Elektra's Revenge: Chapter Two

Doubles

Thirty minutes later, Elektra finally sighed in resignation and slipped a flask of spirits from the cunning velvet sleeve of her cape. She was painfully high, painfully bored, and painfully painful.

All she had for entertainment was Hipparchus, also suckling at a flask, as he stared past his lawn, in the direction whither Miranda had fluttered from his grasp; Elektra didn’t notice it, but each time he took a sip, she did too.

“I’d better not pass out here,” she muttered. “They would both laugh.”

Her hand shook as she forced the lunavodka past the ball of rage. If it weren’t for his periodic swigging, she would have thought Hipparchus was an expensive piece of lawn sculpture. The more he sat there, trapping her, the angrier she became.

“Get your fat hairy ass inside and cry into your money!” she hissed, a fragment louder. He didn’t flinch. She growled and flopped down on their pristine lawn, lush even in the shade. Twenty-eight years of betrayal by things beyond her control closed around her throat like a hand—slowly, slowly, as the hairy ass persisted in near-catatonia.

But the burning vodka-calm began to wash down upon it all, like a hot rain on a riot. In that flood, she felt her idea of “Elektra and Miranda” snap in two, never to be fixed; the romance was over. The madness was over. She knit her fingers into the thick, cyan, moss-like fuzz that served as lawns on the moon, watering it with one bitter tear. It had been shameful inanity, not insanity—six years of blindness. Clinging to the idea that there was goodness, or at least a great love story, hidden somewhere inside such a… 

“Vain bitch!” Elektra hissed aloud. Hipparchus turned his head toward the noise, and she failed to care. Let him search the copse and beat her silly; what did it matter? Miranda wasn’t her mate or her destiny. She was probably mentally ill. They were both insane—all three of them!—what did anything matter?

Without expression, he turned his head back.

—Slurp—

Elektra’s mind flashed back on scene after scene… even in theater college, there were umpteen nights when Elektra wanted to stay in and make love and light, and all Miranda wanted was to go out to parties so their coupled status could be admired… even behind her husband’s back, she had to drag Elektra to masked balls, to feel the envious eyes on her perfect waist. She was too lazy to dance now, with her every material wish granted, but Miranda missed this about the stage, hungry to be looked at hungrily.

What a conventional mind she had. She must have been desperate for immortality, to buck her precious social mores and marry a man!

Elektra recoiled at her own poor taste. “I was a piece of jewelry around her pretty golden neck,” she muttered. “And not even a very valuable one. I’d like to break that neck now...”

They tipped the flasks back, again, again. The mirage of obsession faded into the fluid. Forever, Elektra hoped. 

Yet still she was dismayed: it felt like her capacity for being infatuated with anyone, ever again, had been sucked into the singularity of betrayal. Can a broken heart ever grind back into operation? Could she ever trust her taste in people? Her instincts were wrong. Would she ever let her wishes coalesce around another sacred face?

Just an hour ago, Miranda had still been lodged in her heart, flickering in a tangled frame of desire and a balm for loneliness, the smell of her hair the smell of home…

Well, Elektra really had no home, she reminded herself—unless you called a mat on the floor at your lunatic father’s disintegrating apartment a home. And for now she was clear-headed. In a manner of speaking. Excepting intoxication and a sudden physical thirst for revenge. 

She looked up at the scarlet planet in the sky with a perverse sense of wonder. So vast, so heavy and bloody. Most of her relatives were still back on that red monster. They crawled under the heavy gravity, mining the drugs that pounded in her veins. If her grandfather had been a hair less brilliant at singing, she would be down there, too, a prisoner. Instead she was up here, part of the Great Immigration—but still making a prisoner of herself, pissing away six years of her youth on some empty whore. 

But no more. Elektra suddenly had an idea.

She laughed aloud. So what if Hipparchus heard her?... she had nothing to lose. I’ll do him one better than hearing me.

 The vague notion had no sooner formed in her mind than she lurched in obedience to it—she was almost as surprised to find herself half-falling from the copse onto the lawn as Hipparchus was to see her.

“Hiyy-ya, neighbor!” she slurred, waving to him up the golden stairs. One corner of her lip curled up, sly.

Hipparchus stopped mid-swallow and turned toward the noise, like the stone had come to life, eyes focusing at last on the source of the bother. His flask, sparkling crystal, now wedged between hand and mouth, was near-empty. He smirked around its neck. He looked glad for the distraction, and gulped down the rest of his mouthful.

“Hi… hao? To what… raven-ish-ing… ish-ish-ish, uh, vision of feminine feral-icity do I owe the, uh…?…” He squinted at her. “I don’t think we’re neighbors, sweetheart. I know all of my neighbors.” A light spray of liquor and saliva tinkled after his words onto the lawn.

“You don’t remember me!?” she sputtered. He had spent enough time around her in college to steal her girlfriend! Son of a—

—well, it had been a long six years. Lots of Lyfe and Lunar Likker had gone inside of her, and not a lot of vitamins. She was an elegant-looking adult, in a way, at least when she wore her nice scavenged clothes, but she also looked unhealthy. Her age was impossible to guess. She looked gamine but haunted, with long smooth legs and deep black circles under her wide, clear, but hooded green eyes. The circles fit well with her pointy, oddly erotic face, but they did not aid her attempt to look innocent. 

She gathered herself and tried anyway. “Oh!”

“Oh what?” he grinned.

 “This isn’t Sophocles Lane?”

“You’re a long way from the theater district, honey.” His grin widened. Whatever this little thing thought she was up to, he caught a faint whiff of a possibility for avenging himself.  “This is Cicero Boulevard.”

“Oh… well, I think I live near that. I just moved.”

“‘Moved?’” He furrowed his brow. “From one house… into another house, do you mean?” 

That sense of the word “move” was barely used nowadays in Mandish, the Mandarin-English blend that had won the evolutionary fight to be the final primate tongue (though the mortals down on the planet spoke a patchwork of mine vulgates). One did not often “move” homes in the City of Heaven. Especially since the Great Migration, there were so many people in so little space there wasn’t much room to “move” to. The closest you got was to tear your house down and start over on the same spot: the architectural monstrosity glowing behind them had been built over the tasteful chateau where Hipparchus’s grandparents (dead at 420 each, of a tragically young murder-suicide) had presided.

Elektra had moved out of her family’s New Tiber apartment to go to the theater academy, where the most ambitious youth on the moon were temporarily stored in a stack in the dormitory; but after school, like most college-bound mortals, she eventually was forced back to the ancestral hovel. 

There had been one unusually ambitious detour, in keeping with family tradition. Between the end of her studies and the beginning of her failures, Elektra and her best friend, Ismene, tried to strike out in an attic garret on their own. They couldn’t stand up straight in the center of the room, but still the rent was too much— at least if you shot Lyfe—for Elektra to pay her share, so at 25 she returned with her tail between her legs to Bartleby. 

Ismene’s parents had died on the red planet, where she was born. She had been scrapping gratefully for herself ever since. Being responsible, as was her wont, Ismene had tried to keep Elektra on the lease.  Ismene wasn’t just Elektra’s best friend, she was her only good friend; aside from Ismene, Elektra had only Miranda and drug buddies. But despite Ismene’s best efforts, Elektra’s experiment in independence was doomed to fail. And their lopsided friendship had suffered since.

Christ, Elektra wondered… how many times had she ignored her best friend to get high and chase that whore Miranda’s tail? Ismene was so plain-looking. So quiet and unassuming. It was too easy to ignore her, to forget she had any talent at all, particularly if you were young… and stupid, and shallow, and almost as vain as Miranda…

Elektra realized she was wallowing in guilt, the past… Hipparchus was, meanwhile, still staring at her.

“Moved… you moved!… how exotic,” he slurred. “But now it’s time to stop reminding me of my bitch wife.” She could feel him trace her hips with his eyes. 

She took advantage of his confusion to further confuse him. “Yeah, it’s been rough. I need to blow off steam… sposta go have fun at a party with Miranda Beaulieu,” she said. “Ever heard of her? She’s my super, extra best friend, but we had a fight. I’m a little bit worse for wear.”

“Super extra?!” Hipparchus turned more purple than ever. “That’s my wife you’re talking about!”

“My, what a coincidence.”

“What do you mean by best friend?” he squeaked. 

“Oh ho ho no—I dare say you imply that I am more than her friend!” She surrounded him with a cloud of false laughter, weaving her bullshit story, not even sure what she was getting at herself. The laughter gushed and glittered. “She’s into men, darling. Not me. Ha ha ha ha, aren’t you silly! Me! Why, I just caught her sneaking into the bushes with my husband!”

Hipparchus now turned a color Elektra had never seen before. “She’s into other men too?!” he rattled. It sounded like he was choking to death on a syringe. 

Elektra knew this would make it worse. It was one thing to be rejected for something you could never be, but another model with the same equipment… well, she knew how he felt, as much as she hated him; they were on this Miranda-flavored trip together. And for a second, guilt at making him feel even worse with a pointless lie poked her through the vodka cloud and the long years she had spent resenting him.

But he’s a dumb animal! she reminded herself. He should have realized it was impossible for Miranda to have gotten to a party, rendezvoused with some fellow, and had a friendship-destroying fight with the paramour’s wife in the thirty minutes since she’d left. Granted, his crystal flask showed near-empty, and Elektra guessed he had passed a long thirty minutes. But he was still too stupid for her to care about his feelings.

Still, she felt enough empathy to use it for method acting: “So we’re in the same boat,” she said, doe-eyed. “See? I told you, we’re neighbors.”

“I guess,” he said, fighting back tears. It was very hard for him not to hit the girl merely because she was there.

She lurched toward him and stumbled, throttling another pang of guilt. She laughed. “You’ll have to pardon a lady, I’m… all rattled and addled. You could say Miranda has… broken my little heart.” She flapped her eyelids, too drunk to flutter. Take it easy, dumbshit, she thought. Being choked by this oaf is the most humiliating way I can think of to cash in my chips.

“What’s your name?” he snapped at her.

“Uh… Antigone. Antigone… Hao.”

“I’ve never heard of you, Antigone… Hao. You say you’re her best friend?”

“She probably has a bunch of best friends.” Elektra stumbled closer, letting her cloak open, letting him see the slinky party dress she had worn for Miranda. Someone might as well see it.

“Yeah… she has a bunch of... stuff.” He emptied most of his flask, shook his head like a dog shaking off water, and attempted to focus his eyes on Elektra’s gracile hips, multiple planes molded in thin silk. “She sure does. Ha. Not the first time she got drunk and cheated on me. She’s been sneaking around with some woman, that I know… But if I ever cheated on her? Oh, that would be the end of my marriage! Because she would make my life a living hell!”

“Oh, yeah…? Oh, my.”

“I’d divorce her or I’d off myself. Isn’t that funny? I can put up with her cheating, but I couldn’t put up with the shit she’d give me if I cheated! Or…” he paused on her hips again. “If she caught me cheating. If I gave her a taste of her own medicine she’d puke it up all over me, that’s what she’d do!” He laughed bitterly at his own joke. “The last time she caught me looking at a guy… just looking… I couldn’t sleep for three days. ’Cause she threw water on me every time I closed my eyes!”

“Well, Miranda can be a bit of a handful…”

“A bit?! I guess you haven’t slept with her!”

“No, like I said, I thought she was, uh, totally into men. It was nice to have a platonic girlfriend. No complications. I thought. Then she noticed my husband…”

They looked at each other drunkenly across the lawn.

“Who did you say your husband was?”

She looked at him slyly. “Do you really want to know?”

“What…? Why would I not…?”

“Because you don’t want to act awkward around him.” She nodded at Hipparchus’s flask and said quickly: “Do you have any more of that in the house?”

“Of course, I do… but how is it any of your… oh!”

Zeus, what a slow motherfucker. “I don’t think she’ll be coming home anytime soon.”

She knew this from her own trysts with Miranda; the dancer arranged romantic evenings for the sake of her ego, but once she got warmed up, she could be sincere for quite a couple of hours. “I’m not going home to him anytime soon, I’ll tell ya that!” This is a terrible idea, said something in her head. She told it to go jump in the Tiber. “That dickhead,” she spat, using her acting diploma. 

Hipparchus smiled crookedly at her. She hated him intensely—blamed him for the cold wind hooting through her soul—but. Was there something Miranda saw in him other than money and eternal life? There were many Immortals she might have chased (although none who chased her the way Hipparchus had so briefly done). His button nose might make him look a bit cute, like a big, dumb version of a small animal. But did Miranda see anyone’s face, or only figures drawn on the air? She was now an empty cipher, an opportunistic plague… 

Elektra tried to remember the last time she had been with anybody but Miranda. 

Then she remembered she never had been with anybody but Miranda. 

Well, except when Hipparchus had butted in that first time, when they all three slept together, but that was another story. A story about an awkward orgy she could barely recall the next day. A story from the end of another life, a brief happy incarnation of Elektra, and a different kind of transition. She didn’t remember what he felt like (Miranda had been the star of that production, as was her wont). And from the next day on, Miranda had been pulled into his orbit.

“A pfennig for your thoughts?” said the star.

“Oh… I’m just thinking this evening doesn’t have to end with us lonely and angry. There are things you can do with anger. I’m a fucking alchemist!” Her slur was half-real. He took her hand with an almost charming, sudden confidence; they were both actors. The scene had been set in motion. And she grinned her way up the glowing stone stair. She had been smuggled inside this lovely home before.

I’d better try to look like I don’t know where everything is already…

Being numb made her feel less scared and disgusted to let him have at her—though maybe scared and disgusted weren’t the right words. She was afraid, but not of him; she felt dirty, but not because of him; the fear and revulsion were like traces of soap scum, left from some past event she couldn’t quite remember. She found herself fascinated by his rare, reddish-pink skin color. She was high enough that she imagined it was translucent, that she could see his blood rushing in torrents below it, like one of those albino watercats. 

She remembered seeing an extremely ancient photograph in a school history book: a pink man like this was standing in a round-brimmed white hat and curious white trousers, holding a primitive firearm, next to a crouching man, who was nude to the waist, showing an expanse of skin that was as strikingly dark as Hipparchus was pale. 

Elektra had never seen a person like the dark man in real life at all. These two specimens seemed to belong to a different species from Elektra, and in a deeper sense, they did.

The Lyfe mines of Earth II had exerted some quick and sharp evolutionary pressures on the mortal caste in particular. The gravity of the huge planet was almost double that of Ancient Earth. Elektra could have easily crushed the windpipe of either of the fellows in the photograph with her slender little hand before he could move to defend himself—and Hipparchus would fare even worse. Although they outlived mortals by a thousand years if they stayed safe, the Gods had spent the last umpteen rounds of evolution in the gravity field of a mere midsize moon. So a God could easily be killed by a mortal’s bare hands.

This was one of the reasons the Great Immigration that Elektra’s grandfather began was disruptive to Heaven. The cheap labor was nice, but it was like having a vacuum cleaner that could thrash you to death. It was the reason nobody (nobody Immortal, anyway) objected to the heavily body-armored Government Officers who now lurked behind every tin fig.

Elektra’s complexion was a currently unhealthy-looking variation on the medium tan color that was now the species’ baseline—not that they thought about it, unless they were high and looking at an outlier like Hipparchus. They were as tribal as ever, but now they drew the lines along a more obvious contour: was Nature planning to murder you? Well, then Man had some other misery in store for you along the way. At least the new layer cake was upheld by biology, rather than pure tribalism: Some people died. Some of them could strut along like imbeciles forever. Can’t argue with that.

Hipparchus, who assumed such a well-dressed and articulate lass must be an Immortal female of normal strength, made no particular effort not to antagonize her. He had no idea she could break his throat on a whim. In his drunken condition his idea of foreplay was to wet her lips with vodka. Her easy compliance didn’t arouse his suspicions. 

Now Elektra’s face was being pushed into the slightly greasy riverbat-leather duvet on Miranda’s marital bed. She had been here a few times before, at a slightly different angle. It was a bit disconcerting. But although she found the male sex unimpressive with him as its representative—at first—at least he didn’t smell bad.

They fell into a rhythm and his mood began to improve. Then it improved greatly: “Make slut noises!” he yelled triumphantly from behind her; the nauseating awkwardness of his dialogue made her suddenly realize she had been... enjoying the proceedings for a moment. 

Well, she couldn’t enjoy it after that. How dare such a bad actor be famous while she was obscure? After saying “ugh” aloud, she turned around and bit him spitefully on the shoulder, as hard as she could without losing teeth in his weird, pink, excessive flesh. 

In response, he sprayed a warm liquid across her back, like a riversquid defending its young. It took her a couple of seconds to remember that human males sprayed like that for different reasons… so he’s into biting? No wonder he likes Miranda, the vicious little…

“Ummmmmmmmm,” said Hipparchus. “Ahhhhhhh,” he continued appreciatively. He flipped her over as though she were no bigger than a watercat, then stuck his big male-model face right under her nose. “Oh, you are a good little slut. Did you, uh, did you?”

“Did I who?” Elektra said drunkenly. “Oh… right.” Was he offering to do something extra to care for her if she hadn’t? That was shocking, coming from the preposterously evil person who had ruined her entire existence with his wedding ring. Maybe she had been slightly unfair to him.

Perish that thought! “Uh, yeah, I’m good, that was great,” she lied. 

She did feel pretty good, though. It hadn’t been nearly the torture she had expected—was she disappointed that it was over?! My gods, this can’t be disappointment!—but of course she was disappointed, she had been anticipating a familiar and intense happiness from being undressed next to somebody else tonight…

Welp, too bad; that was no longer her goal. Now she just wanted to ruin their marriage. 

Her protests aside, he kept massaging her nether regions. It felt surprisingly sensual, but there was no way she could orgasm with all that booze in her. She was astounded that Hipparchus had been able. She had intended her flask to be shared with Miranda after an hour of stolen sweetness; after downing it all herself, she could hardly see. Hipparchus had drunk a flask twice the size of hers, and who knew what before that?—and still he was spraying her with that stuff.

Well, that was Immortals for you, she supposed… they might be sissies in a fight, but you never knew what kind of strange powers they would turn out to have. 

Still sighing proudly, her new lover produced another little odd-shaped container from somewhere under the bed and tipped it back happily. Being married to Miranda apparently required a lot of hidden bottles. It occurred to her that perhaps she had gotten off easy. 

He grinned at her and offered her a sip from the new container and she took it with a nod and sipped. He sure seemed relaxed. It was like he was a whole new dickhead. They sat back and stared at each other, each with a different kind of satisfaction.

At length, she stretched and fumbled drunkenly for her gown. “So ah… how do I get back to Sophocles Street?” she asked, hoping he would accidentally give her some information that would help her reorient herself. She had come on the hippobus, but she didn’t have the money for the return fare. She had expected Miranda to pay for everything once she arrived. Miranda had that much to recommend her: she was generous with her husband’s money.

“Didn’t you say you lived on Sophocles Lane?”

How did he remember that?! “Uh… no, I was looking for Sophocles Lane. I live on Sophocles Street. It’s in the … cul de sac of Sophocles Lane. Over by that old theater. I forget its name.”

He eyed her wryly. “And didn’t you say you had just moved away from the theater district? Now you’ve really got me wondering who your husband is!”

“What, you’re going to cheat on me with him? That seems to be the way this evening is spiraling…”

“Oh, so we’re an item already?!”

“Gods, no, I was kidding.”

“Oh.” He thrust his chest further forward, but he couldn’t help sounding disappointed. In her mind, she was rubbing her palms together and cackling. Revenge will be mine! Outwardly, she shrugged. “Well, I know where you live. And I know who you are. I might show up to one of your plays.”

“I guess I wouldn’t be completely miserable if that happened.”

“Just don’t let Miranda find out. You’d have to divorce her, right?”

He chuckled. “What, you want to marry me that bad?”

“I ain’t the marrying kind.”

“Except… for your husband.”

“Sorry, I meant I’m not the divorcing kind. Drinky! Ha ha.”

“OK, That’s good. The last thing I need is two of you… you kinky, delicious creatures. Ah, why couldn’t I have been born gay like all the normal kids?”

He polished off another bottle and grunted. “Hey, so grab anything you want on the way, but you gotta let yourself out… I don’t… I’m kinda sleepy. I don’t wanna be awake when she comes home. Murder… what’ll they do to me if I murder somebody? I’ve never been in that much trouble with the Government before… so uh, get some water or piss or hit the Thyme on the way out if you want to,” he said, gesturing at the bathroom. 

“Time? Oh, I got nothin’ but time, sweetie,” she said, mildly confused. Was there a special clock in their bathroom? 

Then her mind lurched drunkenly off in another direction: How was she going to get the idea into Miranda’s head that Hipparchus was banging some mystery woman without getting herself killed? All evidence would lead back to Elektra herself… well, I’ll slay that Anihil when it crosses the river, she thought, and said: “See ya, handsome.”

“Scram,” he mumbled, sagging back in the pillows. The Immortals had their limits. But it was just as well that she was leaving. Underneath the drunk feeling, she could sense the balance of Lyfe shifting in her blood: the leading edge of withdrawals began to gnaw at her mind. It put a sensuous damp gleam on her copper skin and a fierce luster in her green eyes. The sweat in her long black hair shone like salon-grade hair gloss. When Hipparchus looked up to give her a final friendly wave, it all made an impression on him—he woke up for a second before settling back into his Lyfe and moonshine glow. Elektra was striking when she suffered. He thought she was Immortal.

He winked and she left, thinking: Hey, I have one Immortal grandmother. I’m a quarter-blood, I belong here.

She opened the tiger’s-eye portal, wondering vaguely what a tiger was and why its eyes were so beautiful; the sweet air of Valhalla rushed in on her sex-fetid personal cloud and she looked down on the sweeping lawn and the copse where she had hidden whilst her first love spoiled like rotten food. 

They were lovely magnolias, well-crafted, more graceful than their owners deserved. Had Fate’s hand twitched ever so slightly when she tossed the dice for Elektra, everything could have been so much better.

The slave planet was high in the sky now, but somehow it seemed even more immense than it had looked near the horizon. Filtered through coal fumes in the atmosphere of the moon, the surface resembled boiling blood. Elektra saluted it:

And everything could have been so, so much worse.

She chuckled darkly and stumbled down the fancy stairs.