The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  The new­born lies at the bot­tom of the bin, too wobbly to sup­port its own limbs. The jan­itor swipes a mop along the floor and dumps wastepa­per bas­kets, and each time wastepa­per joins the mass, the baby at the bot­tom of the bin grows big­ger.

  Danilo puts his garbage baby into a box and feeds it fruit. It rattles and bares its tiny tin teeth. His sis­ter looks into the box, once, and gives him a look of con­firm­a­tion. Yes, Danilo is a devil on earth. Yes, he would ad­opt a thing like this thing. She runs from the room spit­ting tattle like she's a can full of crick­ets.

  Danilo's mother looks into the box, but doesn't really see. It's dark. All she can make out is tail and a fringy black ruff. “That'll get too big,” she says. “Bet­ter put it out now and save your­self the pain.”

  “I'll keep it just a little longer,” Danilo says.

  “Don't get at­tached,” says his mother, know­ing he will. These are the sor­rows of hav­ing a son. Daugh­ters are more bloodthirsty.

  So the baby grows. The moun­tain out­side shud­ders and shakes, shed­ding lay­ers of garbage, earth­quak­ing, and the baby cries. Danilo wor­ries about it. He isn't feed­ing it the right food. He gives it a Coke. It whirrs like a mo­tor, and grows fat and sleek on sugar. It sleeps in his bed. It eats a bi­cycle tire, then a bi­cycle, broken and twis­ted after a run-in with a car. Danilo looks at it, as­sess­ing its ap­pet­ite. The moun­tain is there, and peri­od­ic­ally a par­tic­u­larly suc­cu­lent piece of garbage surges up through lay­ers, a gift for the baby's belly.

  Reya reaches over the rail, the fake-fin­ger­nails three inches longer than her fin­ger­tips. The un-thing swims to her. She hauls it aboard. The garbage gyre roils, and then is still. The creature is small and light, its body covered in alu­minum wrap­pings and fin­ger­nails, bones of fish, a bit of kelp, a tentacle of some dead ceph­alo­pod caught in a net. It has a black beak, and large, lid­less hazel eyes.

  The other sci­ent­ists ex­am­ine it, brows fur­rowed, tweez­ers tak­ing samples. They ar­gue. It's a gull covered in oil; maybe it drif­ted in from the Gulf. No, it's some other seabird, messed about in garbage and plastic. At last, they de­cide that it is — it must be — a creature that's been mutated by the plastic wa­ter. They pho­to­graph it, post the photo to the ves­sel's blog, and then send the photo to NOAA, ask­ing for backup. People take no­tice. A con­tin­gent rises up and screams about the end of the world, beast num­ber­ing, signs.

  The un-thing curls in Reya's state­room, wrapped in a heat blanket, open­ing its beak peri­od­ic­ally for food. Its tentacle twists around the bottle. The only wo­man on the ship, and here she is, feed­ing a baby. She's ap­palled, re­pulsed, guilty. She can't bring her­self to think about what sort of baby it is. It'll be­come a pa­per in Nature. She'll be the head au­thor. Ca­reer-mak­ing. New spe­cies. She looks at its glassy doll eyes. There was a con­tainer of five thou­sand drink-and-wet baby dolls lost from a ship late last year. She'd ori­gin­ally thought of track­ing the baby dolls in­stead of the fin­ger­nails, but de­cided it was too much meta­phor, map­ping a sea full of fake ba­bies.

  Though she should've known they were com­ing, Reya isn't ex­pect­ing it when the heli­copter lands on their pad and the uni­formed men get out. They'll take the un-thing away from her, prob­ably to a labor­at­ory to be dis­sec­ted. She looks into the baby's eyes. If any­one's go­ing to kill it, dis­sect it, dis­play it, it will be her.

  Reya car­ries it onto the heli­copter. She cradles it all the way to Wash­ing­ton. She feeds it Styro­foam cups and foil-wrapped can­dies. She doesn't croon to it or lul­laby it. She learns it. That's her job. Does it have re­flexes? Yes. Can it speak? Also yes, a my­nah, a mimic. She knows things about it that the other sci­ent­ists don't. It's in­tel­li­gent. She'll be damned if she lets it pass through her fin­gers without . . . without, what? She wants to know where its mother is. It didn't come into be­ing out of light and pho­to­syn­thesis; it was born from the patch. The creature's mother is drift­ing to­ward Hawaii.

  In the labor­at­ory, Reya looks at the creature, and the creature looks back. It opens its mouth, stretches its jaws, and crumples it­self back into a ball. It lives in a tank be­side the tanks of the seagulls and the ocean fish to which the lab is com­par­ing its DNA. Reya doesn't feel sym­pathy for it. It's more com­plic­ated than that, and also sim­pler. She feeds it a clas­si­fied doc­u­ment, which gives it codes for entry into any locked door in the build­ing. Later, the baby will use the codes to open its cage and rustle out. Later in the night, it will be­come a Top Secret, but for now, she passes it a latex glove, and watches as it sinks its teeth into it.

  A heap of cell phone parts glim­mers green as beetle shells. Chil­dren sort them. A goat minces its way through a thou­sand ghost voices, re­cor­ded mes­sages crushed into ob­li­vion, texts, na­ked pho­tos, emails, and plead­ings. The goat's white-yel­low fur is splashed with tur­quoise powder from a fest­ival that's now over. It nibbles at a bit of metal, faintly an­noyed at the new thing rising from the heap of broken. Chil­dren crouch on their heels and watch as a new­born creature stands, twelve feet tall, flash­ing in the sun. It opens its mouth and screams, and all across the sky, satel­lites tremble.

  This one, at last, hits the in­ter­na­tional news, but is dis­missed as a hoax. Hys­teria. Mass hal­lu­cin­a­tion. Some sort of Techno-En­vir­on­ment­al­ist Big­foot. Eyes roll in the coun­tries that still have all the money. The creature in the photo is con­vin­cing, and that is to the credit of who­ever made it, but that's all.

  The mon­ster crawls into the forest, its feet tender still, bruised by rocks. After a time, some of the chil­dren creep into the trees to feed it. Chil­dren are bet­ter at feed­ing mon­sters than adults are. They don't have the bur­den of sus­pi­cion.

  Danilo finds the baby stand­ing in his bed­room one day with a rat in each of its claws. They struggle, up­side down.

  “Rats aren't food,” he tells it, sud­denly anxious. He can't tell whether or not the rats are ex­plos­ive. The baby is six feet tall now, but still doesn't sleep through the night. Its long tail is whippy, and it knocks things down.

  It's be­com­ing dif­fi­cult to keep the baby quiet in his room, though it folds it­self small when it sleeps, and he's re­minded again of the tiny creature it was when it was born. It re­quires bottles of oil and dirty wa­ter. It needs gas­ol­ine. When Danilo fails to feed it on time, it bites at it­self. When he fails to feed it what it wants, it bites at him. He feels ex­hausted by re­spons­ib­il­ity.

  It eats the rats. They ex­plode in­side its belly. Danilo cringes, hands over his face, sim­ul­tan­eously hop­ing for free­dom and fear­ing dis­aster, but the baby doesn't die. It grows big­ger.

  In a forest in Montana, a new­born made of saw­dust, splin­ters, en­gine oil and bird's nests en­coun­ters a thing with a chain­saw. It picks the thing up, looks at it curi­ously, con­sid­er­ing its pur­pose. Sat­is­fied, it crumples the thing in its gi­ant hand, and throws it away, off the log­ging road and into the river, where it floats for a mo­ment — a bright, chaotic piece of red and white garbage. The body sinks, slowly, and the fish eat it.

  The rest of the log­ging crew is speech­less for only as long as it takes to dial the po­lice, who bring news crews along with their sirens.

  The mon­ster stands in the place where it was born. Is it con­fused? Does it care? It is un­clear. The new­born's still stand­ing there when the log­gers surge around it and cut it down.

  Hys­teria be­gins with that foot­age, world­wide.

  Danilo's baby eats more than its weight, mak­ing its way onto the moun­tain at night, scav­en­ging cars. It speaks to the moun­tain, un­til, one day, the moun­tain it­self stands up, rain­ing down on all the people sur­round­ing it, and walks away from the place it has al­ways been. The moun­tain car­ries its baby in its hands, and Danilo, stand­ing in the door­way
of his school build­ing, cov­ers his eyes.

  Danilo goes about his busi­ness, what busi­ness there is. Rats ex­plode. His fam­ily flees the city. At night, he looks out and as the world gets darker, the stars are, for the first time in his life, oc­ca­sion­ally vis­ible.

  Reya Barr lets the mon­ster take her with it when it leaves the lab. It car­ries her in its arms, and she looks up into its glassy eyes. When it opens its beak to speak it says Bride. It says love. It says sleep. It swims out into the sea, and she rides on its back, free of her stu­dent loans, her pub­lic­a­tion graphs, the way she prayed for an art­icle a year, the sci­ent­ists who've told her, des­pite her ac­com­plish­ments, that she's not their equal. She still thinks of dis­sect­ing the mon­ster, but now she feels like a dis­sec­ted ob­ject her­self, a doll made of soft ma­ter­i­als and stuffed with bat­ting. A thing fallen off a ship and float­ing. She no longer minds. She sings the song from the rock-and-roll band, the end of the world song, and the garbage mon­ster, the mimic, sings with her.

  “And I feel fine.”

  There are guns, of course, and bombs. There are thoughts of nuc­lear strikes, but the sum­mer is hot­ter and hot­ter, and at first, the mon­sters aren't killing many people. Those they do kill, they crush ef­fi­ciently, pla­cing them in slop­ing piles in the dirt.

  Sci­ent­ists and politi­cians de­lib­er­ate. They try bombs, but bombs do noth­ing. They try pois­ons and guns. One mon­ster curls up into tiny pieces of garbage, and then re­sur­rects from each piece, a thou­sand-headed hy­dra, an im­possible ex­cess. More emerge new­born from bur­ied trash, des­troy­ing houses and build­ings. The earth wears a mantle of pa­per and plastic, tin cans, DVDs, and all of it is hatch­ing. Per­haps the cold will kill these creatures made of use­less things. The re­search sup­ports it. Blooms have al­ways ended and wa­ters have al­ways run clear again. Even­tu­ally, even plagues of lo­custs starve and fall out of the sky, and the hu­mans, what hu­mans re­main, will do as they've al­ways done. They will shovel.

  Live and let live, say some.

  Already dead, say oth­ers.

  Use everything, say still oth­ers. The people on Earth who've been liv­ing in places where everything has already been used look out across the dry plains at the dry crops. They move into caves. They set fires around the peri­met­ers of their camps and vil­lages, be­cause the only thing that keeps the creatures away is fire. Those people sur­vive. The ones who are used to ex­cess do not. They hide amongst their own stock­piles, and there, the con­di­tions are right for births. Even a scrap of pa­per for­got­ten might yield a new­born. Even a tooth­pick, or a rind. Even the dead might yield a new­born, and in a city with an un­der­ground full of pau­per's un­marked graves, things shake and stir and skel­et­ons as­semble into horses, large enough for the mon­sters to ride.

  These are new con­di­tions to be­come ac­cus­tomed to, but this is the planet shift­ing. Earth­quakes have flattened cit­ies. Cit­ies have been murdered. The ice has melted. The world ad­justs, after scream­ing and panic, to a new nor­mal. The mon­sters keep to them­selves, and most of the re­main­ing pop­u­la­tion of the planet does not even­tu­ally care. The garbage sleeps at night, and some­times someone tries to kill it with a gun, or with a knife, but it doesn't die. The rivers run and drift into the sea. Lazy twis­ted cur­rents, wa­ter trav­el­ing into lakes and into sky. The garbage moves through the wa­ter and rain from the clouds, floats and drifts, and slowly makes a changed world out of mess.

  The doc­u­ments from this period are pub­lic now. The deaths — called mys­ter­i­ous — of the team of sci­ent­ists sent to ex­am­ine that first sea-born baby, the way they were, months after they har­ves­ted it from the Pa­cific Patch, crushed in its tentacles and torn by its beak, the way the hazel eyes blinked when its head moved to swal­low them.

  The way Reya Barr, the sci­ent­ist who fetched the baby from the wa­ter, was the only one spared as the labor­at­ory was torn apart from the in­side out, re­turned to metal and glass, and how that broken metal and glass re­arranged it­self into some­thing new. The way more ba­bies were born from this new garbage, and how they emerged from the build­ing, flood­ing the park­ing gar­ages, swarm­ing down the street, over­turn­ing cars as they moved, turn­ing the cars into wrecks, turn­ing the wrecks into more of them­selves.

  A bloom of ba­bies. A swarm. A plague.

  And can joy be read between the lines of the of­fi­cial prose? Vin­dic­a­tion, cer­tainly. The world was in­deed end­ing. Cer­tain of the of­fi­cial doc­u­ments re­flect that con­vic­tion. Everything was be­gin­ning again. Slates were wiped clean.

  The Pres­id­ent gave an ad­dress, of course, an Emer­gency State of the Union, but as he spoke, he real­ized that all he could say was that people should stay away from the garbage.

  Fresh Kills land­fill walked into New York City, miles tall and miles deep. In Rome, Monte Test­ac­cio shook off the trees on its back, and stood up to trample, its body made of the shards of an­cient am­phorae, once full of olive oil, now coated in lime.

  The rules of the world changed. There was an evol­u­tion, a shift in everything.

  The last of the sen­at­ors. The last of the sec­ret­ar­ies. The last of the chief­tains. The last of the bur­lesque dan­cers. The last of the as­tro­phys­i­cists.

  The first of these.

  The cit­ies empty. The streets stop mov­ing. The nights get quieter and darker. Danilo is one of the last left in his city, and as he grows older, some­times he sees the garbage moun­tain walk­ing, mov­ing past his shack, and be­side it, the smal­ler body of its baby, walk­ing with long strides, a slip­ping thing with a hard shell, horns, a black plastic fringe flut­ter­ing in the hot breeze. Bey­ond the city lim­its, there's a new moun­tain, this one made of hu­man bones, and in its lay­ers the rats move as they al­ways have, turn­ing the secrets of cen­tur­ies to sed­i­ment.

  Some­where in the Pa­cific, Reya Barr floats on a raft made of de­tritus, her back sup­por­ted by plastic bottles, held above the sur­face by the fin­gers of soda rings. Her hair is long and white now, and it trails into the deep, and her eyes are blind from too much sun.

  Some things are still as they've al­ways been on earth. There are fewer people, but they still fight and still fuck. Some people are frightened of the dark, and some are not. In one of the cit­ies, a hu­man throws some­thing away. A dog finds it in the garbage, snuffles it and barks, and a gleam­ing, clat­ter­ing creature kneels and picks the garbage up, car­ries it away, cradling it, rock­ing it.

  As it's car­ried, the hu­man baby cries, a thin cry, and then it's soothed by the thing that has found it. This green-skinned creature sings out a lul­laby in all the former lan­guages of the world, for more sig­nal, for

  Can you even hear me? And

  Fuck you, just go and fuck your­self if you're go­ing to be like that I'm telling you I'm done and

  I love you so much, oh my god I love you so much and

  I'm go­ing to tell you some­thing I've never told any­one be­fore and

  The creature opens its mouth wider and vi­brates to all the satel­lites, to every­one who has ever oc­cu­pied the place it oc­cu­pies now. It holds the hu­man baby in its metal hands, and talks to the sky.

  I'm los­ing you, it trills in every lan­guage ever spoken through tele­phony. I'm los­ing you.

  Ivory Darts, Golden Arrows

  It was a headcold of a February day, a day for hiding in the dark, but the postmistress was out in it nonetheless, bundled but for her fingertips, moving with her cart.

  She came from a long line of mail deliverers: her mother, and before her mother, other mothers. They weren't pony expressers, but they were close. Horse and carriage. Stage coachers. They'd done it all, over the years, and now they were represented by Miss Kisseal.

  Her last name was like another last name, Licksticker, and maybe that had be
en the original and maybe it had not. Maybe a great grandmother had gotten it changed with a bribe. It was all slang for what one did with envelopes, when one was herself enveloping nothing. By choice.

  As far as the postmistress was concerned, every word used in the mail trade was another word for empty. An envelope was nothing without a letter and postcards were out of fashion. No one sent the contents of their hearts uncovered for anyone to enjoy anymore. It was all manifestos. She delivered them. It was her business, but she doubted the state of affairs.

  Miss Kisseal was the postmistress of Fley, a little village wedged between two mountains, each mountain in the custody of a rival band. Fley was the neutral zone, but the mail went back and forth between, all of it through the Fley office, which was small with a rounded roof. It was an attractive office, and had been made, long ago, of a tremendous striated shell donated by one of the first postmistresses of Fley, a great-great grandmother of Miss Kisseal.

  Working inside it, looking through the translucent walls, Miss Kisseal thought of her great-great, who'd delivered the mail during one of the wars between the residents of the two mountains, ducking to avoid arrows and spears, and she felt part of a grand tradition. She had been born to this, and it was her calling.

  Miss Kisseal knew the secrets of both sides, at least those they printed. She knew about the mail order grooms, who'd come to tend the horses, and the mail order bridges, which were installed a board at a time over gaps in the roads, connecting places that weren't meant to connect. She knew about excessive alcohol and questionable groceries, about longstanding hatreds between siblings, about the women who lived in the town on the highest tip of the eastern peak, and didn't come down at all. She didn't blame them. She went to them instead, pulleying her cart up the high road with a series of hooks and ropes.