The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  Dionysus stumbled up to the bookstore and opened the door, which set off the jingling bell. A fissure shot through his head like a crack in the earth’s crust, and he finally understood the pain Zeus must have felt when Hephaestus split the patriarch’s skull open to give birth to Athena.

  “Can I help you?”

  Margaret Atwood greeted the god, rubbing herself against his exposed shin and arching her back in a display of camaraderie.

  “Wine,” he said, still slumped over.

  “I told you last time, this is a bookstore. The Rite Aid nearby closed. Your only option around here is that bougie new little market that opened up right over there.” She pointed across the street. “Not that anyone from this neighborhood could actually shop there.”

  “They have wine?” He finally straightened himself out and looked at her behind the desk. She was slender and fierce, with hair naturally dark but tinged by the sun. Dionysus had seen only one other like her, the great and powerful Queen of Egypt—except Cleopatra was surrounded by young men feeding her grapes and dates and pouring ruby elixir into her chalice from a golden carafe. He would give anything to be one of those young men if it meant he could sneak a slug of the vine while the queen took a nap.

  “Yeah, but it’ll cost ya. Not the cheap stuff I normally get.”

  He didn’t care what it was. He’d suck down a bottle of Phoenician swill if it meant he could have it immediately. He left the bookstore as abruptly as he had entered and crossed the street without looking. A tiny red car laid on the horn and the god dropped to the pavement, holding the sides of his head.

  He managed to make it to his feet and stumbled to the lip of the sidewalk. Dionysus turned back to the bookstore and met eyes with the young Cleopatra, the calico resting on her shoulder.

  He brushed the pebbles from his toga and marched into the bougie-mart, prepared to end his suffering.

  He spotted the wine section and scanned for Greek—Napa, Sonoma, Monterey—nothing. Dionysus had never heard of these regions and figured they were tucked-away appellations in France he had missed on his tour. The thought of Americans making wine had never even occurred to him.

  He grabbed four bottles of something called Kendall-Jackson—perhaps a Saxon duo who had been invited to the French countryside?—and approached the cashier.

  She scanned the window three times and took a step back when Dionysus plopped the four bottles of merlot on the counter.

  “Ramon! Can you come up here, please?!”

  “Does this suffice?” asked Dionysus, picking pebbles out of his jet-black beard.

  “Those are $19.99 each.” Dionysus looked at her, waiting for a different answer. “That’s only $30.” He remained silent, still. “No, it does not suffice. Ramon!”

  “Yeah, yeah, what is it?” said a broad, bald man as he wiped his hands on a towel.

  “Try Spanish. I don’t know. I can’t handle this right now. The rhubarb came in early and the avocados are not ready to be put out.” And she left.

  “¿Oye chaval, cuánto tienes?” Dionysus held up the money and Ramon walked him through the checkout procedure—he left the store with only one bottle of merlot.

  He sat on the first bench that lined the street outside of the bougie-mart and slid the brown paper bag from the bottle. He stripped off the foil wrapped around the top and neck and stared blankly at the cork.

  Of course, he had seen cork before, but he’d seldom had to deal with the hindrance. Since arriving on Mt. Olympus, Adonis had poured every glass of wine for Dionysus from an urn with a portrait of himself in fading black paint. The smell of the red wine and musk of sweat arrived with the memory, and the god’s stomach gurgled and his head pounded harder.

  Delivering Adonis to the home of the gods had been a consequence of chance, a fruit of Dionysus’s aimless wandering.

  Hera had plotted to kill him again, so Zeus commanded that he leave for the time being, until she could curb her hysteria. Dionysus was far from Zeus’s only child by another woman, but it was the fact that his mother, Semele, was not of divine stock that had so infuriated the Queen of the Gods, therefore making it her preoccupation to conceive ways to rip his impure body apart. Unwilling to experience again what had happened the first time the Titans successfully got a hold of him, Dionysus asked Hermes to take him to the island of Djerba, off the coast of North Africa.

  On the island, Dionysus joined the lotus-eaters in taking to the flowers and fruits that put him in a trance. He spent days lying in the grass, watching his illusions with euphoric apathy, allowing the stress of Hera’s threats to melt from his conscience.

  He had left Djerba completely relaxed, practically having forgotten why he had ventured to the island in the first place, and arrived at the splendorous city of Alexandria, a personal favorite.

  He likely would have remained in Alexandria had it not been for a host of Maenads that had broken through his control and set fire to the city when the Roman governor accepted the rite of Bacchus—a new, acquiescent order shed of the orgiastic revelry that so defined his own. The Maenads, refusing to adhere to the orders of the Senate, burned down the library of Alexandria and tore apart the governor—they wore his innards around their necks like jewelry— their antics only quelled by the mobilization of the Third Legion.

  As the god ventured through Sinai, he heard rumors of a Jew in the Judean Hills who was developing a small but ardent following. The god set out for Jerusalem and met Jesus in Hebron and instantly took a liking to the young man, despite his rhetoric denouncing the pagan gods.

  Dionysus traveled with Jesus throughout the countryside and witnessed his small following start to balloon. They were devout, but without the violent ferocity of the Maenads. The feasts they threw rivaled any he had attended with Sheba or Cleopatra or Silenus and his satyr brothers in the Balkan woods, and just when the celebrations began to plateau, Dionysus would turn the remaining water into wine—he named the elixir the “Vintage of God.”

  But as time passed, the Jew’s sermons became more serious, referring to himself as the “Son of Man” and openly defying the Romans and Pharisees. The god knew it was time to continue up the Levantine coast and he bid farewell to his friend.

  He would later learn that the Romans, or the Pharisees, or both—he never could get a straight answer—had tortured Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem and executed him on Golgotha. The Jew had foreseen his execution and spoke about it regularly. Dionysus never understood why the Nazarene would remain in Judea if he was so certain about his demise, and offered to take him to a Greek island where they could continue to feast and never be discovered. Dionysus had even suspected that Jesus was also an offspring of Zeus, as he too had a peculiar birth, and felt a distant kinship with him as if they were long-lost brothers. But Jesus responded with a story—not an uncommon occurrence—about a lamb and shepherd, which Dionysus never quite comprehended, and the god never saw Jesus again.

  Dionysus followed the Mediterranean coast and crossed into Phoenicia. He had finished his stock before he hit Acre and didn’t have time to stick his spear-like thyrsus into the ground to harvest more. He eventually had no choice but to settle for Phoenician wine—how the Romans tolerated the Levantine swill, Dionysus would never understand. However, despite the utter disrespect the Mediterranean rivals imposed on the vine, Dionysus couldn’t help but thank them for delivering him to Adonis, the love of his life.

  He could smell the wine sitting in the clay carafe stuck snug in the sand of the riverbank. He hadn’t had a drop since finishing the last of his “Vintage of God” and stumbled over to the container, gulping down half of the carafe before pulling it down from his lips.

  Out in the river, a sinewy figure popped out from the water, startling the God of the Vine. Except for a crop of flowing chestnut hair that he smoothed back and down his neck with oil, the figure was hairless, as if he had been born from the riverbed. He waded through the water toward Dionysus, flashing a smile that danced in the sunlight—if a
more beautiful creature had ever graced the earth, it and Dionysus had yet to be acquainted.

  As Adonis walked, flowers burst and bloomed right from the sand, and a path of green, red, and violet guided him like a rolled-out carpet. He plucked a red anemone and stuck it in the thick black of Dionysus’s hair, and then on his lips, he planted the softest kiss.

  They made love on the riverbank until the sun set and the stars sparkled above them. Adonis, being himself quite the lush when it came to the grape, had packed plenty more wine for his picnic. Dionysus criticized and critiqued the wine with every sip—not that it curbed his imbibing in the slightest—and offered Adonis wine “fit for gods” if only he would return with him to Mt. Olympus.

  Dionysus looked back fondly on that day and considered Adonis his finest accomplishment; finer than when he’d defeated Eurytus the Titan with a blow from his thyrsus. And Adonis did return with him to Mt. Olympus, but other occupants of the empyrean palace put their love to the test.

  The god felt the orange sick slosh about his stomach at the mere thought of their conspiracy against him. He had come to New Orleans to forget about that ethereal life, if even for a moment. Sitting on the bench, he took another look at the cork, placed the neck of the bottle beneath his leg, and used leverage to snap it off, leaving a smattering of glass to fall through the spaces in the bench.

  He took a swig from the jagged-edged bottle, plops of purple dropping onto his toga, and spit bits of glass fragments onto the street before swallowing.

  “Soft and supple.” He raised the broken bottle to the sky. “A Vintage of God!” he shouted, before taking a second swig that caught in his throat.

  Zibby

  Zibby had watched like a stalker as the toga-clad heartthrob went in and out of the bougie-mart. She poked her head out from Local Poets, a section that had expanded threefold since she began working at the bookshop four years ago; she blamed the sudden saturation on a movie that came out a couple of summers back about a woman who leaves her corporate office and controlling husband to travel the country and write poetry. Like every writer who’d passed through this city, the protagonist found inspiration in New Orleans. Now every mom who had a glass of Chardonnay after dropping off her kids at Newman or Lusher was a poet. Yes, they even received strung-together poetry collections fresh off a typewriter—where these women were buying typewriters, Zibby could never figure out. She knocked over one of these collections—Love Discovered in Jackson Square—as Margaret Atwood pounced onto her shoulder to get a look herself.

  “Damn, Margs, we need to cut your nails. What is he…holy shit! He just snapped the neck right off. You see that?” But the calico had been watching a little bird bounce along the sidewalk. “This freakin’ guy is gonna get arrested. I told him…ugh, hold on, Margs. Get down, honey.”

  Zibby walked to the back of the store where Liv kept a little refrigerator. On top, a stack of red cups sat in unfurling plastic. Zibby grabbed one and hustled through the store before a customer could come in. She crossed the street, bopping the bottom of the cup against her thigh in quick bursts. “Hey!” He didn’t flinch. “Hey! Ya know, you can’t just drink it like that.” His eyes were watering, as if he had been choking or holding back tears. “Here, you need to put it in a plastic cup.” New Orleans permitted alcohol on the go—they practically advertised it—so long as you emptied your drink into a plastic cup like those found in stacks by the door of any bar. Even with this liberal and enlightening law, tourists and Tulane students would still act as if the entire city was an alcoholic wonderland.

  The glowing toga-clad man took the cup and poured in the remaining purple wine. He picked a bit of glass from his gums and flicked it into the street. “Many thanks,” he said.

  Upon closer inspection, Zibby realized that he had been crying and asked if he was okay.

  “I love desperately,” he started. “I know of no other way.”

  Zibby was speechless. From across the street, a young man in an outfit that belonged in the English countryside scribbled something down into a notebook as he sat outside an indie alt-avant-garde café that she thought smelled sour. He would pop his head up, taking in the toga-clad stranger, and drop it back down to write, as if capturing the moment—he’d probably be in the bookshop the next week, having transcribed his musings onto faux-weathered parchment.

  The beautiful stranger sucked down more of the wine, then licked his lips and looked up at the sky. “Thank you, again,” he said. “You are very kind.”

  Zibby gave him a curt half smile and walked back across the street.

  Throughout the afternoon, she would peek out the front window to see if he had left and found another block of the city to entertain. But not only had the beautiful stranger remained, he had fallen asleep, curled up on the bench like a child on his living room couch.

  She always had been attracted to the denizen fringes of New Orleans, the freaks, degenerates, and derelicts—not the wannabe Wiccans who moved from the Midwest to work at Madame Laveau’s down on Bourbon Street, but the real characters whose screws were just loose enough to be interesting. She remembered another poster her roommate had—New Orleans: Most cities hide their crazy, we march ours down the street—it was still only the second week of school.

  When Liv got back, Zibby asked if she could leave early. The Dead White Men had been neatly organized and shelved about the Fiction section, and tomorrow was her first day of law school. Liv obliged her request and asked her not to become one of those law students; Zibby knew exactly what she meant.

  “Just don’t lose that dreamer I’ve known for years, got it?”

  She got it.

  One night, after knocking back a couple after work at the Maple Leaf bar down the street, Zibby had disclosed to Liv her goal of writing her own novel one day. “Writers write,” Liv responded. “It’s that easy and it’s that hard.”

  As college came to a close, she imagined starting her novel on a balcony in Stone Town, Zanzibar, scribbling on thick parchment as the adhan coursed through the city. But after that plan was dashed—a third European had had acid thrown in her face—Zibby couldn’t put pen to paper again. She could barely write in her diary, which she refused to allow become some bland, regurgitated daily reconstruction. Zibby wanted her diary to be well written and interesting, just in case she ever became famous.

  She left the bookshop. The sun was still high in the August evening, and Zibby checked the bench. The stranger had turned over on his side so his back faced the street; the plastic cup was stuck on top of the decapitated wine bottle. She turned and walked back across the street, even though it was in the opposite direction of her house, and shook the toga-clad stranger until he woke up in spastic, wide-eyed jerks.

  “You gonna sleep out here?” Zibby couldn’t believe he was homeless. Sure, his toga was filthy and there seemed to be a film of grease or oil in his beard, giving it a shine, but she had known New Orleans homeless all her life, even volunteered with the Catholic Worker house over in the Lower Garden District dealing out hot meals, and this guy just didn’t fit that ilk. She scanned his arms for needle punctures (nothing) or a wedding ring (nothing again). The guy’s girlfriend had probably kicked him out of the house or he had separated from his bachelor party to go on a solo bender. “So? You want to sleep out here? Spillovers from the Maple Leaf are loud, and I think A Murder of Crows are playing tonight. Gonna get beacuop rowdy.”

  The stranger turned over. “Do you have more wine?” he asked, the red stains spreading out from the creases of his mouth like the Joker’s smile.

  “Yeah, I think so. I’ve got somewhere for ya to sleep, though. Supposed to storm tonight. You came during hurricane season.”

  He finally sat up and stretched as if he had just woken up from a good night’s sleep. There were scars, red rings where his arms fit into his shoulders, like a sculpted monster from Frankenstein.

  “Come on, you can sleep in the studio.” She put her hand out; he took it. A frisson bolted
through Zibby. “Raabta,” she said, eyes glossy.

  “Pardon?” asked the beautiful stranger. “I can barely understand this dialect.”

  “No…no, no, sorry. That wasn’t…that wasn’t English.”

  “Well, I have spent hours practicing this barbaric language. So if you’d please stick to the common tongue, it would be much appreciated.”

  Zibby couldn’t speak. Perhaps it was a mere connection of applying something recently learned to a present situation, or perhaps it was one of those things that once you learn of it, you see it everywhere. But just last week, Zibby had flipped through a booklet of untranslatable foreign words—hidden in the pile of Dead White Men—and came across the Urdu word raabta: the inexplicable connection of one soul to another.

  Zibby had been in love, quite a few times. She loved Denny Domengeaux when she was eight years old after he picked a dandelion from the sprouting weed that pushed itself through the South Carrollton concrete and stuck it in her hair. She loved Miguel Villalobos for three years in high school and let him “take” her virginity—as if it was a masterminded heist from the Louvre—in the back of his teal-and-purple Suzuki Samurai, a.k.a. the Suicide Samurai. And most recently she had loved Ryan from Colorado, who was the kind of boy she imagined her mother would’ve approved of had she ever bothered to visit New Orleans again.

  When Zibby brought up the possibility of following Ryan back to Colorado Springs after college, her father launched a full-on cuisine-assault counterattack: “Whuh…what?! Colorado? Ya won’t be able ta get decent crawfish in Colorado. What about gumbo, huh? And what do dey eat on Mondays? I bet dey use a kielbasa or bratwurst”—he said these words as if they were the foods of Northern European philistines—“instead of andouille. And…whuh…what about oysters? Don’t even…you can’t sit der and tell me dey’ll have decent oysters in Colorado. Dey got dose Rocky Mountain oysters up dere. Ya know what dose are?! I don’t even want to say it ’cause we eatin’, but I jus’…I can’t believe my daughter would even think about leaving Louisiana for a state dat eats testicles.”