Luda, p.5
Luda, page 5
You saw that? Her eyes took on the bright, cracked glaze of eyes in a Dutch oil painting.
You’re Principal Boy! You’re brave and good, even if no one knows it yet. You’re a superhero! Show them what you’re made of! Slap your thigh! Aladdin can’t fail.
Molly Stocking smacked the meat at the top of her leg with an intensity that crossed the line into self-harm. Then she smiled, snatching at me with a cat-clawing motion accompanied by a halfhearted growl of defiance.
Anytime you forget who you are onstage, just slap your thigh and summon Aladdin—I told her. It’s not you saying the lines, it’s Aladdin. Aladdin wouldn’t forget his own words, right? He’s expressing himself. Everything that’s you—push it away when you’re onstage; it’s a simpler world. In that world—you’re Aladdin.
Gears in motion ratcheted behind Molly’s luminous eyes. I pictured cogwheels cranking a woodcut sun of understanding over the painted hilly horizon of the backlot of her mind.
I had just enlightened Molly Stocking to one of the basic tenets of prancing onstage and playing a role. Something no one had bothered to teach her.
The harder you pretend, the more real it becomes.
Rules of the Glamour.
I heard you do magic—she stopped, shyly. She’d been reading about me on her phone obviously. In my past, I’d said too much.
That’s Abanazar…he’s the wizard!—I joked, with my smile locking into place like a visor on a crash helmet. Don’t get me mixed up with him!
I read about you. Magic. Like angels and the occult.
That was it. Time to shut this down.
It doesn’t take magic to put a smile back on your face—I said. Look at you!
I think you’re special—she insisted. There’s something about you. A light. My nan sees angels. I’d love to know more about magic. My nana reads tea leaves.
It’s not what you think—I told her honestly.
Meanwhile, I was thinking—The last thing I need is a disciple!
Funny how things work out.
I should have taken my own advice.
Glamour, babes. They want us to shine!—I insisted, sure it was true.
Back in rehearsal, Twankey’s first lines came pirouetting along my tongue to trip like hosts of angels taking flight.
What’s my name?
My posture relaxed into Twankey’s hobble-skirted stagger. I walked as if I were in heels, as if to show Molly what I’d been talking about. The hip swing and tipsy teeter coming from my gut not the shoes.
And you all shout “Widow Twankey!”
Dressed down, I could still feel the furry weight of Twankey’s rare, imaginary animal-pelt coats in fluorescent pinks and baby blues, the tanned hides of infant unicorns and endangered teddy bears. In comfortable jeans and a hoodie, I made myself recall the drape and the weight and the texture of every clattering, restrictive item of the costume I’d be wearing onstage.
I mentally outfitted myself in phantom drag before tumbling from the wings, choking on an imaginary vaper.
Now, if you catch me puffing on my vape, stop me. I’ve given it up for my health but I sometimes forget—
You’ll remember how it’s important to establish my forgetfulness to the audience.
The next big scene is a two-hander: Me and Aladdin. Aladdin and me.
And there was Molly’s wan face, crumpled with worry to look like one of those first-draft pages a dissatisfied writer chucks in the bin. A pang of maternal responsibility gripped me, and I was reminded of how it felt to be a volunteer on a suicide hotline, encouraging this fragile lovely young woman to embrace life.
Help me call out for him!
The dialogue prompt was launched with all the precision of a rocket strike across the stage to where, in the wings, our Aladdin intoned a prayer, apparently struggling in the white-hot talons of demonic possession. Her eyeballs rolled back as if to sneak a peek at her brain in full spate as she dragged what seemed to be words in great rusty chains from the haunted cellars of her derelict memory palace, with an effort not only visible but audible.
Then imagine lightning hitting a tree! That was Molly as she flared up and sprang into motion, electric with narcotics, exploding sap and toxic overconfidence!
He’s behind you!—the imagined audience screamed as one.
As rehearsed, I’d spin around, and so would Aladdin, and we’d miss each other by fractions of seconds, like two ninjas each inadvertently shadowing the other’s movements, each disappearing into the corner of the other’s eye.
Aladdin! I know he’s here somewhere…I can even smell his sweaty trainers!
He’s behind you—they yell, and this goes on until we freeze.
No one moves. The audience reactions subside to murmurs. Silence.
The Phantom is revealed, watching it all from his elevated perspective.
The puppet-strings that hold us up are seen to reach into the lighting rig, where the fingers of our mysterious overseer manipulate the story.
This always gets a gasp from the audience, even when they’ve read the reviews and they think they know what’s going to happen.
It was clever, The Phantom of the Pantomime, but it was simple, and funny, and easy to follow. You could take it and read it any way you wanted, and still get something out of it, whether you were bright and eight years old or a strutting twenty-six, or elegantly eighty on the way out.
The Phantom descends from the rafters, riding on a chandelier no less, to wander through the set, among us. No one moves but the Phantom in his weird mask, adjusting our limbs in preparation for the next scene before his departure into the overheads, leaving only blue smoke and gray questions.
It’s what drew me to The Phantom in the first place. That scene where we’re reminded nothing is real.
You probably know the story already and if not we’re too late for a spoiler warning: The Phantom kills the cast off one by one and the absurdity revolves around the production’s attempts to do Aladdin with a diminishing number of performers, until only one remains onstage, playing all the parts before the killer shows his face at last—
Twankey and the Phantom are one and the same!
As it turns out, the Phantom only believes he’s disfigured. When he takes off the mask before the big finale, the whole audience can see he’s remarkably good-looking, if I do say so myself.
That’s when we understand: What the Phantom finds horrifying is the sight of his own aging face in the mirror! He wears the greasepaint mask of Twankey to hide the unbearable disfigurement of simply growing older.
And that’s not even the big twist! To get that, you’ll have to keep listening.
I told you it was clever in its own way. Even knowing how it plays out makes it more ridiculous and ordinary and human—Aladdin meets Beckett if you like.
Dream on.
Molly was more than delighted with that idea. More than anything, she wanted to be taken seriously. I’d been harsh, and I shouldn’t have wished bad luck on her.
I made up my mind to think only pleasant thoughts. From this moment on, I told myself, I would live to encourage and inspire.
Molly sidled up at the end of rehearsal, to tell me I’d been really, really helpful. When she smiled, you’d swear the petals had opened on a lovely Botoxed sunflower.
Only two reallys?—I shot back but I did it with a grin, so she’d know I was being facetious.
Really, really, really!—she repeated, all radiant and full of herself now.
I gave her a big smile and a bigger hug. She’d be insufferable soon enough.
When she slapped her thigh again on her way out, the brutal crack of the impact told me this was the sort of thing that could easily progress from a pleasurable habit to a lifetime problem, but I let it go.
We all know what happened next.
* * *
—
The sets were coming on slowly; the role of a street in China was played by an enormous plywood tableau where painted Han-dynasty pagodas shared a skyline with the Burj Khalifa, the Petronas Towers, and Hong Kong’s Lippo Centre.
Before starting on Phantom, we’d researched every performance of Aladdin since its opening night in 1852 at the Drury Lane Theatre. Some of those Jack-the-Ripper-time shows were epic blockbusters relying on cutting-edge stagecraft: fleets of ships sinking through the stage, semi-silvered Pepper’s ghosts, and other cryptic tricks of light, seeming somehow, in hindsight, like real magic.
Float wanted to bring that back. He was obsessed with ideas of deception, simulation, artifice. The haunted music hall.
Or as I knew it, the Glamour.
By the time of the first dress rehearsal, Molly had raised her game by leaps and bounds. Not the most appropriate choice of words, I’d agree, bearing in mind the poor girl’s impending exit, stage door left on a gurney.
I effervesced onstage in my finery, wrapped for Christmas and the New Year in shiny PVC and candy-colored faux fur.
The look was post-makeover Glamorous Gran in slapper shoes. It’s easy to imagine the Widow blowing her late husband’s life insurance payout on cosmetic surgery and trashy outfits, wheezing for a puff as she stalks the streets of a paint-and-plywood papier-mâché Peking; a stop-motion glam tyrannosaur on HRT from one of those old Ray Harryhausen pictures.
Where’s that boy? Aladdin?
Triggered by her cue, Pavlov’s Pooch drooling into action, Molly sprang out, all radioactive overconfidence like when they’ve mastered their yellow belt in karate and there’s a gang of bastards with Stanley knives huddled round what only looks like an old lady at the ATM.
Like they do when they’ve learned four chords on the guitar and the big time is smiling and saying come on—take that next step—no one will laugh when they realize you can’t sing or play…
Like they do on ching.
He’s behind you!
Molly Stocking aka Aladdin flashed a grin, tossed back her head with gay abandon, and slapped her thigh like I’d taught her. When her right knee jerked up, she lost her balance and was gone.
We were all of us onstage treated to a singular sound like brittle bone snapping as the heel of Molly’s shoe cracked.
This was followed by an equally unrepeatable shriek as her ankle shattered in sympathy and her left leg telescoped, pitching Molly face-first, all turban, pantaloons, and nerve-shredding cries of anguish, into the prop basket outside Widow Twankey’s Laundry.
The ambulance arrived forty minutes later, using the traffic on the Ringway at Dundare as an excuse. Molly was stretchered offstage left, still sparkling in her Aladdin costume, a gift-wrapped accident loaded into the back of an ambulance as an early Xmas present for emergency room staff.
A rambling message arrived later that day, thanking her fans, her mum and dad, me, her management and publicist, her ex-bandmates, ex-boyfriends, and her “best friend,” labradoodle Villanelle, before the morphine accomplished its merciful labor and silenced her for the night.
Experts offered vague assurances they couldn’t possibly back up; she might be able to dance by opening night. We would be wrong to count her out. Miracles had happened apparently. They were in the Bible.
Reason suggested otherwise; even if Molly could learn to regrow her limbs like a salamander, she’d miss out on months of essential rehearsal for a very demanding part.
The understudy—a can-do smiler with a Neanderthal matriarch lurking somewhere in her DNA—wouldn’t last the week. Float was already talking auditions. Thirteen weeks to opening night.
I’ve said it before and will again: The role of the Principal Boy is the lynchpin of any pantomime production. Except for the Dame, of course.
Principal Boys are all cut from the same marketplace cloth: diamonds in the rough, losers from the lower classes who turn out to be winners, like Dick Whittington, Aladdin, and Hansel, with the odd Prince Charming or two from the upper crust seasoned into the recipe.
Float, incapable of deviating from his single-minded, all-or-nothing approach to every problem, decided all at once that what we needed was an unknown for the role of Aladdin. The search was on for a star yet to be born, a heavenly body undiscovered by terrestrial telescopes, an as-yet-significant gap in the map of the sky.
Like some fabulous new continent—I suggested wearily. Unexplored.
Like that. Yeah. Someone special—the gaze of the genius was medicated, dissociated. Someone fresh.
So, we’re looking for the complete opposite of Molly Stocking?—I said.
He stuck his thumb up. Farted spectacularly. Another magic moment in the company of der dictator Dominick Float.
Indistinct auditions smeared by; neither of us could remember any but the last few minutes of those endless indeterminate afternoon hours. Time slowly crystallized, as if nothing could ever happen differently and this was the way things were engineered to be.
It began with a restless prowling apprehension; we both knew if we failed to find our perfect Aladdin before sundown or its equivalent, the pressure would cause the walls around us to inflate and burst, along with our heads and hearts.
And we both knew. In the future it had already happened, one way or the other. There had to be an Aladdin on opening night or there was no Aladdin, no Phantom.
The question became: When would our Aladdin arrive to set us free from waiting?
We found ourselves willing an unspecified moment, wishing a notional being into existence, wringing the immensity of possibility down into a single Aladdin-shaped container made to hold precisely the right candidate.
Our accidental invocation was—and now we come to it—answered by a gunshot ricochet annunciation from the corridor beyond.
As I sit here sponging shallow moons of Kryo white under my eyes, going back to that last minute before the arrival of Luda, I remember Dominick signaling, with every scintilla of accumulated nonverbal passive aggression at his disposal, how the time had come to give up and go back to re-appraising the best of the also-rans.
Float was hungry. He had not fed since lunchtime when he’d swallowed the entire contents of a farm and left the restaurant unsatisfied. His dad-gut snarled at me, and stomachs have their own brain cells apparently. Gut feelings are as real as ravenous tigers.
That’s when he said—It’s going nowhere. I’m out.
Already on his feet, shrugging his jacket on, and fingering his car keys like pocket wind chimes. I had a feeling, a gut feeling you could say, that we should stay a moment longer. The static electricity in the room felt satanic and sexy, casting scalloped batwing shadows across stained glass portraits of saints.
Wait—I said. Just. Wait.
Is that when I noticed the clock had stopped?
Float seemed to acknowledge the moment. He listened to his watch. He frowned. He shimmied his wrist as if to fix the problem, then listened a second time.
I was equally surprised by how much time had passed since time ceased to matter. I looked once more, to be certain, at the motionless clock face and the hummingbird hover of the second hand.
Only one thing counted: that abrupt, repeated rifle shot ricochet of heel on tile approaching down the hall. Metronymic—click kit-kick click k-tik—striking the floor tiles. Multiple possibilities were measured and discarded in precise jeweler’s hammer strokes, chipping and flaking the one singular, inevitable moment into place.
We both felt it happen, Float and I; our wishes converged and took form as an undeniable future, upon us like an approaching, mysterious tsunami, an aquamarine tidal surge of the uncanny headed our way, leaving us powerless in the undertow.
Kick click click k-tik went the syncopated snare-drum strike and counterstrike of spiked stilettos in Pop Art SF/x staccato.
Think of the dreadful tick-tick of the timer on a bomb whose countdown, growing louder, suddenly stops into the roaring silence when a firing squad receives its order.
And Luda was there at the door.
Luda was there.
You must understand: In that eclipse everything gave off a lacquered numinous glow, a superlative holy gloss and polish, where each detail, each lambent light and Rembrandt shadow, came burnished to the profundity of precious stone.
Am I high now?
Looking back, I’m certain the temperature fell at least ten degrees when Luda entered the room. Crucifixes spun on their axes. Outside, the hearts of birds stopped, and they crashed dead from the sky. A distant sun was slaughtered by a new black star.
And somehow, we missed every warning, seeing only the answer to our prayers.
Oddly enough, in all our efforts to remember what happened, we had no memory of Luda’s arrival. The one thing of which we could be certain was that she was there, in front of us, as if she’d always been there, waiting for this moment.
How to describe Luda? Where do I begin?
Do we start with Luda’s impossible eyes? Do we end there?
Do we proceed from the outside in, like a pathologist, commencing with her white vinyl coat, concluding in the black tar pits she keeps where others have souls?
I hope I’m not too late—she said.
We’re still clinging to life, if that’s what you mean—I deadpanned. How’s your first aid?
Float sat down to consult his schedule. I don’t think we were expecting anyone else—he said. Do you have a name?
Luda—she said. And that was that.
First impressions first: Glacial. Tall. Hair in an iridescent copper-violet bob. Under the white coat, she dressed head-to-toe in Vantablack. Spray-on black leather pants, black Oakley boots, a rhinestone spider spinning its glittering web across her black T-shirt. I remember every detail. The studded collar she wore. The voice, educated, measured, and too precise.
You don’t look much like Aladdin—I went on.
Thinking that was enough to put her off guard, I threw her a few daft lines from the Haunted Bedroom scene to see how she’d react.
You’re Principal Boy! You’re brave and good, even if no one knows it yet. You’re a superhero! Show them what you’re made of! Slap your thigh! Aladdin can’t fail.
Molly Stocking smacked the meat at the top of her leg with an intensity that crossed the line into self-harm. Then she smiled, snatching at me with a cat-clawing motion accompanied by a halfhearted growl of defiance.
Anytime you forget who you are onstage, just slap your thigh and summon Aladdin—I told her. It’s not you saying the lines, it’s Aladdin. Aladdin wouldn’t forget his own words, right? He’s expressing himself. Everything that’s you—push it away when you’re onstage; it’s a simpler world. In that world—you’re Aladdin.
Gears in motion ratcheted behind Molly’s luminous eyes. I pictured cogwheels cranking a woodcut sun of understanding over the painted hilly horizon of the backlot of her mind.
I had just enlightened Molly Stocking to one of the basic tenets of prancing onstage and playing a role. Something no one had bothered to teach her.
The harder you pretend, the more real it becomes.
Rules of the Glamour.
I heard you do magic—she stopped, shyly. She’d been reading about me on her phone obviously. In my past, I’d said too much.
That’s Abanazar…he’s the wizard!—I joked, with my smile locking into place like a visor on a crash helmet. Don’t get me mixed up with him!
I read about you. Magic. Like angels and the occult.
That was it. Time to shut this down.
It doesn’t take magic to put a smile back on your face—I said. Look at you!
I think you’re special—she insisted. There’s something about you. A light. My nan sees angels. I’d love to know more about magic. My nana reads tea leaves.
It’s not what you think—I told her honestly.
Meanwhile, I was thinking—The last thing I need is a disciple!
Funny how things work out.
I should have taken my own advice.
Glamour, babes. They want us to shine!—I insisted, sure it was true.
Back in rehearsal, Twankey’s first lines came pirouetting along my tongue to trip like hosts of angels taking flight.
What’s my name?
My posture relaxed into Twankey’s hobble-skirted stagger. I walked as if I were in heels, as if to show Molly what I’d been talking about. The hip swing and tipsy teeter coming from my gut not the shoes.
And you all shout “Widow Twankey!”
Dressed down, I could still feel the furry weight of Twankey’s rare, imaginary animal-pelt coats in fluorescent pinks and baby blues, the tanned hides of infant unicorns and endangered teddy bears. In comfortable jeans and a hoodie, I made myself recall the drape and the weight and the texture of every clattering, restrictive item of the costume I’d be wearing onstage.
I mentally outfitted myself in phantom drag before tumbling from the wings, choking on an imaginary vaper.
Now, if you catch me puffing on my vape, stop me. I’ve given it up for my health but I sometimes forget—
You’ll remember how it’s important to establish my forgetfulness to the audience.
The next big scene is a two-hander: Me and Aladdin. Aladdin and me.
And there was Molly’s wan face, crumpled with worry to look like one of those first-draft pages a dissatisfied writer chucks in the bin. A pang of maternal responsibility gripped me, and I was reminded of how it felt to be a volunteer on a suicide hotline, encouraging this fragile lovely young woman to embrace life.
Help me call out for him!
The dialogue prompt was launched with all the precision of a rocket strike across the stage to where, in the wings, our Aladdin intoned a prayer, apparently struggling in the white-hot talons of demonic possession. Her eyeballs rolled back as if to sneak a peek at her brain in full spate as she dragged what seemed to be words in great rusty chains from the haunted cellars of her derelict memory palace, with an effort not only visible but audible.
Then imagine lightning hitting a tree! That was Molly as she flared up and sprang into motion, electric with narcotics, exploding sap and toxic overconfidence!
He’s behind you!—the imagined audience screamed as one.
As rehearsed, I’d spin around, and so would Aladdin, and we’d miss each other by fractions of seconds, like two ninjas each inadvertently shadowing the other’s movements, each disappearing into the corner of the other’s eye.
Aladdin! I know he’s here somewhere…I can even smell his sweaty trainers!
He’s behind you—they yell, and this goes on until we freeze.
No one moves. The audience reactions subside to murmurs. Silence.
The Phantom is revealed, watching it all from his elevated perspective.
The puppet-strings that hold us up are seen to reach into the lighting rig, where the fingers of our mysterious overseer manipulate the story.
This always gets a gasp from the audience, even when they’ve read the reviews and they think they know what’s going to happen.
It was clever, The Phantom of the Pantomime, but it was simple, and funny, and easy to follow. You could take it and read it any way you wanted, and still get something out of it, whether you were bright and eight years old or a strutting twenty-six, or elegantly eighty on the way out.
The Phantom descends from the rafters, riding on a chandelier no less, to wander through the set, among us. No one moves but the Phantom in his weird mask, adjusting our limbs in preparation for the next scene before his departure into the overheads, leaving only blue smoke and gray questions.
It’s what drew me to The Phantom in the first place. That scene where we’re reminded nothing is real.
You probably know the story already and if not we’re too late for a spoiler warning: The Phantom kills the cast off one by one and the absurdity revolves around the production’s attempts to do Aladdin with a diminishing number of performers, until only one remains onstage, playing all the parts before the killer shows his face at last—
Twankey and the Phantom are one and the same!
As it turns out, the Phantom only believes he’s disfigured. When he takes off the mask before the big finale, the whole audience can see he’s remarkably good-looking, if I do say so myself.
That’s when we understand: What the Phantom finds horrifying is the sight of his own aging face in the mirror! He wears the greasepaint mask of Twankey to hide the unbearable disfigurement of simply growing older.
And that’s not even the big twist! To get that, you’ll have to keep listening.
I told you it was clever in its own way. Even knowing how it plays out makes it more ridiculous and ordinary and human—Aladdin meets Beckett if you like.
Dream on.
Molly was more than delighted with that idea. More than anything, she wanted to be taken seriously. I’d been harsh, and I shouldn’t have wished bad luck on her.
I made up my mind to think only pleasant thoughts. From this moment on, I told myself, I would live to encourage and inspire.
Molly sidled up at the end of rehearsal, to tell me I’d been really, really helpful. When she smiled, you’d swear the petals had opened on a lovely Botoxed sunflower.
Only two reallys?—I shot back but I did it with a grin, so she’d know I was being facetious.
Really, really, really!—she repeated, all radiant and full of herself now.
I gave her a big smile and a bigger hug. She’d be insufferable soon enough.
When she slapped her thigh again on her way out, the brutal crack of the impact told me this was the sort of thing that could easily progress from a pleasurable habit to a lifetime problem, but I let it go.
We all know what happened next.
* * *
—
The sets were coming on slowly; the role of a street in China was played by an enormous plywood tableau where painted Han-dynasty pagodas shared a skyline with the Burj Khalifa, the Petronas Towers, and Hong Kong’s Lippo Centre.
Before starting on Phantom, we’d researched every performance of Aladdin since its opening night in 1852 at the Drury Lane Theatre. Some of those Jack-the-Ripper-time shows were epic blockbusters relying on cutting-edge stagecraft: fleets of ships sinking through the stage, semi-silvered Pepper’s ghosts, and other cryptic tricks of light, seeming somehow, in hindsight, like real magic.
Float wanted to bring that back. He was obsessed with ideas of deception, simulation, artifice. The haunted music hall.
Or as I knew it, the Glamour.
By the time of the first dress rehearsal, Molly had raised her game by leaps and bounds. Not the most appropriate choice of words, I’d agree, bearing in mind the poor girl’s impending exit, stage door left on a gurney.
I effervesced onstage in my finery, wrapped for Christmas and the New Year in shiny PVC and candy-colored faux fur.
The look was post-makeover Glamorous Gran in slapper shoes. It’s easy to imagine the Widow blowing her late husband’s life insurance payout on cosmetic surgery and trashy outfits, wheezing for a puff as she stalks the streets of a paint-and-plywood papier-mâché Peking; a stop-motion glam tyrannosaur on HRT from one of those old Ray Harryhausen pictures.
Where’s that boy? Aladdin?
Triggered by her cue, Pavlov’s Pooch drooling into action, Molly sprang out, all radioactive overconfidence like when they’ve mastered their yellow belt in karate and there’s a gang of bastards with Stanley knives huddled round what only looks like an old lady at the ATM.
Like they do when they’ve learned four chords on the guitar and the big time is smiling and saying come on—take that next step—no one will laugh when they realize you can’t sing or play…
Like they do on ching.
He’s behind you!
Molly Stocking aka Aladdin flashed a grin, tossed back her head with gay abandon, and slapped her thigh like I’d taught her. When her right knee jerked up, she lost her balance and was gone.
We were all of us onstage treated to a singular sound like brittle bone snapping as the heel of Molly’s shoe cracked.
This was followed by an equally unrepeatable shriek as her ankle shattered in sympathy and her left leg telescoped, pitching Molly face-first, all turban, pantaloons, and nerve-shredding cries of anguish, into the prop basket outside Widow Twankey’s Laundry.
The ambulance arrived forty minutes later, using the traffic on the Ringway at Dundare as an excuse. Molly was stretchered offstage left, still sparkling in her Aladdin costume, a gift-wrapped accident loaded into the back of an ambulance as an early Xmas present for emergency room staff.
A rambling message arrived later that day, thanking her fans, her mum and dad, me, her management and publicist, her ex-bandmates, ex-boyfriends, and her “best friend,” labradoodle Villanelle, before the morphine accomplished its merciful labor and silenced her for the night.
Experts offered vague assurances they couldn’t possibly back up; she might be able to dance by opening night. We would be wrong to count her out. Miracles had happened apparently. They were in the Bible.
Reason suggested otherwise; even if Molly could learn to regrow her limbs like a salamander, she’d miss out on months of essential rehearsal for a very demanding part.
The understudy—a can-do smiler with a Neanderthal matriarch lurking somewhere in her DNA—wouldn’t last the week. Float was already talking auditions. Thirteen weeks to opening night.
I’ve said it before and will again: The role of the Principal Boy is the lynchpin of any pantomime production. Except for the Dame, of course.
Principal Boys are all cut from the same marketplace cloth: diamonds in the rough, losers from the lower classes who turn out to be winners, like Dick Whittington, Aladdin, and Hansel, with the odd Prince Charming or two from the upper crust seasoned into the recipe.
Float, incapable of deviating from his single-minded, all-or-nothing approach to every problem, decided all at once that what we needed was an unknown for the role of Aladdin. The search was on for a star yet to be born, a heavenly body undiscovered by terrestrial telescopes, an as-yet-significant gap in the map of the sky.
Like some fabulous new continent—I suggested wearily. Unexplored.
Like that. Yeah. Someone special—the gaze of the genius was medicated, dissociated. Someone fresh.
So, we’re looking for the complete opposite of Molly Stocking?—I said.
He stuck his thumb up. Farted spectacularly. Another magic moment in the company of der dictator Dominick Float.
Indistinct auditions smeared by; neither of us could remember any but the last few minutes of those endless indeterminate afternoon hours. Time slowly crystallized, as if nothing could ever happen differently and this was the way things were engineered to be.
It began with a restless prowling apprehension; we both knew if we failed to find our perfect Aladdin before sundown or its equivalent, the pressure would cause the walls around us to inflate and burst, along with our heads and hearts.
And we both knew. In the future it had already happened, one way or the other. There had to be an Aladdin on opening night or there was no Aladdin, no Phantom.
The question became: When would our Aladdin arrive to set us free from waiting?
We found ourselves willing an unspecified moment, wishing a notional being into existence, wringing the immensity of possibility down into a single Aladdin-shaped container made to hold precisely the right candidate.
Our accidental invocation was—and now we come to it—answered by a gunshot ricochet annunciation from the corridor beyond.
As I sit here sponging shallow moons of Kryo white under my eyes, going back to that last minute before the arrival of Luda, I remember Dominick signaling, with every scintilla of accumulated nonverbal passive aggression at his disposal, how the time had come to give up and go back to re-appraising the best of the also-rans.
Float was hungry. He had not fed since lunchtime when he’d swallowed the entire contents of a farm and left the restaurant unsatisfied. His dad-gut snarled at me, and stomachs have their own brain cells apparently. Gut feelings are as real as ravenous tigers.
That’s when he said—It’s going nowhere. I’m out.
Already on his feet, shrugging his jacket on, and fingering his car keys like pocket wind chimes. I had a feeling, a gut feeling you could say, that we should stay a moment longer. The static electricity in the room felt satanic and sexy, casting scalloped batwing shadows across stained glass portraits of saints.
Wait—I said. Just. Wait.
Is that when I noticed the clock had stopped?
Float seemed to acknowledge the moment. He listened to his watch. He frowned. He shimmied his wrist as if to fix the problem, then listened a second time.
I was equally surprised by how much time had passed since time ceased to matter. I looked once more, to be certain, at the motionless clock face and the hummingbird hover of the second hand.
Only one thing counted: that abrupt, repeated rifle shot ricochet of heel on tile approaching down the hall. Metronymic—click kit-kick click k-tik—striking the floor tiles. Multiple possibilities were measured and discarded in precise jeweler’s hammer strokes, chipping and flaking the one singular, inevitable moment into place.
We both felt it happen, Float and I; our wishes converged and took form as an undeniable future, upon us like an approaching, mysterious tsunami, an aquamarine tidal surge of the uncanny headed our way, leaving us powerless in the undertow.
Kick click click k-tik went the syncopated snare-drum strike and counterstrike of spiked stilettos in Pop Art SF/x staccato.
Think of the dreadful tick-tick of the timer on a bomb whose countdown, growing louder, suddenly stops into the roaring silence when a firing squad receives its order.
And Luda was there at the door.
Luda was there.
You must understand: In that eclipse everything gave off a lacquered numinous glow, a superlative holy gloss and polish, where each detail, each lambent light and Rembrandt shadow, came burnished to the profundity of precious stone.
Am I high now?
Looking back, I’m certain the temperature fell at least ten degrees when Luda entered the room. Crucifixes spun on their axes. Outside, the hearts of birds stopped, and they crashed dead from the sky. A distant sun was slaughtered by a new black star.
And somehow, we missed every warning, seeing only the answer to our prayers.
Oddly enough, in all our efforts to remember what happened, we had no memory of Luda’s arrival. The one thing of which we could be certain was that she was there, in front of us, as if she’d always been there, waiting for this moment.
How to describe Luda? Where do I begin?
Do we start with Luda’s impossible eyes? Do we end there?
Do we proceed from the outside in, like a pathologist, commencing with her white vinyl coat, concluding in the black tar pits she keeps where others have souls?
I hope I’m not too late—she said.
We’re still clinging to life, if that’s what you mean—I deadpanned. How’s your first aid?
Float sat down to consult his schedule. I don’t think we were expecting anyone else—he said. Do you have a name?
Luda—she said. And that was that.
First impressions first: Glacial. Tall. Hair in an iridescent copper-violet bob. Under the white coat, she dressed head-to-toe in Vantablack. Spray-on black leather pants, black Oakley boots, a rhinestone spider spinning its glittering web across her black T-shirt. I remember every detail. The studded collar she wore. The voice, educated, measured, and too precise.
You don’t look much like Aladdin—I went on.
Thinking that was enough to put her off guard, I threw her a few daft lines from the Haunted Bedroom scene to see how she’d react.
