Louis stood in front of the Black Leather Barbers sign, and watched as a homeless scruff walked by, searching each sidewalk crack for remnants of tobacco in abandoned cigarette buds. The man looked like a cigarette himself. His ashen face, a once very handsome thing. You could see it in his lips, the only thing that remained fleshy, red and perched like a stop sign. Louis watched Cigarette Man scour around until he scored a golden nugget. The man fumbled through his tattered linens for a light and skulked when he couldn’t find one. When the man looked at Louis, his eyes lit up like a traffic light turning green. “Young man, do you have a light?”
Louis thought about this, obviously he had a light as it was part of his purpose in going outside his barber shop, to have a smoke break himself. “No, I don’t, sorry.”
“God darn, scoundrel. No decency these days!” Cigarette Man barked in Louis’ face, then kept walking, looking in more cracks, mumbling “no decency” over and over until he was out of earshot, as if it would somehow convert Louis to decency.
There was an overflowing number of homeless people in town. They lived in all kinds of street cracks and grooves. Under kids’ parks like ogres under bridges, parking lot corners, and by streetlights. They were like day vampires roaming and moping around half-alive, but Louis never saw them out at night. Maybe they plotted beneath the city. Maybe they were sleeping, saving their energy, blending into trash bags, asphalt, manhole covers, and traffic poles, fading into everything belonging to the night. Either way, they lurked somewhere in a shadow until they could skulk again the next day.
Louis owned the most beloved barber shop in town. Men came to him. Men who worked in cookie-compact offices, their hair like barbed wire and their wives’ baseball bats ready to fire, and they would leave as rockstars. Then, the next month, they would crawl back to him, slimy and wife-less. Louis’s barber shop was like dope for these men. They would leave their families and date Moiras until their hair shriveled from David Bowie back to Medusa. Louis’s father had left him the barbershop. He was a decent man, people would say. Louis’s dad was a gunner. His job was to set off the cannons when there was a need for cannons to be set off. He died with that cannon, hands still held onto the launcher.
Moiras were much like cannons. They all had black hair and eyes, velvet clothes, and big black shiny boots. Their bodies were round, their lips were circles, with square eyes and triangle noses. Their whole selves were made up of beautiful black shapes. They were called Moiras because they all lived in Moira’s old building.
Moira was a beautiful, long-gone Hollywood actress who made their small town famous. Moira would leave for months on end, and when she came back, she would always take a married man back to her Los Angeles bachelorette pad, and you would never see the chap again.
Moira wasn’t an actress in the way starlets were actresses. She was an actress in the way that words would hit her mouth and fire like gunpowder. She was an actress in the way that souls illuminated, dogs peed, coins dropped, mothers cooed to a babe, and fat men’s jean buttons popped. The way a man cheats, or gambles, or loses. She was an actress in the way that things were supposed to be. Despite her talent, she was mostly famous for her hair. Her hair broke records. It was alleged to be 35 feet in length. Many people called her Rockstar Rapunzel, even though her career never made it outside playing romantic leads.
The last time she left town, she settled down and married some finance broker and then divorced him, of course. She didn’t come back afterwards, but nobody thought it was because of her failed nuptials, but rather out of shame. See, she tried to start a talk show called “Making Moira.” Advertisements had gone on for weeks via radio. It would play this song that was so grating to one’s ear that it would get stuck in there for weeks like its own form of wax.
Moira, Moira, come on down,
Time to share some joy in this town!
With laughter and love, we’re here to stay,
Join the fun. Let’s brighten the day!
And before you knew it, the town was singing and whistling and hooting the tune which everyone just called Moira, Moira.
Louis remembered the show, though he must have been very young when the first episode aired on TV. It must have been just before Louis’s dad had been drafted. Louis’s mom loved Moira. Louis’s dad loved Moira. Everyone loved Moira. Louis’s mom was making dinner and humming Moira, Moira. At dinner, Louis’s dad was humming Moira, Moira. Louis went to bed and woke up humming Moira, Moira. At breakfast, his mom danced around the living room like she was a ballerina again.
In the sixth episode, just after Louis’s dad had left for service, Moira mauled her guest star, Ambrose Kentoni, a famous actor, model, and media personality, by slicing his smirking face with her black knife-like nails. He had said some crude remark about the war, something indecent, something Moira wouldn’t let slide. After the episode aired and Louis’s mom switched to the jewelry auctioning channel like nothing had even happened, Louis climbed into his mother’s lap. She was breathing with her mouth, and the smell of wine filled Louis’s nose. Louis’s mom looked down at her painted nails.
“Kids and boys can take the art out of you, you know?” She kissed the top of his head, the wine breath now imprinted on him. “Shame,” she added, looking back at the TV. He could have sworn he felt tears trickling down his temples, but then again, it could have also been strands of his mother’s silky hair hanging above him like a rosary.
Anyway, all the apartment-building Moiras looked similar to the original Moira in some way. Somewhere within the black hole of them, maybe in the way they laughed or walked, the dilation between their eyes, or the way their hair bopped when they talked—Moira existed.
The war was an event marked by the cultural evolution of hair. See, there was an island that no one knew of, Maince, where people grew their hair so long that their society’s infrastructure, architecture, military, art, and economy were entirely composed of hair. A few American sailors came across the isolated island only to find that the ground was a curly blonde. The people ofMaince welcomed the sailors joyfully. The king of Maince styled his hair in a fifteen-foot-highpompadour, and he showed the men the inner workings of their culture. He showed them the hair-weaving women who crafted intricate hair dresses that looked like industrial machines. The schools where kids learned 101 Ways to Avoid a Bad Hair Day, how to count and multiply hair strands, the chemistry of hair, the history of the French bob. The king showed them where married people slept in their hair trees and the zoos where there were species of animals the sailors had never seen before, and some they had but couldn’t fully discern because their coats were long and matted. They were pretty sure that one was a hippo, or maybe an elephant, behind its giant cloud of hair. One of the animals was called a zanka. It was beautiful, and was similar to an elk, except its antlers went on like a never-ending cobweb. It was the only species on the island without an exceedingly long mane.
Despite his smarts, and his PhD in anthrohairology, the king had made a serious blunder. See, scientist and failed solo pop star Silen Constella was on that sailboat and during the many months after their discovery of the island, she had secretly been studying the people of Maince. Testing them. She discovered that the people of Maince had evolved a gene that had healing properties embedded in the makeup of their brain stem cells, which was able to spread out to their scalps, resulting in an abnormal growth of hair cells. When she reported this to the president of America, he sent soldiers and boats and lieutenants with their guns and cannonballs and all their ugly mustached scientists to put the island on lockdown. But the people of Maince resisted, and thus the 1955 War of Maince, otherwise known as the Battle of Strands, began.
Men in Louis’s town who had survived the war would tell tales of the women of Maince. How beyond the hair that encapsulated their bodies, there was unparalleled and illuminating beauty. The survivors explained how they felt bad for them because the men of Maince were very ugly, but they treated their women like deities, and they loved each other more than any Americans could.
After the war, hair wasn’t just a thing on your head. It was an entirely separate entity. People lost their minds turning their hair into houses and boats and fruits and cars and baskets until the government released a statement disallowing hair to impersonate objects. After that, hair mostly went back to normal, but if it was shiny and well-kept, it increased your attractiveness by tenfold. Men lost jobs because of their balding, but thankfully Louis’s mother passed down her good hair genes so he never had to struggle much. Sometimes Louis imagined his father on the battlegrounds of Maince, when he was shot, probably by a very large ball of a pretty woman’s hair, that, when it came into contact with him, made him look quite beautiful too.
Moiras never got their hair done because the first Moira had said in an interview with People magazine that she would never let a man touch her hair, and unfortunately, none of the hairdressers in the town were women. Louis dated a Moira once. She was a decent girl. Decent family, cute dog, boring little town girl. He loved her inconsolably. One thing about all Moiras is they can illuminate in some way, the way Moira did. Louis’s Moira was a potter. He remembered when he came to one of her art shows. He felt tears already packaged inside him, ready to be released, before even entering the building and looking at the clay things behind their glass enclosures. They were odd things, normal things, random odd normal things: handbags, bowling pins, guns, lamp shades, little houses, scarves. They never failed to make his heart whimper, or his eyebrows furrow like closing stage curtains. It was hard to leave a Moira, and he never did. She left him. All Moiras leave at some point.
As he pulled out a cigarette and flicked a light out of his pocket, lighting it in one swift motion, he heard Cigarette Man come skulking back over to him. Louis rolled his eyes and looked at the man. A beautiful woman was strapped like a grenade to his arm. A Moira. “Decent, girl, decent, decent girl” Cigarette Man repeated, like it was a lullaby. She lit the man’s cigarette with a black skeleton bone patterned lighter and shot daggers at Louis.
“There’s the scoundrel! And look at him now! A liar, a scoundrel, a bad, bad beetle man!” Cigarette Man opined, his face sunken like a skull. He was throwing such a fit that Louis could see the lining of every bone in his face as though the remainder of his skin could fall smack to the floor at any minute.
“Well, hon, that’s very sweet of you, but I must get to my hair appointment now.” She kissed Cigarette Man’s forehead, and Louis felt as if moths were biting holes in his insides. He followed her inside his shop.
She didn’t bat an eyelash at him.
He checked the appointment list to assure himself that what was happening was true, that he was not in a dream. Sure enough, he saw a Moira booked for 3:40. It felt illegal, her sitting there flipping through Vogue magazine, and the fact that her hair, hidden behind a headscarf, would soon be on his shop’s floor.
“Um,” he muttered awkwardly. “Francy will be with you soon. He’s just finishing up Arnold’s mohawk.”
Louis sat down his next appointment, a fat farmer named Ken. His hair was matted and sparse, it was greasy and wrong in every way hair could be wrong. Straight in some ways, wavy in others, going opposite directions, up, down, side to side, looping, swiveling, shaking against the fan in the corner of the room, ends split like a frayed skipping rope. He thought of it like a lost dog, alone and abused and tormented in any way a dog could be tormented. He imagined its caretakers leaving it outside, tied to a fence for days without food or water or warmth. But in that pitiful thing, he closed his eyes and imagined something greater. Machine guns and howitzers. His father’s shotgun and bullets against a deer’s torso. Antlers atop a cobbled fireplace.
He remembered how his father took him out to the woods for a hunt once. The kind of woods that the older kids in town would tell ghost stories about. It featured trees with twisty branches and large bellies that made scowling faces. But in the autumn, when Louis’s dad took him there, the trees began to die and wither away into something that belonged to the fae. The leaves were like traffic lights or Christmas lights or like a cheerleader’s pompoms or the assortment of colours his mom always had painted on her nails. He had never seen her without her nail polish on, not even with a chip. He imagined that every day, when Louis went to school and his dad went to work, she would sit by the TV, take off every layer of paint, and let her nails breathe.
And then, when she finished her cleaning and cooking and sweeping and washing and grocery shopping, she would paint the colours right back on.
To test his theory, he once stole the red nail polish out of her red-yellow-orange combo and hid it in his room. Miraculously, the next day, when he came home, her nails still looked the same, not a chip in sight, still painted orange on the nails that were always orange, yellow on the ones that were always yellow, and red on the ones that were always red. This is when he began to grow a place in his stomach where his fear for his mother resided.
Louis and his dad walked through the woods, stepping on graveyards of colourful, dead tree leaf nails. Louis and his dad rested on a log, waiting for their prey. A lot of time had gone by, and Louis’s dad took out his canister of rum and began to drink and talk about all the times his father took him hunting. He described the primal nature of a man taking his first kill, the mountains breathing around them, watching and judging. It was an entrance into manhood, he said. Louis closely watched ants crawl over the dead leaves. It looked like they were flying. His dad took another swig. He was still going on with his speech. “My father would point the gun right to my chest, told me ‘you gotta hit ’em there, where they exist and all that.’” Louis watched an ant crawl on his shoe. “Good decent man, your grandpa wouldn’t let nothing slide.”
Then something big and grounded enough not to float on leaves started moving in the corner of Louis’s eye. It didn’t make a sound, but it was big. Louis thought at first that it must have been a goblin or a banshee or a dragon of sorts. It had three eyes, and it was white, almost clear, like the tip of a fingernail. Its nose and mouth were flushed dark red, and a long braid hung from its chin. Its eyes stared into Louis’s like a lighthouse, and it gave him the feeling that he was caught red-handed for something, dollops of guilt got stuck in his throat. Its antlers unraveled like they would never end, and there were gold rings plaited on its many ears. “A king of rock,” Louis’s mother would say if she were there.
The old townswomen always told stories of how the woods used to be a civilization for the fae. Most of the fae were ugly things. They were pointy in every part that could be pointy, and the townsmen hunted them in winters when elk and other woodland creatures were hard to find. But some of the fae were said to be so beautiful that they would lull you to sleep. That they would take you and hide you between their giant ears that unwound forever, and would keep you there, feeding off every bit of art that existed in your soul. The town’s ladies said that there are special places in a person’s body where art exists. Some are able to let it out, some aren’t, but everyone has a little in them.
Louis thought about this story a lot. Most of the other kids would make fun of you for believing in it, but sometimes, on one of those nights, long after his dad had left, Louis would wrap himself in his mother’s arms while she sat on the couch and watched her jewelry auction channel. He would look at her feet and see how they rhythmically stepped and then brushed across the floor, and he would turn to her tapping coloured nails, counting one and two and one and two, he would listen to her heart, how warm and fast it was, how it was singing a soft tune to him, and he knew that art lived there.
The fae could only live off art, and that was how they got their beautiful illuminating complexion. They said that it was the fae’s job to protect the woodland creatures.
While Louis looked at the creature before him, he felt his eyes go clear, his chest go numb, his legs felt like a million bees were stinging him, his abdomen burned, and he felt everything a person could feel all at once. His dad must have been looking, too, because he finished his last swig.
One, two, three bullets were shot. Louis looked away. One in the creature’s face, two in the chest. “Look up, boy.”
Louis didn’t look up. Louis’s dad dragged him, sobbing, over to the creature. “No, no!” Louis screamed. His dad pulled back Louis’s hair so hard he thought his skin would rip off with it. He plopped little Louis’s head right in front of the creature’s red one. He finally opened his eyes and looked at the thing. There wasn’t much there to see.
When Louis and his dad went home, and his mom cooked their winning prize for dinner, the first bite was the most delicious thing he had ever eaten. “Good kill today,” his dad said. His mom laughed like it was the funniest thing.
Then Louis continued his thoughts on artillery. Mortars and shell-shocked eardrums. Trench foot in combat boots. Poker games in barracks. Grenades and bodies cut up in places they shouldn’t. And the little dog became a soviet Howitzer named D-30.
When Louis looked up, Ken was gone and hidden behind black spikes and fringe. His fat deposits miraculously lightened, and his eyes were swaying palm trees. His cheeks looked bright and luminous, like blown glass. After two weeks, when it’s all gone, Ken will come back looking like a street junkie.
Louis turned around and was startled to see Moira perched at his shoulder like a pet parrot. There was a fearful look on her face.
“Well, my, my, mister decency,” she flirted. She slipped something in Ken’s pocket. Louis presumed it was her number. The Moira hummed off, humming the Moira, Moira tune, breaking millions of little Louis crow hearts. He sat down, hands over his eyes and tried to think about artillery. It was silent, not a handgun in sight. He dropped the knife he used for Ken’s hair, and it skimmed a slice into the side of his thigh. He didn’t care. He quickly stuck his hands in Ken’s pocket to see what the Moira had put there.
“Ay!” Ken yelped. When Louis took his hand out, a strand of black hair was in it. He kept pulling and pulling and pulling it out of Ken’s pocket. It seemed like it would go on unravelling forever. “A head of hair that woman was hiding, ay?” Ken chuckled. Louis sprinted out of the store.
There were trails of strands that formed into clumps of black hair on the sidewalk, but Moira was nowhere in sight. He picked up every thread he could find and followed the hair-path, winding and winding and winding, all the way to the Moira building. “Moira, Moira,” Louis mumbled. Black hair spilled out of his pockets and shoes. He even ate some of it so he wouldn’t lose it and began coughing black hair as he repeated her name. He got to the stairway of the Moira building, which led up to the black shiny Moira door. Cigarette Man stood sloped at the front.
“Indecent, indecent,” he laughed.
“Where is Moira?” Louis asked.
Guns began firing inside the building, and Louis ran up to the door. Cigarette Man put his hand on Louis’s chest to stop him. His hand now looked so young, his fingernails glowing, his pinky flushed and red.
“Now, boy, you wanna go in there?”
“Is Moira in there?”
Cigarette Man went down the steps. He turned and told Louis how much of a decent bunch the Moiras were. How they bathed him and fed him and gave him lots of lighters. “Good, decent,” and he whistled off. Louis opened the door. A red carpet of hair spilled out. He took off his boots and his socks, flung them away and carried the hair in his hands. He walked onto the carpet of hair. It felt like walking on water.
“Moira, are you okay?” he called out to nothing.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Louis.” Louis realized Moira probably didn’t know his name, and he turned red with embarrassment. “From the barber,” he said.
The Moira flailed her hands on her black hair like someone not wanting someone else to see them naked.
“Oh. Right, that one,” she said weakly, awkwardly.
“Is Moira here? She left something.”
“I’m Moira.”
The Moira took Louis upstairs.
“No, see, I was looking for another Moira. She looks like a real weapon. Her hair is much bigger than yours, actually, like a million tufts of cannonballs. And her eyes are like diamonds, and her face is sharp, and her lips are rubber ducks, and her chin feels like a hammer on your shoulder, so you can’t be her.”
Moira hugged Louis and kissed him.
“Hey! Stop it!” he yelled. Her lips felt like stepping on newly dead autumn leaves. Louis grunted with disgust. She just rolled her eyes, annoyed. Upstairs, a hallway with hundreds of black doors stood in front of him. He knew which one was Moira’s. It was labeled “My Room.” From behind him, he could hear all the Moiras arguing and cackling.
Louis opened the door, and the room’s ceiling and walls were plastered with black hair. There were piles of black t-shirts with the original Moira’s face printed on them and stacks of magazines with Moira’s celebrity profiles and photoshoots and pages from gossip columns and newspaper clippings of Moira quotes. Moira emerged from her hair.
“You missed your hair appointment.”
She kissed him, and it felt like kissing warm, wet clay.
“Are you her?”
“Who?”
“Moira.”
“Yes, we are.”
“I wanted to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
She combs her hands through his hair.
“You forgot your hair.”
He puts his palms out. His hands look like guitars, the black hair strands the strings.
“Keep it.”
“Are you a nymph?”
“No, my love.”
“What are you?”
“If I tell you, do you promise not to tell?”
“Never. I love you.”
“Vampire.”
She brought him close to her chest and wrapped him around in her hair. It felt so warm, and he heard her dead bomb heart beating, slowly firing, only every ten seconds. She sang the Moira, Moira tune, and Louis felt like he was falling asleep. He felt everything, and yet he was about to fall into her like she was a black hole.
“If I asked you to make me into anything, would you do it?” she said.
“Yes, yes, anything.” He was high.
“If I asked you to make me into a jack-o’-lantern, would you do it?”
“Yes, yes, anything.”
“If I asked you to make me into a machine, would you do it?”
“Yes, yes, anything.”
“If I asked you to make me horrible, would you do it?”
“Yes, yes.”
“If I asked you to make me an indecent thing, would you do it?”
“Yes, yes, anything”
“I want you to make me a rockstar.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to make me the best rockstar this world has ever seen. Yes, I want you to make me the most indecent skulking rockstar this world has ever seen. I want you to light me on fire and set me off until I’m just skull and spikes. And then I want you to burn me out and light me up again. Until I’m nothing.”
And he did. He thought of dead men on the battlefield and flesh caught between wires and limbs still hanging on to firearms and heads left in helmets. He thought about war. The war, and he thought about his father. He thought about how there were no decent American men. He thought about how he lied, about how his dad did survive the war. He did not die nobly against the hairball. In fact, the thing that hit him wasn’t a hairball at all. It was a woman. A beautiful Maince woman, and when he came home, she was hidden in his suitcase. And when Louis’s mother found them together, in the tub, grooming the woman’s infinity, she took a pistol and shot him three times in the heart. Louis was sure his father never had any art inside him, because whenever he put his head to his father’s heart and tried to listen, there wasn’t much there.
Louis had made Moira into the very best Howitzer the world had ever seen. A black, spiked pixie cut.
“What are you going to do now, my decent man?”
The room was spoiled with shards of black hair. It looked like the pieces of soldiers he had imagined. Like a grenade had gone off. There were pieces caught between the pages of magazines and in the floorboards and on the windowsill. Louis scrambled to pick up every piece, half awake, flailing like a madman across the room.
Under the illuminating moonlight that ebbed across the room, Moira left, and Louis faded into the night.