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.
The Projected Girl
BY LAVIE TIDHAR
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the linked-story collection
NOTE: DAVID TIDHAR (1897–1970) WAS AN ISRAELI DETECTIVE, AUTHOR, AND HERO OF THE TWENTY-EIGHT DAVID TIDHAR BALASH (“DETECTIVE”) NOVELS.
On Danny’s tenth birthday Uncle Arik gave him a conjuring set. Uncle Arik had just come back from a spell in England. He’d stayed, he’d said, in a five-star hotel in a place called Brixton; apparently he’d stayed there for the whole year and three months of his absence. “A bed to lie on, a roof over your head, and three meals a day,” Uncle Arik told Danny, “—what is there to go out for?” When he’d finally left the hotel, however, and before boarding the El Al flight back home, Uncle Arik had stopped in a shop called Davenports, and there, remembering his favorite (and only) nephew’s rapidly approaching birthday, he purchased the conjuring set. “It’s a shop set underground,” he told Danny in confidence. “Below the great train station of Charing Cross. Unless you know it’s there, you will never find it. ’Course, it’s a
It was Danny’s conviction that his Uncle Arik was a Mossad agent. His mysterious job was seldom referred to, yet it took him to many exotic places, often for great lengths of time. He had once heard his father say, when he thought Danny couldn’t hear him, that Uncle Arik’s work involved “things falling off the back of trucks.” For a while, therefore, Danny thought Uncle Arik was a truck driver, or perhaps a mechanic: yet he had never seen him driving a truck, nor were there ever signs of grease on his immaculately ironed shirt or trousers. “A conjuring set?” Danny’s father said to his brother when he saw the present. “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”
“It’s a great idea,” Uncle Arik said. “It’s what every kid wants.”
“And how would you know?” Danny’s father said.
“I was a kid once,” Uncle Arik said. “I always wished Mum had bought one of those for
Mention of their mother merely brought a head shake from Danny’s father. But the present was given, and it stayed. “Go on, open it,” Uncle Arik said. “Remember, the magic you learn—you’ve got to keep it
“I guess you had a lot of time looking out of windows,” his brother said.
“But there’s nothing,” Uncle Arik said, ignoring him, “quite like coming home.”
Danny, who had never been out of Israel and seldom out of Haifa, shared Uncle Arik’s sentiment wholeheartedly. The city—
