Luda, page 43
The reward for this leap of faith came almost instantly, doing its best impersonation of chance, when all the lights in the apartment decided to go on strike at the same time. The quite magical result of all those unpaid rouge-red demands was to provide me with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seize an advantage.
One other thing to note about the Glamour: It’s hard to maintain in total darkness but not impossible, not if you know the terrain like a cat knows its way around a fragrant litter tray.
Mentally dividing the room into golden sections, I listened for the syrupy decelerated plop of blood hitting paper and moved like spilled ink through a darkness that was total and familiar when it came.
Use every trick you’ve learned, bitch—I heard that awful gloating voice in my head like a cheap Gasglow gangster as I went for the scent of Daisy Dream—here’s some lines you won’t forget—
Fingers curling on the rubber grip of the box cutter, I was blindfolded justice swinging my hand in an upward arc to unzip the Golden Section.
Into the tightly woven gloom, where Luda and I were both as blind as bats, love, faith, and mice arose a shattered glassy shriek.
Whether it came from me or from her is a mystery you may have to solve for yourselves.
* * *
—
There wasn’t much anyone could do, that was the real tragedy; with its principal players, its star talent scooped off the board like captured tokens in the Golden Dames play-off to end them all, The Phantom of the Pantomime was canceled two weeks before opening night amid a Storm Ingmar squall of recriminations and ill will. Tickets were refunded at great cost as lawsuits sprang snarling from the margins like unmuzzled mutts. Scandal mounted scandal and in unsavory congress beget more scandal. Dom, not simply overweight but overbudget, stood crumbling by degrees, a barrier between his cast and crew and the unleashed ire of investors who could never recoup. In the final analysis, as my dad used to say, spin it any way you liked, the holidays were ruined, especially for children and the underprivileged.
I still think of the coachloads of shuffling shock-eyed seniors who might never sit through another “super saver” discount matinee they’d have any hope of remembering. My heart bleeds tears for the down-in-the-mouth men and women with learning difficulties who waited all year to clap along with the songs, gathered up in something bigger than themselves for just one night where the dreams came away all sticky and lovely in their hands and all the stars on top of all the Christmas trees were five-pointed unsolved puzzles.
With the dreary inevitability of prison dead bolts clanking into place, the story condensed and quickly set. To Murdo McCloudie was attributed an effective revenge he’d never set out to enact in the first place. There was only room in this theater for one Phantom, as waggish hacks had it, oblivious to their own spectral participation in our production’s downfall.
Poor Murdo; resentful spirits oozing from every crack in the walls and he, who died by all accounts wishing nothing but goodwill toward man and beast alike, was made the scapeghost for a Haunted Mansion’s worth of unseen bad intentions.
Me, I wasn’t sure I’d survive the tabloid attention, suspecting it would propel me to the realms of the pop immortals for all the worst reasons. I could expect to be canceled, amputated from the cultural discourse, with the yawning wound I left cauterized and sutured neatly behind me to leave no scar of my misshapen ugliness to blight future generations.
* * *
—
When production ground to a halt yards and weeks from the finish line, Dominick Float’s revival of The Phantom was doomed to inhabit an unproduced afterlife, unable to aspire to more than a haunting, a voice contact happening in our heads. I’ve tried my best to build for you a dressing room, a theater, a cast and a world made of nothing but language where Dom’s tour de force in all its tearful symmetry can play to record-breaking crowds in the only auditorium big enough to hold our beefy auteur’s vision intact without breaking everyone involved, in the Hollywood Bowl, the cavernous Budokan auditorium inside all our skulls where he traced his pentagram, invoked his Devil and left the rest of us to pay the pie-eyed piper.
Luda wanted to learn how to disappear. She should have hung around a little longer to see how it’s done.
All that talk; the transmigration of souls, sarcophagi, enameled scarab shells, who’s to say I didn’t empty out Luda’s personal contents just as the Marvells had done before, shimmering from my worn and baggy corporeal bodysuit before easing my active consciousness into the factory-fresh driver’s seat of a new blood-and-bone machine, stretching Luda’s boundaries as I poured inside to set like concrete?
Or why resort to the supernatural? There’s no requirement for body-swap shenanigans or an easy retreat into the Twilight Zone after all.
What if Luda went too deep, the ultimate sleeper agent in a superspy saga—a Comrade X who’s forgotten how to break character? What if her systematic imitation of me couldn’t be so easily shaken off and instead clung to her like a possession, a monkey on her back, until one day twenty-five years from now she would look for herself in the mirror and find me waiting patiently with open arms, bingo wings, and missing teeth?
Could there be an ending where, in her single-minded dedication, her Method compulsion to understand me completely, to become me, she succeeded, and to all intents and purposes it was not Luda who walked away from Ground Zero of our predestined collision but me?
In truth, isn’t this how a tawdry episode of human obsession and madness looks from the inside, with all its self-justifications, its attempts to maintain control of the narrative, its personal miniaturist mythology rendered in scar tissue purple prose?
Let’s go with it, let’s say Luci LaBang bladed, bummed, and buried her rival, the beautiful up-and-coming young entertainer known only as Luda. The triple threat to Luci’s throne. Mirror mirror on the wall!
Rather than face patriarchal justice, rather than endure the gavel and tip the blindfold lady’s scales, panto queen Luci LaBang, TV has-been, chooses instead the high-drama opt-out, snuffing out her own life in a bomb-burst of fire and confetti.
Drunk on lethal champagne and ninety-proof guilt, here’s Luci LaBang a collapsing star at her dressing room mirror in a blazing Golden Rectangle of immodest bulbs, forever ten years younger in the ring light, composing a typically flamboyant Cleopatra swansong with cryptic overtones of ritual transgression, cranky diva drag witchcraft, and flames old, naked, and unashamed.
Can you honestly see me, climbing into a frock the size of a cathedral bell without the assistance of a dresser, a knight without a squire, huffing and puffing into awkward slabs of armor, contorting to do up the zips and lock the hooks, all painted, stiffened, set to strut the empty stage, rehearsed and psyched to play not only mine but everyone’s parts, sing all the songs—and in this way conduct Dom Float’s divine vision to its supreme articulation before I bring down the house with a squib?
You must have a very vivid imagination.
But there’s proof in the case for the prosecution, you’ll say: Luci LaBang’s straight-legged, hip-led gait is unmistakable; CCTV shows the aforesaid La LaBang in her shaggy neon mane of a coat entering the vacant playhouse toting a Goodbye Kitty! shoulder bag plump with yellow canisters of lighter fuel and later, when the inferno shrugs off its red velvet smoking jacket of crackling timber, its black topcoat of crumbling brick, and the Vall is deconstructed back to McCloudie’s ground plan by powerful thermodynamic forces, the TV has-been finally consummates her wicked revenge in rubble and char.
* * *
—
Now you’ve started down a path toward bewilderment, you may as well picture me in the sonic afterburn of the last chorus, gliding in state to the front of the stage, floodlit by lines of turquoise flame that, even as you watch powerless to prevent it, race across the boards to link Float’s markers, sketching his grand five-pointed design in livid rows of igniting petrol.
Think of me if you must, silhouetted by luxurious furnace colors, arms outstretched, dreaming of Boudicca’s sweat and her blood drying in the city-sized bonfire heat of a Londinium she’d delivered to embers.
Imagine all this as I put the cursed, corrupted Vall to the purifying torch. If you’re confident your imagination’s big enough to contain her, feast those prurient third eyes on the Widow Twankey orchestrating it all to ash. Visualize the Vallhambra, ghost-riddled, worm-haunted old whore, lit like a witch fallen foul of Matthew Hopkins, fluorescent chemistry and combustion consuming its stale cake moldings in coral shades of flame, its terraced rows of scuffed velvet folding chairs—devouring in white-hot glory its stalls, grand circle, gallery, its backward-facing shame, in five-story towers of exuberant fire that made of the immense ceiling rose a blistering Buddhist mandala, a supernova of flickering paint flakes and plaster!
Maybe that’s exactly how it went down. You’ll know better than me if Luda’s plan played out as arranged.
Was it Luda who walked out of the apartment under the hand-painted impassive tolerance of MRS. RAIN and MRS. SHINE, that pair of stalled wedding-cake brides neatly coffined in the carved rectangles of two little doorways on the transgender barometer I bought in Schöneberg on that dreamy post-coital Sunday with Jeremy Painter?
Or was it Luci, banking until the dénouement her signature special move, her Hecate-level mother of all spells, her last reverse, her inevitable post-credits plot corkscrew?
Was it Luci who took it upon herself to spare Luda the horrors of growing old? Preserving her in the Polaroid flash of light on a Stanley blade?
If you can’t be sure, I wouldn’t worry about it, that’s just the Glamour doing what the Glamour does best.
Except, there’s the troubling audio evidence to take into account…
* * *
—
I can’t be sure why this came into my head at so late an hour, but I suppose it’s obvious.
When I found it smeared and slimy on the wooden deck at the back of the old house, all those years ago now, I thought it was a rat at first, mauled and left for dead by some halfhearted predator, but it was a newly born kitten, lying in its own watery afterbirth and too much clotted black blood while the flies crawled over its tiny severed back leg—bitten off by a terrified mother who was only a baby herself.
A living embodiment of the barbarism of the everyday delivered in a sticky slurry of biological snot from blissful and drifting uterine completion into our lovelorn world of savage deconstruction and pain.
The torn and bleeding scrap had to be dead but as I overcame my horror and looked closer, I saw two wee clawed pads batting weakly at the air, while hacked bone sawed in and out of fur where a meticulously constructed scale-model leg stopped suddenly, and with a shock of pity and revulsion came the incendiary desire to help, to rescue, to do whatever I could to fan that spark of life to a flame that might endure for two decades, or 140 cat years.
Rose and I fed her with a syringe, and she learned fast how to create suction and drain the tube. We would have sworn she rallied on the third day, like Jesus flexing his muscles in the cave, warming up for the Resurrection, so much so that we became complacent, certain she was destined to pull through. We imagined her grown and confident, darting on three legs with nothing but boundless confidence and the model girl elegance of a fur-trimmed modernist barstool.
We saw in the gasping will to survive, the kindling of pure potential, a future in the making. We strove to give her the tools to realize that destiny as a three-legged prodigy.
Our kitten died on the fourth day, emitting pin-sharp whines of pain I can never seem to put out of my mind.
The more we thought about it, and tried to make sense of it, the more we agreed that we’d delivered our kitten from a harsh unforgiving hell into a world of soft pink blankets and heat pads, a world of regular food and love where she passed into nothing via whatever eyeless dark of warmth, comfort, and attention four-day-old kittens inhabit.
If there is mercy, we told ourselves, it’s because we good people choose to bestow it. We have the capacity to imagine better worlds, kinder worlds than this awful self-munching cannibal engine dreamed up by our elusive Creator after one too many sleepless nights before Time.
Too bad we lack the technology to correct the Almighty’s amateurish mistakes, we sniffed, lamenting as we buried our two-inch corpse with her sleek black fur in a chocolate box whose transparent window made her look like Snow White, waiting forever for a kiss. We assuaged our grief and a nagging guilt by taking pride in our kindness, stoking the fires of sentimentality like a boiler.
Some people see vulnerability and feel the need to protect it. Some see potential and wish to nurture it to its full expression.
Others live to take advantage of the weak. They see the same potential and feel the need to crush it.
Then there are people like me.
As it turned out, I’d been underfeeding the kitten. My failure to grasp lines and measures, my disconnect from the arithmetic of volume and content, resulted in the swift amputation of a potential future.
A four-day-old severely injured kitten died of malnutrition thanks to my stupidity. She had struggled with every scaled-down resource she could muster to survive a violent birth, a mauling, a general anesthetic, and the loss of a leg, all in the first few hours of her life. She fought hard to live and relied on me not to fail her, which I did, so she gasped and died as her tiny rudimentary organs packed in.
There hasn’t been a day gone by where I haven’t berated myself for letting that kitten down.
This confidence we’re qualified to play God leads the best of us astray.
* * *
—
And so, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and others, before I depart with my good friends the fairies and Will O’ the Wisps, I’m duty-bound to demonstrate the full and final power of the Glamour.
Before we get to that, I couldn’t have scaled my way to this glassy crescendo without you, sweet enduring audience and your all-important participation.
As a hero of mine once said—I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn…
I do my best work when someone’s cheering me on or when they’re hissing round my entrances and exits, and I’d like to think we’ve built up a rapport that’s gone beyond comfortable and into unsettling by now.
There. The music stops and in its place a silence drops, a haunting expectant hitch that catches like your breath, that changes everything…
Can we have a show of hands ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and others?
How many of you are beginning to believe mad Charlie Marvell might have been right? Half right? On to something? What if there were too few recycled spirits for too many greedy, selfish bodies? What if the insensate ones, the unfeeling ones are everywhere, anesthetized against affect, fast-breeding like contagion in the petri dish of the mirror? Hordes of naked p-zombies gorging on the wealth of nations and lives, consuming finite resources without conscience.
It almost makes sense.
How could you look at your loved ones in the same way? That’s if you don’t already regard them with justified suspicion. Do they really have souls or are they just faking?
Do they feel real pain, or do they just squeal like that when you break their hearts because it’s what we’ve learned to do to pass as human?
I ask with the full thimbleful of seriousness I’m able to muster, do you feel equipped or authorized to determine whether this whole ridiculous story has been brought to you by a human being with an inner world of self-reflection or a soulless automaton only pretending to recognize its gurning DIY face in the vanity glass?
How discerning would you need to be to tell the difference between me and an identical copy?
Could there be a lampoon more uniquely and exquisitely tailored to my vital statistics than one deliberately crafted to waste 135,000 words faking my voice to drivel on about nothing while spunking malevolent antisocial philosophies into your cavernous minds?
How sweet Luda’s vengeance, if she succeeded, if she was able to convince you I was only ever a thing pretending to be a real person. Or worse, if I couldn’t persuade you otherwise—no matter how much of the dictionary I burned through in my attempt to kindle a beacon fire that could be seen and felt from miles away by others adrift like me.
What can I do but have faith in you not to be hoodwinked? You’d be able to tell if I was some two-legged scout drone for the p-zombie vanguard, wouldn’t you? After all this time we’ve had, hand in hand skipping through my Perfumed Midden, you’d be sure.
Tell me you would!
But then I think, what if you decide instead there’s something artificial about my story, a lack of genuine emotional inflection, a flippancy perhaps, a fondness for camp performance where nothing’s taken as seriously as it ought to be. My lifelong love of the shallows, my disinclination toward the deep could easily play against me.
How much gravitas are we prepared to concede to words the author stitched together for no purpose higher than frivolous display? Can we trust words pimped and paraded into fanciful arrangements too delicate to support real meaning?
In this etiolated account of mine, human passions that deserve to soar on the wings of eagles find themselves reduced with self-conscious regularity to the coy flutter of revue bar feathered fans quivering and darting over teased nipples, implicit ass crack. If there was any beauty to such a narrative it could be only skin-deep, recklessly glib, fundamentally lacking in the essential solemnity that gives a life its epic, unavoidably Glagolitic mass.
