Siren

By Gerard M. DiLeo

Rhea Rainey, a young rock singer, is a genetic throwback to the Sirens of ancient Greek mythology. Locked within her genome is the Sirens' song—powerful, irresistible, and consuming. Rhea begins to discover this inherited memory, allowing her to see her precarious place between two universes—the imperfect one we all occupy and the perfect one that was meant to be. Characters such as the titaness, Phoebe, and the goddess of love, Aphrodite, guide her on her way through our imperfect universe which was a mistake of Creation, and which the right song, locked within her DNA, could dismantle and recreate it as it was meant to be. Mythological characters, beings from and of "dark matter," embolden Rhea to sing this song that will correct the primal mistake of Creation, freeing them from their Limbo and finally righting all existence.
Born of our universe, of our time, she is forced to navigate the conflicts that ensue: corporate greed and skullduggery, political corruption, murder, as well as sex for all of the right and wrong reasons. The antagonist, Peter Harper, Fortune 500 mogul, is himself a genetic throwback to the legendary Harpy, consummate spoiler of all things. To Rhea's peril he and other worldly adversaries like the universe just the way it is. There is a double story of mortal peril at both the corporate and mythological levels, while the complexities of love and devotion from the ancient Greek mythos explode into Rhea's contemporary life. After evading her dangers, ultimately there is the showdown between Siren and Harpy with the fate of two universes at stake.
The modern-day plot is peppered with coexisting Greek mythology which is both beautiful and horrifying. It romps with sexual encounters of which only the goddess of love is capable. The Erinyes (Furies) avenge hubris and sins against the moral fiber of the universe as it was meant to be and police hazards away from Rhea's missteps with a skillful horror only deities could muster. Siren explores how our senses—vision, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and especially music—are main characters themselves in not only our navigating our world but also weaving a meaning to our lives. Rage at the unfairness of life is conveyed by Bacchic madness and the monstrous side of the Furies, the Siren, and the Harpy, whose gene expression lives on in those willing to hear the song within. Like our very being, our songs can be both beauties and monsters.
This book dangles uncomfortably in the fabric of the protagonist's real world—a world which unravels to reveal the only thing that was overlooked during Creation. This unsettling juxtaposition of mundane and fantastic builds tension like a Bolero until the denouement brings the reader home. It touches on many popular topics of today--mythology, music, love between men and women and between women.

Word count: approximately 130,000.
Genre: Urban fantasy/magic realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gerard M. DiLeo
• Release date: Apr 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310663420

Gerard M. DiLeo

Author of FICTION:SliderSirenEddie H. Christ--a Sibling Rivalry of Biblical ProportionsSTARLESS and Bible Black (Short Stories Collection)♂: The Novel (Mars: the Novel)Author of NON-FICTION:"The Anxious Parent's Guide to Pregnancy," 2002, McGraw-Hill, and now as a 2nd edition--an updated eBook for 2012."Ovarian Cysts--the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," a concise treatise on all aspects of having an ovarian cyst.

Book preview

SIREN

by Gerard M. DiLeo

©Copyright 2015 Gerard M. DiLeo

*********************************

Book Title: Siren

Author: Gerard M. DiLeo, MD

Copyright 2012 by Gerard DiLeo, MD

Approx. 130,000 Words

********

To Linda, whose beautiful song is loving, giving, passionate, and eternal.

"Young gods smiled upon the crowd

Their music being born of love

Children danced night and day

Religion was being born...

...If you want to find the truth in life

Don’t pass music by..."

— Burdon, Weider, Jenkins,

McCulloch, Briggs

Prelude: Odysseus

There was a taste in the air. He did taste it, although his lips were pressed firmly together in a clasped defense of wrung creases. It was that salty spray taste that could penetrate even a closed mouth accustomed to sea. He bit against himself until he tasted his blood instead.

He felt for the terror of this night with only his ears, for he also squeezed his eyes tightly so that he could experience, without distraction, the sound that the night and the salty air would carry to his unfettered ears. He thought of the music of the spheres, that harmony of cosmic order heard by Pythagoras. His most modern astrolabe was still a crude instrument, he regretted, yielding only vectors and triangulations, deaf to the blessed vibrations from above. He pivoted his head down in concentration to continue his search.

For now he hoped to hear something divine on Earth.

His balance had motion. There were the rapid forward and backward lurches which were skewed by his subtler left and right list. He flexed and relaxed his muscles and joints in urgent preparation, equilibrating his center of mass to accommodate to the waves of his body. He called upon the strange gravity that poises those who choose to live unanchored to the firm ground, a seaman’s sense that the mundane, the sensible of his time cannot feel when what they pound beneath their feet is firm and adherent and restricts them to shorelines.

His hearing had no such equilibration. His vulnerable ears—open, inviting, and en garde—heard only the nautical wind toward which he feared his heed would be erroneously diverted. His men toiled at their duties on his ship, but each was primarily fearful of their captain’s expected madness. Each knew they had gone too far to be led by a madman. But they obeyed, nevertheless, or so the story goes, when they were ordered to discard the last of the hot wax before pouring it into their captain’s ears. They obeyed, or so the story goes, when they were ordered to tie their captain to the mast as they neared Anthemusa, the island of the daughters of Melpomene. And they dutifully disobeyed, as the story goes, when he ordered them to release him so as to be willingly consumed by the Sirens who sang to him divinely.

The song was of six voices but from three.

He ordered them repeatedly as their captain, warranting the fair justice they would receive for their mutinous refusal. He pleaded with them as their victim, his own salty spray issuing forth from his gasping mouth. The wet binding cut painfully into his ankles and wrists as he flapped and thrashed impotently on the mast like the crying ropes in the wind. His ears could not believe the honored invitation—a request to rejoin the universe in glory.

The rest of the world had no importance at all! He must go, he knew.

But the mast held him fast, its firm curves dissimilar to his own, bruising the very prominences of his spine as he struggled in panic to accept a destiny no one with wax in his ears could understand. He heaved against the mast with all of his might. Its creaking added to his own as he hoped to snap it—he must snap it. He launched himself so mightily that even his men, wide-eyed with horror and amazement, thought he might succeed.

But he might just as well have been impaled.

He slumped in defeat, disgusted with his hated traitors, glaring at them, scorning them for having only wind blowing through their heads. His collapse signaled the knives that cut him away from his crucifix, several of the men lifting him upright.

A final harmony drifted through him from afar.

Is it safe now, Captain? they asked. They strained to hear his response through their sealed ears.

Finally, it is! he said, searching out each set of eyes that prayed for his good sense to return. It is safe—for me! he cried, each flexed elbow carrying a man with him overboard. Falling with them, it seemed so beautiful to him how their howls harmonized with the song from the island.

It was a longer way down to the frigid water than he had imagined. The concussion was his final defeat. When his crew fished him out alone, he had no remorse for his friends who had died by his attempt to reach the singers. As he lay on deck, sputtering and draining brine, he knew that their deaths and all the usual tragedies were jokes.

Neither abandoning Circe nor absence from Penelope, nor even the mixed turmoil of both torments, was a hair’s breadth compared to the miseries of the Sirens’ lure unrequited. His men stood witness to what longing can really be, amazed at how it can drive a man to kill or how it can drive a man to surrender to his inviting killers—surrender to their divine singing his body, his life, his soul—his very reason to exist. But unless one heard what he had heard, no one could conjure the shame and self-loathing that befell all who were to refuse their seduction.

Hundreds of generations ago, he and his men would out-distance their peril, but he knew even in conflict with his rational thought that he would never be whole again until he returned to their sublime melodies that never ceased ebbing in his mind. Worse, this yearning was final and immutable, to be resolved only when these Sirens were to taste of his living flesh. And from the time his mind was so seduced—so poisoned—he was doomed to forever long for this consummation.

*

I

Creature of Harmony

It was supposed to be a three-minute, three-chord song with a simple hook, like could be heard in any of dozens of New Orleans venues that evening. The words fit the measures of the song tightly as Rhea sang them over and over. This computer terminal operator by day and rock singer by night posed her petite body stiffly, an inert chameleon, the fitful lights changing her camouflage from instant to instant. She had turned her back on her keyboard to face the audience. Only her lips moved, and it was impossible to imagine the power that came from such limited animation unless one were there to hear her. The decibels were not good for anyone’s ears and her vibrato mated with the din. Then came the familiar rest, when she stopped singing so that the instrumental hook could go around and around. It was a private annoyance among the band members as to when she might jump back in, the circular hook building momentum with each pass, the crowd getting more frenzied with each cycle. Their stomping became her metronome. At this point she ran the show, and this tease was one of the two things that had gotten her kicked out of the band before.

She stood on the stage and slyly waited, her inanimate stance in contrast to the audience mania below.

The guitars churned out another cycle; still she didn’t jump in. This was the longest she had ever waited and her fellow musicians strummed and plucked and drummed with ever increasing intensity. Then she did what she had promised them she would never do again—the second of the two things that had gotten her kicked out of the band before.

The concentration of heads in front of her was solid enough, she calculated, and she dove backwards onto the carpet of hair and hands. The undulating support for her bobbed her this way and that until, like the supernatural properties of a Ouija, she felt she was willing them to send her back to the stage.

By this time there were only a few more octaves to jump within the known limitations of the instruments, so the saxophone player began a pair of rising cords an octave lower than the finishing chords of the guitarist, and the guitarist repeated the trick, creating the sonic illusion that the rise up the frets was never ending. It was a necessity, an emergency: Rhea forced such trickery out of them. Additionally, the bass and drums began to slow down the rhythm to give them more time for their singer who seemed unconcerned. The stomping metronome agreed. The trip up the frets and the sax’s progression up the scale raised the tension of the song, awaiting the hammer blow of Rhea’s voice only her stage presence would provide. The rough mob had a gentle touch in placing her back on the stage—a hive of killer bees beneath the placid illusion of a colony’s singularity. The band, the crowd, the whole world waited for her to join the chant of strings, winds, and skins and the trickery of the never-ending octaves.

Rhea sang at last.

She belted out the blast that untied the knot that had bound the sound and crowd together. To the crowd it was worth the wait. She brought the acoustic tension crashing down to the home note that defined the song. A great weight lifted from the crowd and went somewhere unknown into the universe. It was less of a hammer blow than it was the uncocking of the hammer of the pistol, perhaps not gently enough to prevent firing. And although it had been worth the wait to the audience, it was a hard day at work for the band.

The walls of sound came crashing down and the crowd had fun. The band slipped back into an instrumental version of the refrain, which Rhea should have overrode with the home note, but instead she paused again. On the backbeat she belt out a vocal attack composed of a wavering, dissonant tritone.

She jumped back into the pit of hands and heads, but the crowd was different. This time the hands were choppy seas, tossing and jolting her. She was rolled face down and saw their eyes—she looked a singular mob right in the eye and became very frightened. This time her will was helpless to drive her back. Hands and elbows struck her in her face, throat, and mouth. At one point she bit to remove two hands at once. The fans slammed her the wrong way some distance before the bouncers ran to her rescue, making a circle of floor for her to alight. She was back on stage quickly and brought the song, the band’s signature finale, to a shorter end that the crowd would never notice. She was the first off the stage, having seen the best and worst that music can inspire. She was tattered, bruised, and reaffirming her promise not to do that again. The lead guitarist made it clear she wouldn’t and again she was fired.

Nearly an hour later, the instruments had been packed into the van and the band paid, except for Rhea. The only thing anyone said to her was by the guitarist, who only looked at the blisters on his fingers her vocal delays had caused him.

Goodbye, he said. Its tone was final.

She didn’t see herself a diva in this role, but enjoyed it only as a lark while she had a real job that was her career. She worked for the famous Peter Harper and at a keyboard on which she had complete control. Like the carpet of heads that carried her body and supported her performance hijinks, the keys under her fingers begged data entry mischief.

Sleep separated her yin from her yang, because such was her life. By day she punched in, punched away, and then punched out. By night she sang with the band, F This & F That, which was always on the verge of breaking up for many reasons, including the dozen times she had been fired. The band had previously been called Roving Band of Negro Youths, but when they acquired the black sax player it no longer seemed apropos.

F This and F That was antithesis to her vocal upbringing. Classically trained in voice and in piano for fifteen years, she had also sung with the choir at her Catholic church, then gone on to college at LSU, only to lose her music scholarship when she succumbed to the party life. She ultimately got a degree of some sort in computer science at Delgado Community College but then went on to ride the horse that threw her by returning to LSU to earn what she called a real degree. She refused to start at the bottom, and with her eventual collegiate achievement she was able to start just above the bottom of Peter Harper’s Ensley-Mix, Inc.

This morning, sporting a black eye from the raucous concert the night before, she greeted her co-worker.

What is that! Penny gasped.

What? Rhea answered innocently.

Your eye. It’s...terrible.

Not enough make-up. Oh, well, the slam dancing got a little rough last night.

Penny bit her lip to sympathize. You’ve got to give that up. All those druggies and creeps, and your ears—your hearing can’t be all right.

What? Rhea asked, cupping her hand to an ear with a grin. Besides, I got fired.

Again? Penny scoffed and turned back to her computer screen. Using the floor’s networking, she obliged Rhea by clicking her terminal on remotely.

Thank you, Penny, Rhea said, attending to her large purse, squaring away keys, makeup, and pens. I wasn’t really ready to actually work, but I guess I’m on-line now.

"Yea, well, I figured in another minute your terminal would light up Dwayne’s idle light at Cubicle Central.

Dwayne, Rhea said scornfully, but her grin reappeared. You wanna start some shit? Rhea whispered.

Not this early, please.

No, I can set off the idle light for every cubicle on the floor.

Not this early, please, Penny repeated more emphatically.

"O.K., later. I’ll save that for when I’m really down. Duh-wayne going ballistic picks me up, y’know."

I know, Penny agreed, grateful for Rhea’s momentary mercy. Penny knew Rhea could do what she claimed. About once a week or so there was always some malfunction, but she laid her tracks carefully so that any diagnostics went off to another floor altogether.

Even though Rhea Rainey had dedicated a lot of her higher education to computers, she knew that their basic problem was that they were stupid. Like a loving parent who is not blind to a child’s faults, she knew their limitations. They could be tricked; they could be made to suffer harassment. And when they couldn’t take it anymore, they would scream and throw a tantrum, either by taking their ball and going home or by scrolling with curses and invectives in their own esoteric hieroglyphics, like a Parisian pretending ignorance for your language. Either way, next came the howling in a flashing checkerboard agony, begging to be re-booted from the blue screen of death.

Computers are big on book knowledge, but that’s where it ends, she told Penny, who always lived in fear of what she might do. A look of disapproval crept over Penny’s face when she realized that Rhea was changing her mind about the computer.

Watch this, Rhea offered.

Oh, no. Penny flinched nervously, her fears materializing, but she didn’t protest any further. With magical finger-digital skill, Rhea cast a byte-digital spell, popping the keys on the keyboard loudly with highly arched knuckles that playfully showed off her dexterity. Pursed lips of concentration gave way to a cheater’s smirk as she played the keyboard for a fool. The computer would now play her song, creating the mental illness that soaked up user space with befuddled debris in the network’s memory. She smiled at her overly cautious friend, awaiting the expected confusion that would bring down the computers and send them on break.

Rhea and Penny sat together as they had for the last seven months. Penny, a plain, tall, thin girl with straight blond hair down to her mid-back, had felt awkward at first, having been assigned to Rhea’s cubicle after specifically requesting anyone else. She had predicted that being with Rhea would be the most awful of fates, for they were opposites in every way. Rhea was flash (in the pan Penny had felt), while Penny blended in. Rhea was mischievous, Penny was anonymously exemplary. Rhea did do her work, but she did other things, too. And Penny did the job she was hired to do—no more, no less. It had been a dreaded first few weeks’ tour of duty for Penny, but by the second month Penny began tolerating Rhea’s mischief. The third month found her abandoning her own highbrow. By the fourth month they were friends, and by the end of the sixth, they harmonized, Penny playing the straight-man for Rhea, the cubicle putting on a private digital show for their audience of two.

By the seventh month another difference between them hung in the air—Rhea, heterosexually experienced, and Penny homosexually attracted to her. Rhea was oblivious to this, even though she knew Penny was gay.

As a lesbian— Penny began. As such she was prone to start an observation—a lot.

Oh, not that ‘As a lesbian’ stuff again, Rhea would whine back—a lot.

They occupied a square patch of blue industrial carpet on an entire floor that was crisscrossed by modular off-white plastic walls short enough such that they could be peered over by tip-toeing passers-by. Penny often coveted her co-worker’s shapely legs, which presented nicely when the tip-toes belonged to Rhea. Whispers of gossip originated from their space, causing Penny to gasp when she heard what went over the wall tops along a different network of sorts. Darting eyes—Rhea’s and those of two or three willing suckers—would watch for the supervisor during the media blitz that would carry the most outrageous rumors over the partitions and bouncing along the acoustic ceiling, showering each cubicle with misinformation.

Prairie dog heads would drop quickly out of sight, like a trap door had been sprung, along the paths the supervisor patrolled. He was the dreaded Dwayne Cody, who now addressed the flock of cubicles about the computer problem Rhea had created.

Everyone please wait, announced his tenor voice over the intercom, our friends, the computers, are down. Rhea giggled. Penny stared blankly anywhere else but at the computer screen, seemingly to avoid eye contact with it.

Let’s take a break, Rhea offered, as Penny shook her head nervously. After all, the computers are down, down...down! she said, making a nose-dive with her thumb.

Rhea, you’ve got to stop. They’re going to catch us, and then what?

Then we get fired, hang out with the other deadbeats—maybe work strip-tease in town, Rhea answered flippantly, pulling her blouse down on one shoulder suggestively. Penny scoffed, but Rhea refused the caution. Aw, c’mon, Penny, she said, they’re not going to find us. We’re in a bank of these things. They’d have to interrogate every stinkin’ terminal, which you and I both know they won’t do because they assume glitches when it’s really bitches. So...break time, courtesy of...

You? which was congratulations, not a question.

Me, accepted Rhea. Let’s go. Rhea typed the letters that would normally be displayed as, So long, sucker, but the screen was still scrolling in pain. B-i-t-e-s instead of b-y-t-e-s, she now spelled out loud, announcing their exit as she sauntered off with Penny to seek the machines that handed out calories instead of data. Penny didn’t saunter, but walked stiffly. Why are your fingers like that, Penny? Rhea asked.

Like what?

All stretched out like you don’t want anything to stick to them.

Like guilt? she answered sarcastically. The elevator door opened for them, and Rhea grabbed her stiff hand, like her best friend would, until it softened.

Tactile defensive, eh, Penny?

I was a preemie, Penny excused herself. We do that.

I thought there had to be a reason, since you’re so gay.

As a lesbian, Rhea, I really don’t appreciate—

There it is again, Rhea stopped her, that ‘as a lesbian’ stuff again.

You started it, Penny argued, then grabbed her hand firmly. They both laughed, and a moment later slipped their hands away from the mutual grasp, unable to guess who loosened up first.

Downstairs, what Rhea had in mind was a burger entombed in plastic from a tall refrigerated machine. Penny muttered a lament of resignation to bad choices for bad meals as Rhea pushed in the panel that gained her hand access to the area into which the sandwich was dropped, the escape of air from the chilled wedge of rack echoing Penny’s sigh. Rhea retrieved the item and handled it appropriately to make it microwave-ready. She set the timer for two minutes and fired it up. Penny, the blond, lean, tall young woman, once again tolerated Rhea’s ritual under a quiet protest as she held her little recyclable paper bag of fruit in her own hand. She had long since stopped trying to change Rhea’s lust for meat. Unlean cuisine, she called it. This was in spite of the fact that Penny felt, though she would never admit it to her friend, that Rhea looked great for being the bag of poison and the toxic receptacle that she was. A full three inches shorter, Rhea seemed physically in perfect shape. Penny coveted not only her legs, but everything about her.

God, if I could just have your skinny ankles, she told her. I love skinny ankles. I hate these stupid thick ankles. Penny took a bite out of her apple, figuring that a body like Rhea’s had some slack in the unhealthy choices path she had chosen. She was always annoyed each morning when she ran her five miles, knowing Rhea’s arms and legs looked better without toil.

Rhea’s short, dark hair, brushed straight back off of her forehead, made her look even younger than she was. It was probably just a little shorter than what Penny thought someone could stylishly get away with. Penny’s straight hair, in contrast, dark blond and long, hung neatly but unimaginatively. Rhea’s hair looked chic, Penny’s was purely a maintenance coif whose style hadn’t undergone any serious changes since high school.

What they did on their heads was symbolic of what they did always. Rhea, the daredevil, took the chances; Penny always stayed on her life-schedule. Rhea wore provocative styles purely for her own fun; Penny traded clothes with her mother who wore the same size. Rhea was fun but dangerous; Penny was her foil.

Rhea had a ready smile that just hung on her face naturally, but Penny had to use more muscles to do the same, adding to her persona of seriousness.

The carcass is ready, Rhea reported excitedly as she heard the bell of the microwave sound.

Great news for PETA, Penny huffed.

Jealous? Rhea taunted. Perhaps a little envious that I get to eat beef, instead of that bulk laxative plant crap that you torture your intestines with.

Hardly, Penny frowned but then held up both her partially eaten apple and her bag triumphantly. No cholesterol, no fat—the food of the survivors, she proudly acclaimed. Rhea held up her burger in retaliation, tipping it around on her fingers because it was freshly heated.

And this, real meat, is the food of the gods!

Real meat, you say? Penny asked.

Alright, Rhea, conceded, meat-like.

They both laughed as they turned toward the seating area to take a place at their usual table, a small round one nestled in an out-of-the way alcove that was the result of an architectural accident. Its unintentional privacy always afforded these two friends a venue to talk. It also afforded them escape from the onslaught of a population that had a ratio heavily favoring men. Sitting more out in the open, they had learned, subjected them to endless come-ons by the men here, and they had long decided that the last person they wished to be involved with was a man working for Ensley-Mix, Inc.

Ensley-Mix, Inc., the global chemical company, was in the Fortune 500. Fortune 2 would have been more precise. It was begun by a young, aloof petroleum engineer named Peter Harper who had stolen his own idea from an oil company he had worked for. Five years later, long after any employment-derived inspiration could be suggested, Peter Harper patented his unique chemical, ENSLEY.

Electrorheological Napthenes in Single Layered Enantiomeric Yields, or Ensley.

Within two years he had his picture on the cover of every major newsmagazine in the world. It was always a head shot, drawn severely with chiseled features and perfect, wavy dark hair. The light would always be from below, rendering a visage of commanding vantage over the masses. Within a dozen more years he would have thirty thousand employees like Rhea and Penny working for him.

Ensley.

It was the petrophilic, insecticidal, thermo-stabilizing, non-flammable, low-friction, non-toxic, inert-type stuff that changed the world.

Tampered with in just the right ways, it just as easily could be, on the other hand, flammable, high-friction, toxic, and hardly inert. It was used in everything from house insolation to frying pans, from surgical scalpels to flooring, and from airplane wings and false glass to secret military applications. Micronized, it was the world’s finest machine lubricant. Aerosolized, it was the ultimate spray-on sealant. Liquefied, a process done simply by using magnetism which could lock it into this form, its uses were endless—coolants which revolutionized refrigeration, irrigants which purified both solids as well as other liquids, even artificial blood, due to its affinity but lack of tenacity for oxygen. Also, it was only minimally carcinogenic, the benefits to industry, Ensley-Mix, Inc. stated, far out-weighing the rare cases it could never be proven to have caused. It also made an excellent packaging for the microwaved burger Rhea now intended to eat.

I swear, Rhea complained around a rather large first bite, this EnsleyPlast leaves an aftertaste.

Oh, hell, Rhea, Penny replied, you think NutraSweet leaves an aftertaste. But, she said, I do wonder how many EnsleyPlastic molecules bind to those meat atoms when you microwave it.

NutraSweet does leave an aftertaste, girl, really, Rhea answered back, and then she chomped farther into her microwave-soggy patty and bun.

You think water leaves an aftertaste, too, Penny said, jabbing at her with a remark that could not be rebutted easily due to food-in-mouth in Rhea’s camp. Not that Rhea didn’t try, however, as crumbs fell from her garbling lips like gravel from a meandering flatbed truck. Something about the Mississippi River aftertaste fell out, too. It was not a pretty sight, and certainly the stuff mortification is made of, as Rhea turned her head to the right to make sure no one caught her in the act of being inelegant.

She scurried with her napkin to her mouth to prevent more debris from falling when she saw someone staring at her from over the half wall that was the architectural mistake hiding their favorite table. It was none other than Peter Harper himself, owner of Ensley-Mix, Inc.

Peter Harper himself.

Discoverer of Ensley, multibillionaire, owner of a massive, albeit stupid, complex of computers—the Überman himself—he peered at the gauche Rhea who now tried to swallow not only the mouthful in one gulp, but her head, too, and with it, the rest of her humiliated body.

Penny sat frozen, her eyes darting from Harper to Rhea repeatedly. It would have been no more startling had the President of the United States strolled up to them instead. Peter Harper, god of commerce, stamp-signer of paychecks of thousands, and with this power, god to them also. Forcing onward every speck of food that had been in her mouth, Rhea dared to speak only when she felt every last calorie was well past the first set of sphincters somewhere.

You’re Mr. Harper, she announced needlessly to him, her nervousness evident in her tremulous voice.

It’s really not fair that you know who I am, but that I do not know who you are, he said, his mannerism twinkly, betraying the fact that of course he knew who she was. Was this a come-on, Rhea wondered in disbelief, architectural blunder notwithstanding?

You sign my check, Rhea offered nervously and stupidly, her mind a blank for witty coyness, which she so desperately wished for at this very moment. Penny recovered the fumble, and she did it for her team.

I’m Penny Stenton, she proclaimed.

Harper turned his gaze to Penny, as if in distraction, almost as if in irritation. He focused intensely on her and his expression hardened. After an uncomfortable and protracted moment, she blinked first. His expression softened, but not in a friendly way. She couldn’t read it.

I know who you are, he answered her wryly. I sign your check as well. And this put to rest any notion on anyone’s part that he might be interested in anyone else but Rhea, whom he now regarded again with a look that baited her for an introduction. Rhea looked at Penny, then back at Harper.

Rhea, she said, Rhea Rosalea Rainey.

How lovely, he said, appraising the name with a fluttering of his eyelids. This temporary blindness afforded Rhea the opportunity to shoot Penny a perplexed look. Penny wished she could have answered the question in that look, but she was still somewhat unsettled by her own brush-off. He was to be forgiven, of course, because he was one of the world’s great human beings, and Penny stared at him expecting orders. She noted that he was exquisitely dressed. The continental double-breasted dark blue suit was silk. His tie had the smallest knot in it. It was so tiny and tight, Penny observed, that it couldn’t possibly be untied. Yes, she concluded, a man like Peter Harper never wears the same tie twice. His couture hung well on a person who could pilot past those who invited the hardened expression Penny had just suffered.

Rhea observed nothing. She was so stunned that she wouldn’t be able to recall anything about the man later, even had he been on fire.

Well, Miss Rainey, Harper said, mischievously accenting the Miss, I like to travel from center to center from time to time, and it is my custom to choose from the, ah, how do I put this, from the non-executives a person to show me around, to give me the inside scoop... He trailed off. ...give me the dirt on this place.

Where shall we all start? Penny asked hopefully, trying once again to worm her way in. Peter Harper merely looked at her with total lack of amusement on his face. The mogul in him reared its ugly head as he spoke.

"We...are not going to start anywhere. You...are going to go back to your cubicle; the computers are up there, and so should you be."

Penny snapped up immediately, her obedient movement a continuum that followed through as a pivot away from her chair and as a striding off without looking back.

Bye, Rhea, were her only trailing last words, launched into her own forward direction which, if Rhea had not been ignoring them, would have been hard to hear anyway.

Rhea Rosalea Rainey, he said to Rhea, the music of her name and the charm of his voice complementing each other. Trochaic, isn’t it? he asked, more to himself. Like what is so common in children’s rhymes.

English, she responded. Except for the Rosalea. That’s Italian.

It sings to all languages, he said with a flattering admiration. Rhea blushed. Please, he now said with a slightly more business-like tone, meet me for a private lunch in the CEO’s conference room at noon. And please, take off the rest of the morning until then. And with that plus a smile, he removed himself from the architectural mistake, leaving Rhea Rosalea Rainey alone in the solitude that the little round table offered, protected from the come-ons of the little people, whose eyes en masse tried in the hardest of ways to see through the half-wall to the focus of Peter Harper’s attention.

Rhea felt that her one-to-one with Harper was a denial of Penny before the cock crowed. Was she wrong not to have begged Penny in when it was clear she was not invited? She had fielded her position brainlessly star-struck, solo by default, being the right person at the right time. But had she handled it clumsily by not hooking Penny for the ride on her coattails? And coattails for what? Career brownie points? Her rational mind told her she had no reason to feel the rat, but the rat nevertheless she felt. And within this indictment she arose to slither back to her cubicle to assess any damage done to the relationship she had with her dear friend.

Penny, on the other hand, had felt no such betrayal. The computers were back up and she sat at her squeaky, wheeled chair at her terminal, entering the volumes, weights, and other parameters that certified the cash flow for the company. She entered the data via format-by-rote while thinking about the recent episode on another level altogether.

What a break! she thought. She admitted that it would have been better had she been the one, or had she been even included, but still this was a break of unprecedented proportions. And it was a perfectly natural sequence of events: she was always the also-ran when compared to Rhea. Socially, the attention without exception always went to Rhea. Penny always figured she got more than would be her fair share had she been alone. She always fared better with Rhea there, just from the spill-over. And even though she was gay, she liked the attention that anyone would like.

And she could be patient for whatever spill-over might come this time.

Thinking it through, being the best friend of the one selected by Peter Harper was the second best career-enhancer she could expect—that is, if he just happened to befriend Rhea on his bureaucratic mission, and he just happened to think so much of her that he would not limit his liaison to business only, and he just happened to feel that any friend of Rhea was a friend of his, worthy of the most expedient of promotions. Rhea was the logical choice because Rhea liked men. Her Pollyannaish daydream went on until she heard the muffled painstaking footsteps on the blue carpet.

Rhea approached cautiously. Penny sensed her guilt and was determined to take advantage of it just for the fun of it. Hey, thanks a lot, she told her friend who slinked into the cubicle with all of the phantom pain that a missing tail between the legs induced. Come on in, join the party, Penny continued. We’re having chopped liver. I’m the main course.

Penelope? Rhea crooned, cajoling forgiveness.

No problem, my so-called friend, Penny snapped, firing away at her keyboard.

Pen-e-lo-PEE, Rhea repeated, forming the widest of smiles she could flash into her friend’s peripheral vision.

Penny lost. She suddenly jumped at her friend and hugged her vigorously. This is so great, she said, squeezing her more tightly. So great, so fabulous. And they both started jumping in place with each other, shrieking in their excitement like two cheerleaders who had just made the cut. Soon the unwelcome head of Dwayne Cody peered around the opening of the cubicle to investigate, as was the responsibility of his job. His tenor voice tried its best to take charge.

Girls, girls, tone down. This is a business. He was his usual repressive self, his sparse eyebrows wrinkling together in disapproval. It was his usual expression, and it was just another thing about him that made both Penny and Rhea hate him. He didn’t let up. Mr. Harper himself is coming in from Atlanta this week to check out this center. I make out the report, and if you want to figure favorably then you’d better shape up. He had a magazine rolled up in his right hand, and he tapped his thigh with it emphatically as he spoke. Rhea strained to see what it was. She rolled her eyes when she saw that its title read, Beyond Layman’s Astronomy.

Well, we just happen to know Peter Harper’s here already, Penny said in a tone she had always wanted to use with Mr. Cody.

Yea, sport, Rhea added, and I think I’ll just take a lunch with him to report on you, O.K.? Mr. Cody suddenly laughed out loud in a forced way, an outburst of mocking disbelief. He composed himself for effect and spoke firmly.

Not only is there more of a chance of you going bowling with the Pope than there is of taking a lunch with a man who is an industrial icon, but you should fear that you’re in big trouble right here and now—in-danger-of-losing-your-job trouble.

Well, laugh, Coody, Rhea said nonchalantly, breezing past him on her way out of the cubicle.

It’s Cody, and where do you think you’re going! he shouted at her. His voice cracked under the strain. Get back to your terminal! Rhea stopped abruptly, visibly irritated with this torment. She turned slowly back around to address her supervisor.

If I’m going to do lunch with Peter, she boasted, dropping names, first names at that, then I had better freshen up.

First of all, your self-destructive joke had better stop right now, he warned her. Secondly, if making yourself presentable is your goal, you had better take a sabbatical. He was pert and spoke with invulnerability as he stared her down. A lengthy sabbatical. And with that Rhea did something she had never done before in her life. Cody was unprepared and didn’t avoid her fist, and he recoiled in pain and astonishment. He clutched his nose with both hands struggling to muffle the pain. The prairie dogs of the whole floor popped above the dividers, then snapped back unseen.

"You...hit me? What? Is it that time of the month for you? he seethed. Penny bristled. You’re fired! he said to Rhea sternly and hatefully through his fingers. Unless, of course, lunch turns this around for you. Collect your things." He snapped around and stormed off.

Time of the month? Penny asked angrily, for all of