“Two words,” Couture tried to purr. His mouth was full, so the words came out more of a gurgle: wet knots in a silk handkerchief. He sparkled, crass with sequins and gold thread in the destroyed thing Versace had designed for him. Couture lacked both the taut body that Versace’s clothing looked best on and the good taste to know the difference between opulence and vulgarity. And it didn’t matter. When you have Couture’s power, it’s always 1992 if your favourite collections debuted that year. Besides, I had a feeling he was biding his time until someone more outrageous (than me) could be made to join us at the table. Gareth Pugh, perhaps, or Gaultier. Wiping a gob of tuna off his lower lip, he said, “Vintage Chanel. Do you know how much originals would fetch?”
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. You can tell when a man cannot think around corners, when he is hitting the brick wall in his mind. The word vintage could be put before every surname in the room to achieve the same effect. Except mine, of course: I was too young when I hanged myself, making the death too recent. Apart from me, we all knew what he wanted from us. Couture could whisper of secret sales to rich eccentrics, but he still had the same clothes he’d dug us up to make for him. He still had no buyers. What’s authenticity in a case such as ours, after all? To start with, where would the fabric come from? It had all rotted or been put to other uses. The best he could hope for would be to pass our originals off as interesting fakes. And why resurrect the dead for that, when half the Chinese economy is based on high-end bootlegging? This would have been a ghastly insult but for what we’d already been put through. It’s possible Couture understood this, whether he admitted to it or not. After all, everything we had made so far was in his own size. Even the dresses.
“Lee, what do you think?”
“You’ll do it whether we like it or not,” I said. If I’d been cut out for diplomacy, I’d have joined the UN, not Savile Row.
“You’re just jealous,” said Couture.
How the living so often utterly fail to get it. Once you’re dead, so much ceases to matter. Oh, there’s plenty left undone. I still regret topping myself before Lady Gaga was even out of her twenties. And this whole death thing… immensely over-rated. I thought I’d be drinking chamomile tea with Mummy in the Café Hereafter. I thought it would be like Paris, only more so. White marble architecture instead of yellowish limestone, vast rococo buildings that would make Alain de Botton wince and Monocle wag a disapproving finger. Perhaps I even had been with Mummy, and now couldn’t remember. There’d been an awful pulling sensation, like a sloppy dentist pulling out a tooth before the anaesthetic shots have taken hold. This was followed by a sort of heave: I thought I was on the runway for reincarnation, about to be launched into or out of a womb… and voila. There was Balenciaga, as soon as I opened my eyes: perhaps the only Basque not to become famous for blowing things up. And next to him, poor Versace, that shocked he-shot-me? look apparently etched onto his face forever.
“Are we in hell?” had been my first question.
“No, Beijing,” Couture replied. “Although I’m told it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.”
At first it seemed Couture had brought us back to spruce up his own wardrobe, or at least to consult. I understood this; the doubts had not yet taken hold. When you can make dead flesh knit itself back together out of the muck it’s decayed into, why not speak to the industry’s best? Stylists are a dime a dozen and half of them don’t know what they’re on about. Balenciaga had the hardest time of us all, I think. Although he and Dior got on well—they’d been on good terms the first time around—he couldn’t tell what Couture wanted with him.
“I think he brought me back because he likes my name,” he confided to me one night.
“Better that than for sex,” I said.
He just stared at me for a moment, awful gears turning in his head. He didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.
Life, or un-life, gurgled on for an interval of weeks. Couture asked Balenciaga what to wear and then ignored his advice, putting on whatever the grands couturiers had designed for him. Dior and Saint Laurent tried to make our master elegant, in a traditional way, following the styles of the times they knew best. It almost worked. Couture had supplied them with acres of good silk and lightweight wool, promising heavier stuff for when the weather turned colder. But he had waif-like proportions, all bones and angles and limbs like small children would draw. No matter what the puppets designed for him, he looked like a scarecrow dressed by the gods. Which might have been why someone told him to dig me up. I’d done my time on Savile Row, after all, and I had a bit of a reputation for managing difficult cunts. If you can come out of corporate LVMH still half sane, masters of the undead can be dealt with.
Then Balenciaga didn’t turn up at the table one morning. The unhappiest of us, and the most vocal about it, he was bound to disappear first. Couture said nothing, and we didn’t ask. When you’re a bespoke zombie, it’s hard to avoid mixed emotions toward your fellow dead. Had the Basque been released into freedom or delivered back to the dirt? Was there a difference? Gloom pervaded. And when poor rotting Coco finished the dress, the next day, like Balenciaga, she was gone. Second thoughts again.
“I have an announcement,” Couture said, sweeping into the dining room with all the grandiosity one would expect from a supernatural villain dressed in authentic, custom-made Saint Laurent. His skirt and jacket had the austere elegance the moment commanded: squared-off shoulders, padded but not so much as to make a caricature of his chopstick frame; exquisite cutting that hinted at the existence of an inner drag queen. Yet there was a matronly aspect, too, as if Couture might purse his lips and glare down his nose at us. Here again, Saint Laurent’s dress suited the occasion.
“There’s been… a change of focus. A new focus.” And with that, he directed us to rise from the table and follow him.
Yves and the Italians looked as apprehensive as I felt, but we could hardly risk open protest. Into a gallery we went, visiting for the first time yet another of the forbidden chambers in this overblown Chinese Versailles that was our prison and our home. On one vast wall, we beheld a single, spot lit painting.
“A Degas?” asked Ferre.
“Almost,” said Couture. “But look closer.”
I had been to enough galleries to recognize something different about the palette and the composition: slight differences in the tones; shapes more fully realized. This wasn’t Degas, but the artists clearly knew one another’s work.
“Who is it?” Versace asked.
“Someone I’ve always thought was sadly overshadowed by her contemporaries,” Couture purred.
And with that, a woman walked into the room… in new Chanel.
“Gentlemen, may I present Mary Cassatt.”
We designers exchanged glances, all cognizant of what this meant—of the writing on the wall, you could say. Couture could only keep so many puppets dancing at the same time… dancing, or sewing, or painting. We’d be replaced by Picasso, van Gogh, or Juan Gris soon enough. Oh, he’d keep one or two of us around for consultations, but before long the rest would inevitably, gratefully follow Chanel and Balenciaga back down into the dark.
The Third Estate
Lee Thomas
Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary Award and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Dust of Wonderland, In the Closet, Under the Bed, The German, Torn, Ash Street, and the forthcoming Like Light for Flies. Under a couple of other names he has authored several suspense thrillers for young adults, including Mason, Shimmer, and the Wicked Dead series (co-authored with Stefan Petrucha). Lee lives in Austin, Texas, where he is working on a new book. You can find him online at leethomasauthor.com.
Morgan Anderson walks into the conference room of the Fearing Oil Company at 10:37 a.m.—seven minutes after the board meeting has begun. With him, he carries a cardboard box: its contents are heavy and
he struggles with the package, all but rocking from side to side as he waddles across the carpet and hoists it onto the burnished mahogany table in the room’s center.
“What have you got there?” Edward Fonit asks. Fonit is a handsome man in late middle age, whose recent visit to a plastic surgeon in Dallas, TX has given him the taught, tanned face of a thirty-year old.
“It’s a surprise,” Anderson says, bouncing his eyebrows comically and smiling as he slides the box to the middle of the table. He looks at the package for another moment, and then takes his seat.
“You’re late,” Edleeta Dorcester says dryly.
Anderson smiles and waves his hands at the box sitting at the table’s center, as if the delivery of the package should relieve him of all other responsibility.
“That’s no excu…” Edleeta begins, but is interrupted by Mitchell Brown, who says, “Are we all here?”
As the Chairman of the Board, Mitchell Brown is often forgiven such rude behavior. Even so Edleeta chirps deep in her throat, a sound of disapproval.
Anderson cocks his head to the side and notes the placement of his peers in the room. He counts eight suits, three skirt-suits, and a revealing blue dress, draped over the ample tits of the secretary charged with noting the meeting’s important moments.
“Something to say, Anderson?” Mitchell Brown asks, annoyed.
Anderson grins. “Surprise!” he announces.
Surprise indeed.
They don’t know that Morgan Anderson isn’t there. Not intellectually. Not emotionally.
I climbed into his skin earlier that morning (one of dozens of recent visits I’ve made to him). Like a fist bringing a sock puppet to life, I slid into his body and moved him around. Now I wear Anderson like a Halloween costume. Further, they don’t understand the nature of the gift I’ve put before them, not even when Morgan Anderson removes a slender remote detonation device from his pocket and jabs the black button at its center.
Inside the cardboard box is a plywood crate in which two wads of C-4 explosives, each the size of a baseball, have been suspended. Surrounding the explosives are thousands of beads of birdshot, which in retrospect might have been excessive.
After Anderson depresses the trigger, all goes white and then black and finally resolves into a field of gray in a single heartbeat. The blast peels Morgan Anderson’s tissue—his blood and bone—away from me; shoots me from the decimated boardroom with the scraps of debris.
The explosion vaporizes the board of directors, two temps who are performing data entry in an adjoining space, the secretary with the ample tits, and three pigeons sitting on the ledge of the window. The collateral damage results in the death of Renny Meltzer, an executive who was in line to replace Edleeta Dorcester on the board if she’d lived long enough to retire at the end of the summer.
They are dead, but I remain. Spirit. Consciousness.
I soar across the office space in the wake of destruction like the steaming mist of Mitchell Brown’s spinal fluid. And then I right myself, and drop through the floors until I reach the lobby. Unseen, I make my way across town to the Chester Building and ascend to the penthouse where I find my body reclining on a leather chaise.
For a moment I admire the body as I might admire the body of an attractive stranger—not young but healthy and heavily muscled. The skin is tight, golden and unblemished. Snow-white hair grows in shocking relief against the almond flesh.
Cubs call me a Polar Bear. Twinks call me old.
I was born Trevor Charles, but I was born broken. Unlike you, I am not chained to my tissue or fluid. I’m a free spirit by the most literal of definitions.
I used to fight crime under the handle Marley. I’d slide into some lowlife’s skin suit and walk him right into a police station, present the evidence of his crimes, confess with his throat and lips, and then I’d leave the felon sitting there, in cuffs, looking confused and babbling questions no one but I could answer.
That was then.
I cared then.
I thought there was something in this country to care about, but all of that changed.
Now, I’m Legion, and I’m changing the world, one atrocity at a time.
Sliding back into my body, I get used to the weight of skin and bone. Sirens wail distantly as I open my eyes. Standing I stretch my arms, flex my back, and then walk to the window. Smoke rises two miles away—a column of black, billowing skyward, carrying fetid souls into the atmosphere.
Soon enough, my partner Curtis will come home. The city will shut down as they always do. The “crime” has to be investigated, even though the police and the feds will undoubtedly recognize my handiwork. People will gather to gawk, to mourn, to sob.
Cry, bitches. You’ve brought this on yourselves.
Unfortunately, Curtis will also be upset, and I’ll have to hear about it for two or three days. Few hate my alter ego with Curtis’s intensity, and I can only imagine what will happen to his heart and his head if he ever discovers that the man he’s shared his life with for the past two years is the architect of so much misery.
Why? He’ll ask. Every fucking time, he asks why?
He knows the answer. Like everyone else, he’s been told the answer. I’ve made Legion’s motivations clear from the beginning. My dogma has been posted on half a million websites the world over and spoken by every broadcast anchor in the nation.
I’m sure my decree is already scrolling along the bottom of the CNN broadcast screen–a concise explanation to accompany digital images of the ravaged Fearing Oil Building.
In my office I watch the video clip I recorded earlier that day. It has already gone viral, as I knew it would.
Morgan Anderson’s face fills the screen, but I am the one speaking, moving his lips, holding the gaze of hatred in his eyes. The limited-spectrum camera on his laptop frames him from brow to chin. His features are grim and shadowed.
“Fearing Oil is directly responsible for the deaths of innumerable men and women. It has destroyed hundreds of eco-systems. They have misappropriated funds from their employees’ retirement accounts…” I fast forward through the list of crimes; I know them all too well. They have been catalogued and collated. The documentation necessary to support my allegations has already been delivered to a BBC News desk. I slow the recording again. “…you don’t listen. You let them—this tiny fraction of the population—you let them destroy and take and consider your paycheck ample reward for the dissolution of our economy and our ecology. You reward them for failure and subsidize their crimes. You elect their puppets into government, and they legislate your downfall, and take payoffs to keep their families segregated from you: the bitter, the beaten, and the exploited.
“Fearing Oil did not fall in an act of terrorism. It was an act of revolution. The Third Estate must rise and reclaim this nation, and they must do so through blood and sacrifice.”
I turn off the computer screen and lean back in the chair.
“And then what?” Curtis’s asks.
Swiveling in the chair, I turn to find my partner standing in the doorway. His arm is extended, aiming a 9.mm pistol at my face.
“Curtis?”
“Tell me,” he says, “how does your great revolution end?”
“How long have you known?” I ask.
“Does it matter? I know.”
I stand from the chair, and Curtis takes a step back. His expression is a miserable stew of a dozen emotions.
“I was so stupid,” he says. “Jesus Christ, how could I be so stupid?”
“This has nothing do with you.”
“How in the fuck does this have nothing to do with me? My partner is a mass murderer.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No shit, I don’t understand. They don’t exactly have an Oprah episode covering this one, and I�
�m guessing I won’t find anything in the ‘Relationship’ aisle at Barnes&Noble.”
“People have to wake up,” I explain. “If these corporations were human beings, they would be caught, tried and executed for crimes against humanity. But they don’t. At least they didn’t, until now.”
“You’re talking about murder.”
“I’m talking about destroying monsters.”
“You actually think you’re a hero?”
“The only difference between heroes and villains is how the media spins their shit. Now, put down the gun and let’s talk this over.”
Curtis shakes his head. He is on the verge of tears, but the gun doesn’t waver. “How can you be so God damn calm? What kind of monster are you?”
“You want the origin story?” I ask. “You want to know if I was bitten by a radioactive demon or if I’m the disaffected spirit of Adolph Hitler? What? You think I know how I became this way? Maybe it was the Agent Orange the government showered on my father, or maybe it was the intricate chemical cocktails mommy created to make it through one fucking day after another. Barbiturates for breakfast. A little acid here. A few mushrooms there. Some heroin to take the edge off. Or maybe God just decided I was special. What difference does it make? I’m broken. The spirit and the flesh don’t connect.”
“That’s not true,” he says.
“Really?”
“You’re connected to flesh,” he says. “Not the bodies you possess. No. But if your true body dies, so does the spirit. You need it to survive. Legion can’t live in a permanently spectral state, so if I shoot you and I kill you, it’s over.”
“You don’t know that,” I point out. “That’s just one of Looking Glass’s theories. It’s not like there are a whole lot like me out there.”
Unfortunately, I have very good reason to believe that Looking Glass’s ideas about my permanent demise are accurate. He is the one motherfucker I could never get past. No matter who I occupied, he could see me for who I was. As superheroes went, he fell on the lame side, reading auras and shit, but he had made my life difficult until I’d slipped him in Atlanta and had gone underground.
The Lavender Menace Page 8