They went on without me. Times changed. Ryan and Ben kept working as a moderately successful comedy double act called Chocolate Robot. They had a weekly podcast now taking the place of a canned Channel 6 series that ended up developing a cult following on its second-to-last broadcast edition. They write for other comedians and do quite well, or so I’ve read.

  Arlo, always more comfortable with the music than the comedy, went back to playing in psychedelic metal bands, entertaining increasingly modest, more intensely cultish crowds with his oblique lyrics in progressively more cramped venues, until finally swapping the uncertainty of show business for the trustworthy routines of school runs and extramarital online flings.

  There were rumors of a Jeremy Painter comeback. He’d condemned in no uncertain terms my appearance on Superstar Survival, claiming to have turned down producers’ entreaties several times and citing an unwavering self-respect, the likes of which, he insisted, I’d happily traded for attention to prop up my saggy chops.

  From my oubliette of self-hating depression, I hit back by going public with details of our brief affair, complete with unflattering descriptions of his cock and his stamina in bed.

  It wasn’t quite Lennon vs. McCartney or Biggie contra Tupac, but the gossip sites and the tabloids had a bonfire party in the wreck of the Troupe clubhouse.

  Jeremy never forgave me. Let’s just leave it at that.

  From what I gather, according to mutual friends, he’s bald, divorced, bitter, disgraced, and alcoholic now but I’d still fuck him. Whether or not he’d end up fucking me in one way or another was a matter yet to be decided.

  None of us kept in touch. I emphasized that. I hadn’t talked to any of the others for over twenty years. Nostalgia has never appealed to me. Whenever I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror, I think I look stupid, standing there all uncomprehending, facing tomorrow and seeing nothing but my reflection as usual.

  You’ve been really lucky—was all she said in reply. And you’ve never appreciated it.

  Where did that come from? I wondered—I don’t believe in luck, babes. And I know you don’t either.

  You don’t believe in luck and you don’t believe in God—she said.

  There’s a big difference between their God and mine—I said. I can show you the God of the Glamour anytime.

  That got her interested.

  I fetched from the shelf my dog-eared copy of Alchemical Studies, that blockbuster potboiler by C. G. Jung, shuffling through familiar pages until I located the relevant illustration, plate B2.

  How about that?—I said.

  With both hands I pressed the book flat on the table to display a sixteenth-century woodcut from the alchemical text Rosarium Philosophorum. The plate presented a fusion of two human bodies, male and female, into one double-headed hybrid wearing a dress while balanced on a green dragon curling around itself and underfoot like a freshly dumped turd courtesy of the Loch Ness monster. Not to be outdone by the flashy androgyne, the salamander sported three heads and a trio of hungry mouths with teeth like broken bottles tearing chunks from its own bleeding body in the desperate act of auto-cannibalism upon which it depended for survival.

  In the left hand of the fused figure representing Mercurius, the philosophers’ dream of androgynous unity, the image of spirit made whole, swung a commendably unflustered, rakishly crowned snake. In their right hand, Mercurius brandished a goblet from which three more charmed and charming serpents, one red, one white, the last black, rose writhing like ribbons of rainbow steam.

  Close by, thirteen sunflowers bloomed from the emaciated branches of a vertical shrub, each with its own individual face. Completing the scene backstage on the flat emerald field vert, a formidable pelican pierced the white down of its plump feathery breast with a stabbing beak, treating two hungry chicks to the dripping stop signs of her own blood.

  Some interpret the dragon as Christ, sacrificing the wine of his veins to nourish the world, and so too the pelican, selflessly giving up its life to succor its young.

  What I see, as I tried and failed to get Luda to understand, is a symbolic image of biological fact, a literal picture of how it all works; the World Serpent being shorthand for the coiled sum of all life extended through time, one cellular source branching out into microbes, dinosaurs, giraffes, and drag queens.

  This singular mega-organism, this hyper-object too enormous and too widely distributed to grasp in its entirety uses a clever trick to spread and complexify; by converting light from the sun, this Dragon we’re all part of gains the power to survive by feeding on itself, recycling death into life and back again. All the while it grows ever more elaborate simply by repeating an elementary binary directive over and over through time. On/Off. Life/Death. Hunter/Prey. Empire/Rebels. M. C. Escher’s Angels and Devils.

  Mercurius—I said, delivering the name as the punch line to a joke I hadn’t told her yet, as if cutting to the last line on the page of a book she hadn’t read, the sardonic closing quip that finally explained what the story was all about. The endgame of alchemy and self-transformation. Man and woman undivided both and all.

  Luda shook her head.

  That’s it? A picture in a book?—articulating her complete disappointment with a derisive snort. I thought you were showing me God!

  This is so you know what to look for.

  When?—she cried, driven to distraction by anticipation.

  That’s for me to decide—I said—I’m curious.

  Bi-curious. Mercurius—Luda giggled, good-humored and tipsy on weed.

  Just curious—I said. How did you choose your drag name? What made you decide on Luda?

  She wrinkled her nose. Tell me yours first—

  The sting in her voice told me I’d picked a scab, so I gave her a moment to recover before pressing her on it.

  Luci, right—I said with little to explain. It’s short for Lucifer and hallucinogens. Let there be Luci! Fiat Lux! La Bang—I recited the spiel I’d committed to memory in the days when I did youth magazine questionnaires for teenage girls and boys.

  LaBang is the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe, considered as the light and the thunderclap accompanying bright glamorous Lucifer’s ejection from Heaven into Matter’s muddy, agonizing splendor.

  I was “LaBang,” to counter the overtones of sexual aggression of the “Big Bang” metaphor.

  I couldn’t put it plainer than that.

  Initiation into the Glamour, the drag, involves a re-baptizing, an induction into an unlikely tribe of mavericks. This early rite of passage we all go through is marked by the careful scraping away of some dated, outgrown label followed by the willed application of a new logo, new packaging, an on-brand name that sums up your personal individual core values and aspirations.

  We assume new code names, superhero identities that describe who we are and what we do, instead of what our parents thought we’d grow up to be.

  Val VaVoom. Lady LaDouche. Boi Georgia. Bambi Bo Peep. Pam Demonium.

  You could have chosen any name for yourself—I said to Luda. Why Luda?

  Luda made a show of being preoccupied with an attempt to project her mind through her gas-jet eyes into her phone.

  It’s the Latin word for “game”—I went on when she didn’t look up. Like Ludo, Cluedo, Magister Ludi, that book.

  Her answer when it came, came ironed flat.

  Maybe I’m a piece in a game like the hat in Monopoly—said Luda, giving all her attention to whatever hypnotic scroll of text or images she’d found in the blue light of her screen.

  Recognizing in her snail-like withdrawal an unaccustomed vulnerability, I struck as she retreated.

  Are you playing a game with me?—I wanted to know, my confidence boosted by the wine, the Purple Haze. Are we playing a game now?

  I’d rather play than work—Luda said. And she turned her head to face me so that her smile was a searchlight, wide and red and blinding bright, rounding up her prisoners as they made a break for the perimeter fence.

  If it’s a picture of something—she said, steering the conversation back to the Mercurius woodcut. I want to see what it’s a picture of.

  Wednesday—I decided. The French call it Mercredi. I’ll show you what I’m talking about on Wednesday.

  Luda decided she was tired. She stretched up her tight fists on the end of wiry arms with skin softer than chamois. She intended to retire to her bed and read through the Phantom script now that the pages were re-collated in standard numerical order.

  Aching down to the marrow, I watched Luda undress in the mirror through the tall narrow cleft between door and frame whose proportions made her look like an illustration on the spine of some erotic novel I’d selected from the library of the marquis. Golden Hours. I found myself vowing I’d do anything to keep this blazing seraph close, committing to any crime that might keep us tied together like Bonnie & Clyde even as I went down in a storm of ballistics and bad decisions.

  She’d wound me up deliberately, poring over my pictures, encouraging me to talk about Jeremy. It was her fault I felt this way, I concluded to my own satisfaction.

  I felt horny, edgy, reaching for Romance by picturing my mood as a heraldic rose secured with golden twine so its petals could never release to the sun.

  As lightning unable to strike.

  I’d chosen a Wednesday night, for reasons partially explained earlier, chief among them being the thematic appropriateness of that one-and-only day of the week. Wednesday promised a rare blood moon event, when atmospheric conditions and short wavelengths would collaborate to shroud the moon in a fog of poppy breath and where ruby constellations, vermilion nets of night-jewelry, and attendant zodiacal mysteries would be revealed in the womb glow of the lunar menstruum.

  The auguries and the omens were irresistible. Wednesday was a red-letter werewolf day, an arc-lit Viking Wotenstag.

  When I checked in on Luda, she was cross-legged on the bed in the fish-tank glow of her laptop.

  I hope you’re not still watching Pussyfever videos—I said. It turns into a habit and by the time you realize, it’s too late—they have people in clinics who’ll never be right again…

  I’ve moved on to the Troupe—was all she said with a smirk and a shake of her head.

  You’re finally developing some taste—I fired back, enchanted and chary in equal measure, like a walk through the woods where Little Red Riding Hood was last seen by witnesses.

  You’re funny—she said, only turning her head in my direction when the Tennis Court Martial sketch, never a favorite, played out on its “Death by balls!” punch line—Is god on his way?

  You mustn’t misgender Mercurius—I tutted. Hair and makeup. Come on!

  When it comes to the Glamour, you’re stitching together anything you’ve got lying around that might help to anchor the desired sleight of mind in concrete reality, full moons, new moons, feast days, holidays, superstitions, talismans, and totems. It’s vital to think on your feet, as imperative as it is to know how to put together an award-winning ball gown out of gift wrap, safety pins, and a shower curtain fit for the bin. You’re looking to emphasize ideas of ritual, establish special days and hours for certain operations. Assembling a look, you want the elements to coordinate, to correspond. You want the drag to match the occasion and vice versa.

  My thoughts gathered pace, a dynamo cycling to capacity, a steam train shouldering out of its snail shell shed. The combination of champagne and weed became my shoveled coal, and now we were chugging back to my place of power, where I was queen of the boundaries and frontiers.

  Now I was ready to draw down Mercurius.

  One of the first lessons we witches learn: The Glamour is best experienced in a state of intoxication. It’s how the antlered shamans and druids and medicine dancers did it, and that’s just the way it is. It’s not that it doesn’t work without booze or drugs. It works better, that’s all. Otherwise, it can feel like going to a play and keeping your eyes closed until the end.

  I mixed glitter and purple and applied it to her eyelids to darken down her gaze, to hood her extraordinary interrogating blue in the shade of massive lashes like awnings heavy with soot. A smoky perfect smudge to make the turquoise pop just so.

  Three times—she reminded me as if I didn’t know. You said you’d do my makeup three times.

  That’s because Mercurius has three faces, or phases—I explained, though I could never be sure when she was listening. Luda preferred the show to the tell. You were the Virgin. Now you’re the Mother.

  Mother?—she said, as if I’d accused her of sex crimes.

  I assured her that the Mother in the Triad also referred to the sexually experienced woman, the Priestess, Empress, or Dominatrix. The third face belongs to the Crone, the Witch.

  That’ll be you. She grinned luscious and wicked. That face! So mobile and generous. So peerlessly proportioned! Delivering her sting with a giggle.

  I applied the finishing touches to Luda’s latest makeover, an airbrushed mist of glitter on the perfectly emphasized letter-opener blade of her left cheekbone. Where previously I’d applied the pink-frosted, lip-glossed doll-sheen of a wide-eyed ingénue on the Bad Ship Lollipop, this time around I was serving the seductive, experienced mask of a bloodsucking, eternally young vampire countess with succulent midnight-blue lips. A three-hundred-year-old teenage black widow blinking in stripped-back starlight as I pinned her Louise Brooks copper bob in place.

  And I said—Where better to find God? I said—Look and you’ll see.

  I wanted her to see what was always there. To twist her goggles and tilt her perspective so she could see ordinary overlooked things for the one-off heartbreaking wonders they were.

  So, we drank wine and smoked until we felt as if the corners of the room were tucking inward to cocoon us both in a dreamy lambent private space made of enfolding firelight and familiar things brought closer together so as to reveal new and undiscovered relationships.

  Luda’s sordid background wasn’t mine; true, we were both products of the underprivileged working classes, but precisely where my mum and dad were supportive, self-educated, and open-minded, hers were kitchen sink stereotypes from a dispiriting social realist play where everyone who should be a trusted figure of loving authority was replaced by a leering alcoholic junkie, groping child molester, or flailing fascistic bully.

  Liquor and drugs and neglect were wound into her genetic line but still I saw in Luda what she wanted me to see: someone like me as I’d been when I needed someone like me in my life.

  In this way I was able to convince myself she needed me, without understanding what that meant.

  I’m saying parasitic fungi need ants, don’t they? Ichneumon flies need living wasps to grow their larvae in. Vampires are hungry too this Christmas!

  I experienced an overwhelming, seemingly instinctual need to take care of Luda, to make it my duty to ensure she’d never go off the rails or throw away her chances like so many gorgeous young things do all the time without realizing what they’re relinquishing.

  Cuckoos inspire nurturing reactions like these in the nests of smaller birds they commandeer, murdering the offspring of littler parents to take their place as they grow monstrous and demanding, too swollen for the humble nest. Exemplars of Mother Nature’s bright cruelty!

  Leafing through Luda’s pages, I saw how I could correct my own first-draft errors, script-doctor my beginner’s mistakes.

  The Mirror’s our doorway into the Glamour—I said. Our window onto Heaven.

  I took her hands—two buoys, we bobbed in the beat, afloat together in a soul-nourishing soup of notes and horns and tidal strings. I took her soft white hands in mine. No raised veins, no visible armature of bones working like creaky Meccano wrapped in parchment. She angled her head, as if appraising a work of gallery art, lost in her own hi-fidelity re-creation in the mirror.

  Baby witch!—I said, knowing it still sounded insincere. Luda had a way to go but she had me to point her in the right direction.

  I led her to my bedroom, where, in no uncertain terms, I planned to introduce my apprentice to the irreproachable reality of the unbound godette Mercurius.

  The Glamour is a way of seeing things. Seeing the sparkle and the possibility that waits in things. In people. The Glamour makes everything magic.

  I pivoted Luda’s slender body, a preserved copy of my own, if only I’d died and been tastefully embalmed at the age of twenty-five. I swiveled her face-to-face with her own immaculate inverted image, her flipped entangled counterpart. Convincingly lifelike, except that the mirror girl’s heart was on the right, not the left, and unlike normal hearts pumped blood in an anti-clockwise direction.

  It’s just a mirror—Luda said bitterly. God’s just a mirror?

  We live half our lives in the mirror—I explained. We look to it for reassurance, or punishment. We stare into it for understanding. The mirror is so like God it might as well be God.

  I was superconductive, fuzzing and buzzing at the edges where vapor pouring off my skin frilled into almost visible fluid dynamics, where sweat clouds and perfume molecules converged mindlessly with individual scintillating skin flakes in a laser show weave of interlacing rays. You must know what I’m talking about!

  Be among us, my Mercurius!

  Svelte quicksilver, bright, luxurious!

  Black pink panther Lamborghini!

  Super-shiny chrome bikini!

  Triple-headed dry martini!

  All the tall mirrors I’d arranged in that tightly crimped room were angled into multicornered infinity so that everywhere she and I turned, through the four cardinal directions and beyond, we saw ourselves replicated in high definition, more real than real, like Dutch Masters. We saw mass-produced dolls rolling by on a conveyor belt. Cutouts made for dressing up.