The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 17
“Yes.” He sits down. The moment his elbow makes contact with the bar, there’s a glass in his hand like it’s always been there, the contents an expensive shade of pale leather. The strobing lights from the bar’s one disco ball turns the ice inside opalescent. “More than a few things. Questions are sacred.”
I sip my scotch and say nothing.
“Hope. That is holy to me too.” He tents his fingers around his glass and stares at the rows of cheap booze behind the bar. “Pity that there is so little of that these days. Your kind has become so tired of being alive.”
“Can you blame us? World is ending. In more ways than one.” To our right, a crowd of twentysomethings roar over a game of beer pong, the contestants like gladiators glorying in the exaltations of the mob. “There’s nothing to do but count the hours until closing time.”
“No. But you know that is the manna that sustains the new gods, right? That ennui. Humanity only believes in distractions these days.”
“You know, you can’t keep blaming secularism for all your ills.”
“Oh, I don’t. Some of the others might, but I don’t. Everything dies, Rupert. No grift is perfect. Nothing survives forever; that’s what tricksters have been trying to teach mankind since you first could speak. But you keep hoping it’s a bad joke, that you’ll keep going, that tomorrow will be here, that you can defer everything that makes you afraid because there are always more days to come, rolling on like the highways of an American folk song.” He downs his drink. When he brings the glass down with a solid thump, it is full again, two fingers of aged gold. “But there aren’t. Not even for gods.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Terrified. But that’s what makes these last days so good, Rupert. I know these are the only ones I have left.” He bares his teeth at me. “What’re you drinking?”
“Southern Comfort. Tastes like a diabetic’s piss.” I sip more of it, anyway.
“Why are you drinking, it then?”
Two girls stumble together so the back of one is pressed against the bar, the other molding herself to her, and they kiss like they could eat each other whole, while the milling boys howl encouragement.
“Because I’m taking handouts from the Internet.” I shrug at him. At this point in the night, I’m out of pretences. “You know, it isn’t really easy to build up a nest egg in my situation. Even harder, when you’re unemployed with a criminal record.”
“Caol Ila.” The girls separate, laughing, giddy with what could be their sixth Long Island or the first shiver of true love. There’s applause. Their eyes glide over us, across me like I’m invisible, but one of them—her hair in a 1920s flapper bob, so thin I can see the spokes of her joints through her tanned skin—pauses to rest two fingers on Coyote’s arm, as though to ask or accord a benediction.
“Excuse you.”
“Every man needs a signature beverage, Rupert. Something that defines him. If you’re English, it’s easy: a gin and tonic, properly prepared. French? You whisper to the bartender each time a name that sounds like sex. Wine red as blood and old enough to love.” He glances over, teases his hand under her fingers and kisses the ridge of her knuckles. Blushing, the girl retreats with her new lover, tumbling into the crowd.
“I don’t see how any of that is relevant—”
“It isn’t.” He smiles at me with uncharacteristic shyness, a rawness in his expression that hurts somehow to see. I wonder for a minute if Coyote had ever been young, if gods come out full-grown, screaming scriptures at the earth, or if for a little while, he lay silent, staring at the primordial sky, breathless with wonder at what was to come. “But I wanted to leave you with something when I’m gone, a blessing. I don’t give those out very often. “
He spins to face me, a hand closing over the brim of my glass. I recoil from the intrusion. “What. Are. You. Doing?”
“From now until the day you die, your cup will never be parched. There will—”
“Wait.”
“—always be Caol Ila in your glass, the finest in ten miles, and you will never be lonely of the best whisky the Isle of Islay may offer.” He twirls his hand up with a flourish, beaming, every tooth on parade.
I look down at my glass, appalled, the watered-down remains of my drink replaced by a spirit that reeks of antiseptic, of simmering peat moss and—bizarrely—of smoked ham. “I didn’t even say I liked scotch.”
“It’s a drink befitting heroes. You’ll learn to appreciate it.” He sniffs. “Besides, gifts are better when they’re something you grow into.”
“I take back every kind thing I ever made the mistake of saying to you. Also, what if I want water? Or orange juice?”
“Keep a mug close by. Or a water bottle, or a saucer, or anything that isn’t glass. At any rate, I think you will be grateful later.”
Coyote flags down the bartender, a stout boy of mixed parentage, his curly hair cropped close to a good-looking face only slightly marred by a cauliflower nose slowly coming back from whatever had broken it, one cheekbone plum-black from likely the same encounter. “Buffalo wings, if you have them. With blue cheese sauce.”
“We have the buffalo wings,” says the bartender, drying a glass. “But I’m afraid we don’t have any blue cheese sauce. Or blue cheese, for that matter.”
“But you have cheese,” Coyote says. “Melt whatever you have into a dipping bowl for me. Ooh, and bring some ranch, too.”
“You’re not really big on checking in with other people, are you?”
He shrugs. “In the old days, depending on where you met me, there would have been a real feast. Venison, wild greens fried in duck fat, bison ribs, berries like you couldn’t imagine, salmon roasted just so with nothing but a bit of salt and lemon. Perfect as going home.”
He shakes his head solemnly. “We would have eaten like kings,” he says. “Now, you get buffalo wings.”
“Dinners can’t be choosers.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Just thinking aloud.” I take an experimental swallow of the Caol Ila. It’s better than the initial whiff suggested. Oaken, with undernotes of toffee and a seaside aftertaste, a tang of brine far less foul than I’d worried it would be.
“Tomorrow, we go back to Winchester Bay. The black road that Tanis saw, it has a beginning there in the dunes for which that place is famous for.” Coyote toasts me, grandiloquent even in that single gesture. Again, his expression falters, becomes boyish in fluttering, thick-lashed embarrassment. “When I am gone, be sure to raise a glass to me from time to time. It will be nice to be remembered.”
I drain my glass and place it back down. True to Coyote’s word, it is full again. Two fingers of amber liquid, with a single frosted ice cube sweating inside. “Aren’t you already flushed with worship? Every hippie in San Francisco is tattooed with your face. You’re in all the stories—”
“There’s a book I like a lot, one written by an Englishman, and made into television by some Americans. In it, there’s a chapter where one god tells another that though her feast-days are celebrated, although people still drink and eat to her name, not a soul remembers where the tradition comes from. It’s like that with me, Rupert.” His voice drops, so quiet I can barely hear him over the electro-pop. “But worse. So much worse. When my bones have been gnawed to the marrow, and they’re wearing my name like a cheap costume on Halloween, I’d like to know one mortal still remembers the whole of me.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility for someone you have recently declared would die really soon.”
“Pff. You’re like a disease, you’ll always find a way to come back.”
“Probably sounded more flattering in your head.”
“I enjoy your confidence in the regard of others.” His smile is a grotesque half-moon. “Not that that’s the point, but I have my reasons.”
“Wouldn’t Cason be a better candidate for this? I mean, the grandson of the Devil. That is impressive pedigree.”
Coyote fixes me with a cool incredulous stare. “Has anyone told you that you talk entirely too much?”
“Cason thinks it’s a natural consequence of excessive amounts of trauma. Humour as a means of self-control.” I hesitate, feeling more is needed. “You know.”
“Fascinating.”
The buffalo wings arrive now, on an altar of celery sticks.
“Yet somehow,” he continues, examining the dip with a hint of disdain, “you didn’t answer the question.”
Exhaustion prickles under my skin like pinfeathers. “Yes. More times than you can imagine.”
“Believe it or not, I can imagine exactly how often you’ve been told to shut up, and more.” Coyote fishes a wing up by its breaded end, tips his head back and lowers it into his mouth. One eye on me, he bites down, crunches through bone and gristle like they were both as succulent as a newborn hare. “Now, eat. Tomorrow, we both die.”
COYOTE WAKES US at sunrise, every lock falling open at his hollering, the sky pink as the inside of a mouth and a hangover like a cancer behind my right eye.
“Asshole.”
My first glimpse of the world is his face, leaning over mine: pink tongue, teeth and canine halitosis panted straight into my nostrils. Strings of warm saliva sink gracefully onto my face. Without thinking, I reach up and shove at his muzzle, flinging Coyote aside. He cackles into the gloom, vaulting from my bed onto Cason’s, front paws coming down on the man’s chest with a pop of cartilage. I wince sympathetically.
“Wake up!”
“Jesus fucking—”
“—Magdalena?” Coyote inquires with a wag of his tail. “What a filthy little family you belong to.”
I fumble onto my side to peer blearily at the clock on the nightstand. It reads five-thirty am, which is just about what I’d expect, given the tines of rosy light stretching across the the blinds. Digging the heel of a palm into one eye, I sit up. Note to the wise, to the health conscious, the ones who rightfully worry about cirrhosis in their old age: don’t go drinking with gods. Least of all tricksters drunk on their coming deaths.
Coyote nips, snarls, bites, tugs, barks with the gusto of a border collie, shepherding us along morning ablutions with manic enthusiasm. He scrabbles at the bathroom door while Cason shaves, howling, “The black road will wait for no one!”
“This is why I wanted my own goddamned room.” Cason bangs on the door three times in reply, and Coyote laughs, doubling over onto the floor, before he dives out our door.
At last we’re done, shambling out of our rooms, groaning. Even Amanda looks beleaguered, more human by the day, more battered by the ongoing production that is being alive. I pass her a styrofoam cup of bad coffee.
“The black door won’t wait. Come on, come on.” Coyote bounds up to our van, blurring between species, the brindled coat and paintbrush tail hung up for Saint Laurents, a grey silk tie, brogues like black oil. “Today is an excellent day to die.”
No one speaks on the drive back to Winchester Bay except for Coyote, undulating between languages, wefting creation myths with cataclysmic data about the world’s destruction, numbers in kaleidoscope, until there’s no end or beginning, no chronology. The world smells implausibly of scotch forgotten on a cold windowsill: peat, pear, caramel, smoke, fresh snow.
Then, quicker than any of us might have liked, we’re there.
“Aren’t they beautiful? When the wind stirs them, even humans can sometimes see beyond the worlds here.” Coyote plants fists on his hips, legs spread, a prideful look to his face. As though he made this, as though the flexures of golden-white sand belong to him. “They don’t like talking about it, but every year, people vanish into the dunes.”
His grin is enormous. “Their bones are the sweetest.”
“Have you ever wondered what would happen if we weren’t a part of this mess? Like, where you would be?” Fitz comes up beside me, hair shaved so close I can see the colour of his scalp beneath the down.
“Eating noodles and watching a football match,” I reply immediately, then regret the glibness. The thought of food has me nauseous. “How you doing?”
“I don’t know. I think—I think I can hear them. But they’re not here, I don’t think.” His shoulders droop. “I don’t know if that matters either. Marduk isn’t dead. They know we’re coming.” He pauses. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
My attention drifts to where Amanda is picking up an argument with Coyote, their voices low, too low to permit eavesdropping, but whatever’s happening, it amuses the trickster no end, and terrifies the younger goddess, her complexion bleaching. Her gestures are quick, angry.
“What for?”
“The fact that you’re here.” Fitz huddles into himself, shoulders drawn up, hands thrust deep into pockets. “That we’re all here. That this is happening. That it’s happening to you.”
My blood curdles into something cold and my tongue goes thick. Hard to tell whether it’s dread or the hangover. “Coyote’s right, isn’t he?”
“Prophecy isn’t a precise science.” The automatic defence. “It might not happen.”
“But you saw it.”
“I saw something. I don’t know if it’ll come to pass. Not everything does. Fate is subjective, and—” He sucks air through clenched teeth, as though stung by the next words. “You’re our friend. We won’t let anything happen to you.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
Coyote peels from his conversation with Amanda and is waving us forward, bouncing on his heels, a kid on the borders of Disneyland. I turn from Fitz to walk towards the dunes, sunlight flattening the dunes, stealing their dimensionality, so they’re nothing but white.
“I don’t think we ever did.”
When we’ve all gathered in front of him, Coyote bows extravagantly like a circus ringmaster, all pomp and pageantry, one arm poised beneath his ribs, the other flung out, one leg thrust behind him in a near-curtsey.
Amanda glares at him. “You’re going to need to stay alert. From what Coyote tells me, this will take you straight to the father gods. I won’t be able to help you here but the moment that you’re out, I’ll”—blood oozes from a nostril, and she wipes it away with the back of a sleeve—“be on the other side. I already have clones waiting in Iceland—”
“Iceland.” An incredulous noise from Tanis. “That is a long way from here.”
“Apparently that’s where the father gods go, when they gather.” Amanda narrows her eyes at Coyote, who smiles primly, hands folded at his belly. “So he tells me.”
“So the road shows.”
“If I don’t make it back,” Cason begins, who’d not said anything since we arrived in the dunes, the breeze tugging at a few strands of hair from its helmet of pomade. He is dressed better than he ever has been. Sunday clothes.
Or a dead man’s last suit.
He tries again. “If I don’t make it back, that clone thing—can you make a copy of me too? Someone needs to update the will. Make sure that the mortgage is order, check on the college funds. There are a lot of things.”
His voice shrinks through the list until it’s a rasp, breath sawing through teeth, slow, too slow, like if he tries anything else, he’d break.
“I’ll take care of everything. For as long as I can,” Amanda says, after a long while. “If something happens, none of your families will be left wanting.”
“Okay,” says Cason.
Tanis exhales, a jagged sound, every muscle in her jaw tight. “Thank you.”
And then Coyote tilts his head back, and the black road unwinds from his mouth like he’d swallowed it for a parlour trick. The colour brings to mind something I’d read a few years ago over the shoulder of a man in a carmine suit: an article about a building in South Korea rinded with a nanomaterial that eats the light. It created a ‘schism in space,’ it said, made the eye see black because we cannot process any way else.
The black road is like that, only it doesn’t just fuck with your neuroreceptors but reality as well, shearing through physics, through the spatiality of the world, so that jet-black ribbon, which had looked so small, sprawls now across the dunes. The trees melt from view, swallowed by sand. Coyote lays himself down as the black road continues its metamorphosis, a well-dressed corpse on the lightless tarmac, eyes staring up at nothing, a smile at the turn of his lips. Then, without warning, he is swallowed by the umbral path he’s thrown up.
“Whoah,” Fitz whispers.
“I know. I like that trick.” Coyote’s voice from behind us, causing every one of us to jump. “And before anyone starts getting on my case, saying I could have said something about it, no one ever asked me about my interpreta—glurk.”
You’d think that the death of a god would be beautiful. Epic, even. A tragedy as rooted in drama as the male gender’s frequent and ill-advised impulse to court post-matrimonial threesomes. Prometheus defined the template: his body yoked to a rock, his liver a perpetually replenishing amuse-bouche for a crèche of immortal eagles. Gruesome imagery, sure, but striking. As the demise of a deity should be.
But Coyote doesn’t die like that.
If I hadn’t had reason to hate them before, I loathe them now. The father gods, how they’d pulled that cartoon noise of Coyote as he flinches inwards, like he’d taken a blow to his belly, so undignified, so unlike anything the trickster would have allowed himself to say even on his worst days. There’s pain in his eyes. He raises his gaze, looks behind our shoulders. We turn as a group, and even if we were blind, we’d have known they were there—Marduk, once again whole, standing abreast with silhouettes like the afterimage of flash bomb—the air full of their power, like steel wool on the tongue.
Marduk brings his hand down like he’s Moses halving the Red Sea and Coyote’s breastbone cleaves in two. There is no crack, no snap of bones breaking, but we hear instead how intestines unwind: slowly at first, with a distinctive greasiness, slick tubing gliding over itself, then with great urgency, the oiliness suddenly so much more pronounced, as gravity tugs and tugs, until a knuckle-sized button of grey meat exposes itself between two shirt buttons.
