“Have you?”
His face did the oddest thing. It’s like it was trying to look ashamed and embarrassed but fell over and landed smack in the middle of kind of pretty proud. And he nodded yes again. I went a little cold inside. I said:
“Don’t. It’s not fair. You’ve kept your secret from me for all these years. I get to keep some from now on.”
In all that teleporting and hitchhiking into the dream-swamps of the greater boroughs, he’d brought something back with him. He couldn’t remember when he’d first dreamed about the man in the plague-doctor mask. It might have been all the way back in Ukraine. In Pripyat. It came for him covered in radioactive slime and his mother’s blood, staring through that medieval face and industrial eyes at a helpless child, whispering the same thing over and over: You will never belong anywhere. Everywhere you go will die.
Year by year, that thing got stronger, got bigger and more solid, could stay in the real world longer, and hated Misha Malinov more. Whenever Misha so much as looked at someone for too long, Miasma would begin to stalk them, invade their mind, tearing them apart to find out what had drawn Misha’s attention. But lately the creature had gone freelance, walking the streets alone, feeding on human hope and longing and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, blood. Meat. Misha became a hero, not to fight some nebulous idea of “crime” but to fight the monster of his childhood nightmare. The Insomniac, hero of the wee hours.
“But it’s okay now!” I said. “You killed him! I saw you pull out his nasty worm heart! It’s over now, baby. It’s done.”
Misha sighed. The Insomniac walked over to the pile of leather still lying on the floor where Miasma had disintegrated. He picked up the long bone mask in one hand and walked past my desk, into his office. He waved me over to the supply closet with a big half-dead fern in front of it, and opened the door.
Inside, hundreds of plague-doctor masks hung on the walls in neat, identical rows.
“Miasma is a bad dream. You can wake up all you want. He comes back the next night just the same.”
And that’s the truth. Some of you out there probably know the score firsthand. The Insomniac hunted Miasma every night and every night he ripped out that thing’s ultraviolet heart and every night the creature turned up again fresh as laundry.
But Misha was so happy after that. He didn’t have to hide from everyone. He had somebody who knew him. Who could really see him. Who would clap her hands instead of freaking the fuck out when he shivered and wrinkled along the edges—like something you see out of the corner of your eye when you haven’t slept for a week—and teleported across the office. And for a while, it was good. For a while, it was thrilling. For a while, I was part of something so fantastic and unusual and big and secret. I knew something no one else knew. I felt special. Like my superpower was loving him. For a while . . . for a while, it was like we were starring in simulcast TV shows. By day, Mild-Mannered Mr. Miller toils nobly in the halls of the American Justice System with a little help from his Girl Friday! But the real work begins at night! The Insomniac guards his sleeping city, the paladin of Luna Park, keeping the world of dreams safe for all mankind.
And then there was The Daisy Show. By day, the adorable Daisy Green performs intellectually stultifying secretarial duties and watches her youth slough off her into a filthy coffeepot! But by night, she shreds her soul to pieces worrying and waiting for her big strong man to come home from a hard night’s labor! Will he come back dead or not dead this week? Stay tuned!
The only life in my life lay in the crossover episodes. View their staunch moral fiber! Their witty banter! Their modestly separate beds! When he came home. When he told me how it had all gone down out there. When he ate whatever bullshit I’d baked to pass the time and the fear like it was the only food he’d ever seen. When he lay next to me after all those sunflowers stopped blossoming in my head and told me how beautiful I’d looked on television. He watched all my episodes. He was so happy. I made him happy. But all the while, I was disappearing. Drinking from two cracked cups every night, one marked TERROR and one marked BOREDOM. I couldn’t relax. I gave him every ounce of my will. Just don’t die. Just don’t die. I stopped sleeping too, but it didn’t give me magic powers. You can’t sleep when someone you love is maybe dying, maybe drowning in the East River, maybe bleeding out in the Meatpacking District, maybe vanished back into whatever helldream vomited Miasma out in the first place. He always came home right at the moment when I knew in my heart that this time, he was definitely dead.
I know you’re listening, Paige. Hear me when I say it’s not so nice, to be the girl waiting in the window. Most of the time, you just wanna chuck yourself out.
My hair started to fall out. I got a Xanax prescription I didn’t tell him about. That worked for a while. I could laugh again. Flash a prescription-strength smile. Boy, I was living the Betty Friedan dream! A roast in every pot and anxiety pills in every stomach! I was disappearing into his life. I only came alive when he was around to look at me and pay attention to me and fill me in at the edges. That’s the sad truth of poor, stupid Juliet’s life. If she’d lived, she’d have gone to see that priest anyway, to float her out of the crush of wifehood on a sweet opiate sigh. And I wasn’t even anybody’s wife! Days went by when the only person I saw was Misha. I started to look forward to Miasma showing up and drop-kicking me into a hallucinogenic ball-pit of the mind. At least that was interesting.
How is life in Denmark, Daisy? Is it all mermaids and pastries and free health care?
Oh, ja. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
And then my parents died.
Plane crash. They got bumped off their flight to Paris for Dad’s endocrinology conference but managed to snag a first-class upgrade on another airline. I imagine they rushed across JFK to make it, giggling like kids and toasting when they buckled in, thrilled with their good fortune. Then boom, splash, sunk to the bottom of the sea. And everything after that was just . . . bad dreams.
I left. I loved Misha, but I left. Canceled The Daisy Show, my Xanax prescription, and my broadband and lit the fuck out. Didn’t have the cash to get back to California. Didn’t have the cash for much of anything but a suitcase and a bus ticket south. Guignol City has a pretty hopping theater scene, but most importantly, it wasn’t New York, it wasn’t Brooklyn, and it wasn’t Denmark.
Here we go. This is the story I know you want to hear. The one you’ve all been nice enough to never ask me about. My origin story.
When you’re as lucky as Misha, when the monster under your bed never gets you once, when the girl you loved from afar loves you back, loves you enough to become set dressing in your big, splashy, high-budget drama, it has to come from somewhere. And Misha’s luck came from everyone around him. He was a vampire of luck. His parents back in Ukraine, my parents toasting with airline champagne, his clients, his college roommate Jimmy Keeler who lost his scholarship, his girlfriend, his sobriety—and me.
I landed on my feet in California, working, hustling, doors opening, footlights shining. It was easy, like high school. But Guignol City laughs at the Juliet Army and puts out cigarettes on their tits. I couldn’t get hired to twirl a sign outside a cell phone store, let alone legit acting work. I crashed on my friend Alexandra’s couch—she played Nurse to my Juliet then and now. We went to clubs together at night, my Nurse and I, dressed up in our best neon and rain, the clubs where casting scouts were rumored to gather, hunting them like birdwatchers chasing reports of a rare emerald-crested plover, and with about as much luck. Men bought me drinks but no one wanted to buy me, except in the most obvious way.
But hey, Occam’s razor, right? Sometimes, the most obvious solution is the best.
I remember my first time. He wasn’t too bad-looking and he didn’t pretend he was producing a gritty new police procedural or anything. Just lonely and frumpy and awkward and shy, which, in Guignol City, makes you a lamb already half-slaughtered. Said his name was Charlie. Told him mine was Delilah. Couldn?
??t resist a little literary flair. He had a loft on Polichinelle Street with this huge skylight. I could see the moon and all the pink and purple and green lights of the seedy street signs rippling below like the aurora borealis. Charlie kissed me and kissed me and what do you know? I was on stage again. I was the prettiest girl this guy was ever gonna fuck. I’d star in his fantasies forever. By the lights of Guignol City, I gave the performance of a lifetime. All the great whores of the stage animated my body: Cleopatra, Salome, Sally Bowles, Mary Magdalene, Fantine, Helen of motherfucking Troy. I gave them all to Charlie, my audience of one, my biggest fan, at least for a few minutes. No sunflowers flared yellow or red in my brain, but Charlie’s eyes became the cameras I’d been chasing all my life.
When he finished, I stretched up, kissed his eyelids, and whispered, I love you. My curtain call. My bow, before a red curtain, roses flying, applause shaking the chandeliers.
For a moment, it was even true. I loved all of them for a moment or two. Every man I ever fucked. I am a professional. I felt Ophelia’s obsession and Laura’s need and I felt the love I gave.
He whispered back, My real name is Joe.
It’s a ridiculous superpower. The smallest of the small. But they always told me their real names.
That was the first and last time I let a customer fall asleep in my arms. He paid me a hundred bucks and boiled me a very sentimental egg for breakfast. I think if I’d wanted to, I could have stayed and Joe would have married me by Thursday. I never saw him again. I took my money down to the Malfi Diner on Pigalle Avenue and ordered myself a disgustingly huge, greasy Salisbury steak, waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, a tower of potato latkes and applesauce, a bucket of lamb vindaloo, and a peanut butter milkshake. I ate every bite. It tasted like a future. It tasted like life. I didn’t feel ashamed. I didn’t feel the urge to run to the nearest confessional and barf up my soul onto some poor unsuspecting padre. The Daisy Show was back on, in a new time slot, with an all-new cast. And after each and every Very Special Episode, I said, I love you. Even if he hit me or choked me a little too hard or called me his wife’s name or called me a fucking cunt whore or broke three of my fingers for no fucking reason what the hell. I love you. I love you. A real actress never falters. She gives the audience what they came for. And love is all anyone comes for.
I stayed on with Alexandra, but now I paid half the rent and graduated from couch-crashing to bedroom-burrowing. We had an Alex and Daisy movie night every Tuesday, shine or rain. That was one of her phrases. Alex hated clichés, but she knew her whole life was one, really, so she settled for a little word-shuffling and dayed it a call. Misha phoned every week. I said I was fine. Audition after audition, darling, you wouldn’t believe it. No, no visits from You Know Who. I think he’s lost interest in little old me.
One night, I caught me an honest-to-god emerald-crested plover. A casting director. Arlecchino Films. Real name: Frank. He liked being scolded. He liked my hair. He liked the fading bruise on my ribs. When I finished punishing him, he told me to come down to the studio in the Medici Quarter and he’d pay me two grand to do my act on camera. Well, why not? Maybe my luck was coming back. Peeking out at me from behind this balding, freckled man who liked being called a disappointment while he jerked himself off. Who liked to watch. It’s not like my parents could get mad.
And thus, Delilah Daredevil was born.
There you have it, Deadtown. The definitive answer. Where have I seen that girl before? Where have I heard that dulcet voice? You’ve seen me on my knees; you’ve heard me moan. You know me from movies. Just not the kind that wins Oscars.
Becoming a porn star is pretty much exactly like becoming a superhero. One day, an intrepid, fresh-faced young woman discovers that she has a talent. She chooses a new name—something over the top, flamboyant, a little arrogant, with a tinge of the epic. Somebody makes her a costume—skintight, revealing, a flattering color, nothing much left to the imagination. She explores her power, learns a specialty move or two, sweats her way through a training montage, throwing out punny quips here, there, and everywhere. She inhabits an archetype. She takes every blow that comes her way like she doesn’t even feel it. Then she goes out into the big bad night and saves people from loneliness. From the assorted villainies that plague the common man. From despair and bad dreams. From tedium. Oh, sure, her victories are short-lived. She finishes off her foes in one glorious masterstroke, but the minute she’s gone, all the wickedness and darkness of the scheming, teeming world comes rushing back in. But when you need her, here she comes to save the day, doing it for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
At least, that’s how it felt at first.
I felt like I understood Misha, finally, in a way I never could before. I liked to think I could have called him up and exchanged stories with him. Tips, techniques. Finally, we both had a secret identity. A By Day and a By Night. Sometimes, I even dialed a digit or two of his phone number before deciding that a good Russian Orthodox boy probably wouldn’t see the wonderful symmetry in our story. I even wore a mask! It was my signature. A little dark red domino mask with red rhinestones at the corners of my eyes and long ribbons that rippled over my breasts or down my back like blood. Very commedia dell’arte! Everything old is new again and everything new is a fetish. I was finally where I wanted to be—at the center of attention, watched by thousands of adoring eyes, the camera firmly on me. My costars were cheerful, uncomplaining, and interchangeable. Boy Fridays waiting for me to come. Repeatable Romeos, too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ’ere one can say it lightens. And in the beginning, everyone treated me like Elizabeth goddamned Taylor.
I “lost” my “virginity” in The Opening of Delilah Daredevil, seduced the President in Delilah Deep, wore a toga for at least the first five minutes of Delilah Daredevil vs. Nero’s Fiddle, brought Satan to his knees in The Devil in Miss Dare, went up against the spirit world in Ghostlusters, got to find out what it’s like to kiss (a lot of) girls in Delilah Daredevil vs. the Amazon Women of Planet XXX, even got to wear wings and a corset in A Midsummer Night’s Delilah and say one full line of actual Shakespeare. Okay, it was: Masters, spread yourselves. But still. It was a world of yes. All my movies got sequels; all my lights were green. Delilah Daredevil Does Detroit, Delilah Daredevil Does Damascus, Delilah Daredevil Does the Danube, and, eventually, inevitably, Delilah Daredevil Does Denmark.
But becoming a porn star is pretty much exactly like becoming a superhero. You start strong, bursting out of nowhere, a bird, a plane, your name on a million needy lips, your name in the papers, your name up in lights, your greatest hits on constant repeat. You’re the fantasy—someone so strong and beautiful nothing can hurt them, not even the worst shit anyone can imagine. In the first flush of it all, you’re so convinced of the rightness of your mission statement that you practically glow when the bad guy’s final spasm stains your mask. The camera loves you. It just feels good to throw down. You do it for fun, just to feel your own strength. When you’re new, everyone’s so fucking impressed with your skill and style. All these roaring, power-drunk men line up just to go one round with you. You blow them all down like paper dolls to rave reviews and the key to the red-light district. But time passes and it hurts more than you let on. You bandage yourself after hours, alone, in a phone booth with filthy windows, wrapping your wounds tight so you can keep fighting the good fight day after day. You get tired now. You get jaded. You get older. And after a while, they begin to despise you. It’s not interesting for you to come out on top every time. To watch your Saturday night marquee smile pop-flash at the end of every climactic scene. You need to keep up your numbers. You need to keep those eyeballs transfixed, Miss Thing. It’s not enough to just work on your craft. You gotta keep up with the times, appeal to modern sensibilities. You have to do something more extreme. Darker. Grittier. More real. You need to be cut down a little. Let ’em see you vulnerable. Let ’em see you bleed.
So, no more cheerful SuperWhore, Guigno
l City’s Girl with a Heart of Gold and a twinkle in her eye. That’s last year’s hotness and it’s this year’s time to burn. The Delilah Daredevil name doesn’t move copies anymore. But Daisy Green still needs to pay her landlord, and once the world’s seen what you can do, you can’t squeeze your way back into the normal world. People recognize you. They avert their eyes. They whisper, Didn’t our barista save Manhattan? Didn’t she battle the Amazon Women of Planet XXX? Didn’t she take three guys at once with a riding bit in her mouth? Yes, she did, cats and kittens. And she wasn’t ashamed of any tiny bit of it until they decided it would be hot to make her ashamed.
Misha stopped calling every week. Every fortnight, then every month. I told myself it wasn’t because he’d seen my recent work. Though I’d certainly seen his. He’d joined some superpower frat called the Union. They destroyed an underwater lair and got to speak at the UN. Misha gave the commencement address at Harvard. My whole life was just a little rummaging backstage while sets changed for his. So much wonder in his world, siphoned from the gas tanks of we bitter few, dying by inches so he can do the impossible, over and over again. Luck is a zero-sum game. There’s only so much to go around. Sometimes, I read his victorious headlines and thought, Was that a part I didn’t get? My parents having a wonderful time in Paris and bringing me back a crappy miniature Eiffel Tower? Delilah Daredevil Does Legitimate Theatre? What dribbled out of me that blossomed into glory for him? Or did I just fuck it up myself?
I turned on the Xanax fire hose again. That worked for a while. I could laugh. Flash my prescription smile. But come on, you know how this story goes. It’s the same word. It’s always been the same word. One hiding inside the other. I am a heroine, after all.
The first time was with Alexandra. Alex and Daisy’s Tuesday movie night. We’d rented the action-packed black-and-white Wuthering Heights because we are who we are and Alex and me were never anything but high school girls blacked out on daydreams, misreading psychosis for love. As the child of many earnest federal drug education programs, I thought the first time I shot up would be dramatic. Ominous music, swooning, air thick with tension, will she or won’t she? Surely, the world closes in on a girl making this momentous decision, the spotlight comes on for a real Hamlet-esque soliloquy on the nature of oblivion and the self-destructive impulses of man.