Luda, p.32
Luda, page 32
They had nothing on me.
Zero.
Zilch.
The police couldn’t touch me. Nobody wanted to touch me, least of all the law.
The cab was a driverless, thank fuck! I couldn’t face conversation. I’d lied to the police to protect Luda. For her, I’d made myself vulnerable again.
Did I expect gratitude?
I needed silence and calm to rehearse in my head what I planned to say next.
* * *
—
What have you done to get the police involved?—I said.
Luda’s eyes flickered, and her lower lip vibrated fetchingly. It was all an act but like the death of Bambi’s mother it would work on me every time.
They think I’ve got something to do with his disappearance—your disappearance—I explained for the fifth time. I covered for you! What do they want with you?
The Marvells sent them!—Luda was unequivocal. Isn’t it obvious?
Backed into a cul-de-sac, I opted for adamant—If this goes any further. If I’m implicated in anything, you have to come clean. You have to tell them Kenny Trace is you!
But Luda held my gaze and flew me like a kite.
I’m not him—said Luda. You don’t know what I went through to not be him. If they find me. They’ll take me back—you can’t let that happen! You made a promise! You have to hide me! From them—she shrieked. The Marvells!
What do the police want with Kenny Trace?—I said. What did he do?
Luda shook. It wasn’t me—she insisted. I wasn’t born then—and it was difficult to find the flaw in her argument.
Rules of the game of Golden Dames.
The game is played on a board that encodes the Golden Section in its angled geometry, with five sides making up a star pentagon otherwise known as a pentagram of the kind a working necromancer might slap up to confound a malignant spirit, as I’d pointed out to Dominick Float in the upper stories of the Vallhambra that day.
Play commences with nine pieces on the board placed at the vertices of the star, with one space left empty.
Two players alternate turns, capturing each other’s pieces by jumping over them like checkers into the empty spot beyond. The winner is the player who captures the last piece and leaves one single token on the board.
There were other diversions like it; Pentalpha was the oldest, going back to 1700 B.C. Then there was Golden Star. In Mexico the five-pointed board was recruited to run a con known as estrella mágica and there was an even more narratively perfect variant known as Vultures and Crows, oddly enough.
Once you know what’s going on, once you figure out the rule book, you’d like to think you can turn it to your advantage.
The board, the spiked and star-spangled field of play that was our stage at the Vallhambra, pinned out like a starfish dissection, flayed bare, with each new vacant space the gap where a captured counter was stretchered offstage, still telling jokes, promising a return, a resurrection.
Like a sack of endless snakes that turns out to be just the one wily ouroboros, all the seemingly random loops and coils of circumstance were braided into the same conclusion. The same step-by-step process led me prancing over the edge of reason into a waiting abyss.
Seen from one angle, the pentagram had two points down, one up toward the unity of pure spirit. From another it showed one point down, two points raised—the horns, the contending dual forces of the material universe.
The One snapped in Two.
* * *
—
The story picks up following the act 2 scene 4 climax where, as you’ll remember, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and all the rest, Abanazar has commanded the reluctant genie to flit the palace across thousands of miles, through time and space to Egypt of all places, where the princess and all her palace infrastructure now appear against a red-and-gold backdrop of pyramids and the inscrutable Sphinx.
The painted flat depicted a romanticized Nile Delta, shuffled together with local Gasglow landmarks, Wonders of the World like the Millennium Wheel, Exhibition Tower, the university spire’s cone of lithic lacework, and the double-D-cup dome of the Mandrake Library joined forces to assemble the half-remembered skyline of some liminal world.
Abanazar enters stage right to a crashing Niagara of hisses and jeers. No one wants the villain to win, after all, and the arrival of a new dawn, a fresh scene, brings hope that there’s more to this story than just the unfair triumph of age, cynicism, and greed. No curse, no sibilant approbation can unseat this new, inflated Abanazar from his perch, strutting into the footlights in curly-toed slippers of pure gold thread, so puffed up with pride he’s popping like evil corn in an evil pan.
After all this time toiling in the pale shadows of the dreams of greater men than he, Abanazar has achieved everything he wants by resorting to subterfuge and deception; his power, as conferred by the Genie, is unlimited. His horizons are reliant only on the constraints of his imagination.
Thankfully, as one more demonstration of the preeminence of irony in the universe, Abanazar, learned, articulate, well-dressed, well-read, well hung I’m sure, has the tiniest little imagination you’ll ever set eyes on.
Stuck with this predictable dullard, the Genie follows his demanding new master dutifully, shackled and surly. You can tell by the spirit’s hangdog expression how he chafes against Abanazar’s orders, but he lacks free will. As a thing of pure power, he can only grumble and obey. While Abanazar shows nothing but contempt for the wondrous being that does his bidding, sending the Genie on boring errands, lavishing the omnipotent sprite’s limitless potential on incessant palace redecorations.
The Genie does as he’s told when Abanazar orders up another banquet featuring all the same exotic ingredients, the same golden cutlery and priceless diamond crockery—Do as I say, you miserable creature! If you can’t hack it, I can always call Deliverex!
Then comes the entertainment! Dancers file in like sluggish rivers of mercury and molten bullion, dispirited jugglers tumble without conviction and describe mathematically complex but fundamentally unexciting arcs with balls and skittles. A dry physics lecture in clown’s motley ensues prompting Abanazar to burst into song, voicing the deep-throated confident bluster of the successful midlife man facing a predictable crisis.
Forget that wretched beggar boy—he sings with powerful conviction. There’s someone new in town!
He struts, he soars—
Here Abanazar performs a textbook basketball throw, a move requiring stage effects to reproduce, in the form of a deflating balloon, a pretend backward toss underlined by the loop-de-whoop of a swanee whistle, and a real basketball plopped through the hoop.
He always scores!
There’s a mirror where he preens, as Abanazar waxing his mustache with a coiling oiling twist of finger and thumb gives his gem-studded new headgear a rakish gambler’s tilt.
He suits a golden crown!
This conceited inventory of the wizard’s many attributes grows showier, more strident, while he strides with self-important assurance among the antic diversions he’s conjuring from transparent air.
His retinue’s spectacular, the master of vernacular, his reach well-nigh tentacular! It’s TRUEEE!
Abanazar’s ostentatious exhibitionism intended to spark the fires of desire in Jasmine’s spent embers is having the opposite effect on the young royal kidnappee. Instead of reacting with the anticipated joy and gratitude, Jas averts her attention, too despondent to react to Abanazar’s manic display with anything other than a stretched-out sigh. Then, as bitter smogs of pollen from the forest of rare flowers he’s charmed to brighten her window box wring tears instead from her eyes, she sneezes and begins to sob.
Get rid of it!—Abanazar snarls in response, scorned and bewildered. All of it!
The Genie obliges, burdened by grim servitude, humorless and demoralized as he banishes the impossibly colored garden, so that all the imaginary performers scatter into the wings, leaving only silent dirt and sand where wonders lately cavorted.
No matter what the old man magics up to impress the captive princess, his threadbare powers of invention serve only to expose his innate lack of flair; his diamonds are never much bigger than the Ritz, for instance, while Jasmine’s own private, personal chariot of stars is drawn through the firmament by only seven clockwork swans, each made of wearying quantities of the pure gold that every fixture, fitting, utensil, and convenience seems to be fashioned from these days in the relocated palace from Peking. With every new and more excessive nuptial offering, Jasmine only shakes her head morosely, deep-dipped in what doctors might diagnose as the marinade of clinical depression.
We all know there’s only one thing she yearns for, and that’s Aladdin. Aladdin. Aladdin!
But Aladdin will never find her, she frets! Not here so far from home!
Dee Jayashankar played a chef’s kiss that day, her chops honed by high-pitched soap-opera performances every weekday for four years. Every articulate facial expression, every hasta gesture she’d studied and absorbed from the Bollywood dance routines she grew up replicating in her crowded family living room, each application of abhinaya now came into play to whet the edge of her performance.
Even in rehearsal, she was amazing to watch. I could hardly imagine what she’d be like when her dial was turned up for opening night and I wondered why I’d overlooked this young woman’s cool, dedicated brilliance.
In fact, and this is me in a dark place emotionally, taking a moment to think about it, the whole crew was operating to the peak of its abilities at a very challenging time. So much so that I experienced an uncharacteristic surge of affection and appreciation for everyone’s accomplishments. Our refusal to bow to adversity was remarkable and laudable. Naïve, you might say.
I gave Float a thumbs-up and regretted it. I don’t do thumbs-ups and he immediately, correctly, suspected something was amiss in the inexplicable blue swamps of my interior world.
I’m master of the Lamp, I’m a winner, I’m the Champ!
It’s plain to see, the clouds, the trees, all dance a jig at my decree!—sings Abanazar to his own perma-tanned face in the bright mirror, but as we watch, the pumped-up pride begins to leak from his posture.
Abanazar has everything he wants but none of it is how he wanted it to be so what’s gone wrong?
The girl’s his, but she despises him down to his biomolecular constituent parts. The Genie obeys his every command, but the miserable thing openly loathes him and ticks off his uninspired catalog of wishes with a sulky disinterest that ruins all the fun. The only way he can get people to love him is to bully them and then punish them if they don’t do as he says.
There must be more to supreme power than this!
Intelligent, I’m elegant, astride a golden elephant—he sings in his uncertainty. What can she see in him but not in me?
What must I do—what’s wrong—what’s wrong with me?—he sings, and these last words break down into a forlorn spoken-word récit, an admission of frailty.
As his self-respect crumbles, as his big number wraps up in dejection and rejection, we may almost feel sorry for Abanazar, but that’s the trick here. For the first time we see through the old fraud’s desperate act; underneath the designer turban and the spangled shift, there’s just one more silly goat losing his edges to the corrosive passage of days, imagining his power and privilege makes him young and attractive rather than something to put up with in return for six heart-shaped swimming pools and a holiday house on the moon.
Just as we’re opening to the possibility that the embittered magus might hide a gentler, more sensitive side, he gathers his rage in a ball of haywire and spite and makes up his mind, pulling the corners tight.
What does it matter, he decides, if he has to twist people’s arms up their ungrateful backs before they’ll admit to loving him? He has the capability to do just that and he intends to use it, singing his song of agency with a renewed will to power.
If she wants a brutal tyrant, then I’ll BE a brutal tyrant and my brutal boots I’ll tie right up right now!
I’ll stamp around triumphant, causing maximum discomfort—and in the end, I’ll FUCK THE SACRED COW!
The actual line goes—And in the end, I’ll WIN her heart I vow! but I include the multiply offensive parody version for completists and in memory of the late, grating Gofannon Rhys.
It’s decided there and then that Jasmine must agree to marry Abanazar, whether she wants to or not, the ceremony to take place, without further hesitation or delay, the very next day.
And in the end, I’ll OWN her heart I vow! He concludes his song to the accompaniment of a scattering cloudburst of neon glitter.
* * *
—
I suppose it would ruin the story, along with the dreams of moon-drunk teenagers everywhere, but I always wondered why it never occurred to poor old Abanazar to have the Genie transform him into a fully authentic physical duplicate of Aladdin. Or even just make him young again in his own skin. Hooked nose and a tendency toward stooped cadaverous clutching aside, you can imagine Abanazar being quite freaky-sexy, in his dating days all those eons ago, Byronic even.
I don’t think the best of people in general, I admit, but you have to wonder how long Jasmine’s resolve would hold out when she found herself in the experienced arms of a jaded, courtly libertine with the gym-sculpted body of a twenty-two-year-old man. Wouldn’t Aladdin seem uncouth, ill-educated, and undernourished in comparison with the worldly, shredded Grand Vizier of gorgeousness?
Wouldn’t an aristocratic girl like Jasmine choose the hard-to-get Bad Boy over the gauche and puppyish Good Kid if the playing field of years was leveled?
Digressions aside, Abanazar’s destined to be a cartoon baddie with uncomplicated motivations, locked within his proscribed horizons. No matter how hard he tries, the story will never let him be evil enough to do what most of us would do, and as for Jasmine, she’s written to be far too pure, too innocent, and too completely in love with her dream boy to dump Aladdin in favor of even the world’s most powerful sorcerer.
It’s a fantastic scene where Abanazar outdoes himself, while Jasmine in her gilded links tries her best to raise a smile at an autopsy.
As Abanazar blusters offstage in a litter swirl of metallic purples and flashing aluminum stars, Jasmine is left alone, sobbing into a watered silk cushion that looks from the gallery like a gigantic foil-wrapped toffee.
But there’s movement. To anticipated audience whoops of delight, Aladdin shows his hand. Tentatively he raises his head from the laundry basket used to smuggle him into the throne room, wearing the wicker lid as a coolie hat.
For the first time since the windbag’s dazzling display began, Jasmine breathes life, rising like a newly watered springtime flower into the refreshing lemon slice of a sudden spotlight.
Extending long shapely pins in nude tights and kitten heels, a gender centaur with the strong wiry torso of a skinny hot twink, and the enviable legs of a hosiery model, Aladdin tiptoes across the stage to the sound of cheers from the audience. Ostentatiously quiet, his upraised finger makes a cross with his lips.
Shhhh!
Luda, eyes big and round as bike lamps trained on the gallery, instructed the purely notional audience to hold its collective tongue, lest the wizard twig to the escape plan. Then just to make certain we got it, she went on to deliver her message in a slapstick combination of International Sign Language and semaphore she’d learned for the purpose. Dee Jayashankar clapped a hand across her mouth and nodded like a dashboard dog into an imagined crowd.
The atmosphere in the palace has shifted, brightened. The audience is surely cheering even though Aladdin’s silently urging them to stop before they alert the sorcerer!
Too late!
What’s that noise?—booms Abanazar’s bad-tempered voice from offstage. The wizard’s on his way!
Aladdin makes it back to the laundry basket’s concealment with heart-stopping moments to spare as Abanazar blows back in like a recurring headache. He’s grasping that something’s not right; they’re cheering. No one’s ever rooted for Abanazar.
What’s going on? What was all that noise?—he demands of the audience, who customarily respond like an overworked boiler room of hisses, a ghost stampede of boos. Tell me, you ungrateful lot, or I’ll order my Genie to turn you all into smelly camels!
He sniffs, detecting molecules of scent, and turns on his heel in a flurry of spangled robes to berate the Genie.
You’re supposed to tell me if you see anything!
I don’t see Aladdin anywhere—the Genie replies with the current undeniable truth.
Aladdin’s still hidden in the basket, but it can’t be too long before he’s discovered. A barely stifled sneeze betrays his position.
That’s because he’s hiding, you idiot!—Abanazar barks.
My wish is your command, O wizard—and Abanazar says—Flush him out!
The Genie points his finger and one by one the baskets explode in a fusillade of sparks and pyro. Closer and closer to where we know Aladdin is precariously concealed. The audience screaming louder and louder.
The princess almost gives him away. If only a diversion could be arranged! Something so ridiculous and diverting it might work.
Something so tacky, tasteless, and unforgettable your eyes would deserve sensitive counseling to help them recover.
Delivery for Mr. Abanazar!—comes the shout as a pair of anachronistic Deliverex drivers played by the twins interrupts the Genie’s target practice in the vital moments before Aladdin goes up in pink powderpuff smoke.
I didn’t order anything—Abanazar objects. I’m a powerful wizard! If I want something, I conjure it from thin air!
It’s got your name on it—the Deliverex dudes insist flatly, bringing the clipboard rules and regs of the real world. You have to sign for it—they say. You have to own it.
