I didn’t answer.
“He would have hurt you,” she stated.
With that she took my arm and walked me across downtown Manhattan to the pedestrian entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t question our walk. There was a buildup of energy in my blood and muscles from the fight I’d almost had, from fear of the pounding I would have surely received.
On the way she told me about her life in Rumania, her escape from the Communists to Munich where she lived with Gypsies for a time. It was a cool October evening and I listened, feeling no need to respond. For her part, she held on to my arm happily prattling about a life that seemed like a story out of a book.
When we got to the other side, she walked me to where there were many warehouses and few residences. We came to a stairwell leading down to a doorway below the surface of the street. She pushed the door open without using a key.
We went down a long hallway until coming to stairs that took us down at least three more levels. There we came to another hall and then to a door that she produced a key for.
IT WAS A SMALL, dimly lit room with a maple table in one corner and a single mattress on the floor. There were no windows, of course, and the room smelled dry and stale, like a tomb that had been sealed for centuries.
The door closed behind me and I turned to look Julia in the eye. The moons there were luminescent and her smile took my breath away. She shucked the blue T-shirt, stepped out of the loose pants, and she was naked. I realized as I lunged for her that this uncontrolled sexuality had been coming on ever since Martin had threatened me. I pulled down my pants and Julia started laughing. I dragged her to the small bed and we were together. My pants were around my ankles. My shoes were still on my feet but I couldn’t take the time to remove them. I had to be in her. I had to f**k her and to keep on f**king. Nothing could stop me. Even my orgasm only slowed down the gyrating urgency for a moment or two.
All the while Julia was laughing and talking to me in some foreign tongue. Now and again she’d pull my hair back and examine my eyes with those eerie lights in hers.
I writhed on top of her while she entwined me with her cold legs and arms. I could not stop. I could not pull away. For the first time in my life, I felt, I knew what freedom was. I understood that this passion was the only thing that touched the core of my being.
I AWOKE NOT REMEMBERING having lost consciousness, yet I must have passed out, because I was now in another room in a bed with a frame. My wrists and ankles were chained to the four corners of the bed and I was naked.
This room was also windowless and stale. It felt as if I was far underground, but I yelled anyway. I screamed and hollered until my throat was raw, but no one came. No one heard me.
As hours went past I thrashed and called out, but the chains were strong and the walls thick. There was a columnlike yellow candle burning for the little light Julia had left me, and I wondered if I was meant to die in that underground tomb.
At times I worried that this was some white supremacist plot against the BSU of New York. Had they captured me to make a statement? Were they going to lynch me or burn me? Would I be a martyr for the cause?
It was many hours later when the door came open and Julia walked in. I yelled for all I was worth before she could close the door, but she wasn’t bothered. She smiled and came to sit next to me on the bed.
She was wearing a red velvet robe that flowed all the way down to her bare feet. There was a hood, but it hung down behind her head.
“This is a room within a room that is itself within a larger room,” she said. “We are far underground and no one can hear you.”
“Why you got me chained down like this?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.
In answer, she stood up, letting the sumptuous robe fall to the floor. She was as na**d as I. The breath left my lungs, but I don’t know if it was her nakedness or those eyes that left me stunned.
She smiled again and knelt down at my side. She moved her head quickly and bit into my left forearm.
I have spent many days over the next few paragraphs of description.
How can I explain a feeling completely foreign, a feeling that pushed every emotion I could possibly experience past the threshold of my ability to bear it? The pain was a song that I cried out to in cracked harmony. The flow of blood was not only my life but the lives of all who came before me. Her quivering joy was a wild animal in my chest clawing and ripping to escape my silly so-called civilized existence.
My back arched upward and I cried out for release—and for the pain to continue. I wanted to bleed into Julia more than I had craved sex. I was an infant again—so excited by the new sensations of life that I needed the chains to contain my ecstasy.
When I slumped back to the mattress, I no longer existed. I was the husk of the cocoon of a moth that had transformed itself from worm to flight. I was filled with nothing, surrounded by nothing. I was not dead because I had never truly lived. The flailing larvae and the fluttering bug had used my inert being merely for the transition, leaving me nothing but emptiness, like the transient aftermath of a weak smile.
“Juvenal Nyx,” a voice whispered.
“What?” I rasped.
“That is your name.”
I drifted for many hours that seemed like weeks or months. I was not unconscious or asleep but neither was I aware of the world around me. In this limbolike ether I was approached by various entities representing sentients that claimed no race, sex, or species.
“You are in danger of knowledge,” one such being, who seemed to be a yellow nimbus with no origin, said.
“Of being found out?” I asked in some fashion other than speech.
“Of knowing,” the empty halo of light replied.
“I don’t understand.”
“Then there is still hope.”
“JUVENAL,” A HUMAN VOICE SAID.
I opened my eyes and saw Julia, again in jeans and T-shirt, sitting at the foot of the bed. She was staring at me in a way that I can only describe as hungry.
“Julia.”
The smile did not leaven her rapacious eyes.
“You are a sweet man.” Though she whispered these words I heard them as a shout down a long, echoing hallway. “I scented your sweetness before I entered the bookstore. I came there for you.”
“You let Martin go after biting his arm,” I said, “didn’t you?”
“I let them all go after the first bite,” she said. “Hundreds of them…thousands.”
I, the old me, sighed in relief.
“And I want to let you go too,” she said, “but your blood sings to me.”