Drink For The Thirst To Come Part 18

Wellington continued to nudge, more insistent. He nudged her toward the living room, the door.

The phone chirped again. The h.e.l.l with it, she thought. If it's Daryl, the h.e.l.l with it. If it isn't... the h.e.l.l with it.

There was nothing wrong with her. Nothing, absolutely. She was, in fact, adorable. No Angelina-y, Scarlette-y sort of beauty, more along the Amy Adams-Ellen Page-Emma Watson axis. Smart, tough, a pal, a partner in a pinch and cute as h.e.l.l.

Yuck, Cute! Yesterday, she would have groin-popped anyone using the C-word. Today: Cute was okay. She'd take cute.

The phone peeped a fourth time...

Okay, the phone was not Daryl. It was not even NOT Daryl. It was, in fact, radio station WLLB. Radio station WLLB, Cla.s.sical 97.3, had absolutely nothing to do with Daryl. Had Ms. Leslie Groves of 831 Roscoe Avenue answered within the first four rings and if she had been listening to WLLB (She was.) and if she had been able to tell Freeman Yasgar and the 97.3 WLLB Cla.s.sical Musical Firmament who had been the wife of composer Richard Wagner (She could. Leslie so admired Cosima Wagner and loved the romantic tale of the Siegfried Idyll, composed secretly by Richard as a Christmas present to Cosima and their newborn son... Oh G.o.d, what a beautiful story.) she would have won an all expense paid trip for two to anyplace in the world. The grim irony of Trip for Two would not have been lost on her but a change of place would have been just what she needed. In addition, the correct answer would have put her name into a pot to be eligible for a two-million-tax-free-dollar prize drawing.

And more about that phone call. In selecting the 2-mil-winner, Freeman Yasgar would have groped among the entries in the bowl and grabbed the card bearing the name of Mr. Willie Luddens, 18 years of age, and the sole support of his slightly dotty mum and her thirty-two unaltered male cats. Before drawing Luddens's name from the pot, however, Yasgar would have had A) an overwhelming sense of his own power and of how that hand of his would alter, forever, some poor life out there and B) an itch in his right ear. Since this was radio (and not television, where Freeman really belonged, d.a.m.n it), Freeman would have dropped Willie's entry, scratched his ear, then snagged the card of Ms. Leslie Groves of 831 Roscoe Avenue. The two million changes in Leslie's life would have caused Daryl to reconsider dumping her and would have given Leslie the wherewithal to flee Daryl and the horde of former and would-be suitors who would suddenly have found her allusive beauty utterly irresistible. She would have resettled anonymously in Dublin. In Dublin she would have met, been courted by, and given her heart to Middle Eastern oil septillionaire Musa Ben-Mustafa. At Leslie's gentle urging, Musa would have placed subtle but inexorable pressure on several warring factions within his home region to sue for peace with their neighbors and with everyone else. Dominoes would have fallen. A cessation of hostilities among the globe's organized religions would have cascaded from what would have become known as "The Dublin Accords." This, naturally, would have p.i.s.sed off all the right people and dear, dear Musa would have been a.s.sa.s.sinated, thus precipitating Universal Armageddon. If only Leslie hadn't answered that d.a.m.ned phone!

Which of course she never did.

She debated, again, whether to shave her armpits or not. She decided not. The phone stopped peeping.

Thank G.o.d. No wonder Welly's so excited, she thought.

At about that same time, she also thought she might try being a lesbian. What did she have to lose?

(Do you want to know? I won't tell. Too depressing.) There were three women of her acquaintance whom she knew to have had... experience. The first was Allison, tall, soft, lovely, sweet, feminine. You'd never know looking at her, but Leslie had it on several good authorities.

When Allison answered her phone, Leslie said, "Ho. Hi. He." Brain lock. Finally, "It's Les." She used the hated short form of her name. Today, she thought it might be a useful hint.

"And ho, hi, he there, back." Allison sounded pleased to hear from her. "What's happenin'?"

"Oh, Allison, Allison, Allison," Leslie sobbed. The sobs were only half-forced. "Daryl broke it off. Today. At lunch. Imagine? The p.r.i.c.k. Lunch. Not even dinner. I don't know." She waited. "I don't know. I just don't know what to do." She swallowed. She listened to the quality of silence on the other end. "Do you want to come over tonight and, well, sit with me...?"

No imagination. Graceless in the extreme. Just what Daryl had said about her: "You're graceless," he had said. Worse, he said, she thought she knew everything.

"I know, I know..." Leslie had said, half in jest, half without realizing the irony. Now the silence from Allison's end of the line was terrifying.

"Allison?" she asked.

"You want to go to bed with me," Allison said. A chilly, questionless way of saying. "Don't you?"

"No," Leslie said.

"No, I can tell. The idea. Where did you get the idea? I'm not. I have no idea where you could have gotten the idea I was. That I was that way."

Leslie had nothing.

"Well, okay. Goodbye," Allison said. "Okay?" she asked. Then she hung up.

"d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n," Leslie said to the d.a.m.n dial tone. She was blushing. She felt it. She was also still naked. And sweat-stinky. I'm being needy, she said to herself and made her second call wrapped in a bathrobe.

"Hi, Deirdre," she said when the line connected. "It's Leslie." She was getting better.

"Hi, Les," Deirdre purred. "I was juuust thinking of you. Feature that? Then the phone rings and who is it? It's you! Hiii..." She sounded at ease, comforted by her life. That was good. According to rumor, Deirdre would do it with anything mammal. Pretty and lithe and...

Good grief, Leslie realized, Deirdre is, well, me... Small, flat-chested, red-haired... Did she want to get involved with, with...?

"Uh," Leslie said.

"Les?"

"Oh," Leslie said, trying again. "What the h.e.l.l? I wanted you to know, Daryl and I broke up. Just. I was, well, you know, feeling a little lonely. It's been a long time since, well, you know, since we were intimate, Daryl and I, and I was wondering. Thought you might like to get together. Tonight."

"Ohhhh, Leslie," Deirdre purred. "Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior, hon?"

Leslie stepped out of the shower. Her skin was smooth, hot, and red. Everything felt soft, smelled lovely. Her hair was plastered across her forehead. Squinting at the mirror, she thought she looked like a 12-year-old Irish immigrant lad. Cute. Like a gerbil saved from drowning, she thought. Or a Calvin Klein ad, the mirror said. A little heat under the voice. All right, all right. Third time's the charm.

She curled on the bed and dialed the third number. On the other end, the phone rang and rang. Then a click.

"Um, yeah?"

"Butch? Les."

"Hey, babe." Butch's voice was thick, groggy. In the afternoon. Just the way Leslie imagined lesbians at midday.

"Uh."

"Yeah?"

"Ee. You want to f.u.c.k?"

"What?"

"f.u.c.k."

"You?"

"Huh?"

"f.u.c.k you?"

"f.u.c.k me? Oh. Yes. Now. Or maybe later tonight. Maybe?"

"f.u.c.k you?"

There was laughter in the background.

"Yes..."

"f.u.c.k no, babe. I like you, but not that way. I'd rather big t.i.ts. No offense. Sorry." There was more background laughter then Butch hung up.

Butch was one authority by which Leslie knew that Allison was, well, you know. Deirdre had been the other. In three calls, Leslie had exhausted her life's supply of lesbians.

d.y.k.es, Leslie thought. She heard they liked being called d.y.k.es, or was it LGBTs now? Okay, maybe she could get her hair done.

Wellington stood on hind legs. He nudged Leslie's calf with his wet cheek and teeth then hopped onto the bed next to her. At a half-inch from her eye his burp was a fishy miasma that drifted up Leslie's nose. She smiled and waved away cat breath.

"Well. That's what I get for fixing you," she said. "Yes?" She snugged his ears.

Welly agreed. From the moment he had arrived on Earth, Welly had loved licking his s.c.r.o.t.u.m. Licking his s.c.r.o.t.u.m was one of the first joys he had ever experienced in an already long, hard, soldier's life. He hit dirt, discovered his s.c.r.o.t.u.m, made his way to Leslie's apartment, was taken in (as he knew he would be), and like/that, his b.a.l.l.s were gone. He hadn't thought of that.

"Welly, Welly, Welly... Do you know how much I really, really, really love you?" Leslie purred and rolled him over to scritch his belly.

Welly knew.

You know, of course, that had any of the women on Leslie's short list accepted her offer, well, things would have ended differently. If, for example, Allison had agreed to meet Leslie at, "Oh, eightish, you know...? At how about Tortue Perfide? That new place on Clark? It's only great! No reservations! Just have to wait..." Allison, having received a last-minute call from an old boyfriend who'd just hit town and thought he'd give her old number a poke and, G.o.d-d.a.m.ned if she wasn't still there, would have been an hour and fourteen minutes late, which would have totally funked Leslie, who would have grumbled through the evening, wit-driven snides (at which she excelled) lobbed at Allison and the evening, which would have ended with Leslie in a dudgeon of tears and Allison in a fl.u.s.tered tizzy and off home, early, in a cab, alone. A week later, still fuming about men and women, Leslie would have seen an ad asking, "HEY, WANNA SAVE THE WORLD?" The ad sought volunteers to save rain forests.

Thinking, What the h.e.l.l, trees are better'n people, Leslie would have signed on. Owing to her undoubted charm, her persistence and don't-give-a-rat's-rump verve, the effort, ultimately, would have saved the Amazon Basin. The resulting alteration in the world's climate would, finally, have tipped the scales, unexpectedly, to the warming trend that everyone but the oil companies and the Republican Party swore was coming. Yes: the polar caps would have melted, and, yes, the world's coastal areas would have drowned and yada-yada-yada. Repressions, interventions, hostilities, brutalities, tactical, strategic, and just-for-the h.e.l.l-of-it bombings would have resulted and, at the end, global Armageddon, followed by cheerless nuclear winter. A few species of deeply sedentary sea slugs, some flightless insects, a handful of creeping things, and several cats (none of them cute) would have survived.

And that was only if Allison had said yes. Now if Deirdre had...

Well, there it is.

By 11:00 Leslie was having a long evening with old movies, chilled vodka, and Welly the cat. Fine. Welly had been brushed and lavished. He was still acting as though he had something much better to do, but that pretty much was Welly.

When the doorbell rang, Leslie was half afraid it would be Daryl suing for peace and trying for a break-up, make-up piece. Leslie staggered to the door, resistance prepared. When she flung it open, her robe came undone.

And there was Allison.

Welly gave Leslie's bare legs one last nudge and fled into the hallway and out the still-closing front door. That is that, Welly thought.

Leslie pushed halfway past a befuddled Allison to call Welly just as the cat's tail eked through the latching door. Leslie snuffled. Wide open naked, she finally realized Allison was staring at her. At her nakedness. At her.

"The cat's got out," she said.

"Oh," Allison said, and, "umm." Her hand waved like a swooning virgin's. The other hand extended a bottle of wine just under Leslie's right breast.

Leslie stared dumbly at it and her breast. "They're small," she said.

"Hiiiiii," Allison said, making the one syllable song sound like an apology. "I. Felt. So. Bad! At what I... Oh... you know!"

Leslie knew. And did not. Didn't matter.

No sense in speaking of what would have happened had Wellington NOT fled into the night, is there?

Later, gas log at full burble despite an unseasonable 82-degrees-Fahrenheit night, lights out all over the apartment despite both women's frequent needs to stumble to the loo, Leslie and Allison sat with their feet toward the flames. The empty Merlot bottle lay between them. Though Allison had shed herself of most of her unnecessary clothes, sweat poured down her nose. Leslie remained in open-robed shamelessness. They talked. Leslie's chin rested on Allison's shoulder. On two of the occasions when Les had dropped off, Allie had surrept.i.tiously kissed her, once on the nose, the second time, on the upper lip. Feeling the soft fuzz that grew there, Allison's heart became an utterly captured province of little Leslie. She knew that... Oh, what the h.e.l.l. Nose to nose, both awake, they kissed. Allison's hand, flickering nervously in the air (it did that when confused or aroused), brushed Leslie's left breast.

The Earth seemed to move.

In fact, it had.

As the day's luck would have it, the local-area Deity had chosen that moment to turn Her attention (yes, the feminists were right, G.o.d was a woman) on the Sol/Earth portion of Her domain. She had also chosen just that moment to turn Her attention to Leslie's portion of things. She noted with shocked finality what was going on, what had gone on and, worse, what was about to go on. So to speak. Worse yet, the Deity reached out and felt Leslie's thrill at the experience building in her, her joy, her, for lack of a better word, sense of "completeness" at the events building in that night (at least that was how Leslie would have described it later to her chums).

Now, the Deity truly loved all Her creatures. Leslie was no exception. Truth was in fact, the Deity had a bit of a crush on Leslie. Go figure. She had a weakness for small-breasted redheads. Who doesn't? Deities are no exception. Read the Greeks.

Leslie and Allison? Well, that did it. More than She could take. At this moment certain Fundamentalist sects were also right. Today, at that moment, G.o.d did hate f.a.gs. Her anti-lesbian animus was trammeled up in some messy unresolved issues of self-loathing transference. All very sad, very nasty, and, to be honest, none of our business.

Full of wrath, the Deity took a moment. She slipped back in time to the Old Stone Age, scooted Herself way, way out beyond the Oort Cloud, found just the bit of wandering s.p.a.ce junk that She needed, eyed Her shot, in spatial and temporal terms, and gave it a nudge. A flick of The Fingernail was all it needed.

"There," She said, more or less to Herself. "That'll teach you."

She then went off to pursue other interests and vanished from Earth's history, thus giving rise to the "G.o.d is Dead," flap of the 1960s. (She will, however, reappear briefly at the end of this story as just another visitor at a celestial equivalent of Club Med. You'll see.) Back in Leslie's time, just as the tingle of Allison's first real kiss, first real touch, reached her vodka-numbed lips and Merlot-moistened eyes, the Deity's carom-shot from the Old Stone Age, which had wandered alone and cold throughout all of mankind's long march, crashed into Earth's upper atmosphere.

Allison gazed at Leslie.

Leslie stared at the end of her own nose.

Fortunately, the meteor was only the size of an olive pit.

"Oh, my," Allison said. Her lips reached for Leslie again. Leslie reached and gave herself, fully, to the touch, the kiss, the moment. She hoped she wouldn't hate herself in the morning. Somehow she already knew she would.

Unfortunately, despite its size, the d.a.m.ned thing was also a pure anti-matter black hole. It did not ablate to nothing as meteors mostly do. The teeny thing instantly turned everything it encountered to pure energy, released untold quanta of nastiness: heat, violently consuming plasma bursts... This is the stuff that powers the Starship Enterprise's warp drives (by an unaccountable fluke, Gene Roddenberry had gotten it right). Now, the warp drive would never come to pa.s.s in human reality (even though the little girl who was going to do the original maths that would, ultimately, have led, irresistibly, to warp technology was at just that moment being born in a Mumbai slum).

Allison looked at Leslie as if for the first time. "Oh," she said again.

"Yep," Leslie said back. "The Earth moved..."

As said, it had in fact. The object punched through the air, bored a hole in the ocean off the coast of New Zealand, ate its way to the Earth's heart, then, finally, sucked the world right out of s.p.a.ce and time forever and ever.

The sole survivors were Mrs. Carmine Luddens and her son, 18-year-old Willie.

Mrs. Luddens's 32 un-neutered male cats, the vanguard of the invading army from a distant galaxy mentioned earlier, feeling kindly disposed toward the old lady for having not removed their scrota, transported both Luddenses off-planet in time to avoid the insucking messy end of everything. A race doesn't get to have interstellar, cross-galactic invasion vanguard forces without the technology to detect nearby onrushing anti-matter black holes, for goodness sake. The troop recall had sounded hours before the final kiss that ended it all.

Out of respect for the Local Deity, the cats had not deflected the Instrument of Her Wrath. Instead they gave up their plans for world conquest as a bad idea. There were other options. As I hope you've now begun to realize.

Wellington (and of course that was not his real name-his REAL name was a batch of interconnected concepts, precepts, and moral/causal directions and inferences that by utter happenstance closely approximated the word "Dave") was back in his bunk with his buddies...o...b..ard the invasion craft and in his righteous skin once more, which would not have been cuddly-cute to anyone. Welly/Dave still missed the s.c.r.o.t.u.m he had experienced for only a few earthly hours. It was one of the most uniquely useful biologic appurtenances he'd encountered in all his years a professional soldier. d.a.m.n!

The Luddenses? Their former cats planted the old lady and her son on a beautiful world in another creation entirely and left them alone. Willie Luddens kept his s.c.r.o.t.u.m but never worked out what it was for. Mrs. Luddens missed the cats. The Luddenses' part of the story ends here.

(In case you wondered, the cats never told the Luddens family that they had very nearly been the big WLLP winners. Best they not know too much.) Welly/Dave took a much-needed leave in another quadrant.

Steeping himself by an unheated slimepool, he met a spectacular (but strangely sad and somehow unfulfilled) minor Demi-Deity. She, too, was taking a rest to recover from a recent, well, bad experience. She and Welly/Dave hit it off far better than might be expected of a Demi-Urge and a common grunt. Even without a s.c.r.o.t.u.m (such things had never been part of the old dating game in that quadrant) the grunt and the Deity had a great time. Of course, you know who She was, yes?

And you know what? Welly/Dave never realized how Leslie had connected the two of them. Even if the Demi- had mentioned the specifics, the coincidence of their link was on such a vast, such a, well, cosmic scale, neither would have believed it. And that very incredulity would have led to misunderstandings. Misunderstandings certainly would have...

No, the Demi-Doll said nothing about Earth, saying only that her last Creation was a pretty silly thing and just as well it had been disa.s.sembled. The rest was silence. But a great leave! Of course some things are inevitable, and following that...

Well, don't ask. It's best you don't know too much.