‘Legend. It’s strange – you don’t sound like you come from New Mexico. My first boyfriend came from there.’
‘I reinvented myself. Don’t we all?’ He wondered how much she had really guessed about him, but she was up now, stretching her limbs like a ballerina moving through slow treacle. She was so high he could do anything with her, absolutely anything – the thought made him hard. ‘Do you think you could really fly?’ he murmured.
‘Maybe, maybe I could,’ she sang back as she bent over and he couldn’t help noticing that she waxed her pudendum. Closing his eyes for a moment, he tried imposing Susie’s face on hers, but it didn’t work.
His heart was pounding, his mind racing over all kinds of tangential possibilities and strategies. He could rule the world. What was he thinking? He did rule the world, puppet master of his own sphere, and now he was going to prove it. He opened his eyes to see Leia dancing to the music oozing through the hidden surround-sound speakers, looping like bands of iridescent light over and over the girl’s sinewy undulating body. She was so self-absorbed she might as well have been masturbating, he observed, before picking up a small digital video camera that he kept for recording – tool of the voyeur. ‘Do you believe in the multiverse?’ he asked, now standing in front of her, filming her gyrating figure.
‘Totally. In this moment there are a multitude of Felixes and a multitude of Leias – stretching out in front and back, each little scenario playing out entirely differently from the next… ’
He zoned in on her face, the eyelids encrusted with glitter-like make-up. ‘Exactly. So in one of these parallel universes those wings would work, you would really fly… ’ To his own ears his disembodied voice sounded distanced and profound – like the narrator in a documentary. Yes, that was it! He was the narrator.
‘I would?’
‘Completely. You would be a triumphant creature of the sky, your wings stretching out to catch the night breeze… ’
A slow smile spread across her face. Felix guessed the ecstasy was really strong. She glided toward him as if hypnotised, gently moving her shoulders so that the wings did seem to flap slightly as he gently directed her towards the balcony, following her as he filmed, the shifting orbs of her pale buttocks, the moonlight catching at her hair and shoulders, excitement thumping like a drum at the back of his throat as she stepped out.
‘You said it yourself: it’s all a question of visualisation… For if we are merely a shifting mass of atoms in a particular configuration in this particular set of physics, what’s stopping us from changing ourselves?’ he continued enticingly, the roar of the city now washing over them.
He felt great, omnipresent as if he could, if he wanted, stop time with one click of the camera. He stood side-on, filming her figure in profile as she leaned over the balcony, the wind transforming her long hair into the serpents of a Medusa, the spiky quills of the angel wings pointing downwards like outstretched fingers.
‘So in this parallel world there would be nothing stopping you from stepping up on that wall, and stretching your huge wings out to catch that strong wind coming in from the north, and with one small leap taking off and soaring high above the building, above the Chrysler Building, above the Trump, swooping down over the harbour, past the Statue of Liberty… flying like an angel, as powerful as an eagle, nothing stopping you at all… ’ He inched her nearer to the edge of the balcony, camera still whirring, and realised he was fully erect, the first time in weeks.
‘In that parallel world… ’ she ventured, oblivious to his excitement, the gold-painted feathers rattling in the breeze.
He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. ‘Imagine if you could step out of this world into that world, that all it would take was a leap of blind faith, of total conviction that you, and you alone, decided which existence you lived. The kind of faith it takes to be a great artist, to make one final statement of profound creativity. Imagine that – to transcend the mundaneness of gravity.’
She let him lift her up onto the wall, the side of the apartment block a screaming sheer drop that seemed, even to him, terrifyingly seductive in its plunging infinity.
‘Imagine… ’ she whispered, hypnotised, dangling her legs over the wall on the street side.
‘You said it yourself: it’s just a matter of visualisation and then you’re there,’ Felix murmured encouragingly.
Below them the wail of a police car belting its way through the streets floated up. Felix paused, thinking he would lose her; that she’d break out of the moment.
‘Total blind faith, a great act of art, a gesture against the ordinary life… ’ she murmured.
‘All you need is to stand up on the top of the wall, then let go, let your wings take you… soaring out into another level of existence… ’ he whispered, intensely excited by his power over her. Slowly she swung her feet back up to the top of the wall, then rose into a squatting position. Framed by the camera, she resembled one of Max Ernst’s half-bird, half-woman creatures. Felix’s heart was now a huge ape shaking the bars of its cage.
‘You want me to stand, to fly off this wall… ’ she asked in a sing-song voice as she slowly rose to her feet, arching high above him as he tilted the camera to capture the whole of her tall physique set against the night sky.
‘I want you to fulfil your destiny, to make something of yourself.’ Felix’s voice hung suspended against the wind while he prayed that the camera was recording every single word.
The waitress balanced against the wind, her wings now rustling wildly, her hair streaming back. Felix’s imagination was already in the next moment, the girl’s tumbling figure with the flailing arms and legs helpless in the fall, the rushing pavement; the collision of flesh and concrete.
He would fly with her, he would be her.
*
Latisha watched the girl standing up there on the lip of the wall like an angel, like the building had suddenly sprouted a statue of flesh out of the white stone. How she stayed standing on that slim edge, Latisha could barely imagine, the breeze throwing up the girl’s red hair and those wings looking like they might blow away with the next gust of wind.
Latisha wanted to scream, but she was frightened she would scare the girl and send her plummeting toward the stream of cars that kept on streaking down the street, unaware of the drama above. And so she sat there, immobile, not daring to breathe, to move, the alchemy of the movements of her own body linked to the girl’s across the street. Behind the girl, on the balcony, she could see Felix. She turned the binoculars onto him, focusing the lens. His expression filled the two circular frames; he was a man in rapture. Don’t push her, don’t push her, Latisha prayed. Don’t push her like you did Maxine. Next to her she felt the ghost praying with her.
*
Susie sat bolt upright in the bed that was alien to her – wrong position, the sheets twisted about her damp with sweat. She’d been in the middle of a nightmare. She couldn’t quite remember what it was about, but Maxine had been there, leading her somewhere, somewhere full of shouting and fear.
On the bedside table the clock digits glowed 03:00.