The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  “They’re too…Goddammit, too fucking tight,” he said to himself.

  Zibby pinched her fingers between the belt and her skin, trying to make room to breathe, wiggling to get free as jagged nails tore at her lower back. In the reflection of the glass bookcase, her assailant gritted his teeth, his flexing arm pulling at both ends of the belt, and at that moment, she realized that no matter what she said or how hard she pleaded, no matter what logic or reasoning she put forth—whether it was the practical “you’ll never get away with this” or the spiritual “you’ll burn in Hell”—Clemmons Ruiz, the icon of the French Quarter and her literary hero, was going to rape her, or kill her first.

  The room went blurry and everything slowed down, and although he was sitting upright, high above her, she could feel every breath on the back of her neck. She let go of the belt, her fingers snapping onto the floor from the pressure, and thought perhaps it would be better—at least it would be over—if she just closed her eyes and went to sleep.

  The pressure released. Zibby was free, she could breathe again. But she hadn’t given in; she didn’t drift off into a dream escape, leaving her body to the appetites of her attacker. The belt had fallen to the floor and the buckle rang against the hardwood, shocking her back to consciousness. Both of his hands pulled at her jeans. Having given up using just one hand, Clemmons was making progress on her jeans until Zibby managed to alligator-roll to her back. Using her momentum, she delivered a strike to the writer’s jaw, followed by a swift knee to the groin, which sent him to flopping to the side. She scrambled to her feet—aware that he had already returned to his and was close behind—rushed to the counter, and grabbed the first object within reach.

  Wine spilled on the floor and all over her face and shirt as the bottle whipped through the air like a tomahawk. Zibby had grabbed the very bottle they had been drinking from only minutes earlier by the neck and smashed it against his skull. The sound was sickening, like something she had only heard in the movies. But unlike the movies, where the bottles always break against bone, this bottle was still mostly full and resembled more of a warhammer than a vessel for Burgundy pinot noir.

  She marched over to where he had fallen, and as he turned his face back to her—a face transformed from one of abject disassociation to one of primal fear—Zibby had already begun a second strike, this time connecting directly with the bridge of his nose, cracking it instantly.

  The more she swung the bottle, the more wine poured out the upside-down top, releasing the weight and creating the effect that an on-deck baseball player achieves using a donut for his bat. The bottle glided through the air with such precise, clean-cut grace, it made a pretty whooshing sound with each stroke. After the last swing—an unnecessary swing, considering the writer had perished five blows earlier—Zibby dropped the bottle on the floor, sobbing and shaking.

  When she first heard the screams, she thought maybe she had died—choked to death, right there on the floor—and her manic fury upon the writer’s face was merely a violent fantasy in her afterlife. But the screams grew louder, speckled with chants, gun shots, laughter, and…and singing? And Zibby accepted that she had not expired, but was still very much alive.

  Covered head to toe in wine and blood, Zibby walked out onto the balcony and looked upriver, downtown. The sounds of terror washed over her like a tidal wave, and she witnessed Hell flood the French Quarter as cracks of thunder erupted in the distance.

  Dio

  An arm covered in blue with an NOPD patch smacked Dio in the back of the head. But when the god turned around, there was no assailant or reckless reveler. He bent over and picked the severed appendage up off the ground—it had been torn off at the shoulder, still warm. A cackling, naked Maenad blew him a kiss—her lips dripped with blood.

  Dio slowly spun on his axis, taking in the carnage, a scene he had not witnessed since Ares delivered him to the Battle of Zama, the Roman victory against Hannibal that handed Africa over to the empire. Headless bodies, torsos without arms and legs, torn-out throats, and bullet-riddled corpses covered St. Charles Avenue, the base of the “Dionysian Circle,” and the grid-configured streets of downtown New Orleans.

  An emergency evacuation had been summoned by the state, but the impending storm—a storm that had miraculously grown to such a gargantuan size at lightning speed that it made Katrina look like a drizzle—had kept out the National Guard, the US Navy, or any other outside forces that could have stood a chance at quelling the inexplicable ultra-violence and evacuating civilians from the city.

  Dio ran back to his chariot—the panthers’ chains long broken, the animals picking off unsuspecting men one by one—and began to sing. He belted the songs of Orpheus until his voice cracked and broke, but not a single Maenad calmed, for not a single Maenad heard his song.

  Out across the Mississippi, thunderbolts fell from the sky with such frequency it appeared as if the black clouds were gnashing their teeth.

  A sudden, stinging puncture flung the god from his chariot, and he crashed to the concrete, reeling in pain.

  “Mon Dieu!” Peter rushed to Dio’s aid. His toga—or what remained of the garment—was soaked red. “What have they done to…”

  But before the priest could finish, a fury of Maenads rushed him, one hopping on his back, clawing at his face from behind, the other two grabbing at his arms and legs, biting into his neck and ripping his outstretched cheeks in half like tissue paper.

  “Oh, the joy and the blood and the raw, red flesh!” they sang in unison.

  Dio crawled to the corpse, placing his hands over the priest’s eyes to bring life back to his body, but before the god could induce his power, the priest’s head was removed from his neck, and tossed into the fray like a beach ball at a rock concert. A Maenad laughed and skipped away, swinging a snake around her head like a lasso.

  The god doubled over in agony and stumbled to his feet, walking through bedlam unnoticed.

  He passed the column and turned onto Carondelet Street, where a flaming streetcar took the turn at full speed and derailed, slamming into a corner building. The gallery supports snapped and the onlookers crashed to the ground, moaning in the rubble.

  One of Dio’s guards, a bronzed, shirtless man, swung his thyrsus in a violent circumference as a pod of Maenads closed in. He caught one in the face, killing her instantly, and another across the knees, crippling the woman—even with her bones shattered, rendering her unable to walk, the Maenad crawled along the blood-stained pavement, wrapping herself around the guard’s leg, singing throughout her struggle, and took a hunk out of his calf. The guard dropped his weapon and fell to the ground, leaving him vulnerable for the fury to pounce and pull out his internal organs through his torso and leave them in a steaming heap on the ground.

  Dio continued down Carondelet past similar scenes of unmitigated violence. He crossed Canal to Bourbon Street, where the smell that had previously haunted him still lingered. But after the smell of exposed innards and burning flesh, the sewerage scent of Bourbon Street was honeysuckle, jasmine, a bouquet of roses; its serenity, the Elysian Fields.

  The lifelessness of the once insomniac street reminded Dio of the Egyptian neighborhoods, blood dripping from their doors, during the tense nights of Passover—when Zeus still put in effort for his cruelty.

  He approached the intersection with St. Ann and the gray bar that once housed him in its upstairs quarters. And as he neared the entrance, running his hands up and down the gallery poles, movement caught his attention out of the corner of his eye.

  She was covered in so much blood and wine he could smell it. She paused in the intersection; he turned to face her.

  “Hello, Pharaoh,” he said. “Is that…is that my vintage which covers you?”

  Zibby began to laugh, slowly at first, controlled, in a rolling disbelief, to a loosening, fluid, uncontrollable, doubled-over, hands-on-knees, tears-in-the-eyes, breath-eating laughter. “Oh my god!” She laughed some more. “I forgot you talked like that.”


  Dio smiled, and they met in the middle of the street.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “Are you?”

  Dio examined the purpling around her neck and the cuts and bruises on her face and arms.

  “I’m…I’m gonna live,” she said, looking to the ground.

  They walked inside, where the disco ball was still rotating, reflecting the neon lights across the unmanned bar and tables.

  He led them up the staircase that Dominic the grizzly once guarded, and opened the door to his old living quarters. The smell, which would repel anyone not familiar with rotting flesh, wafted out of the room and passed by Zibby and the god, who neither cowered at the stench nor at the hanging, discolored body.

  In the center of Dio’s old quarters, the stout mass of Buddy Landry hovered above an overturned stool, his feet slowly turning to the right; Riverside, Uptown, Lakeside, Downtown; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back toward the left—Downtown, Lakeside, Uptown, Riverside.

  Neither cringed—they barely even acknowledged—at the floating, bloated body, and walked past Buddy without pinching their noses.

  Zibby opened the small window and they stepped out onto the balcony. They lay next to each other on the floor, gazing upon the stars. Usually, Downtown’s buildings and the neon of the Quarter hid the stars in a sea of pollution, but every business was closed and the only lights were the bursts of fire that appeared here and there in little pockets throughout the city; the rest was covered in darkness.

  “Do you see those stars?” Dio asked, pointing at a cluster of diamonds shining exceptionally bright.

  “I do.”

  “When my dear Orpheus was killed by the same beasts that now roam this city, Zeus had parts of his body and lyre strewn throughout the sky so that I might see him every day. It was a gift.”

  “That’s why they call it Lyra. I read that somewhere,” Zibby answered.

  “Where was that?”

  “In a book.” Zibby began to laugh and clutched Dio’s hand. But just as quickly, her laughter turned to tears that cut through the dried blood covering her cheeks.

  “What happened to you?” Dio asked, gripping her hand tight.

  “I tried to meet my hero, and I…” She couldn’t finish.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t do that, Pharaoh, for heroes are merely men, and if I have learned anything during my thousands of years roaming this earth, it is that mankind is disappointing.”

  Zibby didn’t respond. They both lay there, looking up at the stars, which were vanishing in the approaching black clouds. A crack of thunder burst overhead, and raindrops, as if released at all once, began pouring onto the pair, washing away the caked-on blood from their bodies.

  “I suppose this will be the end of us,” Zibby said, closing her eyes.

  Lightning lit up the sky like an air raid. Dio turned his head, the side of his face hidden in an expanding puddle. “Is New Orleans worth saving?” he asked.

  For a while—or what seemed like a while, given the impending Armageddon—Zibby remained silent. Unsure if this question was practical or metaphorical, and too tired to differentiate between the two, she turned toward the god. “Of course,” she said, watching the rainwater slide off his face. “Of course it is.”

  Dio turned back to the sky, where the rain fell with such ferocity, the drops stung like pebbles smacking against his skin. The singing of the Maenads and screaming of their victims, and the gunshots and explosions, and everything else that Dio had set into motion, even the lightning strike that vaporized his statue atop the column, was barely audible in the heart of the storm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but Zibby didn’t hear him, so he gripped her hand as the thunder clapped and the flood waters rose.

  JULY

  Zibby

  Zibby sat on the balcony and watched the hypnotic alternation of blues come with the changing of the tide. She had written every day since arriving in Zanzibar—Stone Town, to be exact— and had read any and every novel that even mentioned the African archipelago. A couple, originally from the Jefferson Parish suburb of Westwego, of all places, had opened a little bookshop in town selling books in English and Swahili.

  Every time Zibby visited the store, they would ask her what had happened in New Orleans—what really happened, they meant— and who was to blame. But Zibby couldn’t give a firsthand account, for as far as they were concerned, she had been in Colorado getting her MFA at Boulder during the fury. But she had heard, from friends and family, that someone had spiked people’s drinks with bath salts at a festival. And the storm? Well, as someone from Southern Louisiana would know, hurricane season comes whenever it damn well feels like it.

  The call to prayer echoed throughout the city, which at first had taken some getting used to, but now she looked forward to the oration, as if five times a day, the city serenaded its inhabitants.

  She finished a handwritten letter and slid it inside an envelope: 1526 Dublin Street, New Orleans, LA. Her father, luckily, hadn’t left the house during the massacre, and he and Randall had just sat in the dark, drinking wine, until they both passed out—Zibby had left a note for him on the kitchen table that said she would be spending the semester in Europe. She hadn’t yet thought of an excuse for why she hadn’t come home in May.

  Text from Tara.

  The Wi-Fi connection here was spotty at best, but every so often a text message managed to sneak its way through.

  Hey Zibbs. Just checkin’ on ya. Brian was able to walk a little yesterday. Doctors said he was lucky those girls didn’t tear his leg clean out the socket. Anyway, he’d love to hear from you. The National Guard is leaving next month, so they’ve said.

  Said the same thing last month too. Miss you.

  Zibby didn’t respond, but made a notation in the margin of her notes to write Tara a letter—it was the expatriot thing to do.

  She returned to her rough draft, scrolling up and down the three hundred pages that had come gushing out of her those first few months on the archipelago—she still didn’t have a title. One day, perhaps, she would write about Zanzibar, but she wasn’t there yet. So, from the coast of Africa, Zibby wrote about what she knew best, New Orleans—recently dubbed the “Suicide City.”

  She focused on one being in particular, a wanderer, a beautiful drifter, whom Zibby had finally accepted could not have been part of this world. She dreamed up a background and motive for his travels, using the bits and pieces of what he had told her during their time together, but adding logic and reason—unshakeable carryovers from that one semester of law school—to make sense of it all.

  She had no way of contacting Dio, a name she kept for her book, and never knew what had become of him after that night on the balcony. When she woke up, the sun had come out and the storm had vanished—so quickly she had contemplated whether it all had been a figment of her imagination—and he was gone.

  But during the storm, the beautiful wanderer had never lost his glow, and even with her eyes closed in the darkness and the rain and the thunder, she could still feel his shine next her.

  Zibby scrolled to the top of her document, centered her cursor, and in the spot she had reserved for a title, she typed: The Neon God.

  Dio

  The drifting souls gave the river its green glow, and the few times Dio made eye contact with a child, he had to look away. Charon plunged his oar into the water, causing the souls to scurry around the staff like schools of fish.

  Dio pulled off his crown, which had stuck to his head from the dried blood, and tossed it into the river. It floated gently for a moment before being pulled down into the pulsating green abyss.

  In the distance, he could start to make out a couple of figures in the purple darkness, and as the boat drew closer, Semele, his mother, stood there waving to him and blowing kisses into the air, while Hades pet Cerberus on the banks of the River Styx.

  eon God