"I don't know. It just kind of happened." Trying to figure if her comment was a compliment. Rune didn't think so. Interesting. That's a bitch of a word. Interesting.

"You have any freaks come in?"

Rune said, "Depends on what you mean. There's a guy knows every line-even the TV and radio broadcasts-in Night of the Living Dead. Then this lawyer told me he and his wife rent Casablanca after they have sex. And I can look up in the computer and tell you that they must be having problems. There's this one guy, Mad Max, he's real creepy and always rents slasher films. Those stupid things like Halloween and Friday the 13th, Part 85, you know."

"Sexist bastards," Stephanie said, "that's who makes those films."

"But turns out he's a social worker for a big hospital uptown and volunteers for Meals on Wheels, things like that."

"Seriously?"

"I keep telling you… a video store is a great education."

Stephanie said, "You have a boyfriend?"

"I'm not sure," Rune said. She decided this was a pretty accurate statement.

"Is Rune your real name?"

"For now it is."

A queue formed-and Rune walked Stephanie through the check-out procedure.

"I can't believe this is your first day. You're a born clerk," Rune told her.

"Thanks loads," Stephanie drawled. "Don't tell Tony, but what I'm hoping is I'll meet some producers or casting agents here. I want to be an actress. Just a dry spell right now. I haven't auditioned for a month."

"What about all those casting calls in L.A.?"

"A casting call doesn't mean you get the part. L.A. is yucky. New York's the only place to be."

"I knew I liked you," Rune said, and rented The Seven Samurai, Sleeping Beauty, and Lust Orgy to a pleasant, balding businessman.

The rivers are moats, the buildings are parapets

Wait, is that right? What exactly is a parapet?

Anyway…

The buildings are parapets. The stone, pitted and stained with age and cloudy water. Dripping. Slick stalactites and stalagmites. Dark windows with bars on the dungeons. We're riding down, down, down… The hooves of our horses muted by the cold brick. Down into the secret entrance that leads under the moat, out of the Magic Kingdom, out of the Side.

Richard guided the old Dodge into the Holland Tunnel and headed for New Jersey.

"Isn't it wild?" Rune asked. The orange lights flashed by, the gassy sweet smell of exhaust flowing into the car.

"What?"

"There is probably a hundred feet of water and yuck on top of us right now. That's really something."

He looked dubiously up at the yellowing ceiling of the tunnel, above which the Hudson River was flowing into New York Harbor.

"Something," he said uneasily.

It was his car, the Dodge they were in. This was pretty odd. Richard lived in Manhattan and he actually owned a car. Anybody who did that had to have a pretty conventional side to them after all. Paying taxes and parking and registration fees. This bothered her some but she wasn't really complaining. It turned out that the nursing home where the writer of Manhattan Is My Beat lived was forty miles from the city and she couldn't afford to rent wheels for this part of her quest.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing."

And they drove through the rest of the claustrophobic yellow tunnel in silence. Rune was careful; when men got moody, it could be a real pisser. Put them with their buddies, let 'em get drunk and snap their jocks and throw footballs or lecture you about Bunuel or how airplane wings work and they were fine. But, holy St. Peter, something serious comes up-especially with a woman involved-and they go all to pieces.

But after twenty minutes, when they were out of the tunnel, Richard seemed to relax. He put his hand on her leg. More sparks. How the hell does that happen? she wondered.

Rune looked around as they headed for the Turnpike. "Gross." The intersections were filled with stoplight poles and wires and mesh fences and gas stations. She looked for her favorite service station logo-Pegasus-and didn't see one. That's what they needed, a winged horse to fly them over this mess.

"How did you get off work?" Richard asked her.

It was Sunday and she'd told him that she'd been scheduled to work.

"Eddie covered for me. I called him last night. That's a first for me-doing something responsible."

He laughed. But there wasn't a lot of humor in his voice.

Richard removed his hand and gripped the wheel. He turned southwest. The fields-flat, like huge brown lawns-were on either side of the highway. Beyond were marshes and factories and tall metal scaffolding and towers. Lots filled with trailers from semi trucks, all stacked up and stretching for hundreds of yards.

"It's like a battlefield," Rune said. "Like those things-what do you suppose they are, refineries or something?-are spaceships from Alpha Centauri."

Richard looked in the rearview mirror. He didn't say anything. He accelerated and passed a chunky garbage truck. Rune pulled an imaginary air horn and the driver gave her two blasts on his real one.

"Tell me about yourself," she said. "I don't know all the details."

He shrugged. "Not much to tell."

Ugh. Did he have to be such a man?

She tried a cheerful "Tell me anyway!"

"Okay." He grew slightly animated; the hipster from the other night had partially returned. "He was born in Scarsdale, the son of pleasant suburban parents, and raised to become a doctor, lawyer, or other member of the elite destined to grind down the working class. He had an uneventful boyhood, distinguished by chess club, Latin club, and a complete inability to do any kind of sport. Rock and roll saved his ass, though, and he grew to maturity in the Mudd Club and Studio 54."

"Cool! I loved them!"

"Then, for some unknown reason, Fordham decided to give him a degree in philosophy after four years of driving the good fathers there to distraction with his contrarian ways. After that he took the opportunity to see the world."

Rune said, "So you did go to Paris. I've always wanted to see it. Rick and lisa… Casablanca. And that hunchback guy in the big church. I felt so sorry for him. I-"

"Didn't exactly get to France," Richard admitted. Then slipped back into his third-person narrative. "What he did was get as far as England and found out that working your way around the world was a lot different from vacationing around the world. Being a punch press operator in London-if you can get to be a punch press operator at all-isn't any better than being one in Trenton, New Jersey. So, the young adventurer came back to New York to be a chic unemployed philosopher, going to clubs, playing with getting his M.A. and Ph.D., going to clubs, picking up blondes without names and brunettes with pseudonyms, going to clubs, working day jobs, getting tired of clubs, waiting to reach a moment of intersubjectivity with a woman. Working away."

"On his novel."

"Right. On his novel."

So far he seemed to be pretty much on her wavelength-despite the car and the moods. She was into fairy stories and he was into philosophy. Which seemed different but, when she thought about it, Rune decided they were both really the same-two fields that could stimulate your mind and that were totally useless in the real world.

Somebody like Richard-maybe him, maybe not- but somebody like him was the only sort of person she could be truly in love with, Rune believed.

"I know what's the matter," she said.

"Why do you think something's the matter?"

"I just do."

"Well," he said, "what? Tell me."

"Remember that story I told you?"