American Gods

  The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body . . .

  Emeralds and sapphires and rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. His breath came in shallow gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.

  It’s easy, said someone in the back of his head. There’s a trick to it. You do it or you die.

  He was pleased with the thought, and repeated it over and over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along to the drumbeat of his heart.

  It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

  It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

  It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

  It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

  Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadow’s mouth began to dry out, when his tongue turned dry and skinlike in his mouth. He pushed himself up and away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that would still allow him to fill his lungs.

  He breathed until he could hold himself up no more, and then he fell back into the bonds, and hung from the tree.

  When the chattering started—an angry, laughing chattering noise—he closed his mouth, concerned that it was he himself making it; but the noise continued. It’s the world laughing at me, then, thought Shadow. His head lolled to one side. Something ran down the tree trunk beside him, stopping beside his head. It chittered loudly in his ear, one word, which sounded a lot like “ratatosk.” Shadow tried to repeat it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He turned, slowly, and stared into the gray-brown face and pointed ears of a squirrel.

  In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute than it does from a distance. The creature was ratlike and dangerous, not sweet or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorous . . . but then, so many things he had thought were not had turned out to be so . . .

  He slept.

  The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them. A spider edged across his face, and he woke. He shook his head, dislodging or frightening it, and returned to his dreams—and now an elephant-headed man, potbellied, one tusk broken, was riding toward him on the back of a huge mouse. The elephant-headed man curled his trunk toward Shadow and said, “If you had invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might have been avoided.” Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all, and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly empty. He shrugged arm after arm after arm in a peculiar fluid motion, and looked at Shadow, his face unreadable.

  “It’s in the trunk,” Shadow told the elephant man. He had been watching as the flickering tail vanished.

  The elephant man nodded his huge head, and said, “Yes. In the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You will lose many things. But do not lose this,” and then the rain began, and Shadow was tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep into full wakefulness. The shivering intensified until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders that built upon each other. He willed himself to stop, but still he shivered, his teeth banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was real pain there, too, a deep, knifelike pain that covered his body with tiny, invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.

  He opened his mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it felt like a blow to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and afterimage. Then the thunder, a crack and a boom and a rumble, and, as the thunder echoed, the rain redoubled. In the rain and the night the shivering abated; the knife blades were put away. Shadow no longer felt the cold, or rather, he felt only the cold, but the cold had now become part of himself.

  Shadow hung from the tree while the lightning flickered and forked across the sky, and the thunder subsided into an omnipresent rumbling, with occasional bangs and roars like distant bombs exploding in the night. The wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying him, cutting to the bone; and Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun.

  A strange joy rose within Shadow then, and he started laughing as the rain washed his naked skin and the lightning flashed and thunder rumbled so loudly that he could barely hear himself laugh. He exulted.

  He was alive. He had never felt like this. Ever.

  If he did die, he thought, if he died right now, here on the tree, it would be worth it to have had this one, perfect, mad moment.

  “Hey!” he shouted at the storm. “Hey! It’s me! I’m here!”

  He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there too exhausted to move.

  At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesday’s dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquel’s table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember them.

  By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere.

  And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.

  It seemed to him that the tree reached from hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.

  The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain.

  Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze.

  When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter.

  He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen.

  The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadow’s shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. “Ratatosk!” it chattered. The tip of its nose touched h
is lips. “Ratatosk.” It sprang back onto the tree.

  His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable.

  His life was laid out below him, on the motel-sheet shroud: literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau: he could see his mother’s puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Laura’s eyes on their wedding day . . .

  He chuckled through dry lips.

  “What’s so funny, puppy?” asked Laura.

  “Our wedding day,” he said. “You bribed the organist to change from playing the Wedding March to the theme song from Scooby-Doo as you walked toward me down the aisle. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember, darling. ‘I would have made it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.’ “

  “I loved you so much,” said Shadow.

  He could feel her lips on his, and they were warm and wet and living, not cold and dead, so he knew that this was another hallucination. “You aren’t here, are you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “But you are calling me, for the last time. And I am coming.”

  Breathing was harder now. The ropes cutting his flesh were an abstract concept, like free will or eternity.

  “Sleep, puppy,” she said, although he thought it might have been his own voice he heard, and he slept.

  The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky. Shadow was, he realized slowly, awake, and he was cold. But the part of him that understood that seemed very far away from the rest of him. Somewhere in the distance he was aware that his mouth and throat were burning, painful, and cracked. Sometimes, in the daylight, he would see stars fall; other times he saw huge birds, the size of delivery trucks, flying toward him. Nothing reached him; nothing touched him.

  “Ratatosk. Ratatosk.” The chattering had become a scolding.

  The squirrel landed, heavily, with sharp claws, on his shoulder and stared into his face. He wondered if he were hallucinating: the animal was holding a walnut shell, like a doll’s-house cup, in its front paws. The animal pressed the shell to Shadow’s lips. Shadow felt the water, and, involuntarily, he sucked it into his mouth, drinking from the tiny cup. He ran the water around his cracked lips, his dry tongue. He wet his mouth with it, and swallowed what was left, which was not much.

  The squirrel leapt back to the tree, and ran down it, toward the roots, and then, in seconds, or minutes, or hours, Shadow could not tell which (all the clocks in his mind were broken, he thought, and their gears and cogs and springs were simply a jumble down there in the writhing grass), the squirrel returned with its walnut-shell cup, climbing carefully, and Shadow drank the water it brought to him.

  The muddy-iron taste of the water filled his mouth, cooled his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness.

  By the third walnut shell, he was no longer thirsty.

  He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned.

  The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held, and soon he exhausted himself once more.

  In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret. Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into the body of his being.

  He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders.

  It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself. Shadow in his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart of the tree.

  The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them . . .

  A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was dazzling him. He closed his eyes, wishing he could shade them.

  There was not long to go. He knew that, too.

  When he opened his eyes, Shadow saw that there was a young man in the tree with him.

  His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadow’s head. Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could see that at a glance.

  “You’re naked,” confided the madman, in a cracked voice. “I’m naked too.”

  “I see that,” croaked Shadow.

  The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck. Eventually he said, “Do you know me?”

  “No,” said Shadow.

  “I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My sister likes you.”

  “You are . . .” the name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. “You are Horus.”

  The madman nodded. “Horus,” he said. “I am the falcon of the morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun, as you are. And I know the true name of Ra. My mother told me.”

  “That’s great,” said Shadow, politely.

  The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying nothing. Then he dropped from the tree.

  A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow.

  “Are you hungry?” asked the madman.

  “No,” said Shadow. “I guess I should be, but I’m not.”

  “I’m hungry,” said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly, pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. As he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked farther down the branch until he was only an arm’s length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his head. There was rabbit blood on his chin and his chest, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.

  Shadow felt he had to say something. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below. It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the branch.

  “What do they call you?” asked Horus.

  “Shadow,” said Shadow.

  The madman nodded. “You are the shadow. I am the light,” he said. “Everything that is, casts a shadow.” Then he said, “They will fight soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive.”

  And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?”

  But Shadow could no longer speak. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning.

  Moonlight.

  A cough shook Shadow’s frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for breath.

  “Hey, puppy,” called a voice that he knew.

  He looked down.

  The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree.

  “Hi, puppy,” she said.

  He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time.

  “You know,” she said, helpfully, “that doesn’t sound good.” br />
  He croaked, “Hello, Laura.”

  She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, “You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.”

  He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears.

  “I’ll cut you down,” she said, after a while. “I spend too much time rescuing you, don’t I?”

  He coughed again. Then, “No, leave me. I have to do this.”

  She looked up at him, and shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re dying up there. Or you’ll be crippled, if you aren’t already.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m alive.”

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess you are.”

  “You told me,” he said. “In the graveyard.”

  “It seems like such a long time ago, puppy,” she said. Then she said, “I feel better, here. It doesn’t hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I’m so dry.”

  The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant.

  “I lost my job,” she said. “It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn’t care. I’m so thirsty.”

  “The women,” he told her. “They have water. The house.”

  “Puppy . . .” she sounded scared.

  “Tell them . . . tell them I said to give you water . . .”

  The white face stared up at him. “I should go,” she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground, and wriggled away.

  It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying.