Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End (23 page)

Trevino shook his head,
half following, half ready to lock him up in the asylum himself.
“Lilith said something about that.”

“
Did she?”

“
Yeah. I still don't know what either of you are getting at.
Were getting at. Look, you know what happens now.”

“
You kill me,” Dionysus said nonchalantly. He turned around.
Trevino shook his head again, and then slapped on the cuffs. As
they started walking off, the mercs moved to follow.

“
I can handle this,” Trevino said.

They eyed each other
suspiciously. “Yes, sir.”

They made their way through
a maze of brambles, Dionysus in front and Trevino behind, gun in
hand. The sun was beginning to peak the top of the
bluffs.

“
A lot of good it does, being a Demigod. We age. You can kill
us. We are mortal in every way. Except our
consciousness.”

“
You're looking death in the face, and talking about...I don't
even know.”

“
Humor a dead man. We die and forget, are reborn. Sometimes we
begin to
remember
. So what? It’s a cruel joke that time plays on eternity. The
memories drive us mad, half the time.”

“
I'm beginning to wonder how you could possibly be behind a
terrorist uprising.”

“
Fate is written in stone because the choices we make, given
the circumstances, are always the same. If you kill me now, you
would always do so. Choice is not fixed, but
identity
is. So let me ask
you...what kind of man are you, agent Trevino? Are you the kind
that kills an unarmed, innocent fool?”

“
I'm just following orders.”

“
The greatest crimes were perpetrated by people that were just
following orders.”

“
So they say. Stop here. Kneel,” Trevino said, his voice less
steady than he would have liked.

Without any argument,
Dionysus knelt on the pebbles and cracked earth beneath him. “I
don’t think that’s who you are.”

“
You know I have a gun to your head?”

“
No, you don’t.”

The gun dangled limply in
Trevino’s hand, pointed nowhere in particular. It trembled
slightly.

Dionysus breathed with the
cadence of the desert crickets. A moment of peace and stillness.
The gun discharged loudly into the chill air.

Shaking his head at what
he was doing, Trevino unlocked his cuffs. “Disappear. Do you
understand?
Fucking
disappear.”

Eventually, Dionysus heard
footsteps padding away.

Trevino picked his way back
across the brambles to the mercs, who waited in the idling
SUV.

He holstered his sidearm
and tossed a pair of bloody handcuffs to the merc riding in the
rear before climbing into the shotgun position. “Got any
water?”

Accepting a canteen, he
drank deeply. “I’ve never executed a man before. Get us out of
here.”

After another swig, he
flipped open his phone.

The Suits sat expectantly
with a speakerphone and a manilla file folder on their table. One
of them activated the phone.

“
Go ahead, Adam.”

“
We’re finished, here.”

One of them pulled the
folder to himself and opened it.

“
This is confirmed?”

“
Sir. It’s finished.”

“
Well done, Special Deputy US Marshall Adam
Trevino.”

One of them brought a
heavy, old-fashioned stamp down on the first page of the file.
Trevino’s world-weary personnel profile photo was marred with a
“KIA” in red ink.

“
Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

An impossibly loud gunshot
played over the speaker. They deactivated it, closed the file, and
pushed it across the table.

“
Notify human resources.”

Dionysus walked alone under
the canopy of the stars, marveling at them as he walked. Seemingly
still, always in motion. He was alive, he was free. But without
friends to share either of it things with, he wondered if it much
mattered.

Epilogue

2020

A line of young
intellectuals ran the full length of the campus book store like a
giant snake. (That is, if snakes could pay thirty grand a year for
college and wear Birkenstocks.) The ivory tower, a last,
beleaguered bastion of security against the coming
storm.

All of them are eager,
pushing, shoving. Shoving to see me. If I’d known people could
still get so excited about literature I may have gotten out of the
Antichrist Superstar gig before the feds got involved. Back then I
didn’t really have the rock star ego; now I have the appearance of
it ten times over. Maybe jadedness comes off a lot like
egotism.

The novelty of groupies had
mostly worn off. The doddering professor does Debby schtick has to
get old eventually, right? Maybe I hoped I’d finally connect with
someone like I had with Ariadne, or that I would find her again, in
a new form. No luck, but you can’t blame a guy for
trying.

I wanted someone, anyone to
be able to sit across from me over coffee and talk about the
weather, or Duchamp, or even nothing at all without the Valley Girl
in the back of their minds shrilly proclaiming my ineffable genius.
Well, as St. Augustine said, “give me chastity and continence Lord,
but not yet.” I suppose.

I came out of hiding from
of a feeling of obligation – if people are going to survive what’s
coming, they’re going to need to know about the importance of their
dreams. About Demigods. The world is about to change in a
fundamental way. Shamanism is going to be as important as
horticulture in the new world. It no longer need be an ethnological
anachronism kept alive by the academies and tourist trade. I’m just
doing my job here. But spit in the face of lady fortune when she
offers herself to me? Please. I won’t be a hypocrite either – I’ll
tell this to Amy or Sharon or Chelsea, as I unhook her
bra.

Usually, they just want to
talk to me about how I almost overthrew ‘the man,’ and so on. I try
to be clear. I didn’t almost overthrow
anything
. I just played drums, had a
lot of sex, and participated in a game of capture the flag with
heavily armed mercenaries. Truth is, Babylon set off the first
charge. Maybe it went down just as Lilith planned it.

New cells popped up
seemingly overnight. The harder the government fought against its
own citizens, the more the board buckled. When I reappeared, no one
was looking for me. Which is sensible. I’m no actual threat, I
never was.

They say that you can
remain conscious for four minutes after your head is severed from
your body. This entire nation is just like that head, desperately
trying to tell itself that it was all a bad dream.

History is sometimes kind
to those that stand in the right place and time. As it turned out,
I still had a fanbase. The more I denied involvement, the more they
seem to take it as a feint at humility. So I was stuck with the
myth I had created. Not the worst of fates, as that Historic luck
can translate into a lot of book sales.

Well, I’m thinking all this
as I sign the umpteenth book, give my pleasant nod to the umpteenth
expectant, ubiquitous face, when my pen freezes mid-stroke. Halfway
across the room, near the Romantic Fiction section, stands a
blue-black skinned aboriginal figure wearing a mask ringed with
horns and teeth. Spikes rise from behind the mask, curved like bull
horns. A vulture shifts uncomfortably on one of his
shoulders.

Like everyone else in line,
he is holding one of my books under his arm, patiently waiting his
turn to get a signature from the Author. Unlike the rest, he
clutches an obsidian-tipped spear in his other claw-like hand.
Monkey or shrunken heads bob from matted tufts of hair. He breathes
menace in deep, rasping bellows.

I recognized him, if you
want to call it that, as Zagreuss, the subterranean bull-god. The
minotaur of the labyrinth. But here at a book signing? Well, what
can I say? At least he’s waiting in line politely enough. I just
didn’t know he was a fan of my work.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever
seen something like this in the light of day. It takes a certain
sensibility – or madness – to see these dream beings when they
break through to the waking side. I have a bit of experience at it.
You learn to hold your gorge or your hysterical oh-sweet-Jesus,
I’m-losing-my-mind guffaws. You sign the damn books and move on.
And give a deep sigh of relief when you see that he has
dematerialized upon your next hasty scan of the room.

The girl standing in front
of me leaned a little closer as my hand completed the stroke that
passed as my signature these days. She didn’t turn to leave,
instead biting her lip hesitantly and then blurting out, “The
places you write about. They’re real, aren’t they?”

I found myself adjusting my
glasses for no particular reason. “What do you mean by
‘real’?”

Her hand rests on mine for
a moment. Warm. Real.

“
What we experience is real. If you’re asking me if I write
from my experience, well yes...Mary,” I said, looking down at the
name I had just written on the inside of the book. “The freakish
contents of your dreams, those half-glimpsed scampering beings in
the woods, and the cog and wheel world of the physical world are
all equally real. Just in different ways.”

“
I’ve wanted to get into one of your classes for a while, but
I’d have to transfer. Because when I was in high school I had a lot
of experiences like that, a friend of mine, she was a Wiccan, and
we did this thing with these candles and...”

Here it comes, I thought,
very rapidly losing interest and tuning out. Let me guess, you were
dancing around sky clad and some curtains rustled. Maybe some of
the shadows didn’t line up quite right. Yeah, yeah. You didn’t hear
me. None of you are hearing me.

“
The Gods... the forces that posses Demigods... are like
Yoruban Orisha. Those spirits don't die, they are patterns that
re-occur time and again, embodied in whatever matter will take
them. The flesh dies. These spirits are just immortal ideas. But
they are living. They are
legion
.”

The girl's eyes widen
slightly. She takes an unconscious step backwards.

“
Sometimes we remember one another, we even get these little
inklings of our relations with each other in the past and future
incarnations...like when you meet someone and hate them or love
them, and have no godly idea why. We don't reincarnate. The flesh
withers, dies,
rots
. The spirits that possess us, they are eternal. But the
memories they have of the time spent in these bodies is hazy, mixed
up. We share bodies, my eternal other and this particular self,
this aging meat suit...”

I trail off. No one is
listening, and she had this zoned out look on her face like she'd
just been hit with a massive dose of intravenous morphine. She
laughs uncomfortably and asks if she could have my
number.

The people behind her were
doing some rustling of their own. Finally, I manage to hurry her
off after accepting a slip of paper with a phone number on it. I
promise to call her. We could talk about the time she played
spin-the-bottle with Lucifer.

I look back at the line. It
seems even longer than before. Haven’t I played this game long
enough? I don’t even care about selling books anymore, trying to
put a spark into a youth who I doubt will grow to see adulthood.
I’m fooling myself. I just want to go home.

I stand and walk out of the
room.

Maybe it was just her name.
Mary. It reminded me of an old friend. Sweet, peaceful; of the
girls, she was the most averse to the idea of combat training. She
belonged on an organic farm in the Hudson valley, going on
springtime jaunts in a bio-diesel van, growing vegetables in the
garden behind her home in an old converted chapel.

No. This world makes no
goddamn sense anymore and no amount of blow jobs will set that
right. I’ve never belonged here and I never will.

I just want to go
home.

2021

I escaped a firestorm in
the desert to be blanketed for all eternity under forgetful snow.
It patters like a million fluttering eyelashes against the
windowpanes.

The snow makes a sound.
It’s an ever-present husssssh, though I can’t say who it is telling
to remain silent. Amazing, that something so fragile can crush and
bury people alive. It called to mind an article I'd read by
John-Ivan Palmer about the man who beheaded Yukio
Mishima.