American Gods

The orange night-sky glimmers to the west with distant lightning, somewhere out to sea, and Bilquis knows that the rain will be starting soon. She sighs. She does not want to be caught in the rain. She will return to her apartment, she decides, and take a bath, and shave her legs, it seems to her she is always shaving her legs, and sleep.

“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth,” she whispers. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.”

She begins to walk up a side-street, walking up the hillside to where her car is parked.

Headlights come up behind her, slowing as they approach her, and she turns her face to the street and smiles. The smile freezes when she sees the car is a white stretch limo. Men in stretch limos want to fuck in stretch limos, not in the privacy of Bilquis’s shrine. Still, it might be an investment. Something for the future.

A tinted window hums down and Bilquis walks over to the limo, smiling. “Hey, honey,” she says. “You looking for something?”

“Sweet loving,” says a voice from the back of the stretch. She peers inside, as much as she can through the open window: she knows a girl who got into a stretch with five drunk football players and got hurt real bad, but there’s only one john in there that she can see, and he looks kind of on the young side. He doesn’t feel like a worshiper, but money, good money that’s passed from his hand to hers, that’s an energy in its own right—baraka they called it, once on a time—which she can use and frankly these days, every little helps.

“How much?” he asks.

“Depends on what you want and how long you want it for,” she says. “And whether you can afford it.” She can smell something smoky drifting out of the limo window. It smells like burning wires and overheating circuit boards. The door is pushed open from inside.

“I can pay for anything I want,” says the john. She leans into the car and looks around. There’s nobody else in there, just the john, a puffy-faced kid who doesn’t even look old enough to drink. Nobody else, so she gets in.

“Rich kid, huh?” she says.

“Richer than rich,” he tells her, edging along the leather seat towards her. He moves awkwardly. She smiles at him.

“Mm. Makes me hot, honey,” she tells him. “You must be one of them dot-coms I read about?”

He preens then, puffs like a bullfrog. “Yeah. Among other things. I’m a technical boy.” The car moves off.

“So,” he says. “Tell me, Bilquis, how much just to suck my cock?”

“What you call me?”

“Bilquis,” he says, again. And then he sings, in a voice not made for singing, “You are an immaterial girl living in a material world.” There is something rehearsed about his words, as if he’s practiced this exchange in front of a mirror.

She stops smiling, and her face changes, becomes wiser, sharper, harder. “What do you want?”

“I told you. Sweet loving.”

“I’ll give you whatever you want,” she says. She needs to get out of the limo. It’s moving too fast for her to throw herself from the car, she figures, but she’ll do it if she can’t talk her way out of this. Whatever’s happening here, she doesn’t like it.

“What I want. Yes.” He pauses. His tongue runs over his lips. “I want a clean world. I want to own tomorrow. I want evolution, devolution, and revolution. I want to move our kind from the fringes of the slipstream to the higher ground of the mainstream. You people are underground. That’s wrong. We need to take the spotlight and shine. Front and center. You people have been so far underground for so long you’ve lost the use of your eyes.”

“My name’s Ayesha,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s another girl on that corner, her name Bilquis. We could go back to Sunset, you could have both of us…”

“Oh, Bilquis,” he says, and he sighs, theatrically. “There’s only so much belief to go around. They’re reaching the end of what they can give us. The credibility gap.” And then he sings, once again, in his tuneless nasal voice, “You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.” The limo takes a corner too fast, and he tumbles across the seat into her. The driver of the car is hidden behind tinted glass. An irrational conviction strikes her, that nobody is driving the car, that the white limo is driving through Beverly Hills like Herbie the Love Bug, under its own power.

Then the john reaches out his hand and taps on the tinted glass.

The car slows, and before it has stopped moving Bilquis has pushed open the door and she half-jumps, half-falls out onto the blacktop. She’s on a hillside road. To the left of her is a steep hill, to the right is a sheer drop. She starts to run down the road.

The limo sits there, unmoving.