I flex and move the arm. Pick up a piece of concrete. Toss it from my good hand to my new one and back again. The biomechanical hand feels pressure, heat, and sharpness, but not like my regular one. It’ll take some getting used to, but it’s better than a burned stump.
The arm isn’t the only thing I have to work out. I don’t know a secret way out of Tartarus. I don’t even know the way in. But I’ll find it, and if hoodoo and bullshit won’t get me out, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue. That always worked on Mom.
I walk up to an open level at the top of the garage and look out over the city. On top of a hill less than a mile away is the asylum. If Eleusis is as weirdly laid out and fucked up as the rest of this L.A., Alice might as well be on the moon. I don’t know if I can even get to her in twelve hours, much less get her and Semyazah. I should have asked Josef for a jet pack instead of an arm.
Escaped lunatics are warming themselves around a fire of old furniture and my wanted posters.
Maybe I should steal a car and take my chances on finding a road to the Observatory somewhere.
“Still trying to get up that hill, eh?”
I look over my left shoulderI heft sho and then my right. There’s a small round man in a red tailored suit sitting on the edge of the wall with his feet dangling over the edge. I look at him and he glances at me.
“Is he gone?”
“Who?”
“Your pal Josef. Is he gone?”
“He’s not my pal and yes, he’s gone. Who are you?”
“I’ve had my eye out for you and then I see him fitting you out with a bug claw. I just naturally assumed that you two were buddies.”
I circle around behind him, trying to get a better look.
“Who are you?”
He shrugs.
“Who is any of us really?”
“Don’t get cute.”
“I was born cute. You’re the monster.”
I get out the na’at and hold it where he can’t see and walk over until I’m close enough to get a good look.
It’s Mr. Muninn. Only not. It’s one of his brothers. They’re not just twins, they’re the same in every detail including the clothes, except that where Muninn is all black, this one is all red. The angel in my head makes a sound I’ve never heard it make before. I put the na’at back in my coat.
“What’s your name?”
The round man bounces his heels off the side of the building.
“Kid, you couldn’t pronounce my name with three tongues and a million years to practice.”
“Muninn told me his.”
“Did he?”
“Didn’t he?”
The red man holds up his hands, the fingers spread wide.
“Five brothers. Each of our names and consciousness corresponds to a color. Yellow. Blue. Green. I’m red, as you might have noticed. Muninn is black, the sum of us all.” He ticks off each color with a finger. “Now, if you were the literary type or had ever read a book in your life, you might know that the mythical Nordic deity Odin traveled with two black ravens. One was called Huginn. Guess what the other was called?”
“Muninn nng.01C;Munamed himself after a bird?”
“It’s his idea of a joke. Don’t hate him. He’s the youngest.”
The angel in my head stops making the funny noise and finally gets out a single word: Elohim.
The red man is looking at me. I get the feeling he can read me a lot better than I can read him because I can’t read him at all.
“Are you . . . ?”
“Yep.”
“All five of you are?”
“Yep.”
“Mr. Muninn, too?”
“I think we established that when we established that he’s one of us five brothers.”
My head is going funny again. My stomach twists. I’m swamped by a fascination and anger that I’ve been carrying around a lot longer than the eleven years I spent Downtown.
“Muninn lied to me. I thought he was one of the few people I could trust.”
“Calm down. He didn’t lie to you. He just didn’t come up and say, ‘Hi, kid. I’m God. How’s tricks?’ Would you have believed him? I wouldn’t, and I’d know he was telling the truth.”
“At least I can call him Muninn. What am I supposed to call you? Santa Elvis?”
“How about Neshamah? That’s one I think you can pronounce without breaking your jaw.
“What are you doing down here?”
He holds out his hands.
“Surveying my handiwork.”
I lean on the wall with him and look out over the city. Something explodes a few blocks north. A fire starts in a building down the block. I guess the Kissi with the matches got his wish.
“If this was my Erector Set, I’d return it and get my money back,” I say.
Neshamah shakes his head and shrugs.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. Eleusis was a beautiful place once. The whole universe was. We . . . well, it was still I back then . . . were building perfection, but it went wrong.”
"0"r="#000“Did you invent understatement back then or did you come up with it later?”
“At least we, I, dreamed big. What do you dream about?”
“You know exactly what I dream about. It’s why I’m here.”
“A dunce on a white horse tilting at windmills. Very original. You know what my brothers and I did? We invented light. And atoms. And air.”
“If you get the credit for light, you deserve the credit for skin cancer, too, so another bang-up job on that one.”
He puts his head in his hands in an exaggerated gesture.
“Cancer. Damn, you people are a mess.”
“You made us, so what does that make you?”
He watches smoke rising from the nearby fire as it drifts up to meet the burning cloud of the sky.
“We were so sure we got you right the first time. Then there was the whole Eden debacle and it was all downhill from there. But don’t worry, the new ones are a lot better.”
“You’re done with us and on to Humanity 2.0?”
“Oh, we’re way beyond 2.0. The new ones are nearly perfect. Nearly angels. You’d hate them.”
“Fingers crossed I never have to meet one.”
He leans over to me and speaks in a fake conspiratorial whisper.
“You won’t. I put them far, far away from you people. Why do you think space is so big?”
He sits up and laughs, pleased with his vaudeville act. I always wondered if I’d run into him sometime. I’m not sure what I was expecting. A muscle-bound Old Testament Conan Yahweh. Maybe a pothead New Testament love guru. Something. But not Muninn. And especially not a bad Xerox asshole version of Muninn.
“Why did you leave me down here all those years?”
“You mean why do I allow human suffering?”
“No. What I mean is why did you leave me down here?”
“You don’t belong anywhere, so what difference does it make where you are?”
“You really hate me, don’t you? I’m every fucking mistake you ever made all rolled into one.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Aelita murdered Uriel, my father.”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell her to?”
“Aelita and I aren’t really on what you’d call speaking terms these days.”
“Is my father stuck in Tartarus?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“He’s just gone.”
“The other dead nephilim, are they gone, too?”
He raises one hand and drops it back in his lap.
I ask, “What’s in Tartarus?”
He doesn’t say anything for a while.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d put that cigarette out. It bothers my allergies.”
“You have allergies?”
“Only down here.”
I flick the cigarette over the side into the crazies’ bonfire below.
“What I don’t get is the disappearing act. You hate me. That’s a given. But if you were done with all us mortal slobs and moving on to 2.0, why didn’t you just kill us? Or didn’t you care enough to put us out of our misery? Is that who you are? One of those people who forgets their kid in the car on a hot day until it has a stroke?”
He doesn’t move or speak for a while. He just looks down into the street. A couple of raiders walk by, passing a bottle back and forth. Neshamah leans over the edge and spits, hitting one of the raiders on top of his head. He laughs.
“You broke my heart. Not you in particular. All humanity. And then there was the incident in Heaven with Lucifer and his juvenile delinquent friends. I had to throw a third of my children into the void. I think the ones that stayed, the quote ‘loyal ones,’ were just as bad if not worse. So puffed with their importance and self-righteousness. The funny thing is, I never really believed that Lucifer wanted my throne, but I think a few of the angels who stayed did. They saw my failure and felt entitled to it after they fought and won."leght and”
He shakes his head. Looks down while he bounces his heels off the building.
“Like any decent God, I willed myself into being. I created time, space, and matter and set out to construct a universe. When I was finished, nothing quite worked the way I wanted. The angels rebelled. The Kissi wreaked havoc. And all of you on earth, well, you were just you. Then one day I realized I wasn’t me anymore. I’d gone from one big me to five smaller ones. I never bothered trying to put myself back together. What was the point? Some of me wouldn’t want to do it and I didn’t want to fight with myself.”
“You know, I’m sure if you asked nicely, they could find a bed for you at the pretty hospital on the hill.”
“Watch your tone. I could turn the rest of you into an insect to match that arm.”
Just what I need. For this whole thing to turn even more Kafkaesque.
Adjust course.
“I’ve been wondering, who would build an asylum in Hell and who’d it be for?”
“Ah, that’s the first interesting thing you’ve asked,” says Neshamah. “Originally it was for the Fallen. Some of them went mad when they realized what they’d done and gave up. Occasionally damned human souls develop a similar condition, so when I took back this portion of Hell to create Eleusis for the heathens, I left the asylum intact. It’s pointless to punish the insane—they don’t understand what’s happening or why. Treatment helped them come back to themselves so they could properly resume their suffering.”
I rub my new arm where it meets my shoulder. The contrast between soft flesh and hard chitin is startling.
“You are one cold fucker,” I say.
“Coming from someone who blissfully hacked another sentient creature to death not an hour ago, that’s quite something.”
“Father Traven said something interesting about you. He used a word I’d never heard before, so I looked it up online. There was this Greek bunch called the Gnostics . . .”
He rolls his eyes.
“Not the fucking Gnostics, please.”
“They didn’t call you God. They called you the demiurge. They didn’t believe you’re an omnipotent übermensch. You’re more like one of those dads who tries to build a barbecue in the backyard only you can’t follow the instructions, so you lay out the bricks wrong and the cement dries too fast and the thing comes out as crooked as poker in Juarez. Then, around sunset, you announce it’s finished even though it looks like a onooks librick cold sore. You throw some T-bones in the fire and pretend it’s what you were going for all along. That’s what you did to the universe.”
He swings his legs back over the wall and hops down onto the garage roof. He smiles at me.
“You actually read something? There’s evidence of a true miracle, right up there with the loaves and fishes.”
“Why are you such an asshole when Muninn is such a good guy?”
He throws up his hands in disgust.
“Everyone is so in love with poor sweet Muninn. It’s why he’s always gotten his way. He hides down there in his cave collecting toys, holding on to the past because he doesn’t want to have to deal with any of this.” Neshamah gestures to the burning city. “But he’s part of our collective being, and as responsible for this disaster as any of the rest of us.”
“At least he’s not a whiner.”
“Take away his toys and see how long that lasts. Why do you think he’s hiding? He never learned to share.”
Neshamah takes a flask from an inside pocket. He unscrews the top and takes a long drink.
“Do you think I could have a hit off that? It’s been a long weird day.”
He shakes his head.
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“I drink Aqua Regia; how bad can this be?”
He shrugs and hands me the flask. I upend it and spit out everything that touches my tongue. Neshamah takes the flask away and bursts into belly laughs.
“What is that shit?”
“Ambrosia,” he says. “Food of the gods.”
He takes another sip and puts the flask back in his coat.
“So, if you’re down here and Muninn is on earth, where are the others?”
“Around. We travel a lot.”
“Are any of you in Heaven?”
“Always. At least one of us.”
“Lucifer knows you’re broken, doesn’t he?”