Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  Responding to the orc attack, Brendan raises his staff.

  You might only see Vincent, leaning across the table, gathering dice.

  But notice the air buckle above him, the ambiguous shadow that might be a druid, rising to substance out of a convergence of lamplights.

  At his cue, the druid’s or her brother’s, Melusine readies a Fireball spell, while Maia looks to the parlor, her gaze passing through me to settle on drowsing Jack, while her silhouette, cast on the Starr’s postered wall, takes on a hood and dark corona.

  The other party members, Hrothgar and Kleptos (Kleptos? Apache is uninventive with names) draw their swords to face the onrush of aleatory evil.

  Dice in the open, Vincent orders.

  Maia nods, her eyes stern and enigmatic.

  Thalia: Aron glares back at such challenges, such lèse to his majesté. But what, indeed, can he do? To hide the dice reveals his guilt, to reveal them shows the ropes and pulleys, the backstage of his illusions.

  But what is his option? His shadow dwindles, he is lost in bald light as he shows forth the twenty-sided dice, the famous d20, geodesic and mysterious.

  And this time the players move first, not seeing the spectral and musal hand that turns the numbers in their favor. Oh yes, we are dice loaders on the side of fair dealing.

  Calliope: As one, they announce their intention to absorb the first attack of Aron’s invented orcs. Maia, in turn, tells us that Melusine will cast her Light spell, while Apache’s Kleptos searches for escape passages in the bright, magical glow.

  With their first declarations of intent, their play becomes mutinous. To Aron’s dismay, Maia’s dice roll is a pure, unaided 20…

  Thalia: Not quite unaided, sister. But whatever…

  Calliope: By this the players know that, no matter what obstacles or opposition Aron had set for them, they have surmounted his plans by Melusine’s magic, which is Maia’s audacious and momentary luck.

  A roll like hers means that the players are at blinding advantage. But it is no competition, or is it? More a performance—a story they will all create together, as they tell themselves.

  Like we have nothing to do with it.

  Thalia: Or like we do.

  Now Aron rolls the die, and we could tell he secretly hopes for victory, the orcs’ triumph, command of the game once more. The little bitch. Doesn’t know what he wants, but it isn’t higher rolls on tesserae and tali, on those fancy astragaloi.

  Calliope: But the die roll brings into being Melusine’s magic light, and by it their shadows take on definition, borders, and solidity. Or the shadows of their characters, their imagined persona thrown onto the parlor wall. There Brendan and Hrothgar are standing back to back, weapons at the ready and Kleptos crouches, adept hands feeling the surface of the Starrs’ drywall for a passage to the netherworld. All of this illumined by the torch in the hand of a thin, feminine silhouette, Melusine’s arms aloft as she stood above the fallen body of a comrade, as Maia bends over the table.

  Melpomene: These are their constructs, whispered out of abstraction. By these, they keep living. The Sublime that masters the horrible, and the Comic that springs us away from disgust at the meaningless, the absurd. These children are our chorus, our satyrs or old men or Euripidean women, attendants of the god, saving us from nothingness by their game.

  Calliope: May the luck of the dice continue and sustain them. I am sure they are clever, these puzzles of maze and code that Aron has set before them. But the gamers are buoyed now, self-confident: every moment of chance this evening has fallen their way, and when you ride a current, you decide without second-guess, with intelligence of the body and the instincts rather than the entanglement of thought and self.

  25 Stasimon: Strophe: Polymnia and the Muses

  Polymnia: Aron runs out of prepared encounters within half an hour. Within an hour, he is too tired to improvise, and the game, which usually lasts until the wee hours, adjourns at midnight.

  At another time, I might have warned them. But I know the serpent’s design, or know at least that there is a design, a pattern set in motion before there was a theatre, a serpent, or even substance.

  What was it Jim Morrison said, when he mistook himself for a god?

  Ride the snake?

  I have soared aloft with poetry and with high thought, and though I have laid my hand to many a reflection, I have found nothing stronger than the goddess Ananke. She emerged self-formed at the very beginning of time, shadowy and serpentine, coiling about the breadth of the universe, and from her first appearance, there has been no cure for her.

  Melpomene: Hers is a law of stern Necessity, the immemorial ordinance of the gods made fast for ever, bravely sworn and sealed.

  She is the one who parents your genius falsely,

  Who gives you the dry ground of poverty or region or religion.

  She is the woman who tore apart Stephen Thorne, or Jack Rausch, or Aron Starr.

  Behind the stage she coils. You have not seen her, but she is there.

  Polymnia: When we rise, we surface from her pulse and current, in bas-relief, like figures in a frieze.

  Don’t you know by now? How we switch names, take a different marching order to trick beholders with our processional?

  We exchange lutes, scrolls, podia. Our sarcophagus transforms, we cover our tracks, and the generations to come will guess at us, though the nine of us are one girl only, and that girl a tide in Ananke’s ocean.

  Melpomene: And nevertheless, all nine of us fear her in unison. For if those born to enduring life should sin by slaughter, by disputation, falsehood, oath-breaking…

  Thalia: In short, by the things at which we excel.

  Melpomene: For three times ten thousand years they shall wander outcast from joy, condemned to mortal being, and go their ways in many shapes—in clay and stone and metal—through many hardships. The heavens will force them headlong to the Sea; and dry land receive them when they vomit forth. Unwanted they rise to the burning Sun; and then, thrown backward into the vast entropy of heaven, moving unwelcome from host to host, by all abhorred.

  For a while we coil in the skin of the snake, away from the untimely spring chill, foetal beneath the stage.

  And even though Jack Rausch has barely noticed the podgy old men—the fanciful actor, the creature of lamé and prophecy, and the director who approached him—it might be that he understands the complicity of this triad, their unity and nullity.

  But he has passed into Stephen’s attentions, and though Stephen might have explained all of this as Jack’s entering the story, that is not what it was at all, far from it.

  If anything, it was opposite to that.

  26 Stasimon: Antistrophe: Calliope and the Muses

  Calliope: Someone is Lykourgos here. Crazy godstruck and defined by what he does not know.

  Polymnia: Tell us, my epic sister, before we lose shape and substance, sublimating past vapor into aether, before we vanish to the park, the groves and statuary.

  Calliope: When the Lord Dionysus set out eagerly through the kingdom of Thrace, drawing people to his cult and his worship. Lykourgos, son of Dryas and king of the Edonians, refused to bow to the god. So Dionysus fled to the sea, taking shelter with the gods of water and ocean, but his girls, his Maenads, were taken captive…

  Thalia: And the Satyroi as well, the horned and goat-footed balloon men, our companions in the revels…

  Calliope: So I remember. Lykourgos imprisoned them as well. But all were freed, were we not? After which the god came to Lykourgos caped and young like his father, heavy-kneed and pouring rain like his grandpa. Now a lion, now an unbroken horse, now a bull and a tiger and at last a horned serpent, coiled in the recesses of the Edonian palace.

  Melpomene: And Lykourgos saw the god thus, in scaled translation, serpentine and hungry, the thing behind the thing behind the thing?

  Calliope: Heard instead the dark and skittering rustle over his marbled floors. Smelled the copper and the stagnancy of
water. The god obscured like élan vital pushed down, down, until it emerges hysterical, until it must be answered.

  Lykourgos smelled the serpent, and straightway he heard the rupture of our bars, our chains, as the god set us free and we scattered to vantage points in the shoreline rocks, where we saw the god rise from the sea in form divine and unbearable, trailing weeds and aether. And Lykourgos on the shoreline, shaking with fear, for he saw the glorious son of Zeus, and pale terror fell on him. Now the ox-goad, with which he had chased the god into the waters, fell useless from the king’s hand, and his strong will left him. Still he might have escaped, but when Dionysus approached, he stood in defiance

  Melpomene: So he urged us then, did the god—urged maenad, satyr and muse—to scourge Lykourgos with rods and branches.

  Thalia: I remember how his dark skin opened like blossoms.

  Calliope: Still he stood (did he not?) like a rock against which both wind and sea break uselessly. The king had gone too far. He was king and could do nothing but stand, his mantle and crown too heavy for movement. Then rage settled on the heart of Semele’s son, and he vowed that slow revenge was better than sudden death.

  Madness the god sent upon Lykourgos, and the phantom shapes of serpents, until Lykourgos’ two sons and his wife came before the king. Foolish boys, they cast their arms around their father, but he, thinking them serpents, struck them dead. In compassion Lord Dionysus swept the wife beyond the reach of doom, yet Lykourgos remained unflinching. So the god spread vines about him, entangling his limbs, neckbone snapping in the pressure of branches.

  Muses: And now in the land of shades his phantom draws water from the flow of the Acheron. Such the punishment ordained for men who fight against the gods; that retribution follow them living and dead.

  27 Stasimon: Antistrophe: The Muses

  Muses: Four dreams of four sisters, afloat in the spring air along the court, taking substance in gaslight and humidity. Each of the dreams framing a dream, story within story as the god bursts his shackles.

  Thalia: In the park lies a fat man covered in lamé and newspaper. Who dreams as well, snoring wine-lulled in the shadows of the park, imagining himself prone and belly-up on the boards of the stage as a slim dark figure approaches through his dream. A boy, dark haired and vaguely Asian, vaguely familiar as he takes on body and features. He is rising from the light of the court, which shines behind him as though he had the sun at his back and circled above the dreamer, ready to swoop down the tiered rows of the amphitheatre.

  And Jesus, thinks the fat man. Where the hell is it I know him from? his tipsy thoughts ranging back over a decade’s wandering the park, further still as the trees seemed to shrink to saplings behind the hovering boy and then rise again, no longer the domesticated, manicured Olmstead foliage but something disheveled and wild, plant life he feels he should remember but doesn’t quite, as it burgeons and blossoms in a spring so ancient there is even a cavernous cool on the breeze of receding glaciers, of a time not familiar to history or language or even human knowing…

  And Jesus, the fat man thinks, which makes me smile until my face resembles my mask.

  Erato: Here lies an older man, asleep in silks in a high ceilinged apartment on the court. At first he dreams only of his room and the court surrounding it, as though he might pass into waking by crossing the thinnest of membranes, a veil between worlds.

  And it seems that the same boy has just passed out of his dream, headed toward the shadows and the park beyond Magnolia Street, as the older man watches him go. If the boy looks vaguely familiar to T. Tommy Briscoe, it is to George Castille that he seems downright pronounced and memorable. It is and is not Jack Rausch: of that he is sure. Those dark and delicate good looks that broke hearts back in the day—breaking George Castille’s now, in the land of dreaming—as the boy gives a last glance over his shoulder before the shade engulfs him.

  Something Orphic and doomed about him, something passing from the bright land of the living into unknown country, but at the same time there is in his bearing a new swagger and menace, which George finds arousing, despite having sworn off the young ones.

  My ambition is not so high, he whispers. Now he is eidolon or simulacrum. For Castille’s dream figure is the mask and the player through which pass my sister’s thoughts and breathing, and behind her insufflations the breath of the god.

  So much for satyrs, for beautiful lads in troops, thinks George Castille. As for me, I am the one who has never faltered, who has seen the beautiful come and go, who has denied himself and served the mind instead of the body. Oh, give me this one, god of dreams and secret yearning, give me this one as he passes through the gates of ivory.

  And the boy looks back at him, eyes delicately angled and dark. Splendor flashes from him, like the moon emergent from the fog, and George Castille surrenders his dignity, crying out in the dappled and humbled night.

  Polymnia: And here is the dream I had, youngest of sisters, a dream of the clergyman turning restless on his bed, his wife a stillness in hairspray and cologne. Again the devil, goat-footed and horned and bearded, comes to the mat for him, the grip unspeakable and searing, the minister’s arms clawed back until his chest throbs and threatens to burst with the exertion of breaking the hold. And the devil tells him a story: that the god was born of union with god and mortal, was torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven, leaving wine and the broken flesh in his mysteries.

  The pastor joins hands behind the knotted, caprine back, knots his fingers, squeezes and lofts the creature, who clamps his wrist firmly, pulling his arm free and behind him. Now he falls, the devil spread-eagled on his naked belly, until, fixing the soles of his feet to the ground, the minister pushes up and away, and both roll across the floor, sweaty and struggling and somehow compliant, the creature pressing on the Reverend Peter Koenig, jackhammering his chest until his heart ossifies, his word and breath and dreaming leave him, and Euoi! The old Silenoi shout…

  As calf rope, the devil breathes, the old country way to ask for surrender, to say uncle. Calf rope. Say calf rope.

  Melpomene: A last and feminine call to the boy, as Dolores stands by the window, her hand gesturing figures on the glass. She sees the boy on the stage, a legion of disheveled women leading forth a garlanded bull. From afar the women say,

  Muses: Come this way, and I will make you famous on his back, and the gods will applaud you loudly. There is nothing to fear; Europa was but a girl, and she made this ride, bareback and without reins.

  Melpomene: Dolores watches as the boy stands over the bull’s brow, stroking the curved horns and excited by a sweet sting of desire and fear. The women deck the bull’s body with fresh dewy leaves, they wreath red roses about his back, lift lilies and daffodils over his brow and a ring of purple anemone on his neck. Now the boy calls out, boasting to the round Moon, and the bull, goaded by moonlight, wanders the trackless grounds of the park.

  So rode the boy as the bull gathers fury. Dolores calls out to him, forgetting he is an image, simulacrum, and eidolon. The bull lowers its horns and bucks, and the youth on its back clings vainly, his shoulders bunching, growing larger, more definite, a shape his mother knows as well as her own as he hurtles through streetlight and she hears and does not hear the sound of his fall and breaking.

  His blood flows like forbidden vintage. Against her instinct and nature, she savors it.

  Muses: And in four beds in four places, sleepers startle awake, and something in the world shifts as the god begins to move. And as he moves, so ends the first act of the story. Set it down, rest your eyes. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

  28 Episode: Best-Laid Plans

  Vincent De Chevre opened his eyes and laughed.

  His sister was in the bathroom. The sound of her hair dryer usually comforted him with its familiarity, even as it jostled him toward life. But this morning he was wide awake, alert to notions. Banging on the bathroom door, he shouted out a plot of undercover rescue, and Maia De Che
vre, usually the more cautious and demure of the twins, whooped in agreement.

  She chose to overlook the obstacles. How they could expect help only from Billy and Apache. How Aron would no doubt balk at the plan, and how George Castille and Stephen Thorne would be horrified. Still she mulled and savored it, turning on the dryer again, her hair singed under the hot rush and the electric roar. She thought of the adventure, the chance for disguise and secret agency, the most awesome casting call for a play in theatre history. The old hippies would get with the program later, because if Stephen Thorne prided himself on subversive theatre, this shit was downright guerrilla: if he was as good as the game he talked, he would recognize the poetry in public kidnapping.

  That left Aron as the problem, she knew. Maia had watched him watch them, peeping tom as she and Jack had sat on the stage and talked their histories. Aware of Aron’s gaze that night, Maia had touched Jack’s arm frequently in the conversation. Had once leaned in, laughed, and rested her head briefly on his shoulder. And no, it was not all about sending Aron mixed signals but unmixing them. If he didn’t know (as surely he should by now) he needed to know that this watching her from distances had a creepy edge to it, that there was such a thing as imagined stalking, that sometimes it became visible.

  It was testament to Aron Starr’s timidity that he had not and would not step front stage to serenade her, but simply stare yearningly from somewhere in the wings. He was timid in too many things, and since her brother’s plan would demand a sense of venture, and since the goal was to wrest Jack from Antioch and Our Town, Maia doubted that Aron would go along. At least until she had done with him.