Accidental God 4.0 -- Section 08

[Not really the end of the section, but I figured I should post it anyway.]

My uncle once looked at my sketches of the other gods. He was in town for a visit, something he hardly ever does. He loves my mother, but after a few decades of life they've realized that they have very little to say to each other. I sometimes imagine they're like those Chinese lions that stand guard outside of temples and palaces: they agree with most things, and even work well together, but there isn't much to talk about.
    "Not bad," he said. His name is Blayne, with a funny kind of spelling that isn't anywhere in our family history or anyplace. He's just a random Blayne, as he likes to call himself. "Which one is this? The one with the hotdog stand."
    "Standing Appointment."
    "He looks nice."
    "He is. He's always there."
    "At his hotdog stand?"
    "Yep. Twenty-four-seven, three-hundred-sixty-five, except on leap years."
    "What does he do on a leap year?"
    "Runs his hotdog stand. It's just that he's there three-hundred-sixty-six on those years."
    "Of course."
    We were in my small apartment, two blocks over from my temple. I had considered getting a place somewhere else, but in the end couldn't decide why I would want to. Being a god came with a certain amount of income, but not so much that a bigger place was really an option. I suppose I could have kept on with my part time work at Thai For First, one of the better restaurants in the area, but I got the impression that was frowned upon. Specifically, the government officials that gave me my introductory packet of information had asked me about my work, and then frowned. It didn't particularly make sense to me, considering what other gods in this town do for a living, but apparently 'waiter' is not considered appropriate work.
    Which is why a god who runs a hotdog stand is, all things considered, a little surprising.
    "He's a very thoughtful man," I said, talking with my uncle, sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch. "He gives out hotdogs and kind words."
    "How does he manage to be there all year long?"
    "Best I can figure, that's the miracle he performs. Never leaves."
    "Not even to...you know."
    "Not even that."
    "Wow. Takes all sorts, I guess."
    He flipped through a few more pages. "Who's this?"
    "Bagel Girl."
    "That's the name of a goddess? Sounds a bit prosaic."
    "I've always thought her name was a little unusual."
    "Does she sell bagels?"
    "Yup."
    "I suppose gods aren't always that creative with the nick names they hand out. Doesn't your friend Tumble Dry run a laundromat?"
    "Two."
    "That's nice. Miraculous cleansings, I suppose."
    "Makes your whites whiter. Absolutely."
    My uncle nodded, his face straight. That's something I like about my uncle: no matter how funny something is, I've never seen him laugh. That somehow makes everything funnier. He is the world's straight man, and he'll stay deadpan until he's dead.
    Uncle Blayne flipped through a few more pages, then back to Bagel Girl. "You've got a lot of detail on this one. She seems almost alive."
    I leaned over and looked at it more closely. He was right. I did have a lot of detail on Bagel Girl. She had become a goddess somewhere in her mid-twenties, like me, and her hair was all kinds of blonde. I mean that literally, every flavor of blonde from sawdust to straw to flax, though I'm not sure I've ever seen flax, so that one could be wrong. It had been sunny in her bagel shop that day, and I was trying to catch the way the light tangled up in her hair.
    "I guess I just got lost in her hair," I said.
    My uncle's eyebrows went up.
    "Stop it," I said. "I didn't mean it that way."
    "Oh," he said.
    "Cut it out. I really didn't."
    "I understand."
    "There's someone else, anyway."
    He flipped over toward the back of the book and help up a picture at me. "Her?"
I looked at the picture. It was Midnight Jane on one of her angry days.
    "She just gets that way sometimes," I said. "She's got a really good way with teenagers, though. She's like a mamma bear with her cubs, or an avenging angel."
    "Or an avenging bear with wings."
    "I don't feel like you're getting the point."
    He shrugged and turned the book back, flipping over to Bagel Girl.
    "Don't you need to go somewhere?" I asked.
    "Not any time soon."
    We sat longer, me stumbling around in my thoughts about what, exactly, Midnight Jane meant to me, and why my pictures of her were so much less detailed than my picture of Bagel Girl.

    I didn't go straight home after practice, like I expected I would. Instead I found myself walking over to Midnight Jane's temple. I could feel the pulse of the bass in my chest before I could hear the music. It battered me, but I pushed through it. There was a trickle of people out on the dark streets, all of us in coats against the chill, not so cold that I missed my scarf but cold enough that I walked faster and noticed I needed to use the bathroom. It's a funny thing, but whenever I'm really cold, I always have to use the bathroom. Not sure which is cause and which is effect, but there it is.
    There is no sign outside Midnight Jane's temple, just a black front with a single neon stripe across it, slightly crimped in the middle, like the glass blower had hiccuped half-way through his work. The bouncer, Misty, saw me, smiled, and let me in. Misty was one part gorilla, two parts bigger gorilla, but she carried herself with the grace of a much smaller monkey, which was enough to keep the worse elements from bothering Midnight Jane's club--as if the fact it was MIDNIGHT JANE'S club wasn't enough for most people, or at least the smarter ones. I slipped past the line of waiting teenagers and paused inside the door, letting my eyes adjust as much as they ever did to the dark and strobing lights, a sugary seizure-confetti.
    The club was full, as it always is, and I realized I didn’t want to be there. It was a bad habit, like scratching at scabs on my face, which I only ever managed to stop by virtue of the fact that I don't get scabs anymore. One of the strangenesses of being a god is the little things that simply disappear out of your life: acne, bruises, bad haircuts. I'm serious about that last one, but I don't understand it. Why would being divine naturally give a body good hair? Even Midnight Jane's muddy color job didn't make her hair look BAD. It still fell around her face in attractive waves, almost hiding her eyes but not quite. I've tried to butcher my own hair, cutting it away with my kitchen scissors, just to see if it would work, but I ended up with an attractively disheveled look that pulled a compliment out of my mother. Apparently I had finally made a positive fashion decision.
    But my haircut was not on my mind, at least not anymore than a haircut is always on a person's mind in a technical, geographical sense. I was trying to find Midnight Jane, and I knew exactly why, and I didn't like the reason. It was just another of my attempts to get her to see me, the way the Titanic just wanted to get the attention of that iceberg.
    Kids--and no, I don't know when college students became "kids" to me and not "potential dates"--bounced off each other in a jumble of glowing beverages, glowing neon lights, and glowing faces (and that last one was both metaphorical and physical due to some kind of face paint). Last time I'd been in Midnight Jane's club the theme had been 'FIRE,' and I do mean that with all capitol letters, but with all the fire there had been no smoke. This time the theme seemed to be 'NEON,' and everyone moved in glowing squiggles through the darkness. I found myself pressed and jostled and bumped, surprised at all the business in the middle of the week. It was time to find Midnight Jane and get out of there.
    But she wasn't going to go with me. No, she'd stay at her temple all night, because that was who she was. It had taken me a while to figure that out, what exactly she was, I mean, but I had gotten there. At least a little. Midnight Jane wasn't someone who talked about herself much, so it wasn't from her that I'd started to learn her history.
    Mostly it was from the kids I met at her temple. It's not that any of them knew her better than I did--at least, I hoped they didn't--but it was the kind of kids they were. There was one girl who had been on the street for three months, she told me, before she found her way to Midnight Jane's. The girl told me, while drinking something I was pretty sure wasn't legal for her, all about the best dumpsters for finding food that was mostly good, not too old, and not too fatty. It surprised me, seeing this slender girl talk about watching her weight as she brushed back frizzy hair from her face, but I suppose even homelessness doesn't change some things.
    Then there was the boys, older and younger, one blonde, one brunette, who needed a place to wait while their father sobered up. "He's got big hands," one of the boys had said.
    Then there were the rooms in the back, behind some pretty thick walls that only barely held back the bass, where single mothers could settle in with their kids for a night or a month or a year. There were the rooms upstairs for kids who needed to come down off something nasty and then get help for the time it took them to really get clean, get sober, get ready to go out into the world again. They serve alcohol at Midnight Jane's club, but never to the people that really can't handle it, and nothing harder ever makes it through the doors. Dealers don't even come close. They don't dare.
    Midnight Jane never told me what her life was like before she became a goddess, but, like I said, the kind of kids that make their way to her temple tell a pretty clear story. That's why I say she's a kind woman.
    A kind woman I couldn't find. Where was she? I pushed through the crowd, moving toward the upper level where she'd sometimes hang out with the kids. I caught sight of her chief acolyte, Big Larry, and he nodded his white-guy afro at me, jerking his head toward some tables close to the bar. I guess she wasn't upstairs then. I scanned the various glowing patrons, trying to figure out which was Midnight Jane with her muddy hair, and that's when I realized I'd been looking for the wrong thing entirely. Midnight Jane's hair wasn't muddy at all.
    What I had taken for a bad dye job was, in the dark of the club, brilliant. Literally. It glowed with a jagged weave of blues, greens, yellows, oranges. Her stylist hadn't messed up at all. We just hadn't had seen what the style was really intended for. Somehow she must have felt her eyes on me, because she turned, caught my eye, and smiled.
    I half waved and started to make my way towards her, when someone bumped into me, spilling something onto my shirt.
    "Terribly sorry," said the man.
    "Don't worry about it," I said, but he had already moved on, and I was looking for Midnight Jane again, but I'd somehow been turned around. She was back over...there. I stepped out again to go talk to her, because something was growing in my mind that I wanted to say to her. It was a small plant, a small thought, and I've never been good with plants so I couldn't tell if the idea was a rose or a dandelion, but I was ready to try it.
    If I could just get to her. Someone else bumped into me, a woman, and the bumping wasn't entirely unpleasant, but it was a bit rough and I lost my direction again. Where was Midnight Jane? The bar was over that way, so her table was--no, she wasn't there anymore. Where had she gone? Aha, there was her hair, talking to someone over by speakers, though I don't know how they could possibly hear each other. I started off that direction, then someone collided with me again, a man this time, and when I regained my balance I had, once again, entirely lost sight of Midnight Jane. What was with this? And why was that man dressed in a suit?
    The woman bumped into me again, spinning me around entirely, and she was easily in her late thirties, unusual for this club, and also dressed in a kind of suit, though a bit more stylish than the suit the man was wearing.
    "I don't believe it," I said out loud, and no one heard me, which was good, I suppose, because I actually did believe it. Mr. Obscure Pike was striking again.