Chapter 2 (p.6), Chapter 3 (p.1)
The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. The lights inside the limo transmuted from orange, to red, and back to purple. “You say you're staying at the Motel America?” He tapped on the driver's window, behind him. The glass window lowered. “Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest.”
The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again.
The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy's eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor.
“You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he's history. He's forgotten. He's old. And he better accept it. Tell him that we are the future and we don't give a fuck about him or anyone like him. His time is over. Yes? You fucking tell him that, man. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow.”
“I'll tell him,” said Shadow. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He hoped that he was not going to be sick.
“Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
“Got it,” said Shadow. “You can let me out here. I can walk the rest of the way.”
The young man nodded. “Good talking to you,” he said. The smoke had mellowed him. “You should know that if we do fucking kill you then we'll just delete you. You got that? One click and you're overwritten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option.” He tapped on the window behind him. “He's getting off here,” he said. Then he turned back to Shadow, pointed to his cigarette. “Synthetic toad-skins,” he said. “You know they can synthesize bufotenin now?”
The car stopped. The person to Shadow's right got out and held the door open for Shadow. Shadow climbed out awkwardly, his hands tied behind his back. He realized that he had not yet got a clear look at either of the people who had been in the back seat with him. He did not know if they were men or women, old or young.
Shadow's bonds were cut. The nylon strips fell to the tarmac. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car was now one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, copper-colored, like the beautiful eyes of a toad. “It's all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your old lady.”
The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly. Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he reached the Motel America without incident.
CHAPTER THREE
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
—OLD SAYING
There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodent-like quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and eased when she smiled. Most of the time she looked at Shadow, she looked suspicious. She refused to tell him Wednesday's room number, and insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest was here.
Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to Shadow.
“How was the funeral?” he asked.
“It's over,” said Shadow.
“That shitty, huh? You want to talk about it?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“Good.” Wednesday grinned. “Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence. You hungry?”
“A little.”
“There's no food here. But you can order a pizza and they'll put it on the room.”
Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the hall from Shadow's. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges.
“I got hijacked by a fat kid in a limo,” said Shadow. “He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dung heap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that.”
“Little snot,” said Wednesday.
“You know him?”
Wednesday shrugged. “I know who he is.” He sat down, heavily, on the room's only chair. “They don't have a clue,” he said. “They don't have a fucking clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town?”
“I don't know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up Laura's affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that. It'll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it.”
Wednesday nodded his huge head. “Well, the sooner you're done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. Good night.”
Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of Wednesday's room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motel's little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam.
He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises.
The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer.
He turned on the television, and watched an episode of Jerry Springer he remembered from before he went to prison. The theme of the show was “I want to be a prostitute” and several would-be whores, most of them female, were brought out, shouted at and hectored by the audience; then a gold-draped pimp came out and offered them employment in his stable, and an ex-hooker ran out and pleaded with them all to get real jobs. Shadow turned it off before Jerry got to his thought for the day.
Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would. He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to any time he wanted.
Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in the apartment that he had shared with Laura—in the bed that he had shared with Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her scent, her life, was simply too painful…
Don't go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, or produce paper flowers. But he liked to manipulate coins; he enjoyed the craft of it. He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Laura's grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbie's cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his chest. In his heart.
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
Where had he heard that?
