As the massive crowd cheered, the DJ transitioned to my anthem, Adjoining Tissue, by HammørHêds. During the intro, I rolled my arms, legs, and head like I was a bit of seaweed undulating in a gentle current. It was a tease and the tens of thousands of partiers on the fifteen balconies of the PartyHaus knew it. They screamed my name as if they couldn’t wait. Finally, when the cannon drums started firing, I began.
Back then I had a choreographer, two wardrobe consultants, several hair and makeup stylists, and a team of strength and agility trainers. Because of the forces from the massive, fifty-foot Cold-Flame speakers on the dance floor, the untrained were regularly knocked unconscious, maimed, and even killed by the percussive blasts. I had mastered the beats like a karate-surfer riding tsunami waves.
In my routine, I did splits, hand-twirls, punch backs, double-triples, and my own triple and a half front. Before Adjoining Tissue finished, the DJ started transitioning into Kuts by Dr. Ooooo. The FX for this part of the routine called for a shower of razors, like deadly snowflakes from far above, and as I deftly avoided them both in the air and on the floor, a few other brave partiers began to join me.
One, a young woman known as Elinor W, wore a brilliant blue costume that covered her from head to toe except for cutouts for her eyes, chest, and crotch. I remember how she got into her groove, then looked up to smile at me. In that split second, she lost her concentration, and like an ax cleaving a block of wood, a razor sliced into her left eye. She screamed and fell as more razors lodged into her legs and body. I continued my program while paramedics dragged her away.
When I think of myself back then, especially, how I didn’t even slow my routine for an instant, let alone stop to help, I can see how hollow and unhappy I was—a boy who was very good at one thing, but derived no pleasure from it. Worse, down deep I think I despised the world that adored me, as I was little more than a marionette in Father’s marketing schemes.
But soon after Elinor W was taken away, something happened. What I like to think is that the guilt and self-hate built up so much in my chest that my heart began to seize. In the middle of Engraved Blööd by The Bürning Spines, the ice buttons had melted and my shirt hung open, revealing my puffed chest. Admiring dancers surrounded me like worker bees. Each time a drop of sweat flew from my forehead or torso, they dropped to the floor, and shoved and pushed for the chance to lick it up.
The first sensation of my heart attack was in my jaw. A strange, cool numbness made my teeth buzz, but I ignored it and figured it was the strength drugs or some odd harmonic from the speakers. But gradually, the coldness traveled into my eyes and brain like a slow, thick liquid. Then the chill traveled into my arms and legs and turned dark and leaden. I slowed, lost my rhythm, and one of the beats slammed into me hard. I tried to regain my groove, but was knocked back and forth like a pinball. As I lost consciousness, the colored lights high above grew so bright they seemed to shine through my skin and into my emptiness.
They say the crowd rose to their feet and screamed in adulation, until they realized that toppling over backward and slamming my skull on the floor wasn’t my newest move.
Two days later, when I woke, I heard a tremendous cheer and slowly realized that I was in a hospital bed, in the middle of the dance floor, and that the place was packed with ten thousand watching my every twitch. I had never felt so vulnerable and exposed. I insisted that I be taken away. My house was quickly reconstructed, made quiet and dim. The silence felt good, so I told my choreographers, stylists, consultants, and trainers to leave me. I lay in bed and did nothing. One of the doctors, concerned about my low spirits, brought me a magazine. I remember paging through the thing, at first fascinated, since I had never seen one before. Gradually, though, I became discouraged and angry as I couldn’t read a word or even recognize a single character.
I decided I had to read and begged for a tutor. Father refused because he wanted me to resume dancing as soon as I could, but when my body wouldn’t respond to the healing drugs, he acquiesced, if only to shut me up.
All of the candidates came in party clothes—feathered shoes, fog bras, chrome nose-plates, gelatin shirts. I liked them all, then at the end of the second day, a woman with violet eyes came in a dark tailored suit, a shirt that matched her eyes, and black shoes with tiny grey stitches around the slender sole. I laughed since I had never seen anyone dressed so drearily. Maybe it was impish curiosity, but instead of telling her to go, I let her answer the interview questions like everyone else.
All the party people I knew were full of bombast, like Father. They shouted and swore, bragged and boasted. Joelene did none of that. Instead, she spoke softly, but with a fluid and powerful ease. At the time, I felt like I had discovered a new type of human. I hired her because she fascinated me, and I knew she would irritate Father.
Two years later, I could read and felt like I was becoming a person. Then she introduced me to Pure H and everything changed again.
Published every other month, the magazine is one-half meter square and printed on the most luscious and expensive paper made. It is a joy to touch and hold. But the most extraordinary thing about the magazine is that one anonymous person produces it. Although I’d heard speculation about who he might be, I preferred to enjoy his art without worrying about identity. He photographed every photo. He wrote all the copy. And each issue was a complex puzzle to be savored and deciphered.
I became grey. I began listening to the silence DJs, like Love Emitting Diode, Huush, and ZZZ. I discovered my tailor, Mr. Cedar, and began wearing grey frocks, vests, and suits made of colorless moon and satellite wool. And by then Father and I had come to hate each other.
“Look at these creases,” said Joelene, as she held up the gen-cotton shirt. Indeed, it was beautifully ironed. And at the bottom of the right tail was Isé–B’s fanciful signature of wrinkles.
“Generous of him,” I said, as I put out my right arm. While I loved it, it was small consolation for all that had happened.
“Patience.” She added, “Miniature city flickers.”
The photoR5 that accompanied that copy was of a translucent house at the edge of a dark, piney wood. A woman stands in a clearing. Her twisted hair is powdered a light grey, and her ball gown by H. Trow is a beautiful alpaca-silk and platinum draped creation that creates a perfect hourglass. Her face is young and fresh. Her eyes are tart, her lips, moist. Something about her posture—the way her back is arched, her legs bent—makes her look burdened with melancholy, perhaps even pain.
When I first saw the image, I thought a spotlight or some illumination was creating a halo around her, but as I studied the print I decided that it wasn’t just light but flame. The delicate corona that surrounded her looked exactly like the nearly invisible flames of an alcohol fire, and I decided that the photoR5 was taken the split second before the heat began to singe her hair, skin, and eyes.
Behind her, beyond the translucent wall, stands a man in a black suit and black tie. Although the details are hazy, clearly he is facing toward her. But the way he holds his head both cocked to the right and angled too high, he appears at once blind and yet cognizant of her. At first I assumed he was her killer, but after careful study, decided he was her lover and that he too is dying. His right hand is the clue. His fingers are tense and gnarled in what seems like both grief and regret. On the floor beside him are several sharp dark shapes, like shards of a glass. He drank poison and dropped the glass as the toxins had not only immediately blinded him, but have begun to astringe his veins and muscles, moving from his extremities toward his heart.