PLUTUS.
Of all the underhand, unpredictable and unfathomable moves that Apollo could have pulled, this one took the cake. But knowing Apollo as Hermes (unfortunately) did, he also knew for certain that his uncle couldn’t have pulled off such a wondrous coup alone. Which gave the already soupy plot an even sludgier consistency.
Kurt seemed bemused by this so-called star contestant. Sure, Plutus was good-looking, by Earth standards, especially with contact lenses that disguised his heterochromatic eyes. But even hidden under expensive jeans, his legs were a slightly odd shape and his gait was awkward, like that of an inbred equestrian. And his way of speaking was—again, by Earth standards—creepy. By the standards generally associated with Hades, Plutus was in fact quite erudite but that didn’t make Hermes want to sit him down and buy him a beer. Of course, if you believed his aunt Athena, the residents of Hades were ‘just like us’ but in Hermes’ opinion, this was bullshit, particularly if Plutus was a representative selection. Coincidentally, Hermes and Plutus were quite close in age, which meant that they had both gone through adolescence around about the same time. But while Hermes was off chasing goddesses—or rather, throwing races in order to flatter them into seducing him—Plutus was scheming to escape from his underworld drudgery. That he eventually succeeded was testament to his tenacity but also, unfortunately, testament to the awful wrath of Zeus. Hermes knew that this should make him feel sorry for his underworld cousin, but it didn’t. It only made him more pissed off at Apollo.
‘You know,’ observed Kurt, when Apollo a.k.a ‘David’ and Plutus a.k.a ‘Pete’ were out of earshot, ‘he kind of looks like you.’
Hermes nearly spat out his cranberry juice. ‘Take that back,’ he said.
‘Fine, I take it back,’ said Kurt mildly. ‘But he’s not unattractive. Kind of serial killer looking, sure, but he’s not ugly. If he was, they wouldn’t have picked him.’
Hermes said nothing. He was too busy wondering who ‘they’ might be in this context.
‘What have you got against him, anyway?’ Kurt went on. ‘You only just met him, but you act like you hate his guts.’
Hermes shrugged. It wasn’t true that he had only just met ‘Pete’. He had, in fact, met him twice before: once, after he’d been dragged, kicking and screaming, from the arms of the magnificent Nike mere days after ingratiating himself into them, in order to sit on his first Olympic Council; and a second time, after a trans-dimensional accident landed him in Hades. In the intervening years, he had mostly succeeded in blocking that awful Council meeting from memory. For all the good his presence had done, he may as well have been standing on his head and speaking Swahili. Too nervous to voice an opinion, he had kept his mouth shut. But even Athena, who had spoken long and movingly on the need to be merciful (which was somehow plagiarized almost word-for-word by Shakespeare, a thousand years later), had been powerless to sway the king and queen. Because not just Zeus but Hera too seemed to have a bee in her bonnet about Hades, and the need to ‘send a message.’
Whenever Hermes heard anyone use that expression on Earth, he wanted to clean his ears out with a sharpened pencil.
But the real icing on the steaming pile of sheep’s business was that when Nike heard about Plutus’ punishment, she cut off all contact with Hermes. So in a way, the Council’s decision had fucked both of them (to a greater or lesser degree, depending on your point of view).
‘Coming in?’ said a production assistant carrying a clipboard featuring the love-heart/dollar sign logo of the show. In fact, everything she was wearing or carrying, from the bright pink cap to the water bottle hooked onto her belt was festooned with Greed Date branding. Hermes wondered whether looking like a moron was compulsory for game show attendance; his suspicions were confirmed when, moments later, someone slapped a cap on his head and shoved him through the door.
The warm up guy was doing his best to inspire the crowd. Mostly women, they gave the impression that they had been shipped in on buses from Las Vegas; primarily because they had been. All except for the twelve women who would become the contestants. These had been selected in an audition process much more vigorous than the one imposed on the men (or rather, the one imposed on Todd-the-firefighter.) With uncharacteristic insight, Apollo had chosen not to involve Hermes and Kurt in the selection of female contestants, on the assumption that their natural biases would result in a clean sweep of Halloween clichés: slutty girl guide leader, slutty librarian, slutty policewoman, slutty Statue of Liberty, slutty Mary Poppins, and Wonder Woman. Which was a little unfair on Kurt, but reasonably accurate in Hermes’ case. At any rate the casting had been outsourced to an East Coast firm, which specialized in high-class game shows; apparently this wasn’t an oxymoron. Physically, the contestants were all different in a predictably diverse way: a slim Eurasian, a well-rounded redhead, a bookish brunette, and so on. Personality-wise, too, they appeared to differ: some were bubbly, some were reserved, some were wise-cracking and street-wise. But to a woman, they possessed a steely determination, hidden beneath a veneer of sisterly solidarity. They were looking for love, and they were going to get it. And if not, they were going to be adequately compensated.
To preserve the illusion of randomness, the twelve female contestants were dotted throughout the studio audience on specially marked chairs. This made it easier for the camera to randomly zoom in on their position while everyone around them screamed ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ One by one, three of these lucky ladies would be hauled up on stage, interviewed by the host, and asked to take a seat on a glittery heart-shaped barstool. Once the staged selection process was completed, a screen would isolate them from the rest of the stage, the male contestants would spin around, visible now to the audience but not the women. A large overhead screen would show all this in close-up.
The host was a comedienne and musician with a modest number of YouTube hits for her satirical version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Unfortunately this didn’t equate to an immodest fortune, and she had taken the job at the insistence of her agent, who was tired of fielding offers from advertising execs representing the pink end of the travel market, who clearly hadn’t seen her YouTube piece that was, in fact, about Chlamydia.
As she messed about on stage, joking with the audience and the make-up artist and the warm-up guy and Todd-the-firefighter, Hermes could see that she clearly did not give a fuck. Of course, she was pretty great looking too, because she was on TV, but her teeth were crooked and she was tall, about 5’10” in heels, which wasn’t an especially great height but it somehow made her more attractive in Hermes’ eyes, because she clearly intimidated Kurt, who was a good two inches shorter. Hermes decided right away that he would sleep with her, and then, as an experiment, see if he could avoid insulting her, annoying her or being beaten up by her in a charmingly ineffectual way.
‘OK everyone, take your seats, we’re going to shoot the contestant selection, and if the camera comes near you, what do you say?’
‘Pick me!’
‘I didn’t hear you?’
‘PICK ME!’
And so began the longest four hours of Hermes’ reasonably lengthy life. It wasn’t so much that the questions were inane, or that every five minutes of footage seemed to take ten times that long to bed down. It wasn’t the uncomfortable chairs, or the horrible Greed Date themed donuts that girls with fake red wings (he presumed they were fake) kept trying to make him eat, or the way that the production managers bossed the Las Vegas moms around like they were one-tooth hillbillies. It was simply that, as filming progressed, it became clearer and clearer that Plutus was going to win. Todd-the-firefighter was trying, he really was, but when it came down to it, he was up against a god—even if that god was confined to the underworld for eternity. Well, clearly not eternity, since here he was, but theoretically for eternity and that wasn’t the point anyway. The point was that he was charming. Genuinely charming, with none of the ‘I don’t really get out much since mother passed away’ weirdness that Kurt had been expecting. Even the host—whose name was, deliciously, Lottie Delish—seemed to have developed a crush on him. And the audience lapped it up.
‘Bit of a star, isn’t he?’ said Apollo, slapping Hermes on the shoulder with one hand and shoving a pink donut into his mouth with the other.
‘How did you do it?’
‘Do what?’ said Apollo, wiping a smear of jelly from his upper lip.
‘Get him here.’ Excruciating though he knew it would be, he was going to get to the bottom of this.
‘From Chicago?’ This was the cover that Apollo—or whoever—had invented: Pete the jazz musician from Chicago. The annoying thing was, Plutus actually could play the trumpet. Like a god, in fact.
‘I know someone else is in on it. Who is it? Dionysus?’
Apollo gave a short, derisive laugh. ‘Is that a travel agent?’ he asked.
‘You know I’m going to find out,’ said Hermes, staring intently at the stage, where a team of makeup artists and hair stylists darted around Lottie Delish like hummingbirds.
‘We’ll see,’ said Apollo. One by one, he licked his fingers, a gesture that Hermes found both obscene and childish.
‘Rolling!’ yelled someone from somewhere, and Hermes was saved from having to suppress the urge to snap Apollo’s pinkie finger like a twig, which would, admittedly, heal within a minute but would at least provide momentary satisfaction.
‘Melissa, you won the last round so now…you get to ask a bonus question!’ said Lottie Delish. The audience made a ‘bonus question’ noise.
‘Thanks Lottie,’ said Melissa. ‘First I’m going to ask contestant number two. Contestant number two: if you could take me on a date anywhere in the world, where would you take me?’
Contestant number two was Todd. ‘That’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d take you to Paris.’
The audience made a ‘Paris’ noise.
‘Have you been to Paris, Todd?’ asked Lottie Delish.
‘Not yet,’ said Todd, ‘but it’s the City of Lights. And that’s where I’d take the light of my life.’
‘You’ve only just met her, Todd,’ said Lottie Delish, which got a laugh from everyone except Hermes.
‘Contestant number one,’ said Melissa. ‘If you could take me anywhere on a date, where would you take me.’
That’s not the same question, said Hermes under his breath.
‘That’s not the same question,’ said Lottie Delish. ‘Where were you thinking? The moon?’
This time Hermes laughed. ‘Sorry, Lottie,’ said Melissa.
‘Well don’t apologize to me, apologize to him!’
Hermes glanced sideways glance at Apollo, who seemed to be genuinely enjoying the show. But he wasn’t the only one. On the other side of the room, Kurt was laughing too. So was the stage manager and the camera man and the warm-up guy, who was still hanging around. In fact, everyone seemed to be genuinely enjoying the show. Sheep, thought Hermes, biting his thumbnail, this show is in danger of actually being good.
‘Contestant number one,’ said Melissa, when the laughter had died down, ‘if you could take me on a date anywhere in the world, where would you take me.’
‘I’d take you to my home town,’ said Pete-the-jazz-musician. Somehow, he made it sound wholesome, yet sexy.
‘Isn’t it a little cold in Chicago?’ said Lottie.
‘I have a fire,’ said Plutus-Pete.
‘Ooh,’ said Lottie, giving herself a little hug, ‘that sounds dangerous. Are you ready to play with fire, Melissa?’
The audience made a ‘play with fire’ noise. And with a terrible flash of insight, Hermes figured out where all this was going.
It was going to Hades.