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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