Were there others?—I called after her. Copies of her? Luda said she’d seen others.

  She turned to face me from the bleached darkness beyond a forty-five-degree-angled rafter of sunshine and dust and spat out her words the way you’d flick a coffin fly off your tongue—Don’t believe a word Luda says.

  Alone in the shadow of the allosaurus, I felt the ineluctable hand of circumstance fashioning from bits and pieces that didn’t fit a Victorian portmanteau grotesque, a platypus with wheels, tits, and a unicorn horn.

  I flagged a cab.

  I had a lot to think about, don’t you think?

  * * *

  —

  While Abanazar stands riveted in place, justifiably stupefied, I enact the mock seductive extinction event that is Twankey’s obscene dance of death; designed by me and Elena Novac during golden afternoons we’d spent absorbing YouTube footage of the cannibalistic courtship rituals of preying manti and trapdoor spiders. Aladdin goes to work, ducking in between his mother’s flapping curtains to reach the Lamp on its pedestal by Abanazar’s throne.

  But there’s trouble afoot when the Genie clocks Aladdin dodging and rolling commando-style just out of Abanazar’s sight line. The afrit’s torn between sounding the alarm to warn his new master or keeping his mouth shut long enough to give Aladdin his chance.

  Shall I instruct my Master Abanazar that Aladdin still lives?—he asks the audience.

  NOOOO! The crowd yells one great command.

  Shall I help Aladdin?—our supernatural fly in the wizard’s ointment now inquires of the fully agitated spectators, and this time of course they all bellow YESSS! at the tops of their various voices—fully aware of how, in this enchanted bounded micro-world, so unlike the real one, the clear difference between what’s right and what’s wrong must be insisted upon.

  Abanazar has other things on his mind, such as dealing with the equivalent of battlefield trauma as Twankey all but wrestles the cornered conjurer to the floor, subjecting the man to what in any other context could only be described as aggressive non-consensual sexual assault disguised as a collapsing circus tent.

  As Abanazar drowns beneath billowing bales of stoplight- and acid-drop-colored chiffon, struggling as frantically as a man failing to attract the attention of the lifeguard, Aladdin and Jasmine seize the Lamp with a bit of teamwork—she throws it to him, he catches it, gives it some elbow grease, and hey presto! The natural order of things is restored with six words!

  Your wish is my command, Master!—announces the Genie smiling proudly, winking at Aladdin. We knew we’d get audience cheers for that moment loud enough to be heard above the rush-hour rumble on Gargoyle Street. As long as you don’t ask me to suck your—time the beat carefully—toes!

  And there on the laugh, we hit pause on the action one last time. The lights shift ominously, the music warps into minor chords, ambient electronica, clicks, burrs, and impending thrums that leave the audience paralyzed, dumbstruck with tension.

  The end is close now. The curtains tremble in anticipation.

  * * *

  —

  Me, home, decanted into the cushion scoops of the sofa in a blue fluffy robe. I drank too much coffee and filled a notepad with shorthand doodles, spidery drawings of stars and triangles, pentagons, polygons. Me trying to work it all out, mapping Dominick Float’s intricate proxemics, the stage directions and fluorescent marks that explained the seeming chaos onstage and elsewhere in our lives.

  Pythagorean underpinnings. The whirling Fibonacci helices of atoms and galaxies and Renaissance paintings, the Golden Sections spinning into a conclusion that can never come because there’s always more down there to divide and explore. The deeper you go the deeper it gets.

  Foremost in my ruminations that evening was Charles Marvell’s obsession with the Golden Mean, Vitruvian Man, the Ratio. The crucified Christ. Dragons and fives.

  Phi breaking down into the 1 as penis, the 0 as vagina, womb, receptacle for the force and intention of the thrusting phallic “1,” the matrix where the impulse is brought to term then turned out à la mode onto the merry butcher’s block of the world of everyday things you can touch and divide, buy and sell.

  Binary notation being all that’s required to conjugate a universe of dynamic opposites. All it takes is an on and an off. A dark and light, a yes and no. An up, a down. A push and a pull, reaction, dialectic thesis, antithesis, synthesis, new thesis, antithesis, peristalsis triggering karmic landslides of consequence. The In. The Out. The Give. The Take. Cock and cunt creating copies of another ad infinitum.

  I left school when I was eighteen, but it didn’t take a philosophy degree to figure out where Mr. Marvell had gone awry.

  I drew the Golden Rectangle, separating it with boundary lines into flawless fractions, into Mondrian divisions of space I knew by heart, into fractals, where each tangram tile repetition of the pattern dragged me around and deeper into a ceaseless pressurized intensity, a quintessence of meaning and symmetry where all of this made sense as the simple Möbius twist of one simple thing, seen at last from a distance, recognized as the final period at the end of a long, long sentence a bit like this one.

  The unsatisfying answer to a pointless question.

  I read and took notes, as somewhere out there, east of the apartment and Charity Row, Luda made her way through the gathering dusk of another year’s November, weightless traveler through the moonstruck streets of Gasglow, coming closer.

  * * *

  —

  I was sunk into the sofa’s soft fathoms two-thirds of the way through Some Like It Hot for the millionth time when I heard the door locks clench and unclench, and Luda pitched into the living room.

  I waited for her to go about her routine: opening the fridge, drinking the probiotics, munching on dark chocolate, crunching a raw carrot until slowly she became aware of the mounting tension in the room, sensing my eyes on her, my taut silence.

  What?—she said, and I said—What do you mean by “what”?

  There’s something up. I can tell.

  She paused in the doorway, leaning nonchalant, poised on the threshold, subliminally dividing the space in the frame, and made a dainty rabbit wrinkle of her nose as she sniffed for what you’d have to guess were single molecules.

  Were you doing one of your rituals or something?—she said, making it sound like the accusation it was meant to be.

  There was a half beat before I’d had enough. I was a little fizzy, a little spangled and self-righteous and it was time to pull rank.

  You didn’t—I said, meaning “you did.” You fucked Molly’s boyfriend and—and then—and then what? You can’t blame Kenny—this is you!

  In reply, Luda dropped all the pretense to show me what she’d been learning. With a reptilian sine wave shimmy, she stretched, undid herself, then clinched into a near-faultless reproduction of Molly’s posture, and when I say “near” that’s what I mean; we were back at Uncanny Valley city limits, with this oozing, sexed-up Stepford simulation of Molly Stocking’s distinctive voice and mannerisms.

  Who’s been talking?—she said.

  Luda’s over-the-top posturing was delivered with a side of satirical cruelty that laid bare in each entitled attitude and sulk Molly Stocking’s self-conscious pretensions. Sweet, silly Molly’s every unguarded flaw was amplified by a single gesture, a slur of syllables, a graceless sashay extended to parodic, hyper-camp extremes, so much realer than the real thing it made you gag like an overdose of candyfloss.

  This is what you did with what I taught you?—I said, vindicated, horrified.

  It was and I’d never seen anything like it. The attention to detail that made this spiteful venomous caricature so effective was maddening in its scrupulous, microscopic fidelity.

  He thought I was her!—she said with distilled and bottled contempt. Even when I showed him my cock, he wouldn’t believe it was real! He thought I’d had it strapped on to get back at him for the anal rape—Luda wide-eyed waved her arm, seeking praise, seeing validation in my eyes. I told him I’d always had one and he just hadn’t noticed before.

  Did you? I wanted to laugh and go mad to get out of the trap. I was in the presence, tightly wrapped in the spiky fractured glory, of the Fallen Angel, celestial, young, and forever. Luda.

  Last time I looked—I said, keeping an even tone intended to suggest not sobriety but madness. Murder was regarded as a crime.

  So is rape!—she said.

  When a crowd of them get together it’s called a murder of crows.

  What else have you done?

  Luda said nothing. She didn’t have to.

  I held up the shoe, Exhibit B in the case for the prosecution. Not Molly’s tap shoe but the other one I’d found in Luda’s satchel. My Little Shoe Box peep-toe platform.

  You need to get your shit together and get out of here—I said, best boss bitch.

  * * *

  —

  As she gathered her meager belongings and left, Luda winked and flashed a red-outlined klieg-light smile that made it all seem like a move in a game, with skin so smooth and elastic her expression was streamlined to an emoji.

  Like the back cover of a book with the saddest of endings, the door closed on Luda. Her shape atomized to colored spray in the pebble glass, the hot simmer of pixels that receded until she wasn’t there anymore. The light of her dwindling off-screen, with the sound, much slower, of her typewriter heels on the stair chasing after her into silence.

  With that, I burst like a balloon. I could have filled a basin and washed a week’s worth of dishes in the tears I cried that night.

  * * *

  —

  When I’d given up gulping and snuffling, when my body was wrung dry of its saline and mucus quotient, leaving me sluiced out, serene, and faceup on the living room carpet, I charted the backslash graphics across the ceiling and walls without granting them the succor of significance. They were shunyata—physical optical processes occurring as a result of prior conditions and subsequent outcomes.

  I knew it was likely to get worse.

  Fortunately, I also knew what had to be done.

  * * *

  —

  What’s on your mind, Lu?—thus sprach Dominick Float and by this time, I was fully receptive to anyone willing to take more than a statistician’s interest in my shambolic so-called life.

  Family stuff—I offered, keeping it nebulous, adjusting my lipline.

  You told me you had no family—he reminded me, and I could see I’d let him down again.

  Luda had failed to appear for rehearsals. I could tell Dom held me responsible for her behavior.

  It’s not what you think—I said. It’s nothing like what you think—and he said—You think?

  I held my ground until he opened the News of the Sun. I almost started crying when I saw what had happened. There in declamatory sixty-point type I read the words nailed, like the Romans tacked INRI to the vertical crossbar above Jesus’s skewer-crowned head, to the page beside my picture.

  DAMES IN DISGRACE!

  Grimly, Dom unfolded to a double-page spread. Archive shots of me in the Troupe days, then hunched, furtive, and overweight on Superstar Survival dodging out of view, trying to escape off the frame—

  IS TV HAS-BEEN TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT MISSING BOY?

  I was staggering now, on the ropes, too stunned to defend myself against the feeble punchline.

  OH YES, HE IS!

  YOU DECIDE—it went on, offering an alternative as a joke.

  OH NO, HE ISN’T!

  What about HE’S BEHIND YOU!—I countered dismissively, scuffing tears off my cheeks as if they were bothersome insects. They haven’t used that one yet.

  PANTO CURSE CONTINUES AS BANNED COMIC’S DATE WITH MISSING YOUNGSTER SPARKS MANHUNT…

  Gravely he said I could take the day off. I was touched but he had a reason.

  We can’t do any of this without her—Dom gibbered pale as a sweating cheese. You have to get Luda to rehearsal.

  She walked out, Dom. I’ll find her—I said, a film hero vowing to save the day at the end of act 1. Whatever it takes.

  You don’t understand—he started, then shook his head. This is life and death—

  Dom seemed snapped, his spine rotted and shattered all the way through, bones of biscuit crushed in a heartless fist.

  Don’t let this fall apart, Lu—he pleaded with me, flattened beneath the rubble.

  * * *

  —

  I told myself not to dwell on “TV has-been” with its ugly double meaning. The implication that I may have been involved in the disappearance stroke buggery, prior to murder, of a scrawny homeless waif surely outweighed the stinging throb on my self-esteem and yet…

  TV has-been!

  What kind of has-been can handle the starring role in a prestige theatrical production? Show me the has-been who can dance out the meaning of each of the Seven Veils five nights a week!

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, I thought glumly.

  The oak frames of the dressing table mirrors were shifted slightly off true from a configuration so long established they’d left thin, clean spaces in the dust of years. The frames had been newly angled, so I looked splintery, schizoid, with my unity split into queerly canted fragments of face; the broken plates of cheekbones, the mouth and teeth relocated below my ear as an artistic experiment.

  Sealed inside the three golden rectangles of the mirror’s varnished oak frames, powerless to endure my creator’s lack of talent and time, I was a badly drawn comic-book character with hexagonal mouth agape, eyes wide and marbled in some moment of awful revelation, undone by the corkscrew twist at the story’s end.

  I was a microscope specimen divested of the dimension of depth, glued and mounted beneath the glass slide.

  The frames around the semi-silvered glass were sawn from recycled train sleepers. A friend who sometimes worked with the prop department back in the Troupe days had measured, cut, and handcrafted the mirror’s folding triptych panels to complement the immense and intimidating four-poster bondage bed I’d commissioned from him as a night-boat constructed with voyages beyond decency in mind. With that in mind, the headboard had a built-in working stocks. I can’t say I was ever especially drawn to S/M or B/D or any of that alphabet sex, but it looked good and separated out the time-wasters and faint of heart.

  The bed’s just here as texture for the story about the mirror. I felt cordoned off within its lines and limits, entrapped in carved and jointed bones of tree, for all eternity, facing my face as it hastened toward a promised end in leather and dust.

  I reset the panels, restoring balance and harmony. The central portrait staring me out, the flanking semi-profiles disengaged, eyes on an elsewhere, a vanishing point unavailable from my vantage.

  I knew myself to be in a kind of free fall, a chaos of doubt between the jump and the chute opening. Suddenly I found it impossible to mangle any meaning from the scratchings on the newspaper page. The only thing that made sense was the photospread shot of the waitress from the Rendezvous in her underwear and then only because I recognized the Marlies Dekkers set as identical to one I’d ordered online and last worn twenty years ago.

  Hers was secondhand.

  The waitress from the Rendezvous—“Nataliya Nowakowski, 21” my arse—was willing, nay duty-bound, to testify that she was certain beyond any and all possible shadows of available doubts that she’d waited on Luci LaBang off the TV, aka Graeme Mott, and with him a sexy-cheekboned homeless boy matching the description of the et cetera et cetera.

  You can see how it happens: Some juicy stray gossip crystallizes around a single seed of truth, half-truth, or no truth at all if the rumor is intriguing enough to put down roots. A loop of narrative coils around real people and events until there’s no untying the knots it makes. Fiction lashed to reality as the ship goes down between Scylla and Charybdis.

  The noose tightened.

  Luda had contrived her glittering Glamour, her diamond snare, with care and elegance.

  If they find me, it’s sure to be obvious I did it. Whatever it is. The Crime. Somebody must have done it, so why not me? I’ve got so many motives I don’t know what to do with them!

  Think about the plot of The Phantom, the framing story where the embittered older actor, obsessed with her looks, resolves to wipe out her imagined rivals one by one until she reaches her star pupil. Dame vs. Principal Boy.

  What was to become of my big comeback? The crowning achievement that should have been The Phantom of the Pantomime.

  What if there are police pounding a beat beyond the purview of workaday pigs and plods? What if Flat Police patrol a bigger more splendid yet far more dangerous version of Gasglow that exists where dreams and reality meet and shift on the shore between solid and liquid? What if there are Hollow People?

  What if I’m one of them?

  Would it make any difference?

  * * *

  —

  It was bad, but it’s been worse. One valuable side effect of being dragged kicking and screaming through a few decades is the accumulation of emotional scab with its accompanying merciful loss of sensation.

  I’d survived the gruesome deaths of treasured parents. I’d lost lovers and animal companions. I’d lost myself. I’d made mistakes. I’d hurt everyone including me. I was a disgusting mess and I was uniquely beautiful.

  I was fucked if the Devil was going to bring me to book. Pot. Kettle!

  It all made sense. All it took was the calm, the stillness of that first-page face before the words accumulated as overwritten lines, plot wrinkles. Webs and snares are among the most seductive and deadly of the Glamour’s tools and weapons.