Chapter 6

   Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
   And through them passes a wild motley throng.
   Men from Volga and Tartar steppes.
   Featureless figures from the Hoang-ho,
   Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,
   Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
   These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
   Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws,
   In street and alley what strange tongues are these,
   Accents of menace in our ear,
   Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “The Unguarded Gates,” 1882


   One moment Shadow was riding the World’s Largest Carousel, holding on to his eagle-headed tiger, and then the red and white lights of the carousel stretched and shivered and went out, and he was falling through an ocean of stars, while the mechanical waltz was replaced by a pounding rhythmic roll and crash, as of cymbals or the breakers on the shores of a far ocean.
   The only light was starlight, but it illuminated everything with a cold clarity. Beneath him his mount stretched and padded, its warm fur under his left hand, its feathers beneath his right.
   “It’s a good ride, isn’t it?” The voice came from behind him, in his ears and in his mind.
   Shadow turned, slowly, streaming images of himself as he moved, frozen moments, each him captured in a fraction of a second, every tiny movement lasting for an infinite period. The images that reached his mind made no sense: it was like seeing the world through the multifaceted jeweled eyes of a dragonfly, but each facet saw something completely different, and he was unable to combine the things he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, into a whole that made any sense.
   He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil mustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast’s mane; and he was also-seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with blackflies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ocher leaf.
   Shadow saw all these things, and he knew they were the same thing.
   “If you don’t close your mouth,” said the many things that were Mr. Nancy, “somethin’s goin’ to fly in there.”
   Shadow closed his mouth and swallowed, hard.
   There was a wooden hall on a hill, a mile or so from them. They were trotting toward the hall, their mounts’ hooves and feet padding noiselessly on the dry sand at the sea’s edge.
   Czernobog trotted up on his centaur. He tapped the human arm of his mount. “None of this is truly happening,” he said to Shadow. He sounded miserable. “Is all in your head. Best not to think of it.”
   Shadow saw a gray-haired old Eastern-European immigrant, with a shabby raincoat and one iron-colored tooth, true. But he also saw a squat black thing, darker than the darkness that surrounded them, its eyes two burning coals; and he saw a prince, with long flowing black hair and a long black mustache, blood on his hands and his face, riding, naked but for a bear skin over his shoulder, on a creature half-man, half-beast, his face and torso blue-tattooed with swirls and spirals.
   “Who are you?” asked Shadow. “What are you?”
   Their mounts padded along the shore. Waves broke and crashed implacably on the night beach.
   Wednesday guided his wolf—now a huge and charcoal-gray beast with green eyes—over to Shadow. Shadow’s mount caracoled away from it, and Shadow stroked its neck and told it not to be afraid. Its tiger tail swished, aggressively. It occurred to Shadow that there was another wolf, a twin to the one that Wednesday was riding, keeping pace with them in the sand dunes, just a moment out of sight.
   “Do you know me, Shadow?” said Wednesday. He rode his wolf with his head high. His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak with a deep, monklike cowl, and his face stared out from the shadows. “I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.” Two ghostly-gray ravens, like transparent skins of birds, landed on Wednesday’s shoulders, pushed their beaks into the side of Wednesday’s head as if tasting his mind, and flapped out into the world once more.
   What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.
   “Odin?” said Shadow, and the wind whipped the word from his lips.
   “Odin,” whispered Wednesday, and the crash of the breakers on the beach of skulls was not loud enough to drown that whisper. “Odin,” said Wednesday, tasting the sound of the words in his mouth. “Odin,” said Wednesday, his voice a triumphant shout that echoed from horizon to horizon. His name swelled and grew and filled the world like the pounding of blood in Shadow’s ears.
   And then, as in a dream, they were no longer riding toward a distant hall. They were already there, and their mounts were tied in the shelter beside the hall.
   The hall was huge but primitive. The roof was thatched, the walls were wooden. There was a fire burning in the center of the hall, and the smoke stung Shadow’s eyes.
   “We should have done this in my mind, not in his,” muttered Mr. Nancy to Shadow. “It would have been warmer there.”
   “We’re in his mind?”
   “More or less. This is Valaskjalf. It’s his old hall.”
   Shadow was relieved to see that Nancy was now once more an old man wearing yellow gloves, although his shadow shook and shivered and changed in the flames of the fire, and what it changed into was not always entirely human.
   There were wooden benches against the walls, and, sitting on them or standing beside them, perhaps ten people. They kept their distance from each other: a mixed lot, who included a dark-skinned, matronly woman in a red sari, several shabby-looking businessmen, and others, too close to the fire for Shadow to be able to make them out.
   “Where are they?” whispered Wednesday fiercely, to Nancy. “Well? Where are they? There should be dozens of us here. Scores!”
   “You did all the inviting,” said Nancy. “I think it’s a wonder you got as many here as you did. You think I should tell a story, to start things off?”
   Wednesday shook his head. “Out of the question.”
   “They don’t look very friendly,” said Nancy. “A story’s a good way of gettin’ someone on your side. And you don’t have a bard to sing to them.”
   “No stories,” said Wednesday. “Not now. Later, there will be time for stories. Not now.”
   “No stories. Right. I’ll just be the warm-up man.” And Mr. Nancy strode out into the firelight with an easy smile.
   “I know what you are all thinkin’,” he said, “You are thinking, What is Compe Anansi doin’, comin’ out to talk to you all, when the All-Father called you all here, just like he called me here? Well, you know, sometimes people need remindin’ of things. I look around when I come in, and I thought, where’s the rest of us? But then I thought, just because we are few and they are many, we are weak, and they are powerful, it does not mean that we are lost.
   “You know, one time I saw Tiger down at the water hole: he had the biggest testicles of any animal, and the sharpest claws, and two front teeth as long as knives and as sharp as blades. And I said to him, Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I’ll look after your balls for you. He was so proud of his balls. So he got into the water hole for a swim, and I put his balls on, and left him my own little spider balls. And then, you know what I did? I ran away, fast as my legs would take me.
   “I didn’t stop till I got to the next town. And I saw Old Monkey there. You lookin’ mighty fine, Anansi, said Old Monkey. I said to him, You know what they all singin’ in the town over there? What are they singin’? he asks me. They singin’ the funniest song, I told him. Then I did a dance, and I sings,


Tiger’s balls, yeah,
I ate Tiger’s balls
Now ain’t nobody gonna stop me ever at all
Nobody put me up against the big black wall
‘Cos I ate that Tiger’s testimonials
I ate Tiger’s balls.


   “Old Monkey he laughs fit to bust, holding his side and shakin’, and stampin’, then he starts singin’ Tiger’s balls, I ate Tiger’s balls, snappin’ his fingers, spinnin’ around on his two feet. That’s a fine song, he says, I’m goin’ to sing it to all my friends. You do that, I tell him, and I head back to the water hole.
   “There’s Tiger, down by the water hole, walkin’ up and down, with his tail switchin’ and swishin’ and his ears and the fur on his neck up as far as they can go, and he’s snappin’ at every insect comes by with his huge old saber teeth, and his eyes flashin’ orange fire. He looks mean and scary and big, but danglin’ between his legs, the littlest balls in the littlest blackest most wrinkledy ball-sack you ever did see.
   “Hey, Anansi, he says, when he sees me, you were supposed to be guarding my balls while I went swimming. But when I got out of the swimming hole, there was nothing on the side of the bank but these little black shriveled-up good-for-nothing spider balls I’m wearing.
   “I done my best, I tells him, but it was those monkeys, they come by and eat your balls all up, and when I tell them off, then they pulled off my own little balls. And I was so ashamed I ran away.

   “You a liar, Anansi, says Tiger. I’m going to eat your liver. But then he hears the monkeys coming from their town to the water hole. A dozen happy monkeys, boppin’ down the path, clickin’ their fingers and singin’ as loud as they could sing,


Tiger’s balls, yeah,
I ate Tiger’s balls
Now ain’t nobody gonna stop me ever at all
Nobody put me up against the big black wall
‘Cos I ate that Tiger’s testimonials
I ate Tiger’s balls.


   “And Tiger, he growls, and he roars and he’s off into the forest after them, and the monkeys screech and head for the highest trees. And I scratch my nice new big balls, and damn they felt good hangin’ between my skinny legs, and I walk on home. And even today, Tiger keeps chasin’ monkeys. So you all remember: just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you got no power.”
   Mr. Nancy smiled, and bowed his head, and spread his hands, accepting the applause and laughter like a pro, and then he turned and walked back to where Shadow and Czernobog were standing.
   “I thought I said no stories,” said Wednesday.
   “You call that a story?” said Nancy. “I barely cleared my throat. Just warmed them up for you. Go knock them dead.”
   Wednesday walked out into the firelight, a big old man with a glass eye in a brown suit and an old Armani coat. He stood there, looking at the people on the wooden benches, saying nothing for longer than Shadow could believe someone could comfortably say nothing. And, finally, he spoke.
   “You know me,” he said. “You all know me. Some of you have no cause to love me, but love me or not, you know me.”
   There was a rustling, a stir among the people on the benches.
   “I’ve been here longer than most of you. Like the rest of you, I figured we could get by on what we got. Not enough to make us happy, but enough to keep going.
   “That may not be the case anymore. There’s a storm coming, and it’s not a storm of our making.”
   He paused. Now he stepped forward, and folded his arms across his chest.
   “When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Kobolds and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.
   “The land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, only what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could.
   “So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely.
   “We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.”
   Wednesday paused. He looked from one to another of his listeners, grave and statesmanlike. They stared back at him impassively, their faces masklike and unreadable. Wednesday cleared his throat, and he spat, hard into the fire. It flared and flamed, illuminating the inside of the hall.
   “Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.
   “They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,” said Odin. “You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act.”
   The old woman in the red sari stepped into the firelight. On her forehead was a small dark blue jewel. She said, “You called us here for this nonsense?” And then she snorted, a snort of mingled amusement and irritation.
   Wednesday’s brows lowered. “I called you here, yes. But this is sense, Mama-ji, not nonsense. Even a child could see that.”
   “So I am a child, am I?” She wagged a finger at him. “I was old in Kalighat before you were dreamed of, you foolish man. I am a child? Then I am a child, for there is nothing in your foolish talk to see.”
   Again, a moment of double vision; Shadow saw the old woman, her dark face pinched with age and disapproval, but behind her he saw something huge, a naked woman with skin as black as a new leather jacket, and lips and tongue the bright red of arterial blood. Around her neck were skulls, and her many hands held knives, and swords, and severed heads.
   “I did not call you a child, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday, peaceably. “But it seems self-evident—”
   “The only thing that seems self-evident,” said the old woman, pointing (as behind her, through her, above her, a black finger, sharp-taloned, pointed in echo), “is your own desire for glory. We’ve lived in peace in this country for a long time. Some of us do better than others, I agree. I do well. Back in India, there is an incarnation of me who does much better, but so be it. I am not envious. I’ve watched the new ones rise, and I’ve watched them fall again.” Her hand fell to her side. Shadow saw that the others were looking at her: a mixture of expressions—respect, amusement, embarrassment—in their eyes. “They worshiped the railroads here, only a blink of an eye ago. And now the iron gods are as forgotten as the emerald hunters…”
   “Make your point, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday.
   “My point?” Her nostrils flared. The corners of her mouth turned down. “I—and I am obviously only a child—say that we wait. We do nothing. We don’t know that they mean us harm.”
   “And will you still counsel waiting when they come in the night and they kill you, or they take you away?”
   Her expression was disdainful and amused: it was all in the lips and the eyebrows and the set of the nose. “If they try such a thing,” she said, “they will find me hard to catch, and harder still to kill.”
   A squat young man sitting on the bench behind her hrrumphed for attention, then said, with a booming voice, “All-Father, my people are comfortable. We make the best of what we have. If this war of yours goes against us, we could lose everything.”
   Wednesday said, “You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back.”
   The fire blazed high as he spoke, illuminating the faces of the audience.
   I don’t really believe, Shadow thought. I don’t believe any of this. Maybe I’m still fifteen. Mom’s still alive and I haven’t even met Laura yet. Everything that’s happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end. Then the fire burned out, and there was darkness in Valaskjalf, Odin’s Hall.
   “Now what?” whispered Shadow.
   “Now we go back to the carousel room,” muttered Mr. Nancy. “And old One-Eye buys us all dinner, greases some palms, kisses some babies, and no one says the gee-word anymore.”
   “Gee-word?”
   “Gods. What were you doin’ the day they handed out brains, boy, anyway?”
   “Someone was telling a story about stealing a tiger’s balls, and I had to stop and find out how it ended.”
   Mr. Nancy chuckled.
   “But nothing was resolved. Nobody agreed to anything.”
   “He’s workin’ them slowly. He’ll land ‘em one at a time. You’ll see. They’ll come around in the end.”
   Shadow could feel that a wind was coming up from somewhere, stirring his hair, touching his face, pulling at him.
   They were standing in the room of the biggest carousel in the world, listening to the “Emperor Waltz.”
   There was a group of people, tourists by the look of them, talking with Wednesday over at the other side of the room, as many people as there had been shadowy figures in Wednesday’s hall. “Through here,” boomed Wednesday, and he led them through the only exit, formed to look like the gaping mouth of a huge monster, its sharp teeth ready to rend them all to slivers. He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying.
   “Did that happen?” asked Shadow.
   “Did what happen, shit-for-brains?” asked Mr. Nancy.

   “The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the carousel.”
   “Heck, nobody’s allowed to ride the carousel. Didn’t you see the signs? Now hush.”
   The monster’s mouth led to the Organ Room, which puzzled Shadow—hadn’t they already come through that way?
   It was no less strange the second time. Wednesday led them all up some stairs, past life-sized models of the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and they followed the signs to an early exit.
   Shadow and Nancy brought up the rear. And then they were out of the House on the Rock, walking past the gift store and heading back into the parking lot.
   “Pity we had to leave before the end,” said Mr. Nancy. “I was kind of hoping to see the biggest artificial orchestra in the whole world.”
   “I’ve seen it,” said Czernobog. “It’s not so much.”


* * *

   The restaurant was ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonight’s dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them who didn’t have their own transportation.
   Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock in the first place, without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say.
   Shadow had a carful of Wednesday’s guests to ferry to the restaurant: the woman in the red sari sat in the front seat beside him. There were two men in the backseat: the squat, peculiar-looking young man whose name Shadow had not properly caught, but which sounded like Elvis and another man, in a dark suit, who Shadow could not remember.
   He had stood beside the man as he got into the car, had opened and closed the door for him, and was unable to remember anything about him. He turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at him, carefully noting his face, his hair, his clothes, making certain he would know him if he met him again, and turned back to start the car, to find that the man had slipped from his mind. An impression of wealth was left behind, but nothing more.
   I’m tired, thought Shadow. He glanced to his right and snuck a glance at the Indian woman. He noted the tiny silver necklace of skulls that circled her neck; her charm bracelet of heads and hands that jangled, like tiny bells, when she moved; the dark blue jewel on her forehead. She smelled of spices, of cardamom and nutmeg and flowers. Her hair was pepper-and-salt, and she smiled when she saw him look at her.
   “You call me Mama-ji,” she said.
   “I am Shadow, Mama-ji,” said Shadow.
   “And what do you think of your employer’s plans, Mister Shadow?”
   He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. “I don’t ask, he don’t tell,” he said.
   “If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”
   “It’s not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.
   The man in the backseat—not the peculiar-looking young man, the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said.
   The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.
   The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoeboxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips.
   “That’s some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver’s seat.
   “Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming.
   “No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don’t stop.”
   The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”
   Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars.
   Shadow pulled up at the restaurant, a big, barnlike structure, and he let his passengers off by the front door. He drove the car to the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant alone, in the cold, to clear his head.
   He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier. He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.
   Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back…
   “Hey bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn’t, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him from crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken.
   Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all, but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise.
   “The quarry are all inside,” said the half-familiar voice. “Everyone in position?” A crackle of a voice, half audible through a radio. “Let’s move in and round them all up.”
   “What about the big guy?” said another voice.
   “Package him up, take him out,” said the first voice.
   They put a baglike hood over Shadow’s head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away.


* * *

   There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn’t know, and didn’t care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door.
   He was hungry.
   The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after they’d ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked.
   He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached.
   The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls. He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant.
   His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins.
   He sat on the chair, at the card table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick.
   He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along.
   The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadow’s head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with, on its own, no possible use—for he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for real—calmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear.
   He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, the other hidden. He raised his hand to his mouth and blew on the visible coin, while slipping it into a classic palm, as the first two fingers took the hidden quarter out and presented it. The effect was that he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while.

   He did it over and over and over again.
   He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled, just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the stained green baize of the card table. And then, because he just couldn’t do it anymore, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya Polunochnaya had given him, and held onto it tightly, and waited.


* * *

   At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with dark hair and shiny black shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, had great hair, looked like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails; the other had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the card table, looking down at him.
   “How long have you been working for Cargo, sir?” asked one.
   “I don’t know what that is,” said Shadow.
   “He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. You’ve been seen with him, sir.”
   “I’ve been working for him for a couple of days.”
   “Don’t lie to us, sir,” said the spook with the glasses.
   “Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. But it’s still a couple of days.”
   The square-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadow’s ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. “We told you not to lie to us, sir,” he said, mildly. Then he let go.
   Each of the spooks had a gun bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not try to retaliate. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time, thought Shadow. Don’t tell them anything they don’t know already. Don’t ask questions.
   “These are dangerous people you’re palling around with, sir,” said the spook with glasses. “You will be doing your country a service by turning state’s evidence.” He smiled, sympathetically: I’m the good cop, said the smile.
   “I see,” said Shadow.
   “And if you don’t want to help us, sir,” said the square-jawed spook, “you can see what we’re like when we’re not happy.” He hit Shadow an openhanded blow across the stomach, knocking the breath from him. It wasn’t torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I’m the bad cop. He retched.
   “I would like to make you happy,” said Shadow, as soon as he could speak.
   “All we ask is your cooperation, sir.”
   “Can I ask…” gasped Shadow (don’t ask questions, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), “can I ask who I’ll be cooperating with?”
   “You want us to tell you our names?” asked the square-jawed spook. “You have to be out of your mind.”
   “No, he’s got a point,” said the spook with glasses. “It may make it easier for him to relate to us.” He looked at Shadow and smiled like a man advertising toothpaste. “Hi. I’m Mister Stone, sir. My colleague is Mister Wood.”
   “Actually,” said Shadow, “I meant, what agency are you with? CIA? FBI?”
   Stone shook his head. “Gee. It’s not as” easy as that anymore, sir. Things just aren’t that simple.”
   “The private sector,” said Wood, “the public sector. You know. There’s a lot of interplay these days.”
   “But I can assure you,” said Stone, with another smiley smile, “we are the good guys. Are you hungry, sir?” He reached into a pocket of his jacket, pulled out a Snickers bar. “Here. A gift.”
   “Thanks,” said Shadow. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and ate it.
   “I guess you’d like something to drink with that. Coffee? Beer?”
   “Water, please,” said Shadow.
   Stone walked to the door, knocked on it. He said something to the guard on the other side of the door, who nodded and returned a minute later with a polystyrene cup filled with cold water.
   “CIA,” said Wood. He shook his head, ruefully. “Those bozos. Hey, Stone. I heard a new CIA joke. Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”
   “I don’t know,” said Stone. “How can we be sure?”
   “He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Wood.
   They both laughed.
   “Feeling better now, sir?” asked Stone.
   “I guess.”
   “So why don’t you tell us what happened this evening, sir?”
   “We did some tourist stuff. Went to the House on the Rock. Went out for some food. You know the rest.”
   Stone sighed, heavily. Wood shook his head, as if disappointed, and kicked Shadow in the kneecap. The pain was excruciating. Then Wood pushed a fist slowly into Shadow’s back, just above the right kidney, and knuckled it, hard, and the pain was worse than the pain in Shadow’s knee.
   I’m bigger than either of them, he thought. I can take them. But they were armed; and even if he-somehow-killed or subdued them both, he’d still be locked in the cell with them. (But he’d have a gun. He’d have two guns.) (No.)
   Wood was keeping his hands away from Shadow’s face. No marks. Nothing permanent: just fists and feet on his torso and knees. It hurt, and Shadow clutched the Liberty dollar tight in the palm of his hand, and waited for it to be over.
   And after far too long a time the beating ended.
   “We’ll see you in a couple of hours, sir,” said Stone.
   “You know, Woody really hated to have to do that. We’re reasonable men. Like I said, we are the good guys. You’re on the wrong side. Meantime, why don’t you try to get a little sleep?”
   “You better start taking us seriously,” said Wood.
   “Woody’s got a point there, sir,” said Stone. “Think about it.”
   The door slammed closed behind them. Shadow wondered if they would turn out the light, but they didn’t, and it blazed into the room like a cold eye. Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.
   Time passed.
   He was fifteen again, and his mother was dying, and she was trying to tell him something very important, and he couldn’t understand her. He moved in his sleep and a shaft of pain moved him from half-sleep to half-waking, and he winced.
   Shadow shivered under the thin blanket. His right arm covered his eyes, blocking out the light of the bulb. He wondered whether Wednesday and the others were still at liberty, if they were even still alive. He hoped that they were.
   The silver dollar remained cold in his left hand. He could feel it there, as it had been during the beating. He wondered idly why it did not warm to his body temperature. Half asleep, now, and half delirious, the coin, and the idea of Liberty, and the moon, and Zorya Polunochnaya somehow became intertwined in one woven beam of silver light that shone from the depths to the heavens, and he rode the silver beam up and away from the pain and the heartache and the fear, away from the pain and, blessedly, back into dreams.
   From far away he could hear some kind of noise, but it was too late to think about it: he belonged to sleep now. A half-thought: he hoped it was not people coming to wake him up, to hit him or to shout at him. And then, he noticed with pleasure, he was really asleep, and no longer cold.


* * *

   Somebody somewhere was calling for help, loudly, in his dream or out of it.
   Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding new places that hurt as he rolled.
   Someone was shaking his shoulder.
   He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt.
   “Puppy?” said Laura. “You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon.”
   And there was a moment’s gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her.
   Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky.
   Shadow opened his eyes.
   “Where did all the blood come from?” he asked.
   “Other people,” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin.”
   “Which other people?” he asked.
   “The guards,” she said. “It’s okay. I killed them. You better move. I don’t think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you’ll freeze your butt off.”
   “You killed them?”
   She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative.
   “It’s easier to kill people, when you’re dead yourself,” she told him. “I mean, it’s not such a big deal. You’re not so prejudiced anymore.”
   “It’s still a big deal to me,” said Shadow.
   “You want to stay here until the morning crew comes?” she said. “You can if you like. I thought you’d like to get out of here.”
   “They’ll think I did it,” he said, stupidly.
   “Maybe,” she said. “Put on a coat, hon. You’ll freeze.”
   He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom and dropped onto the floor.
   His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes filled with candy bars.
   The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say who they, were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot.
   Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadow’s hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain.
   “That looks nice,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She smiled, prettily.
   “What about the others,” he asked. “Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they?” Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them.
   “There wasn’t anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock.”
   “You killed him while he was jerking himself off?”
   She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, uncomfortably. “I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn’t I? Here, take these.” They were chemical hand and foot warmers: thin pads—you broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them.
   “Look out for me? Yes,” he said, “you did.”
   She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. “You’re hurt,” she said.
   “I’m okay,” he said.
   He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought….
   The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by.
   They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known.
   “How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.
   She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn’t that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don’t use your credit cards and you should be fine.”
   “Where should I go?”
   She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. “The road’s that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”
   “Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed?”
   “Yeah,” she said. “I think I do know.”
   “I owe you,” said Shadow. “I’d still be in there if it wasn’t for you. I don’t think they had anything good planned for me.”
   “No,” she said. “I don’t think they did.”
   They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he’d seen, blank window-less metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.
   “Laura…What do you want?” he asked.
   “You really want to know?”
   “Yes. Please.”
   Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life, I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, it’s hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it’s easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don’t want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”
   “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
   “Make it happen, hon. You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”
   “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you?”
   But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird or the call of the first bird of dawn.
   Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.

Chapter 7

   As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular sense—for they are born and they die—they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details…and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.

Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Introduction, Hindu Myths (Penguin Books, 1975)


   Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.
   When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.
   Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the, numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.
   So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn’t answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly dejа-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.
   He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually he’d get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea that seemed both comforting and unlikely.
   There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing.
   What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. “It wasn’t me,” he heard himself saying, “it was my dead wife.” He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair…
   He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on—and to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted never to have gone to prison, for Laura still to be alive, for none of this ever to have happened.
   “I’m afraid that’s not exactly an option, m’boy,” he thought to himself, in Wednesday’s gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option. You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time…
   A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten tree.
   Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals stared at him from a skeletal elder bush, then returned to pecking at the clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds’ video-arcade trills and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they faded away.
   The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadow of a hill, and a black bird the size of a small dog was picking at its side with a large, wicked beak, rending and tearing gobbets of red meat from the corpse. The animal’s eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn spots were visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had died.
   The black bird cocked its head onto one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, “You shadow man.”
   “I’m Shadow,” said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.
   “Says he will see you in Kay-ro,” tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin’s ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn, Memory or Thought.
   “Kay-ro?” he asked.
   “In Egypt.”
   “How am I going to go to Egypt?”
   “Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.”
   “Look,” said Shadow, “I don’t want to seem like I’m—Jesus, look…” he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. “Okay. What I’m trying to say is I don’t want mysteries.”
   “Mysteries,” agreed the bird, helpfully.
   “What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It’s a line from a bad spy thriller.”
   “Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro.”
   “So you said. I’d like a little more information than that.”
   The bird half turned, and pulled another strip of raw venison from the fawn’s ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm.
   “Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called Shadow.
   The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.
   The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.
   “You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally been going.
   “Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”
   The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
   “Say ‘Nevermore,’ ” said Shadow.
   “Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together.
   In half an hour they reached a blacktop road on the edge of a town, and the raven flew back into the wood. Shadow observed a Culvers Frozen Custard Butterburgers sign, and, next to it, a gas station. He went into the Culvers, which was empty of customers. There was a keen young man with a shaven head behind the cash register. Shadow ordered two butterburgers and french fries. Then he went into the rest room to clean up. He looked a real mess. He did an inventory of the contents of his pockets: he had a few coins, including the silver Liberty dollar, a disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, three Snickers bars, five chemical heater pads, a wallet (with nothing more in it than his driver’s license and a credit card—he wondered how much longer the credit card had to live), and in the coat’s inside pocket, a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, his take from yesterday’s bank job. He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries and drank his coffee.
   He went back to the counter. “You want frozen custard?” asked the keen young man.
   “No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way.”
   The young man scratched his head-stubbled. “Not around here, Mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow.”
   “A fine idea,” said Shadow. “Thanks.”
   He walked across the melting snow, from the Culvers parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand and feet warmers.
   “Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car?” he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to.
   “Let me think,” she said. “We’re kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going?”
   “Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”
   “I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me an Illinois map from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottom—most corner of the state. “There it is.”
   “Cairo?”
   “That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. But the one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.
   “Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south.
   “Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”
   “So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go?” asked Shadow.
   “Drive.”
   “Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.
   “Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my brother-in-law calls ‘em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me up, say Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess. Say, maybe he’d be interested in your old car. For scrap or something.”
   “It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”
   “He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why?”
   “Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks?”
   She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don’t you tell him I said so.”
   “Would you call him?” asked Shadow.
   “I’m way ahead of you,” she told him, and she picked up the phone. “Hon? It’s Mattie. You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy a car.”


* * *

   The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that might well have been bananas. He couldn’t tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow. Still, of all the vehicles in Mattie’s brother-in-law’s back lot, it was the only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles.
   The deal was done in cash, and Mattie’s brother-in-law never asked for Shadow’s name or social security number or for anything except the money.
   Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said he’d left Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.
   He stopped and ate at a place called Mom’s, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon.
   Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the town’s under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate basketball tournament, or that the town was the home of the Illinois girls’ under-16s wrestling semifinalist.
   He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly side-swiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the backseat, and fell asleep.
   Darkness; a sensation of falling—as if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it…

   Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked.
   Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the man’s body, skin the color of brick clay.
   “Can’t you people leave me be?” asked Shadow. “I just want to sleep.”
   The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadow’s head said, “Where are you going, Shadow?”
   “Cairo.”
   “Why?”
   “Where else have I got to go? It’s where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead.” In Shadow’s dream, with the power of dream logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesday’s mead three times, and sealed the pact—what other choice of action did he have?
   The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. “The storm is coming,” he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks.
   “So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question?”
   There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. “Ask.”
   “Is this true? Are these people really gods? It’s all so…” He paused. Then he said, “impossible,” which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he could do.
   “What are gods?” asked the buffalo man.
   “I don’t know,” said Shadow.
   There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold.
   Tap. Tap. Tap.
   Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night.
   Tap. Tap. Someone said, “Hey, mister,”, and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made some waking-up noises, and then he said, “Hi.”
   “You all right? You sick? You been drinking?” The voice was high—a woman’s or a boy’s.
   “I’m fine,” said Shadow. “Hold on.” He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up.
   “Whoa. You’re pretty big.”
   “That’s what they tell me,” said Shadow. “Who are you?”
   “I’m Sam,” said the voice.
   “Boy Sam or girl Sam?”
   “Girl Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I’d do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped.”
   “Okay, girl Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road.”
   “Why? Are you a crazed killer or something?”
   “No,” said Shadow, “I need to take a leak and I’d like just the smallest amount of privacy.”
   “Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I can’t even pee if there’s someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder syndrome.”
   “Now, please.”
   She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fence post for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night.
   “You still there?” he asked.
   “Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.”
   “Thank you. Do you want something?”
   “Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he’s probably still alive.”
   “You live around here?”
   “Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”
   “That’s not safe.”
   “I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still alive. Where are you headed?”
   “I’m going as far as Cairo.”
   “Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to El Paso. Staying with my aunt for the holidays.”
   “I can’t take you all the way,” said Shadow.
   “Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. It’s a few hours south. You know where you are now?”
   “No,” said Shadow. “I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway Fifty-two?”
   “The next town’s Peru,” said Sam. “Not the one in Peru. The one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down.” Shadow bent down, and the girl sniffed his face. “Okay. I don’t smell booze. You can drive. Let’s go.”
   “What makes you think I’m giving you a ride?”
   “Because I’m a damsel in distress,” she said. “And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote ‘Wash me!’ on your rear window?” Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this car.
   “No,” he said, “I didn’t.”
   She climbed in. “It was me,” she said. “I wrote it. While there was still enough light to see.”
   Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. “Left”, said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car.
   “You haven’t said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”
   “Are you human?” asked Shadow. “An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being?”
   “Sure,” she said.
   “Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”
   “Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that ‘oh shit I’m in the wrong car with a crazy man’ feeling.”
   “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve had that one. What would you find reassuring?”
   “Just tell me you’re not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something.”
   He thought for a moment. “You know, I’m really not.”
   “You had to think about it though, didn’t you?”
   “Done my time. Never killed anybody.”
   “Oh.”
   They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him.
   “What were you in prison for?”
   “I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”
   “Did they deserve it?”
   Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”
   “Would you do it again?”
   “Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”
   “Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”
   “Not that I know of.”
   “You looked like it, was all.”
   “Sorry to disappoint you.”
   “S’okay. You hungry?”
   Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.
   “There’s a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too.”
   Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn’t bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.
   “Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”
   Shadow nodded. “Tell you what. I’ll toss you for it,” he said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”
   “Let me see the coin first,” she said, suspiciously. “I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter.”
   She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her.
   “Tails,” she said, happily. “Dinner’s on you.”
   “Yup,” he said. “You can’t win them all.”
   Shadow ordered the meat loaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasn’t. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn’t work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. “When they see the corpses of their friends,” said a spokesman, “they’ll know that we don’t want them here.”
   The food came mounded high on plates and steaming, more than any one person could eat.
   “So what’s in Cairo?” asked Sam, with her mouth full.
   “No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there.”
   “What do you do?”
   “I’m an errand boy.”
   She smiled. “Well,” she said, “you aren’t mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of shit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway?”
   He shrugged, carried on eating.
   Sam narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you’re a banana smuggler,” she said. “You haven’t asked me what I do yet.”
   “I figure you’re at school.”
   “UW Madison.”
   “Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women’s studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffeehouse to help cover the rent.”
   She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “How the fuck did you do that?”
   “What? Now you say, no, actually I’m studying Romance languages and ornithology.”
   “So you’re saying that was a lucky guess or something?”
   “What was?”
   She stared at him with dark eyes. “You are one peculiar guy, Mister…I don’t know your name.”
   “They call me Shadow,” he said.
   She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. She stopped talking, put her head down, finished her lasagna.
   “Do you know why it’s called Egypt?” asked Shadow when Sam finished eating.
   “Down Cairo way? Yeah. It’s in the delta of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Like Cairo in Egypt, in the Nile delta.”
   “That makes sense.”
   She sat back in her chair, ordered coffee and chocolate cream pie, ran a hand through her black hair. “You married, Mister Shadow?” And then, as he hesitated, “Gee. I just asked another tricky question, didn’t I?”
   “They buried her on Thursday,” he said, picking his words with care. “She was killed in a car crash.”
   “Oh. God. Jesus. I’m sorry.”
   “Me too.”
   An awkward pause. “My half sister lost her kid, my nephew, end of last year. It’s rough.”
   “Yeah. It is. What did he die of?”
   She sipped her coffee. “We don’t know. We don’t even really know that he’s dead. He just vanished. But he was only thirteen. It was the middle of last winter. My sister was pretty broken up about it.”
   “Were there any, any clues?” He sounded like a TV cop. He tried again. “Did they suspect foul play?” That sounded worse.
   “They suspected my noncustodial asshole brother-in-law, his father. Who was asshole enough to have stolen him away. Probably did. But this is in a little town in the North Woods. Lovely, sweet, pretty little town where no one ever locks their doors.” She sighed, shook her head. She held her coffee cup in both hands. “Are you sure you aren’t part Indian?”
   “Not that I know. It’s possible. I don’t know much about my father. I guess my ma would have told me if he was Native American, though. Maybe.”
   Again the mouth twist. Sam gave up halfway through her chocolate cream pie: the slice was half the size of her head. She pushed the plate across the table to Shadow. “You want?” He smiled, said, “Sure,” and finished it off.
   The waitress handed them the check, and Shadow paid.
   “Thanks,” said Sam.

  It was getting colder now. The car coughed a couple of times before it started. Shadow drove back onto the road, and kept going south. “You ever read a guy named Herodotus?” he asked.
   “Jesus. What?”
   “Herodotus. You ever read his Histories?”
   “You know,” she said, dreamily, “I don’t get it. I don’t get how you talk, or the words you use or anything. One moment you’re a big dumb guy, the next you’re reading my friggin’ mind, and the next we’re talking about Herodotus. So no. I have not read Herodotus. I’ve heard about him. Maybe on NPR. Isn’t he the one they call the father of lies?”
   “I thought that was the Devil.”
   “Yeah, him too. But they were talking about Herodotus saying there were giant ants and gryphons guarding gold mines, and how he made this stuff up.”
   “I don’t think so. He wrote what he’d been told. It’s like, he’s writing these histories. And they’re mostly pretty good histories. Loads of weird little details—like, did you know, in Egypt, if a particularly beautiful girl or the wife of a lord or whatever died, they wouldn’t send her to the embalmer for three days? They’d let her body spoil in the heat first.”
   “Why? Oh, hold on. Okay, I think I know why. Oh, that’s disgusting.”
   “And there’re battles in there, all sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods. Some guy is running back to report on the outcome of a battle and he’s running and running, and he sees Pan in a glade. And Pan says, ‘Tell them to build me a temple here.’ So he says okay, and runs the rest of the way back. And he reports the battle news, and then says, ‘Oh, and by the way, Pan wants you to build him a temple.’ It’s really matter-of-fact, you know?”
   “So there are stories with gods in them. What are you trying to say? That these guys had hallucinations?”
   “No,” said Shadow. “That’s not it.”
   She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
   “I like my theory better,” said Shadow.
   “What’s your theory?”
   “That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time.”
   “Oh.” Silence: only the rattling of the car, the roar of the engine, the growling of the muffler—which did not sound healthy. Then, “Do you think they’re still there?”
   “Where?”
   “Greece. Egypt. The islands. Those places. Do you think if you walked where those people walked you’d see the gods?”
   “Maybe. But I don’t think people’d know that was what they’d seen.”
   “I bet it’s like space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
   “I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow. “And they didn’t mutilate cattle themselves. They got people to do it for them.”
   She chuckled. They drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, “Hey, that reminds me of my favorite god story, from Comparative Religion One-oh-one. You want to hear it?”
   “Sure,” said Shadow.
   “Okay. This is one about Odin. The Norse god. You know? There was some Viking king on a Viking ship—this was back in the Viking times, obviously—and they were becalmed, so he says he’ll sacrifice one of his men to Odin if Odin will send them a wind and get them to land. Okay. The wind comes up, and they get to land. So, on land, they draw lots to figure out who gets sacrificed—and it’s the king himself. Well, he’s not happy about this, but they figure out that they can hang him in effigy and not hurt him. They take a calf’s intestines and loop them loosely around the guy’s neck, and they tie the other end to a thin branch, and they take a reed instead of a spear and poke him with it and go ‘Okay, you’ve been hung’—hanged?—whatever—’you’ve been sacrificed to Odin.’ ”
   The road curved: Another Town (pop. 300), home of the runner-up to the state under-12s speed-skating championship, two huge giant-economy-sized funeral parlors on each side of the road, and how many funeral parlors do you need, Shadow wondered, when you only have three hundred people…?
   “Okay. As soon as they say Odin’s name, the reed transforms into a spear and stabs the guy in the side, the calf intestines become a thick rope, the branch becomes the bough of a tree, and the tree pulls up, and the ground drops away, and the king is left hanging there to die with a wound in his side and his face going black. End of story. White people have some fucked-up gods, Mister Shadow.”
   “Yes,” said Shadow. “You’re not white?”
   “I’m Cherokee,” she said.
   “Full-blooded?”
   “Nope. Only four pints. My mom was white. My dad was a real reservation Indian. He came out this way, eventually married my mom, had me, then when they split he went back to Oklahoma.”
   “He went back to the reservation?”
   “No. He borrowed money and opened a Taco Bell knock-off called Taco Bill’s. He does okay. He doesn’t like me. Says I’m half-breed.”
   “I’m sorry.”
   “He’s a jerk. I’m proud of my Indian blood. It helps pay my college tuition. Hell, one day it’ll probably help get me a job, if I can’t sell my bronzes.”
   “There’s always that,” said Shadow.
   He stopped in El Paso, Illinois (pop. 2500), to let Sam out at a down-at-heel house on the edge of the town. A large wire-framed model of a reindeer covered in twinkling lights stood in the front yard. “You want to come in?” she asked. “My aunt would give you a coffee.”
   “No,” he said. “I’ve got to keep moving.”
   She smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time, vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. “You’re fucked up, Mister. But you’re cool.”
   “I believe that’s what they call the human condition,” said Shadow. “Thanks for the company.”
   “No problem,” she said. “If you see any gods on the road to Cairo, you make sure and say hi to them from me.” She got out of the car, and went to the door of the house. She pressed a doorbell and stood there at the door without looking back. Shadow waited until the door was opened and she was safely inside before he put his foot down and headed back for the highway. He passed through Normal, and Bloomington, and Lawndale.
   At eleven that night Shadow started shaking. He was just entering Middletown. He decided he needed sleep, or just not to drive any longer, and he pulled up in front of a Night’s Inn, paid thirty-five dollars, cash in advance, for his ground-floor room, and went into the bathroom. A sad cockroach lay on its back in the middle of the tiled floor. Shadow took a towel and cleaned off the inside of the tub, then ran the water. In the main room he took off his clothes and put them on the bed. The bruises on his torso were dark and vivid. He sat in the tub, watching the color of the bathwater change. Then, naked, he washed his socks and briefs and T-shirt in the basin, wrung them out, and hung them on the clothesline that pulled out from the wall above the bathtub. He left the cockroach where it was, out of respect for the dead.
   Shadow climbed into the bed. He wondered about watching an adult movie, but the pay-per-view device by the phone needed a credit card, and it was too risky. Then again, he was not convinced that it would make him feel any better to watch other people have sex that he wasn’t having. He turned on the TV for company, pressed the sleep button on the remote three times, which would make the TV set turn itself off automatically in forty-five minutes. It was a quarter to midnight.
   The picture was motel—fuzzy, and the colors swam across the screen. He flipped from late show to late show in the televisual wasteland, unable to focus. Someone was demonstrating something that did something in the kitchen, and replaced a dozen other kitchen utensils, none of which Shadow possessed. Flip. A man in a suit explained that these were the end times and that Jesus—a four or five-syllable word the way the man pronounced it—would make Shadow’s business prosper and thrive if Shadow sent him money. Flip. An episode of M*A*S*H ended and a Dick Van Dyke Show began.
   Shadow hadn’t seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show for years, but there was something comforting about the 1965 black-and-white world it painted, and he put the channel changer down beside the bed, and turned off the bedside light. He watched the show, eyes slowly closing, aware that something was odd. He had not seen many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, so he was not surprised that it was an episode he could not remember seeing before. What he found strange was the tone.
   All the regulars were concerned about Rob’s drinking. He was missing days at work. They went to his home: he had locked himself in the bedroom, and had to be persuaded to come out. He was staggering drunk, but still pretty funny. His friends, played by Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, left after getting some good gags in. Then, when Rob’s wife went to remonstrate with him, he hit her, hard, in the face. She sat down on the floor and began to cry, not in that famous Mary Tyler Moore wail, but in small, helpless sobs, hugging herself and whispering, “Don’t hit me, please, I’ll do anything, just don’t hit me anymore.”
   “What the fuck is this?” said Shadow, aloud.
   The picture dissolved into phosphor-dot fuzz. When it came back, The Dick Van Dyke Show had, inexplicably, become I Love Lucy. Lucy was trying to persuade Ricky to let her replace their old icebox with a new refrigerator. When he left, however, she walked over to the couch and sat down, crossing her ankles, resting her hands in her lap, and staring out patiently in black and white across the years.
   “Shadow?” she said. “We need to talk.”
   Shadow said nothing. She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lit it with an expensive silver lighter, put the lighter away. “I’m talking to you,” she said. “Well?”
   “This is crazy,” said Shadow.
   “Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.”
   “Whatever. Lucille Ball talking to me from the TV is weirder by several orders of magnitude than anything that’s happened to me so far,” said Shadow.
   “It’s not Lucille Ball. It’s Lucy Ricardo. And you know something—I’m not even her. It’s just an easy way to look, given the context. That’s all.” She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.
   “Who are you?” asked Shadow.

   “Okay,” she said. “Good question. I’m the idiot box. I’m the TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray: I’m the boob tube. I’m the little shrine the family gathers to adore.”
   “You’re the television? Or someone in the television?”
   “The TV’s the altar. I’m what people are sacrificing to.”
   “What do they sacrifice?” asked Shadow.
   “Their time, mostly,” said Lucy. “Sometimes each other.” She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.
   “You’re a god?” said Shadow.
   Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. “You could say that,” she said.
   “Sam says hi,” said Shadow.
   “What? Who’s Sam? What are you talking about?”
   Shadow looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past twelve. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “So, Lucy-on-the-TV. What do we need to talk about? Too many people have needed to talk recently. Normally it ends with someone hitting me.”
   The camera moved in for a close-up: Lucy looked concerned, her lips pursed. “I hate that. I hate that people were hurting you, Shadow. I’d never do that, honey. No, I want to offer you a job.”
   “Doing what?”
   “Working for me. I heard about the trouble you had with the Spookshow, and I was impressed with how you dealt with it. Efficient, no-nonsense, effective. Who’d’ve thought you had it in you? They are really pissed.”
   “Really?”
   “They underestimated you, sweetheart. Not a mistake I’m going to make. I want you in my camp.” She stood up, walked toward the camera. “Look at it like this, Shadow: we are the coming thing. We’re shopping malls—your friends are crappy roadside attractions. Hell, we’re on-line malls, while your friends are sitting by the side of the highway selling homegrown produce from a cart. No-they aren’t even fruit sellers. Buggy-whip vendors. Whalebone-corset repairers. We are now and tomorrow. Your friends aren’t even yesterday anymore.”
   It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, “Did you ever meet a fat kid in a limo?”
   She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. “The technical boy? You met the technical boy? Look, he’s a good kid. He’s one of us. He’s just not good with people he doesn’t know. When you’re working for us, you’ll see how amazing he is.”
   “And if I don’t want to work for you, I-Love-Lucy?”
   There was a knock on the door of Lucy’s apartment, and Ricky’s voice could be heard offstage, asking Loo-cy what was kee pin’ her so long, they was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucy’s cartoonish face. “Hell,” she said. “Look, whatever the old guys are paying you, I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whatever they’re giving you, I can give you so much more.” She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile. “You name it, honey. What do you need?” She began to undo the buttons of her blouse. “Hey,” she said. “You ever wanted to see Lucy’s tits?”
   The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past midnight. “Not really,” said Shadow.
   He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in cliches.
   And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day.


* * *

   Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town that was home to the runner-up of the state women’s under 16s three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasn’t all that was holding it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash. He was surprised to discover that the car was, when clean—against all reason—white, and pretty much free of rust. He drove on.
   The sky was impossibly blue, and white industrial smoke rising from factory chimneys was frozen in the sky, like a photograph. A hawk launched itself from a dead tree and flew toward him, wings strobing in the sunlight like a series of stop-motion photographs.
   At some point he found himself heading into East St. Louis. He attempted to avoid it and instead found himself driving through what appeared to be a red-light district in an industrial park. Eighteen-wheelers and bjuge rigs were parked outside buildings that looked like temporary warehouses, that claimed to be 24 Hour Nite Clubs and, in one case, The Best Peap Show in Town. Shadow shook his head, and drove on. Laura had loved to dance, clothed or naked (and, on several memorable evenings, moving from one state to the other), and he had loved to watch her.
   Lunch was a sandwich and a can of Coke in a town called Red Bud.
   He passed a valley filled with the wreckage of thousands of yellow bulldozers, tractors, and Caterpillars. He wondered if this was the bulldozers’ graveyard, where the bulldozers went to die.
   He drove past the Pop-a-Top Lounge. He drove through Chester (“Home of Popeye”). He noticed that the houses had started to gain pillars out front, that even the shabbiest, thinnest house now had its white pillars, proclaiming it, in someone’s eyes, a mansion. He drove over a big, muddy river, and laughed out loud when he saw that the name of it, according to the sign, was the Big Muddy River. He saw a covering of brown kudzu over three winter-dead trees, twisting them into strange, almost human shapes: they could have been witches, three bent old crones ready to reveal his fortune.
   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.”


* * *


Somewhere in America

   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, stem, 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?”