• • •
There were more cars parked around the site than the last time she was here. A few kids clustered around an old pickup, drinking and shifting to a low heavy bass from the truck’s speakers. Lee pulled Steve’s car in behind a beat-up minivan. She saw the Orbisons’ Audi right away; it stood out from the old beaters that populated most of the lot.
Lee hunched between the cars, avoiding the kids as well as the closed front gate. She cut into the pine woods and circled around to the back, trying to skirt the sight lines of the cameras along the wall’s perimeter. At the rear corner a tree had blown down onto the wall, providing a ladder right up and over. Every now and then you get a lucky break, she thought. Sometimes you even get a streak of them. Lee jumped up and shimmied to the top of the wall easily, then dropped down.
The area in the back had been neglected. Dried brambles grabbed at her hoodie and crunched underfoot. The only spaces clear of weeds or debris were two large concrete slabs set flush with the ground, a tight steel-lipped seam running down the center. The roof was closed tonight, but she could still feel the beat of techno music throbbing up from below. Passing a rotting utility shed, she nearly tripped over an open air vent. The vent had no grate, and had she fallen in, she could only imagine how far she might have dropped.
Using the monstrous clown’s head for cover against the gate guard, Lee made her way around to a place she could watch him from. He sat slumped on his stool, reading a book. Lee waited, completely still, squatting in the shadows.
A few minutes later the motion lights outside the gate popped on. The doorman inspected some tickets, then opened the gate. The teenagers from around the pickup came flopping in, one of them offering the doorman a beer, which he slid into his jacket pocket. Lee walked quickly toward the door and attached herself to the group just as they went into the stairwell. As she descended, the smoke got denser and the music louder. She came to the green-lit tunnel at the bottom in time to see the kids disappear into the costume room. Lee stepped aside to let a newly costumed couple jostle past on their way out. Their clothes were shiny and metallic, the guy in bulbous Moon Boots and a kind of neoprene leisure suit, the girl in a pearly hoop skirt and a top composed of kelplike strands of silver tinsel.
Then a man wearing an old policeman’s uniform came out of the room. Lee ducked her head. He was the one who’d been heading for her when Tomi had first found her. Thinking of Tomi, knowing he would not be here to save her this time, made her splinter a little inside. She waited in the shadows for the man to pass, then slipped into the costume room. The four kids she had followed in were laughing to themselves as they rifled through a pile of clothes on the floor.
Lee had to act quickly. She shuffled through the racks, searching for something bulky enough to hide her bag. She was halfway into a World War I Russian soldier’s uniform when she saw what the others were wearing: tight-fitting rubber exoskeletons and loops of opalesque plastic, crinkly silver Mylar bodices and hazmat-sized coveralls. Lee remembered the flier Annie had shown her, with its nod to the future. The section beside her was all clothes made from plastics and acetates, stiff-ribbed corsets and Mylar dresses and tops with architectural lines or exaggeratedly rounded forms. She held up a dress made entirely of little iridescent bubbles, replaced it, and picked up a suit constructed from a weave of black rubber. Lee kept combing through the racks until she found a hooded-cowl thing made from a series of concentric circles of thick gray wool. It was heavy and scratchy, but when she pulled it on over her clothes, it cocooned her. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror; what stared back was a monk from a science fiction film. But when she pushed the cowl up, her face disappeared into shadow, and that was enough.
Inside, the big room was much as it had been before—a mass of dancing kids compressed into too small a space—except that they were all dressed as denizens of some future Lee hoped she would never have to live in. The dumb, throbbing techno was the same. She wended her way past kids decked out in latex minis and wrapped in surgical garb, wearing tubular halters made from rings of sausagelike balloons, looking for Annie. Lee kept her head down as much as she could while still scanning the faces of the kids on the dance floor, catching only glimpses between each flickering strobe. The last time she was here, she had come in search of Edie and failed. She wouldn’t fail again.
Lee kept her eyes out for men in vintage suits and uniforms but saw none this time. There was no chess table on the DJ platform, and the DJ was a girl with bright red dreadlocks in a dress made from glow sticks. The air was humid with the heat and sweat of the crowd. She suddenly felt the weight of her costume, the thick wool itchy against her skin. A smiling alien boy in a silver net shirt and Mylar lederhosen handed her a bottle of water, and she drank half of it in a gulp.
She needed a better vantage. The DJ platform was on the far side, and Lee edged her way toward it, pushing through a copse of dancing kids. Though she was hidden in her wool cocoon, the costume still seemed to mark her. Most of the kids were half-naked, some covered by nothing more than strips of silver tape they had wrapped around their bodies.
Lee kept scanning the room for Annie, panic beginning to claw at her chest. A slide show was being projected onto the wall behind the DJ, and Lee paid no attention to it until the corner of her eye caught something that made her turn. Blown up to life size, it left no doubt, if there ever had been any. It wasn’t the cheekbones, or the nose, or the downward turn of the mouth. It wasn’t even the mole. It was the eyes. The woman in the photo had the same eyes as Lee, the same intensity and distance in her stare.
When Lee spotted Annie, it was clear why she’d missed her: Annie had shaved her head, and her scalp was slick with sweat and sparkling with bits of silver glitter. She was lost in herself on the dance floor, her eyes closed. She wore a little plastic dress made up of alternating bands of opaque blue and milky translucence. Lee hopped down from the platform, nearly tripping in her hurry to reach the girl. When Lee grabbed her shoulder, Annie opened her eyes, and her awareness seemed to rise slowly up to the surface and buoy there.
Then she pushed her face into Lee’s cowl, squealing with delighted recognition. “Oh! Lee! You’re here!”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think? You see—I look like you now!” Before Lee could react, Annie pulled Lee’s cowl down, exposing her to the room. “We’re practically twins!”
Lee saw the Policeman who’d passed her in the corridor. He was walking straight for her, and Lee started to measure out routes of escape through the crowd. But the man’s gaze passed right through her, and Lee pulled her cowl back up. “We have to get out of here. Come on.” Lee grabbed Annie by the arm, but the girl just slipped through, her skin slick with sweat.
“Dance with me! This place, it’s nothing but music! This music, it’s the closest I’ve come to being on drugs. Is this what being on drugs is like?”
“What did you take?”
“What?”
“You’re on something. What did you take?”
“I’m so confused and so happy right now.”
Lee felt the music popping beneath her skin in little carbonated bursts. She grabbed Annie by both arms. “We have to go. Now. Will you follow me?”
“I’ll follow you anywhere, Lee! You know that. Just one more song! Oh, I love this song—dance with me!” Annie was spinning again, and Lee could only watch her, frozen between trying to rip Annie free of her spell and following her. Just for one song.
An oozing plasma was moving through Lee in the form of the music, a percolating beat with a high female voice layered and transposed until it was no longer music and words, only vibration. All of it, everything, was only vibration.
Something was happening inside her, some alien, noncorporeal entity taking over her body from within. She thought of the baby lurking there, its tendrils fanning out through her veins, inhabiting her completely. Then
she shook the image away. It wasn’t the baby; the baby was just floating there, a tiny cosmonaut in her womb. This was something else, something laying siege to the cells in her body, invading her consciousness. She tasted the salt of her own perspiration running into her mouth, and swigged the rest of the water. And as the last swallow went past her lips, she understood. The water. It was in the water.
An orchestra was waking from somewhere inside her, tuning its strings and preparing to launch the first notes of a full-blown symphony. She was losing control. She couldn’t afford to lose control. Fighting against it only made her start to shake uncontrollably. She felt as though her flesh was folding in on itself over and over, forming . . . Lee needed to see her eyes. It felt as though they were being inflated inside her head. A boy in reflective sunglasses was dancing by himself, and she grabbed the glasses from his head and used them to see her reflection. Were her irises bigger? She thought of the Thrumm kids she’d seen, tried to compare theirs to hers. She couldn’t tell; everything was throbbing, changing colors, losing shape.
Lee closed her eyes and tried to shut it all out, but when she did, she saw the baby floating amniotically inside her. Its eyes were two big blue jellyfish. She mouthed I’m sorry over and over and felt herself falling, into the same pit she’d fallen into when she was looking down on Mr. Velasquez’s body, realizing that it was all her fault. She was supposed to be protecting the baby inside her—what had she done? Lee pushed through the pulsing bodies, looking for anything that resembled a bathroom. She grabbed Annie to pull her along, but when she looked back, she was holding the hand of another kid, a boy with a nose ring and his hair shaved into leopard’s spots. Lee let go and stumbled back through the bodies, looking for Annie, wondering if she had ever been here at all.
A young girl with one arm wrapped in thick glow bands, her hair a glossy white eel-slick helmet, took Lee under the arm and led her through the dance floor toward a thick black curtain at the other end. She had a long, exotic face, with a pointy beaklike nose and big black avian eyes; the girl radiated serenity and for a moment the ropes of sickness were loosened. The crowd parted for them as the girl led Lee toward the curtain, which she eased aside, then into a bathroom. A series of toilet stalls lined one end, and there was a bank of steel sinks as well, but the girl led Lee toward a kind of metal trough, lined with a series of spigots. The metal’s patina was diaphanous, swirling.
With one cool hand on the back of her neck the girl helped Lee kneel. Her touch was calming and Lee relaxed into it, until the sickness pulled her back and she grabbed hold of the side of the trough. The girl stooped beside her, drew Lee’s cowl back, and whispered into her ear. Lee vomited thick black strands that came alive in the bottom of the trough, curling and writhing like ropy flukes, the sight of which brought up more, and then more, until she was so empty it hurt. The girl stayed by her side the whole time, whispering at her to let it out, all the toxicity of her life; that she could make a clean start after this, and then everything would be okay. The girl helped her up and led Lee to one of the sinks. Lee stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked normal, her pupils dilated as hell but normal. The girl turned on the water and gently pushed Lee’s head toward it. She splashed it over Lee’s face. It felt good, and Lee stuck her entire head under, softening under the cool water, feeling somewhat normal again. She came up and looked the girl in the eyes for the first time.
The girl’s irises were almost nonexistent, two pale blue halos circling the darkest pupils Lee had ever seen. Lee thought she could see herself twinned in them, and as she leaned closer to see, the girl smiled. “How do you feel?” she asked.
Lee felt as if her flesh were liquid, but she could express nothing more than a soft moan.
“It will come and go. You just have to learn to ride it. Like breaking a horse—she will buck you at first, but once you break her, she’s yours. It’s a journey. Not an easy one, but one that you will see will be worth it in the end. Trust me.”
Two strains of Thrumm, one of which left a field of half-sentient vegetables in its wake. Which one was working its way through her? She felt like she might throw up again, but there was nothing left inside her.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked.
“Lee,” she managed before she could stop herself.
The girl’s stare lasted seconds, then minutes, then an eternity as Lee felt herself swimming in those dark pools. “God, you’re pretty, though. And you don’t even know it, do you?”
Lee looked down self-consciously.
“My name is Xenia.”
Xenia. Where had she heard that name before? There was something else Lee had forgotten. But whatever it was was gone now. She had a hard time placing where she was. The smell of the room, like sweat and vomit masked by a chemical strawberry perfume, began to seep in, and she started to feel sick again. Xenia helped Lee up; she hadn’t even realized she’d been on the floor. “Come on,” Xenia said. “Let’s get you to a good place.”
She led Lee out of the bathroom and back through the curtain to the dance floor, and as the music pulsed back through her and the mass of dancers came into focus, Lee suddenly remembered: Annie. She turned, trying to figure out where she had left her. Xenia was pulling her along, and Lee tugged against her, but Xenia was surprisingly strong, and Lee felt all resistance drained from her and could only follow. But she was looking for someone. Who again?
The crowd parted for them as Xenia led Lee toward the exit. Once they passed the curtain and the volume of the music dropped, the green-lit haze of the corridor became something she could hold onto. Xenia pulled her down the corridor as the green smoke pulsed and throbbed around them.
“I can always tell someone’s first time. It can be a little scary. We’ll get you settled down in a quiet place, and it will become beautiful. You’ll see. You’ll see things you never thought were possible.”
As they passed the tunnel mural, Lee came away with fractured snapshots of hands and legs, arms and feet, and the face of an old woman, eyes heavenward.
“They used to launch ICBMs from here. Or were prepared to, I guess. It’s built to withstand a nuclear blast. Now the place is the center of some positivity, at least.”
She took Lee up a flight of stairs and stopped at the first landing, propping her against the wall with her shoulder as she fumbled with a key attached to one of her bracelets. As she opened the door, Lee stumbled backward and nearly fell back down the metal staircase into darkness, but Xenia caught her. “Hold on,” she said. “We don’t want you to hurt yourself.” She flicked on a light and helped Lee into the room. She shut the door behind them. The music was gone now, just a memory in her skin.
Lee found herself standing on a dull green carpet in a large round room, with beanbags peppered about like enormous red mushrooms. A makeshift industrial kitchen took up one wall, with a long wooden dining table and chairs on the opposite end. Two dirty white couches faced each other, and behind them sat a cold war–era bank of controls, all dials and knobs and big square buttons and colored lights, and above it a bank of twelve blank monitors. As in the costume room, a large round concrete column rose up from the center of the floor to the ceiling.
“Sit down,” Xenia said. “I’ll get you some water. You need to stay hydrated down here!”
Lee flopped down onto a beanbag and took the bottle but didn’t drink until Xenia drank from it first and handed it back. Lee heard the music again, pumping in from the dance floor somewhere far away, so low she could hear it only on a subterranean level. Perhaps it wasn’t there at all, it was all just inside her now. Lee swigged from the bottle until she was coughing.
“Easy, now. No need to drown yourself. How are you feeling? Can you talk?”
Lee tried. “Am I saying something?”
Xenia smiled. “I can see you trying. Which is good. The sensation will come and go, so if you start feeling it come on again, it’
s okay. I’ll guide you through. Do you trust me?”
Lee didn’t know, but nodding seemed the easiest thing to do, and so she did.
“Good.” She sat in a bag beside Lee. “Because here you have to let go. Of everything you’ve been holding on to. I can tell you’ve been through some rough times. Am I right?”
Lee had no words.
“You don’t have to say anything, I can tell. How are you feeling now?”
Her mouth tasted tingly, metallic. Her body was fighting waves of nausea. She wanted to throw up again, but she nodded anyway.
“Good. Settle into it and don’t fight it or it will drown you. Let it take you by the hand.”
She was drowning. The more Lee thrashed against it, the deeper she sank. She closed her eyes and felt an unraveling inside her guts, candy-colored tentacles unfurling like kelp. The music, even so far away, was moving inside her. A cumulus of images swirling inside her head: Paleozoic underwater arthropods; a fetal, floating cosmonaut; the white, spread legs of a nude woman lying supine in a thicket of dried brush. She opened her eyes to the eyes of the girl, Xenia, and the images vanished.
“Now. Is there anything you want to clear away?”
Lee shook her head, then nodded, then shook it again. She didn’t know what to do with her head.
“Anything weighing you down. When we carry negative psychic energies around with us, these energies keep us tethered to our fears and our anxieties. You clear these energies, and you release yourself from your fears. Is there something you would like to let go of?” Lee began to tremble, and Xenia steadied her with a hand. “It’s okay. I’m here to guide you. Will you do something for me?”
Lee nodded.
“Close your eyes.”
“No.” The word felt phlegmy, like something she needed to eject from her body.
“You have to trust me, Lee. Do you trust me?”
The Readymade Thief Page 28
