Good to Be God (8 page)

Strong-arm. Strong-arm events. The Hierophant is cleaning a window; he glances quizzically at me. He labels me a tourist in need of directions or some municipal plod in search of a late payment. But I’m not that. I’m the commodity any church desires most. A walk-in.

“I’d like to talk about my soul.”

“I’m rather busy at the moment,” says the Hierophant.

“But I need to talk. I’ve done something…” I planned to let the silence do the talking, but the Hierophant jumps in.

“Have you killed someone?” The hopeful way he poses this question makes it evident that the penitent murderer is right at the top of his wish list. I’m annoyed I wasn’t ready for this, since conjuring up a non-existent stiff in a far-off country wouldn’t be that difficult, but instinctively I opt for the preconsidered story of the abyss tribulating me.

“No.” I add, “Not yet.” Since that’s easy to add. “The abyss is drawing me in.” Which isn’t a lie.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Tyndale.”

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TIBOR FISCHER

Up close, the Hierophant is well mad. His glasses are cheap and his remaining hair is regimented not in the lamentable, denial style of older slapheads, but because everything is locked down. The emblem of the Marine Corps is perched on a shelf.

He’s retained that military spickness. He’s a fighter, I’d guess, and as someone who’s not… I admire that.

Being a fighter is often not much help. I’ve noticed that. Mind you, there was Gus, at my golf club. He played every day. Rain, cold didn’t matter. The coaches made a fortune out of him. He was obsessed, and made all the effort, but he wasn’t any good.

He simply wasn’t. Even I managed to beat him. His ambition was modest: to play for the club in local competitions. For years and years, he waited. I greatly admired him for not giving up, because it’s easy to keep going if you get a whiff of success, but when you’re given bitterade year round, that takes stones.

Gus did get his moment. The club’s team was swallowed up by the ground (new course, old, disrespected mineshaft) and while they ate hospital food, he represented the club. But that’s the exception.

“Tyndale, the abyss is drawing us all in. We have to fight every day. Let me tell you about a young man who was standing where you are a few months ago. Dan. Dan was governed by the abyss, by decades of abuse of alcohol and drugs, by violence, by theft, but he got down on his knees and changed that.”

Some short-sleeve shirts are hanging in the ajarness of a closet.

Even at a distance I can see the shirts are spaced out precisely and they are ironed to perfection. I’ve got to say, as a slob, I’m impressed by discipline. Before I left for Miami, brushing my teeth was almost a full day’s programme.

“Dan got down on his knees and arose a new man. He even had time for reconciliation with his three sons… although 56

GOOD TO BE GOD

the reconciliation wasn’t as long-lived as it should have been, because of his fork-lift truck accident the next day.”

Is Dan and the fork-lift truck quite the advertisement the Hierophant intends? The Hierophant invites me to sit and I give out a carefully edited list of facts about myself. Mystery enriches. Keep it subcutaneous.

“I was called here,” I say.

“We have special soul-clearance techniques here,” the Hierophant replies. “Tyndale, we can make sure every chamber of your soul is cleared of malcontent and darkness. We can start right now.”

G

I haven’t eaten for two days now. Improbably, I feel great. Of course, there’s a huge difference between fasting by choice as I’m doing and, say, not eating because you’re stuck in a disaster or because you have no money.

I’ve been fasting to impress the Hierophant. Yes, I could have pretended to fast, but holiness grows on you. Also, it saves me money, since food is my main expense. And since I came to Miami with something of a gut, I can afford to evade some calories.

I’ve become the Hierophant’s right hand quickly, overnight really. Who wouldn’t like an unpaid henchman? I gave him some guff about the abyss and how his pamphlet came into my life at just the right time.

The Hierophant believed me. Why? Because he wanted to.

Wouldn’t you want someone who agrees with you all the time, who sees how right you are, who does what you want and who doesn’t ask for any money? I told him I’m staying with friends 57

TIBOR FISCHER

and that’s stemmed his curiosity about why I don’t have a job or money or other calls on my time.

I placed myself at his disposal. I collect dry-cleaning. I climb onto the roof to fix leaks. Everything’s going great at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ (his arsenal includes armour-piercing denial, the Kevlar of service to others and the magnum force of the holy word), although I can’t see yet how it will help me, and our average congregation could fit into a car. But it feels right and it’s creating radiance:
oh, Tyndale, he
always
helped others
. Soon my radiance will be noticed.

Curious as to how weak two days’ fasting has made me, I seek out the punchbag and take a few swipes at it. I am very weak, physically at least.

Sixto comes out of the house. “Tyndale, you here this afternoon?”

I’ve got to know my landlord over the last couple of weeks.

Sixto may be the only person in Miami who was actually born in Miami. His father fled Cuba after Castro blah, blah, blah.

Sixto and his sister spent most weekends stripping guns and cleaning them blindfolded, out in the Everglades. “Man, every fucking weekend it was eating snakes and bugs and blowing stuff up with plastique we made in the bathtub. And my father was always pissed because I couldn’t shoot as good as my sister.

She could put a standard NATO round through an ace of spades at four hundred yards, day or night.”

“What does she do now?”

“Market research for a pet-food company.”

For five years Sixto’s father stopped talking to him after Sixto refused to play groovy guerrillas in his leisure time. Warmth was only re-established when Sixto took a vow to shoot Castro like a dog if he ever got the chance, and that whatever happened in the 58

GOOD TO BE GOD

future to one day make the journey to Cuba to piss copiously on Castro’s grave in the event of his father predeceasing El Beardo.

“I need someone to be here later to take a delivery,” Sixto walks towards me and gazes at me oddly.

“Tyndaaaaal,” he says. He stops and, as he quivers a step backwards, I identify the odd gaze. I run towards him, but before I get to him, he’s folded up on the ground and twitched over into the swimming pool. It’s not a big pool, but big enough to drown in if you’re having an epileptic fit.

It’s really not easy getting him out; if he’d been a bigger man he would have drowned. I put him in the recovery position, while searching for his tongue with my fingers, but so much vomit comes out I can’t catch it. It’s indisputable however he’s alive and breathing properly.

I’m terrified and half drowned, but Sixto, no surprise, is in a much worse state. “It’s okay,” he whispers, but he’s shaking badly.

Later, we drink some Barbancourt Rum. “I should have told you about the fits,” he says, “but you know… it’s so boring going through all that.” I sympathize. I had a girlfriend who had minor fits. It was tedious for her, though I’m ashamed to say I was always hoping she might have a fit during sex, just to see what that would be like. I consider mentioning my persistent and embarrassing medical condition, as a sort of bonding, consolation thing, but only for a second. I’ve bonded and consoled plenty, and some information is best unaired.

“I’m draining the pool,” Sixto says. “It’s not as if any of us use it.” He now hates the pool, irrational though that is. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you I owe you. Gratitude is a big deal for us Cubanos,” he says as if he sincerely wishes it wasn’t. “You can ask me for anything.”

59

TIBOR FISCHER

“Don’t really need anything. Some part-time work to earn a few bucks would be nice. Could I help out at your company, maybe?”

Sixto groans. “You would ask for that, wouldn’t you?”

G

I tug on a door and it opens. I advance through the darkness, as I can hear music further on. I am now a successful cocaine dealer. I hope.

“There are only two types of dealers,” Sixto had told me.

“The unsuccessful. They have interesting lives. Shoot people.

Get shot. Get arrested. Have girlfriends who snitch. Feature on television. Spend years doing strange things for bigger men in jail. If they survive, they write hilarious memoirs. Then there are successful dealers. If you’re a successful dealer, your day is more boring than a postman’s or a pizza delivery boy’s. Postmen get bitten by dogs, pizza guys get ripped off.”

Sixto isn’t being entirely reckless or generous about letting me in.

I know nothing.

I know nothing about who he works for. I know nothing about where it comes from. My job is simply to take packages to certain people and bring back the cash. Very often I don’t even get cash. Basically, Sixto has given me the most tedious part of his job. True, it’s a risk on his part, but since, as he confided in me, he is training to be a psychotherapist, he doesn’t have as much time to drive around town making the drops.

And he’s right. It is like returning a book to the library. Sixto only does business with old acquaintances and in bulk. I make brick-sized drops. Like this one.

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GOOD TO BE GOD

“It’s a club,” says Sixto. “It’s one of these so-trendy-we-don’t-bother-telling-you-about-it places, but if you can find the door we might let you in.” Finding the door wasn’t easy, because the door didn’t have a number next to it, nor was the name
Three
Writers Losing Money
anywhere in sight.

I enter a huge dance floor with a bar at the end. This must either be the club or the local circus.

Behind the bar is, I assume, the barman. The barman, in addition to a generous scattering of tattoos, has a variety of metal stalagmites and stalactites fixed on his face – but that we’ve all seen before. He’s shaved his head and fixed onto it a number of thin, bright-blue rubber strips. It gives the effect of a blue dreadlock wig, but a very badly made one. It’s as if he cut the strips himself, but got bored with it after a while, and gave up on uniformity; some strips are hairs, some finger-thick, some long and some short.

It might have worked in an haute-couture way, but for the fact he’s a twenty-year-old twat with acne. Next to him is the DJ

nest, and behind the decks I see a monkey. It’s a small monkey, but I note the monkey has a gun.

It looks like a real derringer and the monkey carries it in a spangly holster. The monkey is changing discs with practised ease. Two hefty guys on the other side of the counter are watching the monkey in a tense, hostile way one wouldn’t associate with monkey-watching, which is meant to be entertaining.

“Does the monkey have a licence for the gun?” I ask sunnily.

“It’s a monkey, it doesn’t need a fucking licence,” replies the barman in a tone they didn’t teach him in bartending school.

“And who are you?”

“I’ve come to see Bertrand.”

“Is he expecting you?”

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It’s very tempting to be sarcastic, or indeed violent. Fasting gets you high as the buzzards, but it does make you bad-tempered. I could take the barman easily, but the other two are very hefty. And it wouldn’t be very radiant. I suppose it’s a repetitive-strain injury from years of visiting strange workplaces.

I always had an appointment. Shall we think about this? If you want a favour from someone is it a good idea or a bad idea to turn up unannounced? And what’s amusing is that while many of the clients I dealt with were self-important dullards, the receptionists were always the worst.

Now, I’m doing Bertrand a favour. I have enough poisonous alkaloid with me to keep the whole club’s gums numb.

“Yes,” I say. “I am expected.” And I remember to smile.

Always smile.

G

Bertrand’s office is up on the second floor. He’s on the phone when I enter, and as there’s no one else around, I flash him the brick. He waves me in.

“It’s a simple question,” he rambles on. “It’s a simple question.

It is
a simple question. So why didn’t they ask me? Why didn’t they ask me? Wh-y? Wh-y? All they had to do was ask. They ask me the question, I give them the answer. That’s not difficult is it?

So, why, wh-y didn’t they ask me the question?”

I peer out the window and scrutinize Miami. I see the light and the roofs. I love this city. I look out for several minutes as Bertrand gases away, and soon, much as I love looking out on Miami, I have to work hard to look as if I’m really keen on looking out of the window and not very impatient.

“Okay, Opium Garden is big, it’s what’s you or I would call 62

GOOD TO BE GOD

big, but it’s not right to say that it’s really big. It appears bigger than it is, because of the way it’s divided up. But if you count up all the bars in Mynt, it’s bigger than Opium Garden. It doesn’t look bigger, but it’s bigger. Now, no… no, no, I’m not saying it’s a lot bigger than Opium Garden, but it is bigger. No, no, no.

Let’s take Crobar. Crobar is actually the same size as Opium Garden. Yes it is, if, if you take into account all the stairs—”

I make some I’d-urgently-like-to-hand-over-the-brick gestures, but Bertrand retorts with some wait-wait flapping.

I stare out of the window pretending I’m savouring the view and not fuming. I think of my old boss, Bamford, and three years on, I understand why Loader asked for his telephone number.

There are events and conversations which sometimes take me a year, five years, ten years, twenty years to unlock. I don’t know why, but suddenly the answer tumbles out.

Bamford was a no-nonsense man. When his wife went mad

– not a little peculiar, but dead-end insane – he had a week off work (and he took it as leave). One week off. He had his wife certified, found boarding schools for his kids, and never said one word about it. I’ve always admired those who could eat their greens without a murmur, because I can’t.