The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “What do you mean?” he asked and wondered if he'd have to kill her. He hadn't killed anyone in thirty years.

  “I was married to one of you,” she said. “That's all. I know it when I see it. I don't care who you are, and you don't care who I am, and we can leave it like that and pretend we're both the same thing. You drink your coffee, and I'll pour you another.”

  She brought a flask out from behind the counter and dripped some of it into his cup, then drank a slug herself.

  “Safe travels,” she said. “Take that fish out somewhere it can swim.”

  • • • •

  When he got to the coast, the sun was setting, and the brightness blinded him. He drove down a rattling road to get to the sand. There were waves still, white and green and blue, and he made a sound he wasn't expecting to make. He thought about red oceans and orange caverns.

  It was twilight as he pushed the whale into the water, still on its wheels. He was thigh-deep in the surf, his clothing wet. It had been thirty years since he'd touched salt. The language of his dead was all over him, the tattoos wriggling and stretching, when the creature rose up out of the water fifty feet from shore.

  He couldn't tell what it was. A long and trembling shape, a serpent and then another. It was a nest of rattlesnakes, he thought, and then his whale pushed into the waves, insisting on floating, and he barely clasped its jaw before he was swimming too.

  The wooden whale had seen it too, the thing in the ocean, and it swam faster, in pursuit. It was a wooden whale. It wasn't alive. It wasn't dead either. Its body contained everything left, and it hungered. He had given it some of his talents. There was no use for them here on Earth, but there were things he knew how to do.

  The man threw himself into its mouth, down its throat and up a spiral stair, into his neat little compartment, where he closed himself off. From there, he looked out through an eyeball made of bottles and old windows, feeling his ship launching.

  Outside the eyeball, he could see the other creature moving. There were tentacles and arms, he understood them now, swooping sections of metal and rubber, suckers made of old tires and shards of broken glass. It flared and beckoned to him. He could not see its mantle nor its beak. Only its limbs, quavering over the surface like seaweed.

  His ship pushed deeper into the water, and finally dove, his window abruptly full of first green and then black.

  Night was not night to him and never had been. The man sat beneath the water inside his ship lined in feathers, and watched the ocean around him, the deep and forgotten places left behind by the humans in favor of the stars.

  His white whale passed a shipwreck drifting like the bones of those birds, flying all alone under the surface. A tentacle clutched at his window, pressing suckers against it. It didn't give. The man wasn't afraid. He'd worked on his whale a long time, and though he hadn't expected to meet any others, he knew he should have. He'd felt called. It made sense that others would too.

  His ship was strong. He'd done something, and if it was not revolution, it was a thing anyway, a reclamation of the lost, a celebration in the way his place had celebrated before the rise and fall.

  Only for a moment did he think about a red footprint on white snow. Only for a moment did he think about blood spurting from an artery, he and his rebels fighting their way into the palace.

  The squid passed close beside him and he saw through its eye to its interior, only a glimpse, but one that made him lean closer to the window.

  There was a pilot at the helm. He saw her in profile and then the dinner plate eye was gone, and he saw only mantle and arms again, swishing and twisting, moving like a scarf with fringe.

  The squid was silver and red, not painted but made of cans slicked together and welded, the smoothness of spoons, pounded into a surface. It was made of braided electrical cables and sheets of metal, and its tentacles wrote alphabets in the water, a sign language of forgotten words. He didn't think he knew them.

  He didn't want to know them.

  He watched it move, each arm and tentacle engineered, articulated.

  His whale had teeth made of the bones of cows and horses. He'd sharpened them until they were keen as swords. This squid had a beak. It rolled in the water and he saw it as the tentacles began to wrap around his whale. The beak was bright and golden, goblets, something made of teacup — .

  He recognized what it was made of.

  The squid rolled again and he saw into its eye. There she was.

  She was a ghost. He stared, his body pressed to his whale's eyeball.

  He wondered if he should make his whale attack the squid. That was what the whale was meant to do, in this world. But his whale was only a wooden whale, and though it had weapons, they were in its head.

  She couldn't be there. She was tattooed on his skin. He touched the place she was supposed to be, over his heart, a moving scar full of her burned body, a place her soul could stay captured and inked into him. She was a memory, but suddenly, she wasn't.

  She was inside the squid.

  She looked out the eyeball at him, her mouth tight. Her face hadn't changed. She'd done nothing to correct her revolutionary identification. She'd overthrown alongside him and been killed even as she killed the invaders.

  The squid moved its tentacles, pulling the whale through the water, and the whale resisted, lashing its tail. The man crashed into the wall as his ship barreled to avoid the squid. His whale didn't attack anything. It flipped and rolled, very slowly, over and then over again.

  Inside the eyeball she looked out, unapologetic.

  There had been a footprint. Eight toes in blood. Fake snow made of chemicals. A holiday for the occupiers. A tree and lights, singing and a suckling pig brought from their own planet. Outside the revolution began, quietly, creeping, and then louder, screaming, and then louder still, running through the streets, all the revolutionaries’ skin covered in memories of those who'd died of plague and violence, a country taken over by something fallen out of the sky.

  He was the leader and she was the leader. They weren't friends. They led opposite factions. They ran through the snow, screaming, knives in the air.

  The invaders got her. One footprint where she'd tried to leap and been caught on a blade. The other leg severed. The ashes from that leg were inked into his tattoo. In the palace, drinking tea, all but her. The invaders took her and kept her. Surely she was dead. She'd been dead all this time.

  Her squid pulled his whale closer. She was the captain of her ship and he was the captain of his and they navigated, separated by solder and seam.

  Her squid used its tentacles to sign the words for You again in the language they'd shared, before the other languages he'd learned, before he came here, before he became this farmer.

  His whale flipped and twisted, tail in the water, its skull an echo chamber, the walls around him strung with gut, a harp in the dark. You again, his whale sang.

  The man let the squid take his whale's jaw and open it, and he exited his compartment. The squid's beak opened for him and he swam through it like swimming into a cave, salt, predator and prey at once, uncertain. He'd been in a field of wheat for thirty years.

  His whale waited, white and solid, swimming in place. He scaled a staircase, up, and up, the curving walls of silver, the cool and unliving certainty of the ship's mantle. The taste of salted licorice in the water, something she'd done to make the squid correct. He felt the tattoos on his back and arm moving in appreciation.

  She'd died fighting. He'd fought the dying. The government was overthrown. He told himself it didn't matter, that it was all in pursuit of a common goal. They'd won until they lost.

  On his chest her ashes moved, shifting, reaching for their owner, and she turned in her chair, this woman he used to know, and looked at him as his chest tore open.

  What was left of her returned to the rest. Her own body was covered in tattoos as well, but he wasn't written on her. He was alive.

/>   She was older. He was older too. She'd lost more of her people since he'd last seen her. Her arms and face moved with ink made of the dead. Thirty years ago, she'd been nearly unmarked. A sister on one arm. A mother on the other. Thirty years ago, he'd wanted to kill her himself. She was in the way of victory, until victory was nothing. Time had passed. He'd changed himself.

  She held out her hands with all their sixteen fingers. His own fingers had been hidden all these years. She opened her arms to him, and there they were, her dead family, inked on her skin. Welcome, she said to him.

  Welcome, he said. To Earth.

  They weren't where they'd come from. They owed each other nothing.

  Her skin, he realized, showed the outlines of their whole planet, ash taken from something burning. Had she set it all on fire?

  He looked at her. He thought about storms high in the sky, water never touching the ground. Geese falling.

  We lost everything, he said, excusing himself from sins he wasn't certain he'd committed. I left only when I was sure we'd lost forever.

  Her face was not amused, exactly, but tolerant.

  You left early, she said. We won. I kept fighting. We burned their palaces. We took their ships. We left them behind. Now we're here. I came to find you.

  She reached out her hands and wrapped her fingers around his arm. He looked down. She was missing one leg and her other had split into two to replace it. Underneath everything he'd hidden himself inside, he was missing an arm, and part of a foot, from the same battle. He was never naked. His tattoos covered the living with the dead. Her eyes were the yellow of the clouds of their home, and her mouth was black and written on with prayers so that they needn't be spoken. Her tattoos were raised bodies, shadows burned into silhouettes.

  Her body was a relic of the war, but she was smiling at him.

  Outside the squid's eyeball the man could see his whale. It was only wood and paint, but it let the metal squid tow it with its tentacles.

  Silently then and swiftly, the squid and the whale dove together, down through the water the humans had called an ocean, and into an unsettled new world.

  Some Gods of El Paso

  They were healing the world, they figured, even though they lived in Texas.

  You know the story. In the town where they'd both grown up, they could look across the river to Mexico. Both of them had seen cheapo Catholic candles lit in the bedrooms of people they'd worked on, and both of them had been called miracle workers.

  Back in the beginning, Lorna Grant and Vix Beller were small time. They worked El Paso to Houston and down the Gulf Coast, him mostly on women and her mostly on men. For a while, they changed people's hearts and fixed people's minds. Then, because this was how things went in Texas, things got broken again.

  This was after the government collapsed but before God and the law got forgotten. Lorna and Vix were both practitioners of the oldest profession, and found easy employment. Their techniques dated from the time of Christ, but roadside religions found them to be sinners.

  By the time they finally met, late in ’29, Vix Beller'd been chased by a mob with pitchforks, and forced to steal a car to put miles between himself and the town whose women he'd waked into wanting. Lorna Grant had been thrown into the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of lost girls destined for the border, but she'd stabbed the driver when he gave her water, took the wheel, and drove them all to a halfway house where she used some of her healing powers to make them whole.

  Lorna'd been fucking like her cunt was a relic since she was sixteen. Vix had spent years doing the same thing, his cock like the True Cross, and the day they met, as the story goes, Lorna was walking out of some old boy's front door, carrying the sorrow of a wife that wouldn't, and Vix was walking out a door across the street, dragging a sack of a forty-three-year-old lady schoolteacher's rage at climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa on a once-in-a-lifetime grand tour and feeling high lonesome the whole way up.

  Lorna and Vix took one look at each other's burdens, and then, without discussion, Lorna poured Vix's out on the front lawn of the old boy, and Vix poured Lorna's on the potted plants of the teacher. Within a couple of minutes, the old boy and the schoolteacher, both relieved of their troubles, opened their front doors, and stepped out into the sun, glancing shyly, longingly at one another.

  For their part, Lorna and Vix took a stroll down the street to put distance between themselves and the scene of their healing.

  “Want to drink some hot chocolate with me?” Lorna asked Vix, giving him the once-over. He was carrying a lot of his own pain, which he didn't notice, because he was too busy carrying the anger of every woman he'd ever worked into a miracle. She thought there might be room for her to maneuver.

  “I wouldn't say no. Want to go to a motel with me?” Vix asked Lorna, mapping the fury she glittered with. Her whole body was covered in things she didn't see, given her own burden of every miracle-ized man's blues. Her rage made him feel certain, along with the thought that he'd cure her of something of which she couldn't cure herself.

  “I wouldn't say no to that, either,” said Lorna.

  He strutted a little, and so did she. They both knew they were good at what they did.

  Turned out, though, that once they drank that hot chocolate and got to that motel, they made love for ten hours, got starry-eyed, and merged burdens. Some people say they got married shortly thereafter by a justice of the peace they'd cured of his miseries, and other people say they didn't believe in marriage but did wear love tokens they'd had installed under their skin like shrapnel. Whatever the truth of it was, the two of them together were something to reckon with.

  After that, everybody knew that Lorna and Vix came as a set. They got spotted at diner counters time to time, drinking coffee, tea, and lemonade, eating sandwiches just like regular folks, but Vix and Lorna weren't regular.

  It was a myth, as Lorna and Vix already knew, that everyone who sorrowed longed specifically and only for joy. Many people wanted darker medicine. Prohibition of alcohol had created a countrywide yearning for other forms of depressant — though no one referred to alcohol as such — and by the time Lorna and Vix met, ten years into Temperance, everything to do with high and low had become illegal. People were supposed to be living in the middle, but nobody liked the middle. New cures for pain were being distilled in basements and bathtubs.

  In secret dens in Manhattan, high rollers mixed powdered powerlessness with seltzer and drank it with a twist. In New Orleans, the drink that had formerly been bourbon punch got drizzled with barrel-aged despair, and backroom saloons poured it by the ladle-full. Most people cut rage into lines and snorted it, all to feel a little of the old days, the vigor and foolish giddiness that came just before a bar fight. There was glory in the knowledge that the price of wrath would be only a broken nose, not a broken country. A few people craved a mixture of different kinds of emotional disaster shaken up into a slurry, and that cost more.

  Soon after they met, Vix and Lorna realized there was a sweet market in fenced emotion, and though they'd never done this before, they started dealing along with their healing. The miracle makers had an easy supply of raw materials for what half the country craved. They had particular access to desperate love, which was cut with rage and sorrow, and for which people paid extra. Desperate love could be shot into a vein.

  Despite the shift in their business, Lorna and Vix still thought of themselves as mainly healers. They were taking pain away from people, after all, never mind that they were transporting it across state lines and selling it. On the way from a stopover to visit family in Florida, they drained the pain and rage from the hearts of ten or twenty normal people: a traveling saleswoman trying to get over losing her samples, a farmworker with a lost dog, a woman with a little son who looked too much like his daddy. Vix and Lorna sat naked on a motel-room bed and bagged that agony and fury up. They had big plans. They'd sell it in New York City, or maybe in Chicago. They got onto
the Gulf Coast Highway, their Chevy loaded down with a few hundred grand in emotions.

  A bullhorn popped out the window of a state patrol car outside Gulfport, Mississippi, and lights flashed in the rearview. Lorna pulled over.

  “Whatcha got in that there?” said the trooper, and Lorna looked up at him and blinked.

  “Somebody's child custody battle,” she said. “And an eighth of alcoholic spouse.”

  “Looks like contraband, bagged up like that. What else you selling, gal like you? How about a freebie and I let you pass?”

  Vix sat up from the backseat where he'd been napping.

  The patrolman's pain ended up in a burlap sack, and Lorna hit the gas. Shortly thereafter, her face appeared on the TV news, all red lipstick and yesterday's mascara, because the trooper had been entirely made of pain and rage, and when they took it from him, there was only skin left, not even bones.

  “Most folk's souls,” said Lorna Grant on the newsreel that got around, “are made of hurt.”

  “And if they're not made of hurt,” said Vix Beller, “they're made of mad. Most folks don't got much else making them human.”

  “We're providing a public service,” said Lorna, and then swiveled her hips for the camera of the cub reporter who'd happened upon the notorious two relieving a train conductor of the pain of the abusive brothers who'd put a snake in his bed back in Kansas, and a female passenger of the confusing memory of the one-off kiss she'd gotten from a beautiful stranger one night in New Orleans. “And we're not stealing. This is pay, fair and square, for services rendered. That officer threw his hurt at us. We took it from him. It's no crime.”

  Vix let the reporter take their picture, Vix with his eyebrow raised, his biceps bulging out of his undershirt, and Lorna nestled there beneath his shoulder, looking at the camera too, a cigarette hanging out of her pout, her dress candy-striped and clingy. They drove off, Lorna in the passenger seat drinking pineapple juice with a straw, Vix pushing the speedometer faster than was legal, through torrential rainstorms and blinding sun.