Luda, p.17
Luda, page 17
That all this could be all this!
Heavy with a burden of unavoidable destiny, I faced the mannequin.
Starting with the feet, which the doll maker had molded into the shape of elegant shoes, with pointed toes and three-inch heels, I gradually raised my eyes in an old-time camera move, the kind that pans up to reveal the face of the femme fatale as she sashays downstairs to the speakeasy.
I noted how this outsized Barbie doll had done away with ugly awkward feet altogether and replaced them with sleek stilettos. I was so jealous. I hated feet.
Gaining the resolve to face the Incarnation, I allowed my gaze to creep up the shins, the knees, the thighs of those endless model girl legs—where plaster flesh met the starfield horizon that was the hem of the dress, before a voluptuous satin blackness spilled out into hips and waist and hourglass contours spangled with aluminum constellations. The gravitational swell of galactic breasts. The swanlike neck emerging above the décolletage, an Elizabethan barge emerging from Pre-Raphaelite star fog and river foam.
The sculpted chin, the hard and generous lips, the symmetrical planes of the airbrushed rosy cheekbones as the features assembled into their traditional arrangement.
There was nowhere left to go except to stare into the painted eyes of the mannequin. Those coolly preoccupied eyes outlined with thick lenticular slashes of black, aerodynamic wing-tipped flourishes. Cleopatra. Horus. Egyptian. The green glass pupils reproduced in miniature the blinding light of the fluorescents overhead.
What do you want?—I said, immediately regretting the attempt to sound tough.
I knew something was about to happen in my life that had never happened before, and when it did—it was accompanied by a brittle clack sound, when the painted eye winked—and as it did, it was. Just like that.
It took a moment to frame what I was looking at. At first, I had it down as one of those lifelike killer robots I’d seen on TV, but this theory couldn’t support the sense of intelligent presence and self-determination the dummy possessed. Whatever I was facing was very much alive. The voice I’d heard before now returned. Clear and calm, it was the voice of a confident young woman with an accent impossible to place.
Stop looking!
The voice could now be heard booming from the store loudspeakers, arriving somewhere in the center of my skull—where it gathered like a storm cloud—where it said—
We do any looking that needs to be done round here!
There was a prickling sensation at the back of my neck that made me want to turn around; but I knew that would be a mistake on a par with Orpheus.
Honestly, I swear it felt as if something were standing behind me, fixing my collar or touching me somewhere I couldn’t point to on a social services dolly. Because it was inside me, that was it. Turning around wouldn’t have helped. I’d have to turn inside out to find the source of the voice I heard and the contact I felt.
We’ve been watching you. Do you know why?
The voice spoke those words, then the tannoy followed with its delay, an overdub, a reverberating feedback loop of five or six voices speaking together, with micro-second intervals between each word to add a staggered “Frère Jacques.” Now it was more like twelve confident young women. Then a forty-voice choir talking in hypnotic layered harmonies.
Why me?—I asked.
Is there someone else we should be watching?—they asked.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I’d never had to wonder whether I might be special or not. I suppose I’d taken it for granted that I was especially interesting because I was me; and everyone I knew seemed to agree with me on that score. Now that the whole edifice of my being was called into question, I felt unprepared to argue my case with any confidence.
Something about the way the question was phrased came across as threatening, insinuating. Each syllable doled out with its own distinctive lip-smacking leer that suggested a shadow-choir of chuckling middle-aged deviants concealed in the subsonics below the soaring tremolo.
Immediately, I thought of Mum, convinced I was all that stood between her frail reason and a mixed-voice ensemble from beyond the beyond.
Mum was in danger. And as much as I understood danger from TV dramas, I was familiar with a special brand of peril that came served with a side of sleazy sex.
I knew it was my job to keep this pervy searchlight attention from finding her.
As a child I could handle these eruptions into the real but Mum, I felt sure, would be defenseless against this gathered murder of angels.
So, I said—No, there’s just me. Then—Tell me who you are first.
Now I know I’m making it sound all Alice in Wonderland—oh, it’s ever-so-queer, said Alice—well that’s just the way it is dear, the Queen of Hearts replied…we’re all queer round here…—but it was a bit like that.
The real thing, my contact experience if you like, was all over me as an unrehearsed free-for-all of roaming feelings, crayon-colored emojis—If you tell me who you are, I’ll tell you everything!
You know the mannie-queen—the voices replied, with a note of triumph.
That’s how I heard it. The “mannie-queen.” A dream word, seeping like serum out of some slumbering outsider’s ears onto a soggy pillow. It wasn’t a name at all. Not even a Rumpelfuckingstiltskin.
Names have power and they knew it. Rules of the Glamour. Always travel under an alias.
I knew I shouldn’t take my eyes off the mannie-queen, but I had to make a sharp, nervous little saccade to check the aisles either side. On Levitz Bros. third-floor ladies’ wear, the store dummies outnumbered the people by three to one at least, I calculated. If they were an army, we were fucked!
My furtive peek confirmed one thing: The other store mannequins were different from the specimen in the spangly black dress standing in front of me; their posed flash-frozen attitudes lacked the essential quality of sly, smirking plastic life possessed by the wearer of the sexy black cocktail number, where nebula dust scintillated hypnotically on a tailored section of void cut to the egg-timer shape of a woman, a personified cosmic sex goddess in a Marvel comic drawn by Steve Ditko or Gene Colan.
The mannie-queen was as real as everything else, which is to say not very real at all on that sultry damp afternoon in late summer.
Is this real?—I asked.
We’re real. Not sure about you yet.
What do you look like?—I asked. Eleven years old, remember? You don’t think you’re being rude at that age. You’d never think twice about asking an embittered lathe operator why his sleeve was flapping from the elbow.
What do you see?
Secretive by nature, my new friends preferred to avoid showing up naked but since I’d been so inquisitive, they decided to honor my childish request. I was a brattish native of the third dimension; I think they wanted to teach me a lesson in brilliant geometry.
The lesson I learned: The world wears a mask too; a clever cosmetic job conceals beneath its smooth and flawless veneer of lacquered light a different, more terrifying face of reality. Look hard enough and the Mona Lisa starts unwrapping into Picasso’s Weeping Woman. A face with more angles, more wrinkles, more unfathomable creases and fissures than you want to have to think about or give names to. The face of experience and disillusion plated over with an android cosmetic glaze. The light arranged, just so, to hide the joins, conceal the ragged edges where the scars of existence bleed through.
Once you get over the shock, that understanding gives you an edge that used to be called Magic. The Glamour.
What do you really look like?—I persisted in my line of questioning.
As I watched, the fashion doll’s newly Cubist head revolved lazily, leaving a solid arc of smeary, waxy faces in its wake as it spoke…
You asked for it.
The mannie-queen’s arms unlatched generously, like the archaic, specialized gadgets on a Swiss Army knife, multiplying into a spectacular fan of elbows, forearms, and scissor fingers, with branching fractal nails lacquered red.
We come from the Glamour.
The mannie-queen did something in a Vegas-y showbizzy manner suggestive of a lunatic TV quizmaster shuffling Thematic Apperception Test cards, so that it moved through and somehow beyond and into itself, right before my soft brown eyes. It was manipulating elaborate origami folds of such complexity as to transform it from a spinning carousel of articulated doll limbs into something like a Christmas tree bauble hatching into a lipgloss constellation.
Looking back, I also recall a Hans Bellmer sculpture undertaking a disconcerting but vigorously choreographed four-dimensional cancan. I’ll swear to a chorus line of dismembered puppet-girls unfurling petal displays of legs and faces, while deep in the lewd, botanical heart of the spectacle were piercing peepshow glimpses of an exposed, heartbreaking, and achingly meaningful kaleidoscope of living polychromatic crystal. This miniaturist Cave of Jewels, this precious, shielded interior dimension, looked for all the world like the Koh-i-Noor diamond melting and re-forming in cascades of never-to-be-repeated color combinations.
We’re watching you…
Those were the last words as that divine wink descended once again, a sexy thunderclack of lid on lid.
Give us a show.
All the horsehair eyelashes on all the glass eyes snapped down then up, all at the same time on all the dummies on third-floor ladies’ wear, standing around in their weekend best, nonchalant under strip lighting in their underwear.
The intense illumination of the overhead bulbs increased—an indrawn breath—until every outline of each existing thing came with a chromatic peacock trim where it seemed the unfinished edges of reality were visible to the naked eye, fretted and crosshatched into sketchy, electrifying schematics…
…then it dimmed on the out breath until the dull, beloved disappointment of things as they are most days was completely restored. Time. Place. Everything put back in the box where it belonged.
Everything except me.
Into the pressurized silence that followed my takeoff and landing bloomed an old record–scratchy voice saying—This is definitely THE ONE!
I had only a few panicked moments to act normal, as I hastily, clumsily reassembled the red-and-blue-and-yellow-lettered building blocks of still-cooling sensory input that required me to identify the approach of what I understood to be an older lady. She was talking about something important. Me perhaps.
Is this your daughter? She has great taste!
My son—Mum gently corrected.
I’m sorry—the shop assistant apologized. He has great taste.
Mum found me “transfixed”—which was an interesting choice of words on her part, I’ve always thought—in front of the elegant dummy in her spangly LBD.
She had no idea I’d stood in the afterburn, at the crossroads, in the intersection of rhomboid dimensions, breathing a cosmic overspill of sequin spatter galaxies embedded in a sexy primordial darkness curved like the mum of all space and time. Some Greek primordial Titan on the mother of all nights out.
I was locked in gunfighter stance, immobile, fixated, speechless, she said. Her words. She told me she was sorry for what happened to me that day.
Why was she sorry?
She told me I wasn’t scared or threatened. I couldn’t put it into words. I looked like I’d survived a lightning strike, Mum told me later. She said I was resplendent with shock. Transfixed.
You like this one?—Mum said, trying to bring me back down to earth. I suppose I must have liked it and nodded slowly. I did too!—she said. As soon as I saw it, I knew this was the one!
Then I said—It’s like space!
On the number 8 bus, a faster, more direct, more utilitarian route home from town, I was jumpy, or so I’ve been told. Checking over my shoulder, frowning at the vacant seats.
Back home, snorting with frustration. I selected a turquoise felt-tipped pen from its see-through plastic pack and tried to draw the next dimension beyond a cube, only to fall like Daedalus banging off a glass ceiling.
It was just a power surge—Mum reassured me much later. When the lights got so bright. That’s all it was.
I knew she suspected I’d suffered a form of electrocution unknown to conventional science, but my bland, edited version of the Levitz Bros. incident could offer no reasonable corroboration for that theory.
You may want to consider, as I’ve done myself, the possibility that this and subsequent visionary episodes were nothing more than evidence of temporal lobe seizures or some rare species of schizophrenia.
That’s the thing. As you’ll learn, when it comes to the Glamour, it all shakes out the same in the end.
* * *
—
After that day in the big store, I became acutely self-conscious, catching sight of my reflection in windows and car mirrors. Correcting my posture. Angling my head. Painfully hyper-aware.
I couldn’t tell Mum what had happened in Levitz Bros.; knowing what I knew would place her in spiritual danger. I entertained a suspicion that I’d made a pact with shiny demons and it was now my job to protect Mum and perhaps all of humanity! I knew now there were things that could come at you from inside as well as outside…
The impulse purchase of Detective Comics from the kiosk at Circle Station, with its stuffed-to-bursting magazine dockets, was a bribe to shut me up, that’s obvious now.
Don’t tell your father where we’ve been—she coached me as she pressed the rolled-up mag into my hands. Don’t say what we’ve been doing. We just went for a wander round the shops and you got a Batman comic.
That was fine by me; I don’t believe I had the vocabulary at that age to tell Dad where I’d been or what I’d seen that day. I’d have had to resort to the medium of modern interpretative dance, and I know that wouldn’t have gone down too well.
Dad was a practical man.
Compared with what I’d witnessed on third-floor ladies’ wear, lingerie, and footwear, the three-dimensional assembly of floors, walls, and ceilings I’d grown up inside now seemed flatter than panto scenery, my world a crudely rendered tableau of half-remembered streets and little old-fashioned passersby, some with the features left undone where the painter couldn’t be bothered to give them a rudimentary personality.
These were playing-card people with smudged thumbprints for expressions, cranked from the printing press for no other reason than to fill out the crowd scenes.
I was afraid of joining that world of shades, with its dismal, endless Sunday afternoons in various convalescent wards.
If real life had become as flat as the Ace of Spades, imagine the diminished state of the Batman book I tried to read that unfinished August evening with light still Batman blue in the sky at nine o’clock; the comic, with its odd locations and outlandish characters pressed down like petals in a book.
It looked as crude and cheap as it was. A crappy souvenir from a smelly stall specializing in garish and diabolical mockeries of the Glory of God’s Kingdom. I held in both hands a cack-handed attempt to secure a dream on paper rendered with a rushed ineptitude that made the promised wonders tawdry. Here was some pure artistic impulse rendered down to its ugliest unskilled expression.
A faithful scale model of the world itself and the Good Lord’s failure to live up to his promise.
Dad yelling.
The door slammed with a bang so hard it cracked the wood. Dad knowing he was using his strength in the wrong way.
Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe I would inevitably wake up and be some different number of years old, dreaming my future or my past.
Performers need to dig deep, to snare those primal luminous primary emotions that swim in the deepest reaches of the self, don’t you think?
The flatness of things persisted; the screen-printed surface of this world I lived in, had always lived in, before I was made to confront the unsettling actuality of its odd compacted edges, its crude folds and corners that only ever trembled on the edge of achieving solidity and reassurance; I imagined if I could just shift my perspective a little, I’d see the edges of Mum and Dad, like cardboard standees of film stars, inflated with life from the front, diminished to paper-thin lines of flimsy minimum existence seen side-on.
Flat pages became flatter in my hands, bleeding dimensions into the ink that came off on my clammy palms.
Dad shouting at mum in a negative anti-matter world. Their cosmic Boss Battle going on for a while, but far away, as if contained in faded speech balloons, drifted loose from the panels of a lost comic strip. Jagged edges and bold type to signify raised voices. A Pop Art argument played out on a gallery wall in ten-thousand-point type Lichtenstein WHA-AAMs and POWs, carrying no more weight than the clouds pumped up with urgent internal monologue above the superhero’s head.
That’s how I tried to explain my desperate, phantasmagoric childhood—and some of my present-day eccentricities—to Luda as we lay in bed together at the end of an awful day.
The Glamour was a way of seeing, I told Luda that night. The Glamour was a method whereby we could put makeup on the dullest moment, transforming it into its own best self.
The Glamour—the original name for magic, for spells made of words and intent—was the dazzling cloak we threw over the ordinary world to make it shine and dance and live up to its potential.
Here’s me, as one of those desperate bastards on the tilting, sinking deck of the wreck, Luda the raft of the Medusa I clung to, knowing I would drown anyway. Knowing the rescue ship would arrive too late. My voice lulling her into unconsciousness.
