The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Read online

  Fall into me, you think, using your old self, willing the worm to woo. It shouldn't come to you, but it does. Hunger and love work the same way. The spells you knew as a little girl are still part of you. Once you start spelling you're never stopping. It's like you have an audience and a word with a million letters, and you're going to spell it to death. It's like you're a champion.

  The worm stretches itself and you stand on top of a building, watching it approach. It's curious. No one comes out in the street anymore. It smells you, or tastes you in the air.

  Then, movement. Now you know why the worm is coming. Your man is in the street, the purse made of your skin held out before him, and on your skin, the unsayable word.

  The worm writhes toward him, following your scent, and you're shaking, feeling a this-is-it-shithead situation, but you're here anyway and so is he. You can see your ring, flashing on your man's finger, his remaining hand outstretched. He throws the purse into the worm's mouth, and it laps at it, tasting it, rasping. Its teeth are shining and white, whiter than anything you've seen before. They close on the purse like it's a washrag being wrung. Now the worm's eaten the name of god. In some places, that would be poison.

  Its head turns toward you.

  You teeter, teeter, and leap, an old movie move showing up in your game plan unexpectedly. You dive for its face, its open mouth, its seven rows of teeth, and they cut you as you go in. No mouth, only throat. The thing is all throat. You hold out the comb and claw your way down.

  You're going into the center of the Earth. You fall, and you fall, and all around you the stars are falling, too. The inside of the worm is the inside of the world. You claw words into its throat, and you're covered in blood and wet, in cold dark. You're being digested and pulsed, inside a long channel of charnel. You think about all the people this worm has eaten from the inside, and now you're inside it, too. You'll do the same. You're Woolworthing the monster, cataloging it into a bin of like unnecessaries.

  You're fucking terrified.

  You think about your mother, whom you haven't seen in years. You think about your umbilical cord and the way it wormtangled around your throat. You think about how you lived through that. You hold your man's hand, the sharpened points of the fingers, and around you, the worm convulses and quivers. You stab yourself in, using the bonecomb, finger by finger, and you tear at the worm's simplicity, bisecting it like a bad deed on a summer afternoon.

  Eventually there is a larger shudder, a scream, a rasp, and you feel the worm give way.

  VI.

  For your sixth anniversary, you are the woman who emerged unscathed from the worm that ate the city. He's the man who did it with you. You hold his hand in yours, and his other hand, the one made of bone, holds your hair, grown back now, into a twist on top of your head. The sky changes. The ash drifts down. You've given way, just as the worm did, and now, your skin, covered in words, and his body, covered in scars, are what the remaining people know to be the way that leaders look.

  Beneath the streets, the worms are asunder, rotting corpses, bewildered by bones.

  You met him drinking. He met you drinking your drink. Now you're both in charge of things.

  You give him a look for your sixth anniversary. He gives you the same look back.

  The Krakatoan

  The summer I was nine, my third mother took off, taking most of the house off with her. The night she left, I found my dad kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator, and he looked at me for too long. He was supposed to be at work.

  “What's wrong?” I finally asked, though I didn't want to know.

  “No one's in charge of you,” my dad told me. “No one's in charge of anything. Haven't you learned that yet?”

  The cold fell out of the fridge like something solid, and I edged closer, hoping it'd land on me and cling. I was still vulnerable to the possibility that one of the mothers would work out.

  “Alright then,” my dad said. He left the ice cream out on the counter, along with the contents of his pocket: three charred sticks, one of them short, two of them long, and a list of dead stars, as in celestial, his specialty.

  Then he went to work, driving in the dark up the spiral road to his job at the observatory. It was one of the great mysteries of the heavens that my father had been married three times. He only looked up, and he was awake all night. Each of my mothers had complained about this, and eventually I picked up some things about which direction you should be looking, and which hours you should be keeping if you wanted a woman to stay with you. I practiced eye contact. I practiced sleeping.

  I ate the entire carton of Neapolitan, beginning with the chocolate. I visited the top of my father's closet, removed five Playboy Magazines, and read them. I considered my three mothers, and compared them favorably to the naked women. I turned on the TV, and then turned it off. She'd taken the rabbit ears from the top, and now all we got was static. She'd taken the doorknob too. It was made of purple glass. When you put your eyeball up to it and looked in, it was like you'd arrived on Mars. I'd gotten a black eye that way, when she opened it accidentally into my face. Getting out of the house now required kicking and a coathanger pushed through the hole where the knob had been, and by the time I arrived outside, it was seven AM.

  My dad was sleeping at the observatory. There were bunks. The astronomers were like vampires, slinking around under the closed dome until the sun went down, at which point they swarmed out to look at their sky. My dad had once referred to the solar system as My Solar System. He seemed to consider himself the sun, but he was not, and if he didn't know that, I did.

  We lived at the bottom of Mount Palomar, where the spiral road started. If you stayed on our road, you'd eventually make it to the observatory, a big white snowball of a building on the top of the mountain, and inside it, a gigantic telescope. The observatory, with its open and shut rotating roof, was like a convertible car and the astronomers were teenagers in love with black holes. Their sky made me miserable. I wanted humans. There weren't many of them on the mountain, and my options were limited. I rarely went up. I went down, if I was going anywhere, and that day I went to Mr. Loury's house.

  Mr. Loury's wife had, two years earlier, gone into the Great White Yonder. That was what my second mother, the hippie one who'd thought that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, had said about it. I don't think she'd ever seen Jaws. I didn't know what a Yonder was, and so in my mind, Mr. Loury's young wife dove into the mouth of not just a great white shark, but a megalodon, every night for months. Then she got chewed up, and at the end she looked like canned spaghetti. My second mother hadn't had much patience for a year of me retching over ravioli. I was pretty sure that was why she'd left.

  Mr. Loury, with his attempt at a handlebar mustache and his short-sleeved button downs, with his sadness, was a human fender bender. I couldn't stay away from his property. Normally I paced the perimeter, feeling his woe, but today, I had woe of my own and it entitled me to trespass.

  He was sitting on his front steps drinking a beer when I arrived, and I sat down beside him, like this was something I did every day. My face was on-purpose sticky with ice cream, and it was beginning to acquire a furry stubble of dust. I was no longer nine years old, but a grown man in misery. My third mother was the one with whom I'd long been significantly and hopelessly in love.

  “Hey, buddy,” Mr. Loury said. Not kid. This was progress. “Want a beer?”

  I took one. No one was in charge. It was known by men the world over. There was comfort in the shared understanding.

  Mr. Loury was an astronomer like my dad, or he had been, until his firing due to an attempted sabotage of the telescope. I didn't know the details, and didn't care, beyond the thrilling fact of sirens making their way in slow frustration up the curve of the mountain. He'd been to jail. Again, this called to me. It seemed he never slept. I never slept either. I stayed up all night reading, and during the day, I patrolled the mountain,
checking for aberrations. I felt like I'd know them when I saw them.

  Together, we watched the goings on of the spiral road, first a rangy cat patrolling, and then Mrs. Yin, our local ancient peril, driving too fast downhill in her Cadillac. I didn't question the fact that it was seven in the morning and he was drinking already. It seemed reasonable. Some people drank coffee. Others drank beer. I was, I decided, a beer drinker. At last, Mr. Loury stood up, and looked at me for a moment, seemingly noticing for the first time that I was a kid. He waved his hand slightly. I thought he might be getting ready to send me home.

  “My third mother moved to Alaska last night,” I told him. “She's not coming back.”

  “My wife died,” he told me. “That's like Alaska, but more.”

  I wanted to ask about the Great White Yonder, but I was worried he'd tell me too much, and so I didn't. I couldn't afford another summer of nightmares, the mouth of the shark opening and showing its chewed food like a cafeteria bully gone gigantic.

  “Want to help me with a project?” Mr. Loury said. “A dollar an hour. Yard work.”

  “If it's lawnmower,” I said, negotiating, “I charge by the square foot.” Lawnmowers weren't safe for me. My toes begged to be run over. There was a death wish in me. One of my ears had been the recipient of eleven emergency room stitches. Hidden under the skin of my right knee, there was a jagged piece of gravel that seemed to have become permanent.

  “Digging,” Mr. Loury said. “Got a spare spade for you, you're interested.”

  Spare spade. I repeated the words in my head, a triumphant vision of myself at the bottom of a deep, dark hole in the dirt, looking up at a narrowed world.

  Mr. Loury had already begun digging. He had a hole the size of a swimming pool, and a huge heap of dirt beside it. After an hour, the sun was high, and I yearned for the freezer, and the rocket-shaped popsicle I was pretty sure was left in there, amid the foil-wrapped unknowns.

  “Why are we digging?” I asked Mr. Loury. I had a couple of ideas. One of them involved the burial of the Great White Yonder. I wondered if the stomach of the Great White Yonder still contained the body of Mr. Loury's wife.

  Mr. Loury looked at me like I was very, very stupid.

  “We're making a volcano,” he said, jerking his head toward the heap of dirt, which I'd taken for beside the point.

  I'd made a volcano once, in a science class, out of dirt, vinegar, red food coloring, and baking soda. It erupted in the car, and the screams of my third mother, caught in the lava flow, still echoed in my ears. She'd cried. I'd cried too, in mortification. I'd made it to woo her.

  “I don't think real volcanoes are made the same way you make fake ones,” I said.

  “This is how they made Krakatoa,” Mr. Loury said, with certainty. “This is how they made Pele.”

  I thought about this.

  “This is how they made the volcanoes on Mars,” Mr. Loury said, and went back to digging. “Don't believe me if you don't want to believe me, but you can look through the telescope and see for yourself.”

  Volcanoes made on Mars. Volcanoes made on earth. What if I could be one of the people who made volcanoes? What if this could be my career?

  “Who made them?” I managed. I could hardly breathe.

  “People like us,” Mr. Loury said.

  “On Mars? Martians?” I asked.

  “Krakatoans, Martians, same thing,” he said. “I knew it when I saw you. You're one of us.”

  I heard the distinctive sounds of my father's car coming down the spiral road. The brakes were failing, and so he kept an anchor in the passenger seat, attached to a rope, in case he lost control going downhill. I ignored the noise. No one was in charge, he'd said. If he wanted me home, he could scream.

  I looked at Mr. Loury. He was offering me everything I'd ever wanted, and I was pretty sure he was about to laugh and take it back, the way adults always did.

  “What are the volcanoes for?” I asked Mr. Loury, a last testing question. He eyeballed me. I swiped at my face with nervous, dusty fingers, but finally he nodded and surrendered everything.

  “I wasn't sure you were ready for this, but you seem man enough to take it. They're observatories, but better. From inside a volcano, everyone knows you can look up. Almost no one knows that you can also look down.”

  It was not as though I hadn't been warned by my third mother about people who said things like this. It was not as though I cared. I was a goner. My dad, I imagined, would one day walk up the slope of this new volcano, and bend over to look down, startled to see me there inside it, my telescope aimed at the center of the earth. I'd be making charts of the things I saw there, the dark stars and explosions. There'd be worms the size of trains. I knew it, despairing with desire. There were mysteries on the earth, and wonders. Even my own bellybutton, and the possibility that through it I might reach blood and guts, had been known to obsess me. Volcanoes were portals too.

  My dad shouted for me from our front door, but I didn't move. He increased volume and shifted to my full name. I didn't flinch.

  Mr. Loury looked at me suspiciously.

  “That you he's looking for?” Mr. Loury asked.

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “I thought you were a boy,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice now, a tightness. “You said you were a boy.”

  “I'm a Krakatoan,” I said. Finally, with greed and great relief, I knew that I was one of something, part of a group. There was a destiny for me. My life wouldn't have to be this way forever.

  “Your hair's too short for a girl,” Mr. Loury said, still staring at me with an odd expression on his face.

  “It got caught in a pair of scissors,” I said, tersely. It hadn't been an accident. There'd been braids.

  “Shit,” Mr. Loury said.

  “Shit,” I replied, and threw another shovelful of dirt onto the volcano. I tromped it down with my bare feet, and spat on the new volcano section.

  All the while, Mr. Loury shook his head, and muttered to himself.

  “Volcano gods need sacrifices,” he said, finally. “What are you going to do about that?”

  “I have thirteen dollars in my piggy bank,” I said. “You have beer.”

  “That won't work,” he said, went inside his house, and slammed the door. “This one only wants boys. Don't you know anything about volcanoes? Don't you know anything about anything?”

  His voice carried out into the yard, and it cracked at the end, with something I couldn't figure. I was repulsed by whatever it was. Crying was for babies.

  I stared at his front door, kicked it once, and then went home to defrost something frozen. I asked my dad what Mr. Loury had done at the observatory to get himself fired.

  “Said the sky was black and all the stars had gone out,” my dad said. “Lost us a heap of funding, which is part of why we're where we're at now. Can't even afford a paintjob. You see how it's peeling.”

  “And so they took him to jail?” I was startled. My dad snorted.

  “No. Rick Loury went to jail because he commandeered the telescope, and tried to crash it into the floor. He thinks there're stars inside the earth. He lost his wife, and then he lost his funding, and then he lost it.”

  Whatever it he'd lost, I wanted to find it and keep it for myself.

  My dad was making another mark on the wall. There were three of them now, black X's in the places where his wedding photos had been. He didn't like the bare spots in the wallpaper.

  I didn't mind them. Sometimes I poked them with a pin, outlining perforations in each pattern. My first mother left right after I was born. She disappeared without warning, and the day after she left, the good part of the story, my dad discovered a new star. After my second mother walked out, my dad's team spotted an elusive comet.

  “Did you find anything last night?” I asked my dad.

  “Why would we?

  “I don
't know,” I said. “I just thought you might.”

  Volcano gods needed sacrifices, Mr. Loury had said. I thought about Pele and her boys. I wondered if other volcanoes wanted other kinds of sacrifices. I wondered if observatories did.

  I didn't know how telescopes worked. I didn't know what made up the center of the earth. I had muddled thoughts of lava. How would I know what the sky was made of, or that there was not another sky just beneath the surface of the ground? I thought it might be possible.

  I knew that Palomar sometimes got angry. The shutters got stuck closed and the telescope couldn't see out. There'd been days of malfunction that week, things jammed in the works, and my dad had complained to my third mother about it. A grant had been lost because of observatory failure, and there were salary questions. They needed to find something new, something that would attract media. I'd heard a daylight argument.

  “Did the roof open last night?” I asked my dad.

  “Yep,” he said, and went back to the X on the wall, going over it with his ballpoint. I thought about the picture that had been there until the day before, my third mother laughing, with her mouth full of cake. I wanted the photo back. I wanted her back. I wanted them all back.

  I arranged the sticks on the counter into a triangle, the shortest one at the bottom, until my dad noticed what I was doing and took them away, breaking them on the way into the trash.

  “Why'd she go to Alaska?” I asked him. “She never said anything about Alaska.”

  He didn't answer for a moment.

  “She likes the cold,” he finally said, and looked at me, his eyes wide and bloodshot behind his glasses. “Leave it alone.”

  I walked away from my dad, and up the stairs. I cranked open my bedroom window and looked up at the dark of the mountain.

  I'd seen a television program about the explosion of Krakatoa, and in it, there was a fact that haunted me. Rafts made of hardened lava had floated up onto the coast of Africa, even a year later, passengered by skeletons. But maybe those people had been sacrificed to the volcano, and their bones thrown up into the air by the explosion. Maybe Krakatoa had exploded because it didn't like what it was being fed.