American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked.

  “Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel.

  “It’s not always fatal,” said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. “This time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He didn’t believe it was his.”

  “She was stabbed . . .” said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted. There was a click as he stepped on a foot switch, turning on a small Dictaphone on a nearby table, “five times. There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left deltoid, a slashing injury. All the chest wounds are deep penetrating injuries. There are no other visible wounds externally.” He released pressure from the foot switch. Shadow noticed a small microphone dangling above the embalming table by its cord.

  “So you’re the coroner as well?” asked Shadow.

  “Coroner’s a political appointment around here,” said Ibis. “His job is to kick the corpse. If it doesn’t kick him back, he signs the death certificate. Jacquel’s what they call a prosector. He works for the county medical examiner. He does autopsies and saves tissue samples for analysis. He’s already photographed her wounds.”

  Jacquel ignored them. He took a big scalpel and made a deep incision in a large V that began at both collarbones and met at the bottom of her breastbone, and then he turned the V into a Y, another deep incision that continued from her breastbone to her pubis. He picked up what looked like a small, heavy chrome drill with a medallion-sized round saw blade at the business end. He turned it on, and cut through the ribs at both sides of her breastbone.

  The girl opened like a purse.

  Shadow suddenly was aware of a mild but unpleasantly penetrating, pungent, meaty smell.

  “I thought it would smell worse,” said Shadow.

  “She’s pretty fresh,” said Jacquel. “And the intestines weren’t pierced, so it doesn’t smell of shit.”

  Shadow found himself looking away, not from revulsion, as he would have expected, but from a strange desire to give the girl some privacy. It would be hard to be nakeder than this open thing.

  Jacquel tied off the intestines, glistening and snakelike in her belly, below the stomach and deep in the pelvis. He ran them through his fingers, foot after foot of them, described them as “normal” to the microphone, put them in a bucket on the floor. He sucked all the blood out of her chest with a vacuum pump, and measured the volume. Then he inspected the inside of her chest. He said to the microphone, “There are three lacerations in the pericardium, which is filled with clotted and liquefying blood.”

  Jacquel grasped her heart, cut it at its top, turned it about in his hand, examining it. He stepped on his switch and said, “There are two lacerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the left ventricle.”

  Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into a jar.

  “Formaldehyde,” whispered Mr. Ibis helpfully.

  Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girl’s liver, the stomach, spleen, pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries.

  He weighed each organ, reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice and put it into a jar of formaldehyde.

  From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last, while he worked.

  Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene.

  “So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.

  “If you’ll have me,” said Shadow.

  “Certainly we’ll have you,” said Mr. Ibis. “No reasons why not and plenty of reasons why. You’ll be under our protection as long as you’re here.”

  “I hope you don’t mind sleeping under the same roof as the dead,” said Jacquel

  Shadow thought of the touch of Laura’s lips, bitter and cold. “No,” he said. “Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow.”

  Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as quizzical and cold as a desert dog’s. “They stay dead here” was all he said.

  “Seems to me,” said Shadow, “seems to me that the dead come back pretty easy.”

  “Not at all,” said Ibis. “Even zombies, they make them out of the living, you know. A little powder, a little chanting, a little push, and you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power.” He hesitates, then, “In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then.”

  “You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five thousand years,” said Jacquel. “Binding or loosing. But that was a long time ago.” He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them, respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again.

  “I need a beer,” said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and brown and purple slices of the organs. “Coming?”

  They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table.

  Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark.

  “Good beer,” said Shadow.

  “We brew it ourselves,” said Ibis. “In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her.” He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. “There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus . . .” he trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head.

  “I still see him, on occasion,” said Jacquel. “On my way to a pickup.” He sipped his beer.

  “I’ll work for my keep,” said Shadow. “While I’m here. You tell me what you need doing, and I’ll do it.”

  “We’ll find work for you,” agreed Jacquel.

  The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadow’s boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched, ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap; she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt
comforted.

  The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadow’s head.

  “Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom,” said Jacquel. “Your work clothes will be hanging in the closet—you’ll see. You’ll want to wash up and shave first, I guess.”

  Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. His eyes looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at him.

  And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat.

  It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if there’s anyone who’d simply take it in their stride, who’d just clean up the mess and get on with things, it’s the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Laura. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. That’s all it’ll take.

  He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. It’s painless. Too sharp to hurt. I’ll be gone before I know it.

  Then the door to the bathroom swung open then, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the door frame and “Mrr?” up at him curiously.

  “Hey,” he said to the cat. “I thought I locked that door.”

  He closed the cutthroat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door.

  His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed.

  He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them was new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead man’s socks? Would he be stepping into a dead man’s shoes? He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically.

  Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie.

  “Hey,” he said to it. “You know something that I don’t?” and immediately felt foolish.

  The door creaked open and the cat slipped between the doorpost and the door and padded across the room, then up on the windowsill. “Hey,” he said to the cat. “I did shut that door. I know I shut that door.” She looked at him, interested. Her eyes were dark yellow, the color of amber. Then she jumped down from the sill onto the bed, where she wrapped herself into a curl of fur and went back to sleep, a circle of cat upon the old counterpane.

  Shadow left the bedroom door open, so the cat could leave and the room air a little, and he walked downstairs. The stairs creaked and grumbled as he walked down them, protesting his weight, as if they just wanted to be left in peace.

  “Damn, you look good,” said Jacquel. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and was now himself dressed in a black suit similar to Shadow’s. “You ever driven a hearse?”

  “No.”

  “First time for everything, then,” said Jacquel. “It’s parked out front.”

  An old woman had died. Her name had been Lila Goodchild. At Mr. Jacquel’s direction, Shadow carried the folded aluminum gurney up the narrow stairs to her bedroom and unfolded it next to her bed. He took out a translucent blue plastic body bag, laid it next to the dead woman on the bed, and unzipped it open. She wore a pink nightgown and a quilted robe. Shadow lifted her and wrapped her, fragile and almost weightless, in a blanket, and placed it onto the bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it on the gurney. While Shadow did this, Jacquel talked to a very old man who had, when she was alive, been married to Lila Goodchild. Or rather, Jacquel listened while the old man talked. As Shadow had zipped Mrs. Goodchild away, the old man had been explaining how ungrateful his children had been, and grandchildren too, though that wasn’t their fault, that was their parents’, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and he thought he’d raised them better than that.

  Shadow and Jacquel wheeled the loaded gurney to the narrow flight of stairs. The old man followed them, still talking, mostly about money, and greed, and ingratitude. He wore bedroom slippers. Shadow carried the heavier bottom end of the gurney down the stairs and out onto the street, then he wheeled it along the icy sidewalk to the hearse. Jacquel opened the hearse’s rear door. Shadow hesitated, and Jacquel said, “Just push it on in there. The supports’ll fold up out of the way.” Shadow pushed the gurney, and the supports snapped up, the wheels rotated, and the gurney rolled right onto the floor of the hearse. Jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely, and Shadow closed up the hearse while Jacquel listened to the old man who had been married to Lila Goodchild, unmindful of the cold, an old man in his slippers and his bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling Jacquel how his children were vultures, no better than hovering vultures, waiting to take what little he and Lila had scraped together, and how the two of them had fled to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Miami, and how they wound up in Cairo, and how relieved he was that Lila had not died in a nursing home, how scared he was that he would.

  They walked the old man back into the house, up the stairs to his room. A small TV set droned from one corner of the couple’s bedroom. As Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him. When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the finger.

  “They’ve got no money,” said Jacquel when they were back in the hearse. “He’ll come in to see Ibis tomorrow. He’ll choose the cheapest funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper send-off in the front room, I expect. But he’ll grumble. Got no money. Nobody around here’s got money these days. Anyway, he’ll be dead in six months. A year at the outside.”

  Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights. The snow was coming south. Shadow said, “Is he sick?”

  “It ain’t that. Women survive their men. Men—men like him—don’t live long when their women are gone. You’ll see—he’ll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he’s gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe it’ll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. Then you die.”

  Shadow thought. “Hey, Jacquel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you believe in the soul?” It wasn’t quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing less direct that he could say.

  “Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you’d answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls.”

  “He must have eaten a lot of people.”

  “Not as many as you’d think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas station. We’ll put in a few gallons.”

  The streets were quiet, in the way that streets only are when the first snow falls. “It
’s going to be a white Christmas,” said Shadow as he pumped the gas.

  “Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin.”

  “Jesus?”

  “Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, it’s not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well . . . I’ve never seen Mithras around here. He was an army brat. Maybe he’s back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he’s probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don’t even remember your birthday.”

  Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice.

  A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped.

  The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic.

  “That’s good,” said Jacquel. “So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.”

  “I think a real storm’s coming,” said Shadow. He was talking about the weather.

  Jacquel, when, eventually, he began to answer, wasn’t talking about the weather at all. “You look at me and Ibis,” he said. “We’ll be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that? You’ve seen Bast. And we’re in better shape than most of them. At least we’ve got a little belief to be going along with. Most of the suckers out there have barely got that. It’s like the funeral business—the big guys are going to buy you up one day, like it or not, because they’re bigger and more efficient and because they work. Fighting’s not going to change a damned thing, because we lost this particular battle when we came to this green land a hundred years ago or a thousand or ten thousand. We arrived and America just didn’t care that we’d arrived. We get bought out, or we press on, or we hit the road. So, yes. You’re right. The storm’s coming.”