Angel's Ride

Part 5

In the earliest days of that relationship, though mesmerized by her story-telling, I had remained skeptical of all these ramblings and ruminations. Yet, the sincerely with which she spoke of this subterranean world had become more convincing, and over time even more alluring. Our sessions of love making and her narratives were always concluded with her insistence that we would go and experience this world for ourselves very soon-together. The intrigue of all this, in close association with such physical pleasure, began to seriously take hold of me. My curiosity about the cavernous world of The River Styx and how it co-existed with the real world had me eventually in thrall.

Of course, it was Angel herself and her deep obsession for this subterranean river which made it all the more a certainty that I would pay the $1000 to ensure our impending date with it. After our seventh week together, the opportunity presented itself to take the great journey, as she promised she could get us in through "connections" with the promotions company she worked for and the nature of her work in modeling. At that time, the ride was still a novelty being offered only to "certain selected individuals," she explained, and mostly VIPs."

In mid-July of 2015 our wishes materialized and Angel and I found ourselves in a long hallway leading to a ramp which descended through a dark corridor. We had previously entered The River Styx departure complex, a thirty minute drive outside the nebulous boundaries of LA. We were suddenly accompanied by roller-bladed attendants in front and behind, who proceeded to glide down the ramp with us motionlessly. They were a young male and female wearing all black-even to their skates and dyed hair, and they showed no expression as they floated along effortlessly as our guides.

I noticed that they had apparently been chosen for their androgynous looks and expressionless demeamor. We were led in this fashion down a tremendously long passageway, eventually converging with other ramps and people like us in pairs, each accompanied by their own attendants. The sensation of descending deep into the earth was evident by the drop in temperature and the musty smell of the celebrated river we neared, the deeper we went into the bowels of the ride. We had been checked-in above ground earlier through an elegant lobby of mythological décor. There, flanked on four sides of this Classical, marble structure were four multistory parking garages, all for the most part still empty. It was at a front desk where we parted with our silver, metallic tickets, which Angel produced from her small purse. I had purchased them for us a week earlier by two drafts of my credit card, a cool grand.

As we walked further down the causeway I put my hand on Angel's back and could tell she was nervous-trembling in fact, and her skin felt damp. I too, was anxious. I mused to her how dramatic and solemn the whole possession was-almost ritual-like. This procedure, which brought us to an underground harbor, was deafeningly quiet and unexpectedly attended by what seemed to be only a hundred or so other guests. The sky suddenly opened up as we arrived at the water's shoreline, shedding seemingly natural sunlight onto the scene, expanding out in all directions to a distant horizon. A dozen or so authentic-looking Grecian triremes bumped along at the dock in front of us, at the edge of a great river, while a sense of distance and virtual atmospheric reality was astonishingly achieved.

We were suddenly standing in the midst of a breathtaking Mediterranean landscape. The azure sky, somehow flawlessly rendered, featured white rolling clouds appearing miles above us. Over the gentle gusts of a breeze I could make out the cries of birds as they wheeled out over the river. I could even detect the faint fragrance of blossoms carried down from the hillsides somewhere behind us.

Angel and I smiled at each other out of amazement. We were then directed by our attendants to board one of the small wooden ships alongside the quay. They were replicas of actual Greek warships, perhaps three-fourths scale with dragon-head prows. For the first time I became aware of the other passengers being assisted along with us, finding seats on the surprisingly simple wooden benches atop the fitted plank decks.

I suddenly noticed that some of the ten pairs of people in our boat looked ill or infirm. One middle-aged man, wearing a three-piece suit, struggled a great deal with crutches at the transom, boarding for the departure. At the unannounced moment our ship magically freed itself from the dock and ventured out onto the swift river, I witnessed something equally alarming and peculiar. The head of a bearded man appeared briefly from a small hatch he had opened on the ship's deck. He popped up stealthily only for a moment to his shoulders, directly in Angel's line of sight. She surprisingly did not react to him and made no obvious acknowledgement to the surreptitious nod I noticed he gave her.

The man obviously did not think I was watching. Wearing a tan-colored utility jump suit, strangely incongruous with the ride's theme, he quickly disappeared back into the under works of the ship and closed the wooden hatch over him. I pointed to the place on the deck where he had appeared and asked Angel if she had seen him. She stared at me blankly and said she saw no one. I found this hard to believe as the ship left the dock and began a rapid increase in speed. Out into the river's depth with a greater turbulence we were ferried.

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