Last God Standing (3 page)

Zeus howled, and fell to the sidewalk, clutching his divine scrotum.

“While you lie there trying to change into something with no testicles, I’m going to draw you down. It’s going to hurt you, Zeus, a lot more than it will me. And it hurts me. A lot.”

I closed my eyes and pinpointed Zeus’ divine lifeforce. To my upgraded perceptions he shone like a man-shaped star; far too much power than even he should have been able to wield under current planetary belief conditions.

What have you been doing, Zeus?

I stretched forth my hand. Lightning burst from Zeus’ body, the shafts crackling from him, dancing along my fingers to fill my senses with their alien tang. No doubt about it: Zeus had been dipping his fingers into some cosmically strange cookie jars.

The Greek alpha god writhed on the ruptured sidewalk, momentarily held captive by my will, his perfect teeth gnashing the air in silent protest of his impending banishment. His storm-gray eyes rolled in their sockets and found mine and his wounded scowl broadened into a grimace of… fear?

“Beware, Yahweh. The Coming stalks us all.”

Then those strange energies flared up from Zeus and blinded my mortal eyes for a moment. Somewhere in the midst of that conflagration, Zeus screamed. The shockwave was subtle as the deathshriek of a burning Babylonian. I staggered backward, half blinded, covering my ears against that awful roar. It was all so distracting that it took me a moment to realise that Zeus was gone.

He should have been under my control, unable to go anyplace to which I hadn’t banished him. But the sidewalk was empty, a vaguely Zeus-shaped scorch mark the only evidence he’d ever been there. But where was his power? Other than those first few wisps I’d absorbed, the Eshuum was pinpricked in several places but essentially undamaged by that bruising of strange force.

What’s happening?

Using the wisps of divinity I’d scarfed from Zeus, I quieted the thunder, and shoved the unused lightning into a pocket dimension I kept handy for such occasions. I scanned the ether for some sign of the vanished Skyfather, but he was gone, really gone; erased as if he had never existed. I could still taste the psychic spoor of the Egyptian Pantheon long after Moses took the Hebrews out of Egypt. Zeus’s energies should have flowed into me, but they hadn’t.

And Zeus was… gone.

Everyone was screaming. Humans were fighting in the streets, driven mad by the Chaos energies our godfight had unleashed. Downtown Chicago looked like someone detonated an atom bomb under Oprah’s townhouse. In the Buses Only lane, the dead dancer was trying to stuff the newly orphaned toddler down an open manhole. The toddler was putting up a good fight but losing strength with every shove. Over by the Lake, Cheesy Domino was humping the Art Institute of Chicago: if I was going to prevent a catastrophic rupture I needed to get crackalackin’.

I spoke a Word, a shrieking shard of matter-rearranging verbiage. You might call it the access code to the operating system of the gods.

And Everything changed.

Five minutes later…

I was walking toward the L train. I was twenty minutes past the end of my lunch break, my boss was blowing up my mobile phone, and I was nursing the onset of what was going to be the biggest migraine in the history of grain. But I’d set everything aright: a relatively simple procedure when you can control the flow of the Eshuum. Not so simple when saddled with a human brain. I’d rolled back Time to a few moments before Zeus attacked me and removed our duel from the spacetime continuum. No fuzzy photos of the confrontation would haunt the nightly news or go viral on the internet; no evidence to alert humanity to the presence of its faded gods. In effect: the Michigan Avenue godfight never happened.

The tour bus trundled on its way, filled with laughing, living Swedes. The attractive woman with her great legs and green dress pranced by without even glancing my way. Hmmmph. If she remembered her original timeline she’d have fallen to her knees and kissed my hightops: dead one moment/healthy with both eyes free of footlong glass shards the next.

I’d cleaned up the Mercedes-sized droppings left by Cheezy Domino and sent him back to his home dimension: he was adorable but his presence in my dimension was an abomination. I’d brought back the Sears Tower: no one noticed. The only person who acknowledged my efforts was the orphaned toddler. As I resurrected his mother and placed him back in his stroller, he’d asked if I could sweeten his mommy’s breast milk. According to him it tasted like mucous. I’d granted his wish because… well, who needs snotty breast milk?

With the mortal world turning once more as it should, I boarded the elevated train and headed back to work. Ten minutes later, the headache I’d anticipated was coming on with a vengeance. I leaned my forehead against the cool window next to my seat and watched the blue vastness of Lake Michigan as I turned over the last hour’s events. Something weird was happening, something that had never happened across the long slog of Creation: a major god, the All-Father of one of the world’s last great pantheons, had been erased.

Murdered?

I was haunted by the song of the strange energies as they engulfed Zeus at the end. The taste of their effluence still stung the back of my throat. Suddenly I had a mystery on my hands and I didn’t like it one bit. But I was going to have to investigate. After all, it’s my area.

I’m the last of the old guard, at least as far as I can see, the semi-retired captain of a losing team crewed by humanity’s outgrown gods. Now I had a haunting absence; a hole where a god should have been but wasn’t. Zeus was gone, and if the power that should have been released from his renunciation had not flowed into me… where was it?

Beware. The Coming stalks us all.

And who or what was “the Coming”? I was unfamiliar with such an entity. And I knew everybody.

I grabbed my inhaler and took a quick suck. Then, while my enflamed bronchi settled down, I leaned back against the seat and tried to relax. I needed answers like I needed Tylenol with a whiskey chaser. But Tylenol makes me nauseous, and getting drunk was the most irresponsible thing I could do. I had to keep my wits about me.

Beware. The Coming stalks us all.

I usually ignore prophesy. After all, my former self had initially warned Noah about my plan to punish humankind by turning every firstborn mortal child into a particularly unpleasant specimen of cuttlefish. It was only after Noah reminded me that
that
many angry aquatic invertebrates would need a lot more water in order to survive long enough to repent of their sins that I came up with the idea for a great flood. By the time I got around to confirming the change with Noah, half the human race had drowned. I knew how unreliable divine warnings can be. But I couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding that Zeus’ warning had cast: trouble was rushing toward me like a plague of blackwinged sorrows.

I had a feeling there was going to be Hell to pay.

User Name:
Yahweh
.

Screen Name:
JVH

Title:
God of the Israelites. The Creator.
“The Man Upstairs.”

Occupation:
I’m the current Guardian of Eschatological Continuity for Human Consciousness and Development. I’m also the Dominant Defender of Dimensional Integrity Against ODAE (Obsolescent Divine Aggression and Encroachment). Standup Comic.

Turn Ons:
Thought. Music. Creativity. The Arts and Sciences. Classic Comic Books.

Turn Offs:
Negativity. Conservative Talk Radio.

TV:
Fawlty Towers. The Daily Show. Doctor Who. The Science Channel. Food Network.

Music:
Suzanne Vega. Ella Fitzgerald. Bossocucanova. James Brown. Tokyo Rocketbike Cyberninja Team Tetsuo!

Contact email: yahwent@Skyfathergroup
.
Waring.DEUS

God’s Facebook Page

The morning after the fight with Zeus reminded me that having a human body is fun when it comes to things like Chicago-style deep dish pizza or drunken orgies. But you try experiencing a million “morning afters” while still recovering from your own hangover. Now multiply that by a few hundred times a million; all those praying people swearing they’ll never overeat/drink/smoke crack/seduce perfect strangers ever again, and you’ll begin to get an idea of the festival that is my day-to-day existence. And, sometime during the duel with Zeus, I picked up a vicious case of the crabs.

“Damn Greeks.”

“Lando! Your hippie friend is stinking up the living room!”

Barbara never used my buddies’ names, pretending she couldn’t quite remember them, and wouldn’t bother trying since they wouldn’t be coming around much after she’d informed me about how horrible they really were. Not that I had many buddies. In fact, I had exactly one: the fellow who was basting her favorite sofa in a cloud of patchouli oil and vegan beef jerky.

“Coming!”

Just then my phone lit up where it lay on my bedside night table; an electronic remix of Agnus Dei.

Call from Surabhi

“Whaddup?”

“Hello, Loverman. Bad news about tonight I’m afraid.”

Surabhi’s voice was the charming mix of accents typical of second generation London-bred Afro-Brits who immigrate to the American Midwest.

“What’s wrong?”

I took a deep breath: I sounded desperate. And even though I was desperate I didn’t have to sound like it.

“I promised to cover for one of the other teachers at the Language Center. She just went into labor. Fifty students. I can’t cancel on them.”

“But I’ve got tickets to
Namaste, Brahma Blumberg
at the Biolark.”

“Sorry, babe. Ask your homeboy, Yuri. Maybe he’ll go with you.”

“But you’re going to New York tomorrow.”

“I’ll be back Friday. I promise I’ll make it up to you then. Crap… I’ve gotta get back to work. I love you, Lando Cooper.”

“Love you too.”

We disconnected. I bent to grab my knapsack, went lightheaded and nearly fell on my face. I took some deep breaths until the dizziness passed. Then I faced myself in the full length mirror on the door that led to my bathroom.

“Yahweh of the Israelites, you are gettin’ hitched come hell or high water.”

One night, years earlier, I’d gotten drunk and tried to improve my appearance. I lost control of the power and turned myself into an embryonic blue whale. It had taken me two hours to change back, another twenty minutes to repair the floor, and another two weeks to clean up all that afterbirth.

My mortal body was just below average height, thin yet cursed with a jiggly ring of baby fat around my midsection which, at the biological age of twenty-nine, was maddening enough to make me consider re-reincarnating myself with a lower BMI. My hair was my best feature: a decent sized afro that I labored not to maintain on a daily basis. Other than a persistent itching in my nether regions, that was it.

I worked out four days a week in the basement with my father’s old gym equipment: push-ups, sit-ups, “medicine hurls” and other “old school” calisthenics calculated to rupture me when I most expected it. In an attempt to rebuild me into the kind of man of which he could be proud, Herb insisted on murdering me: character building through physical suffering.

I flexed both biceps: string cheese had better tone.

Why not just give yourself a little boost? Just move a few proteins around; bump up your hormonal output. It’s not like anyone’s watching. You could be an Adonis.

“No.”

I was determined to look at the life I had given me as a gift: billions of people in the world had to make do with less.

I took a hit from my inhaler and coughed: recently my “childhood” asthma had set its sights on my adulthood. As the pressure on my chest lessened, my other burden made itself felt.

“Lando Calrissian Darnell Cooper, don’t make me come up there!”

Jesus.

Some people name their offspring after their favorite doctor or beloved religious icon. My mortal father named me with his favorite actor in mind.

“Mister Billy Dee Williams, dammit.”

I can still remember my mortal parents arguing about it only hours after I was Embodied.

“Billy Dee sounds like a pimp’s name, Herbert. Do you really want to name your son after a pimp?”

My father was trying to figure out a way to smoke in a hospital maternity ward. At that time Herb dearly loved smoking. He once claimed he could read the stock market in piles of flicked ashes the way African griots read flung chicken bones.

“Woman, I keep telling you: Billy Dee Williams is the greatest actor of our generation. ‘Billy Dee Cooper.’ It has a special kind of music.”

“It’s music to whip whores by.”

“I defy anyone to watch
The Empire Strikes Back
and not be emotionally affected.”

“You are not naming any son of mine after a pimp!”

Barbara would look harshly on the
Star Wars
franchise in later years, but Herb remained a devoted fan of
Empire
and
Return of the Jedi
, largely because of Billy Dee Williams’ performance as “Lando Calrissian”. Darnell was my mother’s dead father’s name so that was a no-brainer. Since they both agreed that “Lando Calrissian Darnell” sounded powerful without being too “ghetto”, they settled on all three.

“Lando Calrissian Darnell Cooper.”

I remember wondering, as awareness of my former godhood faded, how much divinity it would take to crawl back up my mother’s fallopian tubes and pretend the whole thing never happened. As the Coopers cooed and snickered at me, I lay there, awash in my own meconium, unable to express the horror unfolding in my postnatal gut. And as my divine candle flickered out, I understood that this was to be only the first step down a long, ugly road with humiliation as my most frequent companion.

“Coming!”

I checked my hair, squeezed a pimple that had teleported onto the end of my nose, picked my afro till I struck sparks, then hurried downstairs.

My agent hated to be kept waiting.

“What took you so long? My pitch meeting’s in less than an hour and if I’m late Corroder will fry my balls for lunch.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled through a mouthful of Granola. “Migraine. I’m pretty sure a vicious pixie took a dump in my head last night.”

“Dude,” Yuri growled. “I’m late and you’re talking about pixies. You plan on growing up anytime soon? Jesus.” He snatched up his Blackberry and sent his thumbs flying over the keypad. “I’m texting Corroder to tell him we’re stuck in traffic.”

“I’ll be ready in ten seconds. Why lie?”

Yuri glared at me with an expression that managed to convey pity and exasperation simultaneously.

“When are you gonna get a haircut? Afros are so 2000.”

“My hair is a political statement.”

“Right: ‘I don’t know how to groom myself. Please kill me.’”

“That’s a little dark.”

“Dude… I’m a cable television executive and I can’t pay my cable bill. ‘Dark’ is what I do.”

Yuriel Kalashnikov was handsome in a California beach bum sort of way; muscular without being obnoxious about it, with dirty-blond hair and electric blue eyes; a young Clint Eastwood armed with a Blackberry instead of a Colt 45. He was born of a handsome Swedish immigrant couple from San Francisco’s “Little Trollhattan” neighborhood: Ulrik and Ingeborg Rolfstaddtsen. Ulrik was an independently wealthy organic beet farmer and yoga instructor. Ingeborg was a vegan animal rights activist/ecoterrorist/singer-songwriter. They met in 1974 during a street festival dedicated to ending the war in Korea despite the fact that it officially ended in 1953. Ulrik, however, had uncovered evidence while astral projecting, that the American Military Industrial Complex was waging a covert, CIA-funded police action in Pyongyang. While attending a seminar on how to empower the little-known but highly-endangered Native American coon rat, Ulrik watched Ingeborg sing the song that would make her a minor national sensation: Coon Rat vs Fat Cat. The song scurried halfway up the Top 40 pop charts before relegating itself to the 99 cent music rack of history. Yuriel Kalasknikov Che Guevara Rolfstaddtsen was born eleven months later. Now, the leftist socialist Yuri, a bisexual yoga devotee who belonged to PETA, Greenpeace, ACTUP, MOVEON.ORG and the NAACP; who was a subscribing member to National Public Radio, The Daily Anarchist and Oprah’s Book Club… Yuri Kalashnikov was the angriest pacifist on Earth.

We’d met one night five years earlier at a comedy club on the North Side. He was there representing a client, a terrible Indian comic with a wooden leg. He’d watched my set and declared himself a fan. He represented me for three months before being offered a job as an assistant to a television development executive. We’d remained friends and occasional collaborators ever since.

“Can we go please? I can’t be late because of you. Again.”

I grabbed my satchel and headed toward the front door.

“Wait one. Goddamn. Minute.”

My mother stepped out of the kitchen. Barbara Cooper was tall, light brown; the “high yellow” to my father’s “milk chocolate”. She was wearing an ultratight, leopard print microdress that might have contained her in the Eighties but had long since given up the fight. She was the kind of “thin” that never translated into “fit”, her breasts as dangly as the udders on an undermilked heifer. For some reason, she’d chosen that morning to show off the network of fine scars from her latest unsuccessful varicose vein removal surgery. She was wearing her favorite pink “chacha heels”, the ones she only broke out when she was trying to seduce one of my friends. She took a drag off her Virgina Slim and French inhaled.

“Aren’t you boys going to compliment a lady on her appearance?”

“Barbara,” I said. “Why are you dressed that way?”

“I’m on a voyage of self discovery.”

“You hoping to discover the Island of Sad Old Hookers?”

Barbara blew a perfect menthol smoke ring across the living room. “I’m trying to ‘discover’ why you haven’t introduced me to your handsome friend.”

“It’s Yuri, Barbara. You’ve only met him a hundred times.”

“Sarcasm makes you look ignorant, dear.”

“Herb quit smoking, you know. He’s healthier than you are. Doesn’t that fill you with rage?”

Barbara laughed while her eyes checked out Yuri’s package.

“Some of your darker skinned blacks look ridiculous with cigarettes dangling between their big, Ubangi soup coolers, Lando. You know that. Mama can pull it off because I’m one of the sexy people. Right, Yuri?”

Barbara batted her eyes and shook her “junk” in a way that made it nearly impossible to look at her without screaming.

“Yuri… what is that? Polish?”

“No, ma’am. It’s Russian.”

“You mean my boring son is hanging out with a communist? How’s that for a poke in the shitbox?”

“Mother! You’re ‘thinking out loud’ again.”

Barbara shrugged this away. “I’m sorry, Yuri. I’m sure Lando has told you about my condition.”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s not a problem, Barb.”

Barbara giggled. The vodka gust scorched the air between her mouth and my nostrils.

“He’s a winner, Lando. And so handsome...”

Yuri offered up his most rakish smile. “Coming from a looker like you, I’ll take that as high praise, Barbara.”

“…for a big dumb Polack.”

“Barbara!”

“You gentlemen still haven’t commented on my appearance.”

“That’s because you look ridiculous.”

Barbara dropped her cigarette and ground it out on the carpet. Then loosened her straps and winked at me.

“Good.”

“Look out!”

Yuri wrenched the wheel sharply to the left, swerving into the far lane to avoid the elderly man who had just stepped out of his ancient white Cadillac. We’d never even come close to hitting him, but we nearly rear-ended the biker on the Harley stopped at the red light in front of us. We screeched to a halt inches from the Harley’s rear wheel. Yuri overreacted. Of course.

“Will you stop doing that?”

“I wasn’t sure you saw him.”

We were log-jammed in downtown rushhour traffic. In the sweltering heat inside his beloved second generation electric car, Yuri started doing his deep breathing exercises.

“Barbara’s been acting very strange lately.”

“‘Strange’ for your family or ‘strange’ for normal people?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry. I’m pitching something to Corroder today and I’m nervous. I think it could be really big.”

“Swell. What is it?”

“I woke up with this idea in the middle of the night. It was so powerful I started developing it right then and there…”

“Here’s my stop. Stop now!”

Yuri jammed on the brakes, throwing me against the dashboard. I bounced. Then I grabbed my backpack and opened the door.

“You up for a movie tonight?” Surabhi’s got to work, and I’ve got two tickets to see
Namaste, Brahma Blumberg
at the Biolark.”

“I hate when you do that.”

“What?”

“Ask me what I’m up to and then change the subject before I can answer. Besides being the worst backseat driver on Earth, you’re also incredibly self-centered.”

“No I’m not.”

“You make everything about you.”

Yuri shrugged, and lit a cigarette from the box he’d recently begun keeping in his glove compartment. “Sometimes it’s hard to be your friend. I’m just sayin’.”

“Hurtful. Come on, hang out with me tonight.”

“Negative. Corroder and I have a dinner meeting with the Vice President of Comedy Development at Fox. He’s in Chicago looking to scare up some talent.”

“OK, meanwhile, I’ve got the gig at Coconut Jose’s on Thursday; a proposal dinner to plan for Friday night; and my parents are about to kill each other and take a Korean callgirl with them.”

“You’re gonna kill at Coconut Jose’s. This is going to be a big gig for you. I can feel it.” Yuri glanced at his Greenpeace Whale Watch. “Damn. I gotta jet. You want me to pick you up Thursday night?”

“No thanks. I finally got a monthly bus pass. You’re a carpool-free agent, my friend.”

“Bus pass? One of these days you’ll work up the balls to actually drive a car.”

“I prefer public transportation. Why add to the black cloud of toxins already hanging over our fair city?”

“Dude,” Yuri sneered through the passenger’s window. “When the Hell are you going to stop fooling yourself?”