Chapter 9
Nine
Christian
I’d thought about my own death a lot over the years, and it was often like this.
A heart attack, stroke, something taking me quick and unexpectedly.
But I was always much older. I was my father’s age.
In my eighties, with a well-lived life behind me and a truck full of memories and experiences.
My dick no longer worked, my hips no longer moved properly, my joints creaky, and my back stooped. I’d die when I was done.
But I wasn’t done. Not yet.
And my dick, as far as I could see, still worked very well.
Asher is on the phone, nodding and listening intently to what he’s being told while my entire life plays through my head at 16x speed.
The first time I saw Stella. The first time she smiled at me.
The first time she kissed me. The first time we made love.
When Leo was born, unmoving and purple. The sound of his first perfect cry.
The first time he scratched his knee. When I taught him how to hold a tennis racquet.
His first tournament. His accident. Stella’s fall.
Her hospital bed. Telling the doctor yes, to let her go.
Felix’s proposition. Felix’s smile. Felix’s mouth and body. And then Asher. Asher…
“Ambulance is on its way,” Asher says, panicked voice sounding very small and very young. “They said you have to try and get on the floor. And chew on this.” He’s by my side again, holding out a white tablet to me. “It’s Aspirin. You’re not allergic or anything?”
I shake my head and open my mouth to let him put it in. “You have to help me get dressed.”
“What? No, you have to get on the floor. That’s what she said.”
“And I will. I just… they can’t find me like this, Asher.” I give him a look, desperate and pleading for him to understand.
Reluctantly, he nods, moving off to grab my shirt and trousers.
With some manoeuvring, he gets the trousers on.
The shirt is harder because I can’t move my left arm, but he manages it.
“They’re still going to know, you know,” he mumbles as I settle labouriously on the floor, with my back against the side of the bed.
“Why you’re here.” I can’t tell what his tone is, if he’s angry or disappointed, or something else altogether.
“I know. But at least this way I get to keep some of my dignity.” I offer him a weak smile. “You should dress, too.”
He looks defiant for a minute and then goes to his dresser to pull on a pair of loose jogger bottoms and a T-shirt that reads ‘Dairy Queen’ on it. He then comes to crouch across from me on his haunches.
“Maybe it’s not,” he says. “A heart attack. If it was, wouldn’t you be dead by now?”
I would laugh, but I’m scared to.
“A mild one probably wouldn’t kill me.”
His eyes widen a little. “Probably?”
The sound of sirens cuts through the silence.
??
I wait until I’m at the hospital before I give them my full name and my emergency contact details. It’s Gael here. Leo at home. Aside from my parents, there’s no one else who needs to know what’s happened.
Asher had not been permitted in the ambulance with me, though he’d argued with the tall, serious paramedic valiantly.
I was glad he’d lost the fight. It didn’t feel sensible.
None of this is. I imagine him at home, now, pacing with worry.
The main thing I feel now that I know I’m going to live is embarrassment.
A heart attack. A heart attack whilst fucking a man half my age.
Christ, I am truly a walking cliché of a man. A pathetic one at that.
Early diagnostics look like it was a coronary artery spasm, likely caused by stress, combined with a family history (both my parents have had heart attacks, albeit not in their 40s).
It will be eight weeks of R there really is no way to predict it.
Gael arrives shortly after the on-call doctor leaves the room. He is dressed down, Columbia hoodie in navy and a pair of dark jeans. He looks youthful out of his suit, attractive and wholesome, and his eyes are wide with concern. He’s carrying an overnight bag. My overnight bag.
“Sir, I came as fast as I could and had Mrs Kennedy pack what she thought you might need. Are you doing okay?”
“I’m quite alright, Gael. No need to look so worried.”
He nods, looking no less worried. “I called Seema, Sara, and Micah, sir. Seema is on her way.”
“Oh, there’s really no need for that.”
“It’s protocol,” he reminds me. “The foreign secretary has also been informed.”
“Wonderful,” I say dryly. Another thing for Lewis to stress about. He is about a year away from a coronary spasm of his own.
“Is there anyone else you need me to call?”
“I’d like to call my son, if you’re able to arrange a telephone in here? I left my mobile in the office.” A lie. I left my mobile at Asher’s. On top of the boxes of uneaten pizza.
“You can use mine, sir.” He hands it to me.
“Appreciate that, thank you, Gael.”
“Of course, Ambassador.” He sets the overnight bag down on the chair by the bed. “I’ll step out while you make the call.”
“Gael,” I say. He turns. “Please drop the ‘Ambassador’, at least while we’re in here; I may well be on my deathbed, and I don’t want the last thing I hear to be Ambassador.”
His mouth pinches into a small smile at one side. “Sure thing. Christian.”
I nod my gratitude and dial Leo’s number. Leo’s, my old driver, and Felix’s are the only mobile numbers I know off the top of my head. I’ve too much other useless information in there to retain more than three, I suspect.
He doesn’t answer. Probably since it’s a number he doesn’t recognise, and he is entirely Gen Z in that respect.
After the beep of his voicemail, I tell him what’s happened, that I’m okay, and that if he wants to speak with me, he can contact this number.
I want to call Asher next, but I don’t know his mobile number off the top of my head.
I’m certain Seema, when she arrives, could find it for me in her web of information, but that would be like admitting my stupidity out loud.
Just like how allowing him to come to the hospital in the ambulance would have been stupid.
Just like how sleeping with him has been stupid.
And careless. I am still a careless, stupid man.
Still, I feel strangely calm as I sit here, machines beeping the status of my existence into the bright silence.
I could have died. But I suppose each day we wake up in the chaos of the universe, it could be our last; some freak accident or act of God wiping us out in the blink of an eye.
I think about Stella. How much she had left to do, how much love and light and humanity she brought into the world, and then she was just…
gone. It had been as quick as the blinking of an eye.
The blink of an eye had stopped my entire world, Leo’s world.
Her charities and her firm, all devastated.
Whose world would stop with my death? Leo’s?
It’s a thought I’ve had before, and I find even years later the answer is no different.
My circle is as able to continue without me as it was then.
It’s a morbid, self-pitying train of thought, and it’s broken by the door opening and Seema walking through it.
Unlike Gael, she is still dressed in full business dress.
Gael is at her back, and I hand him his phone.
“My son may call back; I left him a message.”
Gael nods.
“Sir, how are you doing?” Seema asks as she rounds the bed.
“Never felt better, actually.”
She gives me an unimpressed look.
“I’m doing alright, Seema. They’re looking after me. It wasn’t a very big heart attack.”
“They’re saying you need an eight-to-ten-week recovery period.”
“Really? I must have missed that… who on earth will talk to the think tanks?” She doesn’t appreciate the sarcasm, I don’t think. Just then, Gael’s phone begins to ring, and after giving me a shake of his head, he steps outside to answer it.
“There are protocols in place for this kind of thing, and we are moving them into position now. The main thing is for you to get well, sir.”
“Yes, of course, the protocol,” I say. “What are they exactly?”
“You don’t have to worry about that, sir. Myself, Micah, and Sara will handle it.”
I close my eyes briefly and sigh loudly. “I am sorry about this, Seema. It’s… well, inconvenient.”
She gives me a blank look. “Inconvenient?”
“Well, yes. I came to this post for an easier life, one less likely to affect my physical and mental health.”
“Oh, I thought you came to this post because you were ordered to.” It’s not said cruelly, but with an ironic upturn of her mouth.
Her eyes suggest she knows every acute detail of why and how I’ve come to be here, in fact.
It makes me wonder what else she knows. She moves a little closer to the bed and takes a seat, legs spread as she leans forward on her thighs, a distinctly masculine arrangement of limbs.
“Okay, look, this is probably not the best time to do this, so I apologise, but given what’s just happened tonight, I don’t think we can dance around this any longer.
” She fixes me with a serious look. “We need to talk about Thomas Lisowski.”
It’s not a name I’ve ever heard before, in any capacity. I assume it’s someone at the embassy whose name I haven’t learned yet. Had he done something serious? Was I going to have to fire someone from my hospital bed?
“I don’t know who that is.”
She gives me a look, as though she’s trying to decide if I’m lying or something else, and then something occurs to her. “Oh. He hasn’t told you his real name?”
I blink in confusion.
“Asher Fox,” she says. “Is that the name he gave you?”
My entire body turns ice cold and then stove-top hot, a prickling at the back of my head that continues down my spine. He didn’t give me his real name?
After a moment, in as calm a voice as I can, I say, “I… know an Asher Fox, yes.”
She nods, looking relieved. Perhaps since it’s clear I’m not going to lie to her.
“Asher Fox is a… stage name if you will. His birth name is Thomas Asher Lisowski.”
He’s an artist. It makes sense that he’d have a stage name; lots of artists have stage names.
It makes sense. It doesn’t mean anything that he didn’t tell me his real name; he can keep that sort of thing to himself if he wishes.
I have no right to it. “A stage name, alright.” Thomas.
His name is Thomas. Thomas Lisowski. The name conjures someone else altogether.
It isn’t Asher. Beautiful, shiny, perfect Asher.
It altered him in my head, made him more…
real. Less… fantastical. “He… had a difficult upbringing. The group I asked you to look into… he was there. I’m certain this is also part of the reason for changing his name.
His art is… well… explicit.” Seema gives me a look.
“Ah. You knew that already. It’s why you had the information at hand when I asked about HHM. ”
“Actually, no. I knew about that because I’m low-key obsessed with cults.
But yes, when I was informed of your new…
association with an American citizen, protocol dictates that I do my due diligence.
So I know that Thomas Lisowski left His Humble Messengers five years ago before moving to New York, where he worked for a time, before moving here to DC. ”
I hold Seema’s stare before letting out a long exhale. “I’m certain I know what you think of this, but my personal life is of absolutely no concern to the US government, or the CIA, Seema. You have no right to follow me or dig into the personal lives of the people I’m associating with.”
She sits up straight in her chair.
“Ambassador, with all due respect, you’ve just had a heart attack in the bed of a male porn star half your age who also happens to have ties to a religious cult. Things are a little more complicated than that.”
I blink. “A… what?”
The look Seema gives me then is the sort of look you’d give a child who’s just asked why they can’t go to the moon on holiday.
“Shit. He never told you that either, did he.”
Beside me, the heart monitor begins to beep frantically.