The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  As Wells squints at the paper, the motorcycle turns into a wheelchair. The little boy disappears. The mother stands up, looking literal daggers at the father, and a Crayola man in a top hat and a tuxedo walks into the picture and adds himself to the family. Wells crumples the paper as fast as paper can be crumpled. He isn't doing this magic trick. Whoever is, bourbon or bad day, it's not funny.

  One drink later, he un-crumples and smooths it.

  The man in the tuxedo reaches out his arms, the mother falls into them, and the father wheels his chair off the paper. Lightning jags from the sky, a gold scrawl, and the magician holds it in his hands —

  Something clatters. Wells looks down and sees his car keys on the ground. The figures on the paper aren't moving. There is no such thing as magic. He shifts to the back booth.

  When he opens his eyes sometime later, the neon is blazing, and the line to get a drink at the Lost Kingdom is four deep. The windows are fogged over. Wells wonders if he's dead.

  He looks to his left and sees a bearded face tattooed with stars, a pair of pink-rimmed rabbit eyes peering down at him.

  “Richard?” he says. This is not the man's name, but a long-gone rabbit's name is the only name Wells can remember.

  “It's the lemon,” says the biker. “It's the fucking lemon who thought he was a comedian.”

  “I'm not a comedian,” Wells protests. “I'm a magician. See?”

  He pulls an ancient coin from out of Richard's beard, and then rains subway tokens from Richard's ears for good measure.

  Richard levitates Wells as easily as plucking a lop from a top hat. He's massive, dressed all in black leather, and Wells looks down on the Lost Kingdom from an unpleasant height.

  “Caro,” Richard yells. “Is this fuckshow someone from Kenny's family? If not, I'm dropping him in the dumpster.”

  Wells dangles, inhaling the sickly scent of lilies. There's a funeral arrangement draped over a table, on which there is a giant photo of a little boy, grinning in a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. A woman Wells knows is at the table, too, hunched over a steaming cup, mascara striping her face like warpaint.

  “Drop him,” she says.

  Wells plummets. He makes it to his hands and knees and crawls toward her feet. Black heels. A fresh tattoo on her calf of a mother and a son, the two of them holding hands and facing the universe. Both figures are oozing blood.

  He looks up, and she's looking down at him. Blue eyes. Rosy cheeks. Hair cut with a dull knife. She's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen.

  “You again,” she says.

  “I can bring him back,” he hears himself say. “I can bring Mica back from the dead. I'm a magician.”

  Her fist approaches him formally, and he feels his nose bend like a spoon. There's a tsunami of tattooed biceps and rolled-up shirtsleeves from the room at large. A bottle breaks. Wells's skull is made of glass, and inside it, there is a spark like a penny becoming electric.

  Wells glows for a few seconds, but the light goes out. High heels click past his face. There's the sound of revving and roaring, and over all of that, her voice ringing out from the parking lot.

  “FUCK THIS!” she shouts. “FUCK MOTORCYCLES! FUCK NIGHT! FUCK DEATH!”

  “Caro,” someone says.

  “FUCK YOU!” she screams. “GET AWAY FROM ME! PRETEND YOU NEVER MET ME!”

  Wells walks backward into the dark until he's underneath the universe and safely flat, invisible.

  * * *

  The dayshift bartender scrapes the dropped magician off the floor and hands him a bag of frozen tater tots for his face. The bar's empty. Wells is sopping. Maybe they poured their drinks out as they went past.

  “I told you to watch out for her,” the bartender says. “Don't think you're driving like this, Wells. Cold front came in. Whole road's made of ice.”

  The bartender sets a mug of burnt coffee down in front of Wells, who drinks it. He eats an order of tots, and then walks shivering into five AM, his tux freezing to his skin. All of this feels like basic destiny.

  Wells opens the VW's trunk, and strips down to his rubber-chicken printed boxers in the glow of the Lost Kingdom sign. The lemon mascot suit is made of shaggy yellow fur and is fleece-lined. Its legs are mysteriously thermal. There's no explaining why a summer suit was constructed this way. It has a pointy hood, decorated with green leaves. Wells zips himself in, and puts his boots back on. Snow's falling like cheapola confetti.

  Wells drives the lemon to a 7-11 and buys a thermos.

  While he stands at the beverage station, staunching his nose with his dad's scarf trick and waiting a thousand years for the kettle on the hotplate to boil, he thinks about performing with his father, thirty years ago, posing in front of a glittering backdrop, his dad throwing a knife at his heart, and the oohs from the crowd as the knife diverted midair and stung the ceiling. His dad, grinning and bowing. Mustache. Top hat. Magic.

  Every once in a while, the knife would go a little way in, and every once in a while, Wells would wake up with a Band-Aid under his t-shirt. Just once, something went wronger than usual and Wells woke up frozen, wristbanded, on a gurney. His dad pushed the gurney out of the basement of the hospital, and there was Wells, alive again.

  “Sorry about that, buddy,” said his dad, and laughed. “Overkill.”

  Wells laughed too, but he wasn't sure what he was laughing about, the “buddy,” never a word his dad would use, or the pun, classic magician patter.

  “Done with that business,” his dad said, and thumped Wells hard on the shoulder. “I put it back. Shouldn't have taken it out in the first place, but I thought I'd keep it for a rainy day.”

  “What back?” said Wells, with some difficulty. His jaw was stiff, and there was cotton packed toward the back of his teeth.

  “Still feeling hollow? It'll get better. Milkshake?”

  Wells concluded that this had something to do with tonsils or teeth, and nothing to do with death. They went to a diner, and little by little, he felt himself return from elsewhere.

  Soon after that, though, his father was dead, and Wells was tricking strangers in a bus station. How many kinds of illusion can a person do in a lifetime? Flash paper, wallet spirited out of a pocket, a loud noise, and Wells would be gone. No funeral for his father. Nowhere to go but out into the wide world, alone.

  He loves damage. Loves it.

  He drops half a box of teabags into the bottom of the thermos, pours the boiling water over them, and waits another thousand years before he tugs them out. He dribbles the milk in carefully. He pays with a pile of ones he's found in the bag, each with the face of his father instead of Washington. The cashier doesn't notice.

  * * *

  Wells has never been into the cemetery before, just seen it from the road, the white stones like cards dropped on a green felt table. He walks it, thermos in hand.

  As morning grays the horizon, he sees her standing on a hill beside a heap of fresh dirt.

  She's wearing a leather jacket, and black motorcycle boots, inches too big. She has a helmet on too.

  “You for the third time,” she says. She cocks her head at him. “Did I break your nose, then?”

  “You did,” he says.

  “That was the idea.” She barks a laugh, but she's crying. “I stole my husband's best friend's bike and kit. All those bikers came for my husband. He's their family. I'm nobody's family.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your — ” he says, and then doesn't know what to say.

  “Kenny's from here. I was living in London. He was riding through. It looked good to me. I got on. He isn't a bad guy, but he has bad judgment. Look at who he married. He took our son for a ride in the middle of the night and ran into a tree, but he didn't die. They're all around his bed convincing him it wasn't his fault, but it was. Tell me how that's fair. Tell me how that happens.”

  She sobs once, and then she's done. Wells notices the second helmet dangling from
her fingers. It's small and red, to match the sunglasses she still has around her neck.

  “What kinds of tricks can you do, then, Wells the Magician?” she says, after a moment.

  “Cards, coins, bunnies.”

  “I watched a magician saw a woman in half once,” she says. “In Brighton. She got rid of everything below the heart. That was a thing to see.”

  He holds out the thermos.

  She takes it. “And there's a trick. You know what I don't take in my tea?”

  “Lemon,” he replies, “Obviously.”

  “It curdles,” she says. “I don't take sugar either. So stay away from me with your vulgarian attempts at sweet.”

  “No sugar or lemon in there,” he says. “Despite appearances.”

  Steam makes a cloud over her face as she pours tea into the cup and sips. She looks at Wells, and raises an eyebrow.

  “Quite nice,” she says. “If milky.”

  “I followed your directions.”

  “It's nursery tea, but it'll do. One for the fates,” she says, and flings a drop of tea into the air. “One for the furies.” She pours a shot of tea into her hand, and smears it over the temporary grave marker.

  “And one for the one I leave behind here, in this fucking ground, in this fucking country.”

  She pours a shot of tea onto the grave itself.

  Blood drips unexpectedly from Wells’ nose and lands on the snow, mixing with the tea. He's turning to apologize, when the ground groans.

  There's a muffled explosion deep beneath the surface, and both of them lurch as dirt and snow are displaced. Gravel peppers his face. A rock bounces off her helmet.

  The grave spits the coffin out.

  It lands hard, and shudders. There's a sound as the coffin opens. Wells isn't sure who makes it, him or her. In the coffin, there's a boy, eyes closed. Alive? Dead? There's no way to tell.

  Caro lunges toward her son, then stops.

  Someone else is with them now, someone Wells has met before.

  The stranger is wearing a coat made of smoke. There's ice forming on Wells's spine, and his heartbeat hesitates. Whether this is death or a devil, it hasn't noticed him. Old agreements were bound in blood, and if he agreed he never met this thing, it agreed it never met him, too.

  Caro's fists are clenched. She smells like tea leaves being insisted into a fortune.

  “No,” says Caro to the thing that stabbed Wells's father. “It's me you'll be taking.”

  “That old trope,” says a voice made out of last calls. “If I wanted you instead, I'd have had you instead. I didn't ask to be brought here. Whatever summoned me, it was old business, not new. I'll be off.”

  Foggy tendrils twist toward the boy, and the smoke steps backward, one foot in the grave, clinging to the coffin. Caro pivots in her stolen boots, and swings the thermos of tea at the stabber's head. Wells watches in despair.

  She's not going to win. She's mortal, and she has no magic. All she has, is that she's the mother of this child.

  Wells is bourbon and hamburgers and a life spent spending every last cent on simple sins. Love has found him wanting. He's stood in rooms full of birth and thought about dying. He's a minor magic man with nothing but his broken life to lose.

  And so.

  Wells upends his bag of tricks and pours it out. He's only ever fumbled for fixes, but the bag is larger than it looks. Here in the snow, now, are all the things Wells has ever lost.

  The house he used to dream of living in, a wedding ring belonging to his mother, a history he's spent decades hiding from. His mother screaming at his father, and then closing the kitchen door, his father in the center of the linoleum. A college-ruled notebook full of promises, a candle sputtering, a cloud of smoke around him. Wells was there when magic showed up in a mobile home.

  Overkill.

  How old was Wells? A high chair? A platter of peas, thrown one by one. Young enough that language eluded him, but he was there as his dad took his hand and cut a fingertip, making him part of the bargain, capable of carrying the bag of tricks and everything else.

  The thing the stranger was rummaging for, all those years ago, was here, inside the sack. Wells was the bag carrier, the little piece of nothing, bearing his father's soul and keeping it safe from any bad bargains. At one point, Wells's own soul was in the sack too, maybe destined for a cup and ball swap, maybe just out of his dad's bad habits.

  Wells feels the magic that's always been beside him, that rode in the passenger seat, that provided him with coins and stars and smoke, that messed with his marriages.

  Now it's in the snow. Wells reaches down and picks it up.

  He has no real magic words for this old business. A trade of merchandise. He dropkicks the soul long-owed into the grave, and yells the word his dad taught him for rabbits and balloons.

  “ABRACADABRA!”

  And there is his father, in the middle of the air, naked and floating over the grave, a deck of cards orbiting him. There is his father, looking to Wells and nodding.

  The open grave is full of smoke, like dry ice in a punch bowl. Like magic in a retirement home, this kind of death, its tricks visible in the light. Wells can hear a marching band somewhere, and he can feel confetti dropping out of the sky, and he can smell the scent of the perfume his mother used to wear.

  The stabber is standing below Wells's father, opening smoky arms, and taking the wandering soul in them. The coffin is open, and now it contains a naked magician.

  Wells feels death depart the premises, and his own heart begins to beat properly again, in a way it hasn't in years. The coffin is gone, and the grave is closed over. The show is done and the curtains are drawn, and Wells looks around, expecting a broom and a janitor, no joy, no glory, not even any roses.

  Everything is as it was, except —

  There is a little boy, very still on the ground, in a frozen slick of tea. There's a pair of sunglasses shaped like hearts, cracked across one lens. There's a helmet on the hillside, upturned. There's an old wedding ring, glowing red, and then cooling, in a tarnished pile of pennies.

  The bag of tricks is gone, but it isn't necessary. Those were old tricks, and this is something else.

  There's a woman in leather, and she's on her knees. There's Wells in his lemon suit, and he's on his knees too. There's no such thing as magic.

  And then, because magic doesn't follow those rules, or any rules at all, the boy's eyes open, and the woman goes to him, and the man goes to them, and the three are there, on the hilltop, with the whole world beneath them like a hat full of lucky rabbits, alive and kicking.

  “Are you a magician?” the boy asks Wells. “I know magic.”

  The boy leans toward Wells and touches his ear, and from the ear he pulls a coin, and the coin turns into a bird, and the bird flies up to spin across the sky and over the heads of sleepers and wakers in the town.

  “Is there still tea, then?” Caro asks, and Wells passes her the thermos. The water is boiling now, and the tea is strong and dark. No one is crying. Everyone believes.

  Read After Burning

  It is crucial to remember that magic is unpredictable. Old magic, new magic, all magic. Magic has its own mysteries and rewires itself according to mood, like weather discovered between streets, rainstorms dousing only one person, or like a blizzard on the skull of a soldier, a brass band on the deck of a submarine. War magic exists, and wedding magic. Love magic and murder magic, spells for secrets kept forever, and spells for dismantling structures. Magic itself, though, sometimes ceases to exist in moments when it's most necessary, and even when you've memorized the entirety of the history of spells and sacrifices, there are always ways to fail and invent, to combine traditions into something else entirely. There are ways to shift the story from one of ending, to one of beginning.

  * * *

  All this happened a long time ago, before the story you know. You were born in a world that wasn't ending. This is a st
ory about how that re-beginning came to be. It's about the Library of the Low, about books written to be burned, and about how we brought ourselves back from the brink.

  I'm old now, but old doesn't matter. How many years have humans been looking up at the stars and thinking themselves annotated among them? How long have the stories between us been whispered and written and lost and found again?

  This, then, is a story about the story: It's about librarians. It begins on the day of my father's death. I was ten years old. I knew the facts about blood; all ten-year-olds do. Do you? You do.

  I knew this fact, for example: There was no stopping blood until it was ready. Sometimes it poured like magical porridge down the streets of a village, and other times it stood up on its own and walked out from the ground beneath an execution, a red shadow. There were spells for bringing the dead back to life, but none of them worked anymore, or at least they didn't in the part of the country I was from.

  I don't need to tell you the long version of what happened to America. It's no kind of jawdrop. It was a tin-can-telephone apocalypse. Men hunched in their hideys pushing buttons, curfewing the country, and misunderstanding each other, getting more and more angry and more and more panicked, until everyone who wasn't like them got declared illegal.

  When the country began to totally unravel  —  there are those who'd say it was always full of mothbites and founded on badly counted stitches, and I tend to agree with them  —  my mother was at the University on a fellowship, studying the history of rebellion. My daddy was the Head Librarian's assistant.

  The Head Librarian was called the Needle. She'd been memorizing the universe since time's diaper days, and I never knew her real name. She was, back then, in charge of rare things from all over the world. Her collection included books like the Firfol and the Gutenbib, alongside manuscripts from authors like Octavia the Empress and Ursula Major. The collection also included an immense library of books full of the magic of both the ancient world and the new world. Everything could turn into magic if it tried. The Librarians had prepared for trouble by acquiring secrets and spells. They knew what was coming.