by side, so that they were nearly touching. “But the whole night, it was dead quiet.”
* * *
Until Laura met Daniel, she had never done anything wrong. She'd gotten straight As in school. She'd been known to pick up other people's litter. She'd never had a cavity.
She was a graduate student at ASU, dating an MBA named Walter who had already taken her to three jewelry stores to get her feedback on engagement rings. Walter was attractive, secure, and predictable. On Friday nights, they always went out to dinner, switched their entrees halfway through the meal, and then went to see a movie. They alternated picking the films. Afterward, over coffee, they talked about the quality of the acting. Then Walter would drive her back to her apartment in Tempe and after a bout of predictable sex he'd go home because he didn't like to sleep in other people's beds.
One Friday, when they went to the movie theater, it was closed because of a burst water main. She and Walter decided to walk down Mill Avenue instead, where on warm nights buskers littered the streets with their violin cases and their impromptu juggling. There were several artists too, sketching in pencil, sketching in charcoal, making caricatures with Magic Markers that smelled like licorice. Walter gravitated toward one man, bent over his pad. The artist had black hair that reached down to the middle of his back and
ink all over his hands. Behind him was a makeshift cardboard stand, onto which he'd pinned dynamic drawings of Batman and Superman and Wolverine. “These are amazing,” Walter said, and Laura had thought at the time that she'd never seen him get so excited about something. “I used to collect comics as a kid.” When the artist looked up, he had the palest blue eyes, and they were focused on Laura. “Ten bucks for a sketch,” he said. Walter put his arm around Laura. “Can you do one of her?” Before she knew it, she'd been seated on an overturned milk crate. A crowd gathered to watch as the sketch took shape. Laura glanced over at Walter, wishing that he hadn't suggested this. She startled when she felt the artist's fingers curl around her chin, turning her face forward again. “Don't move,” he warned, and she could smell nicotine and whiskey.
He gave the drawing to Laura when he was finished. She had the body of a superhero - muscular and able - but her hair and face and neck were all her own. A galaxy swirled around her feet. There were people sketched into the background - the crowd that had gathered. Walter's face was nearly off the edge of the page. Beside the figure of Laura, however, was a man who looked just like the artist. “So that you'll be able to find me one day,” he said, and she felt as if a storm had blown up inside her. Laura looked at Walter, holding out his ten-dollar bill. She lifted her chin. “What makes you think I'll be looking?” The artist grinned. “Wishful thinking.”
When they left Mill Avenue, Laura told Walter it was the worst sketch she'd ever seen - her calves weren't that big, and she'd never be caught dead wearing thigh-high boots. She planned to go home and throw it in the trash. But instead, that night, Laura found herself staring at the bold strokes of the artist's signature: Daniel Stone. She examined the picture more closely and noticed what she hadn't the first time around: In the folds of the cape the man had drawn were a few lines darker than the rest, which clearly spelled out the word MEET.
In the toe of the left boot was ME.
She scrutinized the sketch, scanning the crowd for more of the message. She found the letters AT on the rings of the planet in the upper left corner. And in the collar of the shirt worn by the man who looked like Walter was the word HELL.
It felt like a slap in the face, as if he knew she'd be reading into the drawing he'd made. Angry, Laura buried the sketch in her kitchen trash can. But she tossed and turned all night, deconstructing the language in the art. You wouldn't say meet me at hell; you'd say meet me in hell. In suggested submersion, at was an approach to a place. Had this not been a rejection, then, but an invitation?
The next day, she pulled the sketch out from the trash, and sat down with the Phoenix area phone book.
Hell was at 358 Wylie Street.
She borrowed a magnifying glass from an ASU biology lab but couldn't find any more clues in the drawing regarding a time or date. That afternoon, once she finished her classes, Laura made her way to Wylie Street. Hell turned out to be a narrow space between two larger buildings - one a head shop with bongs in the window, the other a XXX video store. The jammed little frontage had no windows, just a graffiti-riddled door. In lieu of a formal sign, there was a plank with the name of the establishment hand-lettered in blue paint.
Inside, the room was thin and long, able to accommodate a bar and not much else. The walls were painted black. In spite of the fact that it was three in the afternoon, there were six people sitting at the bar, some of whom Laura could not assign to one gender or the other. As the sunlight cracked through the open doorway, they turned to her, squinting, moles coming up from the belly of the earth.
Daniel Stone sat closest to the door. He raised one eyebrow and stubbed out his cigarette on the wood of the bar. “Have a seat.” She held out her hand. “I'm Laura Piper.” He looked at her hand, amused, but didn't shake it. She crawled onto the stool and folded her purse into her lap. “Have you been waiting long?” she asked, as if this were a business meeting. He laughed. The sound made her think of summer dust, kicked up by tires on a dirt road. “My whole life.” She didn't know how to respond to that. “You didn't give me a specific time . . .”
His eyes lit up. “But you found the rest. And I pretty much live here, anyway.”
“Are you from Phoenix?”
“Alaska.”
To a girl who'd grown up on the outskirts of the desert, there was nothing more remarkable or idealistically romantic. She pictured snow and polar bears. Eskimos. “What made you come here?” He shrugged. “Up there, you learn the blues. I needed to see reds.” It took Laura a moment to realize that he was talking about colors and his drawing. He lit another cigarette. It bothered her
- she wasn't used to people smoking around her - but she didn't know how to ask him not to. “So,” he said. “Laura.” Nervous, she began to fill in the silence between them. “There was a poet who had a Laura as his muse. Petrarch. His sonnets are really beautiful.”
Daniel's mouth curved. “Are they, now.”
She didn't know if he was making fun of her, and now she was conscious of other people in the bar listening to their conversation, and frankly, she couldn't remember why she'd ever come here in the
first place. She was just about to get up when the bartender set a shot
of something clear in front of her.
“Oh,” she said. “I don't drink.” Without missing a beat, Daniel reached over and drained the shot glass.
