The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  The carpenter's mother closes that door again and seals it with beeswax. She closes the next door and the next, until all the doors are tightly shut.

  4.

  The golem isn't alive, and then she is.

  The first loneliness is the loneliness of birth. The golem opens her eyelid hinges, delicate doe leather. Her eyes are cold and dry, but she can see the man she's been created to serve, standing over her.

  “You,” he says. “You.”

  The golem has pale yellow-brown skin, smoothly sanded. Her hair is made of creamy white flowers with canary streaks, and there are shining green leaves throughout it. She smells of biting honey. She's small and slender, her waist narrow. No taller than he is. Her arms show the tracks of the tools that made her. There's a gouge between her breasts where there was a knot in the orange tree's trunk.

  The poet has hammered one of the secret names of God into her palate, and this is what has brought her to life. She tries to speak, but she has no tongue. There is a pain, a stabbing where the silver tablet is. She can't tell what it is, only that it hurts.

  It stretches inside of her body, a tentacled name. There is a loneliness in this too, the two hundred sixty-seventh, the loneliness of the only name one can speak being unspeakable.

  “My name is Solomon ibn Gabirol,” the man says, and blinks nervously. “You are my wife and servant. You'll help me write. I've need of someone to keep my words contained.”

  She examines the man before her. His hair is turning white, and his skin is red, black, and yellow. His cracked flesh bleeds. Salt water runs from his eyes.

  Solomon, she mouths. There is no sound.

  “Yes,” he says. “You're a thing made for me.”

  The man feeds her a piece of paper, on which is written a line of a poem, and then he feeds her another. They taste like termite, wasp, worm. A hinge creaks in her jaw.

  She's never seen a man before, not from this angle. She wants to take his tears and use them for some purpose. A ship, she thinks, catching a bewildering taste of his old thoughts. On a salt sea. An island where they have never seen a woman.

  She tries to make a noise, but only a rattle comes out. There's a lock on her lips, a bent metal hook through a bent metal eye, and he has latched it. He takes her through his house, showing her its rooms.

  “You'll clean for me,” he says. “You'll rid my house of dust.”

  She understands. She begins to shovel with her hands. She buries her fingers in the mess and thinks of rooting there, falls to her side and stretches, planting herself, but he pulls her up, telling her he wishes her to sweep the dirt, not roll in it like a sow.

  She learns quickly. She's made to learn.

  5.

  When he ordered her, Solomon gave only the measures of the golem's body, writing figures in the margins of his diagram. The carpenter was no sculptor. The golem is full in the hips and breasts, but one breast is bigger than the other, and her hips are tilted.

  She has no heart, and no soul. She is therefore no sin.

  This is what Solomon thinks to himself when he is trying to sleep in a house in which he is no longer alone.

  Solomon's diagrams included no more than suggestions for her face. She therefore has crude features, a mosaic of lustered ceramic for a mouth, and green glass eyes neither the same size nor the same shape. One is oval, and the other is wide and round. The lids, at least, are neat half-moons. Her nose is an angled slope with a bump at the bridge where the grain of the orange tree arcs. She has only an approximation of a woman's looks, but her hinges are perfect. All over her body there are metal hinges and wooden ones, leather hinges and string ones.

  She's held together to come apart.

  Sometimes, after the first days when she has to be kept from dropping in the garden and pressing her long fingers into the soil, or from standing too many hours outside with her face upturned, waiting for bees to land on her skin, the poet opens a door in her abdomen to remove a word and use it in a sentence. He talks more and more, all day, all night. He paces the room, telling her of injustices, years of woe, jealous companions and patrons murdered. He tells her of his childhood and his disease. He reports every injury done to him, and then writes more lines and feeds them to her.

  My throat is parched with pleading, he scribbles. I am buried in the coffin of my home. I combine my blood with my tears, and stir my tears into my wine. I am treated as a stranger, despised  —  as though I were living with ostriches, caught between thieves and fools, who think their hearts have grown wise.

  Solomon wonders why he still feels lonely. What kind of loneliness is this? One that hasn't been given a number. It makes him itch, all over, everything from his fingertips to his brain.

  6.

  The golem is busy. She sweeps the house's dust into the street. She washes the clothes. She clatters on the stones of his floor, her feet too loud in the night, and sometimes she sits, looking out the window, waiting for him to wake, breathing in the new dust that falls from the old walls of the city. She doesn't sleep or eat. She has no need for it.

  He writes a list of his enemies and puts them into her mouth. He wants them dead or forgotten, himself remembered. He burns his name onto her wooden skin, a thin line of characters, black and smudged, a circle around her wrist. She looks at the words, curious. They're nothing magical. He is, for all his labor and verse, an ordinary man.

  I am your thing, she thinks. Thing. She has no name. It is his job to give her one, and he has not.

  The poet writes poems, and the golem walks in circles. She lifts his pallet with one hand, to dust around and beneath it. She beats a rug with her fist.

  There is a thumping and pleasurable loneliness in this, the loneliness of a drummer in the desert, pounding a sound into leather, untethered by any city. She pounds the rug and feels a song inside herself, the song of falling oranges in a storm, the noise of their ripe roundness rolling away. The rug is silk, and she ravels a strand of scarlet loose and wraps it around her fingers, weaving it through her hinges. There is pleasure in this too, the feeling of an orange tree surrounded by dancers, the feeling of a gourd strung across by strings. She pulls the silk through her hands, stretching it, thinking of spiderwebs. She was once companioned by hundreds of spiders, each one using her branches as an anchor for an instrument of its own, fishing at night. She unravels the whole rug and makes a delicate web in a doorway.

  “What is that?”

  She has no answer, of course. She's standing beside her web, moving silk over silk, patterning the web to mimic the ones she's seen in her own twigs. With dawn there would be dew on each thread, and the spider in the center, waiting quietly for whatever might be drawn to something with so much gleam.

  “This is nothing you'll do again,” he says to her, taking the threads in his fist, tugging at them until they detach. He takes the tangled silk and throws it over the cliff. She watches it unspool, red loops caught in the wind, spun strings. Scarlet words in the air for a moment and then gone.

  The loneliness of a bird trapped in a web, its wings twisting backward as it swings, struggling and trapped. The spider's venom, the twisting of thread to cover the beak, the glittering eyes, the feet and flight. The loneliness of being too much body to eat, and killed anyway. A mummified silence, a veiled singer dangling from a chain of silver threads.

  Solomon leaves her mouth unlocked one night, and she tests it, stretching the hinges, coughing up half a poem. She feels dirty, and so she goes out into the rain and opens nearly every door in her body.

  She thinks of sap. There are roots inside her, her stomach and her intestines made of them, and she places a hand on the ground and takes water from the soil. The sun is part of her skin, and so are the wind and the salt from the sea. She's three hundred years old, and grew from an orange seed dropped by a gull. She's birthed thousands of oranges, and they've fallen from her boughs, taken into the ocean and into compote dishes. A few of them grew into trees.

  Now she's a
golem, but she's still what she used to be.

  In the morning the poet finds her with her head still upturned and screams at her, fearful of rust stiffening her smallest hinges.

  She looks toward the blaze on the horizon, her jaws wide for the rain until he closes them again, muttering that his hidden words will get wet. He locks her mouth. She grinds her tiny wooden teeth, tasting dust, which she swallows, but she isn't built for anger at her maker.

  She's seen the stars now, and she longs to see them again. They're familiar, the green haloes around them, the way the bird-hunting bats swoop and hang from her fingers, the way darkness turns to dawn, bleeding at the edge of the sky.

  7.

  The poet brings her inside the house and locks the front door, just as he locked her lips.

  “You must be as a wife,” Solomon says, his hands shaking. “That is what you were created to do.”

  The house is very clean. He arranges her on the bed, and she opens for him. She is built to do this. Her diagrams were clear. The secret hinges he requested are small and soft, made of the leather of the stillborn goat. They unfold, door after door, until the second to last door unhinges. He shoves himself inside it.

  There's still the final sealed compartment. He doesn't know it exists. Nothing of him gets in.

  The golem wonders suddenly if the house is like her, if she's inside the mouth of a larger golem. The loneliness of the motherless daughter, the loneliness of the daughter eaten by the mother, the loneliness of a roomful of wooden teeth. She looks at the chairs and table. She looks up over the poet's shoulder to see if the name of God is hammered to the ceiling. The loneliness of the result of magic.

  When he's finished with her, the golem's doors shut themselves, one by one. She stands up and sands herself; there's a spot of blood on her breast from a wound on his. Sawdust flies until she's clean again. He coughs blood, and curses. She sweeps the dust away.

  He gives her a chestnut to crack between her teeth. She hands him the meat and keeps the shell for herself to suck. It's like a nub of tongue. The golem makes a tiny sound, balancing it in her mouth, a rattle. She wedges it there with her fingers, pressed against the metal name.

  She feels liquid drip down her wooden thigh. Startled, she closes the doors tighter.

  “I thought I'd be happy with you,” Solomon says from the pallet. “But you're not a real woman. You're a thing I made.”

  You didn't make me, she thinks. I grew.

  With the shell in her mouth, she makes a tiny noise, a moaning sound, not a word, but not the sound of nothing. She chirrs a note. Everything that ever sang through her branches, every gust of wind, every bat, every bee, every bird. They all spoke to her and she spoke back to them when she was a tree. Now she is a hinged woman, muted by magic, and she moves the shell in her mouth, looking for a voice she's not been made to have.

  8.

  Solomon gets up, dresses in his loosest garments, and writes. His skin is boils and snakes. His bones feel breakable, and even his thoughts feel diseased. Talking doesn't help his loneliness. He wants to have her again, because she is all he'll ever have.

  She isn't what he wants. He had a different woman in mind. Copper glances, black lace, a living woman willing to wrap him in bandages, a woman willing to carry him to a warm tub, a woman to cure his agonies.

  This one is cold and has no heart. This one is ugly and has no mind. She's only an orange tree.

  He writes of the loneliness of the poet, years of shunning, the way his life has bent itself into a hoop of suffering. He writes of the eight-hundred-sixty-first form of loneliness, the loneliness of the scratching quill plucked from some dead swan. He writes of the forty-eighth form of loneliness, the loneliness of the moment of orgasm, when all the sky rushes from the blue and into the sea, leaving nothing in its place.

  He goes to the golem and stares at her, considering the conditions of the magic. He asks for one thing he hasn't had yet.

  “Play me a song,” he says. “It's too quiet.”

  9.

  The golem is surprised to discover that she's made of music. She has no tongue, but she has noise.

  The golem's body is a chamber. There are strings made of silk, and a curved bow inside one of the cabinets of her thigh. When she threads three strings through tiny holes drilled in her sternum, and another set just below her stomach, she can play the rabāb. This was part of her diagram, any instrument, and the carpenter's mother chose this one from her own home. There is a thin membrane of doeskin, tanned and stretched taut over the cavity of the cabinet, and this skin vibrates.

  She plays the tunes given her by the carpenter's mother, songs of the desert, songs of another religion. There are S-shaped openings in her stomach from which the song pours.

  She draws the bow across the strings, filling with greater and greater pleasure, until the poet waves his hand, goes to his bed, and waits for her to stop the noise and come to him.

  10.

  There's a hard storm that night, and all the pomegranates fall. The golem goes into the street at dawn and kneels to collect them, each one as large as a baby's head.

  “Who are you?” a woman says, and the golem looks up, startled, her fingers pushing through the pomegranate's skin and deep into the seeds, groping for something.

  The woman is standing over her, looking horrified, and when the golem raises her face, the woman screams and backs away, gasping.

  The golem feels the seeds slick and fat between her fingers. She crushes some, and juice runs out into the dirt. There are tiny ants all over the fruit, and she feels their bodies crushing too, their certainty that they might carry something so tremendous. She feels sorry for that.

  “What are you?” the woman says, and makes a gesture of protection. “Demon,” she whispers, and runs, dropping her basket.

  The golem goes back into the house.

  She curls into the cold fireplace, a heap of sticks, and stays there through the day and until the next morning, though Solomon shouts for her when she brings no evening meal. Her blossoms are falling off. The petals are dropping, and she feels as though she will soon be naked.

  When the petals are gone, though, there are oranges, tiny green ones. Her skull is beaded with them.

  The loneliness of the bee seeking nectar, the journey between trees, a wavering flight, a humming and thrum. The loneliness of the pale flower, a channel of gold at its center, dew and dawn and a white room.

  In the morning she raises Solomon's bed with him on it and sweeps the dust from beneath it. She swabs water over the new wounds on his skin. He is weak and fevered. She wonders if he will die.

  “You serve me,” he croaks. She feels her doors opening. She has no say in it.

  11.

  Solomon presses into her, looking down at her still face, pushing against her hard flesh. He is too sick to leave the house at all. Too sick to enjoy anything. His skin feels like a board being planed, shaven, the scraps trod on by goats. He needs a diet of milk and honey, a balm of olive oil. She can't fetch any of it for him. He is a monster and she is a cabinet. Neither of them can go into the street.

  He considers the precious word that brought her to life. He means to pry it loose. She'll be firewood at least. This has been a failure.

  “You're not what I wanted,” he says when he is finished.

  He puts his fingers to the corner of her mouth, intending to open the hinges and remove God from her.

  12.

  As Solomon approaches her, the golem feels a startling jolt deep inside her body. Something sealed begins to unseal; something forbidden begins to reveal itself. She holds the innermost cabinet door shut, feeling the hinges stretching, the thing behind it trying to be loose. If the poet notices her alarm, he says nothing.

  There is shouting from the street. Solomon withdraws from her. The golem smoothes her dress. The poet rearranges his robes. The oranges are ripening. The room is heavy with their smell, sweat and sweetness.

  The door inside the gole
m's body, the last and smallest door, the last and smallest hinge, shakes and swells. She keeps it closed. She refuses. Whatever is in there, it can stay locked behind the door. Liquid on her thigh. She closes all the doors with ferocious resolution.

  Men shout to enter. Solomon ties a patterned cloth about her head, over the lumpy oranges.

  “Qasmūna,” he says. “Your name is Qasmūna. You're a housemaid.”

  Her fists open and close convulsively as the door pounds.

  She wonders if she'll kill his enemies. That is what she was made to do.

  13.

  The men surge into the house, bearded and cloaked. There are five of them, and they're all elderly, years beyond Solomon. He knows them. The elders are the ones who kept him in this house, unable to walk amongst humans. When he arrived in the city, he was shunned. It was only their permission and their memories of his parents, long dead, that allowed him to live here at all, to stop walking the roads. Otherwise, he'd be dead somewhere, parched and dried to leather.

  It might be better than this.

  He thinks for a moment that he can take them all, pulverize them. He might crush them into a cupboard and barricade them there. He might make them into the contents of a cabinet, dishes asking to be broken. Then he remembers that they're living men, not his creation. He's lost his understanding of the nature of the world. He is a sickly poet, and they are the men in charge of the city.

  The men circle the room, staring at the golem, who stands in the center, waiting, trembling. She's a tree full of birds, and they're foxes.

  “What have you done?” they shout at Solomon, and he lies to them, though it's futile. They're holy men with long beards and hundreds of years between them. They know his books and they know the history of his books. They know every corner of the law. Solomon feels himself surrounded by poems he will never write. He'll be taken to executioners. It troubles him for a moment, and then it doesn't. He'll stab out their eyes as he goes. He'll scream his own elegy from his last moments. It's already written and stored inside his cabinet.