I couldn’t hesitate. I took three steps forward. Stan and Neil both shouted at me to stop. I heard guns cocking. I picked the rock off the pedestal. It was heavier than the real one in my trunk. The room turned fire-engine red and an alarm went off. I lifted the rock as high as I could and threw it at the ground.
It didn’t shatter. Well, there went my theory.
Everyone was staring right at me, mouths open, completely disbelieving. “Uh… that was supposed to shatter. Because it’s a fake.”
Stan was livid. “Well, you can see it’s not.”
Neil looked like he was trying to talk to a crazy person. “Now, who told you it was missing?”
I looked down at the rock. Betrayed me. First its double tries to kill me—twice, even—and now this. It was the most one man had suffered at the hands of a rock since Abel. I picked the rock off the ground and pushed it back onto the pedestal. The alarm fell silent.
“Come on, Colin. Tell us,” Neil said.
I looked at my hands. Gray rock dust covered my fingers. Just like the real one. I rubbed them together.
No, not rock dust.
Paint.
Fucking gray paint.
I pushed it off the pedestal.
The alarm sounded again. Stan was swearing now. Neil shouted, “Colin, what the hell are you doing?”
I shouted back over the siren, showing my hand as evidence. “It’s a fake!”
I walked to the other side of the pedestal. Neil, Stan, and Mina clustered around me. They saw it, too. The paint had scratched away, leaving the luster of solid gold.
I knelt by the rock and started scratching. Paint came away in sooty dandruff flakes. I uncovered all I wanted to see, then stepped away to let the others see it.
There. In the middle, carved into a depression of the rock, was the next best thing to a signature. Inch-high letters that read: KALLISTI.
I shot a triumphant look at Neil and Stan, both of whom were gaping.
Mina just looked blank. “What the hell does that mean?”
-SIXTEEN-
And now, a lesson in mythology. Kallisti is Greek for “to the prettiest one.” Pretty harmless, but it was a phrase that started a whole religion.
Eris is a central figure in conspiracy lore, which is pretty good for a Greek deity that was fairly obscure in her heyday. She was the goddess of discord, confusion, and mood swings. The story goes that all the gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, except for Eris—this lack of an invite known in some circles as the Original Snub. An outside observer might see the wisdom in not inviting the goddess of discord to a wedding, but Eris didn’t feel that way. She found herself a golden apple, carved the word “Kallisti” into the side, and rolled it into that wedding like a grenade.
Being goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all decided that the apple must be for them. The wedding descended into a catfight that only got broken up when someone had the bright idea to have a young Trojan named Paris judge between the goddesses. Each one tried to tempt him into awarding her the prize. Hera and Athena had apparently never met a man before this, because they tempted him with power and military victory. Aphrodite was smarter; she promised the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite without thinking twice.
The problem was that this wasn’t a hypothetical woman that Aphrodite promised. She was talking about Helen (yes, that Helen), who was, at the time, married to a powerful Achaean king (AKA, Greek). Helen left old Menelaus for Paris, and that was how Troy got wiped off of every map.
The lesson is this: when a group of women asks who the prettiest one is, run. Don’t look back. Just run.
I explained this to Mina in response to her question: “Who replaces a worthless moon rock with solid gold?” After I told this story, she asked the question again.
“Eris still has a cult. There was sort of a revival in the ’60s started up by a buddy of Oswald’s. As in Lee Harvey. They sort of softened her a little and combined her with the psychedelic culture that was going on then. Basically an excuse to do weird stuff to point out absurdities. A Discordian is the kind of person that would chant ‘Death to fanatics.’”
Mina was still unconvinced. “They sound fun.”
“They can be a little tiring.”
“Yeah, if they’re always on.”
“They’re always on something.”
On the stereo: “What’s Your Name.”
Discordians, of course, meant a drive back out to Azusa, where the Brotherhood of Sisterhood hid at the mechanic shop. I’d just been there on Thursday, picking up a box and planting it in Silver Lake, so we should be in good standing. Hell, they might not even know about the whole “quintuple agent” thing, like half the rest of the information underground seemed to.
When Mina and I arrived, GOOD FISH had her flock of seagulls stuck under the hood of a Volvo. Her friend was in the front seat, door open, foot on the ground, ready to turn the key. They wore coveralls that didn’t cover much, and the grease on their faces seemed carefully applied, like warpaint. As I got out of the car with Mina, the other one saw me. She perked up when she saw Mina, and whispered something to GOOD FISH, who turned. The sunny expression wasn’t just gone; it had disappeared and didn’t leave a forwarding address.
GOOD FISH stayed put, but the other one came to meet me. Her eyes still had the same homicidal look as before, but they softened whenever she glanced at Mina. That put me in a good place hormonally and a bad place socially. Funny how those things were roommates.
“Nobody called you, Zeke.”
“Yeah, I know. I need to see Gehenna.”
GOOD FISH said, “She’s not seeing anyone.” Her charm bracelet jingled.
“He’s not seeing you,” the other one said.
“She/he can make an exception, I think.”
Mina leaned over, and in a helpful whisper, told me, “It’s polite to use the pronoun of the gender they are inside.”
I had never seen the other one smile, let alone laugh, until right then. Hooking a thumb at Mina, I said, “She’s new.”
“I can tell. Where’d you find her?”
“Star Trek convention. We got in an argument over what sucked worse: Voyager or Enterprise. That led to a round of latinum dances and Dabo, and before you knew it, she was assimilated. Are you letting me in or not?”
“Gehenna’s busy, and besides, you fuck off until she calls.”
GOOD FISH had abandoned the Volvo, and had her arms folded, holding a wrench like her elbow’s erection.
“You make a good point. I have no reason to be here. Hang on.” I went back to my trunk. Mina was getting worried. I removed the rock and chain, and hefted the flail over my shoulder as I walked back. To say they were shocked was an understatement; they had been impaled by invisible lightning bolts while wearing suits made entirely of pennies and standing in full kiddie pools. “I wanted to discuss this with Gehenna.” I gave them a minute to gape. “Yeah, I thought so.”
I didn’t brandish it, just let the rock dangle as I walked past: my swinging moon-testicle. Mina jogged to keep up. “What does ‘she’s new’ mean?”
“Well, you are.” She kept glaring at me. “Oh. You’re thinking of a transsexual—some poor bastard that got born in the wrong body, which is exactly right. The problem with Gehenna is that he/she shouldn’t have been born one gender, but both.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“Did you just quote Big Lebowski?”
She gave me a Cheshire cat grin. “Those were, what, bodyguards?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“The one by the car, the one that barely talked? She seemed sad.”
“She probably found out that Flock of Seagulls broke up like twenty years ago.”
Mina looked back over her shoulder. “You two could commiserate about all the effort that goes into truly tragic hair.”
We walked past where the pumps would have been had this still been a gas station, head
ing toward what was probably an office once upon a time. It looked like a shack with the white paint peeling from it. The window was bordered with red lights and wallpapered with pictures torn from magazines: ads, jeans, perfume, vacations, promises of better lives for a low low price, now repurposed into a sweaty self-esteem-crushing nightmare. It looked like the collage that would sit above the bed of a sixteen-year-old girl about twenty pounds over her fighting weight who walked with a slouch and was sensitive about the bits of acne at her temples. It was a collection of unattainable, airbrushed beauty, all shapes and sizes, both genders, and blended in ways that not only suggested androgyny, but shouted it while grabbing your lapels and shaking you like a hysterical scout leader. I stopped.
I said, “Want to tell me why you’re on this window?”
She was. I didn’t recognize the picture, but it was definitely Mina. They had Photoshopped her, turning already smooth skin into something like ivory, and her expression was probably aiming for sexy but settled for sleepy. Her hair, normally a soft copper, looked here more like Ronald McDonald’s, and they had thinned her neck a bit. It was Mina, but a plastic version of her, the robot that someone had projected onto; perfect, but in that perfection, fatally flawed.
“Oh god,” she said. She sounded genuinely horrified. Possibly she didn’t know why she was on the window. Possibly she didn’t like having her head pasted onto a muscular man’s body while he was straddling a volleyball. I would have believed either.
“This isn’t a bad intro to Gehenna, come to think of it.”
I went into what would have been the office. It started where the desk should have been: red cloth artfully rumpled into a velvet waterfall. Not that the cloth was visible nearly anywhere but at the borders; there were frames and shelves, boxes and books, all of which held ritual objects from every religion I could think of. There were sacrificial daggers and kachina dolls, an alligator head and a six-inch-tall human skeleton, a clay Venus and a plastic Jesus, wads of computer wires and vomit-stained finger bones, a pistol with runes carved into the handle and idols of every pagan god demonized in the Bible. It was an altar that could have provoked the most casual Easter Catholic into a killing rage. Over it all, the sun shone through the wall of people, casting their reflected gaze on it like that of perpetually horny angels.
Mina didn’t say anything. I walked past the altar and to the door beyond. It was the kind of door that really should lead to a dingy basement. The kind of place with a single bare bulb and a nice big hole that you could fill with unfortunate coeds.
It wasn’t.
The space beyond was padded. It looked sort of like a Nerf version of the back of an ’80s dance club. The pads were vinyl, black with red and white arabesques that somehow looked Greek, and neon tubes running along the hall. The stairs were carpeted, but frayed by Eris-knew-how-many lustful feet. The music that throbbed down the hall didn’t sound like a heartbeat, but something more like a drummer on a slave ship who was jacked up on Red Bull and methamphetamines.
I knew what I was going to see when I opened the door at the end of the hall, the one painted like a woman’s mouth. I couldn’t decide if she looked angry, horny, or hungry—or all three. I looked over at Mina to ask her opinion, but she was blinking at it, and I could tell she had the exact same question.
I said to her, “Yeah, I don’t know either.”
“Have you ever been down here?”
“No.”
She opened her mouth. “I was going to ask a question, then I realized it was answered for me already.”
“Yeah.”
I opened the door. Mina gasped. I think I might have if I hadn’t already steeled myself and started picturing things that would have made the Marquis de Sade vote Republican. The carpet was flesh, and not good flesh, either. Not all of it was loose and hairy, but so much of it was stretched over silicone, tanned into leather, and tattooed with patterns that the only thing that could have screamed “do not touch” more effectively was the yellow on a poison arrow frog. The squirming and pumping actually was sex, right there in front of me, but it didn’t suggest sex. It suggested a replicant trying to swallow a bearskin rug.
At the center of it all: Gehenna Tattoo. I think that once Mina set eyes on Gehenna, all the confusion upstairs resolved itself. The porn channel suddenly became unscrambled, and she saw something that was going to be painted on the inside of her eyelids for a long time. Gehenna wasn’t involved in the actual fucking. There was part of me that was convinced that Gehenna was a virgin, the same part that was convinced that McDonald’s burgers were made of worms and pigeons were created by the dirt lodged in traffic lights. Gehenna was naked, showing off the surgeon’s work between two overly veined legs. Gehenna had a pair of breasts that would only be seen in a very specific brand of Japanese porn. Nearly everything was pierced. If Gehenna could put metal through it, under it, or in it, that metal had been inserted: airport security nightmare. Gehenna topped it all off with a very complicated beard that made me think of Spartans.
There’s very little as awkward as being one of only three people in the room not having sex. Gehenna pulled it off. I was having trouble.
Gehenna’s voice was in between male and female, modulated to make actually determining gender impossible, deep but smooth. Gehenna had to shout over the music and slapping. “You finally decided to join us. And you’ve brought a guest!”
I let the chain play out so the rock dropped in front of me in a sort of lunar puberty.
Gehenna’s face tried to fall, but the surgery kept it in a Botox-lifted mask.
Mina nudged me, but I ignored it. I had to stay focused on Gehenna. “Want to tell me why you made this?”
Gehenna smiled. “Why not? Get the Genesis Stone and the Chain of the Heretic Martyr? You try to avoid mating them.”
The smell of fluids, both natural and factory-made, was getting overpowering. I wondered if anyone had ever succumbed to fumes like that.
Mina nudged me again. I kept ignoring her.
“You didn’t just get them. You stole them.”
Gehenna held up a finger. The nails were surprisingly reasonable, even if the fingers were tattooed to look like screws. “Our people stole the Stone, but the Chain was a gift.”
“I didn’t think we were so cozy with the Templars.”
“We’re not. The Chain was a gift from the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist, something about Eris as a consort of the Devil. Superstitious nonsense, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Mina was muttering under her breath, then, out loud, as she remembered, “Zeke!”
I turned to her. She was pointing at the mass of bodies. “Doesn’t that look familiar?”
“Have I not been totally clear about my orientation?”
“No! The man doing it?”
“Looks a lot like Che Guevara. That is weird.”
“You’re an idiot. The other one!”
My assassin was engaged and completely oblivious. I took a step into a clear patch of ground as the flesh carpet shifted like the floor of Indiana Jones’s nightmare. I reached down to grab him, but thought better of it.
“Who the fuck is that?”
Gehenna shrugged. “How should I know?”
“Because someone that looked exactly like that man swung this at me.”
I nudged the man with my foot, and immediately wanted to boil it. He freed up his mouth and gave me a confused look, then reached for me.
“No, no,” I said. “Who are you?”
“The walrus.” He went back to what he was doing. An insult sprang to mind, but it struck me as too obvious a pun to actually sling.
Gehenna said, “So I might as well ask. How did you get that? Did you open the box?”
For a moment, I just frowned at Gehenna. My brain was fumbling after the statement, trying to grab hold and wring some meaning out of it. But there it was. “The box?”
“The one you were supposed to plant the other day.”
Then it clicked. The box GOOD FISH had given me on Thursday. The one that I planted by the Silver Lake reservoir. Somehow, Mr. Blank had gotten to Gehenna—or was Gehenna—and had arranged for me to plant my own murder weapon as a final irony that would make him smile late at night.
Gehenna continued, barreling right through my realization. “I thought it would be fun to make a weapon like that and put it in the hands of a nobody. Suddenly, someone with no connection to anything at all is in possession of an artifact that half the information underground would kill for. Of course, that person would then have the power to fight back. Could lead to some fun! I’m a little disappointed in you, though.”
“I did plant it,” I said, a touch insulted about the jab at my professionalism. “How did you choose who to tip off about the drop site?”
“Only one way to do that. I picked a name out of the phone book.”
And this was critical: “Which phone book?”
“I don’t know. I asked Stacy to fetch one and she did.”
“Which one is Stacy?”
“She has GOOD tattooed on one hand, and…”
Before Gehenna finished the sentence, I was running back for the surface, hoping that GOOD FISH would still be there, but I knew she was long gone. When I burst out into the morning, the other one spun around to glare at me.
“Where is she? Where’s Stacy?”
“She left. Got in her car and drove the hell away.”
I let out a stream of profanity. Some of it was fairly creative; I might have even coined some phrases in there. Finally, I spluttered and spat, “Phone book.”
“That wasn’t even a swear,” she said.
“No. Phone book. Stacy had a phone book. Where is it?”
She pointed to the garage. I saw yellow pages, striped with grease. I ran to it, picked it up. Mina had joined me and was giving me her concerned look, the one that made me feel like an old man with dementia. I picked up the book and let it fall open. I picked a name at random.
Raul Diaz.
I tried it again. Same result. Son of a bitch.
Mr Blank (Fill in the Blank) Page 18