A Fall From Grace (Sort Of)

Sphinx lay in the moonlight and contemplated the infinite.

The infinite was not particularly easy to see, from his vantage point. There was a major intersection, a hotel tower, and an airport in the way, not to mention a new, enormous billboard of Venus in full Extravaganza! regalia looking down at him from one side. But he contemplated, anyway, and felt he did an acceptable job most nights. A good enough job to please his own relatively undemanding deity, at least.

And speaking of deities, he’d seen remarkably little of Venus, lately. At least, he’d seen little of Venus in the flesh. The painted version, several stories high and beaming at visitors as they approached from miles away to the South, was more than he needed as a reminder.

There was a time, he thought, when he would have welcomed this solitude. He would have rejoiced, quietly, and celebrated in his meditations. He would have declared himself deity-free, like a house recently swept clean of termites. And he would have thanked the Goddess, sailing over him nightly. He would have prayed, and praised, and offered up a hymn.

But now, he had to admit, he felt mightily out of touch.

He was a little sad, tonight, and more than a little itchy to learn what was going on in town. He listened to the conversations of the tourists and the valet parkers, but they just kept saying the same things. Sphinx was bored with their old gossip.

There was a time, he thought, when he’d known everything.

“Sphinx!”

If Sphinx had had ears, they would have pricked up. A wail, a cry looped through the night, a mixed, braided sound of anguish and of anger, a twine of emotions, a strong rope busily tying itself into a hangman’s noose. It approached.

“Sphinx!”

A shriek, a roar. Not a release. A sound full of rage. It sucked up anger and hurled it out again. The wave of it flattened Sphinx’s marsh grass and warped the glass walls on his ersatz pyramid.

“Sphinx!” Venus had arrived. “Do you know what’s he’s done?!” she screamed.

She was suddenly in front of Sphinx, her glorious hair flying all around her head, her peekaboo robes whipping this way and that. She was attended by a private whirlwind. She was the very picture, Sphinx thought, of a pissed-off goddess. The statue settled down to take in the show.

And no, of course Sphinx didn’t know what “he” had done. He wasn’t even certain who “he” was — probably Zem, but who knew? He cleared his concrete throat with caution. He’d have to finesse Venus for information.

“No,” he offered, “What has he done?”

“He shouldn’t even be here! I told him to go– this is my home, this is my city. And I told him. I demanded it! But he wouldn’t go, and now... He’s hateful, he’s horrible–”

Must still be Zem, Sphinx reasoned.

There was a brief pause while Venus digested her own words. Then the moment passed, and she licked her lips. She tossed her hair. Sphinx reflected that, if she hadn’t been hiding herself from the passersby, those two gestures by themselves could have caused a twelve-car pile-up on the Strip behind her.

He was a little surprised to see that Venus was hiding herself. Usually, when she was this worked up, she forgot. Or else, she just liked being the center of attention so much that she deliberately chose to show off her tantrums. Many times, she had stood out on the Strip and faced Sphinx and yelled at him until a mob of pedestrians had stopped and stared and the cars slowed down so that their drivers could hang out their windows drooling at the gorgeous, insane creature on the sidewalk. Maybe now she was finding her new Extravaganza! stardom taxing. Maybe she just wanted a break from her fans. But the fact that she was being circumspect made Sphinx take the ranting much more seriously. Whatever was going on, Sphinx reckoned, Venus thought it mattered.

“He’s taking over the whole town,” she spat out. Sphinx blinked. Not really, of course, but he did the thing he habitually did to indicate to Venus that he took that information in and was duly shocked. In effect, he blinked.

“He’s enslaved everybody. He’s got them all coming and going for him. The magician’s union worships him now.” Venus, Sphinx knew, had always been a favorite with Vegas’ magicians. They all longed to saw her in half. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it!” Venus screamed, shrill and piercing. Every individual, blond-to-perfection hair on her head stood out separately for a split second, and even the tourists who couldn’t see her looked up at the sound. They felt its passing, a metal-ripping, live-flesh-tearing screeching in the aether as if Mother Nature were ripping her fingernails across the midnight-black chalkboard of the whole desert sky.

“And now he’s after me! He sent that woman, his harpy, his first servant here to tell me. He’s given her immortality, I could see it right away. He sent her to talk to me in my dressing room with Honoré, and she stood there and told me...” Words seemed to fail her. The blond hair flowed of its own accord around her face and out, away again. Her eyes snapped and she bared her teeth and curled her lip. “They expect me to serve him! Take a place in his temple at my hotel. My hotel in my city. Serve him! Do as he bids! Be priestess in his accursed penis-temple there that he’s forcing the hotel to build. He’s mocking me and defiling me and he’s taking my home!”

And there it was, Sphinx concluded. Las Vegas had offered a haven to Venus, a home and sanctuary when the whole rest of the world had outgrown bubbly blondes and eschewed living dolls. Now Zem had arrived without warning, and appropriated the city. Venus had no choices but fight or flight– but Venus hadn’t fought in centuries, and she had nowhere left to run.

Zem has her trapped, the monolith concluded.

The goddess trudged through the mini-swamp to climb up to Sphinx’s paws and slump there, miserable. The angry wind fell away. She leaned over to one side against a concrete toe and hid her face.

The blond cloud drifted down around her like concealing mist shrouding an injured kitten. The kitten was whimpering, sniffing its injuries, licking its wounds. The blond mist made sure it had the privacy it needed.

Sphinx couldn’t really do much in the way of comfort, but he imagined nudging Venus with his paw, to let her know that he was there, and offer some small indication of support. Meanwhile, he thought over what Venus had said.

“Surely the whole city can’t just be rolling over and giving up without any fight at all,” he murmured to himself. “What can he want with it, anyway?”

Venus shifted against him but didn’t speak, so Sphinx assumed she hadn’t heard.

NEXT POST: MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK... (Monday 12/21)