The Blessed

by Tonya Hurley

  Tony, the bouncer, popped out of the black double doors and noticed her, a lone figure walking across the street. He waved. She put her finger up to her lips, the international symbol for If you tell, I’ll cut your balls off. He nodded, understanding that Lucy didn’t want anyone to know she was around, or alive for that matter. Even though Lucy had a reputation as a cold, ruthless, self-centered narcissist all in one high-end package, Tony was there for her. The keys to her world were relationships—you scratch my back and I’ll talk behind yours. He smiled and held up her old cell phone, to show her that he’d kept it safe and to offer it back to her. She shook her head no. He dropped it to the ground and shattered it with his heel, her contact list, saved e-mails, and photos never to fall into the wrong hands. She blew him a kiss and kept walking. Uphill.

  Lucy was so preoccupied she almost walked by her favorite pizzeria, Paisan’s, without so much as a peek in the window. Shelves of every kind of pie known to mankind. She pressed her nose up against the glass and promised herself she’d come back later.

  “Hey, Lucy. Where ya been?” Sal, the pizza guy, called out from the service window in a deep gravelly voice.

  “In church, Sal,” she smiled, tossing him a wink.

  The beefy pie man in the flour-dusted white chef’s tunic laughed.

  “Now I know you’re shittin’ me. Time for a slice? On me? You look . . . hungry.”

  “To go, okay? I gotta run.”

  “Where ya headed?”

  “Prison,” she said.

  “That’s an even better one.” Sal nodded.

  He went inside and shortly came out with a piping hot slice right out of the oven.

  Lucy wanted to cry.

  “Thank you, Sal,” she said, kissing him on the cheek in gratitude for the first time ever.

  “Get outta here,” he said, semi-blushing.

  Neighborhood people. She loved them the best. No pretense. No pressure. If it weren’t for Sal, she’d forget to eat half the time. She could actually count on him. Like Tony. They were nothing like Sebastian, but he was like them in the most important way. They were for real.

  Lucy knew the Brooklyn House of Detention, the House of D, as the locals called it. She, on the other hand, had hoped to call it the “jail with retail,” the first urban brig to feature ground-floor storefronts. But it was not to be. It was an eleven-story eyesore at the intersection of Atlantic and Smith, towering over the brownstoned streets and alleys of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. About the only accolade it could be given was that nobody had ever escaped. Jesse wasn’t likely to be the first.

  “Lucy Ambrose to see Jesse Arens,” she said, tipping her dark, oversized sunglasses to the guard at the check-in. She walked through the X-ray machine and endured a pat-down by a very manly looking woman. She wished they made hand-size versions of these things that you could just use to scan anyone. How cool to actually be able to see through someone instead of having to guess. Lucy was escorted to the visitors’ boxes and she waited impatiently in the harsh white lighting until Jesse was brought out in cuffs. She watched him as he shuffled into his seat, bruised eye and sickly looking. “Bail fail?”

  “Nobody’s opening their wallet for me,” Jesse said languidly. “I know that.”

  “You need a fucking vacation,” she said, holding the visitors’ phone about six inches from her mouth so as to not catch germs, or poverty.

  “So do you,” he said, realizing that Lucy looked just as battered as he did, if not worse. “I like the raccoon eyes, but usually it’s night-before makeup.”

  “Even here, I have to be judged?”

  Jesse smiled. Lucy smiled back.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “How about starting with what the hell you’re doing here?”

  “That guy, Sebastian—”

  “I know, I know,” she said, interrupting. “You think he’s a murderer. Well, I’m done with him. We all are.”

  “No,” he cut her off firmly, looking from side to side warily. “I think he’s telling the truth. You know, somewhat.”

  Lucy was shocked by his revelation. And suspicious.

  “Why the sudden conversion?” Lucy asked, wondering if this wasn’t some sort of reverse psychology ploy by Jesse to get back in her good graces.

  “You asked me a few seconds ago why I was here. It’s because I wouldn’t tell Dr. Frey where the guy was. After I found you, I confronted him about the story he told me. He didn’t like it. The cops were waiting.”

  “You think he’s lying about Sebastian?” A wave of nausea and guilt nearly overwhelmed her.

  “I don’t know, but something’s not right.”

  “You didn’t tell them anything?” Lucy said, surprised he wouldn’t sing like a diva in a West Village lounge to save his own skin.

  “No.”

  “What’s your bail?” Lucy asked, reaching into her bag for her wallet. “I’m getting you out of here.”

  “Thanks, but don’t bother. I’m on a seventy-two-hour hold.”

  “Are you going to be okay?” It was the sincerest question she’d ever asked him.

  “I’m not worried about me, Lucy.”

  Jesse paused.

  “What?”

  “There are eyes on you.”

  “Jesse, there are always eyes on me. That was our goal, right?”

  “It’s not a joke. They want Sebastian.”

  “It’s not my problem anymore,” Lucy said. “I just want to forget the whole thing.”

  “But you can’t?”

  “I feel like I’m in limbo. Not really happy with who I was and not sure of who I am now. Something definitely changed in me, even if it was all just some kind of weird fantasy I got caught up in. Like the one my mom had me believe before she left. That she loved me for who I was. That nothing mattered but me. We all know how that shit played out. But, I don’t know. . . . This, he, was different. I felt connected to something bigger than myself. Something real. I can’t explain it.”

  “Well, fantasy or not, I don’t think this is going away. Not until they get him, anyway.”

  “Who’s they? The cops?”

  “Probably, but this whole thing is being driven by Dr. Frey. He’s afraid of Sebastian for some reason.”

  “Stop with all the paranoia, Jesse.”

  “I think you’re being watched, Lucy.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  Jesse placed his hand on the glass to meet hers.

  “Good.”

  AGNES’s ECSTASY

  Agnes gave in.

  In the middle of the night. Out in her backyard in the garden grotto by the koi pond. It happened. She felt as if she were leaving her body.

  She opened her silk chartreuse robe, slipped it off, and lay bare on the rocks under the dogwood tree. Her auburn hair in a loose braid and wrapped around her head like a crown. One foot and one hand dangling in the water as gold, white, black, and orange fish nipped at her fingers and toes.

  “Sebastian,” she whispered in a delicate, vulnerable voice. Calling him. Beckoning him.

  She took a deep breath and got lost in the smell of his neck and hair. Spicy, warm—sandalwood, vanilla, frankincense, patchouli. He was not like any other. He knew love. He was love.

  A flurry of cross-shaped dogwood blossoms opened up on the bare tree above her as if it were springtime. Then they started floating down as if it were autumn—petals sprinkling over her naked body, adorning her hair.

  “You are divine,” she heard him say.

  She let out a sigh, closed her eyes, and let the petals float down onto her statuesque body. She glowed in the night, next to the black patent-leather-looking water.

  Her lips waited for his, so much so that she could feel it in her whole body. She ached for him.

  Trembling.

  I won’t hurt you.

  She felt him. In every way.

  Her spiritual lover.

  She grabbed the back of his hair, which w
as her own.

  Trying to get more of him. But the more she got, the more it wasn’t enough.

  Her scars, now dripping blood into the water turned it red. The fish rose up and down into its warmth. Slowly.

  She put pressure on her healed wrists to staunch the bleeding, but it flowed relentlessly. It was all out of her control.

  She placed her lips on the wounds and began to softly move her tongue, stroking them. But the sickly sweet smell of roses emulating from them was too much to swallow. It was so strong that she was sure it would wake up her mother inside the house.

  Once she relaxed, it felt good.

  She was euphoric.

  It had happened.

  “Sebastian.”

  “I know your weaknesses. I understand your mysteries.”

  Agnes believed.

  “I am with you always.”

  She looked down at the black water and saw his reflection. “I recognize me in you.”

  Agnes turned on her side, to face him.

  “Each day I love you, I become more of myself.”

  “That is what real love is.”

  13 “Nature behaving badly,” Cecilia said, eyeing the piles of cicada shells covering the curbs.

  Ever since the storm, Brooklyn had been afflicted by plagues of insects and even rodents. Drugstore chains had sold out of insect repellent. Talking heads blamed it all on standing pools of water that allowed mosquitoes and other bugs to breed in greater numbers, flooded basements, cellars, and subway tunnels that drove subterranean dwellers like rats and mice aboveground. The threat of disease was very real and growing.

  Everyone was talking, blogging, and tweeting about the unnatural cicada cycle, which was in full force and being aggressively exploited by some local businesses. SHUT THE F*CK UP cicada T-shirts were made and sold and stir-fried cicada was being served as exotic cuisine in local restaurants. There were even cicada pops—carcasses, with their transparent, veiny wings and red eyes, frozen inside red lollies for the kids. It was all anyone could talk about after the tornado and the We’re Not in Brooklyn Anymore campaign.

  Brooklynites had pretty much separated into two camps. It either all made sense as a precursor to the end of days—all these unnatural occurrences—or it was beneath their concern. Cecilia was in the second camp for the time being. She’d had her fill of apocalyptic thought unless it had to do with her own day-to-day survival. The only thing on her mind right then was getting a gig. She was desperate to get up on a stage, any stage, and to play plugged into some sort of amp. She had so much inside to get out, and it was the only way she knew how to do that. Her therapy. She took off across the Williamsburg Bridge for Alphabet City in a single-minded quest for a dive bar that would split the door charge with her.

  The rumbling sound of cicada nearly shook the bridge as she crossed it, carrying her guitar. She might not have feared the clicking critters as a sign of the Armageddon, but for her it was disturbing on a much more personal level. As if Sebastian himself was shaking the truss work, reminding her of what she was trying so hard to forget. The storm. Him.

  Once over the suspended span, she wandered through the Lower East Side up Ludlow Street toward the East Village before ducking into a small, dingy place on Avenue B. Somewhere she hadn’t been in a while, where her fans wouldn’t find her. They’d been texting and posting and wondering about her for days now, but she couldn’t bear to respond, to face them. If they found her, then fine, but she wasn’t going to make it easy.

  Around there, club doors were frequently left open onto the street and you were just as likely to be playing in a place with power as not, which was more a function of the bar owners’ bad personal finances than bad weather. She walked purposefully past the door guy and directly up to the stage and sat down on the lip of it. She slid her guitar case down next to her and opened it, revealing not just a beaten up blond wood Telecaster but some spare clothes and an awesome pair of shoes.

  Cecilia kicked off the biker boots she’d walked in and replaced them with a pair of white suede platforms that zipped up the back with eight-inch heels made of what looked like actual bone. Two tiny skulls peered out from each one, sculpted into the back of the heels. Her idea, Mrryah’s art project. How she planned to stand on them was anyone’s guess, including hers, but she felt compelled to wear them nonetheless for this one-off gig. She wore a slicked-back ’do with spackles of white hair paint on each side, giving an illusion of a virgin Mohawk. She wore a vintage gold-sequined backless minidress, and in her ears, a pair of large hoop earrings that she fashioned out of some old barbwire that she found on the roof. She gave the impression that she belonged there, so no one said anything; they just watched.

  “This one’s for you, Alphabet shitty,” she said into the mic, nodding to the house drummer on stage to get behind his kit.

  She plugged in and let her guitar feed back for a while, and that’s when it all started.

  Cecilia strummed and sang softly at first. She was vulnerable. Her voice cracking in a beautiful mournful tone through the amplifier static.

  The lights were flicked on.

  She started sweating and could see her hands starting to bleed in the exact places where she was pierced by the iron maiden. Something was coming over her.

  The house drummer immediately joined her on stage.

  She put a towel over her head and started stomping around to her own slow, dragging beat. Then she motioned to the drummer to kick in double time.

  It was like she needed a soundtrack to coax out what was inside of her.

  Feeling like she was on fire, she threw off the towel.

  She could have sworn that she saw it burst into flames.

  She started screaming as loud as she could. Screeching like an angry banshee or a feline in heat. It looked like an exorcism more than anything, and CeCe had more than a few demons to release.

  The song was unrecognizable at first. A gritty, intense, punk reading of something bluesy. Presented in Cecilia’s style. Spare and violent.

  This was a place where music mattered. And Cecilia was a girl to whom music mattered. A match made in heaven. It was her heart, her soul, and her reality.

  And then the song revealed itself, or was revealed through her.

  “Whipping Post.”

  The tiny crowd of blasé music types gasped and a murmur built in the room. As live songs go, this was sacred.

  Guest-listers from the bar started to pay attention.

  She clawed and screeched, doubled over on the matchbook-size stage.

  People, a mix between cool downtowners and hipster music geeks, immediately started pouring in from outside—either there was a murder in progress or one killer show. In this case it was both. Witnessing either would have been worth the money to them.

  Cecilia scratched at her guitar and wailed:

  My friends tell me

  That I’ve been such a fool

  And I have to stand down and take it, babe

  All for lovin’ you

  Cecilia and the room were at fever pitch. Whatever was happening inside of her was becoming unbearable to her, but was apparently entertaining as well. The curse of the performer. Creating an I was there moment for the audience. And an I’m in hell moment for herself.

  I drown myself in sorrow

  As I look at what you’ve done

  Nothin’ seems to change

  Bad times stay the same

  And I can’t run

  The club quickly filled to capacity, word of mouth spreading from dive to dive all over the neighborhood. She was raw, oozing sensuality, vulnerability, defiance, and anger all at the same time. It was as if she were being channeled by greatness, being used as a vessel for something or someone else.

  Sometimes I feel

  Sometimes I feel

  Like I’ve been tied

  To the whipping post

  Tied to the whipping post

  Tied to the whipping post

  Oh Lord, I feel lik
e I’m dyin’

  She screamed and began to roll around on the ground. The wounds from the chapel were still raw and unhealed. The more she rolled and scraped herself against the craggy floorboards, antagonized them, the more they swelled and broke open. She felt something strike her back. Thinking it was a wayward guitar string, she checked her weapon, but all six strings were there. She looked up on the ceiling into the cracked mirror mounted on it and thought she saw a welt appear on her back.

  Something was happening.

  Cecilia looked out in pain, at the mosh pit, but she didn’t see people—only pieces of them through her winces—hands, teeth, tattoos, elbows, hair, shoes.

  She moaned in agony, getting verbal lashes from the crowd, typical of an otherworldly performance, and physical lashes from what seemed like thin air.

  Lash after lash, whip after whip, she endured it in front of everyone. It was as if she was being beaten up by her own self. An invisible Inquisitor.

  Tied to the whipping post

  Tied to the whipping post

  Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’

  Singing those words was the last thing she remembered.

  Cecilia woke up.

  On the roof next to Bill.

  “What happened?” she asked desperately. “What is happening?”

  “Things are different now,” he replied.

  “I have to leave here,” she said.

  “I know,” he began. “What can I do for you?”

  Cecilia gathered up some of her costumes that she had hanging to dry in an air duct vent and shoved them into her guitar case before disappearing down the stairs.

  “You can write it all down.”

  7 The Brooklyn Museum Gala, or “Da Ball” as insiders called it, was the social event of the year in the borough. Lucy never missed the opportunity to walk the red carpet, and this year was no exception. With Jesse in the House of D, Lucy went stag, which felt strange. They’d gone to the event together for the last few years—it guaranteed her coverage and him a ticket. It also guaranteed her someone to talk to. She was getting to be one of the best-known faces in town, but not the most popular.