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When I deplaned in LA, I’d been written off to make room for an exciting new accidental-murder storyline. My character had jetted off to Denmark as an exchange student. Fucking Denmark.
Was that how it started? One night with Misha Malinov and you lose your oldest dream. I thought I’d bounce back. I booked a dog food commercial. A spring catalog. Sang a jingle for a car insurance company. And that was it. LA went dry as Last Chance Gulch for me. After all, in California, every girl looks like me. We’re a clone army of former Juliets with peroxide pistols on our hips. Money ran out, and I was honorably discharged from the ranks. I moved home to sort my shit out, and, well, Misha’s new practice needed a secretary. I needed rent. I’m not too proud to file and make coffee. But it stung. Juliet doesn’t answer phones for eight hours a day. Ophelia might. Laura, definitely.
We fell back into old patterns. Brooklyn and sunflowers. But he still never let me stay over.
When my friends back in California asked what I was up to, I said I’d moved to Denmark. Hej! Jeg ville ønske at du var her!
I stayed late at the office one night in December. It’s funny; the case seemed so important then, and now I can’t remember one single thing about it. Nobody v. No one. Briefs and affidavits and depositions, oh my! I didn’t see him come in, but you never do. I just looked up from my cup of toxic waste–dump coffee and my sanity went down for a nap. This thing towered over me, just staring with those eyes like holes punched through to hell. Seven, eight feet tall, wearing a brown leather duster and a plague doctor’s mask with glass gas-mask goggles bolted into it. The beak was so long it covered his chest, and there was nothing inside the mask, nothing. Just blackness and heat and the absolute certainty that nothing you could possibly do in this world had any meaning at all.
Miasma. In the flesh, as much as he ever is.
Miasma reached out for me—his hand was all bone. Then it was straw. Then it was my father’s hand. Then Misha’s. Then the electric lights of Luna Park and the Cyclone twisted into fingers, a palm, a fist . . . and I was falling into the lights, down into the midway and the wooden roller coaster slats and the game with those little plastic horses lurching ahead on the big green board, stopping, shuddering forward again. The plastic jockeys turned to leer at me; their faces came alive—my father, my mother, my agent, laughing and laughing, the handsome monster who took off my glasses for the world to see, Romeo, Hamlet, George from Grover’s Corners, Tom Wingfield screaming about opium dens, and Mikey Miller, poor, kind Misha Malinov. One by one, they caught fire and the fire was sickly black. I screamed. I screamed like a girl in a movie. I’d always hated that s
cream. I thought, nobody really screams like that. But in the pinch, I was as good as any final girl drenched in corn-syrup blood.
The plastic jockey–Misha broke free of the pack and roared off the electric board, growing bigger and bigger as I screamed. He wasn’t plastic anymore; he was real, and alive, and kicking the absolute shit out of the Halloween costume that had come to kill me. I never had any idea he could move like that. Maybe nobody can move like that. When Miasma and the Insomniac get down to business, you can’t tell what’s actually happening. Misha drove his fist through the thing’s chest and dragged something out—not a heart but a wriggling, writhing mass of black-violet nightworms that hissed into smoke in his hand. The leather duster and the plague doctor’s mask collapsed instantly. The lights of Luna Park went out in my head, the midway vanished, the slats of the Cyclone blew away, and we were standing in the office again. I dropped my coffee. Misha caught it.
And, loyal listeners, thus began the happiest days of my life.
Mikey Miller explained everything. Since that terrible day when Chernobyl bled out and his parents died, Mikhail Dmitrivich Malinov had not slept for one solitary second. And, it seemed, in losing this, he’d gotten everything else imaginable. He told me what he could do and it sounded like a little boy’s Christmas list. Dear Santa, I have been very good this year you can ask anybody they will tell you how good I am. I would like teleportation, super strength, the ability to travel through other people’s dreams, heightened senses, and if my sweat could also make regular humans absolutely fucking trip balls, that would be awesome. Oh, and also peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Love, MM.
“Can you look into my dreams?” I asked shyly. I expected him to say no, actually. Like, the power of love kept my secrets safe. But he nodded. Okay, then. I remembered the sunflowers opening in my mind. That sweat thing is a fucking curveball, even in the superpower lineup.
“Have you?”
His face did the oddest thing. It’s like it was trying to look ashamed and embarrassed but fell over and landed smack in the middle of kind of pretty proud. And he nodded yes again. I went a little cold inside. I said:
“Don’t. It’s not fair. You’ve kept your secret from me for all these years. I get to keep some from now on.”
In all that teleporting and hitchhiking into the dream-swamps of the greater boroughs, he’d brought something back with him. He couldn’t remember when he’d first dreamed about the man in the plague-doctor mask. It might have been all the way back in Ukraine. In Pripyat. It came for him covered in radioactive slime and his mother’s blood, staring through that medieval face and industrial eyes at a helpless child, whispering the same thing over and over: You will never belong anywhere. Everywhere you go will die.
Year by year, that thing got stronger, got bigger and more solid, could stay in the real world longer, and hated Misha Malinov more. Whenever Misha so much as looked at someone for too long, Miasma would begin to stalk them, invade their mind, tearing them apart to find out what had drawn Misha’s attention. But lately the creature had gone freelance, walking the streets alone, feeding on human hope and longing and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, blood. Meat. Misha became a hero, not to fight some nebulous idea of “crime” but to fight the monster of his childhood nightmare. The Insomniac, hero of the wee hours.
“But it’s okay now!” I said. “You killed him! I saw you pull out his nasty worm heart! It’s over now, baby. It’s done.”
Misha sighed. The Insomniac walked over to the pile of leather still lying on the floor where Miasma had disintegrated. He picked up the long bone mask in one hand and walked past my desk, into his office. He waved me over to the supply closet with a big half-dead fern in front of it, and opened the door.
Inside, hundreds of plague-doctor masks hung on the walls in neat, identical rows.
“Miasma is a bad dream. You can wake up all you want. He comes back the next night just the same.”
And that’s the truth. Some of you out there probably know the score firsthand. The Insomniac hunted Miasma every night and every night he ripped out that thing’s ultraviolet heart and every night the creature turned up again fresh as laundry.
But Misha was so happy after that. He didn’t have to hide from everyone. He had somebody who knew him. Who could really see him. Who would clap her hands instead of freaking the fuck out when he shivered and wrinkled along the edges—like something you see out of the corner of your eye when you haven’t slept for a week—and teleported across the office. And for a while, it was good. For a while, it was thrilling. For a while, I was part of something so fantastic and unusual and big and secret. I knew something no one else knew. I felt special. Like my superpower was loving him. For a while . . . for a while, it was like we were starring in simulcast TV shows. By day, Mild-Mannered Mr. Miller toils nobly in the halls of the American Justice System with a little help from his Girl Friday! But the real work begins at night! The Insomniac guards his sleeping city, the paladin of Luna Park, keeping the world of dreams safe for all mankind.
And then there was The Daisy Show. By day, the adorable Daisy Green performs intellectually stultifying secretarial duties and watches her youth slough off her into a filthy coffeepot! But by night, she shreds her soul to pieces worrying and waiting for her big strong man to come home from a hard night’s labor! Will he come back dead or not dead this week? Stay tuned!
The only life in my life lay in the crossover episodes. View their staunch moral fiber! Their witty banter! Their modestly separate beds! When he came home. When he told me how it had all gone down out there. When he ate whatever bullshit I’d baked to pass the time and the fear like it was the only food he’d ever seen. When he lay next to me after all those sunflowers stopped blossoming in my head and told me how beautiful I’d looked on television. He watched all my episodes. He was so happy. I made him happy. But all the while, I was disappearing. Drinking from two cracked cups every night, one marked TERROR and one marked BOREDOM. I couldn’t relax. I gave him every ounce of my will. Just don’t die. Just don’t die. I stopped sleeping too, but it didn’t give me magic powers. You can’t sleep when someone you love is maybe dying, maybe drowning in the East River, maybe bleeding out in the Meatpacking District, maybe vanished back into whatever helldream vomited Miasma out in the first place. He always came home right at the moment when I knew in my heart that this time, he was definitely dead.
I know you’re listening, Paige. Hear me when I say it’s not so nice, to be the girl waiting in the window. Most of the time, you just wanna chuck yourself out.
My hair started to fall out. I got a Xanax prescription I didn’t tell him about. That worked for a while. I could laugh again. Flash a prescription-strength smile. Boy, I was living the Betty Friedan dream! A roast in every pot and anxiety pills in every stomach! I was disappearing into his life. I only came alive when he was around to look at me and pay attention to me and fill me in at the edges. That’s the sad truth of poor, stupid Juliet’s life. If she’d lived, she’d have gone to see that priest anyway, to float her out of the crush of wifehood on a sweet opiate sigh. And I wasn’t even anybody’s wife! Days went by when the only person I saw was Misha. I started to look forward to Miasma showing up and drop-kicking me into a hallucinogenic ball-pit of the mind. At least that was interesting.
How is life in Denmark, Daisy? Is it all mermaids and pastries and free health care?
Oh, ja. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
And then my parents died.
