The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  The garden is filled with fruit on the vines, but the gardener

  refuses to brush a finger over the skin of even one piece.

  How sad it is! The season of splendor passes,

  and the fruit that ripens only in darkness

  Remains lonely.

  The gulls followed the wooden woman into a new life, out from Spain and over the sea, but that is nothing the carpenter's mother will admit to knowing. She's merely an old woman sitting in the dark, listening to the sounds of a creature made of ash and one made of wood, singing their way away.

  She sits there a long time beneath the stars before she writes the poems onto a piece of cloth, before she walks barefoot down the road to another town with them, before she puts them into the hands of a song-seller.

  “Where did these come from?” the seller asks.

  “A woman,” she tells him. “Qasmūna.”

  “Who is her father?” he asked. “Who is her husband?”

  “She has neither,” the carpenter's wife said, knotting the scrolls with red silk thread. “Will you buy them?”

  Coins are never lonely. They clacked and rang out, and the carpenter's wife held them in her palm, though soon they'd disappear like the kind of shining moths which land for only a moment to drink, before lighting again into the night.

  Historical Note

  The legend of the wooden golem created by the Andalusian Hebrew poet Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-ca. 1058) is much less known than that of Rabbi Loew and the Golem of Prague, perhaps because Ibn Gabirol's golem was a (rare) female golem brought to life not as a defender but as a housemaid and likely bedmate. The historic Ibn Gabirol was a complicated and brilliantly prolific intellectual figure, a reclusive misanthrope who suffered from a skin disease, possibly cutaneous tuberculosis. His poetry is filled with feelings of ostracization and rage relating to same  —  he complains about jealous enemies, among other things  —  though he also wrote rapturous and religiously ecstatic poems regarding the planets, the gardens of the sky, and laughing lightning. In the accounts, Ibn Gabirol was forced to destroy his hinged golem after being accused of fornicating with her. The legend typically comes up in discussions of personhood in Jewish law  —  and the debate in Hinge is typical of that discussion. The Sefer Yetzirah, in which mystical information related to golem creation is traditionally thought to be found, was a significant influence on Ibn Gabirol's work, and he translated sections of it. The Banū Mūsā's Book of Ingenious Devices was written in the ninth century and contains instructions for creating a variety of automata. The legend of Ibn Gabirol's murder and burial beneath a fig tree is historical, though used to new ends here.

  The rabāb is a stringed instrument still played all over the world, an ancestor of the violin (which wasn't invented until after the period in which this story is set). It came from North Africa via trade routes to Spain in the eleventh century, and there's a very nice drawing of a more pear-shaped variant included in the Catalan Psalter, ca. 1050. There's also a version of a rabāb in a fresco in the crypt of Sant’Urbano alla Caffarella, near Rome (ca. 1011), and that version looks almost exactly like a modern violin, including S-shaped soundholes. The tones of the rabāb are said, even in early accounts, to mimic those of a woman's voice.

  Bitter oranges, a primary crop in Málaga, have recently been discovered to have effects similar to those of the banned diet-aid ephedra  —  their extract, often marketed as a stimulant, can cause strokes and heart attacks. The pale yellow wood of the bitter orange tree is so hard that it is made into baseball bats in Cuba. The golem's golem, composed of ash and a name written on parchment, is a far more traditional golem than the wood-and-hinges creation said to have been made by Ibn Gabirol (the only golem of that composition in the history, so far as I can tell), but that one is my invention.

  Qasmūna (or Kasmunah) bat Isma’il was an eleventh- or twelfth-century Andalusian Jewish poet. Her name is likely derived from the Arabic diminutive of the Hebrew root qsm, meaning charming and seductive. Charming, in this case in the literal sense  —  magical. It may also be derived from the Arabic male name Qasmun  —  someone with a beautiful face. Her two extant poems (my loose translations from the original Arabic) are in the text. She is one of only two documented Spanish Jewish female poets in the period, the other being the Wife of Dunash. Qasmūna bat Isma’il's biography is unknown, though there has been plenty of speculation  —  the daughter of a scholar, the daughter of a well-known poet, or, in this case, something else entirely. Regardless, her poems are erotic, and steeped in the natural world.

  Adriftica

  “You're an ass, Heck Limmer!” my wife shouts out the upstairs window, and I watch my favorite leather jacket spontaneously combust on its way out into the snow. Just one of the many things Tania knows how to do. Some of them were nicer, back before she ran out of patience with me.

  Tania used to sing a note that could make me come. I know how that sounds, but I'm not kidding. She could sing some other notes too, that did some other things. There are fuckups one can make, and I made them. I got scared of the woman I'd married. I blamed her for my fear, and I knew I couldn't come close to what she could do. I was jealous, is the bottom line of what it was, and she knew it, but she hoped I was better, and I wasn't.

  Most people will tell you that writing about rock & roll in the middle of the heat death of the universe is questionable work in itself, especially if that gig means you wander the world, leaving your wife and kid alone to deal with the collapse of everything, but rock & roller is a personality type, whether I'm covering the End of Days tours or not. I'm a rotten husband. Tania knew it getting in, and so did I, but I convinced myself I was different, and she convinced herself I could change, and together we managed to raise a six-year-old who is maybe the only kid on Earth who actually likes music at all these days.

  I'm back to my full-time cash circuit, the guy who follows the heroes of rock & roll from failing town to failing town writing down their dickwad deeds.

  The climate's been deep-fucked for a few years, and the trees are starting to crack down the centers. Fields are flooded and livestock is dying, and elsewhere on Earth, the sun has started to get too close. Frost on the roses and nobody can tell the seasons apart anymore. We get winter in the middle of summer, fall halfway through spring.

  Still, all the old gods of rock remain on tour, their knees aching and their bones shaking. Writing about their shows, I feel like I'm writing about the encores of ghosts. The kids don't come out for rock & roll anymore. They don't even come outside. The sky's a weird color, and those of us with death on the horizon don't find it freaky, but the young have a problem with the way the air feels when it goes into your lungs, like you're inhaling scotch. A band that can get anyone under fifty in the audience is an aberration.

  Tania's holed up in our house in Seattle now, growing her usual bower of plants that don't exist anywhere else. Nothing stops her, not volcanic eruptions, not acid rain. Tania used to be a curly headed sweetheart and now she's wearing a wig made out of snakes. She's stopped trying to look like she belongs here.

  I owe her money, and so about the time tsunamis and dictators are rising up and flowing over the land, I'm shambling my sorry ass to a gig at a dark club in Chicago to do a write-up on some kids with guitars. Akercock is the band. Obscure Elizabethan reference to Puck. I've been around long enough to find that annoying. I have no hope that Akercock will be anything better than the crap I've lately been covering. I'm expecting guitars and earnest singers doing the usual songs, one of them with a pretty voice, the rest with a little bit of strut and sin, none of it any real thing.

  Instead —

  I walk into the club and stop in my tracks, because I'm hearing a howl, a trilling sound echoing over the amps, like the song of some animal I've never heard of, and then a moan coming out of the mouth of the lead singer, joined by the rest of the band. Five boys, nobody wearing an air mask, none older
than twenty-three. Long-haired skinny-legged cocktails of rage and despair, and like that, I'm typing in my head, writing this shit down.

  Akercock's music is a chilling cousin of every great band you've ever gone horizontal to — but it isn't that, not really. It's sexy, but also hurts the ears. And mostly, they aren't singing words you know. They're howling and whirring, like a flock of predatory birds over a kill, or like wind coming through a window high in a haunted hotel. All this is interspersed with electric guitar, and then the band begins to play in earnest, riffing their way across history. The band is a hard-on in song form. The kind of thing that makes you look behind you, because what's there? Death. You're never nineteen again, not once you've failed to appreciate it.

  I'm hitting fifty and I don't want to talk about my dick these days. No one else wants to talk about it either, but I have no shame when it comes to writing about bands. I'm not above diagramming my own decline.

  The lead singer clings to the microphone like he's drinking its blood. His eyes flash in the dark, and I find myself thinking about the ’10's, that band that figured out how to phosphoresce and freaked everyone out. Nobody remembers their songs now. Only that they glowed.

  Onstage at the KingKill Club in Chicago, Eron Chaos, the five-octave wailing lead singer of Akercock, looks down at the audience like he's a rabid fox. His hands are covered in blood, and he shrugs for us all: this is the way it goes, boys. Then he licks his hands clean, a cat fixing up his paws.

  That's the on-the-record part, the part I'm going to write for the magazine. The off-the-record is that the guy's eyes are golden and wide as a goat's, and the muscles in his chest move like he's full of snakes. I can see his heart beating, on both sides, and I get a pang of weirdness. He's way too good-looking to be anyone who grew up in America. He reminds me of someone else I know, but the world is big and there are plenty of things in it.

  The room isn't empty anymore. Little flocks of groupies wearing one-eighth of nothing, raddled girls who've been wandering down the road in need of ecstasy and some kind of sainting. Where did they come from? They showed up without any noise, or maybe I'm just that into the music.

  The air's thick with a smell one part civet cat and one part flooded forest, and Eron Chaos stands shirtless in front of a room now packed full of fans, people throwing themselves at him, parking their cars in the middle of the road and running in. A girl perches on top of the bar and swan dives. The crowd carries her to him.

  Immortal, I think, and then shake my head. A trite thought to have about a girl with long hair and a tight white dress standing in front of a boy in leather. The whole thing reminds me of my marriage, that same sense of things I don't know and never will. It makes my heart feel like it's leaking lava.

  Thinking of Tania, I assume, is what cues up my vision of batshit.

  The girl onstage turns around, looks out into the crowd, and starts to sing. Faint form after faint form climbs out of her mouth, all with tails and hooves, all with thin wings. The creatures flutter into the crowd and whisper in the ears of the kids dancing on the floor. There are maybe fifty of them. Maybe a hundred. I see, for a moment, a rift behind the band, a golden and green doorway, opening into some other place. I blink. No, it's gone.

  Back up to say: I have no small history with hallucinogens. Seriously, fuck those mushrooms I foraged in the PNW with Tania back when I was clueless and didn't know that mushrooms absorbed radiation.

  I've seen groupies before, but never like Akercock's. These girls are the old-fashioned kind, dancing in the front row, their fingers clacking over their heads like tiny jaws, their nipples pointing out of their T-shirts like thorns. And plenty aren't wearing shirts at all. When they cheer, they cheer like owls diving at prey. They dance like little kids in a sprinkler, but the kind of little kids you won't mess with because they might be Satan in girl form.

  I relax a little, watching them. If the band has groupies, it can't be that weird. Whatever I just saw can easily be blamed on my own wrongful history. The main weird thing here is that the whole audience, I mean all of it, is in their twenties or younger.

  As in, the audience is made up of kids.

  I Lazarus up, phone Rolling Stone, and shout that they'd better send me to cover this for real.

  The idiot on the phone gives a whine translating into O ancient tragedy of a writer, you won a Pulitzer like-that-even-matters so I'm supposed to let you slide and give you expenses. FINE.

  I'm set. I insinuate myself backstage, flashing credentials and giving the journalist swagger that theoretically compensates for the gray in my beard and the undeniable hair in my ears.

  “Bro,” I say to Eron Chaos, trying to keep my old man situation in check. “I'm Heck Limmer from Rolling Stone.”

  The kid looks at me. “I'm not your brother, and that's not your real name,” he says.

  Of course it's not. No one's named Heck, unless they named themselves after a country-western misunderstanding in the eighties and it stuck, because they were the only Heck.

  “Simon,” I say. “Originally.”

  “I know who you are. You wrote that book, right? The one about bacchanals causing God hallucinations, heart attacks caused by bass, and whether you can deal with the devil or summon the dead if you play the right kind of song? I liked that book.”

  It's unclear whether he's full of shit. I did write that book. It was famous. But it was before he was born. Also, this isn't how it's normally described. Normally people say it's a book about Bowie.

  “My name's not my real name either,” he tells me, like I don't know. You don't get named Chaos by your parents. I don't know anything about his parents, though. There's no story on this guy.

  “Wanna give me the real version?” I ask him. “For the record?”

  He inhales, and sings a note, and the note goes on way the fuck too long, a tangled string of syllables that don't sound like language, or at least, not like any language I know.

  “Mind if I record that?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I mind. You don't get to record that. It's my name and it's precious.”

  They're all eccentrics, but there's something about the tone he uses, and I leave it alone for the moment. I tell the rest of the band I'm coming on the road with them, feature story, big deal. They just look at me, with their animal eyes. Not in a bad way. In a way that says I'm an asshole king of rock, motherfucker, and you're going to listen to me sing. In a way that says You'd better listen to me sing, because I'm not gonna talk.

  I glance toward the couch where Eron Chaos is making out with the girl from the stage. The two of them are a knot of leather and lethargy.

  “Who's that?” I asked the drummer.

  “Mabel,” he says, and rolls his eyes. “He's hers, she's his, don't mess with Mother Nature. Eron had a shit divorce, and everything's been fucked since, all over hill and dale. That's why we're touring.”

  Hill and dale. Please.

  I let myself have one long look at Mabel with her long tangled hair and her white dress, and that's all, because Mabel, if anything, is about a million years too young for me, and not only that, she reminds me, in a shitload too many ways, of Tania. Mabel's teeth look like they belong to an animal, all of them pointy, in stark contrast to her painted lips. I look away as Chaos tears the front of her dress open. Poser, I think, reflexively, but then it feels realer than that. This isn't a motel-room-wrecking band. This is something else. Something that calls me in.

  Outside, the crowd's dispersing, and I make my way with them. I get to my hotel and write a chunk of profile. I'm high as a drone on some powder I bought off a groupie. Akercock. I could've chosen a different name for the late-night radio hosts to say, but late-night radio doesn't exist anymore. Nothing exists anymore. I could talk about pop eating itself. I could talk about punk rock and Sid, and the Ramones, all of whom I knew, in that fanboy drugswap way, before they fell down. I could talk about disasters. I don't know the angle yet on this band, but I have a few ideas
.

  I've been around. I was there when grunge was born, midwifing that poor howling thing, screaming on the floor of some crap room in Seattle. I was there when it died, Cobain on the same floor, bleeding it out like he was killing a religion. I was there for part of punk rock, for Fugazi and King Missile, for Bad Religion, I was there for Public Enemy, I was there for clubs in places like Boise, Idaho, where all the kids had shaved their jack-Mormon mullets into Mohawks. I've been writing these pages for years, in a state of despair, feeling like a biologist diagramming a decline. Rock is dead, I've been writing, like God is dead, like love is dead, like butterflies are dead. Like polar bears are dead. Like the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Like all the dead things are dead.

  I wasn't expecting a band like Akercock.

  I'm going on record now, readers, saying fuck that. I was wrong. I thought rock & roll was rotting. I thought it was so dead it was a bone sculpture in the desert, and then?

  Then there was Akercock. People of America, I take it back, all the things I said about burying the dead.

  Rock & roll is resurrected.

  I'm so wired, so on, that I dial Tania. Is she even my wife anymore? My son picks up and calls me Daddy, and I remember better days before we all went crazy. I'm picturing him, looking at me, his strange, feral little face. I'm trying to tell him I love him, when Tania picks up and asks me if I know what time it is.

  “No,” I tell her, and make an attempt at humor. “Later than you think?”

  I met Tania at her own show, when she appeared onstage in a bright red dress, this brown-skinned woman with a twisted tangle of hair, eyes the color of an oil spill, and a mouth full of curses. She didn't sing rock. She sang a twisted rhyming course like the rapids of a river, spitting it out syllable by syllable, a skittering indictment of everyone who'd ruined the corners of the earth, a history of America in geologic time, and then in leaders of fools. She named them all in a frenzy that scanned, from Pilgrims to preachers to power-mongers.