The January cold bit and stung at me as I waited, careful to take shallow breaths, protecting my lungs, if nothing else, from the cold, my body and face turned as best they could from the wind. The inside of the symphony hall only fifteen feet away glowed and pulsed with heat invitingly, but I liked the idea of waiting for him in the cold and going inside together. I could bear the cold. I also didn't want to potentially be the lone girl standing by herself in the spotlight while everybody pitied me for being stood up. I knew that it was stupid to be so self conscious, but knowing it and feeling it just aren't the same.
He's not coming. It's been over twenty minutes and he's not coming.
It looked as if all the color and emotion of the outside world had drained away, replaced by shades of melancholic gray, sapped of their life by the Chicago cold. The night sky was black, but the reflected city lights off the blanket of snow and dark cloudy sky in conjunction with the gray pavement merged everything into a murky haze. I fumbled with the two tickets in my bare hands, glowing a Rudolph red from the cold, my fingers clumsy and uncoordinated at maneuvering the slabs of paper. The warmth of inside continued to beckon and seduce me.
No. I shook my head abruptly and forcefully, trying to force the image of me standing in the warm indoors from my mind. Fragments of my conversation with Jet and Alex replaced my discomfort and anxiety over the cold with longing for Jet and curiosity concerning our last conversation.
At lunch, Jet had said that just
one girl had been responsible for the October killings and that he had not only ran into her earlier that same night, but fought with her, nearly dying. The little moon shaped scars on his hands were proof enough for my stomach and as much as I empathized with Jet over the injury, the visual of a knife skewering his hands like a kabob made my stomach turn.
Mania was the name. Jet had laughed as if the killings, his injuries, this Mania girl were all no big deal,
but that look Alex had given him.
Venomous.
Trying to deny my feelings at this point for Jet was impossible, but love him or not, Alex was Jet's caution, his reason. And Alex never lost his cool like that. Ever. I liked him too. I hadn't at all at first, but I felt now that I understood Alex better. He needed to be so serious, so contained, so calm because with someone like Jet never taking anything in life too seriously, he needs someone to ground him. Would I end up like that? Would years of being in love with Jet always protecting him from his own recklessness leave me sarcastic, practical, and cold? I wondered again how someone like Jet could even really feel the same way about me. Everything about him was extraordinary, while everything with me, was just, extra ordinary.
Before my mind could continue replaying and picking apart the conversation further, a gust of wind reminded me that the demands of the physical world were more pressing than those of my mind.
Where the hell is he? I couldn't fathom why he'd want to go to a symphony. Worse still to be late. Even somehow more worse to not answer your phone when you're running this late. I gripped the tickets tightly and surrendered to the allure of escaping the cold.
We really don't get to pick who we love.
The warmth was soothing but less so than I expected. My pale skin continued to glow pink,
okay red, to my frustration. After about a minute of thawing, I looked for a place to check my coat, and found the coat closet, but no coat checker. I put the jacket back on and figured I'd suffer in the heat to balance out the waiting in the cold. It's okay body -- on average, we're fine.
Making my way back towards the main hall and concession area, I found one thing, disturbingly missing, people. Food was generally prohibited inside the actual hall, but from my few memories of being dragged to this place as a child, there were typically people schmoozing about having drinks, here for the atmosphere instead of the music. I was equally desperate to get away from the music as a kid and it was one of the rare occasions where my aunt and uncle would indulge any candy or soda request I might have, so these booths were about all I could remember of my trips here.
Not ten minutes ago I saw dozens of people walking about in here while I stood outside freezing. The concern that I was going crazy briefly crossed my mind, but I let my sanity off the hook when I recognized the sound of Chopin in the distance. Maybe they don't let people out during performances now. I decided to find my seat and
if Jet comes, he comes, if not, I'm here and I might as well make the best of it.
I approached the closed center doors to the main floor seating without giving any consideration to where my seats were supposed to be, figuring I'd take an empty seat near the rear and leave if I got too terribly bored. I wondered if normal girls would do this, or if they would just give up and go home. I've always been clueless with the little rules like that on how to live.
My hand touched the handle of the door before I noticed the chains. The large wooden doors were chained and locked from the outside. Strange. I get not letting people out if it disturbs the musicians, but chaining the doors can't be safe. Some sort of fire hazard at least. I paused and tried to ease the growing anxiety building up within me. Maybe it was just this one door.
The adjacent doors were also chained. Something was wrong here. Really wrong.
I pressed my ear up against the door. Chopin. A few coughs and whispers. It sounded like a symphony. Still my heart raced and that anxiety I'd been fighting was turning into something much more like hysteria.
There are no people out here -- no ushers, no coat checker, no servers, nothing. I felt the panic in my stomach and throat.
Without my mind really processing what could possibly be going on, I found myself dialing.
The voice was reassuring, motherly, "Chicago 911, do you have an emergency?"
I stuttered, "Yes, I think so, I'm -- "
I had never felt a gun pressed up against my head before, but I didn't need to turn to know what it was. The voice was male but higher pitched and more nervous than the movie cliches had prepared me for, "Stop."
Without hesitation, I whimpered, "I'm fine actually. Sorry false alarm."
The emergency responder said something. I wasn't listening. She told me it was okay to hang up, and the call disconnected, but I held the phone up to my ear pretending to listen for as long as I could. I didn't get long. A sweaty hand grabbed mine and ripped the phone out of it before grabbing my arm and spinning me around fast enough for me to lose balance. I buckled on my heels but the man was bigger than I had thought and he easily held me up, if painfully, by my arm. He flung the phone into the wall hard enough for me to expect it to explode into a thousand pieces, but instead it hit with just a large thud, and bounced and skidded across the floor.
It's strange now, but at that moment, I made up my mind that I wasn't going to die there that night to a man unable to even break a cell phone. I thought about Jet as the man dragged me off, me stumbling and tripping the whole way. I wished he were here to help me, but this guy had a gun and while I wouldn't ever bet against Jet in a fight, still, a gun was a gun, right? Thinking that he might get hurt again, might get shot, made me instantly glad he didn't come here tonight. And I wasn't going to die here. There will be a moment I knew. I'll have my moment and I'll escape. The doors to the outside weren't chained. We had gone up a few flights of stairs and he was dragging me to a room at the end of a long hallway at the top -- I could run from here to the door in thirty seconds. I replayed the run again and again trying to avoid thinking about the present, but my escape plans were dashed when I saw a second man take up a post guarding the main hallway to the exit.
I felt the gun pressed into my forehead. My mind snapped to the present. I saw my attacker clearly for the first time. He was dressed as an usher but was too big and too
tattooed to be plausible. His face wore a nervous grin as if he were enjoying himself but afraid to indulge his desires. I had always thought that the guy holding the gun would have a lot more confidence. I wanted to cry and panic and beg, but I kept my mind on the cell phone skidding across the floor.
Throw me around and I won't break either.
He drilled the gun into my forehead so hard I felt he was trying to bore it into my skull. "I said fucking strip." He threw me to the wall as I shook my head furiously and he again pressed the gun to me, sandwiching my head between the barrel and the wall with enough force for me to feel my head was going to pop like a grape.
And I saw the menace and intent on his face replace the previous nervousness and I wanted to cry. I wanted to collapse and cry and for it to all be over, but I knew if I did that, I'd still die. Whoever this guy was and whoever the other people here were, they were doing something big, and it didn't end with me. I thought of Jet and my family and my friends and if I could trade anything for a chance to be with them again, I would've with no hesitation. I never thought I would feel this way. I had thought I would've rather died.
I removed my jacket and the pressure on my forehead eased.
A knock on the door.
A new man, also dressed as an usher, also unconvincingly. "We found him, he's here. We need to get in there
now. "
He was clearly in charge, or at least, in charge of my assailant. My attacker took one last longing glance at me and spun around on his heels, slamming the door behind me.
I waited thirty seconds and then tried the door -- it wasn't locked. I peeked into the corridor. A man I hadn't seen before stood with his back to me at the end of the long hallway. Before I could move, he turned, still facing away from me, and walked down towards the stairway I needed for my escape.
Shit.
There were a few other doorways in the corridor. I figured it was better to hide in one of the other rooms than wait for my death where I currently was. One of the rooms clearly led to a balcony overlooking the performance. I thought maybe I could warn the audience and escape in the confusion. I ditched my heels and slid down the hallway silently, shutting the door behind me, and slipped into the room that overlooked the stage. The seats were amazing despite being unused. They must have been exorbitantly expensive, probably for some special VIP -- I spotted my attacker moving about the main floor below me. Silently, I dropped to the floor and peered through a hole in the carved wooden railing. He didn't see me. From where I lay, I could see the stage and the main floor perfectly without being very visible. I watched.
As the second movement of the piece drew to a close, a young woman, a girl my age, although dressed much more marvelously, walked out onto the stage. The musicians continued their playing, but the audience and conductor's reactions were telling me this was something unexpected.
The way the girl moved -- it was just, wrong. She tilted and leaned precariously with cartoonish exaggeration with each step. She stopped face to face with the conductor, seemed to have a few words with him, and then spun around to the musicians, motioning with her hands that they should continue to play. She leaned over a young violinist and whispered for a good twenty or thirty seconds; I could hear none of it, but the reaction on the violinist's face was clear. Terror.
The audience remained seated and relatively motionless despite the subtle confusion on stage but the silent symphony of their whispers began to drawn out the Chopin. The girl spun around and, putting a finger to her lips, shushed the crowd with a gentle smile. The whispers stopped.
One man stood up, something about his movement, lazy and powerful, the same way Jet moved, and immediately the
ushers grouped up around the lone standing audience member. From where I lay, I couldn't get a good look at the standing man. He looked young though. Not older than his early twenties. I couldn't see much of his face at the distance, but he looked furious.
The young man spoke, and even without shouting, the sound carried well enough throughout the hall, "A little much, don't you think?"
The girl seemed to have removed the lapel microphone from the conductor because her voice boomed throughout the hall. It was a child's voice, sugary sweet. "I want my recording."
The Chopin continued but a few audience members began to get out of their seats and crept towards the exits as she spoke. The conductor, red as beet, seemed to be cursing at the girl on stage.
And time slowed down. The girl turned to face the conductor, tilted her head to the side as if terribly confused by what she saw, and in a motion terrifying fast, somehow now with a knife in each hand, cut out the throat of the man, erupting a spray of red onto the orchestra. The girl's white dress was splattered red, her face and hair, drowned in the man's blood.
I felt my stomach press up against my lungs and spine and found myself vomiting before the man's body even had time to crumple to the floor. For the tiniest fraction of a second, the girl on stage's gaze found me, hearing my reaction, but then her eyes were on the crowd, erupting out of their chairs, and then on the orchestra.
The chains held and, despite the crowd's pushing and shoving, nobody was getting out.
The young man remained standing, inert, staring at the stage. He spoke again, "I don't have it."
The childish tone was gone in her response, she growled, "I don't believe you."
The next few seconds were a blur. The ushers pulled their weapons on the boy, five gunshots were followed by screams and cries from the crowd, and then the voice of the girl, "Belmont chair playing violin."
Everything went white.
