Lilith Spreads the Cards

Lilith Lucia Papameletiou, Gypsy by persuasion but Greek by heredity, sat in the storefront fortune parlor she shared with her friend Cheryl, and thought of Zem. She couldn’t get him out of her mind, even though she’d said goodbye and officially stopped thinking about him six months ago. Reminders of him turned up, in her mind, like reruns of a bad sitcom from her childhood, one of those shows she’d never liked, but which now seemed to be syndicated on every channel, at every hour of the day, annoying her with its theme music and its laughtrack.

This was the very table where she’d tried to read his fortune, and where, later, she’d told him to stop coming. She riffled and sorted through the cards, sitting and staring into space. Cheryl bustled behind her, sweeping a huge, bright pink feather duster over her massive collection of arcane chotchkes.

Lilith had bought Cheryl her first Tarot deck years ago, when they’d been neighbors in a tiny apartment building facing a cement courtyard and a cracked pool. Cheryl was depressed over losing her weird job as a female female impersonator, and Lilith, twenty and at a loss to cheer up this oversize and overwrought woman she barely knew, told her that fortunes were sort of like show biz, and she’d teach her the trade. A few years later, Cheryl had talked Lilith into opening a shop with her, which they’d share, trading off shifts. And now, Cheryl possessed more Tarot decks, crystals, and jangling jewelry than a whole Romany caravan combined. There was barely room to move in here.

She’d created a monster, Lilith reflected.

Lilith leaned back in her chair, thinking. Business was slow. She shouldn’t have come in at all tonight.

Cheryl heaved her bulk around the crowded room, occasionally wiping her damp, jet black bangs back from her forehead. She was one of those 300 pound women who never quite seem to be in contact with the floor. She moved as if held up by wires, the world’s largest hummingbird flitting busily to anything that looked like it might possibly be a flower.

“You want a reading, honey?” she asked, uncurling a hair from her cheek.

Lilith quickly squared the cards off, put them down, and stood. “Give me a break, Cheryl.”

Cheryl looked offended as she repositioned her three crystal balls and re-wound the astrolabe.

“Don’t you ever do a reading for yourself, honey?”

“Sure, I spread the cards sometimes,” Lilith said.

“Well? Then why not?”

“For myself, Cheryl. I’ve never asked anybody else to–”

“Honey,” Cheryl began, her voice rising another octave. But they were interrupted. The door tinkled open and three people walked in. Cheryl whipped around and instantly assumed her fortune teller’s simper. One shoulder was thrust forward, and one low-heeled shoe, and she flipped her sweaty bangs over her forehead and lowered her gaze to make a show of inspecting the newcomers.

“Welcome,” she said.

Lilith took a half step back. If she wanted to go home early, she’d missed her chance.

While Cheryl was upselling the three clients, Lilith let her own gaze rest on each one briefly. They were a woman and two men, all around thirty. The two men, she could see, were best friends. The woman was one’s sister, the other’s fiancé. They could have been in a movie about a tragic triangle, a threesome marked for some highly icky, sentimental end, she thought.

Except their ending wasn’t sentimental at all, she realized. They had another future. She looked harder. The woman had sharp features, and she did most of the talking. She laughed a lot, and she was also the only one of them who’d really noticed Lilith. As Lilith looked at her, her glances in return grew more and more frequent. The two men were embarrassed. They laughed a lot, too, whenever their sister or lover did, but they also fidgeted, folded their arms and then stuck their hands in their pockets, then pulled them out again and started over. They looked at the paraphernalia surrounding them with grins, but also as if some of it might sprout wings and descend upon them like harpies at any moment.

I’m with you there, fellas, Lilith agreed silently.

A price was reached. A full reading, for all three, combined, concentrating on how their lives interacted.

“And I want her to do it,” the woman finished.

She meant Lilith, of course. Lilith frowned. This chick couldn’t be gifted, herself, could she, and recognizing talent in the room? She narrowed her gaze, then shook her head. No.

Cheryl misunderstood her head shake. “Of course Lilith will read for you,” she cooed. “Come on, sit around the table. You here, and you… here,” she steered them, “And Lilith at the head.”

The table was round, but no one noticed. Cheryl had put the woman at Lilith’s right hand, the two men next to each other at her left.

“Now, choose a deck.” She spread at least half a dozen in front of the female client, all but ignoring the men. Everybody seemed to know who was in charge here, Lilith thought. She pulled out her chair, settled herself.

“That one,” the woman said. She pointed, extending her long finger and longer nail elegantly. She smiled at Lilith.

“Ooh, a dark deck, miss,” Cheryl breathed. Lilith twisted her head slightly. It was a modern version of the cards, painted in bold colors and geometric forms. She waited.

“And now shuffle three times,” Cheryl instructed. She took away the other decks and set them somewhere on the crowded shelves. “Concentrating on your question.”

All this was useless, really. The subject determined the reading, and the reader, not the choice of cards or how they were shuffled. This isn’t blackjack, Lilith thought.

“And now, we must all take a moment of silence, and breathe deeply, all together. Ready? Breathe in... two, three... and out... two, three. And one more time.”

Really, Lilith thought, Cheryl can be such a fortune telling nerd, sometimes.

“And now, we’re ready. If Lilith feels all the energies are aligned.”

Lilith nodded ever-so-slightly. At least she didn’t ask me if the spirits were ready. And speaking of spirits, I could use a drink. Barkeep!

She took the cards, squared them, and started to lay them out.

“Honey,” she heard Cheryl’s faint voice over her shoulder. She shook her head and kept on dealing.

The layout was a strange one, a circle of twelve cards with five single ones face down in an X in its center. Lilith had happened on it in an old woodcut once, and tried it a few times. It had been used, she’d read, to discern patterns of blood and lust, and the things that masqueraded as love.

“I’ve never seen this,” the woman to Lilith’s right breathed. She leaned over the cards, staring intently. “Bobby, that’s—” she pointed to the card nearest her brother, opposite Lilith.

“The Fool,” Lilith told him. “A popular card. And a good one. It’s you. Happy, unafraid, always willing to go on an adventure.” She gave him a little nod, and a slight smile. It was the simplest, most commonplace interpretation, but in this case it was true, and very nearly a complete character reading. Bobby was one of the world’s born jesters. He grinned at her. Probably thought he might get lucky tonight. She smiled down again. “This card,” she pointed at the one closer to his friend, “is the Knight of Swords. A warrior’s card, a fighter’s. You’ve been looking for a fight, haven’t you?” she asked, pinning the fiancé with her gaze.

“I—”

“Tim’s always looking for a fight,” the woman told them. “He was always beating someone up in high school. Defending my honor, whether or not it needed defending. Right?” she looked from one to the other of her champions for concurrence.

“You’ll soon find fights that are not of your choosing, with stakes higher than you can conceive. And you,” she turned to the woman, “Your name is Gwendolyn, and you believe the world is your oyster. This card that’s fallen to you is the Queen of Pentacles. She loves money, or at least all the things it buys. You’re going to get a lot of those things shortly. I see you living in great luxury, but–” she paused and blinked. There’d been a shadow across her sight.

“Yes?” Gwendolyn asked. Lilith felt Cheryl lean forward. The two boys watched her, not blinking.

Luxury. A lot of it. Pillows and silk sheets, and lush fruits and drinks. Indulgence. More women, and the sounds of tinkling water.

Lilith squinted, as if that would help her see the vision better. It was like a harem, very posh, very well cushioned. Gwendolyn, lying nude on a silk-thrown bed, other figures in the room around her, at the edges of Lilith’s vision. The feel of fingertips on the girl’s flesh. The feel of breath, silent, invisible. A tickle here and there, and then Gwendolyn gasped, and arched her back, and shrieked in ecstasy and kept on shrieking. The other figures in the room stopped, watched her. Waited. The shrieks reached a shrill climax, earsplitting and unending. And then stopped. Her body collapsed. All sound was gone, all movement stopped for good. The shadowy, watching figures moved away.

A hint of chuckling trembled through the air.

“He’s killed you,” Lilith murmured.

“What? What!” Gwendolyn demanded. “I couldn’t hear that. Did you say—”

Lilith looked up, then looked down at the cards. “I see great pleasure in your near future,” she resolved. She touched the Queen’s card, and the one next to it, the Ace of Swords, a dripping blade piercing a heart. “This is a dark deck,” she commented.

Ten minutes later, Tim, Bobby, and Gwendolyn had left.

“Honey, we’ve got to talk,” Cheryl sounded troubled. “I’m not sure what you saw, but…” She shook her head and obviously didn’t know how to go on, or exactly what she wanted to say.

“But I upset them,” Lilith finished.

“That’s an understatement, honey! If that woman hadn’t been so shook up, she would have been fighting for her money back. The only reason I got them out of here is because you scared them as much as you pissed them off. What were you seeing?”

Lilith turned over the five center cards in the spread, still lying untouched on the table. Death, the Tower, the Emperor, the Eight of Swords, and the Moon. All spoke of darkness unleashed, imprisonment, cataclysm. Taken together, they made even Cheryl wrinkle her brow and stare at Lilith in consternation.

“Honey! I’ve never seen— what do you think it means?”

Lilith swept all the cards together and recombined them with the rest of their deck. “It means I’ve changed my mind, Cheryl,” she smiled at her friend. “Lock the door, okay? I’d really like a reading after all.”

Cheryl didn’t ask any questions. She got up and bustled about, turning the key in the door and switching off the neon “Special Readings!” sign in the window. “Good idea, honey,” she said. “Maybe we both should do one.”

Lilith kept shuffling. “I agree,” she said evenly. “We should search through the aether for as much information as it will give up, tonight. It looks like Las Vegas might have some interesting things in its future this New Year’s after all, my dear.” She gave her friend a grim smile.

“Oh, honey!” Cheryl breathed in mingled dread and anticipation.

NEXT POST: ON DRAGONS (Monday 11/2)

Grand Entrances and Arrivals

Sphinx noticed some rustling among the grasses in his mini-marsh. He watched. It could have been a movement made by a small child who had snuck through the railings and was making secret pathways, sneaking up on its parents and the other tourists and the Sphinx, himself. Or, it could have been some animal, a stray dog, maybe, although those were hardly ever seen on the Strip. Or it could have been–

Venus. She raised herself and smiled at Sphinx, happy to be recognized and even more pleased that her entrance had been effective. She was holding something, and waved it at Sphinx. A tattered piece of paper.

“Sphinx! I’m going to be a showgirl,” she announced.

Sphinx pondered that while Venus stepped nimbly among the last few grasses and up to the platform where the monolith’s front paw lay immobile. She spread the page out, smoothing it. “What do you mean?” Sphinx asked then, unable to make sense of it.

“The biggest show in town needs dancers. I’m going to become the greatest star in the world,” the goddess sighed luxuriously. She stretched, reveling as the air touched her along her sides and cheeks. “They’re going to love me. And when Zem sees that–” she licked her lips and tossed her hair, eschewing mere words.

The monolith was still wondering how Venus had seen a newspaper. She’d never given any indication she knew such things existed. And she’d certainly never bothered with local events. The monolith blinked—theoretically—and refocused. “They love you already. They can’t help it,” he pointed out.

The immoral immortal smiled up. “No, they can’t, can they?” she affirmed. “But now they’ll all see me. If he wants to play his game, I’ll show him that I got here first and this is my place. I belong here.” The smile had left her face as quickly as a wallflower at the prom when the head cheerleader arrives. Nobody watching would have remembered it at all. She took on a look that she hadn’t worn in some time. There was, in her rock-hard expression, something warlike, determined. She could have held a spear and been bloodstained, and that wouldn’t have looked out of place.

“But I thought you and Bugsy had some plan for getting rid of Zem?” he asked.

Venus shrugged. “Maybe.” She raised her hand to her chest and let it play there a moment, stroking. “But why should I just sit around, and let that nasty old man do whatever he wants in the meantime? I’m a goddess, don’t forget. I’m the goddess in this place.”

“You are,” the monolith agreed. “So you’ve decided to show yourself…” he prompted.

“To the whole world,” Venus practically crowed.


Testy Lesbiana and Rachel Ferguson arrived in Manhattan sometime on a summer afternoon, when the sun was shining and the sidewalks were gleaming like fat, white beachgoers who’d lost their way to Coney Island and flung themselves down any old where instead.

“Wow,” Rachel murmured, and then found herself kissing the passenger window as Testy swung around a corner and nearly sideswiped a taxi whose driver shook his fist in Rachel’s face and cursed her unintelligibly. “Sorry!” she cried helplessly. “Testy, could we—” and then the car swung in the other direction and she slid back across the huge expanse of front seat into the drag queen.

“Gimme a little space here, sweetie,” Testy told her, and then leaned out her own window to shout, “Yeah? Well your mother thinks so, too!” at some unseen victim.

“Testy?”

“Yeah, doll? Oh—hang on.” And the bumper car act began all over again. “Welcome to NYC, darlin’. Whaddya want to see first?”

“Uh, Testy?”

“Yeah.” Testy swerved past an ancient crone with a grocery cart and leaned into both the horn and the gas pedal as she sped through an intersection. “God, I’ve missed driving in this city.”

“Fun,” Rachel mumbled. “Uh, what are we doing here, exactly? I mean, we haven’t actually talked about—”

“We gotta track down an old friend of mine, babydoll. But that’ll take awhile, and to be honest, I have no idea where to even start the search. So… let’s have fun for awhile, whaddya say? A little sightseeing? Frivolity? Hanging out with your Auntie Testy and learning the deepest, darkest secrets of the biggest, baddest city in the cosmos? Whaddya say?”

And so their adventures began.

NEXT POST: LILITH SPREADS THE CARDS (Friday 10/30)

When Gods Collide

Time, inside a casino, is immaterial. The architects and designers who sweat and struggle over each square foot of gambling area make sure of that. Casino lighting never changes, and there are never any windows. Doors are not that common. There is as little reminder as possible that the world outside exists at all, and if a player does chance to remember it, that memory is quickly quashed by one more free cocktail, or a suddenly ringing, paying-out slot machine.

Still, even inside a casino, there is an ebb and flow to the day. Afternoons are quieter than nights, and mornings are quieter still. Many tables are not open in the early hours, and the ones that are aren’t filled with players. There are fewer dealers working, fewer cocktail waitresses. Fewer change girls ply their little carts around between machines.

Things pick up gradually as the day wears on. As visitors weary themselves with seeing the attractions outside, or exhaust themselves out in the desert heat, or finish their business at their conventions, the casinos steadily fill till, by the time it’s dark outside, the tables are all open and the seats are all full. This is Prime Time, when the place makes its money, when the most desirable players with the longest lines of credit start to show. This is when some tables get marked “Reserved” and all the minimum bets go up. This is when the money flows, along with the cocktails. This is when the life of the casino is in full swing.

Sometime before Prime Time, during the nether-hours of afternoon, when some but not all the tables were in play, when the waitresses had just begun to shrug off their early day lethargy and inject a spring into their high-heeled step, and smile more as they went from table to table; when the sun still shone brightly outside, but not as brightly or as heatedly as it had two or three hours ago; sometime in this in-between time, on one particular, inconsequential day, Zem and Venus sat at a blackjack table.

They had not arrived together. He was playing first, then she walked up and joined him, sitting on a stool three seats around the curve. The other players stopped when she arrived– two men and another woman, all between fifty and seventy-five, all long-time gamblers who were attuned to Vegas’ unique rhythm, all of whom were inured to pretty girls or distractions during cards.

Still, there was a silence as Venus arranged herself. Not just their table was silent, but the entire area around them, in the pit, through the machines behind where she sat, among the roving waitresses and change girls, even to the players at the slots. The atmosphere itself waited for her to be settled.

That hair! Those eyes! Her breasts, so pert and lively as she sat! The men who saw her stared at her. The women looked and tried to decide whether to feel jealous or to admire. She was so exactly what the world told them to be, and lectured them to despise.

She looked at the dealer. “Well?” she questioned.

“Just in time, ma’am,” he murmured, and dealt her two cards. All around, the business of the casino resumed quietly.

“Eleven, sir,” the dealer said to Zem, who occupied the first spot to his left.

Zem smiled. “Double,” he said, and laid a short stack of chips next to his bet.

“Doubling down,” the dealer murmured. He laid a card across Zem’s first two. The Queen of Clubs smiled up at Zem. Zem smiled back.

“Very nice, sir,” the dealer said. Dealers are tutored to be polite. Their first job is to be vigilant. They barely blink. They miss nothing. They see every flick of every finger on their tables. They stand watchful for the merest hint that someone is cheating, trying to sneak a card that shouldn’t be there, trying to count the cards through a six-deck shoe, which is nearly impossible. They miss nothing– but they do it with a professional smile and they say “thank you”.

The two men next to Zem both lost. Then it was Venus’ turn. Her cards were a nine and a seven– what is known in the game as a hard sixteen. In the lore of blackjack, hard sixteens are what separate the real players from the dilettantes, the strong from the weak. To fail to hit a hard sixteen will result in twisted decks, unwinnable deals, an irremediable, disastrous, card debacle from which the players will emerge battered and impoverished, and the house will leave laughing its way to the bank.

Venus just looked at her cards with disgust.

“You’re cheating,” she accused Zem. He smiled broadly and spread his hands, palms up. I’m hiding nothing, the look and gesture said. “You never play fair,” she insisted.

“What’s it going to be, honey?” the woman sitting next to Venus asked her. “Gotta hit, you know.”

“Oh, then, go ahead already,” Venus said, and drew a ten. The dealer collected her cards and her money and continued on his way.

Zem and the woman player won. Venus pouted.

“Why are you here?” she demanded of Zem two hands later.

“I live here,” he smiled.

“That’s stupid,” she said. “You live anywhere. You’ve lived all over the world for– you can go back to... anywhere. Greece, even.”

“I visited Athens once, with my second husband,” the woman next to Venus said. “Horrible food. Great liquor. What’s it called?”

“Ouzo,” Zem informed her.

“Yeah, ouzo. You ever had that?” she asked the dealer.

“No ma’am. Sixteen.”

“Hit me. It’s powerful stuff.”

“Why don’t you go back? No one wants you here,” Venus said to Zem.

“Ah, well, we’ll see about that.”

The dealer lost, everybody who was still playing won. The woman next to Venus had busted, drawing a nine on her sixteen.

“Easy come, easy go,” she said, and pulled herself away from the table.

“Why are you still here?” Zem asked Venus as the cards were dealt again. He got a blackjack, smiled, and tipped the dealer when his winnings were pushed across to him.

She tossed her hair like a model in a shampoo commercial in the 70s and glared at him. Everybody stopped to watch. There was another silent moment at their table, and around them through the pit and among the nearby machines. “Oh! You– I don’t know why– ever since Olympus–”

“Careful, Venus,” Zem cautioned.

“Why? Why should I be? No one cares about you! No one knows. They’ve all forgotten, you horrible old man! They’ve–”

“Careful,” he repeated.

Things slowed all around them. Nothing like the players and the workers freezing in their tracks, nothing so dramatic as things stopping or breaking suddenly into slow motion. There were no splashy special effects, nothing to indicate that anything untoward was happening. But things got very quiet, in that particular region of the casino. Nothing seemed to happen for a longer time than usual. No one looked up, no one said a thing as Zem and Venus watched each other. Play was paused.

“Be careful,” he said one more time.

“I won’t be. We’ve all lived according to your rule for all this time, and it’s stupid! We did what you told us– found places for ourselves where we were happy, and never let on who we were. And what did you do? You couldn’t stay away and just disappear, could you? You couldn’t just fade off into nothingness and leave me alone! You came here, you invaded my new home. It’s not fair! I live here! I belong here! You go away!”

She was screaming by the end of it.

Zem waited till she’d got her breath back.

“You haven’t done a very good job of keeping the world from recognizing you,” he commented. “Although they do forget you as soon as you leave them, so I guess you’re technically following the rule I placed.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now. And no,” he added. “I won’t go away, my dear. I like Las Vegas. I like the modern world. And it’s going to like me. Love me. Just like the ancient one did.”

“Nobody loves you,” she lashed back. “Nobody loves you and nobody cares about you, they only fear you. And you hate me and I hate you and I’m going to do whatever I can to get rid of you, old man. That’s it. That’s how it is.” And she stood up, scowling as violently as only sexy kittens can. A tiny plaything, transformed into a spinning, spitting, ball of razors.

Zem glanced at the still players and tourists and casino workers, all of whom were looking down, or looking away, not noticing. He smiled grimly. Somewhere, sounding far away, thunder rumbled. There was a sudden charge of blue-white light around them, and a crackling of lightning.

“Don’t start that,” Venus taunted. “What about the world finding out? Do you think they won’t notice if you crack the floor in half?”

“I think fear,” Zem told her, “is as good a place to start as any.”

They watched each other, then she turned away, a flounce of hair and wrists and shoulders and ankles.

“Miss? Are you out?” the dealer asked her.

“Go to hell!” Venus yelled at Zem, proud to use a modern expression she’d picked up.

“I don’t think so,” he retorted. He looked up, to where the light had returned to normal and the static discharge had faded from view.

Venus shoved herself away from the table. She shot one more glare toward Zem and then fastened on the first man passing nearby. “Come with me,” she said to him.

His name was David. He’d come to Vegas to marry his high school sweetheart. Neither one of them had ever slept with any other human being.

“Okay,” he said, and followed Venus like a love-struck puppy.

Back at the blackjack table, the dealer was just then laying out the next hand. The speed of things had recommenced, returned to normal.

“That girl seemed unhappy,” one of the players next to Zem commented. There was general agreement.

“She’s not easily satisfied,” Zem said. He smiled around at the nods of the other men.

Zem played three more hands, which he won, and then he wished the table good luck and left, too.

NEXT POST: ARRIVALS AND ENTRANCES (Monday 10/26)

Dragon In the Desert

This is a story about a dragon. Who followed Seth the Hero to Las Vegas after their meeting in San Francisco. (We’re backing up a bit.)

Of course, you know that by “meeting”, I mean battle. “Meeting” can mean get-together, it can mean negotiation, it can mean sporting event (as in, “Mr. McEnroe trounced him at their last meeting”), or, as in this case, it can mean knock-down, bloody, life or death battle.

Quite a lot for one simple word. English is like that. Some words work much harder than others, carry much more baggage. It isn’t fair. If there were a trade union for words, that would be the first issue they’d tackle. That, and the to, too, and two debacle, but let’s not open that can of worms. Let’s just say, these would, undoubtedly, be the subjects of the word union’s first meeting.

But back to our story. Dragons generally don’t follow heroes, unless they’re intending to eat them. Heroes don’t really follow dragons, either, unless they’re stalking. So stalking would make sense. Hunting. Tracking. Either way.

This wasn’t stalking. This was following.

Which was odd. But what else do dragons have to do with their time, anyway? They live long lives. They don’t have careers. So it followed him. Out of curiosity.

They were well-matched, too, Seth and this dragon. Just not in the usual way. Not according to the classic hero/dragon fairy tale paradigm of strong hero/preeminent monster. The meeting of opposites, perfectly balanced adversaries.

Well, this isn’t much of a fairy tale.

So therefore: the dragon had followed Seth away from San Francisco, along the coast, turned, with him, its back on the ocean, arrived in Las Vegas and taken up residence in a neon sign.

Not really residence. After all, it didn’t know how long it would be staying. That depended on its hero. It didn’t move its things in, send out change-of-address forms, and call the cable company to turn on its tv. It just came to rest gently on a flat surface and grabbed an edge with one claw. And then it folded its wings and there it was– in residence.

And this was not your ordinary neon sign, you realize. Not anything small and forgettable like you might see in front of a bar in Iowa or anywhere. This was one of those Vegas Strip behemoths, those monolithic structures that tower over the street, one in front of each huge hotel. I’ve called it “neon” but actually they’re full of neon and light bulbs and sign boards and bells and whistles and sometimes year-round fireworks. There are whole buildings that require less design and engineering than these signs. The Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge put together might not have incorporated their complexity. They are simultaneous advertisement, news relay, and Mardi Gras float. They are meant to be inescapable. They are intended to lure you inside with the wonders they present and promise. And they obviously work, they do indeed lure people in to their respective hotels, or Las Vegas wouldn’t exist.

They are also, quite literally, the size of a house. An actual house. Not a particularly small one, either. Picture a four bedroom two-story perched up on a telephone pole and decorated to within an inch of its life for Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and every other holiday you’ve ever heard of all at once– decorated with a budget in the millions and access to every cutting-edge lighting and display effect out there. And now erase any hint of taste or subtlety. Got it?

So the dragon chose well, and once he’d alighted he curled up in his neon sign and relaxed, content with the knobbiness and the metal and the warmth of it all around him. It was good, for a dragon. If Freud had been a dragon, or if there were dragon Freudians, there might be suggestions of womb-like-ness to the sign. Luckily for all of us, no dragon ever born has had time for Freud.

So the sign was good, for the dragon. That was all it needed. It was a good lair, a good residence. For as long as Seth stayed in Las Vegas.

But two days later, as Seth was still caught up in adventures in the city (all above-board and respectable, I hasten to promise. He may have been in Sin City but he was still a hero, with all the nobility, high morals, and propriety which that word carries.) And after forty-eight hours of unrelieved reposing, our dragon got bored. Curling up in a nice, huge, hot sign is all well and good, of course, and very pleasant if you’re fond of heat and quiet and solitude, which are exactly in a dragon’s line, but eventually even the most sedentary winged creature needs to soar a little. (Birds fly, you understand. Flapping and squawking. Dragons soar.) So it decided to explore some. To stretch its wings. To find a bit of distraction. And then to curl up here again in its nice hot, knobby sign.

That is not how things happened for it, of course. What kind of boring story would that be?

The dragon opened its wings and took off, floated soundlessly, moved its wings once ever-so-negligently to climb, and rose like a stealth bomber to the air high above Las Vegas. Very apt, its shape, its movement. The real stealth bombers flew near Las Vegas while the design was in development, although from the ground they look less like dragons than like big black kites from Hell, or like flying barn doors.

The dragon angled and moved out over the desert. Kited over the Strip and let the lights fall behind it a bit. And so it came quite quickly to the desert, to the place that Las Vegas hides and covers.

It can be amazing how close “the desert” is in Las Vegas. Even to the center of Las Vegas. Everywhere, it encroaches. In other places, one doesn’t think of the outer environment as “encroaching”. But in Southern Nevada the land is an adversary, something alien to life and human things and human places. The desert encroaches on Las Vegas to remind us that we don’t belong there. That we are unwelcome. It’s like aphids trying to make a living on the underside of a plastic plant leaf. They might do it, for awhile, but the next time the plant gets cleaned– sprayed with ammonia or glass cleaner or whatever one sprays plastic plant leaves with to clean them– bye-bye aphids. A dead herd of aphids, all in one fell swoop. Over. Done with.

It’s like that in Las Vegas. One day the wind and weather will overcome all those facades, and the neon and the palm trees and the pretty lawns in front of the eighty billion tract houses, and everything will disappear, and then Las Vegas will become a legend and human life will move to other places.

Do you know where all the enormous, Ancient-Egypt-style sets for the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton version of Cleopatra are to this day? Well, neither does anyone else. They were built somewhere out in the Mojave, and after the film crews left they sat there in the middle of nowhere, and the wind and weather came and now no one can find them. There’s got to be something left of some of them, even after all this time, and there are movie buffs and rabid Elizabeth Taylor fans who would sell their souls for the tiniest souvenir from their plywood remains. But they’re gone, lost like your great-grandmother’s youth. And they’ll stay lost until some small-time archeologist who can’t get the grants necessary to go dig anywhere overseas for real ancient wonders stumbles on them and Hollywood archivists the world over rejoice.

Las Vegas will be like that– the hotels and mega-resorts are barely more than movie-sets, anyway. The gigantic signs are much more stable and solid than the buildings, and that’s just because they have to hold up all those light bulbs. Maybe if the city were abandoned for a decade the hotels would disappear and just the signs would remain, which might be interesting in a surreal and spooky way.

And then they’d disappear, too, and pretty quickly, because most of them are top-heavy and cantilevered and ungainly and just generally unlikely, and Nature doesn’t like those things unless she, herself, creates them, so she’d have it in for those signs, I can promise you. And then there would be nothing but another patch of empty desert, which is exactly what would make Nature happy.

Do you suppose this would spawn a latter-day Atlantis myth? Something about the highly developed desert dwellers who displeased heaven and so were swallowed up by the sands and will return someday? Do you supposed Las Vegas and Las Vegans could pass into our cultural memory as “highly evolved”?

On the other hand, do you suppose that in actuality Atlantis was nothing more than a big resort, a big pleasure dome, and that its sinking is in fact the only thing that gave it its aura of wonder?

It’s something to think about.

The dragon had thought at first it might find a sheep or two (what else are dragons supposed to eat, besides maybe heroes or virgins? Or virgin heroes– two for the price of one, so to speak. Sort of like a chocolate cupcake that also gives you lots of vitamins.) So it kept an eye out for a herd of sheep.

But have you ever seen the Mojave Desert? What sheep do eek out their existence in it live on tiny farms at the very edges, where the foothills provide some shade and shelter, if not much sustenance. Around Las Vegas, which is not exactly renowned for farms, remember, the land supports very little larger than a rabbit.

There is an ostrich farm, of course. It is owned by an ex-showgirl, a retired dancer, a displayer of feathers, herself. Her name is Linda Spinks, and Spinks raises ostriches and sells the feathers to small-time producers who dye them and use them to decorate their own dancers in shows in places like Aruba and Orlando, Florida. Spinks has quite a nice life, quite a successful one. For a woman who made her living topless till she turned forty-two, which is quite an advanced age for showgirls and therefore something of an achievement in itself. Most ex-showgirls seem to retire into real estate, or as doctors’ wives, or into teaching ballet, if they’re British. No other showgirl that I’ve ever heard of raises ostriches.

But our dragon didn’t even see the ostriches, because Spinks’ farm was on the other side of town from where it flew, and it didn’t eat anything else because a jack rabbit would hardly be worth the effort for a great big dragon, and the quail just weren’t appetizing and it didn’t see anything else that was. This not eating wasn’t really a problem for the dragon– dragons don’t eat very often. They are the original biological conservationists. They can go months without eating, and a good thing, too, or the whole world would have run out of virgins and heroes and sheep a long time ago. Or maybe of people altogether, since virgins grow up to become mothers, and thus produce more babies, including baby heroes and more baby virgins. But if the mothers are eaten when they’re still virgins, themselves, before they’ve had a chance to contribute to that next generation, then things could become very sparse very quickly, populationally speaking. So it is probably no accident, evolutionarily, that dragons don’t have big appetites.

Anyway, it wasn’t that the dragon was hungry. It was only that the thought had occurred to it. The mood for food had crossed its mind, as something to consider and look for. Not eating was annoying, now, but not a problem.

And this particular dragon didn’t think annoyance or any other unhappy emotion was worth spending very much time over, so it didn’t. It just soared some more, and went higher.

The high desert air was both still and moving at the same time– like a deep pool of water in a broader river. Still, quiet, removed from the tumult all around and yet also swirling, recirculating, not cut off, but at its own pace, separated from the rushing going on above and below. The dragon rode the peace and calm of it, soared over desert.

“Who are you?”

Voices can carry over deserts. Just like over water. Just one of the many ways, another one of the many ways, that desert and water can be compared. Like that 60s song about nameless horses, where sands turn to seas.

Never mind that last bit. Forget you heard it. No more pop-song references.

Voices carry over water, voices carry over sand. Desert and sea, water and sand. Distances. They can be deceiving.

The dragon pulled up higher, kited around again. It did not answer.

“Who are you?”

A whisper, a growl. A voice from the sands, themselves. A sound from the ground: grainy, rough. Quiet. Yet it carried.

“Who are you?”

“Faraway,” the dragon breathed. A growl from the air, a sound from the upper atmosphere.

Soft, long, slow: “Far away.”

The dragon sank lower. Allowed itself to sink. Lowered as a swimmer into deeper water.

“Who are you?” it returned.

A sigh. A sound like pebbles skittering.

Don’t let this get too poetic-seeming for you. It was a dark night. The air was clear and full of dry white moonlight. The breeze was steady, busy carrying stray sounds here and there.

It was another ordinary Mojave night, in other words. Perfectly normal. All this whispering, moaning– even the simplest sounds, the most ordinary moments, can seem foreign, can seem exotic in a desert night. It doesn’t make them so. It makes them seem so.

Romantic. Extraordinary. But that doesn’t mean they’re anything special.

“Who are you?” Faraway said it again, and this time came an answer.

“My mother was called Stealth.” Which didn’t exactly answer the question.

“Who are you?”

“She flew this sky over the desert. She soared high, till she became less than a shadow against the sunlight, and when she returned her wings had become coated with white ice.”

“That is called frost,” the dragon, our dragon, Faraway, said. Living near humans for a long time, he had become more concerned with words, particularly human words. He had become knowledgeable about them. Most dragons wouldn’t be.

It’s not that other beings, dragons or whatever, don’t pay attention to the human words for things, or the human concern for having a right word for everything. It may be that those distinctions– what is the right word for the white accumulation of frozen water vapor– are not important to other beings. Not that they don’t care. Just that they don’t see it.

Language is a measure of what’s important to us. Take the myth that claims there are a hundred words for snow in Eskimo . It’s untrue– even Eskimos don’t think snow is that important (or maybe they just couldn’t think of a hundred different things to say about it.) On the other hand, it is probably true that no Eskimo language has a word for palm tree.

Again, Faraway asked, “Who are you?”

Some things are important. Finding out whom we’re talking to, for instance. Names. Getting our questions answered. The dragon didn’t mind repeating itself.

“I am called Sage.”

“Sage.”

A moment, while Faraway circled lower. Still flying, but closer to the ground. The action– soaring– hadn’t changed. Only the appearance. Smaller circles. Coming closer.

“Are you wise?”

“Sage. Wise.” A lighter tone. “I know this desert. I know it well. I am wise in desert ways.” Thoughtful. Amused. “A play on my name.”

Faraway circled even lower. If there had been trees, he would have been brushing their branches. “Let me find you. Tell me about this desert.”

“I am right here.” And so she was. She was underneath him, lying quiet among the sands. She had blended in with them completely till he’d suddenly seen her fully. Unexpected. Unpredicted. Another full-size dragon, the color of the Mojave Desert.

“Sage,” Faraway said, coming to rest. His heavy claws gripped sand and broken pieces of glass and sagebrush branches and whatever was lost, mixed into the desert. “Tell me.”

She blew her breath across the sand, causing a skittering of pebbles, a tiny horizontal avalanche.

“My mother was called Stealth,” she said. “She came to these deserts before any others. She flew the skies here, she spiraled up till she disappeared and I feared she was gone, I feared she had never existed. She returned days later, often. She soared higher and farther than any others knew or saw. She flew in secret, far above where other eyes had ever seen. When she was gone it was as if she had never been, as if she’d disappeared.

“I thought she was fine– fine. And I thought she had a fine and wonderful name.”

A pause. She breathed again. Another skitter.

“What was her death?”

“I thought she would die in secret, flying silent and secret. I thought she would die in the dark, no thing seeing her. I did not know that her name was a human thing, too. That it would tear her, that it would pierce her, rip her, fly through her, and leave her in pieces falling in the air. There were dark pieces on the sand, spread across the valley. There were dark things spread by the wind, and she had never screamed that her death was approaching. There was no scream in the air, only silence and shreds of her.”

“A dragon’s name is its death. It is always its death.”

There was a sigh. A pause.

“So I have made myself to look like sand and sagebrush. I have changed to be the desert. I always thought my name told death by desert. Death by sage, death among the desert things. But now you come and call me Sage and when you say it you mean wise. And so now I wonder. How will I die now? Will I be sage, or die by sage?”

“It is a beautiful name.”

“It is a beautiful name. All our names are beautiful. Yours is beautiful and confusing, mine is beautiful and double-meant, Stealth’s was beautiful and misleading. Are our deaths, then, beautiful deaths? Was my mother’s death a beautiful one?”

She had told it well. Told the story, told the memory well. Could that be beautiful? Could that make the thing itself beautiful?

“You are a sage of the desert,” Faraway told her.

“I fear that I am.”

And Faraway, after he had passed some time with Sage, flew back to the sign he had chosen, which was not the most famous of the Strip sign-behemoths (that honor belongs to the Stardust Hotel sign, which has been recognized, in studies, by everyone from Bolsheviks in Moscow to Aborigines in the Australian Outback. It sucks up more electricity each day than the entire country of Botswana, according to hotel brochures. The Stardust management seems to be proud of this.) Faraway’s chosen sign-hostel was particularly new and large, and he curled himself comfortably back into it.

On his way back to the sign and city he flew high, higher than before, and wheeled around the sky at elevations where the Strip looked like nothing more than a zipper of sparkles splitting the gown of the sand. And when he came lower he circumnavigated the whole city, and he took a different route back to his sign than the one he’d taken on his way out.

And he ate an ostrich along the way.

NEXT POST: WHEN GODS COLLIDE (Friday 10/23)

Up In The Croquet Wicket of the Gods

There was only one completely inexplicable moment on Testy and Rachel’s drive East. It happened in St. Louis, where they stopped for a day to look around after surviving the depredations of truck stop hamburgers and bouffant-haired waitresses through the wastelands of Nevada and the barrenness of Utah and the geographical curlicues of Colorado and the flatness of Kansas. St. Louis was the place to stop, Testy announced, rather than Kansas City before or Chicago further along because it offered them– indeed, it featured centrally– its famous Arch, which she’d never had a chance to visit before and which she refused to miss this time.

“I have a thing for arches, honey,” she explained briefly.

Rachel, stupefied by the mile after mile of corn, the sticky weather, and the endless heaving roll of the Drag Racer, was just glad for a break.

“What do we do now?” she asked hours later, when they’d spent the whole day exploring Downtown, which meant touring one historic courthouse with a spectacular domed mural overhanging its rotunda, and hanging out in the classic railway station that had been converted to a mall.

They had worked their way toward the Mississippi and thus the Arch, and now stood nearly under it, staring at its steely sides and gaping up at its great height. It hung over the river front like the world’s largest tuning fork re-fashioned into an upside-down horseshoe. Its metal glinted with the falling sun and had blinded them now and again as they’d walked closer.

“Go up,” Testy told her. “Or go down and then go up. There’s a visitors’ center underneath. I mean underground. Really underneath. Then there are little cars that climb the legs. I read about ‘em. See?” She brandished a guidebook at Rachel.

“Okay,” the ex-showgirl agreed doubtfully. She felt decidedly uncertain whether this was a good idea– to cram herself into some undersized gondola and ride miles upward inside something that looked far too insubstantial to fit human beings. But she followed Testy gamely.

The cars were like little aspirins, and each one had five miniature seats that turned and swivelled as they spun their way up through the Arch. At the top, Testy led the way up one final set of stairs, and they found themselves in a narrow hallway lined with portholes, cheap carpet, and hordes of children. The million-dollar observation deck hanging tenuously above the Mississippi’s concrete waterfront turned out to be indistinguishable from an access corridor backstage at home.

“This is it?” Rachel wondered.

“Don’t judge,” Testy admonished. “Let’s check out the view.”

They pressed their faces to the layered glass and stared East over the Mississippi, and then West over the city. They marveled at how little there was worth looking at from there.

“Is this it?” Rachel asked Testy.

“Hm. Not so thrilling, is it?” the drag queen replied. “Kind of hazy. And not the greatest view, either.”

Rachel nodded and stepped away from the western windows to look across the river again.
And something dark flew through below the Arch. She caught a glimpse of it just as she stepped up to an empty porthole. She pressed closer and shoved her nose against the glass, practically climbing onto the waist-high, child-friendly shelf to see.

Nothing. The sky, river, and warehouse district on the far bank were empty. She wondered, a second later when she had her next coherent thought, whether she should be afraid.
Rachel retraced her steps and peered out over Testy’s shoulder once again.

“Did you see that?” she asked.

“See what?”

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t know how to describe it. Something dark. Like a small plane, but more massive. Like a huge bat. It flew right underneath us. Through the Arch.”

Testy let a moment pass, and then she reached up to lay a palm on Rachel’s forehead. “Are you feeling okay, honey?”

Rachel squeezed her eyes shut and nodded vigorously. “Yes, I feel fine. I saw something. Just for an instant. It must have flown out this way. Weren’t you watching?”

“Maybe it was just something that blew up from the park below, and it looked big to you because you didn’t see it clearly. Some paper, an old box or something.”

“I know what a box looks like.”

“Okay, okay. But nothing flew out underneath on this side, honey. I mean, a few years ago this guy flew a glider through here, and got arrested, but I’d notice if I saw that, believe me.”

Rachel frowned, furrowed her brow. “I saw something.” She looked around the observation deck. None of the other people around, a couple dozen in all, seemed to have noticed anything.

“Maybe we’ll see something from back on the ground,” she said doubtfully. “Can we go back down?”

“Oh yeah. Nothing going on up here, anyway. And the top of the world’s biggest paper clip is probably not the safest place to be if there are going to be mysterious dark objects flitting in and out underneath.”

Rachel was already walking toward the far end of the observation platform, where a line was formed to catch the next aspirin tablet going down.

NEXT POST: DRAGON IN THE DESERT (Monday 10/19/09)

A Moll and the Night Visitors

Miss Honoré Jerques barreled through the backstage hallways of the Extravaganza! Theater, scattering dancers and singers right and left. She scowled. She glared at everyone she passed. Her pupils snapped. Molten lava was waiting there, barely held in by her knit brows. She was ready to let it burst on someone. She licked her lips, tasting melting bone and shrinking skin as it shriveled into an undifferentiated, indefinable, revolting sludge when she set it loose.

Miss Honoré chain-smoked cigarette after unfiltered cigarette in solitary, foul, inhuman inhalations. She reduced each one to ash and flicked its residue away. A trail of fluttering paper fragments littered the hall behind her like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. Except, in this case, it was the witch, not the children, who marked her passage.

Miss Honoré Jerques had just received a visit from a previously winning and charming young Human Resources executive named John Windall. John Windall was definitively, until his audience with Honoré, on his way up; he was famed at the Grand Hotel for his good disposition, his solid confidence, his knowledge of every Resource subject that even vaguely touched on Human. It was unfair, unjust, a travesty and sin that after this one night, he’d be reduced forever to a slump-shouldered, shambling hulk of a junior executive, never again promoted or transferred, who’d spend the next forty years cowering behind his three-quarter size desk in his windowless office deep in the bowels of the Grand Hotel, where the only light was sickly fluorescent and the only wall color was nicotine-tan. His hour with Honoré would leave him with facial tics so virulent, his individual features would appear to be wrestling with each other. He’d manifest shaking spells to shatter coffee cups by the dozen.

John Windall had the wholly undeserved duty of informing Honoré that Nadja Kluckenheim, twenty-year-old dancer on Rachel Ferguson’s former row, had become pregnant and been ordered by her doctor to stop dancing.

Rachel’s row, in the days after her and Testy’s exit, had not faired well. The girls had arrived for work the next night and found an unfamiliar and unfriendly new dresser named Lina bulking massively all over Testy’s old chair. Lina had been a star women’s ice hockey player from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain when it still draped half of Europe. She’d fallen deeply and unrequitedly in love with a sportscaster, defected, and then found herself stranded in a shockingly non-socialist regime where her language wasn’t spoken and her skills weren’t valued. She had a low opinion of dancers and strictly Spartan ideas about how much help they deserved getting dressed and on stage.

Linda, in particular, had been resentful of the change in regime. She’d exhumed every rumor she’d ever heard or made up about Testy Lesbiana’s past, and then she’d gone on to badmouth Rachel and announce that she had no idea why Honoré had signed her for the past year, anyway. Rachel was obviously getting old, and ‘Orrible Honoré had either been hot for her to keep her on or else was getting soft in her old age.

Unfortunately for Linda, ‘Orrible Honoré herself was passing by when she made that announcement, stomping through the girls’ rooms in an effort to terrorize anyone else who was considering disappearing in the night. She paused around the corner as she heard Linda’s gravelly complaints begin, and made her entrance just at the point when the words “hot to lick her pussy” were uttered. Linda was escorted out before Big Bows.

Heddy, who’d been working in Vegas for a decade, was suddenly set upon as she parked her car the very next night. Two men, who turned out to be immigration officials, took her by the arms and hustled her away, and the cast of Extravaganza! was thus tutored in the evils of working for ten years on an expired student visa. The row of six showgirls was thus reduced by half, and the three survivors caroomed uncertainly around their suddenly uncrowded and too-quiet dressing space. They moved their cosmetics and costumes closer together at the furthest end from their Teutonic mistress, spoke in hushed voices, and took care not to complain.

Now, two nights after Heddy’s unintentional exodus, Honoré had been called on her office phone an hour before first show began. A junior executive was coming to talk to her. He’d been in conference with one of her dancers, and not only had he taken on the task of relating her regrettable, though exciting, news to Honoré, but after hearing Nadja’s stories about the tenor of her work experience backstage at Extrav!, he felt a discussion with Miss Honoré was in order. Surely, he told himself, she had no idea that her subordinates felt so overpowered by her. Surely, she couldn’t know how threatening her personal management style was. She was older, perhaps she’d just retained a few too many habits from her earlier days of running shows. He’d offer her the chance to attend training sessions, he thought. He’d educate her as to the most up-to-date theories of directing a staff and getting the most out of them without resorting to intimidation.

Honoré, he learned very quickly, knew all about modern theories. Moreover, she had her own theory to tell him, which was that up-to-date directors of shoddy staffs shunned intimidation only because they weren’t up to it. Miss Honoré, as she demonstrated admirably and immediately, was. If John Windall had been a small, imported car constructed of brightly-painted aluminum and plastic panels, then Honoré was the fully-loaded, diesel-powered highway Goliath that ran him down at full speed. She flattened him, tore him to unrecognizable shreds, chewed through his paint job, melted his plastic parts, and coldly crumpled whatever wouldn’t turn to liquid and run away.

But the end result was still clear. Despite her personal feelings, and despite the fact that Extravaganza! was on the verge of a contract change, anyway, Honoré was going to have to hold emergency auditions and get someone in to– as she screamed at the Head of Wardrobe later that night after she’d watched first show limp along with practically one whole line of dancers missing—fill those goddamned costumes.

NEXT POST: THE CROQUET WICKET OF THE GODS (Friday 10/16/09)

Good To Be A God

Build me a temple, Zem had ordered Magnolia. And she had done so, or at least made plans to do so. She had, in fact, laid out a scheme to turn the whole damn valley into one big temple, deconstructing and scattering it up and down Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street and for miles around the edges of the city.

Vegas had always been the home of more churches, per capita, than any other mid-sized city in the U.S. They hung like spiritual Spanish Moss on the city’s edifice of greed and prurience. Faith fed on sin, and in turn sheltered it from outside forces of destruction. It was a neat little symbiosis.

But now Zem would be bridging that gap. A little reward, a little punishment… just what Vegas had always offered. As always, in Vegas, the results would be immediate. But the stakes would be a lot higher than ever before.

In each hotel, all up and down the Strip, and on Fremont Street, and out in the suburbs, would be a shrine, or room, or attraction, where specific pilgrims would be directed, depending on their desire. Blessings, healings, and wisdom would be on offer, providing the needy pilgrim were willing and able to fulfill a complex series of moves and rituals, making requests at one site and paying tribute at another, completing a series of trials that might have made Hercules cry. Zem liked it.

Anyone wishing the blessing of, say, a successful pregnancy, would be required to make their plea at a lovely blue and pink-veined quartz temple sitting just off the lobby of the Buccaneer’s Pier Casino, somewhat far north on the Strip. Then, if their petition was in order, they’d be sent to gather an offering of flowers and various baby items (conveniently available from the gift shops of several different hotels, but not the Buccaneer’s Pier) and deliver it to the pregnancy temple’s sister site, a garish found-object construct that was to be the new centerpiece of Gotham’s poker room. Later, there would be continued offerings at three other satellite altars in locations all around the city, interspersed with fertility rituals performed outside the Bal Harbor, which had been struggling for years to settle on a successful entertainment policy and would now have that problem taken care of. Len, down there at the Bal, could finally breathe a sigh of relief and convert the old showroom to a buffet.

After all the duties had been fulfilled, and all the offerings supplied, and when at least a week had passed to give the god time to consider, the desirous mother would return to the Buccaneer’s Pier to get her answer. She might leave Vegas knowing that her dreams would come true. Or, she might slump back to the airport, knowing for certain that no hope was left.

In either case, she’d know. She’d know for sure. She could go buy a bassinet or go find some new dream to chase, but she wouldn’t have to waste time anymore on wanting. A better result than any doctor could offer her, for Zem’s money.

The process would be time-consuming and complex, and extremely costly for the more indulgent petitions. Any mistakes would require starting over from the beginning. The system assured both that dilettantes would be eliminated from the pool of pilgrims, and that all the properties in town got their fair share of business. The final design, Zem could see, would send devoted pilgrims scurrying from place to place according to their means and desperation. He laughed out loud as he traced the patterns on the map Magnolia had handily included.
Magnolia figured that wealth-seekers would be more likely to gamble than, say, bereaved mothers, so they were sent to the biggest, highest-limit casinos on the Strip. The terminally ill might be sent on two routes– the ambulatory ones around the outskirts of the city, to the more outrageous low-rent venues on the theory they’d have nothing left to lose and would therefore whoop it up at those threadbare, unpolished properties. The comatose were to be wheeled through smaller houses up and down Fremont by their relatives. At first, Zem assumed Magnolia had succumbed to an out-of-character attack of pity in that instance. But then he saw her notes and grinned. The sick bed attendants would be unlikely to spend money at the tables, but they could be used as entertainment for spectators. Magnolia suggested gurney races, and contests where blindfolded relatives had to grope their way through dozens of mixed-up beds in the street to find their ancient uncle or ailing mother. With just a small adjustment to one city ordinance that forbade gambling out on sidewalks, wagers could be made and the money split among all the houses.

And when the time came for a final answer to any given petition, of course simple yeses and noes were only the beginnings of the possible answers. If a desperate woman begging for a baby displeased Zem somehow (and there were oh, so many ways), she might be told he’d shut her womb forever. Those sick-bed attendants might be sentenced to a lifetime of serving their comatose relative, if Zem chose to sustain life but ignore any other recovery. People were so careless in the ways they phrased their petitions, and so unprepared for a deity who thought like a lawyer. Zem chuckled and licked his lips as he thought of it. Humans liked to think the world played by their rules, that they were in control. The few who’d seen through that delusion usually settled, instead, on the idea that no one was in charge, the world ran blithely by itself, beholden to nothing more coherent than the mathematics of chaos. Imagine their surprise to discover there was, in fact, an Ultimate Authority, and that He could be found in Las Vegas. And he played by no rules at all.

Another martini, another vodka-soaked olive. He hadn’t even heard the bartender come or go, this time.

There would be healing founts at Bombay and Nero’s. Bombay’s fountains would heal from illness, while Nero’s would see to birth defects. Resurrection had been set aside for the Galaxy– which famously had, as the Goats were so often reminded, by far the oldest demographic in town. Magnolia had come up with a very impressive, slightly tomblike setting for the resurrection ceremony, with directions for lots of flowers and wreaths and even organ music.
Zem smiled. Occasionally, he and Magnolia shared an astringent humor. Maybe he’d make Sam and Dan act as temple attendants, forcing them to spend the rest of their days shifting flowers and speaking in low voices to bereaved, hopeful families. If they could stay in human form long enough, at least. He’d recently had to put the goat charm on automatic. The boys just couldn’t seem to remember to behave, and he’d be damned if he’d follow them around like a divine babysitter, smacking their hands whenever they reached too far. He’d heard Dan and Sam were now spending about equal time as men and beasts. They seemed to be growing increasingly comfortable in either role.

An oracle was in store for the new Nile Hotel, that silly pyramid. All its monolithic architecture demanded it. Zem scribbled on that page, too, choosing from two alternatives and approving the plan to clear the center of the casino and build a small temple there– small in terms of square footage, but four stories high, made of pure marble, and designed so that its architecture created constant airflow and sound effects the Wizard of Oz would have given his eyeteeth for. Steam pits underlay the temple to provide the “breath of the god” that gave the resident oracle his or her visions. They necessitated moving a kitchen and two service bars, but such was the price of doing things right. Zem had made it clear to all involved he wanted no half measures.

The other temples, page after page of them, delighted him and made him laugh. Either Magnolia had learned his taste, or else she had the seeds of godhood in her after all.

He considered that thought seriously when he saw the plans for his Hall of Audience.

He knew some of the pilgrims would demand a place where they could talk to their god directly. They’d want answers, information only he could provide. Some of them would no doubt want eternal philosophy or insight into the true nature of the universe. Others would want petty, personal things like vengeance, which was all right, too. In any case, it all came back to availability, so he’d told Magnolia to build him a Hall where his worshipers could approach him, one on one– otherwise he’d be no better than Jehovah or Buddha or any of those other MIA deities who’d infiltrated and stolen the world from him in the first place. He’d said she’d just better make damn sure his Hall was fitting to its purpose. He wanted any pilgrim he was faced with to have proved him or herself unquestionably worthy two or three times over, at least.

She'd outdone herself. He found himself almost eager for the first dumb, small-minded request for an audience, just to get to inhabit this Hall.

These Vegas types really did have a flair for drama, he thought.

The Heroic Pilgrims would begin with various Trials. The Trials themselves were random, so no one could possibly be prepared in advance. Magnolia knew that word would spread, and potential heroes would soon have books, coaches, and probably training camps available to improve their chances. She foresaw a whole new industry; she’d already incorporated three separate dummy corporations to set up and sell just such camps and training, thereby adding yet another layer of profits. But on the Vegas end, she wanted to make each individual pilgrim work as hard as possible, and prove his or her wits as well as daring. Potential tasks included reversing the flow of traffic along the Strip at noon, diving to the bottom of Hoover Dam for a single, inscribed pebble, and climbing up unaided to the Hall of Audience itself.

And that was, perhaps, the most daunting task of all. The Hall of Audience was set atop the Vegas Spire.

The Spire had begun life as the Vegas Needle, and like needles the world over from Cleopatra’s to Seattle’s, it was a tower, a single cylinder sticking up from the earth, with a fat, revolving ring on top. But after limping along with minimal profits from its opening in 1981 to its sale in 1990, it was closed, gutted, and completely reconstructed, and after that it looked like nothing else on earth.

There was a central column, and six curving support legs twisted around it. They held a stack of hotel rooms, meeting spaces, and restaurants on top, and contained escape stairs numbering in the millions. Atop its supports, the shape of the Vegas Spire proper flared up and out to loom asymmetrically, thousands of feet above the earth. It had been called a concrete lily, a champagne flute for Godzilla, and the ugliest piece of architecture anywhere on earth, but nobody could call it unimpressive. It was a huge, carved mountain in the air, hovering and ready to crash down and make a crater that would suck in all of Vegas, all of the desert, all of the Southwest in one gulp.

All sorts of legends had accrued to the Spire even before its Grand Reopening, just as small clouds gathered around its columns even when the rest of the valley sky was clear. Three architects were said to have gone mad designing it. Workmen were rumored to have died by the dozen, their disappearances hushed up by bribes that cost as much as the structure itself. The Spire was said to be a missile, a doomsday bomb approved by the U.S. President just in case the Cold War rekindled. Nostradamus was supposed to have prophesied about the Spire.
Acrophobes had been known to vomit or completely pass out at their first sight of it, even when they stood miles away.

Zem’s Hall sat atop the Spire’s slanted roof, so far above the earth that individual pedestrians on the street directly underneath could not be distinguished– not that any pilgrim was likely to be insane enough to lean over and look.

The Spire’s owner was insisting on a mountain of releases and disclaimers for every applicant, and also suggesting a weight requirement of 110 pounds as a bare minimum. Smaller pilgrims, he said, would be swept off by the wind.

To Zem’s mind, if you wanted to seek a god, you took your chances and hoped for the best. But he understood that in the modern age his philosophy might not stand up in court, so he signed off on all the plans and legal rigmarole anyway. He planned to do a little sweeping, himself. Heroic Pilgrims who bored the god, or who called him from other pastimes more diverting, might find that the daunting tasks required to get to the Hall were as nothing when compared to the challenge of surviving their quick exit. Zem chuckled at that image, too. He’d never thought of himself as a cruel god. But one’s followers needed to learn their limits, and the limits of their god’s patience. Human self-indulgence, as demonstrated by a failure to amuse one’s deity, was definitely beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

Zem rang for another drink and chuckled.

It was good to be a god, he thought. Even in this Age, when people thought they didn't need one.

NEXT POST: A MOLL AND SOME NIGHT VISITORS (Monday 10/12/09)

Queens of the Road

“I remember one day when Plato came over to my place for makeup tips. They still teach you kids about Plato, right?” Testy glanced over at Rachel, miles away on the passenger side of her infamous Detroit convertible yacht-on-wheels. “The philosopher?” Testy prompted. “Well–” she corrected herself, “drag queen-slash-philosopher.”

Kansas was, Testy Lesbiana had warned Rachel beforehand, “A whole lotta nothin’. And they spread it out real flat and open for you so you can see just exactly how little there is to it.”
Testy and Rachel had left Vegas driving North and West, threading the state of Nevada from its point to its triangular heart to join Interstate 80 in Reno. Delusions of the frontier spirit still persisted there, and wagon wheels and cowboy hats abounded. From Reno, they’d sailed East through the countless doughy mountain ranges of the Silver State, natural spiritual home of anti-technology survivalists and rotting trailer homes. They’d hit Utah without pausing, watching the Great Salt Lake slink by their windows as flat and white as a batch of spackle. And then they’d hit the joy of the trip, the jumbled, tumbled western approach to the Rockies, where Testy had insisted on taking every out-of-the-way detour and scenic route she could find, and Rachel had spent the time dizzy with height and confusion and sensory overload.

“Shouldn’t we be hurrying?” she asked.

“Nah. Why bother? We’ve got all the time in the world, babe, and all the world to spend time in. Come on–there’s another scenic overlook!”

But once they passed Denver, the drama quotient of their drive fell as flat as a bad souffle. The Rocky Mountains might be a stage set. They have only one side. Having heroically crested their heights, Testy and Rachel suddenly found themselves rolling down one great, tilted plain, no crags or peaks or even bumps in sight. Shortly, the cornfields began, which indicated, Testy said, that Colorado had surrendered utterly, and let itself be watered down into the boringness of Kansas with no fight whatsoever.

“Disappointing, but what can you say?” she shrugged. “You can’t even tell we’re going downhill. You might never find out at all if this road didn’t eventually fall off into the Mississippi when it gets to St. Louis.” She shrugged again. “And don’t get excited about that, babe,” she continued. “The Mississippi is the biggest, slowest, muddiest river there ever was since the Nile used to flood each year. I remember telling Pharoah–”

So far, Rachel had heard stories about Testy’s misadventures in Rome with Nero (“Terrible musician– I burned the place down just to keep him from the sheet music!”), posing for the Statue of Liberty (“What real woman would know what to do with all that draping?”), shopping with Napoleon (“Great guy, but a bigger clothes horse than I was, and let me tell you, France has always been the Holy Land for drag divas!”), and generally hanging out with Betsy Ross (“That flag? It was supposed to be a gown—I would have been the best-dressed bitch of the whole Eighteenth Century if that silly dame hadn’t suddenly felt all patriotic—what a waste”), and the dinosaurs. Rachel felt pretty confident that that one, at least, wasn’t wholly reliable. They’d been on the road three days.

“So Plato said to me,” the former dresser went on, “‘Testy’, he said, ‘I know this is the dawn of civilization and therefore pretty damn primitive, as far as glamour goes. We can’t even get a decent sparkle eyeshadow in this century! But tell me how you do it, how do you, La Lesbiana, find ways to make a toga look so fabulous?’ That’s what he asked me.”

“Plato?” Rachel clarified.

“Don’t doubt me,” her friend told her. “So, I said to him–” And off she rambled. Between and among the stories had been various thrills and chills, at least for Rachel. Testy seemed monumentally unbothered, no matter what happened. They’d blown a tire in the middle of the night between Elko and Salt Lake, which was the single most desolate stretch of highway Rachel had ever imagined. “Don’t worry, doll, someone will come along,” Testy assured her, and, indeed, someone did. A cute young guy pulled up in a tow truck within fifteen minutes, his headlights appearing out of nowhere over the last rise they’d passed. He’d jumped from his cab with his tools already in his hands, proceeded to jack up the Drag Racer, trade tires, comment heartily on how great these old vehicles were, how they’d run through anything, how if Testy ever decided to sell the car to look him up, and how if they needed any water, snacks, or coffee to see them through the desert, he could give directions to the best truck stop. Rachel thanked him profusely and Testy did so graciously, and he bobbed his head and disappeared into his truck.

“That was lucky!” Rachel exclaimed as they settled back into the car and headed off again.

“Yeah. I’d have hated to get my fingers all greasy doing that, myself,” Testy agreed.

“You mean we could have? I thought we were helpless!” Rachel was shocked. “Why did we wait around? What if he hadn’t come?”

Testy grinned at her, her teeth glowing in the darkness as if plugged in for the purpose. “Angels always show up when you need ‘em, hon. At least they do when I need ‘em! Now, where were we?” And she started in on the tale of how she’d been a geisha several hundred years ago, when the first white men sailed into Tokyo Harbor.

Any day now, Rachel thought, they’d get to the time that Testy and her good friend, Neil Armstrong, strolled along the moon together. Till then, she’d just let the words wash over her, and settle back into the monstrous car’s upholstery and half doze her way across America, as hundreds of miles turned to thousands and the desert turned to fields and cities. And Testy kept on talking.

“Linda must be in class right now,” she mused one afternoon, leaning her head back and watching the rows of corn rush by as if they had an A-list premiere to get to.

“Yes,” she heard Testy agree without any inflection whatsoever. “Don’t start missing it, babe. Don’t do that.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Rachel promised. She blinked rapidly. “I was just... thinking,” she finished.

“Thinking never got anybody anywhere, as my old friend Albert Einstein told me. Great guy– but no sense of style.”

Testy reached over and patted Rachel’s hand while she still stared out at the world's most redundant National Geographic special outside her window. She refused to even acknowledge the enormous lump that had somehow emerged in her throat without warning.

NEXT POST: IT’S GOOD TO BE GOD (Friday 10/9)

The Second Story

This is a story about a hero and his travels. Our Hero Seth went to Egypt, which is a strange place for a hero to go. Egypt is not known for heroes, unless you count Moses, who is really of a different category. Altogether. Then again, Seth didn’t really go to Egypt, he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, to the Egyptian wing. The Metropolitan Museum has a wonderful Egyptian wing. It is one of my favorite places. But it is not really, itself, any part of Egypt. However, there is, undeniably, a little part of Egypt, some little part, there inside the Metropolitan Museum among the careful lighting and the information plaques. Some little part of history, pulled out and brought over land and sea and reverenced, and of course the ironic thing is that the particular part of Egypt that the Met does contain and hold up for everybody’s reverence and edification is particularly that part which goes against heroism altogether. You know-- the museum halls are full of parts of mummies and great big statues. In other words, monumental remembrances. Anti-heroical. Divine, not human things.

But anyway, Seth went to New York, and then Seth went to the Met. You remember he was carrying a book in San Francisco? Well, he finished it, and traded it for another one, and then he finished that one and traded it for another one, too, and so on till he got to New York, at which point he traded in a John LeCarre novel for a guidebook. Because, having finished with John LeCarre for the moment, he felt he needed something a little more practical. Seth had never been to New York before. One needs a guidebook on one’s first trip to New York.

(Suffice it to say, for the moment at least, that the journey was long from San Francisco, and Seth had lots of time to read and lots of time to seek out other adventures that we’re not going to talk about here and now.)

By rights, if he had been in a proper fairy tale, Seth should have arrived at his destination on the back of a dragon, or at the very least on horseback chasing a dragon and with a lance in his hand. He was a hero, wasn’t he? Had he no sense of decorum? Has this story none? But he didn’t arrive any of those ways. He arrived on a bus, which had brought him from a plane.

There was a dragon in evidence, or one that had been in evidence during the interim, but not to Seth, himself. It had flown high, over him, looking down from time to time. Far, far up above his head. More about the dragon later. Seth had traveled in a series of cars, trains, and an airplane, although to be true to the form it should be chariots, cavalcades, and flying behemoths. On the other hand, a modern airplane is quite as unlikely as anything out of Grimm or the Arabian Nights. Consider: something the size of an office building sailing casually through the upper atmosphere (and before you say that an airplane isn’t the size of an office building, just go stand next to a 747 on the runway and let it hulk over you for five minutes) and then banking down over buildings and back yards to trundle gracelessly to a “gate” which is more like a doorway to empty air, lined up with dozens of other planes just like it as if they were a bunch of big, dumb, flying cows all ready to be milked and fed. That is quite fantastical enough for me. But maybe I don’t have enough imagination.

Once in New York, by whatever means, Seth took his guidebook and went to the Metropolitan Museum, which is where we started before all the meandering. He went to the Egyptian section, because the book recommended it, and so do I. The Metropolitan Museum and its Egyptian Wing are world-famous and justly so. Not to be missed.

But back to our hero and his adventures. The thing is, by this point in the story, Seth knew he was looking for something. Not something Egyptian, particularly, although one never knows– the most unexpected things turn up there. Seth didn’t know what he was seeking. But that he was seeking, he knew. He wasn’t sure where to look, but he knew to look. He knew that “it”, his object, the goal of his search, existed. He knew that his mission had become to track “it” down. And that led to his other major realization of this period, which was the inescapable, uncomfortable knowledge that, as a hero, he was hardly fulfilling his responsibilities. He was not living up to the job description, as it were. He was, in fact, less of a hero at this moment and more of a questor. Now, a questor is someone looking for something, and that job description Seth was fulfilling admirably. He was excelling, even. Heroes just look at things in order to do something about them. Seth had started out doing things– he’d done all sorts of things, including battling a dragon, which is pretty much the capstone on a lot of heroes’ careers– but at the ultimate moment of that battle, the time when he could really have made a name for himself in the hero world by battling the dragon to the death– someone’s death, his or its, it hardly mattered– he’d walked away. Not exactly what’s expected. Heroes work by instinct, by bloodlust, by determination linked to a preformed agenda. Reevaluating and walking away in the middle of something is just about diametrically opposed to a hero’s entire ethos, his accepted modus operandi.

So, it turns out, then, that heroes and questors are about as different from each other as it’s possible to be and still be a man of youthful age and adventurous personality in a fairy tale (or any close approximation-- let’s not get too technical.) Seth retained all those attributes-- he was definitively young and adventurous, and arguably ensconced in something like a fairy tale, wasn’t he?– but it appeared that his focus had switched. And so he found himself looking at things now, looking at things as a way of looking for things, looking at things as a way of seeing if they happened to be the things he was looking for. In a manner of speaking. Get it? Looking for, looking for what to look for. It’s a quest, isn’t it? It’s the eternal quest, the human race’s quest.

Well, what he found was a dragon. Gee, a dragon, you say? That’s not exactly surprising, you say. Not exactly new. Well, of course it isn’t. Why should it be? This is literature, after all, and these major elements turn up again, they recur. They may have different meanings for different moments, because it’s all a play of symbols, an interaction, and the game is to see how much they affect each other as they go. How much of each other they take on, how much and in what ways they change and where they end up when it’s over. And how they end up, both in your mind and each other’s. That’s the fun of it. That’s a story. So, yes-- he found a dragon.

Not just any dragon, mind you. It wouldn’t be, would it? Seth found “his” dragon, the one he’d battled, the one who had followed him. He couldn’t find any other. New York isn’t known for its dragons the way San Francisco is. There isn’t room for very many there. The few dragons who are resident in Manhattan have all the good skyscraper roofs already staked out. There’s hardly anywhere for a dragon new to town to go. New York is more hospitable to smaller mythical creatures, like griffins and unicorns. Things that fit in elevators, really.

So where was this particular dragon, if there aren’t many places for one and it had just arrived along with Seth? On the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, perhaps? Well, no, although there is a charming sculpture garden up there and so Seth might have wandered up and found it if it had been. But then, that roof is prime territory, with excellent views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, so one assumes it already had a few mythical residents. No, Seth found his dragon compatriot in the Egyptian wing (otherwise, why all the exposition about Egypt? This narrative wanders, but not that much.) He found it in Gallery 12 pretending to be a monumental statue of Hatshepsut. Not really pretending, of course, just sort of blending in with the actual monumental statues of Hatshepsut. (Hatshepsut, for those of you with an educational bent– those of you who care, in other words– was a woman pharaoh. Not the first woman to rule Egypt, but the first to claim legitimacy for her rule just as the men who came before and after her did. The first to present herself as divine and divinely ordained, as sole successor to the previous pharaoh. Hatshepsut was a woman who changed the rule, in a manner of speaking.) The dragon was still rather obviously a dragon, to anyone who actually looked at it. But it’s amazing how that pebbly dragon skin can look like granite, and a curled-up dragon, with its tail and its wings folded in so its shape is rather square than long and sinuous, looks nothing like a dragon to the casual eye. It looks not much like an ancient Egyptian woman, either, of course, pharaonic or otherwise. But a non-fire breathing, non-battling dragon can remain amazingly still for amazingly long periods of time, so it’s not altogether ridiculous that it got away with not being noticed for an entire morning in the midst of all those other amazingly still, amazingly strange and unfamiliar monumental objects.

Seth, when he saw it, took several seconds to recognize it. He knew right away it wasn’t Hatshepsut, but he took a second to see what it was. One just doesn’t expect to find a dragon in Gallery 12 of the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum, after all. And then when he did recognize it, when it came into focus, so to speak, he wasn’t sure how to react at first.

“Oh,” said Seth sort of explosively. He was expressing two different types of surprise. Two different types of recognition leading to surprise, to be pedantic. The first was that the thing he was staring at was a dragon, the second was that it was his dragon, the one he’d battled. His “oh” served to verbalize both realizations.

The dragon breathed. Not an unimportant action after sitting immobile as an ancient statue for several hours. I mean to say, at that moment it took a breath, it breathed in. It was like a reaction, like a lizard response to Seth’s exclamatory syllable.

A syllable, a breath. It seems like a reasonable trade-off, doesn’t it?

“Why--” Seth exclaimed. Why are you here? might have been the most reasonable question. Or, Why are you following me? or possibly even, Why are you in Gallery 12 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City pretending to be a monumental statue of Queen Hatshepsut? Any of these might have been a reasonable thing to ask, even an expected, obvious thing to ask, but Seth posed none of them fully. Quite possibly, he meant to pose all of them, and some other ones, too, but couldn’t quite narrow the possibilities and so got no farther than “why.” At least, we can assume that those questions reflect some of the things he was thinking, relate to some of the feelings or confusions running through and around his head at that moment.

On the other hand, it’s possible he wasn’t thinking any of those things, and was only starting to say something stupid, like, “Why look, it’s the dragon I met in San Francisco. How are you?” But we’ll take the leap of faith and give him greater credit than that. We’ll assume he was going to say something intelligent, or, if not outstandingly intelligent, at least useful.

“To watch you,” the dragon breathed, and it was making the same assumption we are about what Seth meant to ask, or it wouldn’t have responded so. Its voice was like a rumble, like a distant peel of thunder, like a sound that sooty black smoke would make if it made a sound. Like a nearby earthquake, without the shaking. Very fairy tale-like, very ominous. A little threatening, to tell the truth.

And what does it mean when a dragon is watching you? What does it mean that a dragon finds you interesting, spy-worthy? Why would it bother?

“Why?” Seth said again, and this time I think we can agree that there was very little else that he could appropriately say.

“It is my name,” the dragon breathed again. Next to it, one of the legitimate, actually-ancient statues of Hatshepsut seemed to shake a little. Seth glanced at it nervously. Although of the two objects facing him, the dragon was surely a greater potential threat than the statue, don’t you think?

“Your name?” This was a mystery. An unknown, an enigma. What would anybody’s name have to do with anything? Seth felt he had a chance to plumb some of the secrets of Dark Things (like dragons), to shed some light on the world-view of dragons and their ilk, here at the Met this afternoon. Not that he spent a long time thinking that. It just occurred to him, and so he followed up on it. Very hero-like. Ask the question. Wait for the response. React– take action on the answer.

“My name is Faraway.”

Which didn’t seem to clear things up much, or to shed any particular light on any Greater Issues Relating to Dark Things in General, either. Seth frowned.

“Your name is Faraway so you followed me?” he prompted. He spread his hands to indicate his lack of understanding. It was a little like talking to a small and unclear child, he was thinking. One didn’t quite know where to probe for meaning.

“To learn the meaning of my name,” the dragon breathed. “To learn my death.”

A pause for consideration. Consideration on Seth’s part, at least. Who knew what the dragon had to consider? Or what you have to consider, either? You, at least, can always re-read. Seth was nodding very slightly-- not because he’d unraveled anything, but just as a way of thinking through what he’d been told. To indicate he was thinking, possibly.

And what was he thinking? What are you thinking? Talking dragons. The Metropolitan Museum, where dragons don’t in any way belong. In one of the Egyptian exhibits, behind the mini-pyramid. A female pharaoh, most of whose statues make her look like a man.

There were never dragons in Egypt at all, you know. They’re Far Eastern and Baltic, not Mediterranean.

Seth felt very confused by all this, even the parts he hadn’t thought of. “I am very confused,” he said. He’d stopped nodding at some point.

The dragon breathed a puff of sooty, smoky breath. It bobbed up on its way to the ceiling. The ceiling of Gallery 12, Seth reflected, was going to need to be cleaned soon, after this visitation.

“So am I,” the dragon breathed.

NEXT POST: QUEENS OF THE ROAD (Monday 10/5/09)