The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 2
“A really, really small fucking chance.”
“Yes. But probably not smaller than our chances of surviving an angry dragon god. I don’t know if you were aiming to be reassuring, because if you were, I’m going to have to point out that you’re really bad at the whole ‘comforting someone worried about imminent death by dragon’ thing. Just saying.”
Like any other subordinate of the hells, I’ve died a few times. Knife wounds, explosions, minotaur-related disagreements, voluntary and incredibly athletic decisions to stop my own heart. The usual. But I’ve never been chewed up and digested by a dragon god. Which, I guess, is a class of experience above being eaten by a garden-variety lizard.
Nonetheless, despite the empirical prestige of a death of this magnitude, I’ve never felt the urge to add such an event to my glossary of bad endings, a list that is already profanely and profoundly long. “On the off chance that Amanda isn’t going to come through, can we please, you know, go?”
“Okay, now it’s my turn to be real with you. I have no reason to yank your chain. As far as I’m concerned, we’re two peas in the same banged-up pod. I’m a Chronicler and you’re… something that prophecy, or premonition, or whatever the fuck this is, has declared to be relevant to the salvation of the universe—”
“Does it come with benefits?”
“What?” You can almost hear the needle of the record player jump and scratch in his mind.
“Being one of the, uh, chosen ones. Does it come with benefits?”
Fitz pauses. “You mean like… dental?”
“Yeah. Or, you know, like, whatever the divine equivalent of an EPF—”
“The fuck is an EPF?”
“Something like a 401k? I don’t know. Government-mandated pension or something. My life choices haven’t really left me in a position to understand how all that works—”
“I—” He pinches the bridge of his nose and then, as an apparent afterthought, carefully slurps up a measure of his teh tarik. “Is this how I sound to other people? I’ve been told I do the snarky urban hero thing, but—”
“Do you do run-on sentences? Babble in the face of danger? Wisecrack at encroaching death?” I count sins along my knuckles. In all transparency, I’ve not always been accepting of the fact I might be an archetype, a tried-and-true neo-anti-hero or whatever it is that pundits call pawns of the cosmic narrative. Not until that one week when a prophecy went a bit awry and Chinatowns across North America grew heaped with dead protagonists, every last one of them victim to the Goldilock phenomenon. Prophecy doesn’t like it when their character ensembles aren’t quite right. Too short, too blonde, too educated, too predisposed to the wrong kind of quips. Any of these flaws can be cause for omission.
And by ‘omission,’ of course, I mean that prophecy murders the ones who don’t fit.
Long story short, I spent the week stationed in Processing and by the time I was done, denial had crumbled in the wake of grim fact. There’s a certain quality to the demographic that I forced to recognize in myself. That or lobotomize myself to avoid the fact.
Anyway.
“I—maybe?”
“In that case, yeah. Probably. It’s a calling. Or a linguistic tic. One or the other.” I drop my hands, slot my thumbs in my pockets, look longingly at my indomee goreng congealing on its oily plate. I’d asked for it with chicken, and the mamak took my plea to heart. It wasn’t just a cold cross-section of breast meat that they’d given me. No, a man somewhere, sepulchred in smoke, had lovingly shredded that arch of chicken thigh, refried all the relevant bits, lovingly wefted it into my noodles. He had even drizzled the crunchy detritus that comes with all Malaysian fried chicken: breading and curry leaves and spices, clots of perfectly crisped fat.
I really, really wanted to sit down and enjoy that meal.
Forget the preceding entree. I wanted that meal.
“Ugh.”
“You’re telling me.” The storm swirls closer, bringing with it Ao Qin, he who is cataclysm manifest, his body now coroneting the summit of Sunway Pyramid, Malaysia’s misguided attempt at appropriating ancient Egyptian aesthetics, all in the worship of consumerism. I’ve often wondered where they were going with this, if the architects had understood the connotations of entombing so many shops in those walls. Not that it matters right now. Not with a dragon, lazily slithering up the spine of the shopping complex’s sphinx. Though far away, I can see how Ao Qin’s torso is teethed with legs, so many legs, because Chinese dragons are not, despite history’s enthused insistence, quadrupedal but are distressingly millipedal instead.
The helicopters pull up beside the dragon god, a halo of metallic bodies, no more intimidating than a cloud of fruit flies.
“If I had any inkling as to what to do asides from stand here and wait for Amanda to finally give the signal, I’d tell you. But I don’t.” There. In his face, I discern at last what I was hoping I wouldn’t see: shining faith, burning like godhead in his eyes. The first drops of rain slide from the orange-washed sky and weep onto his face, silvering his skin in tear-stain streams. “It’s been so fucking long since I’ve not known what to do. I don’t…”
I lean away from Fitz. Spend thirty-eight years in Malaysia, where the walls breathe myth, where the skyscrapers stand strangled by the drowsing jungle, and you too will learn a knack for knowing when reality is listening to hear what you intend next.
“Okay, cool. We’ll just stand here and wait to die. No problem at all. Nothing ground-shatteringly worrying about this.”
“This is probably why urban fantasy books don’t feature buddy dynamics.”
“Probably.”
And Ao Qin, who’d had eons to optimize his sense of dramatic timing, chooses that exact moment to speak.
“Rupert.”
It is a whisper. It has the percussions of a whisper, a hoarseness, a rasp to the disyllabic utterance, like he’d exhaled it into my ear. Yet it fills the world: my name made strange in the lungs of a god. It is everywhere. Before me, behind me, beside me—
“Fitz.”
I pause and peer at the prophet, suddenly aware that the stereoscopic effect isn’t quite complete, and what I’m really hearing is Ao Qin’s voice being softly mimicked from my left.
“What?” His voice is his again but despite the defensiveness, Fitz has the good sense to appear abashed. “It’s involuntary.”
“Rupert.” Ao Qin singsongs again, this time with more feeling. “Do you know how long I’ve waited? How many hours I’ve spent thinking about youuu? All that time in the fire, all that time I spent buuuurrning. Never once did I stop thinking about what you did.”
It doesn’t matter that he is still, empirically speaking, about thirty metres away. It doesn’t matter that Fitz and I are on our feet, on the brink of sprinting to the illusion of safety. Ao Qin and I might as well be snout-to-nose, and I might as well already be breathing numinous halitosis. He’d cross that distance before I can think of a profanity to bleat. The only thing any of this changes is that for once, it leaves me convinced there’s no reason to speak.
“Come on, Amanda.”
Without looking over, I raise a thumbs-up at Fitz. You can never go wrong with positive feedback.
“They let me out, Rupert. Did you know that? I didn’t need to escape. I told them what I was going to do to you and Heaven said, ‘why not?’ Why not, indeed?” Even from here, I can see how his face had healed wrong, where muscles had gnarled into valleys of scar tissue, where the bones had failed to reknit, where his jaw tilts on its axis, agape forever, and the ribbon of his tongue wicks listlessly from the break.
Gods, by nature, are protean. Look at Zeus; he was everything from a nimbus of water molecules, to an ant, to a forgery of some poor woman’s husband. Gods cycle through bodies like tai tais through couture houses. To witness one allowing imperfection, to see a deity mangled, can mean only one thing: Somewhere in those long days of torture, Ao Qin forgot himself.
He forgot that he had a face before his mutilation, forgot there was ever a time when it wasn’t splintered cartilage and ruined meat, forgot what it was like when he didn’t burn, wasn’t always burning. Even from here, I can smell Ao Qin, the barbeque sweetness of flesh roasted on the bone.
“Hey, Fitz?”
“Yeah?”
“Any chance you got a magic gun in that coat of yours? Like, maybe something that can kill an immortal? You know, that sort of thing?”
“No. I don’t think it’d be anything that can kill—”
“I’m not asking for Ao Qin. I’m asking for me.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Still got nothing.”
“Damn.” I keep my eyes on the dragon. He pours down the building, puddling in coils atop the asphalt, a baroque spectacle in the sodium glare of the streetlights, gold and red, New Year colours, beautiful as a bad idea. “Can we start running yet?”
“Amanda said—”
Ao Qin is almost on the ground and he won’t stop grinning, an eighth of his body drawn up and curled like an inverse question mark. “Youuuu.”
For the first time, he takes notice of my companion. Fitz stops dead, tongue pinned between his teeth. A bead of red blood wells on its tip. Well, good; fucker’s had it way too easy, standing on the sidelines, convinced that nothing he does will have any consequence.
“I see you, little prophet. I can feel your needling. I know what you did. But it won’t woooork. I will eat you when I’m done with Rupert. And I will keep you alive. I will make sure you stay alive for a long time in my belly, little prophet. Yessss—”
It is at that precise moment that the helicopters suddenly dart into motion, a three-dimensional octagon of steel, trapping Ao Qin between them. Before Fitz and I can comment, before Ao Qin can even look up, lightning judders from the firmament and, broken to glints by the helicopter blades, impales Ao Qin with white light.
“Okay,” says a female voice. “Now you idiots can run.”
TWO
“I STILL DON’T see why I couldn’t grab some clothes first.”
“I don’t know if you remember, but there was a dragon intent on killing you.” Amanda tilts a friendly smile at the teenaged cashier at the fro-yo counter, a bored Malay girl of about nineteen. No doubt she’s heard the whole conversation, but airports at 4 a.m. teem with people tripping on anything that’d provide respite from the wait. Two sweaty ang-mohs and a dog-tired Chinese uncle talking about dragons and the end of the world. She’s probably seen worse. “You still haven’t said ‘thank you.’”
“I guess I owe you that much.” I dig into my jellybean mountain. I may have skipped the yoghurt, went straight into toppings instead, and my cup might be nothing but colourful, gelatinous sweets. Or it may not. I’ll never tell. “Thanks.”
Amanda inclines her head. “You’re welcome.”
At first glance, Amanda is the paragon of normalcy. Brown hair, brown eyes, pleasant features, her build athletic but unremarkable. She could be any other corporate thirtysomething, honed by Pilates and largely healthy eating, her attire emblematic of every office lady at rest: white blouse, pencil skirt, flat shoes, a bright scarf for a pop of colour.
On second glance, that’s the problem.
Amanda is a composite image. She’s a Google Search’s worth of faces melted together, every stock image of ‘office secretary’ and ‘yoga mom’ blended into a single discrete whole. A literal everywoman, down to the brown of her hair and the specific beige of her complexion. Which, if you think about it, is the perfect look for the Internet. Amanda cocks an inquiring look in my direction, and I flush. Although it has never been articulated, I get the sense that my head is, at least to her personal perception, entirely porous, and all my private thoughts are as ostentatiously visible as sushi on a conveyor belt.
“So.” I leaf through my vocabulary for the right words. “Are you a hologram?”
She laughs, exchanging a look with Fitz, who shrugs and drains his water bottle for the umpteenth time. While I still resent Amanda for not procuring me a goodie basket full of James Bond-worthy attire, I’m slightly mollified by the fact she has also left Fitz in a similar predicament. His sweat has dried into continents of damp salt, crusting the ring of his collar, the underside of his armpits, whole sections of his back. Even his thighs have sodium deposits.
“No. I’m real. Flesh and marrow. But.” Her eyes flick to Fitz.
“But she’s a clone.”
“What?”
“Vat-grown clone, with a downloaded personality,” Amanda declares, chirpy as a commercial. “It’s a long story.”
My eyebrows go up. “We’ve got time.”
“He isn’t wrong.” Fitz bobs his head at Our Lady of Digital Pornography and makes room on the plastic bench, allowing Amanda to sidle up into our table. “We’ve got, fuck, five hours to kill.”
Her face goes rigid halfway through Fitz’s estimations, expression turned temporarily mannequin-like, before it again adopts a state of exuberant animation. In no way is Amanda what anyone would label a manic pixie dream girl, but there is nonetheless a kind of spiritedness to her, a vivacity that comes across as meticulously manufactured. I suspect again that it has something to do with the fact she is the Internet and there are specific ideas that the Internet has about how a woman needs to behave. “Four hours and twenty-two minutes, but who’s counting?”
“Me. Definitely me,” I say, although neither of them are paying attention.
Amanda digs a spoon into her yoghurt, mouth pinching with concentration.
“While Amanda figures out fro-yo, I’ve got a question for you. How much do you know about the new kids in town?”
“They’re not bad.” My response is automatic. “The God of Missing People, the God of Being Missing. There was a cat. Weird as all hell, but at least there’s none of the pretentiousness that I—”
“Okay.” Fitz stops me with a raised hand. “You met the shock troops, then. But what about the fuckheads up top? Like—”
“There’s only one of them.” Amanda interrupts. “There’s only one guy on top and it’s the Man. Everyone else is his… property. Big Money, the Agent…”
From the way her voice tails off, I can tell what she was about to say next. The humour rolls from her expression, leaving it rictused. Fitz stares at Amanda for a minute and stretches out a hand to pat her knuckles, a gesture she receives with a tense, thin smile. Whatever lives these two have led, it likely hasn’t enjoyed much affection. Their motions are a minuet of stop-motion awkwardness, like someone had described sympathy to them but forgot to elaborate on the implementation.
“Were his property.” Fitz tries on a smile. It doesn’t work as well as he thinks he does, but I’m too polite to comment aloud. I eat more coloured gelatin. “From what I can tell, the Agent’s still happily an, heh, agent of the Man. By and large, though, the cornerstones of the modern world aren’t designed to be monopolized by authorit—”
Amanda cuts in then. “He doesn’t need the exposition. What Fitz is trying to say is the old guard can take any form they want without worrying about fragging their meat, but I can’t. I’m not just the idea of global communications and free information, I am the Internet. Every damn petabyte of data.”
“And if you corporealise in your entirety, your avatar’s brain dissolves.”
Amanda aims finger-pistols at me. “You got it. So I have clones that I load up with the essentials and pray that they don’t move into an area with poor satellite reception, so I can monitor their interactions. In the future, there might be a more efficient solution, but for now, that’s it.”
“What happens if you get your clone killed?”
“I use another one.”
“Or several.” Fitz wags his pink plastic spoon at us. Unbelievably, the Chronicler made the healthiest frozen yoghurt choice between the three of us: plain, with a seasoning of digestive biscuits and sliced almonds.
I say nothing for the pour of a minute. When I speak again, my voice is softer than I planned it to be, and there’s an ache to the backbeat that I definitely did not want to be there. Usually, I wait until the third date before exposing my sentimental side, but lately, it’s been hard not to wear my heart on a sleeve. Between Minah, what happened to Persephone, that thing with Ananke and all those babushkas, I’m just tired these days. Too much pain, too little hope, not enough time to spread between tragedies.
There are nights when I think about that moment before someone pitches themselves in the way of an oncoming train, or from the ledge of a roof, and how many suicide notes begin with a confession of exhaustion.
“Does it hurt?”
“What?”
“When the clones are killed, does it hurt?”
“I never remember it hurting.”
The next few minutes are uncomfortable, steeped in a silence that, if broken, would allow for compassion and closer ties. But all at the expense of cool, of decorum, of forfeiting toxic behavioural patterns. So we do nothing. It’s like that old joke: an ex-gangster, a mad prophet, and the Internet walk into a fro-yo kiosk—
“What’s up with that ink?”
“Thank fucking god.” I blow out gustily and tweak my sleeve back, happy to have the subject changed. Under the fabric, my tattoos are a cartographic delirium: non-euclidean maps, star charts for heavens spoked with madness, blueprints to cities with names that bloody the mouth to worship. Sometimes, I dream of these places. I wake up screaming. “They… were a bad idea.”
Fitz lets fly a cackle that reverberates through the airport, its notes cutting through the murmured conversations around us. An ang moh couple, so sunburnt their flesh is peeling in red stripes, glares and mumble something in what I think is French. “That’s the story I’ve heard for most tattoos.”
“Anecdotal fact,” Amanda interjects. “Historically speaking, tattoos have always possessed great symbolism. They’re taken to represent something of vast importance, whether religious or otherwise.”
