American Gods (24 page)

On his first and only journey by subway he got lost and confused,
and missed his appointment; now he takes taxis only when he has to, and the
rest of the time he walks. He stumbles into overheated offices, his cheeks numb
from the cold outside, sweating beneath his coat, shoes soaked by slush; and
when the winds blow down the avenues (which run from north to south, as the
streets run west to east, all so simple, and Salim always knows where to face
Mecca) he feels a cold on his exposed skin that is so intense it is like being
struck.

He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is
being covered by Fuad’s business partners, he must pay for his own food);
instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it
up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares.
And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly
lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press
to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays.

Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he
woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stem, and disappointed:
Salim was letting them down—his sister, Fuad, Fuad’s business partners, the
Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders,
Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended
upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money,
living like a sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always
been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too
cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete
misery.

Then Salim walks downtown, holding his sample case as if it
contained diamonds and rubies, trudging through the cold for block after block
until, on Broadway and 19th Street, he finds a squat building over a deli. He
walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports.

The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost
half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the U.S. from the Far East. A real
order, a significant order from Panglobal, could redeem Salim’s journey, could
make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an
uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his
lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who
sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. After she
blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash.

Salim got there at 10:30 A.M., half an hour before his appointment.
Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever.
The time ticks by so slowly.

Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat.

The woman behind the desk glares at him. “Yes?” she says. It
sounds like Yed.

“It is eleven-thirty-five,” says Salim.

The woman glances at the clock on the Wall, and says, “Yed,”
again. “Id id.”

“My appointment was for eleven,” says Salim with a placating
smile.

“Mister Blanding knows you’re here,” she tells him, reprovingly.
(“Bidter Bladdig dode you’re here.”)

Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table.
He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the
stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with
the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock
on the wall.

At twelve-thirty several men come out from the inner office.
They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big,
paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes
out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc
as his sister swears by zinc and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and
gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go
out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.

It is one o’clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer
and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an
apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly
squeezed orange juice.

“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister
Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”

She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still
there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half
hours. “He’s at lunch,” she says. He ‘d ad dudge.

Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was
the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”

She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He’s busy with appointments
for the rest of the day,” she says. He’d biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob
the day.

“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.

She shrugs, and blows her nose.

Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and
powerless.

At three o’clock the woman looks at him and says “He wode be
gubbig bag.”

“Excuse?”

“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”

“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”

She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoid-beds odly
by teddephode.”

“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad
had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his
smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he
walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to
sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the 46th Street hotel,
and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk
and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on
or off, and every cab drives past him.

One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled
pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim’s pants and coat. For a
moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars,
and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the
fate of the sample case than of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to
no one but his beloved sister, Fuad’s wife (for he had always been a slight embarrassment
to his father and mother, and his rpmantic encounters had always, of necessity,
been both brief tfriU relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the
cars are going fast enough actually to end his life.

A battered yellow taxi draws up beside hinijand, grateful to
be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.

The backseat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open
Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him
how much to pay to get to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody
famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seat belt.

‘The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.

The cabdriver grunts and pulls away from the curb, into the
traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater and black
plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if
the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into
grays and smudged lights.

From ‘nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the
cabdriver swears, by the beard of the prophet.

Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but hetcannot
make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he
asks the man, in his own language.

“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same tongue. “Where are
you from?”

“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”

“From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago.
Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.

“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They
found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you
with the expedition that excavated it?”

“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi
driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped
there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the
wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the
city existed.”

“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished,
what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”

The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red
traffic light. The light turns green, but the driver does not move, despite the
immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches
through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder.
The man’s head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas,
lurching them across the intersection.

“Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.

“You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.

“I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty
hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours,
and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”

“I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.

The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from
Fifty-first Street to Newark Airport. When we got there, he ran off into the
airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to
pay the tolls on the way back myself.”

Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who
will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week,
and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”

“What do you sell?”

“Shit,” says Sajim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist
trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”

The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings
around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the
rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.

“You try to sell shit?”

“Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken
the truth about his brother-in-law’s samples.

“And they will not buy it?”

“No.”

“Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they
sell.”

Salim smiles nervously.

A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced
cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest
street.

“We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,”
says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped
completely/There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.

The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to
his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim
reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he
shakes his shoulder, the driver moves, and Salim’s hand brashes the man’s face,
knocking the sunglasses from his face into his lap.

The taxi driver opens his eyes, reaches for and replaces the
black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.

The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers onithe meter
increase.

“Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.

The taxi driver’s lips are pressed together. Salim watches
his face in the driver’s mirror.

“No,” says the driver, very quietly.

The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof.

Salim begins to speak. “My grandmother swore that she had
seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert.
We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she
saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames.”

The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black
plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile
or not. “The grandmothers came here too,” he says.

“Are there many jinn in New York?” asks Salim.

“No. Not many of us.”

“There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made
from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn,” says Salim.

, “People know nothing about my people here,” says the
driver. “They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I
would be driving a cab?”

“I do not understand.”

The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in
the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrit’s dark lips.

“They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe
that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any
stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don’t. I drive
them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.”
His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on
the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How
could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?”

Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrit’s shoulder. He can
feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand
from the wheel, rests it on Salim’s hand for a moment.

Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust storm
through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the
lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind.

They drive up Eighth Avenue.

“The old believe. They do not piss into holes, because the
Prophet told them that jinn live in holes. They know that the angels throw
flaming stars at us when we try to listen to their conversations. But even for
the old, when they come to this country we are very, very far away. Back there,
I did not have to drive a cab.”

“I am sorry,” says Salim.

“It is a bad time,” says the driver. “A stomris coming. It
scares me. I would do anything to get away.”