Good to Be God (11 page)

I pray hard for everyone. I don’t even pray for myself. That’s how pure my prayer is. I’ve been praying hard for some time, begging unashamedly for a better world, because I’m appalled by the one I’m in and I haven’t noticed any difference. It occurs to me that probably many others have been on the beseeching trail; surely if prayer had any effect we’d have noticed? On the other hand, just because something doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it’s not working somewhere else. If I had to start a fire by rubbing twigs, I’d be nowhere, and I’d have some chance of pulling off a stunt like that.

Breakfast restores my spine. How confidence-rich a doughnut can be, how character-forming coffee. Time for a miracle. Time to radiate.

The Hierophant needs to be seeded with intimations of my supremacy. He will serve as the chief witness of my divinity, so he has to be fed some amazing information, so first I need some amazing information.

I grab myself a terminal at Kafka’s, and see whether there’s some good stuff on the net. I immediately find an interview with the Hierophant conducted by a Virginia Hawthorn, the journalist at the Lama’s talk. She’s evidently hot on religion. I mark her down for cultivation.

Then I drive over to the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ, where I sweep up, even though since I swept up yesterday, there’s nothing to sweep up. I leave a terrifically phallic blue pen on a 80

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top shelf in the Hierophant’s office, which should garner me amazing information.

The next day, I arrive early to filter the mail, in case there’s any amazing information. Sadly there is no letter informing the Hierophant of a visit from a long-lost friend or relation.

There is no news of a large fortune bequeathed to him. There is nothing that could be even considered respectable information.

There are bills and ads for gardening equipment, and since I’ve opened the envelopes clumsily, I have to ditch all the mail to conceal my tampering.

I then plug in to my pen, which can record up to eight hours of conversation. The trouble with recording up to eight hours of conversation is that you then have to listen to it. The material is as junk as the mail.

I discover the Hierophant sighs a lot in private. Every few minutes or so a heartfelt “aaaah” is released. Papers are shuffled.

He sighs more. It’s reassuring to learn that the assured aren’t so assured, but the sighs rapidly become exasperating. There’s also a great deal of scratching, although I can’t identify which part of his body is getting the nail.

Finally, a conversation. The Hierophant explains to an unknown caller that he bought a watch that morning. He went into one shop, checked the price of the model he wanted, then went to another shop where the same model was a hundred dollars more. The Hierophant returned to the first shop and bought the watch.

Not a stunning anecdote, and the Hierophant doesn’t tell it well. He doesn’t tell it any better to caller “Mitchell” and caller “Ellen”. He pads it out explaining how he expressed his outrage to the assistant in the second shop that they were selling the watch for a hundred bucks less in the first, and expressing 81

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astonishment to the assistant in the first shop that they were selling the watch for a hundred more in the second (I’m précising here).

It’s unfair to knock someone’s repartee when you’re eaves-dropping, but I doubt if I can carry on bugging the Hierophant, not on account of any ethical discomfort, but because it’s so tedious. I’ve snooped on four and a half hours of the Hierophant’s privacy and I’m drained.

G

“See this watch?’’ the Hierophant asks me the next day, relating that it was one hundred dollars cheaper in the shop he bought it in than anywhere else. I resist the impulse to correct him by saying he only went to one other shop. Who knows, if he’d tried somewhere else he might have found it for a hundred and twenty dollars less, though I doubt it since the market does curb abuse.

But you don’t know. You don’t know whether there is another shop with a better deal. You don’t know whether there’s another shop. Laziness always wins. Sooner or later. How much roaming and asking should you do?

If you spent a week going to forty watch retailers and succeeded in saving a hundred dollars, or even a hundred and twenty, would it justify your effort? You don’t know. That’s what’s so frightening: you walk into one shop and they sell a watch for one price, and another shop sells that watch for another price.

There is a conspiracy. It’s called the world.

“Tyndale, it’s time for the Hierophant to hit the fan.”

The Hierophant requires me to hold a rickety ladder for him, while he climbs up to fix one of the fans. The church doesn’t 82

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have air conditioning (too expensive and troublesome), but five propeller-style fans (cheap but more troublesome). Holding the ladder while the Hierophant spouts some non-God-based profanity, I suffer a powerful attack of futility as I realize that I am holding a rickety ladder in a hut in a run-down part of Miami while a demented ex-Marine fumbles with a fan so old it should be gracing a museum.

That’s my job: rickety-ladder-holder. For which I’m not paid.

The despair grows so strong I can barely stand up.

I attempt to amuse myself by imagining killing, but it doesn’t work. I’m too aware that imagining killing is a trait of the defeated, and that my romps of violence will never happen. Not only will I never beat Loader to death with a handy bit of metal, I probably won’t so much as tread on his toe. I’ll never get to see him luckless and broken. You just don’t get an opportunity for revenge. I think of all the people who’ve shat on me and I’ve just never once had a chance to settle up; they’ve never once walked in front of my car on a dark, rainy, witness-poor night.

On the other hand, while I’ve never managed to get even with my malefactors, I’ve never been able to get even with my benefactors either. True, the latter category is dishearteningly small – family excepted – countable on the palms of my hands really. Bamford, for instance, who pulled me out of the shit, who saved me, all I could do was to say to him “thank you”. A sound isn’t much.

We nothing along with no real power to touch those we want to. I’m here now in Miami, holding a rickety ladder with a persistent and embarrassing medical condition, my other years of no consequence.

I arrived here with no baggage, nothing to help me or hinder me. Born again, the same start whether I had spent my previous 83

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life giving stray kittens milk and running errands for the elderly, or microwaving puppies and strangling the old. Your moral bank account is a currency that can’t buy you anything.

“What was Vietnam like?” I ask to make conversation.

“Hot,” replies the Hierophant. I wait for more detail, but it’s not coming.

“Did you get to the jungle?”

“Yes.”

I wait. After two more minutes of fan-fiddling, I try:

“So what happened?”

“My watchstrap rotted. Everything rots there. Your uniform.

Your nutsack. Everything.”

More silence follows. Finally, the fan jerks into motion.

The Hierophant packs away his tools. “Do you want to know the most astonishing thing I saw while I was in ’Nam?”

“Go on.”

“There were lots of bars and whorehouses. Lots. But one bar had this sign outside saying “Giant midgets”. I never went in.

But my question to you, Tyndale, is this: if they really were giant midgets, how could you tell?”

Picking up the pen, I leave the Hierophant. In my car, I suddenly get pangs of hunger. I should be holy and not bother with food, but I’m so beaten I hang up the holiness for the day.

I ponder where I should go for a meal.

There’s a greasy, hole-in-the-wall place on the next block I’ve noticed, with a greasy, sweaty guy surrounded by greasy bits of scrawled-on card listing his dishes that I’ve never tried because everything about the enterprise said don’t. I now realize I’m too hungry to venture further, so I saunter over and buy a chicken sandwich.

When I bite into the cheap sandwich, I learn how wrong I was.

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The fried chicken is unimprovable: happy chicken, ideal batter, fresh roll, one crisp leaf of lettuce. A simple but unbeatable sandwich, made with reverence for the reputation of the fried-chicken sandwich. A testament to good ingredients and the power of man to create tastiness.

In any job, it’s easier to go through the motions, and in any job going the extra mile rarely gets you anything. The roll could have been stale, the chicken stringy or oily, but they’re not. This guy gets up early to do the job right and it’s unlikely it’ll get him ahead of the stringy-chicken gang. Eventually he’ll get ill or old or broken and there will be no record, no memorial to his home-cooked triumph. I salute the valour, the unbowed courage of this lone chicken-sandwich seller.

“Great sandwich,” I say.

The sandwich-maker shrugs and wipes his counter.

This unforeseen attack by quality restores my faith in life. Part of my joy lies in the fact that I’m ahead. I’ve given the sandwich maker a small amount of money and he’s given me bliss.

As you get older you understand that emotion is like the weather: despair, rage, self-hatred, delight, they all pass (even if they leave some damage). Knowing this doesn’t help much, just as knowing on a cold, rainy day that the cold and rain won’t last for ever.

It’s embarrassing. Holding rickety ladder: down. Eating great fried-chicken sandwich: up.

I wish I could control my mood, spurning fried-chicken sandwiches, repelling rickety ladders, but I can’t. Perhaps that’s where holiness comes in. If you can have the fried-chicken bonus without the fried chicken. But if you could have the fried-chicken bonus without the fried chicken, what’s the point of fried chicken and what’s the point of skipping it?

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I buy two more sandwiches to take home, aware that the hit won’t be the same as the first.

G

Dawn kicks down the door of my unconsciousness and I pray hard. I pray hard for everyone before I get up, and then, gradually, the selfishness takes over.

How am I doing? That’s the question, but what’s the answer?

How am I doing? That’s what I’d like to know. Maybe I’m holding a rickety ladder for an eccentric ex-Marine, gratis, but maybe given the luck I’ve been allocated, maybe that’s the best I could do. Maybe I’m not a failure; perhaps I’m viewed as a failure by many, but to the contrary, I have triumphed over several realms of adversity.

You don’t know. It would be interesting to have a hotline to the Supreme Being to ask: how am I doing? But if you could, would you? What if the answer’s not one you want?

I’ve only ever made two mistakes: too much or not enough.

Too much determination or not enough determination. Too much trust, or not enough. Too much optimism or not enough.

Or, if you want, I’ve only ever made one mistake: not getting it right.

Victory, Bamford used to insist, was not achieved soaring joyfully over the winning line, with the competition in the distance. Victory, he said, was usually a matter of crawling on all fours, cursing and dribbling, your ankles gnawed by your enemies.

If so, I may be on the road to victory, as I’m definitely crawling.

I resolve to get into the church early to check the pen.

Out in the driveway I find a dog crapping. It’s an old corgi mix. The dog growls with gusto. Why do old, small dogs yearn 86

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to pick fights? I locate the owner standing several yards away, smoking a cigarette dreamily; one of those dog-owners too lazy to walk their dog, content to let it off the leash and let it crap everywhere.

I don’t know why I commit the error of being reasonable.

Perhaps because I assume the owner is a neighbour and one wants cordiality on the block. Perhaps the holiness is getting to me.

“Might be a good idea to keep the dog on a lead,” I smile.

Always smile.

“My dog is no business of yours,” he says. Immediately I see him. Smug self-feaster. High on his I. Bureaucrat. Not gifted enough to be a banker or businessman, but safely ensconced somewhere doing something where results don’t matter, but you still get good holidays and reasonable pay: drugs counsellor, or human-rights monitor, so he can claim he’s not part of the system, while getting pumped full of comfortable blood.

He’ll have Congolese thumb-piano music to show how open he is to other (chiefly less affluent) cultures. He will bore you about the environment and the crimes of governments and multinationals, the sweatshops of Asia and the battle against malaria, but he smokes and lets his dog coil out a biggie on someone else’s driveway. Uncanny, how fast you can hate.

The dog, too fat and ailing to jump, half-jumps up on my leg and barks at me in the best frenzy it can muster.

“What’s wrong with you?” says the smoker to his dog in an amused, sing-song, talking-to-a-small-child tone. I’ve noticed this with dog-owners. They never apologize.

“If—” I start to raise the matter of the dog log, when the dog bites me. A nip, but still painful. I glare at the smoker waiting for an apology. I wait. He takes a drag on his cigarette.

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“Your dog just bit me.”

“No, it didn’t.”

Now he could have said this in a dishonest, I-don’t-want-to-accept-any-liability-for-this way, in case I had two lawyers hiding in a bush nearby, but no. Although his dog bit me in front of him, in excellent daylight, he sincerely doesn’t believe it. He is outraged by this vilification of his dog.

I’m so angry I can’t hit him properly, and I punch him in the face, which is a mistake, because you’ll only damage your fist.

But I suppose I go for the face because it’s the seat of the mouth.

My knuckles get a twinge of hot ash. After his dog shat in my driveway, attacked me and he called me a liar, it would have been a crime to just walk away.

Here’s the remarkable thing: as my fist closed in, there was an expression of surprise on his face. It’s also remarkable how much scheming can fit into a second: although I was exploding, there was that part of me, having grown up in a big city, that calculated it was safe to hit him.