Arcadia Burns

FREAKS


ROSA AND VALERIE HAD first met online in a community called the Suicide Queens; none of them were personally acquainted with any of the others. All they knew about one another was how they looked in various states ranging from wide awake, to out of it, to near death. The webcams were unforgiving when it came to recording their dying moments, which would be posted on the site.

All the members were girls and young women, although opinion was divided on the question of whether a woman named Lucille Seville had once been a man. At the very least, she wore a wig, which they knew because the paramedics accidentally knocked it off when they were taking her away.

The rules of the Suicide Queens were extremely simple. They took turns, one of them every evening. A greeting on camera to everyone who was logged in, then the presentation of the pills. Usually this introduction occurred in front of the bed or the sofa on which the rest of the drama was to unfold. The first points awarded by the other Queens were for the number of tablets. More points could be scored for powers of persuasion, which were on display during the emergency phone call. Some members of the club screamed and cried hysterically. Others kept perfectly calm and said only, “I’m going to die very soon. Come and get me if you can.”

Valerie was one of the latter sort. She swallowed more sleeping pills than anyone else, and somehow or other she got hold of the really hard stuff. Her next step could only be rat poison. She washed the medication down with alcohol and kept her emergency call short. After that she lay on the bed, in full view of the community at home in front of their monitors, waiting for sleep to come. And for the paramedics. Sometimes they took only a few minutes, sometimes half an hour. Valerie claimed to have seen the light at the end of the tunnel a number of times already. She knew the movie of her life by heart, she said, because she’d seen it flash before her eyes so often.

No one could compare to Val. She took the most pills, stayed conscious longest, and at least once she hadn’t given the emergency services switchboard the number of her apartment. The paramedics had to go halfway around the block asking questions before they found it. Valerie almost died that night. But a week later she was sitting in front of her webcam again, back in the running—with the highest score since the founding of the Queens. Her smug demeanor told everyone that she thought the point of life was in the expectation of death.

Rosa had competed actively only once. She had spent days on Google, reading everything she could find out about committing suicide by taking sleeping pills, pages upon pages upon pages, until the idea almost took on its own kind of morbid romance.

She hadn’t even fallen asleep yet when the ambulance pulled up outside the door of her building. The only club member with fewer points to her name was a punk from Jersey who claimed that aspirin had the same effect as zopiclone and tried to convince them that she had fallen into a coma after the fifth tablet. Rosa had not taken part again.

A week later she met Valerie at Club Exit on Greenpoint Avenue. Valerie spoke to her as easily and cheerfully as if they had met out shopping. Val was wearing a T-shirt that said Your hardcore is my mainstream. Rosa would never have recognized her on her own. The distorted perspective of the webcam, the pixels, the poor lighting had given her a ghostly look that did justice to the name of the Suicide Queens. In real life, however, Valerie was a pale teenager like Rosa herself, with a black bob that gave her the look of a 1920s silent movie star. Like Rosa, she was thin and heavily made up, and at their second outing, at the Three Kings, it was obvious that she also thought much like Rosa. After half a dozen meetings, some by chance, some planned, she admitted that her appearances on the Suicide Queens site were all a hoax. The pills were magnesium tablets, the bourbon was apple juice, the paramedics were friends from the apartment on the floor above hers.

Rosa was both fascinated and disappointed. “How about the Queens and their code of honor?”

Valerie stared at her, astonished. “But they’re freaks!” she blurted out, and that was that.

In the end, Rosa’s admiration for the way Valerie coolly fooled a bunch of idiots who were tired of life—including Rosa herself—won out. During the online chats, the others were all eating out of Val’s hand and never thought of criticizing any of her absurd theories about life after death.

For Valerie it was all a big joke. Offline she laughed unkindly at the other Queens, and Rosa felt flattered because this strange girl trusted her. Of course she would never mention it to anyone; she’d had to promise that just once and never again. She had entered Valerie’s close circle—a circle that consisted of Valerie and Rosa. For the first time since Zoe had left for Sicily, she felt there was someone who took her seriously and accepted her. In spite of the differences between them, her sister had left a vacuum behind, and Valerie filled it with her bizarre charm and charisma.

After that, they danced together through the clubs, from Bushwick to Brighton Beach, they smoked pot under the Brooklyn Bridge, and they tried to think up ways of outdoing Valerie’s triumph over the Suicide Queens. Twice a week Valerie waited tables at a club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, but she wouldn’t take Rosa with her. It was work for her, not play. Rosa respected that.

Valerie had an eye for cute boys, but all she ever did with them was drink and smoke. For Valerie, her attitude was nothing but a show, an illusion—an act she put on for the Suicide Queens as well as men. Even Rosa wasn’t quite sure whether she had ever met the real Valerie, or only the mask she wore for show.

The Halloween party in the Village had been one of thousands of parties thrown in New York that weekend, and what happened to Rosa could have happened to any girl. The drugs in Rosa’s cocktail, the strangers who raped her—it was pure chance that it was her. There were probably several dozen such cases on the same night. She was nothing out of the ordinary; the police had no doubt of that. She’d been drinking; she was wearing a miniskirt. That was enough to make the rape an everyday event with an eleven-digit reference number in the files.

The party had been Valerie’s suggestion. Someone had given her the address while she was waitressing. She and Rosa took a taxi because the subway on Halloween would be hellish, and they began drinking in the back of the cab. All Rosa knew was that they were going to the Village, but she didn’t know the house, and she had no memory of the building where they got out. A typical brownstone: an old building with several floors. The police spoke to Valerie later, but she too said she couldn’t remember the address. Maybe that was the truth, maybe just another lie so she didn’t get a reputation for hanging out with the cops.

Not that it ultimately made any difference. After that evening Rosa didn’t want to see Valerie again, and for reasons that Rosa first put down to a guilty conscience, and later to indifference, Val herself never tried to get in touch. What had looked like a close friendship for a couple of months had really just been a kind of useful link between them based on Valerie’s idea of a good time, and the rape had put an end to any fun for one of them. In Valerie’s world of trendy clubs in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, there was no place for regret or for Rosa.

Sixteen months later Rosa didn’t know Valerie’s number by heart anymore, and the cell phone where it had been stored no longer existed. They had never met at home. There was no Valerie Paige listed, and the last name was far too common to be used as a starting point for inquiries.

In retrospect, it seemed odd that Valerie had disappeared from her life without a trace. Even the Suicide Queens weren’t to be found on the internet anymore, after one of the girls had taken the game too far. For her, there’d been no going back. Rosa did find hints in one forum that the community still existed on another server, under a new name, but there were no direct links, and no other clues to the new online identities of its members. Anyway, she doubted she would have found Valerie there; she had probably gotten tired of playing around with placebos and apple juice long ago, and was looking for her fun elsewhere.

When Trevini still hadn’t called by late that evening, Rosa took a cab to the Meatpacking District. She had never seen the club where Valerie waited tables, but she remembered its name: the Dream Room. She had found the address on the internet and was almost surprised to see that not everything connected with Valerie had vanished into thin air, leaving no trace.

She got out of the taxi just before midnight and joined the line waiting outside the club. It was on a side street and, like so many other buildings in this neighborhood, had once been a slaughterhouse, as an antiquated inscription on the dark brick masonry of the second floor boasted. The neon sign of the Dream Room, however, looked almost modest. A few dozen people were waiting outside its steel door. Two burly doormen were checking the guests’ IDs. Rosa, in her short dress, black tights, and steel-capped boots, was let in easily enough. She hadn’t gone to much trouble with her outfit, but because her wild blond hair wouldn’t be tamed, and was in such contrast to her black clothes, she looked dressed up enough for Manhattan’s chic club scene. At least an Asian girl with pink hair extensions, on her way down the concrete steps, cast an envious glance at Rosa’s blond mane.

The interior designers of the Dream Room had removed the floor of the second story to make an enormously high-ceilinged chamber. From the stairs, all you saw was a wide, wavering surface—cloud cover made of dry ice concealed the view of the dance floor from above. Here and there the swathes of mist parted to reveal a milling throng of bodies. A continuous salvo of beats, somewhere between industrial and jungle music, boomed from unseen speakers.

Now Rosa could see how the Dream Room got its name. Thousands of dream catchers hung from the ceiling, high above the sea of dry ice. Someone must have bought up the entire stock of the souvenir shops on Indian reservations to get so many. The dream catchers dangled up there like mobiles made of wickerwork and feathers, strings of beads and horsehair, some right beneath the ceiling, others deep in the mist. There were dream catchers large and small, plain and extravagant, and they all shook, swinging and turning, from the booming music from the loudspeakers.

Only now did she realize that she had stopped halfway down the stairs. Guests impatient to get in pushed past her, but a few others also stood there taking in the sight.

She tore herself away, walked down the remaining steps, and broke through the layer of dry ice. The scene below was equally eccentric. The floor was crisscrossed by a labyrinth of corridors, like trenches on a battlefield overhung by mist. They linked half a dozen dance floors together. Guests dressed to the nines pushed along the narrow aisles; physical contact was desirable and couldn’t be avoided anyway. Spotlights flickered above their heads. In the trenches themselves, diffuse strip lighting showed the way, and there were other dim lamps here and there, illuminating the corridors for only a few feet ahead. Most clubs tried to present their guests with a world of their own, but Rosa had never seen one that did it so effectively, and by such simple means, as the Dream Room.

Soon she too was making her way along the aisles, looking hard at the waitresses, but she didn’t see anyone at all like Valerie. She hadn’t really expected her to still be here, but maybe someone remembered her and would know where to find her. Trevini would certainly have some explanation ready of how he had come by Valerie’s video, but she doubted it would be the truth. It couldn’t hurt to find out as much about Valerie as possible on her own.

On the edge of one of the dance floors, she leaned over the bar and asked the bartender if he knew a girl called Valerie Paige. He shook his head. The same with her second and third attempts. She was about to plunge back into the turmoil of the trenches when she stopped to watch a remarkable entrance.

The crowd gave way before a group of black-clad bodyguards. The men towered above most of the guests by a head, and beside the wraith-like emo girls and the heavily made-up Goths they looked like trolls. In their midst swooped a figure from another age. A young woman in her midtwenties, with raven-black hair, high cheekbones, and strikingly large eyes, came gliding out of the mist of dry ice onto the dance floor and immediately took possession of it. She was wearing a wide, black hoop skirt, floor-length and trimmed all around with lace at the hem. Entirely absorbed in herself, she swayed her slender torso above the huge skirt in fluid, circling movements. Her bodyguards shooed away any guests who came too close to her, but she seemed not to notice. If she was aware of the presence of other people, she didn’t let on in any way. Countless pairs of eyes were watching her, and hardly any of them showed less than awe and respect.

“Who’s that?” Rosa asked one of the waitresses, who looked at her with as much scorn as if she had been in St. Peter’s, in Rome, inquiring about the identity of the old man at the altar.

“Her name is Danai Thanassis,” said a male voice beside her. A slender young man, a little older than Rosa herself, leaned toward her. His girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes off the graceful dancer. “She’s from Europe. Former Yugoslavia or Greece, I think. Whenever she puts in an appearance, the world stops turning.” He sounded slightly injured, as if his companion had dragged him here just so she could see the dancer make her entrance.

“So what is she? A pop star or something?”

He shook his head. “A millionaire’s rich daughter, they say. Very rich. And very strange.”

The circles made by the woman as she moved around the floor grew larger, forcing bystanders closer and closer to the walls. Some of them tried to retreat into nearby corridors but met a solid rampart of guests pushing forward to see Danai Thanassis and her fascinating dance.

Rosa noticed a man, accompanied by one of the doormen, making his way out of the crowd behind the bar. He looked Italian, or at least of Italian descent. He was talking to the staff, who gathered obsequiously around him. The owner of the club, or at least someone with a say in running it.

As Danai Thanassis went on with her captivating solo performance, Rosa wove her way toward him, moving against the current with such determination that she caught the doorman’s attention.

The music rose to a frenetic roar of bass and heavy beats as Rosa reached the end of the bar, and went up to him, a colossus, with her chin raised. “I want to speak to your boss.”

The corners of the man’s mouth turned down in a pitying smile. Behind him, his boss was still talking to the staff and taking no notice of Rosa.

“I can wait until he’s through with those people,” she said, assuming an innocent expression. “That’s no problem.”

“Why do you want to speak to Mr. Carnevare?”

She was surprised, but not very. Every pile of shit along her way just seemed to be waiting for her to step in it. All a question of habit. Alessandro had warned her about his New York relations—and guess what?

“I’m his cousin,” she said, without batting an eyelash. “From Palermo.” When the colossus wrinkled his brow, she added in pretend desperation, “Sicily? Italy? There’s land on the other side of the ocean, you know.”

The bouncer’s eyes darkened menacingly. She was afraid she’d turned the screw too far. Did he hit women as well as men? She hardly needed to ask.

“Say hi to him from me,” she said, before he could get any stupid ideas, “and tell him I’m here.” She glanced back over her shoulder at “Mr. Carnevare” and saw that he wasn’t bad-looking up close. Not at all bad-looking.

“His cousin?” repeated the doorman, like a robot.

“Second cousin.”

“From Paris?”

“Palermo.” She dismissed the point and gave him a smile. “Oh, let’s just say Europe.”

Once again he looked her up and down suspiciously, probably wondering whether she had already given him a good enough reason to throw her out of the club. But then he turned and went over to his boss.

Rosa used the moment to glance at the dance floor. Danai was now standing motionless in the middle of a gap in the crowd; her bodyguards were keeping it open for her. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted to one side, as if she were a mechanical doll whose clockwork had run down. Suddenly she moved again, seeming to hover gracefully above the lace hem of her skirt as she went toward the nearest passage. Her bodyguards hurried to forge a path through the throng for her. Although they were none too gentle about it, there was surprisingly little muttering or resistance from the bystanders. They were all under the dancer’s spell.

While Danai Thanassis glided closer to the exit, and the crowd slowly shook off the magic of her presence, someone behind Rosa placed a hand on her shoulder.