Mama take this badge off of me
I can't use it anymore
It's getting dark, too dark to see
I feel I'm knockin' on heaven's door
KNOW YOU’VE BEEN watching me and listening. Listening to not only my words and interactions with others, but also my innermost thoughts. I’ve felt your presence for a long time but I’ve waited until now to address you directly because I don’t know whether or not you can be trusted.
For the record, I don’t like that she’s talking to you but I ain’t too proud to take help where I can get it. She needs our support. All of our support. You’ve been a freeloading stowaway for all these years, bucko. It’s time to nut up and contribute to this situation.
That’s the Other Me. My Dark Self. My Better Half. You’ve seen her, haven’t you? Don’t deny it. I’m not ashamed to have another version of me living in my head. She’s my protector. My savior. You’ve seen what happens when we’re together. You’ve seen what we become.
Don’t act shy now. After all, you’re in here, too, so best not judge. Then again, you’ve seen me kill and torture several people, so maybe you’re looking down from a pedestal thinking you can do so much better with this body. Have you been secretly planning a hostile takeover this entire time? I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to be in your position either but you might as well get comfy because I’m not going anywhere.
You’re wondering why now, after all this time ignoring your presence, am I choosing to speak to you. It’s a reasonable question with a simple answer. I want you to understand why I am the way I am because with everything that has happened, I’ve realized that a Gorgo divided against themself cannot stand. Them. Plural. As in me, the Other Me, and you.
We were created for purpose beyond what most can comprehend. It isn’t destiny, at least not in the metaphysical sense. Our nature is what follows, like the wind that fans the flames of a wildfire or stirs a hurricane above warm ocean waters.
You understand, don’t you? Most people go through life thinking they are the hero of their story. They excuse their bad behavior as mistakes rather than character flaws or blame it on others. I’m under no such illusion. I am not good, nor am I evil. I simply am necessary.
A lot is happening now. Can I count on you? I hope so. You won’t like what will happen if I find out you’re working against me, if I have to sick the Other Me after you. There is nowhere in my head for you to hide. She will root you out from wherever you’ve been hiding and you will not like what comes next.
Not. One. Bit.
It won’t come to that. I can tell we’re going to be tip top friends. Friends for real. You, me, and the Other Me can be one big happy family.
SHOULD BE THINKING about my brother but instead I’m stewing about Enigma. How could we lose? I’ll tell you. My partner spent more time outside the ring than in it. Maybe the Monster Machine was having a bad night—or maybe I gave him too much credit.
I thought I could count on Big E to T.C.B. but it was left up to me and you know what? I almost got the job done. I had that little cunt Dolly in my Death Clutch until some weasel screamed over the speaker. Instead of victory I ended up humiliated in my first XWF match.
I never wanted to be in a tag match but that’s what life is a lot of times—a line of miserable fucking tasks, one after the other, from first breath to last.
“But don’t get aggravated,” I suddenly say out loud, shattering the cold silence of the ICU room. My boots fall from the end of the hospital bed so I can sit forward in the chair to make my point. “The moment you show even a sliver of weakness, they have you by the balls.”
My train of thought derails when I remember why I’m New Orleans. My eyes slowly rotate to see my brother, Nathan, cranked-up in his bed. A real life example of Icarus flying too close to the sun, only instead of the sun burning off his wings, it was a city bus turning his brains to mush two years ago.
To say Nate isn’t in good shape is an understatement. That bus took away his ability to walk, left his body uncooperative, and diminished his ability to think and feel. He’s also been prone to violent outbursts, making it difficult to staff his around the clock care requirements.
But otherwise? He was in great health—annoyingly so—but that changed on January 6th. Right around the time I was getting pinned in fucking Montreal, Nate suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. He coded three times in the helicopter and again in the ER. Look at him now. He beat death! Tell him what he’s won, Gorgo!
Cue the game show music. Flashing lights. Canned applause. Then the Other Me’s voices over the scene, “It’s aaaaa…LIFE AS A VEGETABLE!”
Spotlights converge on Nathan. Drum roll. Crash. Laughter. He doesn’t move because he can’t. The lights are on but nobody's home. The doctors and nurses managed to keep him alive until I arrived the next day to consent to treatment.
He actually does look asleep. It helps that they already removed the ventilator from his neck and the IVs from his chest and arms, along with every other wire that was attached to him until an hour ago, save for the vitals monitor next to the bed.
“Did you hear the news?” I ask him while easing back into the seat’s cheaply padded back. “I signed with XWF. The major league. The pinnacle of wrestling. You know, something-something where the big boys play. Didn’t you want to sign with them at one point?”
I look at him and pause.
“Oh, don’t let it get you. Your time in the limelight was fleeting but you did a lot with it. Cheer up! I’m out there keeping the family’s legacy going and you’re part of that. A small part. A…very small part…but a part nonetheless! Yessir, the mold was broken when dad’s tadpoles wormed their way into our mothers’ over easies.”
My brow pushes together, causing hills of wrinkles to buckle the surrounding skin. Dismayed, I say, “I can’t believe you would say that to me.” My mouth opens to continue but quickly I slice off the words with my teeth. After looking around at no one else in the room, I lean closer to whisper, “A murderer…? How dare you, Nathan. That’s a dirty word and I don’t care for that sort of language. Besides, you know why I did what I did.”
He doesn’t know why because we never talked about it but you know why I killed Tibor Petrov, Alexandra Dupin and Vanessa Byrne. You know why I lobotomized Dr. Corso. You remember, don’t you? My father on his deathbed. His face vacuum sealed around the bone. His eyes black saucer disks. His gray and cold hand upholstered in paper-thin mottled skin was almost too weak to hand me the envelope.
“Balance the accounts,” he said faintly.
Inside was a simple piece of paper and written on it was His List.
“You don’t understand,” I say to Nathan with a finger wag. “You don’t understand our father because you didn’t know him. He was a patient man. If you wronged him, he wouldn’t come for immediate retribution. He found no enjoyment in quickly settling scores. He preferred to let things simmer for weeks, months, or in some cases years. The meat of a frightened animal is bitter in comparison to the sweet succulence of ignorance but it takes time—and he ran out of it.”
Every person I’ve hurt had it coming. Don’t tell me you shed one tear for Esteban Farre after what he did to our darling Marisol Vilaro. As for Katz, he was an outlier. I tried to avoid taking his life but he would not be dissuaded. You saw it. The man was obsessed with me and Mari and would not stop until we were both in prison.
On the vitals monitor, Nate’s declining condition is rendered in unfeeling data. See: irregular, racing pulse fighting to counter the declining pressure. See: oxygen saturation dwindling as the time between breaths stretches from seconds to nearly a minute. I move to sit at the end of the bed, near his blanket-covered feet, and reach forward to touch his hand. He’s cold, almost rubbery, like a doll. His face contorts in discomfort as a long, wheezy breath is drawn through his open mouth.
“Where was I?” I ask with a snap. “That’s right. XWF. So guess who already has the opportunity to fight for a championship. That’s right. Me. Granted, I don’t think I should have to earn a number one contendership but that’s the game. I have to pay my dues…Hmm? Oh, you’ll love this.”
I smack his hand. “Enigma is in the match. Yes, that guy you wrangled into that pseudo-satanic faction a few years ago then turned on when you decided to ditch the robes and Jerry Goldsmith score to become a bland Larry Tact ripoff.”
Right about now you’re wondering what my brother dying has to do with professional wrestling and that means you haven’t learned a fucking thing. All this time you’ve spent observing my every move and you still haven’t figured it out.
My life is a lie. Actually, that’s not accurate. My life is a series of lies, each one radiating outward from the previous like tree rings. Most of the time my true self is masked under one of many fashioned identities. Corporate Yelena runs dad’s non-profit. Socialite Yelena is the life of the party. Relationship Yelena is a loving and unselfish partner to Marisol. It’s taxing pretending to not be me, especially when being me is so much more fun.
There is one place where I don’t have to pretend. It’s the only place, really, that the Other Me can come out and we don’t have to hide. We can be our true self and display our full, terrifying glory to the world. That place is a wrestling ring.
But I’m smart. I court their disbelief. I show them us without destroying their skepticism. It’s a gimmick! It’s a shtick! It’s merchandising, merchandising, merchandising!
That is why I love professional wrestling. The Other Me and I get to have our fun in the public eye without consequences and get paid for it while the saps boo between mouthfuls of popcorn.
“LA Blade and Solomine Kind,” I say, reading off my phone. “Kline, sorry. I’ve never heard of either but it’s not like we run in the same circles. Look at this guy.”
I turn the screen around to show him a picture of a man with an overly manicured beard and flamboyant gear that clash with his otherwise gruff appearance. “This one looks like a background character in a Clive Barker wet dream taking the L.D. from a leather daddy in a zipper mask.”
My tongue clicks against my teeth, tsk-tsk. “C’mon, chum. It stands for Long Dick. Thought that was obvious.” I turn the screen toward me and swipe to a photo of Kline. “Now this one is much more in my wheelhouse bodywise, especially if I starve him for a few days first, but unfortunately he has a face made for Land O’ Lakes. Total churn style. He looks like someone lopped off Arnie Grape’s head and stuck it on a grown man. Such a waste.”
My hand drops with the phone and I say, “I’m not cutting a promo. I’m making conversation, Nate, and no offense but you’re doing dick-all to add to the flow. You’re just laying there with your eyes twitching and death rattle snap-crackle-n-poppin’ in my ear like the world’s worst breakfast cereal. Speaking of, here we go with the not-breathing routine. Shit or get off the pot. Time is money.”
As I watch the discomfort in his face tense as the breathless seconds march along with indifferent resolution, a feeling comes over me. A feeling I try very hard to ignore, but the more I dismiss it, the stronger it becomes until I’m overwhelmed with a white hot pain in my chest. My heart is beating war drums in my ears and my nerves are on fire.
“Why are you crying, baby?” the Other Me says behind me as her hands inch over my shoulders. I touch my cheek and my fingers come away wet. I haven’t cried since dad died in front of me. Why now? I don’t even know Nathan. He may be my half-brother but our lives were spent apart. After his accident I didn’t take care of him. I paid professionals to take care of him. The last time we spoke was September of last year and it was fine, and yet here I am, suddenly overcome with grief.
“Dad wouldn’t want this,” I say quietly to her.
“Dad wouldn’t have wanted a lot of things to happen,” she says to me in her organ-grinding voice while her fingers gently comb through my hair. “That’s life. That’s what all the people say…” Her cadence transforms into a soft, whispering song. “You’re riding high in April…shot down in May…”
“I should’ve made an effort with Nathan,” I say while turning to look back at her but her dirty fingers seize my head and roughly force it straight.
“Why?” she asks as her touch softens, now on my neck. “You tried before the accident, remember, and he refused you. He was stubborn and stupid like his mother.”
She’s right. She’s always right.
“Of course I am.”
But being right doesn’t take away the pain in my chest or the grief tormenting my emotions when his pulse flatlines on the monitor and all of his vitals fall to zero. He’s gone. My brother’s gone and so is the last living connection I had to dad but that isn’t the worst part, if you can believe it. The worst part is his eyes. Gaping open and staring at me. Corpses tend to do that. It’s not like in the movies where they gently close with a peaceful grace. Most of the time they go with their faces captured in howling horror. Eyes split open. Mouths contorted in a silent wail. You get used to it but this is different. Until now I never realized how much he looks like our father.
The Other Me says in my ear, “Blue eyes? Check. Excellent bone structure? Check. Face distorted in postmortem frozen terror? Check.”
A nurse enters the room with solemn grace and sincere sympathy. I hate it. Give me the fake-fake-fake half-hearted politeness, not this warm and cuddly emotional embrace as if it’s somehow going to alleviate this awful feeling.
I move from the bed to the chair and reach for my phone on the next table while she listens to his chest with her stethoscope. After exhausting her medical requirements to confirm the obvious, her attention moves to me.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she says as the stethoscope is looped around her neck, then hands fold together below her slightly protruding belly. “I’m going to clean him up and make him more comfortable.”
I look up from my phone. “More comfortable? He’s dead.” The words slip out of me like a thief in the night before my conscious brain can pull them back.
“Real nice,” my Dark Self says and clicks her tongue for emphasis. It’s hard to see her in the lounge chair over there. The light from the dim, recessed fixtures above the bed only captures her in detail from the waist down but the outline of her hand is contorted into an OK sign.
The nurse, to her credit, does not respond with anything less than kindness. Again, I hate her. Tell me I’m horrible. Curse me. Tell me to leave and never return. Make me feel like the terrible sister I know I am.
She starts to mouth her response but I cut her off abruptly. “I’m sorry,” I say while grabbing my Saint Laurent two-tone canvas sling bag off the floor, then stand quickly. “I’m not thinking clearly.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she says, practically dripping with compassion. “You have nothing to apologize for. You are welcome to stay if you wish, or I can come find you after the doctor confirms the time of death.”
“That’s fine, just fine,” I say, already halfway to the door. When I pass the Other Me, her head pops left on the ball of her neck so that her eyes, shining like mirrors in the dark, follow me until I disappear into the hallway. The secluded waiting room is only four doors down. As soon as the door closes behind me I’m calling Mari.
“Yel,” she answers with genuine care.
“It’s done,” I say quietly as my hand pushes the door shut to cut off any prying ears. The line is silent for several seconds. It isn’t until I’ve sat down on one of the couches that her soft voice replies.
“Babe, I’m…well sorry doesn’t even begin—”
“Please don’t,” I cut her off. “I’ve had enough of that since I got here. He’s gone and nothing will change that. If anything I should be happy, right? His medical care and housing has drained over a million from the account last year alone.”
I hook a leg over the other and lean back with a long sigh. My eyes roam around the room aimlessly until I see the painting on the wall across from me. I recognize it as Christ Crucified by Diego Velázquez, or more precisely a mass-market digital reproduction. The way JC is looking down in misery on the cross unsettles me but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
“And now everything actually belongs to you,” she says, and I love her for it, but the way she said you makes me think she really meant us. I surprisingly would have been okay with that—to a point.
That’s right. Yours truly just upgraded from estate executor to sole inheritor. No more red tape. No more hoops to jump through. No more hurdles to clear. No more…insert a dozen other idioms about overcoming unnecessary obstacles. The Niels Gram Foundation and all of dad’s money that initially went to big bro now belong to me.
That’s when I hear the flamingo guitar plucking up an arpeggio.
Some
things
in
life
are
bad…
They
can
really
make
you
sad…
Other
things
just
make
you
swear
and
curse.
I grip the arm of the couch when Jesus of Nazareth lifts his head in the painting but it isn’t Jesus. It’s the Other Me, with my face under her dirty hair and a very Gorgo-like smile sawed across her mouth like a torn zipper.
“Fuck me,” I say out loud. On the other end of the call Marisol moans softly and quips, “First thing when you get back, mami.”
“When
you're
chewing
on
life's
gristle…
Don’t
grumble.
Give
a
whistle!
And This'll
help
things
turn
out
for
the
best…
Aaaaaand…
“What?” I say into the phone before I can process her response. “Sorry, the nurse just walked in. I’ll call you later, okay? Bye.” The phone slips out of my hand as the Other Me begins cocking her head shoulder to shoulder to the beat of the music with the grace of a broken clock hand.
Always
Look
On
The
Bright
Side Of
Life!
“Are you seriously going to sing the whole song?” I ask her as her puckered lips whistle the melody like a baroque stop motion hallucination. “You are singing the whole song. Okay.”
VOICE OVER BLACK.
We are the hollow woman.
The laughing woman.
The daughter.
The sister.
Their voice has the grace of a dull chainsaw chewing through a tree trunk. Though it sounds vaguely feminine, the words are throaty, distorted, and melodious, like a crooner after decades of whisky and cigarettes.
A face pushes out of shadow into harsh, angled orange light that catches the ridges and cliffs of their features in stark contrast, leaving dark pits of shadow in the valleys below.
They are beautiful.
They are terrifying.
They are GORGO.
Enigma, Blade and Kline. Three in a bind but not of a kind. What did they feel when they saw our name—was it fear? Of course not. What is there to fear? Hm, let’s see.
Failure.
Embarrassment.
Obsolescence.
First contendership for the TV title…that sort of midlevel success doesn’t come-a-squawkin’ too often, now does it? Talk about high stakes pressure!
Blade and Kline, have you been on the world wide webbies lately? You’re both dead fucking meat, and not the Top Choice cuts, neitha. You’re offal. The shit they ain’t allowed to sell for human consumption so you’re being fed to the wolves, instead.
Kline.
We gotta admit that we feel a bit-o kinship with you. Our father was also taken away from us by Johnny Law and the Judy Judges. The difference? It made us better. It made us bitter. It made us angry and we use that every single time we enter the ring against someone like you.
You wanna build your own legacy but should be laying the foundation with the bricks from your father’s demolished career. No one is buying tickets to see you. They wanna see Cray-Cray Crimonson’s baabeee boyy succeed in XWF. Maybe one day but not now. Not this match. Not against us.
LA Blade.
Should we begin with that receding hairline you’re trying to hide or your macho Macho Man tan? Yeah, we’re being superficial because let’s be honest, there ain’t much underneath. Beauty is skin deep but what about talent? Charisma? Intrigue? Those wells are dried out, friendo. Anything interesting about you flaking dead cells on your ashy elbows.
You should go back to bouncing at that rowdy dive bar we assume you came from. It’s always under threat from some evil real estate developer. You can practice your thai-chi montages.
Enigma.
We thought you were our ride or die but it turns out you couldn’t be counted on at all. Is this why my dearly departed brother stabbed you in the back? Maybe he was onto something. Maybe you’re just a mountain of muscle. A meat sack with a gym membership.
And a liar.
A LIAR.
Did you think we bought your little singy-songy-dancy routine about why your wife didn’t come to Yelena’s party? Maybe that’s why you screwed the pooch in our tag match. Maybe the ol’ ball-n-chain crawled in your ear. told you to throw the match so you didn’t end up tied to us. Maybe she thinks we’re a bad influence on you.
Maybe we’ll opennn your eyesss.
Maybe then you’ll see like we do. see the sunny side and stop pretending.
You’re a rat walking over broken glass thinking it’s soft grass. Aghast but it won’t last. You need to wake up and remember what you used to be before you were domesticated by marriage and fatherhood.
You’re better than this but don’t worry. The old you is still in there and we’re gonna dig it out of you even if it kills you.
They move away, retreading back into the darkness, leaving only:
BLACK.
So let it be written.
So let it be done.