Luda, page 30
BEAT IT!
Oh, you mean the carpet?—I beamed, latching on with a big wink to the children and the slow-on-the-uptake in the audience. Well, it might just work! What do you think, boys and girls and all the rest?
Willing to try anything no matter how unlikely, Twankey and Aladdin take turns serving up mighty slapping strikes as if attempting to spank the pattern off the shag pile.
This is ridiculous—says Aladdin. It’s never going to work!
Put your back into it!—Twankey urges, redoubling her own two-fisted efforts to whack the unresponsive Persian rug into life.
Until just as we’re both on the brink of yielding to futile exhaustion, the old mat undergoes a magical transmutation. A scintillating cloud of glitter billows from the beaten rug along with a spluttering voice.
Enough!—it yelps in its own peculiar carpet language, all fringed vowels and tightly woven consonants, as devised by Float himself, of meaning only to him.
Rippling with an ophidian vitality, the mat snaps tetchy fringes, shakes itself down in a rippling haze of stardust, then bobs and lilts and swoops between us, defying gravity with the help of near-invisible prop wires.
I mean, how lucky can anyone get? We’ve found a flying carpet! Almost immediately, Aladdin sets his jaw for adventure and vaults into position on the conveniently suspended plush aircraft.
Well—says Twankey. Help me aboard. You can’t do this without your mother!
Aladdin’s reluctant; and who wouldn’t be? The last thing any brave boy wants on a quest to save his princess is a clinging, raucous reminder of his low-class origins. He tries to talk her out of it but the Twankey’s not for turning, and resolutely hikes up her skirts to clamber aboard the now stationary carpet, hovering at crotch height.
And off we went, courtesy of the props team, over the pagodas and inappropriate minarets of pre-Communist Peking to exit stage left; me hanging on for dear life, shrieking until my knickers flew off in the imagined breeze, gusting away on a whirlwind of laughs, while Luda guided our Persian glider by taking hold of its ponytail tassels to stabilize our frantic flight—vowing to rescue the princess, trusting our lives to Aladdin’s pilot skills and his newly revealed way with floor coverings.
* * *
—
Even the elevator seemed reluctant to rise, wishing it had been installed instead in a swanky five-star hotel.
I hate hospitals. I hate the smell of disinfectant and disease. I hate the way the light goes yellow and everywhere leads to another room you might never leave.
It’s not just me, right?
Some things are universal.
* * *
—
When I arrived at the intensive care ward with my unlikely bouquet of pilfered lilies, purloined tulips, and the latest issue of Hey You! Dee Jayashankar was on her way out, wearing a chic anti-viral mask.
I’m surprised to see you here—I told her. It seemed she felt the same about me. I’d missed rehearsal. I was persona non grata.
I know he’s a bigot—a very lonely bigot by all accounts—she said wisely. I came on behalf of us all.
Gofannon Rhys lay semi-comatose, sucking ragged breaths through a corrugated tracheostomy hose.
So far, he doesn’t have much to say.
I said I hadn’t come for his conversation, which as we all know could be distasteful at the best of times. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why I’d come at all.
Rhys uttered a splutter before heaving forth from his bony chest an alarming chain reaction of staccato ripping barks that threatened to pick apart his skeletal structure.
Unable to spew forth from his customary sewage fountain of arbitrary curses and xenophobic disapproval of the culture and culinary practices of Mundugumor society, the venerable actor’s only option was a recourse to pre-verbal offense as he commenced to masturbate wantonly under the blanket.
They said it was fish oil—I shook my head gravely, politely drawing attention away from the rubbery slap of wattle. It got into his Tom Yum. He ate there all the time…
They’d rolled him into the ward with an allergic reaction, now he had pneumonia. I could feel myself catching it too and tried not to breathe, anxious to get away.
The nurse snapped her apron, Twankey-style, to clear us from the ward as though we were chickens in the yard, or three blind mice.
What do you think of Luda?—I asked Dee outside in the car park, under the pot lid of the overcast sky. Be honest.
She’s very good—she said. Getting better all the time.
Dee’s beautiful face was so clouded with misgivings the effect was well-nigh meteorological.
She took my hand. Be careful—she said.
All I could think was, It’s a bit late for that!
I’ll admit this was my attempt to stress a need for spontaneous Samaritan missions to the Goff’s hospital bedside, using that establishment’s proximity to the Gasglow art gallery and museum as cover for a longer assignation I had scheduled.
I assured Dom that Rhys was on the mend, having successfully regained the use of his penis.
Five days later, Gofannon Rhys died, barking vile slurs in a Micronesian language no one understood.
Call me an idiot, it was only then that I remembered the inexplicable jar of fish paste from Luda’s bag…
* * *
—
I opened the door and after registering a big Deliverex box, I immediately sensed an occupancy, a tenancy as palpable as a magnetic field.
I found Luda poised at my dressing table, very still as if she were impersonating a photograph of herself. Her face hung in my mirror where my face belonged.
She’d made herself up to look like an android, a Frankenstein’s porn puppet, a part-plastic androgyne with her own painted lighting.
There it was, the Golden Ratio squeezing down into the plane of her right cheekbone, fuck poverty, fuck it all, whatever confluence of genetics and math had sculpted her Pythagorean proportions, the mix was exquisite. Everywhere I looked, from heel to shoulder, eyebrow to index finger, I saw the living embodiment of the Golden Mean; in each gesture was a Vitruvian expression of the mathematics of being.
Luda was ratio and angle all the way down, a self-replicating vortex curling around its center in her cellular, microscopic core. Bisected, trisected, divide her any way you liked, the numbers folded together serenely through reckoned to phi and factors of five. She was a found object, a ready-made Platonic prototype waiting to be unearthed from unhewn rock.
What?—she said, never taking her eyes away from their own blue copies. What’s wrong with you?
You touched me that one time and now you never touch me—I said feeling stupid with each word that dropped like congealing molten lead from my lips to clunk on the carpet. It’s hard, Luda—I won’t deny. I can’t help thinking about that first night.
There was no way to take it back.
It was your idea—she said without changing her expression. Platonic, you said. Otherwise it’s a power imbalance. It’s exploitation. You’re my drag mother. It would be incest.
Hearing her say that. What could I do? I broke down and told her about the fantasies, the feelings I’d had about her, and in doing so I handed over to her the very last shreds of what power I had.
She knew me for what I was: a fool seeking solace in the youth of another, projecting my fears and fantasies, elevating Luda to a pedestal she could never hope to occupy.
She had me on my knees and she knew it.
You won’t tell them—said Luda, not asking but instructing.
Last time I looked—I said, keeping an even tone intended to suggest not sobriety but fury. Murder was regarded as a crime.
When a crowd of them get together it’s called a murder of crows.
Why should I protect you?—I said eventually.
Because you made yourself responsible for me—said Luda. Because you love me—and I was undone.
* * *
—
Ruminating on the curious shape of my life, I rummaged in the kitchen drawer for the Stanley knife I’d impulse-purchased on a trip to Ikea some days before Luda’s arrival into my story.
I slid the safety stud into place and the razor blades slipped out like the lolling tongues of vicious robot dogs. I deftly sliced the brown tape on the Deliverex box and folded out its cardboard flaps.
Inside was the wig I’d ordered. The ultimate wig, the archetypal wig I planned to wear for Twankey’s intro. The wig that would do more than half my work for me.
Custom-made, bespoke as fuck, it resembled a candyfloss tower, a piled-high Marie Antoinette shaving foam cloud that was bleached Bondi blond and bubble-gum pink, bobbed and cut and teased to frame my face like a work of art.
Production paid for this, my crown to my design, awaiting coronation day.
* * *
—
Nursing a watery screwdriver in the bar, I had no way of judging how long I’d been in this busy hotel talking through my problems to an old girlfriend/boyfriend with a cute bob haircut and breasts I caught myself coveting, but I’d planned to get to the airport early, so that I could avoid the stress of late arrival by killing time on-site before catching my flight home.
Something about the book I was trying to read gave me a feeling of unease; what I began to suspect was a wildly inaccurate and vindictive take on my biography had been written as a single line of Times New Roman text on a very long thin strip of material exactly like measuring tape winding out of its roller in my right hand.
Bells rang periodically. I understood they had something to do with the close monitoring of the phases of the moon, the essential function of the tides and the nearby ocean, which somehow corresponded with the date and relied on my precise posture to be fully effective. I became aware with a start of how late I was for my flight back home, still disturbed by the lack of content and complexity implied by the ticker-tape book format.
Was this the fate of the novel in a world with less time for the written word? To make matters worse, it dawned on me that I’d left my luggage back at the hotel, expecting to pick it up—when? What had I been thinking? I’d checked out hours ago and the hotel was already miles away, too far from the airport to make the journey there and back and still board my flight on time.
I needed very badly to get home, but how could I leave my belongings at the hotel and get on a plane without them? As panic expanded like gas in a vacuum, taking my last breath with it, I cast around me for my coat, knowing it too was back at the hotel.
My coat was gone, and along with it my plane ticket, my wallet, my cards.
I hurried to see if there was any sign of my bags at the Lost & Found.
As it turned out, the concierge was able to identify an item matching my luggage, although the soft sports bag they produced looked nothing like the sturdy Samsonite roller I’d described.
This was a holdall…—they insisted and when I tried to assert the difference between a cabin bag and a hard-shell, I was immediately placed under soft arrest.
Tall, uniformed officers frog-marched me, wearing my wig and heels, into a holding area where I tried to object but no one seemed willing to listen. As I tried to decipher the barking glottal snorts of the guards, it occurred to me I wasn’t even in the country where I thought I’d woken up.
They had my clothes. Not the ones from the hotel but from the racks at home. My outfits collected over years.
Are these your clothes?—they asked. There have been serious complaints.
I thought, Have there?, and the worry grew that this had something to do with a new movement I’d been hearing about: a protest wave of clothes denouncing their owners, even allegations of lifelong garment abuse.
Why, I thought, especially in this sensitive climate, had I caused such a fuss and deliberately drawn the attention of the officers? I was my own worst enemy, and to prove it I’d behaved in a manner so suspicious I was now being held against my will!
Is this the one?
The Alexander McQueen dress I’d gone to great lengths to secure for that wasted, victorious TV awards appearance twenty-three years ago then never worn after a better offer came in from Christopher Kane, slowly, eerily straightened its hollow windsock arm. The policemen took note of my reactions as one by one the other garments followed suit, a regiment of haunted sleeves converging on me, a haute couture firing squad united in voiceless judgment.
My clothes wanted me to understand they were divorcing me, as unfit to wear them. If I wasn’t knocking them out of shape, I was leaving them to rot in dark closets when what they’d been born to do was party. The degree of neglect was an affront to the Lord. Things had to change.
I had nowhere to put them. No occasion to wear them—I protested.
The mute solemnity of my rebel garments’ gestures could not be clearer. I was being sentenced to life in khaki overalls and wooden clogs.
I had no idea until now how much my clothes hated me.
You can see how it all relates—I said as if I knew what I was talking about.
Dominick Float, nodding abstracted, took a few moments too long to grasp that I’d stopped talking and now expected a response.
There I was, earnestly expounding on why this one dream among all the others had so imprinted itself and negatively impacted today’s mood that I was drifting, depowered in its torpedo aftermath. My engine room was ablaze under what could only be described as a dour cloud blocking all light from my soul, but no one wants to hear about dreams, do they? Dreams are boring, we’re told again and again like it’s part of a lexicon hammered into our developing understanding of the world. Descriptions of drug trips are boring too. Any misguided attempt to describe what’s going on in your mind is boring. That’s what they always say.
It won’t knock you off your rocking horse to learn I’ve always disagreed. I can’t get enough of people’s inner lives. You can’t fake dreams, or visionary experiences.
P-zombies can’t describe a healthy inner life, can they?
* * *
—
Can we try that again?
By this time, I shouldn’t need any he said, she said cues—you know who’s talking. I don’t mind you playing it a little broad, but can we have some nuance? Twankey knows it’s all an act…she knows she’s learned the steps. She’s a chess piece! The Red Queen in Alice! But she’s doing her best to outwit her controllers—
Oh, fuck off, Dom! I bellowed, pruning his tedious mansplain at the root. Is that nuanced enough for you! And with that lip-rolled punk rock snarl I flounced off.
I could hear them shaking their heads it was so obvious.
Is it that time of the month?—I heard the ever-abrasive, unrepentant May Tang-Taylor comment under her breath in the way atom bomb tests happen “under” the desert. What is this obsession they have with periods?
You can’t say that!—Aiysha Dyce blurted out, at all times attuned to the potential for offense. But it was too late. May had committed wholeheartedly to intolerance.
“They”?
* * *
—
You haven’t lost your timing—Float said. Sensing the abject failure of his previous attempts to reach me he’d finally opted for the approach he found most arduous; and here he was, shivering in the pitiless bright and Baltic chill of the moral high ground, on his ill-fated ascent up the north face of Mount Empathy.
He wanted me to see something way up in the rigging above the stage, in the elaborate cross-hatching of the overhead bars that made it all possible.
Bit dramatic—I remarked.
I’d already worked out how I could evade him up there if our confab turned homicidal and I was left with no choice. Designed to support an incalculable tonnage of equipment, the rigging could easily tolerate my sylphlike proportions, but Float, I felt sure, would immediately fail to live up to his name if he dared set foot on the flimsy platform.
You know I like to get the god’s-eye view—the overview—
From here, he explained, I could literally see how his mind worked. Peering down like Olympians through the hole of the sky onto the cubed entirety of our homemade universe below, he wanted me to know it wasn’t all in vain.
The color-coded marks onstage, as viewed from our dimensionally elevated perspective, laid out a wireframe puzzle contrived by a mathematical savant—fluorescent tape tags set as jewels in an unfathomable cogs-out contrivance, so that their precise placement singly and in relation to one another encoded hidden forces, predetermined tracks of character arcs laid bare in the overview of this join-the-dots X-ray of The Phantom of the Pantomime. The entire show unfolded from a basic five-pointed star. A pentagram no less.
Tell me you’ve not been using us to summon the Devil, Dom—I said. He wouldn’t have your soul. He doesn’t know where it’s been.
The proxemics of every costume change, every scene, every number were organized around the same witchy polygon vectors.
I’m impressed—I said. You’ve really made this nervous breakdown work for you. You must tell me the secret because I’m struggling to find the positives.
It’s the Golden Ratio—Dom said, keeping the conversation businesslike. Murdo McCloudie gave me the idea—
From beyond the grave?—I said. He’s the gift that keeps on grieving.
The Vallhambra was designed to embody the Fibonacci spiral. Like the Parthenon. It’s obvious when you look at the plans.
That glint in his eye kindled to a firestorm.
There’s a reason why I’ve been making everyone go over and over it, Lu—he insisted, mounting a spirited defense of his uncompromising artistic vision before riding it into the sunset. Everything we’re doing is non-naturalistic, every move is calculated, but I want it to feel improvised like it’s second nature and there’s no other way you know how to do it!
