“You’re drunk,” Andrea said.
I sat on the bed and popped open a bottle while she walked over to a window with a view of Bridgeline vineyards. We were in one of the most famous wine making spots in the Hessische region of Germany. I ended up wasted.
I pulled Chianti out of a straw basket holder and poured it into a glass.
“The company said we’d be able to try a bottle of Bacchus,” I said. “The whole point of this trip is to judge the flavor of a red. We’ve been here two days and still haven’t had any.”
“You’re concerned about the free bottle? This is a business opportunity, not a party. The people I work under paid for this trip, and I don’t want you to screw it up. I’d be the one to taste a bottle of Bacchus lambrusco, you wouldn’t. I’m not taking you to the most important interview of my career if you’re going to make me look bad.”
I threw the bottle against the curtained wall. The remnants fell to the ground like a jagged crown before it shattered near her. Andrea did not flinch. She folded her arms and glared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll clean it up. Listen, I’ll be good in the morning. I’ll get up before sunrise to meet the founder of the winery tomorrow with you when-”
“When you’re able to walk straight and act like an adult? I’ll be waiting forever.”
I crawled into bed and reminisced on how I met her eight years prior in college. We were happier before she became a popular reviewer for a successful lifestyle site. Her company sent us on international all expenses paid trips at least once a year.
“You used to love me more than you did your job,” I said.
My eyelids grew heavier. I side-stepped the broken bottle and passed out after she got in bed. She rolled over and turned her back to me.
**
I woke up in the morning with cotton mouth, dizziness, and a stomachache. Andrea had left. She went downstairs for breakfast. The broken glass was gone. The alcohol left a dark stain on the carpet.
I was reborn in the default setting of sobriety. It was a terrifying re-acquaintance with reality.
I stared at the blemish on the ground. I regretted not having imbibed the rest of the bottle. My foolishness for having squandered it in of a fit of rage made me wallow in self-loathing. My primary lamentation stemmed from losing the drink itself. I anticipated where to buy another bottle once we got back from the trip.
I took a hot shower, dressed and went down to the lobby. Andrea sat in the dining room eating pancakes. She stared at me and averted her eyes back to her food as the waiter came around and poured her a cup of coffee.
I went outside to get some air. I stood in front of the main entrance’s statue of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. A fountain at its feet flowed and made me thirsty.
I walked back inside and went into the hotel’s gift shop. I bought four miniature bottles of zinfandel, cologne and a pack of mints. I stuffed three of them in my pocket and drank one before meeting Andrea at her table.
“Thank you for cleaning up the mess I made,” I said.
She grew silent. I ordered an omelet. We finished our meal and walked out to our rented Silver Subaru.
I drove by mountains and valleys lined with grapes and rows of lavender gardens. The smell of spring drifted into the car. My good buzz did not trouble my driving. Andrea did not give a hint at having suspected my impairment.
“Behave today,” she said. “I didn’t ask you to come along so you could drag me down. Everything is resting on this interview.”
Andrea looked at her phone and gave me directions. She told me which turns to take along circuitous and vine strewn roads.
“Right here,” she said, pointing to a faux mansion with a cobbled driveway. I pulled in, parked, and walked around, extending my hand to assist her in getting out of the vehicle. She refused my offer and pushed me away.
“Welcome,” a man in a pressed suit said with a booming voice thick with an upper Saxon dialect. He moved away from the front door of the estate.
“Are you Mr. Seltin?” Andrea asked.
“I am his butler. Come inside. I will show you where he wants to meet you.”
We followed the man into the main foyer, a spacious quarter with a spiral staircase. We went down a hallway with red carpeting and walls. Paintings hung of naked men and women on cliff sides who stared at the sky with panicked expressions.
We went out to a balcony overlooking the driveway and forest. A tall individual greeted us with a smile. He wore sunglasses and a white button up shirt with ruffled sleeves.
“Have a seat you two,” he said. He pointed to chairs on the other side of an oval table on the bastion.
“Pleasure to meet a prestigious founder,” Andrea said after she extended her hand. “I’m Andrea, and this is my assistant, Stephen Brake. He’s a second set of ears and nothing more.”
He took her hand and kissed it. He did not look at me. I wanted to react out of jealous defense but refrained.
Andrea pulled out her phone and hit record. Seltin stared at the screen with his teeth bared.
“Oh, I don’t allow phones. My butler should have given you warning beforehand.”
The founder turned towards the threshold, yelled, and the butler came out.
“Put her phone in storage, please. I’ll need yours as well if you have one, Stephen. You’ll get them back when you leave.”
We handed our phones to the butler, and he disappeared into the building.
“I wanted to say it’s such an honor to be here today,” Andrea said after pulling out a pad and pen. “I’ve been an enormous fan of your brand for a very long time. So, first question. Why wine making? What drew you to it?”
“A woman I fell in love with passed away of a brain tumor,” Seltin said. “We used to live in Ohio. When she died, I needed a change of scenery, hence my decision to come to Germany. I handled grief the way men do. I drank to forget it all. I sipped something a little less subpar than Night Train or Thunderbird, and I knew I could do better. I heard her voice telling me I should try. I worked two jobs to create a business. I attempted to prove something to the world about my inventiveness.”
“Did it take a long while to complete Bacchus?”
“It did. So many distillers release products half completed. The Southern whiskey maker might know his brown liquor smacks of coal. Still, he deems it fit for public consumption when a rat wouldn’t even touch it. A Russian oligarch might release his vodka when it’s only good for sanitizing one’s hands. People’s preferences vary. I am a perfectionist. I had a team of people indulge in it before I considered putting it on the shelves. Democratic agreement is critical when it comes to quality checking a product. The best experiences I’ve had with wine are the ones where I flew after drinking it.”
“Reviewers agree on Bacchus living up to its name,” Andrea said with a smile.
“Ah ha, yes. People reason I gave it the title out of arrogance, as if a Greek deity would enjoy it. It has more to do with my appreciation of Michelangelo. He created a sculpture of Bacchus, one never appreciated until long after his death. The great Renaissance man himself knew it to be a failure. He believed it never deserved to see the light of day after the lukewarm reception. The golden part about it all is how the Bacchus piece is now appreciated forever. My wine’s meant for immortal admiration as well.”
“Isn’t getting drunk the one thing people always want to do?” I asked. “You know, besides having sex or getting rich.”
Andrea stared at me with contempt and hit me in the arm.
“We’re allowed some civil disagreement here,” Seltin said. “Taking criticism is part of being an entrepreneur. Mr. Brake, there are different kinds of buzzes. The euphoria of making love to a woman is different from the high you experience after a bottle of scotch. Bliss exists on a spectrum. My goal is to get the consumer to the farthest end of it. It’s not enough to lose your sense of physical balance and grow dizzy. I want to help people transcend reality when they drink, and I know Bacchus achieves such a thing for me and others.”
“Most would agree,” Andrea said after scribbling in her notebook. “Your network sales have been skyrocketing.”
“The amount sold doesn’t give me pride. The experience people have when they drink the product is what makes me do this. Well, enough with the pleasantries. I’m afraid my time is growing short, and my publicist did promise to let you have the wine.”
He clapped and the butler came out. I stared at the front of the bottle and ended up transfixed by it. He placed three glasses on the table and popped the cork.
“Who designed the label?” I asked.
“I did in the midst of the darkest time of my life. When in the preliminary stages of finding the right flavors, I did everything I could to get my mind off of grief. I read more than usual. I found a play about a hunting expedition and a King. The play described a yellow symbol which captured my attention. This label reflects what I envisioned the symbol being. The story invigorated my imaginative leanings. This is my best recreation of it.”
He poured it into the glasses, and we all sniffed the aroma.
“Cheers,” he said.
We clinked and sipped what turned out to be the perfect balance of sweet and dry. It did not have honey-crisp apple zest of Riesling, but something much less familiar. Andrea raved about how it happened to be the best fermented variety of grapes she had ever tried. I doubted her sincerity.
My body grew light. The world spun and my vision improved. Bacchus was not meant to be a mere night cap or to compliment dinner, but to have an interaction with.
“Well,” Seltin said after staring at his diver watch, “it’s been a pleasure. I hope the interview proves to be informative. I have another meeting tonight.”
“Of course,” Andrea said. “Thank you for your time. This piece may help another businessman alchemize his grief into something useful.”
“Can I have your phone number?” Seltin asked. “I wish to call to congratulate you on how well written the article is when it comes out.”
Andrea blushed as she wrote down her phone number on the notepad.
She ripped the page out and handed it to him. He grabbed her quivering hand again and kissed it a second time.
**
I drove through the foothills well over the legal limit. Evening descended on the cement, and a crescent moon hung in the sky with a bright glow.
“Journalism is the last field where the casting couch doesn’t exist,” I said. “Or so I thought. Didn’t know he was your type, but I guess the amount of money he makes appeals to your shallowness.”
“Don’t be so jealous. He’s able to drink and handle himself with grace. I haven’t met someone like that in years.”
“You know guys like him don’t commit. They pick up women who express interest in them for their money and they kick them out of their orbit as soon as they can. You’ll be nothing more than a crossed out line in his black book. You consider yourself different from the rest of his groupies? You’re wrong. The only woman he loved is dead.”
“He’s sweet when talking about her,” she said with a smile while staring out the window at the passing vineyards. “It’s nice to meet a man who can talk about his emotions for once.”
“Listen to you,” I said after taking my eyes off the road to stare at her. “You sound like you’re trying to get backstage to meet your favorite singer. Hard to believe I wanted to marry you. I thought you were different from the rest, but you’re another money grabbing whore.”
I heard her scream, interpreting her noise as a backlash at first before an impact rocked the car.
The vehicle hit something. My hands jerked from the steering wheel. We went through the metal barrier dividing the road from the hillsides below.
Trees flattened before us by the front bumper, their russet barks torn down as I tried to hit the brakes. Tangles of branches whipped by the windshield at a high velocity.
The Subaru crashed into a large beech tree. Its oval overhang cloaked us in shadows as the air bags deployed. I used my wine bottle opener attached to the key chain to pop both of them.
I looked down and my chest was damp. A stream of crimson flowed from my nose.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“I’m hurt.” Andrea’s voice sounded hollow and her forehead had a gash.
“Yeah,” I said after grabbing the inside door handle to the car, flinging open the warped metal to step outside. “You’re not bleeding as bad as I am.”
“Typical. You only care about yourself.”
I walked around, stepped on multitudinous pieces of bark and dampened soil to get to her side. I ordered her to lean into the door with her shoulder so I could help her out. She grabbed my hand. We stood near the great tree and looked around.
“We didn’t even get our phones backs,” Andrea said. “We left them with the butler.”
Her words sank in as I gazed up at the hill marked with tire tracks. I pointed at the tread marks.
“We’ll worry about it later,” I said. “We’ll follow the trail the tires have left. It’ll take us back to the main road. Germans are a lot more open to hitchhikers than drivers in our country. We’ll be back at our hotel in no time.”
“You’re so fucking stupid,” Andrea said, shaking her head and turning her back to me. “We’re drunk. We’re both bloody. We’re foreigners. Take a guess at what the driver who sees us is going to do, Stephen. They’ll call the polizei. The DUI laws in this country make the ones back home look like summer camp rules. Even if they don’t find the car here, they’ll say we got into a fight. Do you want to spend the night in jail? When my boss get news her writer had a night on the town with a whole slew of charges to show for it, I’m done.”
“We can say we went hunting and had an accident,” I said. “The person who picks us up will believe it. What did I drive into?”
“Looked like a dead deer. We should have called a taxi. Let’s follow the tire marks, and we’ll walk back if we have to. We’ll deal with the insurance problems when we’re home. Come on, it’s getting dark. We have to move.”
I held out my hand to her. She refused to interlace her fingers with mine and we climbed the hill.
**
We walked for a half hour. Sweat soaked our clothes. My legs ached. The buzz from earlier no longer anesthetized the chaos my drunken decision making led to.
I stared upwards and saw craggy cliff faces covered in moss. The wheels left a pathway from a drop off point near a large boulder. The ground was solid. We could not trace where the high-speed plummeting originated from. We could not find the road.
“I don’t remember going far,” Andrea said after she pointed to the ridgeline in the distance. “We’ll keep climbing. Once we get to the top, we’ll see the highway from there.”
“Do you have a pickax? It’s steep. We’ll fall and die.”
“What should we do?”
“Move around the mountain,” I said with a gesture towards the east.
We stepped over jutting rocks and rising mounds of soil. The orange and grainy arrival of dusk settled on the landscape. I fell over a twisted piece of bark. I heaved upwards to regain my footing as Andrea stared at me with a look of anger.
A shimmering in the distance caught my eye. The sun reflected off a glistening surface.
“What’s there?” I asked.
“Looks like a lake to me.”
“Why are the waters so black?”
She shook her head and gazed into my eyes, no longer contentious but pleading with me. She grabbed my hand in a way which did not hint at affection but fear. She never expected me to be a protector. It was out of desperation instead of hope.
We trailed along a ridgeline slick with fungi. Small rocks tumbled down slopes beneath us. Patches of earth ascended in our periphery. I saw they were not hillocks but thick branches which jutted from the earth.
I knew the area to be the wine country division of Germany, but the land looked forested. It was not an ideal climate for grapes. I hoped to see a farm.
The air grew colder the more we walked. Within an hour of wandering around, night had fallen.
“Look,” Andrea said.
I glanced over and saw a dozen statues of Bacchus. These made the one at the hotel seem crude. They stood tall in a clearing. The marble white forms had open mouths with flies buzzing in and out. Twirling ivy wrapped around their figures. Past the statues were crumbling pillars, ones Romanesque instead of northern European.
“Shouldn’t a god of inebriants be happy all the time?” Andrea asked while staring upwards at them. “They look so miserable.”
Rows of barrels sat between the columns of the deity’s depictions. We walked into the area and peered inside the wooden containers. Rotted and squashed grapes filled them. Insects hummed, their wings allowing them to float around their nectar. The scent of putrescent fermentation drifted towards us as the bugs hovered in our faces.
“We have to be trespassing on a rich person’s land or religious site,” I said.
“Where’s the house?”
“I don’t know. It’s getting dark. We need to sleep somewhere until it’s sunny out, so we can at least see where we’re going. Let’s rest on the hillside over there. We can’t stay for long. Wildlife might seek the berries.”
We went up the prominence and found a place to sleep in the middle of two towering trees. Their branches silhouetted against the moon.
As I rested my head on the ground, I saw a set of stones arranged on the earth below. They aligned to spell out the word HALI.
**
Andrea shook me awake.
“I found something,” she said. “Let me show you.”
I rubbed my eyes and followed her. We walked down a sloped border which divided a mile of trees from a grassy flank. We stood in front a couple of waterfalls which poured from a rise twelve feet in height. Its flow moved over pebbled rivulets. Wreaths positioned upwards lined the estuary. The water had a murky crimson hue. A sense of dread overcame me.
“Is it blood?” I asked.
“It’s wine,” she said to me with a smile, scooping it up with both hands and sipping from her palms.
I pushed her and almost tipped her over. Andrea would have fallen on her face if she did not shift her feet in time.
“You enjoy ruining everyone else’s good time,” she said. “All you’ve done is sabotage everything positive to ever happen in our lives.”
“You don’t know if it’s infected,” I said, looking with disgust at the cherry stream.
“I write about aperitifs for a living. I know it when I see it, smell it, and savor it. This isn’t cheap hobo stuff. It’s untamed, like the world’s best Bordeaux. Try it.”
“We have to find our way back,” I said. “We shouldn’t be drunk right now.”
“You’ve never said anything along those lines before.”
I contemplated holding her down in the river until all movement ceased.
“We’re done when we get back to the States,” I said. “I’m moving out of our house and getting my own apartment. We’re over.”
I turned my back and walked along the stream up the hill. My eyes followed the flow of amaranthine until I saw where it fed into a lake. A fog settled over the water.
I looked up and saw what appeared to be a firefly, except it did not buzz around but stayed still. It turned out to be a lit cigarette.
“It’s Seltin,” Andrea said.
My legs flew out from under me. I glanced over and saw Andrea thrown to the ground.
A group of at least nine men in toga’s surrounded us. They shouted in a tongue not German or English. It was something unfamiliar and superannuated. They each had conspicuous disfigurations and scars. Some of them held knives the size of my forearm, and others donned spears.
I watched as Seltin walked down to us. He maintained a grin with each step. He had on a black trench coat.
One of the men cranked my neck to stare at Andrea as they ripped her clothes off. One of their blades graced her torso and drew a thin line of blood. The vital fluid seeped down her body and dripped over the rocks, blending in with the small cascade next to us.
Seltin pulled out a sinewy type of fastening rope from his pocket. He trapped her arms in it as she fought and spat on her captors. I watched as the skin of her wrists became inflamed due to the oil from the bindings on her flesh. This led me to believe it to be poisonous oak.
“Tell me you want to stay here forever, girl. Tell me you want the lake of Hali to be your new home.”
They gagged her with a bent wreath. She cried as he slapped her with the back of his gloved hand. He went for a bottle of Bacchus wine from one of the men. He water-boarded her with the lambrusco and laughed at each noise she released. Her screams were as futile as a drowned man in the middle of the ocean. Her white top splatterd with red, like a snowy plain littered with the remains of a predators feast.
Her struggles became flounders. When she tried to worm away their laughing became louder. The look of pleasure each had grew every time they showed control.
“Shh,” the millionaire said. “You’ll be fine in Carcosa. You’re about to meet Bacchus, the god of wine who wears the fluttering yellow robes.”
Seltin wrapped his hand around a knife. He thrust it in the air above his head like an offering to an apocryphal form of divinity.
He plunged it into her stomach. The heel of the blade bruised her flesh a purple tinge. Blood gushed from her mouth as they forced her to swallow it by pouring the remaining contents into her.
Andrea’s eyes turned sallow and rolled into the back of her head. Seltin wiped away some of the spittle and red fluid from her mouth with his thumb. He brought it to his mouth and savored the carmine with his eyelids shut.
He stood up and walked towards me. The bloody knife in his hand dripped. The group grabbed Andrea’s body and held it over me. They twisted her by the torso and feet. Her blood gushed over me as if she was a wet towel wrung dry.
“I did you a favor by placing the animal corpse in the road,” he said. “You will thank me for this purification.”
A roaring and fiery agony split through me and burned the tip of every nerve ending of my body. A blade submerged into my side and it felt like a bolt of lightning pierced my torso.
“Die or become one of us,” Seltin said. “Live with us forever in his tattered robes. Help us control the sacrifices when they try to fight, like my dear Andrea did.”
Blackness took me.
**
When I awoke, I found myself in a dusty cellar kept fluorescent by candlelight. A man stitched my wounds with bare hands and poured alcohol over the mess.
“The initiation is over,” the man said. “As long as you do as Mr. Seltin says and don’t run away, you’ll be a part of us forever. He should be having two dinner guests over tonight. You will be the one to join us as we sacrifice another girl to Hastur.”
A bottle with a bloody handprint on it sat next to me, the same one Andrea consumed by force. I drank from it. The man placed a toga in front of me.
I heard a rustling, and Seltin’s familiar voice filled the room like a song I never wanted to hear again.
“I had my first glass of wine in Venice at a shop where I met a girl who fancied me. Talk about a spoiling experience. Drinking something to help me float in the ether while flirting with someone so amazing left a mark. I couldn’t have been older than twelve. She told me her name was Cassilda. I can never forget her. When did you have your first drink?”
“Fourteen years old,” I said, surprised at how weak my voice sounded. “I snuck into my mother’s liquor cabinet and found a bottle of whiskey.”
“Did you love the buzz?”
“I did.”
“Would you describe it as a greater love than the first time you met Andrea?”
“I cared for her at first. I never loved her.”
“Welcome to the bridge,” Seltin said after letting out a derisive laugh. “There will be hundreds more like Andrea over the course of the next year. Some of them will be partiers eager to meet a certified vintner. Others will be businesspeople associated with viticulturists. Some will be women drawn to money. Tourists and would-be vignerons will all flock to my door as they always have. Each one will end up scattered through the large stretch of land I own in these forests. My makeshift playground of Greek architecture and drunken revelry is for who I pick. They will fight, but we will chant and praise the King in Yellow while we engage in butchery.”
**
Days passed before I worked up the bravery to go back to the forest. I revisited the site of where Andrea’s life ended. I considered trying to make my way to the road once again. My malnourished shell could not do it from subsisting on the occasional scrap of bread and wine. Helping to kill as many as I did could not bother me on any ethical level due to one reason. The blanket of inebriation was around me every step of the way. The idea of coming out of it to face what I had done struck me as fearsome enough to contemplate suicide.
I walked past the area where they had drained Andrea’s blood onto me. Some of her redness saturated the detritus, soaked into the bark and stems.
I waded into the waters and bathed in the black lake as the stars above gleamed brighter than they ever had. I spent each hour escaping the anguish of sobriety. The baptismal euphoria of drunkenness seeped into my skin.
I dove under and found bits of floating yellow fabric and swam to the center. I found a mangled piece of bark at the bottom which had ends wrapped together. It had the shape of a crown. I brought it back to land, and wore it during my return trip to Seltin. I reasoned it lost and they would thank me for giving it back to them.
I fell asleep in the guest bedroom assigned to me. I drifted off and contemplated who the next girl would be.