In a world like that one, of course, there was only one question: How much would I be willing to pay?

  I planted my ass cheeks in a welcoming crater of deflated foam and cracked bull’s-blood faux leather, worn by bums of the ages into the all-purpose glute socket of a chair designer’s fever dreams. The same effect was reproduced, with an artisanal level of detail, on each of the premises’ chairs as a mass-manufactured Pop Art decay. The fractured laminate foldout menu hadn’t changed since 1933 except to add a vegan “V” option. In a giant leap for humankind, it was now possible to order vegan bacon and vegan sausage rolls, along with vegan onions.

  My choice of seating was premeditated, sited a little too close to the gender-neutral “restrooms” that came complete with their own micro-climate of cheap antiseptic and urine, this test of my olfactory tolerance received its intended reward in a decent view of Rentboy’s dorsal architecture.

  Nice legs. Tight butt. Skinny. The rest, it was hard to tell. He’d scrub up well, that was for sure. That other thing, the nasty spicy yearning I tried and tried to blank with a homemade mantra, was simple envy.

  He wasn’t the sort of sensitive hard man I tended to swoon over. The potential I saw in Rentboy was something else.

  I spot a boy like that, all emaciated and waiflike with cheekbones to kill for, the first thing I think about is: How much better would he look in drag? I’m sorry, I do. I dress people up in my head. What was it about this one’s derelict life that couldn’t be sorted with a wig and a boa? Unseen, unnoticed as a spotty boy, he’d stride spotlit through the world in wigs and heels, an object of desire, not disregard.

  Just then, I caught a glimpse of a disgusting old pervert in the next booth; his sly, twisted grin and greedy gaze spoke of debauch and rot that ate down to the soul’s marrow…

  I remembered why I hated the Rendezvous. The creepy old cunt was me.

  There were mirrors all around the booths, compelling me to confront my sagging chops from every angle. Long ago, when I was twenty-one, those mirrors offered an agreeably Warholian mass reproduction of my image. On that wilted day in late spring, two-thirds of the way through my fiftieth year, the traitorous roués in the etched panes convened as the mocking members of a heartless, elderly, and unforgettably corrupt jury.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d react with horror or relief when Luda finally appeared, if she ever did.

  I don’t know why I had this odd presentiment—there was something about her that was all fate and doom and Greek Drama. Even the name.

  Luda.

  It all comes back to Luda. Luda. Luda. Player of games.

  I was enraptured by the spectacular artificiality of how she went about her business. Like Supergirl’s evil duplicate, her laser-blue eyes could cook a steak with a single withering stare. Her spookiness offered a real opportunity to understand something not made to be known.

  The Uncanny Valley, they call it: when the simulation’s real, but not real enough to be comfortable.

  What else could I do but circle back to Rentboy?

  I ordered a double espresso for my nerves, knowing it would only amplify my everyday anxiety. I stood, legs akimbo, at some terrible crossroads where devils swap skills and youth and other mortal perishable things for lightly soiled souls. One false move meant damnation.

  Rentboy shuffled uncomfortably, arranging those heroin cheeks and hairline lips into an aristocratic pout. I saw for a moment the mouth of a mosquito. A bloodsucker proboscis extending in a predatory air kiss. I tore my eyes away, even though I knew how much it would hurt to stop looking at him.

  Excuse me—are you?

  I supposed I was. Even I had to admit it. The waitress, wearing her selfie face, beamed brighter than a star’s dying farewell. My eyes made a swift sideways saccade to make sure Rentboy was keeping tabs on this power exchange. If he suspected I was semi-famous, it could change the whole dynamic; I was being handed an opportunity to morph, with a single signed autograph, from creepy uncle to bachelor playboy daddy.

  I thought it was you! I hope you don’t mind. I just started in here—can I have a selfie?

  Of course, I obliged with a flustered—Hope you don’t mind. I’m supposed to be meeting someone. Tall, legs right up to here, bit boyish, looks like a model, copper hair like Cleopatra…

  The waitress started to shake her head halfway through that second sentence.

  Nobody who looked like a model had come within nautical miles of this dump for an age. The models had moved on, to NorWest, and the trendy reclaimed working-class ghettos of Charliesburn and Agnesland, on a languid prowl for successful online influencers now the musicians and boy poets had lost their luster and their earning capacity.

  Did I want, did I need, another espresso?

  Luda was fifteen minutes late, so why not? Why not accelerate my already pounding heart to a Dutch techno blur of arrhythmic beats?

  The clock hands juggled scythe blades in smooth, indifferent arcs through the waving, grainlike hours and minutes. My reflection, in the relentless mirror walls of the Rendezvous, displayed a field of brow furrows, plowed ever deeper, yielding ever less in the way of fresh produce I might add.

  I don’t know about you but that’s the way I find my mind working after sinking three espressos, which I had, leaving bitter sparks on my lips and prophetic slops on the mug’s interior. For a moment, something there on the brim looked like death wearing a top hat.

  My career as a fairground fortune-teller foundered in that moment, abbreviated by a looming shadow, deliberately obscuring the sun’s halfhearted attempt to rise above the plucked trees of early spring and drain its solar dilution into my coffee mug.

  He sat opposite me, as if I’d invited him, blocking my undead reflection with his own face as precisely as moon eclipses sun.

  Rentboy?

  WTF?

  I looked around in a panic. I felt certain he planned to threaten and extort me right there, in broad daylight. I’d been caught staring at his arse…

  What age was he? Could I get in trouble?

  Can I get you something?

  The waitress had every right to be suspicious now. I couldn’t blame her for frowning and tensing up. She could smell a rat in his underpants. No one who was there in the Rendezvous that day would ever be able to identify the odors he introduced to their experience, other than to agree on a uniform foulness. The Rendezvous encouraged a bohemian clientele of guitarists, rappers, and painters, but there was an unspoken understanding that the café’s hospitality drew a line at homeless, possibly infectious junkies wearing Open Grave by Calvin Klein.

  He’s not with me—I started to say but, I was wrong about that.

  Red velvet cake, eh! It was Rentboy’s voice, but it was Luda who unleashed the first strike devastator of her confident, generous smile. The teeth so straight and white only a millionaire or a classical god could hope to look that finished.

  Rentboy straightened his spine, raising an imperious delicate fingered hand, all white trash in Elysium! I looked on, appalled at first, until Rentboy’s features melted, rearranged, and repositioned the social frame.

  I’m so sorry—we just finished shooting over at the ice rink and we’re both desperate for a quick one.

  Her diction was nearly flawless; the crystal-cut consonants and elastic vowels of Gasglow’s upper middle class squeezed through a vocal apparatus more accustomed to whining glottal stops. What could I do but relax and enjoy the show? She was determined to prove she could handle everything.

  I play a violent ruffian, as you can see. My colleague here, whom you probably recognize, is a ruthless, unrepentant killer and we’d both kill for a couple of drinks—

  We don’t do alcohol until after six—she said.

  He winked at me, then at her.

  Just this once. Go on. We’ll swap two drinks for a selfie! And a couple of slices of that red velvet cake you’re famous for.

  Just one—I said, pursing my lips.

  He ordered vodka Red Bull as I remember. I had Watchtower and tonic. Luda was already best friends with the waitress.

  I’m not famous yet—Luda confided in the awestruck girl. She is.

  I’d taken years to learn how to master those facial muscles. She was a natural. Thin lips seemed to unroll and inflate. Luda’s eyes, nose, and mouth emerged from Rentboy’s underfed sulk as an optical illusion at first, one of those trompe l’oeil pictures; a molded mask that goes from convex to concave as the light changes and the shadows shift; a clever how the fuck can that be this?…as if a puzzle worked itself out in flesh.

  The waitress, stunned, walked away. She looked back, confused.

  Red velvet cake?

  Rentboy smiled, reading me like a beer mat, then lowered his face to his hands, rolling the left eyelid back to squeeze and flip a brown contact onto the tip of one finger.

  I registered a flash of halcyon blue that took my breath.

  Rentboy repeated the procedure with his right eye; there was no one else he could possibly be.

  Luda used Rentboy’s face to look at me.

  Hey you—she said.

  I suppose I should have guessed, but there I was, paralyzed again in the lagoon clarity of Luda’s turquoise eyes.

  I know who you are—she said.

  Who was I? I had to think of something fast.

  I’d like to think you do. We only met on Wednesday and I haven’t forgotten who you are. They say early-onset Alzheimer’s gets earlier all the time. I’d have that looked at if I were you.

  His only reaction was to roll out a red-carpet introduction.

  I read your online diary when I was thirteen—he said earnestly. You changed my life you did…and this. Your old place is just across the street through the park. You started here all those years ago. It seemed like a good place to start something.

  How could I fail to be seduced? He’d done her research.

  Go on then—I said. And that was the end of me. Go on.

  You know things. Secrets no one else knows.

  A moist slice of red velvet cake glided in to land. Rentboy, his eyes cooled back to brown again, wasted no time forking it into his head as if supplying a garbage disposal chute. I swear I blinked twice, and the cake was no more.

  Gone like Luda’s smoky, seductive self-possession, replaced by a needy, aggressive whine that brought bad news of poverty, illness, and a hastily abandoned state education.

  Yet as she shimmied back in her seat, I could see Luda’s big super-red and white smile glowing, as an X-ray trace through Rentboy’s sallow parchment skin. I could see her luscious ghost playing peek-a-boo behind his mask of frail mortality.

  I don’t know how you can eat like that and keep your figure—I said. Of course I did know; twenty-five years ago, I could gorge myself like a pasha on chocolate, chips, and Charlie, and still limbo into a size 10 skintight rubber dress for a night out.

  You don’t look so bad yourself.

  Flattery gets you a first-class ticket to everywhere, I thought.

  …If my dad did drag!—he shaded me.

  You’ve come to the wrong place if you’re on the hunt for Daddy—I shot back. But play your cards right, you might have found yourself a fairy godmother, babes.

  Looking back, it wasn’t a bad improv, in trying circumstances. The whole Dad thing’s a sore spot for me, as you’ll discover soon enough.

  We should go back to your house—he said.

  If I could live it, over and over, again. More than the sex and the drugs. More than the delicious horror. It would have been worth it for that moment when I felt viable again!

  I swear I saw what I understood to be a whole new appreciation for me, rising like dawn over the beaches of Tahiti, done double in those boundless ocean eyes.

  In hindsight, all I saw was the blinding, terrifying come-on the red squirrel sees in the headlights before life is smashed into roadkill.

  I won’t say a word—I promised. I don’t think Dominick would care anyway. He loves you.

  The truth is I was all over him and it was all over by then and he knew it. I sensed in him the purpose I’d been seeking. A focus at my time of life. I had knowledge I could pass on. I missed the next bit when he spoke and said—

  I want to learn how to disappear into someone else…

  I missed it.

  So, what’s the going rate for a hot little homeless boy these days? I asked, all worldly.

  Blow job for the price of a cup of coffee—Luda said with a contemptuous sneer. For you, darling.

  I waggled a finger to attract the check. Reflexively, I was signaling for a taxi, calling for a doctor—anything to escape this pauper’s coffin of a booth, this stale crypt where the dead and the living rendezvous.

  My mum didn’t want me. Dad didn’t want me—Luda was saying. No one did, so they left me outside that place where the girls go to get their abortions over by the convent…

  He was talking about Mercy Mansions, making me sweat.

  I said—I need a proper drink. You’re welcome to join me.

  I was homeless—he said. Like this for real. They found me.

  I shook my head—The police?

  The Marvells!—he insisted. I have to tell you about the Marvells—he said. Like the poet, not the superheroes. The Marvells. What else could I do?

  You must!—I insisted.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t remember much about the taxi ride home. I have a fond recollection of his hand gripping mine. We had a bag of booze we’d bought.

  There was something about an intricate close-up on a worn, buffed Yale key unlocking the door onto my narrow hallway at the top of the stone stairs—the bedroom to the left—opposite my private dressing room.

  The living room, the open-plan kitchen, and the working toilet are to the left, which is where I brought him. All of it new again and bright. Showing him around the valued things I’d accumulated, I got to know my dear possessions afresh and loved them so much more for steadfastly sticking by me all these years, through the bad times and the loneliness.

  The pert, self-conscious three-legged phone table with its red, yellow, and blue arrangement of Toot-A-Loop vintage bangle-phones. The umbrella stand, in the shape of a pelican, or a toucan, or some other bird of paradise, bristling with brightly patterned umbrellas. The elephant grass fronds. The sunburst mirrors. The transgender barometer from a novelty store in Berlin’s Schöneberg. A collage poster for the Troupe’s Edinburgh Festival debut hung next to a bus shelter ad for our final TV special.

  I poured Rentboy a long glass of Watchtower vodka spritzed with a haze of soda and garnished with a lime slice. I imagined myself as some sun-hatted, sunstruck, field-tilling mortal in a Greek tale, entertaining an incarnate divinity in fleshy guise, hoping I could get him and her mortal, as they say.

  I spectated all agog as my boy drained the cocktail with a flapper flip of her wrist.

  Do Luda again—I begged, hoping it didn’t sound like begging. It’s amazing.

  You don’t like me this way?—Rentboy pouted.

  I think boys generally look better in makeup and heels. But no—I just think it’s amazing what you do. I’d like to see…

  His body language softened, heralding let’s call it a fantastic translation from the harsh glottal stops of Rentboy’s physicality to the liquid silver trumpet syntax that announced Luda’s imperial entrance.

  As I watched, impressed, muscle memory eased out the hunched shoulders, melting into a sinuous stripper flex of spine and arm, so that Luda seemed to be shaking herself loose from Rentboy’s cramped whipped-dog posture.

  I understood now why she needed me to get her to the next level of the Simulation.

  There was something deeply fake, unnatural, and artificial about her performance. Decadent, like the art movement.

  Tell me more—I said, settled with my drink on the sofa beside her. You said something about the Marvells.

  I drank Watchtower neat as she talked, perched on the silvery rim of drunkenness with the best seat in the house. I poured more. Sat back among newly familiar cushions, simply dazzled, intoxicated, overwhelmed, by Luda’s presence in my room. This boy, Luda in disguise with diamonds, or the other way around, had entered me like a drug.

  Charles Marvell was fifty-five, Luda explained. I struggled to reorient myself. How much had we smoked? Why were numbers such a struggle?

  Who the fuck was Charles Marvell?

  In Luda’s description of this mysterious mister, Charles Marvell appears as handsome, predatory, hawkish, with hair like abundant tides of steel wire, immaculately turned out in Brioni, Patek Philippe, and Louboutin. Body by Peloton. Mind by de Sade and Machiavelli.

  It was easy to picture the fiend, I assured her. I’d seen his type in action movies and comics. The unlikelihood of him existing in the real world almost made it more convincing.

  What age were you?—I pried.

  He counted backward in his head until I told him to stop.

  Wait. There’s this pair of sexy millionaire perverts trolling for homeless jailbait and God help us—you were there—I said, clutching my handbag.

  It’s not funny to me—he said.

  I assured him I wouldn’t crack a smile before, during, or after his recital.

  I won’t utter a titter—I promised. Let alone the guffaw I had planned. Chuckles are off the menu.

  I drew an imaginary zip across my lips. Looking back, I maybe was being a little glib. I get like that when I’m drunk; I don’t want to hear bad news.

  To tell the truth, I’m of the opinion that everything’s funny when the curtain comes down. Our lives are rock hard candy with one word—Irony—written in sour sugar icing all the way down to the hole in the center of everything. And if it doesn’t feel even slightly funny to you, it’ll be downright hysterical to someone watching from a safe distance.