Chapter 3

Bethany called in the morning, and Julia could not remember her dreams, a wonderful effect of perpetual self-medication. Drowsy, she knocked the phone to the floor from its seat on her bedside table, then scrambled to snatch it up. To confused Hello’s on the other end, she mumbled a meek greeting.

Beth wanted to meet for coffee at the Masque, a proposal to which Julia had no reasonable objections. She tapped the “Off” button and shuffled her feet on the way to the shower.

The entire walk to the Café felt strangely colored, as if her eyes had been tinted an alien shade as she’d slept. Two weeks before, she would not have known what was the topic of discussion in every American household, let alone any American household, but today she was held hostage by posters taped to every store window, protestors at every corner, it seemed.

A photocopied drawing was duct-taped all over the neighborhood, calling on the Black Community to Rise and Resist.

At the other end of the street, a woman with an intimidating, neon-dyed Mohawk slapped a wrinkled man, easily twenty years her senior, in the face. “Don’t you fucking tell me about patriarchy!” she shouted, and a group of twenty-somethings in black hoodies cawed in solidarity from their collective perch on an apartment doorstep, about ten feet away.

Two men and a woman performed an interpretive dance in a small park, simulating sex on a bench, flipping off the few passersby with the audacity to boo. One group – a mix of men and women, teens and seniors, blacks and whites and Latinos – watched as one of the two men grabbed the woman’s head and dragged it toward his crotch with a satisfied grunt. The woman ducked out of his pull, and waved her digits, “Jazz-Hands” style, at the thoroughly entertained audience.

A full-color glossy announced an art exhibit at the University of Chicago, displaying a collection of dissected human fetuses in nine separate frames, nine consecutively arranged stages of development.

Julia found herself taking down the time and date of the exhibit; she stopped herself, then crumpled the scrap of paper she’d been writing on; and, a moment later, since she couldn’t realize why she’d done so, she unfolded it, smoothed it out, and pocketed it. Maybe Beth would like to go, too.

The Café was crowded with townies and college students, both groups that regularly flocked the Masque, but rarely, if ever, simultaneously. They seemed electrified by common purpose, convening to discuss anything and everything, as long as it was spoken in the language of stark aphorisms:

“Woman, fish, bicycle – Google it.”

“An atheist dictator? Muslim dictator? Why emphasize either word? Why not just mention Stalin’s moustache, or Saddam’s skin-color?”

“You’ve never heard about ‘taking to the streets’?”

“Fuck Western Civ. Like we need Rome all over again.”

It was startling, almost laughable, but it felt right, somehow. Like it belonged to Julia’s world, despite the whiff of discomfort she always got from spending too much time engulfed by one massive thought-talk. (Likewise, protests lunging down streets always inspired her, as she thought they self-evidently should; but, nevertheless, she had to avert her eyes after five minutes, and sometimes go and take a nap afterwards.)

She made her way to Beth near the back, waving as she walked; but Beth did not notice. She was focused on a sheaf of papers on the table in front of her, flipping a pen back and forth between two fingers. Julia sat down, and still Beth refused to glance up. Annoyed, Julia looked at the packet.

It was a Wikipedia entry on the New Messiahs, updated that morning. From the breadth of the stack of papers, it could have been twenty pages, easily. Beth was halfway through page twelve, and showed no signs of stopping or slowing her info-gorge.

Fine, Julia thought, and left her purse at the table as she went to buy a cappuccino and a slice of pound cake. But when she saw the line for the counter, she hesitated, sighed, and sat back down.

“Irritated by the nine-eleven intellectuals?” Beth asked, smirking, but not removing her gaze from the Wiki entry.

“The who?” Julia said.

“Nine-eleven intellectuals,” her cousin repeated, tapping her own skull with her pen. “They start reading the New York Times after every catastrophe, get bored after a month or three, and then drop any interest.”

Julia laughed a bit too loudly, and three women at a neighboring table looked up with perfectly cloned “scandalized” expressions. She cleared her throat and turned her eyes downward, blushing.

“Obviously, I probably shouldn’t talk,” Beth went on, oblivious. “I’m reading the ‘online encyclopedia’ like they read the Times.”

“I thought you weren’t interested in that stuff,” Julia said, not quite sure if she was asking a question or stating a fact. “You didn’t seem that obsessed last night.”

“Yeah, well,” Beth replied, not really paying attention. Then she stopped twiddling the pen and looked up at her cousin. “Well. I guess I just wanted to wait to make up my own mind first.” She said it without an ounce of sarcasm or sass involved, but that one sentence still unnerved Julia: Beth was lying.

“I got a message last night,” Julia said cautiously as Beth went back to reading. Her cousin didn’t respond, didn’t show she’d heard. “I got a message, on my phone. I don’t give that number out to a lot of people.”

“I tell you to make more friends at work,” Beth said, obviously by rote. They’d had this discussion many times before. “Was it someone special?”

“Just Grandma.” Julia was surprised at how true those two words sounded.

Beth looked up at her, and the whole thing felt like a sitcom. The studio audience was gasping, sucking in air like sucking down sweet milk. Julia wished she could do without this part, eschew the emotional scene, but it was inevitable.

“Okay,” Beth said, and left the table, saying she was craving a latte.

The studio audience frowned.

Pissed, Julia wanted to follow her cousin, pull her back by the hair and punch her – but she stopped as she stood; thought; and sat back down. A red sensation, dry and almost painful: violence, or the idea of it. It was…she wanted to say familiar, but, really, it was completely new to her, wasn’t it? Then why was she also feeling the strangest sense of déja vu? And why was her fist flexing, without her telling it to do so; her legs twitching, as if she were tweaking; her blood prickling…prickling her fucking veins.

She had to go. She had to be gone, to fly and flee, to be flown and fled.

Her head started to shake, her eyes filled with splotches of white and white-hot, and her body wasn’t her body – which was when she saw it:

That same pamphlet. It stuck out of the stack of papers Beth had been sifting through, revealing itself to her like a topless dancer, shameless, cheap. “It is no mystery that the west is crumbling…”

She stood. She left. She ran.

It was a time before she knew where she was headed, and even longer before she knew why. She ended up catching a cab when the first inkling of comprehension seeped into her skull. She told the man where to take her, and she sat in relative silence, tuning out the reggae on the radio. Her hands still shook, her eyes still hurt – but it didn’t matter. She had purpose. She was going. She was almost gone – just a few more minutes.

“‘Sokay if I let you out here?” the cabbie asked after a while, pointing to the deluge of traffic ahead at the intersection.

She stared at him; gave him a bill; and left the cab. He watched her as she made her way, focusing hesitantly on her quivering arms, her dazed expression. Then he pulled back into the street, into the city.

Julia walked on brittle legs towards the intersection; shivered in the wind while waiting for the signal; tripped over the curb and kept going straight to the entrance, not stopping for a moment. She thought, at one point, that her arms would fall off, her bare neck be divested of flesh, not by any external force, but through her own weakness, her chemical volatility. Her hands began to shake even more.

The entrance called to her, despite the fact that it was no longer there. Instead, there was a hole, defined not by walls, but by a perverse lack thereof. And here a crowd already stood, bearing signs and shouts, bickering with each other – or with the police. There were at least twenty officers present, stolid and stony-faced, protecting the lack-of-walls from intrusion.

But I’m here, Julia thought. I’m here – it’s all right.

She proceeded. Through the crowd she trudged, squeezing between or shoving around the protestors. The police yelled Back, Get Back to everyone, to the collective surging and throbbing against the non-walls, the non-space. But no one Got Back, no one stopped, no one listened to the voices commanding them there – least of all Julia.

She heard no human voice calling to her. But there were words, words only she seemed to hear, spoken solemnly and in a greater volume than any could hope to imitate, flowing over the crowd and engulfing its din, smothering all other sharp, jagged sounds as if they were merely ambient. And though they were words, they were unintelligible, indescribable – a mass of sound and thought and pain. As she approached, the voice grew in strength, until she feared its power would immolate her and the rest of the deaf crowd. But she continued, because she needed to expel this…this violence, this flame, this passion. She needed it gone. And the voice told her, in its strange language, that it would do this for her. The voice told her so. The voice that called from the remnants of a sign:

Wrigley Field

Home of

Chicago Cubs

And she trusted in it like she would not trust any man or woman. If she could reach the sign, be blessed by that which it guarded so cruelly and brilliantly, she would be free of whatever had possessed her. So she pushed through, ignoring the furious glances thrown her way, shoving down anyone who became an obstacle to her, fending off attacks from all sides, verbal and non-:

“Bitch!”

“Fuck you!”

“Cunt!”

Someone tried to take a swipe at her with a knife, but she was faster, somehow, and had smacked the knife from the hand that held it in a moment – and was out of the owner’s sight in the moment after that.

But she approached the thin line, the blue line, the men strong and tall and well armed who defended the hole, the lack, the vacuum. And they would never budge, she knew. They stared, self-assured, at the throng before them, holding the frightening sway of authority over the weaker of the protestors, managing to maintain that thin line with just the threat of physical force. Their power was undeniable.

But I’m here, Julia thought. But I’m here.

And she dove forward.

“Hey!” one of the blues cried. He seized her with thick hands, unbearably meaty hands, as she tried to muscle past him; he pulled her back by the shoulders, and she screamed.

She had never screamed before in her life, she realized with detached awe.

And of an instant, there was no thought, no introspection – just clarity. It was all so very clear. Overwhelmingly clear.

Julia’s head snapped back, colliding with and breaking the officer’s nose. He yelled, and she ducked, streaked behind him as he stumbled forward. The mass cheered at this accidental victory, and took it as a sign to charge.

“Kill the pigs!” one woman shouted, and her gleeful attitude spread through the crowd.

Julia ignored them and sidled past the chaos, dodging hands and blocking out the blossoming fire in the back of her head. She moved with all the speed her body would permit, savoring every beat of her heart, every time her spine would contract and bend and twist all the right ways, just to get her a step more in the direction she needed, she demanded. Because that was what it became, a booming, defiant, crazed demand, as anyone grabbed at her, pulled her down or up:

“No!” she shouted at one other cop, shoving him back with a strength only adrenaline could purchase.

“Off, get off!” she fumed, kicking a man in the face as he tried to pull himself up from the ground by clawing at her legs.

She tore forward, shaking men and women off at every turn – but still there were more. Their energies were not entirely focused on her, of course not. Though it certainly felt like that was the case, she wouldn’t deny that: with every stumbling step there was an obstacle more dangerous than the last, an attacker more determined than any prior.

But, eventually, she saw the end of it – the chasm stood before her, the brawl behind her. The change took place in an instant, from torrent to serenity. She turned and watched: police threatened to use lethal force, their guns were torn from their hands, people cheered, people screamed, and there was pain.

But not for Julia. She was pure and untouched, at least for that second as she observed the world tear itself apart on a Chicago sidewalk. So easily did it appear to die. So effortlessly, it seemed to collapse.

And then there were gunshots, and she had to move.