The LA County Museum of Art, where his mother had worked, bordered the Norval building. The facility was undergoing a massive restoration after a partial redesign infuriated its patrons. The nightlights of giant cranes and earthmovers provided the illusion of daylight along the Wilshire Boulevard façade and sidewalk, rising to tops of the queen palms that bordered the street. Above the museum entrance hung a huge banner promoting the latest exhibit, Sachlichkeit: The New Sobriety. German Art in the Weimar Period. Beneath the promotion hung a second banner. The Digital Armory: Digital Art from Around the World. Opening February 2. The opening fell on his birthday.

  A siren blared atop the museum.

  A large door swung open near the museum entrance. With lights blinking and softly whirring, the facility’s Desquatter emerged from its chamber. The rotund machine, a gleaming metallic cask girded at its base by a golden bumper, glided slowly back-and-forth down the public sidewalk, its half-ton bulk stirring a few homeless setting up camp. They cursed the Desquatter and moved on.

  It didn’t seem fair. Well, the world wasn’t fair. A couple walked hand-in-hand across the boulevard, then stopped and kissed on the other side. He could count on one hand the times a girl had kissed him, and those memories were fading fast. Not that Raphael couldn’t find a girl to kiss or didn’t want to, but honor demanded disclosure. You see, Allison, Itzel, Sophia, Madelyn, Jennifer, Dahlia, I’m trapped within four streets. Wind to the south, fire to the north. glacier to the east, and chasm to the west. And disclosure had always resulted in flight. Sometimes a slow take-off, sometimes a pricked balloon. They’d be gone, and his heart would sink. Better to have never loved at all than be a loser every time.

  Cut it out.

  The temperature had dropped into the fifties, and his T-shirt and drift pants were thin. Crossing his arms, he considered skating home through the museum grounds, past the famous lake-size tar pit with its sinking mastodons and beneath the grassy slopes of the fossil museum, which quarried the grounds’ pits for bones to reassemble and exhibit.

  The gates closed at 9:00 p.m. though the closure didn’t always dissuade him or others—some ill-intentioned. More than once, he’d climbed the fence to roll leisurely along the museum’s shadowy, winding paths, skating past the excavation sites, the animal statuary, and down the ramp beneath the suspended 340-ton granite megalith Levitated Mass. Twenty-two feet high and shaped like a true heart, that work was now unfortunately stored. Night or day, the museum grounds, known well since childhood, camouflaged Raphael. A chameleon, he took on the colors of the winding paths, the broad-leafed trees, and pools of asphalt. Within the museum grounds, he was safe.

  But it was much too late for the museum, and the unfinished painting waited.

  He brushed the hair from his forehead. Above Wilshire Boulevard a skyboard floated by with a pulsing advertisement: Constipated? Monitor and Improve Peristalsis With MyColonBytes. Available in Black, Silver, and Gold from Bodyfluidsandbeyond.com $579.95.

  “Race you,” Raphael shouted to the skyboard and propelled himself forward on the sidewalk—slightly slanted downhill after the big temblor of three years ago—leaving the advertisement in the dust. He boisterously sang the lyrics of an old song about a young man of eighteen confused about his identity. Except Raphael was twenty-six—going on twenty-seven—though still uncertain if it were the boy’s or man’s camp he occupied.

  Twenty-seven, that ominous age. Kurt, Jimi, Janis, they only got to twenty-seven. Listening to their songs on his mom’s old vinyl left him sad and uneasy, but also a little envious. They were free of limitations, geographic and otherwise, for a while.

  He turned the corner and pushed off again. He hadn’t gone half a block when a shrill voice behind him shouted, “Raphael Lennon!”

  His stomach tightening at the unexpected cry, Raphael dragged a foot along the ground, stopped, and pivoted. He lifted his board to his chest. “Yes?”

  “Please, wait. I’m—I’m out of breath,” begged someone jogging toward Raphael.

  The figure, a pear-shaped man with a wobbly gait, slowed, stopped, and grabbed his knees. “Oh, that was hard. I’m not used to …” The man straightened, shook his head, then approached Raphael, panting. “Raphael Lennon, yes?”

  Raphael nodded, while measuring the chances of the odd, panting man who smelled of lavender doing him damage. He lowered his board.

  The man patted his chest. “I spoke to the security guard. He said—the skateboard.” The man bent and grabbed his knees again. “I don’t go in for cardio, but I can see …” With effort, he straightened. “Yes, I can see the benefits.” He held up a large manila envelope and pointed with it over his shoulder. “I thought you’d gone in the other direction, toward the museum. The guard said you sometimes—I ran there, and it was locked up. So, I had to run all the way back.”

  “What’s this about?” Raphael dropped his board to the sidewalk, sensing a long-winded sales pitch he might want to escape.

  The man pressed at his long thin nose as if to widen his nostrils, exhaled loudly and then sucked in a lungful of air. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for a couple of days without success. I was going to leave my envelope at the security desk, but the guard said you’d just left. Lucky I caught up to you.”

  “Lucky? For—”

  “Oh, excuse me. My name is Gilly Stull of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.”

  Raphael set his right foot onto the board, inching it backward. “It’s pretty late, Mr. Stull. Couldn’t this wait until Monday?”

  “Unfortunately, no. I’m on vacation in Puerto Maldonado next week. This was the last piece of business I needed to resolve. ‘Clear desk, clear conscience,’ as they say.”

  Raphael rolled the board back and forth. “I understand.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the lights of the Tar Tower Apartments, home since the day he was born and the dead center of his square mile world. Likely to die there too. With a chill, he met Stull’s gaze.

  “I tried to reach you all day,” said Stull. “Your receptionist said you were unavailable. I left several messages, but … It was the airliner crash, I suppose.” Stull’s brows rose as his eyes widened.

  “Yes, we were busy. Sorry.”

  “I understand perfectly. It’s the same with us on occasion. You see, we’ve had some computer system irregularities lately, compounded by a clerical error sidetracking what would have been a routine response. I wanted to apprise you of the error, and my email, I’m afraid, bounced. Perhaps I simply had the wrong address. In any event, it’s my responsibility, and I would have been dwelling on it all vacation. Ordinarily, I would have sent a messenger. It was so late, and frankly on a Friday night messengers tend to go astray.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard,” said Raphael. “So, you’ve gone to all this trouble because …”

  “You were inquiring about Professor Jason Klaes, a recently deceased.”

  Raphael took his foot off the skateboard. His heart revved. “Yes.”

  “You spoke to one of our new employees: the clerk I mentioned,” said Stull. “She got confused about Professor Klaes.”

  “We’re all confused about Klaes.”

  “Yes, well. She got it ‘bass ackwards,’ as my father used to say. The medical report—I mean, the absence of a medical report. We indeed performed an autopsy on Professor Klaes on January 12. I’ve brought a copy of the report.” Stull handed him the envelope.

  This was odd. Bureaucrats didn’t go out on a Friday night to deliver mail. “You’ve gone out of your way,” said Raphael.

  “It was a terrible mistake.”

  Raphael jiggled the envelope. Stull’s eyes widened like a cat’s watching an unaware bird. Stull wanted him to open the envelope. “How did Klaes die?”

  “Suicide. Shotgun. In the living room of his house in Pasadena.”

  “Well, that answers that,” said Raphael, wondering if it did.

  “Yes, I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “And the body?”

  “The arrangements were made with Donato’s of Glendale. Klaes was cremated.”

  “Ah. Can I keep this?”

  “You don’t want to take a view of it now?”

  Raphael glanced at the envelope. “It’s been an exhausting day, right now I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Can I keep it?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Stull, showing his teeth.

  “So, if that’s it?”

  Stull peered through the fence bordering the recent extension of the museum to Fairfax. “What’s going on over there?”

  “A fossil pit. They’re searching for the remains of Ice Age mammals that died in the Salt Lake Oil Field.”

  Stull studied the surroundings. “Lake?”

  “It’s beneath us.” Raphael pointed at the sidewalk. “A thousand feet down. A huge lake of oil that they used to pump. The oil seeps up and creates the tar pits. A crude oil graveyard, you might say.”

  “How interesting. Dead, dead everywhere and not a drop to drink. No, doesn’t work, does it?” Stull backed up a foot. “Well, good night, Mr. Lennon. Perhaps I’ll see you down the road, and you’ll remember my kindness.”

  Remember his kindness? “Right. Thanks. Goodnight, Mr. Stull.”

  He watched Stull, breathing easily now, stroll down Fairfax toward Wilshire. The man stopped once, turned around, tipped an imaginary hat, then continued on his way.

  He tapped Stull’s envelope against his thigh.

  Awfully convenient, or was Raphael being overly suspicious? Maybe Stull was legit, and Klaes really was dead. Maybe a hacker really had sent those post-mortem emails. Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer had to be the correct one. Despite his uncanny feeling about the Klaes case, he’d hoped Klaes would give him a good chase, so Stull’s confirmation was disappointing. Raphael wasn’t certain he wanted Klaes dead. Keep the database pure. No goddamned possums. He slipped the envelope under his shirt.

  He continued down Fairfax and crossed Sixth, one of the benign streets within the malignant four. On the opposite side of Fairfax, a dozen people stood in front of Nevin O’Moore’s, an Irish pub with enough character to have kept it operating for a half-century. Rock ‘n’ roll poured out the open door. Sidewalk loiterers smoked, tossing their smoldering butts and disposable e-cigs in the gutter, and not a single phone visible, an anomaly for sure.

  Raphael stopped to listen to a song about falling, rocking to the music’s beat. He loved the old music and yearned to walk into Nevin O’Moore’s, if it wasn’t on the forbidden side of Fairfax.

  He gazed out at the street, a flat concrete Grand Canyon of unlimited depth. If he skated over the curb, the canyon’s black tongue would wrap about and swallow him as a frog would a fly. It mattered little if two-ton vehicles raced along on its concrete bed or pedestrians crossed at every corner.

  Sometimes, he teased himself by pretending he might just, might just—What do you have to lose, Raphy? Take a step. Do it! Do it! He lifted a foot and peeked over the curb into the depths of the canyon. His heart leapt into his throat. Dizzy and disoriented, he teetered like a baby taking its first step. Get back! he screamed to himself and stumbled backward. Breathe. Breathe! The brain that knew the canyon an illusion shrunk from the brain that shouted the gaping darkness was real. He stood in the center of the concrete square, trembling.

  For twenty years, the phobia had confined him to the area enclosed by the intersection of four venerable Los Angeles thoroughfares: Fairfax, Wilshire, La Brea, and Beverly. Roughly a rectangle, the shape of a phone, a monitor, a streaming screen, by his calculation the area of a square mile: 60 acres, 3,097,600 square yards, 27,878,400 square feet, 4,014,489,600 square inches.

  His mother had tried every therapy to rid Raphael of his terror, which had leaped upon him like a panther from a tree. One day a strong gust of wind, the next week a gale. One day a crack in the street, the next week a chasm, until the four thoroughfares became treacherous and impassible, though the streets within his rectangle he could traverse and skate to his heart’s content.

  Cognitive behavioral therapy gradually exposes you to your fear, so you become desensitized to it. Raphael’s mother had consulted one doctor who showed Raphy photos of the streets, each photo a further close-up. Then it was mindfulness therapy. Super awareness of the surrounding world. Get him to take that step out of his box. Relaxation therapy. Biofeedback. Hypnosis. When all else failed, they suggested antidepressants, but at this his mother balked. Each doctor had their pet theory as to the source of Raphy’s fears. Did his mother have her own phobia about busy streets? Perhaps as a toddler Raphy had witnessed a horrific accident. Had he seen something appalling on television he associated with these streets? The streets formed a rectangle so perhaps he had gotten trapped in a similar shape as an infant. Or was it just a bizarre dream that infected his consciousness?

  The fifth therapist Raphael had seen about the problem had named it. “We call it dromophobia,” explained Dr. Cow. “The terror of crossing streets.”

  “It’s not every street,” Raphael had replied. “Not even every busy street. Sixth and Third are no problem.”

  “Unfortunately, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, it’s the nearest category we’ve got. Perhaps in the next revision of the manual …”

  The therapies continued into his early teens, at which point Raphy requested they stop trying, though fourteen was the very age he should have most wanted to break free. Before he was fourteen, he wasn’t all that different from the kids he went to school with. Half-listened in class, skateboarded, played video games, hung around the park after school, and cautiously eyed the girls. But it was at that age his schoolmates started expanding their world: skating to the beach, camping, traveling to distant football games and amusement parks, exploring faraway malls and chatting up faraway young women. In the very years life should have been expanding, his life was hemmed in, shrinking in a way. He woke each day angry, sometimes slamming his fist into his own head, knowing his problem was nowhere but within his skull. He was his own enemy, and no doctor could disarm that foe. His anger turned to sullen depression. He drew into himself, stopped hanging out with friends after school. Why torture himself pretending he could break out? Why tease himself with stupid therapies? You’re incurable, accept it!

  His mother didn’t quite give up, but she didn’t press further treatments on him. Her own advancing disease sapped her energy and reduced her mobility at an ever-increasing rate. He stayed home, grew closer to his mom, learned to paint from her, and took up the brushes and oils himself. Like one of those ancient Greek Stoics he learned about in school, he gradually accepted his limitations, or at least banned his brain from dwelling on it. Be happy!

  He had his skateboard, his computer, and his oils and brushes. He made the best of his spatial limitations.

  Like a tide-pooled fish who knew every grain of sand and strand of kelp in its limited waters, Raphael knew every inch of his square mile: the dog that barked from the high window, the pothole unfilled for years, the remains of the old trolley depot, the white-haired man who sold the old and new vinyl, the stalwart bellman, and nonstop Two-Bags, the recyclable collector in perpetual motion; trash bags slung over his shoulders and filled to bursting. Within his rectangle, was he not rich with mall, park, and theater complex? Raphael had the Farmers Market—crossroads of LA tourism—and Thursday night Karaoke. He had sidewalks and parking lots aplenty to skate. A job, shelter, sustenance. If wanderlust struck, he could set out into the world on his computer, though such satisfaction had dwindled in the last couple of years just as his mania for video games had dried up. He had yet to try the mall’s Virtueless Virtual Reality Arcade, which offered low fantasies—Simulate to Stimulate. He had everything he needed and wanted within reach. He whispered the line from Hamlet he had memorized in high school drama class. “‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.’”

  If not for bad dreams.

  No, not just bad dreams. If his thoughts lingered on the enclosing streets, he’d feel a pressure on his heart, as if the streets had replicated themselves in miniature within his chest. Worse were the glimpses of the outer world on phone and laptop or in glossy magazines. Snowcapped peaks and lush islands. Ancient temples and medieval castles. The Sistine Chapel and the Great Sphinx of Giza. To know they existed but would always be out of reach.

  One path of escape existed: when the last stroke met the canvas. When the last image of his life painting had dried, he would be free of the phobia to dance out of his quadrangle.

  His mother had promised.

  From the shadows of his imagination came a whisper: You’ll never get out. Never. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck. His heart fell. He made a fist and spun. Don’t crave. Don’t desire. Don’t get overtaken by emotions. Accept you’re in your little nutshell forever.

  “I’m not. I will …” he murmured, lifting his foot from a gooey substance from which an acrid odor rose. He glanced down at a tiny pool of tar, which usually seeped up only in the summer heat, but tonight seemed to reach up through the earth to grasp him and remind him: you’re stuck. Shuddering, he moved away, scraped his shoe across the sidewalk, then mounted the board.

  A woman sat on the curb a short distance ahead. Raphael skated toward her, middle aged, pink-haired, and dressed in an equally pink parka. Her legs stretched into the street. She held an open laptop and typed on the keyboard. Blood ran from a gash in her cheek.

  “Data, sir? A dollar for data, sir?”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Data, sir? A dollar for data, sir?”

  She lifted her eyes to the blinking lights of an airliner high above and wrung her hands as if squeezing out water from a wet cloth. “Not enough data,” she said. “If they had the data, it would still be”—parting her hands, she flapped them in the manner of little children imitating birds. “Instead it’s”—she brought her hands together, leaned to one side, and drove her fingertips against the sidewalk—“boom!”