The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “The cat has the car keys,” said the Virgin. “He's swallowed them again. We had to wait for you to wire the engine.”

  “The cat's a madman,” said Lazarus Mary, and stretched on her back in the sun practicing her hallelujahs. “He was killed again on the way here. There was a truck and he was taking a piss beside the Trabant. We peeled him off the asphalt and he resurrected. Hallelujah.”

  “HALLELU,” sang Mag. “HALLLLLLLLELUJAH fuckface. That's six deaths, three lives left, I think, counting the ninth, though I might have lost count.”

  “Who do you seek in the sepulcher?” said the Virgin. “No, that asshole of a Cat has risen. Seek him in the bar.”

  “Come with me,” I said. I needed the Marys to keep me safe from highwaymen, soldiers, and wayward intellectuals.

  The Marys looked at me wearily, and then packed their belongings up into knapsacks. The rooster rode on Mag's shoulder.

  We picked up the Russian on our side of the river, where he was hitchhiking on stilts. “I'm removed from Russia,” he said. “I joined the circus, but the circus left me because no one had time to wait for me to walk. I'm Nikolai Kitrovich.”

  “Get in line with us,” said the Virgin. “We have a booking. You'll be our extra angel.” Our last angel had died of flux somewhere on the Black Sea. He'd only had a tambourine, though. A stiltwalker was better, as angels went.

  “You don't have a car?”

  “We're missing an awful cat,” said Mag.

  “I saw him,” said the Russian. “He's at the windmill. He offered to kill me with a switchblade and his silver fang, but instead he just ate them out of house and home.”

  We found The Pet in the bar lapping over a bowl, his fang gleaming. I got a spoon and took a bite. The soup was worthy of the trip, it was true. The stream was full of fish, out of which the soup was made.

  The couple who owned the bar looked at me with bewildered eyes. “This cat's eaten all the fish soup and threatened our lives.”

  “Why?” I asked The Pet. “Why did you leave me?”

  “Some things are worth going out of the way for,” he said, and smacked his teeth. “And I got the sense they were going to kill you for Christmas.”

  “What does that mean, cat?” I asked. “You're drunk. Who was going to kill me?”

  The Pet looked at me closely, shrugged, and licked his lips. “Every day in the sun is a day closer to the grave,” he said. “Haven't all your brothers died? Haven't your parents? Haven't you a few times now?”

  “What life are we on?” I asked him.

  “Seven,” confirmed The Pet, and fluffed his damp fur.

  “Did you jump into the river?”

  “For this very fish soup,” The Pet fluffed himself like a fool. I regretted my loyalties.

  “Maybe they'll kill you,” I told him. “We're late. We've been late.”

  The Pet stood, lazily, and swayed. He was carrying a cello that didn't belong to him. He'd stolen it from someone who was either dead, or a trader, newly in possession of one of the cat's other stolen instruments.

  PART SEVEN: Two Right Hands

  The first time Mag resurrected, we were fucking in a field somewhere in the part of the world where Romania had been, and beneath us there was a mattress of soft hay, and above us a blue sky, and both of us were pretending that Christmas would never come and that the war had never walked toward us.

  Mag was on top of me, my cock inside her, and her teeth in my shoulder, and I was biting her too, because we were trying to be quiet. The Pet was off hunting and the other two Marys were doing laundry in the river. We hadn't been planning to fuck; we never had before, and then Mag said “What the hell is wrong with you, Bruno? Aren't you a man? Aren't I a woman? Life's never as long as you think it's going to be. Let's be good to each other for a minute. I'm sick of walking with my legs crossed.”

  She unwrapped her red scarf and spread it on the ground, and I put my accordion on top of it. She hitched up her skirt and climbed onto me, and she was so wet I thought for a moment of apricots, those lost apricots, those stolen apricots.

  “Don't fall in love with me,” said Mag.

  “I won't,” I said.

  “I'm going to make you scream,” said Mag, arched her back, and pushed my cock deeper inside her.

  “I might make you scream too,” I said.

  The sun was in my eyes, and when I put my ear to the ground I could hear the sound of the war walking, the million feet of an army making its way across the world, pushing up dirt like a shirt being peeled off of a chest. For a moment, though, with her wetness, her mouth against my skin, I could pretend this wasn't the time we were living in. I took hold of her hips, grabbed them where the flesh was softest, and moved her, and she cried out. I got up on my knees and lifted her with me, and she was held up in my arms, not in worship, but in this field, in the middle of the green and blue and sun, when something exploded beneath us, and we blew into thousands of tiny pieces.

  Mag opened her eyes on top of a tree, all the parts of her body flying back to her from where they'd fallen.

  I opened my eyes to find myself still on the red scarf, my accordion in my arms instead of Mag, and I felt my left foot return to me from across the field. My right hand stayed with Mag, and her right hand came to me. The resurrection commingled our bodies, and after that, we played our instruments more beautifully.

  “I never played an accordion before, Bruno,” said Mag when she climbed down from the tree. “It feels about like I'd have thought it would.”

  “I never played a fiddle,” I said. “Now I see why you do.”

  Two lives left.

  PART EIGHT: A Town in the Country of Never

  We called for a mechanic to fix the Trabant, and the mechanic made us serenade his girlfriend's mother for his services, persuading the mother of his virtuous intentions toward the daughter. He towed the terrible car into his shop and fed it parts and oil until it gave its choked roar again.

  The new angel rode in the backseat, his stilts out the window, and The Virgin's double bass across all of our laps, neck out one side with a flag attached to it to keep oncoming traffic from crushing it, doors of the car half open.

  “This side of the river is where hell's located, you know,” said the Russian conversationally. Russians were always casual about horrible things. I felt at home. “This side's where the war's been walking.”

  The Pet grinned.

  “Where the war walks, there walk we,” he sang. Beside the road, we could see trees shaking. I wondered what was in them, behind them, uprooting them. There were clouds of dust on this side of the river.

  “There is treasure to be had in the wake of a war,” said The Pet, and I looked at The Marys and felt certain that none of us welcomed a war as an opportunity to lay hands on other people's treasures. We each missed our own. We'd been doing miracle plays for years now, resurrected at the cat's whim. I didn't know if the Marys missed their families, their old lives, but I missed my father and mother, and the way the sun rose over our Siberian apricots, the way I could touch the skin of one and imagine touching a baby I'd one day father, the way other days I might shake a tree gently and take the fruit from it, into a clean sheet, carrying all that golden light back to our house.

  I'd hated it when I had it. I'd wanted to learn to move the world with verses, to sing the magic rhymes taught in the cities. I kept dreaming of those dark streets, the way the cobblestones lifted to reveal revels beneath the ground. I'd seen a man made of cinnamon bark rise up out of one of those passages, his spiced skin burning the eyes of everyone in three blocks. He lit his finger on fire and used it as a torch. He was one of the poets I couldn't stand beside. He was one of the reasons I'd gone home. I'd kissed him once and burned my tongue.

  I wondered what had happened in the cities. Years had passed by then, and the walking war had taken all the world over, or so it seemed to me. I thought of tea and vodka, silver platters, slic
ed beets and caviar. I thought of the way I'd once stood on the back of a sturgeon as it swam down one of those narrow alleys, its silver skin beneath my bare feet, me shouting merrily as though it were a normal occurrence to be a man on fishback instead of horseback. Those days were over, those student days, and they were over for everyone, but I had left them a coward. Now I played this accordion in the dark. Now I was the cat's companion.

  “I can juggle fire,” said Nikolai Kitrovich.

  “But can you juggle the moon and the sun and some of the stars?” The Pet asked.

  The stiltwalker stretched his back. He was young and strong, but looked old beneath the eyes. There were char marks on his arms.

  “I can,” he said. “On occasion.”

  “This is the time, Angel,” said The Pet. “Christmas is coming.”

  We drove on. Behind us there was a cloud of smoke, and before us the sounds of the new ends of places and homes, of people and names. Who'd joined this army, this other war? We'd been walking twenty years, and stayed the same age. The Pet and his resurrections had kept us young.

  All the birds in the town we were approaching told the place the time by singing on the hour, and the trees fed on the last war's blood were tall and red-leafed. It was a beautiful place if you knew nothing of what it was built on. The history books had been burned and the people who lived here, on this side of the river, were the first war's victors. They'd been the army, before they stopped walking and settled down to normal lives, with wives and husbands, with babies. It didn't matter. We were a band of thieves.

  “Where are we going?” Mag asked The Pet.

  “Bremen,” said the Pet.

  “Why Bremen?” asked Lazarus Mary.

  “Bremen is the direction we're always heading,” said The Pet, as he always did. “We'll never arrive, but we'll play all the way there until there is no way there anymore.”

  We stopped. The town came cautiously out of their houses. The Angel called for the queries.

  “Whom do you seek in the sepulcher?” called the Angel, from the top of his stilts.

  He was juggling the sun and the moon by this time. The Pet had called them down. The people of the town looked at us in wonder, because we were making something happen. We were making a stone roll away and a dead man rise. We were doing the miracle right before their eyes.

  They were the bad people from the last war, and now some of them were the grown children of the bad people. The villains were dead and we were here anyway. I looked around and thought about fireplaces full of bones. I thought about my father and his accordion. I thought about a ferryman taking me to across a river to nowhere. We were going to a town in the country of never.

  “Bruno,” The Pet instructed. “Play your music.”

  The sun flipped backwards, a blazing orb of nothing, a tiny black rock inside it, and the moon was a sliver in the hand of a juggler. There was a third object too. I never knew what else the Angel juggled exactly, but when I think of it now I think it was someone's head. I can see its beard, its big blue eyes, and I can see the torn flesh at the base of its neck. This was the world between the wars, as the second war walked down the road behind us and we stood in the city of the first war, the conquerors’ children all around us.

  “They won't let me back into Russia,” the stiltwalker sang out. “They won't let me into Russia, but I've stolen their sun.”

  The Pet ate a bite from a haunch of hog.

  “And their son too,” he sang. He took a bite of a fish soup, and drank a sip of liqueur distilled from apricots that hadn't been seen in twenty years.

  Lazarus Mary was sleeping in the back of the act. Someone took her hand and tried to comfort her. She was a tiny girl alone. She blasted her dented trumpet into their face and someone's skin fell off their bones. There was a skeleton drinking tea in the back of the crowd then, sharing a teacup with Lazarus Mary. There was a man in his underwear, because the sound of her trumpet had taken his clothes. Lazarus Mary played a clean note that rang like a blade through the roomful of miracles.

  She'd been a child for twenty years and had died over and over.

  She was just a player in the band.

  I looked at her and her history was written all over her face. I could see her shadow, and it contained her city, all the ghosts in it pressed together in darkness. Her braids held all the bones. Her blood held all the blood. She played her trumpet and the Pet sang Black Eyes.

  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 town of conquerors’ children looked at us and drank vodka, sip by sip, paralyzed by the song we sang, the miracle play we brought to them. The faces of an audience rapt with attention are the faces of fools, some nights when you're on the road. You look at everyone watching you and you know you could take their kidneys. You could make them give you their hearts still beating. We didn't usually do that, this band, but sometimes we came to a bad town, and sometimes we were hungry.

  Mag cocked her rifle over her shoulder and said “Hallelujah,” as the new war crested the hill, coming from behind us.

  “Two lives left,” she said.

  The war rose up over the hill, and behind us, this village rose up too and clamored from the cave we'd been performing inside.

  “Hallelujah,” sang Lazarus Mary.

  The Pet played on his fiddle now, a complicated tune with many notes playable only by claw, and some of the notes were lower than those the fiddle should have known. Lazarus Mary's shadow stretched beyond the cave, and out over the land, and I could see within it thorns and tanks, bodies running, people old and young, all of them with swords and with knives. I played my accordion, and out of its sounds, I felt all the trees of my home coming back to life, branches spreading and becoming spears, spiked with metal from the forge. The apricots were ripening, each one red and taut with juice. I felt my family returning. The Virgin sang another hallelujah, and her hallelujah was high and sweet. She turned to me.

  “I came up out of the well, Bruno, and I was and I was not the one who could forgive them. I was and I was not the lady in white. I held them in my arms out in the fields and I forgave them their murders. I held them in my teeth out in the fields and I forgave them as I ate them. I killed the army that cooked my family, Bruno, but there are many kinds of forgiveness. There are many kinds of Mary.”

  The Virgin was glowing now, her skin so bright it hurt my eyes to look at her. She was oiled with something she'd made of tree sap. It increased her shine, her white-bleached hair a corona around her dark skin and black eyes.

  All the Marys raised their instruments, and the Virgin played bass, pulling the bow over the strings so exquisitely that it was almost impossible to pay attention to the way the townspeople around us were slowly dying as she played, collapsing into themselves like they'd never been among the living to begin with. They were paper lanterns full of hot air now. Their bones disappeared, and the air cooled inside them, and they drifted up, and then down.

  The walking army was watching us from the rise, and I could see their uncertainty. Lazarus Mary looked like an army herself. Here was the Virgin, glowing like a city.

  Here was Mag, and she had multiplied. She was all bullets and all hair, all freckles made of gunpowder. She was my right hand, and I was hers.

  “Shall we call this Bremen?” said Mag.

  “Let's call it Bremen,” said The Virgin.

  “Bremen is burning,” sang Lazarus Mary. “Bremen is burning for Christmas.”

  Mag climbed up the stilts of Nikolai the Angel, and perched herself on his shoulders, playing her fiddle. The Virgin didn't seem to climb, but to rise up on her own light. She placed her booted feet on Mag's shoulders, and her bass — it was certain now, that was how it happened, hung in the air before her. Lazarus Mary was last, clambering, dragging her shadow
, as she placed her bare feet on the Virgin's mantle, and stood, arms in the air, holding her trumpet.

  “Bruno,” said The Pet, and I knelt. My accordion was strapped to my chest, so when the tips of the stilts stepped onto my shoulders, I was prepared. Beneath me, the fur of The Pet was soft and warm, and I felt his height in his boots, as we all stood there on the hilltop, a creature nearly thirty feet tall, crowned by Lazarus Mary blowing her horn.

  The rooster we hadn't eaten flew up and roosted on Lazarus Mary's head.

  The Angel threw the moon into the air and it hung, shuddering, just above us.

  Over on the other hillside was the war, and they ran at us for a moment, before the front lines stopped, terrified.

  “What monster is that on the mountain?” someone screamed.

  “We're the band of Bremen!” shouted the Pet. “We come to kill you at Christmas!”

  He flashed his claws and there were more screams, and some gunshots. One of them hit me, and I felt the agony of it parting my bones and flesh, and then I felt myself resurrect.

  “One life left!” shouted The Pet.

  The army was upon us, but it was too frightened. It was no longer a walking war but a running one. I took a man in my arms and kissed him, burning his tongue like I was made of cinnamon bark, like I was a poet. I played him a song with my accordion. I was a man made of fire riding a demon, and above me were angels.

  We were the musicians. We were the band that would play in the last of these wars.

  And the Pet, the Pet was tremendous and pale and drunk, his fur gleaming in the light of the stolen moon. He was singing in Russian, and he sang of miracles.

  The cat is my henchman, I shall not want, I shouted as the walking war surrounded us. The trees were on fire, and the sky was lit with stars. I felt my right hand on Mag's instrument, and hers on mine, and we dueted on a song. We were nothing that would be forgotten. The Pet was galloping now, a white mist, his boots slaughtering soldiers, his teeth tearing faces from skulls. The rooster crowed for dawn and then for dusk, and Lazarus Mary played her trumpet like a girl mistaking a knife for a harmonica.