Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  I plant my feet. “Who is that?”

  “Move.”

  “Is that—” The question loses itself in my throat and suddenly, I’m choking on the implications, on a vision of Minah after she’d walked out of the shower, wringing wet from long, black hair, her skin discolored by a system rigged from the beginning. “Is that Persephone?”

  Ananke doesn’t ask again. In that moment, I discover exactly how filthy some gods will play: she makes me wrench my own arm out of its socket, thumb buried into the glenohumeral joint, fingers hitched through cartilage. I scream, of course, until the sound is sandpaper, grating across my vocal chords, every other thought suspended in raw-veined agony. For a frictionless eternity, it is only pain and its every manifestation, only the excruciating awareness of muscles being unstitched, pulled apart, fiber by fiber.

  Luckily for me, she doesn’t force an amputation, content to simply separate the bone.

  “Move,” she repeats, smug.

  Insert unpleasantly sexist word here.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “RUPERT, HOW’S IT—what happened to you?”

  I grin dully into the camera, a pinpoint of emerald against the black border of the laptop screen. “Life. Life happened.”

  Ghouls don’t photograph well. Something about natural camouflage, a confluence of specialized cells, meant to refract and distract from their ongoing decay. Like chameleons except bigger, badder, and considerably hungrier. Naturally, this extends to video calls.

  Fariz blurs around the edges, cheeks distended by a lag of pixels, features smudged to relative anonymity. In a police lineup, he’d only be identifiable as ‘possibly Asian.’ Or ‘articulate chipmunk.’

  “Your arm is—” He interrupts himself with a dose of a shisha, smoke leaking from his nostrils. Behind him, the sky is dark, orange-tinged by street lamps and pollution. I can see plastic tables staggered in the background. A projector screen emblazoned with a football match. Tropical vegetation. A man attending a charcoal grill. “Seriously, man. What did you do to yourself?”

  I wipe my jaw with the back of my functional hand, the other piled uselessly on my lap, middle finger crooked for effect. The pain is almost manageable, enormous enough that my brain is beginning to fool itself into thinking it’s always been there, the baseline of existence; that there was never a universe not saw-toothed with hurt.

  “You wouldn’t—it’s not important. Seriously. I...” I hesitate, flicking a glance at the door. “I need to know what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s going on’?” Fariz says, guarded, a nervous rhythm drummed on the plastic table. He’s never had a good poker face, whatever he says.

  “Cut the bullshit. You know what I’m talking about. I haven’t forgotten the thing about the Furies, or trying to drive the Chinese pantheon extinct. What has he done?”

  A long pause. “What has who done?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Fariz titters, gags on the noise. He takes another hit from his bong. A server drifts by to deposit a plate of fried noodles, the intestinal-looking mass topped with a fried egg, yolk running off the sides.

  I wait until the waiter’s gone before I bark, “Seriously. What the fuck is going on?”

  “Rupert, I don’t know where to start. It—I didn’t want to alarm you.”

  “You knew.” I squeeze the wrist of the broken arm, let pain blunt the spiking rage. “You. Fucking. Knew.”

  “Look. Not everything, okay? It isn’t what you think it is. Not some great conspiracy to keep you in the dark. Well, a small conspiracy. It’s just that Ao Qin got out and—”

  “What.”

  “He’s on the warpath. I—I don’t really know how to say this, but he found your apartment.”

  “What.”

  “And your personal records.”

  “What.”

  “Possibly a few family members, if you even have those.”

  “And?”

  “Ao Qin might have had a tantrum.”

  I lean back, away from the screen, as though it might ejaculate torrential saltwater at any moment. “Well. Shit.”

  Fariz winds a mouthful of noodles around his fork, almost embarrassed. I wait as he performs the necessary ceremony. Gulp. Chew. Swallow. Ghouls might not share our dietary requirements, but that doesn’t mean they’re not drawn by the allure of deep-fried saturated fats.

  “‘Shit’ doesn’t cover it.”

  A hollow laugh shakes itself loose, and I hiss as the movement uncoils a starburst of pain along my arm. My fingers feel worryingly numb. Reflexively, I clench my hand into a fist, massaging a thumb up the wrist, hoping to encourage circulation, keep the muscle from flirting with necrosis. A vision of the Cat’s extremities, black and green and tumid as rotting berries, flits across my mind.

  “This is well above your pay grade,” Fariz declares sympathetically, eyes averted. He lances the egg and it belches yolk onto his noodles, a punctured blister bleeding pus. “The best thing you can do now—and I’m saying this as your best friend—is to lay low and wait. Let the Greeks and the Chinese fight it out. When they finally collide, they won’t even remember who you—”

  I let myself buy into the fantasy, just a moment. I rub my eyelids as Fariz wheels out a future of blessed mundanity, bought by the deaths of legends. A simple life. A new home, a cat, an illegal subscription to Netflix. I could have it all. A pawn’s paradise.

  “Where does Vanquis fit into this picture?”

  “Come again?”

  “Vanquis. The—” The man on the train. The phrase drapes over the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it down. Fariz, for all his mealy camaraderie, his sheepish demureness, is—has always been, in fact—clued into this. No need to show him the entirety of my hand, when he’s got his closed around the knife in my back. “Gods of desperation and debt. London is swimming in these new deities, and they’ve clearly got a vendetta against the Greek Gods.”

  “Well, no one likes those—”

  “They also know who I am.”

  “Ah! Yes. Erm. About that.”

  I can’t keep the irritation from my voice. “Fariz.”

  The door clicks open, saving him from whatever facsimile of a confession he might have been contemplating. I slam the laptop shut at the sight of Ananke, her eyes trailing over the beaten machine, a slow smile turning up the corners of her mouth. (And nowhere else: the eyes stay mirror-flat, inscrutable.) She folds an arm under her breasts, hip sloped against the doorframe.

  “I could have been masturbating.”

  Ananke chimes a short, unpleasant laugh, but otherwise says nothing, head cocked to a bird-like tilt. We stare at each other, mouse and god, daring the other to commit the sin of the first move.

  In the end, I break. I feel her triumph effervesce briefly through my veins, a reminder that I’m still hers; even if the leash has gone momentarily slack, it’s still chained to my throat. “What do you want?”

  A tug on my psyche, as though she heard every last thought. “People are hungry. You should make us lunch.”

  COOKING FOR NINETY-FIVE is hard when you’re short-handed.

  It’s even worse when you’re also one-handed.

  But at least the chore amounts to a measure of privacy. The gods ignore me as I bustle through the kitchen, a crawlspace turned massive by some devilry of spatial readjustment. Ananke’s orders were simple: make food. More specifically, make good food. Or else.

  Not that any of it bothers me. For all my magical inadequacies and questionable driving, I’ve always been able to cook. Out of deference to the situation, I go Mediterranean, in part because it’s all I have to work with. The larder brims with staples of Greek cuisine. Olives in every format. Slabs of cheese. Aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes, wild amaranth, produce so fresh that they’re practically glowing with a Hollywood sheen. Fish, glassy-eyed. Lemons. Eggs. Haunches of lamb and wild boar in the freezer, still furred, ice crystals glittering in the rough hairs.

&
nbsp; There is honey in small earthen jars, pistachios in the cupboard, all the ingredients to make baklava. Glass vases hold rosemary, dried bay leaves, green sprigs of oregano, thyme, and basil. I catch myself leaning in, breathing the aromas, delighting in the excess—and slam the broken arm against the edge of a cupboard.

  Right. Right. Anyway.

  The fish—plump seabream and silvery mackerel, a few sardines—are prepared first. I descale and debone with reasonable success, only slicing my thumb once throughout the ordeal. Some, I grill whole (the fish, not the thumb; besides, I only have two), to be served with a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil and spices. Others, I layer into roasting tins, together with tomatoes and potatoes, cubes of garlic and messily sliced onions, parsley leaves and oregano torn up by hand. (You try chopping with one arm, ang moh.)

  Occasionally, Ananke appears to inspect my labors, never actually speaking, using small jerks of her will to drag answers from me. I make faces at her behind her back, my one rebellion.

  In between her visits, I crush lemon zest and garlic into a paste along with olive oil and even more oregano; slice cuts into the lamb and work the mixture through the lacerations; fill tins with potatoes, drizzle them with duck fat and black pepper, and set the meat into the oven to roast. I make Greek salad—ruby-red tomatoes, cucumbers, crumbled feta—with a flicker of trepidation, concerned that it might be in the same category as Asian-American cuisine, a bastardization of local traditions.

  But whatever, it’s not like they have me holed up in the Ritz. They can dine on political incorrectness.

  “They’re hungry.” Ananke again, about four hours into my task.

  I roll out another sheet of filo dough, glaze it with melted butter. Baklava is harder to make than I thought. A pyre of burnt confections sits in the trash, testament to this truth. “They can come in and help me cook, then.”

  The goddess slinks up beside me, smelling of cracked earth and jasmine, desert-scent, serpent-musk. I ignore the unnatural warmth of her, focus instead on spreading a mixture of nuts, chopped pistachio and crushed walnuts accented by cinnamon and clove.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Ananke announces, tone furtive, slightly puzzled, like a woman who’d woken up to find all the clocks in her house ticking backwards. She dips a finger into the honey syrup, drags free a tendon of gold. Sniffs. Licks. “It needs orange extract.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “You’d have to do it all over.” Confusion metamorphoses into a kind of agony, despair over a job poorly done. “The cloves need to be toasted. Whole. Not powdered—”

  “You do it.” I thrust my brush at her and stalk back to the ovens, where the lamb and boar are roasting, skin crisping beautifully, caramel-bronze. Despite my bravado, I’m braced for Ananke’s command to heel. It never comes. I hear a clatter instead and swivel to see the goddess scraping my efforts into the rubbish, fork screeching against the pan.

  “What are you doing?”

  Screeech. Strips of metal peel from the surface. Ananke absently picks the shavings free, then begins to unwind a fresh stretch of dough, movements enviably deft. “Fixing your mistakes.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Silence, awkward.

  “You know that you probably shouldn’t use that pan any—” Ananke glares, dusting her fingers with flour, terrifying in her domestic competence. The phrase ‘a goddess in the kitchen’ shouldn’t be as literal as it is here. “Er, nevermind.”

  More silence, equally awkward. I take the opportunity to plate the fish, eschewing fanciness for a light dressing, a handful of parsley. When I turn, they’re gone, which suggests two things. Either Ananke’s a very quick and very greedy eater, or I’m under intense surveillance. Again, don’t like my options.

  “Hey, you.”

  Ananke rears up from the baklava. “What.”

  “Why—” I gesture at the food with a spatula before scooping myself a mouthful of the boar stifado. The taste is alright, flatter that I’d have preferred; the meat is too chewy, too gamy, the shallots too mild. But passable. Briefly, I consider leaving the stew to its mediocrity, only to have pride kick like a mule. A professional never compromises on his art.

  “You were saying something?”

  I snap to attention, suddenly aware that I’d become transfixed, hypnotised by the act of measuring out a portion of dusky, golden honey. I dip the spoon into the stifado, let the truffle-infused sweetness spread into the stock. “Oh. Uh. Yeah.”

  “Well?” Impatience knifes through the syllable, accompanying a warning fizz in my gray matter, my vision strobing white in the corners.

  I screw my eyes half close and take a steadying breath. “I appreciate that you’re absolutely terrifying, but you don’t have to keep rubbing it in.”

  “Talk.”

  “What’s with you and syllables? Do you hate them? Do they offend you? I—” Neck muscles spontaneously clench over the esophagus. I gurgle obligingly for about ten seconds, before beating my palm against the counter, hoping that Ananke understands tap-outs.

  The pressure eases. Maybe we’ll bond over MMA one day. Probably not. I flick a glance at Ananke, who is glaring at me as she trims dough from her creation. Most likely not. Hand to my throat, I wheeze out the rest of my thought. “Why this? Why the soup kitchen? All of it seems so pointless. You could just—I don’t know, kill people and take their whatever. More importantly, why am I cooking for you all? You don’t even need to eat.”

  Ananke’s face strains under its expressions, cycling from modest dislike to bafflement to indulgent, gosh-the-dumb-animal-tries-so-hard amusement. Finally, as she sets the baklava in a spare oven, she says: “Why not?”

  I consider the response. “Point.”

  “Quality. It is about quality,” Ananke declares, abruptly, thoughtfully. “You humans have an aphorism about atheists and foxholes, do you not? A belief that death can make believers of the faithless? There is some truth to that.”

  I arrange braised artichokes on an armada of plates. “Christopher Hit—”

  “You’re complicating things unnecessarily.”

  “I’m told I’m very good at that.”

  “Do you ever stop talking?”

  “Well, I’m frequently told—”

  “Shut up.” Ananke leans against the counter, head canted towards the window, skin coruscating with the idea of scales. In the distance, an ambulance screams. “It is simpler than that. At the precipice of death, the body will fight for one more moment, one more taste of war, one last second of soiling itself, straining to eke out another heartbeat in this miserable world. And that need, that desperate hope to live, that hunger to be—we can sustain ourselves on it. It is just another flavor of faith, if not a particularly palatable one.”

  “Like spam versus steak?”

  Her lips shape a grin. “Yes.”

  Nodding, I add melt-on-your-fork slabs of lamb and steamed asparagus to my little dioramas, balance poached egg yolks on the long green stems. A crumble of feta and black pepper follow, just for texture. “That doesn’t explain the soup kitchen.”

  “The desperate will pray to anything for a warm bed and a hot meal. And they will do anything when you take it away.”

  “But the point of a”—realization sets in—“are you actually pushing basic amenities? Like heroin? You’re—”

  “I’d like to think of it more like cultivating foie gras.”

  “We’re not geese.”

  Circumstances rob Ananke of the final word, as a killing-chute scream guts the air. Ananke doesn’t wait. She’s out of the door in three fluid strides and I charge after her, poking my head out of the kitchen to see—

  Smoke.

  Garlands of black smoke rippling from a burning figure in the hallway, its hands cupped in limp supplication, arms trembling from the weight of the flames. Oil pours from its nose, its eyes, its mouth, like colorless blood, filmed with bluish-white fire. Poseidon is trying to quench the inferno, conjuring acres of water fr
om nothing, the air clouding with steam and the smell of brine. But nothing works.

  The silhouette continues to burn, to crisp, the fat in its arms popping under the spray. Everything smells of bacon and burning fabric. Someone is screaming, telling Poseidon to stop, even as the form sags—finally—to one knee, face charred beyond—no. That’s not right. Recognition coaxes bile from the pit of my stomach, even as it gives a name to the squat build, the mountainous shoulders.

  Hephaestus.

  The irony is spectacular, rhapsodic. A statement piece. To set a god of fire on fire is to create a point, rather than merely proving one. Hephaestus coughs once, hands moving to his throat, fingers fusing in place as the flames keep rolling. Coughs again, vomits fire down his front, and now, hell breaks loose. The blaze sears across the surface of the kerosene swamp, up the walls, along the ceiling. Alive, almost. Ravenous. It licks its way up to the feet of the crowd and then, all at once, reality fast-forwards into a horror show.

  Gods and mythological bipeds go up in literal smoke, transfiguring into columns of phosphorescent white heat. Mouths and eyes gape black, tissues and humors cooked in a flash. Seven go down this way before the rest of them collect themselves enough to organize a stampede towards the front door.

  Eight. Ten. Twelve.

  In the commotion, someone crashes into Orpheus’ wheelchair, sending his disembodied head rolling straight into a pool of fire. I stare, rooted in place, in horror at the flame lapping up his screaming features, his eyes boiling trout-white before they sizzle to ash.

  “Crap.”

  As far as last words go, I suppose I could have done worse.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE FIRST RULE of dealing with a burning building is—actually, I have no idea. I should have stayed in school. Filled with post-public-education blues, I paddle through the fumes into my room at the back of the apartment. The smoke rolls into the corridor behind me, surging in waves, as though propelled by some unseen heart.

  “Crap,” I announce to the spare, shirt-strewn space, as I shoulder the door close. Black fumes glissade through the cracks. “Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap—”