Odd Couple #1

“Sphinx!”

Sphinx had watched Bugsy approach. It had been impressive, an act worthy of the top spot in any of the big shows, if only it could have been fit on a stage. He’d walked through the Strip traffic, cutting diagonally across the eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars, trucks, and buses. Somehow, he’d never been hit, or run through, or whatever would have happened if he and a vehicle had arrived at the same spot of pavement at the same moment. He'd moved through an unpredictable string of clear spaces that danced around the busy lanes, Fred Astaire tripping lightly through a succession of spotlights on a shiny black floor. He reached Sphinx and stepped up onto the sidewalk, where the pedestrians just happened, like the cars, not to need to be precisely where he was at that second.

“Impressive,” the monolith murmured.

“What?” he preened, then continued. “I need to talk to you.”

“Speak,” Sphinx invited.

“Where is Venus?”

“Venus?”

The ghost sighed heavily, showily. “Yes, Venus. I know she comes to you. I know she trusts you. I can’t believe I’m the first person to ask. Where is she?

“You are not a person at all,” Sphinx corrected. “As far as I understand you, you are an embodied legend, a marketing device made manifest.”

“More manifest every day. Where is she? What do you know?”

His tone wasn’t strident, but it was insistent.

Clearly the ghost wasn't going away without an answer. “She came to me,” Sphinx started slowly.

“Yes? When she disappeared from that show?”

Sphinx did the thing he did to indicate nodding. “Yes. She was upset. This Zem—”

Bugsy snorted. “Cheap s.o.b.”

Sphinx paused. He wasn’t sure what Bugsy’s relationship to the newly resident god was. “Zem,” he repeated slowly, “had upset her. He had plans for her that... didn’t please her.”

“I know all this,” Bugsy waved a hand in annoyance. “I want to know where she is now.”

“She is in hiding.”

“Do you know where?”

Sphinx paused. If he’d had the equipment, he might have licked his lips. “I do,” he said slowly. He couldn’t lie. It would displease the Moon.

“Where is she?”

Sphinx looked at his visitor. The ghost, the image, the Legend of Bugsy. Bugsy himself, not Benjamin but Bugsy, the name and idea his original, human progenitor had despised. “I will not tell you,” Sphinx responded. Bugsy made a fist, grimaced, raised it and brought it down upon the railing surrounding his marsh. A few tall grasses seemed to bend as if with wind. A tourist or two stepped farther from him.

“Why not?”

“She so wishes it,” Sphinx took refuge in formality.

Venus had not, specifically, asked Sphinx to keep her whereabouts secret from this Bugsy character. But she’d said she needed sanctuary, solitude, Sphinx’s protection. Surely, that included absolute secrecy? Sphinx watched inexpressably as Bugsy grappled with his answer.

“How soon will she come back?” he asked finally.

“That is up to her. But—” Sphinx relented, “I think it will be soon. Or, not long, perhaps.”

“Soon or not long. That’s your answer?”

“That is an answer. An acceptable response to your question,” he said.

“It’s not acceptable to me.”

“Still,” Sphinx said, as if they were having a quiet philosophical discussion, “it is acceptable. It is as close to my meaning as I can come, I believe.”

Bugsy looked down at the sidewalk, stared in disgust at its cracked and bleached face between his natty shoes. “You are infuriating, Statue.”

“That is not my purpose,” Sphinx allowed, “But it may be my refuge, for now. And hers. Let her have her refuge, Las Vegas Legend. We beings which are halfway between real and unreal must stick together.”

“...if Zem is going to go down in flames, you mean.”

“Whether he is or not. We must agree, or at the very least not oppose each other. There are few of us, and the world is large and varied.”

“And most of it is pointing right here right now.”

Sphinx would have bobbed his head, half a nod, half a bow. “This does seem to be so.”

“You’ll let me know when she’s ready.”

It was not really a question. It was also not — quite — a command.

“As she requests,” he more or less agreed.

“That’ll do, I guess.”

And then a gold-tone limo declaring Totally! Nude!! Showgirls!!! glided by, and the ghost or legend of Bugsy Siegel, with one last look over his shoulder at Sphinx, grabbed onto the flickering, shadowy light it put out and caught a ride around a corner out of sight.

“Thank you, Sphinx,” the goddess sighed.

“Certainly. Although I thought you liked him. You said he was charming.”

“He is. But I can’t be seen now.”

Sphinx, regarding the usual midnight crowd of admirers and camera snappers, observed drily, “That’s obvious. How long do you mean to keep things that way?”

“Till the end comes. Till Zem has to fight.”

Sphinx pondered that. He wished that he could look into Venus’ eyes.

But she was on his back and he stared forever out across the Strip.

“What will the end be?” he queried.

“I wish I knew,” Venus sighed, and Sphinx heard her retreating, stepping back toward the monumental hind-quarters where she would withdraw and stay silent for hours or days on end, vanished and waiting.

Sphinx wished, not for the first or last time, that she’d wait to disappear till they were both finished with the conversation. Venus, he ruminated, had misapprehended the question, and so he was left in the dark in the middle of a mass of complications and goings-on of which he understood practically nothing. His own goddess, whom it might have seemed logical to ask for guidance, was new this week, and therefore utterly unavailable. And even if she had been full, and lying bloated in the sky for Sphinx to see, she was notoriously unhelpful about answering questions.

Maybe that was the hallmark of divinity, Sphinx thought.

NEXT POST: RACHEL HEADS UPTOWN (Friday 1/22)