Anansi Boys (American Gods, #2)

by Neil Gaiman

He’s the finest liar you’ll ever meet.

she had had the nurse put the flowers in a place of honor by her bed and, several times since, had asked Fat Charlie if he had heard anything about his father coming and visiting her before it was all over. Fat Charlie said he hadn’t. He grew to hate the question, and his answer, and the expression on her face when he told her that, no, his father wasn’t coming.

He sat at home that night, waiting for the phone to ring or for a knock on the door, in much the same spirit that a man kneeling at the guillotine might wait for the blade to kiss his neck; still, the doorbell did not ring.

She thought he was too overcome with grief to talk about it. He wasn’t. That wasn’t it at all. He was too embarrassed.

He wanted the world to end now. He knew it was not his father’s fault, but also knew that his father would have found it hilarious.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

If you happened to see Grahame Coats and immediately found yourself thinking of an albino ferret in an expensive suit, you would not be the first.

He wondered how anyone could ever miss the spotlight. In Fat Charlie’s worst nightmares, a spotlight shone down upon him from a dark sky onto a wide stage, and unseen figures would try to force Fat Charlie to stand in the spotlight and sing. And no matter how far or how fast he ran, or how well he hid, they would find him and drag him back onto the stage, in front of dozens of expectant faces. He would always awake before he actually had to sing, sweating and trembling, his heart beating a cannonade in his chest.

a very fine trick to master, something they had always known how to do, deep down in their souls, but they had forgotten, and that this man would remind them of the technique of it.

Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. Most of them will say the equivalent, in their own language, of “Funny old world, isn’t it?” and just keep going.

“What were you singing? It was pretty.” Fat Charlie realized he didn’t know. He said, “I’m not sure. I wasn’t listening.”

And he smiled then, the kind of self-satisfied smile that forced Fat Charlie to ponder the various probable outcomes of sinking his fist into Grahame Coats’s comfortably padded midsection. He decided that it would be a toss-up between being fired and an action for assault. Either way, he thought, it would be a fine thing….

“We are men with troubles,” said Spider to the world. “Our father is no more. Our hearts are heavy in our chests. Sorrow settles upon us like pollen in hay fever season. Darkness is our lot, and misfortune our only companion.”

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.”

“I did,” said Spider. “I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is.” “Not really.” “Things came up.” “What kind of things?” “Things. They came up. That’s what things do. They come up. I can’t be expected to keep track of them all.”

“I’ve met those people,” he said. “The ones from the glossy magazines. I’ve walked among them. I have seen, firsthand, their callow, empty lives. I have watched them from the shadows when they thought themselves alone. And I can tell you this: I’m afraid there is not one of them who would swap lives with you at gunpoint, my brother.

“Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”

“You!” said Fat Charlie. “You were kissing Rosie. Don’t try to deny it.” “I had to,” said Spider. “What do you mean, you had to? You didn’t have to.” “She thought I was you.” “Well, you knew you weren’t me. You shouldn’t have kissed her.” “But if I had refused to kiss her, she would have thought it was you not kissing her.” “But it wasn’t me.” “She didn’t know that. I was just trying to be helpful.”

“They say,” he said, “that houseguests are like fish. They both stink after three days.”

Live long enough, you see all your birds come home to roost.”

Rosie had not had many perfect moments in her life, but whatever the total was, it had just gone up by one.

He was wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he wished he wasn’t. His mother had always told him to wear clean underwear, in case he was hit by a car, and to brush his teeth, in case they needed to identify him by his dental records.

“You’re ruining my bloody life.” “Tough.”

Even the people he represented thought he was a weasel. But they believed that he was their weasel, and in that they were wrong. Grahame Coats was his own weasel.

THE IMMIGRATION OFFICER SQUINTED AT FAT CHARLIE’S American passport as if she were disappointed he was not a foreign national of the kind she could simply stop coming into the country

“But I’m starving. And it’s over two hours away.” “Not,” she said firmly, “the way I drive.”

Bustamonte and Miss Noles clicked their tongues and shook their heads. “He always used to say you were the stupid one,” said Miss Noles. “Your father, that is. I never believed him.” “Well, how was I to know?” Fat Charlie protested. “It’s not as if my parents ever said to me, ‘By the way, Son, you have a brother you don’t know about. Invite him into your life and he’ll have you investigated by the police, he’ll sleep with your fiancée, he’ll not just move into your home but bring an entire extra house into your spare room. And he’ll brainwash you and make you go to films and spend all night trying to get home and—’ ” He stopped. It was the way they were looking at him.

“You will go where they may help you. Even so, give away nothing you own, and make no promises. You understand? If you have to give somebody something, then make sure you get something of equal value in return.

Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited.

EACH PERSON WHO EVER WAS OR IS OR WILL BE HAS A SONG. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.

But even the embarrassment he felt at this wasn’t really that bad. He didn’t even hope the plane would crash and end his mortification. Life was definitely looking up.

There were two men and they looked and sounded completely different, and she still could not work out which one of them was her fiancé.

“You hit me,” he said. “I can do it again,” said Fat Charlie, who wasn’t sure that he could. His hand hurt.

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it. They know.

I love you and I believe in you. So why don’t you let me find out if I believe you or not?”

Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.

It’s easier to say true things in the dark.

“Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin’ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?”

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes.

Rosie’s mother radiated ill-will just as an old iron radiator can radiate chill into a room,

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.

Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.

“You’re no help,” he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

STORIES ARE WEBS, INTERCONNECTED STRAND TO STRAND, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.

“Anyone who calls you ‘little lady’ has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”

“You think I’d lie to you? Son, all you need to wear a hat is attitude. And you got that.

Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You’d miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

I’m going to check my e-mail. Probably going to have to say sorry on the phone a lot. Find out if I still have a career.” “But you’re a hero, aren’t you?” “I don’t think that’s what anyone was paying me for,”

Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those,