The 9 Story Hotel was opened in 1962 (closed in 1968)
Parties and orgies, feasts and masquerade balls, ours was a life of indulgence and opulence. Of ceremony. Lust. Hordes of the young and beautiful whom our people scraped from the streets became permanent hangers on draped across silk sheets and Persian carpets of the elite and tipping their heads to enjoy our champagne and oysters and bodies, our unspoken promises of fame. Their notoriety would never extend to this life but to one beyond their comprehension. The wants to be fulfilled were ours. Wealth and power would always lie beyond their short grubby reach, but their youth and beauty would enrich our lives even in their deaths. We practitioners were artists, doctors, scientists, lawyers, philanthropists, all of us stars. But I shone brightest. A supernova suspended in time and space. A legend, no, a myth reflected in the cosmos.
The entire group, practitioners and initiates alike, joined me to live in the hotel. Our debauchery had reached such levels it occupied our every moment. And the supply of the desperate young and beautiful inside and outside the hotel never waned. In fact, they came looking for us where we all lived on an entire floor in the north wing. By we I mean the society. Naturally, I kept the penthouse. From time to time I’d invite young poets to read their work to me in my own bed as an escape from the incessant hedonistic acts floors below. My guests and I would listen to the activity above us and laugh away rumors of ghosts in the hotel.
We lived in the slipstream of time as it trailed behind the future. From Jackie O to Lady Bird, Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Rosemary’s Baby, Marilyn Monroe to Sharon Tate. Reality sandwiches to avocado and sprouts on whole wheat.Â
Our unceasing fête gathered momentum with the addition of each initiate, Midwestern girls and boys who’d fled work in the fields or college or the draft for something grander only to be taken advantage of by opportunists lurking on every corner. Our actions—expressions of pure uninhibited joy—were a kindness to those poor naïve souls.Â
Although our rituals had never before begotten the group’s intended outcomes beyond the occasional unexplained shows of light and color or the sensation of spiders crawling over bodies, the night of the shoot was different. I believed it was because we all performed our assigned roles to perfection. Not for the cameras, but for what we longed for them to record, what we wanted others to see, no matter how limited the potential audience. It was the illumination in eyes and thoughts we hoped to invoke, regardless of our personal convictions.
Some of us participated in the society’s activities out of boredom, anything to alleviate the monotony of possessing everything and everyone we’d ever craved and our bottomless need for more. Most were in it for the sex. Then there were the true believers who wished to summon into our realm a force or form of energy—some insisted deity—purported to grant the group’s deepest desire, everlasting youth and beauty. These superstitious buffoons had procured ancient figurines ascribed to this alleged god of immortality from around the globe and placed them throughout their suites. The idols’ immense lapis lazuli eyes would look down upon us as we rutted under candlelight, flesh upon flesh, ravenous for both the newcomers and those we often despised in our daily lives, hiding our faces behind the literal and figurative masks we all wore to conceal our true selves. Utter and complete nonsense. Their simple minds were unable to grasp the metaphorical realities of our pursuit.
Beginning at dusk the evening of the filming, I paced the streets outside the hotel. After I burned through my cigarettes, I flipped open my lighter and attempted to close it before the wind blew out the flame for what seemed hours. Why I was so restless that night I didn’t know, but my surroundings compounded the sensation. Wind gusts bayed as they raced through alleyways. Rats and feral dogs obscured and revealed my path until I realized they were pieces of refuse tumbling in the breeze. I chided myself for my foolishness yet couldn’t explain why I saw yellow points of light reflected back at me.
As lightning peeled back the night sky to dump a real rain on the city, a man obscured by shadows grabbed my arm. —Is that you, Becky?
No one had called me by that name in a lifetime, but I recognized myself in its sound. A piece of me I had killed long ago, one who felt special to be chosen, a common, inexperienced girl lost in the world.Â
I snapped out of my reverie and wrenched myself loose from the vagrant who reeked of spoiled milk and piss. The lighter fell at our feet. The man was quicker than I and grabbed it. He flipped open the flame in front of his face as he rose. Incredibly, it was Chester.
—Oh, Chester, darling. I’ve missed you so.
—You killed me, Becky. You’ve killed us all. Murderer. Thief.— He withdrew an old bottle of moonshine from an overcoat pocket and drank from it, the spirit running down his chin and body. Then he corked the bottle and slipped it into my tote. His breath and body stank of human decay, an odor with which I’d become intimately familiar over recent years. He plucked a flattened cigarette butt from behind his ear and lit it before tossing the lighter back to me.
Silence.
His body ignited and I ran all the way back to the hotel. The heat, the stench of burnt hair and human flesh chased me but when I looked from inside the hotel the street was deserted. Such silliness.Â
I freshened up in my rooms then returned to our wing where the initiates sat drinking goblets of our sacramental wine, necking, and tearing off each other’s clothes. For the first time I felt the charged energy of our group—the same that was inducing lust in the young people—and yearned to tunnel deep inside myself. In that candlelight, every flaw was transformed into splendor. As if commanded we all walked toward our leader and knelt around her, in that moment convinced by her words that a more beautiful world would germinate from our actions that night.Â
One by one, attracted to the simplicity of youth and its vitality, we practitioners each took one or two or more of the invited. As the candles died down and young and old alike were sated, our leader, removing bodies from her own, stood, and clapped synchronously with a peal of thunder. Rapturous, she raised her hands to the ceiling. A rumble reverberated above us, radiating in booming waves and erupting into a symphony of textured and multihued song that first knocked the clay idols from the alters we’d erected then liquefied the very walls of the hotel.
Shadows emerged from those molten pools and shifted in the dark. The air moved as they circled. Their gazes penetrated the void in their hunt for prey.
Time slowed and I witnessed their every detail as they passed through shafts of candlelight, lengthening their own shadows. They resembled women missing carved chunks of flesh, puzzle pieces I held now as part of my body. Others bled from open cuts where the doctor acquired young organs to replace my own. They were bloated, pustulant, dripping with decay, their skin sloughing away. I realized they were not some horrible vision my subconscious conjured, but my followers.Â
Some call me mad but those critics must understand that I’d become a believer for the same reason as any other person or society: fear. One for whom the doctor’s unorthodox plastic surgeries were no longer effective. One who understood sacrifice.
The entire cult was circled around me. They were all part of the doctor’s greatest artistic expression. His techniques had evolved so greatly he could perform certain extractive procedures with minimal inconvenience for the donors, those who voluntarily gifted me parts of themselves. One young lady who once made godawful hemp macrame jewelry agreed to degloving so the doctor could culture young skin for my hands once again. She lived in constant pain we offered to numb with medication, but she insisted upon suffering, accepting it as her burden that kept her connection to me pure and strong.Â
Chester’s young lover Otto, who accused me several times of killing my darling husband, donated a lung to the doctor’s endeavors to save my life after I contracted cancer. The dear man, though physically able, never expressed emotion or communicated again. Well, other than the flicker of sheer terror that crossed his face whenever I flourished an icepick in his presence. I interpreted his odd behavior as his vow of silence in honor of our beloved Chester.Â
One young man donated a kidney when mine were failing. Another gave me a piece of his liver from which mine, consumed by cirrhosis, was able to regenerate. The doctor grew a new heart for me thanks to a healthy young woman. She lives on through me.
My stoic donors wore their scars as evidence of their piety. They limped and crawled and pulled themselves by their fingernails after me out of love, for they had all achieved their greatest desire. To become stars in the constellation that is Genevieve Harland.Â
They pawed at me as if to reclaim their missing parts from my body, to tear me apart, but in truth they were captivated by our physical bonds and the grandeur in which we lived our lives.Â
The magnitude of my devotees’ worship that night overwhelmed me. An initiate caught me before I hit the floor then helped me to the nearest chair. Her face and skin and clothes fell away to reveal bone and muscle, then she was once again a woman, and the room brightened. No, it was she who brightened, gilded light radiating from her every pore. I blinked, and she became the girl whose face I stole long ago. She adorned me with a starburst of kisses that drifted upward and orbited us as planets, and we were the Sun.
I looked into her eyes the color of twilight that then faded into clouded orbs of galactic haze. Teeth and blood toppled from her broken face, bone shards protruded from lacerations before the ruptures in her head peeled open from an explosion of light.
Although her lower jaw hung loose, she spoke. —I have blossomed at last.— Strips of flesh and skull fluttered to the floor.
She wept tears of blood, of bile, of mud, flows upon which floated dewy flower petals and powdery moth wings. In the changing light I saw the mask I knew her by, then swatches of her true face, identical to my own, which melted away then multiplied into the infinite reflections of a funhouse mirror that stretched toward a point past the far end of the room.
She caressed my cheek with such love. —What has become of us, Becky?
I shuddered with a chill so frigid it burned. She filled me with a sensation of freedom so distant I was not entirely positive I’d ever experienced it. While inside the memory, I was not a prisoner held captive in an aging body but within the confines of my own mind. We were all trapped. We had arrived at the negative, an unclean place in time. And I understood what I must do, for nothing purifies like fire. Nothing liberates like its fervor. Nothing reveals truth like its light.
Nothing is satisfying as flipping open a stolen lighter with one hand and taking a drag off the first cigarette in a full case. Such potential.Â
My adoring followers reached for me, begged for me to release us all to the wind so we could once again embody the cosmos. To tiptoe from star to star, where time loses all meaning, and live free as comet tails in the night sky. How could I refuse them this, their dying wish? I obliged and filled their gaping mouths with the strongest firewater any gin joint ever served up then stepped back and flicked my cigarette at my loyal and loving disciples.Â
Each night, after the screams have died down, smoke from those burnt offerings still carry their words of devotion to my ears. Sometimes the adherents come to me in my dreams frozen in raptures my passions cannot melt, suspended in the amber fire of faith my death will not extinguish. And at the end, in the blazing reflections of their eyes, I will glimpse a spark of hope return to my own one last time before the roiling louche of these crystal orbs takes over and shatters all into oblivion.
More is on the way…