Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  The fifth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath) infused the room with portent and suspense. Madame DuVernay instructed those at the table to join hands in a circle. Morse balked. Mario roughly slammed his hands to the table. In reflecting on the scene later, Lara noted that his right arm seemed as disabled as his left. He tried to lift it without success. Jacinta grabbed Morse’s left hand, Lara his right. Morse, squinting in the candlelight, followed Jacinta’s delicate hand upward to her face, aghast at the visage of his chambermaid. From his other hand, he glanced upward at a masked and hooded being. He quaked at the sight.

  Madame DuVernay incanted a supplication, repeating it three times.

  BELOVED ADRIENNE, THERE ON THE OTHER SIDE, HEAR ME, HEAR ME. BELOVED ADRIENNE, WE BRING YOU GIFTS FROM LIFE TO DEATH. WE CALL UPON YOU. BRING YOUR SPIRIT TO VISIT UPON US.

  She paused to allow the incantation to penetrate Morse’s consciousness. In Morse’s face, she saw no hint. She continued her chants, quoting Edgar Allan Poe in a hollow haunting tone that shot chills down Adrienne’s spine, echoes of her underwater brush with death:

  THE BOUNDARIES THAT SEPARATE LIFE AND DEATH ARE AT BEST SHADOWY AND VAGUE. WHO SHALL SAY WHERE THE ONE ENDS AND THE OTHER BEGINS?

  She repeated the quote slowly, reverting then to her incantation, calling Adrienne from the dead, again and again.

  Lara, now holding Morse’s hand in the candlelight, now becoming drawn into this terrifying border zone where life meets death, sensed her soul being pierced, a vague horror in her heart, as Poe had written. As though her body temperature had dropped by degrees, she began to shiver uncontrollably. Surely, Morse must be aware. She glanced over to see him slumped against the rope, his head bobbing back and forth across his chest like Poe’s descending pendulum. Was the man conscious?

  Madame DuVernay allowed Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to imbue the atmosphere with discordancy. With a small flick of her index finger, she signaled Eduardo to dampen the music and cue Adrienne’s recorded monologue.

  Morse lifted his head a few inches. Through hooded eyes he seemed perplexed by the echoed voice enveloping the scene. “Wha’s this?” he whispered as Adrienne’s monologue continued.

  Madame DuVernay answered his question. “This, Mr. Morse, is the one we have called from the dead, sir. We have reached this woman you once knew. Lo, this be Mizz Adrienne Fostah.”

  “Knew, who knew?” gasped Morse. His head flopped back toward his chest. “Nobody,” he answered through a croaking cough.

  The medium then called on Jacinta. “Massa Morse. Massa Morse! Look heah, you be da one who done know dat dead woman. You be da one.”

  Morse did not look her way. He uttered no response.

  “Massa Morse, you done beat up and rape dat woman. She be broken and bloody. I find huh in de grass. Den she fall in da sea. You be de cause of huh death … Massa Morse: Confess yo crime.”

  Still no response.

  Madame DuVernay instructed Jacinta to ask the spirit a question. “The spirit will respond with one tap to mean yes and two to signify no.”

  “Yu spirit of Adrienne,” incanted Jacinta, “did Massa Morse beat and rape yu on dat night of October 18th?”

  One tap.

  Morse, his head still down, opened his eyes a slit.

  “Oh spirit of Adrienne,” she continued. “In yu confusion and pain, did you den fall into da sea to yu death?”

  One tap.

  “An' was you runnin' in feah from Massa Morse?”

  One tap again.

  Madame DuVernay briefly nodded, signaling to Jacinta that she had done her job. Madame DuVernay dropped Jacinta’s hand and made a circular motion to Mario. Mario, standing behind Morse, responded by lifting Morse’s head and applying a compress to his forehead. Morse revived. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You are in de presence of de dead,” replied the medium. “Hark! Dere! Huh spirit.”

  Eduardo flicked on a string of lighting that framed the screen and he turned on the ultrasonic misting machine. Adrienne arose behind the screen and drifted into the foggy light, her remote microphone projecting disembodied childish sounds punctuated by a staccato tick-tock, tick-tock in the background.

  The effect was visceral. For Lara, it thoroughly spooked her innate spiritual cynicism and exposed her mortality. Collens also seemed as though he had absorbed a deathblow. As for Jacinta, she could not have been more haunted had Adrienne been a “real” phantom. In her child-like imagination, the medium had taken her into the macabre, a bottomless pit, hell itself. Mario stood stock still behind Morse, unholy dread creeping across his face.

  Morse now fully awake, his native asperity surfacing, bolted from his place at the table, now squealing in unadulterated terror, now upending the table, now breaking the circle. Candles catapulted to far corners. Wine splashed to the floor. Incense toppled. Lara, Collens, and Jacinta jumped to their feet. Madame DuVernay, closing in on her final act, ignored the chaos and stood over Morse. “Sir, sir, I beg of you now, in da presence of dis spirit in immortal pain, dis woman you once knew: Tell us her story. Reveal your own.” On cue, barefooted Adrienne drifted balletically from behind the screen, a candle in hand, her ankle pulsing pain, her long white gown encircling and flowing from her slender body. She flitted now, round and round, shrouding Morse in her gauzy veil, pass after pass.

  In confusion and terror, Morse wailed a scream so bloodcurdling that Adrienne came to a halt, herself teetering at the brink, this demon, her nightmare. Calling on unearthly strength, Morse, shackled to the chair, rolled to the floor and rose up on his knees. He tried and failed to support himself with his arms, reverting to an acute angle, his chest and shoulders at the floor, his ass upwards. Transfixed by his amusing child’s pose — the chair still firmly affixed across his backside — the onlookers beheld Morse setting off toward Adrienne’s feet, the chair twisting and turning, a lunatic tortoise on a mission of wrath. Mario, frozen in fright, could not move. The humped figure and his spectral mistress engaged in an unscripted dance of the dead, echoes of Goethe, a dark tale with uncertain resolution.

  In the kitchen, Officer Clarke left his post and crept into the great room. He surveyed the scene, made a decision. He withdrew his pistol and shouted, “IN DE NAME OF DE LAW, STOP!” The gathered dove for cover. Two waves splashed across poor Adrienne’s shores: What was that I said about a low risk mission? Did he just shout ‘in the name of the law’? Morse’s demented crawl had not ceased. In semi-darkness, Clarke aimed toward the humped figure. He fired a single shot. At first it seemed to have grazed the chair on Morse’s back but then blood began to trickle across his rump and down his thigh.

  Undaunted, Madame DuVernay rose from behind the couch and rushed toward Morse one last time. Unfurling her own shroud, she swung it wildly over the wounded tortoise and exclaimed, “Confess, sir; tell all.”

  Morse howled forth a descending bawl, his face a rictus of contortion, foreshadowing omega, not as imagined. “Noooo … Sumbitch … It canno' be.” In the next moment, when the future of everything teetered on his next move, Morse tipped sideways, gravity taking him down, breaking two chair legs, his bulbous butt crumpling to a halt.

  Lara threw off her hood and mask and rushed to the dead-still Morse. She kneeled and bent over to listen for breath, simultaneously pressing his carotid artery. The others closed in: a tight circle of complicit murderers? Adrienne dropped to her knees, wept convulsively, covering her face with both hands. Officer Clarke, his pistol holstered, elbowed his way past Adrienne to Lara. “He be breathin'?”

  “Yes. It’s shallow. Help me with these ropes. Let’s have a look at the bullet wound.” She tore away his blood-soaked pajamas and calmly surveyed the wound, a transverse gully, already clotting. The bullet had cut a channel across his Gluteus maximus.

  “A mere pain in the ass,” she quipped and addressed his condition: Stroke, stroke: What do I remember about strokes?

  Failing balance: check.


  Weakness: check.

  Facial paralysis: likely.

  Speech impairment: check.

  Lack of reflexes: apparent.

  Loss of comprehension: check.

  Loss of consciousness: obvious.

  “Morse has suffered a stroke,” she announced. “We must rush him to the hospital.”

  “Pack up everybody,” Officer Clarke ordered. “As an officer o' da Saint Thomas Police Department, I shall accompany dis gentleman to hospital. If he get bettah, he be headed to da Charlotte Amalie jail. I do hereby charge him wi' gross predatory sexual imposition and rape of a minor.”

  5

  Stefan’s Journal

  Habit-Forming

  Katherine awakes to the faintest of ring tones.

  Where is it, her phone? She swings her legs over the bed’s edge and hustles across the room for her robe. I open my eyes to behold the woman of my dreams: her graceful strides and sinewy straight back, her regal neck, the multicolored floral tattoo between her scapula and spine, long legs, slender ankles: as sublime an awakening as one could imagine. What would “people who might judge” make of this? And yet, Rumi whispers:

  A lover is always accused of something.

  But when he finds his love,

  whatever was lost in the looking comes back

  completely changed.

  In the living room, Katherine finds her phone between cushions on the couch: the site of a romp a few hours back. It’s Sunday, the day before Flintwinch’s ultimatum. She taps the missed call icon.

  Lara, in St. Eustatius, picks up, her voice pinched, the connection scratchy.

  After the call, Katherine brews coffee, pops a bagel into the toaster, dashes to the shower. When she returns to the kitchen, I’m standing at the counter, sipping coffee, scrolling my phone.

  “Morning there, Katherine. Hey, thanks for sharing your bed and making coffee. This could be habit-forming.”

  “I’ll buy into that. And I’m the one who wants to be gushy with gratitude.”

  “The pleasure’s all mine, really.”

  “Not all, mister, as you may remember, and not just once.”

  My eyebrows arch upward at the memory. I’ve never been so dazzled.

  As if channeling my thought, she says, “I’m starry-eyed, Stefan.” Then a cloud descends across her lovely face, her eyes focusing on some distant horizon, the burdens of the day ahead. Nodding toward my phone, she asks, “Anything there?”

  “Uh…yes. The Boston Globe: an AP story about your occupation, the resignation of Redlaw, the university’s demands. National wire story. It probably means you can expect a media blitz today.”

  She says, almost to herself, “Beth Samuels at work!”

  She pours herself coffee, grabs her bagel, gestures us to the table. “Lara called from Saint Eustatius. Morse had a stroke when they confronted him. He’s in the hospital. Partly disabled.”

  “The law of the universe at work. Karma metes out justice. Did they extract the confession?”

  “No. Looks like it is time to play our Gruppo Crogiolo card.”

  “Careful.”

  “Sheesh, Stefan. I’m full of worry. Events are ramping up massively. I can’t help but think about our discussion the other day in class — our protest and the risks of Late-K. How close we are to unraveling. I mean, really! Tomorrow is, like, what? Some kind accident waiting to happen. Omega, baby: bring it on!”

  “Who can say for sure? Depends a lot on things beyond your control. The trigger could be a random thing like an over-anxious cop or something external like the governor sending in the troops or the media causing panic or even a weather event. A storm to our west, Burt tells me.”

  “Random things. Impossible to plan for.”

  “True. But what you can do is to try to hang together and build redundancy into your plans: many silos, many pathways, many fleet sure-footed responses, learning from fast-paced events, responding accordingly, experimenting on the spot, always thinking upstream. A build-up of resilience, in other words.”

  “I get that, in theory anyway. What’s that mean on-the-ground?”

  “Well, let’s see. First, in the virtual world you ought to make sure you have several means of keeping your followers abreast: trusting and nurturing the most valued resource in protest movements — social capital. I imagine you do this as a matter of course; several people reporting on several sites, constantly assuring your followers they are valued.”

  “Yes. We’re good there.”

  “Eyep. Second, you should set up more than one command post. Make sure somebody’s in charge of each one and lines of communication and authority are clear. This is all about modularity and reflexive leadership.”

  “Nick and I have already organized a second off-campus command post, and who should do what and when.”

  “Okay. Third, today you’ve got to put as many live protestors as possible on the streets. It needs to become a mass demonstration to whack the administration upside their heads. I hate to say it, but you ought to be prepared for pepper spray and tear gas. Stage things so that there are two or three focal points for the rally. It will string-out law enforcement and lower the risk of bashed brains.”

  “Tear gas? Cripes. Actually, I don’t expect it today; tomorrow maybe. Redlaw assured me that a peaceful demonstration today will not be met with force.”

  “How could he do that?”

  “I don’t know. Calling in I-owe-yous?”

  “We’ll see how that works out.”

  “So, a march through campus to collect bodies, then a mass demo, or perhaps two or three mass demos. Then what?” Katherine asked.

  “Hard to say. Leadership may need to make split-second decisions.”

  “It could be a challenge to wind down while also pumping up energy for tomorrow.”

  “Right. A tapering strategy will be needed. Also, while I think of it: Never leave the quad village unprotected. If you can, expand the occupation, say, to the area at the back of Stiggins, Pan’s garden, and maybe a third site down on Southwell Quad that could be your final line of retreat, if it comes to that.”

  “And if the crowd turns violent?”

  “Run away. Core stalwarts should immediately retreat to the villages. Hunker down. Tonight, work on how to respond to police in the morning and to achieve a successful strike and boycott.”

  “We have a totally non-violent fall-back plan in case Flintwinch calls in the troops.”

  “Good. What is it?”

  “Can’t tell you.” She cracks a sly grin, draws a deep breath and shakes her head briskly. She rises, turns her back on me, rushes into the living room to collect her pack. “It’s time to leave, sir. I’ve got a revolution to deal with. And you, you’d best skedaddle before those judging people discover you.”

  6

  We squeezed into Nick’s living room. The warm day made the apartment feel cramped and sweaty. Nick welcomed us. He turned to Katherine, noting her rested, rosy glow.

  Katherine: “We have much to accomplish this morning. Let’s start with Jason.”

  Jason told the story of the séance. The news jolted us. Astrid launched an f-bomb. Zach told her to clean up her act. “Up yours,” she retorted. People weren’t in the best of humor.

  José: “A total bust then?”

  Jason: “Not total. Morse is going to trial for rape. And the case against him regarding Adrienne has new life.”

  “What does that mean for us?” I asked.

  Jason and Katherine, almost in unison: “Who knows?” They looked at each other, shrugged. Nobody laughed. Levity had leaked out of the tank.

  Jason: “Lara did advise that we provide information on Gruppo Crogiolo to the administration with an ultimatum that we would finally release it to the press if they refuse to withdraw their plan to wipe us off the face of the planet tomorrow. That’s it, mates.”

  Katherine: “Astrid, what do you think? You are the most exposed. Is this the time to break-out Grup
po Crogiolo?”

  Astrid: “Damn! I thought I’d be off the hook. But since Morse has crapped out without a confession, I guess I have to agree. It’s now or never.”

  Sean: “But how? I mean, we could all be rendered into sausage by the NSA, as somebody once said.”

  Zach: “That was you, idiot!”

  Sean: “Can’t you come up with a better noun? Like troglodyte , for example.”

  Nick: “Boys! Boys!”

  Friends aggravating friends, cleaving the group’s solidarity. It was clear to me why this was happening. To her credit, Katherine did not to scold. She nodded toward Astrid.

  “I may have a way to shield us,” Astrid announced. I need to consult with my colleagues online.

  Sean, upspeaking: “Yeahhh?”

  Astrid: “It is risky. For that reason, I think I’d better hold back until I’ve checked with them and tried it. If I fail, you all can deny everything in good conscience.”

  Nick: “Shit, Astrid. Stop being so fucking clandestine. We’re all up to our ears in this. What’s one more thing?”

  Em: “Ne pas intimider, brute!”

  Jason: “What? Put that in Oz English at least.”

  Nick: “She told me to stop bullying Astrid. Poor little Astrid from Oakville.”

  Katherine: “Hey guys! We haven’t got the leisure to quarrel. I say give Astrid some time.”

  Frank, as though in Westminster Hall: “Here, here.”

  Astrid popped out and returned twelve minutes later, her phone in hand. “Through channels that are virtually untraceable, I have confirmed the identity of Morse’s conspirator. I will now try to contact him. This is the risky part.” Before anyone could speak, she stepped away again.

  Nick, calling after her: “Him? Are you going to leave us hanging by our fingernails?”