She is thinking she won’t accompany him to the Durant building after all. She will say goodbye to him when they’ve crossed the bridge. She will walk away, quickly. He will not follow her. He will not dare follow her. She feels a wave of sexual disgust, repugnance for the man: the fleshy face, stained teeth, sour breath, layers of fat carried above his belt, misshapen toes. Who does he think he is, daring to approach her.

A would-be predator. Certainly a failed artist. A marginal figure in the no-man’s-land of Detroit, Michigan, to which she has come by the sheerest chance and to which she will never return.

5.

Gently he takes her arm. “Here. We turn in here.”

It has been a surprisingly long walk to a block of warehouses on the river east of Grand Boulevard. L.K. has not remembered that the Durant building is located on a short, stubby block called Durant, which intersects with Grand Boulevard.

She is feeling apprehensive. She could not have said why she has come into this desolate part of Detroit with an unkempt man who is a stranger to her.

In the distance are high-rise office buildings, incongruous in this setting. Smudged-smoky glass of the dagger-shaped Freedom Tower.

The April sky, so promising earlier, has turned gray and glowering. The temperature is plummeting. Yet L.K. begins to feel exhilarated, reckless.

He will offer me a drink. I will not accept.

The renovated warehouse to which Vann leads her is teasingly familiar to her, though it has been lavishly adorned with quasi-primitive mosaics. Here are the Found Object Sculptors League, the Blue Boar Gallery, the Durant Artists Coalition. Positioned on the roof is a triumphant mythological creature—part winged lion, part demon—a chimera with a fierce expression, bared teeth.

Your gaze just naturally lifts to the winged lion. Only belatedly do you see that the lion is surrounded by mounds of skulls amid crimson flowers shaped like tongues.

“ ‘To create is to destroy,’ ” Vann says, as if translating for L.K., “though to destroy isn’t always to create.”

Whom is he quoting? Is he quoting himself? L.K. supposes this is a remark she should know, attributed to Picasso, Kandinsky, Goya, Man Ray, she has no idea.

In the grassless front area is a ten-foot wind sculpture, whose blades, adorned with wan (white-skinned) human masks, are turning erratically.

Proudly, Vann tells her that the wind sculpture is his.

L.K. is subtly offended by the (white-skinned) masks. She wonders if Vnn is not himself “white,” but a person of color, though light-complected.

L.K. tells Vann that the wind sculpture is “very striking”—she says nothing about the (white-skinned) masks, wanting to turn around and flee the warehouse even as she enters the building with Vann and feels a sense of immediate vertigo, as if the floor is tilting beneath her.

No. This is a mistake. Go back.

Recalling revelations of asbestos in many of the older buildings in Detroit. In the Durant and other waterfront warehouses, surely.