I made a move, in this case a shrug, and she gave me the action replay, then reading my every facial tic and tremor, my giveaway body language stutters, she got ahead of me by anticipating where my exact posture and attitude would go next, getting there first.

  In defense, I chose not to move at all, ossified in the petrifying eyeline of the Gorgon Girl. Anything to call a halt to the stomach-churning caricature.

  I know who you are—I said. I know what you’re trying to do—I said even though I was only grasping at straws.

  I know who you are—repeated Luda. When she spoke, there came that mild astringent shock of hearing your own recorded speech for the first time.

  Luda smiled and repeated in my voice, using my gestures, I know what you’re trying to do—as another spot-on impression, certain she had me moused into her trap.

  I didn’t know about you—I said. I still don’t—

  They’ve got this story about the missing homeless kid in the paper—she said calmly, sipping the cold black coffee that was my favorite.

  He’d been seen by witnesses at his pitch, selling Homeless Times—then he was gone and I’m to blame!

  Yet more than just unsettling, her imitation of me was marvelous to behold. Luda had me down to a crossed t. Not just the t, Luda went from a to z. The mimicry was so meticulous it became more real than the real thing, an immaculate satire, or master pastiche, that was at the very least the equal of the original in a dim light.

  I saw in her what she saw in me, how people imagined me to be, and I won’t lie, I was impressed. I was enlightened.

  In spite of all the self-aggrandizing shallow affection for which I was rightly notorious, her take on me exhibited an angry determination, a fighting spirit, a defiant refusal to be entirely serious that I felt showed me in a very positive light. In so many ways she was kinder to me than I’d ever been to myself.

  She made me look fabulous.

  I was flattered, disarmed. How could I not be? Serious study and effort had gone into this disturbing creation, and part of that rigor was meant to impress as well as terrify me.

  In stories like this one, the Pupil always feels the frankly tiresome need to amaze the Master with some final dispassionately executed killing blow capable of condensing all the lessons they have learned into a death strike against which the guru is powerless.

  Instead, as reflected in Luda’s blue-sky eyes I was old and powerful, funny, complicated—even likable in my cranky way.

  Luda was my double, I reasoned, counting backward and forward from 1 to 0 again and again. Calculations in binary notation.

  Her plan had always been to duplicate me, replicate me, reproduce my every thought and gesture to advance her plan.

  Have I mastered the Glamour?

  It was clear: Only one of us was leaving this space, this room, this house.

  Every day is initiation, babes—I said. You’re not done yet. You’re never done.

  All my life’s representation in all my tender jetsam, all the bird-of-paradise feathers, wigs, and secondhand books, the cantankerous TV, the beloved pot plants and special pictures, La Petite Voleuse in its frame, it was time to breathe out and let go of things. Time to say goodbye and shed no tears and stop worrying about how it would all get on without me.

  It’s all a bit much, don’t you think?—I said. It’s like a terrible slasher movie, or one of those old ones with Vincent Price in a mask, killing theater critics—I said—and she parroted every syllable, closing the gap between my words and her duplications until we were lip-syncing.

  —theater critics—

  Luda and I faced the symmetry of each other, matter vs. antimatter. Drag bookends. Mirror universe counterparts. If Einstein had any idea what he was talking about, it seemed inevitable one of us would cancel out the other in a blinding gamma ray wash.

  I know who you are—I said.

  And she said—No, you don’t. You never will.

  You’re the Devil, I wanted to say but couldn’t. It seemed so ridiculous. It was too much to explain and if she really was the Devil, she wouldn’t need me to remind her. I couldn’t bring myself to admit she may have been my son, then my daughter. Born without a soul or otherwise.

  It all makes sense—she said. You couldn’t handle growing old. You had to kill your young rival. It’s in the script.

  I’ve never seen you as a rival—I explained sincerely.

  Thinking it through, she thumbed the box cutter blades into position and ruled red rails across the pale flesh of her forearm with the cold, detached composure of a veteran self-harmer. As if she’d struck oil and rubies, the gashes welled up with generous garnet overspill.

  Her blood is all over—she said. Or it’s the missing boy’s blood. Either way it was Luci LaBang who did it.

  With a few jazz flicks of her wrist Luda cast slaps and spots of her blood in three directions.

  Luci LaBang did both. She bared her teeth in a pumpkin lantern grin, ignoring the pain, the frenzy, the strewn slashes of drippy hemoglobin. Hid the bodies.

  Luda spoke as if reveling, luxuriating in the input of new data. Luda was a calculating machine updating her previous reality with new input, a new program.

  In my heightened state of hyper-vigilance and microscopic awareness, I tracked a heavy ruby globule sliding in slow motion down the mirror’s chilled glass, a resplendent VIP slug laying its own red carpet.

  Luci’s found dead—I said, working it out. Killed herself to evade the law. Video evidence proves it’s her, like it proved Molly Stocking lynched her boyfriend. Case closed. Luda vanishes into the night, never again to be seen.

  The way your mind works—she said. It was a threat rather than a compliment.

  I’m just like you—I said. Older and more fucked up but just exactly like you.

  I knew this would get under her skin deeper than any needle; as she postured there in my clothes with my every accumulated line reenacted by paint and contour shading, Luda could hardly say—I’m nothing like you!

  Unlike you, I can swipe the years away with some wet wipes and baby oil—she struck. I can wash your ugly old face down the plughole and be young again. You’re stuck with it.

  I’m out of here soon enough. If you’ve come this far, and I do sincerely hope you’ve been obliged to go over this mind-numbing testimony not just once but dozens of times, or more, you might be able to forgive me for stringing it out a little until the conclusion.

  I don’t want to stop, I don’t want it to end this way and just like the show, just like The Phantom, I could run and run and run—but there’re always curtains.

  You become me in the end—I said. I hope you’re ready. It happens so fast. Twenty-five years is nothing. It’s what the Phantom learns at the end. Beauty doesn’t last forever, not even a single lifetime. I was on a roll by this time, edit if you can. You can’t copy who I am, where I’ve been, what I’ve been through—

  There was a skipped heartbeat that didn’t come and then—

  What if I could?—she said, activating a smile.

  In languid slow motion, she set down the bloody cutter so big fat drips spotted coffee rings stamped like particle collision diagrams across the cover of the Phantom script on the G Plan Astro Coffee Table by the Martinelli Serpente lamp. I asked the only reasonable question.

  Why?—I said. Why go to all this trouble?

  And Luda said—It wouldn’t be much of a Hell if the Devil didn’t make the effort. It’s all about Pride, after all.

  The table was exactly five paces from where I stood, three from where the Devil preened, or it might have been Luda drawing herself up to full height, thrusting out latex bosoms, gathering the Glamour around her in crackling folds and fissures with such intensity I saw a blood-black borealis that might have been her charred angel wings red-shifting back to the eternal Fall.

  Rentboy. Kenny Trace. Bee Spalding. Victoria Marvell. Luci LaBang. The Double. El Diablo. Luda, the Player of Games. My son and my daughter. My custom-built destroyer. Mephistopheles in a lace-trimmed push-up bra.

  You asked about my drag name—she said. You wanted to know why Luda—

  And so she told me one last mesmerizing story; how after she’d fled from the velvet jail the Marvells prepared for her, she’d gone back to the sheltering streets, home to her wastrel kind’s ancestral hunting grounds, roaming free among the refuse sacks and temporary cardboard townships.

  With her instinctual grasp of their behavioral inclinations, she’d calculated correctly that the estranged Charles and Victoria would eventually meet on Wednesday lunchtimes to get drunk together and negotiate the conditions of their inevitable separation in McCloudie’s bar adjacent to the Vallhambra Theatre where they were sponsors. Neither of them ever paid attention to the grubby strip joint opposite on Gargoyle Street’s north side let alone stopped to register the waifish afterimage shuddering under black awnings across the busy street. Diluted once more to an anonymous transparency in the ever-reliable Gasglow rain, Penny came each week to spy on her parents as their marriage fell to bits behind glass.

  The gluey bonds that held the Marvells together were undone as she observed. And even as they quarreled, her undernourished reflection stood between them unseen, a ghost attending an empty chair.

  It was on one of those waterlogged Wednesday afternoons, she told me, when Luda went into a kind of meditative trance and from the still center of her altered perspective became aware for the first time of a line of fiery letters suspended above their three heads, spelling out the words ADULTS ONLY in McCloudie’s big window but in a blistering neon reverse clipped by the edge of the glass after the letter N.

  It could be read as the title on the cover of a book or show poster, she thought as she mouthed four syllables O ST LUDA, and that was it. The universe had bestowed on her a custom drag name, her very own. She was in that moment christened by unlikely circumstance in a backward masking baptism.

  When I get around to being a pop star, I’m going to call myself Saint Luda—she assured me. Like Madonna.

  What could I say? Naturally hers was a better story than mine, but I couldn’t resist poking holes.

  If you’d seen a bit more—I said—it would have read NO ST LUDA…

  She stuck out her tongue. You!

  For a moment it seemed we’d reached a stalemate. I was still standing. We could both still smile at each other, creating feedback.

  But she wasn’t done yet. Luda had something else to tell me, something I needed to know and to understand before she was finished with her implacable formally constructed vengeance.

  She’d been messaging an old friend of mine, she explained, a bitter ex-lover. Or was it that she’d contacted him with a business no-brainer back when she’d set this whole ornate scheme in motion? She couldn’t quite remember where the loop had started to loop.

  Prompted by a young “fan” of the Troupe’s sketches online, Luda explained, a moribund Jeremy Painter had found the motivation, the willpower, to lift his shorn skull from the bar where it lay among the rest of the empties. Mounting a last-ditch effort to remind an uncaring world of his undying worth, he’d pitched and sold a tell-all biography, parlayed by his agent and ghostwriter into a six-part drama series bible based on Jeremy’s life and experiences with the Troupe, his tussles with genius, scandal, and addiction, his forerunner status as a gender rebel, his betrayal at the beringed, red-nailed hands of Luci LaBang, his side of the many splendored story.

  How many of you were in on this?—I said, addressing Luda’s multitude of faces as well as any other possible accomplices. I didn’t need an answer; all I had to do was count the bodies, the broke and bitter, the left-behind I’d trampled thoughtlessly beneath spike heels on my red-carpet strut to this reckoning.

  All it takes is setup—said Luda. Set dressing. Glamour. You see what I want you to see—

  They can’t do the Troupe without Luci LaBang—I quavered, my substance evaporating in a shock wave. It’s my story too. You wouldn’t—he’s not capable—I heard myself try to explain, as if she’d gotten the script pages muddled up again—but she hadn’t.

  It’s got nothing to do with what you think. They don’t need you—said Luda, who could rinse my years from her face and step into the spotlight as the me I would never be again. It would be easier if you just went away altogether and left this to me.

  When she exposed white teeth her face, my own exaggerated to perfection, became an oncoming locomotive snowplow.

  You’re too old to be Luci LaBang—said Luda, making festive roadkill of me.

  * * *

  —

  They say how could you do it? How could you take on the Devil?

  How can you go up against someone who plays the game of Golden Dames five moves ahead?

  Plan six moves ahead.

  Stop at nothing.

  There’s a common mistake Old Nick makes in more than one of His Satanic Majesty’s celebrated attempts to outwit chess players, backwoods fiddle maestros, or saintly blacksmiths, and it’s to view the world at all times through the bifocals of Duality, as if it’s all blurred or all sharp. All buy, all sell. All power, all weakness. All rise and all fall, like empires and economies, with nothing in between.

  Mercurius, on the other hand, has three faces, the Good, the Bad, and the Absurd, the Up, the Down, the In. The Left, the Right, the Sideways. Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The Bought, the Sold, the Free.

  They offered you a chance to reset me back to zero—Luda said as if I needed to be reminded of Victoria Marvell’s clammy basement transaction—What did you say?

  Would it make a difference?—I said and it was hard to know what else I could add without spoiling the charade she’d worked so hard to make convincing.

  I decided not to tell her how she’d given herself away in the Ancient Animals gallery, and again at the Marvell house. Only I would ever know how badly she’d failed her final exam.

  Cast your minds back, if they haven’t been lulled into an irreversible vegetative retreat by now, and you might just find there some trace memory of that leaden Saturday night when Luda and I argued for the first time. Our pointless row interrupted the lesson I had planned, quite fortuitously foiling my attempts to serve up a mighty Secret of the Glamour I considered she’d finally earned. It had been time to instruct Luda in the Grand Mystère that is how best to obscure the telltale swell of a smooth cock and its attendant shiny balls by easing the whole kit, cue and all, into the conveniently placed snooker pocket of one’s own unsuspecting inguinal canal.

  That was before it all went to hell in a handbag.

  The demanding role of Victoria Marvell was in all respects but one a tour de force; for want of a hole into which to hammer a nail Luda’s Oscar-baiting triumph fell afoul of the judging panel at the last hurdle when it became clear that straps of gaffer tape in Union flag crisscrosses were insufficient to censor the bereaved mother’s ballooning nads.

  That was when I was sure they were all her; each scrupulously crafted Glamour she’d woven like I’d taught her gave her away like a school crest, or the chrome badge on a car grille. Some say style is defined by all the things you do wrong, the quirks of the teacher passed down that prevent you from achieving a faultless performance, the tics that make you human and distinctive and relatable, and in every imitated move Luda made I could see my own ham-fisted techniques learned and repeated. Molly Stocking. Miss Spalding. Victoria Marvell. Maiden. Mother. Crone. Reduced to cartoons.

  The whole improbable three-act Hollywood hero fable told à la ronde from several different points of view remained uncorroborated by anyone but Luda; the damned boy-become-girl hero, the twisted and powerful fairy-tale parents, the escape.

  The Crow Mother, the Nursery, the Homeless Boy; every improbable kink and bend in the story of Luda and the Marvells spun by a single unreliable narrator.

  It’s up to you to decide if that narrator was Luda, or if it was me.

  Given my insider knowledge, it was inevitable I would occupy the ethical uplands and reject Mrs. Marvell’s generous offer of my very own obedient sex genie. It was a Brothers Grimm bargain, a moral hypothetical with no real-world penalties. I had done the right thing and Luda had been there to witness.

  But Luda licked her lips. You should have taken your chance to bind me—she said, deftly volleying my show of mercy back at me as an act of mortal stupidity. I could have been everything you wanted for as long as you wanted.

  I noticed she’d closed the curtains, to deter any nosy neighbors with a Rear Window fixation.

  You were—I said.

  I’d made up my mind, or had it made up for me by circumstance. Only one of us would flounce out of that room. My room. You’ll know that already, which makes this even more frustrating, I expect. Me talking, you listening, judging.

  It was me who closed the door at my back in that final gladiatorial arena. I surrendered to the inexplicable Random that lay between Good and Evil. I opened myself to opportunity, offered up a prayer to pretty Mercurius.

  Are you mad?—I heard her say. And I held my breath the way you’d hold a conviction, just long enough to make it seem convincing.

  She said—Being you would drive anyone mad.

  There’s one last thing I should mention about the Glamour; you may think after all this it’s the sort of “magic” that relies on dope smoke, mirrors, and gullibility, and I’d be the last person to tell you that old grab bag of gimmicks isn’t a big part of what we do, but sometimes the Glamour is all about accomplishing the impossible and being in exactly the right place and moment when coincidence strikes.

  If I was mad could I do this?—I smirked, and snapped my fingers, throwing caution like a well-fed Christian to the starving pride, abandoning myself to the quicksilver rapids of contingency in the sure and certain conviction the Glamour was pumped, primed, and willing to deliver on my rash confidence!