Last God Standing
Page 24
“My name is Lando Kalel Cooper,” he breathed. “I’m married to Danielle Ahmet Cooper. I am fifty-three years old and I live in the city of House of Angels…”
No. My name is Lando Calrissian Darnell Cooper. I am twenty-nine years old. I’m single…
Surabhi… she needs me…
“No. I’m the host of the number one late night talk-show on the Ten networks.”
I live in Chicago.
“No! I live in the Chumash-Egyptian sister city of House of Angels. I have three children: my oldest son Haru; my daughter, Oheo – it’s an Iroquois name, it means Beautiful; my youngest son is Herbert-Hasani.”
The carphone chirped, “Call from Doctor Philip Chapman.”
“Phil, thank the Gods.”
“You called during dinner. I hope the sheets in your guestroom are clean.”
They’d been working together for nearly three years, starting after the intern fiasco, during which Danielle had insisted LC seek individual counseling. Despite his European origins, the British psychiatrist had become as much a confidante as a therapist.
“Sorry,” LC said. “I’m having a moment.”
“A bad one, I gather.”
“I’m thinking in a foreign language and remembering things that never happened.”
“Things like what?”
“Places… names. I feel like I’m… not myself.”
“Who do you think you are?”
“Someone else.”
“Anyone interesting?”
“I’m serious, Philip.”
“So am I. In our sessions you’ve expressed a feeling of being alienated from your own life, disconnection from the people and things that should have the greatest meaning to you. My question to you now – in the moments before my wife chucks my dinner down the disposal – is… why?”
“I don’t know why,” LC snapped. “Isn’t that why I pay you? To tell me why I’m crazy?”
“LC, we’ve talked about false beliefs, delusions. Most delusions reveal or illuminate some inner conflict, usually some frightening or unpleasant circumstance which we refuse to consciously acknowledge because its presence forces us to consider potentially difficult choices about our lives. This denial requires us to create a false reality in order to justify our dependence on maintaining the status quo, usually in order to preserve some untenable but deeply entrenched belief about ourselves. These beliefs are always self-serving, and always destructive in the end. They allow us a kind of emotional placebo, sort of, ‘Hey, if I don’t look at the real problem because I’m too emotionally distracted by my delusionary world, then I can’t be held responsible for dealing with it’. Meanwhile, your true needs are ignored. This causes more anger and frustration, which in turn necessitate more denial in order to protect the delusion. But the question I want you to ask yourself is: how do these delusions keep me from understanding what’s absolutely vital for me to achieve lasting happiness?”
“Wow. Do you have that stuff written down somewhere?”
“I’m very good. Three marriages and two divorces can’t be wrong.”
“I’m sorry about interrupting your dinner. I just needed to talk to someone.”
“Say no more. Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine. Thanks, Phil. I’ll think about everything you said.”
“Please do. I’m very clever and I’m usually right.”
The carphone function chirped again, “Call from home.”
“I’ve got another call. See you Wednesday?”
“See me what? Oh. That’s very funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“You just said, ‘See you Wednesday.’”
“Call from… home.”
“Why is that funny?”
“‘Wednesday’, from the Middle English, wednes dei, or as derived from the Old English, Wodendaeg: the day named after the Scandinavian god, Woden. You’re thinking in English. That’s very interesting.”
“Call from… HOME. URGENT.”
“Go on,” the Englishman sighed. “I’ll see you on ‘Wednesday’.”
LC voice keyed the Homelink function. The lights in the BMW dimmed as the front windshield switched to playback mode and Herbert-Hasani’s face filled the windshield.
“Where are you, Daddy? Mommy wants to know so she can start making dinner.”
They’d named HH after Lando’s dead father to honor his memory. But sometimes such synchronicities were hard to bear, especially when LC was staring them in the face. From nearly the moment he was born it was clear to everyone involved that Herbert-Hasani bore a startling resemblance to his long dead grandfather.
“Daddy, are you crying?”
“No, Hasa. Just got a little dust in my eye.”
“You look like you’re crying. Daddy?”
“Yes, son?”
“Are you and Mommy getting a divorce?”
“Why do you ask?”
HerbertHasani shrugged, his eyes flickering away from the smarthouse commcamera in LC’s office. “Because Mommy told Aunt Ma’at that you’ve been acting weird since you woke up from your cola.”
“The word is coma, Hasa, and no, Mommy and I are not getting a divorce.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Hasa?”
“When people die like you did, do they come back cause they’re really flesh-sucking zombies, like in the movies?”
LC decided he’d definitely talk to House about letting the children screen too many horror movies. “No, Hasa. Sometimes people just… come back.”
“Why?”
“No one knows. Some people are just lucky, I guess.”
“Lucky how?”
“Because they get a second chance to show the people they love how much they love them. Right?”
“I guess so. Daddy?”
“Yes, Hasa.”
“Are you going to die again?”
LC’s “death” was as much a mystery to his doctors as it remained to his youngest son. Despite heroic efforts by Aziz and the attending anesthesiologist, LC had gone into cardiac arrest, his brainwave activity flatlined. The crash team had just applied the “Hands of Thoth” and were preparing to administer a second jolt of electrical stimulus to jumpstart LC’s heart, when he’d gasped, once.
Days later, while LC lay in his private suite trying to remember who he was, Doctor Aziz, his mother and even Flaunt had tried to make him understand how miraculous his resuscitation was.
“You were dead as old camel crap,” Flaunt reminded him, one afternoon while Barbara was at temple. “Clinically deceased, my man. No heartbeat, no pulse and less brain activity than when you were a snotnosed teenager.”
Flaunt had slapped him, hard, on the shoulder, sending shocks of pain through his now healthy skull. “You’re a godhammered medical miracle!”
“Daddy? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, son. I’m… daddy’s fine.”
“Are you coming home soon?”
LC stared at the landscape passing his “knighted” driver’s window. His mind’s eye insisted upon presenting a dual landscape, a place that was familiar, yet utterly alien to his senses.
What’s happening to me?
A quiet panic was spreading through him, enshrouding his joy at having survived. Doubts beat the air around him like black wings. Because… somehow… he knew.
I don’t belong here.
“Daddy? Are you coming home?”
The fear in Herbert-Hasani’s voice pulled him back. Herbert-Hasani was a cautious child. Born prematurely at the same hospital where LC made his miraculous recovery, he had always been sickly. The ship of his young life had been becalmed by respiratory ailments: allergies, a lifelong bout with Baal’s Cough that LC himself had outgrown. It was Herbert-Hasani who found LC, unconscious, slumped over his desk. The nine year-old had voice-commanded the smarthouse servitors to send for help, and even insisted on riding beside him as the autobarque drove him to the emergency room.
Since LC
’s return, Hasa had hardly left his side, constantly checking his whereabouts, inquiring his arrival times and state of wellbeing. The other night, after he’d put the other kids to bed, LC had heard Herbert-Hasani crying in his room. When he’d asked what was wrong, the boy replied, simply, “I miss my daddy.”
He’d spent the next few hours comforting the boy. But when Herbert-Hasani asked him to tell the story of Coyote and the Coming of Apep, he floundered, unable to recall the details. LC apologized, blaming stress and the everpresent “work” for his faulty memory. Herbert-Hasani had forgiven him, even patted him on the shoulder. Then he’d asked to sleep by himself.
Pull yourself together, Lando.
“No one calls me Lando except my mother. I’m LC.”
“Daddy? Who are you talking to?”
LC is dead.
“I’m fine, Hasa.”
He manually disengaged the autopilot. The BMW swerved into oncoming traffic. Collision alarms bleeped as he wrestled for control of the car, forced it back into his lane. He’d never been the most confident driver, a problem that had secretly undermined his confidence for most of his adult life. It seemed easier to allow the auto servitors to do the driving.
“Not anymore.”
He would work through whatever this was. He would leave his problems in Phil Chapman’s office where they belonged. His family… his son, needed him.
“Daddy’s coming home.”
CHAPTER XXII
A DAY IN THE LIVES
Danielle was clearing the dinner dishes from the dining room table when LC walked through the front door.
“You missed dinner. The children were disappointed.”
She moved with the same quiet grace, the quiet precision he remembered. They’d been married for twenty years, but his wife still carried herself like a woman negotiating a minefield while blindfolded.
“Hey…” he began, and realized he couldn’t remember her name.
“Hi…”
Danielle smirked, an ugly expression that he did remember, the anger of this familiar stranger so palpable even now.
“We ate without you. Again.”
As he watched her back, the graceful curve of her spine, the perfect posture so reminiscent of the dancer she was when they’d met in Toronto twenty-two years ago, he was struck by her beauty. She was French-Senegalese, having grown up the child of three worlds in the halls of academia in Paris. Her father was the Dean of Faculty at Les Institutes des Sciences, her mother, an acclaimed Senegalese singer and poet from Dakar. Danielle had inherited her mother’s looks, a severe, almost harsh beauty; long neck and prominent cheekbones, arching nostrils, high forehead and full lips. She’d studied Coptic and Dance at the Academie du Artes Liberal, and pursued her peculiar dream of bridging the Continents through the performing arts. With her business partner, Amadou Diop, Danielle had formed Le Carnaval du Lumière, a perpetually evolving theatrical production that incorporated dance, magic, acrobatics and circus performers from around the world. The first Carnaval: Fernal, had been an instant smash. Danielle and Amadou had gone on to create a series of even more successful Carnavals.
But, LC’s illness and recovery had taken Danielle away from her career. Before his collapse, she’d spent most of her time on the road, working on design and choreographic elements, tailoring them for each new show. Now she was forced to stay home to oversee the children’s daily routines with the help of their nanny, Martika, or at the hospital. He’d hoped his recovery would close the gap that yawned between them since his affair with the intern, but now, more than a year since his initial diagnosis, the distance between them had grown. Danielle spent more time in her office, or interacting with Amadou, who oversaw Carnaval’s operations.
“Where are the kids?”
“Haru just left for soccer practice. Oheo’s waiting for you to help her with her writing project, and Herbert-Hasani has locked himself in your office.”
“Why did do he that?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He never talks to me so there’s no reason to assume he’s changed since you came back. Nothing has changed, LC. He idolizes you. Even when you can’t be bothered to show up after you promised him you would.”
“I got lost. I was…confused.”
Danielle slammed the stack of plates down on the table. LC heard the brittle crack of breaking stoneware.
“Dani…what’s…”
“‘Dani?’” she said. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“What?”
“Gods, you’re such a bastard.”
She stalked into the kitchen, carrying the stack of dishes. LC heard the too loud clatter of the expensive Carthaginian stoneware.
“Dani…what’s wrong?”
“Just stop it, alright? You’ve made your point. You drove it home a long time ago so just… stop it.”
“Danielle…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He’s waiting for you downstairs.” She was staring into the steaming water pooling in the sink. “Go talk to him.”
“Dani…”
Danielle slammed her fist down onto the ledge of the sink hard enough to send soap suds slopping over the rim onto the floor.
“Don’t call me that! It’s not funny, Lando!”
He reached out and gently gripped her shoulders. “Dani… I need…”
“Stop it, Lando. You’re hurting me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Please don’t touch me.”
It had been bad before. He remembered that much. A coldness had stilled the air between them. Sometimes he imagined that coldness as a disease shared by only two people, a condition that isolated them from each other and from the rest of the world. They’d grown apart slowly over the years, mainly due, he thought, to outside forces. They both had high pressure careers that required almost constant involvement. But in the months preceding his initial diagnosis things had gotten worse. Danielle hardly ever looked him in the eye, and rarely spoke to him unless the children were involved. For his part, he’d gotten so used to this coldness that he’d nearly convinced himself that it was normal. Telling himself, “This is the way it is,” until even he had grown tired of his denials. In that way they’d gone on. Until the visions started.
For a while, after the radiation treatments had failed and the tumor proved much larger and more involved than his doctors first believed, they’d grown closer. His family had wrapped him up in a cocoon dense with caring. Danielle and his mother had spearheaded the effort, moving beyond the coldness he’d sensed but could not remedy to buttress his spirits. But since his homecoming, the disease had rapidly grown worse.
“I have to talk to you,” Danielle said, swiping at her eyes with the back of one wet forearm. “We have to talk about what happens next.”
“Alright. I’ll go see HH. We’ll talk before bed.”
A shimmer of puzzlement darkened Danielle’s face, as if she’d been expecting a different response from him. LC turned, certain that there was more he should say. But he was incapable of imagining what it might be. His heart was pounding again: the terror was back. He was standing at the edge of that great abyss and watching the rudiments of his life being torn out by their roots.
Why am I so afraid? I beat brain cancer, didn’t I?
“Whatever it is, Dani. I know we can beat it. We just have to stick together. Together we can beat anything.”
Danielle paused, her hands hovering over the hot suds, her face averted. At first he thought she was crying, her shoulders shuddering with the force of her sobs. Then she turned, and he saw that she was laughing.
“Amadou was right,” she said with a kind of stunned wonder. “You really are a child.”
“Go away! I don’t want to talk to you!”
LC knocked on his basement office door again.
“Hasa, open the door.”
“No!”
Gods, I really don’t need this right now.
The panic, which had withdrawn to a ma
nageable distance in the car, drew closer now. LC sensed it haunting the shrinking periphery of his control; a hungry ghoul awaiting the totality of night.
“Hasa… open the door.”
The door stayed closed.
“Herbert-Hasani Cooper, if you don’t open this door right now you’ll be punished!”
“You can’t punish me if I don’t open the door.”
It started as a rumble of barely suppressed amusement bubbling up from the pit of his stomach. Herbert-Hasani had inherited his penchant for mouthing off, along with the wit to shut down anyone unwise enough to engage him. LC laughed. It felt so good that, in moments, he was roaring, hardly able to catch a breath. He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor with his back pressed against it, laughing.
“That’s…”
But he couldn’t stop. Behind him, he heard the hesitant shuffle of sport moccasins brushing across the rough carpet in his office.
“It’s not funny! Stop laughing!”
“That’s… oh that’s a good one.”
The door thumped. LC felt the impact from Hasa’s kick vibrate up the length of his spine.
“You know… you remind me of your grandfather.”
The thumping stopped. A moment later, the door opened, and LC let himself fall backward into the office. From where he lay, Herbert-Hasani seemed to loom over him.
“You remember my grandpa?”
“Of course I remember him. I just talked to him last week.”
“You… talked… to Grandpa?”
LC nodded and hopped to his feet. The ease of movement was itself strangely confusing. He’d always kept in shape, ran five miles every day, worked out with weights. But his energy levels since his release were remarkable. Sometimes he felt as if he’d traded his old, worn out body for a younger, fresher one. But that wasn’t exactly right either: it was his mind that felt… lighter. He felt as he had when he was a struggling young comic, fresh out of university, as if the world were wide open and waiting just for him.
For a moment he felt that plunging dislocation again, the disorientation of a meticulous homeowner who returns home only to discover that all his furniture has been rearranged.