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.)
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?