by Jack Livings
Turk, who at the time knew nothing of her father’s origins except that he refused to talk about the shattering loss of his family during World War I or his and Magda’s nearly instant immigration to the United States, had no more reason to suspect that her father was a Krupp than the king of England. Lazlo had been meticulous in his destruction of all physical evidence connecting him to his family, who were, when he and Magda decided to bug out in 1919, very much alive and well and hard at work on the fatherland’s illegal rearmament and military reindustrialization. He engaged a forger in Bonn to produce new birth certificates, transforming him and Magda into Brunns; his property was sold off through an intermediary to raise funds for their new life. If not exactly a cakewalk, an unexceptional series of events in the postwar haze, when regulations weren’t much more than smoke rising off the once-reliably thorny bureaucracy that had gone kaput with the rest of the empire. Lazlo burned photos, letters, diplomas. In Berlin, death certificates for L and M Krupp were drawn up and archived (he was KIA; she starved to death during the British blockade), a final act of erasure before the freshly minted Brunns hopped a train to Antwerp and from there a steamer to New York.
* * *
It was after committing her father to Pickering that Turk, just a liberated gal looking for a way to tame her wild despair, underwent a reinvention of her own. No torched documents, no new name, no transoceanic voyage, her ride on the IND Eighth Ave line down to that MacDougal Street basement was no less transformative. She hadn’t been searching for a new self or a new line of work. She was looking only for a little relief, and there was nothing like the loving embrace of the creaking leather straps to help you let go of the feeling you’re responsible for every living thing on the planet. Turk tried it once, got intrigued, became a regular, her tastes expanded, and before long she was on the other side of the dungeon, rigging her own subs. When the bondage market exploded in the early ’70s (Vietnam plus Nixon times Vatican II equals), she put out her shingle.
Twenty years later, Turk was running a well-regarded dungeon, but trend lines were down. The internet was wrecking everything, and she was forced to pivot to a new experiential tableau. She was no dummy. She subscribed to Red Herring and Inc. She was hip to the innovate-or-die ethos.
What she came up with was something like an emotional amusement park, a menu of scenes that would appeal to the varied tastes of her client base. She began testing different complications: hostage situation, verbally abusive parent, bank holdup, little scenarios she could set up and run within the confines of the dungeon. Clients were enthusiastic, but there wasn’t much repeat business. The complications were novelties. They lacked soul.
She kept working on it. Each new complication was a step further down the path. After a year of R&D, she chartered a 727 and sold tickets for a hijacking complication. Fifty-seven participants paid $8,500 each. Seven paid a $1,500 booster that got them a pistol-whipping from the Libyan hijackers. A female client fought back and they took her in the galley and raped her ($2,000). On subsequent hops, Turk added a bareback fee of another $2,500 (pre-complication testing included), but the whole thing got out of hand. Too many clients were signing up for slashings, whippings, and rapes, men and women in equal numbers, and everyone was enjoying it all a little too much—the rapists, the victims, the other passengers. It didn’t sit right with Turk. She was a capitalist, but she’d begun to think of her business as a gallery of sorts. She wanted her product to mean something. She didn’t want clients who were paying to be entertained. She wanted clients who were paying to be moved. She could see the entertainment parabola arcing back to the dungeon, and her business was no longer in the dungeon.
She spiked the plane complication and came up with a clever gas station complication in which a participant, working behind the counter, might or might not experience a brutal robbery customized to his or her psychological profile. She jacked the price up into the five figures. The uncertainty was the selling point—it was luxury in the extreme, tying on that blue bib and waiting all weekend on a stool for the holdup man to come through the door. You waited and you waited, and he didn’t come. He never came. So wait a minute—you’re telling me you spent all weekend in a shithole south of Albuquerque, sweeping scorpions out of the john, watching dust devils hop the highway, and nothing happened? And it cost how much? That’s exquisite, sign me up!
She had run the complication for five different clients before she sent in a crew with guns. How, you might ask, did she keep getting people to pay for the experience of doing nothing?
Look, it’s a fact: There’s a subset of the wealthy who love to get ripped off. I suppose it’s not far removed from the SM binary of powerful businessman by day, gimp by night. Because the U.S. dollar no longer activates their jolly glands, they have to come up with new forms of currency. And the gold standard, the crown jewel, the one thing that will get everyone to shut up, gather ’round, and pay attention, is a good story. They’re all chasing stories. And good stories are always about failure. The more humiliating the failure, the better. You met Mick Jagger on Mustique? Yeah, well, he went down on my wife in a bathroom at the White House, and I was outside holding his coat. Let me tell you how it happened.
Turk understood that if the complication was a guaranteed rip-off, they’d line up to take two. They couldn’t not tell their friends. There was a waiting list. But it troubled her because there it was again, a complication turned into entertainment.
So she mixed things up to invert the inversion. She sent in the gunmen. On the day of that fateful complication, the man behind the counter, who had graced the covers of alumni magazines of Yale (undergrad), Stanford (business), a son of the Mississippi Delta who had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, was at the time the lone Black man in the lily-white field of dot-com billionaires. The gunmen wrenched him over the counter by the collar of his Ascot Chang and sent him through the plate-glass window headfirst (sugar glass, of course, safety being priority one). They dragged him across the parking lot by his heels, secured a noose around his neck, bound his arms and legs, and tossed him into the scarred bed of a Ford F-150. Drove long enough for him to get an eyeball full of the inked 88s and iron crosses. Impressed upon him their violent intentions, in case he had not understood, by invoking the terminologies of slavery and invisibility. Pressed the blades of their knives to his crotch. Waved around a flare gun and made clear their willingness to use it to clear his sinus passages. Pulled into a field, pitched him over the side of the truck, threw the length of rope over a high branch, and began to hoist him up.
He felt the rope bite in.
The final act would always be a problem. You couldn’t kill the clients, even if that’s what they wanted, but without the threat of death, the complication was only playacting. It was the dungeon all over again, welts on the thighs, sore nipples, a bruise or two, puffy eyes and a snotty nose followed up with a cool-down cuddle in the safe room. No one died on a Saint Andrew’s Cross. The client always remained in control. When it was all over, the staples came out neat as you please, the blood was swabbed away, the contusions healed, and the pain relieved your psychic agony for a while.
That was the spiritual divide Turk had to cross. She had to withhold the safety word. The new model was creation of a fresh wound atop the old one. Not healing, but crippling, destroying, laying waste to the psyche and breaking the heart. Leaving the participant in significantly worse shape than when he’d come in.
The noose was hemp, tested and retested for elasticity and tensile strength across a range of humidity and temperature fluctuations, and doctored at a point four feet above the knot to break within two seconds of supporting the participant’s full weight of 197 pounds. (He’d been weighed in a comprehensive fashion, once during the pre-complication medical evaluation, once before entering the convenience store, and his stool behind the counter was situated atop a pressure plate. Pre-assault adjustments were made to the rope to accommodate variations due to sweating, eating, excreting.)
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When they kicked the box out from under him, the rope performed flawlessly and, complication having ended promptly at the moment that the final fiber unraveled, the skinheads caught him and lowered him gently to the packed, dusty earth, untied him, removed the noose, and offered cool water, terry-cloth wipes, and a fresh change of clothes. A Mercedes van arrived to ferry him back to the hotel where he could shower and, at his leisure, proceed to his jet for the trip to SQL.
Was he pleased with the service he’d received? He was listed as a reference by eight subsequent participants. He declined the exit interviews (one immediately following the experience, one forty-five days later, a more reflective array of questions), which led Turk to breach protocol and contact him directly. She’d taken him further than she’d ever taken anyone. She was worried about him, and more than a little guilty. He politely declined all her attempts to speak with him, and initially she thought she’d pushed it too far. But as new clients arrived on his reference, she reconsidered her evaluation. Given his psychological profile, she decided that it had been a success no greater or lesser than any other—her reaction, her attempt to get him to talk, had become an extension of his complication, nothing more than continued attempts to exploit and brutalize a man whose race ensured that he was brutalized every day of his life. Why, then, had he paid for a complication and specifically requested that, in the event that a violent episode was part of the complication, he be the victim of a hate crime? Pointless to speculate. He wanted to conquer his fears. He felt guilt for his success while so many others suffered and failed. He was suicidal. He was consumed with self-loathing. He was a history buff. An adrenaline junkie. A quiet man with secrets. Yes. No. Pointless to speculate.
I believe that’s when she began to consider the design of the holistic complication, one that would continue to run long after the client had gone home. A complication that began before the client ever signed up. The complication that didn’t even require the client to sign up, and took place without her knowledge.
When the tech bubble burst, the NorCal line of revenue dipped, but by then Turk had enough deposit-paid clients on the waiting list to project steady income for five years. She tweaked the lineup. Complications that mirrored contemporary fears had the deepest spiritual impact. Most sought-after: school shootings, terrorist bombings, earthquakes. Each one possible to replicate in a controlled environment, and Turk by then had hired an FX adviser, a couple of former Navy guys who knew their way around weaponry and explosives, a few psychologists who helped her tailor the experience for each participant, a few retired set builders from Silvercup. A legal team on retainer.
She made an interesting discovery along the way: complete realism wasn’t a must. Some clients wanted to be aware of the artifice concealing the art, and each participant’s tolerance for simulacrum was figured into the complication.
Some folks could close their eyes and lose themselves in a dream. Some wanted full-body contact. I was one of those who washed up at her feet after the great spiritual realignment of September 2001. There were millions of us on the island, on hands and knees outside McHale’s at two in the afternoon, getting into fistfights in movie theaters, screaming matches in the checkout line, packing the synagogues, breaking down the doors of churches, lying wild-eyed and clenched in our dark apartments, listening to the radiators click, our eyes dragging us by our faces out of bed at the bleached whine of a LaGuardia-bound jet bisecting the sky above Fifth Avenue, the Strike Eagle engines screwing the air up and down the Hudson, ever watchful of the contrail scribes at thirty-five thousand feet, ears ever attuned to the howling sirens, awaiting copycat attacks, topping off the acid ache in our throats with a little more vodka. The smell of char emanating from the cavity could jump you any time you were south of 14th Street, and sometimes it crept right up to my doorstep, way uptown, took the elevator up, let itself in, and curled up next to me in bed. Desperately seeking: website capable of accurate wind direction predictions.
Did we have seasons that year? Do you remember?
You enter Turk’s place of business through an apartment building on Broadway. Buzz 1B/Borromeo, give your name. Electrical click and door swings into the narrow Lysoled lobby. Cracked terra-cotta floor, chipped marble fascia, the yawning mouths of mailboxes, yellowed scrollwork at the ceiling. Go around the back of the staircase to the basement door, a U-turn, and descend into the orificial reek of wet buckets and rotten vegetable matter, at the far end down another disintegrating set of concrete stairs, through the iron door, into the catacomb, the length of the corridor lit with bare bulbs like droplets of light melting from the pipes overhead. You’re under the street now, a part of the chthonic circuitry of the city, a part of the flaking plaster, the soot, the curling paint, the decay, the mold, the grease, the rust. At the far end of the tunnel is another door. Press the button, look up at the camera, wait for the buzz. Open, enter, down another set of stairs. You’re in the Apelles subbasement.
A few years after Vik disappeared, on the advice of a widow who laughed and told me all I had to do to wake up was walk across the street, I arrived with vomit on my breath, my vision frosted, sleepless, some sort of wraithlike thing that might show up in a photograph as an unexplained greenish glow.
What do they do for you? I’d asked Eden.
They put you inside, she said.
There were no normal conversations then. We still talked in a weird, ethereal code, the parameters of reality undefined, in gestures that raised the hair on our necks, always asleep, always awake, like an eastbound wind meeting a westbound wind over a rotten Jersey marshland clogged with garbage, destroyed cars, decaying marine life. We behaved like ghosts because that’s what we wanted to be. We ran into ourselves everywhere—at the OCME, counseling meetings, grocery store, cemetery. I saw myself in kids, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, all down the line, the solidification, as though we’d undergone a geological process by which we’d sobbed ourselves dry and had turned to granite. A single stupid word chiseled into each of us: Why?
Eden’s face was still a medium for the sorrow that had been inscribed there by such a wickedly heavy hand, but something was off.
Somehow she was alive again; there was an illicit flare to her nostrils, as though she was carrying a great secret. Indeed she was. She was a 9/11 widow who’d regained her substantial nature. It was almost as though she could move her body again.
They put you inside what? I said.
Inside the building. But it’s specific to you. To what you need.
Cognitive therapy? I said.
No, she said. There’s nothing therapeutic about it.
Sign me up, I said. Do they yell at you about what a piece of shit you are? I’d pay five hundred an hour for that.
They might, she said, wincing.
Ohhh, I said. It’s—
No. Well, I think they have the equipment, if that’s what works for you … but that’s not really their main line of business.
Can you just fucking tell me what it is? Is it Fight Club?
It’s Fight Club, she said.
Fight Club’s for little boys, I said. What are we talking about here?
It depends. There are a lot of variables. What they did for me isn’t what they’ll do for you. Unless that’s what you want. It’s bespoke.
Oh, perfect, I said.
I’m fucking this up, she said. It’s not bespoke. Everyone who goes gets something different. And they will figure out what you want. You can be honest or lie but if you lie you’ll probably just have to keep going back, so it’s cheaper to be honest.
Honest about what?
About everything. Everything. There’s a question about, you know, what’s your greatest fear or something. It’s more subtle, but that’s what they’re after. And I gave them the usual bullshit at first, you know, like, What have I got to be afraid of at this point? Nothing scares me now except my own face. And this woman, she’s a shrink, she writes that down and goes on with the rest of the ques
tionnaire and then at the end she says, Would you like to die? As in, If you would like to die right now I can make that happen for you.
She what?
This woman, if I’d said yes, I would like to die, she would have, I don’t know, shot me right there, pulled out a needle, whatever. I knew it like I know my own name. She was totally calm about it. It was an adult conversation and we both knew exactly what she meant. The way a doctor tells you it’s stage four and you’re terminal. She let me know that she knew I’d already weighed the options and could make a perfectly informed decision.
And you said?
I said, No, thank you, not today. And she said, What, then, is your greatest fear? And I was like, All right, I get it. I understand. And we talked some more and finally I said: I’m afraid that he’s not dead. I’m afraid that he’s still out there.
Okay. Right.
And she says, Good. We can work with that. And they did.
What do you mean? I said.
I mean they worked with that.
They made a hologram of him?
Jesus, Hazel. They applied the information I’d given them, and …
And what?
They built a complication for me. They call them complications. They built his office. His desk, where he sat, what he saw out the window. And I got to sit in his chair and look in the drawers and look out the windows—I guess they were screens or something, but they were hi-def, and I didn’t see the same boat twice on the river. There was the bullpen, you know, the traders, and the analysts, Bloomberg terminals, TVs on the walls. I mean, they pulled out all the stops. And they said to me, you know, Now sit in his chair, and become him. Take your time, as much time as you need, and when you feel comfortable, allow yourself to occupy his body. And so I did. I watched the boats on the river, and a helicopter went by, and when I was ready I said, I’m ready, and the phone rang, and it was Tyrone Flint on the other end, because he was talking to Tyrone Flint when the plane hit. Because Tyrone Flint reported to me himself—the guy who insisted that I meet him in Central Park, face-to-face, do you remember that?
