The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  Liv watched from the register as Zibby dragged herself back to the pile of crates.

  “Hey, if you can just put a dent in those, you can get outta here early,” she said, clicking away at a calculator that looked like it belonged in Office Space.

  “Sweet Lord of mercy. That would be sublime.”

  “Girl, I know you hurtin’ and got studying to do. Just knock a few out so they aren’t in the way and I’ll pay you for the full day.”

  “Liv, you’re a saint.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to my daughter. She called me a ‘nasty woman’ last night.”

  “With your mouth, I’m surprised that’s the worst she’s called you.”

  “Don’t make me change my mind.”

  When she got home, Zibby dropped her backpack on her desk chair and continued skimming Mythology. She read about Aphrodite’s beauty and charming wit, and about Hades, the unfortunate “third brother” who drew for his realm the Underworld and ruled over the dead.

  She reached the end of the chapter titled “The Olympians” and was disappointed not to find a passage for Dionysus. But on the way to the appendix to give the god a proper search, Zibby slipped past a chapter that caused her to turn back.

  At the top of the page was the black-bearded, kind-eyed, high-cheekboned, laurel-crowned bust of Dionysus, “The Great God of Earth.” It was an exact match. Zibby imagined the god with the crown and the toga removed—replacing the latter with the Keep New Orleans Easy t-shirt—and smiled at the uncanny likeness to the transient who had planted grapevines in her backyard.

  That’s some freaky shit.

  She read on:

  Dionysus was a wanderer who traveled to faraway lands, teaching men the culture of the vine. Like many unfortunate mortal women of the Ancient World, Dionysus’s mother, Semele, attracted the attention of the most powerful of all the gods: Zeus. Unlike with those same women, for whom Zeus developed a fleeting attraction, the patriarch of Olympus fell madly in love with Semele, drawing Hera’s ire. But Hera, instead of reacting with uncontrolled rage, was diabolical in her approach for revenge, for when a mortal is killed by a god, their soul can never be retrieved from the Underworld. Knowing that Zeus would do anything his new love would ask of him, Hera planted inside Semele’s heart one fatal desire: to view Zeus not in his earthly form, but in his Olympian corporeal glory. Unable to deny his mortal lover her wish, Zeus revealed himself, and Semele instantly perished in the awful, burning light. Zeus removed his baby from the smoking body and sewed it into his leg, where it would remain until it was ready to be born.

  Zibby put the book down on her chest and gazed at the members of her 27 Club poster. She remembered Dio sharing the same stories from the bench on Oak Street and in the backyard studio, and the little hairs on her arms stood up, the pinging on her temples returning.

  But anyone could get this book, or books or internet searches with details about these Greek gods, and sure, it would be a strange thing to emulate, remember, and regurgitate, but I’ve seen stranger characters in this city, she reasoned to herself, and began to speak out loud. “There’s a guy in the Bywater who alleges to be Napoleon the Third, and that’s not even the famous one!”

  She picked the book up from her chest, scanned a few paragraphs about his cult, and read aloud: “‘This strange god, the gay reveler, the cruel hunter, the lofty inspirer, was also the sufferer. He was afflicted, not because of grief for another, but because of his own pain. He was the vine’”—her arm hairs shot back up—“‘which is always pruned as nothing else that bears fruit; every branch cut away, only the bare stock left. His death was terrible: he was torn to pieces by the Titans on Hera’s orders. He suffered numerous deaths in such gruesome fashion. But Dionysus, emulating the vine he cherished, always returned to Earth. He endured a life of suffering. He was the tragic god. There was none other.’”

  Dio

  Dio had been able to make a surplus of wine while Silenus slept—the satyr’s naps typically lasted for three days. As the third day was coming to an end, when the sporadic, throaty snoring had just begun to transform into a percussive addition to the serenading crickets and crows, Dio looked up from cultivating his vines at a gang of still figures, translucent blue in the moonlight.

  “May I help you?”

  “Wad ’appened to da park hyea?” asked the figure, the vines passing through its ethereal body as it approached the god.

  Dio stood up and looked about the park. “No, I suppose such rusticity is unintended…There was a message lining the road that warned about a storm. Perhaps New Orleans felt my uncle’s rage.”

  “I loved this park.” A glowing little apparition floated to the front of the pack. “I would come here every year for my birthday when I was a child.”

  “You done still a child, little one,” said the first spirit as he dropped to the ground, his knee vanishing like blown-out smoke.

  “We’ve been wandering for too long…I don’t feel like a child no more.”

  A third spirit, female, floated over and wrapped her arms around the girl’s shoulder. “I know, I know, but something in New Orleans is changing. The powers that used to keep us away have weakened. If we keep pushing back, maybe we can see your parents.”

  “You are not the child’s mother?” asked Dio, curiously pushing his newly fashioned thyrsus through her blue translucent chest.

  “Oh, no. Her parents are still among the living,” the male spirit said. “They haven’t left their house down in the Treme, not since the shooting. She wanders with us, another soul unwilling to move on to the afterlife.”

  “I have witnessed that life, a blinding darkness.”

  “New Ore-lee-unz,” he said, letting it spill out of his mouth, “did always attract dem poets.”

  Silenus twisted and turned on his mattress of soft moss in violent, sporadic jerks, frightening the juvenile spirit, who floated to the back of the pack. The satyr rubbed his eyes and regarded the group of phantoms, then turned toward Dio. “For how long was I asleep? Certainly my slumber should have mitigated the visions of my gluttonous indulgence.”

  But before the god could answer, the entire group snapped their heads around to follow the sound of crackling twigs and chanting in bastardized French. When Dio turned back, they had vanished.

  Out from the brush, a black woman in an iridescent Ankara dress and matching headwrap led a young, white Catholic priest pulling a cart.

  “Kreyati Bondye, fè plas pou fènwa a!” A hanging crucifix swung across her midriff like a pendulum, bracelets rattled on her outstretched arms, and, flicking at the moist air with its tongue, a snake coiled itself around her neck.

  The priest took one look at Silenus and dropped to a knee. “Notre Père, qui es aux cieux, Que ton nom soit sanctifié…” He continued with the Lord’s Prayer, eventually directing the satyr with the sign of the cross. “Amen.”

  “Que fais-tu ici?” Dio said, recalling some French from his wine-soaked adventures through Burgundy and Bordeaux all those years ago.

  “No, no, bgurp no,” Silenus huffed, already through half of a bottle of Dio’s reserve. “I took the time to polish my English. If I can’t speak in my eloquent Greek, we must all use the barbaric tongue.”

  “What are you doing here?” Dio asked.

  “We be here to purge dis girl from da shadows,” said the woman.

  “Ah! I had read about these women in this leather-bound manuscript I found in the Olympian library, and in my Frommer’s guide,” Silenus said. “I believe she is a voodoo priestess.”

  “Of course I’ma voodoo preestes, I got a damn snake around me neck!”

  The priest, still eyeing Silenus up and down, figuring he had seen it all already during his travels throughout Southern Louisiana with a voodoo priestess, muttered a Cajun prayer to himself as he rolled the cart in front of the god and the satyr.

  Visible by the pale moonlight, a girl lay on the cart with a blanket pulled up to her chin, her eyes rolling around like
an icosahedron inside of an eight ball.

  Silenus rose on his hind legs, his hooves click-clacking on the brick as he joined Dio at the side of the cart. The girl closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if it were her last, and for a moment, all that could be heard was the buzz of nature and the Cajun mutterings of the priest.

  The priestess approached the cart and had begun to uncoil the snake when the girl’s eyes opened—the whites and blue irises had turned black. Everyone shot back from where they stood, the priest tumbling into the overgrowth.

  She stared at Dio and opened her mouth, emitting a vile stench that bellowed in the midnight air. “Good evening, Dionysus.”

  The priest dropped to both knees upon hearing the sonorous voice come out of the young girl’s mouth, and held a crucifix above his bowed head, “Au nom de Jésus-Christ…” he began.

  The priestess began to muddle and mash powders and potions inside of a tortoise shell, murmuring an unintelligible Creole patois to herself.

  The girl spoke again, her deep voice more recognizable this time, “Oh, Dionysus, you don’t recognize your own uncle?” Dio’s jaw dropped; Silenus took a pull from the bottle of wine.

  “…Mère de Dieu, du Bienheureux Michel Archange, des Apôtres Pierre et Paul et de tous les Saints…”

  “I suppose you may not recognize me in my new body, but I’m sure if you took my hand”—her arm snapped up, revealing chains connecting leather bindings attached to her wrist—“you would feel my godly presence.”

  Dio approached the cart and peered deep into the black eyes. “Hades?”

  “I see Silenus has kept you sharp, Nephew.”

  “Good evening, Hades,” Silenus started. “It’s always such a bgurp pleasure to see you…”

  “Silenus, don’t be bitter, old friend. I have taken good care of that Romanian prostitute who so tickled your fancy, among other things…” She smirked.

  Silenus took another pull from the bottle and wiped his chin.

  “Dieu se lève. Ses ennemis sont disperses…”

  “Quiet down over there.” The girl put her chin to her chest. “You’re just wasting your breath with that gibberish.”

  The priest looked up, saw the black eyes, and prayed with more ferocity. “Comme la fumée est chassée, ils sont chassés!”

  “Oh, what’s the use. He hasn’t shut up since they strapped me to this damn thing.”

  “Why are you here, Hades?” Dio asked.

  “For you, of course.”

  “I have already told Hermes and Apollo that I am not returning to Olympus.”

  “Olympus? Ha! I wouldn’t step sandal on that summit even if I were invited. To do what? To listen to Hera grumble and groan over my brother’s rendezvous in Scandinavia or Athena trying to explain the concept of a ‘Just War’ to Ares? Please, I’d rather switch places with Sisyphus than endure Olympian drama.”

  “Then to where?”

  “To my kingdom, of course. You would sit at my right hand in the Underworld.”

  “Zeus would bgurp shatter the skies!”

  “Please, let me deal with my brother. I’m sure his uncontrollable wrath would send plenty of souls to keep me company, anyway. The mortals aren’t perishing like they used to.”

  As if a switch had been flicked, the whites of the eyes and blue irises returned to the girl’s face, and a weak, delicate voice said, “Help me, please. Huh…help me!”

  Before the priest could rush to her aid, the eyes switched back to black, and Hades began to laugh.

  “Lost you there for a second!”

  “Nous vous chassons de nous, qui que vous soyez, esprits impurs…”

  “This one’s stronger than I thought. Where was I? Oh! Silenus, you were always dawdling with potions and poisons, and at least seemed to know what you were doing, not like this one here.” She pointed her chin at the voodoo priestess, who was now holding the tortoise shell above her head. “You think you could cook up a plague for me, old friend? Set it loose somewhere in the Orient? I could use the new company. There are too many of those running around up here as it is.”

  The priestess put the shell to her lips—“Kòmanse move lespri nan lanfè”—and blew a powder right into the girl’s face, causing her to cough and flail in her chains.

  “Will you cut that out?!” Hades’s voice boomed through the abandoned amusement park. “It didn’t work last time, what makes you think it will now, ya old bat?!” The girl spit the powder from her mouth. “Disgusting.”

  “Go back to your dark kingdom, Uncle. I do not have a home there.”

  “And you do here? With these quacks? I’ve seen it all, Nephew. The most demented from every corner of this floating orb of dirt— I’m the God of the Dead, for Zeus’s sake! But I gotta tell ya, kid, the live ones in this city, they add a whole new element to crazy. Didn’t you already kill one, anyway?”

  Dio didn’t respond.

  “Has it been that long since you’ve accumulated a following? Well, that’s not the way to do it, Nephew. Anyway, I’m getting off topic here. Listen, if you come down there with me, I’ll release your mother back to the mortal world.” She scanned her surroundings. “Not that I see the appeal.”

  “You’re lying,” Dio said, catching the bottle Silenus tossed over the cart and taking a pull. “My mother perished from Zeus’s light. She can never return to Earth.”

  “Well, it was worth a shot. You never did trust me since that whole mishap with Orpheus’s lady love…What’s her name?”

  “Eurydice.”

  “Yes, that’s it, Eurydice.”

  “And she was his wife.”

  “That’s all well and good, but listen, I made the conditions of her release very clear to the both of them. He’s the one who broke it by turning around.”

  “Do bgurp not listen to a word this bgurp creature says, Dionysus,” Silenus advised.

  “Or perhaps I’ll send her to Tartarus, where the Furies will keep her company for eternity!” She laughed.

  “Zeus would never let you!”

  “Zeus? Ha! My brother probably hasn’t thought about her since he started visiting Ibiza. You know how he likes them young and reckless.”

  Dio raised his thyrsus over his head as if to execute the girl, but the priest lunged over the cart to stop him. “Ce n’est pas la fille! Dat girl ain’t in deeuh.”

  “Do it! Do it! See?! You’d be right at home in my kingdom, Nephew.”

  “Dionysus, bgurp control yourself!”

  “Yes, bring that wrath with you. He’ll never return to you.”

  Dio brought down the thyrsus and let it drop to the ground.

  “He will never leave Apollo. We both know that. Stop suffering for the mortals, Nephew. They don’t care about you. They don’t believe in you. Join me in the darkness and your existence will have meaning once again.”

  The priest stood over the cart and began to sprinkle holy water onto the girl. “Da power’a Christ compels ya! Da power’a Christ compels ya!”

  “Here he goes with the water. I’m not sitting through this again. You hear me!” she shouted at the priest, who responded by shoving a crucifix in her face. “Hey! Just wait until I see you again, pal!” She turned toward Dio. “Straight to the Furies!”

  Hades’s guttural laughs turned into coughs, and the girl’s body began to convulse. Black sludge leaked from her mouth and her eyes flickered bright white like circulating movie film.

  “Da power!”

  Her midsection shot toward the sky.

  “Of Christ!”

  She landed back on the cart. The voice returned, but the girl’s lips didn’t move.

  The satyr, god, and priest turned toward the voodoo priestess, whose snake began to uncoil itself from her neck and stared the priestess in the face. “Hey, toots,” the snake said in the same deep voice, flicking its tongue at her nose.

  The priestess let out a shriek and fell to the ground, unconscious. The snake slithered away, but before vanishing into the
brush, reared its head back toward the group. “Just remember, Nephew: Olympus, not the Underworld, has caused you your pain.” And he disappeared into the tall grass.

  The priest, doing his best to comprehend the last sixty seconds, leaned over the cart and checked the girl’s pulse. “Elle est morte.”

  Dio picked up his thyrsus, and while the priest was reciting the last rites, placed his hand over the girl’s shut eyes. He and Silenus shared a bottle as they walked back to their makeshift huts. The insects sang louder that night, as if they, too, were excited by the happenings in the deserted amusement park. As the priest was making his final slice of the cross through the air, permitting her soul to make its departure to heaven, her eyes shot open.

  He stumbled backward in shock and then rushed to the girl’s side, feeling her head and looking into her eyes. He looked up—“Mon Dieu”—and watched the mythical creature and glowing man enter the darkness.

  Zibby

  Studying for finals had pushed her brain into hyperdrive—both a blessing and a curse. She could recite key holdings in the shower or while brushing her teeth: “‘The risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed.’” Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad. “‘The mental assent of the parties is not requisite for the formation of a contract. If the words or other acts of one of the parties have but one reasonable meaning, his undisclosed intention is immaterial except when an unreasonable meaning which he attaches to his manifestations is known to the other party.’” Lucy v. Zehmer. Basically, I gotta tell Dad not to joke about betting the house on the Saints game.

  But because her brain was functioning at such a high level, it would throw song lyrics and quotes into the thick batter of legal diction, so the holdings read more like: “The mental assent of the Bitch pleeeaaasseeee, I bleeeeed Louis Thirteeeeeen! parties is not a requisite for the Hey Stella!! contract.” She had to switch to solely acoustic study music and yell at Randall from her bedroom window: “Dammit, Randall! January!”

  After annotating her Contracts outline and working through a couple of practice problems from Professor Cannito’s past exams, Zibby took a study break and signed into her Submittable account to scan the open submissions.