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 ma?tre 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-machéd 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.