The Mythniks Saga

by Paul Neuhaus

  I sat down in the chair Ty’d left facing the couch. “Missing? What do you mean missing?”

  “Missing as in nowhere I can find her. I’m worried sick.”

  “Back up. Walk me through this. Ty said she was in rehab.”

  “You talked to Ty?”

  “He came by this morning, sniffing around for a Dora Status Report.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. Anyway, that’s not what we’re talking about. Focus. Keri.”

  “Right. Sorry. My head’s not on straight. Where was I? What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Rehab. Yeah, I found a place. It was what I could afford, but it was still nice. Good reviews on Yelp.”

  “Yelp reviews rehab clinics?”

  “Yelp reviews everything.”

  “‘Good service, but the methadone was lousy’.”

  “Focus. Keri.”

  “Right. Sorry. Go on.”

  He rubbed his palms on the front of his sweatshirt again. “She went a couple of times. She was pretty noncommittal. I told her if she was going to get through it, she needed to jump in with both feet. She said, ‘Okay, sure. I’ll do that. But you know who’s not jumping in with both feet? Dora. Dora’s not jumping in with both feet.’ I told her you’d offered to go to rehab with her. It stuck in her craw we weren’t able to get ahold of you and you weren’t going. Should I not’ve told her?”

  I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “No. It’s okay.”

  “Finally, after about a week, I noticed something weird. The place was pick-up and drop-off. Like a day camp. I went to pick her up and she didn’t come from inside the building. She came from the street. I said, ‘Where were you?’ and she said, ‘What do you mean? I was in rehab.’ I was suspicious. That evening, I called the clinic and asked them if Keri’d been there that day. They said she hadn’t been there in several days. They thought she’d withdrawn. So, I confronted her and asked her where she’d been. She dummied up. Refused to say. I took her to the clinic the next day and escorted her in. I told them to watch her like a hawk. They didn’t watch her like a hawk. She slipped out at lunch. When I came to pick her up, she was walking toward the car from the direction of the street again. It was the same as the day before, only this time she had… the haircut.”

  “‘The haircut’? What do you mean ‘the haircut’?”

  “I mean the Dutch boy haircut with the point over the forehead. The point like Flock of Seagulls.”

  I slumped in my seat. Fuck. That haircut. I knew exactly what he meant when he said it. The Dutch boy with the point over the forehead (like Flock of Seagulls) was a symbolic haircut. It denoted membership in a club the same way someone in the Elk’s Lodge might wear a funny hat or a fraternity guy might wear the scalps of the women he’s raped. The Dutch boy with the point over the forehead marked its wearer as a devotee of the Church of Reciprocity. The Space Hippies, as most Angelinos referred to them. They called themselves a church. Nonmembers called them a cult. They’d been founded in the nineteen fifties by a charismatic guy with a gift for persuasion and a love for science fiction tropes. His shtick wasn’t unusual as far as cult claptrap goes. Millions of years ago, aliens who believed in peace and love came to earth and created the race of Man. The aliens imbued humans with the capacity for great love for all creatures, but humans had strayed from the path. The Star Fathers would one day return to right the ship but, in the meantime, they’d appointed the founder—Nicos Nephus (one of my own people, I’m sorry to say)—as prophet and guide. Nephus kept followers on the straight and narrow and the only cost was, well, everything you had. The Church of Reciprocity was worldwide, but it’d been a boil on Los Angeles for nearly seventy years. Our fault, really. L.A. was like True North to cultists. Most of them found their way here in time.

  “Alright. When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

  “Three days ago.”

  “Did she say or do anything that’d give you a clue? Anything at all, no matter how innocuous.”

  He fidgeted on the couch, thinking. He rubbed his hands on his sweatshirt again.

  “Why do you keep doing that? Rubbing your hands on your shirt?”

  He smiled and held up his palms for me to see. “Sweaty. You make me nervous.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Table that for now. Answer the question.”

  “Over dinner, the night before she disappeared, she said she was thinking about going to a con of her own.”

  “A con? What do you mean?”

  “A con. A convention. I said, ‘What do you mean? Like BronyKonfab?’ and she smiled this creepy smile and she said, ‘Yeah. Just like BronyKonfab’. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I figured she was giving me shit about the brony thing. She was like a broken record on the subject after our adventure last month. A mean broken record. Almost everything that came out of her mouth was a dig.”

  “Forget about that. Do you have any idea what she meant when she said she had a con to go to?”

  “None at all, but it was the only thing she said that felt like a clue.”

  I sighed and tapped my foot. After a moment’s thought, I did something I probably shouldn’t’ve done. I stood up and put my chair back next to the door. “Alright,” I said. “Let me know if you think of anything else.”

  He looked at me blankly. “You, uh, you don’t wanna help me find her?”

  “Why would I be any better at finding her than you? You told me everything you know and I’m just as baffled as you are.”

  “Sure, but… you found me. When Keri couldn’t find me, and you helped her, and it worked.”

  “That wasn’t exactly master detective work. Anyone could’ve done what I did. I’m sure you’ll be fine. You need to call the police and let them handle it. It’s their job.”

  His expression and demeanor were an odd mix of disappointment and despair. He was shell-shocked enough not to voice either emotion. “Okay. Well. Thanks for letting me bounce it off you.”

  “Sure thing.” I opened the door and let him out. I watched for a moment as he walked to his car, in a daze.

  Once I’d shut the door, Hope said, “Dora!”

  The unexpected reproach caught me off guard. “What?!”

  “Don’t what me. That was mean, and you know it.”

  “Mean? How was it mean? I told him the truth. I’ve got nothing to offer.”

  “Dora. Keri’s missing. You like Keri.”

  The conversation was rubbing me the wrong way. I went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer. “So what? Do I look like a detective to you? Am I wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat?”

  “Yeah, but it’s Keri.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Keri. You know what? Keri’s not even my kid. I don’t need to be mixed up in it.”

  Hope sighed from within her jug. “Wow. That’s just petty.”

  I sat down behind my desk and popped the top on the Budweiser. “So, I’m petty. You can call me ‘Tom’.”

  “I can think of a lot of things to call you besides ‘Tom’.”

  “Have at it. It’s early still.”

  2

  Grand Theft Pinecone

  I disappeared from Malibu and reappeared in a grove of pine trees. The air was gentle and sweet and the sound of the ocean on my right was soothing. I was back in ancient Greece—or at least the facsimile ancient Greece Pan’s magic pinecone provided. I decided to head for the water, so I cut right and waded through waist-high ferns. I brushed the tops of them with my fingertips as I walked and tried not to think too much. I wanted to concentrate all my thinking into a nugget of time and leave my passage in and out thought-free. I focused on my breath, prolonging the inhales and exhales so I’d know I was maximizing my connection to the world (or pseudo-world) I was passing through. Mindfulness, the kids call it. For just a moment, I thought about entering the pinecone and never leaving, but I chucked the notion right away. Pan’s virtual, pocket-universe wasn’t designed for a life of quietude. It was de
signed for fucking. Pan was a high-functioning letch and sex was never far from his mind. That’s why the creatures I glimpsed in my peripheral vision had exaggerated titties, asses, and dicks. The pinecone was an erotic amusement park, and I couldn’t picture myself retiring into an existence of wanton sluttiness. (As good as that may sound on paper.)

  As I neared the sea, I passed through the area of the forest where Amanda, Connie and I had fought Talos, the giant man made of bronze. I knew it was the same area because there were several fallen trees and Talos himself still stood, drained of animating goo. I spared the prehistoric robot a glance and lowered my eyes again. I knew where I was going and wasn’t particularly keen to sightsee.

  At last, I broke through the tree line and onto the sandy beach. When I’d been there before, I’d spotted an outcropping of rock extending into the surf, and I wanted to sit there to do my ruminating. I stopped briefly to take off my boots and socks.

  It was nearing sunset inside the pinecone and the sky was a watercolor wash of oranges, reds and purples. As beautiful as it was, I wasn’t interested in consuming the vista. I wanted nothing but the sound of the water and the thoughts in my head. I sat down on the outcropping and opened the floodgates.

  Why hadn’t I helped Elijah find his missing daughter?

  Because she wasn’t my daughter. And I resented her for it. She was supposed to be my daughter, and I’d been cheated. As irrational as it may sound on the face of it, I was angry with both of them for robbing me. I was more angry with them than I was with Adrestia—and it’d been her stupid revenge that’d left me alone in my trailer for more than a decade. Irrational or rational, I was who I was and, as I’d told Amanda, I didn’t think I would change.

  Did I even care about or want Elijah anymore?

  Absolutely not. I looked at him and felt nothing. No physical attraction; no desire for intimacy. Nothing. He’d become even more of a man-child than he’d been when I loved him. I no longer viewed him as an equal, and I sure as hell didn’t want a mate, I’d have to both love and raise as an offspring. Was I being unfair? Maybe his retreat into childish things was the same as my retreat into my trailer. That certainly made sense, but the idea didn’t sway me. My feelings toward El were a funny cocktail of resentment and indifference. Not a good basis to reignite an old spark. Plus, the whole thing had been his fault. A drunken indiscretion had led to years and years of disappointment and detachment. If El had been able to keep his drunken dick in his pants, the span from roughly 2003 to the present would’ve been very different. Try as I might, I couldn’t forgive him for that.

  Okay, so forget about Elijah. Why not try and find someone new?

  Because no-one was trustworthy. Everyone was either a heat-seeking missile of selfishness, or they were a pinball bouncing around randomly off the bumpers. Humans were bad; Mythniks were worse. As petty and stupid as Men could be, Mythniks were both supernatural and Greek. Being immortal led to entitlement. You felt you were better than all the other living creatures, and the world should treat you accordingly. Throw in the Greek element with its overwrought, histrionic behaviors and you had a recipe for insufferableness. The older I get, the less tolerant I am of affectation, and Mythniks seem to always walk beneath clouds of tiresome affectation. So, that was it, I guess. On the subject of romantic possibility, no-one was worth my consideration. In a world of eight billion people, that was a depressing notion.

  What am I? What am I really?

  I’m a robot. I have one purpose and that is gathering up bad things and putting them into a box. When I thought about what I was at that moment versus what I’d been when I was a little girl, I couldn’t see a connection at all. It was like two different people living two different lives. What had I wanted when I was a child? What had I wanted to be? I dug down under all the layers of soil and rock to find that little girl and ask her.

  What’d you wanna be when you grew up? Times were simpler back then, and there weren’t as many options—for little girls or little boys. I think that might’ve been a good thing. I want to be a wife and mother, the little girl said to me, echoing through time and experience. Quaint. Retrograde. Subversive by modern standards. But there it is.

  What do I want to be now?

  If the wiring is in and I can’t find someone to share my life with, I guess what I want to be is unmoored. Once upon a time, I told myself I wanted to die, but that wasn’t it. Not really. The truth is, I have a healthy ego, and I can’t imagine a world without me in it. More to the point, and given my years of duty and wandering, I couldn’t imagine a world where I wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted to do every second of the day. I’d earned that, I thought. After my adventure with Orpheus and Medea, I thought I’d found a different, possibly better outlook. An outlook where I was open and not only willing but eager to engage with and help others. After my adventure with Adrestia and the Kraken, I felt everything I’d wanted had been thrown back in my face. It felt punitive. It felt gratuitous. A new me began to emerge. A new me that said, It’s time to look out for number one. It’s time to become “Power Dora”; to embrace a great love I’d been neglecting. And that love’s name was, of course, “Dora”.

  That’s what I came there to think. I thought it, and it was time to go.

  I walked back to the sand, sat for a moment to replace my footwear, and headed back toward the trees. As I approached where I’d entered, I had a funny thought: There will be no pining Sicilian women in my life. I won’t allow it.

  I fell out of the pinecone. It was in motion when I passed from the world inside to the world outside, and so I fell. I landed on my ass in front of my desk and was dazed for a moment, unclear what was happening. I looked up and there was Keri Wiener, standing over me. She’d just picked up the pinecone and was carrying the pithos and my bass guitar. She had a Dutch boy haircut with a Flock of Seagulls point in the front. She was surprised to see me. In fact, she gasped and spun on her heel. She ran toward the open door of the trailer. Beyond her, I could see a waiting car. The car was full of kids in their late teens and early twenties, all of them sporting Dutch boy haircuts with Flock of Seagulls points in the front. “Come on! Come on!” the girl in the passenger seat yelled.

  I snapped out of teleportation lag and went after Keri. I snagged her by the cuff of her right pant leg and jerked just as she was leaping into the backseat of the getaway car. I cut into her momentum only slightly and she still landed across the laps of the kids in the vehicle. Though I didn’t stop her, she did drop the pithos. The jug hit the pavement (and I winced as it did), but it didn’t break. It rolled to the left of the car and I lost sight of it. The car burned rubber, threw off smoke and jetted toward the sea. As I watched, it took a hard U-turn, passed in front of the Tonga Lei Lounge and disappeared down Pacific Coast Highway. Someone finally had the idea of shutting the right rear door.

  I’d landed flat on my stomach in front of the trailer. I rolled over, so I could sit on my bottom and look over toward Hope. She’d come to rest against the left front tire of my Pontiac Firebird Esprit. “Maybe you should’ve locked the door,” Hope said.

  “Ya think?”

  I took Hope back into the house and shut the door. I put her down on the desk and took stock. I had no idea how long Keri had been inside the trailer before I came out of the pinecone, but the place looked its usual slovenly self. She took my cone and my Gene Simmons bass, and she’d tried to take Hope too. I drew an immediate and, I think, correct conclusion: Keri had no interest in my things. If she’d taken them, she’d taken them for the Church of Reciprocity—and that meant some bad mojo was in play.

  I’ve already told you most of the details I know about the C.O.R. Most experts considered them a cult. They’d badgered their way into tax-free status (mostly through litigation), but they were by no means a real religious entity. They used their converts for slave labor, they kept their people on a special diet, and this being Hollywood, they counted several celebrities as members. But what could they possib
ly want with a magic pinecone, a battle-axe-shaped guitar, and a jug meant for capturing Evil? I discounted the bass as unimportant right away. Keri had probably been sent for the pinecone and the pithos, seen the bass as something shiny and neat and grabbed that too. The pinecone and the jug were the only things I owned that were worth a damn. Both were significant magic items from the Greek tradition. The pithos had once been called “Death Star of Greek antiquities”. That the jug had been the thing Keri dropped was good. It was real good. I’d had Hope stolen once before and it was an angsty time. Thankfully, that was off the table. But what could be done with a magic pinecone? Not much as far as I could tell. It was great for anyone who wanted a) a taste of ancient Greece or b) a good blowjob, but it wasn’t good for much else.

  “Stop pacing,” Hope said at last.

  I’d been pacing and hadn’t realized it. I stopped. “What do you think that was all about?” I asked her.

  “Why would Keri Wiener wanna rob us? I dunno. I don’t know much about this church she’s attached herself to. Are they on drugs? Keri looked like she was on drugs.”

  “Keri was on drugs before the cult. I doubt she’s on drugs now. The Church of Reciprocity has a fairly Christian-y code of ethics. They don’t like homosexuals, or drinkers or druggers. Although there have been rumors about their food.”

  “Their food?” the disembodied voice from inside the pithos said. “What do you mean their food?”

  “They only eat food they generate themselves. Like Herbalife or Jenny Craig. Some people say it’s full of chemicals. Mind-altering chemicals to encourage conformity. It could be an urban legend, but, a while back, these dudes analyzed some in a lab and they were gonna come forward with their findings. The C.O.R.’s lawyers dropped like Thor’s hammer. That’s how they operate. Through legal proceedings, threats, intimidation. Outside their own circles, they’re not well-liked.”