Last God Standing (12 page)

“And stay out!”

I landed in a pile of trashbags a few yards from the alley entrance to the restaurant.

“Yo,” one of the waiter-apes, grunted. “Always wanted to say that.”

“Me too,” the other one snorted. “And don’t come back!”

The knuckledraggers laughed, high-fived each other, and slammed the door, leaving me surrounded by other people’s trash and a miasma of grape Koolaid-holocaust stink so dense I could have set my bowling ball on it. Even as drunk as I was, the smell was alarming. But when I remembered the fat lady barfing all over her husband I laughed so hard I hurt myself. Then ELO’s Mister Blue Sky erupted from my mobile.

“Hellooo?”

“Lando?” a thick Northside accent twanged. “Is this Lando Cooper? It’s Goldie Kiebler, from The Ha-Ha Room.”

“Goldie, I gotta… g… gotta call you back. I’m in the middle of a personal crisis.”

I lost it again, screamed laughter into the night sky.

“Whatever, Cooper. I thought you might be interested…”

“I gotta call you back, Goldie! I gotta call you back!”

I disconnected. Goldie Kiebler owned one of the hottest comedy clubs in the city. I’d just alienated one of the most influential club owners in the country. Everything was burning down around my ears.

It was hilarious.

“It’s the wine, you thoughtless dolt.”

The coldness of the voice stoked a memory. The nearness of it struck alarm bells in my gut. A Presence had just entered the alley. I rolled to my hands and knees, marshaling my will, trying to fight the effect of the wine as the alley grew colder. Someone had just opened a Portal. That same someone stepped out of the shadows with a sigh of equalizing air pressure and the pop! of displaced space.

“The smell you’ve noticed is called seep. Think of it as a by-product of the fun you’ve been having at my expense.”

I looked around, my eyes straining to pierce the shadows.

“Who are you?”

“You think the Joy I bring comes cheaply? That clarity comes without cost? No, Yahweh.”

The speaker stepped into the circle of light thrown by a nearby streetlamp. It was the man from the restaurant, the tall, bearded man who sent over the red wine – the “fan” with whom I’d shared a toast.

Oh, Surabhi… what did I do?

“Now I can kill you; freed from the nuisance of angry wives or demi-mortal brats seeking ‘closure’.”

The fan dwindled to about five-foot-six. His black hair flared bright orange; not the kind of orange you’d find on a Florida citrus plantation. This was the orange at the heart of a forest fire; the lethal white-orange of the sun’s corona. The thick pectorals softened and rounded like twin cantaloupes. Buttons popped from his vest and clattered to the ground; I looked down to find my expensive new shoes surrounded by tiny circlets of gold. When I looked up again, the fan was gone. In his place stood a short, fat god with a blazing halo of dayglo hair and glorious breasts: Dionysus the Twiceborn – the secret, double-sexed child of the mortal Semele.

Greek.

Son of Zeus.

“Now, God of Abraham,”
Dionysus squeaked.
“I will take my vengeance.”

Dionysus reached down with one chubby fist and grabbed me by the lapels. The strength of a mad god thrummed in his muscles. He lifted me off my feet as easily as I would a child.

“Dionysus… I didn’t kill Zeus!”

“Liar! You stole his power and befouled his holy corpse!”

Something about the image of me “befouling” Zeus flexed my “inappropriate humor” muscle.

“You dare?”
Dionysus huffed.
“Stop that! Stop laughing!”

“I can’t, Di. Your boobs are bigger than Aphrodite’s.”

The enchanted wine was elevating my mood more effectively than a truckload of Paxil even as I tried to reach for the power, sifting through my mental pockets for the Keys to unlock the universe.

Must have left them in my other pants.

“Hey, Dio-nitelight. You’re the god of grapes. What do people pray to you for… mold protection?”

“Fool!”
Dionysus growled.
“Have you truly forgotten so much? I am the
God
of
Epiphany,
of ritual madness and ecstasy. I am the Liberator
who reveals lethal truth through the power of strong drink. You have tasted the wine which may bear my beneficence or my curse. You lie at the crux of my power.”

“Power? Hello? This is the Judeo-Christian Embodiment speaking: I own West Texas. But two aspirin and an egg salad sandwich and your ‘power’ goes byebye… fat boy.”

“I… am not… FAT!”

“Of course not… handsome woman like you… just big-boned.”

Dionysus released me.

“That’s right, Dolly. Maybe next time you’ll think twice before you mess with the real thing!”

The Twiceborn raised his right hand.

“Rise.”

The terrible crocodile that had moved into the pit of my stomach roared, and a gout of vomit blasted out of my mouth like a freight train with melted brakes. I fell to my knees as projectile puke spattered the asphalt.

I heard the power singing my secret names, demanding that I wipe Dionysus away with a wave of my hand. The Twiceborn was in serious trouble… as soon as the stomach ’gator stopped deathrolling with my guts in its mouth. I climbed to my feet and swiped at the thin runner of purple drool bouncing from my lips.

Dionysus waggled his pinky finger...

“Rise
.
”

…and a surge of vomit, more vomit than I ever imagined could be contained by a mortal body, roared up my throat and blasted the wall five feet away.

“Wait! Dionysus… wait a minute!”

At that moment, the mismatched couple stormed out of the restaurant’s kitchen entrance, too busy berating the despondent maître d’ to realize they were stepping directly into the line of fire. Dionysus raised his left hand.

“Rise
.
”

The blast of ejecta struck the skinny husband and blasted his toupee halfway off his head. He turned toward me, a man with a parti-colored muskrat slopped into immobility on his glistening dome, and I heaved again. The blast spattered the chubby wife’s ample breasts, adding to the colorful assortment of condiments and sauces I’d already deposited there. The Sprats turned and ran, dripping, down the alley.

“Dionysus… let’s talk about this!”

The God of Epiphany laughed, and grabbed his crotch.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted to chase down the Sprats, tackle the portly wife, rip off her tainted moomoo and bury my head between her enormous breasts. When I envisioned her dressed in a Wonder Woman costume my brain exploded with the urge to procreate. Dionysus rubbed his stomach, and I realized that I could tackle Jack Sprat too. If I got hungry later I could eat him. I was five steps down the alley when my world turned red. My body became warm, then hot, then unbearably hot.

“I can boil the wine in your blood,”
Dionysus, who is suddenly everywhere, whispers.
“I can command it to freeze and choke your veins with rivulets of red ice.”

His Voice is in my mind, his face the full moon that fills the sky. His power is the sunshine of a morning after, still a million years away and I realize: I am an alcoholic. In my mortal life I’ve worshipped Dionysus, indirectly, but too fervently to deny him now.

“Who’s laughing now… comedian?”

The Twiceborn gestures, preparing to pull the vomit trick again, or something worse. I grasp the fabric of reality in my vomit-slick mental fingers and pull.

Five yards behind Dionysus, a manhole cover blows off and rockets into the sky. From the bile-puddle in which I kneel I’m watching the most probable outcomes of this encounter expand into an infinitude of possibilities. Somewhere in the multiverse, another Dionysus stands directly over the empty space that was filled by the manhole cover in this reality. I pull hard enough to tug the fabric of both continuums a little closer, twisting them together to form something new.

The hole behind Dionysus expands, eating up the space between it and the wine god like an earthbound black hole, as the Liberator puts his foot on the back of my neck and presses my face toward the colorful puddle of liberated belly flotsam.

“Let it be known throughout the halls of eternity,”
Dionysus cries.
“Throughout every pantheon of gods that remain on this stinking mudball: Dionysus of the Greeks has defeated the unassailable God of the Christians! Let my cry of vengeance resound across the heavens: Dionysus! Dionysus! Dionysus!”

I wretch blood-tinged purple vomit across Dionysus’ bare feet.

“You should have worn shoes.”

“And why is that, you pathetic pretender?”

I grab the edges of the manhole and drag it between the wine-god’s feet. For a moment, the wine-god stands on thin air and grape fumes. Then he plunges, still smirking, into the darkness.

I released the hole, allowed its continuity to resume. It snapped back with the sound of a concrete bunker door slamming shut. If I was lucky, Dionysus was trapped in an alien continuity, smothered beneath thousands of metric tons of concrete or water or unexplored earth. Wherever he’d landed it would take time to extricate himself and return home. If I was unlucky, the Twiceborn would rise from the hole and kill me in short, messy order.

In addition to looking out for my own backside, however, I had a larger consideration. I had violated a minor rule in defeating Dionysus. Realities are separate for a good reason. Breaching their integrity for personal gain is always a bad idea. It’s one thing to correct the violations of ne’er-do-well deities, another thing altogether to cause the violation just to protect my own skin. There might be ethical considerations; a karmic price to pay later for my victory in the Now.

I can fix it. If something goes wrong, I can just Reset and start over.

Later, my arrogance would lead me to make the worst decision in the gods’ long history of bad decisions. But the effects of Dionysus’ epiphany were beginning to wear off.

Surabhi.

I staggered back into Henri Lumiere’s, where the maître d’ informed me that he’d already called the police. The Molokes were gone. He recommended, in the most colorful terms, that I follow their example. Before the bouncers could throw me out again, I left.

It’ll be OK. I can fix this.

I punched her number, determined to explain. I called her, ten, twenty times, each time getting her voicemail greeting in return.

You’ve done it, Lando. This time you’ve really done it.

My mortal life, the life for which I’d sacrificed Eternity, was going up in flames that stank of wine and stomach acid. It was also abundantly clear that I was now the target of at least one angry family of gods. My nausea only deepened at the thought of taking on the entire Greek pantheon.

Surabhi was ignoring my calls.

Everything was ruined.

My mortal life was a Godawful mess.

“I struggle with depression. Who doesn’t? Everybody’s got problems, right? But my father taught me how to deal with depression. Which was only fair, since most of the time my parents were the reason I was depressed.”

< Audience reacts >

“When I was ten years old, my father had this big business trip to Africa. The whole family was invited to spend Christmas at this resort in Zimbabwe. My mother signed up for a Swahili class she got from this ad in
Modern Woman
. The class turned out to be a scam cooked up by this ‘African King’ who was searching the New World for a ‘modern American Wife’. This appealed to my mother even though she already had a modern American husband. Barb’s a very romantic woman… also completely insane.”

< Audience laughs >

“The African King turned out to be this schizophrenic from Salt Lake City named Thicke Ronald. Thicke Ronald used the money my mother sent him to buy a bus ticket. He came to Chicago, camped out on the sidewalk in front of our house and begged my mother to come out and meet her ‘Negro Love God’. The man was from Utah: next to him Dick Cheney looked like Samuel L Jackson in black face.

“When my mother refused to come out, Thicke Ronald challenged my father to a duel. My father went out to fight him. Thicke Ronald weighed three hundred pounds. He could benchpress my father, and he had more violent personalities than a flashback episode of
Survivor
. So while one of Herb’s employees distracted him, Herb snuck up behind with a shovel and and coldcocked him. The employee filmed the whole thing. Herb used the footage in a commercial: Crazy Herb Clobbers the Price Giant.

“They kept Thicke Ronald in the ‘special hospital’ for three weeks. On Thanksgiving Day, my mother said Thicke Ronald appreciated her more than we did, packed a bag and flew to Salt Lake City. The night before we left for Africa my father made us pack all our old clothes in boxes and shipped them all to Zimbabwe. A week before Christmas, we all flew to Africa. Without my mother.”

< Audience reacts >

“Yeah, sad. On Christmas Eve we were sitting around, moping in our hotel room, surrounded by all these boxes. Herb told us to get dressed. We took all the boxes down to this big ballroom. The management was having a Christmas party for the hotel staff and their families. We gave away all our old clothes, toys… stuff we didn’t want. I was pretty sure we were going to have to visit my mother and new stepfather in whatever Utah boobie-hatch accepted Blue Cross Blue Shield, but my father gave each of us a little wine, and by the time we’d emptied the last box, we were all laughing.

“My old man knew how to deal with depression. ‘Remember, boys,’ he’d slur. ‘When you think you’re standin’ on the bottom of the barrel, just think: somewhere out there are four little boys with no feet.’

“So he gave away all my mother’s clothes.”

< Audience laughs and yells >

“All her shoes, her toothbrush, her tapedeck, her typewriter; all her tampons, her eyeglasses, her makeup, her Diana Ross wigs, her watches, her earrings, her hunting knife, and her zippo lighters. He gave away every piece of jewelry he’d ever bought and every piece of underwear she owned. By the time he was done, a hundred and three African ladies walked away with more loot than Bernie Madoff. The locals sang Christmas songs in our honor. On New Year’s Day, some of the workers made us honorary members of their tribe. It was one of the best Christmases of my entire life.

“My father knew how to handle depression.”