American Gods (21 page)

“The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.

The cabdriver grunts and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.

From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cabdriver swears, by the beard of the prophet.

Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in his own language.

“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same tongue. “Where are you from?”

“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”

“From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.

“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”

“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”

“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”

The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man's head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.

“Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.

“You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.

“I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”

“I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.

The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark Airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself.”

Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”

“What do you sell?”

“Shit,” says Salim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”

The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.

“You try to sell shit?”

“Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-law's samples.

“And they will not buy it?”

“No.”

“Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell.”

Salim smiles nervously.

A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street.

“We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,” says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.

The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder, the driver moves, and Salim's hand brushes the man's face, knocking the sunglasses from his face into his lap.

The taxi driver opens his eyes, reaches for and replaces the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.

The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase.

“Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.

The taxi driver's lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the driver's mirror.

“No,” says the driver, very quietly.

The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof.

Salim begins to speak. “My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames.”

The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. “The grandmothers came here too,” he says.

“Are there many jinn in New York?” asks Salim.

“No. Not many of us.”

“There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn,” says Salim.

“People know nothing about my people here,” says the driver. “They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?”

“I do not understand.”

The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrit's dark lips.

“They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don't. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.” His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?”

Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrit's shoulder. He can feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand from the wheel, rests it on Salim's hand for a moment.

Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust storm through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind.

They drive up Eighth Avenue.

“The old believe. They do not piss into holes, because the Prophet told them that jinn live in holes. They know that the angels throw flaming stars at us when we try to listen to their conversations. But even for the old, when they come to this country we are very, very far away. Back there, I did not have to drive a cab.”

“I am sorry,” says Salim.

“It is a bad time,” says the driver. “A storm is coming. It scares me. I would do anything to get away.”

The two of them say nothing more on their way back to the hotel.

When Salim gets out of the cab he gives the ifrit a twenty-dollar bill, tells him to keep the change. Then, with a sudden burst of courage, he tells him his room number. The taxi driver says nothing in reply. A young woman clambers into the back of the cab, and it pulls out into the cold and the rain.

Six o'clock in the evening. Salim has not yet written the fax to his brother-in-law. He goes out into the rain, buys himself this night's kabob and french fries. It has only been a week, but he feels that he is becoming heavier, rounder, softening in this country of New York.

When he comes back to the hotel he is surprised to see the taxi driver standing in the lobby, hands deep in his pockets. He is staring at a display of black-and-white postcards. When he sees Salim he smiles, self-consciously. “I called your room,” he says, “but there was no answer. So I thought I would wait.”

Salim smiles also, and touches the man's arm. “I am here,” he says.

Together they enter the dim, green-lit elevator, ascend to the fifth floor holding hands. The ifrit asks if he may use Salim's bathroom. “I feel very dirty,” he says. Salim nods. He sits on the bed, which fills most of the small white room, and listens to the sound of the shower running. Salim takes off his shoes, his socks, and then the rest of his clothes.

The taxi driver comes out of the shower, wet, with a towel wrapped about his midsection. He is not wearing his sunglasses, and in the dim room his eyes burn with scarlet flames.

Salim blinks back tears. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says.

“I do not grant wishes,” whispers the ifrit, dropping his towel and pushing Salim gently, but irresistibly, down onto the bed.

It is an hour or more before the ifrit comes, thrusting and grinding into Salim's mouth. Salim has already come twice in this time. The jinn's semen tastes strange, fiery, and it burns Salim's throat.

Salim goes to the bathroom, washes out his mouth. When he returns to the bedroom the taxi driver is already asleep in the white bed, snoring peacefully. Salim climbs into the bed beside him, cuddles close to the ifrit, imagining the desert on his skin.

As he starts to fall asleep he realizes that he still has not written his fax to Fuad, and he feels guilty. Deep inside he feels empty and alone: he reaches out, rests his hand on the ifrit's tumescent cock and, comforted, he sleeps.

They wake in the small hours, moving against each other, and they make love again. At one point Salim realizes that he is crying, and the ifrit is kissing away his tears with burning lips. “What is your name?” Salim asks the taxi driver.

“There is a name on my driving permit, but it is not mine,” the ifrit says.

Afterward, Salim could not remember where the sex had stopped and the dreams began.

When Salim wakes, the cold sun creeping into the white room, he is alone.

Also, he discovers, his sample case is gone, all the bottles and rings and souvenir copper flashlights, all gone, along with his suitcase, his wallet, his passport, and his air tickets back to Oman.

He finds a pair of jeans, the T-shirt, and the dust-colored woolen sweater discarded on the floor. Beneath them he finds a driver's license in the name of Ibrahim bin Irem, a taxi permit in the same name, and a ring of keys with an address written on a piece of paper attached to them in English. The photographs on the license and the permit do not look much like Salim, but then, they did not look much like the ifrit.

The telephone rings: it is the front desk calling to point out that Salim has already checked out, and his guest needs to leave soon so that they can service the room, to get it ready for another occupant.

“I do not grant wishes,” says Salim, tasting the way the words shape themselves in his mouth.

He feels strangely light-headed as he dresses.

New York is very simple: the avenues run north to south, the streets run west to east. How hard can it be? he asks himself.

He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the hotel room to go and look for his cab.

The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. They were sitting in a small restaurant, two blocks from Ibis and Jacquel's Funeral Parlor. Shadow's meal consisted of an all-day full breakfast—it came with hush puppies—while Mr. Ibis picked and pecked at a slice of coffee cake. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. “The lingering ones are holding on for one final Christmas,” said Mr. Ibis, “or even for New Year's, while the others, the ones for whom other people's jollity and celebration will prove too painful, have not yet been tipped over the edge by that last showing of
It's a Wonderful Life
, have not quite encountered the final straw, or should I say, the final
sprig of holly
that breaks not the camel's but the
reindeer's
back.” And he made a little noise as he said it, half smirk, half snort, which suggested that he had just uttered a well-honed phrase of which he was particularly fond.

Ibis and Jacquel was a small, family-owned funeral home: one of the last truly independent funeral homes in the area, or so Mr. Ibis maintained. “Most fields of human merchandising value nationwide brand identities,” he said. Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. Shadow had figured out within the first few minutes of meeting Mr. Ibis that his expected part in any conversation with the funeral director was to say as little as possible. “This, I believe, is because people like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, F. W. Woolworth (of blessed memory): store brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same.

“In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting small-town personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not on a national one. But in all branches of industry—and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that—one makes ones money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing one's operations. It's not pretty, but it's true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think they're going to a family concern, somewhere they'll be treated with respect by someone who'll tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street.”

Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadow's memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a cranelike stoop. Sitting opposite him now, across the shiny red table, Shadow found himself staring into the man's face.

“So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and it's the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We don't do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what we're good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Don't you agree?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Shadow.

“The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives.” He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. “Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: there's been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We weren't always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers.”

“And before that?”

“Well,” said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, “we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasn't until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as colored—foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored. Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we weren't perceived as black. My business partner, he's always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. It's just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africans—we were the people of the Nile.”

“So you were Egyptians,” said Shadow.

Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. “Well, yes and no. ‘Egyptians' makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me?”

Shadow shrugged. He'd seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. He'd seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis.

“How's your coffee cake?” asked the waitress, refilling their coffees.

“Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your ma.”

“I'll do that,” she said, and bustled away.

“You don't want to ask after the health of anyone, if you're a funeral director. They think maybe you're scouting for business,” said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. “Shall we see if your room is ready?”

Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. “It's good of you, putting me up,” said Shadow. “I appreciate it.”

“We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. It's a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now it's just the three of us. You won't be in the way.”

“Any idea how long I'm meant to stay with you?”

Mr. Ibis shook his head. “He didn't say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect.”

“So,” asked Shadow, “what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something?”

“No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its names from us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days.”

“Frontier times?”

“You might call it that,” said Mr. Ibis.
“Evening Miz Simmons! And a Merry Christmas to you too!
The folk who brought me here came up the Mississippi a long time back.”

Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. “Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago?”

Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, “Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take.”

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I'll buy it, I guess. What were they trading?”

“Not much,” said Mr. Ibis. “Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in what would now be Michigan's upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them.” He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. “This country has been Grand Central for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus?”

“Sure,” said Shadow, obligingly. “What about him?”

“Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. There's nothing special about coming to America. I've been writing stories about it, from time to time.” They began to walk again.

“True stories?”

“Up to a point, yes. I'll let you read one or two, if you like. It's all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally—and this is speaking as a subscriber to
Scientific American
, here—I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they'll talk about the odd, but they won't talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it's true or not. I mean, here's a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here's another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who's descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what'll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That'll shake a few things up, you just wait.

“Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the West Coast—what in later days they called the Slave Coast or the Ivory Coast— they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times—they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you're going to say, but Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn't have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.”

Shadow hadn't said anything, and hadn't planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so he said, “Well, weren't they?” The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.

“The misconception is that men didn't travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific Islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the east, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasn't a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away.”

They had reached a large house, built in the style people called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so fond of Addams Family–style houses. It was the only building on the block that wasn't locked up with boarded-over windows. They went through the gate and walked around the back of the building.

Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a key from his key chain, and they were in a large, unheated room, occupied by two people. They were a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain table that resembled both a slab and a sink.

There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on a corkboard on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied above her head in an intricate knotwork.

Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and matted with dried blood.

“This is my partner, Mister Jacquel,” said Ibis.

“We met already,” said Jacquel. “Forgive me if I don't shake hands.”

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.”