Dusk to Dawn

It was the last sunset of a lingering summer. That evening — Friday, Sept. 14 — started out unseasonably warm, but a chill trailed close behind.

Anything was possible. Midterms were far away. IU’s football team was still 2-0.

The sun fell, and the city came to life. Freshmen pulling strings for alcohol. A boy and a girl surrendering to lust. A convert to Islam seeking solace in prayer. An opera singer discovering herself, and her dreams, under the stage lights. A violent drunk pursuing a trio of unsuspecting students.

Just another night in Bloomington.

6:01 p.m.

At dusk, the restless freshman hurries into her dorm room at Wright Quad, drops her bag, and announces her intention to get wasted.

“I’m so ready to rage right now, you don’t even understand,” the blond-haired 18-year-old tells some friends, already gathered for the pregame. “Guys, I plan on being belligerent tonight.”

She peels off the shirt she wore to class and stands in her brown lace bra, staring into the closet. Who does she want to be tonight? Opting for temptress, she pulls out a black bandeau, a hot-pink crop-top with dangling fringe, and a pair of jeans with strategically placed rips and tears that offer glimpses of her upper thighs. Her roommate, also half-dressed, changes beside her. Neither of them care that guys are in the room watching or that the window blinds are up. Modesty is not an issue.

“We’d probably make someone’s day,” says the roommate. “But no one looks, your loss.” From a nearby laptop, Lil Jon shouts the pulsing opening to “Turbulence.”

Ladies and gentlemen
Welcome to Flight 909
Taking you on a journey
All around the world
Both the freshman and her roommate dance as they dress, spinning and swaying.
Are you ready?
Are you ready?
Ready for takeoff

Some of their friends are ready to go to the tailgate fields for GLOWfest. But the restless freshman has other plans. As the music plays, she texts a guy who lives in Briscoe Quad. They met one night a few weeks back while both prowled for parties. She calls him her “slam piece.”

“He doesn’t want a girlfriend. I don’t want a boyfriend,” she explains. “We’ve hooked up sober five times in a row now. That’s a big deal.”

Before they take off into the night, she and her friends want to get a head start on their drinking. But there’s a problem. All of them are underage, and even though they’ve recruited an older student to go out and buy the alcohol, he has yet to deliver. In fact, he and the rum are three hours late.

The restless freshman is tired of being sober. Having waited long enough, she and a few of her girlfriends decide to ditch the original plan and head to Briscoe. Her slam piece has already secured enough alcohol to begin the pregame.

He meets the group in the Briscoe lobby and escorts them into the elevator. Even though it’s dusk, he’s wearing sunglasses. He takes the group into his room and grabs a handle of Gran Legacy rum. A bottle of Kamchatka vodka already waits on the table.
Twenty minutes later and four shots in, the freshman sits on the bed beside her boy toy, sifting through a bowl of vodka-soaked Gummi Bears.

“Play one of our songs,” he tells her. She cues Mumford & Sons’ cover of “Wagon Wheel” on a nearby laptop. Rum bottle in hand, she gazes toward her slam piece. The two slow dance. They stare into each other’s eyes, and he holds her by the waist to pull her closer. They laugh. They kiss. Mouths open, no tongue. Simple.

The other girls are too busy downing more shots to take much notice of the intimacy unfolding in front of them. GLOWfest beckons and the group is antsy; White Panda is taking the stage. They scurry out of the room in a cluster. The door shuts. At last, the freshman and her slam piece are alone.

9:12 p.m.

The mosque glimmers in the darkness. Silver light pours from keyhole-shaped windows. Abdur-Rahman, 20, sits inside the Islamic Center of Bloomington in a carpeted room upstairs filled with dozens of men he has come to call his brothers. The Center is his refuge. This evening, he is teaching a 12-year-old boy how to recite from the Quran.

“You have to do it beautifully for it to enter your heart,” he explains to the boy. “When you do it fast, your heart is hard.”

Speaking slowly and with more confidence, the boy begins to recite in Arabic Al-Fatihah, the first seven verses in the Quran.

In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The
Merciful
All praise is only Allah’s, the Lord of the Worlds
The Beneficent, The Merciful
Master of the Day of Judgment.

Abdur-Rahman nods.

After the two finish, the boy joins other children at the front of the mosque before the prayer of Isha; the last prayer of the day. Abdur-Rahman, dressed in a turban and long white garment, stares ahead. Thinking. Reflecting. He wasn’t always a Muslim. His name wasn’t always Abdur-Rahman. Three years ago, Denzel Draughn, as his parents call him, reverted to Islam. That’s the word he uses: “reverted.” In keeping with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, he believes everyone is born Muslim, no matter what faith they’re raised.

As a teenager, he was troubled by his Protestant upbringing. Holding hands and singing in church on Sundays reminded him of a séance. He refused to believe in the Immaculate Conception and was not convinced Jesus was the son of God. He wanted out.

When he turned to Islam and took his new name, his parents moved him to Zanesville, Ohio, a small, mostly Christian town northeast of Cincinnati, in an attempt to quarantine their son from Islam. During his stay, Abdur-Rahman visited with scholars, local Islamic centers and celebrated the faith his family scowled upon.

Today, things are different. Now fully immersed in Islam, Abdur-Rahman has moved to Bloomington to care for his mother who suffers from an enlarged heart. He helps her with day-to-day tasks and washes dishes with her at the Scholars Inn Bakehouse.

“Caring for your kinship,” he says, “is the second-best deed one can do to enter paradise.” The first is to consistently abide by the daily prayer times.

At the front of the mosque, the muezzin, the man who makes the call to prayer, attaches a lavaliere microphone to his shirt.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar . . .
God is the greatest, God is the greatest...

Abdur-Rahman makes his way to the front of the mosque, faces eastward toward Mecca, and raises his hands, his elbows bent at a 90-degree angle. The other men beside him face the same direction, already in prayer.

“Allahu Akbar,” Abdur-Rahman murmurs.

In silence, he bows, dropping to his knees and pressing his forehead to the carpet as he whispers the prayer in Arabic. Now is the time when he may ask anything of Allah. Inside his head, Abdur-Rahman is talking to his god. He prays for his mother. He prays for his family’s acceptance.        

11:02 p.m.

Deep into the second act of “Don Giovanni,” the spurned lover stands backstage, awaiting her next entrance.

It’s the opening night of the season at the IU Musical Arts Center, and the house is packed. Kelly Glyptis, a 23-year-old soprano in the Jacobs School of Music’s masters voice program, is fighting the usual fluttering inside her stomach. She is playing Donna Elvira, a character who loves Giovanni but discovers that he is a legendary womanizer. In the upcoming scene, singing an aria known as “Mi Tradi,” she is torn between hating Giovanni and forgiving him.

Kelly has been performing on stage since she was a little girl. But still she fights the butterflies every time.

“Everyone gets nervous,” she says. “Anyone who tells you they don’t is either lying or an idiot.”

Like many performers, Kelly is accustomed to small catastrophes. During dress rehearsals, she broke something every time — a fan, a pair of earrings — and tonight, another cast member is holding a clump of grapes when one breaks off the stem and jumps into Kelly’s emerald gown, lodging deep within her cleavage. She is still on stage when she feels it squish.

When Kelly graduates from Jacobs, she wants to pursue opera, but also sees herself on Broadway. Opera is completely different from singing in a musical, but the training expands her range. When she auditions, she wants to stand out. For her, Mozart is always a challenge. She has a big voice, and her teachers have cautioned her not to let it overpower the delicacy of the composer’s intentions.

“Mozart,” she says, “is very simple but very hard. You have to hit a high note and make it come out of nowhere.”

“Mi Tradi” is particularly difficult — so difficult that it’s often cut from the opera. It’s both dramatically and vocally taxing. It requires physical endurance, a combination of buoyancy and anguish.

Almost time for her entrance. The audience awaits. Kelly stands in the darkness, gazing toward the stage, visualizing what’s about to happen, like a slugger stepping up to the plate hoping for a home run. In her head, she fast-forwards through the upcoming scene. She imagines it going flawlessly; she hears her voice striking every note. She has prepared for this role for seven months, rehearsing and reading multiple scripts, books, and interpretations of “Don Giovanni,” in addition to compiling a two-page character analysis.

She has learned to disappear inside her character. Many critics think Elvira is crazy. Kelly sees it differently.

“I think she’s just misunderstood.”

Kelly waits for her cue from the assistant stage manager. He hands her a bottle of apple juice. She takes a swig and watches his raised hand. Standby. The assistant stage manager’s hand drops.

“Go.”

She steps out into the amber light. From on stage, the audience is draped in a blanket of darkness, but she can feel their eyes upon her. Kelly looks to the conductor, standing before her in the orchestra pit. It’s just me and maestro, she tells herself. Halfway through the aria, she sinks to her knees. The music shifts to a minor key.

Quando sento il mio tormento
Di vendetta il cor favela
When I feel my suffering
My heart speaks of vengeance.

When she’s done, the applause washes over her in waves. She can’t smile; her character, after all, is in misery. But inside, she knows she has nailed it.
Ecstasy.

1:37 a.m.

The night has turned brisk. In front of Dunnkirk, a man slumps on a bench, a river of vomit spilling out of his mouth as the woman next to him rubs his back in support. People continue to walk past, not paying attention to the man. He stares into the puddle of regurgitated liquor, now shimmering in the soft glow of the street lamp above.

The bars are crowded and people spill outside the doors and onto the sidewalk. Three students, two men and a woman, walk beneath the underpass of The Upstairs Pub and head to their car, leaving the raucousness of the bar scene and stepping into the quiet parking lot behind the building.

Without warning, a drunken older man, maybe in his 50s, staggers toward the three. They hear the man shouting to his companion and hurry to their car. Having never seen the man before, the students are confused.

Frantically, the woman tugs at the door handle, waiting for the driver to unlock it. As she swings the door open, the drunk charges toward the woman, knocking her into the interior of the car, hitting her chin and left knee.

“Hey, you don’t fucking touch her! Help!” yells one of her friends.

The attacker falls into the back seat, flailing. Panicked, the woman looks at him. So overwhelmed, her mind goes blank.

3:14 a.m.

The lobby of the emergency room at IU Health Bloomington Hospital is still. A fish tank bubbles and the television babbles above.

A nurse pokes her head in and calls out, “Stephanie?”

A heavy-set woman wrapped in a neon green blanket slowly rises from her chair. She holds the blanket and pulls it toward her chest tight. She turns to the man sitting to her right and attempts to mutter something, but her words are overcome by wheezing and gasping. She follows the nurse, and the door closes behind her.

Her companion watches her go, waits a minute, and grabs the TV’s remote. He begins to flip the channels and comes upon a reality show about street racing. His face breaks into a near-toothless grin.

For a moment he lowers himself to sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor, even though a mass of chairs surround him. Then he returns to his feet. Refusing to stay in place, he walks in circles. Perhaps he’s uncomfortable. Perhaps he’s anxious. Perhaps both.

Finally he settles in a row of chairs, lying down as though he’s home in his bed.

4:04 a.m.

In front of Showalter Fountain, four students waltz beneath the stars. From the center of the darkened fountain, the statue of Venus lies in her bed of water, watching as one of the men takes his lady by the hand. The fountain is not running and the water is still.

Tyler leads the ballroom-style dance as his lady, Emily, stares straight into his eyes.

The two dance slowly, conscious of their steps, giggling.

“You’re the man,” Emily says. “You lead.”

“I’ve never danced outside a fountain before,” Tyler says.

Audra and Jordan, the other couple, are caught up in their own steps. Tyler nibbles at Emily’s neck. She pulls him in for a kiss.

The four freshmen are together. Secure. Safe. But barely sticking out of the women’s jeans are pocketknives — each carrying her own. Just in case.

“We never know when we’re going to have to walk home alone,” Audra says.

7 a.m.

Back at Briscoe, the restless freshman rests at last. Nestled in bed against her slam piece, the friends with benefits sleep off the vodka-soaked Gummi Bears.

It was a busy night. The two drank, attended GLOWfest, danced and walked back to Briscoe. Once the two were back, they drank some more, watched a movie and had sex. At some point, for reasons she doesn’t understand, she sat up in bed and cried.

Hours later, the scent of rum, sweat, and stale pizza linger. The window in the room faces east. The restless freshman and her slam piece sleep on as the rays of the rising sun seep through the edges of the blinds.   

Dawn.

Editor’s Note
The author, accompanied by Editor-in-Chief Michela Tindera and Photo Editor Rabi Abonour, reported this story between 6 p.m. Friday Sept. 14 and 7 a.m. Saturday Sept. 15. The on-stage opera scene and morning at Briscoe were based on later interviews with sources. The group spent their night in search of compelling stories. They even found themselves in the middle of one. The scene at 1:37 a.m. refers to them as they were attacked by a drunken man. Initially, this scene was to be left out. It may have distracted you, the reader, from the story. But soon they realized this was part of the story they were searching for. Crime happens. This was just another night in Bloomington.