The Army of the Box

Inspired by True Events. Truly.

1968, The Cow Palace Concert Venue, San Francisco, CA

Backstage, weed smoke and the lure of sex flooded his senses. Facing away from him, 22 year-old Chloe Bogale writhed her torso, her hair bristling his face and his mood. His body gave up.

“Off.” In his Argentinian accent, Hans sounded luscious, but his physique and leather pants were spindly and tired.

From the darkness, “Hey, where are you going?”

“Move on, princess.”

“My name’s Chloe.”

He raised his hand, “Whatever”, and stepped into the fold of a red velvet curtain. Chloe approached the curtain like a hunter, the overhead light filtering through her full afro. When Hans emerged, her index finger and thumb homed in on the necklace he wore, a leather cord from which hung a small, simple wooden box the size of a dice. As she clasped the little box with her fingers, she leaned up towards his neck, her canine teeth elongating into white spires. She sunk her teeth into him, the name of God spilling from her mouth into his blood. She moved her mouth to the leather cord and bit through it, pulling the leather cord and the little box away, dropping the necklace into her cleavage.

She gazed into Hans’ waning eyes. “Move on, princess,” Chloe quipped, sidestepping into the darkness. The CLICK of a side door and she was gone.”

1989, Prague Czechoslovakia

The coroner’s autopsy room was as crowded as an airport terminal during a snowstorm, but starkly silent. Yellowish light fell onto smooth white sheets covering bodies scraped from the roadways of Prague’s Velvet Revolution. But the woman on the autopsy table had been found on the subway. It was Chloe Bogale.

The overworked coroner spoke into a Dictaphone. “Female, North African or mixed race, pre-menopausal. No signs of causative morbidity.”

He drew a drag from the cigarette in his mouth and flicked it with his tongue, casting ash to the floor. He searched the leather backpack between her feet. In it, he found a United States passport.

“If they would just stay home.” The coroner moved to the wall phone near the door and made a call. “Get me the American Embassy.”

With his back turned, Chloe Bogale opened her eyes for a moment, revealing that she was not entirely dead.

Three kilometers away, The Bridge Hotel’s grand lobby was very much alive. Conversation hummed and natural light ignited the gold gild that adorned nearly every surface except the floor. While kitschy, it wowed against a human landscape clad in tweed. Near the fireplace, Lily, an eighteen year-old woman with tan skin, long dark hair and a face full of promise, stared nervously at the front entrance.

“Miss?” Lily turned to find a young hotel concierge flanked by two well-dressed men.

“Yes?” Lily replied, unaware of the bomb about to drop.

They beckoned her to sit, and she agreed.

“We need you to come with us. We believe we found your mother. She is..deceased.”

Lily dropped her head into her hands.

At the coroner’s viewing room, her mother’s face seemed strangely alive.

“Yes, that’s her,” Lily declared in a barely audible voice.

The coroner assistant spoke in a soothing voice. “We have the instructions from your Embassy regarding transport, and to leave her body as we found it.”

Lily nodded, wiping away tears that wouldn’t wait.

With the bag of her mother’s personal effects in hand, Lily trudged to the footbridge that led to her hotel’s district. When she entered the hotel, she climbed the stairs to her third floor room, unlocked the door and nestled it shut behind her, collapsing on the bed. She sobbed herself to sleep.

Lily woke with a jolt and wiped her wet face with her sleeve. She opened the bag of her mother’s effects. From under her mother’s clothes, she pulled out the backpack. Inside, maps, personal items and a leather portfolio. Lily opened the portfolio. Inside, her mother’s Last Will and Testament. Attached, a key and a short note on plain paper:

“Take this and the key to Mr. Freiden at Bank Leumi in Luxembourg City. He’ll explain everything. I love you.”

Lily boarded the train to Luxembourg, a country she’d only heard about, her maternal grandmother’s home. Luxembourg was to be her and her mother’s last destination, before returning to London for Lily’s first day of Uni. Her private train compartment had a wall of windows that lent itself to sitting and staring. She watched farmland yield to hills and snow, then to peaks crowned by sky. Traveling through the mountains, she purged her grief in torrents that rushed down into waiting canyons and flowed into distant oceans.

When the train pulled into Luxembourg City, she felt clear-headed. It was just after eleven in the morning. She hailed a cab that took her to a tree-lined boulevard of new construction and landmark architecture, like a picture book of the City’s last 9,000 years. The cab stopped at the modern building which housed Bank Leumi.

Lily entered the lobby. A visceral austerity welcomed her as she approached the reception desk. At the end of a short corridor, double white lacquered doors opened. A Black woman stood in the doorway.

“Mr. Freiden will be here shortly. Please follow me.”

Lily stepped into the small space, a bright safe deposit box room lined in brushed titanium. The bank employee presented a metal key reader.

“Please put your key in the housing.”

Lily opened her mother’s portfolio, pulled the key, and placed it flat into the reader. A green light appeared on the wall ahead, and the safety deposit box ejected. The bank employee placed the box on the center marble island and left, shutting the room’s doors behind her.

Carefully, Lily opened the top of the box. Inside, four stacks of U.S. $100 bills wrapped in $5,000 straps gleamed larger than life against her childhood spent clipping coupons. She removed the bills to reveal old photos of her newly married maternal grandparents, a Black American serviceman and a petite brunette, both in their early twenties. Under that, a black notebook clad in goatskin the size of a traditional stationery tablet.

The room’s doors creaked, and Lily turned. A distinguished older man entered, with bright green eyes like the leaves of olive trees in Spring. He spoke English with a Germanic accent.

“I’m Geez Freiden.”

He extended his hand. Lily briefly shook it before he retracted and pointed to the notebook. “I have much to explain, but first, please open it.”

Lily opened to the notebook’s middle, glancing sideways at the first pages. Each page, handwritten in a language she didn’t understand and overlaid with acid-free paper. She rested her index finger on the first page. A flash of bright light enveloped the room.

Cemetery Malakoff, Luxembourg City, 1942

An impossibly cramped space. Nearly dark and heavily shadowed. A slab of rough stone sits just more than a hand’s distance above the face of a shivering woman. A skull nestled at her cheek, its open jaw holding a chard of coal. Day’s first light creeps in through a crack in the stone. She retrieves the piece of coal, raises the black notebook, and writes the heading, “Those Who Have Protected the Box.” Each entry that she writes contains a person and a good deed: A man on the concentration camp train pries her leg from the frozen train car, a young woman distracts a guard while she escapes into the forest. The grave digger deposits bread and cheese through the crack in the crypt lid, keeping her alive in her hiding place.

Blinding sunlight floods the crypt. The Black American serviceman who will be Lily’s maternal grandfather lifts his future wife out of the crypt, the necklace of the leather cord and small wooden box around her neck. He carries her to a waiting medic. And then, a crowded hospital ward: Her grandmother gives the necklace to her grandfather. He travels by jeep to an allied camp. He presents the necklace to General Eisenhower. The General puts the necklace around his neck. The remaining weeks of the War yield favorable events for the Allies. The Nazis fall. Eisenhower attends the Tehran Conference aimed at finalizing the details of a post WWII world. In the men’s restroom, he’s drugged and the necklace is placed in a brown leather doctor bag, which rides on a train to Turkey upon the lap of a blond man wearing new black wing-tipped shoes, then walked by the same man onto a steamer ship headed to Argentina.

Lily opened her eyes to reveal she was back at the bank. Pale and shook, she looked to Mr. Freiden. He pointed.

“In the back of the book, if you please.”

Lily opened to the back of the notebook, revealing a cut-out compartment housing a piece of muslin fabric. She opened it and uncovered the necklace, the little wooden box hanging from the leather cord.

Mr. Freiden directed, “Please pick it up.”

Lily obliged.

At once, the room went black and Lily fell through light, images spinning around her: Desert nomads, campfires, worship. At dusk, a gold box as big as a dining chair resting on its side sits on a sandstone cliff. Lily recognizes this as the Ark of the Covenant. Dusk dims to night, and a guard dozes against a palm tree. Thieves carry the Ark away. At daybreak, the tribe’s leader curses the guard and his family. Banished, the guard, his wife, and their four daughters stagger into the darkness. The family camps at the base of a mountain. While his family sleeps, the guard kneels and prays, crying out to the heavens that his family be allowed to avenge the Ark and protect it.

The answer comes on a sudden wind, “So be it.”

The guard’s canine teeth elongate and his family WAILS in pain as new DNA remodels their cells.

The abandoned Ark lies in sand, exposed to the elements, shrinking over centuries. The guard’s progeny defend the Ark and steal it back when it goes missing. Lily observes soldiers and women and children in battle, their fangs bared, their efforts victorious. Finally, the Ark is small enough to be worn on a necklace around a neck. In overhead stage light, Lily witnesses her mother clasping the necklace, her fangs tinged in blood.

Lily GASPED. Her own canine teeth descended like pearl daggers, piercing her bottom lip. All at once she knew who she was, and it was too much. Her knees buckled from the weight of the truth. Mr. Freiden caught her before she hit the ground.

Tel Aviv, Israel, 2064

Blue water blanketed all the way to the horizon, and early morning sunlight plucked at choppy waves. 97 year-old Chloe and 86 year-old Lily looking fit and young, along with Chloe’s great-great-grandson, 22 year-old Jordan, strolled along the Tel Aviv Promenade. Around Jordan’s neck, the leather cord and hanging from it, the small box.

From behind them, a bicycle messenger clad in a black track suit and a ski mask plowed Jordan off his feet. The thief clamored for the necklace, a WWII Nazi ring on the thief's right hand. Time slowed. With lightning speed, Jordan bit down on his assailant’s neck, lugged him to a nearby bench, removed his mask, snapped a photo with his iPhone, and positioned him as if he had passed out from too much booze.

“Now, what was I saying?”, Jordan asked.

They shared a laugh as they resumed their stroll. They heard a patrol officer come upon the bench. She placed a call to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, exclaiming over the madness of anyone stupid enough to wear a Nazi ring in Israel.

The smell of morning bread urged Lily, Chloe, and Jordan on towards their favorite eatery, a delicious respite for The Army of the Box.