The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

Text to Ben 3L: Not picky. Nothing fancy.

  Text from Ben 3L: Good, because I only drink the cheap stuff.

  Text to Ben 3L: Haha okay. Be there in a few.

  She put on black jeans and a tight black t-shirt that had the Cavalry’s logo on the front with the dates of their North American tour scrolling down the back. She had drunkenly purchased it two weeks ago when Ben had invited her to see them at the Maple Leaf. For three days after that, Zibby would catch herself singing the chorus to one of the songs: “I’m gonna live like it’s thump, thump, spring forever! Like it’s thump, thump, spring forever! Because it’s thump, thump, now or never!”

  In the middle of studying her outline or working a practice problem, the song would pop back into her head and disrupt her train of thought. After that, Zibby had decided on a “no music” policy until after finals were over.

  She chained her bike to the fence outside Ben’s apartment and knocked on the door.

  “Hey! Love the shirt,” he said, stepping aside to let her in.

  A cat jumped off the couch and rubbed himself back and forth across Zibby’s legs as if to welcome an old friend.

  “Ha, thanks,” she said, squatting down to pet the cat on the head and back. “This Jersey boy showed ’em to me and I’m kinda into their sound now.”

  “Oh yeah? He must have good taste in music,” he laughed.

  “I can’t get that one song, ‘Spring Forever,’ I think it’s called, out of my head. It’s actually super annoying.”

  “That’s probably my favorite. Man, he really likes you,” Ben said, crouching to the floor. “Who’s that, Kennedy, huh? Is she a friend?” He spoke in that voice reserved for babies and animals. Kennedy made a couple more laps across Zibby’s legs before attacking a shoestring loop of her red Chuck Taylors. “You remember Zibby, buddy?”

  “I love that you named your cat after John Kennedy Toole. I think that’s why I’m dating you.”

  Ben played with the cat, rubbing at its belly and pulling his hand away before Kennedy could get in a swipe.

  “I still have to check out your bookshelf, by the way.”

  “I know, you were a little preoccupied the last time you were here,” he said, rising to his feet.

  “Shut up,” she laughed, heat rushing up her neck.

  They turned the corner into a small office, where Ben’s bookshelf almost reached the ceiling—his desk, a La-Z-Boy recliner, and a litterbox took up most of the extra space.

  Zibby regarded the bookshelf, which had noteworthy classics and some contemporary gems, but the overall lack of diversity irritated her.

  “This is new.” He picked up a thick purple-covered tome. “I lent my original copy of Infinite Jest to some guy in Portugal and never got it back.”

  “S’alotta straight, white dudes,” she said.

  Ben squinted and bobbed back his head, and acted as if Zibby had invented some alternative metric for judging one’s bookshelf.

  “Huh…well…” He started pointing and plucking books off of the shelves like minorities at a Midwestern GOP rally. “Not white, not straight…woman, not straight…uh…woman…”

  Zibby pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows.

  “Mmm…okay, fine. Maybe I do need a more diverse shelf. How ’bout this? Recommend a few of your favorites that you guys have in stock and I’ll drop by the store to pick ’em up.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Hey, hey, I’ve got Dunces, though.” He slipped the matte-covered book from the shelf and flipped it open. First book bought in New Orleans was written on the first blank page. J.K. Toole lived only a block away, on Hampson Street, it finished.

  “I like the annotation,” she said, closing the book and handing it back to him.

  “Definitely one of my favorites, obviously.” He looked down at Kennedy, who had resumed rubbing himself across Zibby’s shins and arching his fat little back. “You see someone bought his house?”

  “Yeah. A young couple from California.”

  “Speaking of California, I’ve got some cheap wine for us. The grapes probably come from up and down the Golden State!” He laughed.

  She scanned his desk, covered in stacks of paperclipped bunches of rough drafts, law textbooks, and a light film of dust speckled with tiny paw prints. In the center sat the newest model of MacBook, its top clean and unadulterated.

  “Hey, what happened to the ACLU sticker?”

  “Oh…new computer. Hopefully this one doesn’t crap out on me. How ’bout that wine? I’ll go grab it.”

  Zibby took a seat on the couch in the living room as Ben left for the kitchen. The decorations were minimal: a retro streetcar advertisement hung next to a French calendar. Two maps—one of early twentieth-century Europe, the other of a mid-nineteenth-century United States—hung above pictures of family and friends taped on the exposed brick wall in the office. At the far end of the couch, Kennedy sat with his feet tucked into his body like a chicken, staring into Zibby’s soul.

  Ben returned with a pair of stemless glasses clanking in one hand, a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon in the other.

  “I like your streetcar poster.”

  “Oh, thanks. Actually, I got that at an art sale over on Oak Street.” He poured out two glasses. “Speaking of streetcars—excellent segue, I know—I’m working on a short story, ‘Speed 3: Uptown Streetcar.’ Satire, obviously.”

  “That’s clever.”

  “Could you imagine?! It gets turned into a movie with like, Ricky Toronto as the lead. ‘If this streetcar goes below thirteen miles an hour, it’s gonna blow!’” He sat back on the couch and sipped his wine. “Speed was probably the first rated-R movie my father let me watch.”

  Zibby didn’t mean to be rude, but she couldn’t focus—Kennedy hadn’t broken his gaze, and he remained still, as if he had seen something inside of her that made him suspicious.

  “Speaking of short stories—okay, I’ll stop—I read your story in Bayou Magazine.”

  “What? How…how did you find it?”

  “Didn’t you already call me out for Facebook stalking you? I feel like a simple Google search is the logical next step.”

  “I see.”

  “It was beautiful. Poignant stuff.”

  Zibby took him in—he was being sincere.

  “Thanks.” She sipped the wine.

  “So, have you been out to Cali?”

  “No.” She gulped down the rest of the Cabernet and put it on the coffee table for a refill.

  “Gotcha.” Ben poured out the wine with a twist of the wrist at the end. “Have you written anything else?”

  “Yeah, actually. Finished something a month or so ago. Been submitting it to lit mags and online publications. Haven’t heard back from anything.”

  “Another short story? I’d love to read it.”

  At the end of the bottle, Zibby had started to loosen up. They tried a few different shows—on Netlifx, on Hulu, on Amazon Prime—but couldn’t settle on anything. At the spark of a conversation, Ben would pause the TV, quickly severing any budding interest in the show and pushing them closer together. He had proffered a second bottle, a chilled pinot grigio he had promised was just as cheap as the first bottle.

  “How can I pass that up?” she laughed.

  He returned with the sweating bottle sitting in a popcorn bowl, wrapped in translucent blue ice-gel sheets.

  “You ever think about writing a novel?” he asked, pouring the chilled wine into two clean stemmed glasses.

  “Yeah, I mean, who doesn’t?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, for the longest time I didn’t want to write about this city, to be honest. At least not since ‘Neverhome,’ but I think I might.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, but not like the same crap that’s in all those New Orleans novels. There’s always spirits and voodoo priestesses and mythical creatures, or just all the vice and crap on Bourbon Street. Ya know?”

  “I do, I just
think that’s part of the allure. New Orleans’s ‘otherness’ is a draw for people from all over.”

  “I get it, but this city’s too interesting without all that shit.”

  “Definitely is a city of characters. This stuff goes down like water, huh?” he said, admiring the empty glass before pouring out another.

  “Ya know, I had the best wine recently. And guess what? It was grown in my backyard!” Zibby started to tilt and caught herself from falling off the couch.

  “Whadya mean?”

  “I mean it was grown right in my backyard. This illusionist, magician guy rented out my back studio and grew grapevines in the garden and turned it into wine.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few months ago. Right when the semester started.”

  Ben stared back at Zibby and cocked his head to the side.

  “You…ahh…you’re fucking with me, right?”

  “I’m not!”

  “You know how long it takes for a vine to grow and produce grapes and then turn those grapes into wine? Like…like years!”

  “I know what I saw and I know what I drank. The guy made wine in my backyard. Yeah, it was probably some Jedi mind trick, but it was wine.”

  “And you said New Orleans isn’t about voodoo.”

  Dio

  When Silenus got drunk—which was typically the entirety of his consciousness—his tail would whip back and forth, oftentimes knocking over bottles of wine and empty glasses that sat atop the table overgrown with ivy and weeds.

  Dio had been able to find a patch of soil deep enough to plant a few vines. They reused the bottles he had purchased back when he was in the city to give them a couple of days’ stock at a time. From their makeshift mess hall labeled CoOl ZoNe, adorned with Coca-Cola finery, Dio could see the sign for the abandoned Six Flags theme park on the side of the highway, its last message—CL SED FOR STORM—immortalized since 2005.

  “I don’t think bgurp I’ll ever bgurp get used to that hair,” Silenus said, wiping red wine from his lips and beard. “You look like a Viking brute.”

  “I did it for them,” Dio responded, before getting up to pluck a bushel of grapes off the vine.

  “For whom? Bgurp The mortals? They do not care about you, Dionysus. Even the few who still worship bgurp only do so through the rose haze of your wine.”

  Silenus stumbled from the table, the clacking of his hooves on the mossy brick floor breaking the incessant buzz of nature that had reclaimed this eastern fringe of New Orleans after centuries of defeat. From his knees, Dio plucked a healthy bushel of grapes and looked up at the satyr, his longtime friend and mentor. Behind Silenus, beyond the sprawling overgrowth of the swamp, the twists and curls of rollercoasters filled the sky like the skeletal remains of dinosaurs.

  The God of the Vine tossed the grapes into a tin bucket and began to stomp them into a juicy pulp. Silenus had attempted to help, but had ended up causing more damage to the bucket itself than the grapes with his misguided, drunken hooves.

  “Bgurp You killed this one for love?” the satyr asked.

  “I killed him for wine,” the god responded, lying to his mentor.

  The satyr’s tail whipped at the mosquitos. “Ha! Please, ‘killed for wine.’ You expect me…Dionysus, I’ve known you bgurp for your entire existence, better than…perhaps not…But where Orpheus, may he rest in peace among the stars, treated you as a brother…” Silenus looked up into the inky black sky. “I have always regarded you as a son.”

  “Are you here to excavate my subconscious or to drink with me?”

  “In vino veritas.”

  “No,” Dio snapped. “No Latin.” The satyr lowered his near-empty glass, and Dio refilled it with pulpy red wine. “You still maintain that Athena did not send you to retrieve me from this swamp?”

  “I maintain it bgurp, still! I, too, from time to time, must remove myself from the Balkans and seek out new ventures in various pockets of the world. Remember, during that Serbian war, I found myself moving southward and ended up with the Maasai people, drunk off a honey mead in the Serengeti bush.” He bellowed, recalling the memory. “You are not the only one who seeks retreat from the gods.”

  “I leave to forego the inevitable pain of Hera’s wickedness. You leave to get drunk.”

  “Existence is pain, my son.” The satyr raised his overflowing glass. “Pain, existence.” He sucked down the wine.

  “Truer words.” And the god raised his own, and drank.

  Zibby

  It wasn’t a splitting or throbbing headache, but repetitive pings of pain on her temples, as if her skull were harnessed in the middle of a Newton’s cradle. Typically, the bookshop only bought used books for the store on Mondays because they were slow, but a longtime customer was moving out of state and had a commendable library he couldn’t take with him, so Liv made an exception.

  “I know that look,” Liv said after getting a glimpse of Zibby in oversized sunglasses and an extra-large cold brew. “Where was it? Vito’s? Maple Leaf? Snake’s…again? Oh! Or…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Who was it?”

  “Details after coffee.” Zibby watched as a fourth…no, fifth crate of used paperbacks was plopped on top of a stack adjacent to the Dads section—a shelf of books filled mostly with nonfiction WWII hardcovers and athlete autobiographies—and groaned.

  “Ehhhh, yeah, sorry,” Liv sucked in air. “I may have lied when I said it was only a few boxes.”

  “I don’t like you right now.”

  “How ’bout this? You knock out as many as you can and I’ll treat you to Pints for happy hour.”

  “Please don’t mention alcohol again. I almost just yakked on the Murakamis.”

  “Those are new. If you’re gonna puke, at least aim for something that isn’t sticker price.”

  Zibby set her backpack in the office and polished off the rest of her iced coffee—the thought of trudging down to Rue to grab another already crossed her mind. The Saturday post-brunch rush was beginning to trickle into the store. The stream of commerce refers not to unpredictable currents or eddies, but to the regular and anticipated flow of products from manufacture to distribution to retail sale, Zibby stated Justice Brennan’s personal jurisdiction standard for minimum contacts, a standard recited in Civil Procedure ad nauseum. “It is more than a trickle,” she said aloud, causing a patron in the Children’s section to turn and ask if she was okay. But Zibby hadn’t even heard the concerned woman, instead plummeting into the vortex of Civil Procedure standards that “are required to appear in your answer if you expect to do well on my exam.”

  In order for a state court to exercise jurisdiction over a defendant whose residence is elsewhere, the court must establish that the defendant has such minimum contacts with the state that the exercise of jurisdiction over the defendant does not offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice. International Shoe Co. v. Washington. In through her nose, out through her mouth as she continued to the stack of boxes overflowing with books—Margaret Atwood had already claimed a spot on top of a nonfiction hardcover concerning the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation.

  Zibby petted the cat and began to organize: first into quality control, whether the store would even pay for the book, placing those with damaged covers or highlighted text into a return pile. Then into Novels, Nonfiction, Local Authors, Children’s, Cooking, Travel, Biographies, Autobiographies, Historical, Sociology, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Religion, and Mythology. She picked up a black paperback with gold trim. On the cover, a golden archer with rippling back muscles and blond hair sat atop the winged horse Pegasus. The author, Mary Cambridge, an American from Iowa, had written the book in the 1950s—the pages were yellowing and the spine was unbent, as if it hadn’t been opened since.

  She thumbed through the book, suitably titled Mythology, and cracked it open to the chapter on Apollo, the scantily clad hunk from the cover:

  He has been called “the most Greek of all the gods.” He is a beautiful f
igure in Greek poetry, the master archer, the healer, who has taught men the art of rejuvenation and reconciliation, both of the body and of the soul, as he is, too, the God of Compassion. Even more than any of these good and lovely endowments, Apollo is the God of Light, in whom there is no darkness at all, and so he is the God of Truth. No false word ever falls from his lips. To understand Apollo is to understand classical transcendence; Apollo was so perfect, the Romans dared not change his name.

  She flipped through the chapters until she landed on Athena:

  The Goddess of Wisdom, protector of civilization, personification of purity, Zeus’s favorite child—born by him alone through a crack in his head—and wielder of his mightiest weapon: the thunderbolt. Although born into one of the younger generations of Olympians, Athena took on the role of matriarch to her own siblings, acting much like her namesake city, Athens.

  Zibby continued to separate the books into their respective piles while reciting Civil Procedure holdings in a whistle-while-you-work fashion, but caught herself sneaking peeks into passages from Mythology when she needed a break.

  She opened to the short chapter for Hera, Zeus’s wife and sister.

  The protector of marriage and married women, little that is attractive in the portrait the poets draw of her. Hera was chiefly engaged in punishing the many women Zeus fell in love with, even when they yielded only because he coerced or tricked them. It made no difference to Hera how reluctant any of them were or how innocent; Hera treated them all with vicious contempt and hunted their offspring.

  Those scars like pink rings wrapping around Dio’s neck and shoulders popped into Zibby’s head, and she recited the line he would say—Hera’s wrath—as if it were a pertinent rule for her Civil Procedure exam.

  Liv rushed to the register from the back, causing Zibby to drop the book on the floor, nipping Margaret Atwood’s tail and sending her scurrying beneath a glass case that held old-timey withered books that a pseudo-historian would ask to see once every six months.

  “Aww, I’m sorry, honey.” Zibby put Mythology at the bottom of a stack of sci-fis and carried them to the back room, slipping the book into her backpack in the office.