I’ve heard there’s ghosts in here—I said, accessing Twankey mode. I hope you’re all right sharing a bedroom with a ghost or two, Aladdin!

  My attempt to knock her off balance had the opposite effect of propelling Luda into character. Light of foot, quick of wit, Luda became Aladdin peering nervously beneath an imaginary bed as we flew off book.

  As long as the ghost’s paying his share of the bill—she shot back.

  With what?—I said. Ghost money?

  Luda pulled out her empty pockets, cartoonishly glum.

  It’s more money than what we’ve got—she said, wide-eyed. Anyway, I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?

  I’m more likely to see a ghost than I am money! It’s money I don’t believe in!

  Then suspicious.

  How did you pay for this room anyway?

  I promised him a free fluff ’n’ fold—I winked.

  Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?

  Float settled back in his seat as we ping-ponged surreal improv, pooching up his lower lip as the signal he was taking mental notes while nodding intermittently, like my dad had done eighteen months into his Parkinson’s diagnosis.

  Can we try that over again?

  Float was fooled by Luda. I wasn’t.

  Anyway, I don’t believe in ghosts! And as for money…

  And that’s how it went until Float, quivering with an intensity I’d last seen in a kitten chattering after a blue tit on a twig, clapped his Michelin mitts together.

  Let’s have your best eight—ah, Luda—said Dom, and we settled back to enjoy a hard-hitting, uncompromising interpretation of “To Sir with Love” that made up for in ambition and sheer volume whatever it lacked in finesse.

  As the last keening note splintered against the ceiling beams, Dom pretended to take a tough line.

  We really appreciate you turning up like this but you’re not on the list and we weren’t expecting you. We just need a minute, love.

  Luda nodded, smiled like the sun coming up, and skipped off, swinging a Goodbye Kitty! satchel across her shoulder, each inevitable Muybridge moment of her exit enshrined in my memory.

  The only thing I can say in my defense is how I was aware of something odd about her heel-spin and the afterimage she left behind. A faint double exposure seemed to follow her, a Kirlian aura trail, an ectoplasmic smear on the backdrop of reality.

  What are you so scared of, Lu?—said Float, turning to look at me, cutting to the chase.

  He was right. What was I scared of? Competition? I couldn’t compete with Luda for youth, or for beauty.

  Why was I afraid of her? you’ll be asking yourselves.

  Did I fear my fragile heart would break if I was made to face her every day and dream about her every night?

  She’d have a muscular, open-minded boyfriend with a well-paid job in the arts. Girls like her always did. A bisexual photographer probably, or a radical digital artist with a six-pack, a vision of tomorrow, and rampant bipolar symptoms.

  That flawless Fibonacci sequence symmetry. Her youth and her potential. All her numbers adding up to the Golden Ratio.

  I excused myself and followed Luda to the facilities where I fussed at the bathroom mirror, making sure I was close enough to hear her toneless humming and the sound of her youthful, exuberant piss sluicing the porcelain. From the reverberations, it was easy to calculate the angle of arc, the spray trajectory, plop, and splash.

  Put it like this: There are some things you just can’t hide.

  I heard the latch slide back and out she strode from the cubicle, a film star resurrected from an upright golden coffin. Big generous smile. Cheekbones of a sexbot. A fuckdroid. Skin smooth and dusted with a pearlescent haze I can’t explain. And then the eyes: South Sea island lagoon water. The turquoise impossible eyes of a deadly ghost fox woman from a Japanese folktale.

  I hope I didn’t hold you both up.

  Luda met her reflection with a bold grin of pillar-box red, checking the minutiae of her slap for errors no one but me would ever notice.

  Both of us? It would take the world’s strongest man to hold up Dominick Float for thirty seconds, love—I said, making a moue.

  She looked indestructible; my cue to drop the bomb I’d been saving since her audition.

  Pee sounds different when you’re standing up, babes.

  Luda only smiled, all glossy red lips and white teeth as regular and even as the headstones in a military cemetery, unleashing the pitiless light of an exploding hydrogen bomb from those Pacific atoll eyes.

  You think I’m over-egging it? Just wait.

  My future is in your hands—she shrugged, handing me the scrunched rose of a paper towel she’d used to dab Picasso Mon Rouge and gloss from her top lip. That was the worst of it in the end. She felt nothing at all. She didn’t have to feel anything because she knew how it would go. She knew exactly what move I would pull next.

  As I later discovered, Luda’s strategy was to stay five moves ahead in the game, and it was a game, darlings, with Luda laughing at the rest of us as we flapped to catch up, still in denial we were already glued to the strands of her web.

  The name of the game was Golden Dames.

  Like I said, it wasn’t jealousy that set me on edge. Well, truth to tell, it’s always been jealousy with me, but this was something beyond all that.

  Something about Luda was so familiar I wanted to scream and put my face right through that mirror. She was my dream girl, my fantasy Jungian anima. She was everything I’d wanted and wanted to be. The girl I hung out with in dreams, who knew me best of all, looked exactly like Luda.

  That was probably the best audition we’ve seen—Float said, as if we’d watched Luda take off, fly around the room on gilded angel wings, and shit rainbow tinsel fireworks.

  Which, to all intents and purposes, we had.

  Is it a good idea to let a complete unknown sashay in off the street and do Molly Stocking’s job? That’s what I thought about saying and—

  How come nobody seems to have seen her CV? What else has she done? Who’s her agent? Where’s her portfolio?

  —but I knew it sounded ridiculous. Luda had rendered Molly obsolete.

  Maybe she has no representation at all—he mused. You must admit, she was good. Raw but good. There’s work to be done…

  Isn’t it funny she just turned up and was that good? I said, suspiciously. Out of nowhere?

  And he was like—Isn’t it lucky for us she did?

  You don’t think she was a bit masculine?

  He peered at me.

  Aladdin’s a boy!

  That was it. I couldn’t hold back any longer…

  She is a boy!

  I don’t know why I blurted it out like that, but I did. I was guilty of misgenderment in the first degree. I knew I looked bad.

  Luda! That’s a drag name!—I blundered on, fumbling the ball over the goal line. We don’t know if she identifies as female twenty-four seven, do we?

  Float only shrugged.

  I don’t care. I’m asking her back—he said. We got lucky here. It feels supernatural. I need to go home, pour myself an enormous Old-Fashioned, and contemplate the loving grace of God.

  Float lifted his banyan-trunk arms in surrender or supplication. A Space Invader waving the white flag to cover for his buddies dropping bombs on the digital skyline of planet Earth.

  I want her to come back on Friday. I want to see you do the Mangle scene with her.

  She’s a boy playing a girl playing a boy.

  I love it—he said. And he meant it. I love that.

  He was right, but I’d witnessed doom in Luda’s luxury swimming-pool eyes, and I was right too. There was a skull-and-crossbones rippling beneath Luda’s generous smile.

  We agreed with a sparkling, eagerly nodding Luda to meet again to talk through the general challenges ahead, and the specific intricacies of the Mangle scene.

  Delighted, Luda flashed me several sidelong conspiratorial glances, as though we were accomplices in a crime, then spun on her heel and was gone, trailing a scented wake.

  I see what you mean now—Float said. Up close. Doesn’t matter.

  The second hand was on the move once more.

  I couldn’t wait for the torn-off calendar pages to bring us together again.

  * * *

  —

  I’m already starting to look better: Contouring for the stage is its own discipline and I like to take my time; the audience must be able to read your expressions from the back stalls and the gods. The joy, the surprise, the pain, the sadness, and the victory should be visible from near Earth orbit.

  Sometimes, as in now, as I attempt to plaster over the incremental damage time seems to pride itself on inflicting, I imagine myself a specialist mortician, called in at the last minute to renovate the corpse of Luci LaBang.

  How to make the dear old queen palatable to a future she’ll never inhabit?

  Looks to me like the grand old dame’s been down there for a while, Sergeant, partially preserved by peat and compost.

  That explains the leathery countenance, Constable. Observe the cracks and folds. The withered landscape of her once strikingly beautiful face. Filled in with mud and goat droppings.

  They’ve done their best to tart her up on the slab but there’s only so far artifice can stretch, and even the mortician’s commitment to her art can only ever apologize for the ravages of nature.

  I know that face.

  This is her story, not mine. I can only watch through laced fingers.

  The death clown is here, seeking retribution.

  Widow Twankey takes the stage.

  Can we try that over again?

  Every now and then, you’ll be invited to consider the truth of a “true story” that stretches the bounds of possibility so far “possibility” might as well mean “alligator” or “pencil case,” or just about anything else you want it to mean.

  That was me.

  The way things have a way of going, what with this, that, and the other, I wound up ten minutes late at the “world famous” Café Rendezvous, where I’d arranged to meet Luda.

  Here, I’d been promised with a wicked twinkle, she’d explain to me whatever it was that had happened between us following Friday’s rehearsals.

  We’re on the South Side now, three miles out from the Left Bank of the river Dare, among the magic-carpet-colored stalls and storefront barrows of the Asian Quarter where pyramids of precariously stacked melons and plantains share space with spiky bouquets of Day-Glo flowers cut from cardboard, bargain prices sketched in Sharpie ink strokes.

  Me, I’d traded up to the trendy West End almost twenty-five years ago, after the Troupe’s first big splash on TV. Before all that commotion, I’d whiled away my late teens and early twenties here, working hard to build a normal life for myself and for Rose and the baby that never was. I’d moved into Rose’s rented apartment three stories up on a row of architecturally noteworthy red-brick tenement houses carefully wrapped by its designers in an orbit plan around the hub of Spiral Park, or Tit Acres as the beauty spot was known to locals and tourists alike, a result of its distinctive mammary silhouette.

  Unchanging like the Sphinx or the moon, evergreen with decay, miraculously self-renewing as the centuries come and go, the Café Rendezvous abides, cryogenically frozen in that world-famous Sci-Fi Deco Gasglow style while generations prosper and wilt, leaving their cries for help or attention in etched ballpoint tabletop graffiti. All those risible promises of eternal devotion, vows of success, now fading and overwritten; names of former showbiz hopefuls with no one left alive even to forget them. Those initials scratched patiently would outlast their owners, embedded in Formica time capsules, to be puzzled over by caffeinated, wild-eyed amateur historians of the twenty-fifth century.

  All those lovers married now to people they hate, each other more than likely. All the boasts, the flags and manifestos, the abandoned street plans for teenage Utopias. Pop songs gone stale, lyrics scribbled over, lives remixed like landfill under the latest layer of the palimpsest, promising a new flyover with a more direct route to the cemetery.

  On the smoked-ham glaze of the walls hung framed, signed photographs of visiting entertainment stars, the radioactive half-life of their fame decaying to a black-and-white afterburn—a cooling silver fizz that persists when the light goes out and the stellar halo loses its heat—this parade of now unidentifiable mugshots and canceled TV specials. Who remains to nod in recognition at the names? Rickie Blend? Zita Vermouth? Mr. Biceps? Lou Coil? Saxy Berzerk? The Perfect Men?

  Do I have to go on?

  But you do remember the Rendezvous. Everybody remembers the Rendezvous or somewhere like it, where you and your friends “hung out” in the uneasy years between Happy Meals and awards ceremonies.

  Here I’d met girlfriends and boyfriends, all of us crying and laughing, elevated and wide-eyed on drugs or raw love or simply being young and so wet behind the ears you could bathe in it. Here I’d huddled with homegrown visionaries devising elaborate blueprints for life, with accompanying charts and calendars; two of which came to fruition at least.

  Think of the Rendezvous as a nexus, a plexus, a Bohemian Ground Zero; haunt of freeze-dried poets, pop ghouls, resting actors, and the dregs of the dreaming classes since 1933!

  Since exiting the driverless taxi that brought me back to my gnarly roots, I’d made numerous rapid consultations with every available reflective surface to arrive at the angle that best flattered my features.

  Ever since that day, somewhere around age eleven, when I’d first taken quite seriously the lifetime suspicion that I was the star turn in some invisible observer’s dodgy entertainment—somewhere in a parallel universe or distant galaxy—every move I made was a self-conscious calculated nod to this unseen audience; each gesture and joke, every shed tear designed to be appreciated and applauded.

  Mine was a calculated slow-motion vogue through life. If I kept it interesting, I reasoned out, Scheherazade-style, maybe they’d keep watching, or listening. Maybe they wouldn’t pull the “early death; unfulfilled potential” lever before I’d been given my singular opportunity to show how diverting I could be. Maybe they’d be willing me to get through it all unscathed.

  Now, I’m sorry if these admittedly toxic levels of ultra-vanity can be hard to process; think of it as my personal response to a crawling permanent sensation of being observed and judged by a concealed audience. Call it madness or call it self-affirmation but if I can’t convince myself I’m great, how will I persuade the Spectators?

  It’s been an inexhaustible theme in therapy for me going back decades. I’m not saying everyone’s like this, but I think a lot of us are.

  That afternoon, on my way to meet Luda, the spring sun showed up watery and diffuse, losing its circumference to white haze in a way that reminded me of how an effervescent painkiller froths at the edges when you drop it into a glass of water on the morning after a self-sabotaging bender.

  Which, coincidentally, this was. Just fifteen hours previously I’d ruthlessly annihilated half a bottle of Watchtower vodka, before vaping a quarter of hash and settling down to half of a Game of Games season 6 box set, which everyone was watching, that year. I checked out when they brought zombie mammoths into it.

  I shared a dressing room with genies and evil wizards every day at work; what use did I have for gnomes, man-eating cockatrices, cock-eating manatrices, or whatever they were meant to be? You have to draw the line somewhere.

  I beelined across the gum-pocked sidewalk, focused on my immediate goals, which waited in the opaque interiors beyond the Rendezvous’s ziggurat-etched glass—too preoccupied to register the optimistic shuffle and nod of a whippety-looking youth punting this month’s issue of Homeless Times in the toothless socket of an adjacent doorway that now stood as a memorial to the final resting place of one recently deceased branch of the Bite Me! sandwich franchise.

  Why don’t the top 1 percent just give a bit to everybody and we’d all be rich?

  I wondered if Luda was the sort who’d give money to a desperate boy like this one as I passed him with an apologetic grunt. The bell on its spring above the door rattled a familiar welcome.

  Her generation came from a different place. Luda. I had no idea how her morality might work. She had a bad attempt at a finishing school accent. Was she rich? I wondered extravagantly. Luda.

  Ten minutes later, I found myself reduced to wondering what Luda would do if she ever showed up.

  Seen through glass, framed by etched Aztec borders, the Homeless Times boy appeared stuffed; a specimen in a museum case, with a shamefaced admission revealing how people once died in the Middle Ages. People like us forced to live without penicillin, Marvel Comics, or TV. Our tour guide would apologize for any upset, explaining how they’d once roamed the land looking like this. Getting away with it.

  Seventeen, or thereabouts, all poxy, snottery, and viral—three of the Seven Dwarves of Poverty. I could make out speckled glue blisters under his Queen of the Nile nose along with the scintillant beauty crusts at the corners of his lips that signaled the presence of freshly scabbed cold sores. A junkie more than likely. Rent boy.

  I decided there and then to think of him as Rentboy, an Irvine Welsh character, fluent in demotic. Poet of the commonplace.

  Herpes simplex notwithstanding, he had lovely lips. Hunting-bow lips.

  Rentboy was hot, to tell the truth, if you like the heroin-chic thing, and these days I can’t be sure what I do or don’t like. After seven years of enforced and unwelcome celibacy, all I’m willing to confirm is this: Left to its own devices in the cesspit of abstinence, the imagination trends dirtier not cleaner.

  In a world where every existing thing has commodity value, I wondered how much Rentboy would charge for a blow job.