by Neil Gaiman
Town said, “I think the whole thing’s a crock of shit. But if their rules make them happy, then my agency is happy and everybody’s happy.” He slurped his Coke. “Roll on midnight. You take the body, you go away. We’re all lovey-fucking-dovey and we wave you goodbye. And then we can get on with hunting you down like the rats you are.”
“Hey,” said the fat kid to Shadow. “Reminds me. I told you to tell your boss he was history. Did you ever tell him?”
“I told him,” said Shadow. “And you know what he said to me? He said to tell the little snot, if ever I saw him again, to remember that today’s future is tomorrow’s yesterday.” Wednesday had never said any such thing. Still, these people seemed to like clichés. The black sunglasses reflected the flickering candle flames back at him, like eyes.
The fat kid said, “This place is such a fucking dump. No power. Out of wireless range. I mean, when you got to be wired, you’re already back in the stone age.” He sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, dropped the cup on the table, and walked away down the corridor.
Shadow reached over and placed the fat kid’s garbage back into the paper sack. “I’m going to see the center of America,” he announced. He got up and walked outside, into the night. Mr. Nancy followed him. They strolled together, across the little park, saying nothing until they reached the stone monument. The wind gusted at them, fitfully, first from one direction, then from another. “So,” he said. “Now what?”
The half-moon hung pale in the dark sky.
“Now,” said Nancy, “you should go back to your room. Lock the door. You try to get some more sleep. At midnight they give us the body. And then we get the hell out of here. The center is not a stable place for anybody.”
“If you say so.”
Mr. Nancy inhaled on his cigarillo. “This should never have happened,” he said. “None of this should have happened. Our kind of people, we are . . .” He waved the cigarillo about, as if using it to hunt for a word, then stabbing forward with it. “. . . exclusive. We’re not social. Not even me. Not even Bacchus. Not for long. We walk by ourselves or we stay in our own little groups. We do not play well with others. We like to be adored and respected and worshiped—me, I like them to be tellin’ tales about me, tales showing my cleverness. It’s a fault, I know, but it’s the way I am. We like to be big. Now, in these shabby days, we are small. The new gods rise and fall and rise again. But this is not a country that tolerates gods for long. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and the ground is clear for Brahma to create once more.”
“So what are you saying?” asked Shadow. “The fighting’s over, now? The battle’s done?”
Mr. Nancy snorted. “Are you out of your mind? They killed Wednesday. They killed him and they bragged about it. They spread the word. They’ve showed it on every channel to those with eyes to see it. No, Shadow. It’s only just begun.”
He bent down at the foot of the stone monument, stubbed out his cigarillo on the earth, and left it there, like ing.
“You used to make jokes,” said Shadow. “You don’t anymore.”
“It’s hard to find the jokes these days. Wednesday’s dead. Are you comin’ inside?”
“Soon.”
Nancy walked away, toward the motel. Shadow reached out his hand and touched the monument’s stones. He dragged his big fingers across the cold brass plate. Then he turned and walked over to the tiny white chapel, walked through the open doorway, into the darkness. He sat down in the nearest pew and closed his eyes and lowered his head, and thought about Laura, and about Wednesday, and about being alive.
There was a click from behind him, and a scuff of shoe against earth. Shadow sat up, and turned. Someone stood just outside the open doorway, a dark shape against the stars. Moonlight glinted from something metal.
“You going to shoot me?” asked Shadow.
“Jesus—I wish,” said Mr. Town. “It’s only for self-defense. So, you’re praying? Have they got you thinking that they’re gods? They aren’t gods.”
“I wasn’t praying,” said Shadow. “Just thinking.”
“The way I figure it,” said Town, “they’re mutations. Evolutionary experiments. A little hypnotic ability, a little hocus-pocus, and they can make people believe anything. Nothing to write home about. That’s all. They die like men, after all.”
“They always did,” said Shadow. He got up, and Town took a step back. Shadow walked out of the little chapel, and Mr. Town kept his distance. “Hey,” Shadow said. “Do you know who Louise Brooks was?”
“Friend of yours?”
“Nope. She was a movie star from south of here.”
Town paused. “Maybe she changed her name, and became Liz Taylor or Sharon Stone or someone,” he suggested, helpfully.
“Maybe.” Shadow started to walk back to the motel. Town kept pace with him.
“You should be back in prison,” said Mr. Town. “You should be on fucking death row.”
“I didn’t kill your associates,” said Shadow. “But I’ll tell you something a guy once told me, back when I was in prison. Something I’ve never forgotten.”
“And that is?”
“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.”
The driver stood by the Humvee. “G’night, gentlemen,” he said as they passed.
“Night,” said Mr. Town. And then he said, to Shadow, “I personally don’t give a fuck about any of this. What I do, is what Mister World says. It’s easier that way.”
Shadow walked down the corridor to room 9.
He unlocked the door, went inside. He said, “Sorry. I thought this was my room.”
“It is,” said Media. “I was waiting for you.” He could see her hair in the moonlight, and her pale face. She was sitting on his bed, primly.
“I’ll find another room.”
“I won’t be here for long,” she said. “I just thought it might be an appropriate time to make you an offer.”
“Okay. Make the offer.”
“Relax,” she said. There was a smile in her voice. “You have such a stick up your butt. Look, Wednesday’s dead. You don’t owe anyone anything. Throw in with us. Time to Come Over to the Winning Team.”
Shadow said nothing.
“We can make you famous, Shadow. We can give you power over what people believe and say and wear and dream. You want to be the next Cary Grant? We can make that happen. We can make you the next Beatles.”
“I think I preferred it when you were offering to show me Lucy’s tits,” said Shadow. “If that was you.”
“Ah,” she said.
“I need my room back. Good night.”
“And then of course,” she said, not moving, as if he had not spoken, “we can turn it all around. We can make it bad for you. You could be a bad joke forever, Shadow. Or you could be remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitler . . . how would you like that?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m kind of tired,” said Shadow. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave now.”
“I offered you the world,” she said. “When you’re dying in a gutter, you remember that.”
“I’ll make a point of it,” he said.
After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought about—Laura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents’ convention in Anaheim—always morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbie’s cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time.
You’re not dead, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head. But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either.
There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. “Those hamburgers,” he said. “They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.”
“This place is turning into Grand Central Station,” said Shadow. “Okay, so I guess you’re here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right?”
The fat kid was shivering. “No. You’re already dead meat,” he said. “You—you’re a fucking illuminated Gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m . . . I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic . . .” He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy.
“Are you here for a reason?”
“Just wanted to talk,” said the fat kid. There was a whine in his voice. “It’s creepy in my room. That’s all. It’s creepy in there. Fifty miles to a McDonald’s, can you believe that? Maybe I could stay in here with you.”
“What about your friends from the limo? The ones who hit me? Shouldn’t you ask them to stay with you?”
“The children wouldn’t operate out here. We’re in a dead zone.”
Shadow said, “It’s a while until midnight, and it’s longer to dawn. I think maybe you need rest. I know I do.”
The fat kid said nothing for a moment, then he nodded, and walked out of the room.
Shadow closed his door, and locked it with the key. He lay back on the mattress.
After a few moments the noise began. It took him a few moments to figure out what it had to be, then he unlocked his door and walked out into the hallway. It was the fat kid, now back in his own room. It sounded like he was throwing something huge against the walls of the room. From the sounds, Shadow guessed that what he was throwing was himself. “It’s just me!” he was sobbing. Or perhaps, “It’s just meat.” Shadow could not tell.
“Quiet!” came a bellow from Czernobog’s room, down the hall.
Shadow walked down to the lobby and out of the motel. He was tired.
The driver still stood beside the Humvee, a dark shape in a peaked cap.
“Couldn’t sleep, sir?” he asked.
“No,” said Shadow.
“Cigarette, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
“You don’t mind if I do?”
“Go right ahead.”
The driver used a Bic disposable lighter, and it was in the yellow light of the flame that Shadow saw the man’s face, actually saw it for the first time, and recognized him, and began to understand.
Shadow knew that thin face. He knew that there would be close-cropped orange hair beneath the black driver’s cap, cut close to the scalp. He knew that when the man’s lips smiled they would crease into a network of rough scars.
“You’re looking good, big guy,” said the driver.
“Low Key?” Shadow stared at his old cellmate warily.
Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing.
“Jesus. Low Key Lyesmith,” said Shadow, and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. “Loki,” he said. “Loki Lie-Smith.”
“You’re slow,” said Loki, “but you get there in the end.” And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.
They sat in Shadow’s room in the abandoned motel, sitting on the bed, at opposite ends of the mattress. The sounds from the fat kid’s room had pretty much stopped.
“You were lucky we were inside together,” said Loki. “You would never have survived your first year without me.”
“You couldn’t have walked out if you wanted?”
“It’s easier just to do the time.” He paused. Then, “You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”
“Why were you in my cell?”
“Coincidence. Pure and simple.”
“And now you’re driving for the opposition.”
“If you want to call them that. It depends where you’re standing. The way I figure it, I’m driving for the winning team.”
“But you and Wednesday, you were from the same, you’re both—”
“Norse pantheon. We’re both from the Norse pantheon. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
Shadow hesitated. “You must have been friends. Once.”
“No. We were never friends. I’m not sorry he’s dead. He was just holding the rest of us back. With him gone, the rest of them are going to have to face up to the facts: it’s change or die, evolve or perish. He’s gone. War’s over.”
Shadow looked at him, puzzled. “You aren’t that stupid,” he said. “You were always so sharp. Wednesday’s death isn’t going to end anything. It’s just pushed all of the ones who were on the fence over the edge.”
“Mixing metaphors, Shadow. Bad habit.”
“Whatever,” said Shadow. “It’s still true. Jesus. His death did in an instant what he’d spent the last few months trying to do. It united them. It gave them something to believe in.”
“Perhaps.” Loki shrugged. “As far as I know, the thinking on this side of the fence was that with the troublemaker out of the way, the trouble would also be gone. It’s not any of my business, though. I just drive.”
“So tell me,” said Shadow, “why does everyone care about me? They act like I’m important. Why does it matter what I do?”
“Damned if I know. You were important to us because you were important to Wednesday. As for the why of it . . . I guess it’s just another one of life’s little mysteries.”
“I’m tired of mysteries.”
“Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew.”
“So you’re their driver. You drive for all of them?”
“Whoever needs me,” said Loki. “It’s a living.”
He raised his wristwatch to his face, pressed a button: the dial glowed a gentle blue, which illuminated his face, giving it a haunting, haunted appearance. “Five to midnight. Time,” said Loki. “You coming?”
Shadow took a deep breath. “I’m coming,” he said.
They walked down the dark motel corridor until they reached room 5.
Loki took a box of matches from his pocket and thumbnailed a match into flame. The momentary flare hurt Shadow’s eyes. A candle wick flickered and caught. And another. Loki lit a new match, and continued to light the candle stubs: they were on the windowsills and on the headboard of the bed and on the sink in the corner of the room.
The bed had been hauled from its position against the wall into the middle of the motel room, leaving a few feet of space between the bed and the wall on each side. There were sheets draped over the bed, old motel sheets, moth-holed and stained. On top of the sheets lay Wednesday, perfectly still.
He was dressed in the pale suit he had been wearing when he was shot. The right side of his face was untouched, perfect, unmarred by blood. The left side of his face was a ragged mess, and the left shoulder and front of the suit was spattered with dark spots. His hands we
re at his sides. The expression on that wreck of a face was far from peaceful: it looked hurt—a soul-hurt, a real down-deep hurt, filled with hatred and anger and raw craziness. And, on some level, it looked satisfied.
Shadow imagined Mr. Jacquel’s practiced hands smoothing that hatred and pain away, rebuilding a face for Wednesday with mortician’s wax and makeup, giving him a final peace and dignity that even death had denied him.
Still, the body seemed no smaller in death. And it still smelled faintly of Jack Daniel’s.
The wind from the plains was rising: he could hear it howling around the old motel at the imaginary center of America. The candles on the windowsill guttered and flickered.
He could hear footsteps in the hallway. Someone knocked on a door, called “Hurry up please, it’s time,” and they began to shuffle in, heads lowered.
Town came in first, followed by Media and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog. Last of all came the fat kid: he had fresh red bruises on his face, and his lips were moving all the time, as if he were reciting some words to himself, but he was making no sound. Shadow found himself feeling sorry for him.
Informally, without a word being spoken, they ranged themselves about the body, each an arm’s length away from the next. The atmosphere in the room was religious—deeply religious, in a way that Shadow had never previously experienced. There was no sound but the howling of the wind and the crackling of the candles.
“We are come together, here in this godless place,” said Loki, “to pass on the body of this individual to those who will dispose of it properly according to the rites. If anyone would like to say something, say it now.”
“Not me,” said Town. “I never properly met the guy. And this whole thing makes me feel uncomfortable.”
Czernobog said, “These actions will have consequences. You know that? This can only be the start of it all.”
The fat kid started to giggle, a high-pitched, girlish noise. He said, “Okay. Okay, I’ve got it.” And then, all on one note, he recited:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold . . .”
