At an admittedly glacial pace, I'm putting the full text of Demimonde here at my site. It's a full-length novel, just over 80,000 words, written during an attempt at a heyday. The result is a fairly unpleasant book, but straight from the author's pen, so if the nastiness of what can grow inside a man is of any interest to you, feel free to spend as much time with it as you like.

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---

1.

There is a world out there you don't know because you don't see it. You don't see it because you don't want to see it. It's not safe. You're better off not knowing it's there.

I don't mean to come off as a prick, I promise. A lot of what I was up to is going to sound bad, and it may sound a little like I'm suggesting that your safe world is a comfortable denial. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that sometimes you learn something horribly fucked‐up by landing in the middle of it. You're not a part of that, so good on you.

I knew I was in the company of the crazies from the moment I started cutting up the coke on the hotel bathroom counter.

The hotel room was a nineteenth‐floor suite, not cheap. It was full of A-list nobodies, people who are at the apex of their own small worlds but invisible if you didn't care to look for them. Models, rockers from bands nobody ever heard of, drug dealers, socialites, hookers, the alderman's daughters. It was that sort of scene. We were all drunk and high, kissing each other's tits or dicks, throwing lamps out the windows and shouting curses off the balcony. I saw an unsigned pop starlet attempt to put her CD into the player, then I saw a guy with a choppy haircut unplug the whole damn thing and plug his iPod into the stereo instead. He liked Gary Numan.

It was a sordid scene, so I ran with it. I wasn't really sure how I ended up here — I was at Circle/Square for Pretty Jenny's DJ set when all of the sudden this 300‐person cloud of vodka fumes and meth dust blew through the place, carrying me along in its wake. Next thing I knew, hotel suite.

I was there, cutting up coke with someone else's credit card. There was a girl in the bathroom with me, keen to the idea of my drugs, which I planned to give her for free, of course — well, actually, in exchange for a little company. Her shirt was open, showing her small breasts and skinny arms. The shower curtain had been pulled shut next to us, the seat was up on the toilet, and two obviously used hotel hand towels hung askew on the rod. The drinking glasses were gone, no doubt in someone's hand in the chaotic room. A coffee maker also stood on the bathroom counter, but the carafe was gone.

Chop, chop, chop. She tooted a line. Me, too. I bumped a stray from my sloppy cut. She rubbed some of the scattered bump on her gums. Then my hands were on her tits, her hand went toward my crotch and our mouths made some half‐assed attempt at a French kiss. I remember being pretty proud of myself because I'd been coked for three hours and somehow still managed a hard‐on.

Then something suddenly stole my attention, like somebody else had just walked past the room, even though I didn't see anyone there. I closed the door — I didn't want to share the coke with some freeloading stiff‐dick or let him cop a grope on what's‐her‐name here.

The shower curtain. A tiny voice, just a whisper. Part of a conversation, it must have been, an inaudible conversation from which only the last few muffled words emerged: "Sanctimonious whore."

What the hell did that mean? Who did it refer to? The girl I was with? It didn't make any sense. The strangeness of it captured me and I missed a beat, fucking up the rhythm of the make‐out. "Oh, shit," the girl said as she pulled away from me. "You're gay, aren't you?"

I laughed. "No, I just— I heard something. I thought I heard someone... somebody calling me." Lame. She wasn't having any of it. She thanked me for the coke, buttoned up her shirt crookedly, and walked out of the bathroom with a reticent look back, muttering something about fags.

I looked around and shrugged at nobody in particular. Then I pulled the door shut again.

A slim hand emerged from inside the shower stall, pushing the shower curtain aside. The hand belonged to a girl. She said, "Sorry," but she had a quizzical look on her face.

She repeated, "Sorry." The girl was maybe five‐and‐a‐half feet tall, with brown hair cut severely across the nape of her neck. A shock of vibrant, artificially pink hair bordered either side of her face. Ramones t‐shirt. Sunglasses that covered a third of her entire face. Pegged plaid bondage pants and chewing gum. She smelled like lavender.

Something wasn't quite right about her. In my mind, I saw a mannequin. All the proper pieces were in the right place, but somehow they didn't add up to a person. The face was there, yes, the eyes, arms, legs, and body of a human shape, an attractive human shape, but they felt unright.

"You were at the club," I said to her. I mentally blamed my lack of conversation skill on the weirdness of the situation.

"Yeah, I go sometimes." Either she was shit for conversation or she had been caught off guard, too.

"Do you know whose suite this is?" I asked. That always broke the ice well: the cool‐enough‐to‐be‐here‐but‐can't‐be‐bothered‐with‐thepleasantries routine.

"No. Well, yes. Do you have any more of that?" She motioned to the countertop. I did. She may as well have it, I figured. She was a striking girl, and maybe I could switch one for the other. Also, I wanted to see if she had actual nostrils or they were just painted on her ceramic‐seeming face. I cut more on the counter, four skinny rails. She looked up at me, almost accusatorily, then hit a line.

While her face was over the marble countertop, I looked into the shower stall. A faint bulb of pearly gunk slid down the drain. Spit? Soap? I didn't know what the hell it was.

"What's that shit?" I heard myself say. Fuck. Too much coke. I'm talking faster than I can think. I offered a weak smile.

"It's Jill's... you know. That shit she always leaves behind."

I smelled lilacs. "Jill?"

"Jill. Shanky Jill. Don't tell me you don't know her? It's her suite."

I didn't know any Jills, in fact. Maybe one from some boozy school year, but I didn't recall any inherent slime associated with anyone. I hazarded a dubious question: "She's the slime?" So cool. So collected. A master of my environment.

The girl stopped in the middle of her second line. "No, dumbfuck, she just went down the drain, gone as gone. How much of this have you had? Oh, shit, this is just coke, isn't it?"

My brain went two different directions at once. First, I was worried about the matter‐of‐fact way in which she described this phantom Jill's travel by way of shower plumbing. Second, I was offended that she thought I was fucking around with something steeper than coke. It's not like I'm a goddamn junky.

"It's just coke."

"You don't know Shanky Jill." It wasn't a question anymore.

"I know Jack and Jill." Which I did. Up the hill.

A look crossed her face, but whether it was fear or just shock, I didn't know. "You can't be serious. Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?" She waved a hand in front of my face. Then she turned her body a little sideways, looking at me out of the corner of her left eye. "You can see me?"

What the hell was this conversation? "I just cut you some coke, didn't I?"

"Yeah. I guess you did."

And then she spoke in tongues.

I have no idea what she said. The language — which I later learned was Latin — didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before. The syllables didn't form real words. They were more like a continual roll of musical tones or lyrics pouring out of her mouth.

"I have no idea what that means," I replied, fighting a bit of fatigue that had just pressed itself over me. Suddenly getting tired didn't make any sense, either, as I had just snorted blow off the countertop. Even under the sleepiness, I could still feel the electric snow in my lungs and charging through my veins.

"I'm sorry. Just checking," she said. "This is... weird."

"You're telling me. Look, uh, I'm going to leave. I'm going to pretend this is a minor freakout or a flashback or maybe coke paranoia. I'm going to go out there and dance to Gary Numan or Black Kids or whatever's playing out there now."

She took on a falsely coy air all of the sudden, that postured demureness that slutty girls paint on their faces to make you feel like you're going to have to put forth an effort. "Don't be rash. Do you think I want you to go?" She moved forward a bit, into my space, and grabbed the lapels of my jacket. A tiny smile crossed my lips. She closed in further, her thighs on either side of my leg, and maneuvered me back into a half‐sit on the countertop.

I tipped my head to one side and closed my eyes, leaning in for the kiss. Her mouth tasted like the scent of lavender. It was a titillating experience, with her taking a more aggressive role than me, and the strangeness of what had just gone on made the whole thing that much more sensory. The coke moved through me, the inexplicable details of a few moments ago added a shade of the dangerous unknown, and the flavor of her mouth washed over me like a wave. I gave up to it, let the experience pull me out on its own terms, let her guide me where she wanted me, which turned out to be inside her.

In contrast to the moment's delicacy, I was glad I hadn't wasted the hardon. Still, the whole thing didn't feel as tawdry or sordid as bathroom fucks tend to be. In the afterglow, I felt that somehow, I had just done something that was important.

"Is it going to spoil everything if I ask you your name?" I probed, after our impromptu closeness.

"Gloria. Gloria Casares. Yours?"

"Brandon Arthur."

She paused a moment, losing her confident air for just a fraction of a second, but then regained herself and rolled her eyes. "Of course it is."

I cocked an eyebrow. "What does that mean?"

"If you don't know already, I'm sure you will soon."

It wasn't the answer I was looking for. It was almost like the question meant something different to either of us.

Then she walked out of the bathroom and back into the party. I couldn't find her again for the rest of the night.

---

2.

Almost two months after that night, my cell rang, and even before I knew who was on the other end, I felt a tremendous sense of foreboding. It didn't help that I was nursing a vicious hangover, lying in bed, debating in my mind whether or not to go ahead and give in to the inevitable dry heaves I knew were coming.

My apartment was a wreck. Design magazines scattered all over the coffee table. A little baggie of coke spilled on the dresser. Winestains on the desk. Wrinkled pants thrown over the back of the chair. Shaving stubble in the sink. Some half‐assed attempt at a schematic taped to the drafting board. There was a mostly‐gone bag of dog food next to the counter. I didn't have a dog, but every now and then this street dog I had taken to calling El Sketcho came snuffling around the front door and I brought him down a bowl of kibble. He seemed like a decent sort.

"Hello?" I croaked into the phone.

"Good afternoon, Brandon. This is Gloria. We met at a party a few weeks ago?"

"Gloria? Hi, Gloria. Yeah. That party. In the hotel." Something wasn't right.

"That's right. You don't sound well."

"A bit too much of a— things got out of hand last night."

"Well, I hope you're not too broken down."

"No, not too bad. I'm human. I'll heal."

"I'm glad to hear that, Brandon. Listen, do you think you might be able to meet me for lunch sometime? I was hoping for this week."

I sat up, a little more interested in where this was headed, but still nervous about the seeming out‐of‐nowhereness of the call. "Yeah, I can probably do something this week. What time is it?" Play it cool, Brandon. Be nonchalant. Make her work for it.

"It's two‐thirty. Listen, I have to run. I just wanted to make sure I called you while you were on my mind. You have my number now. Give me a call this week when you're feeling better."

"M'kay. See you soon, Gloria." Click.

An hour later, with tears in my eyes as I hunched over the toilet, I recalled that I had never given Gloria my phone number.

---

I called Gloria back early in the week to make a date for dinner, since I was so busy with one of my industrial design contract projects during the day. Having dinner would be a welcome break from computer modeling scissor axle assemblies for ten to fourteen hours. I didn't mention the mystery of how she got my phone number because I didn't want to put her on edge going into the meal. Something was weird and I wanted to know what it was and I wasn't going to find out by going in with guns blazing.

We agreed to meet at Verdad, a hipster bistro with a very real faux-asshole mentality. The food was bad, the service was worse, it was offensively pricey — and it was always inexplicably full. Verdad wasn't really much more than a glorified bar, with its one‐cook kitchen open to the dining room and lounge. Whenever the cook fucked up, which was
often, the whole place smelled like fish or grease fire.

It was a safe place, though, very visible so as to reduce the potential for embarrassing dramatics. I chose it because it would work well, whatever my agenda ended up being. If I had that thrill of giddiness when I saw Gloria again and wanted to try for another go‐round, the place would make me seem sophisticated. If I didn't want to pursue anything with her, it was a nice and expensive enough place that Gloria wouldn't dog out my personal worth to her girlfriends. You know — in case I ended up going out with any of them at any point. It never occurred to me that Gloria might have had a reason for seeking me out that didn't involve my unbridled desirability.

I put my best foot forward for the impending reunion. It took twenty minutes spent carefully mussing my hair to impart the proper degree of indifference. Distressed jeans and a brown pinstriped Zegna blazer, square‐toed brown shoes.

Most people I know would go casually late to such an event. I hate that shit. I went to all my events whenever I got around to them, usually about fifteen to twenty minutes early. Going a little early also made it possible to do some valuable social recon. There might be another girl there worth the effort if things went south with Gloria. I might run into someone I knew and be able to use the early minutes catching up with him. If Gloria herself was there early, I could mentally prepare for trouble, because that meant she'd have something grave on her mind. If nothing else, I could have a drink to relax myself. Not that I didn't have a couple Miller High Lifes before leaving my apartment.

I arrived and the half‐Asian hostess rolled her eyes at the prospect of me getting a table for two. The lounge was loud with conversation and Brazilian Girls' "Homme." I ordered a gin and tonic, which came heavy on the tonic and pulpy with lime.

Gloria arrived unapologetically half an hour later than she said she would.

"We're never going to be able to get a table now," I admonished with exaggerated disappointment, three drinks up.

"I would never eat here anyway," she replied.

"Then why'd you want to meet here?"

"So we could leave." It was a sultry statement, laden with innuendo. Leave with me? Be seen leaving? Some subtle snub to someone else that I didn't understand? I didn't care, really. Gloria looked great, all plunging neckline and retro‐feathered auburn hair, an as‐yet‐unknown new‐breed darling channeling 70s‐era Farrah Fawcett.

And we left, taking a cab across town to a place near Farris Park, next to St. Oda's church. I paid in cash.

The place was nothing, really, an Italian joint that was as close to a pizzeria as you could get without having pizza on the menu. Gloria didn't want to have much dinner anyway, just more drinks and some caponata. The bar was sticky and held onto my glass when I set it down.

We made small talk that diverted into something arguably more serious halfway through a plate of beets, goat cheese, and walnuts scooped into endive leaves. Gloria asked me, "Do you believe in God?"

I cringed inwardly. Things had been going so well... and now this. In my experience, "Do you believe in God?" means one of two things. It means either the girl you've been cozying up to for half the night isn't going to put out (it's used either as a fuck‐off line or it's sincere, which is arguably worse) or it means that the girl is as dumb as a bag of hammers and is going for the heavy topics to seem deep. I ruled the first out, as I'd already screwed Gloria on a hotel countertop while we were both high on coke. She seemed too well‐spoken and savvy for the latter possibility to apply, though. Was this genuine?

"I don't know, really. I don't go to church, if that's the question."

"No, that's not the question. Straight up, do you believe in God?"

"I guess I believe in a god, probably. Not necessarily the Christian God. I've got a friend who's Jewish—"

"What does a god look like? Is it a he? A she?"

"This is a weird conversation all of the sudden."

"Answer me, Brandon. Trust me. I'm going to take this somewhere that doesn't suck."

"Well, I guess it's a guy. White hair and a beard and all that shit. Rays of holy light and a white robe and fat little angel kids flying around. Cherubs. They have trumpets, I think."

"Do you really think that or are you just projecting?"

"Whoah, what's with the pop psychology?"

"It's a legitimate question," she said. "I want to know maybe if this god looks like a specific god or if it's just a jumble of pre‐built ideas."

I looked around for the bartender or a waitress, to see if anyone else was hearing this distressing line of discussion. The waitress was nowhere to be seen and the bartender was watching a soccer game on the TV.

"I'm not a believer in one specific... I mean, I guess growing up as a white guy in the United States makes me have certain, I don't know, expectations."

"Preconceptions."

"Okay," I relented.

"Don't patronize me. Look, I can tell you're kind of swerved by the conversation. Let's go for a walk in the park."

"Farris Park? It's closed by now, isn't it? Anyway, it's all full of junkies and bums."

"Oh, well, pardon me. I didn't know I was in the company of the sheikh."

"Fine. We'll go for a walk in the park. Can we get these drinks to go?" I shook my glass at the bartender, who seemed jolted from his soccergame reverie by the reminder that we were still there. He poured our drinks into plastic cups and mumbled about open container laws while I settled the bill.

We crossed the street into the park as a dozen or so blackbirds flew out of the church tower. The bushes were just a bit overgrown, intruding a tiny bit into the circular courtyard where a few weeds pressed up through the cracks in the concrete. No sooner were we into the park proper than the bums came crawling out, like zombies from a late‐sixties horror movie. Instead of chopping them with machetes, though, we just pre‐empted their requests for change with "Sorry. No cash." When we finally found a bench and took a seat, the press of zombie‐bums abated.

"It's a pretty night." I admit, I was trying to force the conversation into something more pedestrian.

Gloria agreed. "It really makes you take notice of what's around you. Look at those trees over there. And listen to the water running under the bridge."

"And those tweakers flipping out."

"Don't ruin it," Gloria countered, but smiled her stunning smile at me anyway. Then she took my hand in hers. Her hands were small, smooth, without any of the lines at the knuckles that other people have. I thought that was a fine detail to notice in the relative darkness of the park's lamplights. "I think we're a lot alike, Brandon."

Oh, shit. "What do you mean?"

"I think you and I have a lot in common. I just think you don't know what that is."

"Okay, Gloria, that's enough. Drop the cryptic bullshit. It's been going on too long. What are you talking about?"

"Direct. No nonsense. I like that about you, Brandon. So here you go: You've got an old curse on you that goes back to before you were born and before your parents were born and way back before even their parents were born."

I blinked. "You are one whacked‐out broad."

"I have the same curse. Hear me out. You ever notice that other people don't notice you unless you force them to?"

"Is this some kind of post‐modern urban alienation trip?"

"People don't make eye contact with you. You never get wrong‐number phone calls. The pizza guy gets lost on the way to your apartment even though he's been delivering to you for three years — and he doesn't remember your name. You don't get pulled over when you're speeding. They don't look at your ID at a bar. You get cable but you've never paid
for the installation or the monthly fee."

Well... yeah. That's all true, actually. "There's a long way between having a shitty pizza guy and being cursed," I said.

"At the restaurant, the bartender forgot we were there. You startled him when you asked him to pay the tab."

"Okay, but the bums came to hassle us the moment we came into the park. Why didn't they overlook us, too?"

"Because you said they would. You wanted them to see you, to prove your point. You invited them in, so to speak."

In my mind, I was screaming at myself to get the hell away from this crazy slut, but part of me itched at the truth of what she was saying. It had a strange ring of truth. I'd coasted through schools. I'd had to file three change‐of‐address forms and finally complain in person at the post office when I moved from my previous apartment to the one I lived in
currently. The fucking pizza guy. "You're saying I'm invisible? We're invisible?" I pointed back and forth between us.

"Not in so many words. People don't see us and don't react to us because they don't want to. It's not that we can't be seen — we're not invisible. People see around us. They forget we're here within moments of seeing us. They blot us out. We're more like unvisible. Consciously or subconsciously, regular people want to pretend we're not here. That's
the curse."

"It's metaphysical or something?" Goddamn, but it bothers me when creepy shit makes its own oblique sense. I put some of the other pieces together, too. The other girl in the hotel bathroom hadn't noticed Gloria in the shower. That Jill woman who had the suite in her name, who I hadn't even seen. Gloria talked like she knew her, so she must have been invisible, too. Unvisible. The curse. Sweet Jesus, it was so weird that all the details supported such an absurd suggestion — and I could feel myself understanding it.

"I wouldn't try to look at it too deeply. There's no scientific answer. It's one of the strange ways the world works and that's just how it is."

"How do you know, then? If there's no way to... I don't know, quantify it or whatever, how do you know that people aren't just ignoring you actively?"

"Don't make me out to be an asshole. Everything I just told you is true. I could stab you in the throat right here in the park in front of all these bums with one of the dirty syringes on the ground and they wouldn't even see it, let alone call the cops, let alone remember anything about either of us if you actually made a police report yourself or ran screaming from the park."

"Jesus Christ, calm down."

"I'm not upset, Brandon, I'm just explaining what you asked me as best I can. I'm not going to stab you. Well, I'm not going to stab you now. Piss me off later and I reserve the right to do what's appropriate then."

I was so taken by her grace, then, that despite the sketchy story she'd just told me and whatever lunacy was sure to go along with it, I couldn't help but like her. It was more than just the physical lust we'd shared in the hotel suite. I felt drawn to her.

"You know this is some pretty rich shit to lay on me, Gloria."

"You're going to learn about it all one way or the other," she smirked at me. "In fact, I count us both lucky that it was me who found you and not one of the other people who are part of this little shadow‐life. Better to learn it from me than to have it forced on you by somebody further up the chain. They'll get positively bizarre on you, you'll see. They'll make you kiss rings or kneel before them or call them 'your excellency' and goofy shit like that. They'll try to bring you into weird cults. They'll have you observing all sorts of superstitious idiosyncrasies. That's why you're fortunate to have met me first. I won't make you jump all those hurdles."

"Weird habits for weird people, I suppose." This had better pay off. The only reason I didn't cut all this bullshit off at the source was because she said everything with such conviction. Of course, she was in extreme peril of occupying crazy‐woman territory, but some aspect of what she was telling me struck a chord.

"You don't know the half of it. That feeling you had in your gut when I started this whole line of conversation? When I explained what it was and called it a curse? Get used to that feeling. You're going to have it a lot, at least when you meet the eccentrics among us."

I knew she was right. Visions of invisible kings and ghostly nightclub bouncers, sunglasses‐wearing genies and demonic skinheads spun through my mind like half‐captured dreams at the moment the clock radio goes off in the morning. The flattering confirmation that Gloria had indeed wanted to see me again because of something she found desirable also left me gratified, even if it was my value as a resource that was desirable, as opposed to the power of my charisma. I desperately needed another drink to clear my head.

---

3.

The next several days passed very quickly, with Gloria staying at my apartment through the weekend. I bought some weed and some wine and we had carbonara for dinner and French toast for breakfast every day mostly because we didn't feel like leaving. We were undressed and all over each other as often as not. Gloria had a tattoo — not the stupid, lower‐back slut stripes that so many girls have inked just above the waistlines of their pants, but some quiet, red calligraphy above her left shoulderblade that proclaimed "Et In Arcadia Ego."

"What's that mean?" I asked.

"Latin. 'I was there, too,'" she answered.

"Really?"

"Something like that. It's a loose translation."

I was surprised at how readily I adapted to this sort‐of domesticated lifestyle. I'm the kind of guy who's out every night, weekend or otherwise. Normally, I'd like to be seen around town with a gorgeous girl like Gloria, but in learning that nobody would really be seeing us anyway, at least in the conventional sense, it didn't seem to matter. Honestly, I was happier at home with Gloria than pressing some bullshit social agenda at one club or another. I hadn't written it off entirely, but I was so infatuated that for the time, at least, it just didn't seem very important. Power make‐outs, cutesy talk, shared joints, and marathon sport fucking replaced those other concerns readily.

"You don't have to be at work?" I asked Gloria, wondering how she was able to just vanish from the rest of the world for a week. How she was able to vanish more than usual, that is.

"Not really. I haven't been in a while, actually. What do you do? You don't have to be at work, either?"

"I'm on contract. Paid on delivery. I, uh... I make scissor hinges. You know, the things that hold the two separate blades of scissors together."

"A lot of money in that?"

"Enough."

"I didn't know they paid people to do that. I'd figure one scissor hinge is as good as the next."

"Hey, maybe for your mass‐market, discount‐store scissors. I don't do that shit. I'm high‐end, baby. Kyocera Ceramics. Wusthof. The good stuff."

"You go to school for it?"

"Four years of industrial design and two of engineering."

"Hmm."

Which is why I don't typically tell people what I do for a living. I usually just leave it at "industrial design," but I wanted to be open with Gloria. Maybe this had been the wrong thing to lead into full disclosure. It's not very exciting to talk about, or do, actually.

"That's it?"

I really didn't know how to answer that. On a plain, literal level, yes, that was it. I made scissors. That didn't seem to be what Gloria was asking however.

"I'm not sure I take your meaning."

"I mean, is that all there is to you? What does Brandon Arthur do? He designs scissors. With the money he makes designing scissors, he buys pot and beer. The end."

"Well, no, I don't think it's the end—"

"You don't ever feel the urge to be a part of something bigger? You don't ever want to do more with your life?"

"Hey, Gloria, this is taking a very mom turn all of the sudden. And I didn't hear you complaining when I was rolling joints for us."

She sighed and crossed her arms. "We should get out of this apartment for a little while. It's starting to stink of stale sex." She wrinkled her nose.

I affected a frown. "I was thinking that it's starting to stink of us. The commingled brew of our lovers' scent."

"Ugh. That's enough of that, Death Cab for Douchebag."

So much for staying in and not working a social agenda. "Fine for me. Let me shower and shave and we can go. Where did you have in mind?"

"There's a party tonight. It's sort of an insider thing. Our people, if you take my meaning. No rush, really, it's just... this is something I have to do."

That perplexed me. The sum of the impression I'd received thus far was that Gloria didn't have to do anything. She didn't answer to anyone. She could vanish for a week into the dark recesses of my apartment without so much as a "Hold my calls." In fact, the simple lack of a cell phone call questioning "Where are you?" testified to her importance and the principle that her time was her own.

Or, you know, that she was just some unemployed weirdo. But she was too well put‐together for that. She hadn't sent the crazy meter into the red before now — though she'd come close — and her focus still led me

to believe that she was the real deal.

That was also the first insight I had that really scared me — but whether it scared me about her or about what I saw happening in her world, I don't know. That's an unpleasant feeling, being scared: the sense that a sudden, suspenseful thing might happen.

I asked her, "What's this about?" Before I had a satisfactory answer, we were on our way.

We were scheduled for dinner uptown, and when I say "we," I mean everyone. All the people who were like us, overlooked, unseen, beyond the care or interest of anyone else. Anyone real. The thing is, we — and I use "we" in the same context here — really like to put on a spectacle for each other, apparently.

Likewise, when I say "dinner," I'm talking about something just shy of a full, formal cotillion. Nobody, Gloria told me, was actually going to eat anything. Too base. Rather, some people would eat, but those were the people explicitly not worth knowing. I asked, rhetorically, if unvisibles had untouchables. It stood to reason.

"Who pays for this?" I wondered on the way over.

Gloria smiled at my naivety. "Nobody pays for it. It just happens. Pulled together from the world around us because nobody notices us taking it."

My mind reeled. I don't know what I expected. From Gloria's description, it sounded like some kind of homeless person's pot‐luck smorgasbord, or something similarly shabby like an art fair or craft show. I knew that wouldn't be the case, though, because she dressed me in my Prada tuxedo just before we left the apartment. "Put your bow tie under your collar," she said.

"Aw, I can't do that," I said. "I'll look like a twat. Hey, where did your clothes come from? Jesus, did you bring that whole thing to my apartment? Even the shoes?"

"Don't be an asshole." I marked this as good advice.

---

Dinner was on the 42nd Floor of the Waterhouse Tower. We were received. More accurately, we were announced.

The 42nd Floor, in its entirety, was a diamond‐gala penthouse ballroom appointed for lavish‐crooked Boss Tweed‐type receptions over a hundred years ago. A dozen crystal chandeliers hung from a buttressed ceiling at least 25 feet high. I suppose we were fashionably late, because when we exited the elevator into the foyer, there must have been a thousand people there, all in Chanel and Balenciaga.

Bear with me here. A herald announced us. A herald. A guy in an eighteenth‐century surcoat, who rapped his staff — his fucking staff — on the floor and boomed flawlessly from the full capacity of his lungs:

"Miss Gloria Casares and Mr. Brandon Arthur."

The whole room stopped, silenced, no shit, with only the chamber music continuing to provide background sound. It was like a Jane Austen novel. I never told the herald my name, but I'd seen that trick before. Gloria probably RSVP'ed for us in advance, anyway.

She whispered sideways to me, "Remember, don't be an asshole."

"I'll do my best."

A thousand people all bedecked in their own opulence and glitter, all unvisible but magnificent, stars at the center of their own discrete corners of the sky, looked at us. They looked, I felt, at me.

At the same time, I wondered how much of it was me. As the days and events had progressed, I suspected that Gloria had more to her than initially presented itself. Unless she had known about this party far in advance, she had learned of it at some point during our mutual time together. Like I said before, that mutual time together didn't involve any outside phone calls. Neither did it involve any mysterious letters forwarded to my apartment, or messenger‐birds landing on my windowsill. So, then, maybe she didn't RSVP for us after all.

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe this was the event of the decidedly Georgian season, planned previously or occurring every year at the same time.

Maybe Gloria was better connected than she seemed, though. She had pulled that confection of a dress out of my closet — my closet, and I promise that it wasn't there before she had arrived. I didn't even notice it in there when I got dressed that evening. Hell, maybe a messenger‐bird did land on the windowsill and I just slept through it.

Only later did it occur to me that this silent fanfare was for the both of us. Gloria's trumping, triumphant return to this needful society and my own surprising significance to a culture I hadn't even known existed until recently. I also learned later that there's always more to this bizarre quasi‐culture than presents itself superficially. Some untold story always lurks beneath the surface. Some hidden, historical treachery always

colors the course of interaction between these people. This seems to be the truth throughout the full length of their existence, however long it actually is.

Dramatic! I digress from the actual party as it occurred, however.

Gloria motioned me to lead her down the aisle that had formed at the announcement of our attendance. I kept one eye on her and one eye at the end of the processional. She smiled confidently but demurely at the people on either side of us. Some of the onlookers wore expressions of surprise while others had furrowed brows of either anger or consternation. A good third seemed enthusiastic to receive Gloria, suggesting that they were on amicable terms but hadn't seen her in a while. At the end of the aisle stood twenty or maybe twenty‐five of who seemed to be the most prominent people at the party, with the vast, full windows of the 42nd Floor framing them with the expanse of the city behind them.

"I hate to be like this, but I feel ambushed," I whispered to Gloria.

"Please, Brandon, not now. I promise I'll explain everything later. Just go along with what I say."

"Within reason."

"That's a broad statement. Think about what brought you here," she said.

By the end of this exchange of words, we had traversed the aisle. It was a real rogue's gallery at that end, with all of the attendant important people and what were, I guessed, their entourages. There was a guy in a very severe looking, almost military uniform with two, I guess, sergeants at either side. Next to him stood a woman with the most vibrant red hair I'd ever seen. She looked to be about middle age, a little heavy, and she wore a long, green satin dress that matched her eyes and really set her hair on fire. In her vicinity stood four or five men and women dressed in similar colors but without the same striking countenance. There was also a really tall, really pale‐blond guy who wore glasses and one of those James Bond white‐jacket‐black‐pants tuxedos. He had two people with him who looked like smaller versions of him, only one was a woman, I think. In contrast, next to him was a black man about my height with very closely cropped hair, also wearing glasses. He was wearing a severe black suit rather than a formal tuxedo, but nobody seemed to want to call him on it. At the front of the group, in a position of the most apparent regard, stood another woman of flawless beauty. She was perhaps in her mid thirties, with long, black hair bound under a wreath of some kind of purple flowers. She looked straight out of a modern fairy tale, bound up in a dress even more elaborate than Gloria's but with a look on her face that said expressly, "I know what's going on here and I'm not happy about it." As I looked at her, she wavered or rippled or something, like my eyes were receivers and for the briefest second, they took in too much signal and had to correct.

The tall, blond guy in the back spoke. "This is going to make things complicated." He had an accent. Something Scandinavian.

Then the perfect woman in the front spoke. "Ah, Gloria. It's been such a long time. I'm glad you feel up to the task of joining us again." In retrospect, it sounds like a bitchy thing to say, but the woman's voice was earnest as she said it. The two of them shared an accusatory look. "It is certainly a pleasure to meet you in person, Mr. Arthur," she continued, turning to me.

Call me corny, call me gay, call me a theater fan, whatever, but let me tell you that I had the sudden idea that I was supposed to take her hand and kiss it. So I tried, wanting to take her introduction and run with it.

The problem, though, was that she withdrew from me when I tried to take her hand. It was a lightning response, a reptilian recoil that might just as well have be a rearing back to strike. "Let's not exceed ourselves, Mr. Arthur. Personal boundaries are to be respected, of course."

"Er, of course. But, uh, I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage. Do we know one another?"

"Oh, my dear Gloria, you haven't told Mr. Arthur about me? Such a shame to have spoiled the introduction this way. Brandon Arthur, I am—"

"Narcisse," Gloria cut her off. "First Lady of Albion, Matron of Venta Icenorum, and Lady Chosen of House Iceni. My lady, good evening, and I bid good evening to you all." Then she turned and walked her way up the aisle we had just come down, dragging me by the arm but forcing me a bit ahead of her so that it looked like I, as her escort, was actually leading her. I doubt anyone was fooled by the demonstration.

Okay, holy shit. I wasn't ready for any of this. As we worked our exit from the aisle, I noticed a few waves made toward us (or toward Gloria, I assumed) as well as a few nodding heads and a strangled giggle or two. I wouldn't have been surprised to hear a "Well, I never...!" or other stock fripperies from period movies. Gloria pulled me out of the aisle about two‐thirds of the way out of the room and toward a bar. Half of the room still seemed to be paying attention to this quiet faux pas or whatever was happening, but the other half eagerly returned to their previous party attentions.

Gloria ordered a glass of wine from the bartender and I asked for a whiskey and water. He obliged. As we sipped from our drinks, Gloria muttered to herself, "It's too soon," and I knew better than to interject any of my own ignorances into her conversation with herself. Nothing's worse than when a guy tells a woman, "Baby, it'll be all right" when he has no idea what's bugging her but it's plain to see that, no, not everything will be all right. In fact, probably very few things would be all right. That's the feeling I was nursing, along with my whiskey. I saw another black guy come pushing his way through the crowd toward us, his hair in cornrows and wearing the same sort of black suit I saw the other black guy at the front of the room wearing. Gloria saw him, too.

"You could've handled that better," he said to Gloria.

"Fuck you. Didn't know you'd switched sides, or that Narcisse put the council back together," she replied.

"We didn't switch sides. We're just following the way the wind blows right now. And you shouldn't be surprised about the council. Revolutionaries love to suck each other's dicks," he continued.

"Hey, Gandalf said I could join the council, too, after I throw this ring into Mount Frodo," I cut in. "What the fuck is going on, here?"

The black guy smiled at me, "I'm sorry, man. Miss Casares here pulled you in without letting you know too much about what's taking place, I guess."

"Too soon," Gloria said to herself again.

"Good guess. I'm Brandon," I said. The guy had a trustworthy manner, so I extended my hand.

"Brandon, good to meet you. I'm Rock."

"Just Rock? Not Rock of House P‐Funk, Incarnadine Combobulator of the Renegade Masta?"

"If you want to get technical, no, it's just Rock Baker. What are you drinking? Let's have another. Gloria, Brandon and I are going to have a drink."

"That's fine. I'm going to mingle," she said. Resilient girl, to rebound so quickly. I thought the whole situation had caught her completely flatfooted, but after that brief period of distraction, she was ready to wade right back in to... whatever the fuck this was. She took her wine glass, and away she went. Not ten steps from the bar, some guy in an anachronistic soldier's uniform took her arm. She smiled that smile of hers that had so enraptured me the first few times we met, and I have to admit, I felt a little jealous.

"Whiskey and water," I said to the bartender.

"Bourbon and Coke," Rock said.

"Indeed, sirs," the bartender replied.

"So what we have here, Mr. Brandon Arthur, is the return of the prodigal daughter. I don't know how much Gloria Casares has told you, but she was a one‐time heiress to all this and she lost it in a falling out between the houses." Rock swept his arm before the whole room, emphasizing "all this."

"Hang on. What's that all mean? She's heiress to all this?"

"Just what I said. This is all hers. These people are her subjects. Narcisse has taken them away from her. I know, I know; you're thinking, 'What the fuck is this crazy nigger talking about?' and then you're thinking, 'Oh, shit. What do I have to do with this?' That's the key. You're going to help her get it all back, or you're going to keep it all out of her hands. She found you first, so she's trying to lay some groundwork with you. You get to pick one side or the other and you get to make the difference."

"And a party like this is how you learned about the whole thing?"

"No, of course not. They found me when I was 14, sticking up liquor stores with some kids from the block. Everybody else got taken down to the seventeenth and I just walked home with my hands in my pockets. One of the cops was one of us and just crawled his car along behind me. Told me to get in the car, and took me to

talk to some people who turned out to be us."

"That's so stereotypical, I need another drink to help wash it down."

"Not a stereotype," Rock said. "An archetype. You'll see a lot of that around these people."

"Is it too early for me to call bullshit on it all?"

"Most definitely. Give it some time to show you what it's all about. Let Gloria show you."

I rubbed my temples idly and ordered another whiskey and water, since mine seemed to have vanished down my throat.

"Don't let it worry you, though," Rock added. "You don't have to do anything. This isn't some scripted prophecy or any of that shit. You got free will, son," he said, tapping my chest. "That's going to shape a lot of your outlook, I suspect."

 

---

4.

I needed some time to myself. We probably both did, so we left the soiree shortly after the outburst and went our separate ways. Gloria didn't even ride home with me. We parted company on the ground floor plaza of the Waterhouse Tower. The doorman called a limo for her and we exchanged a few minor goodbyes that stunk of both awkwardness and preoccupation with this new situation.

"You still owe me an explanation, you know. You promised you'd tell me all about what was happening when we walked down the aisle," I said.

The look on her face told me it wasn't the right thing to have said at that moment.

Most significant of all, I think, was the irony of the problem. Previous to this party, we'd been a decent couple, at least in my estimation. The sudden rough patch wasn't part of some secret infidelity or incompatibility — we both knew exactly what had occurred and it had driven us apart. It wasn't one of those situations in which the guy wonders "What the fuck was that about?" as the woman goes stomping out the door, nor was it one of the painful twists of trust in which a woman finds out her man's been cheating on her because he's too cowardly to say anything about his unhappiness. Ours was a uniquely honest fuckup, and it was that honesty that had left us both worse for the wear.

On the other hand, I was oddly fine with leaving Gloria, despite the hurried falling for her that I'd been party to over the previous week-and-a-half. In fact, I was feeling more than a little resentful toward her, because she came across to me as having had an ulterior motive the whole time. That might have been my bruised ego talking, but the possibility of her not being interested in me and instead interested in what I represented left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, I didn't know what that motive was or what I represented. I didn't plan to lose any sleep over it, though. I somehow knew I'd have my answers, in time. Rock struck me as a stand-up guy, so I'd taken his phone number before we left. If all else failed, I could ring him up when I was good and ready to think about all this bullshit.

For the time being, though, I did what all selfish assholes do after they've been dumped (however specious the term "dumped" was in this particular instance). I called the friends I'd been neglecting since meeting the woman who spawned that neglect. When the going gets rough, the lonely get hammered, and that was the plan.

Jake answered when I called him, "Fuckface!"

"Yeah, I know. You know what this phone call is. It took only a week-and-a-half this time."

"That's because she was too good for you, and too good looking."

"You never met her, shithead."

"I don't have to have met her. I assure you that's the case. You're ugly and a complete douchebag."

"Okay, fine. So, can I join the crew for tonight's debacle? What time is it?"

"Just coming on eleven. We're about fifteen minutes from going out."

"I get my ass kicked to the curb with perfect timing. What can I say?"

"Black Friend has guest list tonight at Ransom. He's fucking one of the promoters."

"Meet you out front?"

"Behind the place. VIP line."

"I'll see you in fifteen."

God bless my friends. They're good like that. Sure, we're all capable of being callow and prickish, but we're also the first people others of the group turn to when something goes wrong. Despite the fact that all of us readily ditch each other the moment a woman shows up in our lives, we know that deep down, we'll return eventually to the fold and be taken back with no questions asked. It's sort of like a support group for the emotionally stunted.

---

Saturday nights were always hot shit at Ransom. It was the same when the club was called Suite, it was the same when the club was called Steel, and it was the same when it originally opened as the Mink Room back in 1964. It'll be the same when whomever buys it out of bankruptcy or DEA/ATF confiscation opens it next, too. The club's in the middle of Towney, which is a perennially cool neighborhood, but it had its own benefits recommending it, too.

Ransom's raison d'être was substances. The club sold everything it possibly, legally could over the counter. You could buy beer, wine, and booze at any of its dozen bars. You could buy little cans of whipped cream at the café and suck the nitrous oxide out of them behind one of the Roman columns that held up the ceiling. You could buy VCR head cleaner — who even has a VCR anymore, let alone needs to clean its heads in a nightclub? — at the gift shop on the second floor and pop it surreptitiously on the make-out couches of the mezzanine. Cigarettes and "water pipes" were available in the gift shop, too, suitable for use anywhere from just off the dance floor (except for that handful of stupid fucks who actually smoked on the dance floor) to the bathroom to the car ride home. The chill-out lounge had hookahs for rent.

If the legal stuff wasn't your angle, illicit substances were available, too. The place was so full of dealers that cops and junkies alike called it Vegas. The rumor was that Ransom's owners, two ex-D&G-model homos named Lex and Franc, actually had the dealers on the payroll or, (and this would be an even better gig), were taking kickbacks from certain dealers whom they had hand-selected to work the club. Rumors are almost always rumors, but when you see one dealer thrown out on his ass while another's selling 20 hits of Netherlands-grade ecstasy to a bouncer's girlfriend, the rumors don't seem so out of line.

The whole place was just begging to be shut down but it never was, somehow. A friend of a friend used to barback at Ransom and said that Lex and Franc had a great racket worked out by which any time the cops raided the place, the two fags would have already convinced one of their bartenders to tell cops that he was the manager, so they'd take him downtown and book him. Lex and Franc would bail the guy out and cover his legal expenses, and then they'd reissue the liquor license in someone else's name. Next time the cops came around, the other guy would take the pinch, and on and on it goes. The place practically printed its own money, with the twenty-dollar cover, the fifty-dollar skip line, and the sixteen-dollar "signature" drinks they poured (dumb women who want to be seen as "elegant" love appletinis and cosmopolitans), so legal fees and the occasional payoff were never an issue. Even the valets used to fistfight each other for shifts.

The place was a madhouse from Thursday through Sunday, and I make no exception for the Saturday my cronies and I ended up there after the strange party at Waterhouse Tower. I was in a mood to indulge and forget. Black Friend got us through the door with no hassles and Mark had just sold a script to someone he met at last year's Tribeca film festival, so he was flush with cash and bought us a VIP room. The dance floor was psychotic and loud, and everyone was dancing to something dark and almost tribal. Something by Gabriel & Dresden, I think. It sounded like an alien having a heart attack and an orgasm.

"You fucks have to pay for your own drinks, though," Mark bellowed above the noise. "I only made twenty-five thousand on the advance."

Things got pretty out of hand pretty quickly. I was pounding vodka like there was no tomorrow. Ben had seen some girls down on the dance floor, so he sent someone from security to bring them up to our little crow's nest. Mark didn't want this bunch of girls to think we were just out for a grope, so he brought up a bottle of Dom and a bottle of Cristal. Jake tried to saber off the bottle of Cristal using the bottle of Dom, shouting something about hip-hop music, but managed only to break both bottles. Mark shrugged and ordered more, and some beer for Tommy. The girls ordered a round of vodka drinks — one of them was very drunk already and ordered a "Ketel and vodka." Two of them were strippers, so it was only a few minutes until the coke came out, and Tommy had a couple dozen pills to share on top of it.

So, yeah, disaster. Tommy's pills were either vikes or darvies, and soon he was everyone's best friend, at least in his mind. Two of the girls were chopping the pills up and snorting them with him, and the whole trio was laughing like village idiots. Mark had done a good job of keeping his head about him, with only a little coke and a dignified sip-sip-sip of the champagne, and he was talking to one of the strippers who had taken to trying to whore her way into an acting gig since she learned he was a screenwriter. Jake was in full-bore make-out mode. Black Friend and Ben were watching the other two girls go at it with each other in the unscreened shower. I don't know whose coke it was to begin with, but I felt like I had crunched a lot of it and I couldn't feel my gums. A lot of the pieces inside my head were buzzing and some parts were downright soaring and I felt that good-greatness that lingered just on the verge of feeling truly awful. Of course, I wasn't just tootled, I was drunk, too, and that made for a very precarious condition when it came to advanced concepts like standing still or not crashing through things. I remember trying to catch the security guy's eye at the door to our VIP room, but he wasn't paying any attention. I stood up and was going to pour myself a glass of water at the sink. That didn't work out so well. I stood, scraped my shin across the edge of the end table and then fell, face-first, through the aquarium-table at the center of the room.

Everything was wet, infinitely wet, and I think I probably pissed my pants (assuming I could have done it in my state of chemical-dick). I could hear a rhythmic pounding in my head, and could clearly discern three distinct parts of it — the boom-boom of the music coming up from the dance floor below, the glug-glug of the water flowing all over the place, and the lub-dub of my blood through my veins. I gave a frustrated laugh and got up immediately, planning to play it off as no graceless thing and who put that fucking table there anyway.

Nobody seemed to want to be the audience for my antics, oddly. A hundred gallons of water washing everywhere, fish flapping and splashing, blood pouring out of me from about a dozen glassy slices, and not even a sideways glance spared for ol' Brandon. I laughed again. Mark was still in conversation, Jake's girl was still on top of him, and Black Friend and Ben had progressed to pawing the shower girls, only half-dressed themselves. Even the security guy at the door stood with his back to us, without rushing in and demanding that we pay six times what the table was worth. I didn't take a step, but just looked around. I was too deep in my own head, and a tiny voice well hidden in the recesses of my mind — a minuscule, faraway voice shouting up from beneath the haze of booze and drugs — was telling me that I was consciously willing myself not to be seen. So I laughed a little more.

It hit me that it might be the right time for an experiment. I consciously, thoughtfully, at the forefront of my mind, thought you people can't see me. None of you can see me. From what I can tell, it worked, and I practically high-stepped past the doorman, down the stairs, diagonally across the dance floor where I stopped, in fact, to kiss one of the dancing girls on the cheek and she never noticed me, past the coat check and right out the exit door.

When I got outside it was raining, and the velvet rope line was in a miserable state, whining collectively about the wait and the rain. "Live as much of life as you can!" I screamed, my arms out, and I spun in a circle. "Pay a few bucks and you can skip the line! It's too short a time in the world to waste waiting! This club blows anyway! Find somewhere better!" Don't see me. Don't look at me. "Oh, and I fucked this guy's sister and his girlfriend. His sister took it up the ass!" You can't see me.

No one did anything. No one noticed me. No cavalcade of bouncers trundled into the street to beat me into paste, no pair of cops to baton my head and write me a ticket for the privilege.

The thing about drugs is that they're like riding a roller coaster. You can't hop on the roller coaster and test the first few loops and twists and then decide, "No, fuck it; this isn't for me." Once you're on that coaster, strapped tight and turned loose from the station, you're going to ride that fucking train until the very end, even if it blasts loose from its track and flies directly into the ground or through a portal to hell itself. When you're high or on a roll or on a trip, you can't turn it off, either. You're merged wholly, bodily, into that drug-ride until the conductor says, "Okay, kid. You're done" and lets you off at the end. It's his decision. You usually can't sleep it off, because you're too fired-up or otherwise fucked for your brain to settle into a rest pattern. The best you can hope to do is be cool, calm down, and think to yourself I'm high as a fucking kite right now, but if I just sit here and relax, eventually the world and my place in it will return to normal.

I expressly did not think that after I left the club. I thought to myself it will be excellent to test if the you-can't-see-me thing works in reverse. In retrospect, this was a profoundly bad idea. Rationally, it's a valid question, and the quest for an answer is entirely admirable in the name of both science and human interest. The time to conduct that test, though, is not while the subject is batshit off his balls on dubious coke and has vodka instead of bodily fluids. A sopping wet, pee-stained, bloody lunatic raging through the streets roaring a desperate plea for attention is, in fact, bound to end badly.

Fuck that. I tried it. Look at me. Look at me, all of you!

It was like the sun fell to Earth. I could see, could actually feel, the light — or whatever the power was — pouring off me in a visible shockwave ripple. I was a lightning bolt striking ground zero, a scintillating burst of godly awesomeness that had ridden a divine rail straight down from the heavens and graced the world with brilliance! The holy host of saints all went jump-kicking through the air, smiting the revenants and lost souls who wailed beneath the stink of sulfur and the lick of flames and the Devil himself did a double-take with how indelibly wicked-cool I was. The Lord opened his mouth and I poured out; the chorus of angels spoke in their secret, forgotten language that makes women weep and strikes blind the unbelievers and sang the song that crescendoed with Brandon Arthur motherfucking rules, and now all you jackasses know it!

Did I mention how bereft of my senses I was?

The line went berserk. Women screamed and men fell to their knees. I saw someone vomit. My brilliance, my radiance was somehow a terrible thing to see. People ran, panicking, into the night and the bouncers couldn't keep order in the streets. Some people ran into the club, many more ran away from it, and after the shock had surged through me I felt the sickening aftermath of my... my what? Power? Talent? Miracle? The nausea I felt told me implicitly that though I could do what I did, I shouldn't. The shrieking and terror making chaos of the neighborhood reinforced it. It was a brief moment of sober clarity in my otherwise crooked state.

Luckily, I had enough presence of mind to get out of there. After seeing all those horrified faces, I threw myself directly back into thoughts of unvisibility. Even as I did that, though, something squirmed at the back of my mind. Was it as simple as thinking things? What else could I do?

That wasn't the time to continue the experiment, though. I'd have more time to consider those ideas later.

That's all I remember from that night. It's almost as if I'd thrown a switch or something that turned off what I was thinking. My friends told me they'd found me a few hours later, sitting with a transvestite hooker in a brasserie, yelling into my empty coffee cup while the hooker pushed over-easy eggs around on his plate. I must have looked like fifty-five gallons of Hell, and I'm sure the hooker didn't improve the image. My friends didn't know what I'd done. They'd been hustled out of the club in some kind of guerrilla clubland evacuation from the inside, with the bouncers forcing everyone out the door, whether or not they'd paid their tabs. Rumors circulated among them, and I can only imagine what the other club guests told themselves to justify the night. Ben heard someone pulled a gun. Jake said Orlando Bloom and Leonardo DiCaprio were in town and got in a fight on the dance floor, and their PR flacks convinced the club to turn everyone out and shut down. Other, more sensible rumors suggested police crackdown, though the club opened again the next night.

I never found out what Lex and Franc did, or if they did anything at all. I still wonder whether the whole event took on a life of its own, or whether some secreted, inside force either knew what was going on or just happened to run an effective (and probably legally absolving) crowd-control drill.

Looking back, though, I knew I counted the night as a success, despite my condition. First, it was one hell of an object lesson in the things — the previously unknown things — I could do. Second, I kicked Gloria entirely out of my thoughts for the duration of the evening after we parted, which was where I knew she belonged. Score one for me.

---

5.

Monday I woke up at my ordinary, semi-decent time and put in a few perfunctory hours at the Wacom tablet. The work was straightforward but not brilliant, as industrial design tends to be. Nobody in the history of people using scissors has ever uttered the phrase, "This is an amazing hinge!" nor will they ever. That's fine. There's a certain comfort in the anonymity of one's work. My friend Mark, for example, will always be held to a popular standard that I won't. With his screenwriting, he'll always be subject to some frenzied asshat who sees one of his movies and, in a fit of pique, will complain tempestuously to his friends or on the Internet that "this screenwriter is shitty." Never mind that what appears on the screen might have changed in the chain from screenwriter to producer to director to actor. Never mind that what the frenzied asshat really means is "I didn't like this screenwriter's work." Never mind that the frenzied asshat is probably a video-store employee with the sense of entitlement and righteousness that only people who are truly fanatical about largely inconsequential things tend to nurture. That's the sort of thing Mark has to look forward to. Me, I have the insulation of making something no one cares about. No one will ever compliment my creation, but neither will they undertake a personal crusade to complain about my scissor hinges to random people they meet. There will be no T-shirts with witty slogans relating to my work. Socially incestuous subcultures will not grow up surrounding the hinges of scissors as designed by Mr. Brandon Arthur. I like this fact.

I was in this pragmatic state of mind for much of the day, and any time remorse or curiosity regarding the weekend reared its head, I crushed it ruthlessly. I had looked myself over during my few hours of function on Sunday and I didn't seem to have suffered any lasting damage. A few cuts from falling through the table, which Ben says I'm lucky to have, since most crashes through glass involve massive blood loss and dozens of stitches.

The phone rang. It was just Jake, though. "Hey, shitbag, I'm just calling to make sure you're okay."

"Yeah, I'm good. Doodling with the tablet."

"Jeez, you're working? It's worse than I thought. I was worried that you might be listening to the Cure or something, but you're actually doing your job? You need a night out."

"I don't think I ever need another night out again." Ah, the deprecating hyperbole of the drunkard. No sooner did I tell Jake this than I recalled any number of times when, in the shower, I cast my closed eyes heavenward and tried to bargain my way out of a hangover. "Just let me get through today, God, and I promise I'll never drink again," knowing fully well that I'd probably be boozled again by eight or nine that night. Strange how easy it is to make a promise you know you're not going to keep, and to make it to God of all people. That's a little more significant than bullshitting your neighbor that you'll help him move, yet the lie comes with equal aplomb. Maybe because God's not a physical presence, like that fucking neighbor.

"Dinner, then. Come on, young buck, you're available again. We have to hang out before you move on to some other broad and nobody sees you again for another month."

"Yeah, okay. Actually, you know what? Tonight's bad. Let's do it tomorrow. I'm going to try to finish this project today and get paid." I was vacillating. It's always good to go hang out, but I really was close to finishing an assignment.

"That works, but I'm holding you to it. Tomorrow. Dinner. Any ideas where?"

"No, not now. Think about it tonight or tomorrow and give me a call when it's closer to zero hour."

"Done and done," Jake said. "I'll call around and see who else is up for it, too."

"Sounds good. Talk to you tomorrow."

"See ya," Jake concluded and hung up.

That night I rocked the rest of the assignment. I finished the whole thing by eight. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, so I decided to make a quick stop down by the local, Janie Jones, to grab a panino take-out.

I took my usual seat and before I could decline, I had a Miller High Life waiting for me. "Thanks, Carrie, but I'm just in and out tonight. Can I get an agnello to go?"

"Sure thing. You want me to take that beer back?" Ah, the yellow peril, and by that I mean both Carrie and the beer.

"Hey, let's not talk crazy talk, now. So long as it's just this one, I'm fine. I'll sip on it while I wait for the sandwich." So saying, I hooked my heels on the barstool and looked up at the TV, which was playing some Only Old People Like Raymond rerun.

I shook my head like a cat does after waking in surprise from a nap. A bit of spit or drool might even have flown from me. I looked at my watch. Half an hour had passed. My beer sat in front of me, missing only the two sips I remembered taking. Raymond still ran his shtick on the television above. Maybe twenty other people in the place, two at the bar, some shooting pool, and everyone else at tables. I blinked several times.

Two seats down, a blond girl in blocky glasses looked over at me. "I was worried you were about to fall into your beer," she said. This girl had a serious case of boyface. I was all groggy from the exhausted nod-off I had just sort of taken, and that boyface was dreamily familiar. Déjà vu, or having seen her at the bar and then napped (or whatever) and then seen her again. The whole thing was that odd sort of unsettling wherein you think "That was creepy," but it doesn't truly creep you out.

"Long weekend and a full day of work, " I replied. "Hell, I must be more tired than I thought."

"EMT? Security guard? Front desk agent?"

"Uh, no. Industrial design. Long weekend full of elective activities."

"I see. I'm Sigrun."

"I'm Brandon. I'm sorry; I didn't catch your name?"

She smiled, which was pretty, if a bit... boyish. "Sigrun. That's okay. Most people aren't used to it. It's Danish. I have culturally proud parents."

"Did you have a hard time in school?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But, no. I think that if kids are exposed to things like that at an early age, it never occurs to them that it's actually weird. Not that it's actually actually weird. If we were in Copenhagen you wouldn't have batted an eye. Location and environment and all that."

"Are you in graphic design, Sigrun?"

"That's random. No."

"The glasses tricked me. It's no more random than your guesses about what I did, though."

"I thought we'd moved on from that into ethnography."

I liked this girl, I thought, graphic-designer glasses and non-sequiturs notwithstanding. "Oh. Well, my name's nothing special. Brandon Arthur. Just a plain, old, American white-boy name. It's two first names, though. I had a guy in high school who hated me because of that. He said he hated everyone who had two first names. I said, 'You hate Katie Johns?' He said no, he didn't, because 'Johns' wasn't actually a first name by itself. But he did hate Elton John, he said."

"And Jake Ryan?"

"Presumably."

"Sounds like a pain-in-the-ass kid. How'd he come by this rule?"

"I think he just decided he was going to be a knucklehead one day and adopted this as one of the ways he planned to effect that."

"Did this kid turn into a problem for you?"

"No, but we had a fight once. It was over pretty quickly. You know how kids fight. A lot of grabbing and rolling around and shirts ripping. Some cussing mixed in there for good measure."

"I'm glad it wasn't anything that scarred you for life."

"No, but I will kick his ass if I ever see him again." We both laughed at that and had a little more meaningless small talk while we nursed our drinks, even though I didn't approve of hers (white Russian, but I didn't say anything about it). When the conversation came to its natural, twenty-minute lull, I took that as the opportunity to get back to my business and not accidentally end up turning the night into another bender. Those things happen, you know. I shook Sigrun's hand, told her it was nice to meet her, and took my leave of the bar.

On the way home, I clapped my hand to my head. What the fuck was wrong with me? A quick list sufficed. 

Things I forgot to do while stopping out for dinner:

1) Have dinner, dumbass.

2) Pay for my beer.

3) Find out what Sigrun did for a living.

4) May as well get Sigrun's number.

I attributed number one to lingering exhaustion from the weekend and maybe a little post-work psychosis. Number two (and part of number one, I guess) was something I was going to have to consciously think about, now that I was aware that I was unvisible, however imprecise my understanding of that whole mechanic was. I should have checked on the sandwich and asked for the bill. Numbers three and four were just inexcusable, though. I wondered, briefly, if maybe I just wasn't attracted to Sigrun (boyface), but I dismissed that out of hand as absurd. She wasn't ugly in any sense of the word, she just had unconventional features for a female. Speaking from personal experience, it's always the weird chicks who are the most adventurous in bed, and if I could seal that deal (and I could...), it might help resolve any lingering hostility I had over Gloria. 

Fuck! I didn't need to think about her.

It's okay. That's what Sigrun was for. If Gloria was just a fling, rebounding with Sigrun would put that to rest immediately. Granted, there was something unjustifiable about needing a rebounder after a week-and-a-half's relationship — that wasn't really a relationship — but I had to be honest with myself and admit that something about Gloria connected with me.

No, asshole, I did not in fact need to admit that. It was an arrangement of opportunity and the way other people in that culture were talking, it was something she knew more about than I did and had planned to take advantage of, so fuck her anyway.

I couldn't just go back to Janie's, though. That would look like I was trying to put something together with Sigrun, and there's nothing that sours a woman's opinion of you like seeming as though you're investing effort in her. On the one hand, it gives them the advantage, because they see that you're pursuing them, so they can do what they want and you'll suffer through it for their sake. At the same time, it makes them lose respect for you because it makes you seem below them — you covet them, so you're coming after them. If you treat them as peripheral or just part of the environment who, hey, it's nice to see sometime, that keeps them from forming any proud and lofty ideas about being the one in charge.

I know this isn't a terribly progressive outlook, but I don't have to make any apologies for it. I didn't make it this way. It works, though. That's how women are wired. Women doubt themselves on every conceivable level, and you have to take that into account when you deal with them.

In any event, I had the lingering suspicion that Sigrun was a comparative regular at Janie's. I knew I'd seen her before, but I hadn't previously had the brief spark of conversation to ignite my interest. I'd casually stop back by in a day or two (six days, actually — remember, women second-guess themselves, and those six days would make me seem like an unattainable treasure for her by then) to see if she was there and we'd pick up where we left off.

Something was wrong, though, something I felt stinging my thoughts, like it was important or fundamental or... shit, something. I knew it was out of place, but I didn't know what it was and that, of course, aggravated me all the more. Learning to acknowledge that buzz is something that only experience brings, and I was too new to what it was to understand completely. I'll be honest, too. My mind was too much on the missed opportunity with Sigrun and my now-growling stomach.

To hell with it. Whatever it was would either pass uneventfully or make itself known eventually. More important and immediate details loomed, like how to spend the money I had coming for the project I just finished.

Shake your head and click your tongue all you want, but I loved the thrill of writing the check before the pay was in the bank. I'd never been reckless — I never spent beyond my means or dove more than a few weeks into debt (well, if you don't count my bookmaker, but I also tended to let those bills ride when I was in the black). I'm not like these five-figure millionaires, picking up the tab every night and making monthly payments that barely cover the interest when the credit card bills roll in. Largesse is fine — admirable — but not if it means selling my soul to Citibank.

The couch needed an upgrade, or at least a cleaning. My car needed new tires. The time for my cumulative six-month rent payment was drawing nigh and some new going-out clothes couldn't hurt (¡Viva Varvatos!). Time to take home a catalog and order a pizza, I guess. I really wanted that lamb sandwich, but I couldn't go back to Janie Jones' without looking desperate, idiotic, or both.

Then again, maybe I could. Maybe I could purposefully return, saunter up to the bar, and order the same thing I asked for an hour ago. I could chat Sigrun up again and, traditionally speaking, she'd be charmed by the state of fluster she'd put me in that had dazzled me into leaving without my order. Smooth. Vulnerable. Honest. Digits.

In my mind: 

Brandon: I forgot my dinner. 

Sigrun: Something on your mind? 

Brandon: Well, yeah. You, actually.

Oh my god. So beguiling. 

Hell, I'll do it, I thought. A night out with an attractive woman is always worth that initial risk of embarrassment. In fact, the approach, with its dangers of immanent rejection, gives a frisson of excitement that's often better than the date itself and sometimes even the sex. Cowboy up, Brandon Arthur.

It hit me right as I was pulling on the door to Janie's. She had seen me.

That caught me off guard. I didn't know what to do. After letting the door close and ducking around the corner, I stood there on the sidewalk by the bar and reasoned through it.

Sigrun had seen me when Carrie hadn't. In fact, Carrie had already forgotten about me when Sigrun took the initiative and started our conversation.

I thought that I might have been projecting my notice me vibe but that couldn't have been the case, as it's something that requires conscious thought. As well, after Saturday night's escapade, it wasn't something I'd messed with. I didn't have enough fine control with it yet for everyday use, and turning it on full-throttle at Janie's hadn't been on my mind.

That meant Sigrun was one of us.

How to handle it?

I was shaken, no denying it. Before I'd met Gloria, I wouldn't have given it a second thought because I hadn't known there was anything... supernal going on. Since making Gloria's acquaintance, the only other times I'd met unvisible people had been in her presence. Or had it? Had I maybe met one at the club? I wouldn't have known — the experience had no telltale sensation of its own. It had to be reasoned through from context if you didn't know the other person had that same inclination. I might have come across someone else, and it would have had to have been at Ransom because I hadn't been out of my apartment since then. Even if I had met one, so what? I wouldn't have known and nothing was at stake.

That implied something was at stake here, but the alternative didn't seem likely. My belief in coincidence had suffered a great blow since learning of this half-world. My neighborhood. My local. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

It scared me. It really scared me, with a nostril-flaring, eye-tearing primal fear, that someone was watching me, observing my habits, and putting people in the proper place to intercept me. No way this was just a fluke.

I called Rock. He might have some advice.

"Hello?"

"Rock? It's Brandon."

"Brandon! I'm guessing that if you're calling me, you haven't talked to Gloria since Saturday night. Am I right?"

"Why? Has something happened?" Oh, balls. Concern.

"Naw, nothing's going on. But if a dude has the chance to call the gorgeous girl he's fucking, and a chance to call ol' Rock, I have to guess that it's because he's got some key reason for not calling the gorgeous girl he's fucking. The gorgeous, well-connected girl he's fucking."

"We're not fuck— look, this isn't about that. I've just met someone and I need to know what to do."

"Try walking up and saying hello."

"Jesus, it's not like that. It's one of us. One of our people, you know what I mean?"

"A black guy?"

"Man, quit fucking around. It's one of the people no one else sees."

"Okay. So...?"

"Well..." I was losing steam. It did seem kind of absurd, now that I thought about it. "You don't think it's dangerous or coincidental or something?"

"Like you're at the center of some conspiracy and people are staking you out and following you?"

"Exactly!"

"Motherfucker, I already told you that you had a big part to play in what's going to happen. Now just be cool and sort it out. Things haven't gotten all Bourne Supremacy yet, so you're going to have to figure some shit out for yourself. Didn't you tell me that you were kind of bugged when Gloria was steering you toward whatever she had in mind? And now you've got your first chance to exercise some free will of your own and you're calling me, all 'Boo hoo, Rock, what do I do?'"

Okay, so maybe I was being kind of a chump. "That's your advice? Do whatever I want to do?"

"You're a grown man, Brandon. Take some initiative. Take some responsibility."

How embarrassing. Its embarrassment didn't make it any less true, though. Rock was right. No man has ever gained anything substantial by standing around pontificating on what a peen he was being. Action makes a man, not words and wondering.

"Okay. Sorry to bother you. I'll take it from here."

"Shine on, you crazy diamond." Click.

I went back into Janie Jones, confident but swathed in abeyance. Carrie was behind the bar, pulling a rack of glasses out of the dishwasher. Sigrun still sat on a stool, nursing a drink and talking on a mobile phone. "I forgot my sandwich," I proffered, looking at Sigrun but talking (mostly) to Carrie.

Carrie replied, "Oh, shit, hon, I forgot, too. Let me check on that for you." Then she disappeared into the kitchen, a water stain on the back of her little t-shirt.

"I'm not really that hungry," I lied affably to Sigrun. "I came back to see you."

"I have that effect on men," she said with a flourish of her wrist to her forehead, thus clapping the phone shut.

"I'm not that good at this yet. All this sneaking around and furtive diplomacy."

"You'll learn to do it eventually. I like when it's like this, though. When both of us know what's going on and we don't have to mess around with all the archaic formality that anyone who builds himself a title seems to go for."

"Good. So then we can move forward honestly?"

"As honestly as I'm capable of. I still have a job to do, you know."

"Let's start there. What do you mean you have a job to do?"

"Oh, she did find a naïve one, didn't she?"

"Come on. Don't break my balls. I'm talking about this with you and not Gloria, because she seems to have some difficulty being straight with me."

"It's pretty simple. Think of it as an us-versus-them situation. I have 'us' in mind and Gloria has 'them.' You're completely new to all of this, so you're an as-yet unclaimed commodity. Imagine yourself as a contractor. Both sides will promise you something. You'll sell yourself out to one or the other, or you'll genuinely fall for one of the ideologies. Then you'll join that side and the struggle will go on with you contributing to that side's efforts."

"Struggle?" Gloria never talked about this. She had alluded to certain shades of what must be happening among the unseen society, but she played her cards close to her chest. Lucky cards. Anyway.

"Call it a war, if you prefer a melodramatic flair. Call it the dialectic. Maybe it's just human nature. The eternal clash of opposing viewpoints."

"See, that's what I don't understand. What are the viewpoints?"

"I can't tell you that. You won't want to hear it from me. Since I've already chosen my side, my description will come across as propaganda."

Goddamn, this was frustrating. I spoke slowly, "Well, then, how am I supposed to choose a side? And what if I don't want to choose a side?"

"You have to learn about them. Everybody chooses a side. Don't think you're special." She smiled, her boyface suddenly becoming quite enigmatic behind those glasses.

"Fuck that. I'm a unique snowflake and all that shit. I don't care about one side or the other in your mystery war."

Carrie intervened. "Here's that sandwich, Brandon. Sorry to overlook it."

"No big deal. Say, Carrie, did you know I'm a hot commodity? Sigrun wants me to join her side."

Carrie laughed out loud. "They all want you, is that it?" She turned to Sigrun. I noticed in Carrie's otherwise dispassionate Asian eyes a brief look of something akin to surprise, as if she knew Sigrun was there, but was only really seeing here for the first time. "Hon, you want me to throw this brute out on his ear?"

Sigrun laughed, too. "No, he's kind of charming in his own clumsy way. I think he's overstating what he believes to be the case, though."

"Be careful, girl. You have to watch it with this one. He's positively crawling with social diseases, or so they say around the neighborhood," Carrie commiserated with Sigrun.

"Hey!" I said, feigning offense, "Threatening contagion is the lowest form of cock-block. Besides, most of those have cleared up. The only ones I still have are the ones I caught from the bathrooms here."

"You probably caught whatever funk festers inside you from handling dirty money," Carrie said, with one lip curled into an affected sneer. "Speaking of which, that'll be nine-forty for the sandwich." I tried to pay but she said, "Just leave the money on the bar, leper," as she retreated to serve someone else who just approached the bar.

I grabbed the Styrofoam clamshell that held my dinner and looked out of the corner of my eye. "Do you want to continue this conversation upstairs? I live around the block."

"I know where you live, of course. Prodigals like you never know what we've learned about them until they truly start to see the big picture." She threw a twenty on the bar, settling her tab. Then she put her keys in her purse and pushed a handful of stray bangs out of her eyes.

"Then you lead the way, Mata Hari."

I'll be damned. She did know the way. She even knew the numeric security code to let us into the lobby of my apartment building. She waved theatrically at my downstairs neighbor Lisa, who was just headed out with her pair of ridiculous puggles. Lisa waved back at us with a smile, and I hoped it was because I projected a tiny vibe of please notice me. Nothing too forceful. I just wanted someone to have witnessed me here with someone in case I turned up dead or missing later on. Not that they'd be able to find Sigrun if she wanted to hide herself.

Inside my apartment, I turned up the Ladytron CD I had playing on infinite repeat and poured a couple of glasses of red wine left from the previous lost week with Gloria. Only the ignorant sneer at wine from a box on general principle. Yeah, Franzia will strip paint, and it turns fat broads into reeking sluts in the suburbs, but if you know what to buy, your guests will be impressed. Doubly so if they didn't know it came from a box in the first place.

We talked for hours in my little apartment, until it became so stuffy that we had to open the windows and let in some of the sweet night air. It wasn't the dogged mentor-and-protégé conversation that I expected, either. In fact, much of the talk deviated from the details of the half-world entirely. I learned a lot about Sigrun. Her parents, as she mentioned before, were Danish. Her mother was an airline stewardess (back when people could call them stewardesses without getting slapped in an Oprah-induced snit), a Nordic, blonde femme fatale in the idiom of Britt Ekland. Her father had been a geologist for Maersk Oil, and was responsible for moving his family to the United States in the early 1970s, shortly before Sigrun had been born. They divorced in an amicable, secular, European manner, and both promptly forgot about their daughter. Sigrun didn't bear them any ill will now that she understood why it had happened — parents aren't inherently immune to the rogue gene or whatever that makes people unvisible — but she had grown up fairly wild and hostile. She did a stint in booze rehab on her dad's insurance. After the divorce, her father jumped ship to Exxon Oil. Her mother was an "artist," living well off her divorce settlement.

More important than this little history, though, was the fact that both of Sigrun's parents readily overlooked her. I could relate: I felt like the invisible outsider all through high school, college, and especially at home during those years. I spent a lot of time quietly jacking off in my bedroom and drinking cheap beer on the periphery of keg parties, but I just thought in retrospect that I was suffering from the standard teenage alienation that afflicts everyone. My own father didn't pay much attention to me, and all I can really remember about my mother before she died was that she had very soft hair that smelled like strawberries. In all likelihood, that strawberry smell probably came from ninety-nine-cent grocery store shampoo, but, hey, it's a formative memory. It's worth more than the four thousand dollars I inherited when she died. Then again, at least she remembered me for that.

The thing is, we both seemed to have outgrown that inadvertent parental neglect. Neither of us was a sociopath. Neither of us harbored any of those tormented outsider fantasies that haunt the really disturbed kids. We had both become comparatively successful in spite of being largely overlooked at home and among broader society. We didn't grow up with "I'm so tragic!" attitudes, we just did what we could with what we had.

We didn't share everything in common, though. Apparently, Sigrun had earned herself a position of respect in one of the weird factions that held sway over the popular opinion of the unvisible. She didn't have a job, she was entitled to benefits as a perk of that position. Sometimes that took the form of cash. Most often it took the form of expense stipends and use of materiel. She didn't own a home, she lived in an apartment her faction rented in its own name in Crofts Mill.

"You take kickbacks," I suggested.

"No, I use what the people pay to have used in their name."

"So you're a lobbyist."

"You're being intentionally obtuse."

"Well, where does the money come from? It's not like we have to pay taxes or anything for being a part of what we are. Holy shit, we don't have to pay extra taxes, do we?"

Sigrun laughed at that. Maybe it was the wine, but her laughter now had the faintest hint of music to it. Roxy Music, in fact. It must be some car out in the street. "No, it comes out of funds specifically invested for the purposes of keeping order. A lot of people in the demimonde are very wealthy. Think of it more like two different political entities, each of which doesn't have to answer to anyone but is accountable to the people it guides."

"Demimonde."

She rolled her eyes. "I know. It's so amazingly precious, isn't it? But that's what everyone calls it, our quiet little world that exists in the shadows of everyone else's lives. Give people a chance to pretend they're more than they are and they'll gladly take it."

"You're quite the cynic," I said.

"I suppose you're qualified to judge one," she replied.

"Let me tell you, this honesty if pretty fucking sexy. It's refreshing." Definitely the wine.

Sigrun smiled and took off her glasses. "I don't know, Brandon. I came here to bring you over to our way of thinking. You've already said you're going to stay neutral in the whole thing. I'm ready to fuck you into complicity, but I'm not in this to fuck for real."

"I'm impervious to your advances, though. I'm not going to sleep with you for your political gain or mine. I already did that with Gloria, and see where that got her."

"I know. I was there."

Goddamn this woman, with all of her sayings and doings that set off vague warning signals. She had just copped to something, but I didn't know what. Just then my thoughts were too muddled with wine and my junk too busy sporting a semi with the prospect of mounting chivalrous amor to reason it out. "She's gone now," I said. I think it was supposed to be some kind of entreaty, but I knew it came off as more than a little hungry.

"Let's have another drink," she suggested, so we did. "I'll give this a chance, but I want you to know two things."

"Anything you say, princess."

"Cut that shit out. First, this isn't personal. I'm doing this for the same reasons Gloria was, to sweeten the deal, whatever deal we choose to offer later. I'm just telling you straight to your face. Second, I'm doing this because I want to. It's a price I'm willing to pay. You're emphatically not seducing me."

With a flourish, I emptied my wine glass. "Then let us be about it!"

The sex was good. She had this cute minor kink by which she liked me to rub her clit and put her hand over mine while I did it. I knew better than to ask what that was about and reasoned it was some kind of sublimated masturbation fantasy. We were all over the bed and onto the floor and into the kitchen, and just like I guessed, she was into things that good girls don't do without weeks of incessant cajoling. Suffice it to say that I had to take a shower before going to bed for the night.

When I came out of the shower, Sigrun was wearing my jeans, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. No shirt, no shoes, legs cuffed to her ankle height. She had slight breasts that turned upward in jaunty curves. Her hair, tousled, stood out in shocked curls that softened the light coming from behind her. She leaned on one hand that grasped the door frame and her other hand had disappeared down the front of my jeans.

I was ready again immediately.

"I don't think so, Brandon. I just wanted to leave you something to remember me by." She followed this with a torrent of breath, gasping near the end, when she dropped to her knees on the hardwood floor. A thin, dark stripe of glistening wet worked itself over the crotch of my jeans. Then she got up with a sigh of exhausted satisfaction, shook herself out of my pants, and dressed.

"Wait, baby; what's for breakfast?" I joked.

"I left my number on your nightstand. Call me when you're ready to negotiate a little further." Sigrun reassembled herself with all the pieces in their proper places, the last of which were those glasses that made her face so distinctive. With that, she left. No dominant yank on the bulge beneath my towel, no wanton tease or innuendo. With her, business was pleasure until it was business again.

I liked that. I liked this whole demimonde thing, from what I'd seen so far. I'd known about it for only two weeks and I'd already romanced two of the hottest bombshells the scene had to offer. Maybe neutrality wasn't the way to play this after all. Maybe I'd better check out what each side was offering a little more thoroughly. Whatever I decided to do, I wasn't calling Rock to whine about it again.

---

6.

A quick inventory of my life to that point, as it related to my involvement in the demimonde:

Brandon's Scorecard 

	Gloria	Sigrun
Kind of weird	√	√
Up to something	√	√
Gorgeous	√
Unconventionally attractive		√
Probably telling some kind of lie	√	√
Something unknown is at stake and I haven't really bothered to try to understand it	√	√
Crazy (at least potentially)	√	√
The sex was superlative	√	√
In fact, I want more sex with her. Lots more.	√	√

Obviously, each one of the strange women in my life saw me as a beneficial quantity. Now, Brandon Arthur might have been vulgar, but he wasn't stupid. The way I looked at it, I was a token in contention between two rival factions, both represented by women (or at least both employing women as deal-sweetening objects of desire) who weren't afraid to stoop to using sex as an incentive to sway me to their side. One of these women was duplicitous in her presentation of the pursuit of my patronage, concealing the true nature of the political battleground behind a façade of wonder and personal lust. The other woman was forthright but emotionally uninvolved, an agent brokering a deal and nothing more, which was misleading in its own context.

The struggle itself remained unseen, perhaps even illusory, and it occurred between ideologies likewise yet to be revealed. The people who backed both women had no discernible philosophy, or even characteristics. It wasn't possible to pick one side or the other based on what I knew then. I needed more information to make a choice, and that assumed I really intended to make a choice and not just tag along for the amenities offered.

That all lingered in the undefined future, though. For the present, dinner with Jake was a surprisingly tedious event. I told him a condensed version of what had happened up until that point, omitting the questionably supernatural or metaphysical way unvisibility worked. I did this mostly because I didn't think I could adequately explain it, and I couldn't answer questions like why he and my other friends could see me when they weren't part of the demimonde (also omitted). Since that group of experiences had been much of my recent life, I didn't have a lot that was new or refreshing to say to him. We split wings and a couple of pitchers of beer and then finally called it a night after some shorties of Drambuie.

Shorties of Drambuie was a ritual that began as a joke but gradually turned into an earnest expression of solidarity with us. We left with the mutual promise to do something together soon, but that we wouldn't pin down when or what it would be. In that sense, Jake's a great friend. He understood that I wanted to see what shook out between the two inscrutable broads I was playing off each other, and that I needed time to let that culminate. 

To that end, I was keeping my conscious mind off those women by looking for things to do by myself that wouldn't involve them. It's harder than one might think to entertain oneself. Going to the movies is passive. Drinking or drugging alone — "drinking with the Lord" — is a sure sign of a troublesome habit forming. I never obsessed about video games to play them more than casually, television doesn't really entertain, and seeing live music solo is essentially an admission of desperation. Desperate to avoid such desperation, I took to poring over the local alternative-weekly samizdat for something to occupy my time.

I don't like art. I'm not so histrionic as to overstate, "I hate art!" but I don't really like the creative process inherent to art that forces its explanation. I'm reminded of the old Marshall McLuhan remark that the medium is the message, but with so much of art, I find that the artist's diatribe is actually the message, and the medium is just the thing he tacks to the wall to serve as the icebreaker to his tirade. You respect what he says because he's a deep thinker, as a murky blortch of paint across the canvas demonstrates.

I mean, I enjoy some art, but it's art that's representative, not symbolic. "The Oath of the Horatii": Okay, I get that. It's three dudes swearing filial loyalty and patriotism, and its subsequent cultural significance to the French Revolution is plain to understand. As counterpoint, the very idea of Marcel Duchamp turns me off of art. He takes the art out of the hands of the artist and places part of the onus on the audience. It's a progressive idea to think about, but it's only a few steps away from "everything is art" and such hippy logic as "art is what you think it is, and what you think is art, is."

As part of my industrial design prerequisites, I wasted a few semesters in art appreciation classes in college. One of the class assignments was to take a chunk of wood and create a work of art from it. Remember, this was not an art class proper, it was an art appreciation class. With a typically studenty attitude of condescension, I simply stenciled CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED MASTERPIECE on my chunk of wood. When the day came to turn in the project and be graded, I refused to submit my project for evaluation and insisted that the teacher pay me twenty thousand dollars for it. She didn't, and I didn't. I received a high mark on the project, however, solely on the basis of my theatrics. The teacher even remarked that my effort (such as it was) had similar themes as those of Duchamp, in the mockery of the meaning of "art" and the subjective interpretation of its qualifications, thus contributing to the artistic significance of the piece itself.

No, I was just being a fuckhead. And I was rewarded for it. That's a précis of why I dislike art. 

There's probably also something on a pragmatic level preventing me from liking art. I think more along the lines of design than expression. Good art is a well-implemented scissor hinge that makes for a handsome piece of machinery, but is first and foremost effective. The medium is not the message, the medium is the goddamn medium, and these scissors have a perfect slip ratio between the two blade levers. What makes me awesome is not a contrived manifesto on social inequality as expressed by the color red, but rather the fact that my scissors can cut their way through fucking sheet metal if you want them to. 

All of that aside, I do enjoy attending gallery openings and exhibits. I just take special care to avoid the artists or anyone to involved with the monthly changing of the bird-cage paper that lines the walls. Such events always come with free (or cheap) booze, screwy people, easy drugs, and probably some other divertissement to keep the guests from having to suffer through the thrust of the exhibit. 

Unable to dodge whatever fate was in store for me, I ran into Sigrun again at Gallerie Sokolov's showing of Shaun Gale's latest works. Unsurprisingly, I didn't like much of Gale's art, but I respected it. He worked mostly with incongruous images, but he didn't do it for cheap shock value. He'd paint a Madonna and child, say, but they'd be transients on a motorcycle or inhabitants of a trailer park. He didn't have any need to sculpt Mary from feces or depict an aborted fetus as the infant Christ. It was representative stuff, so I accepted it more than I really cared to effectively like it.

The whole place smelled like generic white wine, with ephemeral hints of Cool Water coming off the velvet-clad black guy who must have doused himself in it. The gallery was cold. Sigrun was broadcasting. It made me think about our last encounter, which wound me up a little bit. 

If she had seen me, she hadn't made any overtures to attract my attention. In fact, she was standing in a group of three other people, only one of whom turned his attention to her occasionally in the flow of their conversation. I mentally filed that under nota bene: He might be one of us, so watch how others react to him and how he reacts to Sigrun. 

The whole previous week had kept me in a chancrous mood, however, and I had dressed myself somewhat snidely. My silk-screened blazer covered a T-shirt that stated I Am Not Here. As I approached Sigrun's clique, she turned toward me, obviously seeing my shirt, and made a look of exaggerated disapproval. The other guy, the one who occasionally looked at Sigrun, noticed me, too. He seemed kind of arty, and I confirmed that fear with his scent of patchouli as I drew closer. The two other people had the look of impassioned young collector-hipsters; they were probably a couple. They each held a flute of champagne.

Arty guy saw Sigrun see me and cocked an eyebrow as the conversation slowly fell off. Then he blinked and said, "Hello." 

See why I don't like art? The people involved with it are always trying to trump each other with little, imagined rules and brinksmanship that make sense only in their own minds as they're doing it.  

His whole production was just so... so irksome. That simple greeting reminded me more than a little of the party held at the Waterhouse Tower. Everyone seemed to be very busy trying to be important or noticeable in the scene at hand. At the same time, though, everyone wanted to be nonchalant about it. No one wanted to be seen trying to be important. They just wanted importance to flow from them, uninhibited, like a stream of relevance tumbling crystalline down the mountain. In their minds they were each a locus, but in everyone else's mind, those individuals amounted to little more than bit players of the drama in which they were the central figure. A room full of chiefs and no Indians, but each of the chiefs were actually Indians who refused to acknowledge the self-styled chiefdom of any other. It was a Möbius strip of aggrandizement and perceived social worth.

This guy thought he had so cleverly triumphed over me and had me on the social ropes by acknowledging that I was there before I had a chance to introduce myself or let someone make an introduction for me. I wanted to riposte, "Hello. I wanted to be acknowledged, thanks, which is why I approached your little group. That was the whole point of walking over here." 

That would have been too aggressive, though. I gave Sigrun a two-count to make the pleasantry.... 

She didn't fail me. "Brandon, good to see you." 

"You, too, Sigrun. I've been meaning to call you."

"Do you tell that to all your victims?" asked clever art guy, from beneath a trio of blinks. 

Sigrun jumped in to run damage control. "Peter, this is Brandon Arthur. You've seen him before, you just haven't met him." He blushed a bit, put on the defensive because he knew about me and she'd pointed it out, but I didn't know about him. At least, that's what jumped into my mind when I heard the words she'd carefully selected. "Brandon, this is Peter Black. And these are Michael and Rebecca." She indicated the couple. Rebecca smiled and Michael offered his hand. Peter just blinked and crossed his arms.

"Pleased to meet you, everyone." I shook Michael's hand and returned Rebecca's smile with one of my own. I looked at Peter but didn't offer my hand or resort to adolescent bon mots. I didn't want to provoke the little fucker any more than was necessary, though I wondered if I might have to later. If he wanted to stoop to it, I'd return the volley, but that seemed to be his game from the beginning and I didn't want to indulge it. 

"So what do you think of the showing, Brandon?" Michael asked.

I raised my eyebrows and said, "I think maybe I just don't get Shaun Gale." 

Peter opened his mouth, no doubt with some acerbic comment on my cultural barbarism ready to deploy, but Rebecca beat him to the conversation. "My God, thank you for saying that. I don't like his art either. I hate being the only person to say something like that at the actual showing, though. Honestly, I only came because Michael wanted to." Everyone had a good chuckle at this, and Michael was pleasantly mannered enough to understand that not all art is for everyone. The general spirit of diplomacy even disarmed Peter somewhat. He didn't seem so anxious to hop in with incisive comments.

"I think I'm a bit past my thrill with him, too," Sigrun said. If she meant it for the whole group, some of it had gone to waste, as Michael and Rebecca had already detoured into a private conversation of their own regarding some other exhibit they'd seen in the past month. Peter, Sigrun, and I excused ourselves (somewhat extraneously, I thought) with a gentle wave. "You get a chance to think things over?" she asked me. 

"Not really. I think I'm still going to play the iconoclast for the time being. I still haven't talked to Gloria yet, either."

Peter gave a derisive snort. "That's probably in your best interests, actually. She didn't handle herself too well at Once Upon a Time last week, and all her appearance at the Waterhouse did was reaffirm the old divisiveness." 

I had been at the Waterhouse, of course, but "Once Upon a Time?" 

Sigrun shrugged. "A party last week. Hosted at Narcisse's estate. A theme party, where everyone came as a character from a fairy tale. You must not have heard about it." This last came with a bit of a crooked smile. 

It hurt, strangely. Something happened in this society that I had so recently found out I belonged to, and I hadn't been there. It felt as if I was being left behind. I thought I was supposed to be some hot-shit free agent, the toast of the town, and they had the nerve to throw parties without me? Gloria didn't call me. Sigrun didn't call me about it. Rock didn't call me. 

Some of that disappointment must have telegraphed across my face, because Peter said, "You just told us you wanted to be an iconoclast. Isn't excluding yourself from functions somewhat implicit in that?" Blink blink. At least he had dropped the tone of superiority. 

"Sure, but I want to be the one to decide which events I miss. It happens at my discretion, not you people's." When trapped in your own hypocrisy, self-lampoon is a time-tested way to salvage dignity. 

Peter cocked an eyebrow at this. "An admirable perspective. We just need to do something about your unfortunate tendency to speak so honestly." 

Still playing hard-to-get with my hard-to-getness, Sigrun rebuked him. "Don't assign any methodology to Brandon yet, Peter. He still hasn't decided which side he's inevitably going to end up on." 

"Come on, now, Sigrun. Just a moment ago you were talking about no longer being thrilled with this exhibit. If we're going to have this discussion, can we at least go somewhere that doesn't smell like wilting strawberries?" I asked 

"That's hardly the worst of it," Peter conferred, brandishing an overly conspiratorial tone. "This champagne is actually Prosecco. They hoped nobody would notice." 

Maybe he wasn't so bad, after all. I responded in kind. "Nobody did. Several nobodies, in fact." 

Sigrun smiled. "Okay, Frick and Frack. Let's go." 

--- 

Sigrun already knew where I lived, and since she did, Peter probably did (or people a lot more potentially troublesome than Peter), so I didn't see any harm in heading back to my house after we picked up some beer, some wine (for Peter), and some coke. The booze would relax us, but the coke would keep us sharp — that was the plan as we formulated it. 

My house was stuffy, though. Even with the windows open the air was close, so we went up to the roof. People had parties up there all the time and my landlord didn't care if the residents hung out up there as a kind of veranda. It did surprise us, though, when a dozen or so big, black birds took wing, cawing, as we surprised them by bursting open the fire-escape access to the roof. The place smelled a little like bird shit and a lot like stale beer, the latter of which is one of the odors I find oddly comforting. It makes me think of nightclubs after closing time, I guess, which is when tantalizing liaisons and other events of amusing anecdotes occur.

I don't know whether it was the booze, the coke, or just a trick of the light, but I couldn't see for shit on the roof. In the night air, Sigrun didn't seem to have any eyes; they vanished into dark hollows in her face. She looked hunched over, turned inward on herself, like some Shakespearean witch bent over her cauldron. Peter had an even more ominous air, looking positively demonic. It made me wonder what I looked like on this suddenly strange night. I played it all off, though — I'd been too often the comic butt of bad trips and skanky highs. I had no desire to be "Brandon spent all night shrieking about bloody skulls!" again. 

In a hospitable gesture, I cut us all a few lines, using the skylight of one of the unoccupied apartments on the top floor for a surface. It struck me as kind of interesting at the time, in the way that only people who are into drugs find captivating. If you're not a user, drug presentation is the most tedious, self-righteous bullshit you've ever heard about. If you're a user or abuser, it's positively inspiring. 

We made small talk, mostly in the same vein. Before long, Sigrun and I ended up making out a bit while Peter undertook a devil-looking dissertation on the failures of democracy. It wasn't a passionate makeout, just a perfunctory, drug-fueled horniness made manifest. I could feel reticence beneath Sigrun's movements. Even on the high, she still kept a professional distance and indulged me only because that was what she was supposed to do. I couldn't see her eyes, even up close, and my hands felt soft and tingly. The pointless make-out went on and Peter's voice dropped off. I swear, I thought I saw him jump off the side of the building, and he was gone when I made a surprised stop to our awkward groping.

"Did... I think Peter just jumped off the roof?" I said, unsure. 

"Don't be ridiculous," Sigrun the crone told me. "Look over the side. He's not down there, is he? He probably left to get cigarettes or go home. Honestly, Brandon, you worry me a bit." 

"I swear to God. I didn't hear the door close or anyone open it."

"That's because you were preoccupied. So get back over here and maybe we can make him reappear, since you're so worried about him."

"It's not that I'm worried about him. You don't think him vanishing is weird?" 

"I think he's weird. And I'm starting to think you're weird." 

"Look, maybe we better call it a night." I don't think I'd ever uttered those words before. 

"Are you out of your mind? I'm skyed on this blow and you must've had twice as much as me." 

"Normally I'd consider that a good point." 

"But...?" she trailed off. 

"That's all I've got, really." 

She put her hand in mine. Pins and needles. Balloon hands blown up with a million tiny fragments of glass inside. She said, "You're making this harder on yourself than you need to." She was right. 

On my own level, though, I knew it before she told me, I knew I was doing it, and I wanted to be doing it. Both of these women had climbed inside me, making me feel something I hadn't felt for anyone in a long time. It was more than lust, but lust was a large part of it. A tiny blossom of concern, no more than a springtime shoot, really, had taken root, and I both resented it and.... 

Fuck, I cherished it. I'd never imaging myself using such a Burt Bacharach word, but that was the word that suited it most. That vulnerability made me a little defensive on the inside and more than a little angry. If they knew the power they had over me, either one could sway my tightrope act of a relationship with her. 

That wasn't how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be calling the shots. The tenor of either relationship was mine to control. These women both did what they did out of commitment to a cause, but I was the one with enough force of will to crush their idealism from them. Whatever their hearts held dear, whether it was their purpose or some similarly blooming regard for me, I desperately, viciously, brutally wanted the power to grant it or break it to splinters. 

"I'm... I can't... I've got chemical dick so bad I'm not even going to be able to piss for three days." 

Sigrun stood up and kissed me on the forehead. "Take your time," she said. And then she went home, I think.