Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Weston Walks BY KIT REED

Kit Reed is the author of The Baby Merchant, Dogs of Truth, and Thinner Than Thou. Her short novel Little Sisters of the Apocalypse and the collection Weird Women, Wired Women were both finalists for the James Tiptree, Jr., Award.

Her most recent novel, Enclave, appeared in 2009. Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Yale Review, Postscripts, and The Kenyon Review. Her next short story collection, What Wolves Know, will be published in 2011.

When your life gets kicked out from under you like a chair you thought you were standing on, you start to plan. You swear: Never again. After the funeral Lawrence Weston sat in a velvet chair that was way too big for him while the lawyer read his parents’ will out loud. He didn’t care about how much he was getting; he only knew what he had lost and that he would do anything to keep it from happening again.

He was four.

Like a prince in the plague years, he pulled up the drawbridge and locked his heart against intruders. Nobody gets into Weston’s tight, carefully furnished life, and nobody gets close enough to mess up his heart.

Now look.

When your money makes money you don’t have to do anything—so nothing is what Weston ordinarily does, except on Saturdays, when he comes out to show the city to you. It isn’t the money—don’t ask how much he has—he just needs to hear the sound of a human voice. He lives alone because he likes it, but at the end of the day that’s exactly what he is. Alone.

It’s why he started Weston Walks.

He could afford an LED display in Times Square but he sticks to three lines in The Village Voice: “New York: an intimate view. Walk the city tourists never see.”

He’ll show you things you’ll never find spawning upstream at Broadway and Forty-second Street or padding along Fifth Avenue in your puffy coats. This is the insider’s walking tour.

Nobody wants to be an outsider, so you make the call. It’s not like he will pick up. His phone goes on ringing in some place you can’t envision, coming as you do from out of town. You hang on the phone, humming “pick up, pick up, pick up.” When his machine takes your message, you’re pathetically grateful. Excited, too. You are hooked by Weston’s promise: Tailored to your desires.

What these are, he determines on the basis of a preliminary interview conducted over coffee at Balthazar, on him—or at Starbucks, on you—depending on how you are dressed, and whether he likes you well enough to spend the day with you, in which case he’ll let you pay. He is deciding whether to take you on. No matter how stylish your outfit—or how tacky—if he doesn’t like what he hears, he will slap a hundred or a twenty on the table at Balthazar or Starbucks, depending, and leave you there. It’s not his fault he went to schools where you learn by osmosis what to do and what not to wear. It’s not your fault that you come from some big town or small city where Weston would rather die than have to be. Whatever you want to see, Weston can find, and if you don’t know what that is and he decides for you, consider yourself lucky. This is an insider tour!

You’re itching to begin your Weston Walk, but you must wait until the tour is filled, and that takes time. Weston is very particular. At last! You meet on the designated street corner. You’re the ones with the fanny packs, cameras, monster foam fingers, Deely Bobbers, Statue of Liberty crowns on the kids—unless you’re the overdressed Southerner or one of those razor-thin foreigners in understated black and high-end boots. Weston’s the guy in black jeans and laid-back sweater, holding the neatly lettered sign.

He is surprisingly young. Quieter than you’d hoped. Reserved, but in a good way. Nothing like the flacks leafleting in Times Square or bellowing from tour buses on Fifth Avenue or hawking buggy rides through Central Park. He will show you things that you’ve never seen before, from discos and downtown mud baths nobody knows about to the park where your favorite stars rollerblade to the exclusive precincts of the Academy of Arts and Letters—in the nosebleed district, it’s so far uptown—to the marble grand staircase in the Metropolitan Club, which J. P. Morgan built after all the best clubs in the city turned him down.

Notice that at the end Weston says good-bye in Grand Central, at Ground Zero, or the northeast corner of Columbus Circle—some public place where he can shake hands and fade into the crowd. You may want to hug him, but you can’t, which is just as well because he hates being touched. By the time you turn to ask one last question and sneak in a thank-you slap on the shoulder, he’s gone.

He vanishes before you know that you and he are done.

You thought you were friends, but for all he knows, you might follow him home and rip off his Van Gogh or trash his beautiful things; you might just murder him, dispose of the body, and move into his vacant life. Don’t try to call; he keeps the business phone set on silent. It’s on the Pugin table in his front hall, and if you don’t know who Pugin was, you certainly don’t belong in his house.

The house is everything Weston hoped. Meticulously furnished, with treasures carefully placed. A little miracle of solitude. Leaving the upper-class grid at venerable St. Paul’s and Harvard was like getting out of jail. No more roommates’ clutter and intrusions, no more head-on collisions with other people’s lives. He sees women on a temporary basis; he’ll do anything for them, but he never brings them home, which is why it always ends. It’s not Weston’s fault he’s fastidious. Remember, he’s an orphaned only child. To survive, he needs everything perfect: sunlight on polished mahogany in his library, morning papers folded and coffee ready and housekeeper long gone, no outsiders, no family to badger him; they all died in that plane crash when he was four.

He spends days at his computer, although he deletes more than he types, lunches at a club even New Yorkers don’t know about, hunts treasure in art galleries and secondhand bookstores, can get the best table wherever he wants, but girls?

He’s waiting for one who cares about all the same things.

Too bad that Wings Germaine, and not the first tourist he booked, the one with the lovely phone voice, whom he loved on sight at the interview, shows up for the last-ever Weston Walking Tour. While thirteen lucky tourists gather at the subway kiosk on Seventy-second at Broadway, Wings is waiting elsewhere and for unstated reasons—down there.

Weston has no idea what’s ahead. It’s a sunny fall Saturday, light breeze, perfect for the classic Central Park walk, so what could be easier or more convenient? It’s a half block from his house.

All he has to do is collect his group outside the kiosk, where they are milling with vacant smiles. They light up at the sight of his neatly lettered placard. Grinning, he stashes it in the back of his jeans, to be used only when for some unforeseen reason he loses one of them.

A glance tells him this is a Starbucks bunch. With their cameras and sagging fanny packs, they wouldn’t be comfortable at chic old Café des Artistes, which is right around the corner from his house. It’s not their fault their personal styles are, well, a bad match. But they are. He’s one short, which bothers him. Where is that girl he liked so much? Too bad he has to move on, but maybe she’ll catch up. Nice day, nice enough people, he thinks—with the possible exception of the burly tourist in the black warm-up jacket with the Marine Corps emblem picked out in gold, who walks with his shoulders bunched, leaning into a scowl.

Never mind. It’s a beautiful day, and Weston is in charge. Happy and obedient, his tourists trot past the spot where John Lennon died and into the park on a zigzag, heading for the east side, where the Metropolitan Museum bulks above the trees like a mastodon lumbering away. He keeps up a lively patter, spinning stories as his people smile blandly and nod, nod, nod, all except the man with the scowl, who keeps looking at his watch.

Weston looks up: Ooops. Like a cutting horse, his ex-marine has the herd heading into a bad place.

Time to get out of here. He’ll walk them south on Fifth, point out houses owned by people he used to know. “All right,” he says brightly, “time to see how the rich people live.”

“Wait.” The big marine fills the path like a rhino bunched to charge. “You call this the insider tour?”

Smile, Weston. “Didn’t I just…”

He points to a gap in the bushes; Weston knows it too well. “TAKE US THE FUCK INSIDE.”

No! Behind those bushes, a gash in the rocks opens like a mouth. He can’t go back! Weston struggles for that tour-guide tone. “What would you like to see?”

“Tunnels.”

The ground underneath the park is laced with unfinished city projects—tunnels, aborted subway stations, all closed to them; Weston has researched, and he knows. “Oh,” he says, relieved, “then you want City Spelunking Tours. I have their number and…”

“Not those. The ones real people dug. Nam vets. Old hippies.”

“There aren’t any—”

The big man finishes with a disarming grin. “Crazies like me. I have buddies down there.”

“There’s nothing down there.” Weston shudders. He’s a client; don’t offend. “That’s just urban legend, like a lot of other things you think you know. Now, if you like legends, I can take you to Frank E. Campbell’s, where they have all the famous funerals, or the house where Stanford White got shot by Harry K. Thaw.…”

“No. DOWN!” The renegade tourist roars like a drill sergeant, and the group snaps to like first-day recruits. “Now. Moving out!”

Weston holds up his placard, shouting, “Wait!”

Too late. Like a pack of lemmings, the last-ever Weston Walking Tour falls in behind the big man.

They are heading into a very bad place. No, Weston doesn’t want to talk about it. He waves his arms like signal flags. “Wrong way! There’s nothing here!”

The marine whirls, shouting, “You fucking well know it’s here.”

The hell of it is, Weston does. He is intensely aware of the others in his little group: the newlyweds, the dreary anniversary couple, the plump librarian and the kid in the Derek Jeter shirt, the others are watching with cool, judgmental eyes. In spite of their cheap tourist claptrap and bland holiday smiles, they are not stupid people; they’re fixed on the conflict, eager to see something ordinary tourists don’t see. The authority of their guide is at issue. They are waiting to see how this plays out. There is an intolerable pause.

“Well?”

One more minute and the last Weston Walking Tour will die of holding its breath.

If you knew what Weston knew, you would be afraid.

His only friend at St. Paul’s vanished on their senior class trip to the city. One minute weird Ted Bishop was hunched on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, shivering under a long down coat that was brown and shiny as a cockroach’s shell and zipped to the chin on the hottest day of the year. Then he was gone.

Last winter Weston ran into Bishop on Third Avenue, with that same ratty coat leaking feathers and encrusted with mud. It was distressing; he did what he could. He took him into a restaurant and bought him hot food, looked away when his best friend stuffed everything he couldn’t devour into his pockets with the nicest smile. “I went crazy. I hid because I didn’t want you to know.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.” Weston’s stomach convulsed.

“At first I was scared but then, Weston. Oh!”

It was terrifying, all that naked emotion, so close. He shrank, as if whatever Ted had was catching.

“Then they found me.” Bishop’s pale face gleamed. “Man, there’s a whole world down there. I suppose you think I’m nuts.”

“Not really.” Weston reached for a gag line. “I thought you’d gotten a better offer.”

“I did!” Ted lit up like an alabaster lamp. “One look and I knew: These are my people. And this is my place! You have to see!”

“I’ll try.” He did; he followed the poor bastard to the entrance—it’s right behind these bushes, he knows—and stopped.… “Wait.”

… and heard Ted’s voice overlapping, “Wait. I have to tell them you’re coming. You will wait for me, right?”

Weston wanted to be brave, but he could not lie. “I’ll try.”

He couldn’t stop Ted, either. The tunnel walls shifted behind his friend as if something huge had swallowed him in its sleep. Its foul breath gushed out of the hole; Weston heard the earth panting, waiting to swallow him. Forgive him, he fled.

Awful place, he vowed never to … But they are waiting. “Okay,” he says finally, plunging into the bushes like a diver into a pool full of sharks. “Okay.”

With the others walking up his heels, Weston looks down into the hole. It’s dark as death. Relieved, he looks up. “Sorry, we can’t do it today. Not without flashlights. Now—”

“Got it covered.” The veteran produces a bundle—halogen miner’s lamps on headbands. Handing them out, he says the obvious, “Always…”

Weston groans. “Prepared.”

He stands by as his tourists drop into the tunnel, one by one. If they don’t come out, what will he tell their families? Will they sue? Will he go to jail? He’s happy to stand at the brink mulling it, but the marine shoves him into the hole. “Your turn.”

He drops in after Weston, shutting out daylight with his bulk. The only way they can go is down.

All his life since his parents died, Lawrence Weston has taken great pains to control his environment. Now he is in a place he never imagined. Life goes on, but everything flies out of control. He is part of this now, blundering into the ground.

Weston doesn’t know what he expects: rats, lurking dragons, thugs with billy clubs, a tribe of pale, blind mutants, or a bunch of gaudy neohippies in sordid underground squats. In fact, several passages fan out from the main entrance, rough tunnels leading to larger caverns with entrances and exits of their own; the underground kingdom is bigger than he feared. He had no idea it would be so old. Debris brought down from the surface to shore up the burrow sticks out of the mud and stone like a schoolchild’s display of artifacts from every era. The mud plastering the walls is studded with hardware from the streetcar/gaslight 1890s, fragments of glass and plastic from the Day-Glo skateboard 1990s, and motherboards, abandoned CRTs, bumpers from cars that are too new to carbon date. The walls are buttressed by four-by-fours, lit by LED bulbs strung from wires, but Weston moves along in a crouch, as though the earth is just about to collapse on his head—which might be merciful, given the fumes. Although fresh air is coming in from somewhere, there is the intolerable stink of mud and small dead things, and although to his surprise this tunnel, at least, is free of the expected stink of piss and excrement, there is the smell that comes of too many people living too close together, an overpoweringly human fug.

At first Weston sees nobody, hears nothing he can make sense of, knows only that he can’t be in this awful place.

Dense air weighs on him so he can hardly breathe—the effluvia of human souls. Then a voice rises in the passage ahead, a girl’s bright, almost-festive patter running along ahead of his last-ever Weston Walking Tour, as though she and the hulking marine, and not Weston, are in charge.

Meanwhile the mud walls widen as the path goes deeper. The tunnels are lined with people, their pale faces gleaming wherever he flashes his miner’s lamp, and it is terrifying. The man who tried so hard to keep all the parts of his life exactly where he put them has lost any semblance of control; the orphan who lived alone because it was safest is trapped in the earth, crowded—no, surrounded—by souls, dozens, perhaps hundreds of others with their needs, their grief and sad secrets and emotional demands.

The pressure of their hopes staggers him.

All at once the lifelong solo flier comprehends what he read in Ted Bishop’s face that day, and why he fled. Educated, careful, and orderly and self-contained as Lawrence Weston tries so hard to be, only a tissue of belief separates him from them.

Now they are all around him.

I can’t. Every crease in his body is greased with the cold sweat of claustrophobia. I won’t.

He has forgotten how to breathe. One more minute and … He doesn’t know. Frothing, he wheels, cranked up to fight the devil if he has to, anything to get out of here: he’ll tear the hulking veteran apart with teeth and nails, offer money, do murder or, if he has to, die in the attempt—anything to escape the dimly perceived but persistent, needy humanity seething underground.

As it turns out, he doesn’t have to do any of these things. The bulky vet lurches forward with a big-bear rumble. “Semper Fi.”

In the dimness ahead, a ragged, gravelly chorus responds: “Semper Fi.”

The marine shoulders Weston aside. “Found ’em. Now, shove off. Round up your civilians and move ’em out.”

Miraculously, he does. He pulls the WESTON WALKS placard out of the back of his jeans and raises it, pointing the headlamp so his people will see the sign. Then he blows the silver whistle he keeps for emergencies and never had to use.

It makes the tunnels shriek.

“Okay,” he says with all the force he has left in his body. “Time to go! On to Fifth Avenue and…” He goes on in his best tour-guide voice; it’s a desperation move, but Weston is desperate enough to offer them anything. “The Russian Tea Room! I’ll treat. Dinner at the Waldorf, suites for the night, courtesy of Weston Walking Tours.”

Oddly, when they emerge into fresh air and daylight—dear God, it’s still light—the group is no smaller, but it is different. It takes Weston a minute to figure out what’s changed. The bulky ex-marine with an agenda is gone, an absence he could have predicted, but when he lines them up at the bus stop (yes, he is shaking quarters into the coin drop on a city bus!), he still counts thirteen. Newlyweds, yes; anniversary couple; librarian; assorted bland, satisfied middle Americans, yes; pimply kid. The group looks the same, but it isn’t. He is too disrupted, troubled, and distracted to know who …

Safe at last in the Russian Tea Room, he knows which one she is, or thinks he knows, because unlike the others, she looks perfectly comfortable here: lovely woman with tousled hair, buff little body wrapped in a big gray sweater with sleeves pulled down over her fingertips; when she reaches for the samovar with a gracious offer to pour he is startled by a flash of black-rimmed fingernails. Never mind; maybe it’s a fashion statement he hasn’t caught up with.

Instead of leading his group to Times Square or Grand Central for the ceremonial send-off so he can fade into the crowd, he leaves them at the Waldorf, all marveling as they wait at the elevators for the concierge to show them to their complimentary suites.

Spent and threatened by his close encounter with life, Weston flees.

The first thing he does when he gets home is pull his ad and trash the business phone. Then he does what murderers and rape victims do in movies, after the fact: He spends hours under a hot shower, washing away the event. It will be days before he’s fit to go out. He quiets shattered nerves by numbering the beautiful objects in the ultimate safe house he has created, assuages grief with coffee and the day’s papers in the sunlit library, taking comfort from small rituals. He needs to visit his father’s Turner watercolor, stroke the smooth flank of the Brancusi marble in the foyer, study his treasure, a little Remington bronze.

When he does go out some days later, he almost turns and goes back in. The sexy waif from the tour is on his front steps. Same sweater, same careless toss of the head. The intrusion makes his heart stop and his belly tremble, but the girl who poured so nicely at the Russian Tea Room greets him with a delighted smile.

“I thought you’d never come out.”

“You have no right, you have no right.…” She looks so pleased that he starts over. “What are you doing here?”

“I live in the neighborhood.” She challenges him with that gorgeous smile.

How do you explain to a pretty girl that she has no right to track you to your lair? How can you tell any New Yorker that your front steps are private, specific only to you? How can you convince her that your life is closed to intruders, or that she is one?

He can’t. “I have to go!”

“Where are you—”

Staggered by a flashback—tunnel air repeating like something he ate—Weston is too disturbed to make polite excuses, beep his driver, manage any of the usual exit lines. “China!” he blurts, and escapes.

At the corner he wheels to make sure he’s escaped and gasps: “Oh!”

Following him at a dead run, she smashes into him with a stirring little thud that splits his heart, exposing it to the light. Oh, the chipped tooth that flashes when she grins. “Um, China this very minute?”

Yes, he is embarrassed. “Well, not really. I mean. Coffee first.”

She tugs down the sweater sleeves, beaming. “Let’s! I’ll pay.”

By the time they finish their cappuccinos and he figures out how to get out without hurting her feelings, he’s in love.

How does a man like Weston fall in love?

Accidentally. Fast. It’s nothing he can control. Still he manages to part from Wings Germaine without letting his hands shake or his eyes mist over; he must not do anything that will tip her off to the fact that this is the last good time. He even manages to hug good-bye without clinging, although it wrecks his heart. “It’s been fun,” he says. “I have to go.”

“No big. Nothing is forever,” she says, exposing that chipped tooth.

Dying a little, he backs away with a careful smile. To keep the life he’s built so lovingly, he has to, but it’s hard. “So, bye.”

Her foggy voice curls around him and clings. “Take care.”

They’re friends now, or what passes for friends, so he trusts her not to follow. Even though it’s barely four in the afternoon he locks his front door behind him, checks the windows, and sets the alarm.

That beautiful girl seemed to be running ahead of his thoughts so fast that when they exchanged life stories she saw the pain running along underneath the surface of the story he usually tells. Her triangular smile broke his heart. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he told her. “It’s nothing you did.”

“No,” she said. “Oh, no. But I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like.”

Orphaned, he assumed. Like me, he thinks, although she is nothing like him. Named in honor of her fighter-pilot father, she said. Art student, she said, but she never said when. Mystifyingly, she said, “You have some beautiful stuff.” Had he told her about the Calder maquette and forgotten, or mentioned the Sargent portrait of his great-grandfather or the Manet oil sketch? He has replayed that conversation a dozen times today and he still doesn’t know.

At night, even though he’s secured the house and is safely locked into his bedroom, he has a hard time going to sleep. Before he can manage it, he has to get up several times and repeat his daytime circuit of the house. He patrols rooms lit only by reflected streetlights, padding from one to the next in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, touching table tops with light fingers, running his hands over the smooth marble flank of the Brancusi, because every object is precious and he needs to know that each is in its appointed place.

Day or night, Weston is ruler of his tight little world, secure in the confidence that although he let himself be waylaid by a ragged stranger today, although he ended up doing what she wanted instead of what he intended, here, at least, he commands the world.

Then why can’t he sleep?

The fourth time he goes downstairs in the dark he finds her sitting in his living room. At first he imagines his curator has moved a new Degas bronze into the house in the dead of night. Then he realizes it’s Wings Germaine, positioned like an ornament on his ancestral brocade sofa, sitting with her arms locked around her knees.

“What,” he cries, delighted, angry and terrified. “What!”

Wings moves into his arms so fluidly that the rest flows naturally, like a soft, brilliant dream. “I was in the neighborhood.”

They are together in a variety of intense configurations until Weston gasps with joy and falls away from her, exhausted. Drenched in sense memory, he plummets into sleep.

When the housekeeper comes to wake him in the morning, Wings is gone.

By day Weston is the same person; days pass in their usual sweet order, but his nights go by in that fugue of images of Wings Germaine, who hushes his mouth with kisses whenever he tries to ask who she is and how she gets in or whether what they have together is real or imagined. No matter how he wheedles, she doesn’t explain; “I live in the neighborhood,” she says, and the pleasure of being this close quiets his heart. He acknowledges the possibility that the girl is, rather, only hallucination and—astounding for a man so bent on control—he accepts that.

As long as his days pass in order, he tells himself, as long as nothing changes, he’ll be okay. He thinks.

When Wings arrives she does what she does so amazingly that he’s never quite certain what happened, only that it leaves him joyful and exhausted; then she leaves. His nights are marvels, uncomplicated by the pressure of the usual lover’s expectations, because they both know she will be gone before the sun comes up. She always is. He wakes up alone, to coffee and the morning paper, sunlight on mahogany. Their nights are wild and confusing, but in the daytime world that Weston has spent his life perfecting, everything is reassuringly the same.

Or so he tells himself. It’s what he has to believe. If he saw any of this for what it is, he’d have to act, and the last thing Weston wants right now is for his dizzy collisions in the night to end.

Until today, when he hurtles out of sleep at 4:00 A.M. Panic wakes him, the roar of blood thundering in his ears. His synapses clash in serial car crashes; the carnage is terrible. He slides out of bed in the gray dawn and bolts downstairs, lunging from room to room, shattered by the certain knowledge that something has changed.

Unless everything has changed.

What, he wonders, running a finger over tabletops, the rims of picture frames, the outlines of priceless maquettes by famous sculptors, all still in place, reassuringly there. What?

Dear God, his Picasso plates are missing. Treasures picked up off the master’s studio floor by Great-grandfather Weston, who walked away with six signed plates under his arm, leaving behind a thousand dollars and the memory of his famous smile. Horrified, he turns on the light. Pale circles mark the silk wallpaper where the plates hung; empty brackets sag, reproaching him.

He doesn’t mention this to Wings when she comes to him that night; he only breathes into her crackling hair and holds her closer, thinking, It can’t be her. She couldn’t have, it couldn’t be Wings.

Then he buries himself in her because he knows it is.

Before dawn she leaves Weston drowsing in his messy bed, dazed and grateful. His nights continue to pass like dreams; the rich orphan so bent on life without intrusions welcomes the wild girl in spite of certain losses; love hurts, but he wants what he wants. Their time together passes without reference to the fact that when Weston comes down tomorrow his King George silver service will be missing, to be followed by his Kang dynasty netsuke, and then his best Miró. I love her too much, he tells himself as objects disappear daily. I don’t want this to stop.

He inspects. All his external systems remain in place. Alarms are set; there’s no sign of forcible entry or exit. It is as though things he thought he prized more than any woman have dropped into the earth without explanation.

He can live without these things, he tells himself. He can! Love is love, and these are only objects.

Until the Brancusi marble goes missing.

In a spasm of grief, his heart empties out.

Wings won’t know when they make love that night that her new man is only going through the motions—unless she does know, which straightforward Weston is too new at deception to guess. He does the girl with one eye on the door, which is how he assumes she exits once she’s pushed him off the deep end into sleep—which she has done nightly, vanishing before he wakes up.

Careful, Wings. Tonight will be different.

To him, Wings is a closed book.

He needs to crack her open like a piñata and watch the secrets fall out.

Guilty and terrible as he feels about doubting her, confused because he can’t bear to lose one more thing, he can’t let this go on. With Wings still in his arms he struggles to stay awake, watching through slitted eyes for what seems like forever. She drowses; he waits. The night passes like a dark thought, sullenly dragging its feet. Waiting is terrible. By the time a crack of gray light outlines his bedroom blackout shades, he’s about to die of it. The girl he loves sighs and delicately disengages herself. Grieving, he watches through slitted eyes, and when she goes, he counts to twenty and follows.

He knows the house better than Wings; she’ll take the back stairs, so he hurries down the front. When she sneaks into the central hall and silences the alarm so she can escape with another of his treasures, he’ll spring. Sliding into the niche behind the Brancusi’s empty pedestal, he crouches until his joints crack, echoing in the silent house. He has no idea how she escaped.

Damn fool, he thinks, and does not know which of them he’s mad at, himself or elusive Wings Germaine.

When they lie down together after midnight, Weston’s fears have eased: of being caught following—the tears of regret, the recriminations—unless his greatest fear was that she wasn’t coming back because she knew.

Did she know he followed? Does she?

She slides into his arms in the nightly miracle that he has come to expect, and he pulls her close with a sigh. What will he do after he ends this? What will she steal from him tonight, and what will she do when he confronts her? He doesn’t know, but it’s long overdue. When she slips out of bed before first light, he gives her time to take the back stairs and then follows. Like a shadow, he drifts through darkened rooms where the girl moves so surely that he knows she must linger here every night, having her way with his treasured things.

With the swift, smooth touch of a child molester, she strokes his family of objects but takes nothing.

Damn! Is he waiting for her to steal? What is she waiting for? Why doesn’t she grab something so he can pounce and finish this?

Empty-handed, she veers toward the darkened kitchen.

Weston’s back hairs rise and tremble as Wings opens the door to the smoky stone cellar and starts down.

His heart sags. Is that all she is? A generic homeless person with a sordid squat in a corner of his dank basement? When Wings Germaine comes to his bed at night she is freshly scrubbed; she smells of wood smoke and rich earth, and in the part of his head where fantasies have moved in and set up housekeeping, Weston wants to believe that she’s fresh from her own rooftop terrace or just in from a day on her country estate.

Idiot.

He has two choices here. He can go back to bed and pretend what he must in order to keep things as they are in spite of escalating losses—or he can track her to her lair.

But, oh! The missing furniture of his life, the art. His Brancusi! What happened to them? Has she sneaked his best things out of the house and fenced them, or does she keep them stashed in some secret corner of his cellar for reasons she will never explain? Is his treasured Miró safe? Is anything? He has to know.

Oh, lover. It is a cry from the heart. Forgive me.

He goes down.

The cellar is empty. Wings isn’t anywhere. He shines his caretaker’s flashlight in every corner and underneath all the shelves and into empty niches in Great-grandfather’s wine rack, but there is no sign. It takes him all morning to be absolutely certain, hours in which the housekeeper trots around the kitchen overhead making his breakfast, putting his coffee cup and the steaming carafe, his orange juice and cinnamon toast—and a rose, because roses are in season—on his breakfast tray. He times the woman’s trips back and forth to the library where he eats, her visit to his bedroom where she will change his sheets without remarking, because she does it every day; he waits for her to finish, punch in the code, and leave by the kitchen door. Then he waits another hour.

When he’s sure the house is empty, Weston goes back upstairs for the klieg lights his folks bought for a home tour the year they died.

Bright as they are, they don’t show him much. There are cartons of books in this old cellar, bundles of love letters that he’s afraid to read. His parents’ skis, the ice skates they bought him the Christmas he turned four, the sled—all remnants of his long-lost past. This is the sad but ordinary basement of an ordinary man who has gone through life with his upper lip stiffer than is normal and his elbows clamped to his sides. It makes him sigh.

Maybe he imagined Wings Germaine.

Then, when he’s just about to write her off as a figment of his imagination, and the missing pieces, up to and including the Brancusi, as the work of his housekeeper or the guy who installed the alarms, he sees that the floor in front of the wine rack is uneven and that there are fingerprints on one stone.

Very well. He could be Speke, starting out after Burton, or Livingstone, heading up the Zambezi. The shell Weston has built around himself hardens so that only he will hear his heart crack as he finishes: Alone.

When she comes back too long after midnight, he is waiting: provisioned this time, equipped with pick and miner’s light—because he thinks he knows where Wings is going—handcuffs, and a length of rope. He will follow her down. Never mind what Weston thinks in the hours while he crouches in his own basement like a sneak thief, waiting; don’t try to parse the many heartbroken, reproachful, angry escalating to furious, ultimately threatening speeches he writes and then discards.

The minute that stone moves, he’ll lunge. If he’s fast enough, he can grab her as she comes out; if she’s faster and drops back into the hole, then like a jungle cat, he will plunge in after her and bring her down. Then he’ll kneel on the woman’s chest and pin her wrists and keep her there until she explains. He already knows that eventually he’ll soften and give her one more chance, but it will be on his terms.

She’ll have to pack up her stuff and move into his handsome house and settle down in his daytime life, because he is probably in love with her. Then he’ll have every beautiful thing that he cares about secured in the last safe place.

And, by God, she’ll bring all his stuff back. She will!

He’s been staring at the stone for so long that he almost forgets to douse the light when it moves. He manages it just as the stone scrapes aside like a manhole cover and her head pops up.

“Oh,” she cries, although he has no idea how she knows he is crouching here in the dark. “Oh, fuck.”

It’s a long way to the bottom. The fall is harder than he thought. By the time he hits the muddy floor of the tunnel underneath his house, Wings Germaine is gone.

He is alone in the narrow tunnel, riveted by the possibility that it’s a dead end and there’s no way out.

He’s even more terrified because a faint glow tells him that there is. To follow Wings, he has to crawl on and out, into the unknown.

Weston goes along on mud-caked hands and slimy knees for what seems like forever before he comes to a place big enough to stand up in. It’s a lot like the hole where the runaway tourist stampeded him, but it is nothing like it. The man-made grotto is wired and strung with dim lights; the air is as foul as it was in the hole where Ted Bishop disappeared, but this one is deserted. He is at a rude crossroads. Access tunnels snake out in five directions, and he has to wonder which one she took and how far they go.

Stupid bastard, he calls, “Wings?”

There is life down here, Weston knows it; she is down here, but he has no idea which way she went or where she is hiding or, in fact, whether she is hiding from him. A man in his right mind, even a heartbroken lover, would go back the way he came, haul himself up and station his caretaker by the opening with a shotgun to prevent incursions until he could mix enough concrete to fill the place and cement the stone lid down so no matter what else happened in his house, she would never get back inside.

Instead he cries, “Wings. Oh, Wings!”

He knows better than to wait. If anything is going to happen here, he has to make it happen.

The idea terrifies him. Worse. There are others here.

For the first time in his well-ordered life, careful Weston, who vowed never to lose anybody or anything he cared about, is lost.

The chamber is empty for the moment, but there is life going on just out of sight; he hears the unknown stirring in hidden grottoes, moving through tunnels like arteries—approaching, for all he knows. The knowledge is suffocating. The man who needs to be alone understands that other lives are unfolding down here; untold masses are deep in their caverns doing God knows what. A born solitary, he is staggered by the pressure of all those unchecked lives raging out of sight and beyond the law or any of the usual agencies of control.

Encroaching. God!

Trembling, he tries, “Wings?”

As if she cares enough to answer.

The tunnels give back nothing. He wants to run after her but he doesn’t know where. Worse, she may see him not as a lover in pursuit but a giant rat scuttling after food. He should search but he’s afraid of what he will find. Much as he misses his things, he’s afraid to find out what Wings has done with them and who she is doing it with.

Overturned, he retreats to the mouth of the tunnel that leads to his house and hunkers down to think.

There are others out there—too many! Accustomed now, Weston can sense them, hear them, smell them in the dense underground air, connected by this tunnel to the treasures he tries so hard to protect. The labyrinth is teeming with life, but he is reluctant to find out who the others are or how they are. They could be trapped underground like him, miserable and helpless, snapped into fetal position in discrete pits they have dug for themselves. They could be killing each other out there, or lying tangled in wild, orgiastic knots doing amazing things to each other in communal passion pits, or thinking great thoughts, writing verse or plotting revolution, or they could be locked into lotus position in individual niches, halfway to Nirvana or—no!—they could be trashing his stolen art. He doesn’t want to know.

It is enough to know that for the moment, he is alone at a dead end and that, in a way, it’s a relief.

Surprise. For the first time since the runaway tourist forced him underground and Wings flew up to the surface and messed up his life, Weston has nothing to hope for and no place to go. And for the first time since he was four years old, he feels safe.

After a time he takes the pick he had strapped to his backpack in case and begins to dig.

In the hours or days that follow, Weston eats, he supposes: By the time the hole is big enough to settle down in, his supply of granola bars is low and the water in his canteen is almost gone, but he is not ready to go back into his house. In between bouts of digging, he probably sleeps. Mostly he thinks and then stops thinking, as his mind empties out and leaves him drifting in the zone. What zone, he could not say. What he wants and where this will end, he is too disturbed and disrupted to guess.

Then, just when he has adjusted to being alone in this snug, reassuringly tight place, when he is resigned to the fact that he’ll never see her again, she comes, flashing into life before him like an apparition and smiling that sexy and annoying, enigmatic smile.

“Wings!”

Damn that wild glamour, damn the cloud of tousled hair, damn her for saying with that indecipherable, superior air, “What makes you think I’m really here?”

The girl folds as neatly as a collapsible tripod and sits cross-legged on the floor of the hole Weston has dug, fixed in place in front of him, sitting right here where he can see her, waiting for whatever comes next.

It’s better not to meet her eyes. Not now, when he is trying to think. It takes him longer than it should to frame the question.

“What have you done with my stuff?”

Damn her for answering the way she does. “What do you care? It’s only stuff.”

Everything he ever cared about simply slides away.

They sit together in Weston’s tight little pocket in the earth. They are quiet for entirely too long. She doesn’t leave but she doesn’t explain, either. She doesn’t goad him and she doesn’t offer herself. She just sits there regarding him. It’s almost more than he can bear.

A question forms deep inside Weston’s brain and moves slowly, like a parasite drilling its way to the surface. Finally it explodes into the still, close air. “Are you the devil, or what?”

This makes her laugh. “Whatever, sweetie. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he shouts. “I don’t know!”

“So get used to it.”

But he can’t. He won’t. More or less content with his place in the narrow hole he has dug for himself, Weston says, “It’s time for you to go,” and when she hesitates, wondering, he pushes Wings Germaine outside and nudges her along the access tunnel to the hub, the one place where they can stand, facing. She gasps and recoils. To his astonishment, he is brandishing the pick like a club. Then he clamps his free hand on her shoulder, and with no clear idea what he will do when this part is done or what comes next, he turns Wings Germaine in his steely grip and sends her away. Before he ducks back into his territory Weston calls after her on a note that makes clear to both of them that they are done. “Don’t come back.”

Behind him, the cellar waits, but he can’t know whether he wants to go back to his life. He is fixed on what he has to do. Resolved, relieved because he know this at least, he sets to work on the exit where he left her, erasing it with his pick.