Drink Deeply

By Emile Bienert

Eliza Latimer was an idealistic undergraduate. Now, she's a cog in a corporate machine that she's come to hate. In an ill-advised fit of righteous indignation, she sends a series of emails to her bosses and their bosses. Expecting to be fired, she's invited to an exclusive executive retreat by her incredibly handsome boss, Italian billionaire, Alessandro Neroni. Her reservations are well founded, but Eliza has some surprises of her own.
On the opposite side of the country, all Nick Assencio wants is to pick up his girlfriend on their sixth anniversary, but a terrorist attack on the lab where he works upends his date and his life. Hunted by the oldest and most nefarious cabal in human history, he has no choice but to team up with a semi-immortal, chain-smoking, alcoholic who can manipulate a fifth force of nature in what appears to be magic. An extra-dimensional bar, a French bulldog familiar, and an existential threat to human society bend Nick's path toward Eliza's. Can they survive long enough to figure out their place in a world full of things that go bump in the night?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emile Bienert
• Release date: Mar 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005714963

Emile Bienert

I am probably not a wizard.

Book preview

Chapter 1: Purgatorio

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope

The eruption of concrete, glass, and steel cascaded in from the far wall and was followed, instantaneously, by its ear splitting announcement. For a half of a second, Eliza’s brain registered that she was watching an explosion. Her flinch came too late. Then, the avalanche of sound drowned out everything else, leaving her ears ringing. When her eyes fluttered open, everything was dust and darkness. Ghosts of sounds broke through her ringing ears: screaming, staccato cracks and pops. Had that been a bomb? Too recently, she’d heard the question, Who would bomb a laboratory? The knowledge was there; she just couldn’t accept it. Now, people were going to die. Maybe, some were dead already. Things had been so much simpler before all of this, back when she was at her job.

---

Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing.

Eliza Latimer’s eyes traced the stenciled oxblood letters on the gray wall in front of her. She sighed. This was a morning routine that she had been following since she had gradually realized that this was not a temporary job. It was not a just for now job while she found her way in the world. Staring at the sign and imagining that it said, abandon hope all ye who enter here, felt dramatic, but it was her moment. She got to be in her own head, and she could use her brain for her own thoughts, and they were going to be what they were going to be. Eliza closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to imagine how this job would, could, or maybe even might segue into something greater. Greater? What did that mean? The very idea of being promoted was empty. Any recommendations her superiors might furnish would only really be good for more of the same. Dedication here would only lead to a life even further from where she wanted to be. In what world did this have a good ending for her? For all of her creativity and flare for imagination in undergrad, she failed at answering this question.

Then, her eyes opened, and she looked into the room where she would spend the next nine hours minus lunch break and closed her eyes again. An English major, with great faith in the written word, Eliza felt that this place was not her destiny, if such a thing even existed. But, the sentence in front of her meant something. And, she knew it. It wasn’t an inscription on infernal gates. This was purgatory. Nothing mattered, and you didn’t get to leave.

Uh, are you going in, or are you in some kind of a trance, Dorothy? asked a voice from behind her.

Markus Alwyn, the head of Eliza’s department, dramatically spilled himself against the wall as if Eliza and her tiny bag were taking up three times as much hallway as they were.

Earth to Eliza, he said with a scoff and then turned, as if just remembering something, Oh, right, so Alessandro is coming by today. I need you on point. He stopped after that and took a deep breath. They’re potentially choosing me to go on the Green Canyon leadership trip. Markus searched for appropriate words. If you can stay focused, it would mean that… that you could potentially have a… friend… in the upper echelons of this company.

Is there anything I’ve been doing that hasn’t been up to snuff for you?

Markus stared at Eliza.

Mr. Neroni doesn’t talk to anyone here. The man is a corporate heir from another country. Will I be at my desk? Will I be doing my work? Yes. Provided I don’t stand up and start shrieking about the latest worker’s strikes that have been going on in Brazil—

I know you feel strongly about worker’s rights, but so help me god, Eliza, if you start in on that antifa crap…

Again, Boss, Alessandro barely knows that you work for him. The man is a billionaire. I couldn’t do anything to cost you anything.

Don’t, said her boss. Just don’t.

Eliza contemplated asking what verb and object he might need to end his sentence and even thought about suggesting a few, but she didn’t. She lowered her eyes and waited to be able to go to her desk under the flickering fluorescent lights.

With her too many-eth sigh of the morning, Eliza turned her computer on, sat down at her desk, and set down her bag and her travel mug. She could already tell it was going to be a rough day, but in a very, very small, dark corner of her mind, the idea of seeing Alessandro Neroni brightened her thoughts ever so slightly. That the owner of the Monte Salute Corporation was a breathtakingly beautiful man was a mere bonus to being able to watch all of her bosses get combatively nervous. Still, he was exactly the sort of capitalist that Eliza reviled. But, her liberal sensibilities could let it slide because what else was he going to be? If she’d been a man and grown up in the lap of luxury, she wondered if she’d have been any better a person. The fact that she was physically attracted to him shamed her in ways she would never have articulated.

Who do you think they’re going to replace him with? asked Greg DiAngelo as he sat down at the computer adjacent.

Who? Markus?

No, Hank Drogan.

I’m sorry. I don’t follow basketball, replied Eliza, busying herself with unnecessary tasks so that Greg would leave her alone.

Dude, don’t pretend that you don’t know that he plays football. Everybody knows that. My five year-old niece knows that, and her mom doesn’t even watch football. Anyway, yes, Markus. Why in the heck would I ask you a question about sports? You look like you were the head of mathletes.

Probably, Kasey. She’s been after that promotion for a while. They don’t seem to hire externally.

Who do you think they’ll get to fill Kasey’s job?

I don’t know. It won’t be me.

I mean, I know it won’t be you, said Greg. He eyed Eliza a bit more closely, But out of curiosity, why do you think it won’t be you as opposed to anyone else around here? You can’t accuse this place of having a glass ceiling. I mean, yeah, a lot of upper management is men, but—

All of upper management is men, interrupted Eliza.

What about that hot brunette that’s always following Alessandro around?

His assistant? I mean, sure, she makes more than you or me or even Markus, but what do you think her job description is?

She’s got a seat at the table.

Taking notes about what the men are doing.

Okay, well, I’m not even talking about upper management. Kasey is upwardly mobile here. I mean, I’ve known re- He stopped himself. I’ve known developmentally disabled people who are way more interesting to talk to than you, but you’ve been here for a while. You do decent copy. You’re, like, never late. You don’t take days off. You’re just boring enough that I could see them promoting you.

Eliza’s gaze was drawn to Markus’ office, where she could see the clean-shaven, muscular man talking to someone on speaker phone as he paced the floor with a foam basketball and eyed a small net hung from the private bathroom door. The man’s entire persona bothered Eliza on a level that could have been molecular.

My degree is in English, not business, not PR, and certainly not marketing, replied Eliza, flatly.

Sorry, m’Lady! I forgot you was a poet, dabblin’ in that Jane Austen and an’ such. Quoth something to me. Brighten’ me day, oh m’Lady! Eliza smirked despite herself. Encouraged by this, her coworker continued, Please, Lady Elizabeth, bestow upon us peasantry some twinklin’ words of wisdom.

Eliza didn’t dignify any of it, not even to remind him for the millionth time that her name was, simply, Eliza.

They worked on in silence at their projects. Eliza tried not to think about how the Monte Salute Corporation was irresponsibly genetically modifying crops to withstand more and more toxic pesticides, how Alessandro Neroni had made shrewd enough investments to turn himself into a billionaire, and how this company had made contributions to Luther Spade, the vilest politician alive.

Hours passed.

Eliza had stalled in the middle of writing some copy that would adorn a green and brown FAQ page, euphemizing the Monte Salute Corporation’s bioengineering platform. Her brain had drifted from saying something about genetic modification being responsible for many of the amenities that contemporary civilization enjoyed. It made a pit stop thinking about how apples were originally inedible, no matter what contemporary Christians thought about the Garden of Eden. Then, Eliza’s thoughts trickled into a more primal place. Cavemen. Brutality. She imagined that she had been part of a worker’s revolution that had allowed her to, in full view of the office, eat meat for the first time since high school. Because she felt a special kinship to animals, Eliza had stopped eating them years ago. This was different. Anger made her cuspids ache. She wanted to bite something, tear at it. The meat in question was Markus.

It was disturbing to her how much she loathed the man, but in those deep, dark corners of her brain, she couldn’t help but feel like there was no outcome for him that was too bad. Eat the rich, felt appropriate. Maybe, he wasn’t rich, but – and she admitted that it was an odd thing to think – he was richer than her, and he had absolutely no scruples at all.

Don’t look now, but the landed gentry just showed up, whispered Greg.

Eliza played it cool and tried to continue writing. Every other person in the office, particularly those with corporate aspirations, were darting eyes, leaning over desks, or turning completely around to view Alessandro Neroni as he sashayed into the office. Eliza refused to allow herself to descend to this level. Markus had already made his way past the desk cluster where the copywriters sat and was part of the fawning throng that all but cheered as the man who essentially controlled their fates entered.

When Eliza finally turned around, Markus caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and used the opportunity to give his subordinate a glare. Because there was the man of the hour: Alessandro Neroni, thirty years-old and already a billionaire. Sure, he’d been born on third base, but he had managed to claw his way from millionaire status to the next order of magnitude, one hostile corporate takeover after another. The man before her, in a tailored suit that probably cost more than a semester of her college education, gazed around the room as if the presence of walls and a floor bored him. Even his assistant, for all of the bookish glasses and well-fitted skirt suit, had a superior look. Mr. Neroni’s assistant was someone who would have smugly smirked at Eliza if she noticed her at all. Eliza, in her Brooklyn apartment with roommates, in her simple black skirt and flats, in her college debt, in her sometimes-self-sometimes-not-sabotaged relationships, in her utter and complete lack of the gloriousness that swelled around these Manhattanites. For just a moment, Eliza let her Marxist sensibilities smolder while trying to comprehend how anyone could be lucky enough to exist in those circles. What kind of women did someone like Alessandro Neroni date? Surely, he dated someone. Supermodels, she thought. Maybe, movie stars.

And just like that, her disgust returned, and it brought its best friend: self-loathing.

She returned to work, trying to force herself to concentrate on anything but the charade that was taking place around her. The entourage that surrounded Alessandro threatened to upset her bag and desk as they pushed past the copywriting station toward Markus’ bosses’ offices. The owner of the Monte Salute Corporation paused briefly as he passed Eliza, looking down at the young woman who was diligently typing away, pretending to be unfazed by his presence. She stopped. She swallowed. When she looked up, she saw that he was smiling at her and staring at the patches on her bag. It was a simple courier bag she used to carry necessities for living in a large city. There were some pins and patches that she felt young enough and angry enough to sport. Most of them were not political. Most. There was an enormous Bad Religion crossbuster patch that, she felt, stood out a great deal more than the others. The man let out a sniff that almost seemed like a laugh and continued on, his personal assistant talking for him to the mob of bosses and their bosses.

Greg looked over at Eliza and gave her both thumbs up. Eliza shook her head and rolled her eyes.

He noticed you!

He noticed the crossbuster patch. If he has any idea how anti corporate all that stuff is and actually cares enough to do anything about it, he’ll have one of his assistants’ assistants talk to Markus and have him fire me. Neroni? Italian – he’s probably Catholic and so offended right now that one of his underlings would even have the temerity to think for herself. If anything comes of it, I’m probably toast.

Yeah, said Greg, but he’ll be the one who tells them to give you your walking papers.

Chapter 2: Life is Long

Nick Assencio hated and feared his abuela, but he could never tell her this because it would break her heart. He didn’t understand her, didn’t understand how they could even be related. Even though she had raised him, even though he had never met the woman whom she refused to call his mother.

Dana, she would say, on the rare occasion that his abuela would spit the name like a curse.

Not that she ever cursed.

Every day in the Assencio house was new and, for Nick, that meant trying to understand how to escape punishment for a multitude of crimes that he did not know were crimes. They were unserious, and their corrections were meted out vehemently but without malice.

Cross yourself on the way into St. Benedict’s!

Sit up straight!

You should be outside playing, not in here reading those books!

You need to come inside and do your homework, not hang out with those bad friends of yours!

Most of the time, all Abuela Assencio did was tell him not to do what he was doing, and that was it. Once in a while, it might necessitate a certain number of extra prayers, an extra visit to confession, or both. Twice, she used her green, plastic hairbrush – once, because she caught him using a friend’s bicycle – with the friend’s permission, but Abuela Assencio hadn’t known that. Another time was because he had lied to her about eating a cookie.

The worst, by far and away, however, was not a physical punishment. When he was in junior high, Abuela Assencio found a stack of JCPenney catalogues under his bed. They were folded open to the underwear section. Nick had discovered women. She made it obvious that this was a bridge too far.

You don’t even understand! she screamed, her voice catching and cracking at the shrillest notes. You are too, too, too young! Don’t you even worry about Hell? How can you not? I’m old! I will die first! Do you know what it will do to me if I see you rejecting the Grace of God and willingly going off to Hell!? You are stabbing me! Oh! I cannot fix this! You need to see Father Antonio, but how will you even look him in the eye, with what you’ve done!?

Nick found that in hiding the catalogues, he had known he was doing something wrong, but he could not say what it was or why it was wrong. Abuela Assencio’s loud entreaties to Jesus, Mary, and a multitude of saints, her eyes that somehow pleaded with and judged him, her refusal to acknowledge his vows and disavowals ground him into dust where he stood. She pitied him. She had tried to save him. She begged the invisible power in the room to spare Nick, as if he might be carted off to hell by a rabble of demons at any minute. And, she cried. …and cried. …and cried.

Even after she stopped crying, there was something in her words that felt broken to Nick. Something he felt he could never mend. It was a pantomime that he never forgot because Abuela Assencio never let him forget it. To be sure, she never once mentioned it again. She didn’t even make him go to Mass anymore. But the worst punishment he ever received was to be given up.

He went to Mass anyway. He watched her for scolding, disapproving looks. Nick tried to do what he was supposed to do, and he tried to understand it without her guidance. He didn’t. He never could.

But life is long.

It is especially long when you are a teenage boy, and you are growing up. And so, there was eventually a truce. Nick learned, in absent cries that were louder than the real cries had ever been, that he had learned. He watched Abuela Assencio’s eyes for judgement. He learned to read her, through trial and error, approval and disapproval. The messages were vague and often contradictory, but they were there. When she grew older, he took care of her. He made her meals. He took her to St. Benedict’s.

In the months before she died, he graduated from high school: something his mother had never done. Something Abuela Assencio had reminded him of regularly, all his life.

Sex was a thing that destroyed people. It was to be feared. It was the reason that he was where he was and his mother was wherever she was. Nick had learned from his neighborhood friends – and later school – that he had to have had a father. His curiosity with regard to the identity of this man was akin to wondering what it would be like to be decapitated. Even if there might be a way to find out, the knowledge simply wasn’t worth it.

The day of his graduation, Nick’s abuela gave him a hug. She whispered in his ear something that he had been waiting to hear his whole life:

You are a good boy. I am hard on you so that you will stay that way. You do not want to destroy women. We are the weaker sex. But you, you men, you take everything we have and you leave us. At some point you leave us. Nick, I will not always be here, but you must promise me, before God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, that you will not leave a woman. You will never leave a woman.

Nick cried. He cried because he was a good boy. He cried because at eighteen, he finally understood so much. He cried because he felt relief that the hardest battle he had ever fought was over, and he knew: he would never leave a woman.

Abuela Assencio died three months afterwards. Nick sold the house with everything in it and went to college.

Life is long. And, the human brain doesn’t understand itself.

Nick met a lot of girls in college. Because of his upbringing, he treated them with the sort of care that might be afforded to breathtakingly beautiful, fatally venomous snakes. In spite of this, his guileless charm won him a date or two with girls who felt unthreatened by him but disinclined to see him more than once. He couldn’t have left them if he had wanted to.

He studied science and found elegance and relative simplicity in the theoretical world. There was some abstract and universal indifference in making a life that dealt with the minutiae of quarks and electrons. There was consistency when dealing with something as immutable as the speed of light. Once Nick began to study the sciences, he realized that he didn’t believe in his grandmother’s Hell. There was no need for a creator to create. He became an agnostic in college but was more obsessed with the scientific infinite regressions of why than the philosophical. He didn’t care to know whether or not there was intent to the universe so much as he wanted to understand it, to know what drove it. His promise to his grandmother would have felt, had he bothered to consider it anymore, strange, as if it had been made by a family member but not him.

But, life is long, and it is strange.

Nick eventually met Sarah Humphreys. She came to the coffee shop where he worked an easy but busy schedule to help pay for his very modest room in a house with several equally bashful and socially anxious science majors. Nick saw the poetry of the stars in Sarah’s eyes and smile. He would nearly push the other baristas out of the way in order to wait on her. Her smiles made him foggy even after his shifts. Nick found himself unable to concentrate.

And then, miracle of miracles, when she approached him, his promise to his grandmother seemed all the more absurd; nothing on Earth could make him leave her.

But life is strange. Life is very, very strange. And, in order to make any real sense of it, one must not only understand one’s own brain but must know the very nature of the universe itself, a feat that is the very essence of impossibility. The human brain is as blindingly sophisticated as it is bafflingly primitive. It is simultaneously responsible for all of our prejudices and anxieties, our triumphs and charity, our intents and our outcomes.

It would be impossible to say whether life is strange because of the universe we inhabit or the archaic organ that processes all of our information about it. But suffice to say, life is long, and it is strange. Nick and Sarah met during his junior year of college. Six years later, they would find out just how strange life could be.

Chapter 3: Strange Tidings

Inklings that she might be fired for the patch on her bag haunted Eliza. Surely, the ACLU would take up for her. No one would get fired for espousing antireligious sentiments in this day and age. She wasn't even certain that her employer was a Christian. And that is what she would have thought, had the dread that lurked in the back of her mind taken enough shape to be addressed. As it was, Eliza just felt a little bit off. The hypotheticals did not gain form. At best, she fantasized about being fired so that she could go onto bigger, better things. At worst, she cleaned parts of her apartment that it was not her turn to clean. Eliza’s roommates did not complain. A week later, her stress found a new home.

Your boy has really lost it now, said Beth, her college roommate who had become her post collegiate roommate. The freelance pilates and yoga instructor passed her smartphone across the kitchen island of their Brooklyn apartment. Eliza glanced at it, expecting to see something sensational and damaging about any of the various progressive politicians whom she followed, supported, and for whom she had canvassed. It didn’t.

‘Hell Is a Real Place,’ Raves Former DC Reporter, proclaimed the newspaper’s section header.

What the… started Eliza as her eyes registered a picture of Sam Zimmermann. Her favorite political news correspondent looked as though he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep for the month. His pictured demeanor suggested that he might have uncovered, in that hypothetical sleepless month, that the nation of Russia did not actually exist. Clothes visibly wrinkled and hair unkempt, Zimmermann’s mouth was gaping in the picture, an image of manic rictus, frozen in time.

Yeah, he’s really lost it, man, said Beth.

Eliza’s eyes scanned the article. In the era of the twenty-four hour news cycle, she had seen takedowns of celebrities before, unhinged famous people let loose on social media, blood in the water with actors and politicians. This was different. This was a man who had stared down Presidents. He had taken on the fossil fuel industry. Sam Zimmermann had even taken the fight to the military industrial complex and knocked divots out of their stock. Eliza’s roommate smirked at her in an apparent internal frenzy of schadenfreude.

The article lacked detail, but Eliza could glean that Sam Zimmermann had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. What direct quotes the article had were nearly incoherent on their own, but no reasonable interpretation of them presented itself. Eliza handed Beth her phone and sighed.

I gotta get to work, Eliza muttered.

On Saturday?

It’s a half day. And, I make a full day’s pay.

Sixteen tons and a-whaddya get? chanted Beth. Eliza didn’t take the bait. Keep on fighting the fight! Someday, you’ll bring down those capitalist bastards from the inside!

Eliza said nothing. Beth had been acting more combative and libertarian recently. She had been seeing a guy who had a stars and stripes porcupine sticker on his laptop. Eliza shuffled out of the door, down to her bike, locked in the stairwell below. It was an hour ride to Midtown Manhattan, and she generally enjoyed it. Something about the fall of Sam Zimmermann had struck a chord with her, though. Her English major brain tried to attach it to the incomprehensibility of existence, the horror of the universe’s unpredictability… but nothing really worked. She felt distracted and was nearly killed four times by various cabs and bellicose pedestrians. The fog still hung around her head when she arrived at the Monte Salute building. It followed her into the elevator. It was part of the habitual reverie and blurred her vision as she looked at the letters outside of the office where she worked.

Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing.

Good call on your prediction, said Greg. Markus got his promotion. He’s on that retreat right now. They promoted Kasey.

Greg slid past Eliza into the office, leaving her in the hallway with her thoughts. Was the world comprehensible? What difference did it make? She was going to be in marketing for the rest of her life, letting the nectar leak from her sieve. Rolling her eyes at her own thoughts, Eliza entered the office for a productive Saturday.

She tried to talk to Greg about Sam Zimmermann, but her colleague was unresponsive, save for saying, Damn, wonder what drugs that was.

Concentration came to her in the repetitive cadence of reading lines of copy that had been written by the production company. Every sentence needed to be rehashed, reworded. She had even gotten good at looking up translations of the various red herring words in every paragraph. Between that and a thesaurus, Eliza felt that