Luda, page 18
Ten hours earlier, I’d crawled mechanically from my pit engulfed in a numb Ecclesiastical light that informed me I was still drunk and shortly to pay the price.
I glugged my way through four bottles of springwater in the driverless on the way to the Vall, while lugubrious clouds hung heavy with rain all the way.
As too often happened after a rough night, i.e., anytime in the last few years, my soul cultivated its own special hive of horrible itching doubts and apprehensions. Being observed by unknown forces was the least of my troubles. I had been called to the witness stand at a hostile cosmic court and failed to arrive on time, necessitating my own trial.
I had no idea what I’d done that was so terribly wrong, I only knew with a soul-shaking certainty that my misdeeds were up there with Lucifer’s Mutiny and the Fall of the Rebel Angels. My disobedience and my shame equaled those of Adam and Eve.
I’d offended existence itself; that’s how it felt.
I swear I couldn’t have suffered any more guilt if I’d deliberately taken a shit on the mother-of-pearl throne of the Almighty.
As if the Fall weren’t enough—here, while I lay twitching and disassembled, too weak to defend myself, came the awful bells and whistles of Last Judgment. A ruthless lunchtime audit of a lifetime’s bad karma lay ahead. I vowed to take it easy. I promised to look after myself and never have to go through this ordeal again.
Farewell the ever-spinning wheel of karma!
* * *
—
When I arrived and dumped my bag of blues on one of the folding chairs by the door, Luda was already there. Luda wore hot-pink leggings and a loose T-shirt with a retro RELAX slogan as she lounged against the wall. She had adopted the purposely unstudied Paris collection poise of a fashion doll, feigning the kind of absolute un-self-awareness that always conceals a heightened brittle self-consciousness.
Being watched, she was watching all of us. Watching everything. Not just watching, observing, like a scientist, or a specialist trained to record details so fine no one else would know they existed. I read once that cats can hear molecular motion. Luda could see it. I swear she could detect angels dancing the Gay Gordon with atoms on the head of a pin.
I caught her zooming in on micro-movements of the performances, sampling and repeating a florid hand gesture she could imitate and use again. She wasn’t subtle, and I knew all that arch posturing was something she’d need siphoned out of her repertoire.
Self-consciousness made her look like a boy doing a girl doing a boy, although I think she enjoyed the disorientation, encouraged it.
But there was something else, as a more disturbing thought came to mind; there are plants, bee orchids, that mimic the shape of sexually available insects to attract pollinators.
What if Luda was a mimic, an imitator, a synthesizer sampling, filing, and replaying a repertoire of natural human behavior for her own ends?
In her inventory of gestures, I now recognized some of my own—that sort of thing happens, doesn’t it? We find ourselves imitating traits we admire in the people we like enough to spend time with. We rub off on one another, it’s only to be expected, but somehow this felt intrusive, intimate, unsettling.
Float interrupted—We’re running through this big scene with the Two Ells for a few reasons. One, we don’t have our Abanazar today! The good news is he might be out of the oxygen tent by the weekend.
When he said the words “oxygen tent” Luda snorted.
The atmosphere was glacial; you could have raised money to build a sanctuary for polar bears in the space between us as we turned the rehearsal into a war zone.
You’ll have to help me, Aladdin—I’ve gotten a little behind!
That’s wishful thinking—said Luda. Don’t flatter yourself!
I served up a look loaded with menace.
You can help me with the laundry—I’m doing the wizard’s underpants today!
But I need your help!—Aladdin wailed. I need somewhere to hide!
There was a genuine urgency in her voice. A heartfelt note of jeopardy. Her delivery was terrific, as if she’d blazed her way through a dozen color-coded karate belts in a weekend’s training. As I saw it, Luda was clearly bringing her A-game as a deliberate challenge. Taunting me to rise to the occasion against my inclination.
It was too bad I had to wreck her moment by rolling out a pair of gold-embroidered Y-fronts big enough for a family of three to sit out the apocalypse.
I said the wizard’s underpants! Talk about big jobs! I bet these have seen a few of those!
Oh no! Ma, they’re coming!—Luda shrieked before I had a chance to finish my lines. They’re here! You have to hide me, Ma! Then she dived through the scaled-up underpants into a laundry basket the size of a rowing boat.
Hot on Aladdin’s heels, two “comedy” policemen, idiot heirs to the Keystone Kops/Police Academy genre, barreled onto the scene, stage left, waving outsized truncheons. Released from the innards of Buttercup the comedy cow like Romulus and Remus springing forth from that she-wolf, the twins were completely unrecognizable.
As Twankey, I’m so preoccupied jamming my head through the leg holes of the wizard’s prize underpants in search of Aladdin that I don’t see the law creeping up. As usual, I’m relying on audience participation to keep me up to date as I flap around like a chicken, caught up in the sorcerer’s gusset.
They’re behind you!—they’d shout from rows and balconies.
You just won’t leave my behind alone, will you?—I huffed with exasperation in return as I draped the pants carefully over the ironing board. Can’t you see I’ve got very important work to do for my brother-in-law the wizard?
This last line came out like air seeping from an inflatable chair. I had nothing to give.
How can he be your brother-in-law?—Aladdin pointed out. You’re an only child!
I supposed I was. That explained everything!
* * *
—
With the insurance company insisting on a stringent safety review before anyone else was allowed onstage at the Vall, on-site rehearsals stuttered to a halt. There was Evil afoot. In our new cramped performance space, I endured glances of recrimination from Dominick Float and the cast, as if I were somehow to blame.
There followed more wearisome talk of ghosts. An ill wind blowing. A flapping sheet haunting the production. Unassailable excuse for every lapse of concentration, every mistimed joke, every yawn.
I don’t smoke, not tobacco anyway, and I needed no legitimate reason to hang around street corners in high heels, but it was the best way to get the gossip.
That morning’s puff break brought confident talk of a full-blown Curse as the unsettled ghost of Murdo McCloudie extended his spectral pall over our production. Even though he’d died peacefully in his bed a long, long time ago, in a Gasglow far, far away, the architect still somehow walked among us, determined to ruin everything for reasons no one could arrange into a string of sensible words.
By this stage in the sultry grind of the season, I’d developed an admiration for the great McCloudie and his remarkable postmortem reach. I can guarantee I won’t be remembered in ten years’ time, let alone a whole century; not for all or any of my personal achievements while living, let alone as a ghost doing sweet fuck-all in the après-vie lounge.
After what for me was a purely symbolic lunch, where I made too emphatic a point of avoiding Luda at every opportunity, Float felt compelled to stage a second intervention, wearing his memorable “disappointed dad” expression.
So, what’s all this about an oxygen tent?—I asked, in an all-too-palpable attempt to divert him.
Some fish sauce found its way into Goff’s vegetarian Tom Yum—Float said with such solemnity I had to stifle more than a chortle. Anaphylactic shock apparently. Quite severe.
Life imitates Art, I thought; the parallels to the meta-plot of The Phantom of the Pantomime were too faithful to simply sweep under the Axminster.
That’s not what I want to talk about—Float went on, all ominous. There’s something going on here.
It might help if we stop blaming ghosts whenever things go wrong!—I pointed out reasonably.
It’s not ghosts. Spirits, though, well that’s another thing—he said, visibly pleased with his own rabbit-pellet of a quip, an exploratory jab as the bell rang on Round 1. Little did my opponent suspect that I’d studied his every mechanical, unspontaneous, and downright routine strategy over the many years of our association; I knew exactly what would happen next.
The drink. The drugs. She’s half your age at least—think of that as Big Dom’s trademark upfront emotional sucker punch.
Traditionally, he comes in hard then bounces back on the balls of his feet, permitting his foe a moment to shake out the shock of stars they’re swimming in, covering the precision of his moves with slapstick attempts to sidestep into kindness that in this case came off slippery and unctuous—I need you to look after yourself, Lu.
I’d been here before, relaxing my guard the first two times he ran this script instead of tensing in preparation for the inevitable blow, which wasn’t long in coming—
Since Luda came along you’ve lost focus, Lu. Twankey’s at the heart of Aladdin but you—and here he paused for a sorry shake of that wrecking-ball head. Your heart and soul’s in fucking Fairyland and I need you here. Understand? Let your hair down when it’s over.
I bristled at that. Fairyland?—I said. If it wasn’t for fucking Fairyland, we’d all be out of a job! Sick of all the post-party wretchedness that was the world I’d been condemned to inhabit, I snarled in Float’s face. I’m not her keeper! She’s a free agent! I haven’t even seen her since Saturday night.
That was all he needed to hear; my flushed face, my shrill injured tone and teary defensiveness told the whole sad story.
After what happened to Molly. Then the thing with the light. Now Goff’s out of the picture for who knows how long—Float said, composing an expression that made me think of a boy in a film, watching a beloved dog die of rabies in the barn. With his opponent staggering and confused, he was strategically positioned to deliver the killer wallop, the slobberknocker—It’s not Luda we’re worried about, Lu.
Oof!
Morale is low right now—he rumbled on. I need you leading the troops. I need Twankey on point.
I executed what I felt was an openly contemptuous ballet turn.
* * *
—
Can we try that over again? Top of the page—Float instructed his unenthusiastic, ever-shrinking band of actors after an unappetizing lunch. Where we left off with the policemen.
Even the understudies had begun to sense the possibilities offered by the sinister undercurrents of the McCloudie Curse; its immediate effect, as far as I could tell, was to induce various minor accidents or viral infections necessitating bed rest, sympathy, and exemption from work.
As an imagined audience struggled to attract my attention to the stealthy progress of the boys in blue at my back, I the Widow Twankey laid the iron flat on the wizard’s elephant pants before wandering round the stage in search of Aladdin, driving the anticipated crowd nuts every time I reliably failed to pick up on the movements of the crafty policemen shadowing my every move.
You what?—I cupped my hand to my ear, trying to imagine the response through the sneer storm of inner voices telling me I’d been born a cunt.
They’re BEHIND you!
Finally convinced, I’d turn to face the law and utter a guilty shriek. Today it came out as a world-weary grunt of resignation in the face of a higher, crueler prerogative.
Looking for Aladdin, are you?—said Ping.
That’s good—said Pong—because so are we! And we know he’s here somewhere!
That was my cue to flap my skirts and snap my apron, shooing the snoops away from the basket of clean clothes as I’d chime in—I haven’t seen Aladdin for, oh, it must be since the last time! He only comes here to borrow money and since we haven’t got any we don’t see much of him—do we ladies and gentlemen boys and girls and others!
Before the audience could offer their wholehearted support for my blatant lie, the cops took the opportunity to muscle in.
Liar!—said Ping.
Liar!—said Pong.
And in unison, Liar! Liar! Cueing up audience reaction to make them point and scream…
Pants on fire!
Aladdin’s inches away from capture by deranged authorities, but there’s something they haven’t spotted yet. That iron I’d forgotten to retrieve from the wizard’s barrage balloon underpants now began to smolder, distracting Ping and Pong from the suspicious laundry basket with Aladdin hidden inside.
Shrieking, I emptied a full basin of water over the iron and standing amid the rolling steam clouds I flapped out a pair of soaking Y-fronts big enough to make a sail for a skiff. There, for all to see right through, was a smoking Gothic arch of a hole where the iron had reduced the satin and gold trim to ash.
Goggle-eyed, I peered through the munitions-shell stencil outline all the way back to the empty seats receding in perspective where shadows gobbled up the back-row stalls.
OOOPS! I know.
My lines dropped dead.
We’ll call them hot pants and charge him half price!
My voice emerged as a ramshackle cackle, stumbling from my lips like a meth head exiting a wooden outhouse privy.
If I was flat that day—and I was flat squared at least—it showed up as a steam-ironed depression reducing me to a film, a membrane.
Under the scrutiny of a malicious unseen court and its ever-impending apocalyptic verdict, my whole universe, the one I’d been left in charge of and asked to look after, felt damned, irreparable, condemned to suffer and burn for sins too numerous to list, too toxic to describe, too awful for redemption.
I sincerely wish I could drink and take drugs then spend the next day recovering gently, all spectral and illuminated like I used to. Nowadays I wake up mangled, bent double on the twisted, sweat-soaked, cum-stained sheets of my dissolute life. I can feel the pinholes where a new strain of vampires has gathered to feast on my depleted serotonin. I am that concave space that’s left when the sparkle has gone elsewhere. I am as I feel, and I feel like dirty laundry.
Which brings us by a commodious vicus to the Mangle scene! A mainstay of Aladdin—a slapstick set piece scripted to run with all the precision and pageantry of a mechanical clock in Prague except with real people. You can see how it might go wrong.
As we return to the action, grabbing our seats, we find Twankey twitching and flipping the wizard’s smoldering Y-fronts like a matador’s cape but there’s nothing she can do to make the smoking church window shape go away. And to make matters worse, the wizard’s servants are already on the way to pick up his laundry!
Think fast, Widow Twankey!
We’ll have to tell him it’s the new fashion to have a massive hole in your underpants! Aladdin! Here—and here I thrust the flat of the iron against Aladdin’s ass, exuberantly enough that Luda gave a genuine yelp.
See—all the hip young people are doing it! In a frenzy of invention, I scurried around burning neat rowing-boat-shaped holes in every pair of underpants I could find. Everybody’s doing it!
Ma! I’ve got something I need to tell you!
That day was a prop rehearsal, and it might make things easier to picture if I explain the stage setup.
Before I get down to it, I will have another! Thank fuck above for small mercies, Float knows I do my best work on more than a bottle. And I’m pleased to report they’ve left more than one bottle.
Sláinte!
* * *
—
Now, I expect you’ll have seen the incriminating photographic evidence; all I can add to the picture in your head is that Widow Twankey’s Chinese laundry was conjured into vivid life by a rough-and-tumble squad of rude mechanicals who brought to their labors a self-effacing desire to achieve the impossible on a budget that wouldn’t stretch to the possible.
Giving them credit where it’s due doesn’t mean health and safety considerations played a part in any of their decisions.
For this scene, they’d worked like cave trolls to hammer together an outsized mangle, comprising two immense rollers in a sturdy wooden frame painted to look like wrought iron and operated by a giant, side-mounted wheel-crank. They’d done the frame as the I Ching character 36, which signifies “Darkening of Light” or so I’ve been told by the prop manager. It’s probably not true.
Right up close to the mangle, they’d fashioned an impressive working model of a clanking, hissing boiler with a sweaty oily precipitate of liquid copper rolling down its robot hide.
This frankly medieval apparatus was commonplace in any typical laundry room before some genius came up with washing machines and dryers. Seen from the balcony seats of the twenty-first century, it might as well be a devilish instrument of torture from Torquemada’s Dungeon but somehow the audience, even the youngest ones, seem to know what a mangle is and what it does in a working-laundry context.
The clothes were hefted from the copper boiler using a big stick called a washing dolly; transferred, steaming and saturated, to the mangle, where the wheel was hand-cranked and the wash water squeezed out like pulp from an orange until the laundry, pressed flat and wrung dry, could be hung wrinkle-free on the line.
Nearby we had an ironing board complete with that outsized prop steam iron perched like a Bondi Beach surfer all golden and rigid at the business end.
Here’s me: So, tell me what you have to tell me from the laundry basket, why don’t you!
Prior to this scene, which opens act 2, we’ve seen Aladdin escape from the Cave of Jewels carrying the Magic Lamp he’s found for Abanazar.
