Lion's Strength

This is the story of how Robert stopped drinking. It's only a short story. Until he stopped drinking Robert lived in Las Vegas. Now he travels a bit more and mostly to old places. Once upon a time, because this is the kind of story that starts that way, he was a guard in a casino, and sometimes a victim of it too. There's not an awful lot else to do in Vegas except hookers and drinking. Once upon a time, once among many a time, Robert was drunk, a quiet drunk, stumbling from one row of glassy eyed gamblers to the next into the small hours of the morning. Which is how he met the Sphinx.

Sometimes, when drunk, it's best to lean up against something solid until the orbit of the earth levels out a little. Better still is leaning your head against something cool, metal maybe, glass, or stone. One of Robert's many secrets is that the statue in the foyer of The Cleopatra is just about the perfect temperature at around 2am. Another secret is that there are other qualities of that leonine beast, out of place, ragged, and oddly majestic, that make it occasionally less than comforting.

"The first age of man, writ anew."

Gravelly tones, so low as to be more vibration than actual sound, quiet enough to be intimate, each syllable echoing out dusty and ancient where every other time the limestone had been silent. Robert, frozen in place from sheer surprise.

"Pathetic."

The drinking had affected him badly before, but never with this. He had kept his eyes firmly closed, as if to make it all just an alchohol dream. Even now though, resting on the shore of an Aegean isle, he remembers the dense material rippling under his brow like cool muscle.

"I have seen civilisations rise and crumble, and ever it was thus. A crawl in the dirt, a short jerk of the spine, and a hope that your ills will purge with your dinner."

At this particular moment of his life Robert is poorly equipped to defend himself, but he does try his best. Aware that people are still shoaling in and out of the Casino behind him all he can manage is to hiss into the graven mane. The ancient voice is relentless.

"You are a man of poor temper and worse constitution, while I am a creature of the ages. If anything, it is you who will close your jaw for me. Attend, Robert Calvin, a nothing as he stands. Cleopatra's Needle has been shipped around the world and the pyramids were nothing next to the ghosts inside. I am the Sphinx of yore, and should you answer my riddle the world will bow before you."

These words Robert remembers perfectly to this day, but somewhere in the back of his skull is the terrible suspicion that there was more: A warning. As if this kind of thing had happened before and not ended well.

"Why is it that you, who has a talent for accruing wealth despite your attempts to drink and gamble it away, who has a frame worthy of heroes if only you were to cease poisoning it, and who has nothing but the dim echo of a family long gone to greener fields, is trapped in this place, which is the only place you have ever known?"

Oddly, this is not the moment when Robert becomes sober. That moment comes after he has stumbled violently toward the doors, after he has vomitted into the gutter. It comes after he has gone home to his tiny apartment, even after he has fallen asleep. The morning sun pounding against his eyelids brings no further clarity, just pain and unease. What it is, the precise moment, is when he returns to The Cleo the next afternoon, still uncertain in his skin. The moment when Robert stops drinking is when he walks through those doors for the thousandth time, meets the all too human eyes of the Sphinx, and knows the answer to the riddle. Rippling like cool muscle, it is only fear.