The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  I won't lie. I thought about walking down those stairs then, down to the sands of End Beach. I could see the ocean lapping at the shore like a cat's tongue at a dish. I could see the blood from the day's sacrifices running into its mouth.

  Someone that day had given up a hand, and learned to paint with the other. Someone else had written an apology for everything in the sand and let people fuck on it. Another person had built a tower of unsold canvases, and that was the bonfire that night, a pile of portraits of her lovers. I heard a smaller barter carrying up from the beach, two boys bargaining for dinner, one boy offering another his only memory of his grandmother singing, in exchange for a cheese sandwich.

  I stayed up on the top of the cliff instead. After a while, I went back into your house and tried to forget you. If I was giving you up, if the memory of you was my sacrifice, I'm not sure how much of me would be left on the other side. You flooded through me and mixed with my blood, and I don't know what of me is mine and what is yours.

  Now it's winter, and End Beach is empty. No one's trying to sell their precious things down there anymore. I turn the bracelets on my wrists, and turn them again. Wherever you are, I wonder if you remember the first night we spent together, and if you knew that I almost let myself kill you. You were bandaging my wounds, and I was sitting on the top of your toilet, looking at you. I could see the tears in your eyes, and I almost ran into them, trying to save myself from falling in love with a human again. I could have poured out of you, torrented, flooded you from the inside out until you drowned in a teacup's worth of salt water.

  But I didn't want to kill you. It'd been four hundred years since I'd stood in a courtroom, dripping, and let a town convict my lover of loving me.

  “What was I to do,” he said, pleading. “She came up out of the stream, naked and wet, and she said be with me. What would you do, Sven Andersson? And you?”

  “Not what you did, Peder Jönsson,” said Sven Andersson, but he was staring at me, salivating. Finally they decided on a hanging, and my love was strung up from a gallows with me unable to do anything about it. I had no sway over wood, no sway over rope. I threw myself down a well and stayed at the bottom, eating insects, holding my breath, waiting for another century to come and comfort me.

  I was frightened of you. You'd torn me from my tank. But I let you bandage me, where I was bleeding, and when you told me you didn't have to know everything, I told you I did. When you said you had no secrets, I laughed at you. When you said you were simple, I laughed some more.

  “No one simple would have seen me,” I said.

  But you didn't tell me everything.

  I make a decision at last. I've already lost you, and you're the best thing I ever lost. It's been long enough that I've read all your books and touched all your pictures. I've drunk the last of the tea you left.

  “It's part of the thing,” you said, and so I go to your basement and get the chains. There aren't any special costumes, I don't think, or at least you never said there were. Just the bracelets. I thread the chains through the loops on the rock, and then through the fish on my wrists. I stretch on my back, looking up at snow falling, and then I lock the locks.

  “It's silly,” you said. “Come down to End Beach with me,” you said, but I didn't. Maybe if I had I could have kept whatever happened from happening. You got swept away, or swept yourself away. You let the ocean take you. I don't think you're riding a bus somewhere, or under London on the tube. I don't think you've flown across the ocean and are hiding from me in New York City. I think you're gone.

  I chain myself to the rock hanging over the shore, and perch there until I'm covered in ice. I hold my breath, waiting for another season to come, spring or the middle of summer, with light like blood and every green plant drinking girls like me up from the ground. I think about everyone I ever tugged down through a river, every diver I ever touched gently underwater, until they couldn't do anything but drown for me.

  Through the ice on my eyelashes, I can see the ocean surging, the dark spinning and stirring, an abyss below the surface of the world.

  At dawn, I watch the monster rise up out of the sea, its body a blackness the size of a lake. It's too large to see it all at once, and so I don't. Ink spilled in a glass of water, shifting and spreading, black bleeding into blue, edgeless. I watch the monster surge up over the sand and look at me, eyes gleaming, claws on the cliff face.

  I am not afraid of monsters. I've never been afraid of monsters. I'm afraid of love. Love is offering your body up to some god other than the one you were taught to worship.

  I look into the monster's eyes. It's no monster I know, no monster in a category I've seen before. There are the old monsters that tore ships from the ocean, the ones that leapt from caves, the ones that waited underground for heroes. There are the monsters that trampled mountain ranges, the ones that ate all the cattle, and then all the children. There are the monsters of the air, the ones that fly, the ones that sing songs so beautiful every city sleeps. This is a monster I've never met, a monster of the end.

  I look at it and see not just sadness, but fury.

  “Are you the one who does the sweeping out to sea?” I shout. “Are you the one who takes the sacrifices? Did you take him away? I want him back.”

  “He's not everything,” said your neighbor. “I should know. He eats women. You don't know what I've seen. I've lived opposite him for years. It's not your fault you fell for him. I fell for him too.”

  But the monster just looks at me, eyes shining, and I want to turn to water and become its tears. Love is what you see coming and don't run from. Love is the swift rising darkness darker than the dark. Love is the creature you covet, the wound you want.

  The monster looks at me and says nothing, and of course, I know you. I'd know you anywhere.

  I move my fingers, trying to get between you and your scales, and I get one nail under your skin. My heart is still made of hammers. I drive it in deeper, puncturing you until I smell your blood.

  You open your jaws and pluck me from the rock, the chains that hold me there breaking. Down below us, the coastline erodes and End Beach itself is swept out to sea.

  I met you, love of mine, at the end of centuries spent alone. My body has been every decorative lily pool in Japan, and every waterfall in Africa. My body's been the Amazon, full of snakes, thigh-deep wading for explorers, and the Mississippi and her floodplains, spilling out across miles, looping and twisting to surprise the houses. My body was the last moments of the Aral Sea, the final drops drunk by a camel and carried away. When you found me in that fish tank, I was too lonely to travel.

  So I dissolve onto your tongue. I rush through your tears and pour myself beneath your skin. Water will always find its level.

  In the sea off End Beach, we swim out, our flesh one thing and then two again, you naked and me naked too. Maybe every love affair is the sacrifice that saves the city. Behind us, I see buildings not falling.

  The rocks are black and sharp, and the teeth of dead monsters are all around us. Some of them starved to death, and others were killed by heroes. Some of them swallowed ships in starvation. Some of them, maybe, got harpooned by their lovers. You taste like tea, like salt, like ice.

  “Do you eat all the artists?” I ask you, “Is that festival for you?” and you look at me and tell me you have to have some secrets.

  “Do you drink all the drowned?” you ask me, and I tell you I have to have some secrets too.

  No one knows the end of this. Not me. I don't know if I'll end up in a gutter, or in a teacup again, in a champagne glass, in an ice cube in someone's freezer, trying to wait for forever to pass.

  “This is simple,” I say.

  “Nothing's simple,” you tell me.

  A long time ago, I used to know a fisherman. We met when I was his fish, and he called me up out of the water to grant him wishes. I told him nothing you wish for is what you think it's going to be, that even if you wish for
riches, you'll end up buried in coins, suffocating on metal. He asked for love, and I told him that love will kill you.

  “I don't mind dying,” he said.

  So I gave him love. Later, I rolled his body in a sail and then into the ocean, with rocks at his feet. I watched him drop through the water, and at the bottom, I watched him eaten by the little creatures down there. When all his bones were bare, I made him into a house, and lived inside him for a while. His love gave me shelter beneath the waves, and my love gave him the last thing he wanted. I am not sorry.

  I turn my head to look at you, and you're all around me, this giant span of fins and tail, teeth and eyes.

  “Swim,” I say, and I become the ocean.

  The Scavenger's Nursery

  A boy finds a baby in the garbage. It's hot­ter this sum­mer than it was the sum­mer be­fore. Every­one in the city is try­ing to get to the coun­try, be­cause in the city, the rat pop­u­la­tion is ex­plod­ing. Rats them­selves are ex­plod­ing, though not of their own vo­li­tion. Some­times rats swal­low ex­plos­ives. Some­times ex­plos­ives are wrapped in little bobbles of food.

  The boy, Danilo, has been do­ing some work in this re­gard. Rats are a re­new­able re­source. Today, he's track­ing a big rat up the moun­tain. Be­neath his san­dals is a hill of plastic and peel­ings, rub­ber, blank screens, glass formerly glow­ing, now re­flect­ing noth­ing but sun. He looks through red knock-off sunglasses labeled GUCCY. His feet skid on some­thing. Some­thing across the hil­lock ig­nites, and he looks sus­pi­ciously at the area, judging dis­tance. Fine. No wind today.

  This moun­tain can be seen from space. It has a name, and on maps, it's part of the to­po­graphy. It's only when you get closer that you can see it for an as­semblage, in­ven­ted earth. Secretly, the boy calls the moun­tain after him­self: Danilo's Bundók, as though he's the first ex­plorer to reach its sum­mit. Be­neath Danilo's feet, the moun­tain shud­ders. A quiver, a cours­ing, and garbage slides.

  In the town be­low, roofs clang with tin cans, and auto­mobile parts thun­der down. It's a storm of junk.

  As the ava­lanche sub­sides, Danilo be­comes aware of some­thing at his feet, push­ing out from the lay­ers of re­fuse. The rat, he thinks, ready for it. It's long as his fore­arm. He nearly spears it, a wet black thing, its skin shin­ing, blurry, dazzled eyes open­ing. But it isn't a rat. It is an an­imal, its flesh hard and soft at once, like a ba­nana bound in iron.

  He'll take it home, he thinks, and make it a pet. He's owned other pets, some friendly, some feral. There's a chicken in his his­tory, smut-feathered, beak shiny and per­fect, and when he owned that chicken, he stroked it un­til he lost cus­tody and it be­came a soup. This pet won't be eaten. There's noth­ing about it that looks ed­ible.

  The thing blinks, show­ing pale yel­low rub­bery eye­lids, some­what trans­par­ent, and Danilo reaches out and picks it up. It shifts, com­fort­ing it­self against his fin­gers, and he thinks Baby?

  Danilo once held his sis­ter over his shoulder, her silken cheek rest­ing against his neck, her fuzz of hair brush­ing his face, and so he tries to hold the thing us­ing the same method. He jogs it a bit, and coos, shift­ing his sack to the other shoulder. Be­low him, metal roof­ing vi­brates in the sun, hot and glit­ter­ing, but where he is, far above the town, he's king of the bundók.

  He con­siders his new pet. It's not a mon­key, though it has a tail, and grasp­ing fin­gers. It has a feath­ery black fringe around its neck, and small rough horns made of some­thing very solid. No teeth, but a clamp­ing mouth, the sort of mouth that would cause a bruise were it al­lowed to bite. It is very ugly.

  Danilo knows he hasn't seen everything. He hasn't seen the stars, though he knows they ex­ist, or once did. On the moun­tain, he found a tour­ist magazine with a yel­low jacket, and pho­tos of places all around the world, in­clud­ing the bot­tom of the sea, where a glow­ing jelly­fish or­bited in the dark, like a bal­loon caught in a cur­rent, float­ing higher and higher un­til the clouds took their color.

  An­ten­nae tendril against Danilo's face, ra­dio, tele­vi­sion, in­sect, whisker, he can't tell, but they be­long to the baby. The little thing stares up at him, and he feels power­ful. He might put the baby down and leave it here in the sun, or he might take it and save it. It's his choice.

  It makes a sound, a gurg­ling crow. Then it be­gins to cry. Danilo gives it a bit of his T-shirt to suckle at, and it clamps its mouth down on that, nurs­ing at the dirty cot­ton, smack­ing. He con­siders for a mo­ment, and then wraps the baby in the rest of his shirt, con­struct­ing a small sling. He makes his way, bare-ches­ted, down the moun­tain to­ward home.

  As Danilo des­cends, the moun­tain pulsates. He looks around, won­der­ing if there's a re­lief or­gan­iz­a­tion bull­dozer bring­ing dirt to cover over some par­tic­u­lar tox­icity, but shortly, the quiv­er­ing stops, and he con­tin­ues, the baby sleep­ing against his chest.

  The last of the river dol­phins. The last of the pois­on­ous frogs. The last of the po­lar bears. The last of the Siberian ti­gers. The last of the dodos, gone two cen­tur­ies now. The first of these.

  A small boat moves like a hun­gover party­goer in Times Square on New Year's Day. Nets stretch out to take samples from the patch — bones and tangles. It's a glit­ter­ing gyre, col­or­ful bits of wrap­ping, and metal-lined sacks.

  It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, some­body's mu­sic shouts from the cabin, and some­body else yells “Fuck off, Jack. That song's banned from this boat and you know it.”

  “I miss the nineties,” says the some­body, un­re­pent­ant.

  On deck, Reya Barr sifts fin­ger­nails through her fin­gers. A con­tainer of dec­or­ated plastic press-ons fell from a Chinese ship six months ago, and here they are, as pre­dicted. She's mapped their the­or­et­ical pro­gress on a cur­rent chart, but no one ever knows what the ocean will do, not really. She reads the pale pink ovals, one let­ter at a time. B-R-I-D-E. As though a wo­man might need to look down mid­way through her wed­ding and read her fin­ger­tips to tell her­self who she is. She puts one on each fin­ger, and crimps her fin­gers into claws. It's for the money, this cruise. Her stu­dent loans are due. BRIDE. Her other hand's all glit­ter light­ning and storm clouds.

  This is a par­tic­u­lar kind of ex­ped­i­tion, a sponsored sail though a plastic sea. The goal is to con­firm that the garbage patch is grow­ing, and also to con­firm that it's drift­ing to­ward Hawaii. Every­one already knows this, but this is sci­ence; one hy­po­thesis re­quires con­firm­a­tion be­fore an­other can be made. The sci­ent­ists are map­ping the bound­ar­ies of the mass. Garbage flows over the wa­ter like some­thing fluid, but it's also dis­tinct, each piece some­thing that can be cap­tured in a net, ex­amined.

  She ima­gines garbage cross­ing thou­sands of miles, drawn to this place. A kind of mag­netic de­sire, draw­ing like to like. The world is col­lapsing un­der plastic ducks. Hula hoops. Wa­ter bottles. Were she plastic and thrown into a gut­ter, Reya might be drawn here her­self. She'd sail across the sea, un­til she ar­rived in this civil­iz­a­tion of crumple.

  She leans far out over the rail, squint­ing at some­thing shiny mov­ing in the garbage. Maybe a gull or a trapped fish. There's an an­cient smell out here — rot, salt, and dark­ness.

  There's a kind of weird beauty in the re­in­ven­tion of an ocean. It's not as though things have never changed be­fore. It isn't as though what she floats on wasn't once ice. And the land she walks on, when she's at home? That land was covered with ocean, the sand full of bones of the sea.

  She thinks about that when she feels like pre­tend­ing that none of this is really go­ing to have re­per­cus­sions. There was oil gey­ser­ing up in the Gulf of Mex­ico; the oil was in the news for a while, and then mys­ter­i­ously gone, as though some gi­ant mouth be­neath the ocean sucked it away. It isn't lost. That much
oil doesn't get lost. But the world is con­tent to be­lieve that wa­ter is big enough to win.

  Reya has vi­als full of wa­ter thickened with pho­to­de­graded plastic, a slurry of chil­dren's toys and dildoes, of bag­gies, shiny leg­gings, med­ical tubing and plank­ton, and all of it looks like the same thing. It looks like wa­ter.

  Some­times she dreams of drop­ping to the bot­tom, where none of the world has yet got­ten, but even the deep­est vents are full of mer­maid tears and mi­cro­plastic. The ar­ter­ies of the earth are clogged with hotel room keys.

  The world's end­ing, yeah. It's be­gun to bore her, the sort of hor­ror that's dull when con­sidered too deeply from the deck of a re­search boat out in the middle of the Pa­cific.

  The thing in the garbage patch is still mov­ing. She watches it idly. There was a storm last night, and today the mass has rolled over. New things are vis­ible, bod­ies of gulls and fish skel­et­ons, dead jelly­fish wrap­ping about in­de­cipher­able gleam. She aims her cam­era at the thing, zoom­ing in on its mo­tion and film­ing it. She'll post it to the ves­sel blog. Look at this, ex­ped­i­tion donors, this bit of plastic that looks like an an­imal. Look at this un-thing that looks like life.

  The un-thing looks back at her.

  “What,” she says, quietly, and then her voice rises. “What the hell is that?”

  It's not a seal. It's not a shark. It's not any­thing like any­thing.

  A cloud drapes it­self over Mex­ico City, yel­low with gas­ol­ine and ci­gar­ettes and souls. It hangs there like some­thing solid, low enough to graze the sky­scrapers, put­ting them to their ori­ginal task, that of touch­ing the fin­gers of god. But the cloud is not birth­ing a god; it's birth­ing an­other cloud — small, dark, heavy, wet.

  In an of­fice build­ing in Lon­don, a jan­itor pushes a wastepa­per bin down a hall­way. In­side the bin, a plastic sack of shred­ded ac­counts rustles against cof­fee grounds, news­pa­pers. Its heart is full of de­cap­it­ated pay­ables, re­ceiv­ables, half words and splintered sen­tences, crumpled muffin wrap­pers, its blood copy ma­chine toner and printer ink.