God, it was hot. Halfway to the subway stop, she bought a paper cone of shaved ice from a Latino street vendor. Rune shook her head when he pointed to the squirt bottles of syrup, smiled at his perplexed expression, and rubbed the ice over her forehead, then dropped a handful down the front of her T-shirts. He got a kick out of it and she left him with a thoughtful look on his face, maybe considering a new market for his goods.

Painful hot.

Mean hot.

The ice melted before she got to the subway stop and the moisture had evaporated before the train arrived.

The A train swept along under the streets back up to Midtown. Somewhere above her was the smoking ruin of the Velvet Venus Theater. Rune stared out the window intently. Did anyone live down here in the subway system? She wondered. Maybe there were whole tribes of homeless people, families, who'd made a home in the abandoned tunnels. They'd be a great subject for a documentary too. Life Below the Streets.

This started her thinking about the hook for her film.

About the bombing but not about the bombing.

And then it occurred to her. The film should be about a single person. Someone the bombing had affected. She thought about movies she liked — they were never about issues or about ideas in the abstract. They were about people. What happened to them. But who should she pick? A patron in the theater who'd been injured? No, no one would volunteer to help her out. Who'd want to admit he'd been hurt in a porn theater. How 'bout the owner or the producer of porn films. Sleazy came to mind. One thing Rune knew was that the audience has to care about your main character. And some scumbag in the Mafia or whoever made those movies wasn't going to get much sympathy from the audience.

About the bombing but not...

As the subway sped underground the more she thought about doing the document the more excited she became. Oh, a film like this wouldn't catapult her to fame but it would — what was the word? — validate her. The list of her abortive careers was long: clerking, waitressing, selling, cleaning, window dressing... Business was not her strength. The one time Rune had come into some money, Richard, her ex-boyfriend, had thought up dozens of safe investment ideas. Businesses to start, stocks to buy. She'd accidentally left his portfolio files on the merry-go-round in Central Park. Not that it mattered anyway because she spent most of the money on a new place to live.

I'm not good with the practical stuff, she'd told him.