adjusting to the silence.
I stopped the car along the rear border of the industrial park. A tall cyclone fence topped with curls of razor wire marked the boundary. The fence seemed to have no end, disappearing into opposite edges of the night. Somehow the abject desolation of the place made the night seem that much darker on the other side of the fence.
When the silence broke, it broke hard.
There was a loud rapping on the passenger door window. My heart leapt into my throat. The St. Pauli Girl waved at me, amused at the sight of me jumping out of my seat. She let herself into my old Porsche, trying and failing to suppress her laughter.
“Glad you find me so funny.”
She did that
“Late for what?”
“You’ll see.”
Before I could ask the next question, her tongue was pushing through my lips and her right hand was unbuckling my belt. I forgot the question.
When she was done, Renee looked up at me.
“Was that all right?”
I smiled. It was my turn to shush her. I stroked her hair as she rested her head on my thigh. I wanted to tell her that she was more than all right, but how was I supposed to explain that the only thing standing between her and perfection was the memories of my ex-wife?
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Go where?”
She rose up, kissing me softly on the lips; my taste still on her breath. “Just drive,” she whispered. “Drive.”
I wasn’t wrong about the darkness on the other side of the fence. There wasn’t a light anywhere but in the night sky. That was one thing about Brixton; you could see stars, millions of them. I wasn’t the star-gazing type, nor, it seemed, was Renee. She didn’t need a star to guide the way.
“What is this place?”
“Hardentine Air Force Base. They flew, like, tankers and cargo planes out of here. Some fighter planes too, I guess.”
“Not quite Area 51, huh?”
“You’re the closest thing we got to an alien around here, Professor Weiler.”
I stopped the car. “Look, Renee, given what just happened, I think you’re going to have to call me Kip or Ken, at least outside of class.”
“I’ll try.”
We drove for what felt like another half hour, but was probably no more than ten minutes. In between the occasional “turn right here” and “loop around these huts,” Renee explained that the base had closed in the late ’90s. Hardentine AFB and I shared a common history: we’d both gone fully into the crapper at roughly the same time.
“Jim’s dad-”
“Jim Trimble?”
“Yeah, his dad was a colonel here, but when they closed the base, Jim and his mom stayed behind. Jim hates his dad.”
“Jim’s got some writing talent,” I said, still rushing on my orgasm and feeling magnanimous.
“Oh, my god, he’ll like freak when you tell him that. It’ll mean so much to him.”
“Are you two close?” There was a jealous edge to my voice that only I seemed to notice.
“We went out for a while, but it didn’t work. We’re friends.”
We zigged and zagged a few more times before she said, “We’re almost there.”
Ahead of us, I could make out the shape of several aircraft hangars rising up out of the night. When we got closer, the St. Pauli Girl had me turn into a narrow alley between two of the vacant behemoths. The gap wasn’t actually narrow at all, but the darkness and the huge scale of the hangars just made it feel claustrophobic. I was paying too much attention to the soaring walls surrounding us when Renee shouted for me to stop. There, parked in front of us, were about ten other vehicles: pickup trucks, mostly.
“Come on,” she said, kissing me again, then giving me a little shove towards my door. “Let’s go.”
Now outside the car, I detected the first sounds of activity since Renee’s soft moans and my own strained sighs. There was engine noise coming from somewhere close by and the comforting smell of spent gasoline blew upwind into our faces. We shimmied our way past the pickups. As we walked, the engine noise grew louder, the odor of the fumes more pronounced. After about twenty yards, I spotted a gas-powered generator coughing out a small but steady stream of exhaust. Renee walked ahead, seeming to follow two heavy-duty orange extension cords leading away from the generator. We came to a door held ajar by the extension cords. She shouldered the door open and we stepped inside.
I’m not sure what I expected: music at least, hip-hop or country. Maybe a cloud of pot or cigarette smoke. Maybe a sow’s head on a stick. Whatever I might’ve expected, I didn’t get it. The hangar was cold and cavernous as a giant’s empty crypt. It was dark, but not lightless. Beyond the door, the two extension cords separated by a few feet and ran a parallel course straight ahead of us. Every ten feet or so, caged bulbs-the type mechanics use when checking the undercarriage of your car-lit the way. Appropriate to our surroundings, the path looked kind of like a runway at dusk. And while it wasn’t exactly the Yellow Brick Road, we followed it just the same, our footsteps echoing as we walked.
Twenty yards ahead of us, rising up from the hangar floor was an incongruous rectangular structure with ten-foot-high walls made of concrete blocks. Painted a stark white, it didn’t seem to have any contextual relationship to the rest of the vacant hangar.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the concrete blockhouse.
She didn’t answer, instead walking quickly ahead of me. As I trotted to catch up to her, I noticed an elaborately carved wooden door built into the white concrete wall. The door seemed as out of place on that blockhouse as I did in Brixton.
“Ken, come over here.” Renee beckoned, standing off to the side of the structure. “I need to get you ready.”
“Ready. Ready for what?” I asked, as I came to where she stood.
“You’ll see. Take your jacket and sweater off and put this on,” she said, handing me a clean white T-shirt about one size too large.
I did as she asked, dropping my jacket to the floor, my sweater on top of it, and donning the tee. Renee removed her jacket too. Beneath it, she too was wearing a white tee that fit loosely over the curves of her upper body. Her T-shirt was faded with age and covered in gray-black smudges. There was one more rather stark difference between her shirt and the pristine one I wore. The front of her shirt was marked in small, blood-red crosses.
I pointed at the crosses. “What are those about?”
“Soon,” she said, “soon.” She knelt down to the floor, reached behind her, and came up holding a coffee can in her left palm. She dipped her right thumb into the can and pressed her thumb to my forehead above the bridge of my nose. She dipped her thumb again, only this time she pressed it to her own forehead, leaving a gray smudge.
I opened my mouth, but the St. Pauli Girl put her finger across her lips.
“Ashes,” she whispered.
I thought I heard muted human voices coming from inside the blockhouse and caught a whiff of rank beer. I also caught the scent of something else. It had a sharp metallic tang. The odor gnawed at me, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t place it. I turned, reached for the handle on the carved door.
Renee grabbed my arm. “Not yet.”
Standing there, her hand on my forearm, the smell filling up my nose, it came to me. Suddenly I was twelve
