The following is an excerpt from Chapter 19 of Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton. Lupton will be reading from Old Time Religion—their latest Wisconsin Gothic—at the January Watershed Reading on January 20, 2024.
Ulysses and Sam jogged as far as Capitol Square and around to the East Washington side, then walked down half a block, trying to look collected and like they hadn’t just been sprinting up the hill on West Main Street, as though they were normal, responsible people who were capable of reading clocks and so forth. At least, Ulysses was hoping to come off like that. Ideally, Harry and Ellen would believe that Ulysses was a steadying presence of some sort, rather than a vaguely reprehensible greaser who brought danger wherever he went, which was how Sam had implied they saw him.
Ulysses wasn’t entirely sure why it was so important to him that Harry and Ellen like him. Sam seemed unlikely to listen to their opinions on him; he barely even listened to Ulysses’s opinions on things that were actually important, like how not to die. But it was definitely important to Sam, which meant he was going to show up and put on his best face and try to pretend he hadn’t just had an incredibly weird day on top of—well. He had the sense that Sam would point out that his life was so deeply immersed in the local wellspring of weirdness that nothing he’d done in at least a couple of days was really a high-water mark for odd.
Ellen and Harry had chosen a diner called the Webster Street Inn that was very grad-school chic in that it was cheap, had music and a dance floor, and was largely populated by townies. He and Sam were within a reasonable margin of error for the correct time. Ulysses shrugged out of his jacket and slid into the booth, Sam a pleasant warmth beside him.
Sam was turning back his cuffs, making a few remarks to Ellen about his day and midterms and so forth. Ulysses glanced at the menu. It was a mishmash of stuff, burgers and hotdogs and gyros and various sandwiches. There was also a rather extensive list of cocktails, thankfully devoid of the sort of jaw-clenchingly kitschy names restaurants that served cocktails generally thought they ought to be imbued with. On the other hand, most of them were variants on the old-fashioned.
“So,” Harry said after they’d ordered, “Ellen said you’re one of us.”
Ulysses had a very strange moment before he remembered that he was technically a student. “That. Yeah. Department of Magic Studies.”
“‘Where fun goes to die,’ isn’t that what they say?”
“Yeah, but if they really meant it, they’d say it in Latin.”
Harry laughed. He was leaning back in the booth, scarf still around his neck. He looked relaxed and slightly exhausted. A mirror of how Ulysses probably looked, excluding the relaxed part. “What’s your dissertation on?”
He took a deep breath, mind racing. “The working title is Empty Mirrors and Open Doors: The Historical Problem of the Demigod.”
Beside him, Sam snorted. “Did you run that past your advisor yet?”
Ulysses shrugged. “I’m not sure where she’s got to. Mykonos, last I’d heard. I’m sure it will be fine.”
Ellen was glancing between them. “Is this field research, then?”
Sam said, “Of a sort,” in a way that made Harry laugh.
Drinks arrived. Harry took a sip of his, then continued his conversational gambits. “Do your siblings have names of a similar style to Ulysses?”
He rolled his eyes inwardly, because didn’t everyone account themselves a genius when they came up with a way to ask that question. “My sister is Celeste. And my younger brother is Lazarus.”
Sam blinked. “I didn’t know you had a younger brother.”
“He’s in the Air Force.” Ulysses shrugged. “He wanted to be a fighter pilot.”
“Is he not a magic user?” Sam asked. “I thought that was an automatic deferment.”
“Not anymore. You know what it’s like, they’re desperate. Certain types of magic still can be grounds for getting 4-F status, but not everything. I’d be in real trouble in the middle of a battlefield, as you can imagine. But he’s mildly precognitive, so he has an incredible reaction speed.” He shifted slightly; Sam was putting off an awful lot of heat; he tried to remember if he’d always been like that.
The room was already about half full in anticipation of a live band later on—a psychedelic group called Project Sycorax he’d seen once or twice before. For the time being, a jukebox in the corner was blaring, a handful of couples gyrating on the dance floor to the sound of something by the Stones. A few young women were casting interested looks at their table.
When the food arrived, Ellen started asking pointed questions about the demons and Dionysus that Ulysses needed more concentration to answer. Sam ate his gyros happily, mostly in silence. Occasionally, when a new song came on, he seemed to drift off, a thoughtful expression on his face, as though he were discovering rock and roll for the first time. And then Ulysses would nudge him under the table and he’d smile and eat another french fry.
The two girls at the bar though. Ulysses had been watching them argue for a while out of the corner of his eye. When they’d walked in, he’d assumed they were on a date. But now, both of them seemed captivated by Sam. Every few seconds, one leaned over and whispered something into the other’s ear. One of them—short, dark-haired—seemed very intoxicated. The other, taller with short hair, was a little more sober, but given the brightly colored cocktail she was working on, probably not for long.
Eventually, the short one got up and made her way over to the table. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, as Ellen raised an eyebrow. Then to Sam: “My friend and I have a bet. Would you like to dance with me?”
Sam looked confused, glancing at Ulysses. “Is the bet about whether I’d like to dance with you, or that I will or won’t do it?”
“Oh, sorry, I explained that badly. It’s the latter,” she said.
“Is it for a lot of money?” Harry asked. “Sam, you have to do it. Can you split it with him?”
Sam drained the last of his drink. “It’s fine. She doesn’t have to split it,” he muttered, sliding out of the booth. “Be right back.”
Ulysses ruthlessly pushed down a little flash of jealousy and turned back to the other couple, just to see Ellen watching Sam leave with a worried frown. “What?”
“Sam doesn’t dance,” she said, shaking her head.
“What do you mean?” Ulysses looked at the dance floor, then back at her.
Ellen looked cross. Ulysses was beginning to realize this was a permanent condition for her and respected it. “I mean he came to our wedding in July, and I forced him to dance with me. He wasn’t happy about it. All elbows, didn’t really want to move his feet.” She glanced pointedly at the dance floor, then back at Ulysses. “Not like that.”
Harry leaned forward and touched her arm. “Maybe he’s just finally coming out of his shell.”
“It’s possible,” Ulysses said, mostly to himself, then decided to distract himself. “What are your dissertation topics?”
Harry’s was medieval Pacific trade routes and the island of Mindanao. And Ellen’s was something related to Hilbert space.
“What’s that?” he asked, with an immediate feeling of regret once the words left his mouth.
Five minutes later, Sam wasn’t back yet, and Ellen was still trying to explain what a holomorphic function was and how a vector space could have a sense of distance.
Harry was absently swaying to the music. Finally, gently, he tapped Ellen’s shoulder. “What’s going on over there, do you think?”
Ulysses turned. It took him a moment to make sense of what he was looking at. While they’d been talking, most of the rest of the patrons had crowded onto the dance floor. They were now whirling around in some kind of complex dance, Sam lost somewhere in the middle.
“That’s unusual,” Ellen said.
Ulysses fought the urge to put his forehead on the table.
From Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton. Reprinted with permission from the author.
