Bacchus Evidenced: A Vignette; or, Enemy of Pygmalion

by Griffin R.K.

It was autumn in Montreal in 2019 A.D., and I was playing pool in a bar in Westmount with my friend, Kyle Gursky, as the world devoured its own tail. Earlier that week something of an apparition, much like the one in Cairo a few decades earlier, nihilated itself in the air above Calgary, Alberta: an ebony black angel from an Edgar Ende painting holding in its hands a pearly white sphere. Palmers from around Canada and the world began flying in en masse, and men and women spilled out of their houses and into the streets to burn incense and cry and repent. Swathes of Albertan atheists became god-fearing Christians overnight; by and large the Saracens saw Israfeel and went about their business. People in Montreal were still drinking, but within days every home along Sherbrooke had lamb’s blood smeared above its door, and the whole city smelled terrible. Attendance to the Mormon temple increased tenfold as well, or so I had heard.

It was midnight. The Irish pub with a Laura Secord portrait on the wall was lit by these stained, academic-looking, dealer’s-visor-green lamps: a sickly shade, perhaps the same as their Nazi equivalents. Kyle had accidentally scooped an eight ball into my groin, and we stopped playing and went outside to smoke our savory-smelling cigarettes. I wondered if the chalk on my hand might’ve made lighting up somewhat easier. He was in an unwashed NASA t-shirt. It was too cold for a t-shirt. I couldn’t tell whether his arms were fat or muscular. I was slightly in comparison to him and my undertones were anemically blue. He did something “neuroscience-related” for McGill University, and by that I mean he lobotomized mice. He was a left-brained, Scholastic breed of non-denominational Christian. He showed the bartender a photograph of his baptismal certificate in lieu of a driver’s license.

“You know, Eric,” he pontificated to me, “we’re living in Sodom.”

“No, the Sodomites were living in Sodom,” I replied. “We’re quite well-behaved. God hasn’t smitten a city in a few thousand years. I think God likes the pride parades and the fentanyl and the crime. Your God is a laughing god, like a little fat Budai.”

An inexorable throng of cardboard-carrying clamoring zealots and flagellants passed us by. Their leader had gouged out his eyes like Oedipus and was averring something in French I couldn’t understand. There were colored lights strung up everywhere. A zealot turned to me and smiled and I reeled slightly at his emaciated, Roman-nosed, particularly French face. The blind spirit-seer slipped on ice and his followers hoisted him back onto his feet and continued their slow march. I sobered up, observing their progress, mustering a zen-like focus on the so-called “greenspace” and cobblestone and remnant gossamer from that summer bridging unfrequented recesses. A coffee shop from a Godard movie was still open. Some shadow of the pool table’s pulpy felt continued to linger in my mind. I thought that felt was a crime, and I wondered if its oddness was responsible for the outcomes of the many rounds I had lost. A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility. A particularly strong wall of autumnal wind hit me with perfume-like potency, and then was guided by the laws of thermodynamics back into the sky overhead like a diving bird. I looked down and noticed I had accidentally forgone a belt loop.

“There’s a castle in Jordan named Montreal built by the crusaders. I’ve been there.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

Another angel came to be above a faraway highway. She was a comet above London on December 14, 1664, then again on April 6, 1665. She had been clad in many colors by the Sun back then, a neatly-dressed aerolith in a bodice of magnesium blue and iron red, but this time around she was more austere. She made contact with earth, and her toes preceded her soles, touched and tested the concrete. Then, she stood flat and proudly on her feet. She stirred her own features like a mojito and spun her visage ’round like a pistol’s chamber. She pinched and squeezed and rubbed and shaped. She decided on a face. It was an all right face. How much more grand it was to be ugly and alive than beautiful and inanimate! She wanted to be a testament to that. A heroin-addled lumpenproletarian with a distended, buckshot leg sauntered by her and spat on the bitumen.

This new angel thought to herself, “The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” She blew him a kiss and spun around and began to walk. Shoving her hands in her pockets, she proceeded down the thoroughfare, whistling. There were loose candy wrappers in her pockets. Suddenly, in a kind of sunny beatitude, she began to skip. She skipped and skipped and skipped again past everyone and past two vaguely homoerotic bar goers whispering axiomatic nonsense in each other’s ears.

“The world’s about to end, you crazy bitch!” the heavier of the two exclaimed, sardonically cupping his hands in front of his mouth.

The other guffawed to himself in faux amusement and said, “Careful, your Jew on a stick’s up in Heaven doing that right now.” The skinny one lifted his head and squinted at her behind again and, like a sodomite, only then recognized her as an angel. He cursed in consternation, then, jittering in fear and somewhat aroused, stepped onto the sidewalk and dropped to his knees. He collected himself again and returned to his feet. Reentering the bar, he asked, urgently and desperately, anyone and everyone if they just so happened to own a gun with which he could kill himself, or, perhaps, if they maybe even had one on their person at that very moment. Giggling and unaware and incredibly drunk, his corpulent friend followed close behind, the right side of his jacket raised over his chin like a vampire: an ostensible self-entertaining half-joke only an inebriate could make.

The angel came across some change on the ground and stopped at a payphone and dialed God. She said to him, “I don’t believe in you anymore!” God was on the other end, silent and with his forehead nested in his palm. She waited for a few moments in the quiet, then hung up.