by Adam Vine
I deleted the message. I never wanted to talk to Evan again.
THE CITY
LOOKING UP at the inside of Saint Mary’s Basilica was like standing under a starlit ocean. Vaulted ceilings rose into waves of blue marble speckled with gold and amber studs, huge marble pillars as thick as kelp forests holding that false sky aloft between a robber’s sanctuary of chapels. The nave was riddled with arcane stairways and vining pulpits branching off from the main church’s ground floor. The altar was a hollow mountain of stained glass and black, ancient wood depicting the story of Christ from his birth to the Resurrection.
The place was large enough to hold thousands. Schools of tourists swam errantly through the timeless stones, quieting only for the garden of grandmothers praying in the rearmost pews. And yet wherever I sat, I was still completely alone.
One of the first things I learned after moving to Country was that beautiful old churches aren’t merely conduits to the divine. They are funnels that force-feed you with awe. You think to yourself, how could anyone build something so beautiful? How did they dedicate their whole lives to such a selfless act? Will anyone remember what I do when I’m gone?
I sat in the back rows of the church, as far from the tourists as I could, bowed my head and prayed. It had been two years since I’d spoken to God. I asked him to forgive me for everything wrong that I’d done. I asked him to help me become a good man. I asked him to help me forgive myself for Carly’s death.
If God couldn’t help me do those things, I didn’t think anyone could. If he didn’t answer me here and now, in the last fleeting moment before I slipped and fell into my own shadow, then I would carry this pain forever. There would never be peace in my heart.
I prayed, I listened, and I waited. I knelt, I begged, and I cried. I asked God for forgiveness, but God wasn’t there.
THE CITY
“WERE YOU SICK AGAIN?”
I turned around to see Lolek ascending the stairs of my apartment building with his girlfriend Marzena, both of their arms heavily laden with plastic grocery bags from the convenience shop downstairs. Marzena was the receptionist who worked the front desk at our office. She was tall, thin, and had a village-pretty face and almond brown hair that fell almost to her waist. Like most guys in Country, Lolek was batting far above his league.
“Hey Lolek. Hey Marzena. Yeah, I was sick. Do you guys live here?” I said.
Lolek shifted a grocery bag across his hip. “Yes, of course. Didn’t they tell you?”
“We found you, um… we found your flat for you,” Marzena said. Her English wasn’t as good as Lolek’s, and she spoke with that lilting, wooden false-British accent that my co-workers called “school English.”
“Nope. Nobody tells me anything,” I said.
They both laughed. “Those bastards,” Lolek said.
“Anyway. Been out for the last few days. Some kind of stomach virus. Again,” I said.
“Well, don’t worry. They don’t tell me anything, either. I just found out today we have to redo the whole second part of Arkadius again. This will be the third time. They did a survey, and the focus group didn’t like the artwork. They said it wasn’t what they imagined when they read the poem in school,” Lolek said.
I rolled my eyes, throwing my hands up in the air, and said, “Well, we’re in the same boat with that one. I have to redo all of my shit, too. You guys doing a little grocery shopping?”
“Weekly supply,” Lolek said, holding up one of the bags. I counted eight rectangular boxes of Earl Grey inside the overstuffed, translucent plastic.
“Jesus Christ. You’re addicted,” I said.
Marzena smiled politely. I don’t think she understood my joke.
“Anyway, yes, we live on this floor, right over there, at the end of the hall. Flat number forty-three,” Lolek said. He quickly added, “I can’t believe you haven’t seen us here before. Marcin didn’t mention that we live here?”
Wait. Dammit. This means he must have heard all those screaming, humiliating fights. Months and months of fights. And not just Lolek, but his girlfriend, too. I’ll bet everyone at work knows how much Kashka and I fight... or rather, fought.
No. They seem like good people, like Evan was, before everything changed. They wouldn’t do that to me, would they?
“No,” I said. “I had no idea we were neighbors. We’ll have to get together sometime.”
Lolek’s grin dissolved into a flat, inquisitive line. He raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Christmas. I was going to come over later, but then we saw you leaving and thought it was better to just ask now.”
“Christmas?” I said.
“It’s not important. Will you have time to talk about it later?” Lolek said.
“No, sorry. I’ve got plans tonight,” I said.
“Oh. What plans?”
“I’m going to a magic show,” I said.
“A magic show?”
“It’s at the Old Theater on St. John’s Street. I know the guy who’s putting it on. He’s another American. A bit eccentric, but the guy is crazy talented. Plus, I need to get out of the house for a while. But I have a minute now. What did you want to ask?” I said.
Lolek and Marzena exchanged a look. “I heard that Filip had to break his plans with you to visit with his family. We wanted to invite you to have Christmas at my parents’ place. We don’t want you to spend Christmas alone.”
“Is it far from here?” I said.
“No. My village is maybe an hour east of here. And technically, it would be two Christmases - one with each family. So, six Christmas dinners, because in Country, Christmas lasts for three days.”
My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday but scrambled eggs.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Marzena patted Lolek on the back. “Also, this one is, um… special holiday, for us. We want you to, um… be a part of it.”
“What makes this one so special?” I said.
“It is our last Christmas as, um… boyfriend and girlfriend,” Marzena said.
“We’re getting married in the spring,” Lolek explained.
“Wow. Congratulations. I’m so happy for you guys.”
“Then it’s a date,” Lolek said.
“You can’t, um… say that it’s a date,” Marzena scolded him.
“Why not?” Lolek said.
“Because he’s a man.”
I chuckled. “I’ll mark it on my calendar. So, do you guys want help with those groceries?”
THE OLD THEATER
RED CURTAINS drew over an empty stage. The ancient velvet snapped and slithered across the brightly polished wood, revealing a maze of disjointed floorboards, crowded amplifiers, and microphone chords. It was an old, grand theater on the smallest scale, with less than a hundred seats. The rows of folding, disintegrating cloth chairs were packed so tight together the audience had to sit knee-knee with their neighbors. The balcony was a contradiction of plaster angels and claustrophobia. A full house awaited Ink’s entrance, a mix of stoned college students and middle-aged, mildly interested eccentrics all chatting loudly and checking their smartphones. The air smelled of must, stress, and borrowed time.
The stage lights flashed, and a ripple of silence spread outward from the front row, where I sat with my feet touching the foot of the stage. The lights dimmed to total darkness, and a single white beam appeared at the corner of the stage. Ink manifested from that velvet sea, wearing a top hat, a pince-nez, and a black, three-piece suit.
The crowd gave a hesitant round of applause. Ink confidently walked to center stage, bowed, and three white doves sprung out from under the rear of his tailcoat. The crowd gasped and roared with applause as the squawking birds frantically tried to find an exit among the theater’s high rafters. Ink gave a dramatic snap, inhumanly loud above the din, and the doves stilled and fell, fluttering strangely on the air as if made of paper.
A wave of startled oohs and
aahs spread through the audience. The doves were paper, nothing more than origami.
One of the paper birds sailed down into my lap. I picked it up and unfolded it. It wasn’t made of normal paper. It was a folded ten-crown note. The old grandmother sitting next to me snatched it away and gave me a dirty look, like she was going to fight me for it if I tried taking it back.
Sounds of pleasant surprise punctuated the air all around me as the crowd snatched up the money birds where they fell.
Ink silenced the audience with a gesture and said in a booming voice that filled the musty corners of the theater with his deep gravel, “My name is Ink. I come from America. I arrived in Country four years ago with nothing but the coat on my back and some pennies in my pocket.”
A tiny flame appeared within the white-gloved gyre of Ink’s hands. Ink spun the flame like a loom. The flame-wheel flickered and grew.
“Yet tonight, I am here to entertain. You will witness the wonders learned by a wandering soul. I’ve traveled to places strange beyond all imagining, outside the limits of space and time. I have trained with masters of the macabre and the arcane, men who could bend the laws of this universe, and others, to their will. Tonight, you will see a thousand centuries of the dark arts distilled to the head of a pin. Tonight, I will show you the meaning of awe.”
The wheel of flame between Ink’s hands shivered and stretched into a slender oblong, and then elongated into a rectangle the size of a large picture frame. Flaming stars and stripes populated the inner space, a blazing simulacrum of the American flag.
Ink wove the burning flag into fiery replications of famous American landmarks: Mount Rushmore, Yosemite, the New York skyline. “Why did I come here, you ask? Because my country is no longer free. There, men can no longer be what we were born to be. America, once the land of the free and the home of the brave, is now the land of the fat and the enslaved, a place where you pay more to get less, where having fun is wrong, and telling the truth will put you in jail.”
Ink turned the flames into the bars of a jailhouse door, then erased them with a slash of his finger. The fire curled into a ring once more. Inside it, Ink drew a Vitruvian Man.
“Men are, above all things, playful beings. We are not merely born for games... fighting, war, love, sex...” the crowd gave a nervous giggle, “...in fact, we need them to live and thrive.”
Ink hacked the center of the circle six times, extinguishing each of the fire man’s limbs one-by-one.
“Without games, men cannot be. And without men, civilization cannot be. Where America leads, the rest of the world follows. So here we all are, in the great spiral, tail-spinning down toward a beautiful oblivion.”
The Vitruvian Man vanished, and Ink shrunk the ring of flame back to a ball no larger than his glove.
“There it is, my friends, my dear fellow surfers on this slow, crumbling wave of decline. That is why I left. I quit being responsible. I quit being honest. I quit being good and started practicing the fine art of living for myself rather than those who only wanted me in my place, who wanted to hold me down. And I would encourage each and every one of you to do the same.”
Ink drew a figure eight, summoning a tiny nude woman dancing in the palm of his hand. “Yes, you have stability. You have traditions. You have Catholicism. Family values. Closed borders. You have strong men and pretty, feminine women. You have loving grandmothers, perfect weddings in beautiful churches, three Christmas dinners a year. You have culture, language, and morality... for now. I promise that someday, much sooner than you’d like, all of that will be gone, evaporated like snow in the sunlight.”
Ink closed his fist, snuffing the dancing woman out.
“I have seen it a thousand times before and will see it a thousand times again. The fall is inevitable, the shadow ever falling over the horizon. You can’t escape it, nor should you try. We struggle to thrive, and then we grow rich and comfortable, until comfort turns to contempt, and we tear down the towers that made us tall in the first place. The corruption of all good things is written in their design.”
Ink whispered into his fist, like he was blowing the audience a kiss. A hot spear of fire shot out over my head, turning the dimness of the theater as bright as day. Fearful gasps echoed all around. The gout of fire stabilized above the crowd and began rotating, circling outward until the theater was filled with countless, spiraling rings of flame.
A few audience members yelped in panic. I buried my face in my sleeve, wiping away the thick streams of sweat suddenly drawing from my skin.
“So my friends - my, good, honest people of Country – do not fight corruption. Corruption is our duty. It is in our nature to fall,” Ink said.
He retracted his hand, and just like that, the flaming spiral was gone, leaving only the smell of gunpowder and a few, hesitant claps that turned into rolling, thunderous applause.
No way. That was impossible.
The show picked up, and from there moved at breakneck speed. Before I could collect my thoughts, Ink had already moved onto his next trick: making his albino hawk, Mr. Snow appear and disappear on his arm in time with the stage lights shutting off and then back on again.
Once Ink had adequately teleported the hawk onto various parts of his own body, he made Mr. Snow appear at various points throughout the theater, too; once up in the rafters, once at the rear doors, once on the balcony (where a group of drunken hipsters shouted and tried to shoo the big bird away with a beer bottle), then finally on the back of an old woman’s seat.
After the bird trick, Ink performed the card routine I’d seen him do on the street, in which the magician shuffled and juggled a deck of playing cards, and then threw knives through the cards he was juggling while they were in mid-air. Only this time, instead of tumbling back down to the stage when they were hit, the cards exploded like miniature fireworks, filling the theater with tiny panoplies of color and sound.
When Ink went to fetch the fallen throwing knives from the stage, they turned into wriggling, poisonous snakes. Ink offered a snake to the front row, and then stuffed it under his top hat. When all the snakes were put away, Ink removed his top hat to show us the snakes were gone.
The grand finale of the show was Ink’s own twisted variation of the infamous magician’s sword trick. Big Ben came out dressed up like a medieval executioner, black cloth mask and all, leading a pretty brunette Countryish girl by the arm. The girl was so dolled up it took me a moment to recognize it was Iza, the high school girl Ink had taken home from Drinks Bar the night Kashka gave me the Blot.
Big Ben looked like an overweight American dad dressed up to take his kids out for Halloween, all questionably obtained muscle barely hidden under a cheap-looking costume. Iza was the opposite, dressed to the nines in a tight black dress, fresh curls in her winter branch brown hair, a thick slathering of stage makeup, and a floppy, pointed black witch’s hat.
“Everyone, please allow me introduce my two lovely assistants. This giant, fleshy homunculus is called Baldanders. I know that’s a mouthful. Blame him. He chose the name himself. It comes from a great work of science fiction literature. You’d be surprised that such a massive, meaty fellow could read at all, but old Baldy here consumes at least two books a day. Literally. He eats them.” The audience gave a polite laugh.
Ink flourished his hat and took a deep, theatrical bow in Iza’s direction. “And this perplexingly beautiful damsel in distress is named Margarita. She just arrived from Moscow on her broomstick. Unfortunately, she couldn’t bring her black cat. Baldanders ate him, too.” More nervous snickers murmured from the crowd.
Big Ben and Iza approached center stage, where the Executioner handed the Witch off to the Magician and returned backstage. “Double unfortunate is the fact that here in Europe, and especially in Country, people don’t have a high tolerance for witchcraft. So sorry, Marge, but your days of joyriding with the devil are over,” Ink said.
Iza pretended to be terrified while Ink held up his tailcoat like a curtain, leavin
g only the girl’s head visible to the audience. Big Ben returned carrying not one, but two katanas bedded in black, lacquered scabbards. I wasn’t 100% sure, but they didn’t look like stage swords. They looked like real, razor-sharp steel nihonto.
No way are those actual Japanese blades. No one’s that stupid. Not even Ink.
Big Ben drew the first, then the second sword, and placed them on opposite sides of Iza’s neck, forming a bladed X with her head in the middle. From where I was sitting, I could see one of the swords edge-on, and the stage lights were bright enough that there should have been at least some light reflected off the edge if the blade had been blunted. It wasn’t.
No. He wouldn’t. Would he?
Iza, too, seemed to sense the danger she was in. In an instant, her pretend terror became real. Sweat beaded on her petite, porcelain forehead, gathering under the brim of her hat in visible droplets. Her eyes widened, fixated on the two razor-sharp edges caging in her neck. Her lips quivered, and her whole body began to shake.
Did that prick really not tell her what he was planning to do? I wondered.
Dismayed whispers rose to a full-on clamor as Ink raised his coat-curtain up to cover Iza’s head, too, hiding her entirely from the audience. Ink gave a subtle nod to Big Ben.
The Executioner drew a quick double breath and slashed with both hands.
Three things happened simultaneously: Iza let out a blood-curdling scream; the sound of metal slicing meat rang as the swords scissored closed; Ink flourished his tailcoat, and then dropped it, revealing…
The crowd gasped. Iza’s head wasn’t merely separated from her body. Iza’s head was gone, and so were her clothes.
Iza’s naked, decapitated body stood with her hands on her hips, still swaying from the impact of the makeshift guillotine. Ink placed a hand on her lower back to steady her and gave the audience a huge, self-confident smile.
No. No, Ink did not just murder that girl. That son of a… where is her head? Where are her clothes?
