American Gods

The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them. A spider edged across his face, and he woke. He shook his head, dislodging or frightening it, and returned to his dreams—and now an elephant-headed man, potbellied, one tusk broken, was riding toward him on the back of a huge mouse. The elephant-headed man curled his trunk toward Shadow and said, “If you had invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might have been avoided.” Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all, and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly empty. He shrugged arm after arm after arm in a peculiar fluid motion, and looked at Shadow, his face unreadable.

“It’s in the trunk,” Shadow told the elephant man. He had been watching as the flickering tail vanished.

The elephant man nodded his huge head, and said, “Yes. In the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You will lose many things. But do not lose this,” and then the rain began, and Shadow was tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep into full wakefulness. The shivering intensified until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders that built upon each other. He willed himself to stop, but still he shivered, his teeth banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was real pain there, too, a deep, knifelike pain that covered his body with tiny, invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.

He opened his mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it felt like a blow to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and afterimage. Then the thunder, a crack and a boom and a rumble, and, as the thunder echoed, the rain redoubled. In the rain and the night the shivering abated; the knife blades were put away. Shadow no longer felt the cold, or rather, he felt only the cold, but the cold had now become part of himself.

Shadow hung from the tree while the lightning flickered and forked across the sky, and the thunder subsided into an omnipresent rumbling, with occasional bangs and roars like distant bombs exploding in the night. The wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying him, cutting to the bone; and Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun.

A strange joy rose within Shadow then, and he started laughing as the rain washed his naked skin and the lightning flashed and thunder rumbled so loudly that he could barely hear himself laugh. He exulted.

He was alive. He had never felt like this. Ever.

If he did die, he thought, if he died right now, here on the tree, it would be worth it to have had this one, perfect, mad moment.

“Hey!” he shouted at the storm. “Hey! It’s me! I’m here!”

He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there too exhausted to move.

At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesday’s dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquel’s table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember them.

By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere.

And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.

It seemed to him that the tree reached from hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.