Vika and I used to show up to the Mercury Room every night with new faces and meet for the first time over and over again. She’d stolen the game from a pulp novel called Night Shift, which she loved to quote like a Bible at every opportunity just in case whoever she was talking to hadn’t realized she was insane yet. Lucky for me, because I was nightmarishly bad at identifying her without a consistent face to seek out, so I needed her voice to hold onto instead, half-ironic and bombasting to a bartender with raised stripes of bone above his eyebrows, “Well, as the Good Book says, ‘He brought her deliciously misshapen body back to life with every touch,’” or something. She always knew me by what she called my “absolute” shining out of my face, no matter how my features were configured. I looked for hers all summer, but I never found it.
Instead, I found dozens of not-quite-hers again and again, always adulterated. One day four-armed like a goddess, another day eight-eyed like a spider, waifish and androgynous or full-figured with her shoulders sculpted into elaborate topography and painted like storm-thrashed snowy mountains. On her twentieth birthday—we were too young to drink, but photo IDs were useless for shifters, so the Mercury Room didn’t bother trying to card—my eyes were ballooned to the size of eggs, and her jaw was stretched wide like a snake’s, and the first thing we agreed on that night was how inappropriate these faces were for an event with a fog machine, because oh God did it sting. So I shrank my eyes back to fit their sockets and she maneuvered her jaw back onto its hinges and we molded ourselves into the forms of two slightly off-putting kids, just a few spots and scars to add a little intrigue, and ordered each other the most radioactive-looking drinks on the menu until we were fucked up enough to go hook up in the gender-neutral bathroom. She was incredibly good at being incredibly stupid, and I was doing my best.
I remember we had this idea in our heads that we needed to do all the dumb shit we could think of, and quickly, while we were still young enough to get away with it. “I don’t want to die with no regrets” was how Vika used to put it, which sounded badass and subversive four years ago but, when you think about it, doesn’t really work as a rationale if you’re saying it every other day. She had already solved that problem many times over. Both of us had—not just your classic alcohol poisoning and bad sex, but broken bones and arrest warrants and things that still make me struggle to look my parents in the eyes sometimes. And as a result I now have a mysterious past. Very sexy, very James Bond. I’m undercover in the business district, collecting polite nods from strangers who recognize the skin of the archetypal young professional.
There’s a guy at the company I’ve been temping with this month who thinks he’s got me all figured out because he discovered we live on the same block. Every day I carefully select the most crowded car on the train, and every day he stubbornly wriggles through the cracks in the fortress of armpits and backpacks I’ve commandeered specifically to keep him out, and he calls me “brother” and invites me to his goddamn Thursday night poker game. Like I’m just another one of him, whole, invulnerable, and all I’ve ever wanted was to make friends by sitting around a table and lying to each other. This is why I’ve been experimenting with alternative routes home. If you’re willing to get a little creative, the back exit of the office building that the maintenance guys use to take out the trash and the back entrance of my apartment building that the tenants use to take out the trash are connected by a two-mile labyrinth of alleys and empty lots, like a hollow parallel city someone forgot to finish building. It’s incredibly sketchy, I won’t lie to you, but I’ve decided to take my chances with muggers for a little peace and quiet.
This is the context in which I finally encounter Vika in her absolute. Four years have come and gone and the further I’ve gotten from her in time, the more the many, many shapes I knew her in have collapsed together into a composite sketch of a woman I’ve never seen before, not until today. She’s sitting against a dumpster with her hand resting dangerously close to a spray of pulverized glass across the pavement, smoking a badly rolled joint and coughing up all the smoke, and I know her, I know her by her face for the first time, I know that this is the common base from which every other form I’ve ever seen was derived, this is her, and all those other faces were just shadows she cast on the wall.
I spend fifteen seconds trying to think of what to say before she rears back from her coughing fit and notices me staring. Her hand darts to her waistband and she rasps out, “You need something, my man?”
“Vika, it’s me,” and the moronic shifter name I gave myself years ago swells like a sponge in my mouth. “It’s Eidolon.”
Her eyes widen. “Eidolon?”
“Yeah, um.” God, it’s so embarrassing. “I mean. I don’t really. I’m mostly going by Will again. Like, I haven’t. You know. Not since. Um.”
She doesn’t even make fun of me. She just jumps to her feet and throws her arms around my neck. I hold her awkwardly, still trying to decide how to be normal about this interaction.
“Where did you go?” she asks, and I truly cannot tell if I love or hate the way she’s clinging to me. On the one hand, she has no right to latch onto me like I’m her knight in shining armor here to dredge her up from the gutter and save her from herself. On the other hand, she smells weirdly nice for someone who was just sitting in trash.
“Where did I—what, four years ago?”
“Yeah, you didn’t even say goodbye.” She pulls back from our embrace, but keeps her hands firm on my shoulders as she inspects my face. “I was like fifty-fifty if you died or got picked up by the cops.”
Because I stopped showing up to a nightclub? “I don’t know, man, I had other stuff going on.”
“You could have told me. Texted, at least.”
“My phone was dead.”
“For four years? I looked for you every night for weeks.”
“You don’t know I wasn’t there. I could have been anyone.”
“Fuck off. I always recognized you.”
“You didn’t just now.”
Vika falls silent. This feels like a victory—and it’s come at the perfect time, because I’ve managed to remember how catching up with an old friend works. I clear my throat. “So, uh, what about you? What have you been up to?”
My shallow cough seems to have reminded Vika of the joint in her hand and when she brings it to her lips, I realize it’s rolled out of a CVS receipt. “Same thing, pretty much. Been hanging out in a squat downtown.”
“Shit, Vika, still?” At least it’s not under a bridge, like when I first met her. The squat was a couple weeks later. A tiny apartment with mold in the walls and rust in the water, packed with shifter kids whose bodies endlessly morphed and rippled and refused to settle, or who could only shift in their sleep and woke up every morning unrecognizable. These were the folks with no legal identities who could never sign a lease or hold down a job.
“No, this is a different one. The old one got busted a couple years back. Then I tried to get into this experimental shifter housing project thing, but I got passed over because I wasn’t employed. Total bullshit. Like, clearly you get that no one wants to rent to us, so why do you think anyone wants to hire us? So then I started seeing this girl who was a complete nightmare, but she had a nice-ass apartment, so…” I am no longer listening. I have become acutely aware of my business casual attire. My cardigan makes me look rich. Is that why Vika didn’t recognize me? Or is my absolute only visible under the Mercury Room’s unique combination of black light and laser projections of procedurally generated pseudo-Japanese cityscapes? Maybe all this time I thought “the absolute” was Vika being poetic, but I just had a giant cum stain across my face that turned bioluminescent every time I walked in the door. Well, I’m certainly not bioluminescent now. Off-white, steel gray, navy blue. I’m sun-bleached, washed up and slippery on the shore.
But at least I’m myself. No pretenses. Not out here pretending to be poor, hanging out in alleys and taking up space in squat houses from people who have no other option, done up in a costume of Spandex and safety pins and ragged seams as though my shifting is too wild and powerful for regular clothes. I know where we came from, and it wasn’t the streets. Vika doesn’t have to live like this any more than I did.
“You could stay with me for a while,” I say for some reason. “I’m a nightmare with a nice-ass apartment.”
Vika cocks her head, a slight smirk creeping up her face. “Oh, I’ve heard that one before.”
“Wait, no, I’m not—okay, I get how that sounded, but I just don’t want you to—I don’t know. Get murdered, I guess. Nothing’s going to happen.” Just let me show you what you’re missing. “I, like, don’t even want to anyway. I’m tired. And I’m having really bad acid reflux anyway these days, so I’d probably just throw up on you.” I know my cardigan’s ugly, but it’s worth it to be able to pay my utility bill. “Plus I started antidepressants in February and, like, they are not lying, that shit kills your libido. I haven’t even masturbated in months. Well, okay, that’s not true. But it was so bad it barely counted. You know how it is.” Please say yes so I can stop talking. Or say no. Say anything.
“Will. Babe. What are you talking about?”
Thank god. “I have no idea.”
Her laugh makes my heart shudder. Still. “Wow, you’ve gotten really bad at this.”
“I’m not really doing anything you can be bad at. It’s just an honest invitation.”
“Well, I appreciate it. And lucky for you, my standards haven’t gotten any higher since the good old days, so I think I’ll take you up on that. Let’s see what happens.”
I wish she’d stop talking like we’re playing another pulp novel sex game. If I were in the mood for bluffing, I would have gone to Thursday night poker.
#
Here’s a story about Vika from the good old days. I’m nineteen years old, walking away from my neighborhood Memorial Day barbecue, and nobody misses me. I turn right at the naturopathic medicine clinic trying to pretend it’s a real doctor’s office, I turn left at the dispensary trying to pretend it’s a naturopathic medicine clinic, and that’s when I discover a place that’s exactly what it says it is. The Mercury Room, with a girl inside leaning over the bar like a police interrogator. She’s asking the bartender what was it like in the old days, was it really like in the pulp novels, was everyone laundering money for the mob, did people really have to shift in front of the bouncer to get let in, and I realize I know her voice. She gave the salutatorian speech at my high school graduation. She told everyone she was going to Princeton to study public policy. Now she’s here. Getting ignored by a bartender.
#
I do not have sex with Vika. I don’t know why she seems surprised. I expressed my intentions very clearly. I’m sure she finds me painfully chaste when I point her to my room and then completely disengage from her and pour myself a bowl of cereal. But I let her have my bed for the night, and I lie down on the couch under an overcoat with my head on one armrest and my feet hanging off the other, and for the rest of the night I do not get further than a half-conscious trance state.
At some point the sun comes up, and I crack my bedroom door to check on Vika. But the woman I see in my bed is is not Vika, not really. Her features drift listlessly around her head as she sleeps, the edge of her jawline ebbing and flowing as she breathes. Occasionally they find purchase in some vague parody of the Vika from last night, but then they’re floating away again, oppositionally defiant. I gently nudge her awake and the corners of her eyes melt down her cheeks as she blinks. The pieces of her commit to a shape, but it’s still not hers.
“You can’t go out like this,” I whisper. “The neighbors might have seen you last night—who you were last night. They won’t understand.”
“I don’t care. Do you?”
I don’t even realize I should be insulted. I’m just thinking about the fact that she still shifts in her sleep. It’s like learning she wets the bed. I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to live like this. The more you shift the harder it’ll get to stop. You’ll lose control and you’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy starving in a tent city somewhere.
But I don’t. I say, “Well, I need to get a change of clothes,” and move toward the closet. I wait for her to try to stop me, to say no, boring ass, come throw broken glass at cop cars with me and my crew, or something, but she grunts and flops over onto her stomach. I catch her starting to physically melt into the bed. “If you need to leave the room, please put your face back, okay? I don’t want people thinking someone broke in.”
“Ah, yes, people. When I agreed to stay here, I didn’t know I was signing up for people. Do they know you’re a shifter? Or is that your dirty little secret?”
“Vika, I’m serious. They’ll freak out. You look like a complete stranger. It’ll make both of our lives easier if you just go back to normal for literally five minutes and walk out the door. Then you can look as weird and random as you want.”
“Nice dodge, Eidolon. Fine, you know what? I’ll climb out on the fire escape, and you can tell people I was gone by two in the morning because I’m a real high-class hooker and you couldn’t afford the full night. And then I’ll see you in another four years, I guess.”
Something stabs at me when I hear that last part, but I ignore it. I ignore a lot of what she’s said. “Fine, if that’s what you want. I have to go to work.”
“But of course. Have fun.”
I stare at her for a second, then check my face in the mirror and head to the bathroom to change.
#
Here’s a story about Vika from the good old days. We’re sitting outside in the rain, and I tell her I love her. She says she loves me too. I say I wish this summer could last forever. She turns away and says forever’s a really long time, by the time we get there all the stars in the universe will have exploded. She says we’re shifters, we are possibility. Don’t collapse all those futures into one reality just yet.
#
Vinny the HR rep has brought in cupcakes to celebrate his birthday. I forgot Vinny existed. I’ve forgotten what this company does, so I try to figure it out from eavesdropping on conversations at Vinny’s birthday celebration during our lunch break. I think we’re a consulting firm whose clients are mostly other consulting firms. The guy who won’t leave me alone has started calling me will.i.am, like the rapper. I imagine poisoning his cupcake with drain cleaner. I float through the day wanting so desperately to go home, but when the day is done and I vanish back into the secret city in the alleys, I find myself swerving away from the path to my apartment, the path where I found Vika. I veer into a stranger, sketchier slot canyon of an alley where even the crushed cans and cat shit are sparse, where as the sun sets behind a brick wall reappropriated as a gallery of penis graffiti, glimmers of purple and pink neon seep up from basement bars under my feet. There’s only one place I’ve ever been in the city that makes me this attuned to the reality of light pollution. My head feels like a sickly yellow night sky with no stars and a too-small moon as I drift down the unmarked stairs to the Mercury Room.
Here I am again. Me and the dozens of overwrought alter egos swarming under the exposed ductwork in the ceiling, desperate to replace themselves with something more magical. A pretty DJ with their eyes on stalks like a snail is setting up in the corner. I recognize them from the old days by the enormous rat tattoo on their neck, but as they scan the room their eyes just flick over me, erasing me. Peace and quiet.
I go to the bar. The light bends around me so I don’t cast a shadow. The whites of the bartender’s eyes glow electric blue under the UV light. His teeth, too, a sabertoothed grin the color of a nuclear reactor. I ask to start a tab.
“What’s your name?” he asks, radiation flashing from his mouth.
“Vika,” I say.
He laughs in my face. “Sure you are, kid.”
Music blazes from the snail-eyed DJ’s booth, the kind that pulses hard enough to pump your blood if you’ve forgotten how to do it yourself. Somebody stands up in my body, somebody from another time, and carries me into the crowd before I’ve ordered my first drink. I move like a mass of dead muscle puppeteered by an electric current. I haven’t danced in years. A boy next to me stands enthralled watching the veins in his arms swell and convulse with each throb of the bass. Someone stumbles backwards into him, and his ribcage butterflies open to limblessly embrace his friend. An eye blooms from the gaunt clavicle of a woman in a tube top, blinking as the lights whirl overhead, purple and gold. They’re all flowering around me. My shirt is untucked. Seasick vibration creeping on the sensitive parts of my feet, while the shifters’ skulls unfurl like petals, their bodies curl like vines, they sprout skyward and invite the light inside to assuage their hunger. It’s cold in here. How is it cold? The thing inside me is swelling, reaching, dragging itself out of my hollow body and gasping for fresh, living air.
Then for just a moment the music lulls and I hear a voice soaring over the crowd. “Hey, Eidolon! At times like this I turn to scripture! Night Shift 5:13!”
A fist closes around my heart, sending a burst of rage coursing through my body. I close my eyes and shout “Fuck you!”
The music surges again, orders of magnitude louder than my voice. She’s here, somewhere on the far side of the tangle of writhing blossoms. I strangle the undead thing thrashing in my chest and claw my way through. The misshapen bodies tower over me, ecstatic, desperate, glorious in their formlessness, their organs rearranged to entwine with one another’s, straining through their skin. There’s a woman with her head upside down on her neck standing outside the gender-neutral bathroom. She has Vika’s brown skin and no sign of an absolute behind her eyes, and I hate her, I hate every single one of the infinite people she has ever pretended to be.
“You need something, my man?” she asks in Vika’s voice. Her shoulders broaden and narrow like a heart beating. An Adam’s apple stabs out from her throat, then recedes.
#
Here’s a story about me from the good old days. It’s late August and the winds are changing. I wake up hungover in a penthouse hotel. I have a job interview today. Last night I was half blacked out on gas station vodka and Vika convinced me to spend all the money I’d ever gotten without working for it. Birthdays, allowances, inheritances. But it’s okay, because I have a job interview today. My pockets are twenty years lighter, but my hotel room has a waterfront view and I’m wearing four diamond bracelets. And I have a job interview today. Is my face right? My face is wrong. Everything’s too far apart. I’ll fix it. No, wait, that’s still not right. Try again. Try again. Come on, fuck, why won’t it go back the way it was before? I’ve stretched myself too far and ended up distended. What did I even look like last night? What do I look like on my ID, my passport, my yearbook photos?
And thank God, just a flicker of those images in my mind is all it takes to bring me back. I take selfies until my phone runs out of memory. I’ll never forget that face again. I’ll sculpt myself into it every day if I have to. I’ll force my eyes through my flesh like beads in clay. I’ll chip or chisel or file down any wandering bone, anything I don’t recognize, anything bulging under my skin.
#
“Vika?”
“Will.”
“You still come here?”
“Whenever I get the chance.”
“Why are you still living like this?”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You could just be you.”
“This is me.”
“No, the real you. Your absolute. The one I saw yesterday.”
“My absolute?”
“Yeah. You remember. You always used to say you could pick me out in a crowd by my absolute. I didn’t know what you meant, but I saw you yesterday, and you looked so much like you. Like whenever you’d shifted in the past it was just a mask with that face underneath all along.”
“Will. There’s no underneath. That was just another face. They’re all me.”
“Bullshit. I recognized you immediately.”
“Did you? Did I look exactly how you pictured me all these years? Pretty crazy coincidence that you got it right first try.”
“I—”
“Your absolute was the way you walked. That’s it. You always had this swagger like you were trying to be cool. It was not convincing. But it was cute. You don’t do it anymore.”
“Bullshit. Bullshit. There’s a you in there, a real one, and you could have a career, or a family, or, like, healthcare, and all you’d have to do is just grow up, just collapse the fucking possibilities or whatever and commit to something for once in your life instead of playing dress-up until the stars explode.”
“Is that what you’re doing? In your sweater vest and your shit apartment? Why are you here, then?”
“No, stop. Stop. God, don’t you dare turn this around on me.”
“You’ve got it all figured out, Eidolon. You made your choice. How long has it been since you shifted? Three years? Four? How long has it been since you killed every version of you but one?”
“You don’t get to judge me for surviving.”
“And I won’t. Not anymore. Just try something for me, okay? Try to shift for me one last time. For old times’ sake.”
#
I don’t know why I obey her, but I do. She holds open the door to the gender-neutral bathroom, and I walk in and lock eyes with myself in the mirror. I don’t know how to begin. It’s like trying to flex an atrophied muscle. I’m trying to change, but I can’t.
Peel the mask back and my face is all naked, sinewy muscle pulling away from itself in filmy layers. My eyes are melting down my cheeks, electric blue. There are so many different kinds of person in this world and they’re all Vika. I am none of them. I made my choice. I washed myself up on the shore and let the sun fade me away. Maybe if I look in the mirror for long enough I’m going to crack through the glass and see a thousand more of me wriggling underneath.
Then there’s nothing, not a skull or an absolute, just a hollow cavern where I should be. I’m a veil with nothing on the other side.
