Lexx tells Tink they need to leave the club—he accidentally pissed on the Pain Viking’s beard and is now concerned he might be tortured to death in the toilet. Tink does not think this sounds credible, but it’s 5am. She’s several stations past deeply fucked up and has spent most of the night shadowed by a mute six-foot-tall demon in a red latex dress. The DJ keeps sampling a trill of a children's choir that just reminds Tink of church, and she did not come all the way to Berlin for that noise. So she dodges elbows at 135 BPM and paddles through rubbery dancefloor sweat to collect her fellow Neverlanders. Outside, they gasp on spitty spring air that stinks like diesel and wet cigarettes. Dinu announces that he’s starving and Masha says there’s some new fast food not far, open late. American. He drawls it out like chalkboard nails and stares at Tink because she’s the only one of that them is. 

American. 

Tink is from Indiana. Most of the Neverlanders believe she is from California, because undyed and wigless, she is tall and blonde. She has never been to California, nor has she been to New York City, Disneyworld, the Grand Canyon, or Washington, DC. Kyle, the last American she slept with, thought that was embarrassing. Like, you’ve barely seen anything worth seeing. 

But she has seen Prague glitter against the snow. She’s seen apotheosis on the dance floor at clubs dudes like Kyle couldn’t even imagine, let alone gain entrance to. She’s watched the goddess of peace drive her steeds to victory through a cherry-colored dawn at Brandenburg Gate. She survived her ugly, banal past so she might be born into the new millennium on the tide of five hundred ecstatic dancers when the floor goes electric with rhythm.

Her mother called her lost when they last talked. She told the boys and they started calling her Tinkerbell because she’s too weird to be a Wendy. The only girl among them who is a girl all the time, she helps them score drugs, sequins, and parts for Lexx’s broke-ass sewing machine. Tink has never paid rent on the loft where the Neverlanders fuck and crash and bicker. She knows better than to ask whether anyone else does.

The Lost Boys laugh at her provincialism. They mock her nasal vowels. They snipe at her for being gullible and vanilla. Still she knows they love her wholly in the immediate. They live by the same notions as she does. History is dead. The future is everything. The future is nothing. The only thing that matters is the beat. 

Tonight, she’s winded from it. The soreness feels post coital and her high hasn’t yet turned entirely sour. Somehow the Demon is still with them and their wig is so very thick and velvet soft. All of them are at least a little scary. The club encourages rules broken, looks devised out of the glamorous nightmare. As fearsome and inhuman as the beats. But even among the latexed sybarites of Neverland, the Demon is advanced tier. The vibe transcends the costume. The Demon has not said a single word. Not even a sound. They don’t react to German, English, French, Spanish, or Masha’s Australian-accented Russian. 

Lexx clears his throat. He spent hours last week constructing his stripey knitted face mask, some glorious anonymizing-but-never-anonymous partner to the argyle thigh highs he may or may not have stolen from Tink. He didn’t realize the mask would activate his allergies. Hence Tink watched him yank off the mask at the pink-misted strobe on the dance floor and cough up an unexpected minor storm of white fluff as the beat dropped. For a moment, Lexx looked like the Lord and Lady of Winter before he hit his inhaler.

“What about the Balkans?” he says. “Dinu, want to give it a go?”

Dinu jogs up to the Demon and chatters off a string of phrases in languages, still unrecognizable to Tink after eighteen months of Europe and nine with the lost boys in Berlin. No response from the Demon.

“Nadir, why don’t you ask if he’s Turkish,” says Masha. 

“I’m Algerian.”

“Don’t all Muslims speak Arabic?”

“Not all Turks are Muslims and you’re a racist.” Nadir struts over to the demon. He has the best legs of all of them, including Tink. He walks in heels like a dancer, which Tink assumed he had been until Nadir said he’d grown up fighting with his brothers and repairing motorcycles in his uncle’s garage outside of Paris. She knows the most about Nadir, his relentlessly dull, unglamorous, and heteronormative childhood in an ugly suburb with terrible, unimaginative parents because he talks to her at the north side of morning when they sleep together, which is often. Nadir is a beautiful boy and a dazzling woman. He is tender in bed and never makes her feel boring for still wanting that from a lover. 

Nadir whispers up to the Demon. He says the bits of prayer he only lets Tink hear him say aloud. The Demon’s eyes widen a bit, but no response. 

“Maybe they really are from hell,” says Masha. 

“You know there are 7000 languages spoken in the world. It’s unlikely that the five of us could rule all of them out” says Dinu, who did a couple of years at an English university before he claims to have met a talking dragon at a rave in Glastonbury. Lexx believes this is a metaphor for Dinu’s rapid acquiescence to amphetamine addiction. But whatever the case, Dinu likes to remind the rest of them that he is educated. When he speaks English, he does so with an exaggerated British accent.

The Demon’s origins don’t really matter to them. This is Europe, peak ‘90s, post-checkpoint, post-Cold War. Tink watched the Wall fall while sitting on a rec room plaid carpet back in Indiana. The TV star in his lightbulb suit reuniting the world and she thought, I belong there. It took her not quite a decade to drop out of college and beg, borrow, and cross the ocean so she might let Lexx hug out her hangover while news chyrons scrolled out the Good Friday Accord last week. Almost makes me want to go home, he’d said (he wouldn’t). Anyone could belong so long as they belonged here.

Tink sidles up and takes hold of the Demon’s bare arm. She touches their cheek, pale and smooth as sea stone. They’re tall, at least as tall as she is, even without precipitous stilettos. “I like you,” she says. “You seem like a real big scary sweetheart.” 

Dinu points out the restaurant across the way, a shiny yellow block in a dark hulk of office building. They dart over the light-slicked crosswalk because everyone is suddenly cold and famished. Tink’s stomach growls at the scent of shoestring fries and she waves off a ping of unwanted nostalgia. She turns back to Nadir. He spins past a puddle and takes her other hand. 

They enter in a flush, clacking over the tiles. It’s empty. No one at the tables. No one behind the counter. Masha whooshes past. “Hallo? Hallo? Ist jemand hier?”

Tink walks to the counter and peers over the register. Everything is clean. The metal trays from incoming orders shine, empty. There is no sizzle, no sound of footprints, no coughs, no breaths. 

“Maybe they’re in the jacks,” says Lexx.

They wait, each silent as The Demon, for a chorus of Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You” that plays in tiny volume over unseen speakers. 

“Maybe they’re dead,” says Masha.

“I think we should definitely leave,” says Dinu. “Things feel strange.”

“Isn’t strange your preferred ecosystem?” asks Lexx. 

Dinu steps back, as the Demon steps forward and tosses his head back, breathing in the scent. Exhaling deep noisy breaths. 

“Well, the hell beast is comfortable here,” says Dinu. 

Tink takes one of the Demon’s gloved hands. “Don’t be cruel. We accept, remember?”

“I’m hungry.” Nadir walks forward, toward the doors in the back. He tries knobs, calls out, in German, is everything okay, does someone need help. The bathroom door swings open at his fist. Tink wonders what they would do if they found an unconscious body. Call, certainly, but stay? In a pinch, she could swallow the remaining X secreted in a hidden pocket beneath the feather cuffs of her coat. But Dinu likely has more or worse in his pockets. Lord knows what Masha is carrying in his zippered pants. And Nadir—we may be in your bright and shiny new Europe, but I will be the one jailed if we get busted. She meets his eyes when he comes out of the bathroom. He looks untroubled. 

“No one. Nothing. Like the bathrooms have never been used.”

“Maybe they’re not open yet,” says Lexx.

But the lights are on. The doors are unlocked. The music plays. She can almost taste the french fries.

There are no french fries. No sign that french fries have ever been made or consumed on premises. 

“We should leave,” says Dinu, again, though none of them pay attention. 

Tink sides up to the counter and dangles a finger over the top of a register key. She worked at a Dairy Queen for a few months when she was sixteen. She would mention it if it wouldn’t provoke a world of jokes about fat cows, udders, breeders, milk, and cum. How to explain Dairy Queen to a French Algerian drag queen? Or to a Romanian drug addict with delusions of fashion design? The Demon might understand. She was raised on Sunday morning visions of fire lakes and flayed sinners, but she knows to her core that hell is an endless divided highway past the same strip malls in a thousand small towns failing in exactly the same ways.

“Dare me?” she asks. 

Dinu says something about possible security cameras, so she poses, one finger on the key, and the others gather round, tacitly summoned, family portrait style. Nadir to her right. Mash to her left. Even Dinu slinks in besides Lexx and adjusts his military cap to rest rakishly over his right brow. 

The Demon comes last. They half-float up to the lip of the Formica to sit, legs swinging, staring out into the last gasp of night. Shadows solidify outside the glass, summoned. Fellow late-night revelers, club-worn and similarly costumed slip through the unlocked door. 

Masha greets them and invites them to join their tableau. 

“She’s going to open the register,” he says. 

Nadir gives Tink the nod. She pushes on the button.

Nothing happens. The screen stays blank. Tink is disappointed and relieved. 

There’s a shuffle at the back, a subtle change in the atmosphere. 

The Demon takes a deep breath and when they open their mouth the sound tumbles out in screams and echoes of screams. It is a roaring orchestra of tormented sound, furious and loud. Masha flinches as the windows rattle. She feels their bodies tense in anticipation of the end. The Demon doesn’t stop, not after a breath, not a minute, not until their howl resolves into something, if not quite soothing, then less jarring. The new arrivals start to shuffle off, unsettled. Tink feels Nadir’s hand on her waist and knows that he can also see the tears at the corners of the Demon’s eyes. 

The others flinch, but Tink is pretty sure it’s a love song.