"The Adept”

Part 1: Nigredo

“Now hast thou but one bare hour to live

And then thou must be damned perpetually.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven

That time may cease and midnight never come!”

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Chapter 1

Julia had no goddamn idea why they bombed Chicago.

Standing on the balcony of her cousin’s fifth-floor apartment, she watched the light show flitter across the city. The fireworks were enveloped by black clouds that ballooned into the starless night sky, which hung, indifferent, above it all. Wrigley was ablaze, she heard on Bethany’s radio in the kitchen, where Beth and twenty other people clomped together. They’d all gathered for the party – Beth’s twenty-eighth – but now they were gathered and bound by a different purpose: the sport of it.

“Can you see the Field from here?” called one of Beth’s friends, as he shoved out the balcony door to stand next to Julia. He flipped out his phone and started thumbing through the features. “I said, can you see—”

“No,” Beth yelled back, twirling one of her many curls around an index finger. She leaned into the kitchen counter, surrounded by her friends – her fellow spectators.

“Ambulances…stopped…traffic,” the lady on the radio reported. Every other word was chopped off by the sounds of sirens, screaming, crashing. Then a clear sentence: “We’ll have video in a minute, looking on Ronnie Webbs standing in front of the second site—”

“Second site?” Julia’s comrade on the balcony shouted back into the apartment. The world outside was a din – people up and down the street were echoing every move made on Beth’s property, yelling back names, phone numbers, all in excited tones. “Second site, I thought there was just Wrigley,” the guy said. A flash emanated from the back of his phone. “Shit – all I got was the building across the street.”

“Aim higher, and turn off ‘zoom,’” Julia offered. He looked at her for the first time, and nodded a “thank you.”

“They’re saying Rush got hit,” said a girl next to Beth.

“Who?” someone else asked.

“Rush. The hospital, not a who.”

“Oh,” the guy grunted, and snapped another photo with his cell. “Skyline,” he said, smiling to Julia. “Perfect shot.”

She smiled back at him, but turned to the sky once more, cracking her neck a couple times as she stared into the great disk of nighttime that hovered over the Second City; watching it silently swallow smoke, fire, and admiration for a masterpiece well done.

Someone was on TV, talking about where they’d gone wrong. What they’d done. Why they deserved it.

“Blowback,” the ACLU said, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other with every syllable. “It’s all blowback, I mean, what do we expect? We violate, violate, violate…” He went on, slapping his hands; the knuckles turned bright red.

Julia couldn’t tell them apart. She sat on the sofa in Beth’s living room, cycling through the channels with her cousin and about five other people who’d stayed after calling a few friends and taking some shots of the burning sky. But every channel she went to, she couldn’t tell anyone apart.

The man from the ACLU, they hadn’t said his name; same with the woman from CAIR, wearing a slick Dolce headscarf. They’d introduced them as representatives, and they talked, cutting into each other every opportunity.

“Blowback, I hear ‘blowback,’” the lady said, sounding the word “blow” like a whale crooning to its mate. “But I don’t hear what kind. I do not hear – and this is what I’ll tell you, you read my column, it’ll say exactly this – I don’t hear anything exact. Just bromides, just empty speeches.”

“I don’t think—” ACLU started.

“Just empty speeches, just the same old jingoism.”

ACLU stared at CAIR through his side of the camera, pausing for a few moments as she looked back at him, smiling.

“I don’t—”

“Empty.”

Julia switched it from CNN to FOX, handed the remote to Beth, and headed to the bathroom, flipping out her phone to check the voicemail.

NO MESSAGES flashed up at her; she snapped her cell closed and stepped into the washroom.

The first thing to see was her own face, boomeranged back to her by the small mirror stuck into the wall. Dark hair hung down the back of her neck, tied into a bun; a few locks swayed like wispy bangs in front of her eyes, every strand equally limp and dry. Her lipstick had gotten smudged when she spilled her beer in the shock of the blast. And, leaning in, she saw that a few pimples were about to break out on her forehead.

She splashed some water in her face, left the bathroom, and called a goodbye to Beth.

“Kay,” her cousin called out to her, sipping Bud from a cup. Almost as an afterthought, she turned her head slightly and said, “Take a cab to Washington, yeah?”

Grabbing her coat and bag, Julia “Uh-huh”-ed back and left out the front door, down the stairs. She exited the complex at the landing.

Out on the street, she thought she could smell smoke. It rolled through her nostrils into her mouth, and she was reminded of sulfur, rot, and gas chambers. Taking a breath, she shouldered her purse and went her way down the street.

Night still rung clean through the city, like a bell that called all to be vigilant to crime and vice, but Julia, along with the other people on that sidewalk, ignored it. She took long, indifferent steps back to her apartment, guided by the traffic rushing down thoroughfares and avenues, the lamps on the sidewalk, the sounds of movement and haste from other pedestrians. She looked only at the ground, clutching her bag with white hands.

No sobs, she noted, could be heard; no outrage, blame. She passed by a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and caught a swatch of the radio: “Once again, America’s Second City…Wrigley Field and numerous other well-executed bombings…none have come forward to claim credit.” Despite the static and the various ambient city noises pervading the air, Julia found herself entranced by the woman’s voice. She paused by the store window, ignoring the curious looks from the man behind the counter, and listened intently to the woman through the store’s propped-open door. It was a voice to be savored. Commanding, subtle – comfortable. An “everyday” sort of normal.

She should do books on tape, Julia thought, and yawned.

Suddenly, a chill crept into her chest, and her skin felt tight around her bones and breasts. She shuddered; the woman’s voice had lost its soothing touch. Her face reddening, Julia walked from the pharmacy to the curb and raised her hand to hail a cab.

The man pulled up to the sidewalk, rubbing his eyes with clenched fists as Julia stepped in from the cold. She told him to take her home – said the exact street, even the address in a learned-by-rote mumble. They took off through the city, winding down long avenues of short, abrupt stops. Traffic was heavy – not panicked, but quick and serpentine.

When Julia looked out at the city, she saw what she always saw, thought what she always thought, and understood none of it: Fusions of flesh and electricity encapsulated by vessels of steel, a welding of body and of soul multiplied into a million variations, each speeding toward his own niche in the world. And in those neatly hidden, tucked-away corners of the city, every man and woman pursued their own lives, as hunters, to destroy, to purge, eradicate and—

He was staring. The cabby’s eyes, colored red by spider-webbing veins, were surprisingly patient in waiting for her to turn from the tinted window. She looked for a moment more, her fingers twitching in her lap. Then, silently, handed him a bill, took the change from his outstretched palm.

The world was still tight with smog when she stood on the sidewalk in front of her building. The cab pulled away, back into the busier parts of the city, where it could find more “hunters” jonesing for a change in venue. Once it was out of sight and earshot, the neighborhood was quiet and ignorant, as it always was.

Except for the men. They stood in front of each complex, forming clumps at every door – passing out flyers to any man or woman, coming or going.

“You know what tonight means,” one of them told a lady as he waved a paper through the air. The woman avoided his gaze, kept on down the street, her pace hurried. Her solicitor, by contrast, was perfectly calm – his hand still ratcheting back and forth, fingers still clutching the flyer, eyes and face placid. “Tonight,” he kept on, “was the answer. Everything you lost to the decrepit gods of your age, everything you never had – purpose, comfort, or life – all of it! Tonight was about all of it!”

Christians, Julia thought, waiting by her door as she watched him. Christians, evangelicals – bigots. He stood at the other side of the street, yelling hate-filled, fascistic words while his fellows nodded emphatically in agreement.

She went to step through the door into her building – one of the few not blocked by a fanatic – when the man spoke again.

“You seek to destroy,” he said, and she stopped. His voice was now devoid of anger, of emotion – all she could hear were the words, pure. “You look to annihilate yourselves; worshipping promiscuity, murder, suicide, death – nothingness. You make love to chaos, and revel in its scent!”

The man’s rant soon lost meaning to her, but the few words that penetrated remained in her, a lump of lead in her stomach. She turned toward the nearest man, fifty yards away, as if she was going to say something – to agree, disagree, or scream. But she only stared.

And he looked back. Glanced over, eyed her without a change in his tired, passionless expression.

Julia turned from him, and stepped through the door into her complex.

No one made a sound in the building’s narrow halls. Julia walked the three flights up to her landing, and all she could think was how quiet it was, how vacant it felt. For a second, she paused in front of her neighbor’s door, hoping to hear a sign of a human presence – a TV, bedsprings, crying. But the woman who lived there was gone, or sleeping.

Julia held her hand up in a fist, prepared to rap on the door and call out, demand that the woman, old as she was, wake up and yell, sob, moan. But she let her hand back down, tucked it into her coat sleeve.

“Mrs. Ferrigno,” she said in what seemed a child’s voice. “Mrs. F, do you need anything?” No response.

Julia went into her own apartment and locked the door, blushing.

It was two in the morning by the time she had her fourth sandwich.

The bowl of Cheerios had been tossed into the kitchen sink, half-finished, an hour before – that was when she’d moved on to sandwiches, to salami and mustard and white bread. Her fingers flinched when they had nothing to grasp; all she wanted to hear or see or touch was the world outside, the Field burning, the men who had stared at her and spoken in koans. But she had no TV or radio – a typical city-person thing, she admitted, thinking it was revolutionary and nonconformist to live without distractions. But when she’d tossed out her eleven-inch – purposely lent it to a coworker who always borrowed but never returned – she hadn’t understood how much she needed distractions, needed to move and touch. The food filled that vacancy.

She took a third bite into the sandwich, not really noticing the flavors. Her stomach must’ve expanded over the past few months, but she never noticed. No one pointed it out to her, in any case, so it seemed a non-issue in her eyes.

Bored with eating, Julia stood from her living-room sofa, paced toward the window and stared outside; she laid the sandwich on the sill.

They were still out there. Those men, numbering some fifteen to twenty-five. Each wandered up and down the neighborhood, turning corners, coming back and leaving individually. She could tell they were all part of the same group, though they wore no uniforms, had no identifying marks. From her third-story window, her eyes discerned regular passersby from the bigots. Regardless of race – some were black, white, a few Latinos – they were all brothers of a sort. An aura they gave off, maybe. Something that inspired revulsion in her – a response to religion trained by years of the cosmopolitan life, of the Sunday New York Times and corner café political gossip. These men might as well have Religious Right tattooed on their foreheads, God Hates Fags on their chests.

Fanatics, she called them in her head, with a capital “F.” They came out after every event, every cataclysm, to tell the world how they could rid it of evil. Chain your women, kill the Jews.

Though, these ones were different. They were not old men, but youths. They did not seem the type to hide in basements, plotting the new theocracy, the Overthrow of the Semitic Conspiracy. In fact, she recognized some of them. One, a big-armed barrista from her favorite coffee shop. Another from that gym she signed up for, but never went to. Fanatics, still, one and all – come to tempt the world into entropy.

If it’s not already there, she thought, and pulled the curtains shut.

In bed, Julia dreamt she was a man, lying on an operating table. They were castrating her.