Luda, p.14
Luda, page 14
How do they get it to move like that?
I couldn’t answer.
Here upon this dull wall was pinned the ninth wonder of the world.
A sapphire viper festooned with branching aerial adornments from belly to throat where industries had grown and died and left these cryptic prosthetic scabs, incisions, excavations for future archaeologists to find and fail to identify, in a world without heavy industry and no need for ships.
Up close, these odd additions suggested unreadable letters in a secret oneiric alphabet—the italic lowercase e of the Magdalena Docks, the truncated f of Turner’s Yard where my granddad lost his footing and plummeted forty-five feet from the riveter’s platform where he worked into a scrap heap of jumbled clinker that disassembled his vertebrae.
Each individually crafted hieroglyph came with a talismanic singularity, gold-leaf characters in some secret occult or religious script.
This is what it’s really like—they don’t want us to know how big it really is—Luda said, with eyes far brighter than could be good for her.
Who’s they?—I said. The Mayor’s Office? The Parents’ Group?
In this way we arrived, step by faltering madcap step, at the obvious conclusion that we’d uncovered an operations room where plans were made concerning the secret policing of Gasglow. We could agree on that momentarily at least.
Why would the police set up down here?—I said, casting reasonable doubt on this latest of an increasingly provisional series of homegrown conspiracy theories we’d inflated to working cosmologies, then debunked in the last few minutes.
It made sense that it would be much easier for them to police the real city, we reasoned, if ordinary people were permitted to experience only a limited cross section of its entirety in our waking world while law enforcement had access to the whole map; all the corners we never look around, the lanes we pass each day on our way to work and never choose to venture down, the overgrown brownfield sites we’re too preoccupied to explore. All the rabbit holes, and snow-filled wardrobes, the phantom tollbooths and freestanding doors we ignore in favor of the ordinary were marked here on the wall chart.
There was a note of urgent alarm in her voice that I wasn’t ready for. We’d been having fun and now things were trending creepy as though the shadow of something invisible were drawn across the light.
Perhaps even more horrible to contemplate was the implication that our habitually prescribed routes, the regularly reinforced boundaries of our daily round, those snug spaces and familiar faces, demarcated the limits of our cramped prison-cell experience, while the map of Gasglow brought to life the true extent of the penitentiary’s pageant sprawl; its escape tunnels and unlocked gates barred by an unvoiced consensus, its exits blocked with the dusty rubble of doubt.
I had no idea where we were or how to get back to where we’d been before this. Our adventure was surely my fault and she’d hate me forever if it went wrong, I reasoned, unable to look her in the eye now…until I did, firmly…
It’s the Glamour—I assured her. We followed the familiar into the Glamour. I took a deep breath. Reality swam and bulged and settled as a jelly congealing. Everything’s meant to be.
It’s all moving around a fixed point—Luda said, confounded. There’s a hole through everything, like a mint with a hole.
She leaned in close. Her voice seemed to drop an octave, but I was probably just imagining it.
This is damnation and we are the damned.
Even though I didn’t want to, I tried to see what she was seeing.
What you’re describing is a classic migraine—I cooed, too sure of myself for anyone’s health.
The map seethed uneasily—a queasy sifting of the granular component particles of reality was taking place, triggering a memory of hundreds-and-thousands shaken onto icing, where imperceptible sudden pixelations sprinkled together into new sand-painting configurations of almost familiar roads and place-names, where Amberwood Street dissolved into Broomeward Lane, as if to foil the monthly meeting of the Residents’ Association! Stumbling home in a dream where your keys won’t fit the locks on a worryingly alien front door. And Drewboard Terrace was already rethinking its whole approach to urban planning before resetting as Wonderbra Mews; I surveyed entire postal districts squirming and rearranging themselves like a bathtub of cartographic maggots. Except these wiggling words were more well behaved than larvae.
They moved as if to order. Finely calibrated, tracking tectonic shifts in the Dreamtime Deserts where we’d kicked up the sequins and thunder of the Glamour. Needles nodding, accelerating to a frenzied pecking crescendo as unknown energies were released, or contained.
It won’t stay still—Luda said. I don’t think I want to keep looking at it. Maybe we shouldn’t have come here.
Don’t touch it—I said, but the warning came too late. Or was that another helping of déjà vu?
Luda swiped away a film of dust to reveal the letters on the stuffy brass nameplate set into the map’s painted wooden frame.
MYSTERY CITY it read.
Or maybe it was MISERY CITY. Or MISTER TITTY. Or MISTRESSITY.
How can it do that?—Luda wanted to know. I worried she was losing control of her emotions: angry, scared, angry…
Letters were shuffled restlessly, scrabbling from one half-formed thought to another thought that still somehow suggested a single concept viewed from multiple directions at the same time.
The concept as I came to understand it was Luda, reflected in a music-box arrangement of five full-length mirrors, omnifold.
It’s the spirit world—she said again with a chime of awe in her soft little Disneyland voice.
It was, and it wasn’t. Just before you write this off as some unlikely and unconvincing ghost story, The Shining in six-inch heels, I should step in with an assurance: The Glamour doesn’t go in for the supernatural.
What’s natural and known is quite spectacular and peculiar enough for anyone when you learn to see it all from the best seat in the Dress Circle. Or the Pit, which is where Luda was at that moment, peeking round the edge of things into the gulf, gey grim, that bubbled below the worm-eaten timbers we’d been using to fix the holes in everyday reality.
Determined to respawn and remotivate our intrepid videogame character sprites, I tried to remind her how not so very long ago those wild-eyed witches, those extravagant partners-in-crime, Luci and Luda had deliberately, indeed ritually, consumed industrial quantities of hallucinogenic sacrament.
Bearing this in mind, I explained to her, our present deconstructed perceptions, this ongoing exotic spectrum of moods, suspicions, certainties, and puzzles with no names—ranging from bass-note infra-terrors to the bright hypersonic frequencies of ultra-bliss—could be expected to come with the territory. I emphasized this with the sincere authority of a professor defining a solemn mathematical proof, but the information failed to connect with my student’s immediate concerns.
By the time I’d gotten all this worked out to my own satisfaction and felt comfortable saying it to Luda, we’d become separated by a wall of transparent, rotating shutters whose interminable operations were only made visible to a lucky few and for a mercifully short time period. Echoes of their ceaseless rotation could be experienced in the revolving doors of big hotels and department stores. You’ve been with me this far along the winding dirt track through Deep Dark Woods so you’ll have to take my word for it and don’t let go of my hand when I tell you these shutters offered a rarely glimpsed representation of Time the nightclub bouncer’s tendency to huckle us along the uglier we became, the farmer threshing every last one of us into the future, fed as so much laundry through an invisible mangle called life; creasing, drying out…the metaphors accumulated as spray-can snow on a window ledge in Santa’s buried grotto.
And all I had to offer in return for this synaptic cascade of spark-spitting dendrites and axons was—Where’s that Aladdin?—half aware that I’d taken refuge in Twankey’s rudimentary personality yet again as a substitute for my own, presently misplaced Self.
Where indeed? Aladdin had wandered off into a folding-napkin Narnia made of unfinished notions and temporary spaces bound for the bin. Otherwise known as the room we’d come into only minutes earlier.
I’d brought Luda into this sunken hypogeum—this tomb of the Unknown Man from the Ministry. This revolving Pharaoh’s Antechamber—and I couldn’t for the life of me remember why it had seemed like any kind of idea, let alone a sensible one.
We shouldn’t have done this—was the last thing she’d said, echoing the cries of my own inner demons. I couldn’t understand why I’d led her into this obscure and intimidating space.
What were we thinking?
When I turned to reassure her that everything was proceeding to plan, I had to concede the Devil might have plans of his own. Luda was frozen in place, Lot’s wife immobile on the Plain, caught looking the wrong way and reimagined as a five-foot-one tower of sodium chloride when the Angel of the Lord enacted the spiteful wrath of the Almighty on the sex-positive hedonists of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Oh fuck—she said, staring at the floor. There’s been a murder!
I could hear the exclamation mark at the end of her sentence. I’d hoped I could steer her away from misinterpreting quite ordinary sensory input, but this was different.
Unnerving chalk lines were drawn around a creased heap of shed skin on the floor, nauseatingly reminiscent of a spider’s empty carapace it’s shrugged off on your carpet in favor of some roomier nightmare form.
Except this was no spider or snake husk: Before us lay a massive broken swastika of limbs and torso and grin—the crumpled, discarded skin of a dappled pantomime cow.
It’s just a cave painting—I tried to reassure her as the shrieking paralysis in Luda’s nerves became almost audible, wind in the wires on the wrong side of night. Remember? When they need good luck on the pantomime aurochs hunt, the shaman does one of these sketches…I thought she’d laugh at that, but she’d gone too far for giggles.
What happened to its head?—emerged as a wuthering moan. It hasn’t got a head…
And if I hadn’t been wearing a wig, I swear the hairs on my head would have stood up like Jesus’s halo on a Byzantine fresco.
Hanging from a nail above the transom was the empty head of Buttercup the pantomime cow. The goggle orbs were still, fixed by gravity and death in a cross-eyed pathos. With those outsized piano-key teeth bared in one final oracular rictus, it knew now what the dead know and was eager to impart the terrible secrets of the afterlife in what I imagined would be a marrow-chilling sequence of reproachful moos out of Hell accompanied by the skeletal gamelan clacking of the bell she’d worn in life.
The accumulating palpable aura of the paranormal was too much to tolerate. I’d brought Luda into this world of shifting scenery, this borderland zone, where tremors shook the foundations of the soul and where the planks of reality, rotted through with the acid drip of leaking, overflowing bad inclinations, now splintered into rotten pulp beneath our heels.
I’ve seen this—she said in strangled tones
I experienced a Hitchcock focus pull, a vertiginous horizontal fall toward a telescoping background wall. Unsure how we’d gotten to here from there. We’d set out in high spirits to party among beautiful perverts. Instead, we’d wound up, Luda and I, trapped in a basement going mad and neither of us could locate the exit. We were too terribly high and there was a simmering extravagance of spirits crowding that lost basement room, caught in the unceasing, cycling press of time.
How long had we been here? Hours? I was the responsible one in this situation, which I have to say was an unusual experience for me. I was the Jedi Master; it would be unthinkable to stand by as my young Padawan succumbed to the dark side of the Force—otherwise known as the Police Force if we couldn’t explain what we were doing down here in the Twilight Zone.
Luda, spaced out, her tether to the command module severed, seemed to rotate in her own personal anti-gravity, beyond any hope of rescue.
I’ve seen all this before—she repeated.
We might still be there if I hadn’t heard what I knew to be very real footsteps coming closer. Sensible shoes on a concrete floor would sound that way. Three, maybe four men. Brogues. Lace tips as yet unfrayed.
Luda swayed on her heels and staggered backward with hands thrown out ahead, an evil hypnotist’s victim, or old-school movie zombie. I caught her wrists on the edge of a precipice you didn’t see but felt in your heart. An existential edge shelved away at her back, a bottomless psychic crash, a black suction presided over by the severed head of a mad cow.
It’s not the first time. It’s not the first time—she told me again and again, as if the words were unknown tastes and textures in her mouth.
The resulting expression on Luda’s face was so beautiful, so defenseless, and vulnerable, so fragile and impermanent, I wanted to protect her somehow, from the multiple-tracked clock beats of the footsteps approaching down the corridor on the far side of that never-more-extraordinary door; the inevitable calculated pace that rose in volume; from time, to time, unhurried, taking all the time in the world.
Luda—I said. Look at me, sweetheart.
The void revolved at her back as she surrendered to the singularity. Only me gripping her two hands prevented a fatal backward stagger; one step, two, then toppling, shrinking, smaller and smaller, draining of color until Luda was a fading dot, a blinking cursor on a screen. Then nothing at all.
We need to get you out of here.
Her hands were locked to mine, so I felt it like a candyfloss landslip when her entire body started to shake uncontrollably, from her painted toenails to her matching “She’s a Bad Muffuletta” OPI neon-pink fingernails.
I had to admit something was especially wrong when I realized her pupils had expanded to eclipse her blue-green eyes.
Around then was when Luda began to resonate, you’d have to call it, the way a tuning fork, struck on the edge of a kitchen table, then touched lightly against the hollow belly of an acoustic guitar, transmits its pure tone into the wood and the plucked string.
Struck like a bell, Luda rang in unison—no pure G or E, this tune was a sick tone, a semi-demi-quaver out of sync with the natural world and all the wholesome laws of the universe. The flounces hemming her party dress moved like seismographs tracking the tremor and as far as I could tell, it was demolishing bonds down at the molecular level, clanging her to pieces, along with everything else in her vicinity that had pretensions to material existence, a classification that still included yours truly.
I was shaking too, in sympathy, until it felt as if my skeleton was dismantling into kit pieces, discreetly, behind the modesty screen of my skin.
First, she’d caused the Birth of the Universe with the light switch, now she was ringing it to its End.
Don’t let go of me—she tried to say and right there, at the exact moment I opened my mouth to scream—I need to let go, or it’ll kill me—it was as if she’d been hit by bespoke lightning.
Her face went white and her oil-spill eyes popped bright as lightbulbs obliterated in a power surge. Voltage divided down her veins. Her jaw seemed on the verge of dislocating, prepping to swallow a whole gazelle.
You’re all right. It’s all right—I knew I was well wide of the mark there, but I didn’t know what else to say as Luda was cracked like a bullwhip—so that I swear I saw a blue sine wave working its way from head to toe and flexing every muscle, every vertebra to its limit on the way down and then up again.
When you’re with someone who looks to be on the edge of either a grand mal seizure or demonic possession, the best thing to do is keep it light. Don’t scream or tell them they’ve turned green. Don’t mention the sweat, the drool, the rolling whites of the eyes. Whatever you do, don’t bring up the vomit laced with razor blades and crusty fishhooks. I mean, that bit didn’t happen in this case, but I don’t doubt we’d have gotten there if my last vestigial link to common sense hadn’t worked to our advantage.
I’d forgotten about the approaching footsteps of doom during this razor-sliced tissue-thin fragment of what was turning out to be a disordered sticky substitute for the calm progress of the conventional seconds and the minutes and the hours I was used to.
The voices were louder now. Then they stopped, outside the Operations Room, where the map still seethed on its wall. Words were muttered in some understated European accent. Government business. The Bureau and the Department. Keys jangled like charm bracelets, or maybe handcuffs. It’s all joined together in my head. There were a lot of handcuffs at the party. Enough keys, and locks, and chains to account for the clinking shuffle we could hear but not for the mounting panic we felt.
It occurred to me, at last, that this might be some category of courtroom.
In the pointillist scramble of the pebble-glass window, dot-matrix shadows skewed in parade across the wall. The voices switched to ominous mutterings. The locks rattled impatiently.
What if we were to be placed on trial in a dreary Kafkaesque purgatory while a sex party went on overhead? What would happen if we stayed long enough for the magistrate to park his fat ass in his seat in front of that demonic wall map? Would he condemn us for shocking violations of rules we didn’t even know had made the statute books?
Anything could happen.
Trust Luda then to make it worse with a Sibylline whisper that augured inexplicable fate, obscure judgment…while hinting at a nameless price we’d have to pay for desecrating the ritual chamber, thereby invoking its implacable flat-packed guardians.
Flat police—Luda confirmed through grinding teeth. Teetering over the rim of pure pandemonium, I picked her up in my arms and manhandled her out of the self-dismantling room through the door I’d somehow found again exactly where I’d left it—Flat police—
