Margin of Eros

by Hawthorne, Clare

  Apollo had been somewhat surprised by Hera’s call. Euterpe’s palace was far enough removed from Zeus’ radar that Apollo generally managed to avoid confrontation and thus, responsibility. Euterpe herself was a particularly amusing Muse, known throughout Olympus for her ability to play Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, all at the same time, along with a number of other multitasking skills that had earned her the slightly obscure nickname ‘Beverly Wilshire’. She was also one of the few creatures in Olympus who could stand more than a couple minutes of Apollo. Consequently, he had no real desire to leave her palace and return to Earth. But when Hera confronted him with her proposal, he simply couldn’t deny that there hadn’t been a decent romantic comedy since My Big Fat Greek Wedding (and that was hardly Roman Holiday). And he readily agreed that even in a blind stupor, he could put something in the multiplexes that would get more laughs than Troy. And so, somewhat reluctantly, he agreed to save the Earth from certain ruin.

  Fortunately for the Earth, he had learned his lesson as far as writing his own screenplays was concerned. This time around, he was determined to trawl through the slush pile in order to unearth a rough diamond that would re-launch his producing career. Or at least, have the interns do the trawling. Apollo himself would be far too busy redecorating his apartment and catching up on episodes of Top Gear.

  Unfortunately, there was the annoying business of Ares and the mortal, about which Hera seemed to have a hornet in her hoo hoo. Personally, Apollo couldn’t have given a goat’s gonads who or what Ares did in his spare time, but Hera had promised to have another talk to Zeus about Apollo’s stunt career, even hinting that she could get him a little uncredited driving on Foxhole Fury. And so, with the carrot of high velocity handbrake turns dangling from his rearview mirror, Apollo broke into the studio at a quarter to ten with his Olympian skeleton key, in order to do a little pre-emptive espionage on the half-brother he knew to be in Vegas. He was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find his nephew running around the corridors wearing nothing more than a copy of Variety on his head, fashioned into the shape of the Sydney Opera House.

  ‘Hello Hermes,’ said Apollo, casually slinging his sweat top over one shoulder and assuming what is known in colloquial Olympian wrestling parlance as the Statue of Nonchalance. The reference was particularly apt, given Apollo’s preference for light grey, brushed cotton sweat pants and tight fitting white workout tops. Backlit by streetlights, he looked like the Statue of David. Or more accurately, the Statue of David looked like him.

  ‘Uh oh,’ said Hermes. Thrilled to find that the tequila had not diminished his enthusiasm for athletic nudity, Hermes had been channeling his sexual energy into sprint training around the building, in between belting out the album tracks of Wham! Fantastic on SingStar. He knew all the lyrics, just as surely as he knew that he couldn’t outrun Apollo, even with his slight aerodynamic advantage. At the same time, he knew that Eros and Apollo’s longstanding rivalry could result in considerable unpleasantness, particularly if the god of light discovered that the god of love was singing.

  The thing was, Eros was pretty good at a lot of things that Apollo was also good at: hunting, charioteering, archery, cooking, Marathon running, playing the harp, the lyre, the flute, and in particular, singing. Viewed from a dispassionate perspective, Eros and Apollo were a lot alike. The only difference, as far as Hermes could see, was that Apollo was a douche bag, and Eros wasn’t.

  As with every other activity that could conceivably be rated, Apollo considered himself to be the best singer in Olympus. And although he frequently claimed that he found being the best at everything tedious, that didn’t mean that he was ever going to admit that he wasn’t. Sure, he was older than Eros and pretty much had his measure in all the highly skilled pursuits at which they both excelled. The problem with singing was subjectivity. Apollo hated subjectivity. And he knew that there were a lot of people in Olympus who, subjectively, believed that Eros was the superior baritone. Unfortunately there seemed to be no way to prove otherwise.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ said Apollo, cocking his head and internally attuning his aural compass to the low frequency rumblings seeping through the closed doors of a soundproof room.

  ‘What noise?’ said Hermes. Like Eros, he was a terrible liar, but unlike his cousin, he was fatally attracted to losing battles, and with a roar befitting a much meatier immortal, he charged at Apollo. In the split second between the roar and the charge, Apollo shifted his stance from the defensive Statue of Nonchalance to the very offensive Brick Shithouse. Still, the dual elements of nudity and surprise had a little something going for them, and Hermes at least managed to knock Apollo to the ground, even if he didn’t manage to keep him there for long. For the second time that day, Hermes quickly found himself pinned to the ground with an arm wrapped around this throat. Only this time, the sheer brutality of the biceps meant that speech was not only near impossible, it was suicidal. ‘What noise?’ hissed Apollo.

  Hermes could neither breathe nor move. He had been hoping to buy Eros a little time, perhaps alerting him to the intrusion with a few flying pot plants, or, if necessary, a broken leg. But Apollo’s complete domination had been so swift and soundless that even a god’s highly attuned hearing would have struggled to pick up the distress call. Particularly a god who, at that moment, was listening with rapt attention to the most beautiful woman in the world as she slaughtered Satisfaction. The last thing Hermes heard before he blacked out was a terrible nasal lament, an aphorism for eternity, caught in that infinite moment. But I tried, and I tried, and I tried. Pinpricks burned his eyes as he felt himself spinning into the abyss. ‘Baby,’ he thought desperately, trying to anchor himself to some feeling, some place, ‘I’m your man.’

  45.

  Apollo was a little surprised to see Hermes disappear out from under him. As a less experienced traveler, he was not aware of the vagaries of trans-dimensional jumping that sometimes resulted in unconscious transitions. These were not recommended, of course, and rarely spoken of. The only reason Hermes knew about them was that he had once accidentally ended up in Hades after being hit by a Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica. The Fates had intervened on that occasion, but Hermes knew he had been lucky to see the light of day. He now took extra care in traffic, incorrectly assuming that the greatest risk to his safety on Earth was human incompetence.

  None of this was of any concern to Apollo, however. He simply concluded that the pusillanimous postal worker had gone crying back to granddad, flapping his cute little feathered heels behind him. ‘Fag,’ he muttered, climbing to his feet. It was an interesting choice of insult from the god who is widely credited with having invented homosexuality, but as Poseidon had often remarked, if being gay meant having to idolize Apollo, he’d rather cut off his own cock and feed it to the dolphins, who would at least admit to enjoying it.

  The music seemed to have stopped. Ordinarily, that would have been enough to curtail Apollo’s famously short attention span, but Hermes’ reaction had piqued his interest. Like a dog sniffing the dirt, he scanned the human frequency spectrum. Then, hearing nothing, he expanded into the subliminal. Not a great deal there either, other than the occasional call to purchase from a floating soda blimp. He frowned, relaxing his stance. He could have sworn he’d heard some early Stones, but the cover version was one he wasn’t familiar with and to be honest, a bit of a massacre. Maybe there was a karaoke bar somewhere nearby, or maybe some high school band was rehearsing at the Burbank town hall. Or maybe –

  So true, funny how it seems. Apollo narrowed his eyes. He knew that voice. Always in time, but never in line for dreams. Only one person would be audacious enough to attempt Spandau Ballet. Only one god, that is. Moving at a speed that would have broken every Olympic sprint record, on Earth at least, Apollo was outside the editing suite before Eros had the chance to reveal the sound of his soul.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said Apollo. Eros nearly choked on the coda. ‘Uh oh,’ he said, lowering the microphone.

&n
bsp; Violet stared at the intruder in surprise. He looked like a blonde David Hasselhoff, circa 1986. Unfortunately, that wasn’t where the comparison ended. ‘That looks like fun,’ he said, with a smile that made ‘fun’ sound like a dirty word. ‘Mind if I have a go?’

  Violet frowned. The guy’s hair looked like meringue. ‘Do I know you?’ she asked, dusting off her clinical voice. Unfortunately, Apollo knew pretty much everything there was to know about Violet, right down to the marks she had received in abnormal psychology, thanks to the dossier Hera had given him prior to his inter-dimensional departure. So there was little point in her polishing her framed degrees, especially if she thought that it might buy her a few more minutes of unsanctioned serenading. ‘Not yet,’ said Apollo, ‘but the night is young.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Violet saw Leo squirm. She had never seen anyone move like that before, yet there was no questioning what he did. He squirmed. She even went to the trouble of looking it up in a dictionary when she got home, just to reassure herself that she had labeled it correctly. Wriggle, writhe, twist, shudder; display feeling of embarrassment or shame. ‘Are you OK, Leo?’ she said.

  ‘Leo!’ said the blonde Knight Rider. ‘Named after Tolstoy, I presume?’

  Leo shook his head. ‘Violet,’ he said, unable to meet her eye, ‘this is my uncle David. David, Violet.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ said Apollo. Violet looked at the hand he was offering, completely appalled. He was without doubt the creepiest man she had ever met. And yet, convention demanded that she take his hand; feel his disgusting intentions pulsating through the soft, moisturized slide of his palm against hers. ‘Maybe for you,’ she said, extracting her hand as quickly as possible.

  Apollo laughed. So, he thought, a tease. ‘Leo,’ he said, patronizing, threatening and smiling at his nephew, all at the same time, ‘why don’t you tell me how this works?’

  ‘It’s just a dumb game,’ muttered Eros. ‘You pick a song, you sing it, the computer gives you points.’

  ‘Really?’ said Apollo, his ears pricking up at the mention of an objective scoring mechanism. ‘So who’s winning?’

  Eros shook his head, staring at the ground. It was the kind of passive, non-confrontational behavior that Violet had seen many times in the course of her previous professional career. It almost always masked some kind of abuse, either mental or physical, and generally she was a lot more circumspect when treating such a patient. But Leo was not her patient and this uncle, this David, was asking to be kicked in the tonsils. Of course, she had no idea that in doing so, she was throwing Eros to the sharks. ‘Leo’s winning,’ she said. ‘He’s the best singer I’ve ever heard.’ Actually that was true, even including the three seasons of American Idol that Ashley had forced her to sit through; although to be fair, it was often hard to hear the contestants over Ashley’s high-pitched harmonies.

  It wasn’t true, however, that Eros was winning. The Spandau balled had been his first song. Up until that point he had been shyly watching Violet as she belted out an enthusiastic, but ultimately tuneless, attempt to knock Hermes off his Fantastic pedestal. ‘Really,’ said Apollo, staring pointedly, if somewhat irrelevantly, at Violet’s breasts. ‘Personally I find that hard to believe. He sings like a girl.’

  ‘Well maybe if you’d let him finish,’ said Violet, crossing her arms over her chest, ‘you’d see for yourself.’

  Apollo laughed, long and loud. Really, if there had been any justice in the world, he would have laughed his own head off, ideally kicking it out into the parking lot for the coyotes or the cops to deal with, whoever got there first. But there wasn’t and he didn’t. He simply stopped laughing just as suddenly as he started, rolled up his sleeves and twiddled with the soundboard, taking to audio engineering as easily as if he’d been born with a tweeter for a teat. Three synthetic chords mashed against the black screen as the lyrics started to pop up like so many baby songbirds, demanding to be sung. It wasn’t the song that Eros had started with, which Apollo had quickly deemed way too easy. With his choice of the more upbeat New Romantic number, Apollo threw down the gauntlet. Eros opened his mouth, fumbled the intro, and finally found his high note.

  Every love story needs a musical number, and as far as his unrequited adoration of Violet went, Eros knew he might never get another chance. And so he gave it everything he had. When he passionately intoned that love is like a high prison wall, but you could leave me standing so tall, Violet almost believed him. He was growing in confidence, verse by verse, even throwing in a few sweeping hand moves in the lead-up to the saxophone solo. As it happened, Eros could play the horn as well as any session musician but he avoided the obvious air sax by closing his eyes and swaying like a palm tree in front of a wind machine. He reeled in those gilded lyrics and made them his own, belting out the final chorus from the instep of his sneakers. When he opened his eyes again, everyone in the audience was applauding; Violet, with genuine appreciation, and Apollo, with the ironic slow clap that he had seen Euterpe adopt in response to less than stellar performances by her students.

  ‘Very impressive,’ said Apollo, sounding completely unimpressed. ‘Ninety-two!’ The number was meaningless to him, but he managed to make it sound like the number of times he had thrown up on a total stranger, say, or the number of times he had defecated in a fruit bowl. ‘Now children,’ he continued, scrolling through the playlist, ‘why don’t you let the grown-ups have a go.’ Exactly why he was referring to himself in the plural was unclear until he chose ‘The Prayer’, by Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli; a manipulative, pseudo-spiritual musical marshmallow that Violet had always hated. Predictably, he performed both parts with tedious perfection. The irony was not lost on Eros. ‘Very devout,’ he said, when Apollo had finished.

  ‘I am nothing,’ said Apollo, taking note of his near-perfect score, ‘if not devoted.’ With a self-satisfied sigh, he handed the microphone back to Violet. ‘I guess that settles it,’ he said to Eros.

  ‘Settles what?’ said Violet, swinging on the end of the microphone, as if weighing up the length of her lasso.

  ‘Don’t you worry…’ Apollo started to say, before he caught the look on Violet’s face and thought better of adding ‘… your pretty little head’. Although she was a mere mortal, it could certainly be demonstrated, if it hadn’t been already, that she was capable of bringing an immortal to his knees. Even an insanely insensitive egomaniac like Apollo was smart enough to quit when he was ahead, which was lucky, because if he’d gone on to complete his cliché, there was a high risk of attempted asphyxiation by microphone cord, already an all-too-common incident on the LAPD beat.

  46.

  Hermes blinked into the blackness. Or at least, he thought he did. It was difficult to tell whether his eyes were open or closed, just as it was difficult to tell if he was upside down or the right way up. Normally, he would assume that he was the right way up but he couldn’t feel his feet and his arms seemed to be dangling above his head. However, when he lifted – or possibly dropped – his arms, they stayed in place. Or felt as if they did. Again there was no real way to tell, because he couldn’t see his arms and they were so numb from cold that he couldn’t feel them pressed against his body.

  Cold. It was definitely cold. Pleased with identifying that much at least, Hermes attempted to spin around. Or possibly roll over. He had the sensation of movement, but it was a very slow, heavy sensation, like walking underwater. He didn’t think he was underwater, although curiously, he didn’t seem to be breathing. Being immortal, he could hold his breath pretty much indefinitely, but he had to prepare for it. Having the air squeezed out of his lungs the way Apollo had done it was not ideal. It put stress on the system. And stress on the system, when the system was a long way from its natural state, was asking for trouble. He didn’t think he was dead though. The closest analogy he could come up with was of being in utero, although of course he couldn’t actually remember what that was like, and at any rate he had never been ‘in utero’ in the tr
aditional sense, having been implanted under an eagle’s wing at embryo stage by his overly cautious mother. Certainly this version of a uterus was a lot roomier that he would have expected. And he definitely didn’t feel like he was in the fetal position. And yet, the nagging sense that he was about to be born persisted. Or – going by the increasingly rapid feeling of air rushing past him and the buzzing in his ears that had started as a mosquito hum and now sounded like a Spitfire with its engine ablaze – that he was about to crash land.

  ‘Aarrgh,’ said Hermes, landing with a loud crash. It was still pitch black but at least he now knew which way was up. He was lying on his back, his legs in the air, the rest of his body sprawled out across what felt like a stack of cardboard boxes. The air tasted greasy and stale, like empty buckets of chicken, alerting him to the fact that he was at least breathing again. Gingerly sitting up, he noticed that he was naked. Although, come to think of it, he had been naked when he was fighting with Apollo, so the lack of clothing didn’t necessarily mean anything. Still, his hat appeared to be missing. His back also hurt and his throat felt like it had been pounded by a rubber mallet. But again, no surprises there.

  Fumbling forward on his hands and knees, Hermes moved towards what appeared to be the lighter end of the room. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he began to suspect that he was in a storeroom of some sort. Tall shelves, or maybe neatly stacked boxes, towered above him. But why did everything have to be so dark? His ears were still ringing from his emergency landing, but beyond the ringing, he began to detect a rhythmic thumping, droning monotonously in the distance. And beyond that, another sound, something melodic but vulgar, intermittently punctuating the bass vibration. Both sounds were familiar, but they were such a strange juxtaposition, like a purring kitten riding a Harley Davidson, that the combined sound only confused Hermes further. He was starting to get a headache between his eyes, so breathtakingly sharp that it felt like every evil thought he had ever had concentrated into one blinding point of pain. He needed water. He needed cinnamon. He needed light.