Little Gods (11 page)

I kept my hands in my pockets as I walked. “No. I just moved here a couple of months ago, on a whim, more or less. I didn't like my job, and I'd just come out of a bad relationship. So I went on the internet, applied for some jobs, and got one out here, doing graphic design."

She nodded. “That's quite a turning point."

I was beginning to see her interests, at least; the hingepoints in a life, the moments when things shift. “Yeah. I guess my life would've been a lot different if I'd stayed in North Carolina."

“You wouldn't have met me tonight, for one thing,” she said, and took my arm. She was so warm and alive, she felt wonderful. I didn't even want to sleep with her, especially, though god knows I'd spent plenty of long nights fantasizing about meeting a beautiful stranger and doing just that. I only wanted to hold her, to feel her skin against mine, mingling my warmth with hers. To know for just one night, right down to my skin, that I wasn't alone.

“Have you noticed that there aren't any funeral homes here in Santa Cruz?” she said. “And no cemeteries, at least not any you can find easily. It's like that all over this part of California."

I hadn't thought about that, until she mentioned it. “That's weird. I wonder why?"

She shrugged. “Wealthy young people live here, it's a new demographic. They don't like to think about death, I guess.” She shivered, though the weather was mild, and she had her shawl. “I guess no one does."

We kept walking, past an ivy-covered parking garage, past stucco walls. “You talked about blending in...?” I still wasn't sure if that comment had been a dig at me or not, an ironic jab at my gray shirt, my jeans, my short hair. Mr. Nondescript, nary a tattoo nor piercing to be seen.

“There are festivals where people try to frighten away restless spirits,” she said. “At least, that's the origin of the festivals. We have our version in Hallowe'en. In other cultures there's a day of the dead, and it's less about driving the spirits away, more about visiting with them, though sometimes they have to be coaxed back to the place where they belong, afterward. I wonder, sometimes, about
potential
ghosts...” She shook her head, as if dismissing that thought as too unimportant, or enormous, to follow. “But there are other rituals, held right after people die, to move their ghosts along. The spirits linger, you see. Some people bang drums, to frighten them away. Some people cover the mirrors, to keep the spirits from becoming entranced by their own reflections. People believe that the dead can be dangerous, though it's often unclear how, exactly. Black is the color of mourning in our country. Black, like I'm wearing. The dead don't see very well, I guess, and when you're dressed in black you blend in with the shadows, they don't notice you. If they don't notice you, maybe they won't do you harm, right? In some countries white is the color of mourning, and it's the same thing. Gray works, too. You can frighten the dead away with masks and drums, or you can try to go unnoticed..."

She sat down on a stone stoop in front of a closed dress shop. I joined her. She leaned against me, her head resting on my shoulder.

“You said something about potential ghosts,” I prompted.

She sighed, nuzzled against me more closely. “You always had to get to the bottom of everything,” she said, fondly and absently. The words chilled me for some reason, made me cold all the way through, as if my heart had been exposed to November air.

She went on. “At the University ... or at
some
Universities ... they study quantum mechanics. The way the universe really works, spooky contradictions, frightening paradoxes, and all. There doesn't need to be a god of the crossroads. The
universe
is the god of the crossroads."

I'd read
In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
and
Schrödinger's Kittens
, the Feynman lectures, recent articles about quantum entanglement. More broadening of my horizons. Ever since Charlotte said I was boring and narrow, right before she broke up with me, I'd been trying to expand myself. “You're talking about the many-worlds theory, right?” I said. “About the idea that everything which
can
happen, does happen ... from an atomic level up. The universe doesn't like to make choices, so it does everything. Is that what you mean?"

“You were never good at the math,” she said. “But you usually grasped the essentials.” She took a deep breath, and spoke, slowly. “You used to live in Chapel Hill. One night you were supposed to go to a theater party, but at the last minute you chickened out, because you were afraid you'd be uncomfortable with so many strangers. Most actors are pretentious jerks anyway, you've always thought so. So instead you went to a bar, and met a woman named Charlotte. She spilled a drink on you, and more or less at that moment you fell in love."

I pulled away from her. “Do you know Charlotte?"

She shook her head, looking at the pavement. Tears glistened in her eyes—I could just see them in the light of a street lamp. “No, Michael. Me and Charlotte ... we're almost mutually exclusive. If you hadn't gone to that bar, if you'd gone to that theater party instead, you might have met another wallflower there. You know, two shy people who didn't know anyone, talking together in self defense. She might have been a physics student. You might have become friends, or rivals, had a conversation ... or a love affair.” She shook now, really shivered, and more hairs came loose from the pile on top of her head, falling into her face.

She didn't look familiar. I
wanted
her to look familiar. But she didn't. She was just a beautiful stranger with a beautiful, strange story. She might have been crazy. I was too captivated to care.

“I don't know what to say,” I said. “I don't know what you're saying. But, I mean, you're here, now..."

“No,” she said, sharply. “Almost anything can happen, but not that. I fooled myself, I shouldn't have come here. You
might
have met this girl, you
might
have had a love affair, but you met Charlotte, instead, and she damaged you. She broke you in important ways."

That hurt, it stung, but it was true. “I can heal,” I said, a little defensively.

She didn't look at me. She stared at the asphalt street, and spoke in a controlled monotone. “You might have met this girl, at this party ... you might have had a love affair, moved in with her ... you might have been out walking one night, coming back from a Chinese restaurant. She might have crossed the street, at the same time some drunk came careening around the corner ... you might have watched that girl die, right there on the asphalt, right in front of you.” I heard the strain in her voice, the tightness, how close she was to breaking.

“And maybe something happened then, in that instant before the car hit,” she went on, less tense, more sad and resigned. “The smell of copper pennies and burning motor oil filled the air, a jingle of bells, many paths opening before the girl, the girl about to die. Of course she'd choose one of the paths, wouldn't she? She'd do anything, to keep from dying. So maybe the girl wouldn't have died, but only disappeared, right before your eyes. And eventually you'd convince yourself she just abandoned you, that you didn't see her disappear at all. You'd become bitter, and withdraw even more completely from the world.” She laughed, harshly, the sound echoing off the empty buildings. “That's just speculation, of course. I've never been back there, to the place where the forking paths began. I'm afraid to return."

She looked at my face. “Oh, Michael. I've been so many other places. To worlds where I didn't die, where we're still together, where I like to think there's happily ever after in store for us. I'm sure in some of those worlds there is; there'd have to be, wouldn't there? But I had no place in those worlds. You already had a Merrilee there, and I couldn't take her place. Even in those happy worlds there were differences, unwanted pregnancies, different jobs, my fellowship falling through ... They weren't the world we
would
have had, if that car hadn't come, if ... for whatever reason ... the god of the crossroads or the unprecedented quantum event or
whatever
happened to me
hadn't
happened. But I kept trying, kept searching. I looked for worlds where we'd never met, where I could find you, where we could start over. In most of those worlds, you met Charlotte, and usually you two broke up. So here I am. Trying again, knowing I'll fail again."

I believed her; I believed
in
her; I needed her like a religion. “It's not too late,” I said. “We can—"

“You don't even know me,” she said softly. “And the Merrilee I am is not the Merrilee you would've loved. I've seen too much. I'm too estranged from reality ... or too tangled up in all the realities."

“This can be a new thing,” I said. “It doesn't have to be finding something you lost, it can be
new
."

She looked at me, her gray eyes still wet with tears, and she smiled. But it was such a sad smile. “Maybe we could. If it was that easy. But ... I have to keep moving, Michael."

“What are you talking about? What are you looking for? You'll never find—"

She shook her head. “It's not the search—that's just how I occupy myself, how I keep the will to continue. I
have
to move on, it's necessity. I should've died when that car hit, Michael. It's not a question of fate, or destiny. There are plenty of worlds where I'm alive and well. But my death is one of the things that
had
to happen, one of the potential outcomes. Instead, I
lived
. I don't know why, but my survival left something unsatisfied in the universe. Every day I live it gets a little worse, a little more serious. I can't die at the right time, or in the right place, or in the right way, anymore. But I still have to die, and the universe is doing its best to kill me. I worry, sometimes, that I'm doing something to the world, tearing at the fabric of things ... but then, my wandering up and down the forking paths is part of the fabric, isn't it? It's not something I chose."

“You choose to keep going,” I said.

Her expression hardened, her mouth turning down. “You try doing the noble thing when the grille of a car is coming at your face, Michael. You try giving yourself up to death when there's an alternative. I don't think you could do it.” She looked away, but kept talking, bitterly. “I forget that you don't know me, that you never will."

“Merrilee—"

“I wear black, to try to blend in. To make myself unobtrusive. In a way, it's a ghost that's after me. The ghost of my own death, a phantom possibility, getting realer by the moment. I can't scare it away with drums or masks, and so far I haven't been able to hide from it. Not for long, anyway. I thought I could find you, maybe bring you with me, drag you across the worlds with me...” She shook her head. “But you're not the one. Charlotte messed you up too much. I know. I've met other damaged Michaels, in other places. You'd never really trust me."

“Give me a chance,” I said.

“Too late,” she said, and stepped into the street.

I hadn't even heard the car coming. I don't know how I could have missed it. It was an old Corvair, the color of dried mustard, and it ran right through a stop sign and smashed into Merrilee as she stepped into the street.

I smelled burning motor oil, naturally enough. And pennies, old dirty copper pennies.

Somewhere across town, church bells rang the wrong time.

The Corvair swerved into the curb and stalled. An old hippie with stringy hair climbed out, eyes wild. “I hit her!” he shrieked. I couldn't tell if he was proud or appalled. “I hit her!"

I looked. Merrilee wasn't there, no body, no trace. I left the hippie lurching around the street. He peered under parked cars, looking for a body. I walked slowly home, to my rented room in a house full of strangers. I tried not to think of that house as a metaphor for my life.

Tonight I packed a bag. I'm giving myself over to the god of the crossroads. I'm going to Chapel Hill. There might be a Merrilee living there, one who's never met me, one who didn't die. I don't love Merrilee. I didn't even really know her. It's silly to think that she's destined for me. I believe there was a time, and a place, when we would have fallen in love ... but there might not be another such time and place in this world.

Still. It's somewhere to go. It's a direction. A place to begin.

It's better than the nothing I've had so far.

The God of the Crossroads

The god of the crossroads came to me in a shabby café in Missouri, during a time of confusion and malaise—a personal infestation of spiritual lice, a hundred chigger bites on the flesh of my sense of purpose, you might say.

The god rode in the head of my coffee server, a displaced punkette with mismatched eyes and buzzed-black hair and a silver ring in her left nostril. I recognized the god's arrival by the usual signs—the scent of copper and vanilla in the latté steam, the jingle of the bells hung on the door like

garlands, the revving and honking and backfiring of cars in the street trying to go every direction at once and tearing themselves apart in the process.

“You're waiting again,” the god said in the punkette's sexy-raspy voice. “What are you waiting for?"

“I can't do it all,” I said, stirring cold coffee with my forefinger. “I hate to make decisions I can't revise later. I used to take comfort in quantum uncertainty and the many-worlds theory, the idea that somewhere else, some other me was doing
everything
.” The god snorted and said “Every other you is sitting

in this stupid coffee shop with the water—stained walls and the rude waitstaff, or else crouching by a rock staring at a stream, or looking up at a flyspecked motel ceiling—and all of you are getting yelled at by me.” The god came around the counter and thumped me in the chest. I

gasped as my heart sputtered, stuttered, stopped and then started again as all the engines outside revved and the cars surged forward. “Every road ends,” the punkette god said. “You can't linger forever.” Her mismatched eyes were one color now, the morning blue of a sky