Margin of Eros

by Hawthorne, Clare

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said the driver, hanging the Louboutin slingbacks over his finger and pretending not to notice the vile stench and slightly greenish vapor that one shoe was emitting. ‘And you sir?’ he added, turning to Jesus. ‘Where should I take you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Jesus. ‘I’ll walk.’ He felt confident that Florida’s driver would get her home safely, where she would be protected, at least temporarily, by the crystals and quinoa of Topanga Canyon. As for the rest of the city, he didn’t entertain such high hopes.

  As soon as the limo had disappeared up the ramp, Jesus pulled out his iPhone and began jogging toward the fire stairs. The cell phone coverage in the basement parking lot was non-existent, but even after four flights of stairs, his phone was registering patchy coverage at best. Still, it was worth a shot. Taking a short cut through the outdoor mall, he tried calling Hermes but once again, all he got was an emergency tone. There was still one option left to explore, but that involved a scramble up the northern slopes of Runyon Canyon to see if he could get a glimmer of reception. Unfortunately, those trails were steep and the lights of Hollywood were receding rapidly. Fortunately, Jesus hiked them every day, despite his natural aversion to the dogs, their doggy business and its apparent magnetic attraction to his collection of vintage trainers. He was sure that he could find his way, now that the storm had cleared and a full moon was decorating the trees with shifting silver veils.

  High above the turmoil, the air felt clear and fresh; a romantic notion that was actually far from the case. From the foothills of the mountains, a winking carpet of tiny lights rolled all the way to the sea, evoking all the contradictions of the dirty, pretty city. Jesus had admired the view many times before, but tonight he was specifically admiring the telecommunications towers that would digitalize his voice and send those ones and zeros in an instantaneous pulse into the hand held signal decoding devices of his friends across the State border. At least, that was his rudimentary understanding of their function.

  ‘Hermes?’ said Jesus hopefully. The line was full of interference but his phone was registering the call.

  ‘Jesus?’ he heard Hermes say. ‘I’ve been trying to call you.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Jesus, ‘I couldn’t get through.’

  ‘You need to get to Vegas.’ At least, that was what it sounded like. Either that, or ‘You peed the rest of spray guns.’

  ‘Las Vegas?’ said Jesus. ‘When?’ Grabbing hold of a tree root, he eased himself down a steep embankment, making his way towards the northern park entrance.

  ‘Yesterday!’ yelled Hermes.

  Jesus thought about that for a moment. ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a figure of speech,’ said Hermes. ‘Just get here as soon as you can.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jesus. The trail was as muddy as all get up and his sneakers felt like disco boots.

  ‘So you can get here?’ said Hermes.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jesus. He was nearly at the end of the trail now and he could see the lights of Mulholland beyond the roadside parking lot.

  ‘How?’ crackled Hermes. Now that Jesus was back at street level, the line was breaking up. The static sounded like a train carriage full of carousing crows.

  ‘Hermes?’ Jesus yelled. ‘Hermes?’ But there was no response from the other end of the line. He looked down at his phone. Call ended, it said. ‘I guess I’ll figure something out,’ Jesus said to himself, staring out into space and thinking, not for the first time, how cool it would be to be like Hermes and have wings on his heels. Standing on the side of the road in his pedestrian sneakers, he cut a very lonely figure. Mulholland Drive was deserted, it was less than a mile to his house, his cats would be wondering where he was and he really needed a beer. Still, he had promised his friend that he would go to Vegas, and that was what he would do. Closing his eyes for a moment, he hummed something that sounded like a Neil Young song. And then he stuck out his thumb.

  Ten seconds later, a white Porsche spun around the corner, fishtailed once, twice, and pulled up on a moonlit dime in front of Jesus. The tinted window lowered with a gentle hum, and a man who looked a little like a blonde version of the actor who played Michael Knight in the TV series Knight Rider leaned across the passenger seat. ‘The stereo’s jammed,’ he said with a wink. ‘So I hope you like Frank Sinatra.’

  66.

  Eros lay gasping on the beach, naked as the day he burst through several dimensions onto a kitchen floor in the Hollywood Hills with a pounding headache and a pixelated penis. Strictly speaking on that day he wasn’t entirely naked, in the sense that his private parts were covered by a virtual fig leaf. But today, back in Olympus, he was completely unadorned. At least, he assumed he was unadorned. Looking down at his penis, he saw the perfectly uneventful flesh curved in a plush boomerang against his upper thigh. Then again, the equipment had looked pretty much the same to him on Earth; it was only the cats and cameras that didn’t share his view. Eros assumed that the creatures of Olympus would be immune to Aphrodite’s sorcery, although the proof remained to be seen.

  As if to test his hypothesis, a large bird – which Eros vaguely identified as some kind of heron, but then again he was no birdwatcher so it could just as easily have been an ibis – landed on the sand a dozen or so yards away and proceeded hesitantly towards him on spindly, elegant legs. Eros propped himself up on his elbows and watched as the bird plucked a small shellfish from the sand, examined it with a connoisseur’s eye, then politely rejected it, placing it suction-side-up on a patch of wet sand. With its long curved beak swiveling slowly from side to side like some kind of radar, the bird continued its tentative walk in his general direction. At first it wasn’t clear whether the bird was actively seeking him out, but as it drew closer, the oscillation of its radar beak became more frequent and its path less meandering. Less than a yard away from its apparent destination, the bird paused, pointed its beak towards the sea and fixed one beady eye upon the wary god. Eros stared back, gripping the sand with his toes. He didn’t feel as bad as he had expected to feel after the trans-dimensional leap, given his experience on Earth, but that didn’t mean he felt like defending himself against a hostile heron. Or Ibis. ‘Shoo,’ he said, unconvincingly.

  The bird turned toward the forest, tracing its beak in a wide semicircle. The eye now trained upon Eros was no less beady that its opposing orb, but it seem to possess a superior level of intelligence that was slightly disconcerting. After a moment’s pause, the bird moved cautiously forward again, placing one three-pronged foot in front of the other, lifting and curling, as if picking its way through manure. When it was standing between Eros’ legs, roughly adjacent to his knees, it stopped. Before Eros had even had a chance to think about what this meant, the bird took aim with its beak and with an efficient yet gentle action, flicked his penis from one side to the other, as if checking for crabs under a rock. Or indeed, under a cock. Eros was too stunned to speak.

  ‘Seems to be OK,’ said the bird, tilting its head to one side. ‘No harm done.’ And then, with an indifferent ruffle of feathers, it stepped over Eros’ knee, spread its wings and launched itself into the orange sky. Eros watched in astonishment as it soared above his head, coasting on the morning mists of Mount Olympus. It was only then that he recognized the dark insignia on the underside of the bird’s belly, stretched out against the white plume of its expanded chest feathers. Two serpents and the skull of Cyclops: Aphrodite’s personal sorcerer.

  So much for an inconspicuous arrival.

  With a nauseating headspin, Eros rose to his feet and squinted at his destination. His mother’s mansion was in the lower foothills. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t take him more than an hour to run there and reunite with his bow and arrow. But these were far from normal circumstances and he didn’t have an hour. He had wasted a precious ten minutes preparing for the leap, during which Violet had stopped talking, shaking and shivering, and had become eerily still. He had left her wit
h Hermes in their suite at the Bellagio, stretched out on the California King, her heartbeat gradually decelerating while Hermes sat with his fingers on her pulse and his eyes fixed firmly on the Weather Channel. Using a formula based on body temperature and external air pressure that Hermes had stolen from the sorceress Circe after a particularly one-sided game of strip poker, they calculated that Violet had about thirty minutes left to live. Time was relative, of course, and there were ways to circumvent the clock face but Eros didn’t want to complicate matters. To be absolutely sure of success, he wanted to do this in Newtonian time. Which meant that he had about twenty minutes to find his bow and prepare the arrow, execute the virtual leap to Las Vegas and take aim at the hairless chest of Hunter Cole.

  To be absolutely sure.

  It didn’t escape Eros’ notice that the certainty he was now craving was the evil twin of the sickening uncertainty he had felt when he first drew back his bow at the foot of Violet’s bed, just over a month ago.

  The thought of Violet set his own heart racing and a renewed sense of urgency propelled him unsteadily along the sand. Every footfall felt like landing on a banana skin, and soon his ankles were aching with the effort. He didn’t exactly have a plan in mind but if he had learned anything from Jesus, it was to focus on the outcome, not the obstacles. By the time he reached the end of the beach, his crooked jogging had become running and his running had become rhythmic and swift. But still not swift enough. Past the bathing water nymphs he ran, ignoring their melodic enticements. Over the sandstone bluff, his feet burning with the unaccustomed harshness, softened by weeks of cushioned socks and waffle soled sneakers. Along the cliff top path, almost level with the lower foothills but still half a bay away. And then a stumble, and suddenly he was falling, tumbling through the air in rapid freefall towards the jagged rocks and raging waves below. ‘Sheep,’ he breathed, as cold air assailed his eyes and his nostrils filled with salt and sea spray.

  He was just starting to calculate how much time the little mishap would set him back when he was jolted back into the present by a mouthful of feathers. And then he was rising, soaring even, towards the clouds on the broad, comfortable back of an Athenian sea eagle. Womb of Hermes, those magical, maternal birds were as loyal to the messenger god as they were violently opposed to winged mammals. Hermes was the only exception to their strictly enforced no-fly zone, and it was a foolish gryphon or sphinx who strayed too close to the ocean’s edge. Eros had been rescued by sea eagles a number of times, but on each of those occasions, Hermes had been directly responsible for Eros’ peril and had, presumably, called upon his devoted birds of prey to save his cousin from a painful brush with mortality. This time, it appeared that the sea eagle was acting entirely of its own volition. ‘Thanks,’ Eros whispered hoarsely, subtly trying to clear his throat of snowy down. Unlike Hermes, he couldn’t speak sea eagle but he was sure he felt a distinctive coo of sympathy vibrate through his feathered reins as the bird descended through a jasmine canopy and landed, with a neat two step, on the eastern balcony of Aphrodite’s mansion. No fan of the goddess, the bird took off immediately, leaving Eros with exactly six minutes to locate his bow and arrow and travel virtually back to Earth.

  Holding his breath, Eros turned the handle of the French doors and peered inside the third story room, which just happened to be the library. With its shelves groaning under the weight of dusty scrolls, it housed a collection of ancient texts that would have made any classical scholar worth his or her weight in papyrus shudder with desire. Or, indeed, blanch with horror if he or she happened to catch Aphrodite throwing one of the scrolls on the fire in her adjacent chamber, which she did from time to time when she ran out of wood and couldn’t be bothered summoning one of the servants. A faint smell of dust and decay permeated the room, as the immortal words of the poets were revealed to be not so immortal after all, rotting right off their gossamer pages. As well as being an opportunistic fan of inefficient fuels, Aphrodite was a terrible curator and did little to maintain a constant temperature and humidity in the room. In this way, many important works were lost – works that, had she bothered to read them, might have given her some insight into the terrible pain she was now suffering, as a result of her internalized rage.

  ‘Eros!’ she demanded, pausing for maximum effect as the name echoed about her chamber like a crystal canon ball. ‘Come here this instant!’ For such an overused maternal demand, it was remarkable that it still carried authority, coming as it did from the mouth of such a dedicated adulteress and absentee parent.

  Eros froze, one foot raised, the other dangling, uncommitted, in the slippery air of an escape route. If his mother was forewarned, she was definitely forearmed. He could thank her sorcerer for that. Even so, he hadn’t expected to face her wrath the very second he set foot in her house. He had expected a five minute window at least. Not only was that all the time he needed, it was all the time he had. But on a scale of one to a hundred, with saving Violet at the top, his urge to run away from his mother’s screeching was probably only an eighty-seven. Then again, it wasn’t as if those two options were mutually exclusive. Leaping across the library and landing, cat like, in a crouch by the doorway, he peered from side to side. The door to his mother’s chamber was ajar, but the angle shielded Eros from her view and a direct assault from her feral butterflies. Temporarily, at least. Thus far, Aphrodite had never used the butterflies on her own son, but Eros had no doubt, given what she had done to his penis, that there was a first time for everything.

  He took a deep breath. And sprinted.

  He felt the icy blast of air on his back before he heard the whoosh of their wings. One lungful of their poisonous dust and he would be paralyzed for a week. It was a common deterrent used by Aphrodite on Eros’ would-be lovers, who found a lack of sensation below the waist was usually sufficient to smother their burning desire for the pinup god.

  Although Eros still had a good ten yards on the butterflies, the rapid fire force of their beating wings was propelling their dust forward with alarming velocity. Eros could see it all around him, golden clouds of microscopic darts, glittering in the gorgeous dawn. He didn’t need to breathe but after all the morning’s exertion, he wanted to. He wanted to with all the desire of an alcoholic contemplating the celestial sparkle on a tequila lake. But he knew from helplessly watching its effects on his paramours that it was only the dust talking; the glimmer and twinkle of the particles was like a diamond to a débutante. Lust dust, as seductive and dangerous as a four-way intersection, where every light is stuck on green.

  Eros skidded around a corner, jumped on a brass banister and slid down sixteen steps to his own level of the mansion, where his private chamber awaited. There was still one possibility he hadn’t contemplated, but with the butterflies gaining there was no time to contemplate it now as he sprinted the last twenty yards to his sanctuary. With a final leap, he twisted in the air and threw his shoulder against the door, forcing it open with his whole bodyweight. As a barrier, it was great for keeping out unwanted guests. As a door, it was painfully slow to respond. Even with such a forceful battery, the heavy door groaned lethargically and opened begrudgingly. But the narrow opening was wide enough for Eros, and he slipped through it just in time to cut off his pursuers and their poisonous forward offensive.

  Slumped on the floor with his back against the marble block, Eros took a deep, delicious breath of clear air as the butterflies bitched and beat their ragged wings, a solid foot of stone away. But there was no time to savor his escape. His bow was hanging in his closet behind his golf clubs, his ceremonial cloaks and his bamboo-blend bathrobe, which Hermes had picked up at the W Hotel in Hollywood and smuggled from Earth through a loophole in the trans-dimensional tunnel. Unless – and this was the possibility he couldn’t contemplate – his mother or some other agent of malfeasance had confiscated the tools of his trade. In which case he didn’t want to contemplate anything other than his bottomless despair.

  But there it was, just where he
left it. His golden bow, a little dented here and there but fully functional, its string taut, its quiver of golden arrows hooked carelessly around a nail under a garishly decorated pork pie hat. Never had Eros been so glad to sling those arrows over his shoulder. The comforting weight of the leather strap which had so often felt like a burden, now felt like a safety belt, holding him firmly in place. It took him only a moment to select Hunter’s arrow – extra thick, just to be sure – and dip it in a tiny vial, which he had jokingly marked ‘Eau de Violet’ when he had prepared it, all those weeks ago. But there was no time for sentimentality. No time to demonstrate his newly acquired talent for tears, no single drop of his sorrow to singe a hole in the heart shaped arrowhead. No thinking, just doing.

  Gritting his teeth, Eros stepped into the center of his chamber, where a well-worn marble tile sat directly under an open skylight. It wasn’t necessary for the transportation, but the spotlight was a nice touch. Eros had always thought so. With a small lump in his throat, no bigger than a jumbo olive, he placed a foot in each shallow groove. Then, grasping his bow at the fulcrum, he closed his eyes, muttered something that sounded like a Sam Cooke lyric, and flickered into dual reality.

  67.

  For the second time that evening, Freya pulled on her pajamas and prepared her toothbrush. There was no real need for her to brush her teeth again, but something about the evening had left a foul taste in her mouth. It wasn’t just that Violet was suddenly nowhere to be found. It wasn’t that no one – not even Kurt and Beef – had been able to satisfactorily explain what Kurt and Beef were doing at the restaurant. It wasn’t even the queasy alcoholic memory loss from which she seemed to be suffering, despite her complete and regrettable sobriety. It was the way that Hunter had been so smug about the resolution, as if some celebrity superpower of his had miraculously packed the problem into a padded box in the corner of some PR vault in Beverly Hills. Despite the obvious and alarming fact that the problem was about as neatly resolved as a Middle Eastern conflict. Previously, they merely had a blabbering sleeping beauty to deal with. Now they had a missing person.