The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 7
I drain my cup in one go. “You are definitely being too casual about this.”
Amanda shrugs, and after a moment, I do the same. While I’m rummaging for ingredients to make a proper cocktail, having decided that decorum has no place the day after coming back from the dead, Cason walks over to one of the two beds and seats himself. Springs creak and he frowns. “You’re exactly what I pictured.”
“Underfed crackhead?” Fitz opens the window, leans out as he produces another hand-rolled cigarette from his person.
“Something like that.” Despite assurances that he would not show me any bigotry, Cason’s still clearly experiencing some doubts about my proximity. He stares in my direction, a cool look, before he nods at the fridge. “Got a beer in there, friend?”
I lob a can of Pabst at him. “We gotta talk about what I said in the elevator.”
“Like I said, not my business.” He snatches the beer from the air, pops the tab in a quick motion, tilting the foaming mouth away.
“What’s he talking about?” Fitz cranes an eyebrow. He ignites the tip of his cigarette and drapes out of the window, the fingers of his free hand anchored in the frame. He sucks at the smoke and blows out, a curl of smoke wafting skyward.
“He murdered his wife and kid.”
“Definitely the wrong interpretation of what was an incredibly nuanced situation.” I mix ginger ale and dime-store gin, feeling slightly, as I do, like I’ve disappointed the universe in a profound way. “But maybe right now’s not the time to get into it.”
“He’s right,” Amanda says and the air blues at the sound of her voice, crystallizing, so the world is suddenly in high-definition, every colour rendered so sharply it hurts the eyes. Reality fissures, just enough to see between its laminae: Amanda is raw electricity, a murmuration of data points, impossible, indecipherable. I blink. The effect fades away. “This is where it gets real. Now that we have the three of you collected, there’s one more person to find. Ironically, she’s in a domestic partnership with someone I’ve known for an incredibly long time.”
Fitz pushes from the windowsill and pads forward, a thumb hooked in the pocket of his shorts. At the last minute, he flicks his cigarette out of the window. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t think it was necessary to mention. Naree and I are old friends. The details are unimportant.”
Cason takes a loud slug of his beer. “I don’t want to be rude, but my youngest just pulled off a grand slam at the tee-ball all-stars, and if I’m going to be missing important life events, I want it to be for a good reason. Could we possibly get on with this?”
“I—” Amanda collects the tip of her ponytail in a hand and begins twirling the end around a finger, her agitation girlish and disconcertingly out-of-character. As with so many other things about Amanda, it seems put on: hyperreal, yet disconnected from the usual portraiture of her psyche. But then again, that could also be a miscategorisation of her character. What is the Internet, after all, but a museum of memetic ideas collated at seeming random? “It’s complicated.”
“That is so not an answer,” Fitz says.
“It is absolutely an answer,” Amanda counters, dusting herself off. “It just isn’t the answer you wanted.”
OUR DESTINATION REVEALS itself to be the University of Florida, a reasonably impressive aggregation of structures which Cason quickly dismisses.
“Apparently, it’s all about the Greek life here,” he confides sourly, as we cross into the campus grounds. It is closing on dusk when we arrive. The sky has burned itself down to indigo, and the light is shrunken to blooms of pink. Apparently, we’ll be accosting our target at her last class of the day, although no one will tell me whether the quarry’s a student, a teacher, a janitor, or a nightmare creature folded into the rafters, unable to escape until the school closes for the night. Of course, that part’s my own fault; they already did tell me and I missed it. I really need to learn to talk less and listen more.
“I have no idea what that means.” I look past Cason’s shoulders to the manicured lawns, the attractive topiary, the students drifting between buildings. A few of them are dragging six-packs of beer.
“It’s a party school. My eldest was hoping we’d let him come here to study, but no. He’s going somewhere like CalTech. We’re not letting him waste his youth.”
Cason follows my attention to where a group of students is canvassing passers-by for donations. From this distance, I can’t tell what cause they’ve aligned themselves with. The gilded sign is an abomination of curlicues and complicated lettering.
“Where’d you go to school?” he asks.
I don’t miss a beat. “Hard knocks.”
Cason laughs, loudly and without apology, but he doesn’t say anything more. Instead, we leg it into a brick-red edifice and move rapidly towards a set of double doors. No one but the janitorial staff spare us any attention, and even that seems cursory.
“Computer geeks,” Fitz whispers.
“Come on.” Amanda glances down at a watch that I know doesn’t work. “Naree should be just about done teaching.”
We enter a white-walled amphitheatre, bowl-shaped and ribbed with chairs, staircases on either end. Students crowd the seats: most in hoodies, battered laptops on display. It’s a young crowd, but it isn’t their youth that makes them unique. It’s the fact that more than half of them are not Caucasian, but an eclectic mix of other ethnicities; a sight that makes me indescribably happy. Nothing like seeing non-white kids rocking through the education system. That said, they do share an intensity, which testifies to either an uncommon intellect or a rare respect for their lecturer. Fitz gestures us towards the wall, and we huddle together in a queue. In minutes, it becomes clear where said educator falls on that spectrum.
Smart people are everywhere. Men and women for whom physics is a puzzlebox to crack between their teeth and mathematics is a provocation, something to reach into, bleed on, reconfigure with a pricking of their thumbs, so that two plus two is the colour of a dead woman’s eyes. But not all of them can humanise these theorems, can discuss quantum as easily as an episode of a mid-list sitcom, and even fewer exude the kind of charisma radiating from the locus of the class.
Naree is a presence.
Short, gorgeous, fat, Korean, she paces the floor beside her whiteboard with obvious excitement. Her clothes have an anti-authoritarian lean: punk with a ghost of goth in the latex thigh-highs she wears, stars and moons emblazoned on the black. Naree talks with her hands, with metaphors both esoteric and earthy, with all of her being, acting out every analogy with dizzying enthusiasm.
I peel from my corner of the wall and sidle up to Amanda, leaning over, an arm crossed over my chest. “So, here’s my question: why exactly do you need us as back-up?”
“I told you—”
“Did you get her pregnant?”
“What.”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. Some people seem to really enjoy the internet.”
Amanda stares at me like I’ve sprouted a number of extraneous heads. “I can’t tell if you’re joking, sometimes.”
“I can’t either.” I shrug. “But in all seriousness, what is the story here?”
“If I tell you, will you go away?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“Worth a try.”
The class ends without incident. Students funnel from their seats towards Naree. In minutes, she is ringed by a crowd three bodies deep, every last one of them with questions, papers, excuses for extensions to one assignment or another. We wait until the commotion simmers to a dull clamour before wading into the throng, Naree still oblivious to our arrival. It isn’t until Amanda, squeezing between two blond boys in matching letter jackets, touches Naree on the wrist that she finally takes notice.
“Amanda?” Eyes, lids heavy with shimmering green-golds, widen. “Oh. Em. Gee. It really is you. I can’t believe it. You’re here. You’re actually here.”
Naree burrows through the crowd and into Amanda’s arms, squealing, her next words buried against the other woman’s rib cage. It takes a moment for her exhilaration to be reciprocated, Amanda’s face cycling between expressions before at last settling on a peculiar species of relief. Slowly, she folds her arms around Naree’s shoulders, one after the other.
“Hey,” she says, soft enough that we almost do not hear.
At that, Naree pries herself out of Amanda’s embrace. The students begin an awkward exodus, unable to make sense of our presence. A few bob their chins in our directions, a few scowling in disapproval. Most ignore the fact we’re there, their attention lingering on Naree, and it takes her outright dismissing them for the dregs of the class to finally disperse.
“You’re kinda popular,” Fitz offers, raking a hand through his hair.
“Eh.” Naree loops an arm around Amanda’s and squeezes her hand, a sororal gesture. ”I think they just like the fact I’m not sixty-five and white. Anyway. I’m Naree. I guess you’re Amanda’s questing party.”
“Guilty as charged,” says Fitz.
Cason extends a hand, his smile warm if mildly uncertain of itself. “Cason.”
“Rupert,” I announce, completing the triptych of introductions.
Naree shakes our hands in turn, her grip firm, her gaze steady and fearless. When we’re done with the formalities, Naree takes a step back, exhaling as she does. “Tanis doesn’t know yet.”
“I thought not,” Amanda says, tone even. “It isn’t your responsibility to tell her.”
“That… no, that’s not why. Although I’m still trying to figure out how to tell her that we’re talking again. Tanis knows why we stopped being, uh, friends the first time.” Naree gives a helpless shrug before flitting to her desk, where she extracts a battered leather satchel from under the surface and drapes it over a shoulder. “And after everything that happened in the last year or so, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spring any surprises on her. I mean, Bee was already a lot, you know what I’m saying?”
“Bee?” Cason asks.
“Beatrice. Our baby. We named her for one of Tanis’ sisters who, sadly, isn’t around anymore.” The brightness wicks from Naree’s face, her smile faltering as her eyes drop, memory clouding her expression. But she perks up quickly enough. “She was incredible, though. You guys would have loved her.”
“I’m sure.” Cason hesitates. “Do you have any pictures of Beatrice?”
“The kiddo or her namesake? Because I actually do have both.” Naree waggles her eyebrows dramatically, two fingers already on the clasp of her bag.
I cut in before the photos come out. “Actually, I’m really curious about that thing you just said. Whydid you and Amanda stop talking the first time?”
“Oh. That? You didn’t tell them?” Naree looks at Amanda, purses her mouth.
“It didn’t come up.”
“Liar.” I jab a finger at Amanda.
“Yes. But it can wait. Let’s not forget exactly why we’re all here. Personal histories can wait.”
Any impulse to continue with the teasing dies at the sight of Amanda’s expression, her face haunted, her mouth drawn to a tense line. I wince. It has been easy, too easy, to buy into the camaraderie, the levity of that connection, of coaxing loose a reluctant answer. Like we’re nothing but schoolyard kids and this isn’t the end of the world. Heat blotches my face. I poke my tongue against the inside of a cheek, sigh.
A silence drifts through the room, lingering until I break it with a soft, “Sorry.”
“Whatever.” Amanda smoothes away her unease, recovering her original façade, features once again without anything but a bland pleasantness; the timbre of her voice civil, absent of significant emotion. “We should get going. If that is okay with you, Naree?”
“Yeah. We just have to make one stop.”
“Fine,” says Amanda. “And where’s that?”
The smile is incandescent, almost confrontational. “Daycare. It’s my turn to pick up Bee, and I guess y’all are coming with me.”
SEVEN
HAVE YOU HEARD the one where the Devil’s grandson, a prophet, and a tourist walk into a daycare centre in Florida? It begins with the three of them discussing contingency plans in the event that the children, being more perspicacious than adults, take offence at their existence, and it ends with them wading through an excited sea of bright-eyed kids, their calves suddenly commandeered by ecstatically shrieking toddlers.
“Why aren’t they scared?” Fitz hisses as he plucks a little Hispanic girl from his knee, holding her out at arm’s length, while she screams for him to toss her in the air.
“I blame Cason.”
Of the three of us, Cason is the only one who appears at peace with the scenario. He has a child draped over his back, their arms around his neck, and one riding on the crook of each elbow. Cason, for some reason, is also having an animated conversation with their warden, a sweet-faced redhead in bohemian attire, the airy wardrobe at odds with the distress cragged into her brow.
Fitz sets down the girl. “I blame Naree.”
“Speaking of Naree, where the hell is she?”
As though they’d been waiting their whole lives for the opportunity, listening for the moment that an adult might trip, a chorus of childish voices immediately belt out the word ‘hell’ like it’s a nursery rhyme, sing-songing the expletive at increasing volumes, their glee escalating with every exclamation of the word.
“Shit.”
Just as quickly, the choir picks up on the new obscenity, and the air rings with words both fecal and infernal. Adding insult to injurious guilt, the children suddenly link arms and begin dancing in circles around us.
“Class! Please! That isn’t a word that we use. It is a no-no word—”
“Shit!”
“Hell!”
I lean over to Fitz, who is already being harangued by two sets of twins, his body the rope in an impromptu game of tug-of-war. As he see-saws one way and the other, I declare, “You know, their teacher is probably going to kill us.”
“No sssh—” Fitz swallows the word before he finishes it. “Again. Where the fuck is Naree? Oh, Mary dick-sucking Louise—”
If I wasn’t already consigned to the bureaucracy of the Ten Chinese Hells, I imagine this would be the deed that tips me over the edge into eternal damnation. As the aftershocks of Fitz’s reflexive swearing spreads, cherubic faces becoming illuminated with new, forbidden knowledge, I start cackling. When messiahs of manure are invoked in giddy earnest, I succumb to guffaws, burying my face in my hands, even as the kindergarten teacher barrels down on Fitz, no longer a paragon of pacifism, but an advancing seraph, full of righteous fury and tiny wildflowers in her braids.
“Come on, this isn’t the first time someone’s cussed in front of these kids—“
“How dare you.” She delivers the words like a prophecy, the syllables given the weight of worlds. I sidestep as she speeds up, but apparently there’s no real cause for alarm. Fitz, for now, is the sole recipient of her ire. Briefly, the woman pauses, practically wobbling in place, and in a more normal voice breathlessly demands, “And which of these unfortunate children belong to you, anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you—”
“None of them, actually.”
“Pervert.”
He dances away, palms raised. “That is… okay, not a completely accurate—”
“Not helping your case, Fitz,” I shoot at him as I cross the vestibule to safer grounds, migrating to where Cason is standing with a look of perfect dismay.
“What did you two do?” he asks.
Loyal to comedic timing, the kids pick this instance to revitalise their rendition of shit, fuck, goddamn, and other blasphemies first popularized in the sixteenth century. I jab a thumb in their direction. “Improved their education.”
“Jesus, Rupert, they’re three years old—”
And Naree electsthat moment to saunter out from a corner office, leading a pint-sized replica of herself by the hand. The obscene choir halts, takes a breath, then renews their felonious worship. Two things happen as the first ‘fuck’ hits the air: Fitz dodges a blow from the kindergarten teacher and Naree slaps palms over her child’s ears, mouthing what the heck is going on as she does. I shrug and point at the gate.
“Exit, stage anywhere?” I say.
“You idiots need to find me a new pre-preschool for Beatrice,” Naree hisses, scooping her daughter up, and stalking towards the gate.
I follow in lockstep. Fitz jogs after us and Cason lags behind, apparently intent on smoothing things over with the harassed educator. “Deal.”
“And smooth things over with this school! If this blows up, that’s it. Bee’s going to be a social pariah. People will talk.” She accelerates.
I flutter a hand at Cason, who is still talking to the woman. “Already being dealt with.”
“And—”
“Yeah?”
“And—”
Naree slows as we round the corner. She’s parked under an enormous magnolia tree, its boughs lousy with white flowers. A breeze picks up and petals wick from the branches, suddenly sleeting down upon us. Naree straps Beatrice into her appointed seat in the back, imperiously gesturing at Fitz to take custody of the carrier, and straightens to regard me over the rim of her car’s roof.
“Yeah?”
“That was funny.” Shutting the passenger door with a quiet click, Naree flashes a megawatt smile. “But don’t ever tell anyone that I said that.”
“Got it.”
“Cool. Now let’s go home.”
HOME, AS IT turns out, is a single-storey house made of cardboard.
“Is this in any way safe?”
I gawk at the building, mildly dismayed, half-out of the car window, torso propped up by an elbow jammed against the side of the car door. The walls are yellow, flimsy as a politician’s campaign promise; the roof is white, erratically shingled; there’s a single cupola slanting from what is possibly the attic, or a questionable attempt at adding value to low-cost housing. But the lawn is green and well-tended, the rose bushes flushed, and the light pouring from the sliding glass doors is the warm gold of good custard.
