Little Gods Read online

  I sit back down, the oppressive weight suddenly gone, making me feel impossibly light by comparison—as if I could float away, as if no one I loved had ever died, as if the sun were filling my veins. But that thrill leaches slowly away, returning to me to the grayness, the neutrality, that I've felt since Emily died.

  I fall asleep, which is really only another flavor of oblivion.

  I wake to find a man dressed in a threadbare black suit sitting on the edge of the hearth, cleaning his fingernails with a folding pocketknife. I immediately think of him as a preacher, as he resembles somewhat the country preacher of the small church my family attended when I was young, though he is clearly not the same man. He has black hair, a bit mussed, and a single heavy eyebrow that looks almost too hairy to be real. His face is middle-aged, hale and hearty, and when he looks up at me his eyes are blue and twinkling.

  “Boo,” he says, softly.

  “Who are you?” I demand, irritable from being just-awake, irritable at all these incomprehensible intrusions, all these distractions from the grayness of my first week without Emily, the first of who knows how many weeks I'll be able to bear.

  “I'm here to help,” he says, sounding sure and self-satisfied. “A couple of the girls told me there was something funny about you, that you could see them, so I came to investigate things personally. And here I am, and here you are, seeing me.” He stands up, folds his knife, taps it against his palm. He makes a peculiarly medieval sort of bow. “I'm the King of Grief, Gatekeeper of the Dead Places, and a Gambler of Bad Fortunes."

  I don't know what to make of him. “Those women...” I say.

  He waves his hand dismissively. “Just little goddesses, handmaids, field workers, don't mind them. The one in the kitchen was the goddess of scents with sad associations, the one with the big black skirt was the goddess of heavy hearts. You don't need to think about them. I've taken a personal interest in you, because of your ... peculiar vision. You can see us, and that means you're a special man, a man who deserves more than bad luck."

  I look at him blankly; it is as if I am observing all this through a pane of dirty glass, as if it is taking place inside an aquarium. Little gods of grief? Like Emily's little gods of joy, of love? Is this the route my madness has taken, to make me inhabit a darker version of the world my wife imagined? How can this man be the King of Grief, with his threadbare suit, his greasy hair? Just looking at him, I know he has bad breath, and his teeth are crooked when he smiles. His eyes shine, but it seems to me that the shine is like that of oil on a rain puddle—full of rainbows, but ultimately foul. Still, who am I to question my own delusions, to question the face of a god?

  He sits back down on the hearth and leans forward, elbows on knees, rubbing his hands together briskly. “Now then. What will you give me to get Emily back?"

  I sit up straighter, as if I've been given an electric shock, and the grayness recedes, replaced by a furtive and desperate kind of hope. “What?” I say. “What do you mean?"

  He looks annoyed, his single eyebrow bristling and drawing down. “A bargain,” he says, enunciating plainly. “You've heard the stories, haven't you? A man goes into the underworld to fetch out his dead wife, a woman gathers the dismembered pieces of her lover and begs the gods to put him back together, it's a classic tale, and here you are, in the middle of it. But it's a bargain, and I need something in return, if you want Emily back."

  “Anything,” I say, not caring if this is a delusion, not caring if I've gone insane—better an insane world with Emily alive than a sane world without her. But of course that's a contradiction in terms; no world in which my beautiful wife is dead can be called sane.

  “Your left eye?” he asks, flicking open his pocketknife, showing me the shiny blade. He grins, and there are bits of gristle and meat stuck in his teeth. “That's more or less what Odin gave up for wisdom—is your dead wife worth as much to you?"

  I think of the knife, the blade, the pain that would come, my vision forever dimmed—but I'd have Emily. Would I give up an eye to look upon her again?

  I don't even question. If I'm insane, insane enough to see and hear this, then my mind is lost beyond redemption. But if it's real, if this offer is real, how can I refuse it, how can I even risk a hesitation?

  “Give me the knife,” I say, holding out my hand. “I'll do it."

  He laughs heartily. “Good man! But you're too eager, that's no way to bargain. Your left eye is hardly anything, after all. Perhaps if you also sacrificed an ear. Van Gogh cut off his ear for a whore—is your wife worth as much flesh as a whore, hmm?"

  I clench my fists, furious, and say, “Don't toy with me. I'll give anything for my wife. If you are who you say, you know that."

  “Oh, yes,” he says, voice suddenly like velvet, but even that image is rotten, and I imagine tattered red velvet eaten by moths. “I know. But would you give your life? Would you plunge this blade"—and suddenly the blade is longer, ten inches long, a foot, length sliding from the hilt like a cat's claw from a paw—"into your eye, into your brain, knowing your death would bring your wife back to life?"

  I hesitate. Death? By my own hand?

  “I see,” he says, sounding satisfied, flipping the knife closed. “I thought you wouldn't. I mean, just because you caused her death, that's no reason for you to give up your own life."

  I tremble, but not from anger, from something different, more brittle, more sharp. “I didn't,” I whisper. “The boy, the boy with the gun—"

  “He just wanted money,” the man said. “But you had to shout at Emily, call the boy's attention to her, startle her, startle him. If you'd just kept your mouth shut, she wouldn't be dead. And yet you"—his contempt is total, I am as useless as the gristle caught in his teeth—"you won't give up your life for hers."

  He is right. He is absolutely right. “Give me the knife,” I say. “And give Emily back to the world."

  “That's my boy,” he says, and flips the knife over, and holds it out to me—

  The sound of wings, battering at glass. Both of us look at the windows, and there are butterflies there. No, not butterflies, white moths. The man, the King of Grief, whimpers. “Shit,” he says.

  I smell dust.

  A woman glides into the room from the kitchen. She has olive skin and otherworldly, golden eyes. Her long dark hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she wears white pants and a white shirt; they could be silk pajamas. Her feet are bare. She looks at the man on the hearth. “You,” she says, and the disappointment in her voice is heavy and inescapable. The man cringes. “Get out of here,” she says.

  “I was only doing my job,” he mutters, folding his knife.

  “Away,” she says, and the command in her voice is the command of the mind moving a muscle—it cannot possibly be disobeyed.

  The man looks at me, scowls, and then climbs headfirst up the chimney. A moment later his feet disappear from view.

  I wonder who this woman can be, to reprimand the King of Grief, and I hate her for driving him away on the cusp of my absolution, my sacrifice for Emily's salvation.

  “He is no King,” she says, looking at me, and in her eyes I see long years of looking at gray slabs of stone, of peering through air thick with dust. “He is a petty thing with pretensions, and I regret to admit that he is one of mine.” She sits down beside me on the couch, and it is this unassuming, perfectly normal gesture as much as anything that makes me believe her. “I am the goddess of grief,” she says matter-of-factly, and I don't hear the grandiosity, the capitalization-of-words, that I heard when the man said something similar. “He is the little god of guilt and bargains. A natural part of grief, for many, and therefore necessary to my employment ... but his spirit is meaner than those of most of my helpers. When he realized you could see us, that he could interact with you directly...” She shrugs. “He chose to violate all protocols and do so. I apologize for his behavior."

  I nod. Tentative, hopeful, I say, “What he said, about bringing Emily back
, about bargains, can you...” But I trail off, because her eyes are sad now, full of twilight. I slump. I put my face in my hands but don't cry.

  “I'm sorry,” she says, and I believe her, but it doesn't help.

  “If there are gods, then is there something more, a place we go when we die, will I ever see her again?"

  “I am concerned with the living,” she says simply. “Grief is my work, from beginning to end. The causes of grief, the resolutions ... I cannot speak to those things."

  I am not angry, only empty. I wonder if I am not angry because she does not wish me to be angry, if she controls me that much.

  “It is ... unusual, your situation,” she says. “Not unheard-of, but rare. A loss such as yours can sometimes trigger deeper understanding, deeper vision. Needless to say, this changes everything. The process is made more complicated. By seeing us, knowing we're here, you interfere with our work."

  “I think I can be devastated without your help,” I say, but without as much bite as I would wish.

  “Oh, yes.” She nods, her hands folded neatly in her white lap. “Without a doubt. You can be destroyed by your loss, emptied out and drained. But without our help ... it is unlikely that you will come out whole on the other side."

  “It's supposed to get easier with time,” I say.

  She smiles, perhaps, but the light touches her slantwise, so I can't be sure. “Yes. I make it so."

  “I don't care. Without Emily, nothing matters.” And then, bitterly: “And it is my fault that she died."

  “I can help,” she says, and I hear the pattering of moths again, white moths against the windows. “The process is broken, but ... I can make you forget. Carry away your memories, carry away your pain. This house and everything in it"—she makes a sweeping gesture—"is an engine of grief. But that engine cannot run smoothly, now; your perception ruins that. Let me soothe you. Let me make it easy. Let me take it all away."

  The moths are inside now, flying around her head, and I remember reading once about a sort of moth that drinks tears to survive, clustering around weeping eyes to drink. I wonder if these are that sort of moth, and think: of course they are. They can drink my pain away, and leave cool white flutterings where the hurt used to be. That's her offer, her gift.

  Anger penetrates my grayness. “No,” I say. “No, no, no. No forgetfulness. I loved her. I won't give that up."

  She brings her hands together, as if in prayer, and kisses her fingertips. The moths swarm together for a moment, then disappear like candle flames going out. “Then another way,” she says, and puts her gentle hand on my knee. “We'll find another way."

  I do cry, then.

  She stays with me. She holds me while I shiver on my too-empty bed. She makes me drink water, but she won't let me take pills; instead, she sings to me when sleep won't come, and though I suspect the songs are funeral dirges from some lost civilization, they serve as lullabies. She says that everything will be all right, and from her, how can I doubt it? And yet, of course, I do. I doubt it.

  She washes my sheets, clearing away the dust, taking away the scent of Emily that clings to the fabric. She opens the drapes to let light in. I talk about loss, my loss, and she listens somberly. She watches while I rage, when I punch my fist against the wall until my knuckles are bloody, and in the presence of her patient eyes I calm down, I sit. I am not angry at the house. She says little, but somehow her presence helps me. The grayness of the days just after Emily's death is gone; I am plunged headlong into the furnace, into the boiling pool, into the whirlwind of my life without her.

  After the first two weeks, the goddess doesn't stay every day. She leaves me to sort through pictures, clothes, musical instruments, books—these are Emily's earthly remains, as much as the body I saw buried, and I divide them, some to go to her family, some to be given away, some to be kept deep in a closet. I feel as if I'm burying her all over again.

  The goddess comes every few days, and though I tell her that I feel so broken and torn-apart at times that I fear I'll never be whole, she never offers me the solace of her tear-drinking moths again. I hate her for that, but I am also grateful. She is the queen of grief, and she wants me to pass through the dark and the tunnels and the shadows of her kingdom, and emerge into the light on the other side.

  I ask her if she was ever human, if her helpmeets ever were, if Emily might, perhaps, have her wish fulfilled—become a goddess of ice water on hot days, goddess of warm oil on sore muscles, goddess of breath in a sad lover's lungs. The queen wraps her arms around me, and the smell of dust that surrounds her is almost sweet. “What I am, I have always been,” the queen says. “And as for others, who knows? If it pleases you to imagine your wife in such a way, do."

  Like all her comfort, it is somewhat cold and all too truthful, but I accept her words as best I can.

  She leaves that night, after brewing me a cup of black tea and kissing my forehead. My grieving is not done, she says, but the time for her direct intervention is past. From now on, the process will proceed on its own. From now on, it's up to me.

  My first moment of happiness comes three months after Emily's death. I sit on a bench in a little park near the sea cliffs, watching the sailboats in the bay. Sailboats have no particular association for me—I never went sailing with Emily, she never particularly exclaimed over the grace of wind-driven boats. Watching the colorful sails in the water, I find myself smiling, a true smile that won't turn to poison in a moment, that isn't a smile over something Emily said or did. This is a smile of the rest of my life.

  I see a woman on the sea cliffs, and at first I think it is the queen of grief because she has the same sort of presence, the same sort of bigness, but this woman is dressed in yellow, not white. Her dress seems to be composed entirely of gauzy scarves. She dances lightly along the precipice, and when her face turns toward me for an instant it is a morning star, a sunrise after a long night, a sudden downpour of water in the desert. I recognize her in the deepest chambers of my heart—this is the goddess of joy. And behind her come other women and men, dancing in colorful costumes, feathers and shawls and hats and capes—the retinue of joy, her small gods. The goddess of joy leaps into the air over the water and shatters into light, becomes motes of brightness drifting, becomes the reflection of sunlight on the waves. The small gods follow, jumping after her, whooping and singing and laughing, and I find myself still smiling as they, too, turn to light.

  The last of the small gods hesitates on the cliff. She wears a purple dress sewn all over with stars and moons. She turns her head toward me, her hair a cloud of soft black corkscrews, hiding her face. My breath stops. I look at her, wondering—do I know that shape, that hair, that stance?

  I smell, faintly, a trace of cinnamon on the wind, and nothing has ever been sweeter.

  The small goddess (of cinnamon, of one man's love) leaps from the cliff, and turns to light.

  I sit, watching, until her brightness merges with the sparkles on the surface of the water, and then I walk away, mouthing a prayer of thanks to the small gods of waking up in the morning, the small gods of drawing breath, the small gods of holding on.

  THE FALLEN AND THE

  MUSE OF THE STREET

  “Pretty wild place,” Madisen said, stepping aside to avoid a drunk retching his way out of a strip club. Madisen splashed through a puddle of rainwater and beer, breaking up the reflection of neon signs and streetlights. The air smelled of liquor, smoke, and sweating bodies.

  Samaelle snorted. “Gomorrah was a wild place. This is a playground. Why couldn't we go to Bangkok?"

  Madisen took her arm. At six-foot-two, Samaelle topped him by four or five inches. They strode down the middle of the street, and the crowd of drunken pedestrians parted before them, unaware of the angels in their midst. “Eight-year-old prostitutes make me uncomfortable, and Beelzebub is there, testing plagues. You know how he feels about me. I like New Orleans."

  “Bangkok's better,” she said stubbornly. Samaelle had relinqu
ished her armor and black wings in favor of a tank top and ragged denim shorts. She kept her sword, strapped firmly to her back, but no mortal would see it. They never did, until the last moment.

  A red-bearded man with a dozen strands of beads hanging around his neck lurched toward them. “Aren't you hot in that?” he asked, pointing at Madisen's red velvet tuxedo.

  “I've been hotter,” Madisen said, stepping past him.

  They passed under a wrought-iron balcony packed with leering, shouting people. Dance music thundered out of the bar below. “Hey!” someone called. “Hey, Red! Show me your tits!"

  Samaelle looked up and pointed to herself. The man on the balcony nodded and held out a handful of beads. Samaelle smiled.

  The man squawked and tumbled headfirst over the railing. The small portion of the crowd that noticed gasped. A moment later the man stood, unharmed by his fall to the street, and let out a whoop of triumph. He high-fived random members of the crowd. People applauded.

  Madisen tugged her arm. “Samaelle, we've talked about the value of subtlety."

  “You didn't have to cushion him,” she said, irritated. “It was only a one-story drop. You're no fun any more."

  “I don't want a repeat of our last vacation."

  Samaelle rolled her eyes. “It was only a small village."

  They shouldered their way through the crowd, passing drunk college girls lifting their shirts for beads, hard-bitten middle-aged women drinking daiquiris, and serious bald men with video cameras. “We could have at least come during Mardi Gras,” Samaelle said. “I hear it's a thousand times—"

  A quartet of black-clad teenagers passed them. A boy bumped into Samaelle hard, almost knocking her over. Madisen hooked his fingers under the boy's leather collar and pulled. The boy squawked. His dyed-black hair stuck up in rooster-tufts, and silver rings glinted in his eyebrows and nose.

  “Apologize,” Madisen said. Samaelle stood smiling, her arms crossed.