American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

“And would I have wanted to employ someone who could not even best a sad case like that in a bar fight? But never fear, you’ve repaid my faith in you a dozen times over. Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

  “Las Vegas, Nevada?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “No.”

  “We’re flying in there from Madison later tonight, on a gentleman’s red-eye, a charter plane for high rollers. I’ve convinced them that we should be on it.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of lying?” asked Shadow. He said it gently, curiously.

  “Not in the slightest. Anyway, it’s true. We are playing for the highest stakes of all. It shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours to get to Madison, the roads are clear. So lock your door and turn off the heaters. It would be a terrible thing if you burned down the house in your absence.”

  “Who are we going to see in Las Vegas?”

  Wednesday told him.

  Shadow turned off the heaters, packed some clothes into an overnight bag, then turned back to Wednesday and said, “Look, I feel kind of stupid. I know you just told me who we’re going to see, but I dunno. I just had a brain-fart or something. It’s gone. Who is it again?”

  Wednesday told him once more.

  This time Shadow almost had it. The name was there on the tip of his mind. He wished he’d been paying closer attention when Wednesday told him. He let it go.

  “Who’s driving?” he asked Wednesday.

  “You are,” said Wednesday. They walked out of the house, down the wooden stairs and the icy path to where a black Lincoln Town Car was parked.

  Shadow drove.

  Entering the casino, one is beset at every side by invitation—invitations such that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless, and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them. Listen: a machine-gun rattle of silver coins as they tumble and spurt down into a slot machine tray and overflow onto monogrammed carpets is replaced by the siren clangor of the slots, the jangling, blippeting chorus swallowed by the huge room, muted to a comforting background chatter by the time one reaches the card tables, the distant sounds only loud enough to keep the adrenaline flowing through the gamblers’ veins.

  There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.

  The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts.

  The money flows through the casino in an uninterrupted stream of green and silver, streaming from hand to hand, from gambler to croupier to cashier to the management to security, finally ending up in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the Counting Room. And it is here, in the counting room of this casino, that you come to rest, here, where the greenbacks are sorted, stacked, indexed, here in a space that is slowly becoming redundant as more and more of the money that flows through the casino is imaginary: an electrical sequence of ons and offs, sequences that flow down telephone lines.

  In the counting room you see three men, counting money under the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny cameras they cannot see. During the course of one shift each of the men counts more money than he will see in all the pay packets of his life. Each man, when he sleeps, dreams of counting money, of stacks and paper bands and numbers that climb inevitably, that are sorted and lost. Each of the three men has idly wondered, not less than once a week, how to evade the casino’s security systems and run off with as much money as he could haul; and, reluctantly, each man has inspected the dream and found it impractical, has settled for a steady paycheck, avoided the twin specters of prison and an unmarked grave.

  And here, in the sanctum sanctorum, there are the three men who count the money, and there are the guards who watch and who bring money and take it away; and then there is another person. His charcoal-gray suit is immaculate, his hair is dark, he is clean-shaven, and his face and his demeanor are, in every sense, forgettable. None of the other men has even observed that he is there, or if they have noticed him, they have forgotten him on the instant.

  As the shift ends the doors are opened, and the man in the charcoal suit leaves the room and walks, with the guards, through the corridors, their feet shushing along the monogrammed carpets. The money, in strongboxes, is wheeled to an interior loading bay, where it is loaded into armored cars. As the ramp door swings open, to allow the armored car out onto the early streets of Las Vegas, the man in the charcoal suit walks, unnoticed, through the doorway, and saunters up the ramp, out onto the sidewalk. He does not even glance up to see the imitation of New York on his left.

  Las Vegas has become a child’s picture-book dream of a city—here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o’ war.

  The man in the charcoal suit ambles comfortably along the sidewalk, feeling the flow of the money through the town. In the summer the streets are baking, and each store doorway he passes breathes wintry A/C out into the sweaty warmth and chills the sweat on his face. Now, in the desert winter, there’s a dry cold, which he appreciates. In his mind the movement of money forms a fine latticework, a three dimensional cat’s cradle of light and motion. What he finds attractive about this desert city is the speed of movement, the way the money moves from place to place and hand to hand: it’s a rush for him, a high, and it pulls him like an addict to the street.

  A taxi follows him slowly down the street, keeping its distance. He does not notice it; it does not occur to him to notice it: he is so rarely noticed himself that he finds the concept that he could be being followed almost inconceivable.

  It’s four in the morning, and he finds himself drawn to a hotel and casino that has been out of style for thirty years, still running until tomorrow or six months from now when they’ll implode it and knock it down and build a pleasure palace where it was, and forget it forever. Nobody knows him, nobody remembers him, but the lobby bar is tacky and quiet, and the air is blue with old cigarette smoke and someone’s about to drop several million dollars on a poker game in a private room upstairs. The man in the charcoal suit settles himself in the bar several floors below the game, and is ignored by a waitress. A Muzak version of “Why Can’t He Be You?” is playing, almost subliminally. Five Elvis Presley impersonators, each man wearing a different-colored jumpsuit, watch a late night rerun of a football game on the bar TV.

  A big man in a light gray suit sits at the man in the charcoal suit’s table, and, noticing him even if she does not notice the man in the charcoal suit, the waitress, who is too thin to be pretty, too obviously anorectic to work Luxor or the Tropicana, and who is counting the minutes until she gets off work, comes straight over and smiles. He grins widely at her. “You’re looking a treat tonight, m’dear, a fine sight for these poor old eyes,” he says, and, scenting a large tip, she smiles broadly at him. The man in the light gray suit orders a Jack Daniel’s for himself and a Laphroaig and water for the man in the charcoal suit sitting beside him.

  “You know,” says the man in the light gray suit, when his drink arrives, “the finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. Geor
ge Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn’t see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said ‘I know. But it’s the only game in town.’ And he went back to the game.”

  Dark eyes stare at the man in the light gray suit mistrustfully. The man in the charcoal suit says something in reply. The man in the light suit, who has a graying reddish beard, shakes his head.

  “Look,” he says, “I’m sorry about what went down in Wisconsin. But I got you all out safely, didn’t I? No one was hurt.”

  The man in the dark suit sips his Laphroaig and water, savoring the marshy taste, the body-in-the-bog quality of the whisky. He asks a question.

  “I don’t know. Everything’s moving faster than I expected. Everyone’s got a hard-on for the kid I hired to run errands—I’ve got him outside, waiting in the taxi. Are you still in?”

  The man in the dark suit replies.

  The bearded man shakes his head. “She’s not been seen for two hundred years. If she isn’t dead she’s taken herself out of the picture.”

  Something else is said.

  “Look,” says the bearded man, knocking back his Jack Daniel’s. “You come in, be there when we need you, and I’ll take care of you. Whaddayou want? Soma? I can get you a bottle of Soma. The real stuff.”

  The man in the dark suit stares. Then he nods his head, reluctantly, and makes a comment.

  “Of course I am,” says the bearded man, smiling like a knife. “What do you expect? But look at it this way: it’s the only game in town.” He reaches out a pawlike hand and shakes the other man’s well-manicured hand. Then he walks away.

  The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: there’s now only one man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a charcoal-gray suit. “You doing okay?” she asks. “Is your friend coming back?”

  The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home.

  The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.

  “So who was that guy you were seeing?” asked Shadow as they walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them, feeding them coins. Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home.

  And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi had been, and he had missed it.

  “So he’s in,” said Wednesday. “It’ll cost me a bottle of Soma, though.”

  “What’s Soma?”

  “It’s a drink.” They walked onto the charter plane, empty but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in Chicago by the start of the next business day.

  Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniel’s. “My kind of people see your kind of people . . .” he hesitated. “It’s like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people . . . we feed on belief, on prayers, on love.”

  “And Soma is . . .”

  “To take the analogy further, it’s a honey wine. Like mead.” He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur.”

  They were somewhere over Nebraska eating an unimpressive in-flight breakfast when Shadow said, “My wife.”

  “The dead one.”

  “Laura. She doesn’t want to be dead. She told me. After she got me away from the guys on the train.”

  “The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew Ainsel.”

  “She wants to be really alive. Can we do that? Is that possible?”

  Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, “I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.

  “I know a charm that will heal with a touch.

  “I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.

  “I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.

  “A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.”

  His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone, gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious ritual, or remembering something dark and painful.

  “A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.

  “A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.

  “An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.

  “A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.

  “Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.

  “For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.

  “An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.

  “A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.

  “A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.

  “A fourteenth. I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.

  “A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”

  His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the plane’s engine noise.

  “A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.

  “A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.

  “And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”

  He sighed, and then stopped talking.

  Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.

  “Laura,” was all he said.

  Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray eyes with his own. “I can’t make
her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”

  “I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”

  Wednesday raised an eyebrow.

  “Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it onto Laura.”

  Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course.”

  “What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones and thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”

  He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.

  Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well.

  He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.

  Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.

  The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas.

  “Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”