by Brian Hodge
Manuel understood this concept. He had been raised by a gods-fearing mother. She had taught him much of the many gods. And there were very many different gods. There was Huitzilopochtl, the hungry-hearted god of war. There was Tlaloc, the god of fertility whose priests would sacrifice babies to make the rain. If the baby cried before death they believed the tears would bring the rain. Then there was Huixtocihuatl, the goddess of salt who could a peel a man's skin with one lick of her tongue. There was Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god who made men as a joke, by sprinkling blood upon bones. Manuel sometimes wondered where the bones came from, if this was the first time that Quetzalcoatl invented men.
One thing was for certain. The gods are always bloodthirsty. They savored the taste of suffering. Blood and tears were the eternal picante salsita.
Then, too there were the smaller gods. The gods of amaranth and maize and pulque and the god of screams. They could be nasty, as well, but they were closer to men. They understood the petty drives and hungers that make a man's life complete.
Manuel could smell the strange woman's sweat and her sex. It was a good thing. He could smell something else moving beneath her skin that was not so good, but what was life without a little of both?
She asked him if she could pay with something else besides money. He knew what she was talking about. A part of him wanted the money, to send to his wives and family.
But another part of him listened only to the monkey.
"There are more good things on this earth than money," Manuel said with a knowing smile on his face. "I understand this."
He unzipped his jeans.
The sound was loud and intrusive in the quiet of the apartment.
Somewhere deep inside herself what was left of Maggie wept and raged and screamed. None of that mattered. The monkey had her by the throat.
Manuel had the woman once, and it was good and a little strange. A part of her seemed to want it so much, yet another part of her seemed to be screaming. Manuel could feel her screaming, like a woman hiding behind a screen door. He touched his turquoise for a little luck. Inside the heart of the stone his fingertips Brailled across the face of the screaming blue monkey. Some voice inside his skull whispered that he ought to want more, so he tried to take her again.
That was Manuel's last mistake.
* 12 *
In terms of crash safety, a surrogate lover's cobweb vagina is far more forgiving than a solid brick wall, but not by much.
Bobby's head sucked into the fantasy Maggie's vagina, like someone had shoved him into a sweaty too-small padded diving helmet. For a moment he couldn't breathe. He heard the sea and the mermaids singing in the distance, and he was pretty certain they didn't croon for him.
Bobby struggled for his freedom. It was a strange kind of sensation, caught like this, trying to pull himself free from the dank steamy confines of the electronic dream of a vagina. His succubus diving helmet shuddered orgasmically in response to the inadvertently erogenous struggling of Bobby's earlobes.
He had just enough time to wonder to himself how safe sex could be with a fantasy woman, especially at such a close proximity as this. Then he heard an audible "pop" as Anansi yanked him out of his sticky predicament.
"Any further in and I would have sent for a St. Bernard and a search party," Anansi said.
"Maggie," Bobby gasped. "Where has she gone?"
"She was never here. You knew that when you went in face-first. What you saw was nothing more than a reflection of what you wanted to see."
"I know that," Bobby replied perversely. "Where is she for real?"
"What does it matter? You are dead. Even if she survives being ridden by the Sumatran Blue Monkey of Wanton Desire it's not likely she'll have much interest in you. Your prospects are, how shall I say , fairly limited. Burial or cremation, that's about all of the choices that are left to you."
"Sumatran Blue Monkey? Is that the name of that little blue beast?"
"It is one of the many names you can call it," Anansi said.
"I don't care," Bobby said. "I want to know where she is."
Anansi shrugged. It was quite a sight, watching a giant blue spider god shrugging.
"It beats me," he said.
"Listen," Bobby said. "I'm not moving another inch until I know how she is."
Anansi laughed.
"That's a moot threat, isn't it? The world has been turning far longer than you've been standing here farting around. The universe is a single dizzying particle of lint, circling the navel of an unbelievably huge god drunk stone dead on a rare celestial unspeakable plonk. You couldn't stand still if you were staring at a stoned drunken gorgon, tanked up on a bucket full of petrified cement."
"Where is she?"
Anansi ignored Bobby's question and just kept on talking. He seemed to be awfully good at that.
"You're always in motion, even when you're dead. Take your atoms, for example. They're bouncing and weaving faster than a pack of Mexican fighting fleas."
"Where is she?" Bobby repeated.
"How should I know?"
"You're a god, aren't you? Doesn't omniscience come as part and parcel of your deityhood?"
"I don't know," Anansi said. "Nobody ever told me. Do you think I know everything?"
Bobby stood there, staring at the giant blue spider.
Then he started to shake.
He couldn't help himself.
He started to laugh. He had to. It was all so damned funny.
"There," Anansi said. "Isn't that much better than soaking in all of that doom, gloom and angst?"
Bobby kept laughing. It felt good to laugh and let it all out. For a moment Bobby wasn't worried about anything.
"Sex is a pulse and love is the rhythm but only a good horselaugh is a sure sign of life. Even the highest god has got to find himself a good juicy joke to giggle over, every now and then."
Bobby smiled, still chuckling to himself.
"If you really need to know where your widow is," Anansi went on. "She's currently riding the hell out of a Mexican truck driver's eight inch cock."
Bobby stopped laughing.
"He's really quite good, you know," Anansi said. "Perhaps a little better than you ever were. There are no words to get in the way of the action. Nothing is lost in translation."
Bobby exploded.
He caught up the great blue spider and started pummeling him. He didn't stand a chance. Anansi was a god, and this was his territory. Bobby gave it as good as he could, working the spider god over like an eight legged heavy bag, but Anansi wasn't doing anything but laughing.
"What's so funny about my wife being raped by another man?
"It wasn't rape. She asked him. She offered it to him."
Bobby's face fell.
"What does it matter to you?" Anansi asked. "You're dead, remember? She's a widow."
Bobby didn't have an answer for that. The spider was right. What the hell did he have to say about Maggie's pleasure?
"Look," Anansi said. "If it's any consolation, your wife's Mexican lover will be dead too, soon enough."
It wasn't.
* 13 *
Maggie didn't think the Mexican truck driver was a bad man. He'd been invited into her body, after all. How could he have known that it was not Maggie who had done the inviting?
Maggie understood all of that, but it didn't help one bit. She felt angry and sorrowful and guilty all at once. She did not hate the Mexican truck driver. It was not his fault that the monkey was making her do these things. Yet a part of her wanted him dead. And because she wanted it, even if only in a part of herself, the infection spread.
Maggie felt the monkey reaching a little deeper inside her, pausing just a little to enjoy the titillating aftershocks of her third orgasm, and then reaching its tiny blue hand deep past all zones of pleasure and into the meat of her own hand. She felt the monkey's paw reaching inside of her skin, like an unseen hand pulling on a peculiarly designed glove.
Once inside
of her hand, the monkey wasted no time. It reached up through Maggie's hand and touched the Mexican truck driver's neck. At first it was nothing more than a caress. Then it stretched a little further, following the current of the truck driver's honest primal want like a shark follows a bucket of chum.
The monkey reached into Manuel's throat and began to throttle him from the inside out. Manuel could feel it working deep inside his throat. You could tell by his eyes that he did not understand any of this. He could not imagine how he might have swallowed a tiny squirming hand. He could not believe that this tiny hand inside his throat might be killing him.
Maggie reached up her free hand and caught hold of the leather and turquoise necklace. She twisted the turquoise necklace from the outside, using it as a makeshift garrote.
Now Manuel was being strangled from the outside and the in.
Then Maggie tore the necklace apart and used the largest chunk of turquoise to pound Manuel's skull into a soft puree. What was inside of the skull felt a little like lukewarm porridge. It takes a lot of effort to make such a mush of a human skull, but Maggie the monkey was as patient as a slow summer rain.
When she was finished pounding she played with the leftover mess for a while. When the mélange began to gel she inserted the three turquoise stones. She jammed the two smaller pieces of turquoise into the place where his eyes used to look out from. Then she crammed the larger fist sized chunk into the spot where his mouth used to speak from.
He looked like a funny kind of snowman.
She was glad he was dead. He had raped her, hadn't he? Sure, she'd let him, but she hadn't wanted to, and she had to blame somebody.
So she was glad, except a part of her wasn't.
She felt torn in two.
The monkey smiled just because it wanted to and worked itself into Maggie, just a little deeper.
* 14 *
Bobby had nothing left to live for, not even life.
"There is always something to live for," Anansi said. "Shall I tell you a story?"
"Don't bother," Bobby said.
"I insist," Anansi said. "You need to hear this story."
"There are thirty-six different plots in this world, and I have heard them all," Bobby said. "I don't need to hear any more stories."
"A writer who does not have time for a story? What kind of nonsense is that. I assure you that you have not heard this particular story," Anansi said. "Come with me. I will take you on a journey."
And he began to talk.
"This story started a long time ago, and I'm not quite sure it has ended yet."
Bobby listened because there wasn't anything else to do.
"I was sitting alone in the jungle hiding from a wife who wanted me to go and find another job to feed our hungry children when the sun went down and the moon peeked out from behind her sad dark veil. Now I had seen the moon many a time, but she had never looked as beautiful as she did that night."
As Anansi kept telling his story, Bobby was amazed to realize that he could see what was happening in the story. It was playing out in some distant dimension just beyond vision and dreaming.
"I wanted that moon," Anansi said. "So I sang a song to her, but she didn't listen. She hung there and said nothing."
Bobby saw the spider-god singing softly to the beautiful moon, looking more than just a little like Michigan J. Frog singing – "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal."
"I want you, I shouted out to her, but she still hung there and said nothing. So I decided that if she would not come to me than I would come to her. So I did a little dance and I made some magic and I wove my longest web and I climbed up into the heavens to go and hunt the moon."
Bobby saw the spider-god clambering up a forever long strand of web looking tiny before the vastness of stars and space. It was more than just imagination. He could see it just as clearly as could be.
"It took a long time to climb through the heavens to the earth, and I saw many things upon my climb," Anansi continued. "I saw a man push his son from a high balcony down to the ground and then he nailed him up upon a tree, and then he pulled his son's body back up and nailed it to an even higher tree. I thought of dialing 911, but telephones hadn't been invented yet."
Bobby saw three crosses, a stretch of webbing strung between them like the world's largest tic-tac-toe game.
"When I got to the moon I saw that it was nothing but a giant mirror – and inside that mirror I saw another earth, and another Anansi, and this other Anansi was married to the most beautiful spider-woman I had ever seen. So I sang my sweetest song, and danced so prettily, and I slept with that other spider-woman. She couldn't tell the difference between the two of us, or at least she pretended not to. That is the way with woman and spiders."
Anansi chuckled.
"But while I was sleeping with that moon-spider-woman, the moon-Anansi climbed down my web and pulled it down after him. I could see that moon-Anansi sleeping and having fun with my own woman, down there on the other part of the world, and you know looking at her from this high distance, she didn't look nearly as bad as I'd remembered. I was jealous and angry, but the moon-spider-woman only whispered in my ear, foolish spider, you may be a god but time does not see you. While you were busy climbing up to something that was only a reflection of what was really real, life moved on without you."
"So I shot another web, just as fast and as hard as I could, and it stuck into the ocean."
"I am going home now, I said to the moon-spider-woman. I am going home to beat up that moon-Anansi who is sleeping with my wife, and when she sees how hard her real man is she will forget everything and learn to love me again."
"Foolish Anansi, the moon-spider-woman said. You are not going anywhere that you have not already been."
"She pointed and I looked and I saw that I had spun a web from the moon floating in the sky down to the moon floating in the ocean."
"If you climb down there, the moon-spider-woman said, you will only find another reflection."
"So I hung there, reflecting on what she'd said."
"You may have a point, I said, but I'm not listening."
"So I climbed down the web and into one more echo of a reflection and for all I know I'm still climbing down."
He breathed and stretched all eight of his legs.
"Aaaaaaaaah," Anansi said, unwittingly making the same sigh of satisfaction as had inspired the naming of dead Manuel's trucking firm. "I feel so much better. There is nothing more wonderful than a story. It positively invigorates me."
"So was it true? Did it really happen that way?"
"That's how I remember it happening, so that's how I tell it. The lion might tell it in a different fashion. Stories change. They move and they mutate. Politics and amnesia get laid upon them in layers that reform the story."
"And is there no constant?"
"The storyteller is the only constant. He always stays the same. He is the shaman, the one who talks to the gods. People listen to storytellers if they can only stay in tune. Are you in tune, story man? Have you completely forgotten the pure and simple joy of telling a tale?"
Bobby laughed ruefully. This would have been a fascinating conversation a few hours ago. Now, with Maggie gone and himself probably dead, he just didn't feel as philosophically inspired as he might have.
"Nowadays we have something that serves a similar purpose," Bobby said. "We call it television."
Anansi shook his head impatiently. "Television is nothing more than an imperfect mirror being viewed by an even more imperfect mirror. The whole thing is a virtual loop, an eternity trap advancing absolutely nowhere. It shows us nothing more than what we are comfortable with. It is a soulless vision that refuses to grow. The flat screens are even worse."
Bobby was growing impatient.
"Who cares?" Bobby said with a shrug. "What good are stories?"
"How can a man like you ask such foolishness? A storyteller offers his spirit and his tongue as a mirror to life. He imagines
us all wild, crazy and sometimes brave. He knows the plot. He lets us picture ourselves as finally knowing what to do."
"A story isn't going to help me get my Maggie back."
"Don't you see, she never was yours in the first place? She was her own person from the very beginning. Having her was just a story you told yourself. It probably helped you sleep at night."
"What's your point?"
"There is no point. A story is nothing but a dream that you can hold in your ears and your mouth and your memory. A storyteller gives the world hope that there is something more than what we can see and touch," Anansi said. "The right story, cleverly told, can inspire and teach us not to give up. A story teaches you how to strive."
Anansi stared hard at Bobby.
"Reflect on this," The spider god said. "Don't give up. Move to the front of the bus."
And then Anansi was gone.
* 15 *
Maggie wasn't ready to give up yet.
She wasn't sure what she could do. She wasn't sure what was really happening. She didn't know where the monkey had come from. She only knew one thing for certain - whatever had happened, she knew she needed to get her hands around that monkey's throat.
Just give me the strength, she whispered to herself. No one could hear her pray. The monkey was too busy steering her body and controlling her voice. It had totally forgotten about her ears.
All that Maggie could do was look on like an unwilling spectator. She wasn't sure where she really was. She felt her body, her hands and her feet, but there was this sense of incredible distance between them. All of the stuff that the monkey had forced her to buy was separating Maggie from everything that was truly real.
I have to get closer, she thought.
She reached further, from deep within herself. That was how the monkey did it, wasn't it? He reached and he grabbed her and he took control.
Hadn't he?
What if all of those desires and all of this greed had always been there?