Eros appeared next to him, cross-legged on the ground. He laughed the same laugh he’d used at the wedding earlier that day and pounded Ganymede on the back.
“Aw, come on, G,” he said. “You didn’t seriously think Zeus would have eyes only for his new cupbearer. I mean, you’ve seen Hera. If she can’t keep his dick to herself, you’ve got no hope.”
Ganymede remembered what he’d been thinking of—hoping for—with Eros just before he’d seen Zeus, and his face burned. “He said she was his favorite,” Ganymede muttered. “That’s what he called me when we first—when he took me up to the clouds. His exact words.”
“Yeah. Every guy has a line, you know? I’ve heard thousands of ’em. Hell, I fucking created the whole idea.”
“Why did you show me that? What was the point?” To his shame, Ganymede found tears gathering in his eyes. “I thought we were friends.”
“It was the truth,” Eros countered. “What kind of friend would I be if I let you live with a lie?”
The arrows in Eros’s quiver gleamed in the soft sunlight, and Ganymede’s shame and sadness turned to rage. He jabbed a finger into Eros’s chest. “Did you use one of those arrows on me?”
Eros held up his hands. “Not me, bro. My arrows wouldn’t work on Zeus, and I never have to use them on his … targets. No one ever turns him down, you know what I’m saying?”
Ganymede dropped his head into his hands. “Yeah. I do know.” He let out a heavy breath. “I’m such a shit.”
“Hey, look.” Eros put an arm around Ganymede’s shoulders. “For what it’s worth, Zeus wasn’t lying when he said those things to you. He really meant them. It’s just that for Zeus, love is cheap.” He laughed a little. “The guy loves everyone, and you were next.”
“Shit,” Ganymede said again,
“It’s okay. It happens a lot. Listen, let’s take your mind off it.” Eros held up a big handful of solid gold dice. “Wanna play the bones?”
Ganymede almost refused. Then he thought, what would he do with his time? He had nowhere else to go, nothing to do. And he didn’t want to think about what Zeus was doing right then. “Yeah, why not?”
In ancient Greece, dice was kind of like Yahtzee mixed with poker. The players threw down a bunch of dice in the middle. Then each player turned a cup with more dice in it upside-down and peeked underneath it to see what those dice showed. The players combined the middle dice with the ones under their cups to make a hand, and whoever had the best combination won. They made bets along the way, bluffing or raising or whatever, and twice they could select dice to re-throw. Ganymede, who liked people and could read them pretty well, was a decent player. They sat crossed-legged on a smooth patch of ground and played a quick round. Ganymede won. They played another round, and Ganymede won that one, too.
“I kind of suck at this game,” Eros admitted with a rueful laugh. “And you’re better than I thought. Let’s try again. I’m gonna beat you this time.”
But he lost, and badly.
“This is getting boring,” Eros said, pouting a little. “You keep beating the shit out of me. I don’t want to play anymore.”
“Don’t quit now,” Ganymede protested, secretly glad he’d found something he could best Eros at. “We’re just getting started.”
Eros settled his wings. “Okay, okay. Let’s make it interesting, at least.”
“How?”
“Let’s play for forfeits,” Eros said.
“Yeah? What do we forfeit? Gold?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Eros scoffed. “We can all make that out of nothing. You may as well bet leaves or dirt.”
“Then what?”
Eros thought a moment. “I know! The winner sets a dare for the loser.” He reached across the dice and lightly grasped Ganymede by the wrist. Their eyes met, blue against green. Ganymede felt his breath quicken, and Eros lowered his voice. “And the loser has to do it, no matter what it is.”
Ganymede was starting to feel like a ping-pong ball, bounced from god to goddess, from goddess to god, from earth to Olympus, from Olympus to earth, from fear to desire, and desire to fear. It hadn’t even been two days, and he’d been jolted from Minos to Zeus, from Iris to Aphrodite. Now he had Eros. He felt his life spinning out of control. And even that brought its own duality, one of both fear and exhilaration. In a burst of what-the-fuckness, he gave in to the exhilaration.
“Done,” he said, his own voice low.
“Do you swear by Styx to do the dare if you lose?” Eros asked, still holding Ganymede’s wrist.
“Yes.” Ganymede continued to meet his gaze. “Do you?”
“You got it.” He let go of Ganymede’s wrist. “Let’s play.”
They tossed the middle dice and flipped their cups. Ganymede had a pretty good hand. He and Eros both selected some of their dice to re-throw, and Ganymede’s hand became even better. A little flicker of annoyance, barely noticeable, crossed Eros’s face. Ganymede privately exalted and selected two of his dice to throw one last time. What did he want Eros to do for the forfeit? A number of things came to mind, and not just ones that involved Eros directly. Hell, maybe he’d have Eros use one of his arrows on Iris just as she looked at Ganymede. Or would that be cheating?
“Okay,” Eros said, “show ’em.”
Ganymede revealed his dice. “With the ones in the middle, I have six of a kind with fives,” he said.
“Oh.” Eros lifted his cup. “I have six fives and three fours. Looks like I win, G.”
Ganymede stared down at Eros’s dice. It was true. Eros had won. Before the stunned Ganymede could react further, a low, throaty laugh wound its way through the trees. Ganymede and Eros looked up to see Aphrodite gliding toward them, her lovely gown fluttering in the soft breeze. She leaned down to read the dice, putting a hand on Eros’s shoulder and revealing a generous amount of cleavage.
“Eros!” she mock-scolded. “You little scamp! You didn’t trick this poor boy into throwing dice, did you?” She smiled at Ganymede. “He’s the best player on Olympus, you know.”
“He agreed to the forfeit,” Eros said, and Ganymede’s horrified mind flashed back through the events of the day. It was Aphrodite who had persuaded him to go see Eros in the first place, and everything that had happened since then had been Eros’s idea. Ganymede had just gone along with it. Had Aphrodite set him up? But why and what for? Before he could say anything, however, Aphrodite turned and strolled off, her musical laughter following behind.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Ganymede snarled to Eros. “Are you screwing with me?”
For a wonder, Eros wasn’t laughing. He wouldn’t even look Ganymede in the face. Instead, he kept his eyes on the ground. Ganymede’s hands formed into icy fists, and he barely restrained the urge to punch Eros in the face across the pile of golden bones.
“You have to pay the forfeit by doing the dare,” Eros said quietly. “And you swore by Styx, so you can’t get out of it. No immortal can.”
“What’s the dare, then?” Ganymede demanded through clenched teeth.
Eros took a deep breath but kept his eyes on the ground. “I dare you to bring me three hairs from the head of Prometheus.” With that, he vanished.
Ganymede stared at the spot where Eros had been sitting. The grass was still flattened a little from his butt. What the hell did that mean? Before he’d been pissed off. Now he was pissed off and puzzled. He needed help making sense of this.
“Iris?” he shouted. “Iris, can you hear me?”
Colors swirled, and Iris was there, her rainbow gown dazzling in the sunshine. Ganymede was caught by how pretty she was. She didn’t have Hera’s regal beauty or Aphrodite’s lush sensuality, but her fresh, bright loveliness made Ganymede think of a spring afternoon just after a new rainfall. Her colorful presence instantly made him feel a little better.
“Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I’m in trouble,” he said morosely.
She sat down next to him. “That didn�
��t take long. What happened?”
He told her, and she listened without interrupting until he got to the three hairs of Prometheus. Then she let out a long, low whistle.
“Yikes,” she said. “That sucks pondwater with major rocks in it.”
“You know what? Screw it,” Ganymede said. “I was tricked. Why should I have to follow through on this forfeit? I’m not going to—” Bright pain lanced through his head like a laser trying to drill out his brain. He clutched his temples and screamed.
“Quick!” Iris shouted. “Say you’ll do it! Say you’ll do the forfeit!”
“I’ll do it!” he cried. Anything to end the horrible pain. “I will!”
The pain ended. He looked at Iris, panting. “What was that?”
“Styx. You swore by the River of Death, so you have to do it. And if you put it off for too long, the pain will start up again, so don’t think you can avoid it for a thousand years or something.”
“Great. Now what do I do?”
“Do you know who Prometheus is?”
“Yeah. He created humans, then stole fire from Olympus for us—them. Zeus found out about it and hanged him upside down from a mountain.” The story was a familiar one. “Every day an eagle rips out his heart and liver and eats them, but they always grow back because he’s a god, so he’s punished again and again.” Ganymede paused. “Is this still going on?”
Iris nodded. “Like you said, every day.”
Ganymede bit his lip. Prometheus and his fate had been a story to him, not truly real. Oh, Ganymede had believed in the gods like anyone else, but he didn’t think of the individual stories as actually happening. Athene was real, but she hadn’t truly turned a weaving woman into a spider. Zeus hadn’t really thrown a horde of monsters in a deep pit at the beginning of the world. And Prometheus wasn’t really being tortured on a daily basis. Now, it seemed, he had been wrong.
“The main problem,” Iris continued, “is that Zeus has forbidden anyone to talk to Prometheus, or even go near him. If Zeus finds out you did, he’ll do something that makes Prometheus’s situation look like a vacation, no matter how big a favorite you are with him. You’ll be out of Olympus and into Tartarus for sure.”
Ganymede’s stomach went cold as an icy wave of realization swept over him. “It was Hera,” he whispered. “This is her way of getting rid of me. I saw her talking to Aphrodite when I came back to the party. They planned this entire thing.”
“I did kind of warn you,” Iris said.
“And Eros went along with it,” Ganymede said bitterly. “Here I thought he wanted to be my friend.”
Iris took his hand. “I think he does, Ganymede. But Aphrodite is his mother, and when she snaps her fingers, he goes all Oedipal and jumps like a trained frog.”
“Oedipal?”
“Never mind. The important thing is, yeah—I think Hera screwed you over big time.”
Ganymede looked at Iris. Her eyes changed colors, shifting through the spectrum from reds and oranges to blues and violets and back again. Her hand was small and strong, and suddenly he wanted to appear brave in front of her. He squared his shoulders. “She did. So now I have to find a way out of it. Will you help me?”
“How?”
“Take me to Prometheus.”
Iris hesitated. “I can’t take you all the way there,” she said. “Zeus might see my rainbow in the sky, and I can’t hide it from him if he looks. But I can get you close.”
“Then do it,” he said, tightening his hand around hers. “Please?”
Iris nodded once. The colors swirled and they vanished.
BOOK 8
PART VII
Fear as a three-headed dog
The first head
(Fear before)
Has a growl
That turns bone to water
The second head
(Fear during)
Has long teeth
That spatter blood in four directions
The third head
(Fear after)
Has bottomless eyes
That make you wonder
What
you’ve
become.
I was shaking when I arrived at the Haidou Hotel, but Lucian didn’t seem to notice. He tossed the stupid, too-small clothes at me and told me to change in Room 8, then talk to Gerald in the bar ASAP. I almost threw up in the bathroom while I was changing, and I avoided looking at the saggy bed, which was still rumpled from yesterday.
Gerald is a younger guy who looks older because he’s going bald in front, and he has crooked teeth. He’s both the bartender and the manager. The second I walked in, he put me to work clearing tables in the hotel’s bar and restaurant. There are three other busboys, too—all from Cuba. They don’t speak any English. They were dressed in the stupid white shirts and black pants like me, but they were a little older than I am. Most of the customers in the restaurant were men, and a lot of them wore suit jackets. There wasn’t enough work to keep us busy at the tables, so I thought Gerald would make us do dishes or mop floors in the kitchen or something, but whenever we ran out of work, Gerald told us to stand in a line near the back wall like sides of beef on butcher hooks. We were all there for the same reason and we all knew it, but we pretended we didn’t. The Cubans spoke Spanish and watched the waitresses, who were both old enough to be our mothers. Me, I just stared at the floor, but I knew eyes were touching me.
half an hour bent over tables ties cold knots in your stomach and their eyes cover you in mud
and then one of them smiles too long and speaks in a feathery voice to the man who sells
old grapes. a flash of greenery like poison ivy leaves, and you get a key to Room 16
you drag your feet through a slushy carpet and then you find the Toxin Man
in that room and he winds his arms around you like iron jungle vines,
pushing, probing, invading, and always
hurting hurting hurting hurting
until you catch the trick of
letting every thing
drain
away
to no
thing
.
.
but
then it
all comes rushing
back up in a pool of bitter bile
and rancid acid to splash over the hard white tiles
The guy complained that I barfed, and Lucian hit me four or five times, careful not to mark me up. I know because he said so even while he was pounding the shit out of me. I limped back to the bar, my ribs like hot ribbons under my shirt, and half an hour later he gave me another key.
ROOM 24
Say two words four times and they become a hope
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
Say a hope three times and it becomes a prayer
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
Say a prayer a hundred times and it becomes a mantra
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
A hard black shoe gleams on the floor beside the bed and reflects everything back up.
Reach down toward it with a hand that jerks in a stranger’s spastic rhythm
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf
The difference between a mantra and a prayer comes when the stranger does:
A prayer has a hope of being heard.
I cleaned up in the bathroom, pulled on my clothes, and stared at myself in the mirror. It seeme
d like I should look different, but I didn’t. Same black hair, same brown eyes, same long nose. My insides felt dry as paper.
When I went out into the main room, the Second Guy was sitting on the edge of the bed—dressed, thank god—with the TV tuned to the Weather Channel. A white smear swirled across a digital ocean, and the broadcaster announced that Tropical Storm Tyler had been upgraded to hurricane status, though it wasn’t expected to hit Florida. Tyler might be only a small hurricane, but it looked to me like he had sucked up all the clouds in the world.
The Second Guy smiled at me and patted the mattress next to him. He was older than Uncle Zack. A wedding ring gleamed on his left hand, and I wondered if he had kids my age. “Want to sit down for a second?” he asked.
I hadn’t barfed, and wasn’t sure if I should be proud that I’d managed it or upset that I’d changed enough that I didn’t need to. But looking at the Second Guy pat the bed like he was going to read me a bedtime story brought the acid back to my throat again.
“Uh, I should probably get back before Lucian gets ticked,” I said.
He shrugged. “Sure. See you around.”
I fled the room and almost ran down to the bar. Lucian was there, looking dangerous.
“You throw up this time?” he growled.
I shook my head. Lucian broke into a smile and patted my shoulder with a hand that almost crushed me to the floor. “Good boy. This is yours.” He folded a bill into my hand. I looked at it.
“Twenty bucks?” I said. I should have gotten pissed off, but suddenly I didn’t have the energy for it.
“It would have been fifty,” Lucian said. “Next time, don’t lose your lunch on the customer’s bathroom floor.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
“And there’s something else.” Lucian put his finger under my chin and made me look up at him, which I didn’t like. “I talked to your step-dad Myron.”
Ice speared every vein and artery. I couldn’t do anything but stare at him in total shock. Finally I managed to croak, “What?”
“I told you it’s a small world. He was pretty upset about you running away. No more new movies for his web site. Not only that, both you boys took off right before hunting season—prime rutting time. He wanted me to send you back.”
Danny Page 18