The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Take that, Harriet!” I shout, and then I fold my part of the Dim Sun in half and shove it in my maw, chomping down on it with the dentures I had specially made. They can withstand anything I'd want to eat. It's hot and cold and delicious. It's junk in the most divine sense, celestial debris, a miniature of the fail of Earth's sun, and all over the universe these are a coveted item. They fill you up no matter what. They're known for it.

  Bert's gobbling his down, and so am I, though I'm tempted to savor it more slowly. I can feel it quieting the Black Hole, stopping its progress. My belly shrinks. The dark is retreating. The melting goodness covers over the nothing, and my shirt, now tattered, relaxes.

  Harriet sighs and stands up. She has her own whole Dim Sun, already nibbled around the edges. She eats it in three bites, showing incredible tolerance for the burn.

  “You're always entertaining, Harriet,” Bert Gold says, wiping his mouth. “I'd wish you better luck next time, but you'd miss me if you caused me to be absorbed into the dark. You should try and get over me.”

  The chef passes Harriet a small dessert cone. She licks at it like a pleased cat. Bert looks at it enviously. I know his mouth, like mine, is blistered.

  “Comet ice,” she says, and shrugs. She offers the cone to me, and gives me a single lick, which instantly ruins me. It's not normal comet ice. It's the kind of thing that delivers seas to a dry planet. Faintly strawberry, faintly coconut. A little rum, a little gasoline. It's a cocktail of perfection and it soothes my burns. Harriet's not bad. She never was. In fact, I always liked Harriet. Why I'm the guy Bert got in the divorce, I don't know. He chose me, but I should never have chosen him back.

  “That was completely your fault, Rodney,” Bert says petulantly. “You're supposed to be the taster. I won't take you places if you don't do your job. I shouldn't have even had any of that black hole in my mouth. I'm unstarring this place and reporting it to Health & Safety,” says Bert. “I am.”

  I look at Bert, waiting for him to apologize. He doesn't.

  “Have one of these,” I say, and I pass Bert the last basket on the cart. After all these years, I'm finally sick of Bert. He's criminally ungrateful. I just saved him from a Black Hole, and will he ever he say thank you? No. He's never been nice, not really. I'm only here because a lady canceled on him, and she was right to do it. Bert will never learn.

  “What are they?”

  “They're delicious,” I say. “But dangerous. It's sort of like that French cheese you had back in San Francisco, the one that walked.”

  I didn't eat that cheese. I was never a gourmand like Bert. You couldn't have paid me enough. I preferred a nice processed cheese spread slathered on hot dog.

  Bert grumbles a little, but he opens the basket. Little exotic crullers inside it, with a creamy filling. He perks up.

  “Long as they aren't raw,” says Bert. “I have allergies.”

  “Not raw,” says the chef. “These aren't even special. They're something the back kitchen whipped up. Grandma food, you ask me.”

  “Retro,” says Bert, clearly taking notes even as he bites in. “Home-cooked. Chef's washed up, but the kitchen staff innovates with traditional flavors.”

  Harriet and I watch as he puts the pastry in his mouth, chews, and swallows. His head stretches. His ankles extend. His belly contracts and then rolls out to a long rubber-band of middle.

  “See you, Bert,” I say.

  “Damn it,” Bert says. “Damn it all. Wormhole?”

  “Wormhole,” Harriet confirms.

  Harriet and I watch as Bert Gold starts time-traveling from both ends.

  His belly stays. The rest of him flickers through time and space. His head is briefly in the 1820s, while his backside visits the dark side of the moon circa two thousand years from now. His feet step momentarily into Mesopotamia while his head dunks in a mucky sixth century bog.

  Harriet gives me another lick of her ice. She hoists up her swath of sky, scatters the crumbs in it, and rewraps it around her midriff.

  “Nice to see you, Rodney,” she says. She heads for the door.

  “Can I call you?” I ask.

  “You can take over as critic,” Harriet says. “Looks like that position's open. I like to eat. I like hungry company. I'll see you around.”

  She walks out into the nowhere, the sky shining in her wake. She's striking, Harriet. Even more than usual.

  I look down at Bert. He's divided between Mars and Pluto. I can see it, each place a flicker. His belly remains the same, stuck here in the middle.

  I look at the chef. He shrugs. “Kitchen works for the President,” he says.

  “What'll you do with him?” I ask.

  “The President has provided for his care.”

  The chef wraps Bert Gold in a tablecloth and slings him over his shoulder. Bert's head is in the Wild West. His legs are clamped around a shuttle from the early years of the colonies. I wonder if he's eating well on his journey.

  When I get ready to leave the restaurant, I discover that the President of the Universe has paid the check. What can I say? The woman keeps a guy busy. She keeps everything busy. She teaches me things. I learn words from Harriet, which is more than I ever learned from Bert Gold. All he ever did was hit me with racquetballs and kick me out of fancy restaurants midway through the amuse-bouche.

  Things are different now. I'm free of Bert Gold. I'm already hungry again, and the universe is wide. I pick up Bert's rating notebook. I walk out the door into the great darkness.

  There are things to eat out there.

  What There Was to See

  “I am touched by the emotions of the unfortunate patients who sought me out for help, and had to leave without consolation; they had lost their sight because of disease or destruction of the cornea…Never can those half-blind find consoling peace, when their eyes involuntarily seek out light, and the alternating sensation of light and darkness awakens their recollection of the painful loss of vision, and motivates their desire for help, which still remains unpromising. How unpleasant it is for the physician, and how depressing for the patient…”

   — Franz Reisinger, 1824

  1.

  Outside the windows, the scenery was a bristling green flecked with gold. The group had taken the train from Frankfurt, a long day of vistas no one appreciated, the curtains open, cases piled behind them, all three passengers in the car weary and gilded with pollen.

  When at last they reached the town where the doctor had his surgery, Professor Abendroth turned to look his wife, and Johanna startled him with a tired smile. He caught himself wondering what their lives would have been had there been no child. Fritz felt forced by philosophy into an attitude of benevolence; Johanna was his wife, after all. It had been a good match, he a student, she a professor's daughter. He'd come up in the world by wedding her, and she'd stayed where she began. He didn't love her. She didn't love him either, he was sure. Her eyes were prone to filling of late. She would not insult him by openly weeping.

  Johanna Abendroth stiffened back into her petticoats, considering her husband. She was wearing her brave face, and had been for years. There was a saint-seeing sister on his side, and a great aunt as well, both of them institutionalized. They'd scarcely met before they were married, Johanna in sprigged lace, her arm laced in Fritz's, her life ruined within months. No, not ruined. It hadn't been truly ruined until the daughter, and the fever. She must be generous. Even if Fritz did have flaws. His ears were growing fur, and his belly was large enough to enclose a child.

  Fritz scowled. Beate was her mother's daughter: Johanna was nearsighted. She used a magnifying glass. Fritz's sister, yes, was in hospital, but she'd never been near the girl. And he'd not known his great aunt. He'd had in his mind a different trajectory for himself, a philosophical library, a desk with rolled documents, sheaf after sheaf of paper, and nothing moving anywhere but for his pen. This marriage and daughter had eaten away at silence, filling quiet with high voices, clamorous and pining. He had a
n office at the university, but he was rarely there. His wife would look at him in the mornings, her eyes full, and so he'd hasten home in the evenings to make sure the daughter did not die of domestic disaster. She had to be watched. She set things on fire. She flung herself down the staircase and leapt into the cellar. She tripped from the front door in an ecstasy of wandering, and all of this almost without sight. When she was small, soon after the fever, Beate had escaped the attic and climbed onto the roof, her dress ballooned out upon the splintering shingles, the cat beside her, yowling.

  She'd claimed she was following someone. That had been the beginning of the real trouble. Fritz shuddered. Beate's eyes had returned again and again to the figure she indicated, consternation spreading across her face as she looked more or less in her father's direction, following his furious voice, then back again with great precision at someone who was not there.

  “There, father,” Beate said, and pointed into the air just off the roof. “She's falling now. She'll fall again in a moment.”

  There was nothing, no one. A bird flitting upward, leaves dropping from the big tree.

  “She's dying,” said his daughter. And then, “Now she'll die again. Her back will break, and her neck.”

  The cat yowled and Beate nodded as whatever she watched tripped from the shingles and fell to the street below. The chill had never left Fritz, though he did not believe in ghosts.

  Together, the Abendroth's bore the burden of their daughter. In public they were gracious sufferers of their misfortune, but at night, they'd silently lie awake, and blame each other. Their daughter was seventeen, but her mind was younger. She was pursued by imagined friends and enemies, never silent, always gabbling. Her parents dreaded her. Even in her sleep she spoke to the invisible, and in daylight she swore she saw them watching her. She couldn't read. She couldn't write. From interrogating her, Fritz gathered that Beate could see only blurred insinuations of the real world, but alongside them were her own notions. To find her a teacher would have meant trotting her into public. This journey, to a village outside Giessen, was difficult enough. They could not quite bring themselves to institutionalize her. People would find out.

  This was a last resort. Perhaps, with this procedure, something could be salvaged. If she could see what she should see, it might quiet the other ravings, and who knew? — perhaps even some young man… She was a beautiful girl, the mother and father agreed, a plausible pride and joy, her skin flawless, her long blonde locks curling into smooth spirals, and perhaps her eyes might be fixed.

  Beate Abendroth sat between her parents, uncaring of their concerns. They looked at her. She did not look back. A caul over each cornea. She focused, as ever, on the things only she could see.

  “Perhaps,” Fräu Abendroth said in the brave voice she reserved for such pronouncements, “this will be a true cure at last.”

  “It will be,” said Professor Abendroth, and nodded for emphasis. His daughter was gazing out the window, for all the world as though she could see the scenery. Before the fever she'd been playful and quick-witted. Now she muttered all night and daylong. The servants never stayed. Everything was dirty. He had a sticky splot of jam on his vest. He touched it, and now his glove was spoilt.

  Fräu Abendroth sneezed into her handkerchief — her husband shuddered — and brushed dust from her daughter's cheekbone. She twisted a lock of her daughter's hair about her own finger.

  “Mother,” Beate said, adjusting her eyeshades, tugging her hair away, seeming to peer out the window. “Stop.”

  There was something visible, hanging in the trees, or at least, Beate assumed the unseen things from which the thing dangled were trees. From the way it moved, hanging by its neck from an unseen rope, they might be passing an old gallows. She slid across the leather to get closer to the window, and stretched out a hand to hold herself in place, but it was gone.

  “Nearly there, and a time we've had,” huffed Johanna. There was a piece of boning stabbing her, just below the left breast, and there was no way to get at it. Instead, she fussed with her daughter's hair. Fräulein could not be made to care about such things.

  Beate was calm. The train wasn't the worst place. The things she saw were nearly invisible at that speed, most of the time, and they rarely noticed her. Early in the journey, she'd seen a bad one, but it had eventually left her alone, drifting back to the front of the train where it belonged. Beate wasn't sure if it was male or female. Once it had leapt before the train, and now it was part of it. She could only make out its mouth, and that spoke ceaselessly, a maddened murmur. She could hear it now, though it had returned to its place beside the conductor, watching the snub-nose of the train, opening its mouth from time to time to taste pipe smoke.

  The things Beate saw in substitute for what other people saw were much more than just light and dark. She was familiar with faces that had disappeared from flesh a thousand years prior to her birth. Her closest companions had lived in her bedroom since she was seven. The house had been built atop a plague burial. They'd moved house several times because of her affliction. There was no place where the dead were not. Every building, every room, every small garden plot. Everything had something buried beneath it, and if you thought things were green and gold, you were wrong.

  The ghost she'd seen first on this journey had curled into her lap in order to whisper. She couldn't see her own skirts but she could see the stains its blood had left on them. Sometimes the space around her body was defined only by the presence and spoor of ghosts.

  Another ghost was sitting beside her mother, looking expectant. She shook her head at it, but it looked at her hungrily anyway.

  Johanna had brought cold chicken and insisted Beate eat it. Beate opened her mouth to take a little bite. She did not like meat. It reminded her of her own fingers. Vegetables were like organs. Wine and water were unknowns, but she had a feeling they were all living things, or recently deceased, the wine blood, the water tears. Nothing tasted like food to Beate. She wasn't sure what food was meant to taste like, though she listened to her parents eating, the way they clattered folks and knives and moaned with pleasure, the way the cooks — they always quit, terrified of the things Beate saw in the kitchen — spoke of seasonings and vinegars, roasted meats and basted things. Fat cherries marinated in kirch. Shaved chocolate. All of it tasted like ghosts to her, and sad flesh. She swallowed the chicken. Dry as bark, but pulsating somehow, a sweet filth to it. She gagged. Her mother clucked. She stopped gagging.

  The ghost beside her mother looked at the darkness where the chicken had been and hissed. Sometimes the dead didn't like other dead things. Beate swallowed again, this time without chewing.

  “I'm not at all hungry,” she said, but her mother forced three more bites into her mouth before she was done. The ghost watched her closely, its eyes glowing, chewing in time with her.

  “I'd give it you if I could,” she told it, “if you're starving. Are you starving? Did you starve?”

  Her mother pinched her thigh. She wasn't supposed to talk to them in public. Sometimes it couldn't be helped.

  Hope should have been trampled by now. Twelve years of blindness and along with the blindness, the Other Thing, as her parents called it. Beate herself was happy enough to wear dark glasses, though had she been allowed, she'd have left her eyes bare. Her mother wouldn't allow her to show them. She'd threatened corneal tattoos, India ink pricked in to change the pale to black, but no one would perform them, because Beate still had a little sight. If items were held very close to her eyes, she could see the blurry edges of objects from the real world, a watchface, a fingertip, an earring. Her own world was a lamplight shadow show full of spirits, and sometimes, she was lonely there. Sometimes things she saw made her fearful, but most of the time, she simply observed the ghosts, and went about her own tasks. Today, she was not lonely, and mostly not afraid, though she was less than delighted to be traveling to the country.

  The country was alwa
ys full of murdered dead. Cities had fewer. People noticed ghosts in cities, and dealt with them. Beate assumed that others must do better helping them than she could. Some ghosts could be satisfied, it seemed, or the world would have been all ghosts, twenty dead for every living person. In cities, the dead blended together into a blurring mist, people walking and riding horses that were not there, everyone endlessly on the way to somewhere else. Beate's life was small enough that she knew the problematic ghosts on her daily path, and avoided them. The rest, she didn't mind. They were just ghosts, about their ghost business.

  In the country, the dead wandered for years, uncared for, unnoticed, and when Beate passed them, they clamored and crowded her, until she could see only them, pressing, touching, all around her, sorting blades of grass and biting hay, clawing tree branches, hissing and rattling. Sad ghosts and regretful ghosts, but none of them had much knowledge of the world. Ghosts lacked ambition. They revealed no secrets, gave her no joys. They were like a thousand hungry dogs, all crowded and yapping, all wanting and wanting, but their wants were nothing anyone could provide. When Beate slept, they pried up her eyelids to be seen, and when seen, they reveled. For some of them, her gaze on them was as good as food.

  “She saw me!” they shrieked in triumph, whenever she acknowledged them.

  She swallowed again, feeling the chicken in her throat, and the hungry ghost looked at her and clicked its tongue.

  “Go away,” Beate said. “I'm not allowed to talk to you.”

  Her mother grabbed her thigh, pinching.

  “You mustn't,” said Johanna. “You mustn't speak like this before the doctor. He can only use you if you're a good girl. You have to show you know how to behave. They have to trust you can withstand the surgery, not damage your eyes again, nor hurt yourself.”

  “This isn't a privilege everyone receives,” her father said, holding Beate's shoulder tightly between his thumb and forefinger. “It's because you're precious that we're taking you to see the surgeon. You are precious,” he repeated carefully.