“How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.
She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn’t that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don’t use your credit cards and you should be fine.”
“Where should I go?”
She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. “The road’s that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”
“Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I do know.”
“I owe you,” said Shadow. “I’d still be in there if it wasn’t for you. I don’t think they had anything good planned for me.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think they did.”
They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he’d seen, blank window-less metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.
“Laura ... What do you want?” he asked.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes. Please.”
Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life, f want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumpitigln my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, it’s hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it’s easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don’t want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”
“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
“Make it happen, hon. You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you?”
But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird or the call of the first bird of dawn.
Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.
Chapter Seven
As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular sense—for they are born and they die—they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details,.. and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.
—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Introduction, Hindu Myths (Penguin Books, 1975)
Shadow had been walking south, or what’he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.
When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.
Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the, numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.