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industrial park was about as welcoming as a clenched fist. The six-building complex was strictly Warsaw Pact chic: drab, impersonal, desolate. This place was nowhere in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t want to perseverate on the implications of that for me.
    I put my car in first gear and rolled into the old industrial park, listening for any sign of life. Mostly I heard the
tha
-
dump
tha
-
dump
of my tires rolling across the cracked pavement. That was another thing about Brixton: it was a mostly silent place. You’d hear whistles from the mines, the distant buzz of cars along the interstate, the blaring horns of freight trains, but the cars never seemed to stop here. Brixton was somewhere to pass by, not through, a blur in the rearview mirror: a faceless place not worthy of forgetting. I remembered my inability to adjust to the silence when I first moved here. Even Manhattan, Kansas, and Bloomington, Indiana, were loud enough to drown out the not inconsiderable noise in my head. That first year in Brixton I spent a lot of time with the Jack brothers—Yukon Jack and Jack Daniel’s—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
shhhh
thing again, pressing her finger across my mouth. “I thought you’d never get here. We’re going to be a little late.” She brushed the back of her hand against my cheek.
    “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