Dull familiarity lifted its face dripping and bedazzled from immersion in wonder and shone as if electroplated with the true and impossible colors staining the heart of everything. Common things caught fire and were remade as lights at a carnival. I could go on.

  Turquoise fire in a flux over every surface. The ceiling molding began to dribble ultraviolet pearls all down the wall into the carpet.

  I found myself thinking of Heaven going on forever, tangled in infinity. It was that all over again, like when I was little. Falling backward into the crushing gravitational pinprick of the Big Bang before there was me.

  LaBang.

  I know I’m practically acting the whole thing out with voices here, but that night is very vivid in my memory. It was one of those epiphanies you sometimes hear about. From some unforeseen and sacred recess of my innermost Self I salvaged the names of the Holy of Holies.

  The Boigey!

  My voice shivered, finding a natural comedy vibrato.

  The Fanto! The Fekka!

  The veil between what was happening now and what was moments ago shimmered and was rent asunder, so that everything seemed as likely as two flying saucers landing on a café table and pledging matrimony. Buying their first apartment together—starting a family of UFOs—

  The Gombo! The Mini-Team! The Teamo!

  Every time I warbled out the name of a fresh squad of violent young offenders, Luda swallowed me whole, drained me out, and again and again and again like that.

  The Troye!

  Desperate to elongate this moment to its ultimate elastic extension in excelsis, I’d run out of my supply of hooligan teams and moved on to pantomime stars in a doomed effort to dam the pressurized reservoir of backed-up jazz.

  DAN LENO!

  Famous dames of history.

  ALASTAIR SIM!

  The Great Twankeys of pantomimes past.

  BIGGINS! CHRISTOPHER BIGGINS! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!

  It was as if I melted through my chair, headfirst.

  STANLEY BAXTER! DANNY LA RUE!

  The walls rippled as though painted onto fluttering prayer flags.

  DANNY LA FUCKING RUE!

  My stale apartment where I’d been lonely, where I’d been manless in Moloch for so long a time, underwent a spectacular metamorphic process, turning itself inside out like a glove to reveal the holy hidden firebird soul I’d first discerned in that Timorous Beasties wallpaper when I bought it before it was taken for granted for years.

  Just by being the same, everything was new.

  And—stay with me now—because here’s me in the mirror. And she’s here with me.

  By this point in what was a very professional blow job, all I had left were words for “nothing”—how many could I recall—

  Nought.

  Zilch.

  Nil. Nada. Zero.

  Holy zero.

  The world’s wet paint backcloth surrendered to liquid inferno and a pulsing insistent kick from my balls where Luda was slow-juggling them into her face.

  ZERO! ZERO! ZERO FUCK!

  When I was done and dazed, flopping and staring, beached and newborn, Luda lifted from her knees in a single wave-like motion to lick my mortal salts and alkali from her immaculate lips with a dismissive gesture.

  Tell me the secrets of the Glamour.

  I hesitated, but Luda was already taking off her clothes.

  Teach me the magic—she persevered.

  Why is it so important to you?

  I want to become someone else—she said with an ardent yearning made to soften hearts—I want to learn how to disappear—

  I know! I couldn’t have put it better myself. The Devil has only to tell the truth once, at the start. The rest takes care of itself, if only in the way a gangrenous wound can be said to take care of itself.

  I want—she said with eyes the color and intensity of the eldritch gas jet that gave Ursula Andress her immortality in that film—I want there to be nothing left for them to find—

  She-who-must-be-obeyed. Ayesha!

  How far do you want to take it?—I inquired. Are you talking about transition? Surgery?

  But she wasn’t.

  Of course. I could see no other way. I ignored the mysterious “them.” I would educate Luda in the refinements of the Glamour. It had to happen. I owed her a debt of kindness at the very least. Whatever Luda wished to learn, I would bend over backward, possibly literally, to teach her. The fruits of my life as a drag artiste and shapeshifting witch would be hers to gorge upon until the juice ran down her chin onto her plastic tits.

  I vowed to take this opportunity to instruct the holy fuck out of my disciple.

  * * *

  —

  She’s BEHIND YOU I heard the audience cry, spiraling into the suction.

  Oh no he isn’t—

  Oh yes, she is

  Oh no

  Oh

  O

  Afterward, I had Chinese delivered. Salt & Chili Chicken. She ordered Turkish—ours the combination of spices and cultures that was Aladdin.

  Not what you’d call an authentic dish. A hybrid, a crossbreed.

  The doorbell did its thing, making me jump to my feet. She nodded to my crotch and said—Zip—with a big red smile.

  The doorbell was still buzzing but I got there just in time to accept the delivery, zipper sealed.

  We can’t do that again—I said. It was amazing—I admitted. I’m flattered—but we have a play to rehearse. I think you could be fantastic.

  Egg Fu Kebabs! Luda grinned, crunching her prawn crackers to grit and dust between movie-star teeth. Chicken Chow Tikka!

  I watched the crumbs accumulate in her lap, a light snow of savory debris and hallucination. We didn’t talk anymore about the Marvells. That came later.

  That Chinese was the best I’ve ever tasted. Rentboy never left my apartment, Luda did. Luda cross-legged in a taxi home, wide awake at 5 A.M., with the next day’s lights reflecting in her marvelous eyes.

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  As you put on years, you start to think about how best to pass on what you’ve learned during your tour of duty. How to be useful. You can’t take it with you, can you? All the precious memories, the lessons learned, the nuggets of wisdom polished by years to an exclusive shine. What’s the point if it’s not rolled up and passed on?

  In my view, it would be perverse to visit my curse on another generation. There are too many fucking people as it is, if you can excuse my rare use of the word “fucking” to make a literal point.

  We shouldn’t celebrate the birth of yet another mouth to feed. In lieu of children, I vowed to encourage disciples, acolytes, apostles so enamored of me, they’d compose undying scripture preserving my every fascinating deed and flippant bon-mot in a book of golden parables for Life and How to Live It in the Glamour.

  Which is to say, the thought had crossed my mind more than once—in the event of a young ingénue in need of a new messiah, I was right to be on the lookout for mean, keen recruits to my cult of extravagance.

  The truth was more complicated; I’d always been wary of protégés, fans, and followers; I knew from bitter experience that what started as devotion all too soon curdled into envy, then anger, before boiling over into an all-consuming desire for positively Jacobean revenge.

  Why then did I leap at the chance to coach Luda? How did it go from a few singing and dancing lessons to full disclosure of my personal, private cosmology?

  I’ve read the beautiful King James Old Testament and its pacifist Jesus-led Sequel. I’ve slogged across the sunstruck desert dunes of the Quran and boned up on the Book of Mormon’s sci-fi sales manual. I’ve been dazzled by the Diamond Sutras and Bhagavad Ghita, I’ve swallowed whole the Book of Shadows, the Satanic Bible, Liber Null, and Nihil Unbound—I’ve done all the Holy Tomes, so I like to believe I’ve given it all a big think.

  While my interest in the subject was genuine and scholarly, I played up the whole “devotee of the occult” thing during Luci LaBang’s nervous breakdown years—forty to forty-three—to cover for a precipitous decline in my mojo, where “mojo” in the equation equals “grip on reality.”

  Mine was an arcane system of symbol and correspondence, a DIY grimoire so personal as to be inimitable, an Outsider Art School take on the systematic color-coded maps of Qabalah or the etched Tablets of Enoch. The rudiments of the Glamour.

  Like a highly developed musical or artistic talent, like the mongoose speed and focused power of a tenth dan black belt, the Glamour can look like sorcery from a distance, but these human miracles are the result of focus, practice, repetition, and a way of understanding.

  There was only one way to enter the otherworld and return intact, only one method guaranteed to cross the eyes and reveal the fused image, the stereoscopic faerie realm where two worlds overlapped, and that was to reject duality.

  The Glamour provided the means to blend the real and the imagined, smoothing out the divisions between the physical and the not, subject and object, the masculine and feminine, God and Devil. The Glamour encouraged new relationships between seeming binaries that folded all polar opposites together into multifaceted wholes.

  I was delighted by the idea of spirit being dual and one. I imagined milk and plain chocolate in the same delicious bar, coffee and cream, one and zero, man and woman, alchemical Adam and Eve and all of us in between…

  The Glamour as endless creativity, perpetual transformation.

  * * *

  —

  The best of it came front-loaded, lined up at the start in those first few days and nights; I woke from a validating dream where I was the witty, confident center of attention at a fantastic nonstop party.

  It must have been 4:20 A.M. judging by the footlights glow of dawn at the horizon above the shaggy treetops of Prospero Park.

  Luda lay asleep in the deep, her head and left hand heavy on my chest where she’d passed out in my arms.

  Three of her press-on nails had come loose, carmine plastic petals spilled across my rib cage. Faded to black, she was a deadweight. Her schemes undone. Her destiny briefly abandoned, her head rising and falling in oblivion with the expansion and contraction of my lungs. Her wig shifting independently, yanked askew where the weave had snagged on my bra clasp.

  Me?

  I spun adrift on a shoreless ocean of expansive unconditional peace. Mine was the kind of tranquility you’d finally achieve on the last day of a long and tedious Buddhist retreat where they won’t allow phones, pens, or off-color jokes.

  It was still dark; feral car lights, drivers up past bedtime, raked through the half-open blinds to throw traveling bars of slatted light and shadow that lengthened, slanting into long oblique italics before the changing angles were bent and folded across the ceiling and the far wall while tires hissed on the rain-rinsed streets three floors below the bedroom window.

  Luda with tight skin pulled snugly over tighter flesh, taut muscle, and springy sapling bone. Her steady hot heartbeat, first syncopating, then pulse by strong pulse more steadily synchronizing with mine; her flinches, her inevitable blockbuster champagne farts. Her measured inhale and exhale. Tension and relax. My arm losing its boundaries to a fizz of pins and needles.

  Even then, in the flattering ashen light of an early-summer morning still unbroken, Luda was a long way from the polished sculpture I’d gazed upon with awe-blistered peepers when we first met in the rehearsal room.

  Close up, her scuffed foundation exposed the yellow pinheads of a shaving rash. Bristles breaking through the porcelain glaze along her jawline robbed her of perfection. Yet Luda’s flaws made her more perfect. She was real, tangible, physical in my arms, and in my bed. I felt I’d won a prize at the Wheel of Fortune and kissed her head, and caught my breath, and thanked my lucky constellations.

  All you care about is the sex, I bet. The sex magic. What we got up to. Details will be craved. Top-shelf tittle-tattle. Red top exposés. Gossip site headlines. What was it like?

  Yes, she sucked my cock until it popped pearls again and again. Yes, I licked the rim of the bright sour midnight singularity of her arsehole. Yes, and we French-kissed with the lube still bitter on our lips. Yes, to all of whatever you imagine went on between us, between the sheets, among the stretched-out shimmering hours in the Cave of Jewels.

  And no. None of that happened.

  There was no sex. After that first night and the blow job, I had to take sex off the menu. Sex ruins everything I told myself. Ensuring sex was kept at a safe distance from our budding guru/student relationship was my only hope of retaining any dignity and holding on to my treasured status as sage of the stage. Not that I didn’t think about it every hour of every day, but I couldn’t afford to be another of her slobbering admirers.

  It was my job to be different and special. My job to draw the lines accurately.

  I opened my eyes to be sure I was still asleep. The red traffic lights hadn’t changed for what felt like hours, making me wonder if I’d been granted my wish by Aladdin’s Genie and hung suspended between now and forever, crucified on the eternally motionless clock face, pierced by the second hand, the minute hand, the hour hand, as I posed for Salvador Dalí doing Saint Sebastian!

  Be careful what you wish for. What had greeted the day as a reliable and efficient left arm was nerveless now, at best a novelty paperweight, “gone to sleep” and enduring a nightmare of amputation. I thought of the sadhus in India. Mortification of the flesh.

  Barcode stripes steadied and stood still on the wallpaper, stalled in the stark diagonals a convict chalks on the walls of his cell, counting the days like sheaves of corn, or the years, and the sound of the rain became a static, a radio wavelength broadcasting nothing but the solid-state buzz of indecipherable Buddha conversations on car radios or hands-free sets. Cars dreaming, snoring insomniac at the red end of the spectrum.

  Diagonal slashes of brake light and blind shadow divided Luda’s face, marking there a diagonal bar, a “forbidden / no entry” that put her off limits.

  Then the cars moved off the line, casting outsized I Ching yarrow stalks across the film poster for Claude Miller’s La Petite Voleuse I’d framed above the fireplace twenty-five years ago. Hexagram 51—

  The superior man sets his life in order

  And examines himself.

  I won’t even go there! It’s always a man with the I Ching. Where’s the superior woman?

  I remembered I couldn’t sleep. I’d lain awake, too wired for REM until that gauzy flush grading up from the windowsill reminded me time would restart and dawn would arrive sooner than I wanted it to.

  Smelling the nape of Luda’s neck, its faint vapor of warm, fresh cake mix and new cosmetics, I wanted this moment to never end but inevitably it did just that, leaving me beached on the sheets, with no idea how I’d arrived at this point in my life, or when time had restarted its one-second-per-second progress.

  Moving with stealthy purpose, shadows slid across the ceiling, and this time I made myself ignore some faraway warning bell as I imagined a row of tall thin detectives in narrow overcoats, fine-tooth-combing the ceiling for evidence. To make them go away I had to stop looking.

  Five minutes later, exhibiting rapid eye movement, I’d surrendered to delta wave activity and deep sleep. Dreaming department stores where I was lost.

  All things must pass, as they say. Excuse me while I refresh my flute…

  * * *

  —

  By remarkable coincidence, the poignant brevity of human experience as exemplified by my inability to snooze became a theme of the next day’s rehearsals.

  Time started up again and tipped both Luda and I bleary and glowing faintly out of bed—via coffee and taxis—onto the stage where it was up to me to set an example, as Float muttered menacingly.

  It’s up to you to set an example.

  Luda was struggling through her Cave of Jewels meeting with the Genie, as portrayed by an irate Dez Blue, who kept breaking character to complain about this one particular aspect of Luda’s performance.

  You do know Aladdin’s supposed to be a boy?—I could hear him snark incredulously. A lad! It’s in the fucking name. You’re playing a BOY!

  I expected better from her—said Float gravely. You promised you’d get her up to scratch.

  Suddenly it was all my fault and there was worse to come.

  Luda stalled again, motor sputtering to a halt, while Dom prompted from the script bible, his tone increasingly impatient.

  She’s not concentrating—Float grimaced as I joined him at the production desk, where he turned to face me with a disenchanted wobble of that cannonball head atop its plush and fleshy ruff of neck. I hope you’re not back to the drink and drugs and late nights…I hope you’re keeping it professional.

  I stared at him, hand on chest, making a big stage O with my mouth.

  What age d’you think I am, Dom? I inquired, affronted.

  They stop counting after a while—he said. Sort this. Tell her not to go off book unless she can back it up with solid improv.

  We were dry rehearsing the Cave of Jewels, a key scene where Aladdin discovers the Magic Lamp—the source of all his supernatural superpowers. No costumes, no songs. By this point in the show, end of act 1, the audience has been waiting impatiently for the Genie to finally show up. Their tolerance will only last so long; everyone knows the story doesn’t really get off the ground until the Genie shows up.

  Most audiences are familiar with the Slave of the Lamp from Hollywood films—and whether it’s as a shapeshifting mercurial Robin Williams on cocaine, or a weird patrician boyfriend who looks like Will Smith, he’s always blue.

  Our Genie enjoyed a bit of both worlds; sprayed gold, he was summoned to life with an eye toward cultural sensitivity as a near-the-knuckle Islamic afrit by malignant TV comedian “Dez” Blue.