Chapter 1: The Initiation
The interview was in Beverly Hills, which should have been a clue. The bus dropped Barney off two miles away, and he walked the rest in a cheap suit that swallowed his bird-like frame. Sweat glued his shirt to his spine. The mansion wasn’t elegant; it was a shout. Gold-plated gate fixtures, faux-Roman statues sprayed in glitter paint, a fountain featuring dolphins doing something anatomically confusing.
He rang the bell. Somewhere deep in the house, a chime echoed like a cathedral gong.
The door swung open, and the smell hit him first. A tidal wave of gardenia perfume, so thick it felt edible, underpinned by something else… something warm, organic, vaguely chemical. Like a public bathroom after a festival.
“You’re late,” a voice boomed. It was a bass rumble, a voice that had smoked a thousand cigarettes and shouted over a thousand parties.
Barney looked up, and up. Delilah Diamond filled the doorway. She was a mountain in a leopard-print caftan, her hair a towering confection of platinum blonde extensions. Her face was a taut mask of surgery, the skin pulled so tight her smile seemed to strain at the corners. Her lips were two swollen, shiny pillows. But it was her breasts that commanded attention—they strained against the thin fabric like overinflated life rafts, bisected by a valley deep enough to lose a phone in.
“I… the bus…,” Barney stammered, his own voice a pathetic squeak.
“Save it. Inside. You’re letting the AC out.” She turned, and the landscape of her body shifted seismically. Her rear was a vast, jiggling continent, each cheek moving with a separate, slow-motion agenda. He followed, mute, into the marbled foyer. A chandelier dripping with enough crystal to sink a small boat cast a garish light over everything.
The living room was worse. White shag carpet, velvet purple couches, gold-trimmed tables. It looked like a casino had vomited inside a brothel. The cloying gardenia scent was stronger here, but that other note was too, now unmistakable: the sour, faintly metallic aroma of a recent, violent bowel movement.
“Sit,” she commanded, lowering herself onto a couch that groaned in protest. A cloud of perfume-and-other wafted toward him. Barney perched on the edge of an ottoman, his bony knees knocking.
“So. Barney. Your resume was… short. ‘Keen to learn,’ it said. That’s good. I need a learner. Someone who doesn’t know enough to be judgy.” She fixed him with eyes the color of weak tea. “My lawyers say, after the… incident with the pool boy and the emergency gastric pump… I need a monitor. A minder. Someone to be my… what did they call it… my ‘impulse control facilitator.’ You’re it.”
Barney blinked. “Facilitator?”
“You watch me. You make sure I don’t do things. Like order twenty thousand dollars worth of antique porcelain clowns online at three AM. Or try to recreate the ‘Bolero’ scene from 10 in my hot tub with the pizza delivery guy.” She leaned forward, her breasts settling on her knees like overstuffed duffel bags. “Mostly, you listen. I pay for the listening. You got listening ears, Barney?”
He nodded, too quickly.
“Good.” She settled back, and the couch exhaled. “You gotta understand the context. I was a star. Not just any star. A phenomenon.” And she was off.
It was a torrent. A two-hour, uninterrupted monologue. She talked about her first Hollywood party at eighteen, her affair with a famously stoic cowboy actor—“He wasn’t so stoic with my lipstick on his—” She named names, dates, positions. She described her brief, glorious reign as the queen of a very specific niche of fetish cinema in the late 70s.
“It was art, really,” she mused, picking at a speck on her caftan. “The Goddess of the Galaxies trilogy. The costumes were vinyl, darling, I nearly died of heatstroke. But the fans… they understood.” She described film sets with a startling, graphic precision. Barney felt a hot blush creep from his collar to his hairline. He tried to focus on a particularly aggressive gold wall sconce.
His eyes grew heavy. The heat, the smell, the hypnotic, vulgar rhythm of her voice… His head dipped.
A sound jolted him awake. A long, low, rumbling brrrrrrrrrrrrrrp that vibrated through the couch cushions. It was followed by a sigh of profound relief from Delilah. The air in the room thickened, the gardenia scent now decisively losing its battle.
“Where was I?” she continued, unfazed.
“The… the director who wanted you to work with a live octopus,” Barney mumbled, desperate to prove he was listening.
“Yes! The bastard. I said, Delilah does not do tentacles. Not after the misunderstanding with the prop guy on Space Vixens.” She studied him. “You’re tired. It’s a lot. I’m a lot. But we’re getting to the good part. The part about your job.”
Barney straightened, trying to muster professionalism.
“It’s simple,” she said, her sausage-lips forming a smile. “I’m an artist. My body is my instrument. But instruments… need tuning. Need maintenance.” She patted the vast expanse of her thigh. “My last assistant was squeamish. Couldn’t handle the intimate stuff.”
A cold trickle of dread dripped down Barney’s spine. “Intimate stuff?”
“The injections, for a start. The buttock lifts require a very specific schedule of corticosteroid shots to manage the inflammation. I can’t reach.” She said it as if asking him to pass the salt. “Then there’s the colonic irrigation system. The hoses get tangled. And my lower-back shaving… it’s a blind spot. A treacherous landscape.”
Barney’s vision swam. The gaudy chandelier blurred into a sunburst of nausea.
“You’ll live here, of course,” she boomed on, cheerful. “There’s a maid’s room off the kitchen. You’ll start tomorrow."
She stood up, the movement triggering another, softer pffft of gas. She didn’t notice. She extended a hand laden with rings. “Welcome to the team, Barney. Don’t look so scared. It’s just a body. Everyone’s got one.”
He looked at her hand. He looked at her face, at the eager, unhinged hope in those surgically widened eyes. He thought of his empty bank account, his shredded resume, the two-mile walk back to the bus stop in the crushing LA heat.
His own hand, thin and trembling, rose from his lap. It moved through the perfumed, poisoned air, and it let her engulf it in her warm, damp grasp.
“Excellent,” Delilah Diamond said, her grip tightening. “Now, be a darling and help me up. I think the bean salad from lunch is staging a revolt.”