I slam my hand down on the table. “But what if the coincidences are excruciating?” I nearly yell at him. “What if the ‘whole new world’ that opens up is one that’s terrifying and nightmarish? Where all the signs feel deceptive, unwelcome—punishing for no apparent reason?”
Michael Landy’s smile is serpentine. He runs his fingers through his silky curls and leans forward. “Then obviously they’re tests.”
“Of what?”
“Why, character, of course. You must understand your given role before you can move forward in this grand play.”
Immediately this whole scene feels distinctly familiar—not that I’ve been here before, but that I’ve felt exactly this way. The movement in the restaurant begins to slow down as parts. I take in the setting around me as if in a series of slow-motion shots. The jiggling skin of the stocky food runner as she throttles forward. The jingling of the front door. The scrape of a metal spoon against ceramic. Michael Landy’s mouth contorting without sound, the contours in his face offering a slightly more grotesque version of Adam’s, off in just a way that haunts every expression, intensifies every word. The world around me begins to flicker like a faulty image in a film; I see my mother with her head split open on the floor, swelling and expanding dimensions, existing before me like a place; it fills up my brain like the closing in of a camera on a face. Like Andy Warhol’s screen tests; The Passion of Joan of Arc. It chokes the entire screen. The Lack, I recognize all too well—but this time I carefully observe it, allow myself to stay floating outside of it. I feel rage forming, confusion, near debilitating grief. The emotions arrive one after another in almost perfect succession—building, building—overwhelming my exterior reality, as if turning me inside out.
Like a tumor, attacking from the inside, and watching the body fall. I’m turning imagination against itself, provoking my own psychotic state, triggering my nervous system to self-destruct.
Everything around me begins to swell. The windows disappear. The walls fall away. The floor becomes merely a plain to stay afloat.
Outside the moon is a screaming bright orifice and the air is alive in millions of chilling waves. We tear through pulsating, claustrophobic streets, packed with bodies clutching shopping bags, shrieking children, arms shoving restaurant fliers in faces, hunched old ladies pushing through crowds, bent over in markets picking through dried crustaceans emanating harrowing scents of the shriveling, of the dead. Lit Chinese lanterns in greens, yellows, and reds drape from streetlights and buildings, crisscrossing above us in an ethereal glow. Crowds accumulate weight at red-lighted crosswalks, form a mass of one deep, holding breath, before the light hits green and it bursts.
“Click your heels and follow me,” Michael Landy is saying. His hands are flailing in wild gestures as he talks. We pass by stores with huge glass displays showcasing colorful figurines, golden moving cat sculptures, jade dragons, thousands of loose tinned teas. My shoulders brush against other shoulders and arms, my teeth clenching and unclenching, my brain a soaring, swollen balloon.
We break through the masses and wind around a side street into a calmer darkness lit in pale yellow light, the sounds of crowds now hollow and retreating into the distance. We wind around a few more constricted, dark streets, the whole time Michael Landy grasping my hand and swinging it—our motions like Hansel and Gretel, naively walking along on the path to our own doom.
We come upon a dark, cavernous entrance below an unlit marquee.
“Are you ready to embark on a journey?”
I push him. “You’re not going to take me into this abandoned theater and murder me, are you?”
He laughs, and leads me to the ticket booth. “We’re going to a show.”
I watch him approach a dark, closed window. “Is this some kind of joke?”
He looks back at me, his eye catching the glimmer of a street-light above.
A shuffling from the ticket booth. I jump back. A tiny red light appears. A soft woman’s voice.
“Two to The Lost Theater,” says Michael Landy. I approach the booth cautiously, examining the petite woman inside sporting a 1920s updo hairstyle and dark red lipstick. She sizes me up with a snarling grin, checks something off on a list. “You may enter,” she says.
“The Lost Theater?” I whisper to Michael Landy as we walk towards the dark entrance. “What’s the The Lost Theater?”
He squeezes my hand and tells me to come along. We enter through an open glass door and follow what I now notice is a crimson red carpet—lit from along the sides of the floor in dim golden lighting. The building itself is airy and high-ceilinged and vast; lining the walls are empty poster display cases doused in graffiti. Lingering scents of dust and mold.
Sounds begin to emanate from behind two approaching closed doors, outlined from behind in a glowing red. A floor standing sign reads Welcome to the Underworld in printed golden script. Michael Landy pushes open the doors.
Madness. We enter into an enormous theater alive with flashing bodies, colors, and music, the red carpet beneath us like a long tongue expanding down between the seats to a grand, open stage. Glass chandeliers dangle from the ceiling lit with electric copper-colored lights. I stand gaping as a bikini-ed aerial acrobat dangles on stage from flowing silk lavender ribbons, contorting her body in swift, balletic movements. Below her, a pianist dressed in a full-piece suit plays jazz on a grand piano, the tails of his jacket fluttering along with his movement as people gather around him, a few couples dancing. Tall women dressed in sequined one-pieces and feather headdresses swish by us, holding glasses of champagne, laughing. A waiter offers us some sort of fresh fish hors d’oeuvre off a round silver tray. I shake my head no, still shocked by the reality of the scene. Groups of people cluster about the theater, some seated in the audience, others gathered on tufted sofas and chairs arranged below the stage. Everyone seems to be dressed in elaborate costume, faces gleaming with makeup. Men in high heels wearing sparkling thongs with suspenders; bodies in fluorescent wigs, doused with glitter. Michael Landy grasps my shoulder, shaking me. “Wake up, Sheila.” He’s laughing now, loving the expression on my face, so blissfully entertained.
“I don’t think I’m dressed for this,” I mutter.
“Nonsense!” He leads me up a side staircase to the mezzanine, which has been converted into a full bar and lounge. Small round tables line the outer edges of the balcony, which is itself aligned with leather booths and vintage looking velour furniture—the original box seating having been gutted and restored to a gleaming hardwood floor. Candles on the tables create a mysterious, romantic glow, lighting up people’s faces with shadows like masks.
We brush by bodies adorned with furs and pearls, others sporting shimmering antlers, tails, and whiskers, over to a seated sharp-looking older man dressed in a silver pinstripe three-piece suit, his sleek silver hair gelled back like a movie star’s, puffing from a long electric cigarette. Next to him a nude woman painted from head to toe in leopard print sips from a clear martini, two cats ears poking out from her spiraling black curls. On his other side, a thin man in a dark green suit and a waxed mustache scribbles in a small spiral notebook, sips bourbon from an ornate glass tumbler.
“Landy!” The silver-haired man looks up, his voice surprisingly high and effeminate. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Eli Moscowitz, the devil himself.”
Eli stands up and the two shake hands, Eli grinning with bulging eyes, dark black eyeliner. “I hear you’re working on a big show, you motherfucker. Good for you. This guy,” Eli looks at me, “pure fucking genius,” he points. He sits back down in the booth, crosses his legs, takes a puff of his e-cigarette. He shouts to the bartender to fix us some drinks. “As you can see,” Eli holds out his hands, “it’s a pretty big production now.” Eli talks loud at Landy, his voice oddly like a teenager’s in the body of an androgynous mobster.
Michael Landy nods. “It’s totally alive.”
Eli grins, a golden tooth catching the light
with a blinding gleam.
“How do you two know each other?” I ask.
“It doesn’t fucking matter how we know each other,” barks Eli. “I don’t give a fuck about how you know anyone.” He laughs, vapor escaping from his lips. The leopard caresses his leg, her eyes fixated on me mischievously. The scribbling waxed mustache man smirks. “All that matters is who you are, right now, in this theater.”
Who the fuck is this guy? I mouth the words to Michael Landy, who, grinning, just winks at me, then holds out his hand in a gesture as if to say just settle down, wait and see.
A waiter sets down our drinks. The leopard leans in to Eli’s neck and lightly bites him, causing Eli to turn to her with a lustful force; she unscrews the top of a pendant from a necklace camouflaged in the paint around her neck, and holds up a tiny silver spoon to Eli’s nostril. He violently snorts the white bumps, first in his left nostril, and then in his right, thrusts his head back, wiggles furiously, whoops with energy. “Mercury was just telling us about her experience suspending,” he talks rapidly. “You know—hanging on a rig from those fucking metal hooks in your skin.”
“He, like, thinks it’s another form of theater,” says Mercury, the leopard, screwing back together the pendant.
“He thinks everything’s a form of theater,” says Waxed Mustache.
“It’s a living confrontation, a superior act of concentration—a massive focus of a large group.” Eli flicks his wrist. “Describe the grotesque fucking thing, sweetheart.”
“I was, like, hanging from four hooks—two in my shoulder blades and two in the sides of my knees,” Mercury gestures a motion of floating with her hands, “and I was like, raised above this guy who was suspended below me, but facing up—and we were staring into one another during this crazy intimate experience with, like, drums playing and the whole group seated Indian style surrounding us, chanting in an ancient language. It was, like, the pain was a button that blasted us off into this other dimension. It was so much more than, like, having sex. We couldn’t even have sex afterward—sex was like, nothing compared to that kind of intimacy. We were totally lost in it.” She turns towards Eli. “It was fucking insane,” she mouths the words seductively at him. He stares at her wildly, ripples of energy pulsating through him, cobalt veins bulging in his neck.
“I think I want to do this,” his manic, effeminate voice is saying. “This fucking cat here is selling it hard.” He laughs furiously.
“My roommate sometimes hosts them in our backyard,” says Waxed Mustache. “I’ll definitely let you know when the next one’s happening.”
“No, no,” Eli shakes his head aggressively. “We need to get it in here. We need to bring it to the theater—get my drift?”
“Totally,” Mustache says. “Oh man, dude, yes.”
Michael Landy scoffs. “It’s Modern Primitivism, Eli. It’s a cultural fashion show.”
“It’s like, so much more than that.”
“Yeah, Landy, don’t knock it ‘til you try it!”
“Oh, I’m not knocking it at all. I think it’s a decidedly spiritual act. I’m merely pointing out that flesh hook suspension began as a rite of passage in the Mandan tribe in the early eighteen hundreds—”
“Here we go with the Landyisms.”
“—and that this kind of ‘suspension’ lacks the whole ritualistic part. Just think about it—the act itself of literally inserting hooks systematically on certain points of the body naturally causes the release of endorphins, adrenaline, fight or flight responses, which will immediately cause one to perhaps believe what they imagine the definition of transcending to be.”
I nod. “You know after the great performance artist Stelarc suspended himself between skyscrapers, he wrote that he no longer needed his mind to understand the immense pain that overcame his body. He called his body the zombie body.”
“Or the body without organs,” says Michael Landy, quoting Deleuze and Guattari.
“He said he understood its ‘total obsolescence,’” I continue, “—it wasn’t about transcending, it was really about metaphorically suspending yourself in a non-place between mind and body, past and future—he said it was torturous.”
“It’s shamanic,” Mercury protests. “The ritual is the act. Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who believes that culture can’t exist in modernity.”
“You fucks can intellectualize it all you want,” barks Eli. “But unless you’ve actually tried it, your opinion is pretty much null.”
“I’ve, like, honestly never had an experience that was more intimate.”
“Oh, come on.” Michael Landy throws up his hands and points at Mercury. “You were looking for a thrill, an experience, an escape. You wanted to fuck that guy, and in order to do that, you were willing to stick a thick, cold piece of sharp metal under your skin and have that experience. I have to hand it to you—that takes real balls.”
Eli smacks his hand on his lap, bawling from laughter. “Now this is entertainment,” he shrieks. Mercury grabs Eli’s e-cigarette and puffs it, rolling her eyes.
“And of course the sex was bad,” adds Michael Landy, smirking. “It would have been, anyway. The suspension just gave you both the perfect excuse.”
I sit sipping my drink amidst a body chaos, aware of the dilation of my pupils, the chemicals rushing through my veins. “I think really everything just boils down to comfort and discomfort,” I find myself saying. “It’s the human condition—the nature of having bodies.” I look around, still trying to place myself, feeling the incredible discomfort in my own body—its inability to align with my racing mind, resisting the electrifying MDMA, my voice sounding foreign and disassociated in this loud, pulsating room. “Where the fuck are we anyway?” I say loudly. “What even is this place?”
Eli stops laughing and looks at me sharply. Michael Landy reveals sparkling teeth.
“Fresh meat,” says Waxed Mustache.
Mercury, grinning, narrows her gaze.
Eli snaps his fingers up high, signaling for more drinks. He cracks his neck from side to side, then fixates his gaze directly on me.
“Welcome to your fucking show,” he says.
I stare at him. “What do you mean my show?”
Michael Landy clasps his hands together, giddy with excitement, nearly jumping out of his seat. Eli laughs, vapor escaping from his lips. A waiter sets down fresh drinks. I sip my drink—the slosh of creamy, bitter whiskey. Jazz piano mixes with ambient undertones spurting from hidden speakers, red lights flashing, the mezzanine whirls.
“Obviously you’ve never before been more in need of a theater.”
“What do you—”
“THIS, here, is culture.” Eli’s eyes widen—two dark orbs surrounded by thick black outlining. “The real essence of San Francisco boiled down to its thick, gritty remnants—and digested into a living performance that never stops.”
He slams his hand on the table. The room spins. “And what do you mean it never stops?” He interrupts my thought process. “I see this question on your fucking face. A person who even thinks this idiotic question must still believe in such things as ends. But here there is no beginning and there’s never an end; the show is constantly happening all around us.”
“She, like, still believes in an outside,” says Mercury.
“An outside to what?” I stammer.
Mercury unscrews the lid to her necklace and holds up a bump for Eli, who snorts with a tremendous force. “DRINK ME says the tiny bottle on the table,” he shouts, “EAT ME says the cake! We must ingest substances that alter our consciousnesses, release chemicals into our brains; we must shift the Now into a more comfortable and pliable form.”
“Perception is, like, everything.” She takes a bump herself. The whole room feels like it’s shaking.
“Too much art today exists outside of life.” Eli’s limbs flail. “Art as a concept, art as an institution—you fucking intellectual fucks. It’s CONSCIOUSNESS that’s the highest form of art.
Never has the artist been more in need of a people. Tell me you can’t feel it in the vibrations in these walls—The Lost Theater is an operation of death. This theater is dying. Its walls are literally crumbling. Our bodies are dying. Everything in this space is dying. The only thing that’s alive here is the show.”
The theater flickers in and out. I watch as Michael Landy dips his finger into the tiny bag, licks it monstrously. The glint of his crooked teeth. The noise in the room like a deafening hollow of sharp consonants and static.
“Your inner monologue is dying to be spoken. I see it writhing on your fucking, twisted face. I feel it in your manic energy.”
“You can see it in her blood red aura,” adds Michael Landy.
“Your life feels like a series of acts, DOESN’T IT?” Eli is shrieking amidst the chaos. “LIKE EVERY MINUTE AND SECOND ARE PERFECTLY TIMED, WHERE EVERY LINE SPOKEN TO YOU AND FROM YOU FEELS PURPOSEFUL AND RELEVANT, LIKE IT’S ALL CONTRIBUTING TO SOMETHING LARGER THAT YOU KNOW IS THERE—YOU CAN FUCKING FEEL IT CONSTANTLY—BUT IT FEELS JUST OUT OF REACH…”
“Yes,” I’m nodding. “Yes.” The voice emanating from my mouth feels distant and strange. Tears are streaming down my face. My heart feels as if it’s ballooning out into the crevices of my ribs, forcing them to their skeletal limit.
“Tell me something,” Waxed Mustache says to me as he scribbles, “what kind of role do you see playing in your own life?”
The Fifth Wall: A Novel Page 13