Rain washes in sheets over the cab’s windshield as Irina opens a map in her other memory. The map shows the whole world but the Mnemosyne coordinates are all in San Francisco, so apparently it’s a local thing. Each coordinate has an extra number, which at first leaves her nonplussed, but then she realizes it’s probably altitude, which means that these locations are mostly underground.
The closest one is ten minutes away by foot, and several hundred feet down, which must put it in the BART tunnels. The mystery of the thing is stirring. She must be ever deeper in breach with W&P, but that’s what lawyers are for. Strangely happy, she tells the cab to pull over.
She turns on her implant’s wireless and finds a site called Urban Underground, which is an atlas of the spaces below the cities of the world, cobbled together by generations of urban explorers. There’s a list of the city’s points of access to the subterranean world, and she feels like Alice on the threshold of Wonderland with all its rigors and absurdity (she’s always been told she resembles the photograph of Alice Liddell as a young woman in her garden). The nearest is in a restaurant called Boulevardier, which seems to have been around for centuries, and to offer access to the old infrastructure of the city; in its basement bar is a staircase leading down into the BART tunnels, which should put her at the right depth, and about a quarter of a horizontal mile from her chosen Mnemosyne coordinates. The site says the restaurant staff are used to people slipping in and disappearing.
She opens the door and wind blasts rain into the cab, like it wants to keep her there; she takes a breath, ducks into the wind and runs for an awning.
She draws the gaze of a soldier in power armor in the middle of the street. Helmet retracted, he wears a sodden, dripping camouflage hat, and how does he keep the water from getting inside? The armor is wearing him, she thinks, taking in the roses in his wet, sunburned cheeks; barely old enough to shave, and death in the missiles in the pods on his back. With his head protruding from the massive steel body he looks like a parable of masculine insecurity, a boy trying to present himself as robot and gorilla.
Meeting her eye, he flashes his authority-face, and then, reflexively, looks down at her chest; she’s wearing a thin shirt of midnight-blue linen, now rain-damp and clinging. Embarrassed, he turns away and makes a show of waving on cars whose hulls seem to vibrate in the downpour, unaware that she’s warmed to him, a little, for the humanity of his gesture; she’s reminded of an old boyfriend, how, deep in REM, he’d pull her close, stiffen against her as dawn lit the windows.
The rain lags, a gap in the clouds opening onto white depths, a tower of empty space culminating in a blue disc of sky; the air is sweet, now, redolent of eucalyptus, maybe jasmine; there are private gardens on the city’s rooftops, though few know they’re there—she remembers spending New Year’s Eve in one, leaning on the rail in the glow of Christmas lights looking down at the traffic and the revelers crawling by. She feels thankful for the gardens, and for the rain, wonders if without them the city would always smell like piss and decay.
* * *
Boulevardier is lit with dim red light and even this early in the afternoon there are pairs of silhouettes hunched intimately over their drinks and when the maître d’ accosts her she murmurs something about meeting friends and brushes past him toward the stairs leading down into the bar.
Even darker, down there, and there’s a table full of women convulsed with shrill, manic laughter, a reminder of why she’s always preferred the company of men. The red velvet and shadows and extravagant deco chandeliers put her in mind of the Paris Metro. There are black-and-white photographs of what must be seraglios, some abandoned ones with pillars crumbling and others populated by fleshy beauties disporting themselves in the bath, and it’s all persuasive enough that she can accept the illusion that this place is about absinthe and decadence and sin and not just a basement with a decorative motif.
As per the directions on Urban Underground, she finds a closet next door to the ladies’. Taped to the door is a legal notice disclaiming responsibility for what happens to anyone who chooses to go through. Opening it, she finds a narrow and plainly ancient staircase leading down between water-stained red brick walls, the product of some more ancient building code, or perhaps preceding them. It occurs to her that, not trusting her phone’s battery, she should go and find a flashlight, but then, as though her thought had called it into being, she sees a heavy-duty industrial flashlight in shatterproof yellow plastic, hanging from a nail driven into the smirched brick wall.
A few steps down, she hesitates, imagining getting lost, inhaling spores or stumbling on a coven of broken people who can’t function in the light, but it’s a point of pride, now, to continue, and what else could be as interesting, so she goes on into the dark.
* * *
The service corridor is ankle deep with crushed coffee cups, papier-mâchéd newspaper, dead leaves, used condoms—she wonders who would find BART infrastructure romantic. The intermittent fluorescent strip-lighting shows a path of crushed litter and bootprints worn down the center of the corridor. The walls are completely covered with jagged overlapping graffiti scrawls, like a continuum of largely illegible words, or of forms inspired by words, and for a moment she fancies it’s a mineralogical property of the concrete that, in this darkness, in the waves of pressure from the passing trains, it exude these vibrant, vaguely calligraphic lines.
There’s a grating low on the side of the corridor, opening into darkness. She hears the onrushing rattle of metal, and then the train roars by, almost close enough to touch; yellow strobe flashes of its windows and frozen passengers, and for a moment she feels absurdly exposed, but then the train is gone in a gust of ozone and cold earth.
She comes to a round metal door set in the wall, the graffiti warped to accommodate its shape. On the door is a joyfully grinning death’s head, apparently recently painted—she’s reluctant to touch it, but does, and finds to her relief that the paint’s not wet. Under the layered paint, the maker’s name, she assumes, is written in raised capitals. She deciphers them by touch: BRAUMANN MANUFACTURING, SINGAPORE.
She expects the door to be locked, and at first it won’t move—that’s it, she thinks, my journey over—but then it swings open under the slight pressure from her hand.
Dark, within. She fishes the high beam out of her bag, suddenly reluctant to leave the relative security of the service corridor’s light. She imagines some morlock vagrant wandering the tunnels, finding the door, locking her in, leaving her too deep for cell service, far from any help. Taking a breath, she ducks through the door, pulls it almost shut.
The high beam picks out isolated graffitos on the rough walls; they’re spaced out, here, and seem to have been made with greater care, as though this was the place for the really serious vandals to follow their muse, hidden from the world and the BART police. How did it feel, she wonders, when that farmer first saw the horses in the cave in Lascaux? The dim tunnel recedes in the distance before her.
As she goes on, the graffiti gets less frequent and more baroque; the avant-garde of urban art in this waste below the world. There’s a sort of rebus that might be a manticore made out of indecipherable, almost Arabic calligraphy, the monster’s smile idiotic and baleful. She almost misses a tessellation of UFOs on the ceiling. There’s the story, written in careful lowercase letters bounded by an intricate knotwork, of a maintenance man taking care of his dying and increasingly senile mother.
When she finds it, she thinks at first that it’s a water stain running from floor to ceiling. Homogenous from a distance, on close inspection it’s a mat of minutely interlocking blue and green spikes, suffused with vital energy, as though it were about to burst apart. The fugue hits her then—she sees desert, empty highways, shallow seas—and then vanishes as she drops her light.
She sits there, rapt in the image, hugging her knees to her chest, scarcely breathing. The stillness is broken only by the Doppler rush of distant trains. The flux in air pressure looses a fine grit that floats down through her high beam as though she were in an undersea abyss. The fugue comes and goes as the light moves with the tremor of her hand; the graffito is a flawed image, but behind the errors, the limited resolution of narrow-gauge spray cans and epoxy pens, the glyphs are discernible, and it has nothing to do with theorem or proof or the AIs’ usual concerns but is something like a story. Her other memory flickers with images of wastelands as she takes in the graffito inch by inch, careful not to touch it. She shines the light up and down the pitch-black tunnel, looking for some context or explanation, but besides a tiny line drawing of stylized abstract clouds there’s only the bedrock’s lunar surface.
It’s the voice of the girl, the one on the road, the one who was the focus of the AI’s concern—it has to be. She tries out various translations, still bemused to find it translatable, turning and polishing sentences until she gets it right:
… and the last night, driving through the desert. Empty, there, nothing but the cone of light before me, the dust in the light. Deaf to engine’s roar, my velocity such that I felt like I was floating. I was out of money, so I didn’t look at the fuel gauge, just floored it, red-lining. No one cares what you do, out there. It was like waking, when I rounded that bend, saw the city open up below me, just like that, with the lights of all its highways, right there, finally real, in all its possibility. At sunset, I’d heard, if the light’s just right, you can see the reefs, the old city’s outline under the water. The car’s windows were open, the air-conditioning having died before my boyfriend stole it, my ex-boyfriend by then, I guess, since I’d left with his car, but it hardly mattered, since I wasn’t going back. As the road fell toward the light the air changed, sage and dust giving way to something burned, chemical, notes of salt and maybe ether, and I knew that this would be the smell of home. There was moon enough to reflect palely on the loops of road incising the miles of hillside below me, and it was like gravity and momentum were drawing me in, welcoming me, would carry me the rest of the way, like the city wanted me.
I thought of my mother then, the gin empties like votive offerings around the TV, always tuned to the channel of Loving Christ Victorious, and her week-long stupors, and her hysterical prayers. The dust-occluded, fire-colored skies, out there, the shattered skylights in the endlessly branching terminals that used to be an airport. Making love on the cracked tarmac, in backseats, on the floors of boys’ squats, once even in the middle of the street, the broken windows of vacant houses staring blindly.
I steered into the first turn and the emptiness, which had always been there, rose up in me, pressing against my skin, burning where it touched, but there was nothing to go back to, and it was the next thing or nothing at all …
* * *
She emerges from a service corridor into the disinfectant reek of Powell Street Station, joining the damp and dark-coated throng around the escalator, trying to present a semblance of composure. It’s raining, outside, and harder than ever—it must be the monsoon.
What, she wonders, is Cromwell’s interest in this strangest of artworks, and what, if anything, does it have to do with her? In her preoccupation she almost walks into a cab, one with a driver who gesticulates and abuses her in Arabic as he peels away in a fantail of water.
Dazed, she stops at a window display of Japanese prints, tries to collect herself. Peasants in wide hats bent under their loads, struggling over cold shingle through driving diagonals of rain. A fisherman and his son haul on a taut net, Fuji looming across the water. Hokusai, she thinks; the prints’ names and histories, glimpsed once in a book, flashing to the surface, drifting away. There’s an erotic print—shunga, they’re called—showing a samurai grappling with a lady-in-waiting, their kimono fallen open. Another print shows the face of a woman, probably a geisha, white-cheeked and doll-pretty, her black hair precisely coiffed.
A light clicks off inside, the prints disappearing, leaving the reflection of a woman peering in, her hair glinting wetly; behind her the passersby are bent against the wind, the sporadic diagonals of rain. She squints, and the image becomes as abstract as a floating world print. As always, helplessly, she tries to find a loveliness in her own image, and when she does to believe it’s unillusory. In Hokusai’s time, the season of beauty would be passing, would have passed long since, but now, with the Mayo, there’s no telling, for her money will get her time, is the key to the kingdom of life and death. She once met a regenerative surgeon, drunk in the bar of the Chelsea Hotel, who’d insisted he was an artist, literally an artist, volubly scorning the mid-market hacks in the strip-mall plastic surgeries; there’s always an elegance, he’d said, in the givens of bone structure, cartilage, the chemistry of skin, one that he, and here his hand had brushed hers, would not let fade.
A flash of dread, sudden and staggering, for no reason she can see. She looks back at the last few seconds, and there it is, in the reflection in the window, the lights of a hovering drone, and then another, and her adrenaline spikes as she sees the wet gleam of their lenses, focusing on her, and they then shot up and away, and now an unmarked van with tinted windows is pulling up beside her.