The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2010

BāZ Rhymes with Crazy

Jeffrey David Weitzel

Colonel Keu of the RokSonic Secret Police has a thing or two to learn about love. Dystopia he’s got down; the BāZ faithful of this city know neither his face nor his name, but each and every one holds a picture in mind: the One Who Watches as they get out of bed in the morning, the One who delivers ruby-sparkle-ink-on-black-paper citations to those who stumble to the bathroom with too little soul, clean teeth without appropriate side-to-side head movement, sit and do their business with no groove in their move. He’s tried that whole point-and-she-shall-be-mine approach, dispatching shock troops in spats and cufflinks to the homes of his would-be paramours. When the sacks come off their heads, the women find themselves under swaying palm trees with their feet in warm sand. The sun is sinking into a tranquil ocean, and Colonel Keu is there in brilliant white linen, holding champagne flutes. Results have been mixed. He thinks maybe he should try something different for the girl with the moose-face slippers.

No one knows where she got them, nor the pink flower barrettes that keep her ringlets out of her face while she’s at home, nor the flannel nightshirt that she sleeps in. The day she first put them on, propagating a flurry of personal style alerts all the way up to Colonel Keu, she took them out of a box from under her bed. There is no recording of how the box came to be there in the first place.

Every morning, an entire totem pole of lesser apparatchiks sends the girl a thick stack of black slips. What does she do? She sews them into her clothes, earning still more citations, which seems to be the objective. She’s got an entire ruby-ink-on-black-paper wardrobe. The latest project is a sassily mannish bit of discowear: a tailcoat now half covered in write-ups to match an already coated pair of bellbottoms. The Colonel lives in fear of the day that she’ll go out in one of those things. The Metropolitan Police would swoop down, and there would be nothing he could do about it.

RokSonic would have quietly plucked the girl from existence long ago, but she’s charmed; Colonel Keu is hardly her only fan on the LyZal Council. Some argue that she is an artist; forget re-education, her talents should be cultivated. Send her to Attitude Academy and groom her as a Royal Trendsetter.

The Queen seems to side with the slight plurality who say the girl is mentally unbalanced and attempting suicide by fashion error. Personally, Colonel Keu doesn’t know what to think. Every morning, the girl sits up in her flannel, puts her feet into those gamely grinning slippers with antlers on them, and stares at the wall. Strictly speaking, it’s a State secret, but everyone knows that their rooms are dusted with microscopic cameras. Everyone knows why it’s illegal to wash the walls; that girl is staring right into the eyes of Colonel Keu.

He dreams of meeting her at the Club, that vast fortress at the center of the city where the BāZ go to curry favor with the State on the dance floor. RokSonic visit the Club only incognito, so Colonel Keu will have only the raw BāZality of his hep-cut suit, watch fob, and two-tone shoes to turn every head in the room, but doubt not, it will be enough. Who’s that? she’ll think, covering her mouth with her hand. He’ll never want to dance with little old me. Oh, but Colonel Keu does. He’ll point, the crowd will part, and she’ll fly to him like she’s on a winch. Colonel Keu will lead his bedazzled love through a labyrinth of ever more exclusive rooms to the special, not-so-secret elevator to the Skydeck, where the Queen herself presides and the atmosphere is refreshingly collegial after the tooth-and-claw competition of the lower echelons. Like a rubber monkey, he will dance, but only for a minute or two before the girl presses close and whispers in his ear: I can’t stand it, take me somewhere. Otherwise, I’ll give myself to you right here . . .

Only, the girl never goes to the Club. Finally, after weeks of waiting, Colonel Keu sends a valentine red envelope to her mailbox at the Jumpsuit Design Bureau. “BāZ rhymes with crazy, baby,” the note reads, “Let’s shake it at the Club tonight. I’ll be there in the Bumper Room. Want to know who I am? Come find out. Dreaming of Your Booty,” and then a sketched silhouette, ostensibly his.

Colonel Keu watches as the girl opens the envelope, reads the note, and tucks it into her bag. Later, as she’s riding the train home, he catches her smiling to herself, and he jumps up and dances the Juice Jiggle on his chair. Her ascent up the gloomy stairs in her building is agony. There are unoccupied rooms as low as the fifth floor, but that’s too much population density for Moose Feet Girl’s blood; she lives way up on eight. The Colonel can hardly wait to see what she picks out to wear.

Finally, she palms her door open. Bag goes on the bed, letter comes out, and without rereading it, she holds it up. “This,” she says, smiling wryly, walking to the wall and pressing the sheet to the paint “is beautiful.”

Colonel Keu frowns. He’s not sure what she means by that.

The letter flutters to the floor, and the girl unzips her rhinestone-studded jumpsuit. Out comes a low-relief breast the color of once-white cotton, and she kisses her fingers, touches brown nipple and then the wall. “That’s for you, sweetie-pie.”

Colonel Keu disaggregates into a warm pile of porridge. The girl leaves the jumpsuit on the floor and goes to the bathroom, but he can’t look. He’s watched her a hundred times before, but now he’s embarrassed; he has to peek through his fingers until all her parts are covered by flannel and she’s sitting with her antlered feet up on a threadbare ottoman, reading a book.

The book is Gone With the Wind.

Colonel Keu shrieks and slaps off his viewer, terrified that someone from the Queen’s staff might be spying on him right now. If he doesn’t call in a collection, he’s as answerable as Moose Feet Girl. He can’t do it. He’s in love. Shit.

It occurs to him that Moose Feet Girl must have suspected as much to commit a capital BāZality-offense knowing that he was watching. If no natty RokSonic shock troops in matching yellow spats and cravats show up by morning, her suspicion will be confirmed. Shit.

He keeps his eyes shut as he turns the viewer back on and closes the feed by touch. Hands trembling at the keyboard, he calls up the surveillance logs to see if the random rotation has flashed her in front of any of the level one monitors since that book came out. It hasn’t. Mistyping the command seven times in a row, he puts a lock on the feed from her room, which means he had better get cracking. The Queen’s staff can and will override that lock. The only question is, when, and what will they see? If Colonel Keu is in Moose Feet Girl’s bed, black ringlets visible at his shoulder, delicate long limbs curled about him, well, nothing wrong with that, rank has its privileges, har, har, har! If, on the other hand, they catch a glimpse of the criminally unBāZ Gone With the Wind, that will be it for Moose Feet Girl and Colonel Keu both.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s pumping up the mold-smelling stairs in her building, slick with sweat by the time he reaches the eighth floor. It’s dark. He knows there’s electricity up here, Moose Feet Girl has lights in her room, but for the hall, there’s just what shines in through a window at the far end and a flashlight he finds by accident with his foot. Suddenly, he’s not feeling so BāZ anymore. Is his hair okay after that climb? He’s a little out of breath, and his soul-saunter has gone to hell. When he flips on the flashlight, his yellow RokSonic spats jump at him from his insteps. He can’t knock on her door like this, she’ll run screaming. And what was that line he thought would knock her flat into bed? “Love me baby if you want to live.” It’s never worked before.

He paces past her door a dozen times, more than once raising a fist to knock, but he never does. In the dark, the Metropolitan Police monitors have probably missed his spats, and if those lazy Metro bastards are earning their keep, there’s a uniformed officer mounting the stairs right now to hassle him for loitering and unBāZ gait. Could be bad. Colonel Keu’s in the kind of mood where that unfortunate cop might vanish without a trace by morning, and the Chief of Metro always gets testy when her people disappear. She might decide to inquire as to what Colonel Keu was doing in this hallway.

He scurries away, thankfully meeting no one on the stairs, cop or otherwise. In bed that night, he masturbates until he can’t anymore, and after that, there’s nothing for it but to lie in the dark and listen for the whisper of ropes uncoiling past his windows, the patter of wingtip shoes on the sides of the building.

Before dawn, the room lights rise and stab into his swollen, sleepless eyes; no one has come for him. Maybe Moose Feet Girl had the good sense to put that book away before anyone saw her. Miserably, Colonel Keu rises and swaggers to the shower. God, his bounce today is pathetic; if it was anyone else walking like that, they’d be sent away.

He arrives at RokSonic headquarters cleaned up in a three-piece and spats, hopefully looking formidable enough to be taken seriously. He lasts fourteen minutes before he checks in on Moose Feet Girl. Her room is dark, but she’s there, a green heat phantom under the sheets. At seven, her lights come up, but she’s not interested and burrows until 7:17. Finally, shoving the sheets aside, she stretches. Oh my. Oh my. Is she doing that on purpose? Oh yes she is.

For a long giddy moment, Colonel Keu teeters at the edge of running over there. He can be waiting on her bed by the time she’s done in the bathroom, but before he even rises from his chair, doubt stuffs him back down again. She stretches every morning as she’s getting up. What makes him think that today’s full-body-arch-slithering-around-on-sheets-nightshirt-riding-up-thighs is special, a self-assured gauntlet thrown at his feet, daring him to come over there and find out what it’s really all about? Maybe the girl hasn’t changed at all. Maybe he’s the one that’s different.

His only option, it seems, is to woo her the old fashioned way. Where? How? He can’t sidle up in that little coffee joint she favors. They read rhythmically ambiguous poetry there. More than a few formerly regular performers have been sent away for reBāZification, and RokSonic has the place permanently staked out. The Colonel would be recognized.

Today, Thursday, is grocery day, but in all the time Colonel Keu has been watching Moose Feet Girl, never once has she favorably received a would-be suitor while shopping or waiting in line—which is just as well, half a dozen of her most persistent admirers are rotting in prison as it is.

The place to meet her, he decides, is on the train. Every day after work, she catches the 5:26 at the Flash Street Station. For the People, the platform has been converted into a discotheque, and in skirting the sprawling, booty-shaking throng of career-minded State employees, Moose Feet Girl inevitably ends up in the last car. Today when the crowd surge carries her on board, Colonel Keu is there waiting for her, staked out in a position near the door, but before he can slither up to her, a kid in a tasseled shirt of questionable BāZality offers her his seat, next to a heavyset older woman with headphones and elaborately plaited hair. The woman is lost in her own world, oscillating her head and singing to herself. The kid’s a billy, Colonel Keu can smell one a mile off. He places a call, and at the next station, four Metro cops in gold chains and headscarves board the car. The kid, a billy for sure, vanishes out the far door before they reach him, no BāZ in his walk at all. The woman with the headphones is thoroughly surprised when the Metros grab her and hustle her off. Colonel Keu takes her seat.

He licks his lips and opens his mouth, ready with a many-times rehearsed opener prepared about the difficulty of striking BāZ poses on the overcrowded train.

“What’s going to happen to that woman?” Moose Feet Girl asks, pointedly staring out the window.

Colonel Keu catches his breath. He’s dressed as a BāZ-poor construction worker, complete with lunchbox and hardhat, state-issue bellbottoms and a ruffled maroon shirt. Does she suspect? Sticking to pretense, he says, “Got no brain on that. They’ll ’sess her BāZality, I ’spec.”

“I know who you are, don’t pretend. She had more BāZ than anyone on this train. Why did you do that?”

Colonel Keu is accustomed to pistol-whipping people who talk to him like that, but he’s not carrying a pistol, and he knows from experience that pistol-whipping is not a good way to get laid.

“You never can tell about the underclothes,” he says.

Moose Feet Girl doesn’t respond, and Colonel Keu, veteran of countless leveraged interrogations, smells blood. But that’s not good, is it? He doesn’t want her to be afraid of him. Shit.

Still looking out the window, Moose Feet Girl says, “Did it ever occur to you to just ask me out for coffee like a normal person?”

Colonel Keu nearly inhales his own tongue. What should he say? He can’t ask her out for coffee now, he’ll sound like a parrot. “Okay baby, let’s BāZ out tonight,” he ventures.

She snaps her head a few degrees his direction, black eyes coming at him like whips.

“We can yumyum at Aunt Sal’s Soul Supper,” he suggests. It’s the most exclusive restaurant in the city.

“I can’t eat there. I’m a vegetarian. I figured you would know that.”

Of course he knows that! What was he thinking? “Smack me, baby, I’m an idiot. That place you like then.” Uh . . . uh . . . “Nina’s.”

The gem-hard facets of her face soften, but she doesn’t answer.

“And after, we can shake it,” Colonel Keu tries, squirming under her gaze. “That dance place down the street isn’t bad.”

Nothing. Colonel Keu can’t read her. The look on her face could almost be mistaken for pity.

“No,” she says. “I’m not going out with you. You talk like a moron, you are a creep, and you’re evil. Now leave me alone.”

Some time later, it occurs to the Colonel that it is very unBāZ to have one’s mouth hanging open the way his is right now. He had her. She was going to say yes. She told him to ask her out.

Moose Feet Girl faces forward, reaches into her bag, and goddamnit, there’s Gone With the Wind again. Is this some kind of taunt? Is she so self-assured that she thinks he can’t do his duty even after she’s slapped him in the face?

The train is slowing for the next station, and Colonel Keu struggles to his feet, about as BāZ as a wet cardboard box.

“Are you going to make me disappear?” Moose Feet Girl asks without looking. “I’m not afraid. Nothing you can do can hurt me.”

Oh, you’re quite mistaken about that, young lady. Colonel Keu understands, he’s supposed to be disarmed by her directness, unable to follow through now that she’s called him on it. Well, the Colonel has had quite enough of getting jerked around by Moose Feet Girl.

Finger to a subdermal switch in his temple, he says aloud, “Control, baby.”

The dispatcher who answers is nothing but deferential: “BāZ rhymes with crazy . . . ”

“ . . . Cuz it’s crazy how it’s cool,” the Colonel replies. “Juice me a collection.” He recites Moose Feet Girl’s Unique Identifier by heart. Watching her, he knows she heard him, but she doesn’t lift her eyes from her treasonous book.

“A moment please, poobah.” Clattering keys. “The subject is on the 634 eastbound, car sixteen. Express pick-up or regular?”

“Regular,” Colonel Keu decides. Let her have the evening to think about the fate she has chosen for herself. She can’t escape, there’s nowhere in this city that they can’t find her. “But send the subject to B6 in a red bow.” B6 is the special section of the RokSonic Interrogation Center, where the senior officers keep their personal projects.

“B6, red bow,” the dispatcher repeats, typing. “Sweet. Anything else, poobah?”

“No, that’s it.”

“BāZ rhymes with crazy.”

“Cuz it’s crazy how it’s cool.”

Colonel Keu has been looking at Moose Feet Girl this whole time, but she hasn’t moved. He wants to wait, allow the silence to ripen and curdle, but the train is stopped, the doors open, and trapping himself here until the next station could be risky.

“See ya,” he says and pushes out into the dance party on the platform.

He calls for a car, but he can’t wait that long to see what Moose Feet Girl does next. Doubletime, he soul-saunters down the stairs and across the street to the local LyZal lounge. Mid-level music production bureaucrats in silk shirts are partying in the salon. Colonel Keu ignores the offered bong and hides himself in back, in the private phone room, rejoining Moose Feet Girl on his pocket viewer just as she’s getting off the train.

There is, he imagines, a tightness in her shoulders, an urgency to her state-mandated ass wiggle that isn’t ordinarily there when she walks home, but one would not otherwise suspect that she is facing down the end of her life as she knows it. Maybe when she reaches the security of her room, she will kneel at the wall and beg his forgiveness. Maybe he’ll give it. The Colonel is not a cruel man. The important thing is that they come to an understanding.

During her long hump up the stairs, he can hardly stay in his seat. Finally, she palms open her door, and look at that, she does get down on her knees, but next to her bed, not the wall. Ice water rolls down the Colonel’s spine as he realizes what she’s doing. A precious cardboard box comes out, lovingly varnished, and she produces the crown jewel of her protest wardrobe: a ridiculous ruffled ball gown, every inch of fabric sewn with ruby-ink-on-black-paper citations.

“No,” he says. He wants to look away, but he can’t. Jumpsuit comes off in a single movement, and she holds up the dress, smells it, shakes it out, and steps into it. “No.” Zipping up the back, she practically dislocates her shoulder. “No!” She checks herself in the mirror and walks out the door, right into the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.

Notification that his car is at the curb arrives just then. He sprints out, dives in, and screams her address, but he’s never going to get there in time. Cursed hubris, why didn’t he ask for express pick-up? As it is, no one from RokSonic is coming for Moose Feet Girl before two a.m., and Metro is going to grab her long before that. Metro is going to grab her in the in the next five minutes. Once they do, who knows whether he’ll ever see her again?

She descends the stairs like an empress, neck long, hands clasped elegantly in front of her, an axe, cleaving his heart. God, she’s beautiful. What has he done? He’s still miles away when a van pulls up to her building. Just as she’s rounding the landing to the last flight of stairs, dowdy Metro enforcers in black coveralls vomit out the back and roll up the steps like a lizard’s tongue. Objective acquired, they roll back, jump into the van with Moose Feet Girl, and drive away.

After a long moment of stunned inaction, Colonel Keu redirects his car to the station where they’ll be taking Moose Feet Girl. He calls the precinct captain, but unsurprisingly, he’s not available. Metros have a remarkable tendency to be busy when their betters at RokSonic phone them up. The Colonel’s still working his way down the chain, trying to find someone who will pick up for him when the squad van rolls under the stationhouse and the BāZality Enforcers get out carrying Moose Feet Girl by her arms, citation dress already in tatters. Colonel Keu can only look on helplessly as they drag her into the elevator and take her down to the basement, into the special room with no cameras, a gift from the Queen.

His car pulls up two minutes later, and he jumps out and bounds up the steps to the lobby. It’s thronged with gyrating petitioners in their BāZal best, queued for evaluation appointments via which they hope to avoid BāZality probation. The Colonel pushes through, and the security door opens right up for him; the desk Metros on the far side who happened to see this look hastily away. Anyone they don’t know who can open that door is someone they don’t want to mess with. The Colonel doesn’t trust the elevator; he takes the stairs two levels down to the basement, and the door to the special room opens for him too.

The gown is now in rags on the floor, but charmed Moose Feet Girl still has her underwear on. A big cop with a very bloody nose is holding up more intimate violations by pinning her to the wall at the neck and punching her repeatedly in the face.

“Hey,” Colonel Keu says, barely a whisper.

The scarf-wrapped heads of Metros in the room, six of them, turn one by one. The ox holding Moose Feet Girl by the neck is the last.

“Get out,” Colonel Keu says.

The six Metros pale to various shades of green, and Moose Feet Girl is allowed to collapse to the floor. They file out, surely praying under their breath that their situation is not as bad as it looks. Pray all you like, boys and girls. None of them will be alive in the morning. The Colonel will see to it.

Coughing, Moose Feet Girl struggles to sit up. “I knew you’d come,” she says, blood on her teeth.

“Are you . . . are you all right?”

Moose Feet Girl seems to consider this a stupid question, although it’s hard to tell because her left eye is swelling shut. She points behind him, at a stack of clean towels in the corner. “Could you hand me one of those?”

“Oh yes, of course.”

She wipes her mouth and chin with one end of the towel, spits in it a few times, and holds the other end under her nose. A finger from her free hand goes in her mouth and probes around. “Hey, I’ve still got all my teeth,” she says.

“Why did you do that?” Colonel Keu asks, suddenly furious with her.

Moose Feet Girl answers with her middle finger. “Pink bow?”

“It was a red bow! Please, what kind of taste do you think I have?”

“Do you understand that I chose those gorillas over your red bow?”

Colonel Keu’s mouth feels like sandpaper. He swallows. “You know, I think we got off to a bad start,” he tries. “Let’s—”

“No, let’s not.”

“We’ve got an island—”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Colonel Keu opens his mouth, looking for the words that will buy him a second chance.

Moose Feet Girl cuts him off. “I’m not having lunch with you. I’m not having a drink with you. I’m not even going to speak to you again, except maybe to express my loathing and contempt.”

Colonel Keu shuts his mouth and purses his lips. “You’re putting me in a very difficult position.”

Moose Feet Girl shrugs her shoulders.

“What am I supposed do?” he begs, palms open.

Moose Feet Girl thinks about it, wincing when she tries to rest her chin on her fingers. “How about you go get me some ice,” she says. “Asshole.”

It is easier said than done. It takes him ten minutes to find the kitchen in the station, surly Metro cops backing into reluctant retreat at every turn. Of course they have a working refrigerator, and the freezer is full of ice cube trays. When he gets back to the basement room with a big plastic cup full of ice, Moose Feet Girl is gone. A spectacular, origami-folded panic opens inside him like a rose, still revealing itself when a chime sounds in his ear. Of its own accord, his finger goes to his temple. “BāZ rhymes with crazy.”

“Cuz it’s crazy how it’s cool, poobah. Lieutenant Z-Ray here, Shift Commander, Monitoring.”

Affecting detached nonchalance by habit alone, Colonel Keu purrs, “What’s the phat happening?”

“A gruesome unBāZality, poobah, in progress. Metro dispatch called. There’s a billy on the 718 westbound, a woman in seditious fit, moldy to boot. Metro says they had her in custody, but someone from RokSonic removed her and let her go. I checked the surveillance.” Long pause. “Smack me, poobah, but was that you?”

The Colonel chews that over. He can see it in his mind: the Metros upstairs sitting on their hands while Moose Feet Girl walks out the door, and the precinct captain gleefully tapping up RokSonic to report this baffling development. Good for him. The whole of RokSonic is probably grinding to a halt right now while the Colonel’s enemies make ready to fight it out for his job.

“Yes,” Colonel Keu says and taps off. Ice cup still in hand, he dashes for his car.

When Moose Feet Girl finally makes it back to her apartment, he’s waiting for her, leaning like a hustler against the wall next to her bed. She stops with one foot across the threshold. The dress, too damaged to stay on without constant attention, is slung over her shoulder like a toga, and contusions glow red all over her face and body. “You just don’t know when to quit,” she says. “I should have expected as much.”

“I brought your ice, baby,” Colonel Keu says, holding up the cup. One way or another, the Queen is going to see this; he’d better have his BāZ on.

Moose Feet Girl looks like she’s going to spit on him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she limps over, snatches the cup, and steps into the bathroom. Without shutting the door, she urinates, and after that she pours the ice water into a towel. Back in the room, she lies down on the bed and gingerly lays the cold-pack over her face.

After a time, she speaks. “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” Colonel Keu says.

Moose Feet Girl laughs. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something. Now what is it? And don’t lie to me. You’re an embarrassment when you lie.”

Colonel Keu wonders what she means by that.

“I can only presume that you want my ass,” Moose Feet Girl thinks aloud, “but you could have taken that at any time, so there must be something else.” After a thoughtful pause, she removes the towel and sits up. Her face looks like something out of a butcher case. “Take your clothes off,” she says.

The Colonel starts. “Huh?”

“If you don’t want to take your clothes off, why the hell are you here?”

“Oh!” Hurriedly, Colonel Keu starts unbuttoning his barely-BāZ ruffled construction worker shirt; meanwhile, two competing tickles at the back of his mind: What is she doing? and The Queen is watching, I need to be BāZer. He’s about as turned on as an overripe banana.

Moose Feet Girl fishes under her bed with her toes, pulls out the moose face slippers and slides her feet in. “Do you like these? You must.”

The Colonel can’t answer. It would be treason.

“I’m going to wear them,” Moose Feet Girl says.

Now he’s turned on. He fumbles at his last button and struggles out of his shirt.

Moose Feet Girl stands up and returns to the bathroom. “See, I think I’ve figured it out. You want me to like you.”

Colonel Keu feels slightly disarmed by this observation, but not enough to stop him from taking off his pants.

“Because I don’t wear what the State tells me to wear, or dance the way the State tells me to dance, or think in a State-approved manner.”

The Colonel, having forgotten about his work boots, is teetering with his pants around his ankles, bent over, struggling to unknot his laces. And he stops, erection shriveling away, because the Queen is watching, and now he has to beat Moose Feet Girl until she recants what she just said.

Moose Feet Girl returns from the bathroom. “If I were someone like you, and someone like me was into me, that would make me feel pretty special.” She’s holding the lid from her toilet tank.

What’s she doing with that?

“Unfortunately, I don’t like you.” The toilet tank lid comes straight for his face.

“Billy! Pervert! Billy! Pervert!”

Colonel Keu comes to with a mushroom cloud where his head used to be, and he’s being dragged, on his face he puts together eventually. His wrists are tied behind him, and it must be Moose Feet Girl pulling his ankles (also bound) because it’s her voice doing the shouting.

“This pervert broke into my apartment, took off his clothes and waited for me! He’s got unBāZalities written all over him!”

He gets a moment’s reprieve as she stops and pivots him around. He sees the stairs an instant before she shoves him down them, face first.

Some time later, the agony subsides enough that he’s able to roll over on his back. Orange light leaks into the stairwell from every floor; the sun must be setting. On his belly, written in black magic marker, he sees the words, “ELVIS IS ALIVE.”

The light has faded grey when the Colonel’s finely tuned ear picks up the sound of footsteps in the stairwell, leather-soled shoes stepping in lazy triplet feel, six or seven pairs of feet. He’s expecting yellow spats and ties, but when the first figure swaggers across the landing, she’s wearing thick, gold-rimmed sunglasses and an indigo jacket over a silk shirt: a member of the Queen’s Guard. She steps over Colonel Keu like he’s garbage left on the stairs. So does the rest of the party. Third to last, the Colonel recognizes Lord Woot, Grand Arbiter of That Which is BāZ. God Damn. God Damn. Is Moose Feet Girl getting a Royal Style Exemption? No, no, it’s worse than that; it doesn’t take Woot to deliver an RSE. Woot heads up the Royal Trendsetters; the Queen must have enjoyed the day’s escapades so much that she’s offering Moose Feet Girl an invitation to join their ranks. That bitch the Queen is in for a rude awakening.