INTERLUDE

FACE THE MUSIC
(EXTENDED CUT)

This will never end ‘cause I want more…
More, give me more, give me more…
— Fever Ray, If I Had a Heart

IN THE GREAT BEYOND, consciousness returns to me. I’m disoriented at first, drifting in some deep darkness without my senses to guide me through it. The last thing I remember is my match against Jack Sullivan and then the car ride back to the hotel and the blood boiling beneath my skin. I felt so hopeless. And worthless. And angry. Angier than I’ve felt since I was a little girl sitting on a park bench listening to a lawyer tell me my father was being held in a lunatic asylum.

Then memory slips through my fingers like sand through glass. How long have I been drifting in the gloom without purpose, the void without beginning or end? Maybe it was a car crash. A bus slammed into the taxi. My head went through the window and I was flung in the air. Now I’m dead on the sidewalk. See the bystanders snapping photos of my crippled body and bloated, bloody face. See my eyes bulging out of their sockets, staring off into opposite directions like a strangled chameleon.

Gorgo is dead. Long live Gorgo.

And yet, there’s a feeling. It’s distant at first, almost imperceptible. It’s an electrical charge, buzzing all around me and then inside, and for the first time I feel a physical body. I’m reminded of that familiar pins and needles sensation of a numb limb regaining feeling, except this isn’t just an arm or a leg. This is my whole body, all at once, pulsating back to life.

And then, after an unknowable amount of time, the severed neural paths between my mind and body reconnect, the power generator is flipped back on, my heart pumps, my lungs breathe, and suddenly I hear a woman singing Let’s Face the Music and Dance with a swingin’ band backing her up.

There are layers of voices, talking and laughing over one another. Then a sputtering car engine motors from right to left. I can smell the stinging odor of gasoline and exhaust, and feel the slipstream of wind rush over my skin.

The blackness cracks open, splitting laterally across, and blinding white light pours in through the rift and surrounds me until the darkness is nothing more than a soft vignette frame around the boundaries of my sight.

Indiscernible haze fades to the façade of a chic nightclub on a solitary block. The edifice is a large angular tower dominating an endless black milieu. An art deco cathedral of reinforced concrete and bronze. Sleek and linear and inlaid with geometric patterns.

Café Existentiel flashes across the buzzing neon marquee, and beneath it massive double doors welcome me with open arms. Strange it is, I realize while looking up at the sign, that it’s devoid of color. Rather, it’s black and white and grainy, like an old Hollywood movie, captured on monochromatic celluloid.

I look left down the street, and then right. I see no cars, no pedestrians, and no other buildings. In both directions the road and sidewalk slowly fade into shadow before disappearing completely behind opaque veils of night.

I start walking. The further down the sidewalk I travel, the darker it becomes, until I’m completely swallowed in pitch black. I keep moving, comforted by the sound of my steps clicking on the unseen cement. Ahead, the darkness breaks, fading away like a memory, and I follow the sidewalk around a building. I don’t realize until I see the sign that it’s the same nightclub, having arrived from the opposite direction that I had departed.

I turn around and go back the way I came, into the umbral cloud, and continue until I emerge on the other side to find myself standing once more in front of the Café. With its glowing sign and open doors, the nightclub beckons me to accept the inevitable conclusion and walk through the doors.

I stop resisting and enter.

Swing music and merriment greets me. Beyond the foyer is a smokey room with arched ceilings and chevron patterned carpet. Round tables are arranged throughout the main floor, and each one’s populated with dark silhouettes.

Suddenly I’m wearing a white tuxedo with a black bowtie and gray boutonnière pinned to my lapel. I check my pockets, outside first and then inside my jacket, where I find an ivory cigarette case. I open it and remove a hand-rolled cigarette. My lips hold it firmly as my hand searches for a lighter or matches.

I hear the scrape of flint and when my eyes raise there’s a flame dancing from a small lighter in a gloved hand. It’s the doorman, Mr. Johnny On the Spot, only it isn’t a man. It’s a woman dressed in an Egyptian tunic and pants, with blonde hair spiraling out from under a red fez hat. She has a familiar face, with blue eyes and a stretched smile like mine, but the most remarkable thing about her is that she’s frozen, like a statue, with that smile pulled apart and her eyes peeled open staring directly at me.

I lean in until the cigarette touches the flame. A lungful of heavy tobacco smoke fills my chest. It burns a little as it escapes through my nostrils.

“Thank you,” I say, then descend three steps to the main floor and begin moving through the sea of tables. All of the patrons are women and every single one of them shares the same familiar face as the gal in the fez hat, albeit with minor differences in appearance, like hairstyles and makeup (or lack thereof). Their fashion is distinctly Roaring 20’s, ranging from flapper dresses to boyish suits, and although I could hear them talking all around me, they too were motionless models, like living mannequins on display.

Likewise, the big jazz band at the far end of the room is paused in mid-motion, with instruments held high, the drummer stuck between crash symbols, and a singer with her wide mouth in front of a condenser microphone, but I can still hear her belting out It Had to Be You over a swanky jazz jingle.

Straight ahead a man in a tuxedo is behind the bar, cleaning it with a rag. He’s the only man in the joint, but most of him is masked in blocks of shadow. Behind him brown bottles shimmer on lighted shelves. Sensing my presence, he stops cleaning to look up. The whites of his eyes are islands in a silhouette.

The bartender says, “Have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.” He returns to wiping down the bar as I sit down on the only stool parked at the counter despite having space for at least twenty.

I fold an arm over the counter and smoke while I wait. Next to me is a bowl of peanuts. I take a handful and pop them into my mouth a few at a time. A moment later the bartender’s pale hand extends out of the adumbration to place an empty old fashioned glass in front of his new customer.

“What’ll it be,” he asks, looking down with black dots surrounded by white, his face still obscured. His voice reminds me of someone I can’t quite place.

I chomp on the last couple peanuts. “Well,” I start to say with a few bits still in my mouth, “here’s the rub. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. Can you fill me in?”

The bartender thinks for a moment then says, “You need medicine.”

I slap my hand on the bar and point. “You have me confused with my brother. I don’t take pills because I’m not crazy.” I grab another handful of peanuts.

“But you’re mistaken, if you don’t mind me saying.”

I stop mid-chew. There’s something different about this one. Something tugging at a memory I can’t recall. I say with a sarcastic whip, “And why’s that, barkeep?”

He says, “You are crazy.” A bottle appears in his hand. He pours two fingers of caramel-colored liquor into the glass then sets the bottle aside. “Just like your father.”

My throat feels drier than the Sonoran desert after watching the liquid spread across the bottom of the glass and rise up the sides. I stamp my cigarette in the nearby ashtray then pick up the drink.

“That’s a funny thing to say,” I offer before downing the alcohol. It tastes like gasoline and makes my stomach wretch. I put the glass down while coughing up fumes. “Fuck me,” I say hoarsely. “What is that?”

“A house blend,” the bartender answers as he pours another. “Prohibition has required some sacrifices in quality, I’m sad to admit.”

I shake my head no. “I’m done with that shit.”

“As you wish,” the bartender says.

“Why did you say that?”

“What, sir?”

I look at him sideways. “You said ‘just like your father.’ What did you mean by that?”

The bartender takes the glass and knocks it back—smooth. “Your father was certifiably insane. Non compos mentis.” He picks up the rag, gives it a shake, and uses it to wipe out the glass. “That’s why they put him in the looney bin.”

“How do you know that,” I say suspiciously. “Did you know my father?”

“In a way,” he says with his teeth gleaming through the darkness. He places the glass down and pours another mouthful. “I’m your father—or rather, your memory of him, and I’m here because you have been such a disappointment.”

A creeping dread festers in the dark hollow of my mind like a necrosis slowly devouring not flesh, but thought. Hysteria strikes the primitive confines of my brain and fires panic signals to every nerve ending. I feel my chest tighten and my heart race. Sweat gathers on my skin. Without thinking my unsteady hand picks up the glass. Liquid courage. I dispatched the burning alcohol straight to my gut.

I breathed fire after putting the glass down. “I’ve done nothing to disappoint you. I’m almost halfway through the list. I killed Petrov, the cop, Vanessa. Next is Fukuyama, as soon as I figure out a way to get close to him. What more can I do?”

“Your failures outweigh your accomplishments,” he says while pouring another refill. “You know it was never just about the list. If all I wanted was for you to kill a few people, I could have arranged that myself.” The bottle is placed on the counter and slid away before his hands spread across the wood. He leans ever so closer but never breaks the shadow plane.

“You treat wrestling as an afterthought. How will they remember me, if not through you? How will they go to bed frightened every night if you don’t remind them that lurks in the shadows? You are my conduit. You are my legacy. I had two children and I hoped at least one of you would prove worthy. Maybe I was wrong. Nathan was a world champion but now he’s a useless, paralyzed husk who didn’t have the good sense to die when that bus ran him over.”

“And you,” he continues, “you’re ever worse, because you have all the best parts of me and you can’t even stop Sam Tolson or Jack Sullivan from throwing you over a top rope.”

“It’s not my fault,” I say. I feel like I’m shrinking, smaller and smaller, like Alice trying to escape the rabbit hole. “No one has pinned me. No one has made me submit. I didn’t fucking ask to be in a Haunted House match or battle through a miniature city. What else am I supposed to do?”

“Win,” he says simply. “At all costs. No matter the circumstances.”

I grab the glass and throw it at him but it sails right, going over his shoulder and crashing into the bottles behind him. Glass shatters. Alcohol spills. I stand up and scream at him.

“You aren’t here! You left me, remember? You fucking died and I’m doing the best I can!”

The music of the band, the cheers of the audience, the clatter of staff serving drinks, and any other thing, living or otherwise, that makes a sound is suddenly silenced like the wind snatching a flame from a wick.

My head twists around. All of the patrons and band members have abandoned their stations and are now gathered in a large crowd like statues, with ghastly grins and wide eyes.

He said with a sly little smirk, “Are you done?”

I turn forward to see him retreat into the viscous penumbra, until the only visible parts of him are two almond shaped white eyes with black dots in the center.

“SIT DOWN.”

His voice suddenly grows with an inhuman snarl, guttural and primitive, like some wild beast which has long been forgotten by the world of today. It’s monstrous, howling like the ravings of a thousand lunatics being burned at the stake.

Immediately I’m scared back onto the stool. A new glass is waiting for me, half full with brown liquor and a single ice cube. I reach for it with both hands because they’re shaking so bad.

“Spiral, your father, was a great man,” he says, reverting back to my father’s timbre, but my ear discerns another voice speaking in parallel with his; a feminine whisper, raspy and foreboding in tone.

I recognize it immediately. It’s my voice, but it was chewed and twisted, like I swallowed ground glass, chased it with gasoline and swallowed a match. This isn’t my father or some dream-conjured abstraction of him. It’s me. The Other Me, and she’s wearing him like a costume.

As that dreadful realization comes to me, so does another. All the immotile women gathered not far from my back, perpetually gazing and grinning at me, are wearing my face, too.

“But like all great men, he lived too long,” she says, having shedded all semblance of my father’s pitch and accent. “He became old and weak. Disease grew in his brain like a bad seed and within a short two years reduced him to a pitiful thing.”

Two hands, not my fathers but like mine, reach through the darkness and press on the bar, their fingers spreading unnaturally apart. “He laid in that bed for three months waiting to die, shitting and pissing himself, watching the disgust in the nurse’s face when she had to clean up after him. You remember the smell. It’s hard to forget.”

Her knotty fingers branch out further, like bent tree limbs. “In the end he died like all pretty things—in horror, with what was left of his brain trying desperately to take another breath after his lungs and heart had already given out. You sat there watching him suffocate for minutes, and when it was finally over, you made a promise.”

For a moment, I’m back in my father’s room, sitting at his bedside and counting the beeps on the heart monitor. He’s near death in a drug induced coma, nothing more than a frail skeleton wrapped in loose skin and atrophied muscles but what I remember most are his eyes. They were staring at the ceiling, wet and glassed over. Never blinking and never closing, not even after he passed. It was like he saw something terrifying above him and couldn’t look away.

“What was the promise,” she says, pulling me back to the nightclub.

My voice shakes. “I promised I would be better than him.”

“And are you?”

“Not yet.”

The Other Me screeches, “You’re going to go to Japan with your new best friend…” I sense a tinge of jealousy. Is she threatened by my relationship with Mari?

“…and you’re going to lose again to Jack Sullivan. You remember what happened when your father was forced to be in tag matches?”

A flash plays in my head of Spiral slamming a chair into the head of one of his tag partners, then another of him walking away while the man is beat down by their opponents.

“Mari is different.”

“And then,” she says, talking over me, “you’re going to go to Vegas a week later and lose in the Terrordome, a match your father invented. My money is on Tolson, by the way. She has a lot more experience climbing ladders than you.”

I lean forward and scowl at the darkness. “If you don’t like it, you’re more than welcome to fuck off. What have you ever done for me that I couldn’t have done myself?”

A laugh bellows out, and her eyes dance around. She says, “When you were all alone with our alcoholic bitch of a mother while daddy dearest was in the looney bin, I was the one who made you feel like you weren’t alone. I was the one who protected you over the years when you needed to get your hands dirty…”

“…and let’s not forget about them…”

Her hand raises and a disjointed finger directs my eyes to look back at all the disturbing caricatures of myself in 1920s period clothing, and the deranged expressions on their faces.

I hesitate to ask. “What about them?”

“They’re us,” she says menacingly. “You don’t remember them because I made you forget. I erased the memory after I took over this Mickey Mouse operation. All these Other Us’s were causing you a lot of distress. Always with the babbling and wailing. It was too much for a kid to bear. Dada of course wasn’t worried, being a little touched himself, but mama? She was very concerned. So concerned that she called a psychiatrist behind dada’s back.”

Suddenly I’m five years old and lying on a coach in a small office. A man in his fifties with bifocals is asking me in Moldovan, “How often do you hear these voices?”

The Other Me draws a long, wheezing breath, like too much air forced through a straw. “The Screaming Mimis, that’s what I call ‘em. They were going to ruin everything, so I had to silence them.”

I look down at my shaking hands and nervously begin rubbing them together. I’m trying to process all of this when a bent finger presses under my chin and lifts my head.

“And, more importantly, I keep them quiet.”

Countless screaming voices flood my head all at once, like lightning in my skull.

(You’re nothing.)

(Cancer in your brain…)

(You’ll always be nothing.)

(Father secretly hated you.)

(…cancer in your brain…)

(You’re fat and disgusting, you pig bitch.)

(DIE ALREADY.)

(…cancer in your brain just like daddy.)

(I think she can hear us.)

(I want to stab your eyes out with a pencil…)

(Don’t listen to them. You’re amazing.)

(…and then use the fluid as ink to write a poem about how much I hate you.)

(You’re smart and beautiful and funny.)

(She can definitely hear us.)

(Good, tell her to cut her fucking throat open.)

(Look at you, you stupid, stupid…)

(Murderer.)

(…stupid fucking whore.)

(CUNT.)

(Kill that bitch Vilaro and throw her body in the ocean for the sharks to eat.)

(I love Mari.)

(You two make a good couple. You should bang.)

(BANG.)

(I hope you get hit by a bus like your brother.)

(BANG.)

(Daddy should have strangled you as a baby and dumped you in the river.)

(One day you will die and the last thing you hear with be MY FUCKING LAUGH. HAAAA HAAAAA HAAAAAA HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAA.)

I cover my ears but their voices aren’t coming from outside. Every word is echoing in my head like dozens of church bells ringing over top one another, and beneath the discordance was an endless cacophony of laughter.

And then they’re gone and beautiful silence welcomes me into its embrace. My hands slip off my ears and fall into my lap, and I’m sitting there, hunched over, trying to recover from the trauma.

“I went through a lot of trouble locking them up,” the Other Me says from the darkness behind the bar. “It would be a shame to let them out permanently.”

Is that what my brother hears when he’s not on his medication?

“Yes,” she says, answering my thoughts. “More or less.”

How would she know?

“Because I’m smart.” Her hands on the counter whiten from her weight pressing down onto them. “Nate shares our daddy’s gift. His problem is he doesn’t have one like me inside his head. Someone who can keep the others in line. Aren’t you lucky?”

I look up at the two eyes floating in the black void and say, “I don’t think you’re helping me out of the kindness of your heart.”

A malevolent laugh bellows, long and haughty, so vociferous and harrowing that it spills forth from darkness and echoes like a murder of crows across the club.

She says sweetly, “Would you?”

“No,” I answer simply.

Her fingers rap on the bar like a ratchet. “I loved our father, same as you.”

Her fingers drum again, one after the other.

“I want to do what you promised.”

Ra-da-da-dum.

“I want to kill the names on the list.”

Ra-da-da-dum.

“But most importantly, I want to be a world champion, something your father failed to do time, and time again. Something your brother achieved only a few months after hitting the big leagues. I want what people like Jack Sullivan take for granted—the love and adoration of millions, given voluntarily if they wish, or taken from them as hatred and scorn, pulled like teeth with pliers. In the end, it doesn’t matter, so long as we get what we deserve.”

My eyes lift and I say, “Envy is the ulcer of the soul.”

“Fucking Socrates. Really?”

I stare at her eyes. “That’s all you want? For me to kill my father’s enemies and become a world champion? Aren’t I already working on those two things?”

“You can’t do it alone,” she says with a murmur, “and I’m tired of riding in the backseat all the time.”

And there it was, what she really wants.

“Let’s face it,” she quickly adds, “you need me as much as I need you. Like the song says, We Can Work It Out. So what do you say, hmm? I’m hungry, baby. I wanna eat, too, but I’m done dining at the kiddie table.”

If I say no, she’ll let them out.

She moans, as if she is fine with either outcome.

“Exactamundo, kiddo. No matter what, I get a front row seat to the action. We’ll do terrible things together, or I’ll watch as all those Other Us’s drive you bat shit crazy.”

“Okay,” I say after a long breath. “I accept your deal. We’ll work together.”

Her hands retract into the void then, soon after, a scroll of paper unwinds onto the bar and flattens. Fine pint, too small to read, is etched into the document in a number of blocky paragraphs, leading all the way down to the bottom where a line awaits my signature.

“We must make it legal,” she says. “Can’t have you getting second thoughts.”

A fountain pen appears in my hand. I move it to the line to sign, but there is no ink. I hear a judging tsk-tsk-tsk from the Other Me. “Blood opens,” she says with a seething hiss. “Blood closes. A sacrifice is made. A deal is signed.”

Immediately understanding what it required, I take the nib of the pen and jam it into my left index finger. Blood draws slowly up the metal point and begins filling the reservoir.

I wonder, as I move the pen over the line, if I should do this, but there is no hesitation. I never want to hear those voices ever again. Quickly I scribble my name in thin, red cursive letters.

The scroll quickly rolls back up into the darkness. Her eyes close and I lose track of where she is. Seconds pass. I lick the blood from my finger but it’s already sealed shut.

“Run rabbit,” she suddenly and terribly says.

“What,” I say, staring into the pitch black umbra.

“Run rabbit.” Her voice is like a grunting oliphant horn. “Run…run…RUN!”

Abruptly she thrusts forward from shadow into light, emerging above me from the blanket of darkness with my face, but covered in maggots and mold and smelling of rot. She says, “We need some ME TIME.”

As she speaks her skin shifts and sags off the angles of her face like a poorly fitted rubber mask. One of her gnarled hands reaches up to grab some loose flesh and I witness something truly abhorrent. The face is torn away along with her clothes and the meaty layers of her body like a person suit which lands on the carpet in a wet, sloppy pile.

There now stands a black, glistening creature with RED EYES and rows of SHARP TEETH behind an unhinged Cheshire grin. She’s humanoid in shape with two arms attached to a central torso but she isn’t a woman anymore. She’s something alien. An Entity from beyond.

I try to get away but my foot hooks the stool’s crossbar. I fall to the floor landing hard on my left hip then roll onto my back. The monster leaps over the counter and comes down atop me.

With my arms down pinned down with great strength she spews hot, foul breath in my face. “Look who’s here,” she says with grinning teeth.

I turn my head to follow her gaze and I saw them, all of the Other Me’s, lined up shoulder to shoulder in staggered lines, each with a contorted smile slashed across their faces.

“They do like to watch,” she says above me while licking her lips. Her hot body presses against mine and grinds into me like an animal in heat.

I want to struggle. I want to get away. Like Faust, I want to regret signing the paper and giving this thing allowance to use me however she wants, but I don’t. I accept what is happening because somewhere, deep down, I know this is what I’ve always wanted.

My eyes tick over, like the second hand on an analogue clock, and gladly stare into her red eyes without remorse.

“Oh God,” I whisper in rapture as the Monster Me opens her grotesque mouth, peeling wet lips back from jagged fangs and putrid gums. I want nothing more than to see the cavity spreading apart to reveal a concentric nightmare of absolute darkness, and the longer I look, the more I sense something in the void moving toward me.

A thick, ropy white tentacle uncurls from the cavernous space of her mouth and flares the sickly, pulsating suckers on its underside. There are no words in any language of man to properly describe the ecstasy I feel as it comes toward me.

More appendages stretch out into the light, writhing and dripping with a vile plasma which smells sweetly of rotting death. The tentacles curl back over her head, latching onto its own face with hundreds of suckers, and together all at eight arms push. A wet, white shape emerges from the Monster Me’s mouth, much larger than the opening, forcing her jaws to dislocate with a loud pop.

As the bulbous thing descends I see it’s covered in what appears to be blisters, but when one of the welts splits open it isn’t to spew puss or ooze. It’s to reveal a large, milky eye, and reflected in the mirror I see myself.

More eyes open, hundreds of them, all looking glasses with my face staring back at me, and I’m laughing madly, lost in the downward spiral of psychosis. The Other Me’s are laughing, too, like a horde of hyenas, guffawing, raving, falling over and rolling around on the floor around me.

The tentacles wrap around my face, and slowly the arms enclose my head, until the last slither of light between them is snuffed out and I am completely lost in the beautiful horror.

I wake up in bed. Angel is asleep next to me. I’m covered in sweat and my heart is racing. My hand pushes slick hair stuck to my face out of the way and I wonder if it was just a dream.

I take several slow, deep breaths. The panic burns out like a fire without fuel and my heartbeat slows. I start to lay back down but I get that feeling like someone’s watching me. Over in the chair, half hidden from the moonlight shining in through the window by the half-closed curtain, is the Other Me.

She says, “We’ve taken our first steps. Together we will achieve great things—terrible things, but great nonetheless.”

I lay down and close my eyes.

And I’m smiling.