o0o
“That was terrifying,” I confessed as we hustled through the hotel lobby. “And don’t rush me! What about your anti-charisma?” Baz had me by the elbow and he was bustling me along as if he was trained in celebrity security. “We got here okay.”
“I’m not worried about the random public or paparazzi. I’m worried about running into your family. They won’t be fooled.”
“Oh.”
That got me moving. He didn’t have to push my elbow.
We scampered into the parking ramp and I leaped into his car, belted up, and sat there, quivering, feeling my heart panic-bump, panic-bump.
He put the key in the ignition and then looked at me and put his hand on my knee. “Relax.”
“I can’t.” I clenched my fist under his palm, feeling the slamming inside my chest. I filled my suite full of rose petals and then gold-leafed it.
“You’re gonna do your heart a mischief.” He eyed me gravely. “Don’t you know any yoga, or, like, zen tricks or something? I thought all the big stars meditated.”
“I don’t have the patience,” I admitted. “I fidget.”
He smiled and his skull-like white-guy face transformed into a commedia dell’arte mask of delight. How anyone so ugly had made it in the entertainment business had me baffled. I smiled back.
“That’s better.”
We drove out of the ramp and got away from the hotel without any of my family spotting me. Or anyone else. That blew my mind all over again.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To a very scary place. My Lair.”
I gave him the cut-eye.
He said, “Seriously. The bathroom hasn’t been cleaned since a renegade angel camped with us last month. You’ll have to put TP on the toilet seat before you sit down. That’s why it’s called the Lair.”
When I saw it, I had to admit that no other word would do.
We entered from the alley through a loading dock door at the back of an old factory building. There were a couple of cars lying around in states of wrecked-and-being-repaired, several motorcycles, and something Baz described as “the sauna, but I wouldn’t open the door right now. It hasn’t been cooked out for two years.”
We crossed through a kind of all-purpose shop full of tools, out onto a basketball floor, past a giant gas grill.
“You use a gas grill indoors? On a wooden floor?”
“It’s sort of outdoors,” he said, gesturing up, and I saw we were in a loftlike space—no, a factory-floor space—with a thirty foot ceiling, and skylights like great dark bubble-eyes set in the corrugated aluminum roof. “C’mon.”
The showers were on the first floor—old factory showers in a locker room that must have dated back to the very latest thing in the nineteen-fifties. They smelled very locker-roomy. Our footsteps rang on a long flight of steel stairs up into the factory’s offices, now converted into living space.
We passed several bedrooms, mostly with doors ajar into cavelike, aromatic clutter. I recognized the smells coming from them—my cousin Joe lived in just such squalor.
The kitchen was gigantic and almost clean. It extended into a kind of living or lounge area full of tattered La-Z-Boys, a row of wide-screen TV sets mounted high on one wall, six big refrigerators, and a long counter where sat every imaginable kitchen appliance, from toasters up to Margaritaville machines, all plugged in and actually kind of clean.
I had been expecting something like a pig trough, after downstairs and those smelly-cave bedrooms.
Baz explained, “I’ve tried to keep my galley clean, but they wouldn’t toe the line if I didn’t also do all the cooking.”
“They?”
“The other sex demons.”
I turned to him. By now I was getting a little tired of this joke.
“That,” he said, holding my gaze, “is breaking it to you gently.”
I remembered again why we’d fled my hotel room. I started to tremble. All the craziness, all the mystery and terror and confusion and distress of the past months piled up inside me. I covered my face with my hands.
He put his hands on my shoulders. “Shh, shh.” Then he put his arms around me. I shook like an icicle on a tree branch, feeling his heat pour into me through my thin sweats. He was solid and hot in a world full of ice.
“You gonna be okay?” he said to the back of my neck.
“I want to run and run and run.”
“Go easy on your heart. It does a big job.”
“A run would work up a sweat,” I argued, feeling foolish. “I’m frozen with fear.”
“Downstairs for that. Nobody sweats in my kitchen.”
His arms were hot around me, and his body poured heat into me. Tears rolled out of my eyes and washed down my face and I couldn’t stop them.
He pushed me away. “That does it. You eat something. I know you people don’t eat, but you have to. Drink some hot chocolate or something.”
He marched to the nearest in the endless phalanx of fridges and yanked open the door.
My eye caught the cappuccino machine. “Can you work that?”
Of course he could. He’d figured out the one in my suite in seconds.
“My hotel suite,” I blurted, remembering. I started shaking again. Acres of rose petals. “The walls were solid gold,” I whispered.
“Probably no more than a millimeter thick,” he said with his back turned, monkeying with the coffee machine.
“What?”
“I’d say we plated ’em, but that was it. Can’t have done your espresso rig any good, though.”
“We? We plated them?”
The milk frother started to hiss.
He came over to the table and put two giant mugs in front of us. I sat.
He said gently, “Okay. Do you want to talk, or shall I?”
I caught my breath on a hiccup. “You talk.”
He looked down at his cappuccino and back up at me. “You’re turning into a goddess.”
“I know, ri-hic-ight?” I burst out. I hadn’t had hiccups since I was twelve and Uncle Chester scared them out of me by threatening to put a bag over my head during a concert and making me go on stage like that.
That thought stopped the hiccups instantly, like always.
Good old Uncle Chester.
Baz was looking at me strangely. “You know?”
Here it came. He would get weirded out at last. My life was already a steaming pile of tightly ordered and compartmentalized shit.
I took a deep hic-breath. “About four months ago, I noticed something weird going on at my shows. The audience was getting out of control. They were pairing off. Not just at one show, but all the time.”
His look got stranger. “I can see how that would bother you.”
I gulped. “So I had monitors put up backstage, where I could see them on infrared. That way I could pick out individual bodies. Otherwise it’s an indistinguishable mess of mirror-ball spatter and fog.”
He gave a stagehand’s nod. “Smart.”
“It took me forever to figure out what was doing it. Of course, it was me. I mean, what else could it be? They haven’t figured out how to put Ecstasy into a fog machine, and even if they had, I wasn’t feeling it, and neither was the band.”
He looked stunned. “You noticed that?”
“I experimented a while. Then I realized that if I backed off on—gosh, this is hard. I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about this. It was something I was doing. Making. Something.”
“I think I know what you mean. Call it mana,” he said. “That means charisma. It’s your goddess energy.”
“That. When I backed off on it, they sort of settled down and stopped hugging and kissing and they looked at me instead. They went back to listening to the music. Then that got a little creepy, because they would get really intense, and then security did have a job, keeping the front rows from climbing the stage. One or two nut-jobs have tried to climb up there before. But everyone in the first five rows?”
I shook my head.
“So I backed it off a little more. Then Uncle Chester warned me I was throwing a lackluster show, and the reviews were bad. I had to tweak the . . . what you said . . . again.”
“Mana. Tell me,” he said in a light voice, “how you tweaked it.”
“I don’t exactly know how to tell you. I’ve never tried to talk about it before. It’s a . . . a feeling inside me. I know what I want the audience to feel. I kind of . . . decide that. I make up my mind exactly what each song is supposed to make them feel. I focus really hard—no, not hard. You can’t do anything except perform, when you’re performing. You know that. But I can feel how I want everyone out there to feel. I sort of keep that in my attention.” I trailed off and threw my hands in the air. “Oh, this is hopeless. I don’t know anything and I’m responsible for everything and now it’s even worse! Something huge and messy will happen and it’ll be all my fault!”
I could feel the hiccups trying to come up. I thought about that paper bag and quieted down.
“Drink your coffee while it’s hot,” Baz said.
I sipped.
He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” I looked at him, feeling hurt. He said, “I’m supposed to help you figure all this out and get you through it without maiming yourself. You’re doing fine.” He smiled a marveling smile. “You’re amazing.”
“I get that a lot,” I said sourly.
“Sorry.” He sounded like he meant it.
I sipped coffee. I felt oddly calm, now that I’d told someone and he wasn’t freaking out. It was as if I stood at the doorway of a warehouse full of very crazy shit with a native guide at my elbow. “You’re supposed to help?” I said, catching up. “Help how?”
“I was sent to you, to make sure you keep it together.” He looked serious.
I sighed deeply. “Look, I’ve used up all my crazy talk. You have to top that.”
He gave a nod, as if I had scored a point. “The first time I met a goddess,” he said, “I was twenty-seven. Exactly your age. I’d been campaigning hard and I was bone-tired and I couldn’t sleep because of the energy roaring through me. Assyrian kings are gods, you know,” he added. “There’s no rest. Ever.”
My brain skipped over Assyrian kings. All I heard was, there’s no rest. Tears pricked my eyes. He did know. There was never any rest.
I think that’s when I really started believing his story.
“I went out hunting with my buddies and we got separated. I got lost in this very dense little grove of fig trees. In the middle, I found an open spot, all lush grass and a spring-fed pool. And there she was. She may have been naked, but I honestly don’t remember.” He shook his head.
He said, “The second time, I was in my early forties. I’d been up all night fixing some drawings for a palace I was putting up in Nineveh. Something wasn’t working with the southeast end. The footing was too soft and the foundation stones were sinking. It was driving me nuts. I stared at the site map until my eyeballs were like exploding rocks.”
He made a voilà! gesture with both hands. “And there she was at my elbow. She said, ‘It’s quicksand about a hundred feet down there. Put a courtyard here and build around it. Dig a pit and run a pipe in underground to add water and it’ll be a nice little marsh.’ Scared the poop out of me when I turned around and saw her. I felt her mana. Like walking smash into the sun. I fell to my knees. Me! Ruler of the universe! Then she vanished. She played me good.” He looked sober.
“The third time, I was fifty-eight, and, well, anyway, she brought me to my knees again, and I knew who she was by that time. I knew that whatever greatness I had achieved, it was nothing to this. I was like a mayfly in love with a lake. But I was King of the Universe, right? She made my dick hard again. I would have given anything to keep it like that. I knew that as long as I stood in her presence, I would be forever young, forever king. It was humiliating and at the same time it made me feel bigger than a tree. My head brushed the clouds.”
“Who was she?”
“Need you ask?” he said. “She’s Love. Aphrodite, Venus, Ishtar, Inanna, Lada, Oshun. She has a thousand names, but that’s what they all mean. You’re going to be her avatar—one of hundreds. Big job, I guess,” he added bleakly, and stared down at his knuckles knotted together on the table.
I sat there quite a while, not speaking, thinking, while he sat in silence.
What rose out of the chaos of questions in my head was this: if I had The Symptoms, as I’d come to think of them, only during a show in front of an audience, then why had it . . . stepped up suddenly? Why the sea of rose petals? Why now?
I’d thought I had it under control.
Until I met Ashurbanipal of the Mesopotamians, right there in my hotel suite with his steel-toed sneakers and his flying harness in his big hands and his kind, ironical eyes and his tilted way of waiting for me to get it together.
His head tilted now.
“Who are you?” I said finally, realizing I should have asked this before I let him bring me here.
“You know me. I’m Ashurbanipal, of course.”
“Ashurbanipal the musician.”
“And Ashurbanipal the king.”
I sat with that for a minute. “That’s pretty good crazy talk.”
“Thanks. I don’t get to say it very often.”
He was very entertaining, but I had an agenda that had been making me miserable for four months and I wanted to get to the point. “Tell me more about the third time.”
He nodded. “The third time.” He put the coffee cup down. “She kissed me. And she—she took me. Sexually. It was like having sex with fifty queens at once,” he said as if we both knew what that was like, “only better. I was hers from that moment. I didn’t think of it that way. I believed she was mine.” He barked with laughter. “Joke. Nobody owns Love. Love owns you. She owned me.”
“You had her for that moment,” I said, feeling a foolish need to make excuses for him.
He shook his head. “No, she had me. But I thought I could have her. Someday, somehow. I wanted to marry her. You can’t imagine how impossible an idea that was. She laughed at me. I’ve thought about that laugh for centuries. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it made me fall deeper under her spell. Now I realize her intention. She wanted to divert me. Make me change direction,” he explained, as if that explained everything.
“Change?”
“I’d spent forty-odd years conquering everything in sight. She explained all this to me not long ago.” I thought I saw him wince. “Like you, I was turning into a god, and not a nice one. When a man hits middle age,” he said, and that made me believe him more than anything he had said so far, because no man ever admits he has hit middle age, not until he’s eighty or so, “he starts hating the world for making him old.”
I understood what he meant. In my business, a woman gets old when her skin loses that fourteen-year-old freshness, when the first lines appear around her eyes, when she feels sore in the morning after dancing all night. Thirty, say. Thirty-two.
A man, of course, can go a lot longer before he’s a has-been. Forty-five. Forty-eight.
He seemed to be waiting for me to catch up.
“Go on,” I said. “She wouldn’t marry you?”
“She said I was too young. I could understand that. I wasn’t the kind of man—yet—who had to marry ten-year-olds to feel big. Some of my wives were in their forties,” he added with pride.
I raised my eyebrows, but he didn’t take the bait.
“Anyway, I told her, ‘So let me live long enough to be fit to marry you,’ and she laughed, and I insisted. And, well, she made me immortal. Or something. I spent more than two and a half millennia pathetically in love with someone I couldn’t have. Because even that’s no time at all compared to her life. I guess that’s why I’m telling you all this.”
“To let me know what I’m getting into.”
“To warn you. To help you maybe stop it.”
&nb
sp; I saw that happening. “Riiight.”
“Okay, I don’t think you can stop it,” he admitted. “But maybe you can bargain with her. Commute the sentence. Or choose, I dunno, choose what kind of goddess you turn into. I’m not doing this very well,” he admitted, scowling.
“Bargain? The way you bargained with her?” He glanced up guiltily. “C’mon, Baz.”
He didn’t say anything.
I thought about my relationship with love. I said, “Besides, I did choose.”
I thought I saw hope darken his eyes. “How? When?”
“When I was nine. My parents had just died, and Aunt Maybellyne and Uncle Chester told me they would be taking care of me from now on. They gave me their love. They put aside everything for me. Uncle Chester gave me a puppy when I cried. Aunt Maybellyne understood everything I felt. They made poor Joe put up with me. They made me the center of their lives.”
I swallowed. If he wasn’t stringing me, Baz had had two millennia and more to get used to all this. For me it was less than twenty years ago.
“Baz, I needed love really bad. I was nine. I saw clearly that as long as they loved me, I would be all right, that this disaster would save me.”
“Wait, what disaster would save you? Your parents dying? How could that save you?”
“I don’t know. I was positive I was on the brink of something so big, it would eat me alive. Something impossibly huge stood right outside my door, and it would become me, and then it would kill me, but first it would scare me into wanting to kill myself. Then Uncle Chester told me what had happened to my favorite musician.”
I pointed straight at Baz.
He swallowed and looked ashamed.
I said, “It really affected me. I sat down and gave a lot of thought to all the stars who did what you did. Amy and Marilyn, Janis and Whitney, the Lizard King and Michael Jackson and Jimi. They all opened that door. It killed them all.”
He blurted, “She said that. When she sent me to you. She doesn’t want apotheosis to kill you.”
“Isn’t that kind of a contradiction? If you turn into a god, you become immortal.”
He snorted. “Only to everybody else, honey. The struggle is staying alive inside. Day comes when all that shit don’t mean nothin’. You’re left alone with yourself.”
Walking on Sunshine Page 10