I listened to her voice, sounding rushed and tinny through my smartphone.

"Greg, this is Alex, I'm about to go into the tunnel to get some of those photos. Since you're always telling me to be careful, I thought I'd let you be my designated life line. I'll uh, I'll keep your salty old sea captain story in mind. "

The message ended without a goodbye. She never weighed herself down with social niceties, but it was this ellipses that melted the following days into a fluid state. For almost two weeks she had been missing.

A day without a call was fairly normal. We never defined ourselves within the boundaries of a relationship, or by our lack of one. This ambiguous tone always made me feel both over and under protective. After two days of unreturned calls from her, I called the police from my office at noon. The fictional missing person narratives I'd unwittingly consumed had led me to believe that a phone call and five minutes would result in a tightly packed phalanx of police holding German shepherds, expanding out into the abandoned subway's dark portal. Instead, the man on the other end of the phone's voice was a bureaucratic monotone, whetted to a slight edge of accusation.

"You're aware, sir, that the location you've given me is restricted access without the express permission of city officials."

"Yes sir, but she's an adult, and I work for the museum, and if there was some sort of legal issue, I'm sure I can find somebody who can clear it up."

"Sir, you've given me her information. We will look into it."click

I put my cell in my pocket and looked at my desktop screen, at the cursor flashing where I'd stopped cataloging the museum's new acquisitions. I was curating a new display on the history of the city's abandoned subway tunnel. Everything around me reminded me of my complicity in Alex's disappearance. Behind me on a large table, under the crooked metal arm of a magnifying lamp, lay a railroad spike consumed by rust. Next to it lay a cracked shard of tile taken from one of the station platforms.

I inserted my earbuds, and began listening to  a certain German romantic symphony. I needed something more than background music, a different country that I could immigrate to for a small amount of time. I needed something that would help me forget that I had been the person who had planted the seed in her mind.

She and I been at a bar in the university village with her friend Felicia, an adjunct in the linguistics department. We had just left a college conservatory of music concert. After witnessing an experimental saxophonist practice two hours of circular breathing, pushing forward hypnotic bass thumps of polyphonic rhythm, our throats felt communally dry.

We pushed in around a chairless high top table, matte finished with layers of spilled beer. Alex twisted her head to talk to Felicia. I watched the silver crescent moons dangling from her ears flash in the beerlight, between jet black locks that just grazed her shoulders.

"Did you have a chance to catch the Woodson retrospective?"

"No, I didn't hear about it until its last night, and then I was up till midnight grading papers. Work comes first. How could I not be able to pay my bills if I lost my job?"

Alex laughed. "I know what you mean. On an artist's salary, if they repoed my car I'd be homeless".

"I'm gonna go grab a beer. Do you need anything?" Felicia asked as she rested her hand on Alex's shoulder.

"No thanks, I'm good."

She glanced toward me before walking away. I raised the mostly full bottle I'd barely been touching. Just Alex and I now.

I'd been mapping the ways I could try to give her the keys to my apartment, the copy I'd purchased at the hardware store this morning.
She focused kohl rimmed eyes on me.

"You look a little lost tonight."

"No, it's just been a long week. The administrative manager's been on me every day. He wants me to have the subway exhibition up and running by next week. He said he can't have empty displays on the weekend. He took so long to approve the budget, I got behind on cataloging."

"Oh, hey man, I was really just trying to be polite." She squinched her face up a certain way when she nettled me for her own amusement. I didn't really mind. We both paused, then started to laugh.

It would seem forced to bring up the apartment keys now. They were burning through my pocket. I felt that the moment would have to be played just right, though, and bided my time.

She sidled up to me and pressed her compact, athletic frame into my side.

" So your place or mine?" she asked.

"If you pay for my next drink you can take me anywhere you want." I replied. "Would it be too forward of me to say I'm really digging this flannel shirt and leather jacket combo you have going on tonight."

"You like?" She said, pushing her hands into her coat pockets and spreading it's wingspan wider. "I found everything at that vintage warehouse down on Second street."

The shirt was open to the third button. A silver rune dangled suggestively by a chain in the collar's valley.

"I bet you'd like them better on the floor" she smiled. I couldn't argue.

"Yeah, but if I could make a request, leave the necklace and earrings on. There's a weird part of me that wants to see what that looks like. "

"Why don't you have an emergency, so we can leave Felicia with some cab fare, and I can take you home."

"Sounds good to me."

"Ok, here she comes. I'll handle it. Just wait for me by the door."

I shouldered through the crowd and turned to watch Alex. She whispered something into Felicia's ear, who then saw me and flashed me a look of mild disgust disguised as sympathy. I was sure my emergency was diarrheal.

In the car back to her flat, she began talking about her dealer, how he had refused to purchase her most recent prints. It was a photogravure collection of a riverside community whose land was being slowly eroded.

"I wanted to call the exhibition Borrowed Time, but I probably won't be calling it anything at all. Strangely apropos title given that I can't use my usual buyer for them. I need to find another project quick if I want more grant money. "

A thought crossed my mind.

"I'm surprised you haven't hopped on the 'ruins porn' bandwagon. Given that you're a photographer who likes to visit ruins".

Her shoulders tensed. "There's something different to me about classical ruin. Enough time has passed. I don't have to see the people affected by it. When I look at Roman architecture, I can just imagine the people who inhabited it".

" Yeah, I guess you're right. But if you need something to work on, I have a set of keys to the old subway tunnel I could copy for you".

"Just give me a little time to think about compromising my ideals."

Her apartment was really just two particle board bookshelves, overstuffed with glossy photography collections and dense anthropological treatises. On the walls were some of her original prints.

Her work usually featured a person photographed in some paroxysm of joy or sadness, the line of which was often rendered indistinguishable. He photos were always developed in stark black and white.

The one I found most oneiric hung over her bed. Against the backdrop of a distressed wooden floor, a human blur seized in an ecstatic fit. The rictus of her mouth was stretched into what could be a smile or a cry for help. I was curious, but had learned long ago not to ask her to decode her work.

By her bed, she stripped quickly, like she was caught changing in a department store. Through the Roman blinds, the moon washed her body in its light. She was built like a boxer, muscles compacted tightly around her lithe frame. Her necklace and earrings glinted in the faded light.

"C'mon man. I had a rough week and you had a rough week." She flipped the covers back while I dropped my jeans, and heard the loud thunk of two sets of keys hitting the floor.

The next morning we sat on either side of her small table, crowded with an SLR camera and books on primitive folklore. She was wearing my blue oxford. We sipped microwaved coffee that had been sitting in the percolator for at least two days.

I decided this was the time. "You know, it might save some decision time if you just had a set of keys."

"Keys? Oh yeah, I'll do it. "

"You'll, do it?" I felt something flutter in my stomach. I thought about her picture above the bed. It seemed like I wanted to throw lines down on life, whereas her entire body of work had been about erasing  them. Could this be happening?

"Yeah, I need the money. I need to produce something people will buy. If you can sneak them out to get me a copy, I'll have them back by Monday evening".

A lead ball dropped into my guts. I kept my face impassive. "No problem. There won't be any more site collection for at least another week."

I paused.

"I know it was my idea. I want you to be careful in there though. I know you don't want me to tag along. Uh, but, um, one of the collection guys told me about something he'd seen last time."

How had I not remembered this?

I felt the unnecessary protectiveness coming back and tried to smother it.

She was already giving me the skeptic's eyebrow. "This sounds like it'll be academic".

"Well it's probably worth a grain of salt, but museum careers don't usually attract the superstitious. He just told me that he'd seen somebody in the tunnel the last time he was in."

She leaned forward a little. My half buttoned oxford woke the caveman that I was trying to lull to sleep.

"He was a little further from the rest of the group, getting ready to run the floodlight's cord back to the generator. Thought he saw a bat fluttering ahead, but close to the ground. He trained a flashlight on it. It was a man, so far in the tunnel that he could barely make out his features. He was dressed in an old overcoat, and his pants and shirt were spattered in mud. Well, best case scenario it was mud. As he raised the flashlight, he noticed that the man was wearing a short brimmed hat, pulled all the way over his face. "

The details were returning, like rotten food at the back of the fridge. I felt centipede legs creeping up my back, remembering the almost childish fear of the man who recounted the story to me.

"The other thing he noticed was the smell. He said as soon as he noticed the man, it was like someone had cut open a horse next to him. He almost vomited, and this guy is used to
just about every kind of decay imaginable. He swore that the man had noticed him, though he wasn't sure how. He started waving to the collection guy in these really broad, sweeping hand gestures, like he was trying to lure him further down the tunnel. He heard buzzing, and said that there were, almost instantly, flies all around him. His hands and arms were covered, and he said it felt like they were trying to get into his mouth. That's when he ran."

Alex leaned closer.

"And the sharks ate every last survivor".

I deflated. "Yeah I know, he probably just saw some poor guy without a family who thought he was about to be rousted. Just be careful. Take a taser or something."

" I'll take my butterfly knife, but I might need you to show me how to use it. I wasn't paying attention in my knife fighting class because" she fluttered her hand against an invisible
pearl necklace "I was shocked that some of the other thirty-year-old women weren't wearing wedding rings. "

" Ha ha. Sorry for caring". Maybe I'd try the apartment keys next weekend.

I snuck the museum keys out that day to make a copy for her. As I handed them to her, she showed me the butterfly knife, then flicked it expertly open and closed.

"I'll be ok" she said.

This was the last time we had spoken before she went missing.

Almost two weeks later, I was sitting on my couch trying to force down some takeout. I threw most of it away. I tried to organize the stacks of books growing around my bookcase. When that held no distraction I put in my earbuds to let myself fall into a hard bop quartet. I was dimly aware that the last week had segued into the next. This was my fault. Her parents lived on the other side of the country. I couldn't bring myself to call them. What could I tell them?

The police called later that night to let me know that they had thoroughly searched the tunnel, with no results. They were going to open up a larger investigation. This meant it was only a matter of time before I would be questioned.

The administrative manager had stopped by my office as I was leaving for the week, to ask if I had known why the tunnel had been found open, with an abandoned car parked near it. He made a point of taking my access keys. Another bead of suspicion was being threaded. I had the feeling that some new reality was rising like tar around whatever had happened to Alex.

There was something about that tunnel. I don't usually dream. For the past week, a series of static images had come to me unbidden in the night.

The entrance to the subway was closed in the first dream. On the second night the metal doors were flung open. Each successive night brought the dark portal closer to me. On Friday night, even though the picture was frozen, I could just peer into the darkness. I heard the buzzing of flies. Barely discernible in the darkness was an outline. Black hair, leather jacket. She was standing like a pillar,
almost where the darkness would swallow her completely, her back to me. Alex. I tried to call to her, but my throat was plugged with dust.

On Saturday night I couldn't control a shiver as I pulled the covers up. Tomorrow, I would have to buy an LED flashlight. I would also have to pack food, as I would probably be in there for a while. Alex had called me her life line, and in waiting for someone else to find what they couldn't, I was failing her.

Although the track's loop was never completed, the workers had tunneled a deep shaft into the earth. Before the Great Depression had halted the city's dream of a world class public transportation system, an eight mile tunnel had been burrowed through hard clay and limestone. Five station platforms had been completed, save for the stairs to the surface. Five cement and tile boxes parallel to a track that terminated into a solid slab of chthonic shadow. I knew that she was waiting for me, in the tunnel. There was nothing to lose now.

I pushed my earbuds deep into my ears. Restless sleep covered me like a shroud.