It’s what he calls himself when reality kicks in. Like when he cleans the sick from the downstairs toilet, or climbs the stairs with his mother slumped across his shoulders, whispering hot gin all over him. “Hang in there God damn it,” he grunts through gritted teeth, imagining a forest burning, bullets whistling past his head.
His sister was taken in the dead of night. Last Action Hero was in his room doing press ups when he thought he heard a car pull up. Muffled screams stifled by tape wound tightly around her mouth, by rain beating the asphalt, her contorted body bundled into the trunk of an all-black SUV. By the time he looked out his window the street was dead. Not even headlights trailing off into the rain soaked night.
His father had to go. It was a matter of national security. For all anyone knew it might have been the president himself that phoned him, as he drove his sister back from her gymnastics competition that wet Saturday morning.
Before his mother took to her room she stopped crying long enough to declare him the man of the house. So Last Action Hero got an after school job. Amongst the aisles he daydreamed about an armed intruder, a gun to the pretty, blonde head of the store manager. Each time he’d fight him off, she’d fall into his arms, but at night when the dream reoccurred, the armed intruder would shoot a hole in her face, and knock him unconscious, and when he woke, still in the dream, a blurred figure would be standing at a stove, whistling Looney Tunes, the smell of eggs and coffee rising all around them.
At school, his friends offer him their lunch. Turkey sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, but Last Action Hero smells a rat. No one offered John Wick a sandwich after they killed his dog, and so one lunchtime, when given a slice of homemade cherry pie, he throws a punch that lands on a boys chin, knocking him to the floor. He’s taken away, arms behind his back to the principal’s office. The beginning of his redemption arc, he thinks.
On his way home, he takes a bunch of flowers from where the crash barrier is black and twisted. He sprints off down the embankment to blaring horns and distant shouts, evading capture. Last Action Hero opens the door to his mother passed out on the sofa. Bugs Bunny, massaging the bald scalp of Elmer Fudd on TV. He puts the flowers in a vase, then pulls the blanket across her, brushing unwashed hair from her face, kissing her forehead. The affection, he’s learnt, is easier when the eyes are closed.
He wakes beneath a pile of dirty laundry. The doorbell, ringing. Last Action Hero senses a tightness around his throat and when he looks down he sees his father’s favorite tie. On the porch steps is another homemade offering, still steaming. He slices the pie in half, leaving a plate outside his mother’s room. Beyond is the heavy snoring of a deep and dreamless sleep. He types out a message to his sister. I will look for you, he writes. I will find you. He sends a photo of the flowers in the vase, already starting to droop.
When he wakes again, this time in bed, Hans Gruber is hanging from the window of the Nakatomi Plaza. The messages, like the ones before, have only one tick. He calls his father but there is no answer. Last Action Hero leaps to his desk, opening up his laptop. Frantically he types messages to his sisters friends. He writes: I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they want. If they are looking for ransom, you can tell them I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills that make me a nightmare for people like them. If they let my sister go now, that’ll be the end of it.
Only one replies. She writes back: I hope you get the help you need. Then calls him by the name he has forgotten.
Last Action Hero stumbles down the stairs. Dishes are piled in the sink. Empty bottles on the worktops. The flowers on the kitchen table are shriveled, dead leaves surrounding the dusty vase. “Get it together,” he says, pulling the imagined pistol from the holster against his naked hip. He breaches his father’s office, splintering the door from its hinges, flipping over the desk for cover. His father’s uniform lay at his feet, decorated with patches for his service. They read: “James R Watkins And Son, Pest Control.”
His sisters room is empty. Her phone, on the bedside table is cracked and dead. He scans the gymnastics trophies on a shelf, looking for clues, but counts only twelve, not thirteen. Never thirteen. He pulls out drawers, tears open pillow cases, searching all the places he has already searched many times before. When his mother appears at the door, he aims his gun at her, waiting for her to deliver the line. “Lower your weapon,” she says, and he collapses to the floor.
When he was younger, Last Action Hero was just a movie. His friends were not really friends. At lunch they would crowd around him, helping themselves to his food. One day after school, without warning, he crept round the back of the house to see if a window had been smashed, if there was sign of forced entry. He knew from the movies that the armed intruders would likely still be in the house when the hero arrived at the crime scene. It would’ve been his origin story, had he not found his father at the stove, his sister eating eggs, his mother drinking coffee in her dressing gown, and the flowers from his sister’s gymnastics competition, blooming between them.