Margin of Eros

by Hawthorne, Clare

  It was something else, too. Something was seriously off, and she felt it from her toothbrush to her toe socks. It was a little like her Sapphic sixth sense, only this was not a pleasant tingling. This was a gripping, twisting tumble. It was off balance, like a top loader full of towels. And she knew from experience that even with hours of intravenous TV to dull her senses, she would never get to sleep.

  Spitting into the sink, Freya caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall behind her. It was a mirror image, of course, but her brain was sufficiently switched on to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to register the correct time. It could also, it turned out, register shock. How could it possibly still be so early? Even taking into consideration the memory loss, which in theory could have covered any length of time, it just didn’t seem feasible that take one of her solo pajama party had occurred less than an hour ago. It was as if an evening the size of an avocado had been squashed into a walnut shell. She almost felt as if she had been split into two parts. One part of her was traveling on a bullet train on a parallel track, while the other part, the part cleaning her teeth in her pajamas, was sipping sake on the slow train to Kyoto. She hadn’t felt so weird and disjointed since a girl she met at Burning Man talked her into a past life regression.

  As soon as the thought hit her, she realized that it was the only possible explanation. Some renegade stage hypnotist, possibly a customer at the restaurant, had played some kind of elaborate trick on them. Of course, that didn’t explain the absence of Violet, but this was surely the missing link and if they found the magician, they would find the girl. Freya was so convinced of her theory that she threw down her toothbrush and ran from the bathroom without even bothering to floss. In thirty seconds flat she was in front of Hunter’s suite, her toe socks crackling with static and her minty breath misting on the polished door.

  While, on the other side of it, a naked deity drew back his bow.

  68.

  Eros stood beside the bed, his elbow forming a perfect right angle, his body cast in stone. Slowly, he turned his head toward the commotion at the door. His first thought had been one of ecstatic hope, but only for a fleeting instant. If there had been any chance of a last minute reprieve, he would have known about it. And although the timing of the intruder was uncanny, the incessant banging on the door announced the presence of a mortal in a way that a total disregard for doors did not. In such desperate circumstances, Eros knew that if Hermes had wanted to contact him, he would have used all of his divine powers to sidestep the laws of physics, even though, strictly speaking, such behavior was banned on Earth. But even if the banging didn’t give the game away, then the distinctly female voice, calling out the name of the movie star in the tone of an irritated kid sister, did.

  ‘Hunter!’ said the voice. And then a little louder: ‘Hunter, open the fucking door.’ It had to be the assistant, the one named after that psychotic second cousin of Aphrodite’s. Eros turned slowly back to his target. His deltoid was screaming in isometric outrage but he didn’t dare relax his stance. If the movie star woke up now, the arrow wouldn’t take. It always happened that way with assholes. The closer they were to conscious, the less likely it was that the arrow would penetrate through the layers of ego to their emotional core. Anything shallower and the narcissistic scar tissue soon closed over the wound, sealing off the danger of a genuine connection. There had been no time for the usual dusting of opiates and to be honest, Eros didn’t want to give Hunter the pleasure. Only the pain. Fortunately, Hunter still seemed to be slightly concussed from his collision with the wall, so Eros had achieved that aim at least. Somehow, it didn’t make him feel any better.

  ‘Hunter, open the fuck up!’ She was persistent, that was for sure. Eros wondered what a smart, ballsy woman like Freya was doing working for a guy like Hunter. And conversely, what a guy like Hunter was doing with a smart, ballsy assistant. As if in answer to the question, Hunter rolled to one side, groaned a little, and let out a loud snore. He had no idea what he was doing. He was just a happy accident of sex appeal and stupidity, a pumped up guy with a rugged, handsome face who appealed to a section of the population who equated pumped up guys with rugged, handsome faces with the kind of tough love that this country, and let’s face it, the rest of the world really needed.

  Stepping stealthily around the bed, Eros adjusted his aim accordingly. The stealth was probably overkill, since he was both invisible and inaudible, and he was now in danger of inflaming his archer’s elbow, which had never been the same since Apollo challenged him to a ‘shear and shoot’ competition at the end of golden fleecing season. Already his shoulder burned savagely, as if it was being skewered with bamboo. And he needed perfect form. It was now or never. He had to do it. Now. Or never. Three. Two…

  ‘If you don’t open this fucking door I’m going to call the cops. And I don’t give a fuck what Kurt says about the forty-eight hour rule. One. Two…’

  ‘Huh?’ said Hunter, blinking groggily and feeling around blindly for a gun that wasn’t there; a reflex action born of playing too many ex-con vigilantes.

  ‘No!’ cried Eros. His arm started to shake. His heart started to race. His breath escaped in strangled gasps. ‘No,’ he repeated, but it was no use. He had blown it. His hesitation had cost Violet her life, and all because he couldn’t bear to see her with this buffoon. Slowly, he lowered his arm and released the tension on the wire. There was no adjective for his despair. He had blown it. He was no use.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he heard the assistant demand. Those immortal words – or more accurately, those words to an immortal – had never sounded sweeter to any man, beast or god than they did to Eros at that moment.

  ‘Get out of the way,’ he heard his cousin say, and with a series of swift cracks that sounded like a Titan popping bubble wrap, the door flew open and Hermes crashed through, a wilted flower drooping in his arms.

  ‘I figured something must have gone wrong,’ said Hermes, laying Violet carefully on the bed. Next to her, with a face like a loaf of bread, the movie star simultaneously tried to sit up and back away, unconsciously mimicking his reaction to Violet’s attempt at early morning seduction, all those weeks ago in Malibu. Neither the gods nor Freya knew about that, of course, and all they saw was a grown man, scampering from his erstwhile lover like a monkey from a rubber chicken.

  ‘He needs to be unconscious,’ said Eros.

  ‘Done,’ said Hermes, knocking Hunter out with a nifty open-palmed punch he’d picked up watching Ninja movies with Athena. Dragging the movie star by the feet, he pulled him flat out on the quilt, just as Violet’s entire body arched in a final, desperate grasp on life. ‘Do it!’ yelled Hermes.

  ‘Who the fuck are you talking to?’ yelled Freya.

  Eros took a deep breath. He narrowed his eyes. He ran through the drill. Relax. Tense. Aim.

  Shoot.

  The golden arrow found its target like a happy baby. It giggled. It quivered. It was home.

  69.

  It was very dark. She had never been anywhere darker. And cold too, but not as cold as it was dark. The darkness, that was absolute. But the cold had nothing on January in Manhattan. Which didn’t mean it was a walk in Griffith Park. More like a skinny dip in the ocean, but without the gradual acclimatization. This was a constant cold, unpleasant and pervasive, but far from unbearable. She could still feel her body, or at least what seemed to be her body. There was no way of confirming that theory visually, as the darkness had no edges. But she could move through it, press on, power through. Towards more darkness, that was true, but it had to be better than standing still.

  Without quite knowing why, she started to hum. Only she couldn’t work out the song she was humming, or how she even knew the notes. It sounded so familiar, but it was as if someone else was using her mouth to make the vibrations. Still, the movement warmed her up a little, at least around the face, so after a few bars of the mystery tune she gave up thinking about it and let the humming overtake her. Hmmmm. Hmm h
mm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmmm-mmmm. It was a pretty cool song, she had to admit, so whoever was taking over her humming faculties either had a decent vinyl collection, or was some kind of musical genius. For some reason she hoped it was Prince.

  Moving through the darkness felt a little like running in deep water. She had done that a couple of times when she sprained her ankle playing tennis and her physical therapist had come up with a complex rehabilitation program worthy of a Grand Slam winner. She had never really been that good at tennis, and to be honest she had only ever done it because she liked the outfits. Like most recreational sportspeople with minor injuries, she gave up her exercises after a couple of days and put up with the occasional twinge she got on cold nights or long walks in high heels.

  Strangely, the cold wasn’t affecting her ankle. This was probably due to the anti-gravity situation, although anti-gravity didn’t really describe it. She wasn’t exactly bouncing around like Buzz Aldrin. She was simply floating, propelling herself forward inexpertly like a kid learning to swing. She was still humming, but someone had changed the record to a slow ballad and her lips were starting to fatigue. As an experiment, she decided to see if she could stop humming, and found that she could. Instantly, her mouth and lower jaw started to burn with cold, as if she had been sucking on a particularly fiery menthol candy. But when she tried to hum a tune of her own devising in order to warm up, she discovered that she couldn’t do it. It was Prince or the highway. Although now that she thought about it, the tune was more New Romantic than Minneapolis sound.

  Hmm hmm, hmhm hm hm hmmmm, hm hm hm hmmm, hm hmmm hm hm hmm hmm hmmm. What was that song? It was bugging her, really bugging her, more so than the dark and the cold and the inefficient forward propulsion. There was something about her spatial un-coordination that made her think of synchronized swimming. The joke sport of the modern Olympics, it always looked so laughably simple, but try those upside down eggbeaters and you were soon choking on a nose full of chlorine. Choreographed drowning, inverted water ballet.

  Ballet? Something about that word set off a distant fire alarm in her head, like a bomb scare at a high school a couple of blocks away. Ballet. Tutus. The Nutcracker. Swan Lake. Coppélia.

  Nothing.

  Ballet.

  Ballet.

  Ballet.

  Hmm hmmm, hmhm hm hm hmmmm.

  Spandau Ballet?

  And then she was falling, or maybe not falling but definitely gaining speed, getting faster and faster until she was flying, faster than fast, terrifyingly fast, like being sucked inside a particle accelerator or tricked into a theme park ride. And the sound, like knives on a blackboard made of crushed lead crystal.

  ‘Aaargh!’ she cried, as she violently and abruptly fell out of the screaming darkness into a warm and quiet room of muted red. Funnily enough, the landing was nowhere near as brutal as she had expected. In fact, if she was being perfectly honest, the surface beneath her felt a lot like a tray of marshmallows. Glancing around, she quickly realized that her eyes were closed, which possibly explained the rosy mood lighting. Tentatively, she opened one eye. And then the other.

  ‘Violet,’ said the man leaning over her. Staring at her with the goofy, drooling adoration of a chocolate colored puppy, he brushed back an involuntary tear from her cheek. Unable to move, Violet stared back. It took her a couple of seconds to place him but her body recognized him instantly, a pile of iron filings to his hidden horseshoe magnet. ‘Hunter,’ she said, her voice as brittle as kindling.

  ‘Violet,’ said Hunter again, savoring the word, letting it linger on his lower lip as he bent towards her. When he kissed her, he drank a little from a windless sea, its surface puckering like a pink silk sheet between his teeth, tasting of strawberry milkshake. Violet kissed back, softly, fully, fearfully, until Hunter pulled away.

  ‘Violet,’ he said, a third and somewhat redundant time, ‘my darling, my love, my amaranthine flower.’ Amaranthine flower? Where the hell did that come from? It was a little disconcerting, the way multisyllabic words – such as multisyllabic – kept popping into his head. He supposed it didn’t really matter, because there was only one thing that mattered to him any more, and she was lying on his bed, gazing up at him sleepily, adoringly, and uncomprehendingly. Goddammit! Shaking his head, as if to dislodge the discombobulating jumble, he reached for Violet’s hand and pressed it against his spongy left pectoral. With steely determination, he locked his eyes onto her deep green depths and prayed for simple phrasing. ‘Will you marry me?’ he said, with considerable relief.

  It was difficult to say who was more surprised by the proposal: Hunter’s future fiancée, or his eavesdropping assistant.

  70.

  In the middle of the desert, a white sports car streaked along the interstate, occasionally weaving around long haul trucks, other times dodging misty phantasms, shaped like headless statues. In the cramped and gleaming cockpit, the handsome driver and his passenger grated politely against one another, like the adjacent hulls of a sports yacht and a wooden dinghy, forced to share a mooring in a storm.

  ‘It’s not really a dating show,’ said Apollo. ‘It’s more like a public service, with a cash incentive.’

  ‘Like The Bachelor?’ Jesus suggested. Although a novice dater himself, he was familiar with the oeuvre. ‘I quite liked that show,’ he admitted.

  Apollo shot him a look of Olympian disdain. ‘Wash your mouth out,’ he said, rolling down the window and ejecting his chewing gum into the philosophical wasteland. It was a constant source of irritation to him that shows like The Bachelor were considered watchable by people who didn’t have to look down at their hands to count. According to Hermes, Jesus was a pretty cool guy but he clearly didn’t know the first thing about non-scripted television.

  Oblivious to this mental slight, Jesus took a sip of his Gatorade and gazed out the window. Bathed in fragrant moonlight, the outskirts of Las Vegas looked like a row of dominoes, ready to topple with the slightest seismic encouragement. ‘So what’s it called then, your new show?’ he asked. He didn’t really want to know but they were still fifteen minutes away from the city center and Apollo had revealed himself to be the kind of god who took contemplative silence as an invitation to break into song.

  Apollo grinned. For the past hour he had been skillfully manipulating the conversation around his development slate, with a view to answering that very question. He liked to think that he wasn’t the sort of god who blew his own trumpet; besides, there were any number of creatures, musically gifted or otherwise, who would gladly do that for him. No, he was the kind of god who let the chips fall where they may, as long as they fell in the direction of his own agenda. ‘Wait for it,’ he said, shifting down to fourth and zipping around a tanker carting vitamin-enriched milk from the cows of Northern California, ‘it’s called –’ Back up to fifth and straight ahead along the pulsing white line, drawing them forward, hand over fist, into the Vegas vortex. ‘Greed Date!’ Apollo couldn’t help himself. He giggled. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He fishtailed in and out of the transit lane. ‘It’s so brilliant,’ he went on, tossing modesty out the window after his disused gum, ‘because even in the title, it reignites the age-old conundrum: which is more important? Love, or money?’

  ‘Is that a serious question?’ said Jesus.

  ‘You betcha,’ said Apollo, warming to his subject. ‘We take a bunch of contestants, rigorously screened for ratings-friendly personal attributes such as stunning good looks, unwavering self-belief and ruthless ambition and place them in an artificial work environment. What they don’t know is that we’ve also screened them for personal and sexual compatibility, using advanced psychological profiling.’ Idly, he poked at the stereo. After four hours of The Capitol Years, even the god of lounge music was getting a little sick of Sinatra.

  ‘Why don’t you try the radio?’ Jesus suggested.

  Apollo shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said, hitting the dial. Immediately, all twelve speakers resonated with opening cho
rds of Livin’ on a Prayer, which just happened to be one of Jesus’ favorite songs. As Apollo reached for the ‘seek’ button, Jesus did a little advanced psychological profiling of his own and quickly calculated the optimum method of ensuring a four minute Sinatra-free zone.

  ‘I never picked you as a Bon Jovi fan,’ he said mildly.

  Apollo paused. ‘Can’t get enough of it,’ he lied, withdrawing his hand. ‘Sorry sport,’ he added. ‘Driver’s privilege.’

  Jesus turned toward the jagged skyline and lowered the window a couple of inches, smiling with the windward side of his face. ‘What happens if the most attractive, confident and ambitious contestants aren’t the most compatible?’ he asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Apollo, unconsciously tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music. That was the problem with being contrary. After a while, the line between what you actually liked and what you were merely pretending to like to annoy someone became blurred. ‘As long as they’re moderately compatible, we can manipulate the circumstances of the show to make them think that they’ve met the love of their life. Subliminal messages, breastfeeding hormones, an element of danger, that sort of thing. Plus,’ he added, with a sly wink that made Jesus want to climb out the window of a moving vehicle, ‘I’ve got Eros on my side. Or at least I will have, by the time the Council has finished with him.’ Laying down a slick of rubber around a couple of surprised SUVs, Apollo took the exit ramp towards the inner city. ‘Then, we introduce a series of professional challenges,’ he went on, ‘that force them to choose between fucking over their soul mate, and a chance at a cash jackpot. Only of course they don’t realize that the dating element is the whole point of the show.’