American Gods (25 page)

The two of them say nothing more on their way back to the hotel.

When Salim gets out of the cab he gives the ifrit a
twenty-dollar bill, tells him to keep the change. Then, with a sudden burst of
courage, he tells him his room number. The taxi driver says nothing in reply. A
young woman clambers into the back of the cab, and it pulls out into the cold
and the rain.

Six o’clock in the evening. Salim has not yet written the
fax to his brother-in-law. He goes out into the rain, buys himself this night’s
kabob and french fries. It has only been a week, but he feels that he is
becoming heavier, rounder, softening in this country of New York.

When he comes back to the hotel he is surprised to see the
taxi driver standing in the lobby, hands deep in his pockets. He is staring at
a display of black-and-white postcards. When he sees Salim he smiles,
self-consciously. “I called your room,” he says, “but there was no answer. So I
thought I would wait.”

Salim smiles also, and touches the man’s arm. “I am here,”
he says.

Together they enter the dim, green-lit elevator, ascend to
the fifth floor holding hands. The ifrit asks if he may use Salim’s bathroom. “I
feel very dirty,” he says. Salim nods. He sits on the bed, which fills most of
the small white room, and listens to the sound of the shower running. Salim
takes off his shoes, his socks, and then the rest of his clothes.

The taxi driver comes out of the shower, wet, with a towel
wrapped about his midsection. He is not wearing his sunglasses, and in the dim
room his eyes burn with scarlet flames.

Salim blinks back tears. “I wish you could see what I see,”
he says.

. “I do not grant wishes,” whispers the ifrit, dropping his
towel and pushing Salim gently, but irresistibly, down onto the bed.

It is an hour or more before the ifrit comes, thrusting and
grinding into Salim’s mouth. Salim has already come twice in this time. The
jinn’s semen tastes strange, fiery, and it burns Salim’s throat.

Salmi goes to the bathroom, washes out his mouth. When he
returns to the bedroom the taxi driver is already asleep in the white bed,
snoring peacefully. Salim climbs into the bed beside him, cuddles close to the
ifrit, imagining the desert on his skin.

As he starts to fall asleep he realizes that he still has
not written his fax to Fuad, and he feels guilty. Deep inside he feels empty
and alone: he reaches out, rests his hand on the ifrit’s tumescent cock and,
comforted, he sleeps. They wake in the small hours, moving against each other,
and they make love again. At one point Salim realizes that he is crying, and
the ifrit is kissing away his tears with burning lips. “What is your name?”
Salim asks the taxi driver.

“There is a name on my driving permit, but it is not mine,”
the ifrit says.

Afterward, Salim could not remember where the sex had
stopped and the dreams began.

When Salim wakes, the cold sun creeping into the white room,
he is alone.

Also, he discovers, his sample case is gone, all the bottles
and rings and souvenir copper flashlights, all gone, along widi his suitcase,
his wallet, his passport, and his air tickets back to Oman.

He finds a pair of jeans, the T-shirt, and the dust-colored
woolen sweater discarded on the floor. Beneath them he finds a driver’s license
in the name of Ibrahim bin Irem, a taxi permit in the same name, and a ring of
keys with an address written on a piece of paper attached to them in English.
The photographs on the license and the permit do not look much like Salim, but
then, they did not-16ok much like the ifrit.

The telephone rings: it is the front desk calling to point
out that Salim has already checked out/and his guest needs to leave soon so
that they can service ttie room, to get it ready for another occupant.

“I do not grant wishes,” says Salim, tasting the way the
words shape themselves in his mouth.

He feels strangely light-headed as he dresses.

New York is very simple: the avenues run north to south, the
streets run west to east. How hard can it be? he asks himself.

He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then
he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the
hotel room to go and look for his cab.

He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him How that
could be—I thought the dead were souls, he broke my trance. Don’t that make you
suspicious That there’s something the dead are keeping back? Yes, there’s
something the dead are keeping back.

—Robert Frost, “Two Witches”

The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral
parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. They were sitting in a small restaurant,
two blocks from Ibis and Jacquel’s Funeral Parlor. Shadow’s meal consisted of
an all-day full breakfast—it came with hush puppies—while Mr. Ibis picked and
pecked at a slice of coffee cake. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. “The lingering
ones are holding on for one final Christmas,” said Mr. Ibis, “or even for New
Year’s, while the others, the ones for whom other people’s jollity and
celebration will prove too painful, have not yet been tipped over the edge by
that last showing of It’s a Wonderful Life, have not quite encountered the
final straw, or should I say, the final sprig of holly that breaks not the
camel’s but the reindeer’s back.” And he made a little noise as he said it,
half smirk, half snort, which suggested that he had just uttered a well-honed
phrase of which he was particularly fond. Ibis and Jacquel was a small, family-owned
funeral home: one of the last truly independent funeral homes in the area, or
so Mr. Ibis maintained. “Most fields of human merchandising value nationwide
brand identities,” he said. Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, ‘earnest
lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out
at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound,
explain. Shadow had figured out within the first few minutes of meeting Mr.
Ibis that his expected part in any conversation with the funeral director was
to say as little as possible. “This, I believe, is because people like to know
what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, F. W.
Woolworth (of blessed memory): store brands maintained and visible across the
entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small
regional variations, the same.

“In the field of funeral homes, however, things are,
perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting smalltown personal
service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal
attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know
that your grief is happening on a local level, not bn a national one. But in
all branches of industry—and death is an industry, my young friend, make no
mistake about that—one makes one’s money from operating in bulk, from buying in
quantity, from centralizing one’s operations. It’s not pretty, but it’s true.
Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a
cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty,
fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think they’re going
to a family concern, somewhere they’ll be treated with respect by someone who’ll
tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street.”

Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched
his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses
perched on his nose. In Shadow’s memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he
would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six
feet in height, with a cranelike stoop. Sitting opposite him now, across the
shiny red table, Shadow found himself staring into the man’s face.

“So when the big companies come in they buy the n#me of the
company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency
of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they
are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an
independent. We do all our own embalming, and it’s the finest embalming in the
country, although nobody knows it but us. We don’t do cremations, though. We
could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what
we’re good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent
or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Don’t you agree?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Shadow.

“The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead,
just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of
tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of
lives.” He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he
might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. “Anyway, what we give them
here is continuity: there’s been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for
almost two hundred years. We weren’t always funeral directors, though. We used
to be morticians, and before that, undertakers”

“And before that?”

“Well,” said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, “we go
back a very long way. Of course, it wasn’t until after the War Between the
States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor
for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as
colored—foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.

Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a
time when we weren’t perceived as black. My business partner, he’s always had
darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they
think you are. It’s just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes
me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves
as Africans—we were the people of the Nile.”

“So you were Egyptians,” said Shadow.

Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob
from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses,
seeing things from both points of view. “Well, yes and no. ‘Egyptians’ makes me
think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our
graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me?”

Shadow shrugged. He’d seen black guys who looked like Mr.
Ibis. He’d seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis.

“How’s your coffee cake?” asked the waitress, refilling
their coffees.

“Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your
ma.”

“I’ll do that,” she said, and bustled away.

“You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re
a funeral director. They think maybe jiou’re scouting for business,” said Mr.
Ibis, in an undertone. “Shall we see if your room is ready?”

Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled
in the windows of the stores they passed. “It’s good of you, putting me up,”
said Shadow. “I appreciate it.”

“We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we
have the room. It’s a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now
it’s just the three of us. You won’t be in the way.”

“Any idea how long I’m meant to stay with you?”

Mr. Ibis shook his head. “He didn’t say. But we are happy to
have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat
the dead with respect.”

“So,” asked Shadow, “what are you people doing here in
Cairo? Was it just the name or something?”

“No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its nameg from
us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days.”

“Frontier times?”

“You might call it that,” said Mr. Ibis. “Evening Miz
Sim-mons! And a Merry Christmas to you too! The folk who brought me here came
up the Mississippi a long time back.”

Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. “Are you trying to
tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago?”

Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, “Three
thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take.”

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I’ll buy it, I guess. What were they
trading?”

“Not much,” said Mr. Ibis. “Animal skins. Some food. Copper
from the mines in what would now be Michigan’s upper peninsula. The whole thing
was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough
to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die
of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them.” He stopped dead in the
middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. “This country has
been Grand Central for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about
Columbus?”

“Sure,” said Shadow, obligingly. “What about him?”

“Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of
years. There’s nothing special about coming to America. I’ve been writing
stories about it, from time to time.” They began to walk again.

“True stories?”

“Up to a point, yes. I’ll let you read one or two, if you
like. It’s all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally—and this is
speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, here—I feel very sorry for the
professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that
belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or
artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk
about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as
something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s
true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese
aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that
shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And
all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing
the point entirely. Heaven knows what’11 happen if they ever actually find the
Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait.