It was marvelous, he had to allow: Jack setting up a gamic, driving base, Vincent’s batrachian lead climbing the line like a great, predatory snake, twining until it was enough to make a wino blush. And indeed T. Tommy’s face was flushed, incandescent, as he and the Brischords emerged from the shadow, and took up a wailing, improvised call and response.
Then it began, vines breaking the surfaces of treated wood, sprouting and burgeoning, the sets suddenly grown over with ivy and all of them playing, rapt by the music and indifferent to the dark greenery that encircled them. Aron alone, unmusical and seated on the topmost tier of the amphitheatre, watched as all of it—players and singers, instruments, folly towers and mirrors—fell ambiguous and green.
It unnerved Aron, but he knew it was the light and the superlative weed the boys had nicked from a sandwich bag under Stephen Thorne’s copy of The Bacchae, slipped there hastily and half-assed at the arrival of young and impressionable guests. And from where he sat, he could not see the muses dancing in the mirrors, hair untied and disheveled, masked and wreathed, Thalia bearing a wine pitcher called the oinochoe. But he could hear as the music drove into an ambling, nasty medley of Elvis songs, as Elvis became lives and evils in the hands of raucously stoned musicians, lifting the songs out of the cleanly, castrated appeal of the Colonel Tom Parker years and giving funk and cojones to ‘Viva Las Vegas,’ ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ T. Tommy’s glitter barely visible under the shadowy green as he rose to a solo ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ with the Brischords in a welling intoned background so lonely that Aron found it the saddest sound he believed he had ever heard, and he breathed more easily when the music lifted up and away from him, buoyed on a dark warm wind and accompanied by a strange, desolate melody that the boy could not recognize but was played on the double reeds of an aulos. Something like a qeej but sacred to the approaching god.
And the sound of the ancient flute lifted up and north over a stand of oak, past the sidewalk silvered in moonlight and north toward Ormsby and Oak Street beyond it, the infamous corner where the Brother talked to the crossing signs and where money and substances changed hands in open streetlight, where the gaunt girl there only the night before had vanished, snatched off by the god that is both Dionysus and Hades and leaving a scarcely noticed emptiness amid the commerce and squalor—an emptiness the music did its best to fill.
And there, doors locked against intruders and night and melancholy wind, Maia De Chevre sat behind the wheel of the van and listened.
As far away from her, left backstage and overlooked in the ecstasy of rising music, the scaled god tremored and stretched.
42 Stasimon: Strophe: Polymnia and the Muses
Polymnia: Sister ours, Lady of the Blood Moon. Virgin of the Nets. Artemis, shadow to your brother’s light. Be near us as this story unfolds. As light and shadow meet in Antioch.
Thalia: You witness the foolery of men, Artemis Keladeinos. You call it foolery, as indeed it should be called, and yet…You know it is not only a pissing contest, not only a measurement of members…
For though size matters, not that size nor those matters…
You know their vanities, Sister, how they trump up the opposition.
How Stephen Thorne mimics the sonorities of Peter Koenig in his mind, mocks a voice accustomed to no challenge.
Melpomene: How Koenig, under a smile and false solicitude, is wondering why amateur directors see no difference between pretend and pretense.
How Peter Koenig is content that the Bible will endure when Euripides is ashes…
Thalia: How Stephen Thorne responds that Thornton Wilder is no Bible, much less Euripides, and that those who prefer the Bible to the tragedies have read neither one. As Stephen imagines aw shucks is neither ethics nor aesthetics…
Melpomene: Peter Koenig sees no art in obscurity or offense. As Stephen will not build up people falsely…
Thalia: Koenig will not tear them down for no reason.
Polymnia: All struggles are for power, and not all power is the same.
Melpomene: As Koenig expresses polite disapproval at Jack Rausch’s abduction…
Thalia: while Stephen celebrates politely the boy’s liberation,
Polymnia: it all comes back to blood and the letting of blood, to the hunt upon primal hillsides before all your will fell down below thought and language, coiling and seething until the cracks in the fissure, the oblique eruptions that reminds you briefly of the feral things you are.
43 Stasimon: Antistrophe: T. Tommy and the Brischords
T. Tommy: That night, barely twenty and a student at the university, I went to see the Doors at Freedom Hall.
The god was subdued that night, children. Baggy white jeans and a t-shirt, no bombast of tight leather. ‘Hello, I Love You,’ as his greeting, smoking and drunk evidently, theophany five days before the election that brought Nixon in, and something in history gone bad that you could smell under the cannabis.
I dropped the acid on the way home, thunderstorm rumbling out of the west. The last of the trick-or-treaters still on the street, the big kids, cheap masks and gerrymandered costumes—they were too old, had outstayed the holiday’s welcome. And Nixon masks among them, as I tried to stay outside the trip while driving. By the time I reached campus I was sure the Republican Party was out to get me, and of course the acid, as always, was prophetic.
All the buildings were closed down and locked for the night, and I rode the fear like someone in a bad Hunter Thompson story until I found a door ajar in Gottschalk Hall, where someone had propped it open and forgot, so I slipped in out of the rising storm.
There is a small seminar room on the third floor. I knew it because I’d had a Moderns class there—Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Faulkner—believe me or don’t, but I took the class and got a C+. They was a stairway off the room, and you could get to the roof, though it was unwise, they cautioned. And though it was unwise, I got there, and I looked out across the campus by night, through the trees toward the parkway and the old Confederate Monument.
And the bolt struck, and I felt it before I heared it, children, wild light and the top of my head sheared away and it was like my soles were soldered to the ground in sheer electric energy. For a moment I gained balance, and the branches opened and I saw city lights steady in a current of blackness, a current that broke across them and almost carried me with it, in rain and shadow, but I held my ground.
It took me a year to grow hair back. I was magnetized, could not wear a watch. I would black out and awaken at the overlook, sometimes naked, sometimes wrapped only in a blanket against imagined winds. And from then on I was asking Alice, drawn back like something primeval and tidal.
44 Stasimon: Strophe: Polymnia and the Muses
Polymnia: Over here, Tommy. Down Fourth Street close and littered, then a block east past the statue for the Confederate Dead, to this place where we now sit sheltered and illumined. This museum, across from the krater, the wine vessel, on which the god appears, reclining in black-figure.
All these things I tell you are close in place and time. The god arrives on a stage of nine city blocks. Seven, if you don’t count the side streets that branch to nothing off the main thoroughfares. Seen from above, the streets are hexagrams, and the lines change yin to yang, but mostly yang to yin, as the landscape settles, as ELIVS fades from sight and the god appears in dark radiance, changing the third line of the hexagram so that it no longer reads Sovereignty but now Contradiction, as the King devolves into fragments.
Erato: Desire and power and love are elusive, all of the same until they sprout in fertile ground. But courtship is what the earth yearns for. A longing that is simple, terrible, to be vitalized. And in this desire, T. Tommy is no fool. He knows that divine invasion shapes receptive country and is shaped by it, but what that means is you keep calling on the god until you get the coiled thing backstage, something you half-expect at best.
Thalia: For example, sisters: the congregation at Antioch—those who yearn for the
Rapture at least—would shit themselves at the form Apocalypse would take. Because the pleasure of imagining hell for their business rivals and political opponents would be short-lived. It would not pan out the way their malice has it plotted.
Melpomene: And if Aron Starr had come to life in the way Dolores imagines, those nights she stands above his sullen and nightstruck bed, this story would not end as she foresees.
Not that it will, anyway.
Erato: Because what the passive earth takes in is transformed by its yielding soil. Forgotten seeds spring surprisingly to life, while others, mindfully planted and tended, sprout pale and grotesquely shaped by a week of unforeseen rain, by a passage of shadow or unseasonable cold snap.
Clio: And far from the earth, when hardened and fired, slipped or glazed to be hidden for centuries or housed in a well-lit museum, the clay still harbors life, the vessel commingles with what it contains, producing something that is neither or both. And both is neither in this game of divine kottabos, when the wine tossed by the god rings against the surface of the krater.
In the week after Dolores looks down on her sleeping son, the krater begins to change.
Erato: I saw it first and told them, Thalia and Polymnia. How Ariadne…
Thalia: …or the maenad—because we did not know who the girl was on the vase…
Erato: …or the maenad, then…had begun to change. She was aging now, her dark hair flecked with strands of gold that the experts would mark as wear on the surface of the krater rather than the woman’s transformation.
Thalia: It was Dolores, aged and inebrious, staring across at the god. Or becoming Dolores, as fleshly and lost, somewhere she wandered through classes and rehearsals, the moving world around her becoming foggy and abstract, while the craftman’s brush lines sharpened after two millennia of rest, gaining texture and layering over the clay.
We laughed at first, but we knew what the changes meant. Now the surface of the vessel shimmered and the steady museum light fluttered as it did only in passing storms.
Melpomene: And since I know the god best, I can tell you. He was filling the calyx, was nectar in the bud of the flower, blood in the ceramic heart that slowly, unavoidably was starting to beat.
45 Episode: Rescued Again
Aron shook the dice in his hand. Trapped in a labyrinth of his own devising, now he was fastened to Jack Rausch. What had begun as courageous rescue had settled into an irritating daily life, his private schedule disrupted by company, his friends’ allegiance as shifting as his mother’s. He and Jack umbilically nourished at the same residence, but the guest more favored than the son.
Aron was being dismantled by women. Or so he figured. For when he watched Maia’s averted glance, how she brushed back her hair in a way she never had when visiting before, how the top button of her blouse was free, the collar framing the heartbreaking hollow of her throat…
Compromised by infatuations, Aron had sealed off the world of his game from Jack’s entry. But tonight he rolled the dice and wove scenarios for half an hour until he sensed impatience in the players, the restlessness of Vincent and Apache while Billy hovered at the refrigerator and Maia sat with Jack in the common room of the apartment.
So does nobody want to play or what? Aron asked into the lulled mood. And it was Vincent, ever the peace maker, who drew him aside at last, out for cigarettes and advice, as he explained how all of them wanted Jack to rejoin the game.
Very well, Aron conceded. Because how might he do otherwise and not appear spiteful, mean, adolescent? But Jack would have to earn his way back in. For after all, it was a game, wasn’t it? And the idea of a game—of this game, at least—was to test the wits of the players.
Often an RPG comes down to ingenuity. To simple dice roll and problem solving. Sometimes the whole RP in RPG dwindles even further, to cleverness and luck.
But surely there are those moments when the player becomes actor, is filled with the breath of the god, and is transformed. Sometimes, even in those games where a single player acts as more than one character, the moment comes as he tumbles with assurance into one role, or the other, or even both—often in sequence or sometimes even simultaneously. Enthusiasm, George Castille called it: where the god fills the player. The moments the actor relishes, but also the reader, the story’s listener, who finds himself in residence, translated to the world made of those words and gestures (or of those dice and maps and diagrams). A world that takes on shimmering life, like the way a constellation becomes a lynx, a dragon, a cup, when our eyes summon shapes from the spaces between stars.
Now Aron set a maze before his players, yet another obstacle to the subterranean descent of Brendan and Melusine, Hrothgar and Kleptos. From the outside, it was simply five young people seated around a table. Vincent drew the others back to the game, including Jack, who stood behind Maia’s chair, his hands on its high back.
But something was forming in the spaces between them. Perhaps only the Muses saw it clearly.
Aron announced that the party of adventurers had found the body of a female cleric, sealed in a sleep resembling death, encased in impermeable crystal. His eyes met Jack’s, his reluctant gift was received with a nod, and quietly Jack took a seat at the table between the De Chevre twins.
Aron masked the dice roll and explained. Surely there is some way to open the crystal casket. Surely something can revitalize the sleeping girl.
It was now that Urania descended upon the little community. For though the Nine Sisters were almost all verbal creatures—muses of drama and poetry, history, epic, even dance—Urania was different. The stars she governs are stationary and abstract until drawn together by seeing and imagining. Because the heart cannot bear an unstoried world. And so the players in a game like this conjure flesh and nerve and place and journey from numbers and the chance roll of astragali and tesserae.
Billy Shepherd’s shadow hulked on the wall, enlarging, assuming a bearish and bristling shape. No trick of the light except Urania’s starlight, in which Apache Downs’ shadow dwindled, became slim and dexterous and febrile. In the mirrors of the Starr apartment, then, you could see fighters, a magic-user, a thief, and a golden girl in white robes, asleep in a crystal casing. Aron cast no shadow. At best he left a ripple in the aether, something undetectable except for a voice that overlay the scenes in the mirrors, a quality of light that defined the shadows, hardened their edges.
The girl stirs in the cabinet, that voice intoned. Stirs in airless glass.
And indeed, the priestess stirred, the thief crouched beside her, desperately searching for seams in the faceted casket. Urania was joined by Thalia, who rose from the interstices of starlight and leaned close to Apache Downs, whispering inspirations he was too thick to gather. Hrothgar and Brendan stood guard over the fiasco.
Then the players’ own muse, the flesh-and-mortal Maia, breathed clemency into Aron’s improvised storm.
I lean over the casket, she announced. I kiss the mouth of the priestess through the thin barrier of glass. For I know the old tales, wherein a kiss revives and restores the sleeping maiden.
It took no muse to see defeat settle upon Aron’s shoulders like a grim and monitory bird, as, keeping with the roleplay but following the prompt of her rising desire, Maia De Chevre mouthed a kiss less than an inch from Jack’s parted lips, and the whole room tilted with a sharp intake of the Muses’ breaths.
46 Episode: Unclear Jealousies
Maia finally told her brother that Jack had visited. Had dropped by the house a time last week after his school. That he had claimed he was looking for Vincent.
Jack had helped her lift some boxes to the attic, had labored under her teasing. Perhaps he should grow his hair like Samson, he offered, but Maia teased him, saying it would make him prettier, hardly stronger. They pushed and scuffled, both feigning wrath and tamping laughter. Erato’s hand on Vincent’s shoulder as Maia told her brother how the pushes became gentler and more bodily, slipped into a slow wrangling of thighs and chests.
How Jack and Maia slid to the attic floor, startled, still pretending at wrestling, raising dust amid De Chevre castoffs.
And when Vincent shivered an intake of breath and stared at his sister raptly, asking what came next, she turned and blushed, because of course she had come next, her gaze languidly, blissfully sinking into Jack’s dark eyes as she lay back amid boxes and portmanteaux, dumbfounded and sexcellent, his slim bassist’s fingers tracing patterns on her lower lip as she slipped his index finger under her tongue unto the first knuckle, looking up at him with drowsy, knowing eyes.
It was enough for her brother to hear this. Near breathless himself at Maia’s account, reddening when she spoke of Jack’s fingers, Vincent forbade his sister to be alone with Jack Rausch. Then at once recanted. He was a better brother than counselor, after all, sitting on the De Chevre patio, smoking a stolen cigarette, and trying to tell himself what he could not tell himself.
And the Muses watched as well, were exultant. Seeing possibilities and permutations in all of this, loving the sheer geometry of the scandalous triangle. Such events make inevitable motions, are lines converging in the distance. It took no prophet now to see things ending badly.
47 Episode: Agon at Antioch
Vine: An Urban Legend Page 13
