WORLD

Age of Aquarius

Cat McDonald

 

Ganymede looked at himself in the mirror behind the bottles, then at his boss, who sat over her glass of wine at the bar. She had been a young lady when she’d found him, and it took a little math for him to realize that had been forty years ago. Her blonde hair had gone white and lines spread out across her face, which had come loose at the edges. He’d barely noticed it.

He, on the other hand, hadn’t aged. He woke up from dreams of Olympus some time before getting this job, and he’d stopped thinking about what he was, or how old. Hazy memories gave way to a long void, and then the modern world, and the highway, and the woman who almost ran him over. Carolyn gave him a job at the bar and a room in the hotel, and forty years to try and figure the rest out. He hadn’t made much headway.

“Staying late today?”

She sighed and held her glass out to him. “Just needed a drink, sweetheart. Do you remember when we met?”

“I mostly just remember headlights!” He started to laugh, but stopped when she didn’t join him. She’d been able to tell he had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and told him she’d just taken over her father’s bar if he wanted a job. He remembered the way she’d towered over him, her huge voice and broad smile and straight, golden hair, her stories about college. She reminded him, in her bullish strength and power, of the Queen.

“No, not that. Remember the times?” She gestured with her wine at the TV screen and the end of the news broadcast. “Look at this. When I was a girl...we really thought it would be different. That we could put an end to war. The Age of Aquarius was coming, and war and greed would be things of the past. We’d refuse to be part of it all and choose a new world.”

“Like the song,” he said, laughing through the stabbing regret he felt every time he heard about it. According to the books, it was him. He was Aquarius, which meant all that boundless hope of Carolyn’s student protest days had rested on him. For a time, when he’d discovered how he could affect humans, he’d shared her optimism, but that had been a long time ago.

“Exactly like the song! Now look at us. We all got old, and we went into business, and nothing changed.”

“...I don’t think you’re any different, Carolyn. You’re still the best boss I’ve ever had. And maybe the world’s just working on changing.”

He could recognize the scent of her sadness, something invisible on the air that dimmed her and everything around her. It was an unpleasant noise, Despair.

Because Ganymede knew Despair well, could name it and recognize its shape, he could nullify it. While he poured her second drink, he listened closely to the ascending chime of wine against the inside of the glass, felt the sound mingle with the Despair on the air, dissolve it, sweep it away. By the time the glass was full, he couldn’t sense it anymore.

If he explained his memories to her, and she found out who he was, then he’d have to explain why he’d never been able to do more than cheer people up, and even then only after fumbling with shapes and scents and sounds. Before the void, he’d known them as words and concepts and changes in his breathing, but now he had new senses to learn.

She’d been expecting a revolution. The truth would be unfair to her.

She shook her head with a quiet little smile. “Oh, before I forget, weather channel says there’s storms tonight.”

Ganymede looked up out the bar’s front window at the purple undersides of the thunderheads, and memories swelled in his throat. Memories of the King, and his grip, and the scent of wine on his breath, and the breathless height of Olympus.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re too old to be scared of lightning.” Carolyn took another drink, then pulled her purse up onto the bar and started wrestling her way into a slick black raincoat. “However old you are.”

“It’s not that. I’ll be fine. Good night, boss.”

“Don’t burn the place down,” she said on her way out the door, just like she always did.

Carolyn disappeared through the door leading into the hotel lobby, letting the door shut behind her and triggering the little digital bell attached to it. When that sound died out it was just Ganymede, a lone drinker at the far end of the bar, a collection of out-of-town visitors seated just under the television, and the beginnings of a hockey game. He’d spent years listening to regulars talking about the game in general and Oilers in particular, and now he could identify the names and numbers taking their positions for the face-off. They’d helped him learn about Disappointment. He liked the Oilers.

Ganymede noticed the empty bottles collecting on the table, and made his way over to start taking new orders. Before he even reached the table, a familiar sound hit him. Those cheerful young men sitting under the television, despite being bronze-skinned like the men of Turkey or Cyprus, were speaking his old language. At least, the new version of it. One of them waved him over to ask for more drinks, in English. Ganymede wanted to answer in the old language, to prove he was still Greek himself, but the old language stuck in his throat, he stumbled, and he answered in English without making a real attempt.

When he’d brought a new round of beers, he stood near the table a while, pretending to watch the hockey game, so he could listen. Even while he poured the young man at the bar another beer, his ears stayed focused on the sound of his faraway past, on laughter that somehow sounded unmistakably Greek to him, like the too-loud laughter of the King’s favourite son. His memories from his youth, from when he could live without needing a purpose, blurred together in voices and sensations like a dream that left him anxious all day without a reason.

The feeling on the air started to change shape. He didn’t notice until the beginning of the second period, but when he returned to take the empty glass from the bar and replace it, it had become something completely different. Frustration, which he knew and could often dissolve just by getting back to work, had given way to something else, something he couldn’t quite name anymore.

The patron at the bar was young, Ganymede assumed. Carolyn had asked him for identification when he’d walked in hours ago. He wore, like most people did recently, a baggy hooded sweatshirt in a greenish beige sort of color, and it completely hid his posture and his figure, which was probably as lean and bony as his pale face. No matter what happened in the hockey game, or how quickly Ganymede brought his drink, his face was distant, tied up in a frown Ganymede couldn’t decode.

He couldn’t do anything about an emotion he didn’t know, so he watched. It wasn’t quite Hatred, which he had a limited experience with. It was close, somehow, to Despair, but the more he watched the young man’s face, the less he understood the connection. It didn’t look like Despair.

“Can I get you another drink?” Ganymede asked, and watched carefully as the customer lifted his eyes, grumbled his assent, then looked back down.

While he poured another beer, a shout burst from the TV’s speaker and the distant audience started to cheer. One of the Greek-speakers called his friends’ attention to the screen and they reacted as a group, joking, as far as Ganymede could tell, about money wagered and lost on the game. They smiled and clapped one of their number on the back and laughed, and Ganymede came over to clear the bottles, listen to their voices, and take more drink orders. Behind him, he could feel that unknown feeling simmering and taking on its own unidentifiable shape.

Ganymede could feel the exact second that he’d let it go too far.

When he turned around, the man at the bar was standing. He held a gun, like the kind people used on TV, pointed just past Ganymede at the other patrons. The feeling on the air was completely new, however hard Ganymede fought to focus, to tear his vision from that little black muzzle, to look the man in the eyes, to remember a feeling that somehow, somewhere, he must have been introduced to.

“Hey, hey, wait, my friend,” said one of the men behind, a well-dressed young man with glasses, in flawless English. A little jerk of the gun silenced him.

Ganymede had no idea what this was. He couldn’t speak; the words struggling to take form in his mouth were Greek, ancient Greek, and English faded from his mind even though he’d been speaking it for forty years. That gun! It pointed between Ganymede and the customers now, and he couldn’t keep himself from jumping when it veered his way. The man shouted something at them, but Ganymede could only translate a few words; “you”, “people”, “our”, “country”.

It could kill him. It would kill him. That journey through clouds on the King’s talons hadn’t killed him, but this would. In a time before guns, he’d been promised immortality. Olympus, and then the stars, and he would die here to a feeling he couldn’t name.

His chest started to hurt, to anticipate the bullet. Everything in his vision drained into that little black hole.

Ganymede took a breath and tried to feel warm again, tried to bring himself back to the bar. He’d broken up fights before. He’d dissolved Anger from the air and swept it away. Despair, too, and Regret, and Sadness and Fear.

With another deep breath, Ganymede noticed it. Fear in the air, solid and real, the same Fear he’d seen before and learned to dissolve.

He raised both his hands. Slowly, as he struggled to pull his attention from the gun, he remembered his English.

“There’s...no need for this. Let me pour you something to drink. If you...shoot someone here, you’ll only make more trouble for yourself down the road, right...?” On light, short steps, he made his way closer to the bar, still with his hands raised, pulling the man’s gaze and the gun’s barrel along with him.

In a blur of modern Greek behind him, he made out one word. “Help.” As soon as it was uttered, the man’s attention snapped back to where it was, the gun moving unsteadily this way and that.

Ganymede pulled a glass across the counter, leaned over into the well to grab the tap, and slowly brought it over the bar, keeping his left hand in plain view. Then, holding the image of Fear in his mind, feeling its shape and its sound, he pressed the button. A bright cascade of water poured out of the tap, ringing out against the glass and pulling the gunman’s attention back toward Ganymede as the Fear on the air dissolved into nothingness and was swept away by the sound.

The other feeling remained like a stone in a drained pond. That unnameable almost-hatred sat heavy on the air. It hadn’t been Fear.

While the gunman looked away, one of the men at the table hurriedly produced a cellphone and began pressing against its screen, free of the Fear that had held him back.

“Here,” Ganymede offered, and, with his left hand still open in the air, brought the glass of water to the gunman.

Something had changed in his expression. The wildness in his eyes was gone and something cold and calm had taken its place.

And, as Ganymede crossed the floor to bring him the drink, he risked a glance to one side at the men he’d meant to hold at gunpoint. By now the phone was lowered, but Ganymede could still see a blue sliver of light against a dark hand.

“Why’s that phone on?!”

“I’m getting a call,” lied the one with the richest accent.

The gun moved toward them again. No jerking, now that Fear had been removed.

“Now, there’s...there’s no reason...please, let’s...” Ganymede, as always, failed to sweep away his own fear, left himself stammering.

Could he try and clear away Hatred? Was this just Hatred in a different shape? It smelled different, and sounded different, but he couldn’t think of anything else it could be, not while that weapon drew his focus.

He couldn’t get another drink, of course, but he held the water in his hand.

So, he breathed in, and tipped the glass slightly. With his mind on the shape of Hatred, he listened to the drum-beats of water on hardwood floor, felt its song trying to break down the Hatred on the air and clear it away.

Before he got more than a spoonful of water out, the song was torn in two by another sound, and pain stopped him. Before he noticed anything else, he noticed the pain, a burning pain in his ribs. Then he saw his field of view change as he fell, and noticed the echo of a loud banging noise. As he slipped to the floor, he saw the black muzzle of that gun, pointed squarely at him.

When he thought to look down, he saw that he was bleeding.

Somewhere in the shine of the floor, he saw the reflection of blue and red lights, and beyond the ringing in his ears, he heard shouting voices and more shots. They didn’t sound anything like TV had taught him to expect. Things started going cold around him, like, he thought, the winds around Olympus.

 

 

“There you are, sweetheart!”

“Carolyn!” Ganymede tried to push himself up into a sitting position in his tight white hospital bed, but his midsection completely failed him. It was stitched up and bound tightly with white cloth. Today, he hadn’t bled through it, but the day before, when he woke from the surgery, it had been red.

“Don’t sit up. If you don’t heal right, I’ll have to keep Jeremy on your shifts for even longer. Evan’s already so mad he’s closed the kitchen early two days in a row.”

“Yes ma’am.” He groped about for the button that would operate his mechanical bed, found it, and started the whirring that slowly lifted him so he could watch her set a big shiny balloon and bouquet of blue irises on the table by the window.

“Are you okay there?” She draped her raincoat over the back of the nearby chair, sending little raindrops to spatter against the floor. “You need anything?”

“...not really. Carolyn? What happened?”

She sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you. The guy was crazy. You weren’t the only one he shot, but the other two should pull through. Those Lebanese guys you helped said they’ll be coming by to visit you and say thanks, by the way.”

“I’d like that. But, Carolyn....what happened?”

“I said I don’t know what to tell you, sweetheart. You want me to talk feelings with you?”

He nodded. “It was kind of like Hatred, wasn’t it?”

“I guess it’s not the kind of hatred you usually see around here. The kind that causes fistfights. That’s....I don’t really have a word for it. You know personal hatred, like when one guy hates another one because there’s been a slight or something.”

Ganymede nodded. “But this was different.”

“Yes. Hate that’s not about what you’ve done, but about who you are. When that hate mixes with fear, desperation, stuff like that...it makes people do terrible things. Things like we see on the news.” She reached over to stroke his hair with that odd little smile of hers. “I still don’t know what you are, but you can’t ask me to make sense of ordinary humans for you all the time.”

“I need to give it a name, Carolyn. Please.”

“I suppose you could call it Terror,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not quite right, but...it’s going to have to do. Now, here, stop being depressing.” Carolyn pulled her hand from his head to rummage in her purse for a little stuffed lion, which she nestled in against him. “Cheer up. If you couldn’t stop him, then nobody could expect you to.”

Ganymede reached up to stroke the toy’s soft head. There had been nothing he could do at the time but fumble for distractions and clear the wrong pain from the air. Forty years he’d been learning the names and shapes of the world’s ills, and forty years he’d been easing minor pains and doing no good for the world outside the bar, until Terror had appeared and frozen him in his tracks.

But now, he understood it, could name it and recognize its shape. And it wouldn’t defeat him again.