9. LUZ Y FER #3
I couldn’t argue. I was there after all, at his mercy. The dead bolt didn’t really mean much. I let him turn the knob and followed him into the barren loft. There was nowhere in the space for anyone to hide, even the wall to the bathroom had not yet been erected.
He sat down in a ratty armchair, gesturing for me to do the same. I opted to pace instead.
“I don’t know where your friend on the phone is. I apologize if I frightened you, but I couldn’t risk revealing myself. It was enough risk even finding you. If you’re going to pace like that, please just stay away from the windows.”
He was rather erudite and well-spoken for being a disheveled conspiracy nut.
“You’re not…”
“The ‘Twinvesitgator’? No. They got him a while ago. That wasn’t him who replied to you. My name’s Jay.”
“ ‘They’? Don’t just say ‘They’! Who the fuck is ‘They’?”
My foot bumped against the cheap propane heater struggling to keep Jay’s concrete box warm.
“Please be careful.” He seemed unfazed by my fervor. “They are called the Birthing Room—you could say they’re the twins’ handlers. A group claiming to be scientists, physiologists, social psycho-engineers, but they’re actually experimenting with twins… Let’s say, unconventional experiments.”
“And I know you’re not one of them, because? How did you even find me?”
“I’ve kept an alert for anything online about the twins.
I’m one of a few concerned parties. In truth, I met the Birthing Room many years ago.
I was a comparative religion professor. They’d contacted me about some of my research into Luciferian magic, I obliged them, then I made the mistake of digging into their work.
They didn’t appreciate that. Now I’m…” He gestured to the barren hovel he was now camped out in.
“And these concerned parties… They sent you to get me, and what? I get my own little hole to hide in?”
Jay sighed. “I’m here of my own volition.
My colleagues don’t get involved like this.
They see it as too big a risk. But after what happened to Twinvesti—Michael.
After what happened with Michael, I couldn’t just stand by.
I think the Javits incident was too big to be swept away.
Too many people are still looking for answers.
Even before you posted, the Birthing Room had already started moving in New York.
I think they’re going to end their experiment. ”
“End their experiment? The twins?”
“Lucia and Fernanda, yes.”
“What is this ‘experiment’?”
“Lucía de la Cruz, known as Luz, and the other, Fernanda Griffiths, goes by Fer. Luz was raised by a well-to-do family in Mexico City. Fer grew up broke in the Bronx. Mother was a drug addict, in and out of prison. Two twins, born of the same egg, the same body and genetics, separated and placed in high-contrast environments to ostensibly study nature versus nurture. Show one of them destruction, deprivation, the darkness of humanity. The other: kindness, warmth, and the good in God’s world.
“The seal of Lucifer is formed with two arrows at the bottom, creation from duality. Not evil itself, but the capacity to choose between good and evil. You ever see a picture of Baphomet? The right and left hand? Creation and destruction, Heaven and Hell. Stable concepts on their own, but you bring them together? What happens when Heaven and Hell come together? Like sodium and water, a violent reaction as some new thing struggles to come into being.”
“Javits,” I concluded.
He nodded.
I looked at him incredulously. “Lucia and Fernanda. Luz and Fer. Luz y Fer?”
Jay shrugged. “Speak the devil’s name and he shall manifest.”
“You said they were already moving in New York to end ‘the experiment.’ You mean Fernanda.”
“Cleaning up and going back to the drawing board. Yes.”
“But we’re going to go get her before that though, right?”
Jay looked at me like I was an idiot. He was already stuffing what little he had into a backpack. “What? No. I had enough time to get you, that’s it. Going after Fernanda would be suicide. I’m telling you that when they mean to clean up, they don’t leave any trace.”
My limbs turned to lead as my stomach dropped.
“Tanita… She never showed at the library. She didn’t answer at her place either.”
My host froze. I’d grown accustomed to his paranoid demeanor, but the expression on his face as he turned to look at me was that of pure terror.
“You went to her apartment before you came here? Are you fucking crazy? No. No. We leave. We get the fuck out before they show up here.”
“Where is Fernanda? She’s in the Bronx, yeah? If that’s where these people are going, then I’m going there, too. They might have Tanita with them. Address?”
Jay shook his head. “It won’t do anything. You’ll die. Disappear. She’s already gone. Fernanda, too, in all likelihood. You’d walk into a trap for nothing.”
“So what? I go with you and spend the rest of my life in a place like this? Dodging shadows and watching my back forever?”
Jay couldn’t respond, only look at me. It seemed that the answer was yes. I looked around the barren loft again. Dusty, cold. A place lived in out of fear, huddling around a propane burner for warmth and waiting for a silent apocalypse.
Jay got up and started toward the door.
“We need to go.”
I pounced, pinning him to the wall with my forearm on his throat.
“What the fuck are you doing? I’m trying to help you!”
“Fernanda’s address. Now. I’m finding Tanita.”
He kneed me in the inner thigh, going for my nuts. I broke his nose with my forehead and shouted, “You say they’re likely on their way, right? Followed me? What if I just keep you pinned here until they get here?”
Blood from his nose was already dripping off his upper lip onto my arm. “They’ll ged you doo!”
“They’ll get me if I go to Fernanda’s or they’ll get me here. Either way, I’m got. Only one way I take you with me. Address.”
He stopped squirming, voice snuffled by the blood in his nose. “Seben seben tree, eatht, one eighty turd sdreed! Siggs bee!”
I let him drop to the floor, goose coughing as his windpipe went back to the correct shape.
He yelled something after me, but I was already out the door.
Stumbling back out into the night, my heartbeat thumping in my ears as details flashed across my mind again: stench, screams, blood, dust, collapse, ears ringing, panic, followed by the women—Fer and Luz, Luz and Fer—over and over.
Now I could put names to their faces; their faces were all I saw.
I was back in the Javits Center seeing Fer for the first time as I made my way to finally see her again.
On my way toward the subway, I pretended not to see the man who had begun following me.
I went into the most crowded train car I could, shouldering through the straphangers to trace my finger along the subway map to navigate without my phone.
The whole ride up to the Bronx, the man watched me through the window of the next car over.
I was oddly relaxed. He wouldn’t come for me here, I thought.
He already knows where I’m going. I did, however, need enough space from him to get from the train to her apartment.
As we entered Harlem, though, I saw a C train waiting in the station across the platform.
I followed the other commuters toward it, making sure the man was following as he entered the adjacent car.
Just as the doors began to close, I bowled over an abuela and her grocery cart as I launched myself back onto the platform and scrambled back into the B, watching through the window as the man was carried off to Washington Heights.
Getting off the subway and making my way toward 183rd, the usual vibrance of the Bronx was nowhere to be found.
Maybe it was the cold, but I couldn’t help but sense the city itself had withdrawn from my presence for fear of being caught up in whatever I mess I was in.
My stomach began to toss. It would be only natural to feel sick after a daylong adrenaline spike with a hangover and a single pastry in my stomach, but that was only a compounding factor.
It was the air around me. The smell. Every step I took toward my destination, it grew thicker, heavy in the sharp winter breeze: burnt flesh, smoke, and a perfume of caramel and geraniums. The olfactory memory of the day at Javits raged in my mind, almost as if to tell my feet to stop moving.
“This way,” it seemed to say, “will only bring you back there again.”
As I approached Fernanda’s building, I looked around. Not a soul in sight. None I could see, anyway.
The smell overpowered me. I doubled and spewed the contents of my stomach into a city trash can.
Wiping my mouth, I mounted the steps of 773.
I found F. Griffiths #6B and punched the button, and only as it buzzed did I realize I had no idea what to say if she answered.
What the hell could I possibly say without coming off as a random lunatic shouting about shadowy figures into this stranger’s intercom?
I wasn’t given the chance to sort my scrambled thoughts before her voice crackled through the intercom.
“Hello?”
I did my best to sound normal. “Hello, is this Fernanda Griffiths?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
I’d done this before. I fell back on my years of work as a documentarian. “My name’s Aurelio Barrera. I’m a documentary filmmaker here in the city. I was wondering if I could talk to you about a project I’m working on.”
“About what?”
“It would be better to explain in person. Would it be all right if I came in? It’s pretty cold out here.”
There was a pause. The intercom static hissed. I glanced around at the empty streets.
“Sure.”