Laces tightening on a corset, the strands of the plot, the play, whatever had begun when I first met Luda, contracted sharply into shape, taking my breath, straightening my spine to look truth in the eye.

  Was it really beyond the realm of the possible that a would-be rapist and hooligan could find himself the guinea pig in a social experiment conducted by wealthy, bereft parents?

  Was it likely they scrubbed his identity with cleaning products courtesy of brainwashing pioneer Ewen Cameron and the CIA?

  If there’s anything I value it’s the opportunity we’re given to shine, to be authors of our own gripping biographies, directors of our own blockbusting movie franchises, celebrated actors slipping effortlessly into our starring roles.

  Spalding’s story was anathema, apostasy; so fundamentally opposed to my core values, so tailor-made by some consumer anti-algorithm to offend specifically me, I found it hard to swallow. It sounded like science fiction, but you know me, I did some looking into it later and it’s all true about Cameron and KUBARK counterintelligence techniques.

  Charles wondered if a soul could be constructed—she said. Or reconstructed I suppose. Could Penelope Marvell’s soul be rebuilt from scratch then housed in a body renovated for the purpose?

  I get it—I said, a bit troubled. But transplanting souls, I mean—it can’t be legal.

  Temporarily alive in this unlikely world, sensibly shod Miss Ess and I flitted brief as damselflies among the eternally dead. The stuffed, the mounted, the painted, the wrapped, and the embalmed. Among the sarcophagi, the dead bodies swathed in cloth cocoons, prepped for some unknown metamorphosis in the afterlife, in the Fertile Fields of Aru, the Sunset Lands…

  She wouldn’t be drawn on the judicial front, but I will say she was an absolute gusher of information when it came to the transmigration of souls.

  Together we continued down broad sandstone-and-marble stairs to the expansive ground floor. Above us a blue whale skeleton hung suspended in its imagined X-ray ocean above the grand hall, participating in an inadvertent Surrealist dogfight with the World War I biplane strung a little higher, visible in sections through the rib cage of the whale.

  We stopped again in the Ancient Animals gallery by the scale model of an allosaurus painted blue-green. Here since the 1900s, it reared up behind her, two tiny arms typing at an imaginary keyboard made, I like to imagine, from rib cage, monkey knuckles, and bamboo.

  Charles, the spinster Spalding explained, clearly reminded of the man by the thunder-lizard’s murder clown grin, was obsessed with reincarnation. At first, he’d clung to the idea in the hope that Penelope would be reborn and that he might hasten her return to the world of the living by crafting a vehicle suitable for her return.

  But set a pessimistic madman to ponder reincarnation and it’s easy to see how the needs of an analytical mind might get scrambled together with articles of faith and led by the nose, by the heady aroma of reason sizzling to scratchings in the pan, in the direction of some far-ranging, some might say downright unreasonable, ideas concerning the brunt of overpopulation on the global supply of souls.

  If it was true that human spirits were recycled into successive generations, in a closed system where population was doubling exponentially, Marvell calculated frantically, where were the fresh essences coming from to occupy all the new bodies?

  In almost two thousand years, between the arrival of baby Jesus in his spaceship from the planet Krypton and the febrile death of Lord Byron at Missolonghi, the number of human beings living on planet Earth multiplied from an exclusive clique of 160 million to a jostling hoi polloi of 1 billion, kept in check by regular visits from one or other of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  I’m not just making this up. I’ve got it written down.

  Since the last time the Black Death had its way with Europe, improvements in health and education, along with standards of food production and distribution, have resulted in what they call logistic growth of human biomass—in only two-hundred-odd years from the Regency period to where I sit today doing my stage makeup, our human obsession with mass production in all areas has yielded a surly swarm of eight billion people, shuffling shoulder-to-shoulder around the increasingly shabby décor of the same old living room. Even the enthusiastic mass extermination of our animal companions has failed to free up enough space and it’s not as if we can just knock up an extension.

  In my own brief lifetime, the number of squabbling, competing, self-serving Homo sapiens has doubled. I’m no chicken spring roll but that does seem a bit excessive. I’d go so far as to say profligate but it’s not a word I tend to use more than twice.

  You’re asking—Where is all this leading, Luci? Well, it’s leading to Charles Marvell’s theoretical breakthrough. A misguided Eureka! on a par with reaching the conclusion that the sun is a giant plug of flaming dung orbiting an Earth shaped like the lid on a tin of Pringles.

  Could it be, the doctor speculated, that the accelerating human birth rate was outpacing the allocation of souls? I know! It’s not my idea. It’s what I heard that day, wandering through the display units, where stuffed wolves serenaded a painting of the January full moon in gouache, and kingfishers spread lysergic blue wings to take flight yet never left the sheet of rippled glass that stood in for their long-dried marsh, where nature was impersonated by taxidermy.

  These same animals have been here since I was a kid—I said, pausing to admire my reflection superimposed over the blunt head of the black leopard in its shrunken diorama context.

  I’d come here with my art class when I was nineteen. I’d chosen to draw the panther because I felt sorry for it, adding a bleeding carcass spiked and limp between the All-Beast’s open gate of jaws. The strawberry blobs of dripping bloody saliva I’d chosen to include brought the only splash of color to my charcoal sketch.

  The panther must have been shot dead a hundred years ago, longer—victim of an old-fashioned 3-D photographic technique where instead of emulsion, the subject was immobilized in a glass case, fixed by the taxidermist’s art as a faithful snapshot of a day long ago when it muscled through the undergrowth in search of food, prowling through an afterlife among the artificial branches, the artful facsimile of savanna and distant tropical volcano. The panther pretending to live beyond its natural span as its own substantial ghost—its parents and its siblings, the cubs it was driven to care for gone to dust long ago, while it kept on into impossible futures padding on its habitat base, outpacing us all, eyes locked to an inner endless horizon as the rest of us faded away, as we grew old and passed and where other children, surly students with pens in hand and screens instead of cartridge paper, sketched the immortal likeness of Panthera pardus, the All-Beast, become one more ephemeral reflection among countless generations smeared across the convex curve of its inscrutable glass eyes.

  The price of staying the same forever was to live in one eternal moment, shot dead then stuffed and mounted to look your best in a glass box.

  In its shoulder-led gunslinger poise, in the glossy fur coat, the tanned and tempered hide held together by glue and string, was the ultimate performance—a cosmetic triumph of armature and cotton batting, wax and paint.

  Death dragged up as Life Eternal.

  I’d titled my drawing The Kill in a troubled attempt to shake the panther from her daze of permanence and restore her hemoglobin-speckled fangs to red currency.

  My teachers regarded the addition of dripping cherry gore as needlessly sensational, and in flagrant violation of the strictly black-and-white brief, but I won a minor prize, nevertheless. At least one perspicacious critic saw in my title the ironic double meaning I’d intended.

  Miss Spalding seemed disconcerted; the glass eyes troubled her, she explained, made her skin creep. There was something awful about the painted polystyrene dirt scrabble between the claws, the snarl forever young, forever defiant in the face of a death that couldn’t be deferred because it had already happened long, long ago.

  Charles Marvell was sure we’d run out of souls to recycle, she told me. There weren’t enough to go around, you see, new babies were being born without souls.

  I wasn’t persuaded by the numbers. Marvell hadn’t taken into account that some more populous breeding ground might supply the necessary discarnate ingredient—battery hens, for instance, slaughtered at the age of seventy months, might be rewarded with an upgrade where they would blink to awareness in a different kind of incubator, as a human baby.

  Who can tell? For all we know, especially virtuous and hardworking insects might level up to Homo sapiens after a lifetime of service to the hive. The soul of the whole honeycomb reborn as a baker’s wife, or a corporate CEO.

  None of that mattered. What did matter was middle-class Marvell’s deeply held, deeply flawed conviction that some people, maybe entire generations, could be born without souls; some of us could be flat people with only one dimension, on the outside.

  That perhaps this Invasion of the Charisma Snatchers was already under way, had already happened, and there was nothing any of us could do to prevent it, until the last of the truly human found themselves with cudgels in their hands defending a giant, black-walled city against the hordes of feral, amoral simulacra was enough of a threat to justify in Charles Marvell his voyages beyond the pale.

  This infestation of the unsouled, Marvell conjectured, accounted for the loss of meaning, the degradation of culture, the sociopathic narcissism characteristic of the Age of the Individual, the zombie apocalypse.

  Where we saw simple alienation, Charles Marvell saw a literal plague of the p-zombies.

  * * *

  —

  Sorry I’m late—I trilled, fluttering busily into an atmosphere so thickened with impatience and disappointment it seemed to set around me, stilling me into a cringe.

  I was only three hours late. Abanazar’s nervy understudy had given up and scuttled home to contend with a veterinary drama centered on an aging red setter with a boisterous bladder. The first canine victim of the McCloudie Curse, I ventured, but Dom was immune to levity. His whole body seethed with the scrunched fume and scramble of those tightly squiggled black balls cartoonists scribble to signify wordless anger.

  There’s only one thing for it, Dom—I said. I refused to give ground. I’m willing to pay back the three hours and work all night but you’ll have to be Abanazar.

  I didn’t give him time to reply. I made a precise Knight’s move into my start position on the massive cat’s cradle of tags and with an imperious flick of my wrist directed him into place. Dumbstruck, he shuffled onto his mark and just as he found his voice again and was opening his mouth to speak like a blowhole gaping in a whale’s head I cut him off with these words—If it’s a princess you’re looking for, Abbey National—I crowed. You’ve come to the right place. If you’re still straight after this performance, it’s a miracle—

  With that, Twankey shimmers across the stage, a dreadnought in a frock on full steam ahead. As he faces down this vision of an oncoming force of nature, this pyroclastic mirage of glitter and polychromatic polyester fabrics, this unstoppable whelming slurry of lipstick and rouge, sarcasm and predatory sexuality, Abanazar’s jaw flaps open like the back end of a cargo plane.

  I didn’t have to delve deep to summon Twankey to her pivotal scene. What I had to do was forget all about p-zombies and mind-wiped louts until we were done.

  I swung my hips to a sinuous slut strut, taking care to stumble artfully on my heels, so that I didn’t come across as too good or too overtly sexy. Twankey’s function is to be funny and she’s an underdog after all, an underbitch you might say, reaching for fruits she can never pluck. If I tell you I learned everything I know about throwing shapes from watching late-night documentaries about lap-dancers, or by imitating the blank-faced, serpentine flexing of caged go-go girls and belly dancers in ’60s movie parties, you might be halfway to understanding the potential for taking it all too far in the direction of nausea-inducing erotica.

  Swooping in on Abanazar, executing a kamikaze approach run, I trailed a fluttering flag of silk as if it were colored smoke pouring off the engine of a dying Mitsubishi G4M gliding toward the aircraft carrier on a wing and a banzai! The wizard retreated, nipping behind his wall of bodyguards for protection from the living single-minded flame that now swept through his chamber, the named hurricane, Storm Twankey, wiping out the contours of the weathergirl’s map.

  I was a nightmarish premonition of his young and wealthy wife after twenty-five years of embittered cohabitation for which even matching thrones could never compensate.

  Everywhere Abanazar tried to flee, I was there already—flapping my wings of trailing fabric, puckering puffed-up red balloon lips, I was herding him, manipulating him into ever-smaller safe spaces, leaving the wizard with fewer and fewer options for survival.

  * * *

  —

  I did a bit of research and I’m not saying I’m an expert, but I think I got the gist; a p-zombie, or philosophical zombie, is a living, reacting creature that looks and behaves exactly like a typical human being would, except for one all-important difference: The p-zombie has no inner life, no sense of self or self-reflection. The p-zombie is a living robot, driven to respond to stimuli in certain ways, but incapable of free will.

  Tickle a p-zombie and it will beg for mercy like anyone else but only because it has learned or been taught that’s the correct response given the circumstantial parameters.

  In fact, the p-zombie can feel no pain, no surprise, no sensation, nothing at all. Even when it insists it’s in pain you know it’s not. It’s entirely mechanical.

  Think behaviorism. Skinner’s pigeons. Pavlov’s pooches trained to slobber at the sound of a bell.

  The maddening thing is how would you know if you met one? The only way to be sure that any living thing other than yourself has an inner reality of hopes, dreams, is to have that internal life described to you in some way that can be acknowledged and recognized as human. We like to think Marcel Proust had a world inside his skull because he went to great pains and filled thousands of pages with words to explain how it felt to be him, dining on biscuit-shaped memories in bed.

  I can’t help thinking about the crumbs from Proust’s madeleines. Doesn’t matter how comfy your silk pajamas are, it must have been like sleeping in a cat’s litter tray!

  Could a p-zombie describe that sensation? I ask the question in all seriousness.

  Charles Marvell came to believe that “Kenny Trace” had been born without the appropriate USB port for a plug-in. All attempts to endow the Trace with a prosthetic soul invited the same inevitable reckoning, the same reenactment of Baron Frankenstein’s cautionary journey—from a boast to a scream.

  If any of this was true, Luda had been conditioned to respond appropriately to sensory input; she’d been schooled by experts on how to reproduce the physical signs of caring and affect, but she didn’t care, she wasn’t affected in any meaningful way by events in her life. I’d met narcissists and sociopaths before. I’d fucked more than one and had stories to tell about how they operated according to strict guidelines and dependable routines.

  Like so many girls and pretty boys, I’d been the center of attention, flattered, wooed, and then insulted, ignored, betrayed, and accused. I knew the standard type: rock-star boys who couldn’t abide to be out-glammed, who indulged their bleak banal appetites by immersing unsuspecting pretty faces in the suppurating cesspit of self-loathing they kept nailed down behind the eyeliner and Jack Daniel’s. Or there were coked-out Patrick Bateman city boys scrubbing search histories that would put anyone else on the register.

  Luda was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Something I had no vocabulary to describe until this new appreciation of the whole p-zombie hypothesis made it all clear to me that something was seriously wrong.

  There were hollow people. They lived among us and we knew them when we met them but refused to believe the evidence of our senses. Of course we did. They came from beyond our common understanding.

  In the unsuspecting yellow soil, the sprawling untended garden that is my imagination, a Pepperland of thistle-whistles, glitterhorse trees, coffee apples, and wonderwear, Bee Spalding had sown the leprous seed of a fleur du mal grown so purple and so virulent its dripping tips oozed the wine of all intolerance, all othering, all “ethnic cleansing.”

  To suggest that some people might not be real people at all was to sound the bugle, blow the conch, press the button, and board the express train to one inevitable terminus, and the camp gates of sanctioned genocide.

  Welcome to the world according to Charlie Marvell!

  * * *

  —

  Speaking of hollow, Spalding seemed drained when I left her, as if the effort of absorbing all available light in the room had taken its toll on her liver. I, on the other hand, was bursting with energy, a mosquito topped up to bursting at a human filling station.

  I promised I’d keep in touch, my current most regularly deployed fib.

  As she walked away, shoulders bowed by the weight of her own insignificance, a living silhouette lost in the high-contrast shadows between the tall leaded windows that let in flying buttresses of light, I remembered what I’d meant to ask.