But I’m far from heartless. Split me from gizzard to gills if you must; you’ll see a big pink squidgy Valentine beating below these convincing fake breasts, based entirely on my own design and costing less than a pair of tights and a couple of bags of lentils, I should add. Compare that with the prices they charge for silicon and latex, and you’re looking at an unbeatable bargain.

  I’ll fill you in on my tit trick when it comes back into the story in a more meaningful way. It’s one of the countless secrets I passed on to Luda, one unique aspect of the Glamour, so you’ll get to hear about it when she does. Right around now, I expect you’re much more interested in steering this back to the Marvells.

  Luda painted a vivid, arousing picture of squalor and exploitation as he asked me to visualize him, as I ask you now—in Rentboy camo, malnourished, starving, shivering outside St. Jude’s subway station, downtown Gasglow. His inner compass spinning like a comedy bow tie, unable to find polar north. His future sitting on the end of his nose with the off switch in its hand.

  You can see how they’d film it—picture the strobe effect of legs scissoring past in quick time. December crowds blur into a picket fence of multiple overlapping limbs while the poor destitute teenager remains unmoving at his pitch, and the light changes; the cinematic equivalent of a statue placed in an alcove to commemorate the unholy martyrdom of some unlucky saint.

  He is overlooked, unseen. Any last traces of uniqueness, of individuality worn down to anonymity by the oblivious slipstream friction of all these passersby. In a crowd of warm-blooded mammals, he is slowly dying of the cold.

  Our heartstrings are plucked, our sympathies aroused! Here, at the poor orphan’s lowest ebb, comes a tinkling voice. The chimes of a Christmas angel with devilish intent.

  Hello? Are you all right, child? Oh dear God, the little darling is half dead!

  As I listened, I understood: Luda was mad. The best cocktail mix of all: beautiful and crazy. In a tall glass with a slice of low self-esteem and daddy issues, please. Predatory instincts I’ve tried hard to suppress were given provocative bloody rags to snout at, I’m sorry to say.

  Weed?—I offered.

  When Charles Marvell physically hefted him up from his pitch, the boy who would be Luda could barely walk. He’d been sat in the same position for three days. It was Christmas Eve and the boy had stage 2 hypothermia, which explained the missing toe he showed me later.

  The boy had forgotten his name. It may have started with a K, like some existential hero teetering on the edge of the Abyss of modernity. Or maybe just Kevin. Or Ken. Kieran?

  Charles Marvell offered to help him out, taking his temperature as a prelude to taking everything else, barely able to believe his luck as he swaddled the homeless waif in a blanket and stowed him in the back seat of the Marvells’ people carrier. This lost boy. No friends. No family. No trace.

  No longer a cast-off rag of human refuse, his earthly lead was sublimated, elevated to become the Marvells’ gold. Their Fleece. Their Holy Grail. The ideal subject for an experiment they’d until now only dreamed was possible.

  Did they?—I half said. Was it some sex thing?

  As I recall, the pause was nigh-on Vedic, with a span that extended endlessly, engrossing fathoms deep, while the duration of the whole conversation was brief. Three seconds. Tops.

  Their daughter was that girl. The one they thought was kidnapped, remember? Nobody found out what happened.

  It’s not something I like to think about. My sense of humor’s twisted like a noose, I’m the first to admit—but I don’t like hearing about real-life cruelty or crime. I’d rather create a world of my own where nothing like that gets in.

  It was her eyes. They were quite unusual—he said, holding the moment, underlining it even, by pausing his tumbler in freeze frame on its way to his pneumatic lips. Remember? I knew he would only go on saying “remember” until I did, so I remembered.

  There had been a case. Sobriety and I had agreed to a trial separation around the time frame in question, but what he said about the unheimlich eyes of the missing kid seemed oddly relevant.

  Intense, like those colors you only see in animated movies and videogames. Like a computer-generated saturated primary shade, a laser beam slicing through dry ice.

  Like your eyes—I think I said, not certain what was real and what I dreamed later or just made up.

  That shade, that hue, the hyper-blue of Luda’s eyes has been my favorite color since I could spell it. My mother preferred green, though, and she spent her life trying to indoctrinate me into agreeing with her.

  Personally, if pressed to settle on a favorite, I’d have to point to Yves Klein International Blue, chosen for distinctly nonpartisan reasons. It’s more of a glow than a color. “The Azure” of Artaud. Feeling guilty over my lifelong noncompliance with Mama’s aesthetic diktat, I made a heroic effort to synthesize her first choice with my own preference, with turquoise as the only plausible compromise.

  A color in the sweet spot between green and blue. Like Pacific Ocean water. Naturally, Mum loved the idea, dying much later into a blue-green submarine Heaven on morphine in a hospital ward.

  Turquoise. Aquamarine. A wavelength of 495.08 nanometers. The color of Phi. That’s what Mrs. Marvell said. She was a mathematician and behavioral scientist. A lecturer. He was a surgeon.

  Like your eyes—I said.

  My eyes didn’t start out like this—was all she would say, barely suppressing a shimmy of dread.

  I’m finding this very hard to believe—I admitted. But I could listen to you talking all night.

  Her cartoon-kitten-skulled Goodbye Kitty! satchel lay open on its side, spilling its Cesarean booty of intrigue. I caught a glimpse of a single shoe. There was something familiar about the blocky heel but at the time I had no idea how momentous this detail might become.

  What else have you got in there?—I said, reaching down.

  If you don’t believe me—Luda began, racked by sudden gulps and shudders as she broke down and tears streamed down his hurt, pretty face.

  I’m not stupid; I had a hard time convincing myself his feelings were real, but not so hard I didn’t fall for it. Through a supreme act of kindness and self-delusion, I made myself believe the tough little homeless boy gone spineless in my arms was truly weak and fragile. A sobbing helpless niece for Widow Twankey. I held her and stroked his head until Luda stopping jolting and the sobs softened to whimpers and snuffles.

  We can talk more about this another time.

  So, I chose not to smuggle a peek into his satchel. It’s funny to think how much of what happened proceeded from that decision, although maybe “funny” is the wrong word.

  She’d finished his drink, so I helped him tidy up and poured her another. Maybe I could tip my guest off guard and get to the bottom of something before the night was through.

  I only expected a meet and greet—I drawled, nibbling on another mint Matchmaker. It doesn’t have to be therapy.

  Now pacified, Rentboy, or Luda, or whatever the name was of that intoxicating apparition, passed me the plump and smoldering J. A radiant red détente. We’d smoked it down to the candlewick and all the vodka was gone. It seemed so wrong. I had no recollection of what we talked about except how to destroy the straight world…and save the tiger. Black cats. Familiars. Jaguars and panthers and Harry Harlow’s Barbed Wire Mother experiments. The buying and selling of souls. We had so much in common!

  He upended his glass to reach the remnant dribbles before getting to his feet—pacing the room to create lurching German Expressionist shadows all over the fixtures and fittings. All flickers and fritzes, his wiring seemed amiss—a fireworks display of random, brief fixations.

  I like your house—he said admiringly, fingering the window sash where it screamed for repointing. I may have burgled a few like this in my time.

  I followed him, just in case he’d gotten his beady eye on my threadbare erotic DVD collection.

  You won’t find much that’s worth anything in here—I said. TV’s ancient. Sound system runs on coal. Smoke?

  He accepted the spliff, inhaled at the door to my dressing room, and blew breakers of unrolling vapor into my dimly lit sanctum sanctorum.

  You don’t owe me anything. You can just go home if you want. I don’t need to hear the whole story. You’ve got raw talent. We can work with that.

  Calmer now, with four vodkas and two spliffs of Bhangistan Indica in his personal rearview, he asked if he could show me something in my mirror.

  At least I think he asked, although when I look back now, I don’t remember his lips moving. And I’ll never forget his lips.

  My “altar.” That’s what he called the dressing table, which set off clanging alarm gongs right away. He’d done his research. He said he’d be honored to sit where I did my face. I let it go. I couldn’t say no. I’d have paid a week’s wages to have him sit on my face. I instructed my suspiciously muttering inner parliament to fuck off just this once.

  Rentboy arranged an immaculately grooved ass in my chair as though ascending to the royal throne of who knows what Elizabethan fairy queendom; the peacock-tailed chair was from Superstar Survival, and I’d demanded to have it included as part of my prize when I came first in the season 3 final.

  There was a plump pink Valentine-heart cushion contrived for the perching of dainty bottoms. The sumptuous red-gold upholstered wooden backrest was draped with strings of pearls and feather boas slung like trophies, pelts of feral plushies I’d hunted and skinned through neon-pink-and-blue jungles. And as I mentioned, a lavish fan of iridescent peacock quills formed a dandy halo of petrol colors that could turn anyone into an avatar of the Glamour.

  Luda was right to acknowledge that seat of power. She knew exactly what she was doing when she arranged herself to tell her tale to the mirror.

  It’s easy to see what’s ahead when it’s behind you.

  He leaned forward, as if to dip his face in its own reflection, beauty magnetized to its own symmetry, canceling out like two waves. I suggested he try it with the lights on to get a proper picture.

  Framed in that suddenly blazing rectangle, bordered by a Golden Ratio of bare bulbs, his face was mathematically symmetrical. I could almost see the Fibonacci spiral: a watch spring tightening toward his cheekbone. He brought a finger to Rorschach-blot lips and gently, with a pearl-lacquered nail I hadn’t clocked as quite so long and feminine until then, he gently scraped away what I’d taken to be cold sores.

  Brown sugar and Vaseline, he revealed, proud of his invention.

  He was still Rentboy, stuttering and whingeing through the details of his barely plausible adventure, but as he kept on, his voice underwent subtle shifts and startling modulations.

  His vocabulary expanded, as if some heavenly engineer had turned up the volume on his intellect. His voice softened, shed an octave.

  I could see all the mistakes, but it was an impressive effort for a young pretender.

  You know the way tyrants roll out their tanks and missiles on May Day parades? That’s how he carefully laid out the pageant procession of his kit, the military precision of his pencils, brushes, liner, rouge. Like that. They made a circuit diagram of tubes and horsehairs, compacts open like mirrored oyster shells, a deconstructed Luda, spread there in abstract.

  Buzzing with fresh possibility, I felt mesospherically high, flirting with cartoon satellites in low Earth orbit. The luxury-swimming-pool eyes of my guest appeared to outgrow his skull to flood the whole horizon as he did something very precise and very particular with liner.

  I came to call this cosmetic operation the Luda Swoop—a shorthand sketch of mismatched gull wings in flight—and vowed to correct it.

  There—said Luda with a Hollywood grin.

  The Marvells, Luda told me, felt sure they’d never survive the loss of their beloved little girl. The grief was devastating enough on its own, without the attendant relentless allegations of collaboration and cover-up that placed full responsibility on their collapsed shoulders. They drew up a suicide pact then reneged at the last minute after convincing each other that Penelope might yet return, and concluding she’d likely be dismayed to find her parents replaced by date-stamped headstones. There was nowhere left for them to go, so they went mad. That’s all. Pain sent them round the bend, until at last they convinced themselves they could do something impossible, something as thoroughly against nature as a Big Mac. They’d find a way to bring her back, from scratch, from a rag, a bone, and a hank of wig.

  I was already racing impatiently to next base. They didn’t…—I said, holding his gaze. I felt sure he was making it all up and zoomed in on minute tremors of his eyes and the dimpled corners of his lovely mouth.

  I’m looking these people up—I said. So, I did, expecting to catch him out with facts.

  But no. There they were. Charles and Victoria Marvell. Educated. Successful. Patrons of the avant garde. She looked haunted, vacated. Whatever it was that moved out when her daughter vanished had made space for something else to take up residence. You could see it peering out from her attic-window eyes. A thing made of nothing.

  As for him, Charles, his eyes turned you into a specimen; evaluated, classified, measured up for a microscope slide.

  Saying that, the lion’s share of the pictures dated from the raw aftermath of the disappearance of their daughter, so it’s hard to imagine what would be acceptably normal facial expressions under those circumstances.

  The couple had now separated, according to reports; Charles last glimpsed with a beard and an entourage at a Bangkok katoi bar, Victoria flaring in a brief public supernova as she waged all-out war against online trolls before her absolute withdrawal, her tzimtzum retreat into anonymity, into hearsay and conspiracy theory.

  That’s what I’m telling you—Luda said. Charles Marvell was a surgeon. His wife was a behavioral scientist. Victoria.

  As the application of his makeup grew ever more elaborate, so did Rentboy’s story.

  Kids nowadays, they have it all worked out. Online makeup tutorials are a wonder of the Age of Information. I had to learn it all myself. Trial and error. Lipsticks worn down to stubs to get it right just once. I admired his elegant fingers working the base onto his skin, zeroing in on the bitten, broken nails as he expanded on his theme, teasing out the salacious details, the unlikely wonders. Those would have to go.

  I was half dead, a smackhead. I could easily disappear. I could become someone else and no one would care. That’s the reality.

  Legs crossed, leaning forward with her neck extended to face the mirror, painting in the final details.

  I can see you’ve got talent. I could help you develop that—but what’s in it for me?

  In Rentboy’s place sat Luda, fully grown, a ragged Expressionistic portrait. Dew-damp and bejeweled. She ran her tongue across her plastic upper lip. Should I have noticed it was forked?

  I am—she said, conjuring a whole new universe of possibilities with those tried-and-tested words.

  I could have peeked in her pink kitty satchel then, following up on the solitary shoe lead, and perhaps I should have, considering what I discovered there later. But it seemed wrong. There was something vulnerable about the worn scuffed cheerfulness of her bag—as if in there was all she really had of herself and to pry would be to betray her secret spaces.

  As Luda’s attention snapped around, and her eyes ignited, I took a step back, shot through the soul with a yearning arrow, curare-tipped and fletched with hummingbird feathers.

  She had my wig on. The big-haired Op Art Twankey wig I wore for act 2’s sing-along. She looked phenomenal as me. She could play me in the film, if the film showed me with all my flaws corrected. I wanted her to play me.

  Play me! I screamed inside.

  I can take it off if you want.

  I knew a caustic envy, burning me as she blazed on oblivious.

  I wish I looked as good as you. I did once. Never take it for granted.

  I’m not Widow Twankey—she said simply, taking the wig off and putting it back carefully on the dummy head. That’s you. I am Aladdin. I’m the Principal Boy. We’ll be rehearsing scenes together soon enough.

  But I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t listening. I was dealing with a riptide of unreality sucking the carpet and the floorboards out from under my feet. The lights got brighter.

  When you said “I am” just now…

  She’d gotten down on her knees where, all the while maintaining eye contact, she deftly opened my flies, saying—I am Aladdin. I can make anything happen.

  She had my cock in her hands. Those long birch twig witch fingers, dipped in crimson lacquer, closing around a sudden exclamation mark.

  All I need to do is rub the Magic Lamp—she said.

  I couldn’t believe it. When was the last time?

  It came to me how long I’d been waiting, tensed in a knot.

  There, in the oak frames, enclosed in the mirror’s triple geometry with me, was Luda.

  Her head bobbing came with a wet hot sound of suction and chewing gum. She looked like me when I was her and she’d be me someday and the feedback was deafening.

  She looked up at me with those big round swimming-pool eyes, her wet red mouth shining and slack. The tongue again, split. Reptilian. Or so I thought.

  Try not to cum—she said. What do you do to stop yourself cumming?

  I go through a list of the gangs—I explained in a matter-of-fact voice, sputtering now at the edges. I’d discovered over many years of practice how to postpone orgasm using my own idiosyncratic method. The old Gasglow gangs from the Razor Years. Alphabetically.

  Tell me—Luda insisted then left me to counter the sound of primal gobbling with intelligible speech for as long as I was able. With each metronomic bob up and dip down of her head, my house became increasingly enchanted, inflamed, engorged with all the wonder and the glory of the Genie’s cave.