He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead.
He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of déjà vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobog’s apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odin’s Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him.
He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there.
She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There was no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-linen nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago.
She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. “Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” said Shadow.
“How are you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I’ve been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison.”
Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, “All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them. You have to understand that.”
“I got it,” he said.
Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. “This is yours,” he said.
He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld.
She took it from his palm with her slim fingers.
“Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice,” she said. “And now it will light your way into dark places.”
She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. She let go of it. Shadow knew, then, that this was another dream, for instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadow’s head. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky, the face that was only visible until you stared at it, whereupon it would become dark seas and shapes on the moon’s cratered surface, the pattern and the face replaced by shadows of pure randomness and chance.
Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head; or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of perspective. Perhaps it was all a matter of point of view.
He looked at the forking path ahead of him.
“Which path should I take?” he asked. “Which one is safe?”
“Take one, and you cannot take the other,” she said. “But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk—the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?”
Shadow hesitated. “Truths,” he said. “I’ve come too far for more lies.”
She looked sad. “There will be a price,” she said.
“I’ll pay it. What’s the price?”
“Your name,” she said. “Your real name. You will have to give it to me.”
“How?”
“Like this,” she said. She reached a perfect hand toward his head. He felt her fingers brush his skin, then he felt them penetrate his skin, his skull, felt them push deep into his head. Something tickled, in his skull and all down his spine. She pulled her hand out of his head. A flame, like a candle-flame but burning with a clear magnesium-white luminance, was flickering on the tip of her forefinger.
“Is that my name?” he asked.
She closed her hand, and the light was gone. “It was,” she said. She extended her hand, and pointed to the right-hand path. “That way,” she said. “For now.”
Nameless, Shadow walked down the right-hand path in the moonlight. When he turned around to thank her, he saw nothing but darkness. It seemed to him that he was deep under the ground, but when he looked up into the darkness above him he still saw the tiny moon.
He turned a corner.
If this was the afterlife, he thought, it was a lot like the House on the Rock: part diorama, part nightmare.
He was looking at himself in prison blues, in the warden’s office, as the warden told him that Laura had died in a car crash. He saw the expression on his own face—he looked like a man who had been abandoned by the world. It hurt him to see it, the nakedness and the fear. He hurried on, pushed through the warden’s gray office, and found himself looking at the VCR repair store on the outskirts of Eagle Point. Three years ago. Yes.
Inside the store, he knew, he was beating the living crap out of Larry Powers and B. J. West, bruising his knuckles in the process: pretty soon he would walk out of there, carrying a brown supermarket bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. The money they could never prove he had taken: his share of the proceeds, and a little more, for they shouldn’t have tried to rip him and Laura off like that. He was only the driver, but he had done his part, done everything that she had asked of him…
At the trial, nobody mentioned the bank robbery, although he was certain everybody wanted to. They couldn’t prove a thing, as long as nobody was talking. And nobody was. The prosecutor was forced instead to stick to the bodily damage that Shadow had inflicted on Powers and West. He showed photographs of the two men on their arrival in the local hospital. Shadow barely defended himself in court; it was easier that way. Neither Powers nor West seemed able to remember what the fight had been about, but they each admitted that Shadow had been their assailant.
Nobody talked about the money.
Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted.
Shadow wondered whether the path of comforting lies would have been a better one to walk. He walked away from that place, and followed the rock path down into what looked like a hospital room, a public hospital in Chicago, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. He stopped. He did not want to look. He did not want to keep walking.
In the hospital bed his mother was dying again, as she’d died when he was sixteen, and, yes, here he was, a large, clumsy sixteen-year-old with acne pocking his cream-and-coffee skin, sitting at her bedside, unable to look at her, reading a thick paperback book. Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother’s death into London during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no excuse.