I pulled feathered strokes of concealer back toward her hairline to emphasize Luda’s already prodigious cheekbones.

  The essence of glamour became defined as a heightened, artificial characteristic; exaggerated to seem more real than real, it attempted to bottle the captured dazzle of a dream world. A world more professionally lit and tastefully arranged than the thrown-together sets where the drama of everyday experience plays out like amateur hour in a drafty Community Hall. Like the contouring strokes I apply to mimic Golden Age Hollywood lighting, like the haunted holy shine of the face I summon in the vanity glass, the light of the Glamour is directed from an unseen source, defining and separating the remarkable and the individual from the all-comprising context.

  I brightened her brow, her nose, her chin with highlights then went to work on her eyes—stroking concealer over the creases of her lids and under her sockets to sculpt the huge oncoming headlights of a manga character bearing down on her hypnotized admirers like a haulage truck doing porno.

  Spem in Alium unfurled its sonic brocade as I applied a glossy candy-frosting to Luda’s lush pink lips until they glistened like confectionery.

  The power of the Glamour could rearrange figure and ground so that the unnoticed was unexpectedly accentuated, while foreground dissolved and disappeared into its surroundings.

  So you could disappear?—she asked eagerly. You could be totally someone else…

  You can change your face. You can change how you move. You can change how you speak, and people will react to you as if you are what you pretend to be—I explained, rolling the snipped-off end of a used stocking over her skull, an improvised cap, so I could fix her spectacular wig in place with an elaborate snakes and ladders of bobby pins.

  Dress like a rock star, behave like a rock star, you’ll be treated like a Rockstar…act like a supermodel superwitch…

  With a last finger flounce of ribbons and silver strands, I said—You can open your eyes.

  I directed her gaze at the flawless, dew-damp vision of powder-pink wide-eyed teenage innocence we’d evoked together. Platinum-blond bimbo bunches gathered up in ribbon scrunchies.

  Funny—she said as I worked her look. You’ve made me look like YOU.

  There are worse things to look like, darling…—I said, but the barb stuck. I adjusted her head, aiming her eyes at the mirror, immersing her in her own beauty.

  You put that picture online—I said, lapsing into Twankey to take the edge off—the boys will be falling over themselves to get the cocks out their boxers—

  You think?—she said quizzically, lost in herself, drunk on being Luda.

  Mother knows best—I said and tweaked her wig to make her silhouette sublime.

  I’m not doing it for boys or anyone else—she snarled. I don’t care about them! This is for me!

  Let’s ask the Glamour to take us deeper—I said, becoming high and ignoring who she was.

  I expected we could anticipate some meaningful synchronicities later that night. Now that we’d committed, we could surely look forward to a symbolic encounter with the hypothetical power of pretend in its purest form.

  As I’ve done to my cost before, I was miscalculating the dose, misjudging the settings, and in the process exposing us to the unadulterated hot-pink voltage of the Glamour.

  Thunderbolts of desire and madness came arcing our way!

  We’ll start with Clip 1 to make it easy: Clip 1 is vivid and colorful, bright with magic and melody. Compared with everything else that went on that evening, it still comes across as something that could potentially happen to real people in a real world.

  Unlike most of the rest of what I’m about to tell you.

  * * *

  —

  In Clip 1, we’re all dolled up, Luda and I, awaiting our ride. Me dressed as headmistress of a respected fetish school, in patent platform peep-toe sandals from the Little Shoe Box, a polished black leather hobble dress, red bob wig, mortarboard, and gown; an evil Disney stepmother leading her innocent blond victim on a jingling leash. Luda in this story was a soon-to-be-debauched disco dolly, in her pink latex gymslip, white socks, and Pleaser lace-up platforms color-coded to match the glossy plastic flamingo sheen of her lips. A budding starlet hoodwinked into a life of booze and drugs and porn parties in the canyons.

  You look gorgeous—I sighed with jealousy and pride. Nobody ever did you up like that before, did they?

  She shook her head, mesmerized by her own reflection. In the mirror a freakish double exposure revealed a “before” and “after” of the same person, the distance between them measured in decades of unanticipated experience.

  I squeezed Luda’s candy cobweb lace-gloved hand.

  You’re perfect—I told her. She was.

  We’d decided it would be even funnier if I secured a studded pink collar round her elegant neck and buckled it and clipped a pink leather leash into place so I could lead her around and keep her out of trouble.

  Delirious. Disquieting. The mirror never failed to fill my head with the same old ideas.

  As Clip 1 stutters a few frames into the future, we’re punching the air and howling along with “Two Ladies” in a lip-sync mirror meltdown. Glam Goddesses Gone Wild.

  I should put you on the streets—I shrieked in Twankey register, waving my magic wand so the plastic star on the end began to flash its maddeningly repetitive mind control patterns. I’m your fairy godmother; I know what’s best for a nasty little truant like you!

  We hooted and tumbled our way in a tangle into the back seats of our taxi, riding the first raunchy boost of the evening as the MDMA came on, and there we were at last staring into each other’s souls before the car pulled away from the curb, before we settled back in the plush with slashed burgundy-and-rose grins on our faces to watch the light show.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 2—we’re making minor adjustments to our makeup for the third time. Luda looks flawless, like a creation of CGI. The trip out to the suburbs has been going on for the last twenty minutes or twenty thousand years of playacting, giggles, and obscene improv in the back of a taxi, with the drugs scrambling all incoming sensory input to abstract impressionism and where inexplicable coalitions of leaves and light are immediately, disappointingly I have to say, reclassified into sudden trees, where the inexplicable wondrous bellowing of shining metal walls clarified into buses filled with gawping aquarium faces as the lights went to green and laughing we were gone.

  Luda’s fingers fit the gaps between mine so naturally my heart liquefied to molten gold.

  This!—I said earnestly, returning her grip.

  Turn that one up!—we shrieked, and the driver complied, enjoying the show. It was “Run the World (Girls),” if you must know. Beyoncé.

  We added what sounded to us like tight if ambitious harmonies. The driver was nice and kept his opinions to himself as the town gave way to semi-detached post-war bungalows, then unlit parkland, sprawling cemeteries shoulder-to-shoulder with bowling greens, rows of shuttered shops and the interlocking darknesses between.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 3. And here’s me, paying the driver—we’re already here where it’s noisy and bright and I’m apologizing for our singing as I sweeten the sour with a generous tip born of intoxication. Trading double entendres.

  What kind of party is it?—he says, clocking the flash cars, the tipsy guests in fancy dress as nuns and bikers, schoolgirls, octopi and coral pollutants.

  I don’t think it’s the party we all voted for!

  He seemed to think we were quite good—I told Luda as the cab pulled away in a bloody smear of taillights. Asked if we were a couple of pros…

  I heard him say I was your daughter—

  My daughter…I WISH!

  Luda laughing.

  Poor you—she said.

  I checked my reflection in the slope of a car window. Tigress unbound.

  I could be your daughter—she said and stuck out her tongue. I tugged on her leash to pull her close, which cued the Pop Art BANG! of an expensive firework.

  As missile light drew fiery chalk rocket scrawls over the ornamental gardens, we almost kissed for real.

  Until a second gunpowder boom blew the moment to smithereens and nanoseconds, coming as a self-important divine fart that made us laugh together at the same unspoken thought while a flower head of whistling sparks opened into an umbrella made of dandelion galaxies above the specimen trees.

  A soft genie released from its bottle towered overhead, looming momentarily in a gust of mauve smoke. I could hear its rumbling laughter echoing through the sound of the gathering crowd. Expensive tires bit gravel. Pounding EDM. The chortling of the Djinn.

  Make a wish—I said, mesmerized, before making mine, which in the end failed to come true.

  Luda was mashing the crunchy grit into particulate dust with her princess heels, her pink platforms, gawping up at the façade of the mansion, where falling firework embers were reproduced across every reflective surface in a slow shower of lights.

  Don’t do that! You’ll ruin those shoes!—I said and as I did, I had a warning of something that hadn’t happened yet.

  Broken heels.

  Now we’d reached our destination, I expected to relax into the chemical slipstream. I could lazily drift downriver to when I was thirty in the Troupe, and beautiful. Luda’s lace-gloved hand in mine, like a sweet love letter folded into a sinister leather envelope. Best girlfriends!

  I told myself I couldn’t be the oldest one here.

  Password!

  He’s behind you!—we said in unison, laughing madly at our rapport, our precious telepathy, while the door swung open with a smooth electronic tongue-click of approbation to divulge a sour-faced dwarf standing on an antique chair dressed as Louis Quatorze, if Louis had neglected his trousers. The jaded doorman had accepted this lucrative gig before being notified of a requirement to spend the night in voluminous diapers, the sort you’ll need when a lifetime’s anal sex catches up…

  It was all a bit try-hard, I thought, ashamed of my cynicism when I saw the lights bursting in Luda’s wide-open eyes.

  As we tumbled inside cackling madly, caroming off the wood paneling, clutching each other’s marvelous handbags for support, we immediately found ourselves component parts in a gear mesh of interlocking beautiful bodies all in restless motion and set to Industrial Techno. They were playing a mix of “Venus in Furs” by the Velvet Underground, although this was a girl-band cover I think I preferred to the original.

  The beat made us feel like domme queens striding into the arachnodelic web of swirling lights in search of bizarre adventure and unlikely victims among the hustle and bustle of flesh and vinyl, feathers and fur.

  We kissed and flirted our way through a crowd of masks, and leers, through gurning gorgeous pill monkeys. A muscle girl with a shaved head and her Clark Kent boyfriend. A cluster of football stars and their pop-eyed girlfriends dressed for this year’s “Love’s Island” season.

  There’s an oddly angled, elongated moment where Luda’s leash gets tangled around a grotesque sculpture—a reverse of Epstein’s St. Michael’s Victory Over the Devil from Coventry Cathedral, where a priapic leering Lucifer is shivving the Archangel to death in a prison toilet.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 4. Commences as a tableau porno of the rich, the famous, and the deviant in masks and devil wings, where everything was lit up from the inside like a Halloween lantern or a Hollywood soundstage and where it feels we’ve been here for ages, orbiting the light like moths. Warm burnt orange. Wrought-iron banister. Polished wood. Modern art.

  It’s like a film—Luda said, and it was the first time I’d seen that awestruck expression. Luda reduced to a child opening her eyes in Santa’s Grotto, gawping at the Christmas lights flashing off cheap baubles, tinsel, and bubble wrap as if they were miracles.

  I loved her so much. The kind of love that made the world go round; the love that was the drug; that was all you need; that was the sweetest thing. That kind of love.

  What film? Pinocchio?

  We necked vodka from a three-liter bottle—two rough-cut crown jewels of ice on top, an unrepeatable double chime of light on mass-produced rim, and we were off to the races, with another pill-chaser each.

  Plastic tumblers—I said. Cheapskates!

  Luda and I swaggering on our slipstream of strong, long legs in high, high heels through the paneled hallway in search of familiar faces. There were quite a few that night; television stars, a celebrity judge, an MP, him from that band. The girl and her teacher from Balthus’s scandalous painting of The Guitar Lesson. Our own faces startled and fascinating in the profusion of mirrors.

  The art collection skewed toward the erotique gothique très chic as I recall—twisted bronzes of souls having sex with centipedes in Hell. Bondage scenes with Peter Pan and Darth Vader. Inflatable guillotines, blow-up electric chairs. Massive silk-screen prints of famous ghost photographs. A life-sized portrait of Dorian Gray quite naked and wholly corrupt.

  I don’t fancy yours much—I said.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 5. In this one, an hour or so must have passed since we arrived—a crawling unease stalks our perimeters. We’re planing down off the first rush, descending the plateau before the second and the third waves crash in and sobriety’s last flotsam is swept away by medicinal tides.

  I keep thinking I know this place—Luda said more than once but that kind of disjointed déjà voodoo is common enough on the lucky dip of mindbenders we’d guzzled so I let it pass without much consideration.

  I know we talked to people and put on silly voices to tell lie after lie about who we were or weren’t.

  I was Lady Prospero, named for my address, and Luda my lollipop-licking niece, the Duchess Lizzi LaDitz, whose jangling tether I tugged sharply as I introduced her and explained about her medical need for restriction.

  She’s wild. Captured alive in the PVC jungles of Venus—I busked wildly, loving the barrel ride down my stream of quicksilver consciousness.

  But the white shine was coming off, and the second pill had barely ignited. A disquieting conviction decided to grow: We were failing to live up to the tits-and-tinsel promise of the event.

  We were missing out.

  I’d brought Luda here to dive headfirst into the shallow waters of illusion, where I could begin to explain the Glamour: How it works. What it is. Where it comes from.

  All we’d done so far was get wasted and laugh at people.

  They can get a bit cringey in real life, these things—it would look better in a film. I stopped short, to snatch another glass of champagne from a passing topless waiter.

  I raised my glass to the guests all around—To the Glamour! May it show up fashionably late!

  As I caught my balance and sipped at the slopping lip of my glass, I caught sight of Luda showing all the warning signs of what I recognized as a Break on Through…episode.

  Teeth grinding mad-eyed, she stared over my shoulder, asking—You said something about familiars.

  I might have done. I just didn’t know why it was relevant.

  What the fuck’s a familiar?—Luda pressed. Like a witch’s cat?

  In answer, there came from the corridor a hallucinatory clip-clop sound on parquet and marble; a lopsided double gait that signaled a freakish arrival from beyond the frame.

  Luda thrust out a definitive pointing finger, the kind of gesture you’d use to single out the witch in the local crone community.

  Is it like that?

  With these words, I turned to face the strange.

  Jostling through a knot of semi-naked furred and feathered dancers, as if intent on making its presence known, felt, experienced to the full, a nodding, glassy-eyed refugee from the madhouse of the collective unconscious now thrust its remarkable snout. Polka-dotted, rag-tongued, it careened toward us, striking sparks of multicolored stardust from polished hooves. It was a pantomime cow cackling on cocaine, sweeping us aside in its galloping rush to place first in the Bedlam Sweepstakes.

  Backs to the walls, staring into each other’s eyes across the corridor’s abruptly uncanny gulf, we let the Devil-horned beast rampage past, praying it wouldn’t notice us.

  None of the other guests seemed particularly surprised. Instead, they appeared to think it was funny. Lofting glasses overhead to avoid spillage, they cheered the night-mare’s antic gallop or slapped its upholstered rump with encouraging whoops.

  If it’s Buttercup—I reasoned. They’ll be heading for the secret room where all the really weird and dirty stuff goes on. We should follow them.

  They’re quite hot—Luda mused. I wouldn’t mind.

  I felt a twinge of jealousy there; more than a twinge, this was a twin-bore tsunami of doubt that called for immediate course correction.

  You could always watch—she leered.

  Let’s stick to what we know—I said firmly slamming the brakes on that train of thought. I’ll have the front end, the back’s all yours.

  But Luda was uneasy, and for good reason. Her lacy-white fingers gripped my black-opera-gloved wrist as she directed my attention to a troubling tableau: The boys or were they something else who should have been piloting Buttercup the cow could be seen in the adjoining smoking room partially woven into a complicated reef knot of naked limbs. Stripped of the cow suit, they wore matching angel and devil wings from Victoria’s Secret and expressions of ecstatic surrender.

  Reeling at the implications, I spun, gyroscopic on my five-inch heel to catch a glimpse of flywhisk tail departing around the corner with a flirty twitch.