American Gods (20 page)

He drove alongside the Mississippi. Shadow had never seen the Nile, but there was a blinding afternoon sun burning on the wide brown river that made him think of the muddy expanse of the Nile: not the Nile as it is now, but as it was long ago, flowing like an artery through the papyrus marshes, home to cobra and jackal and wild cow . . .

A road sign pointed to Thebes.

The road was built up about twelve feet, so he was driving above the marshes. Clumps and clusters of birds in flight were questing back and forth, black dots against the blue sky, moving in some desperate Brownian motion.

In the late afternoon the sun began to lower, gilding the world in elf-light, a thick warm custardy light that made the world feel unearthly and more than real, and it was in this light that Shadow passed the sign telling him he was Now Entering Historical Cairo. He drove under a bridge and found himself in a small port town. The imposing structures of the Cairo courthouse and the even more imposing customs house looked like enormous freshly baked cookies in the syrupy gold of the light at the end of the day.

He parked his car in a side street and walked to the embankment at the edge of a river, unsure whether he was gazing at the Ohio or the Mississippi. A small brown cat nosed and sprang among the trash cans at the back of a building, and the light made even the garbage magical.

A lone seagull was gliding along the river's edge, flipping a wing to correct itself as it went.

Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing old tennis shoes on her feet and a man's gray woolen sweater as a dress, was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin was as brown as the river.

He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly.

There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car.

“Hey,” said Shadow to the girl. “You ever seen invisible powder before?”

She hesitated. Then she shook her head.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “Well, watch this.” Shadow pulled out a quarter with his left hand, held it up, tilting it from one side to another, then appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and putting the hand forward. “Now,” he said, “I just take some invisible powder from my pocket . . .” and he reached his left hand into his breast pocket, dropping the quarter into the pocket as he did so, “. . . and I sprinkle it on the hand with the coin . . .” and he mimed sprinkling, “. . . and look—now the quarter's invisible too.” He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty left hand as well.

The little girl just stared.

Shadow shrugged, and put his hands back in his pockets, loading a quarter in one hand, a folded up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked like she needed it. “Hey,” he said, “We've got an audience.”

The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. The dog's huge ears were pricked up, giving it a comically alert expression. A cranelike man with gold-rimmed spectacles was coming up the sidewalk toward them, peering from side to side as if he were looking for something. Shadow wondered if he was the dog's owner.

“What did you think?” Shadow asked the dog, trying to put the little girl at her ease. “Was that cool?”

The black dog licked its long snout. Then it said, in a deep, dry voice, “I saw Harry Houdini once, and believe me, man, you are no Harry Houdini.”

The little girl looked at the animals, she looked up at Shadow, and then she ran off, her feet pounding the sidewalk as if all the powers of hell were after her. The two animals watched her go. The cranelike man had reached the dog. He reached down and scratched its high, pointed ears.

“Come on,” said the man in the gold-rimmed spectacles to the dog, “it was only a coin trick. It's not like he was doing an underwater escape.”

“Not yet,” said the dog. “But he will.” The golden light was done, and the gray of twilight had begun.

Shadow dropped the coin and the folded bill back into his pocket. “Okay,” he said. “Which one of you is Jackal?”

“Use your eyes,” said the black dog with the long snout. It began to amble along the sidewalk, beside the man in the gold glasses, and, after a moment's hesitation, Shadow followed them. The cat was nowhere to be seen. They reached a large old building on a row of boarded-up houses. The sign beside the door said
IBIS AND JACQUEL. A FAMILY FIRM. FUNERAL PARLOR. SINCE
1863.

“I'm Mr. Ibis,” said the man in the gold-rimmed glasses. “I think I should buy you a spot of supper. I'm afraid my friend here has some work that needs doing.”

New York scares Salim, and so he clutches his sample case protectively with both hands, holding it to his chest. He is scared of black people, the way they stare at him, and he is scared of the Jews—the ones dressed all in black with hats and beards and side curls he can identify, and how many others that he cannot—he is scared of the sheer quantity of the people, all shapes and sizes of people, as they spill from their high, high, filthy buildings onto the sidewalks; he is scared of the honking hullabaloo of the traffic, and he is even scared of the air, which smells both dirty and sweet, and nothing at all like the air of Oman.

Salim has been in New York, in America, for a week. Each day he visits two, perhaps three different offices, opens his sample case, shows them the copper trinkets, the rings and bottles and tiny flashlights, the models of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, gleaming in copper inside; each night he writes a fax to his brother-in-law, Fuad, at home in Muscat, telling him that he has taken no orders, or, on one happy day, that he had taken several orders (but, as Salim is painfully aware, not yet enough even to cover his airfare and hotel bill).

For reasons Salim does not understand, his brother-in-law's business partners have booked him into the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street. He finds it confusing, claustrophobic, expensive, alien.

Fuad is Salim's sister's husband. He is not a rich man, but he is the co-owner of a small trinket factory. Everything is made for export, to other Arab countries, to Europe, to America. Salim has been working for Fuad for six months. Fuad scares him a little. The tone of Fuad's faxes is becoming harsher. In the evening, Salim sits in his hotel room, reading his Qur' an, telling himself that this will pass, that his stay in this strange world is limited and finite.

His brother-in-law gave him a thousand dollars for miscellaneous traveling expenses and the money, which seemed so huge a sum when first he saw it, is evaporating faster than Salim can believe. When he first arrived, scared of being seen as a cheap Arab, he tipped everyone, handing extra dollar bills to everyone he encountered; and then he decided that he was being taken advantage of, that perhaps they were even laughing at him, and he stopped tipping entirely.

On his first and only journey by subway he got lost and confused, and missed his appointment; now he takes taxis only when he has to, and the rest of the time he walks. He stumbles into overheated offices, his cheeks numb from the cold outside, sweating beneath his coat, shoes soaked by slush; and when the winds blow down the avenues (which run from north to south, as the streets run west to east, all so simple, and Salim always knows where to face Mecca) he feels a cold on his exposed skin that is so intense it is like being struck.

He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is being covered by Fuad's business partners, he must pay for his own food); instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares. And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays.

Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stern, and disappointed: Salim was letting them down—his sister, Fuad, Fuad's business partners, the Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders, Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money, living like a sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete misery.

Then Salim walks downtown, holding his sample case as if it contained diamonds and rubies, trudging through the cold for block after block until, on Broadway and 19th Street, he finds a squat building over a deli. He walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports.

The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the U.S. from the Far East. A real order, a significant order from Panglobal, could redeem Salim's journey, could make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. After she blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash.

Salim got there at 10:30
A.M
., half an hour before his appointment. Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever. The time ticks by so slowly.

Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat.

The woman behind the desk glares at him. “Yes?” she says. It sounds like
Yed
.

“It is eleven-thirty-five,” says Salim.

The woman glances at the clock on the wall, and says, “Yed,” again. “Id id.”

“My appointment was for eleven,” says Salim with a placating smile.

“Mister Blanding knows you're here,” she tells him, reprovingly. (“Bidter Bladdig dode you're here.”)

Salim picks up an old copy of the
New York Post
from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall.

At twelve-thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc as his sister swears by zinc and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.

It is one o'clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice.

“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”

She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He's at lunch,” she says.
He'd ad dudge.

Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”

She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He's busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says.
He'd biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.

“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.

She shrugs, and blows her nose.

Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.

At three o'clock the woman looks at him and says “He wode be gubbig bag.”

“Excuse?”

“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”

“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”

She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoidbeds odly by teddephode.”

“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the 46th Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.

One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim's pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad's wife (for he had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars are going fast enough actually to end his life.

A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.

The backseat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to get to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seat belt.