The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 4
“What the ever loving fuck?” Amanda repeats. The exit to Orlando International Airport is teeming with excited children and their exasperated parents, a few surly teenagers, and couples who, for some reason, believe that Disneyland is a better honeymoon destination than the genteel balconies of Paris or—anywhere not otherwise swarmed by sugar-drunk kids. “It was a bloodbath. If you’d just fucking gone quietly and asked for a lawyer, this could have been done more discreetly.”
“I’m allergic to lawyers.” I shrug out of my hoodie. Florida isn’t what I was expecting. I blame popular culture. America, in my brain, is either red desert, prairie the colour of skin and the smell of sun-bleached bone, or something green and dark and cold, fizzing grandly on the tongue. I’d expected anything but the unctuous heat of Malaysia, sticky, sauna-like, suspiciously similar to being smothered to death by a warm towel. And I think I want a refund. “Even the thought of them gives me the creeps.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Amanda rolls her eyes so hard I hear it in her voice. We’re waiting for what is allegedly another clone of Amanda’s to come pick us up, so we may adjourn to the ritzy Best Western that she had booked us into. Despite the fact that Amanda could, in both practice and theory, home us in the grandest of Hiltons, she won’t, pleading the need for anonymity. I suspect she doesn’t like us as much as she claims.
“In fairness,” says Fitz, taking a drag from his third cigarette of the hour, “it was funny.”
“Thank you! Someone who appreciates my art!”
“Art.” Amanda grinds out an incredulous laugh. “And I thought Reddit had terrible opinions.”
I shade my eyes against the noon-day glare and frown. The sky is gorgeous, a faultless blue groping towards forever. Despite my best efforts at being a curmudgeon, it’s hard not to become infected with the excitement buzzing through the crowd, anticipation a more efficient disease than even the common cold, regardless if the vector might be oversized mouse ears. I flick a glance back at Fitz and Amanda, the two of them now engrossed in an argument about hot breakfasts and the legitimacy of British bacon. My scowl deepens.
It takes me a minute, but I realize why I’m rankling against the experience. This is pleasant. All of it. Forget the fact I’ve just drenched immigration in bodily fluids and dispatched a demon into their custody, albeit one who most likely won’t do anything but lightly traumatise the airport personnel. This moment feels companionable, comfortable.
And I don’t trust it at all. Good things happen to the morally ambiguous hero, not the guy who makes amuse-bouches of ears.
A black SUV screeches up to the pavement before I have the opportunity to further interrogate my paranoia. The window winds down. Inside, there’s a woman who could well have been Amanda’s aunt: same jawline, same incline to the cheekbones. Her eyes are obscured by aviator glasses, and where Amanda keeps her hair in a neat ponytail, this one wears hers in a bouffant worthy of any Hong Kong tai tai.
“Get in the van.”
I look between the two of them. “Whoah.”
“Yeah, in case you’re wondering, that never stops getting weird.” Fitz twitches a shoulder at me, slinking past as the two Amandas mouth curses at his back, the one-point-five second lag between them causing no small amount of aural dissonance. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to survive the technological singularity. I don’t wonder anymore and I deeply regret the fact.
“Great,” I mumble, following Fitz into the mouth of suburban weird.
THERE’S A LARGENESS to Orlando that I don’t think I was prepared for. Malaysia, small enough, from one end of the peninsula to the other, to traverse in a day, is a knot of cramped streets and labyrinthian highways, overgrown with plant life. London, in its own fashion, wasn’t much different. You can tell it was built for horses.
But America.
Film cannot convey the immensity of the country, how it balloons in your consciousness, fills you with the dizzy ambition of it all. America is earnest. For all of its problems, its clandestine bigotry, its history and its horrors, it is earnest as a dog with a jaw full of dead squirrel. You can practically feel it tail-wagging through the asphalt.
Also, there are an odd number of palm trees here.
“Does this mean we’re not going to Disneyland?” Fitz lounges across the back seat like a cat, one leg hooked companionably over mine. “Because that will be disappointing.”
“I feel like you’re just fucking with me now.” The Amandas, one riding shotgun, the other steering one-handed, an arm crooked out of a window, have given up on talking in tandem. Instead, their mouths now move noiselessly, while a voice crackles from the radio. The effect is still unfathomably disconcerting, but at least it is easier to stomach, so long as I keep my eyes somewhere else.
“Maybe,” says Fitz. “I mean, you’re kinda fun to annoy. It’s one thing to outwit the gods, but it’s another thing to piss off the spirit of pure knowledge.”
“Again, not a spirit.”
“That’s a reference, isn’t it?” I rummage through the duffle bag that Amanda Sr had bestowed on us. There are gaudy Hawaiian shirts in citrus colors, most of them too big, one of them likely intended for an infant, khaki shorts to be paired with flip-flops, boxers, bedazzled Ray-bans, and a heap of gold chains. “The hell?”
I raise the jewellery for inspection, but neither Amanda looks over, although I’m sure the corner of Amanda Jr’s mouth crimped fractionally in amusement. “It seemed appropriate.”
“A decent suit would have been appropriate too. Haven’t you watched gangster movies?” I sift through the mess again, hoping half-heartedly that somewhere in the bag I’d find, if not grayscale, then at least less offensively cheerful attire. “Lots of rumpled jackets and silk ties.”
“This is Florida, though,” Amanda retorts gaily. “You’ll fit in better this way.”
I don’t reply. I toss Fitz a selection of shirts: red, blue, and white alligators against a luridly tropical backdrop of green-gold palms and ambiguously ethnic-looking women, as some might put it, what with the racist shorthands used by the artist. To my relief, he swaps his filthy wife-beater for the first of the set, flinging the discarded garment out of a window and into the way of a Corvette. The driver narrowly dodges the fluttering horror, swears up a hurricane at us, flicks Fitz the finger, and peels off to the right.
For myself, I finally find a hospital-beige shirt with pineapples. As much as I would like to shuck my jeans along with the grubby pair of boxers sticking to their insides, I can’t bring myself to do so. It would be an admission of middle age—or worse, that the ang mohs who flounce around Kuala Lumpur might actually be right about less-is-more in the equatorial sauna.
“Huh.”
“What?” Fitz, unlike yours truly, has no cultural misgivings about shorts or exposing hirsute testicles to the freeway. Or me. Ugh.
“Cason’s already there, it looks like.”
“Who’s Cason?” I’m not sure who says it, Fitz or I, but it doesn’t matter. Exposition must take place.
Except it doesn’t.
“He has done reconnaissance at the university already. Says that no threats were registered.” Back to that unwieldy practice of massaging air through the larynx, I suppose, although this time, Amanda’s decided it would be better to distribute responsibility of the sentence between two mouths, the pair of them start-stopping in creepy twin fashion. Oddly, that’s still more reassuring than the lag.
“Who’s Cason?”
We zip past a billboard that entreats us to come have a hoedown with a heaving meat-mountain of a burger. I count four patties between the dribbles of cheese.
“I don’t know if I trust his opinion. Cason’s on a different level, you know what I’m saying?” Fitz, with supernatural deftness, begins rolling a fresh cigarette. “The fucking apocalypse could come and all he’d have to say on the topic is, ‘there was an inconvenience.’”
“He’s not stupid.”
“Seriously, who’s Cason?”
“Then why did he spend so many fucking years stuck blowing coke up Eros’s ass? Has it occurred to you that he might have an agenda of his own?” Fitz exhales, and the smell of weed plumes through the air. “That he might be looking for some way to buy back all the things he’s lost?”
“If he was, he wouldn’t be the Lamp.”
I roll my eyes to the ceiling, the navy faux-velvet pockmarked with stains. “Oh, great. More things I don’t know.”
“He could be the Lamp and an asshole.” Fitz jerks a thumb at me. “Case in point.”
“I prefer wiseass, personally.”
“Even so,” says Amanda Senior, chin dipping, even as Amanda Junior raises her jaw. “That doesn’t change the fact that they’re part of this. You’re the one who told me this.”
“Someone? Anyone? I know you’re just ignoring me.”
“The Lamp, the Road, the Door and the Knife,” Fitz recites, voice strange and rolling, that electric hum twitching through the air again, and suddenly, the inside of the SUV is cottony with a taste of static. “After our pow-wow with the old gods—”
“Where Fitz basically threatened the entirety of creation.”
“We really need to circle back to that, at some point.” I dot the air with a finger, as though to bookmark the moment.
“—I had a vision. Which could well have been just a hallucination.”
“For the last time, morels are not that kind of mushroom.”
“You two have a problem communicating information clearly and effectively.”
“The father gods on a land of glass, their faces turned to an ocean black,” Fitz whispers, and now, now he has the rhythm of prophecy to his voice, that roiling timbre, half-here in reality, half elsewhere, his soul moulded into a mouthpiece. “They see a way out. Down through the belly of earth, down where even the gods won’t go. But there is a road that will take the willing to them and at the end, there is a door and a knife. The Lamp will show us the beginning. The Knife will see us to an end.”
“What end? Also, who the fuck is Cason?”
They look over, all three of them, an act that has us swerving alarmingly into a copse of palm trees. I scream. Fitz turns, joins in a high-octave warbling chorus. The Amandas, unsurprisingly, only glance sidelong at the encroaching catastrophe. At the last moment, we turn away, the SUV scraping along the body of a tree. The screech almost drowns out what follows.
“Cason’s the half-human son of the Devil.” Fitz does one of his shrugs, suddenly the icon of insouciance yet again. “That’s all.”
“Oh. Is that it? Is that all? Well, in that case—”
“—SERIOUSLY, WHY DIDN’T you think it would be a good idea to tell me these things?”
Amanda Jr—who is now again the solitary Amanda, her counterpart having driven off, tear ducts drooling blood—cants a look at me. “We figured it wasn’t that important.”
“It is important to know when you’re going into business with people dealing with the Devil.”
“You work for Hell.”
“Diyu, thank you.” I pause. “And that’s different.”
She plants a fist along the indent of a narrow hip, eyebrows raised to the roof of the world. The day persists in being uncomfortably attractive, the blue a colour from the palette of god. Saturated in sunlight falling slantwise over its roofs, our Best Western looks veritably palatial. “How is it different?”
“Diyu is a place of rehabilitation. Abrahamic Hell is just barbaric.”
“Uh huh.”
“The idea behind the Eighteen Levels of Chinese Hell is that at the end of your sentence, you’ll emerge a better entity, purified, ready to again enter the cycle of reincarnation—”
“You have a hell that involves putting sinners in a steamer.”
“The Chinese culture is intimately tied with food.”
“I guess that explains the pan-frying in oil as well.” Fitz adjusts the positioning of the duffle bag, easing it up and over his collarbone with a shrug. Amanda Senior, who is allegedly all right, who is certainly not endeavouring to careen down the side of a cliff, removing proof of our existence and freeing up resources for use by the distributed consciousness of the World Wide Web, wasn’t much of a fashion maven, but she knew the value of gold. Which makes me miss her, but the Internet doesn’t care about individuals. Least of all those it grows on a carbon-fibre umbilical cord in an undisclosed location.
“And that hell where you’re force-fed lava.”
“Really enlightened,” Fitz drawls, a shit-eating grin spreading across the whole of his face. “I gotta ask. What does it smell like down there?”
Like my every day, I almost say, but I curb stomp the compulsion. It’s too soon. I suspect it will not stop feeling like it is too soon, not while I can still smell German tourists crisping in the oven, that fatty tenderness I’ve come to associate with human meat because texturally speaking, we’re not too different from low-grade wagyu. You would think that Hell reeks of the abattoir, but truth is that it smells like the kitchen of a king.
“Like bad decisions,” I manage, and if either of them notice the hitch in my voice, they give no comment. Fitz winks at a coy, luminous, young, brown-haired thing as she saunters past, earning giggles and air kisses, all in spite of the fact Fitz resembles a pimp from the set of Miami Vice.
Amanda holds my eyes for longer than I’d have liked, longer than I can still my breath, and I’m about to tell her don’t make it weird when she lets loose a fluting laugh. “Touché.”
I swallow. I wonder how much they know.
We file into the reception area, which is sterile and spacious, liberally doused with whatever it is that the international cabal of hotels had long ago unanimously agreed would be their signature scent. I swear on Guan Yin’s painted toenails, there’s no other explanation. It’s the same smell everywhere, even when the wallpapers are soaked through with gore: a frantic, pine-infused cheer. Similarly, the receptionist who greets us could be any of the hotel employees I’ve ever encountered: enamelled hair, gleaming smile, a kind of predatory alertness, bringing to mind a Shiba Inu in sight of a small, soon-to-be-dead squirrel.
“Ma’am.”
He runs his gaze over us. I’d expected the practiced amiability to falter, compromised by the fact we’re two idiots in beachwear and a woman of ambiguous ethnicity, a duffel bag between us and nothing else. We have to look like fugitives or a polyamorous triad intent on a brisk, athletic kink.
“Amanda Doe. We’re looking to check in.”
“Really.”
She ignores me. “It’s been a long flight and we lost our baggage.”
The receptionist swaps his expressions, trading ‘impersonal friendliness’ for ‘curated concern,’ the change so abrupt that it makes me recoil. He fixes each of us with thirty seconds’ eye contact, head bobbing, before he concludes the gesture with a smooth, “Sorry to hear that. We’ll send you a bottle of wine. It’s the least we can offer.”
Amanda nods, slapping a credit card atop the countertop, her movements as rehearsed as his. The smile, too, a tiny upturning of her mouth to complement the way the light oils across her hair. It is all frankly unsettling, what with the cognitive dissonance that comes from knowing that Amanda, for all her secretarial elegance, is a goddess hoping to abort her demon children before they can infect reality.
Speaking of which, no one’s discussed this fact anywhere near enough.
I jot down a mental note to remedy this, while the receptionist busies himself with procuring us access to our temporary habitats. Three keycards, specifically. To two rooms. I suspect the wine will route itself to Amanda’s personal sanctuary, but hope rules eternal.
“Fitz and I are taking the suite. You get the weird double.” Amanda passes me my keycard, an apologetic shrug in accompaniment.
Better than nothing. “Beats having to share a room with either of you.”
“Hah.” Fitz glances back at the receptionist, the man’s smile still gelled in place. “Looking forward to alone time with Cason?”
“I was assuming he had his own accommodations?” I glare, letting my voice rise on the last syllable, a question in its tail.
“He does.” Amanda has taken to scanning the environment slowly, skull travelling too far in one direction and then the other, enough to make me wince. No wonder she churns through clones so quickly. “Cason doesn’t like sharing his personal space when he doesn’t have to.”
I bite my tongue hard enough to choke on the pain. Too easy to think that a life with Eros is all orgiastic fun and an all-you-can-fuck buffet of naked bodies. As a species, as a man, you’re flat-out conditioned to make that joke. But it doesn’t require much to put two and two together, and figure, with waxing horror, how bad that can be when you want nothing of what might be involved. Small wonder Cason prefers to be left alone.
“He’ll”—green twitches, neon and wild, across Amanda’s brown eyes—“convene with us after he’s had something to eat. In the meantime, get some rest. We’ll do the same.”
Fitz taps two fingers to the side of his forehead, his eyes bruised purple with exhaustion. Neither of us had really slept during the long flight to Florida, but I wonder when Fitz had eight hours to call his own. His sallow complexion and the microscopic facial tics are clues to an unpleasant truth. Wisecracking is symptomatic of trauma; at least, in my personal experience. I study Fitz, silent, as we enter one of the lime-scented elevators, a child and her blonde mother taking the opposite corner.
The pair exit on the third floor, although not before Fitz conjures a pair of clean boxers to toss at me, blowing a kiss and an entreaty to call him. The mother, for all the haute implied by her hundred-dollar bangs, only muffles her sniggering, while her daughter stares, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.
“Tell you when you’re older,” I mumble, wadding up the underwear and cramming it into a pocket, too tired to be embarrassed.
A droll mechanical voice announces that we’ve arrived on the seventh floor. I stagger out. I want a shower. I want to lie on clean sheets. I want sleep. Mostly, I want a world where I wake up to nine-to-five doldrums, to a wardrobe full of pastel shirts, a job that requires only the punch-card worship of daily attendance, a wife who tolerates me, mediocre children, a dog, maybe, of suspicious pedigree and reasonable intelligence, and tedium, nothing but sweet tedium. I want a life so staggeringly boring that I dream nightly of a dragon god, burning up inside, roasting on the spit of his own spine.
