His cheeks began to burn from the crisp cold air.
“Why did you and your sister call your dad by his first name?” he said suddenly, also with a tinge of anger. “I suppose it’s normal for teenagers to start rebelling against their parents. Now that I think about it, I did the same at your age... You, though, seemed so lovey-dovey about it all, though.”
He had not planned to ask them, not really, but he might as well he figured since he wouldn’t see any of them any longer, and the curiosity would only drive him a little mad from time to time when he was remembered of it.
“But why, Rod, do you ask now?” she asked, looking at him plainly.
“You and your sisters all called your father, ‘daddy’ and all that affectionate jargon; we were standing there, when I first met you guys,” he said, and pointed to the double doors behind the little girl.
She turned to look and just said flatly, “Oh.”
Rod tilted his head and looked at her questioningly. Then he turned back and looked down the strip he had to walk down to enter the city. He wondered if he should just call an Uber.
This landing strip. There was a roundabout in front of him, but behind that lay the landing strip. The weather was fine, not yet winter, but it felt drastically worse than autumn. Perhaps this was how autumn was meant to feel, and he had forgotten that it was not at all as unpleasant as he currently was led to believe. He was going to die; he knew that very well. He shouldn’t have been born; he believed that without self-pity or any sense of injustice being inflicted upon him. No, he was just a mistake, and he had to live with that.
As much must fallen leaves covered the landing strip as if it had not been used for many years, and had been inexplicably retired and run out of business by competing big chain airports, and would it not be wonderful for the inhabitants of Manchester, no, the world, to see the giant megalomaniac bankrupt and chased out of every corner of the earth like the Irish elk, one of the largest deer to ever have lived; or the Sea Mink, which used to occupy the rocky coastal regions of Canada. Rod wanted to cuddle one of those Sea Minks because he liked the name, even though he was not much of animal person; although he was once in love with a blue budgie called Cinderella. Smoke came from the upper story of the palace, out of one of the several windows lining the exterior, lowering itself to the front entrance where the two lonely people stood, mistrusting each other, and looked to them like fog. So thick was this fog that tobacco flakes could be seen like dirty clumps of snowflakes, as though trying to block out the coming of the sun, the natural exposer of all dark deeds. Strangely, there was no sign of any animals, no dogs or cats or horses for that matter. Being a man from the countryside, Rod would have thought Aleku, having grown up on a farm, would have kept at least some pets...
“Because he’s not our father; not really, anyway,” Cee said, looking down also the strip. “How nervous you look, it reminds me of my first day at school... Why are you so unconfident?”
“Unconfident?” asked Rod, blinking. He glanced at her questioningly and then back at the strip. It looked like a landing strip.
“I would normally give you a list of reasons, or, as your father would say, excuses. But to be honest...” he said, thinking. “I’m just different... I just have to live with it and do my own thing,” he answered vaguely, his eyes fixed on the landing strip.
He bent his neck to the left and then to the right, cracking the tiny bones in it and releasing the pockets of air between them. Cee did the same.
“So,” Rod said abruptly, “why did you and Lena call your father by his first name?”
His motivation to keep up appearances was failing him. The more time he spent there talking to the little girl, the less he desired to live in the adult world even with a buttload of cash. He was so tired.
“I told you, he ain’t our father,” she said with curled lips, scanning the man intently, and studying his movements. “Why are you hesitating?”
Rod ignored her question and focused on what she had said first. “What? He isn’t your father? What do you mean?”
“Just like it sounds...” she said eyeing him, her hands behind her back.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Rod darted his eyes to the double doors, but they remained as shut as they’ve ever been.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about the world,” she said.
“Tell me what you know,” he said impatiently, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean, Aleku isn’t your father.”
Cee gulped, suddenly nervous by shiftiness of her eyes and swaying of her hips. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it isn’t. Stop messing with me. You held a blade to my neck for goodness sake! Where’s your mother?”
At once the little girl covered her eyes with her tiny hands and let out a quiet sob. Then her face contorted into one of anger and vexation, and she hissed, as though possessed by the devil, “They’re right: you’re such an asshole.”
“What?” said Rod exasperatedly, throwing his arms into the air. “You know, just fuck off. I can’t win. I don’t fucking understand anyone,” he went on in a huff, his cheeks burning red, “I just don’t understand you people. I don’t fucking understand.”
Suddenly there was a loud knock on the double doors. Startled, Rod turned to it and started to sweat. He put his hands into his pockets and then back out again, and then just one hand into it and back out just as quickly as he had put it in the second time. Rod pulled at his collar and scratched his neck a little. He looked at the back of the little girl, at her head, and wondered why she was out alone at this time. His mind worked overtime, just as hard as his heart, and he suddenly imagined that the person on the other side of the door was out to get him; then he thought that the girl was a ploy to get him to stick around. “What for?” he racked his brain for an answer, biting his purple lip. His limbs had grown fearfully weak, he felt them leave his sense perception until they were just loose, dangling electrical wires. His hand clenched seemingly of their own accord, as though his mind and body had disconnected, and now he was watching his own body from the outside like an old and neglected woman watching the television screen in the dark, sorry and depressed. He imagined himself vividly storming the palace and bludgeoning...that system, destroying Aleku’s life work. He wanted it all to fall, he wanted everything to go back to the stone age...A sudden and inexplicable and dangerous excitement and giddiness washed over him like a sink bath.
Turning around, the little girl walked over to the double doors and pulled the door handle. Trying to prevent her from reentering the house without answering his question, he pushed off his back foot and thrust himself through the air like a dart and slammed into the door, which had managed to open just a crack, and prevented it from opening any further; however, there was resistance on the other side of the door, keeping it ajar, much to his rage. He thought in a flash to grab the girl’s shoulder to prevent her also from fleeing, but thought better of it, or rather, his first impulse was restrained by the anxiety of touching another human being, and thus his clawed hand was left only inches from her skin like an arcade claw machine. His face was white hot with rage.
“Urg,” he snarled, frothing at the mouth. “Not you too. Tell me, tell me, tell me!” he hissed, grinding his teeth nastily. “What the hell is happening?” he added.
“Please...” Cee whined, “Let me go!”
“Not until you tell me what the hell is going on?”
Cee spluttered into an uncontrolled cry. “What are you talking about? What do you mean?”
“There’s something going on. Your answers...You’re being controlled, aren’t you?”
“Oh,” spluttered Cee, all the air leaving her tiny, burning nostrils, “I don’t know what you’re on about. You’re fucking crazy.”
“I am not: why were you out here? Eh? Eh? I’m not the mad one here. You held a blade to my neck. You say Aleku isn’t your father. Then what the hell is going on here? Why are you all living in this house? Why’s he got a podcast? Who are those people? What the fuck is going on?”
“You’re... you’re so fucked.”
Trying to help the person on the other side of the door to open it, she turned to the man, lifted up her knee and struck him in the groin. Instantly, the young man’s eyes bulged out of their sockets, and he curled over at the waist, releasing pressure upon the door at the same time. His strength failed him, and he struggled to articulate any words as he looked squarely at his attacker with a mixture of disbelief and hate. At once, the door burst open, and the man, who was already off balance by the surprise attack, was thrown to the ground. His wrist bent at an odd angle, crumpling underneath his heavy bodyweight.
He cried out and stretched out towards the roundabout and began to drag himself nearer to it and away from the house.
“He’s getting away!” one of the sisters shouted.
Smoke continued to loom from the upstairs window, along with the national anthem of a country he couldn’t even name; he was always bad at geography – not because he was incapable of geopolitics, but because he was simply not interested in anything that wasn’t his own. No doubt, he wondered to himself, trying to distract from the searing pain every tiny shift of movement awarded him, it was Aleku who was playing that grandiose, baroque music. It was no doubt to him that Aleku was kissing that woman; it was no doubt to him that Aleku was playing him, that he had set up this whole elaborate plot to humiliate him. It was no doubt to him that it was his best friend who had orchestrated this whole event to ruin him. There, the raw early dawn is rawest, and the clarity of the air, where the landing strip was beyond the shrubbery roundabout, was clarity in its clearest form, and the smoke which was hatefully filling his white lungs was hateful indeed, coughed up by the most hateful man in the world at that moment. That man wanted him, not just dead, but spiritually dead above all. Rising out of the green shrubbery was an ornamental statue, a dark bronze figure, of the great man himself, Aleku, the System keeper.