“I’m sorry about last night. I made a complete jackass of myself.”
Surabhi uttered the weird, strangled little laugh she affected when she was trying not to cry. “Daddy’s been hammering at me since we left the restaurant.”
“I’m so sorry, babe. I drank too much. If your dad yells at anyone it should be me.”
“Oh, Daddy never yells. He smiles. He offers his advice. After the first five hours you’re ready to throw yourself under a UPS truck.”
We both laughed.
“You made a joke,” I said. “Jokes mean things aren’t all bad. Right?”
“Lando… I need to take a break. I’ve got to get my head together, and I can’t do that if you’re around.”
“Surabhi… I can make things right.”
“Lando, I saw something in you last night… something I never knew was there.”
“I drank too much of that damned wine.”
“It wasn’t just the wine, Lando. You were… different. Really different. Angry, vengeful…”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “There are things… you don’t understand.”
“You said that already. Twice.”
“Because it’s doubly true.”
“Really, Lando? That’s how you’re going to explain? By making jokes?”
“Surabhi…”
She’d hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately it was the nail that sealed the lid of the casket into which I’d incarnated myself. My mind was racing, sifting options. I realized I was searching for a lie, the right lie. But every lie led to an even more unacceptable lie. And every one of those lies led right back to the most unacceptable Truth.
“Lando... do you love me?”
“Of course… of course I love you…”
“There’s a part of you that you keep locked away, and every time I get close to it you make jokes. Help me, Lando. I can’t live a life filled with surprises like last night. Help me understand.”
“Here it is, Pinocchio,” Connie whispered from somewhere a million miles away. “The moment of truth.”
“Not now.”
“If not now, when, Lando?” Surabhi said.
“No! I wasn’t talking to you!”
Surabhi made that terrible sound again.
“I guess I have my answer.”
“Wait! When are you coming home?”
In the background at her end I could hear a gate agent announcing that boarding was about to commence.
“I’ve got to go. Daddy’s waving like a maniac.”
“Surabhi…”
“Don’t call me, Lando, OK? I’ll… I need to think.”
“Surabhi… I love you.”
The line went dead.
I spent the rest of Saturday evening enumerating all the ways Magnus Moloke might be poisoning his daughter against me. I’d certainly given him more than enough ammunition. I’d become my own Trojan Horse, concealing my true self beneath a false front in order to smuggle an army of doubts through unguarded gaps in my common sense. The hopeful part of me continued to replay the events at Henri Lumiere’s and proclaim, “It wasn’t really that bad.”
But the other part of me, the merciless assassin armed with the keys to my mental projection room, whispered, “Oh no. It was worse,” and it took demonic pleasure in replaying the worst moments in 3D and Dolby Digital, ad nauseum.
Desperate for some way to pass the time, I checked the Waring’s telepathic interface, scanning the web browser of the gods to compile a database of deities who might want to humiliate, depose and/or kill me.
GODS WHO PROBABLY WANT TO HUMILIATE, DEPOSE AND/OR KILL ME…
I. ZEUS.
Last of the known active skyfathers. Hates Yahweh for diverting believers during the advent of Judeo-Christianity. Whereabouts unknown. Believed dead.
II. ODIN.
King of the Norse Gods. Hates Yahweh for diverting believers during advent of Judeo-Christianity. Retired.
Odin had voluntarily retired more than a century earlier, opting to assume a mortal seeming. This allowed him to move about in the mortal world while maintaining his powers and actual divinity, even though he was still subject to the dwindling effect that constrained all of humankind’s extant gods. He currently owned and operated a large organic dairy farm in Minnesota with his commonlaw wife, Lesotho, the Nigerian goddess of the harvest. When last I’d checked, Odin was fat and happy and up to his ears in almond bark.
My mobile tinkled: Bodhisattva, by Steely Dan.
CALL FROM ATTICUS
“Hello?”
“I haven’t heard from you.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“It is when you promised my kids you’d take them to Wacky World tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, man. I totally forgot.”
“Lando…”
“I forgot!”
“So you’re gonna blow them off… again.”
“I didn’t say I was going to blow anybody off.”
“Good, cause if you did I’d hunt you down and stab you myself. They’re making me nuts and I need to get laid.”
“I always feel so good when we talk.”
My oldest brother laughed, completely without humor.
“Good. Maybe you can actually enjoy your family. For a change.”
I thought about it: a day spent chasing my brother’s brood through a harmless amusement park might take my mind off my problems. At least for a while.
“I’ll pick them up at nine,” I said. “Maybe a day of Wackiness is just what I need.”
Whoever said God loves children and fools never met my niece and nephews. We had just exited the Wacky Wheel of Wonder after being stranded atop the “oldest ferris wheel in the Chicagoland area!” The Wheel suffered a senior moment exactly when our car was at the top. I’d spent the last two hours crammed between three hysterical pre-adolescents: Nancy screamed for her mother the whole time while Nelson, who suffers from shrunken bladder capacity, urinated directly onto the heads of the riders below us.
I’m throwing up in a convenient trashcan when a hypermasculine Voice thunders across the park.
“Where are you, Yahweh? Come out and fight!”
People raise their faces toward the heavens, perhaps expecting a fireworks display, or Walt’s WackTacular: a tired laser lightshow that no one enjoys.
“Face me, Yahweh! Heed the voice of your master!”
I turn to see Lucifer standing three stories above Wonderworld, a tall red-skinned abomination wreathed in flames.
Wait… that’s not Lucifer.
It’s Agni, the Hindu god of fire. In full battle Aspect. He looks furious, though from what I can remember, Agni is always furious.
“Look, Marty!” one Northside hausfrau shrieks. “It’s one of those Bollywood musical numbers, like in Slumdog Millionaire!”
More people snap photographs. Several Japanese tour groups wave enthusiastic thumbs ups, chanting at the glowering god.
“Jai Ho! Jai Ho! Jai Ho!”
Agni sneers down at the milling mortals. He’s come dressed for the occasion: blood-red armor that shines like a dying sun; red leather greaves covering his wrists and ankles. Golden armbands gird biceps the size of a hippo’s backside. For our duel, he’s selected his favorite talisman: the Overthrow, a flaming spear whose blade was smelted at the heart of a raging volcano. The burning blade screams; its voice is the burning of a thousand villages, the shriek of a million cut throats. With it, Agni can destroy a large city. There can be no doubting his intentions: the God of Fire is open for business.
“Where are you, Yahweh? Show your face so that Agni may carve it from your skull and feed it to my battle hogs!”
But…
Then Agni squints down at me and his eyes turn redder than his skin.
“Die!”
Agni hefts the Overthrow, and hurls it. With other than mortal vision I watch the spear streak over the park, slicing atoms and sucking fission, adding their released energy t
o Agni’s obscene might. But I’m an asthmatic comedian with pee in his cotton candy, and I have no idea why Agni is doing this. He was a friend, once. My confusion causes me to hesitate one second too long.
And Changing Woman steps out of my medulla oblongata and catches the Overthrow.
“Hey! This thing’s got quite a kick!”
Connie holds the burning godspear. It screams and bucks, inches from my face, straining to contain all that power. Power taken from the souls Agni claimed in the millennia of his reign of fire; the souls of those who burned in his name.
“I could use a little help out here!”
“But Agni is one of the good guys! Connie… he’s on our side!”
I can feel Agni’s power struggling to wrest control of the Overthrow from Connie. He’s too strong.
“LANDO!”
I listen to the souls shrieking inside the spear, all those shrieking souls. And I tell them the Secret.
A stunned silence is the weapon’s only reply. The great spear hangs in mid-air, vibrating, as if considering its next target.
Connie releases the Overthrow and steps back.
“That oughta do it.”
Then she disappears. Normal spacetime resumes.
“What…?” Agni grunts. “What did you do?”
The stunned voices trapped within the blade are beginning to comprehend what’s happened. But they’re frightened. While they remain afraid Agni can use their power for himself.
Around us, tourists are snapping photos and waggling their heads like Indian kuchipudi dancers. The Overthrow is wavering, its captive souls growing bolder, waking up from their long nightmare. I reach up and touch the tip of the burning blade.
“Go on! The revolution has begun. You’re free!”
The mass exodus explodes into three-dimensional space. Countless souls stream out of the Overthrow, swirling through the air above Wonderworld like a torrent of rainbows, a stream of luminous mortal spirits. I also see the souls of monsters and minotaurs, maidens, and minor gods. The released captives laugh and sing as they streak skyward.
“Where’s everybody going?”
Agni is down to a mere six feet tall. The Overthrow, which has always been a magical extension of his ego, douses itself and droops toward the ground, finally flopping with all the force of wet naan bread.
“Agni… why are you doing this?”
Agni charges me. My head strikes the concrete and the glowing soulstream is replaced by shooting stars. When I can see again I’m sharing nosespace with Brahma’s angriest son.
“You don’t get it, Yahweh. The Coming… it is stronger than all of us. It wields power greater than any god. Greater than mine. Greater than yours.”
That’s when I see the terror in the firegod’s eyes.
“What’s happened, Agni?”
“It compels me. It has my family, Yahweh… my children!”
“Agni… what’s wrong?”
The firegod gets to his feet, backing away from me.
“Beware, Yahweh. The Coming stalks… stalks us… No! No please! Please don’t do that!”
Agni screams, tearing at his hair. Then he begins to spin, whirling, turning faster than mortal eyes can follow, until he vanishes in a blast of red flame.
Agni!
The tourists broke into wild applause, snapping pictures and dancing like Hindi Cinema stars. Nancy, Nelson and Nathan were all staring at me, nearly catatonic.
“Uncle Lando,” Nancy whispered. “You’re really Professor Dumbledore.”
Then she fainted.
A million tiny spikes pricked behind my right eye.
“Great show, young man. But I think all that blood is a little over the top, don’t you?”
The Northside hausfrau was standing in front of me, staring at my chest. I looked down: my shirtfront was soaked with blood. I reached up and felt wetness all along my upper lip and chin: blood was pouring out of my nose.
Someone offered me a tissue. I grabbed it, then two more, and pressed them to my nose.
What just happened?
“Thank you. Goodnight, everybody. Drive safely.”
Then I hit Reset.
My laptop screen was blinking, announcing that I had a message. The flashing screen found its echo in my throbbing brain. The browser of the gods had added another entry to my list of gods who probably wanted to kill me. I changed my shirt. I’d had nosebeleeds before, but never as heavy as this one. I tossed the shirt into my dirty laundry basket, grabbed a clean T-shirt and logged on. My screen turned pearlescent as the entry loaded.
III. ARES.
Hates Yahweh for humiliating him and probably murdering his father/uncle, Zeus… and for diverting believers during the advent of Judeo-Christianity. Status… unknown.
Yes. Ares. The Greek war god’s hatred for me nearly matched his father’s. More importantly, I hadn’t seen him at the last few conventions. Centuries of bad blood between the pantheons had ensured low turnout from Zeus’ relatives. But Ares was hyper-confrontational – all too eager to pick up a bazooka or a Christian oil company executive and start blasting. Whoever my enemy was, He or She was more subtle, sending in dumber gods to wear me down, exploiting ancient resentments among my colleagues. My thoughts turned again to the one entity of whom I still wasn’t sure.
Where are you, Lucifer? What did you do to Agni?
I searched the Waring, but could find no trace of the Adversary. Lucifer had hidden himself so well that even the search engines of Divinity couldn’t find him.
Thoughts of the battle at Wacky World gave way to thoughts of Surabhi. What was she doing? What was she thinking?
Hungry.
I went downstairs to make pancakes: nothing like a condensed carbohydrate onslaught to set my abused neurons firing in the correct sequence. I was halfway to the kitchen steps when Missy Tang’s highpitched giggle percolated up from the kitchen.
“Is that my wayward son skulking around up there? Come on down here, Land Rover.”
Missy Tang giggled again.
“I call him ‘Land Rover’, which is really just the words ‘Land’ and ‘Over’ stuck together! See? It kind of rhymes with Lando! Isn’t that a pisser?”
The noise from their conjoined guffaws sent iron spikes through the bones in my skull. I considered giving them matching strokes. Small ones. Just lethal enough to kill off their speech centers.
“That would be wrong,” Connie said. “Hilarious. But wrong.”
“Now you show up. Where have you been?”
Our relationship was part of a premortality agreement I’d taken up with the Earth Goddess of the Navajo nation: a gradual divestment of divine power via the slow acquisition of a human soul. The essence of the Plan: act as my conscience, occupy the driver’s seat of my morality until I matured enough to regulate my actions. In return, Changing Woman would remain an active player in the human story. But the alliance was never easy.
“You’ve been handling things so well on your own lately I thought I’d go visit some new worshippers.”
“That’s odd.”
“What’s so odd about it, bigshot? I know your followers tried to wipe every trace of my pantheon from the world, but good gods are like cockroaches: you can’t kill ’em, no matter how hard you try.”
“I don’t want to fight, Connie.”
“My people held onto the Old Ways well into the Twentieth Century, despite genocide, Catholicism and Dick Clark. How’s that for faith, Mister Ten Commandments?”
“I’m sorry, Connie. Who did you go see?”
“There happens to be a little old lady named Esmeralda Sanchez, out of Santa Fe. She’s a tribal elder, which is unusual in Navajo culture. Anyway, Esmeralda’s been telling the people the white god of the Americas is dead – no offense. She’s calling for a return to the old religions. She’s building a considerable following. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about.”
Connie sighed, loss and longing in the exhalation. “Did I ever tell yo
u about my family? My Husband? Sun Spirit Who Shines At Night? Now there was a sun god. So handsome. I remember…”
“Where the Hell’s my money?”
Herb was in my face. He was bulking up for a local Ironman competition, bingeing on protein drinks and vitamin supplements. They sometimes made him subject to fits of organic ’roid rage, usually whenever I was in the general vicinity.
“Earth to Lando: I want my money back.”
“What money?”
“See that, honey? Why do I even try?”
“Daddy’s a little sad, Lando,” Missy Tang squeaked from the stool at the center island. “He’s struggling with some deepseated resentments at the moment.”
Missy Tang was a pretty, KoreanAmerican woman. She was in her early thirties, but blessed with the body of a twenty year-old aerobics instructor. Missy took courses at a local community college, pursuing a double certification in Philosophy and Karmic Conflict Resolution, while dancing nights at the Shakedown, the “gentleman’s club” Herb owned with a silent Filipino business partner.
“Daddy’s disappointed because he feels you let him down. He’s also struggling with the growing suspicion that he can’t really trust you, leading to feelings of disconnectedness combined with increased awareness of his approaching mortality.”
Herb was glaring at me with an expression that managed to convey everything Missy Tang had just described.
“We had an agreement, Mister. You shook my hand at the conclusion of that agreement and accepted monies from me. In exchange for said consideration, you promised certain services, to be rendered by you. When I pay monies collected by the sweat of my buttocks I expect you to hold up your end of the bargain.”
“Ah! The lawn.”
“You asked me for an advance, supposedly to pay for a hotel room to celebrate with your ‘girlfriend’.”
“I spent the money.”
“On what?”
“A ‘like new’ copy of X-Men #94. It’s the issue where Thunderbird dies while fighting Count Nefaria on the wing of his stolen evil jet fighter.”
“I couldn’t be more depressed.”
“Sorry. Things are crazy for me at the moment.”
Last God Standing Page 14