Severance Pay for Minor Gods

Gaiman had chosen the restaurant, which was a mistake. It was one of those places in midtown Manhattan that serves Nordic food to people who don’t actually want Nordic food but want to be seen eating it — raw things on slate, fermented things in jars, a waitress who explained each dish as though recounting a creation myth. O’Connor sat in the corner booth with the posture of a woman enduring a dentist’s waiting room, studying the menu the way she might study a religious pamphlet left on her doorstep: with suspicion, and a faint professional interest in its presumptions.

“There are no prices,” she said.

“It’s a tasting menu,” Gaiman said. “You don’t choose.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

I was late. I’d gotten turned around in Penn Station, which is the kind of building that makes you believe bureaucracy is a living organism with a digestive tract, and I arrived sweating through my jacket to find them already on their second course — or what the waitress called the second “movement.” Gaiman was eating something that looked like a cloud that had been arrested. O’Connor had pushed her plate to the side and was drinking water.

“We were discussing your premise,” Gaiman said, gesturing for me to sit. “The god who gets fired.”

“Not fired,” I said. “Administratively terminated. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” O’Connor said.

“In the story there is. Firing implies performance. This is about metrics. He doesn’t meet the threshold for continued divine status because his worship base has dropped below — I was thinking below some number. Seven thousand. Eight thousand.”

“Seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-two,” Gaiman said. He said it immediately, with the specificity of someone who had been thinking about this longer than the last five minutes. “The number has to be precise because the bureaucracy is precise. The absurdity isn’t in the number being wrong. The absurdity is in the number being exactly right. Someone counted. Someone in the Department of Celestial Affairs has a spreadsheet, and on that spreadsheet your god is line item four hundred and seven, and his worship metric is 7,832, and the threshold is 8,000, and he is one hundred and sixty-eight believers short of continued existence.”

“That’s very funny,” O’Connor said. She did not laugh. “And it’s a trap.”

Gaiman looked at her. He had been warming to the bit — you could see it in his shoulders, the way he leaned forward, the pleasure of a comic premise being wound to its proper tension. O’Connor’s interruption landed on that pleasure like a boot on a spider.

“A trap,” he repeated.

“If you make the bureaucracy too funny, the story becomes about the bureaucracy. And bureaucracy is not interesting. Bureaucracy is what happens when people are afraid of each other and build systems to avoid having to look one another in the face. You can dress it up with divine spreadsheets and celestial HR departments, and it will be very clever, and everyone will laugh, and no one will be changed.”

I watched Gaiman process this. He did not agree. But he also did not dismiss it, which was more telling. He picked up his fork, set it down, and said: “What would you do instead?”

“I would start with the letter.”

“What letter?”

“The one that tells him he’s no longer a god. You said he receives notice. What does the notice look like? What paper is it on? Does it come in the mail? Does someone hand it to him? Because the moment of that letter — the moment a man holds a piece of paper that says you are no longer divine — that is a moment of grace, and you are about to waste it on a joke about interdepartmental memos.”

The table went quiet. The waitress arrived with the third movement, which appeared to be a single radish on a bed of something frozen. She placed it between us like an offering and retreated.

“I don’t think I’m wasting it,” Gaiman said, carefully. “I think the comedy and the grace are the same thing. When I wrote about gods taking buses, the joke wasn’t that gods shouldn’t take buses. The joke was that gods do take buses, and the bus is late, and the god is annoyed about it, and in his annoyance he is exactly like every other person waiting in the rain at a bus stop in Nowhere, Wisconsin. The comedy is the democracy of it. Everyone waits. Everyone is subject to the schedule.”

“But your gods know they’re gods,” O’Connor said. “They remember Asgard, or whatever it is they remember. They carry divinity around like a suitcase they can’t put down. This man — your man, this premise — he has no suitcase. He doesn’t remember being a god. He’s just been told he was one and that he failed at it. That’s not comedy. That’s diagnosis.”

I said, “That’s actually what interests me most. He has no memory of being divine. He’s a man with a letter.”

“A man with a letter he doesn’t understand,” O’Connor said, “about a job he doesn’t remember having. And now he has to visit the people who believed in him. Not to reclaim anything — you were clear about that, and that’s the right instinct — but to understand what he was to them. Which means he is going to knock on doors. And the people behind those doors are going to look at him and see — what? A god? A failure? A stranger?”

“All three,” Gaiman said. “Depending on the door.”

“And that is where it becomes interesting. Not the department. Not the spreadsheet. The doors.”

Gaiman leaned back. He was doing that thing writers do when they’re conceding ground they hadn’t planned to concede — a physical rearrangement that makes the concession look like relaxation. “Fine. The doors. But I want the letter, too. I want the bureaucratic apparatus to be real and specific and slightly insane, because the insanity of it is what makes the grief possible. If the system that fires him is solemn and tragic, then the firing is solemn and tragic, and we’re in the territory of Milton. If the system is absurd — genuinely, structurally absurd, with forms in triplicate and a checkbox that says ‘Reason for Termination: Insufficient Worship (Chronic)’ — then his grief exists inside a machine that doesn’t have a gear for grief. And that’s worse. That’s funnier and worse.”

O’Connor considered this. She picked up the radish, looked at it, and ate it whole. “I’ll grant you the machine,” she said. “But the man inside it has to be bleeding. Not metaphorically. I mean — his body has to register what’s happening. When divinity is stripped from you, something should change in the flesh. A sound he can no longer hear. A color that drains from his peripheral vision. The loss of godhood should be physical, the way losing a limb is physical. You don’t think about your arm until it’s gone, and then you reach for a glass of water and your hand isn’t there.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“It’s not beautiful. It’s what happens.”

I tried to steer toward the believers — the 7,832 people he’d be visiting. “I was thinking about what each of them has lost. Or thinks they’ve lost. Because some of them — maybe most of them — don’t know they’re worshippers. They don’t go to a church. They don’t pray. They just — orient toward something. A feeling. A direction they face without knowing why.”

“Like sunflowers,” Gaiman said.

“Like birds that migrate and don’t know the mechanism,” O’Connor corrected. “Sunflowers are too pretty. Birds are better because migration is compulsive and exhausting and they don’t enjoy it. These people don’t enjoy worshipping your god. They don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s a pull in the gut. A habit of the nervous system.”

“And when the letter goes out — when the department reassigns them — what changes? Does the pull stop? Do they wake up one morning and the direction they were facing is just… a wall?”

“Yes,” O’Connor said. “And some of them are relieved.”

“Some of them are furious,” Gaiman added.

“One of them insists he’s still divine. Refuses the reassignment. Keeps worshipping out of spite, or love, or the inability to do anything else.” I was writing this down. The ideas were coming faster than I could hold them.

“And one of them,” O’Connor said, “never believed. Was performing the whole time. Going through the motions because everyone around her was oriented in that direction and it was easier to face the same way. And when the letter comes, she feels nothing, and that nothing is the most frightening thing in the story.”

“Why frightening?” I asked.

“Because she’s the only honest one, and honesty in a story about gods is monstrous. Everyone else had something real — even if they didn’t know it, even if it was just a pull in the nervous system — and she had nothing. She was in the room but not in the congregation. And now the congregation is dissolved and she’s the only one who isn’t grieving, and the absence of her grief is a kind of violence to everyone around her.”

Gaiman was nodding, slowly, the way you nod when someone is building something you want to interrupt but can’t because the architecture is sound. “The god visits her last,” he said. “She’s the final door.”

“No,” O’Connor said. “She’s the third door. Or the fifth. She is not the climax. She is a station of the cross. If you put her last, you’re making the story about the revelation that some faith is false, and that is an undergraduate observation. Put her in the middle. Let the god absorb the encounter and then have to keep going. The road continues after the honest woman. That’s the cruelty of it.”

I could feel them pulling the story in two directions, and both directions were good, and they were not the same direction. Gaiman wanted the road — the picaresque accumulation, door after door, each believer a different color of loss, the god changing incrementally as he walks through the inventory of what he apparently meant. O’Connor wanted the encounters to be lacerations. Not accumulative but penetrative. Each door a wound. The god doesn’t gradually understand — he is gradually destroyed. Or not destroyed. Revealed.

“Can I ask something?” I said. “Does he become more divine as he loses divinity? I keep coming back to this. The department says he’s not a god anymore, but every door he knocks on, every conversation he has with someone who worshipped him — or didn’t — he starts to understand what a god is. Not from the administrative definition. From the evidence of people’s lives.”

“And if he becomes divine through understanding,” Gaiman said, “then the bureaucracy was right to fire him in the first place, because he wasn’t divine before. He was just holding the position. He was the substitute teacher of gods.”

“Substitute teacher,” O’Connor repeated, and something in her face shifted — not a smile, exactly, but a recognition. “A substitute teacher doesn’t know the students’ names. Doesn’t know the classroom routines. Stands at the front of the room with someone else’s lesson plan and tries to get through the hour. And the students know. They always know. They can smell the impermanence.”

“But some substitute teachers are better than the real teacher,” I said.

“That’s not the point. The point is they leave. The bell rings and they go home to a different life, and the students are left with whoever comes next. Your god is a substitute who didn’t know he was substituting, and now the bell has rung, and he’s trying to understand what he was to the students before he has to leave the building.”

Gaiman ordered another glass of whatever the Nordic place served as wine — something pale and faintly bitter, the color of late afternoon light in February. “I keep thinking about the number,” he said. “Seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-two. He can’t visit all of them. He’s not going to knock on 7,832 doors.”

“Obviously not.”

“So which ones does he choose? And how does he choose? Because the choosing is a divine act. When a god selects who to appear to, that’s theophany. He’s performing divinity in the act of trying to understand divinity. He’s the god who doesn’t know he’s being a god while investigating what it means to have been a god.”

“You’re making it recursive,” O’Connor said. “And recursion is a way of avoiding the ground floor. At some point the man has to stand on someone’s porch and knock, and the door has to open, and the person behind the door has to look at him and say something, and what they say has to be real — not clever, not recursive, not thematically satisfying. Real. The kind of thing a person says to a stranger who claims to have been their god.”

“What does a person say?”

“I don’t know. That’s why the story has to be written.”

The waitress brought the sixth movement. Neither of them looked at it.

“I think the one who insists he’s still divine is the hardest to write,” I said. “Because that person has to be wrong in a way that’s also right. The department says he’s not a god. The god himself doesn’t remember being one. But this believer says: I don’t care what the paperwork says, I don’t care what you remember, you are my god, and my experience of you as divine is not subject to administrative review. How do you argue with that?”

“You don’t,” Gaiman said. “That’s the engine. The believer who won’t let go is the one who makes the god wonder if the department was wrong. And the department wasn’t wrong — the metrics are the metrics — but the metrics might not measure what matters.”

“The metrics never measure what matters,” O’Connor said. “That’s not an observation about gods. That’s an observation about metrics.”

“And yet we are all subject to them.”

“Yes. And yet.”

They sat with that. I sat with it too. The restaurant had emptied around us. The waitress was wiping down the slate plates with the care of someone tending gravestones. Gaiman traced a circle on the tablecloth with his finger — a habit, I think, or maybe he was drawing the orbit of something.

“One more thing,” O’Connor said. “The god should be ordinary. Not fallen-angel ordinary, not disguised-prince ordinary. Ordinary ordinary. He should work at a place. He should have a commute. When the letter arrives, it should arrive in a stack with his electric bill and a coupon for twenty percent off at a hardware store. The divine interruption should be sandwiched between the way life actually presents itself, which is without hierarchy. The most important letter of your life arrives on the same day as junk mail. God does not get priority postage.”

“God gets bulk rate,” Gaiman said.

“God gets bulk rate,” she agreed, and for a moment they were both almost smiling, which was as close to consensus as the evening was going to get.

I closed my notebook. I had three pages of handwriting I couldn’t entirely read, and somewhere in those pages was a story about a man with a letter and a list and a series of doors, and behind the doors were people who had been facing a direction that had just been revoked, and the man knocking was the direction, and he didn’t know it, and some of them were going to tell him things he couldn’t bear, and one of them was going to feel nothing, and that nothing was going to be the loudest sound in the book.

Gaiman finished his wine. O’Connor was already standing, her coat over her arm, looking at the door the way she looked at everything — as though it might at any moment become the site of an irreversible event.

“Who pays for this?” she asked, meaning the dinner.

“The department,” Gaiman said. “It’s a business expense.”

“Whose business?”

He didn’t answer. She left. He left. I sat in the empty restaurant and reread my notes and realized I still didn’t know what the god looked like, or what his name was, or what exactly his believers had been worshipping when they faced his direction. I knew only that the letter existed, and the doors existed, and somewhere between the letter and the last door was a story that neither Gaiman nor O’Connor had agreed on, which meant it was probably the right one.