She looked over at the Wizard, who stood just outside the lamplight, like a vampire.
“Give us a spin, kitty-cat,” he said. “Let the Wizard take a lookie-loo.”
Louise turned self-consciously. She thought about her grandmother sorting mail at the post office, about her mother out there somewhere, lost in America, about the father she didn’t know. Maybe this was him. Crazier things had happened.
“Meow,” said the Wizard, his eye hidden behind a pair of two-thousand-dollar sunglasses. He invited her back to the pool to meet the others.
They walked up the grand stairs and through the foyer. Louise could feel the front door recede behind her, as if she were standing still and the exit were running. Ahead of her, the Wizard disappeared through a door. Louise hurried to keep up but stopped short in the doorway. The room was black with scripted white writing on the wall. Moloko Plus, she read. Moloko Synthemesc. Moloko Vellocet. Lining the rectangular wall were six life-size alabaster mannequins, all kneeling on pedestals, giant white bouffants on their heads. But they weren’t just women. They were fountains. A thin white liquid spouted from their nipples into a milky moat below.
The lighting was low, everything white glowing against the dark walls.
At the far end of the room, Louise saw, four men dressed all in white, wearing black bowler hats. They sat on a white bench and stared at her from under heavy eyelids, motionless.
She froze.
Where is the Wizard? What am I supposed to do?
The tinkle of six fountains filled the air. Behind it was a light classical score, uplifting, familiar. A little bit of the Ludwig V.
Tentatively, Louise entered the room and moved toward the men—why don’t they move? Is this a gauntlet? Am I the show? But when she got closer, Louise saw they weren’t men but silicon replicas. Statues. Which was somehow creepier. She stopped. Behind her, suddenly, she felt a man’s breath on her neck.
“You like milk, kitty-cat?” the Wizard whispered in her ear. “A little bit of the chocolate meow-meow.”
Louise turned and took a step back, her foot sinking into the floor’s channel moat with a splash.
“I’m—” she said. But the Wizard just smiled from behind his sunglassed eyes.
“Wanna see a trick?”
He raised his right hand and pointed at the four replicas.
“Let there be light.”
Louise turned. Ahead of her, the black wall seemed to split, revealing a bright light, which filled the room, blinding her, as two of the seated statues swung out to the left, the other two to the right. It took Louise, her right foot submerged, soaked to the ankle, a moment to realize that what she was looking at was the outdoors, an enormous white terraced patio. She followed the Wizard outside. And it was there that Louise understood the sheer size of the estate, its vast terraced gardens, its startling view of the San Francisco skyline, and, directly below her, an enormous swimming pool, around which sat a dozen young girls, just like her. A man in a dark suit moved among them, carrying a white pitcher, from which he filled their elevated wineglasses with milk.
“Look,” Louise will tell the therapist, sitting across from him on the screened-in porch, “you wanna talk about Mommy left me, or Daddy wasn’t there, that’s cool. I got no problem with the deep dive into why Weezy likes to clean the bathroom three times a day, but we’re not pals, and I don’t owe you anything.”
The therapist clicks his pen a few times. “It’s not what you owe me,” he says. “It’s what you owe yourself.”
Louise smiles, not because it’s funny, but because he’s acting like words matter, like being clever matters, like he can fix it all if she’ll just pick away the scab and let it bleed. But what if all your blood is gone? What if a vampire took it in the night and replaced it with something milky, something white?
“Why did Kevin kill himself?” she says. “Any of them? All.”
“Did you know him?”
“I saw him. He was here. We’re all here.”
Click-click went the pen.
“Why do you think he killed himself?”
“Because he didn’t want to live anymore.”
“That simple?”
“That simple.”
Click-click.
“It’s interesting, I think,” he says, “that when I asked if you’d had experience with abuse, you brought up suicide. Is there an implicit threat? Dig too deep and I’ll kill myself?”
Louise sighs. There are cobwebs in the top corners of the porch, and it takes all her willpower not to climb up and wipe them off.