It's Raining Men

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “How did you find me?” I hissed to him as I poured banana liqueur cups.

  He waved a gold-braceleted hand. “Finding women is easy.” He looked around. “Good pickings here, if you like ’em skinny.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Something on your mind? I’m working.”

  “Huh?” He turned from scoping bar bunnies and refocused on me. “Oh, yeah. Are you trying to get us all killed?”

  I scowled. “What?” My heart started thumping unpleasantly.

  “Archie. You’re breaking his fucking heart. I thought Lido warned you against that.”

  “Look, jackass,” I began and remembered I was wearing my work clothes. I peered left and right, then leaned across my table to hiss into his five-foot-eight ear. “He broke my heart, okay? He dumped me. And when I tried to seduce him and talk him around, he threatened to kill himself so Aph—so that goddess wouldn’t come and turn me into a lobster.”

  “He loves you.”

  “He loved me.” I held up a hand. “His word. Past tense. Now he’s going to sacrifice both of us to keep us alive.”

  Kama fidgeted, clearly impatient with this quibbling. The dimples vanished from his adorable baby face. I remembered Lido had said something about Kama getting toasted to a cinder once. Was that when Archie had burned down the lair?

  “Please,” he said.

  “Please what? You live with him—I don’t. He won’t talk to me. Or are you afraid of the goddess, too?”

  Kama’s young-looking eyes were troubled. “This never works for me,” he grumbled.

  “What never works?” I demanded relentlessly. I was darned if I would take the blame for this when the five of them were so ancient and powerful and smart and oh, right, how could I forget, complete lazy-ass slacker bums.

  “Intervening in the love lives of the gods,” Kama said.

  I looked at him with contempt. “I don’t see any gods. I see me, only a couple decades older than my shoes, and you, too lazy to breathe. Oh, and Archie, who is—who is—” I couldn’t think of a single word to describe him. Other than everything.

  Kama suggested, “You could free him. Cut him loose.”

  “And have him burn down the lair with him in it? No thank you,” I said.

  “Cut yourself loose, then.”

  “I wish I could,” I vowed.

  He gave me a long stare out of those big dark eyes. Then he turned away.

  After work, in my apartment, I hunted through the litter of beer coasters, business cards, pens, bottle openers, crumpled dollar bills, and random Boshy Brands tchotchkes on my bedside table until I found the card Bubbie had scribbled on.

  I lay on my side in bed, propping the card against my second pillow, and stared at it, feeling Archie inside me, feeling his rejection like a stone wall cutting me in half, wondering how much worse I could feel.

  The setting sun slanted in the window and lit up the scribbled nonsense syllables. How much worse would I have to feel before I did something?

  My brain went round and round the same old tired course: wanting him, knowing he wanted me, feeling him inside me, knowing it was an illusion. He was far away, avoiding me. I felt the knife-sharp cut through the center of my soul, never, I can’t, we have to talk, I’m sorry, I loved you.

  If I didn’t leave him alone, the goddess would get us both.

  If I did, he’d kill himself.

  Or not. Maybe. Maybe he was smoking enough weed that he didn’t feel like this. Did he feel that his heart had left his body and traveled to mine somehow? Did he feel hollow and sweet, just knowing I was out here breathing in the world with him, and then remember I was gone for good and feel hollow and dead?

  Right now, dead sounded a lot better than this.

  I got up, went to the bathroom, threw up, rinsed my mouth, drank some water, and came back.

  The card sat on my second pillow. I picked it up and read it silently, mouthing the nonsense words.

  How much worse than this could it be?

  Sometimes it settles my nerves to garden. After ten days of ignoring Chloe’s calls, gritting my teeth, and hoping she would summon me naked again, I was running out of coping mechanisms.

  Weed was great, but I had to work out sometime.

  Working out gave me a great high, until all those endorphins made me horny.

  The bar was full of horny women, so tempting, so easy, and then they opened their mouths and I realized they were too dumb, too smart, too young, too old, too short—all of ’em were way too short—too not-Chloe.

  And back to my old buddy Mr. Doobie again.

  It was Veek who reminded me that weed comes from somewhere and he wasn’t my hoe nigger. That led to a nice dustup in the garage.

  “I think,” he said, blocking me, forearm to forearm, “it is time you resolved your father complex.” His left snaked out and popped me on the floating rib.

  “What?” I wheezed and caught a stinging pop on the nose before I could get my right up.

  “I have accommodated you in this masochistic displacement activity for some time—” and pow on the side of my head. I saw stars.

  “Dammit!” I faked right, which he ignored.

  “—But ultimately you must confront your Oedipal demon.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He sailed in with one solid wallop to my kidney and then stood, calmly waiting for me to shake the tears out of my eyes.

  “Besides, you are not that good a boxer.”

  “Well, thanks for—condescending—to spar—with a lame-ass—anyway,” I panted. I smiled, ashamed of myself for using him. “Seriously. Thanks.”

  He watched me drip blood on the garage floor for a moment, and then, with a sigh and a head shake, he left.

  Fucker. What did he mean, not that good a boxer? It felt like he’d cracked one of my ribs with that kidney punch. Groaning and bloody as usual, I limped into the plant and climbed the steel ladder up the wall to the platform where we grow Mary Jane.

  It was soothing on the platform under the skylight with the setting sun just catching the roof. Hotter than blazes, but MJ liked it warm. I pinched buds and flowers, harvested seeds that had happened while I was smoking and ignoring the plants, weeded, moved the fertilizer spikes, dusted off the skylight, and noticed it would want degreasing again sometime soon. Not today. I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Want a margarita?” asked Baz from the floor.

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Does that skylight need degreasing?”

  I sighed. Nothing comes for free from Baz. I called down, “If we didn’t run the turkey fryer so often, we wouldn’t have to degrease the skylight.”

  “Try telling that to these bums.”

  “Lido does like his deep-fried turkey,” I admitted.

  “So do you,” Baz said, his voice fading as he went to get the booze.

  When he came back, I lowered the bucket and he put a quart jelly jar in it and I winched it back up. Ah. Baz used to tend bar—we all had, I think—and he had a nice touch with the salt. I considered degreasing the skylight after all. Sometimes I’m miserable enough to clean it. This could be the day.

  I heard a voice chanting faintly—was Veek playing that Carmina Burana shit again? When I got through here, I would have a word with his lordship. Then my floating rib bitched, and I thought, Maybe another time.

  The chanting got louder. Not Carmina Burana. It sounded faintly familiar, though. Woman’s voice. I drained the margarita in my left hand and emptied the sprinkler can in my right, and was just about to holler down to Baz for a refill when the chanting got really loud. My ears began to buzz, my stomach turned over, and I saw, to my astonishment, my empty clothes crumpling onto the floor. The last thing I heard, before the chanting rose to a roar, was the margarita jar and the sprinkler can hitting the platform deck pretty much at the same moment.

  Chapter Sixteen

  WHEN I CAME AROUND, I was standing in line.

  Oh no. Last time I was here, Elvis Presley had just put
on the white leather jumpsuit, and I was dead.

  I sniffed my naked armpit. Phew. Unless Baz had poisoned the margarita, I was pretty sure I wasn’t dead this time.

  The air had that boiled-dry, tasteless feel to it I remembered, and the rocky landscape was a washed-out sepia photograph of itself. Dead people lined up endlessly in front of me in a queue that strung out across desert valleys and barren hills and up and down the sides of mountains far, far ahead.

  People behind me in line looked at me with scorn. They were mostly dressed.

  “What are you in for, kid?” said the granny in front of me. “Fornication?” She wiggled her eyebrows hopefully at my nakedness.

  “General troublemaking,” I said, shaking my head at the single file in front of me. Mortals are such sheep. I stepped out of the queue and marched briskly, or as briskly as I could barefoot, past granny.

  “Hey!”

  One or two protests behind me indicated that at least some of the departed still had brains. As soon as I got ten feet, the wilderness vanished, and suddenly I was at the front of the line, which had shrunk to a couple of dozen people, standing on an unspeakable carpet in a cramped, industrial-green-painted room lit by flickering fluorescent tubes, in front of a dinged-up wooden half-door that let into a tiny, grimy office.

  Inside the office, working by the light of a bare bulb, a figure slouched in front of an original beehive screen, I swear, one of the first post-keypunch computer monitors ever built. If I’d had any doubt where I was, this dispelled it. I reached for the doorknob.

  “Hey!” yelled the first person in line, a weedy teenager in leather with blood on the side of his head. “No cuts!”

  “What are you made up for?” I said.

  “He beefed it on dead man’s curve, and he thinks they wrote the song about him,” said the woman behind him with sarcasm.

  “Well?” I looked him over, amused. Yup. If he wasn’t the original James Dean, he wanted everyone to think he was. “How long have you been waiting here?”

  He shifted on his feet. “Forty years, give or take.”

  “Oh, for the love of Mike,” I said kindly, “While you’ve been loafing around here, I’ve died, got my body fixed, gone back to my life of sin, screwed maybe twenty thousand women, smoked one and a half tons of dope, and did two hundred thousand one-handed pushups. On each arm.”

  I made as if to push past him, and he had the nerve to push back. “Get in line, punk!”

  “Look, grandpa,” I said patiently. “In forty years, have you ever got through that door? No? Well, watch and learn.”

  I rapped on the half door as I opened it. Of course it wasn’t locked. I shook my head. Sheep.

  The door demon looked around, and a murmur arose from the queue outside. At the sound, he seemed to swell. He grew big leathery wings, curly bighorn sheep horns, and a goatee. His eyes glowed red and yellow. Flames licked off his giant bare shoulders.

  When he saw me in the room, all these special effects shrank and vanished, leaving a scrawny nerd with thinning hair, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a pocket protector.

  “Hello, Smeepy,” I said.

  “You!”

  “Me,” I said.

  “You can’t get through here,” he said, jutting his weak chin. Another sheep. He’d been here longer than any of the sheep outside.

  “Do I have to remind you how much you hate dealing with me?”

  “Get back in line,” he snarled. “I don’t care who you fucked in sixteen forty.”

  “That’s funny. You cared then.”

  “You can’t come in this way.”

  “I don’t want to come in at all, but I’m here. Somebody must have run an exorcism.”

  “Not my problem.” Smeepy shook his head violently. “You’re crazy. I don’t want anything to do with you and your problems.”

  “You dope, I’m not dead this time. Sniff.” I lifted my elbow and puffed past my armpit. “Only the living have BO.”

  He recoiled. “Get out of here!”

  “We can do this the easy way,” I suggested.

  He moved to stand in front of the passage to the elevator bank. “You heard me.”

  I got the feeling he’d made up his mind.

  “Fine.” I smiled unpleasantly. “Better call for backup.”

  I went back to the cramped waiting room.

  “It’s like this, people,” I said in a normal voice. “Gather round, okay? I don’t like to shout.”

  They huddled around me, breaking what I was sure was a habit of eons. It really was pitiful how some of them were dressed in their best jewelry and furs, hoping to intimidate each other and impress the demons, while some were still bloody from their unhappy demises, hoping for sympathy, I suppose. Good luck with that. Smeepy had all the bowels of a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk.

  When they were crammed together at the doorway, I said, “Take a look around you. Now look behind you.”

  They did. I knew, because I’d been under the same glamour when I arrived, that they saw hundreds of miles of desert, punctuated by barren rock outcrops rising into mountains. Only I, at least, knew it was an illusion.

  “When I was here forty years ago, before grandpa here let his Harley slide out from under him on a perfectly dry road, you couldn’t see the end of the line from here. In fact, there wasn’t a line. Every inch of that desert out there was covered with people like you, waiting. Those mountains in the distance? Jammed with humanity. Every rock had people standing on it, shoving each other off, climbing back up, hoping for just a glimpse of this door.”

  This was an exaggeration. It had been more like five hundred years since the joint was that busy.

  They all looked at the door. A wave of raw impatience hit it like a wind, rattling the latch.

  At his beehive inside, Smeepy never looked up.

  “Okay, now don’t answer this question out loud. Just think about it.” I looked into each face. “What are you doing here?”

  The kid with the bloody face reached out and touched granny on the arm, and of course once he did that, the glamour was broken. Granny grabbed someone else, and the kid did too, and in a minute they were all staring around, their expressions sliding from amazement to disappointment to wrath.

  “Where did everybody go?” the kid said.

  I shrugged. “Somewhere else. Upstairs. Downstairs. Back to life. Or nowhere. Or some other hell,” I suggested, feeling I hadn’t done enough to undermine the house of cards I stood in. “Some other hells are a lot more fun.”

  “I want one where they bring you cold beer,” said a woman with a tired face.

  “I want one with hot chicks bringing me cold beer,” said the Jimmy Dean look-alike.

  “Hot guys,” amended Granny. “I see you still don’t have any clothes, sonny.”

  “That’s because I’m not dead,” I said.

  “I thought it was because you were one of them,” said a guy dressed in farmer-john overalls and floppy boots.

  I drew breath to explain what exactly I really was and had to stop and think. “I don’t know, actually.” I put my hands on my bare hips and looked down, suddenly uncomfortable in front of two-dozen dressed people.

  “Just think of what you want to wear,” the Jimmy Dean kid suggested.

  I did. And bang, I had on a white beater, a pair of gym shorts, and my cross-trainers.

  “Do you have powers?” the kid said eagerly. “Like, can you do something to that jerk in the office?”

  “I have a lot of powers back on earth,” I said. “Here I suspect I have no more than you do. Depends, I suppose, on what powers you have. Have you tried anything?”

  “Like what?” Granny said.

  “Like walking past that idiot in there, for a start,” I said, realizing how stupid I’d been.

  “What’s in there, anyway?” someone said from the back.

  “You’re kidding me. You’ve been here all this time, and you don’t even know?” I shook my head. “All ri
ght. There are elevators in there, although I think that’s a directional misnomer. They go up and down.” I pointed. “Go up or down one stop and get off, and you can pick a door, any door, to sample alternative afterlives. Or you could open the little door across the elevator lobby and just go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back wherever you came from.”

  “How do we know where we’ll end up if we take door number three?” Granny said. She was a smart one.

  “Depends on your balls, I guess, and your imagination. Maybe you can go back and haunt people you left behind. Maybe you get a body out of the deal—goodness knows that would be no dumber than the bullshit I had to go through to get this body refurbished last time I was here. Maybe you get to be your own father or mother or grandchild, or maybe you get to be yourself all over again. Or maybe you end up on the other side of the world, trying something completely new.”

  “We can’t do that. We can’t make things up like that.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, we can’t. We’re dead,” Granny said.

  Farmer Bob said pompously, “The dead have no imagination.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” I said with contempt.

  Jimmy Dean shook his head. “No, really. We can only, like, be ghosts or something. We go with our last powerful emotion.”

  I said, “You’ve watched a lot of trashy movies, haven’t you? Because there aren’t many ideas in your noggin right now.” I knuckled him on his bashed-in forehead. “Do what you want to do. There. Are. No. Rules.”

  “Why aren’t there any rules?” Farmer Bob complained.

  “Okay, there are rules,” I said patiently. “You’ve been making them up and going along with them for—forty years,” I said, pointing at Jimmy Dean. I pointed at the granny. “How long?”

  Her lips moved. “Three. Three years.”

  “But you’ve been in line longer than I have!” Jimmy Dean said.

  That started a lot of excited yelling.

  I sneaked a hand over the door, opened it from the inside, slid past Smeepy still parked in front of his monitor with his back turned, and headed for the corridor to the elevators. As I pressed a button, something occurred to me. I turned to the door demon. “You’ve been faking your manifests, haven’t you?”