Aloha from Hell

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.”