The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Raise it,” Gen­eral Steng barks, and we look at each other, un­cer­tain, but we do, fi­nally, lift­ing the trees we've cut and hewn into their new con­fig­ur­a­tion, a rect­angle, and at the top an in­tric­ate struc­ture of knots.

  “Today we hang the cro­codile,” the gen­eral says. “We will bear no more loss. We will bear no more.”

  A Re­cipe for Mercy

  I think yearn­ingly of my El­ev­enth Mercy, the Mercy of Re­bel­lion. The Re­versed Mercy is the Crush­ing of the Re­bel­li­ous. It says that the sins of re­bel­lion shall not be lif­ted up. The spell is simple enough, though it re­quires wire and a razor blade, a grind­ing of coarse salt, a dish made of fine glass, and an en­vel­ope of some­thing stronger than co­caine.

  I have none of those in­gredi­ents here in the jungle.

  There will be no more El­ev­enth, nor the feel­ings it evokes, the way the spell is craf­ted to fill its vic­tim with hope of re­volu­tion, the way the room seems to dis­ap­pear as my hands and the wire move closer. It's a Mercy, and it is a ma­gic, and in the cycle of ma­gics, I've had nearly as much power as the gen­eral does.

  I will never see my son again, nor know what sort of sol­dier he may be­come.

  I feel some­thing rise in­side me, a re­bel­lion against the Mer­cies, a know­ledge that there will be no for­give­ness.

  I de­cide to think about the desert and how we trained there un­til our skin was one with the sand. This was noth­ing reg­u­lar, our train­ing. We were elite. We were the good men, the best men, the only ones trained in the Thir­teen Mer­cies, and all our train­ing went to hell when the coun­try turned against us. None of us knows why we've been con­demned to a cro­codile. Noth­ing like this pun­ish­ment ex­ists in our manu­als.

  I re­mem­ber the way we learned the Mer­cies. I re­mem­ber the blood I took from my son, how I poured it out into a circle and lit it on fire. I knew what he would feel, thou­sands of miles away, and I did it any­way. My baby in his crib. His mother lean­ing over him, puzzled, then frantic.

  The skin of the sky peeled back like a wound full of gravel.

  Our train­ing was more im­port­ant than love.

  We would win the war with these weapons, we thought then. We'd take the land and pour our burned bur­dens out upon it. We'd be mer­ci­ful, all of us, Re­vers­ing the Mer­cies of god un­til the sand turned to salt and then to fire.

  There were no gods who could ig­nore it. There was no love that could sat­isfy it. We were the men, and we were win­ning.

  I don't know any­thing like that now. The ma­gic's worn off and all I am is a man in the dark, sur­roun­ded by men in the dark.

  The Fourth Com­ing of Nobody

  The gen­eral stands straight, his arms crossed. “Now we wait,” he says.

  We sit in the mud. We wait night and day, in the dark, in the gray down­pour. All around us, the jungle crackles and things move within it. Our guards whis­per but we can't un­der­stand them.

  We're on an is­land sur­roun­ded by sharks, and the sharks are like Mer­cies. Any one of them could kill us, or they might all do it at the same time. We feel fed upon.

  Eight of us are dead, and we have only five men left. Per­haps we're the last five men in the world.

  “There was an old wo­man,” sings Ma­jor Rivel Harmer, prac­ti­tioner of the Ninth Mercy — Keep­ing Kind­ness for Thou­sands of Gen­er­a­tions, Re­versed to the Keep­ing of Hatred, the grudge against grand­chil­dren and great-grand­chil­dren. “Who lived in a shoe — ”

  Gen­eral Steng puts up a hand to si­lence him. None of us will take Harmer's tongue, but the gen­eral can do as he pleases. There will be no babble here in the jungle, no mat­ter how frightened we are, no mat­ter how the sev­enth year ebbs into a winter that isn't.

  “There,” the gen­eral hisses, star­ing into the trees where some­thing or­ange glows. “She's there.”

  I crouch on legs that've lost muscle. An old man now, all at once, and us in pos­ses­sion of only five of the Mer­cies, not enough to break any­thing strong.

  She comes out of the trees, body like a tree trunk, tail long and nar­row, face poin­ted. We have our stakes, but our stakes are only twigs. She's older than we will ever be.

  She looks us each in the eyes and smiles.

  “Who are you?” the gen­eral shouts at her. “Who sent you?”

  The cro­codile writhes and her skin splits, blood drip­ping from hide. Her mouth opens wider.

  “Who are you?” I shout in echo. “What kind of Mercy are you?”

  The cro­codile's no longer a cro­codile. She ripples up out of the skin, her face through the teeth, her fin­gers through the claws.

  “I am,” the old wo­man says, “the Thir­teenth Mercy.”

  The Mercy of the Un­clean­ing

  The Thir­teenth Mercy was ori­gin­ally the Mercy of the Cleans­ing of Sins. In Re­verse, the Thir­teenth is the Mercy of Filth, the be­stowal of all of our sins into the souls of the en­emy, the crush­ing be­neath sins of everything liv­ing. Every­one is evil in the Re­versed Mercy. It's con­struc­ted around the know­ledge of hope­less­ness.

  It is per­formed with bleach and wool.

  Had we com­pleted it at Kino­tra, a cloud would've risen over the prison, and in it, the en­emy would have drif­ted, driven for­ward across the sky by our hatred, sleep­less and hungry forever.

  The sac­ri­fice stands for everything we've lost, everything we've given over to fight­ing, sol­diers’ lives spent pla­cing bombs in pub­lic squares and buses, cen­tur­ies of sol­diers’ time spent pois­on­ing and lynch­ing, all the labors of war both just and un­just, all the or­ders fol­lowed, all the sins ac­crued by souls that did not ask for them. The pur­suit of the truth is com­plic­ated. Some­times the truth hides in the or­gans of the en­emy, and some­times it does not.

  There is no way to know un­less one looks deep.

  The Ex­e­cu­tion of Nobody

  The gen­eral sig­nals and the ropes spin up from the mud, wet and twist­ing, las­so­ing her legs and tail, knot­ting around her throat.

  Ma­jor Harmer hauls Nobody up, grunt­ing, hiss­ing the phrases of his half-broken Mercy, curs­ing her chil­dren and her chil­dren's chil­dren, curs­ing her past and fu­ture.

  Nobody opens her jaws and shows us teeth, and then opens claws and shows us fin­gers, the del­ic­ate hands of a wo­man pressed be­neath the claws of a cro­codile.

  She has sil­ver hair and or­ange eyes. Her scales are black enough to make her dis­ap­pear. Our cam­ou­flage doesn't hide us. She's the kind of thing that can see in the dark.

  At last we see her in full.

  This cro­codile hangs from our gal­lows now, we five re­main­ing Mer­ci­ful around her. We're win­ning. She's our en­emy. When we kill her, we'll be free of everything.

  We'll com­plete our Mer­cies and end this tor­ment. Then home. We're all think­ing it.

  She's our mis­sion, re­vealed to us at last. She's what we came here to des­troy.

  I can see her mov­ing, her tail lash­ing. The rain doesn't cease. It's harder, hard enough to bend the trees sur­round­ing us, and a wind gasps into life, break­ing branches around the clear­ing.

  Our gal­lows hang heavy with the mon­ster and she swings, jerking, strangling, the bod­ies of our com­pany already in her belly. She gags and chokes and be­comes an old wo­man again. She's thin enough to break, but she doesn't. She hangs by her neck at the end of the rope, but grav­ity doesn't hold her. Not her, this old wo­man not old wo­man, her claws and her black-scaled tail, the cro­codile parts that sur­round her body.

  The Pho­to­grapher

  There's a click, a sound from the world, and I turn my head to see the gen­eral hold­ing a cam­era like someone from a hun­dred years ago, a hood over his head to make a por­trait of Nobody's ex­e­cu­tion.

  Ma­jor Harmer makes a noise of be­trayal.

/>   The pho­tos from Kino­tra.

  I think of a pale young man walk­ing out of a cave with two charred heads in his hands, our pun­ish­ment part of his Mercy.

  “I will be Mer­ci­ful,” Nobody says, and smiles at us from the gal­lows. Her mouth is full of teeth. She isn't seven hun­dred years old, I think, but seven thou­sand, and she's been hired by someone to des­troy everything.

  That was sup­posed to have been our mis­sion, not hers.

  “You're mis­taken,” the gen­eral says, his eyes brighter than they were be­fore, his face clenched. “This is the last round of Mer­cies. My Re­versed Mercy will com­plete it.”

  She laughs, and her skin shud­ders off en­tirely from her fe­male body and be­comes a cro­codile, smal­ler now, and then an­other wo­man, still smal­ler. The noose doesn't tighten, though we lean back­ward, gun­less, ropes slip­ping through our hands.

  We've failed in our Mer­cies, and now the gen­eral stands and shouts, and the wo­man in the noose doesn't. She does not hang. She doesn't die.

  The cro­codile skins she's left be­hind are jerking in the mud, and they rise up to tilt the gal­lows while she hov­ers there, arms ex­ten­ded, smil­ing.

  The mud of the world be­gins to dis­solve. The dirt of my gar­ments, the filth of my skin, the mat­ted hair and snarled beard, the quiet hor­rors I've fed on to fat­ten my­self, all the dark things I've kept in­side my heart.

  The gen­eral screams, and I watch his body rise to her hands. She touches his face, and he hangs high in the air, the noose leav­ing her neck and loop­ing around his.

  “The Thir­teenth Mercy,” she whis­pers, “is the Mercy of Cleans­ing of Sins.”

  The Flood

  Wa­ters rise then. I re­mem­ber, as we stand in river to our knees, as the jungle roars and sings, as our guards dis­ap­pear be­neath the sur­face, that the Mercy of the Flood is an­other Mercy, not one of the Thir­teen, but an older meas­ure. A Mercy that can­not be per­formed by hu­mans, neither it­self nor its Re­verse.

  Be­low the wa­ters the old wo­man brings, bat­talions march tongue­less and fin­ger­less in the deep, and cro­codiles swim through black silt, their eyes above the wa­ter, and cradles full of ba­bies rock, and the land we fought over for so long is ob­lit­er­ated.

  I see, as the wa­ters rise up to my eyes, an im­age of a Mercy, the gen­eral's body bent back and hanging in midair as Nobody's jaws open his flesh, tear­ing his skin away from his bones and peel­ing him like some­thing over­ripe and fin­ished.

  Be­neath the wa­ter, we feel our en­emies drown­ing as we drown, and we all be­gin again to­gether, in a world without any of us.

  The Virgin Played Bass

  PART ONE: It Seems I Met You in an Unlucky Hour

  After the War, and before the War, the first time I met him on the road to Moscow, the cat was wearing a green woolen coat he'd stolen from a sleeping soldier. He had fluffy white fur, and was six feet tall in leather boots he'd made from a reindeer he'd killed with his teeth.

  He was standing on the side of the road, making a cackling sound in the back of his throat and stalking a bird, but out of courtesy to me he stopped cackling and the bird flew away in a panic of feathers.

  I knew the cat instantly for a thief and a madman but I was on my own desperate attempt toward the North to find another accordion player I knew, and my boots were lined with mangy goat. The back of my belly mapped the front of my spine. All I could think was that I didn't know what my last song would be. I thought I should decide before it was too late.

  The cat looked well fed. I wondered if I might rob him, and then decided he'd kill me for it. I thought about begging, but he didn't look like he'd be in-clined to give to a beggar. I tried to keep walking, but my legs were shaking.

  He stopped me, and told me in seven languages to fuck myself.

  “Sack of curd, waste of universe, I'll teach you to throatsing like an angel,” the cat continued in Russian. “I'm a fucking feline. You don't need to go to the Sami. Join me.”

  I could not identify his accent, which seemed to be from everywhere and nowhere at once. He gave me a cocky green look, adjusted his gun belt, and stamped his boots. The Sami had indeed been my plan, but the cat had no way of knowing that. I'd been imagining reindeer jerky and eerie tones, the herders and their open spaces. Once, I'd played at a rural festival with my father. I'd seen someone's pretty wife, and eaten a dinner cooked by her, and now she was all I thought about day and night.

  I was delirious. I'd been walking a year, since the previous December. There were murderers where I'd come from, taking us into trucks. There were graves all over the hillsides of Khakassia, and shady red-leafed trees fed on blood. My whole country had been killed for twenty years, and then renamed. No one had intervened, because we had no oil, and we had no diamonds. All we had were orchards full of apricots. They were the size of grapes and the color of sunrise, and we made them into brandy, but when the war came, no one had the patience for fermenting our fruit, and the soldiers shook the trees and trampled them. When you looked at a globe, the place we'd been was nowhere on it. I'd run out from my father's house in the dark.

  “There's no point fighting, Bruno. There are too many of them,” my father told me. “No one knows you're not dead already. You're an invisible man. Leave me here and let them come.”

  I was twenty-four, returned from a failure in another country. I'd been home in secret shame only a week before the army started marching over the roads and into the houses, calling us all dead men. I'd been an intellectual, but now I was nothing.

  “You're the end of the line,” a soldier said to my friend Jacob Mogilevich, and then tore the tree from the back page of Jacob's family bible in half, like he was chopping down an elm. I didn't hear this from Jacob Mogilevich. I heard it from his sister, after I found her on the road. She was dressed as a man. Jacob Mogilevich was dead by then, and she was nearly, but she had yellow hair and so no one killed her. It was only that by then. The world was a strange rattle of black and white film, and the ones who survived were the ones who shone in the sunlight and melted into the snow in the winter. Jacob Mogilevich's sister and I walked together for a time, and then she gave me her best wishes and her knife, sang a high note and stepped into a place where the river ice was cut away. I'd been alone since the New Year.

  The cat passed me a wormy sausage from his knapsack and said “I'm on my way to sing to a city, fuckface. You better come with me or they'll kill you by Christmas.”

  This was something better, I thought, than the death I could find anywhere. If I grew weary of the cat, all I'd need to do was call out in a loud enough voice and the war would come for me. I fell into step, my accordion on my back. I thought I was too tired to keep going. I'd been living on dry bread and melted snow. If I'd played anything more tender to the tooth, I'd have eaten my instrument by then, but accordions couldn't be boiled into soup. Still, I walked along behind him.

  The cat called himself The White Pet, or The Pet when he felt informal. He'd stolen the name of a sheep he'd met somewhere, because he thought it suited him. He had no fucks left. Instead, he had delusions of grandeur. He'd been mistaken for a god and a warlike thief, over and over again, and he didn't care if he was only a musician. Only wasn't a word that applied to him.

  The Pet sang Ochi Chyornye as we walked, and eventually I joined him. Everyone knew it. How could you not? It was the worst and most typical song. I'd heard it played around a Roma campfire by men with fiddles and women dancing in a circle.

  Black eyes, passionate eyes,

  Burning and beautiful eyes!

  How I love you, how I fear you,

  It seems I met you in an unlucky hour!

  The cat danced a sideways rendition of the Dance of Cakes, pounced on a rabbit, tore its head off, and ate it raw. He offered me the hindquarters, and I built a fire while he brought a violin out from his knapsack and played the next verse with screaming tr
ills added in. I knew I should never join him, but I couldn't help myself. He was a cat on his hind paws. There were stories about things like him, but my mind couldn't hold onto them. My mother's voice in my head, black cats, white cats, crossing my path. All I wanted was some of The Pet's rabbit.

  Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep!

  I see mourning for my soul in you,

  I see a triumphant flame in you:

  A poor heart immolated in it.

  The cat played a harmonica and ate a sparrow loudly, crunching the ribcage. I tried to suck the marrow from my rabbit bones. It was an effort to keep from chewing off my own fingers as I ate. The cat's voice wasn't good, but as he sang, my accordion wanted playing. It was a caterwaul, and my instrument asked for his claws. I didn't take it from its case, and so The Pet sang on. I couldn't help myself. I joined him.

  But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,

  My fate is soothing to me:

  All that is best in life that God gave us,

  In sacrifice I returned to the fiery eyes!

  The Pet looked calculatingly at me, and tossed me a string of small birds, already roasted. By the end of the song and meal I belonged to him forever. It was only later that I thought about the crossroads we'd been standing at.

  He slung his knapsack onto his back and said “What are you waiting for, goat's son? Make tracks. We're in the miracle market.”

  “We do miracles?” I asked. I was already falling into step. “What type?”

  “We do miracles and mysteries both, alongside the traditional repertoire. I've been looking for an accordionist for half a year. The war's walking behind us, and if we don't move, we'll be fucked. Nothing but thieves and murderers out there.”

  The Pet had one silver fang, replaced from the original by a dentist in Odessa. He occasionally claimed he was a minor minion, a missionary sent by the devil to right the wrongs of the state, but he only did that on nights when we had enough money to buy bullets for our gun. The Pet seemed not to care that he was plagiarizing part of his identity from a famous novel. Otherwise The Pet kept his counsel and wore a scarf he'd bought off a Roma violist around his feline face.