Chapter 67: Trying Not to Lie

IT MIGHT SOUND like I was just flitting back and forth between Kansas and Italy, but those were just two of the stops that I’ve talked about as I continued to travel and seek out talent for the next show. I’d been to Georgia, New York, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Rio, and Moscow. It was going to be a very international show, but I was having to spend a day between each stop just recovering in Areola and getting my head in the space for the next girl on the list. I watched recordings of my previous encounters and reviewed with the crew and family what I should be doing next.

And I didn’t have sex with all of them. Not like with Roxie. Once it was established that Roxie didn’t want a permanent place on my show or my ship, and had a very reasonable request for me, we went to bed.

No, that’s not quite the order. We fucked on the kitchen table. Then we went to bed and fucked there. Then we fucked in the shower. We fucked in front of the fireplace. Eventually, I lit a fire and we fucked in front of it again. We ran outside while the rain was still pouring down and then fucked on the front porch with water dripping off us. Annie did join us and we fucked all together before Roxie finally got her car and left. In the meantime, Peninnah went to work and bought a strip club in Des Moines. When Roxie got home, she had a new job.

I ended up back in Houston, which had been a regular stopover on my trips to see May. She was happily working on her designs for our space station/interstellar ship.

“How’s it coming?” I asked. I was still carefully maintaining a separation between The Bob and Cleveland Bob. As The Bob, I was getting daily reports on the progress and had made a few calls to smooth out the path for her. I let it be known that this was what I wanted and even the scientists grudgingly reviewed her designs, eventually becoming confused about them.

“Oh, it’s great, but I miss you. The preliminary station plans passed review, but now the hard part is to get the finals coordinated with all the departments that have to contribute to it. It seems like every time I need something, Presto! it appears. I was having difficulty with a materials list and this girl, Sally, shows up and introduces me to a new alloy that another division of The Bob’s company had developed. I have no idea how the stuff is made, but I had it run through various stress tests and it’s the lightest and strongest alloy that’s been manufactured. I guess it’s exclusive to our ship. It’s good that it will be so light. We’ll still have to shoot tons of it into space to build the station.”

“That sounds great. How about the power plant and engines?”

“Presto! An atomic engineer appears on the staff. He’s got some interesting concepts about compressing atomic fuel and channeling off only as much power as is needed at the time. I can hardly believe his estimates on output. It’s hard work and I’m crunching numbers absolutely all day long, but I’m so excited, Bob. Let’s go to my place.”

“Are you sure, May? I mean, The Bob is doing all this stuff for you and is really making things happen for you.”

“I won’t lie to you, honey. If I’d met him first, I probably would have fallen head over heels in love with him. But it’s hard to do that when I’m already head over heels in love with you.”

“Then let’s go to your place, lover,” I said.

I was close to ready to rename the whole mini-series Double Life. Only I’d need to have it be triple or quadruple. I was leading so many lives as I met and dated these women that I was sure I’d mess up and be the wrong Bob at the wrong time.

Fortunately, there were some who were an instant ‘no.’ Like the racist Lorelei. She wasn’t the belle in Georgia, but the boutique owner in New York. I walked into her shop with Lakshmi on my arm, out for a day of sightseeing and shopping. I thought we might find some nice gifts for the girls in this shop and get to know the owner informally as well.

After a few minutes of being ignored, I started toward Lorelei to ask a question.

“We really don’t carry any ghetto clothing here,” she snapped, looking at Lakshmi. “Just look at the posters around the shop and you’ll see what our girls should look like.” I glanced around. There were full-size posters of women in the lingerie offered for sale in the shop. Every one of them was white and blonde. I hadn’t seen a display like that in years. Something grated against my sensibilities. I turned to her.

“I see. So, you only cater to women with huge oversized tits. Well that definitely brings our business to a close.”

Lorelei huffed.

“You’re a decent looking guy who obviously has money. You could have any one of those white girls on your arm. You don’t need to eat dark meat.”

That was it as far as I was concerned. I reached in my pocket for a business card. It was simple and I’d not had a reason to use one before now. On the front, it had our show logo and a smiling picture of me in my other guise. It said, “To Boldly Go, starring The Bob.” On the back, it simply said, “You have been eliminated.” I took Lakshmi’s arm and led her out of the store as Lorelei spluttered behind me.

The thing is, if she watched the show and applied to be on it, she had to know that I had all races on with me. Whatever her intent, I didn’t plan to even show her shop or mention her name on the show. She didn’t need any advertising from me.

I took Lakshmi to dinner on the rooftop of our hotel where we could watch the lights of the city come on. It was lovely.

“I think you’ve been holding something back from me, Bob,” Mia said on my next visit to Italy.

There were lots of things I was holding back. And Mia was certainly holding a little something in reserve as well. She hinted at intimacy, but never quite got there. For my part, there were so many possible answers to that suggestion that I thought it best to just keep silent and let her proceed.

“I’ve looked into a couple of the references you gave me on temples built with magic. I must say it isn’t at all what I expected.”

“I’ve tried to give you some appropriate examples that I felt illustrated the concept. Of course, I’m not making an outright statement that magic was involved, only that it had the appearance of something magical,” I defended myself.

“But I think you know,” she said. “You’ve carefully avoided claiming the exact knowledge, but your statements about how such buildings were created have led me to believe that you know more than you’ve let on. I believe you know—or think you know—the actual magic that was used. Say to enchant the bricks of the duomo in Firenze or of the excavated temple in Mesopotamia. You want to avoid a witch-hunt, as do I, but I want to see the magic used. I want to know for sure there is a power that moves through the earth that is greater than our feeble efforts. Show me, Bob. Show me how the spell was cast on bricks to make them more durable and to weld them together.”

“Ah. Well, Mia, it’s like this. I don’t know for sure that the magic still works. It hasn’t been used in centuries,” I said. “It seems that as technology is developed that supersedes what could have been done by magic in a different age, the magic falls into disuse and then finally disappears altogether.”

“For example?”

“It was said that certain sorcerers and witches could fly and get to a place far away faster than any pursuit. Well, now all we need to do is get on an airplane. Who needs to fly? Though, I admit that I’ve sometimes wished I could fly, even though I have a pilot’s license for small planes.”

“But from that, I detect that you do know the spell, but haven’t tried it,” she persisted.

“I have access to certain ancient manuscripts which purport to have that knowledge.”

“And you can read them.”

I nodded. I was thinking it might be time to tell her I was The Bob, but really, the only thing that I’d revealed about The Bob that could be considered magic was my portal. And that was shrouded in mystery and widely supposed to be a television special effect.

“How about if you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” I think she meant ‘spell’ but I was certainly willing to exchange glimpses of other things.

“I think it calls for something special,” I said. “What would you say to a weekend away with me to someplace very private?”

“I would say yes under one condition,” she said.

I assumed she was going to put a stipulation on how intimate it was.

“And that is?”

“We could go away for a nice weekend someplace very private if we were already in an intimate relationship, don’t you think? Why don’t we go to your hotel, Bob?”

I think it was all the traveling around the world and all the keeping different characters straight as I met women that made me do what I did with my next contestant. Or it could have been the setting in which I found her. Sonia Lind was a twenty-seven-year-old PhD candidate in archaeology, completing her thesis at the Çanakkale University in Turkey. Yes, an American woman with a Swedish name, studying in Turkey. What’s more, she was completing her dissertation while assisting on further excavations of Troy.

“It’s been years since I was last here,” I breathed as I stopped to look at a bit of rock she was examining. She started and looked at me, then snorted.

“Couldn’t have been that many years, could it?” she asked. “You can’t be more than thirty.”

“I look much younger than I am,” I sighed. “Who wants to go around looking like an old man?”

“O-kay,” she said. “So, when was the last time you were here?”

“Hmm. I think it was with Alexander. He had a great fascination with Achilles and Patroclus. I showed him where the tomb was and he and Hephaestion placed flowers there.”

“I’ve heard that story, but while there is evidence of many wars in this area, there is nothing that points to an actual tomb of Achilles or legendary battle of Troy,” she said.

“Oh, there was, indeed, a battle of the Greeks against the Trojans over the trivial insult of Paris stealing Helen away from Menelaus at his very wedding. I’ve no doubt you disbelieve it because Homer made a mash of it and Virgil did little better. I brought Homer here to show him the site, but he was far more interested in heroes and gods than in history.”

“You brought Homer here. You visited with Alexander. You are such a liar,” she laughed.

“I assure you I am telling the truth, but you could never write it in your thesis. If the stones could talk, they would tell you the story,” I said.

“Really? What story would this stone tell, oh instructor of Homer?”

“Ah. This stone once knew Helen intimately,” I said. I could say that about nearly any stone in Troy.

“It is not shaped like a dildo. Or as contemporary archaeologists like to say, a ritual device of unknown use.”

“Oh, no, of course not. But this stone was part of the structure of the master’s bed in the households of Ilium.”

“So, this was part of Paris’s bed?”

“No. This was part of the bed of a local baker.”

“Now you have me intrigued. How did the bed of a local baker know Helen of Troy intimately?”