Little Gods (27 page)

“I read Dante in college,” Jay began.

“Don't think that way. Dante wrote a political treatise, a love poem, a spiritual meditation. He wasn't drawing a map. You can't map this place.” I pointed. “Let's follow the buzzing bees. If there's a path, stay on it."

We passed through the dark wood. Was the sky empty of stars, or were we in an enormous cavern underground? It didn't matter, really, but my mind worried at the question, to keep from wondering where H. was, I guess. This wasn't my journey. I was the catalyst, the facilitator, nothing more, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Pretty soon we came to a clearing, a circle surrounded by trees, and there was E.

Jay gasped. I just stared.

E. was a beehive. I couldn't tell if she'd ever been pretty, or if she was short or tall or fat or thin; her body was changed beyond such things. She leaned against a tree (it looked like she was
fused
to the tree), and her chest was filled with hexagonal chambers dripping honey. Bees flew around her like a black-and-yellow poison aura.

“Jay,” she said, or else the bees buzzed and made a sound like words.

“E. Are you...” He shook his head. “I came to get you. To bring you back."

The buzzing increased in volume, and the bees moved faster and more erratically. I wondered if someone would get stung, and what a sting from an underworld bee would do. I hung back. This wasn't my journey, and I wanted to stay out of the way. It seemed to me, though, that E. was at peace. Like she'd left her troubles behind.

“I'm full of honey now,” she said.

“Baby,” Jay said softly. “I've come such a long way..."

But he hadn't, not really. Where were the trials? The tests, the bargains, the obstacles? Or were they still ahead? If this was it, if he just had to lead E. out of here now, it was too
easy
. If this was all it took, the world would be full of the rescued dead, and no one would ever have to mourn again.

Something slinked into my peripheral vision, and when I turned my head, I saw monitor lizards. Big as wolves, with dark green scales, wedge-shaped heads, watchful unblinking eyes. They flickered their tongues. They beckoned me.

I knew the lizards could take me to H. The real H., or what was left of him, whatever essential part had passed on.

“I can come back with you,” E. said, a dreamy buzz. “But only if you don't look back. You can never look back."

“Like Orpheus,” Jay said.

I knew that story. Learned it in school. Orpheus went into the underworld to bring back his dead lover, and he was told she would follow him back to the land of the living—as long as he didn't look back on the way out. And, of course, Orpheus didn't hear her behind him, and he doubted, and he looked over his shoulder, and that was that. She sank back into death forever. I always thought Orpheus was an idiot, having one rule and breaking it, but now,
here
, I suddenly understood.

Don't look back. It wasn't meant literally. It didn't mean “Don't turn your head,” it meant “Don't
remember.
” Because how could your lover live, if you knew she had died? How could you go on loving her, with the weight of that knowledge, with all that interrupted grief clogging up your head? You had to
forget it all
, drink the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and afterward you'd never understand why your lover was afraid of subway stations and cemeteries, why she refused to go to your aunt's funeral with you, why she wept on gray days and stared off into the middle distance as if she were looking at things you'd never be able to see. Because
she
wouldn't forget about her death. Just you.

I thought about all the gray, hollow people I'd met in my life, shuffling through their days, as if they were swathed in shrouds no one else could see, and I wondered how many of them had been dead, once upon a time, and come back, and remembered.

I looked at the sinuous lizards, at their indifferent grace. They would lead me to H., if I let them. I would find my dead lover holding a needle full of Lethe-water, more potent than any drug we'd taken in the old days, and then what? Would we go back in time? Would I be a star again, with H. by my side? A strangely quiet H., still doing drugs but for a different reason, trying to forget something he knew I would never remember again?

Because the dead know things, even if they come back to life, and because it is still up to the living to act, to
choose
.

Was I willing to forget all the pain, everything I'd learned since H.'s death, in order to bring him back, to have him suffer, and remember, and be lost to me again someday?

“The bees can sting you,” E. said to Jay. “They can sting the loss away, and then I can follow you back. If you want.” She sounded totally indifferent.

“Don't you want to come with me?” Jay asked.

“It's up to you."

“Of course I want you back,” he said, and walked into the black and yellow mist of bees.

I turned and walked away, taking big ground-eating steps. The lizards followed me, paced me, and I started running to get away from them, from their cool green temptation. I wept as I ran. I wondered if H. would understand why I was running away, if he would want it this way, too.

I found the train, and its doors hissed open at my approach. The lizards hung back among the stone trees, watching me.

I looked back at them, for a long moment, then wiped the tears from my eyes. I got on the train. Jay would find his own way back, into the sun, and E. with him. But he would never understand why she didn't want to go outside, why she was so afraid of bees and dark places, and he would leave her eventually, I think, because the strange sad girl who came back would not be the woman he'd loved.
That
was Jay's trial, his price to pay.

“Doors are closing,” the driver whispered over the speaker, in tones of warning. These doors wouldn't open again, not for me. This was my one and only trip on this train, at least while I was alive.

“Let them close,” I said, and rode back through the emptiness in the belly of the night, toward another morning, having nothing but my memories, but holding tightly to those, holding them as though they were worth all the rest of my life.

Orpheus Among the Cabbages

She picked up a pomegranate, squeezed it hard, sighed. She'd always preferred golden delicious apples, but they were all mushy today. Someone called out from the direction of the cabbages, not her name, just pleading. She pushed her clattering cart toward the greenest part of the produce department.

A man's head rested among the cabbages.

He had black hair, and the kind of olive skin that some women find exotic when they don't know better. “I am Orpheus,” he said, “cursed to live forever, bereft of love, and now left among these living green things that by their fecundity mock my living death. My woe is legend..."

She resisted the urge to thump his forehead like a melon. She called to a beefy old man wearing a supermarket smock. “What's this head doing in among the cabbages?” she asked.

He walked toward her, looked at Orpheus, grunted. “I just unload the crates,” he said. “The quality of the vegetables is none of my business."

“Did these cabbages come from Greece?"

she asked.

“Olives are what come from Greece,” he said. “Cabbages come from places like

Ohio.” He wandered away.

“Long I sought my love,” Orpheus said.

“Long I wandered singing in the lands below the earth."

She looked at the sign. “Cabbages, 89 cents a head.” She picked up Orpheus by his hair. He didn't seem to mind. If his neck had been bloody she might have left him there, but his wound was smooth as cut cucumber. She dropped him in her basket, paid for him at the register, thinking “Of all the places to find

true love."

In the car, on the way home, Orpheus went on and on about his dead wife from inside the grocery bag.

She wished he would stop; a girl could start to feel like an afterthought. She decided he would never love her after all.

A mile from her house he started singing.

She wept. So did a dog in the street, a mailman passing by, and a stop sign. She decided to keep him after all.

When she got home she put the rest of the groceries away, but took Orpheus into her dusty bedroom, swinging him gently by his hair. “Long I sought my love, and an end to loneliness,” Orpheus said.

“Long I searched to find the gates of my paradise denied."

She undressed, surprised to find herself trembling. She stretched out on the bed and bent her knees, then tucked the murmuring head of Orpheus between her thighs.

“Sing out,” she said, and he did.

A bit later, so did she.

Pale Dog

Marla carried a drawstring bag containing a dozen kidney stones recently passed by an elderly clairvoyant named Bainbridge. She swung the bag and hummed, almost dancing down the alley. She'd taken Rondeau along with her to see Bainbridge, and Rondeau had been the one to actually fish the kidney stones out of the toilet. Marla wasn't averse to doing her own dirty work, but given the choice, she'd let Rondeau do it for her every time.

Now Rondeau had his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket. He wore a vintage purple zoot suit with a gold shirt—a suit which he claimed was haunted by its former owner. Marla had yet to see any evidence of a ghostly presence, though Rondeau had been wearing the suit for a week straight, ever since he bought it.

Rondeau looked up at the looming brick walls on either side of them and sighed. “It seems like we're always skulking down alleyways. Why can't we take a nice stroll down a broad avenue, all with...” He waved his hands in a vague gesture. “With trees and shit. Happy little lampposts."

“Alleys are shortcuts,” Marla said. “Shortcuts are our business."

“So me having my hands in a filthy toilet, that was in the service of the Great God Shortcut?"

“It beats cutting Bainbridge open and taking the stones out that way, doesn't it?"

“At least you would have done the cutting yourself,” he muttered.

A white dog trotted into the alley. Marla didn't know much about dogs, but if pressed she would have said it was partly shepherd but mostly mutt. The dog was neither big nor small, but medium-sized—just exactly the right size for a dog, Marla thought.

“Lovely pup, Rondeau said, squatting to pet the animal on the head. The dog panted and wagged its tail. Marla crouched and ruffled the fur behind the dog's ear. “Good boy!” It looked at her with peculiar, honey-colored eyes, and licked her hand. “It looks well fed, but it might be a stray. Do you need a home to go to, little pup? Do you? Do you need a Mama? I can—” Marla stopped the rush of baby talk she felt welling up within her. Slowly, she lifted her hand from the dog's neck. The dog didn't seem to mind the end of attention, just kept looking at her, panting and wagging.

Marla eased away from the dog. “Rondeau,” she hissed.

Rondeau looked up. “What?"

“Why are you petting that dog?"

“What do you mean? It's a nice dog. Aren't you a nice doggie? Aren't you just?"

“
Rondeau
,” Marla said, in her most sandpaper-on-nerve-endings voice. When she had Rondeau's attention, she said “Can you think of any two people
less
likely than us to stop what we're doing so we can pet a stray
dog
?"

Rondeau stopped patting, his hand hovering a few inches over the dog's head. He looked at the dog, at Marla, and back at the dog. “Ah,” he said. “Right.” He eased away to stand beside Marla. The dog didn't move, or seem troubled by their behavior. It just kept wagging its tail, looking at them expectantly.

“I still want to pet it,” Rondeau said. “And I
hate
dogs. A dog stole my dinner once when I was a kid, living under the Brandon Street underpass."

“I don't hate dogs,” Marla said, keeping her eyes fixed on the animal. “I don't even
think
about dogs. They're pointless. I have no opinion about them. But I want to take this one home, and give it a nest of blankets at the foot of my bed, and ... and feed it
steak
."

“Do you think it's some kind of a ... dog god?"

“I hope we haven't sunk that low, Rondeau, to get pushed around by a
dog
god."

“Well, what, then? Somebody's familiar?"

“Maybe, but it would have to belong to someone pretty damned powerful. Who runs a dog show? Some out-of-towner? It's nobody local; I would have heard.” Marla was the head sorcerer in the city, chief of chiefs, first among equals. Not much slipped through her information network.

“And
I
would've heard if anyone of consequence came to town.” Rondeau ran Juliana's Bar, and all gossip of relevance to the city's sorcerous population passed through there eventually.

“So."

“So."

“Shapeshifter?"

Marla snorted. She could tell a shapeshifter from a real animal. Only ordinaries and amateurs were fooled by shapeshifters.

“Maybe it's just a sport, a fluke.” Rondeau looked down at the dog, whose tail had not slowed in its wagging. “An otherwise normal dog that was born with some psychic twist. It happens to people sometimes, so why not dogs? It makes us want to love it and take care of it ... that seems like a reasonable, beneficial adaptation."

“Maybe,” Marla said. “But then why is it out on the street with no collar, no tags? If this were my psychic dog, I'd take better care of it."

Rondeau shrugged. “Maybe the collar broke. Maybe—"

The dog moved, and Marla and Rondeau both stepped back warily.

The dog turned and trotted out of the alley.

“See?” Rondeau said. “Off to seek other suckers."

“I don't know..."

Rondeau shook his head. “You just don't like my theory because, if I'm right, the dog is harmless, and you don't know how to deal with anything harmless."

“Maybe that's it,” Marla said. And maybe it was. But as they walked back to Marla's apartment, she kept her eye out for the white dog. She didn't see it, but she wondered if it could see her.