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  Nicky was the gallery assistant. He said again: "Someone was in here last night, looking for you. Seemed to know you."

  "Can you be more specific?"

  "A man."

  "Good start. More specific?"

  "A god of a man. Perhaps an ex?"

  Jess thought for a moment, then shook her head. The lovers before her current relationship had been casual at best; chosen for their angular, hipster beauty, their faux vulnerability, and sent on their way when their ability in bed could no longer atone for their inane conversation. No reason why any of them would come looking for her.

  "So if you don't want him," Nicky chirped, "can I have him?"

  "He might be a serial killer."

  "But you should have seen his eyes. And his shoulders."

  Jess turned, rising up on her toes and stretching her arms above her head. The place was shaped like a cul-de-sac, steel stairs going up into the back. The artist showing there did ancient Egyptian-inspired collages with the inevitable postmodern, pop-culture twist. Her own work would fill the lower level.

  Her gaze fell on Heir of Nothing, the title piece of the series, propped by the door.

  The boy.

  Her boy.

  He filled the foreground, his slanted, glowing eyes staring out at the viewer. Behind him, the desert swept up to a line of mountains. Jess imagined that beyond those mountains the desert dropped away altogether. Because this world was flat, and if you weren't careful you would step over the edge, you would never stop falling. The sky was a pale, apocalyptic red. In the boy's thin body and sweep of landscape were shards of mirror, embedded in the paint. Jess saw herself reflected in bits and pieces: fragments of a tall lean body in jeans and a vintage-rock tee.

  There were odd moments, like now, when she didn't feel like she had created him. He'd emerged from some dreamlit inner space, and she'd been smart and quick enough to get out of his way—to get to paint and canvas and let his image rise up through her. Usually Jess spent months planning a painting, assembling notes and photographs and rehearsal sketches; only when the image was locked down in her mind did she take it to canvas, starting at six or seven in the morning and continuing straight through until twilight, or longer, working in the white glare of spotlights, stereo blasting, until she stepped away ravaged with hunger and fatigue.

  But the paintings of the boy—seven of them in all, forming the core of her first one-woman show—had been different experiences. She couldn't plan him out or lock him down; he was just simply, suddenly there, springing full-blown into the center of her mind, and it was a question of getting him down—of nailing the image—before he slipped away from her.

  She'd never experienced anything like it. Like him.

  Her nomad. Her archetype.

  "So no idea who he is?" Nicky's low honeyed voice was suddenly in her ear. "Does he even exist? Or is he just a figment of our collective imagination?"

  Jess glanced away, self-conscious. "It's just a painting."

  "Silly rabbit." He was looking at her with a self-satisfied smile, the backs of his hands on his hips so that his arms made off-angle wings. "I meant the guy who was in here before, claimed to know you. Was he faking us out? Was he full of shit?"

  She was tired of this topic; her mind had jumped to other things. She shrugged.

  "It's about time you got your first stalker," Nicky mused.

  The boy was still returning her gaze.

  Jess Shepard sipped her coffee and turned away from them both.

  Chapter Three

  Jess was behind the bar, hanging up wine glasses, when she saw Michelle Hathaway, her closest friend and boyfriend's twin sister, coming down the stairs. "You," Chelle said, collapsing on a chair. "I'd hug you like mad, except I'm too frigging tired. How've you been?" The votive candles on the bar flickered shadows on her cheeks.

  A girl's voice squealed, "You would not fucking dare," and the group in the far banquette shrieked more laughter. Kevin, the model-actor-waiter still on duty, was shooting them murderous glances. Jess could read his mind. He wanted them all to spontaneously combust so he could cash out and go home. "How was LA?"

  "I started smoking again," Chelle said, slapping down a pack of Marlboro Lights, "so don't give me shit about it, I feel like a loser as it is. I got the job."

  "Yeah, well, that's why they flew you out there, isn't it? To woo you."

  "I was wooed," Chelle muttered. "All they want is my soul. They'd pay a good price for it."

  "So tell them to go to hell. You don't need that kind of income."

  "I like the income. I just don't want to be a lawyer anymore." Chelle flicked ash into the ashtray. "So fuck all those episodes of 'LA Law' I saw in my formative years."

  "The evils of eighties television," Jess agreed.

  "I want to be like you. Pursuing what I love."

  "I was lucky."

  She had come to the city as a seventeen-year-old runaway. She'd been lucky to have Chelle, then a law student at NYU, to run to; lucky that her uncle had never come looking for her; lucky for those friends and mentors who taught her what they knew, shared supplies and studio space, let her sleep on couches and floors in their cramped Lower East Side apartments; lucky to get discovered by her dealer at an obscure group show in a Brooklyn warehouse.

  Chelle rested the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. Her sleeve fell down her left arm. Jess saw the pale network of scars there, hard to see if you didn't know to look. She glanced away. Kevin came by the bar. "Another round of martinis for the rat bastards," he said.

  As Jess shook them up and filled the glasses, she could sense Chelle's eyes on her. Kevin sighed heavily, dramatically, and trotted off with the tray. Jess grabbed a cloth, wiped down the bar and said without looking up, "If it's about Gabe—"

  "He says you're in angst."

  "In what?"

  "Playing the brooding artiste—"

  "I'm not playing anything—"

  "Distant and secretive and won't tell him why."

  Jess rolled the cloth through her hands. She was finding it difficult to meet Chelle's gaze. "Maybe I can't," she muttered.

  "Maybe you should try."

  Jess tossed the cloth in the sink. "What should I say, Chelle? That I'm on the verge of some kind of… break with reality?" She was smiling as she said it, but the undertone of her voice was serious enough.

  "Jess, are you—"

  "No. No. I'm exaggerating."

  Chelle leaned in towards her and placed her left arm on the bar, inner forearm turned up for full exposure. She had not missed Jess's earlier glance at those decade-old scars, Jess realized. And now, targeted in that calm, hazel gaze, Jess felt her walls going up, her expression turning blank, her gestures and inflections betraying nothing. If Chelle excelled at reading people, Jess excelled at being unreadable.

  Jess said, "Chelle. I just—" She rubbed her eyes. "I'm anxious about the show. I'm a mess, I admit it, but it's just the show. I can't focus on anything else."

  They looked at each other for an oddly helpless moment. Chelle drew in breath to speak, when her gaze shifted towards the stairs.

  Jess looked over.

  The man had paused on a middle step, shadows slanting over him; but Jess saw his height and strength, his dark hair, the bronze shade of his skin. He wore a dark suit that was loosely, beautifully cut, jacket open on a dark silk shirt.

  He was looking straight at her. Even through the shadows, though she couldn't see his face, she felt their gazes connect. It was like a snap of cold electricity at the base of her spine.

  "Jess," Chelle said, but Jess was only vaguely aware of her. Something was pulling too fiercely at her memory: salty taste of tears, high shelves filled with books, a man in a gold and green uniform holding a porcelain teacup, and someone else—

  —Yes, someone else, there in the room with her, sitting in the plush armchair as she slowly circled round it, someone with long legs extended, one large hand falling on the armrest as a body lean
ed forward and a deep voice spoke her name, spoke it as if he knew her—

  The man in the suit turned and went back up the stairs, out the door, swallowed by the summer night.

  Someone was looking for you.

  "Jess? Honey?"

  It took a moment to focus on her friend.

  Chelle said, "You know that guy?"

  "He was just… He was reminding me of—" Another memory came to her, but this one was full and intact: standing on the Cape Town harbor looking over the water, to where dark shapes of ships moved in the distance. She had watched those ships without knowing what they were doing, searching for the wreckage, the bodies. She had been six years old.

  They never found the black box; they never came to a satisfactory conclusion about why the plane went down.

  Your parents are dead. You are my child now.

  "He was reminding me of something," Jess said. "I don't know why. I don't know that guy."

  Chelle looked as if about to say something, then closed her mouth, stubbing out her cigarette with small, precise motions.

  Chapter Four

  That night, Jess Shepard had dreams:

  * * * *

  She's in the desert, some kind of ghost town: wooden buildings, sun-bleached and wind-beaten; bars with no one inside them; broken windows streaked with grime and dust.

  "Hey. You."

  She turns.

  He's standing about twenty feet away from her, hands hooked through the belt loops of his jeans. He wears a white shirt that hangs off his tanned chest. He is lean, wiry, maybe five-ten. His hair is sandy brown and longish, his jawline rough with stubble.

  "I know you," he says.

  And grins.

  It is a hard, fierce thing, that grin, and yet there's charm in it.

  "About the boy," the man says. "Thought you should know. We're going to find him first. Ready or not, we're getting all ready."

  She has no idea what he's talking about.

  "Stay home, girl," the man says, and smiles. "You'll get everything you ever want if you just stay home. Wouldn't fuck that up if I were you."

  A shadow falls over him, and he looks up into the sky. The air shimmers, thins, and Jess Shepard steps through the membrane separating the dream-life from the other.

  * * * *

  She was not in her bed.

  She was in the bathroom, crouched in the corner, the tile like ice beneath her feet. She glanced at the forms that surrounded her, found comfort in their banality: claw-footed tub, sink, blue shower curtain. Get a grip. Get a grip. People sleepwalk all the time.

  Only dreams. They couldn't hurt you.

  There was a cosmetics tube on the floor. It was uncapped, the lipstick broken off and blunted. Slashed inside her arm in dark red lipstick, in handwriting she recognized as very much her own, were the words: release the boy.

  She bit back a shriek; it emerged from her in a strangled half-cry of repulsion. Fumbling at the taps, she ran her arm through the water, scrubbing until the lipstick marks blurred and smeared and faded altogether.

  She glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror.

  Does your brain work right, girl? Her uncle used to say that to her, those years she lived with him and his whisper of a wife in their elegant Georgetown town-house. Are you stupid, or just crazy? Sometimes accompanied by a slap to the face, a punch to the back or sometimes the stomach. His name was Claude Harker, although everybody called him the Judge. She hadn't talked to him in a decade, didn't even know if he was still alive; but she could still hear his voice in her head. Some voices never left you.

  "You're okay," she muttered to her reflection. "A bit fucked in the head, maybe, but so what. You're fine."

  Somebody drop you on your head when you were just a wee bitty baby? Scramble things up in there? Is that what happened? Or were you born a fucking imbecile?

  She left the bathroom.

  The words were written all over the scratched hardwood floors, the mirrors and windows, in marker and lipstick and paint.

  RELEASE THE BOY RELEASE THE BOY RELEASE RELEASE RELEASE THE BOY

  Eventually, when Jess felt she could move again, she set to work scrubbing, washing, and rinsing.

  Chapter Five

  The night of the show, she stayed in the bathtub for close to an hour. She closed her eyes and searched for the image. A familiar image, a valuable daydream. Jess hadn't used it in a while, but she located it with ease, let it flesh itself out:

  She stands on a balcony in a hammerfall of sun. A lizard dozes along the ledge, one pale eye opening to look at her, then closing again. Beyond and below, the city rambles on: zigzagging sunbaked walls, turrets and domes, the fringed green of palm trees, winding out into the desert. The sun hammers down on glazed tile, stained-glass windows, courtyard mosaics. Music floats from below—stringed instruments, flutes—and she breathes in the drifting scent of incense. She feels all anxiety ease, draining from her like water through a sieve.

  At once, she felt better. Calm. Jess pulled the plug and stood, water sluicing off her body. Reached for her robe.

  She was ready.

  * * * *

  "Jessie, sweetie," Timothy Clayton was saying, "why the hell are you still with Taylor-Taylor?" He had a habit of sidling too close to her, so that she was subtly but constantly backing away. "Have you seen the place that Damon Oaks just opened in Tribeca? Now he would know how to show off a great young prize like you—"

  "I like Taylor-Taylor," Jess murmured. She caught fragments of a conversation going on behind her, a dealer and art writer discussing the new wave of artists coming out of Africa. That was the conversation she wanted to join, but it was breaking up now, the art writer drifting away. As Clayton yammered on about the latest renovations to his house in the Hamptons, Jess scanned the gallery for Chelle.

  The crowd was a curious mix of uptown and downtown, dressed in New York black and holding glasses of red wine: socialites and creatives, Wall Street types and their well-manicured significant others. Sara Nolan, the gallery owner, flashed her a discreet smile, talking with a black-haired collector in the corner.

  "—Art as an intellectual exercise," Timothy was saying now, "and not just a scene, although God knows there's nothing wrong with a high-caliber guest list. Tell you the truth, I wish there was a magic spell you could cast on people, so you could tell at a glance who's worth talking to and who's simply—"

  Chelle was standing alone in front of the heir of nothing painting, sipping wine.

  "I'm sorry, Timothy," Jess said, and gave him her best smile. "Would you excuse me? Thanks for coming."

  Chelle glanced over as Jess fell in beside her. "The ones with this kid in them—this character you've created—they're different from your other works. There's a different feeling to them."

  Jess glanced at the youth in the painting. The sleep-written words in red lipstick flamed through her mind; she felt the urge to look away from this painting but forced herself not to. It was ridiculous to be so unnerved by an image of your own creation, as if he were about to breathe himself to life, step down from his framework of paint and canvas, challenge her right there in the gallery.

  "Duende," Chelle said.

  Jess glanced at her sideways. "Isn't that the Spanish word for demon?"

  "The poet Lorca used it as a metaphor for artistic expression." Chelle had done her undergrad degree in literature. When she talked books or writers she slipped into a professorial mode that Jess found amusing, even as she listened intently. She would never admit how deeply she envied her friend's education. "The duende is kind of like a dark muse—artistic inspiration in the presence of death. It's hard to explain." Chelle paused, frowning. "You know, I've always thought you're so talented it's scary. Especially considering you had so little formal training. But these paintings—"

  "Duende," Jess echoed.

  "That feeling of apocalypse," Chelle agreed. Then: "Hey. There he is."

  Her brother was angling his way towards them. He was dres
sed more casually than the people around him, in jeans and an olive-green cotton sweater, his strawberry-blond hair in need of a cut. Gabe was the black sheep of the Hathaway family, who had elected not for law or medicine but designing and building furniture.

  As he looked at her now, he wasn't smiling. "Jess," he said, and was about to say more, when she gave herself over to impulse: stepping forward, touching his chest, saying, "I've been unfair. I'm sorry." His nearness unleashing something inside her, like rain. "I've been—"

  His hand closed over hers, tightened.

  "Let's talk," he said.

  "Not here."

  * * * *

  She put in her appearance at the afterparty and left as early as she decently could. She and Gabe walked through the quieter streets of the Village, railings glinting in the near-dark, thin young saplings spaced out along the sidewalks. They ended up at one of those places that manage to be crowded and mellow at the same time: candles flickering at high round tables occupied by a mix of gay and straight couples. A white-haired woman in a fedora played Gershwin at the baby grand.

  Jess said, with some difficulty, "I do love you."

  He downed the rest of his beer, signaled the waiter for another.

  "I do. I'm just not very good at it."

  "You know what it's like, sometimes, being with you?"

  She waited.

  "It's like—it's like standing in fucking shadow. It was intriguing at first, your aloofness and everything, but it gets old, Jess. It's not what I want."

  "But you—" She paused as the waiter set down another beer. "You know me."

  "Christ, Jessie, what makes you think you even want to be known?"

  She was slightly bewildered. "Doesn't everyone?"

  Gabe rubbed his hand along his jaw, snorted.

  She felt herself go into a kind of free fall. "There's something inherently wrong with me." She realized how vague and melodramatic that sounded. "Shit," Jess sighed, and pushed her hands through her hair.