The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  “She said she didn’t have anywhere else to go. What was I supposed to do, just turn her away?” She heard Tomi say.

  “So what, she’s homeless? Do you even know how old she is?”

  “Are you asking did I card her, Derrick?”

  “She could be fourteen for all we know. You know what that would make you?”

  Lee bristled at the implication of what Tomi might have told them.

  “She’s eighteen,” Allison said. “She told me.”

  “What else would she say? I’d be willing to bet she hasn’t even seen sixteen yet. Just find out who her parents are and call them to come pick her up,” Derrick said.

  “We don’t know anything about where she came from,” Allison said. “Maybe she was abused or something. You just want to send her back?”

  “Not our problem,” said Derrick. “Look, she’s a nice kid. But we’re not running a shelter, and we don’t know anything about her. We could get into trouble just for having her here.”

  “I told her she could stay here,” said Tomi. “She’s my responsibility.”

  “For a few days. It’s been weeks now. Are you going to start paying her rent, too? Paying for the food she eats?”

  “I don’t mind sharing my food.” This was Will. “It’s mostly stuff from Whole Foods they’re gonna throw out anyway.”

  “Fine,” said Derrick. “I don’t care about the money, either. I just don’t want to go to jail for harboring some teen runaway. I’m getting too old for this shit.”

  “You’re twenty-seven, Derrick.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I told you she’s my responsibility,” Tomi said. “I’ll take care of her.”

  Lee went back in to the apartment before she could be found out. She was quiet all that night, the conversation burning a hole in her stomach. She felt shitty enough about not contributing any money. She did what she could around the house, but it didn’t seem enough. That night, when they were all asleep, she put her shoes on and took them off twice, always on the verge of just slipping away. But Tomi was right: she didn’t have any place else to go.

  • • •

  A few days later she was coming home from the supermarket when Derrick came up behind her, taking a shopping bag and opening the door. “Let me get one of those for you,” he said.

  She thanked him and followed him up the stairs, but then he stopped, so suddenly she walked into him. Lee tried to move past, but he blocked the way.

  “How long you planning on staying with us?” he said. “By the way.”

  Lee tried again to get past, but he blocked her again. “I don’t know.”

  “Because everyone here pays rent, utilities, groceries. You’re in a hard place and I understand. I’m not a bad guy, you know. You need a place to crash until you get your shit sorted out, I get it. But sooner or later everyone has to pay their own way.”

  “I know, Derrick. And thank you. Really and truly. And that’s exactly what I’m doing, trying to sort my shit out so that I can pay my own way.”

  “So you’re looking for work?”

  Lee was not looking for work, she couldn’t, but she also couldn’t tell him that. “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “What kind of work? Maybe I can help.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Anything.”

  “You ever do any acting?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Movie acting.”

  “What? No. Why?”

  “Or more like webcam acting. Anything like that?”

  It took Lee a moment to understand. She could tell he was enjoying this.

  He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his hair. “You’re eighteen, right? I know some guys. I could hook you up.”

  Lee heard the door open and close upstairs, then the sound of footsteps. Derrick turned as Tomi rounded the staircase. “I was just looking for you,” he said to Lee. “I’m going to my studio. You want to come?”

  Lee turned to Derrick. “Bring this one up for me, too?” She handed the other bag to him without waiting for a reply, then followed Tomi down the stairs.

  • • •

  Tomi called the excursions creeps, and over the next two weeks Lee went on eight more with him. They visited a derelict hospital, an abandoned aquarium on an island, the rooftop of a half-constructed high-rise, an old theater in ruins, a crumbling hotel, two factories, and a network of tunnels beneath a rail yard that seemed like a vast catacomb of industrial corpses. Like any explorers, they sought out places unsullied by the footprints of previous urban explorers. Posting the first photos of a site on an urbex forum was like planting a flag. Others could explore it now, but they would always be following in another crew’s footsteps.

  He called his crew the Philadelphia Urbex Society, and when she asked who else was in it, he said, “Just you. Assuming you’d like to join.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a very exclusive crew.”

  “So before I came in, you were a society of one?”

  Tomi smiled. “No one else has made the cut.”

  Urban exploration altered the way Lee saw the world. The corner of Oxford and Broad was no longer an office high-rise under construction, a movie theater, a subway station, and a department store. Now when she passed by she saw a ladder of scaffolding leading to rooftop access, open windows like invitations, and minimally secured underground access tunnels.

  Lee loved the feeling of being lost in an empty building, the nebulous, directionless sensation of passing through an unknown space with no idea what might be ahead. The funny thing was that her internal compass always knew where she was and where the exits were. She’d challenge herself by going as deep into a building as she could, sometimes turning her flashlight off for minutes on end or closing her eyes and spinning in circles. But she always found her way in the end.

  One night she and Tomi were exploring a crumbling high school, empty since the mid-’80s. As Lee ran her flashlight over old lockers and along the heaps of trash and sludge at the bottom of the drained swimming pool, she found herself by the pool bleachers, remembering that last moment with Edie before the cops came to take her away. It seemed so long ago. What a child she was then.

  Tomi had gone on ahead, and she caught up and followed him down a stairwell. At the bottom they emerged into an enormous basement warehouse, shining their lights over a block of old textbooks as massive as a Greyhound bus. Decomposed to near disintegration, the stacked volumes looked fungal, like something growing in a forest. She wandered the damp room on a floor of books as soft as moss, the smell—earthy and thick with mold—making her lightheaded. It was fantastical down here, like an enormous underground cave.

  Lee lay on her back in the middle of the room, her flashlight pointing up, losing herself in the dark expanse of the peeling ceiling. Down here the JDC was a distant memory, her mother was a character in a book she’d read a long time ago, and the Crystal Castle was a dream, the Station Master a phantom within it.

  Tomi sank into a spongy pile of books that collapsed around him like a beanbag and lay back next to her. They listened to the faint ticking of the decomposition around them. She loved how alone she could be here. It was different being alone in the real world; there she just felt missed, invisible. But here, in the underground darkness, she felt whole. She didn’t mind that Tomi was here, too, because he saw her. It was as though he made it real just by witnessing it. Lee picked up an old geometry textbook, so soggy it came apart in her hand.

  “It’s like a necropolis of the written word down here,” he said finally.

  It wasn’t anything like that here. And he’d ruined her moment by saying it. He must not see her after all, she thought. “You’ve been waiting this whole time to say that, haven’t you? Why does everything n
eed a headline?” Lee felt bad the moment the words left her mouth. She didn’t know why she sometimes felt the urge to be mean to Tomi. He made it no secret that he had feelings for her, that he wanted more from her; maybe it was his nakedness that drove her to swipe at him as she did. He was never hiding anything of himself, which made Lee uncomfortable.

  She thought she’d hurt his feelings, but after a pause Tomi laughed and told her what a bitch she was, and she figured they were okay. “What’s Derrick’s story?” she asked.

  “Why? You like him?” Tomi looked resigned to the idea, as if he had come to the conclusion some time ago.

  Lee wanted to laugh. “What are you talking about?”

  “You told me you thought he was handsome.”

  “He’s also a fucking creep. Did I not tell you that, too?”

  “So you’re not into him?”

  Lee found Tomi’s palpable relief kind of sweet. He’d never brought up their tryst in the museum and hadn’t made a move, though she’d expected him to and half dreaded it, hating the idea of hurting him. She braced herself for a move now, but Tomi just got up and walked toward the stairs. Even in the darkness she could tell he was smiling.

  As they walked back to the apartment that night, Tomi told her about his crazy Czech family, his three childhood cats—Bolo, Tomo, and Gogo—and the reasons why, if he could pick any year in history to travel back in time to, it would be 1917. He rarely pried into her life, and she liked it that way, but tonight he ventured a few questions about her past and Lee was forced to choose her words carefully, offering details that she didn’t think could ever be used to pin her down. She could sense the rawness of his nerves around her, and she liked watching him weigh her answers, as though there were something in them to weigh.

  • • •

  Some nights they’d go out and eat sandwiches by the pier or picnic in a half-constructed office building, in the middle of an emptied public pool, in a derelict bank’s vault. Once they snuck into a Cineplex to view a late-night showing from the rafters up behind the screen, legs dangling and staring down at the film in mirror image. Tomi opened his backpack to show it stuffed with popcorn, then reached in and pulled out a flask of whiskey buried inside. As they passed the flask, Lee watched his face, his skin pale silver under the reflected light of the projector, and felt a tenderness for him she hadn’t known was there.

  Most of all she liked coming to his studio at the Water Works, liked to watch him work as he moved back and forth along the length of the canvas, which he’d tack down on the floor across the entire room. He didn’t talk when he painted, but he would when he took breaks. He asked her opinions on things. He asked her if she’d felt anything like aura when they’d creeped the museum that night, and seemed delighted when she told him she thought she’d felt something standing in front of the big glass sculpture by Duchamp.

  “What happened that night? After the museum. When you showed up at the apartment the next morning.” When she didn’t answer he said, “Allison told me you were living in a van in a junkyard.”

  Some vault. But Lee didn’t blame Allison. “I was. After you dropped me off, I came back to find it flat as a pancake.” She tried to laugh, but he just looked at her sadly.

  “All your stuff, too?”

  Lee brought her hands together in a crushing motion.

  “What was in there?”

  Lee thought about her clothes, her sleeping bag, the girl’s diary. “Everything I owned.” She shrugged. “Not much.”

  Tomi held that sad look on his face and returned to his work.

  She liked that Tomi saw her, and yet he seemed always to know when she needed to be alone, too. She liked especially when he’d turn off the lights and plug in one of his paintings. She’d hear a hum, then the little vibrating tendrils would come to life. In the dark the white fields glowed radium green and seemed to free-float in the air like small, trembling clouds.

  • • •

  At first she thought it was a random, possibly accidental, blip of a highlighter pen: someone had highlighted the word hello halfway through the book she was reading. The book was a bloated paperback historical novel that Allison had plucked from her bookshelf for Lee to keep herself occupied with, and Lee was burning through it. A half-dozen pages past the highlighted greeting was another word, lee, highlighted in that sickly neon yellow, extracted from the word “bleep.” Lee flipped forward, finding what highlighted a few pages in, do on the page after that. The word you was highlighted a few pages later, followed by see on the same page. She flipped forward until the word through jumped out at her, followed by your a few pages after. Lee couldn’t find another highlighted word until nearly the end of the book, when she landed on the word windows. A bit down the page was a highlighted question mark. Then there were no more highlighted words.

  Lee shut the book and sat there, listening to the hum of the silent apartment. It was three in the morning and everyone was asleep. “Hello Lee what do you see through your windows?” Was this Tomi’s doing? It seemed the kind of coy, oblique game he might play. But what did it mean? It could have been someone else. Allison could be playful like that. Derrick had been agitating to kick her out since the beginning; maybe this was just him trying to fuck with her head. She had been out earlier that day, without the book. It could have been any of them. Lee scanned the living room, landing on the windows. She got off the couch, dragging the blanket with her, and pulled up the shade.

  All she saw was her own face staring back at her in reflection. It took her a moment to realize that she was seeing, beyond that, her face again. Lee turned off the light. A picture was taped to the glass from the outside: a rectangle made of photographs of men—black-and-white and from another time, all of them in old-fashioned suits and ties and overcoats, all of them with their eyes closed—surrounding a single Polaroid photo: the same one Ester had taken of Lee in the cafeteria of the Crystal Castle. Someone had cut out her eyes, replacing them with big, sightless engorged eyes that sucked all sentience from her face. Lee tried to open the window, but it was painted shut. They were four floors up.

  · BOOK IV ·

  Nude Descending a Staircase

  SEVEN

  THIRTY-SIX days. A long time to have something growing inside you. How could she have gone so long without knowing? But she had known. Isn’t that why she stole the pregnancy test in the first place? She stared down at the white stick now, wondering how big the thing was and how it would feel to kill it. She wondered too what it would feel like to let it keep growing, taking up space inside her. She couldn’t help but imagine it as one of the creatures in the diorama in front of her, some Cambrian thing from the bottom of the sea crawling around in her belly, tickling her insides with its antennae, clawing to get out.

  Lee had cried when she first saw the little pink plus sign begin to appear on the stick; she had nearly stopped breathing. She had wanted to smash everything around her. Then her sobs stopped, as suddenly as they’d started, and she told herself that this, like everything else, could be taken care of.

  Lee forgot about all of it, if only briefly, when she plucked the little scroll of paper from the diorama and unrolled it to discover the photo of her twin from a hundred years ago. Lee had gotten only a glimpse of it in the Station Master’s room and had mostly written off the resemblance as her adrenaline playing tricks on her. But she had taken it in for nearly an hour now, and the resemblance was undeniable.

  “A.T. Juli 1911.” It wasn’t much to go on. But the note below the cryptogram was clear enough: “Return what you have taken.”

  If she’d had the object on her, she would return it; she’d give anything for all of it to just go away. Lee wondered if they could be here now, watching her. She turned quickly, shining her flashlight across the room, the beam glancing off empty tanks, old exhibition signage, defunct fossil displays. She flicked the light off and listened. No sound; n
othing at all. She was alone, she knew it. Still, the place was no longer hers.

  • • •

  As Lee motored the little boat back to shore, she thought about what to do. The apartment was no longer safe. She’d left it two nights before, stuffing a few things in a bag and slipping out as soon as she’d found the photo taped to the window. The abandoned aquarium was the most isolated place she knew. Earlier that day she’d gone back to shore for food, using what little money she had. She’d lifted the pregnancy test on a whim, just to ease her mind—missing her period had to have been a side effect of the stress of the past month—stuffing the empty box behind a milk carton and slipping the stick into her waistband. That must have been when whoever it was had come to the aquarium and left the scroll for her to find. Whoever it was had known she liked to sit and stare at the diorama. Which meant that he or she had been watching her. Tomi had been the one who showed her the place. Who else would know that she would come here? Lee began to consider the very real possibility that Tomi was behind it. He had been at the Silo party, after all, just happening to be there to whisk her away. Had her rescue all been engineered? But why? If that was the case, then he’d had her right there—why let her escape, only to come after her again?

  If Tomi was with the Station Master, then they had been toying with her from the beginning. Lee began to run through it all in her head, from the Silo party to his studio to the night in the museum—because of which she was now carrying Tomi’s baby, which made her feel sick—to all their explorations together. But why choose now to start taunting her with notes? Tomi was her friend, had been her lover, too, if just for a night. He had feelings for her, she knew that, or thought she did. Had he fooled her about that, too? Lee watched the oily black water ripple by and thought about what it would feel like to sink into it and simply disappear.

  The boat hit the shore without her even realizing it was there, nearly knocking her into the water. She’d missed the dock completely. She killed the motor and doubled back to it, then tied the boat up but just sat there for a long time. She’d known Tomi for only a little over a month, and yet she’d felt like she’d known him her whole life. What do you do when the one true thing in your life turns out to be a lie?