You look gorgeous. Look at you, Luda babes—I said sincerely. You can be anything—at your age—you already are anything—

  I was trying to repeat and reframe her disturbing vision of multiple selves.

  Is it like gods or angels?—she said, and I said—Well, yes and no…you shouldn’t believe anything you’ve heard. Believe what you see and experience.

  Mercurius is the messenger, I told her. A metaphor. The gatekeeper, the key, and the gate, I intoned. Luda barely suppressed a snort of derision.

  That doesn’t even mean anything!—she said but it did, as I went on to elucidate.

  Mercurius is of blended gender, remember. The gate is pussy. The key is cock. Two in one at the same time, mutually self-unlocking. Zero and one in quantum superposition. The binary notation, the on and off, the push and pull that builds a universe occurring all at once as a self-affirming self-negation…

  Luda nodded slowly, amazed, enlightened.

  Right—she whispered. I get it.

  Shiny hotspots of reflected light glinted like pirate treasure beneath those impossible blue lakes of eyes as I raised the chant to freshly ecstatic euphoric peaks.

  Inbetweenie! Mannie-queenie! Sisterbrothersupergenie!

  A gasping invocation into resonant expanding space.

  I am you are me are we Mercurius am he are she!

  One is all and all is us!

  My fingers made an arcing windscreen-wiper gesture and a stuttering, feathered trail of primary-colored false nails spread and multiplied like fabulous red enameled wingtips from my fingers.

  Three-faced we!

  Mercurius!

  A cool, pale luster separated each movement into throwaway snapshots as we faced each other in the mirror glass, silvered and vaporous cigarette smoke holding brief human form.

  It shows you what’s real—and what’s not—I said, seeing in the screen of the glass the Crone with the Mother wrapped in her jealous bony arms. There was a third Self missing between Luda and Me.

  The Glamour.

  Naturally I began to wonder if she’d faked the whole thing somehow, if the masquerade party that night was something we’d imagined together.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it might seem irresponsible but not all forms of epilepsy can be triggered by flashing lights. I’d made myself a bit of an expert in the subject and as it turns out only around 3 percent of sufferers fall into the “photosensitive” bracket.

  The category is—I said in a breathless dramatic MC voice—higher-dimensional realness!

  I flipped up two arms to vogue a stark and hieratic mudra, and my fabulous reflection countered, like a statue of Kali unwrapping her lobster limbs to trail a cape fringed with fingernails, describing two wings of unfolding solid flesh that were suspended for an extended moment in our line of sight as the splintered afterimages stayed in place for ages.

  Luda giggled.

  Trails.

  Laughing together, she and me, we flapped our arms in a vivid spectral smear of limbs, leaving snow-angel casts carved from spacetime’s soft and yielding substance by our passage.

  I said I’d show you my god—look!

  In the choppy strobe flash, every movement had a silent-film stutter, a spastic flick with missing frames.

  There’s Mercurius—see? You and me, spun through the fifth dimension.

  She had no idea what I was talking about, but the Flashy Flickers flurry of multiple arms and myriad legs was its own best evidence. I subjected Luda to the multiplying visions of limbs blossoming freakishly in the hard, smooth glass of the bedroom mirror—imagining the sweet soft little cock between her shaved smooth thighs rendered impotent by wonder, drugs, and her determined refusal to be a boy ever again.

  There’s more to you than meets the eye. There are more dimensions than you can see. You’ve got length and breadth and then there’s the inward direction, the infinite space we keep in our skulls—and I felt sure I was articulating all this with the concise eloquence of wisdom, but I don’t think I opened my mouth once.

  As she began to understand what was possible, I heard Luda moan involuntarily, so I had to hold her and channel her energy. I tried to resist the powerful erotic overtones of our embrace, resulting only in a throbbing hard-on gaffed painfully between my cheeks.

  I held her gently as Luda, my young apprentice, lost control of her spine to the blue-violet Kundalini flash activating each individual chakra—muladhara to sahasrara—in explosive ascending sequence as far as I could tell. Rigid muscles liquefied in an unplanned, unrehearsed Salome slut drop until, succumbing exquisitely like Odette in Swan Lake to gravity and entropy, Luda needed my help to stand on two trained feet.

  I made it back from the bathroom to find her gazing from the bowed window at the moon’s made-up face smirking down on Gasglow. I did my best to bring her back from the splendor of the starlit firmament with a head massage.

  My maternal instinct was still strong as the stubbled, scarred, and tattooed scalp beneath her luxurious red wig yielded to my fingers.

  I bent to kiss her skull, impart my cherry lipstick’s stamp of approval on her sealed fontanelle.

  Somewhere in the white empty afterward, stars were born, and yesterday’s babies died of old age. There were bees or doves or maybe moths in the room, tugging embroidered scraps of wings loose from the hearth rug and flittering around the overhead lampshade where they would burst into stained-glass fog against the bulbs or become trapped in the wallpaper all over again.

  The kickback came almost immediately. The way so many spells can only be said to come true at the same time they backfire, bringing the inevitable reflex, the punch of the rifle stock, the recoil—which in this case made its presence known that horrible following night, a subdued Saturday in early still-hot September.

  On Saturn’s day, with shite clogging the TV screen, our stern planetary granddad decided to stick his veiny nose into our lives, that lugubrious senior citizen of the Pantheon reflecting on the horrendous beauty and fatal equilibrium of time’s arrow as it arcs in slow motion from left to right across Eternity’s pages en route for his ancient pendulum heart.

  I’d planned to impart to her one of the great secrets of the Glamour—never mind rabbits, here’s how to make a cock disappear—but things took a different turn that night.

  With far-reaching consequences, you might say, but we’ll get to that soon enough.

  Luda returned from dance rehearsal in a fluster of Muybridge motion. One sentence after another was chopped to incoherence by her rapid passage from kitchen to bathroom to lounge as she delivered a continuous data download.

  I didn’t really notice how quiet the place was without her, but it occurred to me quite suddenly how since she’d taken up residence, I hadn’t slowed down, hadn’t settled, hadn’t meditated for long enough to get the benefits. I was always on my toes, waiting for her to erupt into the room like oxygen into a vacuum.

  For so long it seemed, I hadn’t been able to think for her noise, the jittery buzz and static of her company…

  She demanded complete attention, occupying my total field of view. It was as if she represented some quantum event, a momentary lapse into being that might disappear if I wasn’t constantly observing, reinforcing her existence.

  The effort of staying alert for every spike on her EEG or jagged tremor on her seismograph was making me agitated, edgy. I tried to remember when I’d last sat serene like a meditating monk at the center of my own psychocosmos and drew a blank.

  There was Before Luda and After Luda. Of the former Age, only folk memories were left, fading flavors of Eden, and its citrus mornings tingling on the tip of my tongue with all the other unspoken words, the forgotten names.

  Could it be that her complete disregard for my needs, my routines, my possessions, had worked its way under my shell as an irritant, an itch I couldn’t scratch even as it drove me mad with irrational frustration?

  Was I really this prickly and guarded when I felt my space invaded and colonized?

  I said—You haven’t seen my peep toes? I wore them at the party—

  What would I want with those?—she said. There was nothing left of them!

  I was taking them in for repair—I insisted, wondering when the barometer would register the change in the weather, the hardening frost, the escalating chill.

  They were horrible. Luda curled her lip in disgust. I wouldn’t wear them if you paid me!

  Luda, whose dirty tights lay draped over the sacred places of my home, the radiators and designer chairs, whose half-eaten dinners were stacking up in the watering hole where faucet gods had convened in my immaculately scrubbed stainless-steel sink.

  Have you been using my razor? You shouldn’t use all my stuff—what about infections—I said, unable to stem the incoming tide of irrational gibberish.

  I don’t have any infections—she spat back. Is there something you want to tell me? Did you give me AIDS?

  DISEASES! You’re the fucking disease!

  I’m not a fucking thief! Stop treating me as if I’m HIM!

  The door to the spare room slammed hard enough to bounce the brass doorknocker, the one shaped like a crow’s skull, off its hook.

  * * *

  —

  I’m going out—said Luda.

  It was bad enough she’d disappeared for two hours after our contretemps. Now here she was framed in the doorway like Barbie in her cellophane display window, all stockings and heels, factory-fresh.

  My response, when it came, came without words.

  You can come if you want—she huffed, and I could tell she was praying I wouldn’t say yes, yes, I will come actually.

  She could see I was nowhere near dressed and even if I had been ready, I was in no mood to face another overlit, exhausting late-summer night out with the same gaggle of queens and wannabes in one of Gasglow’s exactly three decent drag bars.

  As if all that Saturnian, purple paternal solemnity had worked its way into the water supply, or more likely my vodka supply, I took one gander at Luda and—may God forgive me—uttered the phrase—

  You can’t go out—the words escaping from my lips like madmen from the asylum, like nitrous from a can—not looking like that.

  I know! I prided myself on a lifelong laissez-faire, devil-may-care broad-mindedness, but as this petulant, self-pitying squeal came out like piss strained through a straw, I already knew it was fully deserving of Luda’s merciless response.

  Like you?—she said, supplying a brattish exclamation point with her stiff middle finger. I thought that’s what you wanted?

  How about this then?

  She pulled the dress open down the middle and threw it at me.

  Let’s see how good you look in it!

  Shrugging into a vinyl coat only accentuated the potential for immodesty once she’d pulled the belt tight around her enviably trim waist, hiking the hem up her thighs to flash her stocking tops.

  Your arse is hanging out! I can see your tape!—I told her, resorting to peeved teacher tones. And that’s not all. Have some fucking style!

  This is my style!—she spat. This is how I want to look! You think I’m going out looking like you to meet people my OWN AGE?

  You’re the one who said age didn’t matter!—I reminded her, two rocks of ice in my tone.

  Until you went ON AND FUCKING ON about it all the time!—she fired back.

  And we were off at a gallop.

  You’re not my fucking mother—Luda volleyed, as if the word were a tainted cherry she had to spit out.

  I wouldn’t have you as a free gift in a raffle!—I struck back, conscious that I’d inflicted a wound much deeper than I expected.

  All you do is stare at me—and—mirrors and—She went on and on like this, ramping up the incoherent abuse.

  Until—If you can’t stand that you’re an old bag, if you can’t deal with it—she snarled. Do what all the other old bags do and get the fucking Botox you keep saying you don’t need!

  You’ll need it before I do if you stay out every night drinking and taking drugs!—I announced from my personal pulpit. You can’t hide party eyes!

  At least my face isn’t hanging off my skull like a fucking waxwork in an oven!

  That’s enough!—I shrieked and that was the moment I finally cracked. Have some fucking respect, bitch!

  She didn’t expect the crowd-control-hose ferocity of my reaction and took a step back on her spikes.

  Get out of my fucking house!—I thundered. As a performance, it was up there with Jehovah casting Adam and Eve starkers from their comfortable Garden hideaway and it was concluded with the coda Genesis forgot to record—And give me my keys back!

  Take your fucking keys—she growled like a boy as she flung a frosty jingle of cut metal and Toytown-colored plastic past my shoulder. I don’t need you or this shit tip you live in! You’re an embarrassment when we go out! You’re a fucking dinosaur that thinks it still rules the world!

  The keys struck the ironic barometer I’d impulse-purchased with Jeremy during that weekend in Berlin twenty-two years ago, shattering the brittle arch above the tiny cottage door on the left that said SHINE.

  Your feet smell like a fucking locker room! That was my final flourish, and as final flourishes go, as shade is my witness, I knew I could throw so much better.

  From the abject nadir of my despair, I found myself admiring Luda’s brio; that insolent pause to correct her doomsday button lipstick with a pinkie dab in the mirror before the cannon shot of slammed door, and subsequent fading reports, the crack-crackety-crack of her heels on the lobby flooring.

  I was still in shock. The space where Luda had stood preserved the brilliant absence seared into it, her afterimage still steaming on the wallpaper.

  She’d seemed enormous only moments before, a storm cloud piling black on top of black, before evaporating into nothing like those spectral giants some oxygen-deprived climbers report, that turn out to be their own shadows magnified against fog banks at the summit.

  I drank another half bottle of Chardonnay. Inhaled more gray-green weed clouds.

  Tear tracks carved river valley grooves through my makeup. I sniffed great lines of air, shoulders heaving.

  There’s no point avoiding the elephant in the knicker drawer: I knew Luda had to be fucking other men. I imagined it was how she made her money. She checked her phone more often than she checked her reflection, which was constantly. I suspected secret assignations. Independent income. Rich men. The kind girls like her were born to impress and fashioned to indulge. If there was any truth at all to the Marvell story, I presumed it was most likely the bit about Charles Marvell’s voracious appetite for femboys and twinks. There was a class of older men like that, daddy types paying rent on bijou apartments near enough the office to expedite quick consultations.

  “Cockroach problem!” I snorted.

  She was probably on her knees right now—I told myself even though she’d been gone only twenty minutes. She’d be dressed in Victoria Marvell’s white stockings and that boned, lace-trimmed summer-cloud-colored wedding-night basque the Mrs. would never fit into again—how could I compete with that?

  Building from this basic premise, I quickly and with a practiced routine scripted, directed, and shot an ever-more-elaborate cycle of self-loathing porno clips in my head; Oscar winners they were not, but the plots, direct and to the point, saw my leading lady, “Luda LaBang” according to the credits, progress from a sincere religious vow of chastity to threesomes, foursomes, and gang bangs with aging sex offenders, until I was rigid at the notion of her depraved infidelities, imagining myself the sex-starved jealous stepmother gnashing her teeth—Mirror, mirror on the wall…—the Wicked Queen syringing a rosy apple with Soviet nerve agent.

  That stupid old bitch Luci has no idea what she’s missing—her handler, Charles Marvell, would gloat from a panting throne of living willing sex dolls where Luda writhed and cackled in his intimate lascivious grasp, just one more disposable plaything in the monster’s twisted harem.

  I’m Luda Marvell now!—she gasped as she underwent a shattering orgasmic release. My name is Luda Marvell! I belong to Charles Marvell! Charles Marvell!

  That did the trick. A bitter jet of spite and spunk pulled the plug on the lurid sizzle reel in my head. I lay, cooling factory steel, savoring the circulating steams of disgust and recrimination as they poured off my skin into a vaporous unhealthy darkness near the ceiling.

  Jealousy can be unspeakably arousing if you give it a chance.

  * * *

  —

  You need to try this on—I giggled and jiggled a bendy snow-white, lace-fringed leather basque that would never fit me again.

  I used to come onstage with the Troupe as Virginia Plain, a super-horny virgin bride on her long-awaited honeymoon. The gag was her groom would do anything to avoid sex, having been diagnosed with a voracious STD the day before his expensive marriage ceremony.

  I love it—Luda simpered. If I can’t be you who can I be?

  In that instant, as I began to suspect there was something entirely unlikely about this frothy kitsch scenario, something I couldn’t put my finger on without bursting it like a bubble, the sound of sirens amplified to an insufferable volume.

  I quickly came to the reasonable conclusion that the Apocalypse had been greenlit quite suddenly and without consultation, the way you always suspected it might.

  They’d dropped the Bomb, all the Bombs if the all-inclusive roar was anything to go by. They’d unleashed Plagues and pandemics like genies from a thousand glowing radioactive test tubes. Frantic emergency lights were strobing out the last seconds of life on planet Earth and I had an unwanted ringside seat unless, unless, unless I could just—unless—I—