American Gods (8 page)

Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, out
decided against it. “No, thank you,” he said.

The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when
the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, it smelled a little like
burning electrical parts.

The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the
smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow
suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before
doing it in public. “If you’ve lied to me,” said the boy, as if from a long way
away, “I’ll fucking kill you. You know that.”

“So you said.”

The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. “You say
you’re staying at the Motel America?” He tapped on the driver’s window, behind
him. The glass window lowered. “Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We
need to drop off our guest.”

The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again.

The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to
change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the
boy’s eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.

“You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he’s history. He’s
forgotten. He’s old. Tell him that we are the future and we don’t give a fuck
about him or anyone like him. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history
while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Shadow. He was beginning to feel lightheaded.
He hoped that he was not going to be sick.

‘Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell
him that language is a virus and that religion is an opcrating system and that
prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,”
said the young man mildly, from the smoke.

“Got it,” said Shadow. “You can let me out here. I can walk
the rest of the way.”

The young man nodded. “Good talking to you,” he said. The
smoke had mellowed him. “You should know that if we do fucking kill you, then
we’ll just delete you. You got that? One click and you’re overwritten with
random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option.” He tapped on the window
behind him. “He’s getting off here,” he said. Then he turned back to Shadow,
pointed to his cigarette. “Synthetic toad skins,” he said. “You know they can
synthesize bufotenin now?”

The car stopped, and the door was opened. Shadow climbed out
awkwardly. His bonds were cut. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car had
become one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, now copper-colored,
like the beautiful eyes of a toad. “It’s all about the dominant fucking
paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your
old lady.”

The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly.
Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there,
breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every
kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he
reached the Motel America without incident.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

—old saying

There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel
America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave
him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodentlike
quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and
eased when she smiled. She refused to tell him Wednesday’s room number, and
insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest
was here.

Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to
Shadow.

“How was the funeral?” he asked.

“It’s over,” said Shadow.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“Good.” Wednesday grinned. “Too much talking these days.
Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how
to suffer in silence.”

Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the
hall from Shadow’s. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on
the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking
pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges.

“I got hijacked by a fat kid,” said Shadow. “He says to tell
you that you have been consigned to the dungheap of history while people like him
ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that.”

“Little snot,” said Wednesday.

“You know him?”

Wednesday shrugged. “I know who he is.” He sat down, heavily,
on the room’s only chair. “They don’t have a clue,” he said. “They don’t have a
fucking clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town?”

“I don’t know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up
Laura’s affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that.
It’ll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it.”

Wednesday nodded his huge head. “Well, the sooner you’re
done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. Goodnight.”

Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of
Wednesday’s room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the
bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all
the motel’s little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam.

He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it
and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got
out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises.

The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and
Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer.

Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free
man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would.
He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food
joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out
there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in
the apartment that he had shared with Laura—in the bed that he had shared with
Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her
scent, her life, was simply too painful ...

Don’t go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about
something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have
the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so
necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, nor produce paper
flowers. But he just wanted to manipulate coins; he liked the craft of it. He
started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the
coin he had tossed into Laura’s grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was
telling him that Laura had died with Robbie’s cock in her mouth, and once again
he felt a small hurt in his heart.

Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Where had he heard
that?

He thought of Wednesday’s comment and smiled, despite himself:
Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their
feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was
a tot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep
enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn’t feel anything at all.

Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing.

He was walking ...

He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere
he looked there were statues and carvings and rough-hewn images. He was
standing beside a statue of a womanlike thing: her naked breasts hung flat and
pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of
her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck
there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to
attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and
violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it.

He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those
statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step.

In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name
burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace
of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman
with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hubur; the
ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef.

A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in
his dream, but he could see no one.

“These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as
well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone,
but their names and their images remain with us.”

Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another
room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see.
Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher
cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were
three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist:
their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and
genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird
which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vulture’s,
but with human arms: and on, and on.

The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class,
saying, “These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are
lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their
totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without
passing on their secrets.

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and
unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be
killed, in the end.”

There was a whispering noise that began then to run through
the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a
chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the
halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgotten—octopus-faced gods
and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires ...

Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his
forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him
the time was 1:03 A.M. The light of the Motel America sign outside shone
through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny
motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the
bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his mind’s eye, but he could
not explain to himself why it had scared him so.

The light that came into the room from outside was not
bright, but Shadow’s eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman
sitting on the side of his bed.

He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand,
or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had
buried her in.

Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar line. “I guess,”
said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”

Shadow said nothing.

He sat down on the room’s only chair and, finally, asked, “Is
that you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”

“You’re dead, babe.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to
her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.

“No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We
have some unresolved issues to address.”

“Like me being dead?”

“Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and
Robbie.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined
that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his
ex-wife ... no, he aor-rected himself, his late wife—sat on the bed and stared
at him, unblinking.

“Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly
get me—a cigarette?”

“I thought you gave them up.”

“I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the
health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the
lobby.”

Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot,
into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John
Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the
night clerk for a book of matches.

“You’re in a nonsmoking room,” said the clerk. “You make
sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a
plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.

“Got it,” said Shadow.

He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on
top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the
cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw
that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud
under them.

Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She
took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing
anything.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Me too,” said Laura. When she inhaled the cigarette tip
glowed, and he was able to see her face.

“So,” she said. “They let you out.”

“Yes.”

The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful.
I should never have got you mixed up in it.”

“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.”
He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave
him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.

“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke
wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know
about me and Robbie?”