American Gods

Wednesday was smiling, and Nancy was laughing delightedly, an old man’s cackle, and even the dour Czernobog seemed to be enjoying himself. Shadow felt as if a weight were suddenly lifted from his back: three old men were enjoying themselves, riding the World’s Largest Carousel. So what if they all did get thrown out of the place? Wasn’t it worth it, worth anything, to say that you had ridden on the World’s Largest Carousel? Wasn’t it worth it to have traveled on one of those glorious monsters?

Shadow inspected a bulldog, and a mer-creature, and an elephant with a golden howdah, and then he climbed on the back of a creature with an eagle’s head and the body of a tiger, and held on tight.

The rhythm of the “Blue Danube” waltz rippled and rang and sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was to ride the carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the center of everything, and the world revolved around him.

Shadow heard himself laugh, over the sound of the music. He was happy. It was as if the last thirty-six hours had never happened, as if the last three years had not happened, as if his life had evaporated into the daydream of a small child, riding the carousel in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, on his first trip back to the States, a marathon journey by ship and by car, his mother standing there, watching him proudly, and himself sucking his melting Popsicle, holding on tightly, hoping that the music would never stop, the carousel would never slow, the ride would never end. He was going around and around and around again . . .

Then the lights went out, and Shadow saw the gods.

CHAPTER SIX

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.