performing a grotesque pirouette; a pair of men playing chess on a rooftop. Seated in chairs on the stage, as though mirroring this part of the film, two men in tweed suits stared down at their own chess game, ignoring the throbbing chaos around them. They moved pieces quickly back and forth, but Lee couldn’t help thinking it was all for show.
A girl in a black sequined dress flowed past her, and a boy wearing an old soldier’s uniform twitched in place. Lee pressed herself against the wall, trying to make herself invisible. The music took residence in her with a kind of popping effervescence, so dense it hurt her teeth.
There was a hiss followed by a creaking noise so loud Lee thought a wall must have collapsed. People around her stopped dancing and looked up. Lee looked up, too, to see the concrete roof slowly split down the center as four enormous yellow hydraulic arms pushed the slabs until they were vertical. The room erupted with a cheer, and with the roof open Lee felt a cool wave wash over her and a sudden feeling of expansiveness. She looked up to the naked sky, the clouds gone, stars dotting the black canvas in a mist of light.
A girl with short blond lacquered hair was circulating the room, her beaded flapper dress winking as she threaded through the dancers. She carried in one hand an unlit cigarette in a long holder and in the other a tray of plastic water bottles. She was something to look at, oozing sex in that effortless way that Lee had always envied, and it caught Lee by surprise when the girl said something to her. Lee had to lean in to hear, close enough that she caught the smell of watermelon candy from the girl’s neck.
“I said, welcome to Société Anonyme!” she shouted this time. “I’m Xenia. If you need anything, come find me!”
Lee felt some part of herself begin to unfurl toward the girl, the way she did when Edie had first approached her that day behind the gym, when Ester had outside the Crystal Castle. Like a dog rolling belly-up in hopes of a rub. She hated herself for it.
The girl placed the bottle of water in her hand. “You need to stay hydrated down here! Even with the roof up I’ve seen girls pass out when they didn’t drink enough water. Don’t make more work for me.” She winked and went off the way she had come.
It was just like any other rave she’d been to—vintage suits and dresses and uniforms instead of phat pants and pony beads, and a repurposed missile silo in place of a warehouse or field, but in the end it was the same music and the same lost, unfettered kids. They were kids she could have gone to school with; she didn’t recognize any of them personally, but they danced with the same hunger, looked inward with the same blank stares while wanting only to be seen. Edie was nowhere to be found, of course. She hadn’t really expected her to be here, but a part of her had hoped. What had she expected to find? The Station Master? Ester? More Thrumm kids? At the Crystal Castle, the Thrumm kids were held upstairs; maybe they were being held somewhere out of sight here, as well.
Lee wove her way across the floor, navigating sweat-slick bodies and hands that darted about like pale hummingbirds. Looking without knowing what she was looking for. Nobody paid her any attention beyond a few stoned smiles that greeted her as they did everyone else. A boy danced around her, his feet sliding around beneath him like he was on ice.
Suddenly Lee felt herself being watched. She turned. The chess players were staring at her. It took her a double take to recognize the one on the right. He had shaved his beard down to the mustache, and the kindness was gone from his eyes, but it was him: the man who had given her sixty dollars for a bus ride back to Ohio. The professor. Their eyes met. He no longer saw in her his own teenage daughter. He didn’t even have a teenage daughter.
A wave of sickness washed through her. She’d been playing a game with an opponent who was moves ahead of her. The tall man who’d given her the dress was watching her from across the room. She turned back to the DJ, recognizing him now, too—the homeless guy from the park, the one who’d told her to find the Station Master. Lee looked up through the open roof. The surface was there, three stories up, but there were no ladders, no way to get out but the way she’d come in.
The curtained doorway was across the dance floor. Lee made for it, slamming through the dancing kids. She was through the curtain and halfway down the tunnel when she stopped. The costumed policeman was sitting on the stairs at the end, smoking a cigarette and eyeing her curiously. Without hurry, he ashed his cigarette and stood. Lee felt her breaths turn to sharp pains in her chest, and she bent down, dizzy and collapsing inside, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t breathe. A voice said, “This way.”
Lee couldn’t see well enough to make out more than an old woman wearing a shawl wrapped around a head of gray hair. She wore a pair of black-framed glasses glinting green in the light. The woman hissed. “Come with me.”
Lee looked back at the policeman. He was walking her way now.
The woman gripped her shoulder and pulled. Lee broke from her stupor and followed the woman back toward the doorway she’d just come through. But instead of going through the curtain, the woman turned quickly the other way, behind a different curtain. She shifted herself behind Lee and guided Lee’s hand to a ladder welded into the wall.
Lee climbed. She could feel the woman behind her, her hands brushing against Lee’s ankles. Step by step her breathing began to return to normal. Then her knuckles brushed a steel ceiling and Lee nearly hit her head. The woman grabbed hold of her. She was surprisingly strong. She reached around Lee and undid a latch. The woman pulled down. There was a click, followed by a tiny hydraulic gasp, then a sliver of light came through from above. Lee pushed and the cylindrical steel door popped open. She emerged behind the clown’s head. Lee turned to help but the woman was already up, closing the door behind her. When she reached up and pulled the shawl off, her hair came with it. It was a wig.
The boy before her was short, shorter than Lee even, with a wide, squat face and wavy brown hair. Just a few years older than she.
When he reached out and grabbed her arm, Lee instinctively pulled back, losing her balance and nearly falling. She steadied herself and looked down. A good thirty feet below her the kids danced, oblivious to everything but the music. The chess players were gone, but the tall dark-suited man was staring up at her. Lee thought she saw him smile before she turned and headed quickly for the front gate. The boy followed. “Slow down,” he said. “Take it easy.” Lee slowed, but only because she thought the doorman might try to stop them. But he opened the door to let them through without even looking up from his book.
The Readymade Thief Page 9