American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely.

  “We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.”

  Wednesday paused. He looked from one to another of his listeners, grave and statesmanlike. They stared back at him impassively, their faces masklike and unreadable. Wednesday cleared his throat, and he spat, hard into the fire. It flared and flamed, illuminating the inside of the hall.

  “Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.

  “They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,” said Odin. “You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act.”

  The old woman in the red sari stepped into the firelight. On her forehead was a small dark blue jewel. She said, “You called us here for this nonsense?” And then she snorted, a snort of mingled amusement and irritation.

  Wednesday’s brows lowered. “I called you here, yes. But this is sense, Mama-ji, not nonsense. Even a child could see that.”

  “So I am a child, am I?” She wagged a finger at him. “I was old in Kalighat before you were dreamed of, you foolish man. I am a child? Then I am a child, for there is nothing in your foolish talk to see.”

  Again, a moment of double vision: Shadow saw the old woman, her dark face pinched with age and disapproval, but behind her he saw something huge, a naked woman with skin as black as a new leather jacket, and lips and tongue the bright red of arterial blood. Around her neck were skulls, and her many hands held knives, and swords, and severed heads.

  “I did not call you a child, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday, peaceably. “But it seems self-evident—“

  “The only thing that seems self-evident,” said the old woman, pointing (as behind her, through her, above her, a black finger, sharp-taloned, pointed in echo), “is your own desire for glory. We’ve lived in peace in this country for a long time. Some of us do better than others, I agree. I do well. Back in India, there is an incarnation of me who does much better, but so be it. I am not envious. I’ve watched the new ones rise, and I’ve watched them fall again.” Her hand fell to her side. Shadow saw that the others were looking at her: a mixture of expressions—respect, amusement, embarrassment—in their eyes. “They worshiped the railroads here, only a blink of an eye ago. And now the iron gods are as forgotten as the emerald hunters . . .”

  “Make your point, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday.

  “My point?” Her nostrils flared. The corners of her mouth turned down. “I—and I am obviously only a child—say that we wait. We do nothing. We don’t know that they mean us harm.”

  “And will you still counsel waiting when they come in the night and they kill you, or they take you away?”

  Her expression was disdainful and amused: it was all in the lips and the eyebrows and the set of the nose. “If they try such a thing,” she said, “they will find me hard to catch, and harder still to kill.”

  A squat young man sitting on the bench behind her hrrumphed for attention, then said, with a booming voice, “All-Father, my people are comfortable. We make the best of what we have. If this war of yours goes against us, we could lose everything.”

  Wednesday said, “You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back.”

  The fire blazed high as he spoke, illuminating the faces of the audience.

  I don’t really believe, Shadow thought. I don’t believe any of this. Maybe I’m still fifteen. Mom’s still alive and I haven’t even met Laura yet. Everything that’s happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

  Then the fire burned out, and there was darkness in Valaskjalf, Odin’s Hall.

  “Now what?” whispered Shadow.

  “Now we go back to the carousel room,” muttered Mr. Nancy, “And old One-Eye buys us all dinner, greases some palms, kisses some babies, and no one says the gee-word anymore.”

  “Gee-word?”

  “Gods. What were you doin’ the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?”

  “Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger’s balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.”

  Mr. Nancy chuckled.

  “But nothing was resolved. Nobody agreed to anything.”

  “He’s workin’ them slowly. He’ll land ’em one at a time. You’ll see. They’ll come around in the end.”

  Shadow could feel that a wind was coming up from somewhere, stirring his hair, touching his face, pulling at him.

  They were standing in the room of the biggest carousel in the world, listening to the “Emperor Waltz.”

  There was a group of people, tourists by the look of them, talking with Wednesday over at the other side of the room, as many people as there had been shadowy figures in Wednesday’s hall. “Through here,” boomed Wednesday, and he led them through the only exit, formed to look like the gaping mouth of a huge monster, its sharp teeth ready to rend them all to slivers. He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying.

  “Did that happen?” asked Shadow.

  “Did what happen, shit-for-brains?” asked Mr. Nancy.

  “The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the carousel.”

  “Heck, nobody’s allowed to ride the carousel. Didn’t you see the signs? Now hush.”

  The monster’s mouth led to the Organ Room, which puzzled Shadow—hadn’t they already come through that way? It was no less strange the second time. Wednesday led them all up some stairs, past life-sized models of the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and they followed the signs to an early exit.

  Shadow and Nancy brought up the rear. And then they were out of the House on the Rock, walking past the gift store and heading back into the parking lot.

  “Pity we had to leave before the end,” said Mr. Nancy. “I was kind of hoping to see the biggest artificial orchestra in the whole world.”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Czernobog. “It’s not so much.”

  The restaurant was ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonight’s dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them who didn’t have their own transportation.

  Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock in the first place, without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say.

  Shadow had a carful of Wednesday’s guests to ferry to the restaurant: the woman in the red sari sat in the front seat beside him. There were two men in the backseat: the squat, peculiar-looking young man whose name Shadow had not properly caught, but which sounded like Elvis, and another man, in a dark suit, who Shadow could not remember.

  He had stood beside the man as he got into the car, had opened and closed the door for him, and was unable to remember anything about him. He turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at him, carefully noting his face, his hair, his clothes, making certain he would know him if he met him again, and turned back to start the car, to find that the man had slipped fr
om his mind. An impression of wealth was left behind, but nothing more.

  I’m tired, thought Shadow. He glanced to his right and snuck a glance at the Indian woman. He noted the tiny silver necklace of skulls that circled her neck; her charm bracelet of heads and hands that jangled, like tiny bells, when she moved; the dark blue jewel on her forehead. She smelled of spices, of cardamom and nutmeg and flowers. Her hair was pepper-and-salt, and she smiled when she saw him look at her.

  “You call me Mama-ji,” she said.

  “I am Shadow, Mama-ji,” said Shadow.

  “And what do you think of your employer’s plans, Mister Shadow?”

  He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. “I don’t ask, he don’t tell,” he said.

  “If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”

  “It’s not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.

  The man in the backseat—not the peculiar-looking young man, the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said.

  The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.

  The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoeboxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips.

  “That’s some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver’s seat.

  “Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming.

  “No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don’t stop.”

  The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”

  Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars.

  Shadow pulled up at the restaurant, a big, barnlike structure, and he let his passengers off by the front door. He drove the car to the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant alone, in the cold, to clear his head.

  He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier. He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.

  Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back . . .

  “Hey bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn’t, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken.

  Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all, but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise.

  “The quarry are all inside,” said the half-familiar voice. “Everyone in position?” A crackle of a voice, half audible through a radio. “Let’s move in and round them all up.”

  “What about the big guy?” said another voice.

  “Package him up, take him out,” said the first voice.

  They put a baglike hood over Shadow’s head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away.

  There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn’t know, and didn’t care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door.

  He was hungry.

  The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after they’d ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked.

  He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached.

  The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls.

  He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant.

  His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins.

  He sat on the chair, at the card table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick.

  He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along.

  The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadow’s head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with, on its own, no possible use—for he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for real—calmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear.

  He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, the other hidden. He raised his hand to his mouth and blew on the visible coin, while slipping it into a classic palm, as the first two fingers took the hidden quarter out and presented it. The effect was that he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while.

  He did it over and over and over again.

  He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled, just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the stained green baize of the card table.

  And then, because he just couldn’t do it anymore, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya Polunochnaya had given him, and held onto it tightly, and waited.

  At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with dark hair and shiny black shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, had great hair, looked like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails, the other had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of th
e card table, looking down at him.

  “How long have you been working for Cargo, sir?” asked one.

  “I don’t know what that is,” said Shadow.

  “He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. You’ve been seen with him, sir.”

  “I’ve been working for him for a couple of days.”

  “Don’t lie to us, sir,” said the spook with the glasses.

  “Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. But it’s still a couple of days.”

  The square-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadow’s ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. “We told you not to lie to us, sir,” he said, mildly. Then he let go.

  Each of the spooks had a gun bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not try to retaliate. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time, thought Shadow. Don’t tell them anything they don’t know already. Don’t ask questions.

  “These are dangerous people you’re palling around with, sir,” said the spook with glasses. “You will be doing your country a service by turning state’s evidence.” He smiled, sympathetically: I’m the good cop, said the smile.

  “I see,” said Shadow.

  “And if you don’t want to help us, sir,” said the square-jawed spook, “you can see what we’re like when we’re not happy.” He hit Shadow an openhanded blow across the stomach, knocking the breath from him. It wasn’t torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I’m the bad cop. He retched.

  “I would like to make you happy,” said Shadow, as soon as he could speak.

  “All we ask is your cooperation, sir.”

  “Can I ask . . .” gasped Shadow (don’t ask questions, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), “can I ask who I’ll be cooperating with?”

  “You want us to tell you our names?” asked the square-jawed spook. “You have to be out of your mind.”

  “No, he’s got a point,” said the spook with glasses. “It may make it easier for him to relate to us.” He looked at Shadow and smiled like a man advertising toothpaste. “Hi. I’m Mister Stone, sir. My colleague is Mister Wood.”