Gagapocalypse

by Moxie Mezcal

  The door opened into a spacious loft apartment that looked like it’d been ripped from the world of Tron. There were the usual hallmarks of contemporary upper crust domesticity, like minimalist Scandinavian furniture with chrome accents and monochromatic upholstery, except everything was trimmed with glowing florescent tubes of red and blue. And it wasn’t just the furniture, even the walls, the baseboards, the counter tops and cabinetry were outlined in the florescent tubes, all of which ran throughout the apartment in intricate criss-crossing patterns and converged in the middle of the room where they intertwined together to form a giant crucifix of neon lights.

  I wandered from room to room, looking to see if anyone was home, but found no one. Then I walked up a spiral staircase that led to the master bedroom, where I heard a shower running through the closed bathroom door. I glanced back down at the card in my hand and figured that the protocol would be pretty much the same as before with Celeste. So I stripped off my clothes, laid down on the bed, and waited.

  Five minutes later, the bathroom door opened, and out of a cloud of dense steam walked the Mother Monster herself. Lady Fucking Gaga. Skin still slick and scaly from the shower, her angular bone structure jutting against her pale flesh as she moved like some albino reptilian. She took one look at my naked ass lying on her bed, and bashed me over the head with the fiber optic Mary Magdalene statuette from her night stand.

  ——

  She is sitting beside me, straddling the piano bench, her lips hovering mere millimeters from my right ear.

  I laugh nervously.

  "Sorry, I just remembered something funny," I lie.

  “You know, sense memory is a powerful thing,” she whispers. “I can give myself an orgasm just by thinking about it.”

  I shift uncomfortably on the bench, feeling the blood rushing to my cheeks and groin simultaneously.

  “Do you want to fuck me?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I both do and don’t. I don’t want to fuck you in any vulgar or profane sense, but I can’t think of any other way to connect with you intimately, to consummate this moment in time that we are sharing.”

  She thwaps me in the face again with the flyswatter.

  “Sexuality is half poison and half liberation. What’s the line? I don’t have a line.”

  ——

  The next morning I tag along with her as she gives interviews to promote the new album. I find it easy to blend into her entourage, to be just another face in the crowd, another cold and barren satellite orbiting her star.

  I watch her shift uncomfortably in her seat as the pair of morning show hosts lob inane questions at her. They don’t look human, they look like animated wax dummies, and their questions and awkward attempts at banter display about as much humanity as wax. Everything about her demeanor makes her seem genuinely uncomfortable with the attention—the nervous laughter, the clipped responses, the vaseline-toothed smile plastered onto her face that keeps veering over the line into a grimace. And to make matters worse, the skin-tight and barely-there vinyl skirt she’s wearing won’t stop riding up her thighs, so she keeps tugging it down and fussing with it. The overall impression is not of Lady Gaga, polished pop goddess, but instead of some normal random person who woke up one day in this ridiculous costume and was forced to fake her way through the role.

  She’s just like us. I think to myself. She’s just a regular human being after all with the same insecurities and awkwardness as the rest of us.

  That train of thought quickly leads to: So why should she deserve to be famous? What makes her so much better than the rest of us?

  But that question is only a half-truth. What I really want to ask is: What makes her so much better than me?

  The female host is asking Gaga about her exercise routine, or rather she keeps hinting she might ask about it but is too busy talk about her own age-defying diet and exercise system to actually get around to it. She’s finally cut off by a lecherous remark from the male host about how all that working out really shows. He’s old enough to be his partner’s grandfather and makes no attempt to hide the plainly visible erection this gives him. Gaga takes the awkward pause that follows as an opening to finally talk about her own daily rehearsal and exercise routine, which is insanely disciplined and makes me self conscious of the fact that I don’t even remember which floor my apartment building’s exercise room is on. She then goes on to talk about how hard she’s worked for her art and about the years she spent cutting her teeth doing shows in New York’s club scene and the tireless hours of self-promotion it took to make it where she is today, and I’m thinking about the one demo tape my band managed to make in college and how there’s still a box full of copies in my parents’ garage that I’d always intended to take around to the local radio stations and record stores and clubs but never got around to. And then I think about the unfinished screenplay that’s been sitting neglected on my hard drive for years.

  And then I notice that Gaga’s stopped talking and is staring apprehensively into the camera like a deer in the headlights because no one’s asking her any more questions; the male host is too busy tugging away on his misshapen member while the female host sucks the blood out of a nineteen year old P.A. in a CUNY sweatshirt until his skin collapses in on himself like a deflated Capri Sun juice pouch.

  The whole studio falls into a protracted hush. It lasts too long for anyone’s comfort, until finally a young woman in the audience screams out, “I love you Gaga,” and the rest of the crowd bursts into riotous applause.

  Suddenly Gaga snaps out her petrified daze, and her eyes sparkle and her lips curl up into an ecstatic smile and she waves to her fans while gazing lovingly into the camera’s adoring lens, and says, “I love my fans. Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other.”

  ——

  Later, we are in the back seat of her limo, and she is stilling glowing from feeding on the positive psychic energies of a studioful of people who worship her like people in sandals used to worship golden calves.

  I ask her, “How did you do it? How did you make it to the top?”

  “I’ve always been famous,” she answers, as if the question itself is absurd. “It’s just everybody’s just now finding out.”

  ——

  That night she does an in-store signing. The fans are all young and beautiful and insane, standing in line with telephones strapped to their heads, draped in slices of rancid meat and fishnet underwear and latex bodysuits, generally looking like refugees from a Broadway adaptation of Beyond Thunderdome.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other,” she commands them.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other,” they chant back in unison.

  Fans start to pass out as they reach the front of the line and receive their autographed CD. A pair of stage hands drags them away like at an old time tent revival. The line snakes up and down every aisle of the store before going out the door, around the building, and then trailing off down the street.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other,” the chanting continues.

  Fans start speaking in tongues and throwing themselves on the ground in convulsions. People are losing bladder and bowel control left and right.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other.”

  A fourteen year old girl flings herself on top of the table in front of Gaga and starts to orgasm ecstatically like Bernini’s Saint Teresa.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other.”

  All at once, twelve of the fans look down at their hands at the exact same moment and see bloody stigmata.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill for each other.”

  A massive orgy breaks out in the Easy Listening aisle.

  “Live your eyeliner, breathe your lipstick, and kill each other.”

  “Kill each other.”

 
“Kill each other.”

  I feel sick, overwhelmed and claustrophobic, like the entire store is going to implode around me. So I stagger out the back door through the stock room and end up on the loading docks behind the building.

  From inside, I can still hear the rapturous chanting.

  “Kill each other.”

  ——

  I’m not sure exactly how much time passes after that.

  I’m living on the streets now. Sometimes I find a place to sleep with a roof over my head, but sometimes I just sleep under a doorway or a bus shelter.

  Sometimes people will give me a place to stay, or give me some money. Most of the time they expect something in return, but that’s okay, it doesn’t bother me. Nothing really bothers me these days, everything’s just sorta numb.

  I’m still blacking out. Often when I come to, I’m in a new city and I’m not sure how I got there. Sometimes I am dressed like a bum, sometimes I’m in drag, sometimes I’m wearing expensive tailored suits, and sometimes there’s blood on my clothes but I don’t seem to be cut or injured anywhere.

  I haven’t been back home at all. One time it occurred to me to call in and check my voicemail. There were a few messages from work. The last one said that if I didn’t come in the next day, not to ever come back in at all. The machine said it was over a month old.

  I have been back to New York, though, but not back to her. Sometimes I do come out of a blackout and find myself in front of that hotel by Central Park, the one with the globe where I met Celeste. I never go inside, I just stand out front and look up at it for long periods of time. I’m not sure why.

  One day I found myself at a bus shelter, staring at an ad for the TV show The Apprentice. I had no way of knowing exactly how long I’ve been standing there, staring, but from the freaked-out expressions of everyone around me, I could safely guess it’d been a while.

  A grizzled old man walks up and stands next to me. He looks like a teamster or longshoreman or some other suitably masculine profession that I could never do.

  “I can’t believe that joker might actually run for President,” he says in disgust at the poster, then turns to look at me. “I sure as shit wouldn’t vote for him, would you?”

  I turn to look at him and notice that he bears a subtle resemblance to the cab driver who picked me up at Kennedy Airport.

  “No sir.”

  “Damn straight you won’t.”

  Then he whispers something to me, or at least it sounded like he did, even though I watch his lips the whole time and they didn’t even seem to twitch. But anyways, he whispers, “Watch very closely as the magical angel and I are swallowed by the rainbow twister, and left stranded on the Glitter Way.”

  I turn back to look at the poster. Someone has drawn devil horns and a goatee on the face, along with a big 666 on his forehead. I focus on the preternatural orange quaff on top of the man’s head in the photo, and in my mind’s eye I picture it staying perfectly composed, not a single hair moving out of place, while the head it sits upon jerks back, and to the left.

  Back, and to the left.

  No. 1

  It starts the same way every time.

  Zero seconds. It’s the last day of our honeymoon. Sarah is standing on the Champs-Élysées, the sun setting behind the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, the early-evening foot traffic rushing past her in either direction. Sarah looks straight into the camera with that big, toothy grin of hers. The same grin that caught my eye when we first met. The grin that I used to say would always make me melt, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

  “Are you messing around with that stupid thing again?” she asks, trying to adopt her best sternly-nagging tone of voice, but that grin gets in the way.

  Nine seconds. I zoom in tight on her face. She hides behind a cluster of overly-ornate shopping bags, her haul from an afternoon spent maxing out what little was left on our credit cards after a two-hundred-guest wedding and a pair of intercontinental plane tickets.

  The camera zooms back out, and a figure appears in the background, emerging from a side street on the extreme right of the screen. She stands out from the rest of the bustling crowd immediately, her lithe figure looking statuesque and regal in a white summer dress.

  Thirteen seconds.

  Off-camera, I say, “Hey isn’t that… ?”

  I zoom past Sarah, focusing in on this new figure. Sarah whips her head around to look, a motion that I barely catch in the blurry foreground before she completely disappears from view, crowded out by this new woman. The pop star.

  Seventeen seconds.

  She’s wearing oversized sunglasses with dark brown lenses, and her long, platinum blonde hair keeps falling in front of her face, but it is unmistakably her. That face has gazed alluringly from magazine stands the world over, reproduced millions of times on everything from glossy fashion rags to pulpy gossip tabloids. Those full, pouty lips have been plastered on an infinite sea of CD covers, those lips that sculpt the notes with such melodic conviction that she makes even the most clumsily-suggestive lyrics seem somehow enticing.

  But now she doesn’t look glamorous or seductive, having dropped the well-practiced mask of her public persona. She looks raw, real, almost human.

  I zoom in closer. She turns to look at the camera. I think she sees me. She’s looking right at me. I zoom in closer, so close I don’t see what she’s doing with her hands, can’t see what she’s pulling out of her handbag until she lifts it into view and slides the muzzle into her mouth.

  Twenty-three seconds.

  The shot rings out loudly, even over the camera’s weak microphone, and a burst of red explodes from the back of her head. For a split second she keeps looking at the camera, but then she collapses out of view, dropping to the ground.

  The video goes chaotic. Screams and terrified cries overload the microphone, turning the audio into one garbled, distorted sonic shriek. The image shakes violently as I jog towards her, crossed haphazardly by the incoherent shapes of the panicked crowd surging in both directions - half running away to safety, the other half running closer for a better look.

  I’m close enough that I can muscle my way to the front. Like a ghoul, I keep filming. I couldn’t tell you why - I wasn’t thinking clearly, just reacting, pure instinct. The image stabilizes and I am right on top of her, looking down at her strangely unchanged face. Her glasses have fallen off, exposing her still-open eyes as she looks straight up. Her hair is spread out across the sidewalk like rays from the rising sun over the horizon, and a puddle of blood crowns her like a halo from a medieval painting. I zoom in closer on her eyes, which still seem so vivid and alive, still look like they’re staring straight at me. A strange sensation comes over me, like for just a moment I forget that she’s dead, for just a moment it feels like she can still see me, like she’s caught me spying on her deeply private moment, and I feel a brief but intense pang of guilt. I shut the camera off.

  Thirty-three seconds. The video ends, the image on my computer screen freezes on that last frame, an extreme close-up of her eyes.

  ——

  I heard the door creak open behind me, so I quickly jerked the mouse over to close the video player window, revealing the wallpaper photo of Sarah and me at the altar.

  “Ready to go?”

  Sarah poked her head into the study. I clicked around a couple more times to shut down the computer, grumbling some weak noise about how I was just checking my e-mail while waiting for her to get ready. Before powering off, the screen lingered on the desktop picture for a few extra seconds, and I realized that I’d looked at that photo so many times that it had become virtually meaningless. Just a random collection of red, blue, and green pixels, unable to elicit any kind of emotional response. I felt like a dead nerve fried out by persistent overstimulation.

  Sarah stopped me at the door to straighten my tie and fix my collar. She furrowed her brow and let the corners of her mouth droop, passive-aggressively telegraphing her displeasure with my wardr
obe.

  We were meeting her brother Alex for dinner. It was our first time seeing him since the wedding, and she had attired herself immaculately in a form-fitting draped cocktail dress of red silk, her short auburn hair carefully styled in homage to Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina . She hadn’t dressed this nice since the honeymoon, and somehow this realization stirred a tinge of resentment within me.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You seem distracted.”

  “Nothing,” I replied dismissively as I coiled my arms around her and pulled her in close enough to smell the sweet vanilla scent of her perfume, trying my best to ignore the subtle way she flinched at my touch. “Let’s go eat.”

  Together, we walked carefully through the hallway, treading over the clear plastic tarp that covered the bare floor. We passed the dining room, which was empty and similarly covered in plastic sheets, and the kitchen, which was savagely gutted and covered with plastic sheets, and finally the family room, which had been crammed full of all the contents that had formerly been in the kitchen and dining room, and then covered with plastic sheets.

  The remodeling began right after the honeymoon. We bought the house brand new when we got engaged, so there wasn’t much that desperately needed to be done. Just a few quick tweaks, it was supposed to take no more than a month or two. That was one year and two loans ago.

  “Where are we meeting him?” I asked as I scooped my keys and wallet off the small table by the front door.

  “Petaloúda’s.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Babe, you know we can’t afford to go places like that now.”