Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet (debian ebook reader .txt) 📕

fanciful moonrise/sunset on a steampunk zeppelin, pulled by a team of elegant purple dragons.

Gina had found the perfect venue for the festivities—perfect for her, at any rate. The rest of us were just along for the ride. She had us meet her at a generic wine bar, probably so that no one would instantly bail; then we trooped over to the nightspot, Gina in the lead. It was instantly obvious I hadn’t gotten clear of the sex industry after all: this was some kind of Goth, medieval-bloody S&M fetish club with the tag line “The Decadent Seduction of a Horrific World.” I was glad I hadn’t invited members of the older generation, though it did give me a bit of pleasure to ideate Chip’s mother entering the place.

There was a band playing dirge-like atonal music whose singer had multiple studs sticking out of his cheeks Chia Pet-style; in cages hanging from the ceiling, ghoulishly clad people danced in zombie-style slow motion. Holes were strategically cut in the dark, shining costumes they wore, which made them resemble enormous spiders, albeit with hanging or popping characteristics. On the walls played grainy, obscure movies of what seemed to be morgue attendants plying their trade; and then, of course, there were your basic whip scenarios, masks and black latex.

“At seven we have the Ravage Room booked,” said Gina. “A private show. Just for us.” The prospect filled me with creeping dread—at that point I would have welcomed a few basic, beefcake male strippers—but I ordered a drink and played it casual, as Gina demanded. One woman in our party, the only person I’d invited from my office, was openly terrified, eyes darting around like those of a hunted herbivore. She said she was feeling sick, slunk off to the bathroom, and did not return. I felt bad and made a mental note to reach out to her when I went back to work; she had photos of poor kids tacked up on the walls of her carrel whom (she believed, at least) she was sponsoring with monthly payments to a multinational charity. Seated atop her computer were several “cute” bobbleheads.

“Gina,” I said with some audible irritation, because Gina only intimidates me sometimes, “congrats. One down, thirteen to go. You really outdid yourself this time.”

“That woman’s got an actual PBR can stuck through her giant ear-pierce hole,” mused Gina. “You think it’s got any beer in it?”

“Seriously, Gina,” I said, shaking my head. “I swear.”

“Absinthe for everyone!” she cried.

Nearby stood our waitress, waiting for orders with tears of blood flowing from her eyes. She was wearing a skin corset, that is, a corset whose dozens of opposing hooks, between which dark-red-and-black silk fabric was stretched, went into her actual skin in two rows up and down her back. I stared at the hooks, goggle-eyed.

“First round’s on me!” crowed Gina. “Let’s raise a glass of the favorite drink of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast! To Debbie and Chip! Absinthe for everyone!”

“Could I please have a wine cooler?” asked someone timidly.

“I’d like a Budweiser Chelada,” said someone else to the torture waitress. “Do you have Budweiser Cheladas? Those ones that come in cans?”

“Pimm’s Cup,” said my college friend Ellis, a good-looking dentist.

Ellis pretends to be a Brit, doing an accent he learned from Masterpiece Theatre, but his deal is he won’t admit he’s not English no matter what you say—despite the fact that his parents were born and bred in Teaneck, N.J. The mother chews enormous wads of bubblegum-flavored bubblegum. Though technically a prosthodontics specialist, Ellis is really more of a method actor. He never drops his English persona, going so far as to eat cottage pie, Marmite and large jars of pickled onions; he even leaves his bottom teeth slightly crooked. He makes annual trips to London, ostensibly to “see some West End theater” but really for language immersion, honing the accent. I think he tries to pass there, and where he fails he makes adjustments. The upshot is it works perfectly for him, here in the Golden State, where based on his Englishman status he sleeps with dozens of women.

No one was jumping onto Gina’s pretentious absinthe bandwagon. Everyone was annoyed they even had to be there in the first place, all they’d signed on for was a harmless bachelorette party and instead here they were at the Plague Death Tavern, where rooms off the main area had blood-dripping signs in visceral designs that read RAVAGE, BLACK TUMOR, and PUSTULE.

Also, the cover charge wasn’t nothing.

I sympathized with my guests, hell, I agreed with them, so that when it was Gina’s turn to make a bathroom run I smiled at their plan to get back at her. And when we did—before too long—file into the private space referred to as the Ravage Room, several of us were feeling better than we’d felt before, newly brimful of liquid courage.

A minute later the red lights in the Rav. Room changed to a purplish-blue and an amateur theatrical began, involving a peroxide-wigged woman in a white dress, behaving fakely innocent, and a muscular man, possibly garbed as some kind of primitive metalsmith, who wielded a battleax-like tool and seemed to have small nubs of horns implanted between his skull and his scalp. I couldn’t figure out what they were enacting, but I got the message that it was both purportedly twisted and achingly stupid.

“You’re kidding,” I groaned to Gina. “The pedophile theme? Really?”

“It’s tradition,” said Gina, smugly.

She wasn’t so smug a minute later, when the guy with horn implants turned his attention away from the pretend virgin and focused it on her. One thing about Gina is, she talks a great game and she’ll even walk the talk if she can do so in private, but she doesn’t like to be in the spotlight. It’s a secret weakness that can, if necessary, be turned against her.

The horned man in his satanic leather stylings had a piggy, solid kind of face on him, a face that signaled openly that