Chapter 41: A man feels fear
A man, pale of skin and blue of eye, sat in a bar. An India Pale Ale sat in front of him. It wasn’t his first. It wouldn’t be his last. He needed the solace of alcohol, the fuzzy-brained optimism, the suppressing of bodily excitement it afforded.
Kaa was nervous. Kaa was worried about failure. Kaa felt like he was in an ad for erectile dysfunction, the worried ‘before’ caricature, as opposed to the dancing, whistling and singing ‘after’ caricature. This was unusual. The willful magic that kept him young, kept him toned with little exercise, ensured that his hair didn’t thin and his eyes didn’t fail, that willed magic also ensured that chemicals weren’t required to enjoy the end result of the seductive processes he enjoyed so much.
He wanted a hoppier beer, but the session IPA from a Chinese brewery was what was available, so that’s what he was drinking. He’d been growing more and more addicted to hop forward beers, just as he’d been a sucker for heavily oaked Chardonnays for a handful of years. This too would likely pass. Or not. Or the world would end and all of the infinite expressions of flavorful alcohol would be degraded into a cesspool of bucket vodka and barrel mead.
It really didn’t matter. Tomorrow, he would meet Dian Mu in person for the first time. This fascinating, terrifying creature who he had been enticing sensually and magically for weeks would be flesh and blood and godhood in front of him the following night. She was thousands of years old, powerful beyond his imagination, orders of magnitude more experienced than him, and yet tomorrow night he was going to walk up to her at the preordained place and time, pretend to have experience, pretend to have knowledge, pretend to have a sensuality that matched or exceeded hers.
What was he thinking?
He was thinking of Joyce. Maybe Joyce. Maybe it was Joanne or Josephine. J something. He had been so certain that the trail of intellect and teasing hints of sexuality would appeal to her, bread crumbs to her labyrinthian mind, touches of Borges pulling her deeper into a Minos’ maze of lust, that he had been stunned, befuddled, perplexed and frankly disbelieving when she had glanced blankly at him, walked away.
He was thinking of Brenda. Her love of and talent for music had been equal to Wigeon’s, an opportunity for redemption, an opportunity to replay the past with better outcomes, an opportunity to make wrong right. He’d crafted the staves, set the rests and the quarter notes just so, descant and crescendo and diminuendo of seduction perfectly aligned to what he understood of the complex woman he was so interested in. And after his approach, his deep-eyed look which spoke to her of the magic he found in her, she’d wandered away with what appeared to be a plumber, no interest in him or his charms or charms, no spark lit by his preparations. Nothing. But a plumber, dirty fingernailed, unkempt, perhaps illiterate, had plucked this flower from the garden where Kaa had failed.
He was thinking of Dai Tai, so many decades ago now. She was a stern bureaucrat in a Mao jacket, little Red Book always to hand. Underneath, he was sure that she was a sensual and passionate woman, wishing to express herself at least in private differently than the Party allowed, more expressively than the times allowed, more expansively than the Revolution allowed. With multiple efforts of will he’d barely managed to walk away from an opportunity to toil in remote fields with suspicious intellectuals, an opportunity he’d shuddered to consider.
He remembered Maria Eduarda in Santos, home of Pele. During the lead up to carnival in that February not so long ago, he’d tempted her with visions, seduced her with smells, tantalized her with titrations. And then. And then during the one time of year when women flung themselves at men, when so many marriages crumbled, when so many trysts occurred, she’d wandered off with a soccer player, then a restaurateur, then a banker, then a random passerby. But not once with him, who had invested so much.
He remembered Inga, her platinum hair, her pale skin, her knife-edged cheekbones, her double advanced degrees in mathematics and philology. He’d approached her through Umberto Eco, gifting her with first editions of Travels in Hyperreality and the Structure of Bad Taste, laughing stories of traveling with salmon, hints that the monastery in Name of the Rose had been converted to an upscale and decadent brothel. He’d held his nose and eaten lutefisk, drunk akvavit, switched his back with birch twigs after naked saunas. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Why did he think he was capable of seducing a goddess? Not some faux pop-culture goddess, some modern day Paris Hilton, but a true, ascended member of a puissant pantheon, an expression of animist power, who had been wielding lightning for a thousand years before Thor was a twinkle in some red-bearded Viking’s eye. Why did he think that he was man enough or magician enough to pull off this trick, insights into color and scent and galvanic skin response be damned?
Then he remembered Nancy, groaned, drained his beer, raised the bottle to signal to the bartender that another was required. He put his head on his arms, wondered how he’d ended up in this bizarre circumstance of trying to save the world with only the power of making women excited to sleep with him, especially when there was so much evidence that his powers were limited, trivial, fallible.
The beer arrived, ice cold, bottle dewed with condensation. He held it to his forehead, drank, put it down, sighed. Tomorrow night. Crap.