Something about the shape of the bottle containing La Danse Rouge, its contours vaguely curvaceous, drew my eye.
“Well… I suppose I’ll have a little of the red, my good man. Anyone else?”
“Ah ah,” the maître d’ said. Then he leaned over to whisper in my ear, “The gentleman should sample the bouquet.”
“Of course. How foolish of me.”
The maître d’ opened the shapely bottle of red wine and poured a draught into my wine glass. I picked up the glass, sniffed at the rim the way I’d seen countless actors do in movies, and took a cautious sip.
“Well. Very refreshing.”
The maître d’ rolled his eyes and poured more into my glass. I took a deeper draught this time. The wine filled my belly with warmth, a liquid glow that settled in my gut and radiated outward, pulsing through my veins. I hadn’t had a drink in six years for good reason: one drunken binge and half the human race could wake up on Mars. When I accepted Connie’s burden I’d also agreed to her most important admonition: godly power and booze don’t mix.
But this stuff was delicious.
I took another sip and rolled the luscious claret around my mouth as if I could coat every micron with its fruity goodness.
“Damn… this is really good.”
Thunder rumbled somewhere to the East. No one else seemed to share my delight in the wine; Magnus demurred of course. He sat there glowering at me, sharpening another arrow in his quiver of hate. Marian, my new best friend, was nursing her glass of chardonnay, her eyes darting back and forth between Surabhi, me and the man-monster she married. Surabhi wasn’t drinking at the moment. She had a Kendo tournament coming up and was trying to slim down for her weigh-in, although she’d practically destroyed the bread basket. That left me and Calliope, who was well into her third glass of the chardonnay.
“Oh, well,” I shrugged. I took a long slug of the claret, that wonderful little claret; it seemed to get better with each swallow, going down all cool and fruity, like fresh grape juice infused with moonlight; Heaven in a glass. “You guys don’t know what you’re missing!”
A giggle bubbled up from my chest. “That. Is. Awesome!”
My future in-laws were staring at me like confused owls.
“Whoooeeee!”
I drained the glass, grabbed the shapely bottle and poured myself another one. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw something, a flicker of light; an argent gleaming in the crimson depths.
Nah, trick of the light.
Surabhi reached over and grabbed the bottle out of my hand.
“I think you’ve had enough, babe.”
“Awwww, come on, Bee! You gotta try this stuff! It’s the bomb!”
Someone at the table, I think it was Marian, asked me if I was alright.
“I’m great! I’m strong! Like the bull!”
To prove my strength I banged on the table. My right hand struck the tines of my salad fork. The fork flew over Marian’s head, narrowly missing her as it flipped across the room. At exactly that moment, a waiter carrying a tray loaded with condiments and cream-based soups stepped into the salad fork’s flightpath just in time to intercept it with his eye. The waiter screamed and threw up his hands. The tray of condiments, creamy soups, and salads with heavy dressings sailed across the room and came down on the mismatched couple at the next table. The skinny gentleman in the threepiece gray suit was instantly drenched in a variety of creamy sauces. His wife, who easily outweighed Calliope by a hundred pounds, got the salad dressings and condiments.
“Ooopssh!”
The wait staff descended on the mismatched couple’s table, peppering them with apologies. I didn’t care. I’d never experienced such overwhelming joy. It felt like someone had just detonated a happy bomb in my brain.
“What’s the matter with you?” Magnus growled. “You’ve just ruined that couple’s dinner.”
“Oh, lighten up, Mags.”
“Magnus frowned. His voice rumbled, low and dangerous.
“What did you just say?”
“You heard me. Lighten up, bro. Take a chill pill and blow it out your big, Ethiopian cussi.”
That last one was good enough that I shared it with the rest of the diners, at twice its original volume.
“I think we’ve seen enough. Marian, we’re leaving.”
Surabhi pulled me around to face her.
“Lando… what are you doing?”
“Oh… Oh… wow!”
Surabhi… shone. Her face was suffused with some secret luminescence, as if she had swallowed the sun and let a little of its light infuse her atom.
“You are, without question, the most beautiful woman on Earth.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Let’s do it now, Bee. Let’s find a justice of the peace and take the plunge. Screw the surprise. I want the world to know!”
I leaped onto the table, knocking over several glasses. The shapely bottle teetered, tipping toward the floor. I lunged, and caught it by the neck.
“A toast! To the most beautiful woman since Helen of Troy. Scratch that… Helen of Troy was a pig. To the woman who has agreed to become my wife!”
“Lando, come down!”
“My fiancée, everybody. The future Mrs Surabhi Moloke-Cooper! Or Cooper-Moloke… or just… Surabhi! Give it up, folks!”
An elderly couple seated near the kitchen applauded.
“You want to know about love, ladies and gentlemen? Do you want to talk about a passion that knoweth no bounds? Well… ooops! I almost forgot.”
I reached into my pocket and clawed out the pretty little black box. Then I got down on one knee.
“Surabhi Azalea Moloke…”
Surabhi’s eyes pierced the joyful white noise in my head. A fleeting clarity shimmered through the drunken haze. I looked around at the faces of the diners all glaring up at me.
“What’s… what are you all looking at?”
I took a long swig from the shapely bottle.
“Surabhi!”
Magnus towered beneath me, satisfaction plain in his woeful, evil smile. Marian and Calliope were hovering near the exit. “Your family is leaving.”
“Magnus Moloke, ladies and germs. Everybody remembers Magnus and that terrible video he did back in the Eighties! The one where he dressed up as a wizard and…”
“Lando,” Surabhi cried. “What…what’s happening?”
“Oh, come on, babe. That video sucked.”
Magnus gestured toward the horrified waiter. “Check please.”
“Seriously, Mags, it’s the crappiest video ever.”
“Babe… why are you doing this?”
Surabhi was crying now. But a part of me, the part that capered blindfolded at the edge of a vast abyss, whispered of adventures to be had, a destiny to be mastered: Magnus Moloke would not decide my fate.
“A wizard, Mags? A rapping wizard that waves his wand and makes people do that stupid dance?”
I did the dance. Da Magnus March. I hopped and slid. I bugged out my eyes and slithered across the table, scattering glasses and plates across the beautiful hardwood floors, all the while sucking down huge gulps of that unbelievable wine, reveling in the terrible, wonderful mania that lifted my spirits until I felt I could dance out of the restaurant, up into the clouds and into the stratosphere.
Other diners were heading toward the door as the maître d’ stalked up to my stage. “Sir, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“I mean… who directed that video? More important, where can I buy some of the antidepressants he was using when… when…”
The rumble started low; a groaning tremor that shuddered in the pit of my stomach. I took a healthy swig from the shapely bottle to calm my distress.
“Sir… if you don’t get down from there this instant I will be forced to call the police!”
“Bite me, Frenchie. You’re not the boss of…”
An apoplectic alligator snarl burst up from my guts. A smell eru
pted from my open mouth, a rotten grape/fecal hellstench that curdled the hairs in my nostrils. The condiment-drenched fat woman at the next table took one sniff, frowned, and threw up all over her husband.
“Honey? I don’t feel so good.”
Surabhi shook her head, her anger so palpable it could have worn my pants. Magnus’ smile was so bright it hurt.
“What’s wrong, guys? Oh my…”
Nausea flipped my world upside down. The sound of the barfing fat woman a few feet away only made it worse. Fleeing diners were holding their noses.
“God! What is that stink?” Calliope cried.
“Surabhi, babe… I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“You will not!” The maître d’ raged, through pinched nostrils. “You. Will. Not!”
Two waiters who looked like disgruntled extras on loan from a B-grade action movie tackled me off the table and hauled me toward the kitchen.
“Hey! Somebody grab my wine!”
The last thing I saw before they threw me out was Surabhi’s face.
I don’t like to remember the expression I saw there.
“And stay out!”
I landed in a pile of trashbags a few yards from the alley entrance to the restaurant.
“Yo,” one of the waiter-apes, grunted. “Always wanted to say that.”
“Me too,” the other one snorted. “And don’t come back!”
The knuckledraggers laughed, high-fived each other, and slammed the door, leaving me surrounded by other people’s trash and a miasma of grape Koolaid-holocaust stink so dense I could have set my bowling ball on it. Even as drunk as I was, the smell was alarming. But when I remembered the fat lady barfing all over her husband I laughed so hard I hurt myself. Then ELO’s Mister Blue Sky erupted from my mobile.
“Hellooo?”
“Lando?” a thick Northside accent twanged. “Is this Lando Cooper? It’s Goldie Kiebler, from The Ha-Ha Room.”
“Goldie, I gotta… g… gotta call you back. I’m in the middle of a personal crisis.”
I lost it again, screamed laughter into the night sky.
“Whatever, Cooper. I thought you might be interested…”
“I gotta call you back, Goldie! I gotta call you back!”
I disconnected. Goldie Kiebler owned one of the hottest comedy clubs in the city. I’d just alienated one of the most influential club owners in the country. Everything was burning down around my ears.
It was hilarious.
“It’s the wine, you thoughtless dolt.”
The coldness of the voice stoked a memory. The nearness of it struck alarm bells in my gut. A Presence had just entered the alley. I rolled to my hands and knees, marshaling my will, trying to fight the effect of the wine as the alley grew colder. Someone had just opened a Portal. That same someone stepped out of the shadows with a sigh of equalizing air pressure and the pop! of displaced space.
“The smell you’ve noticed is called seep. Think of it as a by-product of the fun you’ve been having at my expense.”
I looked around, my eyes straining to pierce the shadows.
“Who are you?”
“You think the Joy I bring comes cheaply? That clarity comes without cost? No, Yahweh.”
The speaker stepped into the circle of light thrown by a nearby streetlamp. It was the man from the restaurant, the tall, bearded man who sent over the red wine – the “fan” with whom I’d shared a toast.
Oh, Surabhi… what did I do?
“Now I can kill you; freed from the nuisance of angry wives or demi-mortal brats seeking ‘closure’.”
The fan dwindled to about five-foot-six. His black hair flared bright orange; not the kind of orange you’d find on a Florida citrus plantation. This was the orange at the heart of a forest fire; the lethal white-orange of the sun’s corona. The thick pectorals softened and rounded like twin cantaloupes. Buttons popped from his vest and clattered to the ground; I looked down to find my expensive new shoes surrounded by tiny circlets of gold. When I looked up again, the fan was gone. In his place stood a short, fat god with a blazing halo of dayglo hair and glorious breasts: Dionysus the Twiceborn – the secret, double-sexed child of the mortal Semele.
Greek.
Son of Zeus.
“Now, God of Abraham,” Dionysus squeaked. “I will take my vengeance.”
Dionysus reached down with one chubby fist and grabbed me by the lapels. The strength of a mad god thrummed in his muscles. He lifted me off my feet as easily as I would a child.
“Dionysus… I didn’t kill Zeus!”
“Liar! You stole his power and befouled his holy corpse!”
Something about the image of me “befouling” Zeus flexed my “inappropriate humor” muscle.
“You dare?” Dionysus huffed. “Stop that! Stop laughing!”
“I can’t, Di. Your boobs are bigger than Aphrodite’s.”
The enchanted wine was elevating my mood more effectively than a truckload of Paxil even as I tried to reach for the power, sifting through my mental pockets for the Keys to unlock the universe.
Must have left them in my other pants.
“Hey, Dio-nitelight. You’re the god of grapes. What do people pray to you for… mold protection?”
“Fool!” Dionysus growled. “Have you truly forgotten so much? I am the God of Epiphany, of ritual madness and ecstasy. I am the Liberator who reveals lethal truth through the power of strong drink. You have tasted the wine which may bear my beneficence or my curse. You lie at the crux of my power.”
“Power? Hello? This is the Judeo-Christian Embodiment speaking: I own West Texas. But two aspirin and an egg salad sandwich and your ‘power’ goes byebye… fat boy.”
“I… am not… FAT!”
“Of course not… handsome woman like you… just big-boned.”
Dionysus released me.
“That’s right, Dolly. Maybe next time you’ll think twice before you mess with the real thing!”
The Twiceborn raised his right hand.
“Rise.”
The terrible crocodile that had moved into the pit of my stomach roared, and a gout of vomit blasted out of my mouth like a freight train with melted brakes. I fell to my knees as projectile puke spattered the asphalt.
I heard the power singing my secret names, demanding that I wipe Dionysus away with a wave of my hand. The Twiceborn was in serious trouble… as soon as the stomach ’gator stopped deathrolling with my guts in its mouth. I climbed to my feet and swiped at the thin runner of purple drool bouncing from my lips.
Dionysus waggled his pinky finger...
“Rise.”
…and a surge of vomit, more vomit than I ever imagined could be contained by a mortal body, roared up my throat and blasted the wall five feet away.
“Wait! Dionysus… wait a minute!”
At that moment, the mismatched couple stormed out of the restaurant’s kitchen entrance, too busy berating the despondent maître d’ to realize they were stepping directly into the line of fire. Dionysus raised his left hand.
“Rise.”
The blast of ejecta struck the skinny husband and blasted his toupee halfway off his head. He turned toward me, a man with a parti-colored muskrat slopped into immobility on his glistening dome, and I heaved again. The blast spattered the chubby wife’s ample breasts, adding to the colorful assortment of condiments and sauces I’d already deposited there. The Sprats turned and ran, dripping, down the alley.
“Dionysus… let’s talk about this!”
The God of Epiphany laughed, and grabbed his crotch.
Suddenly I realized that I wanted to chase down the Sprats, tackle the portly wife, rip off her tainted moomoo and bury my head between her enormous breasts. When I envisioned her dressed in a Wonder Woman costume my brain exploded with the urge to procreate. Dionysus rubbed his stomach, and I realized that I could tackle Jack Sprat too. If I got hungry later I could eat him. I was five steps down the alley when my world turned red. My body became warm, then
hot, then unbearably hot.
“I can boil the wine in your blood,” Dionysus, who is suddenly everywhere, whispers. “I can command it to freeze and choke your veins with rivulets of red ice.”
His Voice is in my mind, his face the full moon that fills the sky. His power is the sunshine of a morning after, still a million years away and I realize: I am an alcoholic. In my mortal life I’ve worshipped Dionysus, indirectly, but too fervently to deny him now.
“Who’s laughing now… comedian?”
The Twiceborn gestures, preparing to pull the vomit trick again, or something worse. I grasp the fabric of reality in my vomit-slick mental fingers and pull.
Five yards behind Dionysus, a manhole cover blows off and rockets into the sky. From the bile-puddle in which I kneel I’m watching the most probable outcomes of this encounter expand into an infinitude of possibilities. Somewhere in the multiverse, another Dionysus stands directly over the empty space that was filled by the manhole cover in this reality. I pull hard enough to tug the fabric of both continuums a little closer, twisting them together to form something new.
The hole behind Dionysus expands, eating up the space between it and the wine god like an earthbound black hole, as the Liberator puts his foot on the back of my neck and presses my face toward the colorful puddle of liberated belly flotsam.
“Let it be known throughout the halls of eternity,” Dionysus cries. “Throughout every pantheon of gods that remain on this stinking mudball: Dionysus of the Greeks has defeated the unassailable God of the Christians! Let my cry of vengeance resound across the heavens: Dionysus! Dionysus! Dionysus!”
I wretch blood-tinged purple vomit across Dionysus’ bare feet.
“You should have worn shoes.”
“And why is that, you pathetic pretender?”
I grab the edges of the manhole and drag it between the wine-god’s feet. For a moment, the wine-god stands on thin air and grape fumes. Then he plunges, still smirking, into the darkness.
I released the hole, allowed its continuity to resume. It snapped back with the sound of a concrete bunker door slamming shut. If I was lucky, Dionysus was trapped in an alien continuity, smothered beneath thousands of metric tons of concrete or water or unexplored earth. Wherever he’d landed it would take time to extricate himself and return home. If I was unlucky, the Twiceborn would rise from the hole and kill me in short, messy order.
Last God Standing Page 11