Dead Beautiful (2 page)

Sure, I’ve been socking away the drachmas but inflation can really eat into your capital, and once the Chinese become players in the stock market it’ll be a real rollercoaster ride.

There’s no real pension plan with this position, no benefit package at all. Oh, sure, all of us here on Olympus are immortal, or at least studied by schoolchildren and deconstructed by academics (that’s a laff riot, what they write about us. Have you ever tried to penetrate that jargon? Some people have altogether too much time on their hands. And I’m tired of them tying their careers to our coattails). And we pop up in car ads, place names, that sort of thing. I have to tell you, though, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. When Hermes/Mercury test drove the car they named after him, well, he said the 0-60 pick-up — if you could call it that, if you get my drift — was beyond sluggish. Actually, he said it sucked the big one, but that’s off the record. Then he took off somewhere. Which reminds me, I should check with Hera and see if she’s had him assessed yet. That ADD/ADHD thing really rang a bell with me where he’s concerned. Always popping here, popping there with these messages. “Hi, Dad. Thought you should know the Visigoths hate you.” “Thanks. And don’t call me Dad.” I told Hera I wanted to snap up a telephone and an answering machine as soon as they came on-line just so I can screen that sort of stuff, but the little woman says no. She thinks they’re vulgar, and says we have staff for that sort of thing.

But back to Persephone. Of course I was concerned. All this talk of abduction and rape. Demeter weeping and wailing, the folks on earth moaning because their crops were failing. (Meanwhile I’m trying to get through to Demeter — market share, market share.) So I sent Mercury/Hermes. (That was another thing — the name change. We thought it would spice up our image, maybe bring in some new converts. Gods, what a mess, all the sacrifices going to the wrong God because Mercury — got to get that boy checked — didn’t get the forwarding thing sorted out. Aphrodite/Venus was getting Vulcan’s sacrifices, and I had that big lug knocking on my office door — knocking down my office door. So between you and me, a lot of us use the old names up here. It’s what we’re used to.)

Anyway, I send Hermes down to check out what’s happening because we can’t have this stuff going on. People on earth keep a pretty close eye on us. We’re not role models exactly, more like excuses. “Oh, look, Hades has bopped Persephone. Well, if he can play hide the chorizo, I guess I can, too.” The next thing you know, all the males 94 and under are going to use it as an excuse and we’ll have an epidemic of abductions and rapes and you know that’s not good. For one thing it results in our followers taking out others of our followers, further shrinking our support base.  And it’s bad for social stability; that sort of behaviour leads to revenge killings and Hades is already working at 87% capacity. One small outbreak of typhus and he’s going to get backed-up, just like the Plague disaster a couple of years ago. Factor in a spate of revenge killings and my head hurts worse than it did when Athena popped out of my forehead — and that was no picnic.

So I sent Hermes down to check out the situation and to get him out of my hair for a while.

Hades

Me? I work on the supply-side of things. I’m on the disposal end, although I frame what I handle more in terms of going on a vacation. A long vacation.

We don’t really have anyone specifically responsible for the beginning of the supply chain; I mean, Hera handles childbirth, Demeter is fecundity and fertility, but the real start we pretty much leave to hormones and opportunity. Humans have proved quite capable of maintaining a steady stream of births. It might be an idea to start a new department. I’ll pass the idea on to Mr. Big Shot up on the mountain.

So I had a pretty nice gig. It was steady, although with summer coming along — not that you could really tell summer from fall from winter from spring weatherwise in those days — there was likely going to be a spike in new arrivals, what with cholera, typhus, couplings (longer days, more opportunity for that sort of thing, which led to childbirth, which resulted in a secondary spike). The Plague had swept through a few years earlier and caused real problems. At one point the boat crossing the Styx was so overloaded it almost foundered. That’s when Charon installed Personal Flotation Devices, which cost a pretty drachma. The waiting area got all backed up; thank Zeus Orpheus was there to lead everyone in a rousing round of Kumbayah which kept them all occupied for several months while we processed the new arrivals as quickly as we could. I’m not saying there weren’t a few glitches in all the mayhem. I think a few rock and roll musicians slipped out while no one was looking and went on tour again. But if their groupies don’t care, why should we? Plus I hear 00/01/11 is planning to audit musicians now that he’s finished with vestal virgins. When he hits the delinquent rock and rollers they may be begging to come back here. I don’t know what it is about number crunchers.

And it’s true that a few people who were supposed to take the Big Dirt Nap never even made it into the waiting area. I suspect that’s the explanation for the upswing in interest in stories about vampires and the undead; and some of those expressionless faces may not be simply a result of botox.

At any rate, I had it good. Sure, Persephone was pretty juicy, but trust me, there were plenty of attractive women interested in me. Why would I put all that at risk for an unauthorized roll with her?

Persephone

Of course he’d say that. “It’s not my fault” blah, blah, blah. “I’m a successful guy. Why would I need to kidnap someone?” blah, blah, blah. Typical of him to refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. As far as I can see, most males just don’t think in terms of consequences; they’re wired to focus on one thing — sex, or whatever mastodon they’re pursuing, or return on capital — to the exclusion of all else; while we females have no choice but to consider the long-term repercussions — one minute of pleasure (o.k., twenty if we’re lucky) and ten months later we’ll likely be dealing with the results for the rest of our lives (in my case, eternity).

Shall I tell you where it started? At my mother’s knee.

We didn’t live upstairs with the rest of them. My mother has the care of fertility, weather, agriculture, like that, and she didn’t want a long commute. Close to the job site was better, too, in case of emergencies. Plus there was a little friction between her and Hera since Hera was Dad’s first wife. I mean, part of this is Dad’s fault. Couldn’t keep it in his chlamys, could he? Messing around with Leda and who-all. It was bound to make Hera grumpy and a bit jumpy. Anyway, Mum thought out of sight, out of mind was the best course, so we lived on earth.

Which was cool with me. I’m not big on Pantheons, everyone swanning around in formal dress, fancy architecture — all marble and gold, it gets a bit uncomfortable after a while. I think that’s one of the reasons Dad can be such a grump sometimes, he has to sit on that golden throne all the time. If he had a nice soft chair, or a swath of grass to relax on he’d probably be in a better frame of mind. And there’s a lot of infighting that goes on up there.

I like the earth. I love the sun on my skin, the wind. I love the way the soil crumbles in my hand, the way it smells. Even now, after all this time, I am amazed by the way green life springs from it.

So we made our home among humans. Some of the others upstairs are contemptuous of people. They think since humans can’t move with the speed of Hermes, can’t carry the world around on their shoulders like Atlas, they’re not much better than ants: puny and squishable. Some of the relatives like to torment humans.

But I’ve lived among humans and I’m fond of them. In the face of disaster, pain and hardship, people keep going. They get up, plow the fields, raise families, build cities, wage wars (often because of something stupid that’s gone on upstairs, although not always by any means). Humans are resilient and resourceful. I enjoy their cleverness. They’re always observing the world around themselves. I love their inventive tools, their shrewd solutions to problems. I respect how well they know their world. I have seen how often it comes close to defeating them but it never fully does. Upstairs, if Aphrodite breaks a nail we hear about it for a week — no joke. Down here, plagues, famines, droughts: the humans take these blows, stumble sometimes under their impact, pick themselves up and carry on.

Mum homeschooled me at first. Took me to work with her. Things were good then, just the two of us. We ate when we wanted to, ate whatever we wanted — we didn’t have to accommodate anyone else, and our tastes were pretty similar. We were tight; we hung out together, liked doing a lot of the same things. We even liked the same plays, which made deciding what to do on a Friday night easy. It was like one mind living in two bodies.

She let me have pets. I had some pet worms once; I kept them in a jar full of dirt. Unfortunately I left the jar sitting in the sun one afternoon and the poor worms were cooked by the end of the day. Apollo did it. Like he didn’t know what was going on — no, he’s just the exception that proves the rule about males, he thought it would be a good way for me to learn about consequences. Typical of him. He is so super-ego. Who suffered as a result? Not him, not me — the poor worms. Let’s teach someone a lesson and who ends up dealing with the fall-out? What’s the term? Collateral damage — in other words, no one’s taking responsibility. Standard for the upstairs bunch.

After that it was baby frogs. But they’d jump and jump, bouncing against the walls of the jar in what looked to me like fruitless attempts to gain freedom. That was when mum told me, “Don’t anthropomorphize, Persephone. That’s a bad habit to get into in this line of work. They’re just frogs and they can’t see the glass.” That made me feel much better. Anyway, I let them go.

Then I collected about a dozen praying mantises. Have you ever looked at them closely?

They’re really beautiful, so long and elegant. But day by day there were fewer and fewer of them.

“What’s wrong?” I asked mum. “Are they sick?”

“No, hon.” That’s when she told me about the birds and bees and the female mantises’ post-coital snack.

“Ew. Gross.”

“It’s not gross. It’s nature.”

They were my last pets in captivity. From then on I walked the earth with mum and enjoyed watching animals in their natural habitats. That was when mum sprang her saying on me,
When you enter nature take only curiosity with you; when you leave take only memories.
She’s full of these pithy one-liners.

So even though I am one of the Olympus dwellers by right, I’m out of the loop. We’d go visiting on major feast days — Zeus’ birthday and the like. We’d sit at the big table, drink mead. Mum would sit as far from Hera as she could, with me beside her on a slightly lower stool, to keep me out of Hera’s line of sight. The adults made small talk. Mum caught up on what was happening. Big whoop.

I guess of all the relatives I like Dionysus the best. He liked a lot of the stuff Mum and I liked, although he was a bit wilder than us. Sometimes he sent stuff our way. I mean, vinegar’s a no-brainer; leave some grape juice standing around for a while and — bingo! — you’ve got vinegar. But wine? It doesn’t happen by accident. Dionysus invented it and it’s nice for taking the edge off a rough day.

When we went to visit Olympus we’d often take along new discoveries.  Some successful, some not so. Nectarines were a big hit right away, but no one likes turnips, not even boiled, mashed and baked with brown sugar and marshmallows on top and anyone who tells you so lies.

I didn’t get to know Hades well at these bashes. He kept pretty much to himself, stayed on the periphery. Ever since he and Aphrodite split up it was like he had a little dark cloud over his head, it sort of kept people at a distance. You couldn’t call him the life of the party, either. He was more of a loner. Attractive in a dark, broody way. Not a big talker. You would never call him cute — too chiseled for that, too many angles in his face, too many shadows.

Once in a while he’d say something. Not much, but when he talked there was always this charge of electricity. “Hello, Persephone,” he’d say. “How are you? That’s a very nice diaphanous gown you’re wearing” and you knew he wasn’t talking about the gown at all. In fact, he was talking bout the non-existence of the gown, if you know what I mean, but not in a threatening way, in a way that made it clear he was interested and amused and challenged. In a way that implied he was more interested in what was happening inside my head, in fact, than under the gown. I know that’s a lot for 13 words to communicate — it was something in his eyes that added the context.

Which was a change from Ares’ conversation: “Did you see me in action in that last war? I was a real hero,” or “Did I ever tell you how many people I slaughtered in this battle?” or “How do you like my new armour? Makes me look pretty ripped, eh?” And I don’t think he knows the word bath.

Or Hermes, who was such a chatterbox. Yakkety, yakkety, yak. You could not get him to shut up.

Hades wasn’t a big talker, but he asked me what I thought about life, death, our purpose in life, thoughtful things, and he really seemed interested in what I had to say.

Plus, it turned out he had a sense of humour. Black, admittedly, but I preferred a few jokes to Apollo always going on about art for art’s sake and the epic form vs. the lyric. Yawn.

One of Hades’ jokes: “How many Gods does it take to change a light bulb?”