“Daniel Less, the guy who got me out of Perpetual Help, is pretty happy. He set me up in the new place with all this equipment, a computer.”
“And a phone, I see,” Agnes joked.
“Yeah, I finally caved. It’s always blowing up now though.”
“You’re a popular girl.”
“So I hear,” CeCe said. “I’m doing a show for the new single and album release and it’s sold out.”
“Sounds like a big deal.”
“I guess. You’re coming, right?”
The distinct lack of enthusiasm in Cecilia’s voice was confusing to Agnes. “You could sound a little more stoked about it?” Agnes noted. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“You tell me.”
Cecilia stood up and paced the wide-plank floorboards of Agnes’s room. Cat had made the same point but as close as she and Cat were, Agnes was more than just a friend. She was a soul sister, a spiritual companion and there was no point trying to blur the lines with her. It was hard to explain, but she tried.
“I’ve given it a lot of thought since the hospital. About what I want, what all this is really about. Who I am.” Cecilia stopped and looked Agnes in the eye. “You understand?”
“I do,” Agnes said. “I’ve done the same.”
“I needed to get some distance from Sebastian. From Lucy. Even from you. To do my thing. Sign a deal. Record. At least what I thought was my thing.”
“And you did it.”
“Yeah, I did. And I liked it. It was everything I always wanted it to be. Dreamed it would be. I got caught up for a minute. Like Sebastian and you and Lucy had never happened. Like I was the only thing that mattered. Like the ugly, empty old days.”
Cecilia looked at Agnes almost apologetically. The tough exterior she’d so carefully cultivated gave way to an honest and vulnerable interior. Cecilia was baring her soul, confessing her truth to Agnes.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Cecilia,” Agnes replied empathetically, reaching out her hand. “Who could blame you? We’ve been through hell.”
“It was tempting,” Cecilia admitted.
Seeing the statuesque, rough-and-tumble rocker towering above her reveal a softer and more introspective side only made Agnes love her more.
“You didn’t come here just to tell me that or just to ask me to your launch party though, did you?”
“No, Agnes, I came to tell you that Sebastian was right. That we were right for believing him and for believing in ourselves. It wasn’t until I really had to choose between who I know I am and what I thought I wanted that I truly realized it.”
“And accepted it.”
“Yes,” Cecilia agreed. “Lucy was the first to figure it out. Fame, adoration, wealth, power. It’s all a distraction. A DISTRACTION. We are the message. How we live. How we die. That’s how and why we’ll be remembered by those who believe in us now. We will inspire people long after we’re gone. People we’ll never meet, never look in the eyes, for generations to come. Forever.”
Agnes let CeCe’s heavy words fall gently on her ears. It was almost as if Sebastian was speaking through her.
“More good than evil,” Agnes mused, as if she just realized the final answer to a difficult crossword.
“Yes. More good. That’s how we win. And we must win.”
“Does Less know about your change of heart?”
“No. But this is the first and last album I will ever make,” Cecilia answered, ominously.
“And the show?” Agnes asked. “I just don’t think it’s safe. You remember what happened last time.”
“What better way to get the message out, Agnes? Don’t worry. Daniel is providing security. I really need you to understand.”
“Okay, I’m with you.”
“Have you seen Jesse?”
“No, I tried calling and texting but he doesn’t answer. I’m going to go see him when I’m feeling better.”
“I heard he’s in a bad way. If you see him please invite him to the show. I really want him to be there too.”
“I will.”
The look on Agnes’s face said otherwise to Cecilia. In fact, she was starting to look terribly pale. As if she were about to be sick.
“Are you okay?” Cecilia asked. “I hope I haven’t upset you.”
“I’m sorry,” Agnes said, covering her mouth and bolting for the bathroom.
Cecilia could hear her heaving in the toilet. After a few minutes she returned.
“That really is a bad bug you’ve got,” Cecilia said, rubbing her friend’s back as she sat, doubled over on her bed.
“I don’t know,” Agnes said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been dreaming a lot.”
“Me too,” Cecilia said, rolling her eyes upward.
“Of Lucy. And of Sebastian.”
“So have I,” Cecilia said quietly.
“He came to me. Right here in this room. It was so real.”
“Maybe it was. But you’ve been sick. Fevers can do strange things.”
“I don’t have a fever.”
“You should see a doctor.”
“That’s what my mother keeps saying, but I’ve seen enough doctors to last me a lifetime.”
“What do you think is wrong?” Cecilia asked, worry in her voice.
Agnes paused for a second, unsure if she should say out loud the one thought that had been running through her head for days.
“Cecilia,”Agnes began.
“Yes.”
“I think I’m pregnant.”
Frey was pacing his office expectantly and grumbling under his breath just loud enough for the nurse at the desk outside his office to hear. She stepped in to ask if there was anything he needed.
“I’m sorry, Doctor, did you say something?”
“What? Oh no, just thinking out loud.”
He appeared unusually distracted. On edge. Not being a man who shared his thoughts or his problems openly, the nurse thought it best not to inquire any further.
“Okay, then I’ll just close your door if you don’t mind.”
“That’s fine, nurse. I’m expecting a call.”
“Yes, Doctor Frey. You told me earlier.”
Frey nodded, recalling that in fact he had mentioned the call to her. Several times.
“Well, please just put it through as soon as it comes in,” he asked tersely.
“Yes, Doctor.”
Frey turned toward his window and looked down. For a change, there were no crowds gathered outside the hospital entrance below. As a matter of strategy he believed he’d done the right thing by letting Agnes, Jude, and Jesse go, by spitefully making more problems for Less, if only to prove his own point. But that didn’t mean he liked it. It wasn’t the fact that it had been forced by the idiot idolaters that had gathered daily, or the predatory media looking for a story that bothered him so much. It was that a onetime colleague turned rival had undermined him that was most galling and that sparked such resentment.
The nurse’s voice blaring from his phone’s speaker cleared his mind.
“Your call, Doctor Frey.”
He grabbed the receiver tightly.
“Hello, Daniel.”
“Alan.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Just calling for an update, you might say.”
“About?”
“Please don’t be cagey, Doctor. It’s insulting,” Less said antagonistically.
“No offense intended, Daniel. But shouldn’t I be the one asking for an update? How is Cecilia? Still breathing, last I heard?”
“Everything is going according to plan.”
“Your plan?”
“Yes.”
“So signing her to a record deal and promoting an album release with a big concert is supposed to diminish her influence?”
“I’m giving her what she always wanted, Alan. And still wants. In the end, it will be her undoing.
She’s sold herself, so to speak. I can spin that when it’s all over.”
“The corruption of Saint Cecilia,” Frey mused. “Sounds like the title of a Renaissance poem.”
“Or a Greek tragedy.”
“That’s quite clever, Daniel, but the first thing that comes to mind is Elvis. You remember him?”
“You mean about the lunatics that still see him at the truck stop in Tuscaloosa or wherever?”
“Partly,” Frey replied.
“Elvis, Jesus, Joan of Arc, it’s the same thing. We’ve had to deal with it for centuries now.”
“Death is not necessarily the end, Daniel. That’s all I’m saying.”
“But it is more manageable. Life, as you have seen in your practice, is far more unpredictable.”
“It might be worth noting, though it should hardly be necessary to tell an old record man such as yourself, that Elvis sold far more records dead than alive.”
“Yes, but it’s just old songs. Repackaged. Nothing new. Without new, you are just Fat Elvis. Passé.”
“Images can be rehabilitated, Daniel,” Frey cautioned. “She will be seen as a martyr. Exactly what she wants. What they all want.”
“I don’t understand your obsession with invalidating them. I say exterminate them and let the pieces fall where they may.”
“You mean like Lucy? Where people gather outside her shrine each day handing out flyers. You can kill people, but an idea is a very different matter.”
“With the media machinery I have at my disposal, Cecilia will soon be seen as damaged goods, a fraud, and a sell-out,” Less promised. “And best of all, she’ll be dead.”
“You seem to have it worked out.”
“Mostly. To be honest, I’m also calling to ask a favor.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m going to need some assistance from your minions at that halfway house.”
“Isn’t that a bit down market for you, Daniel? Consorting with animals, as you call them?”
“Well, I’m not unaccustomed to a little slumming,” Less admitted.
“So I’ve heard.”
“As the Bible says, Alan, to everything there is a season. Even for homicidal junkies.”
“Recovering junkies,” Frey corrected snidely.
“Yes, whatever you say. Just make sure they turn up when I need them.”
“Leave the details with my secretary and I’ll see to it.”
“The dream will be shattered in a million pieces.”
“Just remember the old gift shop warning: You break it, you bought it. And it may come with a hefty price tag.”
“I’m not worried, Alan. I can afford it.”
7 Jesse waited patiently as the file loaded. The videotape of Lucy’s death was completely digitized, edited, and ready for upload. It would be his first post to Byte since he’d gotten back from the hospital. And quite possibly, he was thinking, his last.
His intention was not to surprise or provoke but to memorialize in a way that only he could. If he wanted to shock he would have just posted the raw footage, but that, he thought, was a snuff film, not a tribute. He added slates and type, quick cuts and slow-motion dissolves, whatever felt right, whatever put across her message. If Lucy was a guide, a light in the darkness, then this little piece would help her show the way. A sort of inspir-mercial-informercial for the directionless, the disillusioned, the despairing. Not a piece to tell you, but to show you. And one without an eight hundred number to call at the end.
The upload bar filled slowly with data, turning from white to blue. Jesse floated the cursor over the upload button, imagining what would happen once he clicked it. Byte was linked to virtually every major social media site possible. It might take a second for it to be discovered, since his blog had been inactive for a while, but once it was, he figured, it would travel fast. And then what?
Jesse decided it didn’t matter. He clicked play. He watched his clip as if he’d never seen it before. Watched gray words float over the black slate:
SEE FOR YOURSELF
They meandered by like a cloud across a darkened sky. Hopeful, but ominous. Paparazzi photos of Lucy from her earliest debut on the scene and some from his own personal camera roll filled the screen. Images of her alternately imperious and inviting flashed one after another. At clubs, parties, openings, premieres, charity events, and police precincts. Leaving Precious Blood after Sebastian’s death with Cecilia and Agnes and disappearing into a cheering throng. Dancing on tables in banquets, surrounded by adoring crowds on Brooklyn street corners, and bending to acknowledge a child. The whole of her short, controversial, and complicated existence boiled down to a handful of now-iconic images. Suddenly, the soundtrack stopped and the clip went silent. Voices rose. Questions. Answers. Demands. Refusals. A puddle of blood, a burst of light, and screaming. Lucy, blinded and crawling in her bloodstained clothes, struggling, Sebastian’s heart clenched tightly in her arms. It was hard for Jesse to watch, but then, it was supposed to be. Then news reports of her death, of the outcry, the lamentation and the indifference, and editorials on its meaning.
There was no accusatory finger pointed. No sinister portrait of Dr. Frey dropped in, devil horns Photoshopped on his head. No manipulation. No CGI. This was not about blame for Jesse. It was about Lucy. It was about truth. Revenge was his obsession, but not hers.
And finally, a cut to a single candle in the chapel that widened out to row upon row of them. As the camera pulled back, she was revealed in her glory. Beautiful and still. Encased in glass. Protected. Regal. Like a saint. And then more words. A message.
KNOW YOURSELF.
BE YOURSELF.
ACCEPT YOURSELF.
SEEING IS BELIEVING.
The typeface dissolved into nothing and the reel faded slowly to black. He knew from his club days a good response to a blind invitation was roughly five percent. He was always good for ten percent, and if Lucy was involved, maybe even twenty. They’d built a business on it. Now he was trying to build a movement. The viewer counter on his home page tripped from zero to one and he smiled. Jesse stared at his computer screen. And waited.
13 Cecilia walked for a long time, distracted, trying to clear her head, to process Agnes’s news. She was overjoyed and also overanxious for her friend. She could feel deep in her heart that it was true. If ever there was a sign that what had happened, what they had been told by Sebastian was real, this was it. Immaculate conception 2.0. It was clarifying. A much-needed reminder. Suddenly her own ambitions seemed less pressing, less important to her.
She walked from Agnes’s house in Park Slope toward Third Avenue and into the rapidly gentrifying Gowanus neighborhood. So lost in thought was she that she’d almost forgotten an important appointment she’d made.
Ordinarily, walking alone creeped her out now. Walking so near to Born Again even more so. It was the beauty of Less’s apartment set up for her in the East Village. She felt safe and relatively anonymous. Back on the streets of Brooklyn, she could feel eyes on her once again. Fleeting glances of recognition, knowing nods, admiring stares, and contemptuous ones. That much had not changed. Leers, but nothing dangerous so far. Cecilia squeezed her fingers into her palms and they were dry. Not even a drop of blood. Strangely enough, she found herself thinking, the only times her palms bled these days were in her apartment.
Before long she found herself at her destination, an iron works shop. She looked up toward the roof at the oversize Sacred Heart of Jesus statue encased in glass. The place was run by an old no-nonsense neighborhood guy named Jimmy. He was a real craftsman. The first choice in that neighborhood for the sort of Italianate railings and fences that decorated every single brownstone in that part of Brooklyn. He could make anything, she’d heard, so she’d commissioned a very special piece from him. And it was ready.
She stepped through the doorway and the smell of paint thinner, propane, and Rustoleum was almost overwhelming. Dressed completely in black, rail thin, shoulders thrown ba
ck, she seemed to fit right in with the rows and rows of black metal bars leaning along the walls. She strolled toward the white-haired old man, fascinated by the kind of wrought-iron platform he was welding together. It looked to her like nothing less than the stand for some ginormous fish tank some Brooklyn Heights stockbroker had ordered custom made for his parlor floor living room.
“Magnificent,” she said.
“Fit for a queen,” came the reply.
The gruff but warm tone of his voice, peppered with the slightest Italian accent, landed softly on her ear. Like music.
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah,” he said, turning off his blowtorch and raising his welder’s visor.
She reached for his hand and he took hers gently. She felt the callouses on his skin, the thickness of his fingers, and the arthritic twist of his overused and hard-working knuckles.
“I’m . . .”
“I know who you are,” he said tersely. “C’mere.”
She followed him back to a small office with dirty and overstuffed accounts payable binders piled high on a single desk. Empty coffee cups littered the floor.
“How’s business?” she asked sincerely, ogling the beautiful artisanry that lay along the walls of the workshop.
“Menza menza,” he replied, pursing his lips and turning his hand to one side and the other.
Cecilia knew the gesture and she translated for herself. It meant “so-so.” Judging from the amount of work he was doing, what it really meant was that business is good, but I’m not admitting that to you. She loved how cautious the old-timers were. Ever vigilant for a jealous competitor or even a bargain-hunting customer putting the evil eye on them. How proud yet modest about their talents and their achievements they were.
He stepped behind the desk and reached for a long, narrow, black leather case. He swung it around and placed gently it on the piles of bills and correspondence. The weight of it was obvious to her as the paperwork below gave way under the case. He flicked a gold latch and opened the case. The interior was lined in red velvet. Nestled in its center was what she’d come for. He lifted up the piece as if it were fragile or delicate, but it was neither. It was rock-solid. Iron through and through. Cecilia was speechless.