Last God Standing (24 page)

“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.”

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 manageable 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.

“What did you talk about?”

“We argued. We always argue.”

“What did you… argue about?”

“What we always argue about: money.”

“But Grandpa’s dead. He died before I was even born.”

And LC remembered that too. Of course Herb was dead. How could he misplace the passing of his own father in the jumbled closet of his memories?

“It’s because you’re different. You look like him. You talk like him, sort of… but you’re not him. You’re… different. You’re…”

Herbert-Hasani shook his head, his eyes squinted nearly shut behind his thick eyeglasses.

“You’re… other. You’re like a puzzle piece with no place to go. All the other pieces are right; they belong. But you don’t belong.”

“Stop it, Hasa.”

“You even smell like him. But you’re the wrong piece. It’s like you’re from a different puzzle altogeth…”

LC slapped him.

The blow grazed the boy’s chin, barely turned his head and he instantly regretted it. It seemed the familiar response. Even now, Herbert-Hasani held his head proudly, a single tear slipping down his cheek.

“You don’t even hit like him.”

Then he was gone.

LC stood in the center of his office while the horrors crowded in around him.

He didn’t know who he was.

He spent the next three hours staring at his computer screen, scanning the global gateway, consuming all he could about things he remembered but didn’t know. His head was throbbing. His eyes ached from scanning hundreds of geographic and historical files.

The horrors were back with a vengeance.

“Anowarkawa is the most populous continent in the Northern Hemisphere. Its three main partitions are called (generically) North, Central and South Anowarkawa.”

My name is Lando Calrissian Darnell Cooper and I live in North America

“Its peoples are an ethnic conglomeration descended from indigenous tribal cultures thousands of years old: Apache, Mohawk, Iroquois, African and Asian-derived peoples largely descended from transoceanic trade partnerships dating back to the Era of the Pharaohs.”

I was born January 12th, 1980. I hate English muffins.

“Coptic is the most widespread language currently in use in North Anowarkawa, although in many places, particularly in the South and Central Partitions, Chumash, the language of the most widely spread of Anowarkawa’s indigenous tribes, is still spoken, largely by first generation émigrés to the Northern Partition and in many traditional religious ceremonies...”

My parents are Herbert and Barbara Cooper. He sells auto parts. She smokes.

“Because of its widespread ethnic diversity, Anowarkawa is host to many religious traditions. However,
the
Light of Amon-Ra remains the most widespread and popular among the Anowarkawan people. Adherents refer to themselves and others as
‘brothers and sisters…’”

I have three brothers: Renfield, Atticus and Gandalf Gary…

“The most widely observed of all the Egyptian-derived belief systems transplanted into the Anowarkawans by pre-European traders and missionaries, Amon’s Light is considered one of the ‘Great Planetary Faiths’ and, alongside Hinduism, Judeo-Christian-Islamicism, Shinto Buddhism and similarly themed
‘ancestor worship’
systems common to indigenous peoples, is among the most widely practiced religions in the modern world.”

I live in Hyde Park. I grew up in Chicago…

“The Midwestern city of Sheekawaa was founded by the indigenous Potowatomi people a century before the first recorded European visitors set foot on Anowarkawa. The Potowatomi later enslaved members of older local tribes, Miami, Sauk and Fox peoples, forcing them to lay the foundations for what would later be known
as the ‘City of the Wild Onion’.”

“LC, I’m talking to you.”

This is wrong. This is other.

“In the Seventeenth Year of Pharoah HorAha, Sheekawaa was destroyed by fire during the second Egyptian invasion. One hundred years later, after the fall of the Potowatomi and the successful assimilation of the
‘debtor tribes’
who had assisted the Egyptians in overthrowing their Potowatomi enslavers, the
‘Burned Mound’
was renamed, New Shekawaa and rededicated as a ‘Wedded City’ to the Egyptian capital city of Cairo.”

“LC, I’m leaving
.
”

I’m engaged to Surabhi Moloke. We’re going to…

“…welcome you to
the
Happy Weddings Show, where our celebrity Bridesmaids help five lucky couples create
‘Weddings to Anger
the
Gods Themselves!’”

“Surabhi!”

He came back to himself with a physical lurch, a sense of engagement so intense that he bolted from his chair.

“I remember! Oh my God… I remember!”

“I can’t do this anymore, LC.”

Danielle was standing in the doorway to his office.

“I’m leaving.”

“Danielle…”

Inside his head, memories were unspooling, memories from another man’s life. “You’re my wife…”

But how can this be?

Look at that damn head. Boy I swear, you look like a damn spear chucker!

LC saw Danielle, her anger and resolution, but he also saw someone else superimposed over her; another woman who loved him, who needed him, whom he had failed.

I want to trust you, Lando. But you don’t let me in.

Danielle. No. Someone else…

My parents taught me how to deal with depression, which was only right since they were the reason I was depressed.

“LC, are you listening?”

And he remembered the headaches, the suffering that seemed to bracket him between both lives, disparate experiences joined and ratified by the blinding throb of…

Power.

…pain. The pain had threatened to…

Save the world.

…destroy him. It had been like this right before his surgery. But the tumor, the source of his pain, had been excised. Now the pain was back; worse than before. It pushed at him, powerful as a tsunami, threatening to sweep him away on a wave of revelation and dread: if his cancer was back, he didn’t know if he could survive another surgery.

“You
didn’t
survive, Lando Cooper. And
that
places us upon the horns of a great dilemma.”

That was the worst moment, the moment before he collapsed. Because the new voice was one he’d never heard before, deep as the rushing of blood through his veins, too powerful to ever be mistaken for human. It spoke in his head as clearly as the tolling of a funeral bell.

“Everything you think you know is wrong, Lando Cooper. You must be
corrected. Death cannot be long
cheated, even by the gods. You are a great wrong in
My universe.”

“LC… Amadou and I are in love. I want a divorce.”

The last thing he saw, before the pain claimed him, was the face of the woman he loved, resolving itself like the ghost of a cherished memory over the face of another man’s wife.

“I remember.”

Then darkness.