Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  So Aron called out again, and from Tommy’s vantage near the sneaker shop just north of the Chinese restaurant, he could barely hear the calling over the crowd. They were loud at Fourth and Fellini, their voices rising through the music one of the brothers broadcast from his car stereo—old school ‘Gin and Juice,’ Snoop with his mind back on his money, the thump of drum and bass vibrating the street until even the Rausch sisters shook their seasoned and privileged booties and the sound-bewildered boy, Aron/Pentheus, backed into traffic.

  A cab rushed by, and Tommy flinched, thinking Pentheus was done for, but the cab swerved to miss him and clipped instead a brother on a bicycle, who tumbled to the curb and faked dismemberment and agony until he saw nobody studying him, so he got up and looked for someone to blame. And that was Aron Starr, of course, who had crossed Fourth to the southeast corner of the intersection and was perched atop the Church of Christ, with nowhere to run now. T. Tommy looked over to him, thinking go back down the street to rehearsals, son, or better yet I’ll take you there since Mr. Thorne needs a chorus. But then the brother pointed to Aron and started yelling at him. And since the cabbie was rushing past York Street by now, headed downtown, it was hard to blame the brother, who was after all an innocent bystander brushed by swift immutable atê of metal, his accusation the missed shot by the archer that got the tragedy going, and it was Aron, or Pentheus, or Aron who got the shaft.

  The shouting ignited the crowd. Now the boy climbed the down spout, which buckled to his heaviness, and most of the mob started to cross Fourth toward the scene of approaching accident. One of the god’s aunts stood drunkenly south of the intersection and stopped traffic, because of course any sparagmos—any sacrificial tearing of flesh—demands a drunk Republican woman as a crossing guard.

  By this time Pentheus or Aron had pulled himself up onto what they used to call a parapet, and the accusing brother tried to follow, seeing it had gotten way out of hand, that his initial anger at the boy had unleashed a tide. He tried climbing the spout himself, tried to make peace even at this late hour, but the thin aluminum was giving way under his weight as well, so one of the girls tried it. And she climbed the side of the church like a twining plant, and another followed after her, and soon there were four of them up with Aron and stalking him slowly as he climbed over the arch in search of safety on the other side.

  And people under him all the way, shouting for him to jump.

  If he’d made it to the back of the church, he would have made it. He could have followed the wide alley into the shadows, have lost his pursuers. From there, Aron could have headed back to the park by circuitous route and even returned for rehearsals, become Pentheus in the theatre rather than in the intersection, as though he had never passed through Fourth and Fellini. And he could have gone in protection and cover, because T. Tommy and Daddy Chrome and DJ Mel were headed to the rescue, even when they saw the empty wine bottles being broken on the curb, saw them in the hands of the women above and below, and people tearing the metal of the downspout into bludgeons. The Brischords were headed there, and Aron would have made it, would have stepped away from this, out of preposterous drag and into the clean tunic of the Theban prince.

  But Maia stepped aloft then, boosted to the cornice by a gaunt young woman with yellowed eyes. She held out her arms to console or to snatch at the reeling boy. And when Pentheus—when Aron—saw her, he lost his will and most of his balance. He staggered and raised his arms, at first like he was warding things off, but a hot wind passed from west to east, and it slammed Tommy against the store front, and Aron felt it on the parapet, where he stumbled and just gave up.

  Or maybe gave in. Because down he fell on the north side of the church, into the crowd, who fell on him like a pack of scavengers, and it all went quiet except for the rending and his lonely scream.

  T. Tommy knew that the snake had been unleashed. He knew it was the breath of the god, not the one in the mask, but the one at the heart of the passion. For the gods appear in many forms, carrying with them unwelcome things.

  What you think will happen, won’t. What you least expect, will. It’s the way the gods roll, and Tommy remembered it all.

  60 Episode: Anagnorisis

  He regretted inviting her already. Muriel swallowed attention whole.

  That morning the hexagram had roiled with changeable lines, bifurcating to endless and multiple meaning as though the oracle was playing out its last warnings, doubling itself into a silence of too much possibility.

  The superior man does not quit the courtyard out his door, but the regulations are severe and difficult, and even with firm corrections there will be evil.

  Waters of the abyss over the joyous lake.

  The whole production had been a mess of limitations. Even, he thought, with firm corrections. If there was any other cast member who could disappear on him, Stephen would like to know it, and certainly before the curtain went up. Everyone had switched roles too often for comfort. The music was recorded now, because his hopes for an original score had dissolved with Vincent De Chevre.

  If the entire run-up to the play was not entangled and irritating enough, Peter Koenig and wife had shown up. To dress rehearsals instead of opening night. Not only early, but uncomfortably so, both half-reclining on the outdoor tiers in pairs of jeans obviously bought and ironed for the occasion. No theatre crowd would greet them, and Stephen, in a moment’s compassion, thought of sitting beside them, offering amenities and welcome. But he still rankled at their previous encounter, fully suspected that Koenig was not here as a lover of the arts, and factored it all as yet one more fissure in the fickle Tao.

  Stephen held his breath, recalled the stable lines of the hexagram, looked for a rhyming steadiness in the evening.

  He could trust in George for a workmanlike, if fulsome, performance as the blind prophet Tireisias. Dolores was a pro, despite her erratic behavior of late and her checkered history (and he was part of that checkering, could not blame her so much): she would be there, would smooth Aron’s ruffles. Apparently Jack and Apache were reliable as well: he’d received a text on his cell phone from the big, surly gofer stating that Jack hr np. He deciphered the encouragement, then turned to anguish over the chorus, knowing that vagrant drunks made for an unreliable work force. But there was T Tommy in the wings, robed and ready, gesticulating over something to another masked figure identified by mullet as Daddy Chrome.

  So maybe it would work out at last. Maybe this would be the story of one of those productions with a heart, whose rag-tag, loveable crew braved through setbacks to put on a plucky show affirming middle-class American values. Sort of a Garland-Rooney Bacchae for the new millennium, he thought, and shuddered.

  But of course, that is the stuff of comedy, upon which Sister Thalia smiles vacantly.

  And this, as he almost forgot, was The Bacchae.

  As they sat in the slowly filling amphitheatre, Muriel Thorne drew the audience. Friends of Stephen’s paid court upon the tiers, and she sunned in their attentions. Of course she was the director’s mother, she said. She had a right to be critical, so none of you need comment in media, whether broadcast or print or that vicious little internet.

  She glowered at Wade Abner, and for a moment Stephen marveled that his mother was taking his side, until he remembered a young critic’s scathing review of her performance in A Doll’s House back in the sixties, and realized Muriel’s vanity was a stable line as well.

  It was too hot outside, she told him. This park was full of mosquitoes, and why didn’t the city spray the little bloodsuckers into oblivion. That couldn’t bode well, because uncomfortable atmosphere would not make the likes of Wade any more pleasant.

  Stephen could count on her support, she confided. No matter the reviews.

  With clenched jaw he excused himself, heading back stage to dress as Cadmus. Billy Shepard trotted breathlessly up the sidewalk toward the theatre, laughed and shook his head apologetically, saying it was a good thing he had come in by Sixth S
treet, that Fourth was crowded with some ruckus and you know the police, they’ll get there when they can.

  Stephen ignored this news entirely, bound for the makeshift tiring room where he came face to face with an hysterical George Castille.

  “Oh sweet dramatic Jesus,” the old actor stage-whispered, his wide eye-liner simulating some kind of school-play blindness as he waved and gestured toward the audience. “Two of your principals are late.”

  It was like the world dropping away. Stephen steadied himself against a tree, stared off into desolation. “God damn it, George,” he muttered. “What do we do?”

  “It should be fine, Mr. Thorne,” assured a voice behind him, reedy and melodious. He did not recognize it as Jack until he turned and saw the boy smiling in front of him, clad in a purple tunic gashed with dark copper red.

  “Really, sir,” Jack emphasized. “Aron went to get his mom a few minutes ago. They’re scarcely two blocks away by now, I’m certain.”

  Stephen looked south toward the Court and Hill Street beyond it, his thoughts not allowing that the two would be coming from the disrupted north, where Billy claimed some kind of riot was simmering. He strained his eyes and saw two forms approaching in the summer dusk, hugging the brick wall that cornered Fourth and Magnolia.

  He believed—he wanted to believe—that it was Aron and Dolores, so he took Jack by the arm, perhaps even roughly, and pointed toward the shadowy, still-distant figures.

  “Your eyes are younger, Jack,” he said, the statement more question and plea.

  Jack nodded. “Sure looks like them, don’t it?”

  In desperation, Stephen murmured agreement, hoping that things would settle and right themselves and even the changing lines fall into solidity and balance. Surely the worst had happened.

  He looked up as the music started, astounded that Jack had cued Apache Downs and the tape was rolling, the first lurching bars of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” that brew of exoticism, ecstasy and narcosis. Jack was off to the stage, heedless of Stephen’s direction. Stephen called aloud to stop, to wait, but the dress rehearsal was in motion, T. Tommy leading the robed Brischords to their orchestra space in front of the stage where they stood and waited, swaying to the music.

  61 Episode: Out of the Machine

  The god descended on Jack, and the air unraveled.

  He moved downstage and stood at the apron, the expectant eyes of his derelict chorus turned upward, as though in admiration. He grew in the lights, his shadow lengthening, thickening, gathering substance as Apache brought down the music and the crowd fell hush.

  Even Muriel was quiet, surrendered to the god’s incarnation as Jack began to speak:

  I am Dionysus, Jack began, standing contrapposto like a classical statue, the thyrsis in his hand bristling with borrowed light,

  come here to Thebes,

  I am the son of Zeus, delivered in fire

  from Semele, the daughter of Cadmus,

  my father’s lightning the midwife.

  Now have I changed form, taken human shape

  to present myself at the springs of Dirce

  at the waters of Ismenus.

  He held the wand aloft, and in the trees surrounding the sequestered amphitheatre, the birds settled in the branches, among them the Muses transfigured, their duties over, their time to watch begun. Melpomene was one of them, murmuring ecstatically, sexually, as the thyrsus in the boy’s hand—cardboard tubing wrapped half-heartedly by Apache Downs with green pipe-cleaner—suddenly flourished with vines, with grapes that empurpurated swiftly in the bent light.

  Jack was the first of the antipodes, the first spark of ignition. Melpomene, moaning for him or for the god his occupant, melded with the night and vanished, but her sisters knew where she was headed, knew the next step in the story.

  For a moment there was unstable, sacral space. And then the drum pounded from a distance to signal the chaos approaching.

  Down Fourth the women came from the intersection, glowing corposants, dancing in jubilant disarray, stumbling, calling out, their cries rushing up to their throats from deep in their loins, their arms and clothing torn as though they had passed through briars to emerge here on a city sidewalk, stunned by the passage. At the head of the crowd Dolores walked, her mouth and chin bloodied as though she had been struck, placing one foot before the other with a kind of staggering gravity, like a drunken driver asked to walk the imaginary line. Supported by a Rausch sister at each arm, she held aloft a bundle, all three women regally, formally posed like the fountain statuary to their south, a stable, gliding tableau in the midst of the whirling arms and legs of the crack-heads, whores, transvestites and beggars who had accompanied them from the intersection.

  Peter Koenig stood up in the crowd, shielded his eyes, and gazed out toward the approaching procession. He understood the nature of sacrifice, and if anyone saw where this was headed it was the high priest of Antioch, his Maraleese tugging at his belt incomprehendingly, as now Dolores Starr stepped into the theatre light and the air swam and buckled.

  You could smell the wine and blood. T. Tommy led the chorus,

  O Thebes, nurse of Semele! crown yourself with ivy;

  blossom with bindweed, and join the procession

  with boughs of oak and pine

  the whole land is dancing, when the god

  leads his revelers to the hills, where maidens await,

  roused from loom and shuttle

  their chant lost now in the outcry when the procession moved through the audience, and the first of the spectators noticed the blood that gloved the hands of the women, that painted their lips and cheeks.

  Stephen and George stepped forward now, the play past their grasp, action and word riding the hot current of the god’s will and the mounting will of those present. Nobody wanted to want this, but everyone knew in their deepest heart that they had wished it from the moment they could wish, that the current they heard pulsing and driving in the wombs of their mothers had brought them to this night, this moment, the sodden bag held aloft in Dolores’ slick red hands.

  Oh! happy that celebrant who falls to earth

  out of the riot in his holy fawnskin robe,

  chasing the goat to drink its blood,

  sweet raw flesh as he hurries to Phrygia

  or to Libya’s hills, ahead of him the god

  exults with cries of Evoe! Evoe!

  Dolores Starr shouted above the tumult how good she had been, how dutiful, how all the men who stood in wing and waiting should be proud, how she gave the lion the first blow.

  She opened the dripping bag, and something fell to the gravel beside Peter and Maraleese Koenig. Maraleese cried out, and the Reverend lurched to his feet, dragging his wife out of the wake of the unspeakable. Dolores staggered toward the stage and turned the bag inside out. And there in the orchestra, where once the chorus danced the dithyramb to the arriving god, she emptied the rest of its contents into the orchestra.

  And the wet sound of her son’s head falling was all that was heard in the world.

  62 Exodos: Strophe: T. Tommy

  The police record on the matter is sketchy, children. You would think that cable news would drip all bloody and commentators would feast on the remains of poor Pentheus. But the story slides toward silence, its details like the faintest crust of pigment or wine or blood on carved figures.

  I heared the paranoia pick it up on the second day. Apache Downs’ weekly blog told a story that all ten readers dismissed as science-fictional reverie, as something Lovecraft and eldritch and not even Apache’s best work. A huge python lurked and did not lurk, he said, in the recesses of a theatre, where it swallowed and did not swallow cast and audience of a play’s dress rehearsal. He set forth rumor, then speculation undercutting rumor until “Has Anybody Seen Jack Rausch?” remained a question unanswerable.

  Apache claimed twenty people missing, though by the time he posted, all but four had surfaced, some of them talking about the horrific disruption of
the play, how it broke the frame with vengeance until they thought the procession was real. Now they knew, or thought they knew, and it just wasn’t right, the actress going crazy in the role like a suicide Judas at Oberammergau. But though the jury was out on the deeds and whereabouts of Dolores Starr, Apache Downs’ snake turned into a metaphor in the blogosphere, even the most conspiracy-minded of the floating trolls out there calling it metaspeculation, a symbol of how local authority, government in general, the capitalist machinery or the Obama Administration had “swallowed the evidence and the offenders.” It was Vince Foster floating in the Potomac once more, 9/11 as an inside job or the fifty-year deep six of a birth certificate.

  And whatever myth they brung to the dance was the myth they kept on believing.

  The police worked hard, but slow as usual. They had trouble finding witnesses after the tumult, for Falcon and Chrome and Mel and I lost ourselves in the shelters to await our Reunion and Vegas Commemorative, headed to a park in your neighborhood on the sixteenth of August when the signs go up on the overpasses. Eventually I seen it as my civic duty, and told the Brischords to lie low, that I would take on the tricky country of public relations.

  So when the police asked, I described myself as resident at large, told them how the snake story was literally true fact, brothers and sisters. That after Agave’s unveiling, the audience had scattered. Not that they was many of them to begin with, no more than a dozen at a dress rehearsal. Some was scared, some disgusted, the critic thought it was performance art and therefore not edgy. When they all left the theatre it was like this huge wave of malice had passed over us all, and the girls from Fourth and Fellini slunk back into the dark, since they figured the show must be over and they weren’t getting paid none.