What Faith Smells Like in a Basement

The bar was real. That’s the thing I want to establish before anything else, because the rest of this is going to get strange enough. It was a real bar on a real street in Chicago — or a version of Chicago that existed in the back of my mind, which is close enough. Wood surfaces the color of dark tea. Brass taps that had been polished so many times the lettering had worn to ghosts. A jukebox in the corner playing something by Patsy Cline that neither of them had selected.

Gaiman was already there when I arrived, which surprised me. He was sitting at the far end of the bar with a glass of something amber, and he had that look he gets — the one where he’s watching everything and pretending not to. He was wearing black, obviously. He nodded at me the way you nod at someone whose name you’re still deciding whether to remember.

Abercrombie came in from the cold. He stamped his boots and looked at the ceiling as though checking for structural integrity. He ordered a pint of something dark and told the bartender — there was a bartender, a woman about thirty with flat eyes and good posture — to pour it properly.

“So,” he said, settling onto the stool between us. “Gods in tunnels.”

“Gods in tunnels,” Gaiman agreed.

I said something about how I wanted to write a story set in the infrastructure beneath a city, about old gods who’d been brought over by immigrants and then forgotten, and how faith works like currency — like plumbing, almost — and what happens when the system breaks down. I was nervous. I tend to oversell my premises when I’m nervous.

“You’ve just described something I wrote,” Gaiman said. Not unkindly, but with the bluntness of a man who has heard this pitch before. “You’re going to need to tell me what’s different.”

“It’s going to be meaner,” Abercrombie said, and took a long drink. “That’s what’s different. Or it should be.”

Gaiman leaned back. “Mean isn’t a tone. Mean is what happens when you haven’t thought hard enough about why you’re being cruel.”

“Mean is exactly a tone,” Abercrombie said. “It’s the tone of people who’ve been alive long enough to stop pretending. Your gods in American Gods — and I like that book, I genuinely do — they’re melancholy. They’re sad creatures nursing their decline with a kind of dignity. I’m saying: what if they’re not dignified? What if they’re nasty about it? Desperate. Cutting deals. Selling each other out.”

“They do that in the book.”

“They do it elegantly. I’m talking about gods who’d shiv you in a tunnel for half a prayer.”

I jumped in — too quickly, probably. “That’s what I want. The contrast. Gaiman’s sense that gods are everywhere, woven into ordinary life, that the sacred is hiding behind every diner counter. But then Abercrombie’s sense that these beings are people, with all the pettiness and selfishness that entails. The wonder and the ugliness at the same time.”

Gaiman turned his glass slowly. “The risk is that you get neither. You split the difference and end up with gods who are mildly unpleasant but still vaguely charming, and the reader doesn’t believe in any of it. Myth requires conviction. You have to commit to the sacred before you can profane it.”

“I’d say it the other way round,” Abercrombie said. “You have to earn the sacred by showing what it costs. Start with the mud. Start with a god who tips badly and smells like wet wool. Make the reader live with that before you ask them to feel awe.”

“A god who tips badly,” Gaiman repeated, and I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. “That’s not bad.”

“It’s not not bad,” Abercrombie said. “It’s a starting point. Tell me about the protagonist.”

This is where things got difficult. I described the character I had in mind — a bartender, someone who’d studied religion in college and ended up pouring drinks, someone whose cynicism was calcified grief. Someone who’d stopped believing in wonderful.

Abercrombie nodded along. “Good. A cynic. Someone who sees the world clearly enough to be angry about it but not clearly enough to do anything useful.”

“Not a cynic,” Gaiman said. “Or not just a cynic. The interesting thing about a bartender is that they listen. They’re the secular version of a confessor. They hold other people’s stories without being part of them. That’s a very specific kind of loneliness.”

“It’s a job,” Abercrombie said. “People romanticize bartending. It’s standing on your feet for eight hours listening to strangers lie about their marriages.”

“Yes, and the standing and the listening are what make her useful to the story. She’s already in the business of receiving other people’s truths. When a god tells her what he is, she has the professional reflex to take it in without flinching.”

I said: “I was thinking she has a degree in comparative religion. From DePaul. It went nowhere.”

Gaiman smiled. “Perfect. She studied the sacred academically and found it didn’t stick. Now she’s behind a bar where actual gods come in on Tuesdays, and she doesn’t know they’re gods. The education failed her; the experience won’t.”

“But she shouldn’t be thrilled about it,” Abercrombie said. “That’s important. She shouldn’t be the person who secretly always wanted magic to be real. She should be the person who finds out magic is real and thinks: well, that’s going to be a problem.”

“Agreed,” Gaiman said.

They agreed. It made me uncomfortable. When two writers this different agree this quickly, it usually means the idea is too obvious.

“What’s her flaw?” Abercrombie asked. He was looking at me. “Not her tragic backstory, not her dark night of the soul. What’s the thing about her personality that makes her life worse in ways she can’t see?”

I didn’t have an answer ready. “She doesn’t let things go?”

“Everyone says that. Give me something specific.”

“She… she holds onto knowledge even when it hurts her. She’d rather know a terrible truth than be comfortable not knowing.”

Abercrombie considered this. “That’s a flaw that looks like a virtue. Which is the best kind. She’ll hold onto the truth about the gods even when it ruins her sleep, poisons her relationships, makes her unable to walk down the street without seeing the sacred bleeding through every crack in the pavement. And she’ll think she’s being brave.”

“Is she not being brave?” Gaiman asked.

“She’s being stubborn. Bravery is when the cost is clear and you accept it. She’s the type who won’t know the cost until she’s already paid.”

We talked about the tunnels. Chicago’s freight tunnels are real — forty miles of narrow-gauge rail under the Loop, built for coal and mail, abandoned for decades, flooded in ‘92. Gaiman knew about them already, of course. He knows about everything underground.

“The tunnels are the right setting,” he said. “They’re literally beneath the city. The gods have sunk to the infrastructure level. They’re below the streets and the buildings and the commerce. They’ve become part of the plumbing.”

“And they should hate it,” Abercrombie said. “These were gods who had temples. Feast days. People genuflecting. Now they’re in a wet brick tube arguing about who gets the dry section near the junction. That’s not poetic decline. That’s humiliation.”

“Both,” I said. “It’s both.”

“It can’t be both at the same time,” Abercrombie said. “You have to choose which register you’re in, moment to moment. A god can be pathetic and beautiful, but not in the same sentence. If you try to do both at once, you get bathos.”

Gaiman shook his head. “I don’t agree. I think you absolutely can have the pathetic and the beautiful in the same breath. That’s what fairy tales do. The princess sleeps on a pea. The fisherman’s wife lives in a vinegar bottle. The absurd and the mythic coexist because one makes the other bearable.”

“Fairy tales have an audience of children.”

“Fairy tales have an audience of everyone. They just trust children to handle the contradiction.”

There was an edge in the room that hadn’t been there before. I watched Abercrombie’s jaw set. He wasn’t angry — he was doing the thing he does where he tests an argument by pushing against it until it either holds or breaks.

“Here’s my concern,” he said. “You write the gods living in tunnels with a kind of threadbare grace, and the reader feels sorry for them, and the story becomes a parable about how we’ve lost touch with the sacred. Very nice. Very NPR. But if these gods are real beings with real power — diminished power, fading power, but power — then they’re also dangerous. They’re cornered animals. And cornered animals don’t give speeches about the decline of faith. They bite.”

“They can do both,” Gaiman said quietly.

“Can they? In the same story? At the length we’re talking about?”

This was the question I’d been circling. “What if the gods aren’t the danger?” I said. “What if there’s something else — something older, deeper. Something that was there before the gods arrived, before the city, before the people. Something in the deepest part of the tunnels that doesn’t need belief because it’s not that kind of entity.”

They both looked at me.

“That’s Lovecraft,” Abercrombie said.

“It doesn’t have to be Lovecraft,” Gaiman said, slowly. “Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors are alien. They come from outside. But something that was already here — that grew up out of the bedrock, that’s as native to this place as the lake and the wind — that’s different. That’s not cosmic horror. That’s chthonic.”

“What’s it want?” Abercrombie said.

“Maybe it doesn’t want anything. Maybe wanting is a human thing, or a god thing, and this is neither.”

“Then what does it do?”

“It eats,” I said. “It eats knowing. Not belief — knowing. The difference matters. Belief is currency for the gods. Knowing is something else. It’s the recognition that the sacred exists, the lived experience of having looked at something divine and understood it. The old thing eats that out of people, and they walk away with everything else intact, but they can’t remember what they saw.”

The bartender — the real one, the one serving us — paused in her polishing. I don’t think she heard us. But the pause felt significant in a way I couldn’t explain.

“So you’ve got a feeding system,” Abercrombie said. “The gods need belief. The deep thing needs knowing. The gods need a human who knows about them, and they walk her down to the deep thing, and it eats her knowledge, and everyone gets twenty years of peace. That’s your plot.”

“It’s a con,” I said. “The gods con the protagonist into going down there. They tell her she just has to be afraid, that fear feeds the deep thing. But the truth is worse.”

“Who tells her the truth?”

“The god she trusts. The one who’s been coming into her bar for three years. He tells her at the last moment, because he’s having a crisis of conscience.”

Abercrombie grinned. It was not a warm grin. “A god having a crisis of conscience. That’s good because it’s a disaster. A god with a conscience is a god who’s bad at being a god. He’s going to ruin the plan, not because he’s good, but because he can’t stomach what they’re doing. And then they’re all worse off. That’s the kind of moral choice I want to see. No right answer. Just different flavors of wrong.”

Gaiman was quiet. He’d been quiet for a while. I could see him turning something over.

“What happens if she says no?” he asked. “If she keeps the knowing. If she refuses to be fed to the thing.”

“Then the deep thing stays hungry, and the tunnels get worse, and gods keep fading, and eventually something breaks.”

“And she knows that. She knows the cost of keeping her knowledge.”

“Yes.”

“And she keeps it anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I didn’t answer right away because I wasn’t sure. Abercrombie jumped in.

“Because it’s hers,” he said. “That’s the only reason that matters. It’s hers and she won’t give it up. Not for gods, not for the city, not for the greater good. It’s a selfish act dressed up as principle, and the beautiful thing is that she might be right. She might be right that a person’s interior life — even a miserable, burdensome interior life — is not something anyone else gets to take.”

“Or she might be wrong,” Gaiman said. “She might be choosing to suffer because suffering feels like authenticity. People do that. They hold onto pain because releasing it would mean admitting they carried it for nothing.”

“Both can be true,” I said.

“Now you sound like me,” Gaiman said, “and I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

We talked for another hour about things that I don’t think belong in this account — tangents about Chicago architecture, about the specific smell of Lake Michigan in winter, about whether faith and stubbornness are the same thing in different clothes. Abercrombie told a story about a friend of his who’d been injured badly and refused painkillers, not for any medical reason but because he wanted to know what the pain felt like, and how that was either the most courageous or the most idiotic thing he’d ever witnessed. Gaiman talked about a temple he’d visited in Rajasthan where the offerings were cheap candy and whiskey, and how the gods there seemed to prefer it to anything expensive, and what that meant about divinity and taste.

The bartender refilled our glasses without being asked. She did it with the practiced invisibility of someone who’d been doing this for years. At one point, Gaiman caught her eye and said something to her that I couldn’t hear, and she gave him a look — not unfriendly, not warm, just the look of a person who has been told things by strangers at bars and has learned not to take any of it personally.

The thing we didn’t resolve — the thing I’m still sitting with — is whether the ending is hopeful. Abercrombie thinks it isn’t, or shouldn’t be. “She goes home, feeds the cat, sets the alarm. She’s chosen the burden. The city is worse off. The gods are still dying. Nothing is fixed.”

Gaiman thinks it is hopeful, in the only way that matters. “She kept something. In a world that wanted to strip it from her, she kept something that was hers. That’s not a happy ending, but it’s a human one.”

I think they’re both right, and I think the story will have to live in that contradiction without choosing a side. The last thing Abercrombie said, as he pulled on his coat and looked out at the weather, was: “Don’t make her noble about it. She’s not making a stand. She’s just too bloody stubborn to let go.”

The last thing Gaiman said was: “The cat. Make sure there’s a cat. Gods are optional in fiction, but cats are essential.”

I sat at the bar after they left and tried to write down everything I could remember. The bartender collected their glasses and wiped down the wood and did not ask me what we’d been discussing. She didn’t seem interested. She seemed like someone who had been listening to people talk about impossible things for a very long time and had stopped being surprised by any of it.

I left a good tip. It seemed like the right thing to do.