by Dahlia Adler
Tariq closed the gap between them. “Make me understand. Do that, and I promise I won’t snitch.”
“Everyone was gone because you got hurt. I was going through my regular shit, and she strolled in here like she wanted it. I mean—she did want it—said she had some fantasy about boning in a locker room.”
Tariq glanced at the phone, and the photo of Courtney wore a scowl inside the oval filter, her eyes daggers. That’s a lie, Morris.
For every step Tariq took, Morris took two backward, until he was making the three-step climb onto the ice-tub platform. “We were right here, ’Riq, and I mean, sure, maybe she was looking for one of you guys, but we’re all a team, right?”
Courtney’s face was pure rage inside the oval filter.
“Then she slipped, fell in the tub,” Morris said, like that made any kind of sense. “Must’ve hit her head or something.”
“You could’ve pulled her out. Called nine-one-one.”
The picture on his phone zoomed to that gripping hand, and that oversize ring. It’s okay, baby, Tariq thought. I know.
Tariq held the phone up for Morris.
“Dude, what am I looking at? The screen’s black.”
Tariq climbed onto the platform, grabbed Morris by the neck, and edged him toward the frigid water. “Take a breath,” he said. “Ten minutes should do it.”
On his phone, Courtney, his sweet, sweet Courtney, inside the oval filter, was all teeth.
Red
Hillary Monahan
inspired by “The Masque of the Red Death”
Eleven p.m. on a Boston train headed for Cambridge. It’s Friday. Halloween.
The car is bustling. Drunk party boys whoop and holler, their costume makeup long since smeared off onto their shirtsleeves. Drunk party girls avoid drunk party boys, clustering together at one end of the car, snapping selfies and shriek-laughing. A Chinese woman on her way home after her night shift reads a Kindle, wearing sneakers with business casual, her nylon tote bag on the seat beside her, a freeloading passenger. The vagrants huddle in on themselves, needing the warmth of a till-one train in the face of a record-breaking cold snap.
It’s not often October gets snow, but El Niño or a random stroke of bad luck set the windchill to subzero with gusts strong enough to force most kids to miss trick-or-treating. It is, for them, a Halloween they’ll remember.
Tears and disappointment for all, then, Prospero.
I sit in the middle of a three-set seat, my body wrapped in a coat far too big for my five-foot-nothing. You could fit two of me in the ankle-length wool, and as I warm my fingers in pockets that are newly mine, I think of the man who wore it last. Broad-shouldered. Tall. Hints of cologne ride the collar along with the faint, acrid tang of old cigarette smoke, accounting for my ownership of the coat in the first place.
Across from me, swaddled in a black parka with tears at the elbows, is an old white man with sallow skin and a grizzled beard long overdue for a trim. He smells like bourbon and post-bourbon vomit. I think he’s asleep, but then he lifts his red-rimmed gaze my way. The whites of his eyes aren’t white but banana-yellow. Jaundice. That’s one liver that’s seen better days.
“That your real color?” he asks-slash-demands.
I pull my fingers from my pocket and thumb the long, silky strands resting on my shoulders. Scarlet, the color of freshly spilled blood. I’d almost forgotten, but that too-smooth texture reminds me again. I’m young now, only sixteen. My skin is pale, my chin is soft, my eyes are dark. I’ve been so many to so many, but tonight, I am Red. I am Red and I am coming.
The man asks his question again.
I peer at him over the standing-tall collar of my new coat.
“Sleep,” I say.
His lids droop and he fades into slumber. Not forever, just for another stop or two. The conductor’s voice comes over the loudspeakers.
“Park Street,” he says, the R of the name lost to his accent. “Next stop, Park Street.”
* * *
Boston’s layout makes little sense until you realize the roads were once the cart routes of a freshly colonized world. Infrastructure wasn’t a consideration of the Puritans; they went where their tow animals pulled them, and years later, when it came time to pave roads, they paved where so many had trodden before. The buildings were fitted in between the migratory patterns of the domesticated cart-hauling cow.
I think of this as I navigate a grid of streets that’s not a grid at all, but something much more nonsensical. A sharp left. A jagged right. The structures are packed in tight on the narrower streets, creating tunnels of wind that drop the temperature not by a degree or two, but by ten or twenty. I shiver inside my too-large coat, the snot in my nose frozen, my eyes blinking against the shredding gusts.
I walk.
I turn a corner, clear on my destination, and yet I pause. There’s an old man. More appropriately, there was a man, the flesh that contained him all that remains. He’s laid out on a sidewalk bench as if presented on a bier. His eyes point to the October sky. His lean bones are clad in pants that fit before the hard times hit the hardest, but now require a rope belt to keep him decent. A filthy shirt. A grease-stained hat. His fingernails, jagged from gnawing, are riddled with dirt. Between hands stained dark with soil is a sign.
I TRIED, it reads. There’s a cup beside it, a few paltry coins on the bottom indicating a short haul, and perhaps why the man dared the elements in such frigid cold.
The man’s name is unimportant to me. What is important is his coat. It is camouflage and there are patches of numbers that long ago frayed at the edges sewn on. The threads are bright despite their forty-five years. The pins on the lapel are worn straight—a mark of pride—despite their thirst for polish.
It is a coat that has been with this man longer than it hasn’t, as evidenced by its condition and its stench. It is a good coat, a worthy coat, and I shoulder out of my large woolen one so that I may take this newest mantle. It’s a grim task, to pull the clothing from stiffening limbs while the October night screams, but I am, after all, ever patient.
Soon, I don the new garment. Soon, my old coat is laid atop the body as if to shield him from New England’s weather-borne indignities.
Soon, I am back on task.
Onward.
* * *
All great cities have their multitudes, great wealth and great poverty coexisting in an inequitable truce that sees those who have doing what they want and those who do not have suffering. Boston’s feast-versus-famine dichotomy is more pronounced than most. The man whose coat I wear lived among the squalor, where the lights were dimmest, where rats scurried and trash skittered down the streets with every gust of winter wind.
Where I’ve come, where Prospero’s prospers, is beyond the sour smoke pouring from the haphazard train stops. Beyond forgotten alleys harboring shivering humans gathering their warmth for survival. The pavement here is not cracked, old, and gray, but neatly poured, unsullied, and a pleasing beige against well-maintained cobblestone. The streetlights are not rare birds in a concrete jungle but standing stalwart on every corner—iron lanterns with whorled adornments that look good on Wish You Were Here postcards. It’s perfect landscaping and perfectly kept brick buildings. It’s logoed sweatshirts, stiff upper lips, and too many coffee shops. It’s Ivy League, where trust-fund babies rub elbows with those who clawed their way to their rightful place among the illuminati.
It’s no coincidence that Prospero’s is found here, among the riches. It caters to monarch butterflies only; the common codling moth need not apply. A wall of wide males standing shoulder to shoulder, wearing identical black suits, blocks the entrance. To mark the holiday, they wear masks of horned gods and birdlike creatures and gargoyles. These bouncers are decorated deterrents, keeping the revelers inside “safe” from the excitable rabble outside.
I force my way to the front of the jockeying crowd. It’s a spectacle for a slight, red-haired girl in jeans, sneakers, and a dirty military coa
t to stand among such finery, but I boldly command space women often aren’t allowed, tilting back my head to better see the marquee waving across the night sky. Prospero’s! it proudly proclaims, both to tantalize and to taunt.
The centermost bouncer motions me near with his clipboard. He peers at my clothes from behind a demi-mask fashioned like a skull. I do not belong, his eyes say, but he is wrong. The hustle, glitter, and glam are all meaningless without the urgency only I can bring. And his mask! It is an offering, albeit an unintentional one.
“Name?” he asks, his thick finger gliding over a list.
“Does it matter?” I ask.
And as I look at him, he peers at me from behind that twisted, painted leather tethered with a string. He knows. Halloween is a holiday of fear, of manufactured scares that quicken the heart, but this is altogether different. This fear starts in the recesses of the primitive brain, in the place where reason and logic are trumped by something older than human sensibilities. It is where instinct is born. It demands survival by telling the prey animal that it is outmatched by a nastier, venom-fanged predator and to flee, flee, flee!
The muscles in the man’s body furl. His feet itch to run. His bladder twinges. He knows me and he knows my purpose. He sweeps the mask from his face, revealing a bevy of worry lines across a wide, brown brow, revealing a top lip dotted with fresh sweat and the rawness that goes along with deep-seated terror that mortality is not such an abstract concept after all.
His hands tremble, and both clipboard and mask drop to the ground. He retrieves the former, I the latter, my thumb coursing over the smooth, sanded inside, where the wearer’s nose nestles into the leather. He does not ask for it back as he steps aside. I do not offer it, passing him and venturing into a domain that was, truthfully, mine all along.
Velvet ropes do not apply to me.
The black glass doors open, and then they close behind me. Immediately, the clamoring of the masses is silenced. I assess the dozen steps before me. Wide. Carpeted black. The front edges have strings of lights that shift color, from blue to purple to green to orange to white to violet. It reminds me of an abbey long ago, and I wonder if they know this is how it began then.
If they realize this is how it will end again.
I don the mask and, with nary a word nor care, I ascend.
* * *
Prospero’s has seven immaculately decorated rooms connected by a meandering, looping hallway. There is no sense to their placement, nor is there logic to the awkward angles and shapes of the walls within. It’s meant to confuse. To tantalize. To lure you in deeper. Come closer, it says, never revealing why. Certain apex predators do this: entice with flashy colors, with hypnotic movements and appealing scents. Beauty is the trap, assuring demise.
The club is no different. The guests are drawn to a flame that will inevitably consume their papery wings.
I walk.
In the first chamber—on the eastern-facing side of the building—the ceiling, walls, and floors are the color of cornflowers, sun-kissed clouds painted all about as if to grant one the illusion of flight. The decorations are suns—so many suns. Hanging from the ceiling as chimes. On the walls as large, bronze disks. In inlaid mosaics on the end tables. At the center of a rich, thick carpet imported from the Middle East. The furnishings are deep, golden velvet, the wood pale and polished to gleaming.
Cherub statuettes loom above, their faces fat and smiling. It is all so very garish, but so, too, are the guests. The people swarm, their costumes tailored, not selected from a shelf or bought off the rack at a store, but fitted over long hours by skilled seamstresses. Their makeup is paint, applied in layers by an artist’s hand.
They are peacocks fanning their tail feathers.
I walk through the blue, stepping over a man supine on the floor, his pupils enormous, his body twitching as he ogles the angels above. Ignoring the man slipping his wedding ring into his pocket so he can better woo an Aphrodite who’s starved herself for just the right jut of hipbone. Threading my way through bodies grinding to heavy drumbeats, their manicured hands spilling champagne on themselves and one another. I pause to admire a tall, narrow window with blue glass through which I can see the twisting hallway. Electric candelabras ignite the panes in a fiery hue, casting all inside the same cornflower blue as the walls.
Smoke and mirrors. Illusions to please. Like the bouncers making those outside believe they aren’t worthy. Making those inside believe they are shielded from the unworthy.
I take a harsh, unnaturally sharp turn to enter the purple room. Tapestries cover the walls in lieu of clouds, yet it is no less decadently adorned. Divans with sprawling, twined bodies occupy the corners. Scarves hang from the ceiling. A bar serving only purple cocktails is centered on the tiled floor, with tables offering candies and fruits in colored accordance. The air smells of grape—not the fresh fruit on the vine but a sugary chemical tang best served in Popsicles and punch. It’s cloying, but it defeats the sweat-and-perfume stench of the guests.
Again I pause by a tall, narrow window shining colored light on such a party. Again I walk. This pattern continues for six of seven rooms. I bear witness to the celebrations of the joyfully oblivious as I pass from purple to green, from green to orange and through white and violet, always admiring Prospero’s light play through the windows. Only the seventh room—the last room—is different, and it is here that I will take my stand, as it is here where the revelers do not dwell.
The room is on the western side, the walls black velvet, the ceiling and floor covered by shining black latex. There are no furnishings beyond a tall black clock with a stark white face, the shape and countenance reminding me of nuns who scurry into their stone holy buildings to serve their Lord. The pendulum swings back and forth, heavy as it ticks away the seconds of the minutes, the minutes of the hours, with deeply resonating clangs that echo through its hollow guts. A long, slender minute hand inches closer to twelve to mark the day’s death on this Halloween masque to remember.
I brace my legs apart, my hands sunk deep in the pockets of my camo coat. This room, and only this room, has a window with glass of a differing color than the walls. The panes are sanguine red, the light shining within—on Prospero’s walls, on the slight girl standing alone inside—splashed in such a way that we are bloodied.
Soon, the clock will chime twelve.
Behind me, commotion stirs.
Rarely does Red smile, but I do find one on the brink of this new day.
For you see, he’s learned of my arrival.
Much to my delight, Prospero comes.
* * *
The manager wears a fine suit imported from Italy, crafted by a man whose father and grandfather outfitted kings. The stitching is precise. The lining on the jacket is silk, as are the vest and tie. He stands out among his guests for his simplicity as much as his severity. He is a sleek figure in black with silver jacquard accents and a plain black mask. His hair is blond and wisped through with silver. His eyes are watery, indistinct blue.
The metal nametag reads DUKE, which is delicious and ridiculous and so very apt. His importance was decreed at birth, then, by parents who thought to declare his quality with four simple letters.
“Where is she?” I hear him say. He is hard and unmelodic. I’d much rather listen to the tick-tocks and metal groans of the clock before me than this privileged son.
“You, there. In that— Damn it. Get Victor in here. Get that mask off of her!” he proclaims. There is a pause before he adds, “Kill the music. We have a breach. What am I paying you for if that kind of kid can get in here without an invitation?”
Not a kid, that kind of kid. A walking, talking reminder of the filth that exists beyond Cambridge’s picturesque streets.
The speakers go quiet, as do the guests. Duke’s voice is robust, echoing throughout his carefully curated rooms, throughout the asplike hallway, his words bouncing off the mirrors’ surfaces to reach my ears. He comes for me, passing his rooms in order, fr
om blue to purple, through the violet and toward the black where I stand, waiting for him with a minute left on the clock.
This should be a time of celebration, when all are overjoyed that they may unmask! But no, silence reigns as the man in the suit comes to do work his paid men will not do. They know, you see. They sense who I am—what I am—like the man at the doors with his clipboard. These brave men … their feet will not move forward but backward toward the exits. Their rabbit hearts pitter-patter inside their chests in anticipation of an unknown awfulness they cannot yet grasp.
“Christ, she smells. Victor! Where are— You there. Kid. Come here,” Duke demands.
I do not turn.
“I said to come here. If you think I won’t—”
He reaches for me, to manhandle me. To displace me from his gilded cage because I don’t belong. I am one of them. I am the unwashed masses with the stink of poverty clinging to me. My lack of riches in this immaculate place is an affront he cannot abide.
He wishes to show me my place.
Away from him, abandoned to the freezing, unseen alleys.
The minute hand ticks over to twelve. The pale-faced clock clangs its first, heralding the change of day with gleeful fury. I turn to face my unwitting host so he may know me. So he may see me within the eyes of this young woman, fathomless and black and hungry to swallow him whole. The chimes sing a delighted symphony as he grasps for one moment and one moment only exactly whom—what—he tried to subjugate.
He ends prostrate on the floor, his pale eyes swimming around before going forever sightless.
Another clang.
Another.
The guests descend upon the black room. Shouts. Fury. Frenzy. Hands reach for me, but they find themselves grasping air, discovering too late that I can touch but cannot be touched. Revelers fall like discarded dollies at my feet. They fall beyond, too—in the colorful rooms and the winding, mirrored hallways, until all those inside the club are expended.
