Free This Location of Unknown Possibilities by Brett Josef Grubisic Page A

wanted clarified. Marta closed her eyes and returned to the scene. She might wander through the sets—to all eyes an embodiment of the absentminded professor—in search of a scone and a mug of tea. Or else: she could send a request for an afternoon snack and have it promptly delivered by an underling—who might be one of her former students for all she knew.
    3 .
    T he robot transit system voice announced Marta’s stop: “Studio Way.”
    The doors parted and Marta stepped off. Searching the concrete platform for the escort the studio had dispatched—young, lowly, and instructed to please, she assumed—yielded no results. Not a soul approached as the platform emptied. She’d pictured the airport scenario: “Dr. Spëk” written on a cardboard sign held aloft by the anonymous functionary. One email from Lora Wilkes had mentioned that the studio sprawled five minutes by foot from the station, but at the time Marta hadn’t interpreted the information as an invitation to march on over.
    Marta decided to wait five minutes. Raging for fame has its price , she thought.
    Beyond the grey platform the scene presented muted northern hemisphere urban rim—power lines, parked cars, low-profile businesses housed in dreary if spacious generic boxy structures, vehicle traffic, sooty concrete arterial roadways, and forlorn weeds, bushes, and trees flocked with grit. The sour tang of the air was distinctive: thousands of sticky cottonwood leaf buds peeling in slow, temperature-orchestrated synchronicity. Their pungency could be bottled, trademarked, and sold alongside maple syrup in tourist shops, Marta supposed: Fraser Delta Spring No. 5 .
    The short-term options , Marta thought, are simple: walk to the studio or stand and wait for an inbound train and, later, a perplexed and likely curt email . Calling a taxi would be silly.
    She strode to the exit stairway. What kind of cut-rate studio is this, she wondered. Jakob Nugent will probably ask me to split the cost of our no-frills lunch. Or we’ll each plug coins into a vending machine and retrieve plastic-sealed sandwiches. She felt stalled. While the effort of the walk might erode her composure, Marta suspected that not arriving at all would be a lapse she’d bemoan louder than the executive and his assistant, her daydream of crucial necessity revealed as being only that.
    Grumbling as she trudged along the sodden makeshift path at the road’s edge—strewn, she counted, with a narrow range of discardables: cigarette packages, torn condom wrappers, fast food takeout bags, soda cans and beer bottles, Styrofoam containers, trampled clothing, plastic bits snapped off from cars, and panties (panties always, why?)—Marta envisioned herself as the kind of crazed marginal individual who squatted beneath septic overpasses or within the dirty blackberry brambles that thrive on the perimeter ground between commercial buildings.
    Hearing the volume of the fault-finding, she pressed her lips shut. Were these low utterances like a gateway drug—one unexceptional day you begin with a few choice expletives, and soon enough you’re pushing a stolen overflowing shopping cart and warning passersby of precarious mental balance by muttering nonsense several decibels louder than what’s acceptable in polite society? Marta switched focus to the approaching interview, sealing the portal to abjection.
    At the foreground of the blocky mass of white stucco and vinyl-clad buildings a single guard waited on duty, soaking up afternoon sunshine. She’d leaned a stool against the plywood booth that housed gate controls, a computer, and communication equipment. Stray locks tumbled from beneath her police-style cap.
    Lora had sent no pass code or specific instructions about a gated entrance. Her name, she supposed, must be on a list.
    The guard did not move as Marta approached.
    â€œGood afternoon,” Marta said.
    The guard nodded, but