And even though twenty-four hours must have passed, her stomach felt full and she couldn’t get through what she knew might turn out to be her last meal for another three days.

  Describing this to me, she made two thick cuts of iced gingerbread disappear in seconds, one of them mine.

  This was her origin story, her “how I came to be”—a savage deconstruction by voltage and toxins.

  The only way to explain any of it was to posit an overreaching global conspiracy of wealthy deviants. Luda was one element in the impossible jigsaw complexity of their conspiracies, as were we all. The scale of their reach was too much to think about, another hyper-object like weather or plastic.

  That’s not the worst!—she moaned, pawing at her phone.

  She pushed the device into my face and there was a photograph of the crow mask, the same feathered headdress I’d last seen worn by the doctor who’d tended to Luda that night at the party.

  Whose house was that?—I said.

  Luda’s eyes got rounder and bigger, inflating to cue-chalk-blue balloons. She seemed to be on the verge of a sublime hysteria that could not be denied, as if her red hair might combust and flare up like a struck match. I took her hands in mine and they were as chilly as rubber mitts.

  Luda, what’s happening?—I said.

  They told me I’d never have to be cold, or sick again—she insisted. They told me I’d never need money. I’d never need ever again. All of this came drooling out of her face as saliva. They told me they could change my life right there and then—and all I had to do—all I had to do was—

  Luda paused here. She seemed to evaluate me in that way she had, scrutinizing every micro-movement, each muscular tremor; judging by my tics and tells how far I might be inclined to follow her Pied-Piper-ish dance over the precipice. She had nothing to worry about. I was under her spell. There was no one in the whole world more riveted to Luda’s every word and gesture than me in that moment. If she’d ordered me to storm the Capitol, I would have weighed up my options for five minutes before committing to an insurrection.

  She let go of my hands, fell backward into the fixed context of space and time where this would and had already occurred.

  Charles and Victoria—she said. The Marvells. The Marvells are coming to get me! I shouldn’t have done it.

  Done what?—I shrilled. What have you done?

  I did something wrong. I keep doing it wrong—she replied. I stole something precious—

  That’s when she produced an item from her bag, and I recognized with a drop in my gut the little music box, with its bat-winged ballerina, its hand-cranked note-by-note labored stab in the direction of “Devil Woman,” that buzzed and burned blue-black with bad luck. After a mental hiccup that felt like a failed attempt to reject the thought entirely, I forced myself to remember where I’d seen the trinket box before and in that moment, dear long-suffering listeners, I climbed into a handcart bound for Hell.

  You have to promise you won’t let them get me!

  How could I promise that? Except I had to. I told myself it was my sworn duty to commit. Luda was my student. Even her name suggested some lost Delacorta thriller where Gorodish, played in my mind by Serge Gainsbourg, accompanied by a teenage Bardot as blond voleuse Alba in her red thigh boots, would rock up at the château in his Citroën 11 Normale to solve the mystery of the wrongly accused chanteuse.

  They’ll erase me—they’ll wipe me out!—Luda wept. I’ll be nothing!

  I’ll look after you—I vowed, gripping her hand in mine, barely suspecting the abyss that lay ahead as that handcart we’ve all heard about accelerated to where the rails ran out. I won’t let that happen.

  Promise!—she urged, her eyes filling with tears, to become otherworldly millponds of kingfisher blue. Highlights of indigo and viridian in those mermaid fathoms. Slave to beauty, I went under willingly.

  I promise—I said, all too aware of an acrid gunpowder presentiment that made me wish I’d hesitated. I reminded myself the purity of my path was predicated on superhuman levels of self-denial and continued down the Yellow Brick Road to Yellow Brick Ruin.

  In this way I convinced myself that Luda—and What Luda Did Next—was my responsibility.

  Just when it seemed it was too early, too late for things to get any worse, the waitress dropped a bombshell.

  Friend of yours?—she said.

  I had no idea what she meant until I read the banner upside down on her phone.

  CHART STAR FOUND DEAD went the lead, while SINGER MOLLY SUSPECT rode shotgun.

  Luda was online faster than me. Pictured, looking like one of those computer reconstructions they do of Neanderthal Man—was Joss Weill, the former singer of chart-topping Boystalking, found dead. There was conclusive video evidence that his girlfriend, Pussyfever singer Molly Stocking, had played a part in the apeman’s demise. Crazed on drink, drugs, and irrelevance, he’d crossed the line and paid the price for his appetites.

  Accompanying pap shots presented the arrest of a dazed and tearful Molly Stocking.

  Molly says she wasn’t there, it says here—I said, and what felt like a trickle of ice water ran all the way up my spine as I scryed the bedlam headlines laid flat on gouged Formica. This wasn’t you, was it?—I said, reading an unwelcome answer in the blowtorch glow of those eyes.

  Luda smiled, a red and deadly shallow crescent. Her tears had dried remarkably quickly.

  Don’t look at me—she said, well aware it was impossible not to.

  Out in the Gasglow morning, early birds let it all hang out; sans conductor, their rousing orchestral arrangement of brass caws and woodwind trills, pizzicato peeps and fluting twitters brought order and organization to the morning as it did each and every day, asking no reward.

  At least, I consoled myself, I could count on some things being trustworthy.

  I still had crows on the cortex fifteen minutes later in the waiting room at the clinic.

  Fifteen minutes later from what?—I hear you cry. Have we missed something?

  After that manic, panic night in September, already receding into incredulity, there’d been no more sightings of Flat Police. No reprisals, no follow-up calls. The coiled suspense we both felt, the hunched anticipation of a leather-knuckled knock at the door, a firm hand on the shoulder, slowly eased out of our busy days and nights as the year proceeded in an orderly fashion toward the exit.

  Luda tried not to talk too much about what had happened. There were no more fights, but I made a note of the accumulating nano-aggressions, the cracks at the expense of my body or the progress of my bags and wrinkles. Sometimes it felt like the sleepy slap of subtle steady waves carving away at the chalk foundations in slow and patient tidal erosions of confidence. Otherwise, I pretended not to notice or care. And although no one said anything, there was an unspoken directive. My meditations at the mirror became ever more ruthless inspections.

  Still, she had lost the snotty truant edge, dedicating herself to the craft of the triple threat. She was learning how to frame everything in terms of the Glamour; how to give her performances the power of ritual by adding meaning and intent.

  I taught and she got better. Luda was a natural, everyone said. In light of the subsequent revelations, it was an appraisal that couldn’t be further from the truth.

  But this is my story and it’s down to me to control the fast forward and rewind; it’s for me to say we’ve reached mid-October where the days, visibly losing light from both ends, were bleeding heat in sympathy.

  Wise trees knew from experience what was coming, tolerating the deepening chill in these declining days past the equinox. High and dry, on parade in the tatters of last summer’s fashions, outmoded by the returning season’s stark trend away from exuberant life-affirming emeralds to sullen blast crater reds, the trees bore the approach of panto season with no detectable complaint.

  Something silted in the corner of my right eye that might have been ash flakes swirling in the updraft of a cigarette but wasn’t. That flurry of jet-black litter scraps swirling above the sprouting heads of oak and elm trees turned out to be a collective noun of crows bickering in the high branches.

  Given their great multitude as they climbed in a jagged corkscrew whirl, the whole thing seemed more massacre than mere murder but that’s just me.

  A grating repetition characterized the apprehensive cries of one young bird with darts of white angel plumage showing through feathers otherwise scorched to black tar in the blast furnace of maturity.

  The second bird in the drama was older, more cautious. Unlike her junior, no trace of hysteria attended the elder bird’s monotonous reassuring caw. She stayed watchful, aware of every movement in every degree and quadrant, vigilant to every potential source of danger or distraction.

  At first, I’d assumed they were squabbling over treetop turf, but now I could tell the older crow was teaching the younger one how to navigate the air currents. Bird school in session.

  Between lines of a harsh vocalization that suggested a wrench shearing off an unwilling bolt head, I told myself I heard proud encouragement, the adult crow giving the raucous corvid equivalent of a thumbs-up with its pinfeathers.

  Me? I needed all the encouragement I could get!

  Now it was fifteen minutes later in the tense, formal silence of every gray-wallpapered waiting room ever, every transit lounge where no one ever came to relax, only to wait, as I tried to occupy my mind with trivialities.

  The cracked vocabulary of crows dispensing wisdom. Well-thumbed general-interest magazines. Women’s leisure. Bikini diets. Men holding up gasping fish for the approval, I could only venture, of other men just like them who shared the same taste for bullying defenseless river dwellers. All the covers looked out of date, printed on the sun-faded presses of some adjacent, depleted universe.

  The receptionist bobbed a nod in my direction—Graeme Mott?—she said. Inside, I died.

  It should be pointed out, while I’ve got this one unlikely opportunity: They’re highly intelligent birds, crows, and one of the few avian species to make tools as we understand them; as it turns out they have a special module in their brains that works like the crinkly crust-topping otherwise known as the human neocortex we have on ours, that crumpled crown of entangled neurons that gives us carte blanche to outperform and obliterate en masse all other animal species. Consider also the module in my brain that prevented me from seeing what Luda was up to until it was too late.

  I thought of the photograph she’d shown me in the all-night café—that predatory mask. The scimitar beak oxidized with blood or maybe hot sauce. The flesh-eating gleam in the eye of obsidian.

  As instructed, I did my best to make myself comfortable in an articulated chair whose design suggested a tentative branching out by Ikea into the lucrative area of torture equipment, or “coercion furniture” as we prefer to call it.

  In less time than it took to read the warning signs and disclaimers on the walls, Elspeth Beltane, my surely pseudonymous “aesthetic practitioner” as these needle queens prefer to be known, arrived, a Goth pinball flipped off the bumpers of her little consultation room. Spinning in contradiction, Elspeth’s spherical weightlessness seemed grounded paradoxically in the loam of the earth, in the sedimentary foundations of Gasglow’s glacier-slashed river valley, with coarse effusive dyed-black hair leaching minerals from the soil to nourish gray roots tinted metallic purple at the tips.

  Then there was her mighty matronly landslide bosom, a black upholstered bolster accounting for the lioness’s share of her upper body, while the rest of Elspeth, her lower half, tapered away toward vestigial feet like tiny specialist chisels in child-sized Doc Martens, her fabulous midnight substance diminishing toward the floor as black sand sieved through the wasp waist of an egg timer.

  You must be Luci—she said.

  As ever in situations like these, I supposed I must. Like most people above a certain age (shhh—forty-six!), she recognized Luci LaBang aka “Graeme Mott” from the reality show, rather than the two ground-breaking, award-winning, Channel 6 series.

  I’m Elspeth Beltane—she said—we spoke on the phone—

  You might think we did, but that wasn’t me—I corrected her, regretting the pedantry when she seemed so nice. That was Luda.

  You sound very alike—Elspeth said, pottering around in search of the sharp, invasive tools of her trade as if behaving like a Nazi dentist would put me at my ease.

  She talked me into it—I maintained. I thought I’d get away with being forty-four forever!

  That was my go-to if I was ever restrained and tortured by the cosmetic police after they’d brought me to book for frightening consumers on Main Street with my new countenance born in the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno where frauds do your hair and makeup then present you as garish foregone conclusions for damnation in the lower bolgia.

  Elspeth Beltane expressed amazement that I’d come this far without having any work done, which only set me to wondering—how far had I come and how bad did I look at the end of the expedition?

  This insidious suggestion that I’d spent my entire life fondly overestimating my attractiveness, brought with it an unwelcome and yet somehow irresistible new way of berating myself.

  Where prior to that day, I’d greeted the face in the mirror as a delightful and well-regarded caller, I was beginning to understand that what others saw in me might be a crudely thrown together tribute to self-delusion.

  I could tell this was a fresh scab I’d never tire of picking until the wound below refused to heal, its suppuration welcomed.

  As I settled back in my “aesthetic practitioner’s” chair, I tussled with a brief blindingly reasonable compulsion to get up and run like fuck; the rebel patient in a hospital drama, tearing out the drip lines, hurling the oxygen mask into the trash, and lurching for the exit dressed in a flapping bare-assed paper gown. This wasn’t me! My lifelong commitment to Decadent artificiality notwithstanding, there were levels of irreversible self-deception even I wasn’t fully prepared to endure.

  My girlfriend talked me into it—I said hoping to justify the whole misguided endeavor, as if to remind Elspeth I wasn’t so ugly and malformed as to be disqualified from normal human relationships. I say girlfriend, we’re working together. Actors. I hate needles.

  There’s nothing to worry about—she assured me. All the young girls are doing it. Twenty-one-year-olds. Botox improves your muscle tone.

  As she gave me the sales pitch, Elspeth went to work on my skin, priming the canvas with cleansing wipes.

  I thought I was getting away with it—I said. That’s all. I knew I wasn’t.

  She didn’t respond, instead asking—Can you move some of the muscles in your face for me?

  Why?—I said as I smiled, snarled, raised my eyebrows. I get paid for this sort of thing—

  A bit more if you don’t mind—she said, prompting me to run through my Eva Fraser facial massage routine the way you’d practice a karate kata. That’s better—she said, nodding. It helps me find the best place to inject.

  Now you tell me—I said.

  Seeing the look on my face, she did her best to console me—You’ve not to worry, love. You won’t need facial exercises after this.

  I hate needles, that’s all—I began but she gave me no time to elaborate.

  You won’t feel a thing—Elspeth lied as she squirted air bubbles in a tiny fountain from a syringe, then moved in on me. Think of this as liquid youth, my darling.

  I let out a thin whine, a rendering in pointed onomatopoeia of the needle’s freezing tip as it glided under the skin of my forehead glabella in the middle of a sentence. I tried to take my mind off the moment by picturing a silver submarine slicing down through the surface tension of the waves, the flesh, delivering its deadly payload.

  This goes in under here. We freeze the muscle there; you’ll look fifteen years younger.

  It feels like cheating—I said. I don’t deserve it.

  I knew that sounded ridiculous coming from me, mistress of the art of deception and Glamour. But I was feeling vulnerable there on the chair awaiting the next point.

  She laughed. What’s wrong with cheating?

  I had no answer to that.

  These at the outer corners of your eyes are your lateral orbicularis oculi muscles—she explained helpfully as she loaded another syrette with liquid toxic vanity. Where we get crow’s-feet.

  That perked me up. Always alert to the potential of a pattern in random circumstance, I said—Funny. I was thinking about crow’s feet earlier. Not just the feet, the whole crow package. The complete crow.

  Swooping around among the circling crows again—I’ve thought about this for a while—and there’s the mama bird teaching her three offspring to execute a midnight holding pattern, spun flecks in the spiral playout groove of the thermals. With the focus on those ragged specks forming tea-leaf runes in my line of sight came an accompanying shift in the light, a brightening, a steep rise in definition and clarity that heralded the arrival of an unexpected altered state.

  Ushered into Fairyland all unawares, I’d almost forgotten Elspeth was there until she responded to a question I hadn’t asked yet.

  She said—I see things. I’ve got the Sight. The cards. The tea leaves. The clouds. The flight of birds. A third eye. I thought that’s why you came to me—she said emphatically, reading my mind as though it lay open like a webpage.

  I nodded in the distinctive brilliance, the uncompromising authenticity of moments like these where commitments are made and honored.

  It was time to begin the next procedure; the moment I feared was all over me. Needles piercing my lips. It seemed like the kind of fetishistic ordeal a Catholic martyr would opt to undergo as a fast track to the Pentecostal gift of tongues.