Muse by Rebecca Lim
She takes a sip of her juice, then puts it down, lost in thought. I cross over to her and put my glass and plate down next to hers. I see her shoulders tense as she zeroes in on the backs of my hands. Is it my imagination, or is Irina’s skin the tiniest bit … luminescent? When I stare harder at it, it just seems like ordinary skin to me.
I know Gia’s biting back a million questions as she crosses over to the console table near the door and picks up the telephone receiver. She looks down and dials a number.
‘I’ve always liked puzzles,’ she mutters as she waits for someone to pick up. ‘Who knew one day I’d end up working for one?’
It’s probably a ten-minute walk from my hotel to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele — the place where the parade’s supposed to take place. But when you’re Irina Zhivanevskaya you don’t ever walk anywhere unless you’re paid to do it. So we drive there, and it takes us twenty minutes to make it from my suite to the car. The whole time Vladimir watches me, stony-faced, with his wise-guy eyes, and says nothing. He doesn’t even try to make nice, because at some subterranean level, he doesn’t recognise who I am any more.
Gia watches him watching me and calls Gianfranco, feeding him the fake story we’ve worked out together, in fluent Italian. Then she calls Giovanni’s head of security and tells him the same story, in the same language, and says we’re on our way. Lastly, she calls someone at Irina’s management company’s head office in New York to let them know that Giovanni Re won’t be suing for breach of contract now, because Irina’s feeling much, much better.
It takes us another half-hour to reach the edges of the Piazza del Duomo, where paparazzi surround the car, shouting twenty questions in almost as many languages. Some of them even start banging on the outside of the limo. But the driver just keeps crawling forward at a snail’s pace and, like an overcrowded life raft complete with clinging humanity, we edge closer towards a grand, triumphal arch at least one hundred feet high.
I realise as we get closer to the giant arch that it’s the main entrance to the Victorian-era Galleria: a building with a wide frontage onto the Piazza del Duomo that’s punctuated by graceful arched windows. The few people allowed to pass under the arch by the burly security guards standing on either side, look like ants.
Everybody seems to be focused on my car. Nobody’s looking at the sky, which is filled with billowing grey storm clouds as high as mountain ranges. They look like the massed sails of a fleet of Spanish galleons setting out to war. Nuriel and Luc are out there in that, somewhere. If one of them hasn’t already killed the other. The thought makes my stomach lurch.
Don’t force me to choose sides, I think feverishly. Please.
Gia sees me shiver, and knocks on the glass screen between the three of us and the driver, telling him to turn up the heating.
As we draw up to the entrance of the Galleria, she points out the two giant banners hanging down either side of the high, open archway and murmurs, ‘You see how much faith Giovanni placed in you? The gamble he took on you was huge.’
The left banner, at least one hundred feet tall, features a colour photograph of a model with strong eye make-up and a sky-high beehive wearing a stunning red, vintage-style evening gown, the kind that Gia herself would kill to own. I realise belatedly that the dress looks vintage because the photograph itself is from another time, maybe the 1960s. And it’s in Giovanni’s signature red, rosso Re. It’s from the start of his career.
The right banner depicts a model whose small, symmetrical face is dominated by smoky, smouldering eyes; her long, caramel-coloured hair is tousled and unbound, and pulled forward over her shoulders. She’s wearing a gown that looks as if it’s made of chain mail created from molten gold. Her hands are wrapped around the bejewelled pommel of a golden sword, which she’s holding point down before her, like a medieval knight in a painting or on a tombstone. The model’s long, narrow feet are bare and she looks like a pagan warrior queen, a powerful sorceress.
The two images side by side are so stunning, and so unlike each other, that it takes me a moment to realise that the figure on the right is Irina. It’s the opening look from the parade, without the wings.
‘When was it taken?’ I whisper, craning my head up to study the vast image through the tinted windscreen of the limo. I would have remembered the sword. It would have made me recoil even more than the wings.
‘When we arrived three days ago,’ Gia replies softly. ‘But before … you did.’
Vladimir startles us both by saying loudly, ‘We’re in position.’
The car door on my side is suddenly thrown open and I have to shield my eyes from the sudden glare of camera flashes. Giovanni’s head of security leans in and Vladimir hands me out towards him.
‘Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Crackhead,’ I hear someone say nastily as I make my way under the arch, blinking as my eyes adjust to the level of light inside the Galleria.
In the strange way I sometimes have of seeing too much almost at once, I see that the building — a kind of glorified shopping mall that’s four storeys high — is cruciform in layout, shaped like a giant cross. That fact alone raises instant goose flesh on the backs of my arms. It’s formed of two covered arcades at right angles to each other, each with a vaulted, arched ceiling built of struts of iron and thousands of panes of glass. Where the two arcades meet in the middle, there’s an octagonal space, topped by a giant glass and iron dome that has to be over one hundred and sixty feet across. The floors of the Galleria are inlaid with mosaic tiles that form symbols and patterns of great beauty and rich colour, and there are colourful painted scenes upon the pendentives beneath the gigantic dome. It’s all stunningly beautiful.
The arcade I’m facing down forms the north–south axis of the cross. A team of black-clad men and women are putting the finishing touches to a narrow white catwalk that runs down its dead centre, and laying out white chairs in rows on either side. The catwalk features a circular platform that’s centred beneath the giant dome, and narrows again as you move away from the dome towards the northern end of the arcade. There it ends abruptly in a white, featureless ‘wall’ with a concealed opening, which is actually one wall set in front of another that runs back behind the first. The effect is such that the people I see coming and going through the narrow aperture seem to suddenly just appear or disappear.
More people are busy setting out white chairs around the central, circular platform, while others are standing at the iron railings of the third-floor balconies, carefully making final adjustments to the false wall of giant video screens that hides the shopfronts inside the Galleria from the audience. It’s as if real life is not allowed to intrude on the spectacle Giovanni has planned. I realise suddenly that all these people are busy turning this glorious building into a kind of giant blank canvas on which his final vision is to be projected.
Gia takes me by the arm as Juliana materialises in front of us, surrounded by security men in dark suits. There’s a worried crease between her strong, dark brows, but a smile lightens her expression when she meets my eyes.
‘You are just in time,’ she says to us both. ‘While they test the sound and the light, we make you ready, yes? Come this way.’
We’re absorbed into Juliana’s security detail and move as a group towards the northern end of the catwalk, through a sea of stares and whispers and gestures.
Someone abruptly turns on the lightshow. My hands fly up to my face in awe as the entire space — the blank white of the catwalk, the video screen-covered walls, even the chairs — is suddenly transformed into a moving, changing panorama of the universe. Giovanni has brought the cosmos inside: everywhere I turn, I see comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space, twisting and curling overhead, all around. Along one side of the arcade, a solid wall of stars melds into the weird towering shapes of stellar spires — so much like reaching fingers, the expelled breath of the universe itself. On the other, the remnants of supernovae morph into the surface of distant Io, then
As we walk beneath the giant dome, it comes to life, dripping with a cobweb of tiny, sparkling blue lights. A blue so pale and luminescent it’s almost the colour of holy fire.
And the music that suddenly bursts forth from the speakers is the operatic duet that was playing when I walked through the atrium of Atelier Re yesterday. Two voices, two soprani, singing a piercing melody so haunting, and so familiar, that I screw up my face in pain, trying to remember where I’ve heard it before, how I know it.
‘It’s the closing song,’ Juliana bellows cheerfully. ‘Your song. You appear in the white bride’s dress, the wings and boom — the voices, like the angels. The end. Happiness.’
Happiness?
It’s too much for me to process. I feel as if I’m spinning weightlessly, out of control, through space as those disembodied soprani sing:
Sous le dôme épais
Où le blanc jasmin
Ah! Descendons
Ensemble!
It’s French. Someone told me that once. From Léo Delibes’ Lakmé. The Flower Duet. And it means: Under the thick dome where the white jasmine … Ah! We descend, together!
Lauren Daley and Jennifer Appleton sang that duet together one night, at an inter-school concert in the tiny town of Paradise. After that, their lives were never the same again.
I don’t believe in fate. I believe in coincidence, that’s how I’m wired. But when I hear the words Paul Stenborg uttered in another life, in Carmen’s life, coming at me from the surround-sound system at a volume loud enough to split my head open, I actually swoon. I fall to the ground.
And the uncaring universe that swirls and turns and changes above me, that reminds me so much of home, goes dark for a little while.
‘Irina?’
‘It’s a gigantic publicity stunt, I tell you.’ It’s a woman’s voice, malicious. Hint of an Irish accent. ‘The gold dress should’ve been mine, anyway. Couldn’t you just see it with my hair? I told Giovanni it was a mistake to cast her, from the word go.’
‘Irina?’
‘Was ist los?’ Another woman, speaking German, sounding curious.
Voices are coming at me from everywhere, in languages I don’t ever recall knowing or speaking — Japanese, Dutch, Korean, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Sudanese — almost all asking: What’s wrong with Irina? What’s she on? What’s she playing at? What’s her game?
I open my eyes to find that I’m backstage. I’ve been carried behind that blank white wall at the northern end of the building. I’m slumped untidily in a raised armchair before a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. It’s a make-up chair, I realise, as I see, on either side of me, models having their faces touched up or painted, all craning their swanlike necks, trying to get a look at me between brushstrokes. There are people everywhere, crammed into this narrow area alongside racks and racks of mind-blowingly beautiful, intricately detailed gowns. Some are in various states of undress, curlers piled high atop their heads; others clutch the weapons of beauty in their hands: brushes, dryers, tongs. A parade of elongated, idiosyncratic beauties passes behind my chair constantly, all wearing that fearsome demon facepaint Tommy devised: smoky eyes touched with gold, strong brows, and blood-red lips and nails.
I see Irina’s face in the mirror. Free of any make-up.
Giovanni’s, Juliana’s, Gudrun’s, Gia’s and Tommy’s faces are reflected there, too, crowded around Irina, all looking concerned.
And my own face is reflected there, though visible only to me and to Gudrun. She meets my eyes, knowingly, in the mirror and I wonder again why she always wears modest, high-necked, old lady’s blouses when she has such killer curves.
‘Say something,’ Tommy pleads in his light, silvery voice. ‘Don’t tell me you fractured that multimillion-dollar skull of yours when you went down.’
‘You say she has the trouble with her feet,’ Juliana murmurs to Gia. ‘Not the balance. Feet and balance together — that’s very bad. How can she walk?’
I see Gudrun — her skin faintly gleaming, but only to my eyes — wrap one of Giovanni’s arms in hers. She pats him on the hand reassuringly, her blood-red nails glistening.
‘It’s too late to change the banner now,’ Giovanni confides to her worriedly. ‘It must remain. But Orla will have her way. We must end with the silver gown.’
A woman with flaming red hair, dressed in a heavily beaded, blue-green bustier, blue jeans and bare feet, gives an excited little clap at the periphery of my sight.
‘Over my dead body,’ I say, refocusing the attention of everyone gathered around me. ‘And, clearly, I’m not dead.’
The redhead’s expression congeals as Tommy calls, ‘Let’s do this, people! In ten. From the top.’
I place my hands upon the padded armrests of my chair and hoist myself upright, then lift my arms resignedly as a phalanx of complete strangers rushes at me, shouting at me to take my clothes off and for heaven’s sake, be quick about it.
When we return to the hotel suite around midnight, I’m in no mood to talk.
‘Get some rest,’ Gia says at the door to my bedroom. ‘You were unbelievable today — I had shivers down my spine every time you appeared. And when Orla stepped on the hem of her silver dress and fell out of it and her shoes right before you came out in the fantasy bridal gown, I nearly died laughing.’
‘Just one more day … Mercy,’ she says my name hesitantly, ‘then maybe you’ll get to go … home.’
I don’t reply. I just lock myself inside the ensuite bathroom and stare at my reflection, at Irina’s, and shed her clothing as if it is contaminated.
Then I sit on the floor of the marble shower stall and just let the water pound down on me for a while.
When I fall asleep, it’s as if I slide into a black and formless pit.
It’s out of habit that I reach for Luc in my dreams, search for that slender thread that continues to bind us together, even though I still can’t reconcile the horrors I witnessed through his eyes, through the news footage, with the Luc I love and remember.
Instead, I find myself in a blank, black void, deprived of every sense. It’s never happened before, and I can’t even call out Luc’s name because nothing’s working.
I can’t feel him out there.
It’s as if I’ve been shut down, or shut out.
It’s as if the connection between us — that’s always been there, always — has been severed.
When I wake suddenly and turn my head to look at the clock on the bedside table, it’s already 10.05 in the morning. My cheeks are wet with tears. Because that feeling of absolute disconnect can only mean that Luc’s badly injured, even … dead.
I sit bolt upright and have to stop myself from letting loose a scream to shake this building to its foundations. Gia doesn’t need to see Irina, me, us, caving in.
He’s been my only true friend, my constant companion. How do I make you understand what this sense of absence … feels like?
There’s a roaring in my ears, darkness in my eyes. It feels as if I’ve lost my hold on the physical world. My mind is suddenly crowded with memories: of the two of us in our sacred garden, our perfect place; of Luc laughing, his golden head of hair thrown back, revealing the sinuous line of his throat; of Luc dazzling me, almost scaring me, with his feats of grand magic; of Luc placing my happiness first in all things, disregarding everyone and everything else around us.
He’d said he existed to amuse me. He’d said he existed to prove what love could be.
And he’d said:
You are the best and most loved thing in my life — let nothing ever be possible, or complete, if you are not with me. And may the elements witness my vow in all th
I can’t help it, I let out a wail that has sharp edges to it — a sound of such terrible grief and loss and mourning, that Gia bursts through the door of my bedroom at a run.
From inside the cavernous, black limo, I stare up, numbly, at the hundred foot image of Irina that stands guard at the entryway to the Galleria.
I don’t even know if Luc’s alive.
I feel emptied out, incapable of feeling anything right now.
Maybe I don’t know who he is any more, and maybe I won’t like what he’s become since we’ve been physically apart, but I can’t imagine a life, any sort of life, without Luc.
It’s something that will take major adjusting to, and right now I have no time. I can feel it getting away from me again, reeling out of my hands like an angler’s line.
I just hope They do it properly this time when they shift me — so that I forget everything. It was almost simpler when I didn’t remember, because I had no concept of what it was possible to lose.
‘It’s just gone noon,’ Gia says gently, casting me her thousandth sideways glance of concern for the day, ‘and the parade’s set for four with cocktails at six, dinner for the chosen ones at eight then the afterparty from midnight onwards. As soon as the parade finishes, I’ll meet you backstage, but before then, you’re on your own. Juliana doesn’t want any extra bodies back there — it’s already a tight squeeze. She’s somehow managed to wangle a front-row seat for me beneath the dome. Just do what you did yesterday, okay? And you’ll be helping Giovanni, Irina and all those poor people …’
We look at each other sombrely, recalling how we’d watched the world burn from our six-star hotel room.
The limo’s door is opened from the outside and Vladimir hands me out onto the red carpet that’s already been laid from the Piazza straight into the Galleria’s arched entryway. There’s the usual wall of noise and faces and camera flashes, but it’s all being kept at one remove by the golden ropes cordoning off the red carpet. I look neither left nor right as I hurry towards the entrance, Vladimir’s unyielding hand at my back.