It’s just an old lamp—she shrugs. The Widow can’t bring herself to believe something broken and rusty might share in the powers of the gods. She’s been let down by life too many times and it’s only when she finds a way to compare the Lamp to herself that Twankey gives Aladdin leave to kick-start the plot.

  Well, look at me—I said, using myself as an example of my thesis, while Luda sneered. I may be past my best, but I still polish up a treat!

  That’s the thing—says Aladdin aka Luda, mastering her role, her technique, making the rest of us skip through hoops to keep up with her elastic improv.

  Luda presented the dented, green-mottled, verdigris-encrusted, heat-blasted old Lamp so that it hung between us, our eyes meeting across the projecting wick of the outsized prop.

  She knew I was hurt, wounded below the Plimsoll line and taking in brine.

  She raised her cuff, like Batman sweeping his umbrella cape across his face, then she buffed the Lamp with three exaggerated Paganini arcs of her sleeve, followed by an accusing glare.

  There was a single tremendous bang timed to a magnesium flash and the Lamp lit up from within, revealing its magic in a renovating blaze.

  Dez Blue took his cue like the consummate professional he’d always been; despite severe hip and spine injuries, he spun like a barstool granted life to hit his mark so accurately I felt I was watching a pratfall run in reverse.

  How may I serve you!

  Here’s where Twankey does a double take, flapping away the rags of violet smoke that swirl around the genie’s return to the material world. She thinks about it then she brings it all back down to earth scanning a roll of paper with a weighted end that drops all the way to the floor.

  As a matter of fact, I’ve had one or two ideas!—I said, using Twankey’s voice.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t worth explaining any of this to Elspeth Beltane that day in the chair, the Mercy Seat. The full story, even in précis form, would have chewed too deeply into her next client’s valuable appointment time.

  Are you sure you’re okay?—she asked, with what I took, quite cynically, to be a naked, avaricious concern in her charcoal-black eyes. It was all too easy to picture her as a ravenous raven, pausing to ensure her roadkill prey wasn’t 100 percent putrid before stabbing the beak back into the tender flesh.

  I told her I had lost the conviction it would take to quantify or define “okay,” but I could be certain of one thing.

  “Okay” would never be good enough.

  * * *

  —

  As I zipped up my belongings, Dom Float surfaced like Moby-Dick or an asteroid threatening mass extinction, blotting out the light.

  I thought you should have it—he said, thrusting a fluoro-pink Post-it note so aggressively into my line of sight I thought he planned to label me.

  What’s this?—I said.

  We’ve had an inquiry—he said.

  Scribbled on the note were a string of numbers and in all caps the word LUDA???

  Looks like someone from her past trying to get in touch—said Float, already moving on to the next phase of his life without a backward glance. I thought you could pass it on…

  Five minutes later, I called the number and left a message.

  * * *

  —

  The mantra didn’t help; I couldn’t seem to settle. I knew there was something about what I’d done that could never be taken back. It was different for young queens, I told myself. Nothing you did when you were young had consequences. Those came later. Mascara runs at 3 A.M. made you sexy, not sad.

  I’d betrayed my own skin. When the toxin dispersed under the surface, petrifying muscles I never knew I had until they were sealed in place, a horrible admission of fear would be tattooed on my skull for all to see. The wind-tunnel tightness suggested a supersonic ghost train ride, a pre-afterlife hurtle toward the exit doors.

  What would it be like when I lost the ability to frown my displeasure, when that smooth, inarticulate forehead prevented me from ever again doubting? I had become a premonition of my own resting coffin face preserved in a snapped instant of time no mere emotion could shift, not even with a dynamite chaser.

  I touched my cheek. It felt spongy, congealing to the consistency of loft insulation, as if I had to be careful not to leave my fingerprints in it. When I prodded my fat sexy lips, there was nothing there but anesthetized negative space.

  I’d reveled in flux and metamorphosis, until the Gorgon, Medusa Madame Beltane with her viper’s-nest hairdo, pinned me ossified and unawares in her glare. The needle fangs of Momma B’s rattlesnake dreadlocks fastening deep in my face to pump me full of botulinum, freezing one uniquely dull moment of freakish unchanging stillness on my face.

  From this day, I would wear the impassive artificial mask of the mannie-queen. Of all the shapes and faces I could be, I’d settled for this vacant passport portrait!

  Glumly, I was forced to concede I had ventured into von Aschenbach territory. The black toxic dribble of eyeliner through layered foundation would mark as a boundary the padlocked Gates of Eden, where in yellow letters fifty years tall the universe confirmed in no uncertain terms—You will never again fuck a golden youth…

  Trying to look younger is the essence of tragedy. With Luda around, the effort was laughably pointless.

  And yet there it was again, that face, the face of Luci LaBang that I’d left behind in my hurry when I was unceremoniously shown the door out of my untamed thirties. There it was again, unchanging, serene as a trophy head in a wooden frame, behind glass.

  And I had my wardrobe; I still liked to imagine her in all my old clothes, bringing them back to life. I took every opportunity to pass on some fabulous dress, pair of supernaturally fitted thigh boots or stainless-steel boned corset ensemble. Luda would accept these hand-me-down gifts of my fashion history with a shrug, but she never wore them around me.

  The only time I’d catch sight of her decked out in one or other of these second-hand extravagances was to glimpse Luda slipping out the door after midnight, going wherever it was she went.

  And underneath it all, below the pack ice, in the substrate, among the roots of the underbrush, was the rustling, insinuating creep of an ever-encroaching spookiness; shadows thickening to ugly psychic bruises on the self-esteem, their cobweb crookwork clotting as the corners seeped across walls, ceiling, and floor to become the whole room with all the lights out. In that stifling, drunken obscurity, insidious possibilities spawned monsters.

  If everything she told me was true about the Marvells, what was Luda, I asked myself, but a creature born and raised in an upside-down twenty-first-century fairy story?

  I thought of the temperature drops, the stopped clocks, the mysterious upbringing.

  Wasn’t there, hadn’t there been from the start, something about Luda that came with the joss stick spice of the truly, authentically supernatural?

  At this point in the narrative, it was hard to be certain of anything. Even the most outlandish explanations for the prevailing atmosphere of collapse and disorientation seemed worthy of serious consideration.

  Was Luda a luscious doppelgänger, the Sister Hyde to my Jekyll, the Dorianna Gray to my rotting Picture?

  Was she some manifestation of those small, personal crimes and misdemeanors we fuss over, those transgressions long thought buried, now disinterred to haunt anxious days and insomniac nights?

  Was Luda the deadly avenging avatar of sky-blue possibilities I’d squandered in some mirror during some drug-trip breakdown half a lifetime ago?

  Here’s the elevator pitch: Narcissus absconds from the reflecting pool and makes it his primary objective to seek and destroy his ugly, compromised, disillusioned future self before it can happen!

  Was Luda a Cautionary Tale made flesh?

  Elspeth’s last words to me had been—“Be careful…”

  Careful of what? Drunk drivers? Loose bathroom tiles? Coughing strangers? Betrayal?

  In all my elaborately conjectured scenarios, you may notice Luda relegated to the role of shadow projection, a troubling tulpa summoned into fleshly reality as some miscast spell powered by ugly personal neuroses. Looking back, I can see I was already trying to dehumanize her, already preparing my justifications for what I might have to do to survive her.

  As I, Luci LaBang, narrator, basked in the soft, silent dark at the bottom of my tank, there was no limit to the contortions of speculation. The regrettable flipside of a colorful imagination is a flair for summoning night-horrors and floppy disfigured hell-things…

  Ask the Romantics.

  I say that but it’s more likely these tales of mystery and imagination that preoccupied my mind were concocted to obscure a more troubling conclusion I could hardly bring myself to flirt with.

  The idea’s one virtue, that of distressing plausibility, failed to make it any more palatable.

  I trod the ugly writhing conjecture down into the mud at the back of my mind and decided to explore some brighter avenues of investigation.

  But the unthinkable wouldn’t stay unconsidered and bubbled up again as blossoming florets of filthy black silt…septic suspicions, infected qualms…

  There was something about Rose and the baby that never was. Something incomplete. There was a rusty saw-toothed trap set to spring behind Heather’s sweet smile.

  During the breakdown I’d lived in denial of the Glamour and its implacable responsibilities, but I couldn’t look away from the sequin dazzle forever, I couldn’t turn my back on the promise I’d made the mannie-queen to at the very least be entertaining. Like a probing tongue, relentless self-examination revealed unfilled cavities, feeling out mysterious foundations, identifying Work that remained to be done.

  Destiny had me down for something big I decided.

  * * *

  —

  I thought of The Phantom, a play that consumed its cast. A story reflecting its own pathology, a dramatic brew so rich, a Glamour so heady it had begun to slop over the barrel into our real lives, recapitulating my catastrophic mental and physical breakdown, my emotional journey, into life-affirming drama and song.

  I half expected a last-act reveal; the blurred lines that no longer served to separate fact from fiction in the case of The Phantom of the Pantomime would turn out to be a meta-marketing masterstroke as played by Dominick Float and the publicity department. There was still an open invitation for rationality to ride to the rescue.

  The Glamour can be so seductive and so convincing it’s easy to mistake it for the real thing—like those inexplicable discarded totems on shadowless beaches Yves Tanguy painted and J. G. Ballard wrote about—abstract driftwood and dream jetsam that stood in for more complex emotions, their obscure arrangement substituting for an urgent, untranslatable cri de coeur from the dark of the mind.

  I mean, why not?

  * * *

  —

  I pushed lightly with my fingertips and the door to what we’d both come to think of as Luda’s room swung silently open on its oiled hinges.

  She didn’t have much, and what she had was concentrated like a white dwarf star into this space. I no longer believed there was a plague of cockroaches at her mythical place. There was no place.

  When Luda wasn’t here, she might as well be nowhere. Her whole life could be subtracted into a single bag of clothes and shoes, cosmetics and condoms. It was why she borrowed my heels, however reluctantly. She owned nothing.

  Like I said, Luda was a quantum event, existing only when she was observed.

  * * *

  —

  I know now and I knew then, I shouldn’t have pried but pry I did. I felt compelled to ease our closet door open to rummage below the hems of splendid coats and dresses for her Goodbye Kitty! bag.

  I paused to register the little key-ring ornament dangling from the bag handle—a plastic vulture from some cartoon or famous animation I could barely recall. Lion King most likely, or The Jungle Book.

  The painted eye regarded me with scorn. A predetermined panic dug in—I knew what I’d planned to do could only lead to trouble, but I went ahead with it and fished blindly inside, unwilling to look at first—a premonition—a lucky dip scramble through the contents—lipsticks smeared to stumps, brushes and mirrors, Q-tips, face wipes, an enigmatic tub of fish paste.

  Intruders, my fingers searched by shape and contour alone, moving with a delicate prudence as if expecting to encounter a spider’s hairy feelers and dripping fangs in there. It wasn’t long before I found what I instantly recognized as the things I didn’t know I was looking for.

  First there was a wig. No surprises there, you might think in this story of drag queens and drama. At first, I couldn’t identify where I’d seen the familiar style. It wasn’t one I’d seen Luda wearing.

  When it came to me, it came the way it might to a passenger on a runaway train, careering downhill, with no way to halt the momentum of events.

  I was reminded of the particular unnatural shade of Molly Stocking’s hair extensions—a cut she’d made her own, bravely taking a bullet for a whole generation of women who might otherwise have gone out looking like that—it seemed impossible.

  A further fumble and rummage only made things worse; now I held in my trembling hand a shoe. In every way the shoe was ordinary but one awful detail made it special.

  The shoe with its blunt and broken heel belonged to Molly Stocking. The left. Someone, I wondered who, had taken a hacksaw blade to the block heel, broken it carefully along the fault line where Molly had cracked hers on the day she bowed out of The Phantom.

  It might seem like a moment of shocking revelation but looking back, I was mostly baffled. I held in my hands what seemed to be damning evidence of unfathomable crimes, but I knew Luda was a long way from stupid. I didn’t have to make a trophy-winning standing long jump to the conclusion that she’d left these clues for me to find. This did little more than add to the mystery, as you can imagine—flywheels struggling in the cogwebs of the mindmills of your wind…

  Where Luda was upon me. I froze like a pervert foraging through a neighbor’s daughter’s underwear drawer. A “knee-creeper” my mother used to call them.

  I’d already put her bag away—in its place, I lifted a blameless tin of rosin, posing with it like a housewife in an ad.

  I’ve been looking for this—for you—put this on your shoes you’ll fly across the stage.

  She took the tin, suspiciously.

  Roll us up a jay, then—I said, all innocent.

  There had been something else in there that I recognized. This time I knew it by touch—the tactile memory of those fidgety buckles and straps came with an electric shock of recognition.

  Next to the broken fetish, the talisman that was Molly Stocking’s shoe, had been my Little Shoe Box peep-toe platforms, missing since the night of the party.

  * * *

  —

  Crows glory in the most effortlessly cool, most defiantly metal of the animal kingdom’s collective nouns so in order to compete, vultures have at least five available varieties depending on when you see them and what they’re up to; when a gang gathers in a waiting huddle like swags of feathered fruit in the bare branches, they’re called a “committee.”

  When they descend to feed, it’s a “wake.”

  Where it got more complicated, more elaborate, baroque, and frankly Mephistophelean in its Cat’s Cradle intricacy was this…

  Elspeth was clear about one thing; activating her Spirit-Vision she’d peered beyond the veil—which I have to say feels like a bit of an invasion into postmortem privacy—where Heather was engaged in what appeared to be an ancient, star-shaped board game. Alice in the Afterlife, only turning her head from the intricacies of the play when she sensed the presence of a Peeping Tom observing from the sordid solid world.

  According to Elspeth, Heather shook her head solemnly and spoke three words—

  She’s behind you.

  * * *

  —

  Oh no she isn’t…I tried to convince myself.

  Rehearsals took on color and substance, a ligne claire drawing filling out with rim lights, shadow, texture. As we drew closer to opening night, we were pulling six full run-throughs a week, bone-weary from singing and dancing, drilled down to parade-ground war-machine efficiency.

  When it comes to Aladdin’s grand arrival at the palace, the Genie has it all worked out, arranging circumstances so that events flow naturally the way a stream joins a river, and, borne on a tsunami of hallucination, the boy-king arrives at the head of a parade of wonders.

  With a start, the princess connects the young gender-neutral pinup with the vision she caught sight of in the Market scene. Confused and uncertain, she agrees to consider his coarse hand in marriage based on nothing more than good looks and a flair for performance.

  Her wayward, scatterbrained, spendthrift mother, the Empress—a sleepwalking May Tang-Taylor, and I’m sorry but I’ve danced with livelier hat stands—is only too happy to forge an alliance with a fabulous and impressively polite, super-wealthy young prince from a land of gold no one’s ever heard of. His arrival in a flying chariot pulled by a team of tame rocs suffices to quell all doubts, and the stacked treasure chests take care of any misgivings that may have survived the original quelling. Aladdin, let’s remind ourselves, is a street urchin wielding the power of gods to reshape reality on a whim.

  It’s a big scene, exhausting when you’ve been playing it on repeat a few dozen times, when you’d be forgiven for thinking, even hoping, it was the last scene. Sorry, we’re barely midway through act 2.

  I flapped offstage. Twankey, installed in the Royal Palace in the run-up to Aladdin and Jasmine’s wedding, sports another outrageous fashion confection the djinn has conjured for her, this time a feathered overindulgence that fluttered around me like ghosts having a pillow fight.