I



Every man shares the same fantasy, and it is this:

He will marry a universally beloved sweetheart. Live a noble life and succeed in all the ways his father taught were best. And when he stands at the pinnacle of filial and paternal achievement, when he has finally reached that great height of goodness, honor, and inarguable virility, then and only then, his wife, child, and pet should be ripped from him. Violently, unforgivably.

Restoring, ultimately, freedom.

Because he has done the good thing, the right thing, and only then become the victim of its vanishing, this virtuous man may now turn with the full support of any onlooker to violence, rage, nihilism, and debauchery. Which were his ultimate true aims all along. To lose himself in the glorious, sanctioned rapture of retribution. How many husbands of wives have lined up at the box office to live out this exact fantasy that they deeply, fundamentally, and brutally desire?

Men are insipid, stupid creatures.

Here is the truth, the one that so few of us know:

You do not need a moral and noble story to do what you want. You do not first need to be a victim to become a monster. Your loved ones need not be taken from you so that you might drink and brutalize and chase the sublime. Life is fleeting and meaningless and crying to be seized from behind and fucked into obscurity.

This is my story, and you cannot control it. No more than you can the ever-lower dangle of your sex or the warming of this fat, lazy prison rock floating in the semen-splotched dark.

My name is Maeve Fly.

I work at the happiest place in the world.



II

Kate and I kneel opposite each other in the ice queen castle room, costumed in our uniform princess dresses, as we are every day. I watch as a single bead of blood plops, and then another, from Kate’s nose down to the head of the child sitting in her lap.

Kate is beautiful and hungover, and she is a dulled but still precious gem in a dark and faux-Nordic cave of artifice. I mean that literally. They’ve painted the walls to look like an amalgam generic Scandinavian castle, which looks nothing like the few actual Scandinavian castles in existence. Kate is twenty-six, one year younger than I am. The kid in her lap is wearing some kind of cartoon sport-player shirt and has dried cotton candy stuck to the side of his face. Her blood can only improve upon an already bleak image. The mother does not seem to have noticed. Today is a Tuesday in September, and the parents shiver in their Southern California sweat, cooled and sickening in the artificial air.

“Wow, what a lovely dress you have on! It looks even better on you than it does me!” Kate says to the little girl who sits next to me. They are siblings, the children, and I cannot help but see them as competitors to each other. One will eat the other someday, one will steal the other’s spouse. The little boy, the one with the sugar and the blood, he can’t be older than four, but even so, there is a mind at work.

And all at once, he seems to understand, with great clarity, the fleeting and fortuitous situation he has found himself in. Sitting with his face very near the firm young breasts of a woman who is not a familial blood-tie. His mouth is open, and his eyes fix on one of Kate’s nipples. We’re supposed to wear bras with the costumes, but it’s standard for Kate to forget. I’m not complaining. Neither is this kid.

The little girl beside me twirls in her princess dress. Kate’s character is the younger sister to mine. Kate smiles benevolently down at her. No one has noticed that her nose is bleeding. The little boy, slowly, as if it might not be real, reaches his hand up, just a couple inches, toward the fruit of his adoration. He stops himself. He looks at me: Is this okay? Will I be punished? What all men want to know. I smile and give him a wink. We’ll all be punished eventually. Why not?

I love playing my princess. Of all the little girls who come, most seem to resonate with Kate’s, since she’s the sister who is unwaveringly virtuous, the protagonist who not only saves the village but also falls in love with a large handsome Scandinavian to produce more beautiful large Scandinavians. It’s only the kind of fucked-up girls who like my princess, the sister with the destructive powers, the one without a husband. The one who occupies the space of both princess and villainess. We’ll discuss that further later, but my princess is significant, a rare archetypal defiance in a world so blandly predictable. She is beyond glorious. The only downside to our particular appointment is the song of the snowman, Kate’s oafish bumbling traveling companion, which plays at intervals throughout the day and is a truly unbearable one minute and fifty-one seconds of nasal-voiced torment. The children live for it.

This particular little boy though is really getting his parents’ money’s worth and pays no mind to the song in the slightest. His attention has returned to the breast, and there is a new determination in his eyes. Kate’s nose drips another drop of red, mingling with his hair, and I am filled with a deep and unwavering love. For Kate. For this job. For all of it.

Kate and I place our arms around the little girl and lean in for their parents’ photo. There’s a line, and we can’t keep the other kids waiting. We are very popular in the park. The most popular, in fact.

As we lean in, the boy looks to me, and I feel the moment just as he does. This will be the pinnacle of his early youth, this brave young knight on his first true quest. And I am bearing witness to such honor. I nod in stolid encouragement. He understands and prepares to move forward, on his course of destiny.

He reaches upward.

“Say CHEESE!” the mother shouts.

The boy gives Kate’s breast a firm, whole-handed squeeze.

The flash shines bright. The mother cries out. Kate laughs. The father tries to look appalled, but it is plainly there in the barely concealed smirk, the adjustment in stance. He is so proud of his son. He wishes it were him with his hand there on this faux-princess’s chest. He indulges, finally, the fantasy he has not until this point allowed himself, standing before us. The soft firmness of it compared to his now-maternal wife’s, the illicit glory of a mammary yet untouched, unconquered by him. How the fathers envy their progeny. How they cling to that envy forever.

I raise my eyebrow at him, and he shrugs, unapologetic. He knows instinctively that I know. The ones who know always do.

* * *

We get a half-hour break in the afternoon. We head into the break room. Cinderella and Snow White are eating fat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free yogurt. They glare at us. There is a distinct hierarchy among the princesses, and Kate’s and mine, as two of the newest of them, are the most popular. Children have really all but forgotten the old ones. Additionally, it’s worth noting that we are all—Kate, Cinderella, Snow White, the others, and I—lower on the totem pole than the princesses working at the main park. We work at the newer park next door, which holds more adult rides, and the children’s attractions—such as meeting princesses—are very much afterthoughts. Our park also always holds fewer guests than its next-door sister park, the original. It opens later, closes earlier. So to be Cinderella or Snow White at our park is to be the B Team of the B Team, and they are both extremely bitter about it. I would be too.

Kate and I ignore them and step into the locker room beyond the break room. We both immediately pull our wigs off. My hair is not far off from my character’s white blonde, but they require that we wear the wigs anyway. Kate’s hair, unlike that of her red-brown wig, is as bloodred as hair gets without dye. It is fascinating, sometimes I am caught staring at it for too long. Copper wire, pyroclast, menstrual blood. She lays out the lines for us on a paper plate from the break room, and we suck them up through tampon straws. I stick a little up in my gums. We slouch against the lockers on the floor, towels between our costumes and the ground, and chew the gummy bears I flirted the 7-Eleven guy out of this morning. The fluorescents gleam off Kate’s hair. Her skin is so translucent I can see the veins beneath.

The break room door opens, and Liz comes in.

Liz is everything that is abysmal in a human being, and is, consequently, my nemesis. She is both loathsome and curiously fascinating. Liz adores rules, loves adhering to them, upholding them, sucking their little metaphorical dicks with the love and patience of a saint or a woman getting paid. She is also our supervisor. Sort of.

I watch as her face turns red at the sight of us. This is one of Liz’s two modes. Both insufferable, though I find this one at least somewhat amusing. Kate sniffs once, and Liz crosses her hands beneath her fantastic breasts, the source well of all her despair. Fun bags. Sweater globes. She used to be a princess, like us, but one day, she woke up to find that her chest had inexplicably grown to such an extreme degree overnight that she suddenly no longer fit in her uniform costume. Well, she fit in it, but she looked enough like a porn star that Management sat her down and told her that her princess days were behind her. This is the greatest wound and disappointment of her life, and she will never emotionally recover. Liz is stupidly hot, and to outgrow her dress only to become the pinnacle of what every woman in this town wants to be, in fact pay ample money for, is to Liz the death of all that is good in the world.

It makes Kate insane. Kate who, beautiful herself, might kill for Liz’s body. Enter a reactionary self-flagellating donut addiction on Liz’s part that never makes her gain a pound anywhere and a general off-putting sense of prolonged adolescence, and any chance she stood with Kate was gone forever. I could give two fucks about any of it. For me, it is just her. At all times either policing or indulging in interminable longing for something that will never return, and the most un-self-aware person I have ever encountered in this town. The wistfulness, the laborious sighs and ravenous gazes clinging to us in our dresses, a yearning so deep that it makes me sick. Liz is, in every way and above all else, the worst and most basic thing anyone can choose to be. A victim.

Now Liz plays a fur character, sometimes a chipmunk, sometimes a lady mouse, and she put up such a fuss when she lost her princess role that Management, in an effort to appease her extreme desire to contribute and to save themselves the lawsuit they believed would come (though Liz would never do anything to besmirch their name), bestowed upon her the semiofficial title of Princess Supervisor. This is not a real appointment and resulted in no pay bump, which I know because Kate and I snuck into her locker and opened her paychecks to find out, or any discernible benefit beyond the fact that she felt it gave her some small semblance of power over us.

“Again? Again? I am going to have you fired, you two are so done!” Liz spits out in a fevered whisper.

“Lighten up, Liz. Have a bump,” Kate says.

“If you think that you can get away with—”

“Sorry, what was that? What can I not get away with?” Kate says. “I seem to remember something that you might not get away with, Liz, if I were to, you know,” she inspects her fingernails, “say something to upper management. Maybe … show them something?”

Liz’s face pales.

Liz loves the park. Liz loves the park more than any place on earth. Her dream is to get engaged in matching mouse ears with a park-loving husband-to-be, to marry in Cinderella’s castle, spend a magical night botching her purity, discarding it swiftly in the coveted castle suite in the East Coast park which she will never be able to reserve. The whole of her room in her shared, white-carpeted apartment is full of park paraphernalia, her daily breakfast mouse-shaped donuts. She watches cartoons on repeat, especially the old ones. She has not masturbated, ever, as she is saving herself for a Ben or Jake or Paul who will undoubtedly be a virgin himself. Maybe not Jake. Jakes are sometimes fucks. I don’t know. I’m riffing. I want another bump before we have to go back on shift.

Liz says to me, sincerely, “I don’t know why you go along with her. You’re better than this.” She has always categorized Kate as the mean girl and me as the weak-willed sidekick, and there’s never been any need for her to believe otherwise.

“We going to Bab’s tonight or what?” Kate says this to me, ignoring Liz. Liz’s face has returned to its wounded bereft exaggerated image, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s ever trimmed her bush or if the thing just runs wild in her cotton princess panties.

“Yeah, maybe,” I say, distracted. Bab’s, short for Babylon, is the Old Hollywood–themed strip club in the basement of the pirate-themed strip club, the Gangplank, where all the visiting New Yorkers go. Kate and I go because those same visitors are almost always looking for California sweethearts to liquor up in hopes of relieving their jet lag and daily rage and whatever other vitriol is stored up inside them. Ready to be pumped out from between their legs into something willing, or even part-way willing. It’s usually a matter of perspective, anyway. And they always leave the next day.

“I’d like to finish my book,” I say, “but maybe after.”

Liz stares wistfully at Kate’s dress, gives a long, shoulder-slumping sigh, then turns to gaze beyond us into the endless abyss of want.

“No, bitch, you promised, remember? My brother?” Kate leans in close enough that her hair brushes my arm, and I can smell her sweat and the sickly-sweet department store perfume she said she’s worn since puberty. I just catch a glimpse of the hole in her tongue where her piercing lived before she took it out for this job. That tongue can speak five languages, one more than my own. It’s how she got the job, likely how we both did. Over- or undereducated millennials, we’re all a dime a dozen, but somehow, we both ended up here.

And so I do remember. Her brother just moved to town. I had forgotten. My mind has been … elsewhere as of late.



III



Just a short walk up the hill from the giant Western brothel–themed tourist bar on the Sunset Strip sits a large Mediterranean home crawling with vines and flowers that only open at night. On either side of the enormous imported wooden door sit mature cacti, a South African breed that one finds all over the city in front of beautiful homes like this one. This cacti’s cuttings sell for something like twenty dollars apiece online. Its sap, known as a milky latex, when ingested or brought into contact with the eyes, causes severe rashes, blindness, and death in pets and humans. Almost no one knows this. But I do.

I arrive home, brushing my fingers against one of the cacti as I pass.

People say that no one is from Los Angeles. This is of course not true of all, or even most of the white people to whom they are referring, nor most of those in the minority groups that make up the vibrant and vital fabric of this town. However, it is true of me. Where I am from is not important, as where I am meant to be is here, and backstory is generally entirely overrated. Designed merely to sate our need to understand why someone is the way they are, to categorize and pathologize instead of simply accepting. But I am not completely lacking in generosity, so here are the bones of it:

My parents and I parted on bad terms a number of years ago. Their transgression was nothing more than bringing me into this world as something entirely different from and completely incomprehensible to them. But anyone who has truly experienced this domestic ostracism, not just the hormone-fueled tumult of the teen years but the great lack of understanding and betrayal that is the total inability to be seen, will understand that this is no simple failing at all.

The only person who exists in my world besides Kate is the woman who took me in. My grandmother, Tallulah, was an actress back in the days of Hollywood’s glory, not so famous that people hear my name and know who I am related to, but famous enough that when they see her face, when they used to see her face, they would often stop and furrow their brows and try to piece together why she was so deeply familiar to them. But her famous Halloween photograph adorns countless walls, is sold in prints that likely cost less than twenty dollars, on street corners or on chain websites. They used to say she was the most angelic of the starlets, her face eternally youthful and innocent, her natural nearly white-blonde hair a rare commodity in this town. And her eyes. Blue as ice, even now. Just like mine. The truth is that we look so much alike, we’re nearly identical. But people have short memories. And they rarely care about anything beyond themselves.

Now here I am, her double, her ghost, haunting the Strip unseen.

* * *

Entering through the front door, the foyer greets me, opens up into the large living room beyond. My bedroom sits on one side of the house, and the master, my grandmother’s room, on the other. Between them a series of open spaces: dining, kitchen, bar. Balconies wrapping around both the main level and downstairs, looking out over the Strip and up into the hills. Downstairs, there is a small movie theater and a guest suite that has never, as long as I have lived here, been utilized. And below that is the wine cellar. Only the wealthy have basements in Los Angeles. There is something unsuitable about them here, and to spend too much time underground in a city in which the ground routinely shifts is a sort of glamorous temptation of fate. We have no yard, no pool. Just the three stories attached permanently and precariously to the hillside. As fixed and fleeting as any of us will ever be.

I step into my grandmother’s room. Hilda, her nurse, has just left, and the air still reeks of her disinfectant. I have never liked Hilda, not since the day she arrived and shoved me aside, shooed me out of the room as though I would ever do anything except help, as though I would not give all of myself to this woman I love. But Hilda has kept my grandmother alive, and that is more than enough to make up for her impatient European efficiency and vulgar sense of entitlement to our home.

But now it is my grandmother and me. Only us. I stand just inside the door. I do not approach her, and I do not say anything. The room, like the rest of the home, is tastefully decorated by a designer in an Old-Hollywood bungalow aesthetic, though the house is far larger than any bungalow. The velvet curtains are pulled wide, and the late afternoon sunlight spills in over her body.

My grandmother doesn’t know I’m here. She is dying, has been dying, slowly and ungracefully, for months now. Cirrhosis of the liver that led to hepatic encephalopathy that led to hepatic coma. The failing body works in every way to remind us that we are nothing more than a series of fired impulses, a machine of biological compulsion that really has very little use after reproduction. A slight tremor makes its way through my grandmother as I watch her, and her lips quiver as though she is attempting speech. She is not conscious. It is too much to wish for.

I remember those same lips, with her signature red lipstick, meeting the rim of a glass, her Old-Fashioned swirling amber inside. The two of us tucked in a booth at Jones my first night in town all those years ago. Red-checked tablecloths, brick walls, low lighting from sconces and small lamps. She ordered us two plates of spaghetti. Neither of us touched them. I took a sip from my own glass, filled with the same liquid as hers, and set it down, my hand shaking just a little.

She sat back and tapped her long red fingernails on the table, studying me. She wore an ivory Chanel blouse, left undone to a scandalous degree, a black lace La Perla bra beneath. Bulgari diamond snake around her throat. She has never told me her age. I could ascertain it through a quick internet search, but if there is something she does not want me to know, I am content not to know it.

“So. My granddaughter.” She said the word slowly, tasting its syllables, its hard consonants exaggerated in her haughty mid-Atlantic precision. This was the first day we had ever met. She and my father never saw eye to eye. It had almost everything to do with the fact that she took very little interest in raising him and left him in the care of a nanny for most of his childhood. His father was undoubtedly a movie star, but his identity has remained a mystery to my father for the whole of his life. I know, now, of course. But I will not tell him.

“You’re beautiful,” my grandmother said to me.

“I look just like you,” I said.

The edge of her lip quirked up, and her nails fell still on the table. She considered me.

“What do you see, when you look around this room?”

Billie Holiday played over the speakers. Waiters visited tables unhurriedly. In the small pools of light in the dim space, faces leaned close in conversation, dipped down to take a bite of food or a sip of a drink. Someone laughed. The bartender shook and poured.

“I see…”

“Don’t try to please me,” she said. “Just look. Really see.”

I drew my eyes away from hers and scanned the room once more. I saw humans. Humans trying so hard to make meaning, to create a space for meaning. An experience. Something to be desired. I saw walking corpses draped in finery meant to look not so fine. Expensive but casual. I am not trying, they said, this is effortless. But the trying, the striving, it poisoned the air, it perfumed it. It was everywhere. It was intoxicating. Everywhere, all the time, people are pretending. But here, in Hollywood, it is so much more. So much more that it renders it authentic. I wanted to drink it down and gulp it up and fill myself with it. I looked back at her, and I knew that my cheeks were flushed.

There we sat, the two of us, and I stared into her eyes, so like my own, this woman the picture of what I will grow into, what I will become. And the wrenching loneliness I had felt for the whole of my life, the simple fact of my being utterly and completely different, began to float away. We were two wolves in a flock of sheep.

She smiled then, as though she had read my thoughts. A wide and knowing predator’s grin, and her eyebrow lifted. She brought her glass up above the plates of untouched food. “We are going to get along just fine,” she said.

The bar fades from my mind, and I am staring at an unmoving woman, sunken in ways I never could have imagined. Connected through translucent tubes and wires to machines that light up and seem to do nothing else beyond take up real estate in the room, marring an otherwise beautiful space. All of it, a dying dream. Her condition, usually brought on by alcoholism, I was told was likely in fact brought on in her case by a rare genetic disorder. Hereditary, they said. You should be cautious yourself, they said, to me. In my initial frantic research, I even turned (in perhaps my darkest moment) to the overly moneyed and inanely out of touch new age corners of the internet—largely broadcast from the west in Venice and the east in Joshua Tree—in which I was informed that liver disease is tied to an excess of anger.

My grandmother’s familiar, a decrepit old Lester the Cat, brushes past my ankle and into the room to jump up on her bed. He bends down to nuzzle his face against hers, trying to get a reaction. Of course he does not. I can’t be in here anymore. I close her door softly behind me and head out into the living room. The floor-to-ceiling glass looks out over the Strip on one side, the hills on the other. Props from her movies hang from the walls and sit in corners on shelves, preening and alive. A tiara, an old telephone, a vase of fake winter flowers. I pour myself a glass of water and strip my shirt off over my head, let it fall to the floor. Unlike my grandmother, I adorn myself with nothing. I wear simple clothing, keep my face and my neck bare other than the makeup I am required to wear at work. It suits me better. I sip from the glass, and my hand again shakes.

Here is what matters: my grandmother is dying, and Kate will soon find everything she wants and more, and I will not enter her brave new world of television stardom and Hollywood grandeur with her. But I have done the research. On average, it takes two years from the current stage of my grandmother’s illness to claim the life of someone her age if she does not wake, which the doctors have said I should not hold my breath for. And, on average, from my own personal observations, it takes a young Hollywood actress about five years of nonstop pursuit in this town before anything substantial takes off, if it ever does. Kate arrived here three years ago, so she also has about two years before anything happens. So, I have determined that I have two years with the two people who matter, before I become a one. It is not exact, or even reliable if I am being honest, but it is enough to keep myself sane. My grandmother doesn’t speak to me anymore, but she is here, and that is the core of it. She is everything.

I have the Strip, and I have the park, and I have Kate and my grandmother for two years. I know everything about this place, every crack, every facet, and I am its surveyor and keeper and master and appreciator. For the next two years, my life is perfect. And beyond that, I will live alone. The timer on my life as it exists now is ticking louder every day, culminating in that ultimate inevitability.

I don’t have to face it yet, and in the meantime, there is so much pleasure in routine.


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