The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 19
And there I find the door back to where the others are and turn the knob.
“Dude,” I announce to a startled Fitz. “You’re up.”
His mouth opens, surprise in the colour of his expression. But before I can pull him through, drag him back so he can turn the gods into threads, roads that go nowhere except where we say, the patriarchs of heaven take notice. They seize us, all of us, split us through entropy, and fill my brain up with their ringing voice.
We can give Minah back to you.
And just like that, she’s there in the supine dark, hair lacquered and gleaming, stars in her eyes, her skin warm and brown like I’d never seen it. Minah, alive as I’ve only imagined her. Minah, dressed in the life we’d never had together: thirty-seven, maybe, if I’d had to guess, with silver in that inkfall hair, lines like love poetry along the country of her smile. She holds out her arms to me, and I open my mouth to say something, something, anything. But I choke.
What I want to tell her is everything. How, that first night after the gods paid in the peace she wanted, I’d cried in a bed that had never been warm in the first place. I blubbered like a child orphaned on his birthday. I cried like Judas when the dust had settled, and there was no one there and nothing left but his regret to carry, like the ghost of a kiss.
I want to tell her how I can’t walk to the supermarket, can’t hear the first chord of ‘Highway to Heaven’ without breaking down into a heap. I want to tell her how much it hurts. I want to hold her, and I want, I want, I want—
“We can give you the life you were owed.”
What I say instead is:
“I’m sorry.”
I close my hands over her face. I’m allowed this, at least. I can give myself this. Just this. A brief memory of her jaw cradled in the book of my palms, like her cheekbones are psalms and prophecies, like the look in her eyes is a wedding vow to be read aloud so our happily-ever-after could finally come true. I stare at her, open-mouthed, aching.
And I let go.
“She wanted to die, you assholes.”
The lights go out.
Minah vanishes like a blown bulb, a pop of white and then emptiness again, rushing in with a hiss.
“You fucking assholes. You don’t get it, do you? Her idea of a happy ending was never having to come back to this shitty plane of existence again. She wanted out.” My voice cracks into a scream. “But you can’t get that, can you? Because dying scares you more than anything else…”
Through the void, its depth chandeliered with whispers, I feel Fitz reach out, discorporate but still infused with that same furious will. He is knotworks and tangles of unprocessed fate, maybes made into a billion threads, the fringe on a celestial flamenco dancer’s skirt, each of them weighted down with a bell that when rung sounds like Fitz snarling fuck you at the cosmos. Roads to nowhere, somewhere, everywhere and everywhen.
Epiphany is a supernova in this abyss, and I look up as it floods into whatever I have left of a soul, fills me with light, with heat like the end of a tail pipe shoved against my hip. I burn to cinders in the revelation, a tattered laugh shaking itself free.
“We were wrong,” I tell Fitz, the father gods, that faint stupid hope that Minah is there somewhere looking on, loving me.
I should have said I love you. The first time she died, I only said goodbye.
“We were wrong. Tanis isn’t the Door. I am.”
Here’s the problem about kings. They never evolved to think quick. Every monarch, from the lord of the meanest farm-plot to the master of Olympus itself, presides over a parliament of scapegoats and lovers, ministers and murderers. Every decision is made by consensus, even if none of them will profess to that, preferring instead the fiction that the head has no need for a body, or its belly and bowels. So, kings faced with a problem like an assassin named Maria, they freeze, and that half of a second is all I need to catch enough of Fitz to hiss my intent.
“Well, fuck.” His voice from every direction, laughing, and then it is suddenly no effort at all. The end of everything, halted by the turn of a key in its lock.
THE ROAD FINDS them, every last god.
They turn to look for a place that isn’t asphalt, but there is only highway wherever their eyes dart, open sky the colour of a coyote’s bad eye, and the smell of tar and tobacco and something like salt, sharp enough to tear a hole through eternity. No matter what they do, how they run, transform into swans or serpents though they may, there is nowhere for them but through the door at the road’s end.
Somewhere, up where a sun might let its light lean on the earth, there’s a voice: Coyote, humming the song he taught us as we rode along the Oregon coast, green in our lungs, pure again.No gods grow old, no sea will take them home.
This isn’t what I see. This isn’t what they see either, not with their shining eyes. But it might as well be. Five-dimensional space allows for a dizzying amount of artistic license. Slowly, as the sound of Coyote’s voice becomes the face of the dead trickster, grinning down on his murderers with all the love he can muster in the heart they’d calved from his skinny ribcage, the father gods let go.
One after another, Ra and Marduk, Odin and Cernunnos, Tengri, Zeus and Jupiter, those bickering twins; I can’t imagine how many times they’d tried killing each other to be the one and only, they put their heads down and they let go. Like condemned men promenading to their hanging, they go, their bodies stooped, their hands entwined. Even gods know there’s no such thing as forever.
“I told you, didn’t I?” says Coyote, all at once the sun and a corpse and a long-haired man in Saint Laurents, black and white silk with a rumpled grey tie, a dainty cigarillo in his slim hand. He smiles at me. There is a hole where a heart should have been and it should have been gruesome, but it’s beautiful instead: the wound is verdigrised, ridged with emeralds pale as cream. Inside, I think I can see entire palettes of reality in slow orbit, light glinting along the edges of possibilities. In one of them, there’s a timeline where Minah and I are alive, and in love, and there are children and a rose garden, and I hope to God that Rupert knows how sweet his life is. “They’re just scared little boys.”
“I saw you die.”
I’m standing next to Fitz—or at least, I am standing next to the idea of something like Fitz, the Chronicler clean-shaven for the first time I’ve known him, hair pomaded, clothes fresh. I blink and Fitz becomes a kid, gawky and gangly, hunched to keep his height from offending, and he is still the Road leading the father gods home, and I’m the Door on the other side of nothing.
“Yes? I said I would die, didn’t I?” Coyote smirks as he drags from his cigarillo. “Weren’t the first time, won’t be the last, or even the most remarkable.”
“You made such a goddamned fuss about it—”
“Because death isn’t pleasant even for people like us. Not permanent, but not pleasant. Hey, did I tell you about the time I died four times to marry a woman?”
“That seems a bit like partner abuse,” says Fitz. I realise, with a jerk, why he looks like a boy: there’s not a scar or a hint of track marks to be seen, skin innocent as the face still round with puppy fat, brown eyes big and almost guileless.
I wonder what I look like to him.
“Probably, probably.” Smoke ribbons from Coyote’s teeth, becoming faces, bas reliefs of the father gods, their features sagging with resignation. “But no one ever asks if it’s consensual abuse. Maybe it was a game for us. Maybe I liked being hacked up, and maybe she liked me begging, tail between my legs, telling her yes, baby, I’ll even let you kill me if you’d just let me crawl into your bed.”
He yips a coarse, crazed laugh.
“Love’s always like that. You know what I’m talking about, Rupert. It’s a lot more bite and a lot less breast than advertised.” Coyote jogs his eyebrows and winks one eye, black as his hair, black as the ink on a marriage contract.
I breathe out. The gods keep shambling down the road, down and in and through Fitz’s fingers, knitted into light, into fleece from the golden ram, on and on and on until they have his wrists, his forearms manacled by their weight, and Fitz is standing knee-deep in the glow of the deconstructed divine. He looks up at me, metaphor and meaning spindled around his fingers, and I know it’s my turn now.
Where do gods go when the world is done with them?
“Hey, would they really have done it?”
“Done what?” says Coyote.
“Would they really have brought Minah back? Given her to me as flesh and blood?”
“Every last strand of hair. And she’d have been the real deal, too. The father gods have the power to do things like that, you know?”
“And George?”
“I don’t understand why the hell you’d want somebody else’s demon baby—”
“Just answer the damn question for once.”
“Yes. I don’t know if he’d have been happy about it. He’s two now and being raised by a nice French family down in Bordeaux. But they would have brought him back for you.”
Where do we put them? History suggests we pare them from wonder, dissect and diminish and decipher the reasons we made them, undo the miracle of them, and laugh as we say, Here, this was because we were afraid the sun will not return, and, Here, this was so we can pretend the dead go on.
Except that isn’t true.
Ashes to ashes, dust to fucking dust. Nothing is eternal.
“If it helps to know”—Coyote’s voice becomes kind, and makes me think of summers that won’t die, fields of dark honey going forever—“they would have remade her from the atoms of what had come apart. Piece by piece. Put her back together, put a mind in a body that only wanted to sleep. And Minah would have remembered all of it.”
“Would she have hated me?”
“You know she isn’t that kind of woman. But you would have hated you. Forever.
The world gyres into multitudes, crystalline, and if I twitch my wrist, reality will reset into a place where gods weren’t anything but fairy tales: a universe arctic and rigorously impersonal. Which wouldn’t be so bad, would it? What with the stellar job they’ve done of shepherding the species, their ineptitude, theirhunger—
They hold out their hands to us, blessings in the bowls of their palms. Everything, anything, anything so long as we put breath to a name. Even now, contained in the doorway to nowhere, their bodies reduced to photons, the father gods will bargain.
We will give you Minah.
We will give you a childhood, a boyhood, a life silent and sweet.
We will give you a life long and painless, more grandchildren than you can count, Naree at your side for always, always.
We will give you the promotion you’ve coveted, the house you’ve dreamed of, the wishes you’ve paid into a thousand wells, the world for your children; don’t you want them to always be happy?
Your grandfather’s blood, seared from your lineage.
Human, forever.
The Lamp blinks on, and Cason licks his tongue across his teeth: broad as a lie, antlered, bangs hanging over eyes that are just shadow. Only his teeth shine, pale and perfect. He flickers erratically between aspects. One moment, his father’s son, the horned god in eternal silhouette. The other, the most incandescent of the heavenly hosts, twelve wings in endless orbit around a body of holy flame, eyes without number.
But when he answers, he isn’t either of those things. He’s just… Cason. Washed-out button-down, thinning hair, white trainers, khakis rolled mid-way up his calves. “No.”
“No,” says Fitz, jerkily.
And then Tanis leans forward and I feel the Knife’s fingers coil around my wrist, and she pushes down, and the image flickers again. We are in her living room with its no-budget-all-love decor, its clean IKEA furniture, its honeyed lights, and Naree’s voice floating from the nursery. I feel love choke in my lungs, and I know it is Tanis, thinking there is no way she’s allowed to be so happy, that perfect is as easy as falling asleep, one finger clutched in a tiny, tiny hand.
“That’s all they’ve ever wanted,” Tanis whispers, feral. “To feel. To be. To experience something that isn’t immortality, long and featureless and drab. So let’s give it to them.”
Cason crooks a lupine smile. “All the fucking and feasting they could ask for.”
“Forever.” Fitz doesn’t smile, his face rictused. “Then they get to do it all over again. Like it’s brand new. Over and over and over.”
No, beg the gods of never having to ask, never having to wonder if today’s the day when it all comes down, when the paycheque stops, when the tap runs dry, when the light winks shut and there is only dark. When someone calls to say a mother, a father, a lover, a child is dead, dying, lost, and we will do everything to bring them home.
No, beg the patron gods of those bastards who have never once listened when anyone else said no.
I look down at Tanis’s hand on my wrist, pushing down, and we are in my kitchen in the ghouls’ florid manor with its baroque horrors, its clean marble, its sepulchral air. Cason and Fitz stand as audience, passing a cigarette between them, and it’s just us and a slab of meat on a worn cutting board. My knife sinks through red muscle, white bone. The gods crack apart, their immortality bared like fresh marrow.
“Yes,” I say.
We will give them flesh. We will robe them in capillaries and dress them in calcium, bedeck them with a heart, a mouth, and lungs that will hurt when they scream. We will have them wear skin like a bridal veil, wed them to death. We will spoon forever from the pith of these gods, and we will sear it over a fire. Until it blackens. Until there are ashes. Until there is nothing left except dust blowing in the wind.
Tomorrow, the gods will wake up as we all have at some point: baptised in terror, bloody, meat like the rest of us poor bastards.
Just meat.
“THAT WAS REALLY slick.”
Amanda doesn’tquite look human anymore. Her silhouette shimmers and spits, static barely contained, its run-off corroding to silver. When she speaks, her voice is an echo, the feedback from a thousand unseen speakers.
“The hell happened to you?”
The world settles: grainy at first, until it attenuates into coherent shapes. Wherever we are, this isn’t Oregon anymore. My breath burns white; it’s cold here. Fuck, it’s cold. Worse even than the damp chill of London, a cold that tunnels down to the grey marrow. Slightly inexplicably, I find myself offended. After saving the world, which I assume is what we’ve done, you’d at least expect a blanket and a hot cocoa, if not an outright parade.
“You look different.”
“Power is constant,” Amanda murmurs. She raises a lean hand to the air and as I watch, light spirals in her palm. “It had to go somewhere.”
“Did you know this was going to happen?” Cason is almost human again, save for the shadow of antlers curving from his forehead. Unlike me, he seems resolutely oblivious to the temperature.
“Of course she did,” says Fitz, teeth chattering. “She’s fucking Wikipedia.”
“You mean she’s Wikipedia incarnate, or—” Although I know I am witness to the apotheosis of a being already too powerful to measure in words. But if I can’t have the world celebrate what we’ve done, at least I can run my mouth.
“Not today, Rupert.” says Amanda, no threat in her tone at all, nothing like warning save for the radiance leaking from her. “Definitely not today.”
I raise both hands. “I’ll stop if we can get a space heater. Where the fuck are we, anyway?”
“Iceland.” says Cason, wonderment in his face as he chews on the inside of his cheek. “My second honeymoon was here. Why the hell are we in Iceland?”
“Also, I think I’m getting frostbite—shit.” Fitz drops his roll-up, hands quivering too hard for anything like purchase. “We just saved the world, Amanda. What gives?”
“I suppose I needed a running start.” Her smile is beatific, haloed in neon-green. Reality bends where Amanda stands, gazing rapturously out into the wasteland, and it almost hurts now to rest my eyes on her.
“You still haven’t answered,” Cason says, doggedly. “Did you know you’d get their power?”
“Oh. Yes,” breathes the thing that was Amanda, the thing who’s become the fulcrum of the world, the axis of creation. A song wafts unsolicited into the foreground of my thoughts. God is a girl now. I can only hope she’d be more compassionate than the fathers that preceded her, more forgiving of the wounded creatures made in their flawed image.
“Are you going to use it to get rid of the, uh, new gods attached to you, then?”
“I was thinking of it,” she says. “But perhaps I’ll just remold them. After all, there is no limit to what can be done now.”
“And this is how we enabled the singularity. All hail our new robot overlords.”
Something like a smile crooks in the light.
“Close enough,” says Amanda.
EPILOGUE
I LOOK DOWN skeptically at my plate of curry katsu. “This isn’t what we ordered.”
“Come on. We both know that when you’re in a country stingy with their protein, you complain. Be happy with what you’re given.”
“Yes, but I don’t think I need so much breaded pork.”
Veles see-saws his hand. “Need. Want. Which is more important?”
The nice thing about Europe is it has no reason to be suspicious of hulking Slavic men eating ramen on a cold autumn day, what with the ease of travel in the European region. Veles might be mountainous in measurements, but Scotland, I’ve come to learn, has no shortage of men in the same category, although the locals have a tendency of sharing silhouettes with a fridge. Daintily, the god separates his chopsticks and fishes a slice of charsiu from the bowl.
