“And what are you?” asked Dr. Tiller, seated across from Jemma. “Pure chopped liver? White tuna in virgin olive oil?”
“I am… very drunk,” he said, and laughed. He reached out, very swift and very sure for someone so drunk, and plucked Dr. Tiller’s Rob ’n’ Jemma from her hand, then drank it all down in one gulp. Jemma sipped at hers. It tasted kind of like shampoo, and she wondered of she weren’t missing the best part of the experience, without the alcohol. It was the most popular drink at the party, and the most stupefying, designed by Connie and the angel so that just one of them was enough to knock you on your ass. “I am… sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage. What are you, anyway, Ms. Fancy-Ass Do-Rag Sourpuss?”
“I am Dr. Carmen Octavia Tiller,” she said, tilting her head back and looking him right in the eye. “How many lives have you saved?” Ishmael laughed again.
“Creature! You think you will escape the water, just because you’re dry now? The bottom could drop out of this place at any moment, and then nothing would keep you from being dragged down by your own corruption. You say, I have taken pains, I have made amends, I am being careful, but you haven’t, and you haven’t, and you aren’t.”
“Hear hear,” said Dr. Sundae, staring up at the empty sky, waiting for the rest of the show.
“Now you’re putting words in my mouth,” said Dr. Tiller.
“I had better do it, since all you put in your own is shit and worse than shit.” He knocked his head once against the table, making all the plates and glasses jump.
“Hey,” Jemma said. “Take it easy.”
“There is no more ease, and has been no more since the rain came, and yet everyone cries, Ease and pleasure and good work and celebration. But no matter what you do all that keeps you from the water is the uncovenanted, unobliged hospital of an incensed God.” He stood and leaned over the table and nabbed Jemma’s drink, but had hardly taken it all into his mouth before he spit it out again. “That’s useless,” he said, pushing himself upright off the table, wobbling in place while he looked around for the nearest bar table. Another flight of rockets went up, animals this time, a parade of leaping fish and dolphins, a serene blue whale that hung hugely in the sky for a moment and then gave a languid swish of its tail and dissolved from its head down, so it appeared to be swimming off into a different, hidden sky. There were jellyfish with rocket-streamer tentacles and bright, magnesium-flare bodies, and a host of land animals that galloped or trotted or slithered across the stars. Ishmael came back with a drink in either hand, one of them already empty, just as the finale exploded above them. “You shat all over the old covenant,” he shouted, “and there will be no more covenants, and the new uncovenant will not be with you!” No one but Jemma was listening, though. They were all looking up at the four rockets that burst in turn into blue sea, green land, silver mountain, and white cloud, the whole picture seeming to take up the whole quarter of sky toward which the animals had all been swimming or running or slithering. The music started again. Ishmael took off his shirt and stumbled out toward the dance floor, where he knocked Josh aside with a blow from his hip and swayed and stomped with Cindy Flemm, both of them doing an awkward-looking honky jive that mostly involved pointing around in various directions. A herd of pre-teens, hopping alternately from foot to foot, broke and ran when they came near.
Jemma never told him “I think you’ve had enough,” though it was obvious that he had already achieved the drunk of a lifetime, and she never warned him to look out for the cake, though she was sure he would fall into it at some point, because there was something about drunks and cakes and punch bowls and Christmas trees, an attraction as certain and powerful as gravity that dictated they must meet once a certain level of drunkenness was established. Many nights she had watched as her mother approached the ten blotto threshold and was drawn inevitably to sway and lean toward her shelves of precious porcelain figurines, the ones she’d been collecting for decades. And when she finally did fall into them one night when Jemma was sixteen it was as satisfying as a celestial event. By the time Ishmael fell into the cake he had taken off all his clothes except for one stubbornly clinging shoe and sock. Jemma was still sitting, leaning forward with both elbows on the table. She had a good view of him and the small crowd of assistants he’d drawn to himself, people trying to get him dressed again or take away his drinks. He was too big for anyone to make him do something he didn’t want to do. The shoe only thwarted him because he had triple knotted it at some point.
The cake was as tall as he was. Nine tiers, it looked a little like the hospital itself, and was decorated with a fine marzipan lace and hundreds of little figurines. It was a not-wedding cake for a not-wedding. Instead of Rob and Jemma standing on the top, everyone in the hospital had a little representative planted in the frosting. Ishmael had gone after the cake knife, to cut his shoelaces, and had scared away his assistants when he brandished it. There was no one nearby to catch him when he fell after finally extricating himself from the shoe. It went flying forward as he went falling back, passing within feet of Jemma’s head. “How can you rest for one moment in this condition?” he was shouting, before he tipped. Being in the cake seemed to calm him. He just lay there while the music stopped again and word of the disaster spread across the roof and down the ramp into the hospital. People stopped dancing and talking and drinking and eating; children stopped chasing each other or throwing food, and ring after ring gathered around the former cake to look at him. Jemma got up and went to it, too. The crowd parted for her, people thinking that she must be terribly upset to see her cake destroyed, but she didn’t much care about the cake. It could be replaced in an instant.
Rob came through on the other side of the crowd just as Jemma got close enough to wade through some smaller pieces. Rob and Dr. Sasscock helped Ishmael stand up. He was clothed in cake, a big lump of it clinging modestly to his crotch, and two spongy yellow epaulettes at either shoulder. Little people were stuck everywhere on his back and his legs and his chest. He was weeping now.
“Okay, buddy,” Rob said. “Time to get you home.”
Ishmael leaned on him, turning away from Dr. Sasscock and pressing his face into Rob’s shoulder. “I’m so lonely,” he said as he was led away.
The party was more subdued, but not unfestive, after Ishmael was led away. Another cake was brought out after the other one was cleared away by a volunteer crew who threw it by the shovel full into the sea, and those brave enough to taste the old cake from shovel or shoe declared that the new one was even better than the first. Jemma did her duties: the cutting of the cake, the scheduled dances with Rob, and the solemn little mini-ceremony where she tossed her bouquet into the water, in memory of all the dead, instead of flinging it to the ravenous maidens, but she didn’t have much fun after Ishmael fell in the cake. His rage had depressed her. She had tried all her life to believe that drunkenness hid or perverted the truth, and that the real you was not the one that fell into things or spat poison at people you loved or threw glass at your children, and though she did mostly believe that, there was still a part of her that did not, and it made her sad to think that big, gentle Ishmael, with the innocent, unknown past, might deep down be a rageful, depressed hater.
The cake was consumed, the music played, a few more rockets, private creations that were made by kids without the sanction of the official wedding planners, were launched from the stern. Jemma stayed at her table when she wasn’t doing a duty. With her feet up and her back supported and the band having yielded the little stage to the resident string quartet, she got a little sleepy, and when the wind blew her veil over her head to fall across her face, she didn’t move it. Hearing the music and the lick of the torches and the faint noise of the water, she imagined that she was at a beach wedding, somewhere, and that she was just a guest, and wondered if it hadn’t been in terribly poor taste, to come to someone else’s wedding in a wedding gown, when Rob lifted her veil and kissed her.