American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public. “If you’ve lied to me,” said the boy, as if from a long way away, “I’ll fucking kill you. You know that.”

  “So you said.”

  The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. “You say you’re staying at the Motel America?” He tapped on the driver’s window, behind him. The glass window lowered. “Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest.”

  The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again.

  The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy’s eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.

  “You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he’s history. He’s forgotten. He’s old. Tell him that we are the future and we don’t give a fuck about him or anyone like him. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Shadow. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. He hoped that he was not going to be sick.

  “Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.

  “Got it,” said Shadow. “You can let me out here. I can walk the rest of the way.”

  The young man nodded. “Good talking to you,” he said. The smoke had mellowed him. “You should know that if we do fucking kill you then we’ll just delete you. You got that? One click and you’re overwritten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option.” He tapped on the window behind him. “He’s getting off here,” he said. Then he turned back to Shadow, pointed to his cigarette. “Synthetic toad skins,” he said. “You know they can synthesize bufotenin now?”

  The car stopped, and the door was opened. Shadow climbed out awkwardly. His bonds were cut. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car had become one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, now copper-colored, like the beautiful eyes of a toad. “It’s all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your old lady.”

  The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly. Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he reached the Motel America without incident.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

  —old saying

  There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodentlike quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and eased when she smiled. She refused to tell him Wednesday’s room number, and insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest was here.

  Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to Shadow.

  “How was the funeral?” he asked.

  “It’s over,” said Shadow.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No,” said Shadow.

  “Good.” Wednesday grinned. “Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.”

  Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the hall from Shadow’s. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges.

  “I got hijacked by a fat kid,” said Shadow. “He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dungheap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that.”

  “Little snot,” said Wednesday.

  “You know him?”

  Wednesday shrugged. “I know who he is.” He sat down, heavily, on the room’s only chair. “They don’t have a clue,” he said. “They don’t have a fucking clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up Laura’s affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that. It’ll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it.”

  Wednesday nodded his huge head. “Well, the sooner you’re done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. Good night.”

  Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of Wednesday’s room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motel’s little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam.

  He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises.

  The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer.

  Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would. He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

  Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in the apartment that he had shared with Laura—in the bed that he had shared with Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her scent, her life, was simply too painful . . .

  Don’t go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, nor produce paper flowers. But he just wanted to manipulate coins; he liked the craft of it. He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Laura’s grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbie’s cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his heart.

  Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Where had he heard that?

  He thought of Wednesday’s comment and smiled, despite himself: Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn’t feel anything at all.

  Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing.

  He was walking . . .

  He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere he looked there were statues and carvings and rough-hewn images. He was standing beside a statue of a womanlike thing: her naked breasts hung flat and pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it.

  He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step.

  In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hu
bur; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef.

  A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one.

  “These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us.”

  Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vulture’s, but with human arms: and on, and on.

  The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, “These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets.

  “Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

  There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgotten— octopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires . . .

  Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him the time was 1:03 A.M. The light of the Motel America sign outside shone through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his mind’s eye, but he could not explain to himself why it had scared him so.

  The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadow’s eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed.

  He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had buried her in.

  Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar one. “I guess,” said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”

  Shadow said nothing.

  He sat down on the room’s only chair and, finally, asked, “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”

  “You’re dead, babe.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.

  “No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”

  “Like me being dead?”

  “Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That.”

  Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his ex-wife . . . no, he corrected himself, his late wife—sat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking.

  “Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly get me—a cigarette?”

  “I thought you gave them up.”

  “I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the lobby.”

  Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.

  “You’re in a nonsmoking room,” said the clerk. “You make sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.

  “Got it,” said Shadow.

  He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them.

  Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Me too,” said Laura.

  When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face.

  “So,” she said. “They let you out.”

  “Yes.”

  The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”

  “Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.

  “Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”

  “I guess.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”

  “I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.

  “I know. So we’d meet for coffee. Talk about what we’d do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you’d gone away.” Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”

  “I didn’t need to hear that.”

  “No? I’m sorry. It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.”

  “It matters to me.”

  Laura lit another cigarette. Her movements were fluid and competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all. Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes,” she said. “I see that. Well, we carried on our affair—although we didn’t call it that, we did not call it anything—for most of the last two years.”

  “Were you going to leave me for him?”

  “Why would I do that? You’re my big bear. You’re my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you.”

  He stopped himself from saying I love you, too. He wasn’t going to say that. Not anymore. “So what happened the other night?”

  “The night I was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be.”

  “Mm. Thank you, babe.”

  “You’re welcome, darling.” The ghost of a smile crossed her face. “We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn’t. He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give him a goodbye blow job, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants, and I did.”

  “Big mistake.”

  “Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then R
obbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, ‘I’m going to die.’ It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasn’t scared. And then I don’t remember anything more.”

  There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed.

  “What are you doing here, Laura?”

  “Can’t a wife come and see her husband?”

  “You’re dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon.”

  “Yes.” She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her fingers and threw it out of the window.

  “Well?”

  Her eyes sought his. “I don’t know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn’t know then I can’t put into words.”

  “Normally people who die stay in their graves,” said Shadow.

  “Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps.” She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for.

  His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. “Laura . . . ?”

  She did not look at him. “You’ve gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. You’re going to screw it up, if someone isn’t there to watch out for you. I’m watching out for you. And thank you for my present.”

  “What present?”

  She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. “I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. “I think there are several aspects of our marriage we’re going to have to work on.”