Free Hellenic Immortal by Gene Doucette Page B

more than a little ugly, and fond of going about without clothes on. This last part was just to make things easier on him when it came to passing on his seed, something he did at least three or four times daily because basically the guy always had an erection and always knew what to do with it; clothes just slowed him down. Seeing him afraid was quite a surprise.
    “Ut-Naphishtim,” he boomed, “you must tell me what I have done to anger the gods!”
    This may have sounded like an order, but it really wasn’t. More like a plea. I got some decent respect from Gilgamesh, who believed that my apparently eternal good health meant the very gods that suddenly had it out for him, had smiled on me for some reason. (It should be said that even though I’d never conversed with any god at anytime, I assumed much the same.)
    “Why do you suppose you have?” I asked, showing him in.
    I lived alone in an extremely modest dwelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh had me ensconced with a bevy of nubile women, but consider the source. Whereas the great men of the Old Testament were recognized as great by their uncommonly long life spans, the Sumerians equated greatness with sexual prowess. Both were meant to be taken metaphorically. Well, except in the case of Gilgamesh the Virile.
    “You did not see the heavens fall?” he asked. “You did not hear their displeasure?”
    “I did,” I admitted. “But perhaps you are being hasty. Come sit.”
    We sat on the floor, atop some animal hides I used for just such a purpose. We wouldn’t get around to inventing decent furniture for a while. “Tell me, what do the people think?”
    “They only know fear now,” he stated. “But this will change. For if I have insulted a god, they will do me harm to save themselves. Already the muttering has begun.”  
    This is something that’s never really changed, by the way. Look at how random fluctuations in economic indicators affect a U.S. presidential election.
    “The crops?”
    “Robust. The cattle as well. It cannot last. Ut-Naphishtim, you must help me.”
    “I do not know how.”
    “Can you not speak to the gods? Discover how I have stirred them?”
    I think of this conversation whenever I encounter a priest or, well, any holy man. (Like popes. I’ve met a couple.) Gilgamesh—and everyone else in the land of Sumer—just assumed I had a direct line to the gods, and I never did anything to disabuse them of the notion because it was one of the things that kept me alive. But I didn’t have a direct line; sometimes pretending you do can put you in uncomfortable situations like this one. This is ten times worse when people think you are a god, incidentally. I’ve had a little experience with that too.
    “I fear my pleas will be met with silence as I have been seeking audience with the gods since the night in which their ire was demonstrated.” Which was sort of true, if you can call sleeping a bunch and basically pretending nothing happened seeking audience.
    “And?”
    “I have no answer for you. I am sorry.”
    His face fell. “Then I am lost,” he cried.
    I pondered his dilemma. “Perhaps you are thinking of this incorrectly.”  
    “How do you mean?”
    “Consider that it was not displeasure at all, but a gift.” In today’s lingo this is called spin.
    “A gift?” he asked.
    “Something fell from the heavens to the earth.”
    “T’was a thunderbolt out of the clear night sky!”
    “It did arrive as if borne on lightning,” I agreed. “But something struck the land that night. I heard it. It was an object, a solid thing. Possibly a godly object presented in a spectacular way? A thing that the gods wish upon you?”
    He ruminated on this line of reasoning for a few minutes. Although barbaric and quick to violence, rapacious and voracious, Gilgamesh was not stupid. He actually had a keen political mind when one got right down to it. Not quite Solomonic, but good enough to out-maneuver lesser tacticians in most fields of life.