American Gods (48 page)

“It must be hard,” said Laura, “not being alive.”

“You mean it’s hard for you to be dead? Look, I’m still
going to figure out how to bring you back, properly. I think I’m on the right
track—”

“No,” she said. “I mean, I’m grateful. And I hope you really
can do it. I did a lot of bad stuff ...” She shook her head. “But I was talking
about you.”

“I’m alive,” said Shadow. “I’m not dead. Remember?”

“You’re not dead,” she said. “But I’m not sure that you’re
alive, either. Not really.”

This isn’t the way this conversation goes, thought Shadow.
This isn’t the way anything goes.

“I love you,” she said, dispassionately. “You’re my puppy.
But when you’re really dead you get to see things clearer. It’s like there isn’t
anyone there. You know? You’re like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the
world.” She frowned. “Even when we were together. I loved being with you. You
adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I’d go into a room
and I wouldn’t think there was anybody in there. And I’d turn the light on, or
I’d turn the light off, and I’d realize that you were hi there, sitting on your
own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.”

She hugged him then, as if to take the sting from her words,
and she said, ‘The best thing about Robbie was that he was somebody. He was a
jerk sometimes, and he could be a joke, and he loved to have mirrors around
when we made love so he could watch himself fucking me, but he was alive,
puppy. He wanted things. He filled the space.” She stopped, looked up at him,
tipped her head a little to one side. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?”

He did not trust his voice not to betray him, so he simply
shook his head.

“Good,” she said. “That’s good.”

They were approaching the rest area where he had parked his
car. Shadow felt that he needed to say something: / love you, or please don’t
go, or I’m sorry. The kind of words you use to patch a conversation that had
lurched, without warning, into the dark places. Instead he said, “I’m not dead.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But are you sure you’re alive?”

“Look at me,” he said.

“That’s not an answer,” said his dead wife. “You’ll know it,
when you are.”

“What now?” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve seen you now. I’m going south again.”

“Back to Texas?”

“Somewhere warm. I don’t care.”

“I have to wait here,” said Shadow. “Until my boss needs me.”

“That’s not living,” said Laura. She sighed; and then she
smiled, the same smile that had been able to tug at his heart no matter how
many times he saw it. Every time she smiled at him had been the first time all
over again.

He went to put his arm around her, but she shook her head
and pulled out of his reach. She sat down on the edge of a snow-covered picnic
table, and she watched him drive away.

The war had begun and nobody saw it. The storm was lowering
and nobody knew it.

A falling girder in Manhattan closed a street for two days.
It killed two pedestrians, an Arab taxi driver and the taxi driver’s passenger.

A trucker in Denver was found dead in his home. The murder
instrument, a rubber-gripped claw-headed hammer, had been left on the floor
beside his corpse. His face was untouched, but the back of his head was
completely destroyed, and several words in a foreign alphabet were written on
the bathroom mirror in brown lipstick.

In a postal sorting station in Phoenix, Arizona, a man went
crazy, went postal as they said on the evening news, and shot Terry “The Troll”
Evensen, a morbidly obese, awkward man who lived alone in a trailer. Several
other people in the sorting station were fired on, but only Evensen was killed.
The man who fired the shots—first thought to be a disgruntled postal worker—was
not caught, and was never identified.

“Frankly,” said Terry “The Troll” Evensen’s supervisor, on
the News at Five, “if anyone around here was gonna go postal, we would have
figured it was gonna be the Troll. Okay worker, but a weird guy. I mean, you
never can tell, huh?”

That interview was cut when the segment was repeated, later
that evening.

A community of nine anchorites in Montana was found dead.
Reporters speculated that it was a mass suicide, but soon the cause of death
was reported as carbon monoxide poisoning from an elderly furnace.

A crypt was defiled in the Key West graveyard.

An Amtrak passenger train hit a UPS truck in Idaho, killing
the driver of the truck. None of the passengers was seriously injured.

It was still a cold war at this stage, a phony war, nothing
that could be truly won or lost.

The wind stirred the branches of the tree. Sparks flew from
the fire. The storm was coming.

The Queen of Sheba, half-demon, they said, on her father’s
side, witch woman, wise woman, and queen, who ruled Sheba when Sheba was the
richest land there ever was, when its spices and its gems and scented woods
were taken by boat and camel-back to the corners of the earth, who was
worshiped even when she was alive, worshiped as a living goddess by the wisest
of kings, stands on the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard at 2:00 A.M. staring
blankly out at the traffic like a slutty plastic bride on a black-and-neon
wedding cake. She stands as if she owns the sidewalk and the night that
surrounds her.

When someone looks straight at her, her lips move, as if she
is talking to herself. When men in cars drive past her she makes eye contact
and she smiles. I

It’s been a long night.

It’s been a long week, and a long four thousand years.

She is proud that she owes nothing to anyone. The other
girls on the street, they have pimps, they have habits, they have children,
they have people who take what they make. Not her.

There is nothing holy left in her profession. Not anymore.

A week ago the rains began in Los Angeles, slicking the
streets into road accidents, crumbling the mud from the hillsides and toppling
houses into canyons, washing the world into the gutters and storm drains,
drowning the bums and the homeless camped down in the concrete channel of the
river. When the rains come in Los Angeles they always take people by surprise.

Bilquis has spent the last week inside. Unable to stand on
the sidewalk, she has curled up in her bed in the room the color of raw liver,
listening to the rain pattering om the metal box of the window air conditioner
and placing personals on the Internet. She has left her invitations on adult-friendfinder.com,
LA-escorts.com, Classyhollywoodbabes. com, has given herself an anonymous
e-mail address. She was proud of herself for negotiating the new territories,
but remains nervous—she has spent a long time avoiding anything that might
resemble a paper trail. She has never even taken a small ad in the back pages
of the LA. Weekly, preferring to pick out her own customers, to find by eye and
smell and touch the ones who will worship her as she needs to be worshiped, the
ones who will let her take them all the way ...

And it occurs to her now, standing and shivering on the
street comer (for the late February rains have left off, but the chill they
brought with them remains) that she has a habit as bad as that of the smack
whores and the crack whores, and this distresses her, and her lips begin to
move again. If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her
say,

“/ will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and
in the broad ways I will seek the one 1 love.” She is whispering that, and she
whispers, “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me
with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.”

Bilquis hopes that the break in the rains will bring the
Johns back. Most of the year she walks the same two or three blocks on Sunset,
enjoying the cool L.A. nights. Once a month she pays off an officer in the
LAPD, who replaced the last guy she used to pay off, who had vanished. His name
had been Jerry LeBec, and his disappearance had been a mystery to the LAPD. He
had become obsessed with Bilquis, had taken to following her on foot. One afternoon
she woke, startled by a noise, and opened the door to her apartment, and found
Jerry LeBec in civilian clothes kneeling and swaying on the worn carpet, his
head bowed, waiting for her to come out. The noise she had heard was the noise
of his head, thumping against her door as he rocked back and forth on his
knees.

She stroked his hair and told him to come inside, and later
she put his clothes into a black plastic garbage bag and tossed them into a
Dumpster behind a hotel several blocks away. His gun and his wallet she put
into a grocery store bag. She poured used coffee grounds and food waste on top
of them, folded the top of the bag, and dropped it into a trash can at a bus
stop.

She kept no souvenirs.

The orange night sky glimmers to the west with distant lightning,
somewhere out to sea, and Bilquis knows that the rain will be starting soon.
She sighs. She does not want to be caught in the rain. She will return to her apartment,
she decides, and take a bath, and shave her legs—it seems to her she is always
shaving her legs—and sleep.

She begins to walk up a side street, walking up the hillside
to where her car is parked.

Headlights come up behind her, slowing as they approach her,
and she turns her face to the street and smiles. The smile freezes when she
sees the car is a white stretch limo. Men in stretch limos want to fuck in
stretch limos, not in the privacy of Bilquis’s shrine. Still, it might be an
investment. Something for the future.

A tinted window hums down and Bilquis walks over to the
limo, smiling. “Hey, honey,” she says. “You looking for something?”

“Sweet loving,” says a voice from the back of the stretch.
She peers inside, as much as she can through the open window: she knows a girl
who got into a stretch with five drunk football players and got hurt real bad,
but there’s only one John in there that she can see, and he looks kind of on
the young side. He doesn’t feel like a worshiper, but money, good money that’s
passed from his hand to hers, that’s an energy in its own right—baraka, they
called it, once on a time—which she can use and frankly these days, every
little helps.

“How much?” he asks.

“Depends on what you want and how long you want it for,” she
says. “And whether you can afford it.” She can smell something smoky drifting
out of the limo window. It smells like burning wires and overheating circuit
boards. The door is pushed open from inside.

“I can pay for anything I want,” says the John. She leans into
the car and looks around. There’s nobody else in there, just the John, a
puffy-faced kid who doesn’t even look old enough to drink. Nobody else, so she
gets in.

“Rich kid, huh?” she says.

“Richer than rich,” he tells her, edging along the leather
seat toward her. He moves awkwardly. She smiles at him.

“Mm. Makes me hot, honey,” she tells him. “You must be one
of them dot corns I read about?”

He preens then, puffs like a bullfrog. “Yeah. Among other
things. I’m a technical boy.” The car moves off.

“So,” he says. “Tell me, Bilquis, how much just to suck my
cock?”

“What you call me?”

“Bilquis,” he says, again. And then he sings, in a voice not
made for singing, “You are an immaterial girl living in a material world.”
There is something rehearsed about his words, as if he’s practiced this
exchange in front of a mirror.

She stops smiling, and her face changes, becomes wiser,
sharper, harder. “What do you want?”

“I told you. Sweet loving.”

“I’ll give you whatever you want,” she says. She needs to
get out of the limo. It’s moving too fast for her to throw herself from the
car, she figures, but she’ll do it if she can’t talk her way out of this.
Whatever’s happening here, she doesn’t like it.

“What I want. Yes.” He pauses. His tongue runs over his
lips. “I want a clean world. I want to own tomorrow. I want evolution,
devolution, and revolution. I want to move our kind from the fringes of the
slipstream to the higher ground of the mainstream. You people are underground.
That’s wrong. We need to take the spotlight and shine. Front and center. You people
have been so far underground for so long you’ve lost the use of your eyes.”

“My name’s Ayesha,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re
talking about. There’s another girl on that corner, her name’s Bilquis. We
could go back to Sunset, you could have both of us ...”

“Oh, Bilquis,” he says, and he sighs, theatrically. “There’s
only so much belief to go around. They’re reaching the end of what they can
give us. The credibility gap.” And then he sings, once again, in his tuneless
nasal voice, “You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.” The limo
takes a corner too fast, and he tumbles across the seat into her. The driver of
the car is hidden behind tinfecl glass. An irrational conviction strikes her,
that nobody is driving the car, that the white limo is driving through Beverly
Hills like Herbie the Love Bug, under its own power.

Then the John reaches out his hand and taps on the tinted
glass.

The car slows, and before it has stopped moving Bilquis has
pushed open the door and she half jumps, half falls out onto the blacktop. She’s
on a hillside road. To the left of her is a steep hill, to the right is a sheer
drop. She starts to run down the road.

The limo sits there, unmoving.

It starts to rain, and her high heels slip and twist beneath
her. She kicks them off, and runs, soaked to the skin, looking for somewhere
she can get off the road. She’s scared. She has power, true, but it’s
hunger-magic, cunt-magic. It has kept her alive in this land for so long, but
for everything else she uses her sharp eyes and her mind, her height and her
presence.

There’s a metal guardrail at knee height on her right, to
stop cars from tumbling over the side of the hill, “and now the rain is running
down the hill road turning it into a river, and the soles of her feet have
started to bleed.