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on,” I said, and grabbed Alis’s hand.
    “Where are we going?”
    Someplace. Anyplace. A theater where some other movie is showing. “Hollywood,” I said, pulling her out into the hall. “To dance in the movies.”
     
    Camera whip-pans to medium-shot: LAIT station sign. Diamond screen, “Los Angeles Instransit” in hot pink caps, “Westwood Station” in bright green
.
    We took the skids. Mistake. The back section was closed off but they were still practically empty—a few knots of tourates on their way home from Universal Studios clumped together in the middle of the room, a couple of druggates asleep against the back wall, three others over by the far side wall, laying out three-card monte hands on the yellow warning strip, one lone Marilyn.
    The tourates were watching the station sign anxiously, like they were afraid they’d miss their stop. Fat chance. The time between Instransit stations may be inst, but it takes the skids a good ten minutes to generate the negative-matter region that produces the transit, and another five afterward before they turn on the exit arrows, during which time nobody was going anywhere.
    The tourates might as well relax and enjoy the show. What there was of it. Only one of the side walls was working, and half of it was running a continuous loop of ads for ILMGM, which apparently didn’t know it’d been taken over yet. In the center of the wall, a digitized lion roared under the studio trademark in glowing gold: “Anything’s Possible!” The screen blurred and went to swirling mist, while avoice-over said, “ILMGM! More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” and then announced names while said stars appeared out of the fog. Vivien Leigh tripping toward us in a huge hoop skirt; Arnold Schwarzenegger roaring in on a motorcycle; Charlie Chaplin twirling his cane.
    “Constantly working to bring you the brightest stars in the firmament,” the voice-over said, which meant the stars currently in copyright litigation. Marlene Dietrich, Macaulay Culkin at age ten, Fred Astaire in top hat and tails, strolling effortlessly, casually toward us.
    I’d dragged Alis out of the dorm to get away from mirrors and the Beguine and Fred, tippity-tapping away on my frontal lobe, to find something different to look at if I flashed again, but all I’d done was exchange my screen for a bigger one.
    The other wall was even worse. It was apparently later than I’d thought. They’d shut the ads off for the night, and it was nothing but a long expanse of mirror. Like the polished floor Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell had danced on, side by side, their hands nearly—
    I focused on the reflections. The druggates looked dead. They’d probably taken capsules Heada told them were chooch. The Marilyn was practicing her pout in the mirror, flinching forward with a look of openmouthed surprise, and splaying her hand against her white pleated skirt to keep it from billowing up. The steam grating scene from
The Seven Year Itch
.
    The tourates were still watching the station sign, which read La Brea Tar Pits. Alis was watching it, too, her face intent, and even in the fluorescents and the flickering light of ILMGM upcoming remakes, her hair had that curious backlit look. Her feet were apart, and she held her hands out, braced for sudden movement.
    “No skids in Riverwood, huh?” I said.
    She grinned. “Riverwood. That’s Mickey Rooney’s hometown in
Strike Up the Band,”
she said. “We only had a little one in Galesburg. And it had seats.”
    “You can squeeze more people in during rush hour without seats. You don’t have to stand like that, you know.”
    “I know,” she said, moving her feet together. “I just keep expecting us to move.”
    “We already did,” I said, glancing at the station sign. It had changed to Pasadena. “For about a nanosecond. Station to station and no in-between. It’s all done with mirrors.”
    I stood on the yellow warning strip and put my hand out toward the side wall.