Good to Be God

by Tibor Fischer

  The burial that’s finishing as I arrive is another youngster.

  A frat boy who let off a fire extinguisher. He was unlucky too, when you consider that at any given moment there are hundreds of thousands of drunken youths letting off fire extinguishers all over the globe, and yet you never hear of a fatality. Of course, he made the mistake of letting off the fire extinguisher into his mouth, so unlike Wilson’s brother he did do something reckless, even if the penalty was unduly harsh. Would Wilson’s family feel better if he had been involved with tomfoolery, say juggling chainsaws as he changed television channel?

  “This is a bitter moment for us,” I say, giving a eulogy of someone I don’t know to people I don’t know. “What sort of man was Harvey? A young man.”

  I notice two enormous insects on one of the wreaths; they are either wrestling or getting it on, buzzily. Should I shoo them off?

  Have the others not noticed? The insects are very large and very noisy. Is this a message from nature – it all continues? “All we can do is lean on each other for solace.” I’m surprised at how emotional I am becoming and how eloquent I sound at my first funeral service.

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  “I don’t understand,” Wilson says afterwards. “My brother lived right. There’s this guy who lives opposite us, he does drugs, he doesn’t wash. He’s got to be over sixty. He sits on the porch smashing beer bottles over his head. For hours. He’s here. My brother’s gone.”

  There’s no answer. “I don’t understand either, Wilson,” I say, because I don’t, and because I can’t attempt a clever answer to balm his pain. I wonder why I am here consoling someone I don’t know for no money. “But you must make the most of life. Your brother would want you to do that.” I sound quite convincing. I’m getting the voice.

  “I don’t understand,” says Wilson.

  He’ll be saying this all day so I depart. Then, discreetly using the Burger King opposite as cover, I go to observe Napalm and Shy.

  I reflect on the many ways the encounter could go wrong.

  Shy might have run off with the money. Napalm might have failed to turn up. The café might have burnt down overnight.

  To my relief, I see across the street, Napalm and Shy engaged in conversation. I wouldn’t have recognized Shy at all. Women have this ability to transform themselves, by a new dress and doing their hair. Gone is the hyper-whore of yesterday, replaced by a close-to-frumpy bookworm.

  This is what’s so infuriating about life: it occasionally works.

  Every so often, you need a loan, you ask a girl out, apply for a job, and you get a yes. There’s just enough compliance to keep you in the game, like the odds in casinos, carefully honed to yield enough to keep punters on the premises.

  I buy a burger.

  The girl behind the counter is chatting to the server on her right and gives me change for a twenty-dollar bill, whereas I gave 210

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  her a ten. I suppose it’s your reflex that tells you about yourself. I hand the money back. She looks at me confused. Tired? It takes her a while to comprehend I’m giving back money I could have walked off with. She doesn’t thank me.

  I can’t win. If I’d gone off with the money, I would have felt bad, because she probably would have been given a hard time over the missing bucks. One checkout girl I knew was reduced to tears over a few absent coins. On the other hand, although the sum of money is tiny and, even multiplied a thousand times, would make no difference in the level of my happiness, I’m a little displeased with myself for refusing free money.

  Goodness and decency should be punished. What sort of world would it be if good acts were rewarded? Imagine if you spent an hour at the hospital cheering up a lonely, dying patient, and then got your promotion? You give five dollars for famine victims and then you win five thousand on the lottery? Kindness would be a career move, generosity selfishness.

  Goodness should be loved for itself, and perhaps the tribulations of the righteous are the proof of a just God. Goodness should cost. Goodness should hurt. Although, personally, I’d prefer a universe where five bucks gets you five thousand and where the lonely and dying would have a throng of well-wishers.

  I withdraw and as I spot a florist’s across the road it occurs to me that no one is buying flowers for Gulin. Flowers aren’t that important; they don’t last long. And, of course, Gulin could always buy them for herself, but that won’t do. It makes me angry that she isn’t getting bought any flowers. She’s working her guts out, is the most honest and cheerful of us – she deserves a small gesture like that.

  “Hi,” says the florist warmly, but I’m not letting her good nature induce me into spending big. Buying flowers is also one 211

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  of the great wastes of money. Buy someone a candle, a box of chocolates or a poster and they get something out of it, but flowers are a blink, and in my experience usually more expensive than the aforementioned items.

  “What sort of thing are you looking for?” the florist asks. I don’t want to say the cheapest ones you have, but that’s precisely what I want. It’s the purchasing of flowers that’s important, not the price.

  The florist is very friendly (and you always have this question with a very friendly woman: is she merely very friendly, because occasionally you do meet very friendly women and men, or is she being very friendly to you?).

  The florist gives me a discount on two sprays of carnations.

  While she’s wrapping up my selection, a girl of about sixteen comes in with a squat, older man. The girl carries an elaborate cone of flowers (of a type unknown to me), woven with lengthy fronds.

  “I just passed my course,” she says. “I just wanted to show you.”

  “That’s fantastic. Isn’t it?” the florist remarks, seeking my agreement.

  “Yes,” I say, because it’s easy to say and the bouquet’s not bad.

  “I just wanted to show you,” the girl says. “Only three of us on the course passed.” How can you fail a flower-arranging course if you, say, actually turn up? I couldn’t arrange a bouquet as well as the one the girl’s brandishing, but then, if I had the basic principles explained, I don’t think I’d have any trouble passing.

  “Only three of them passed,” says the older man, with the pride only a father could muster. He and his daughter are not overloaded with brains or money. It’s hard to know how to react.

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  It’s good that she’s passed a course. It’s good she has something approaching a skill. It’s good that she’s close to her father, it’s good that he has pride in his daughter’s achievements, but it’s also somewhat depressing that someone can get quite so worked up about bunching some flowers together.

  “I just wanted to show you,” the girl says. Many conversations are, essentially, repetition.

  “That’s really fantastic,” the florist says, no longer wrapping up my flowers. I’m all for encouragement and being benign, but not when it’s hampering my purchase. I want to buy the flowers and go. Another day I might have wanted to wallow in the general good cheer, but now I really want to pay and leave.

  It’s odd how some of us have no ambition. I went to school with kids like that – kids whose dearest wish was to become a window-cleaner like their dads. I never understood that, because the best thing about ambition is that it costs nothing. Why not aspire to be an astronaut, a wadologist, an idol, why opt for window-cleaner?

  On the other hand, there is an advantage to not having a masterplan: if you don’t have a masterplan, by definition you can’t fail in your masterplan, although I doubt if my contemporaries were far-sighted enough to see that.

  It’s true I never dreamt in a concrete way, but I had entertained a conviction that my greatness would be acknowledged or that I would have accumulated vast wealth through some vague but inevitable process by the time I was twenty or so.

  But then so many of us are passengers. Many
of the poor are poor because they’ve not been given a chance, but some because they’re feckless. I realize I’m annoyed with the father and daughter because they’re only an exaggerated version of me. I’ve been unquestioning and rut-hugging most of my life.

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  What am I doing here? I’m angry at finding myself stuck in a florist’s. Stuck in a florist’s instead of working on my divinity.

  Stuck in a florist’s spending the last of my money on cheap flowers for someone I hardly know, in between arranging for a cripplingly expensive call girl for someone else I hardly know. And on top of it all, I still have a persistent and embarrassing medical complaint.

  My lungs are so full of futility I can barely breathe.

  “She just wanted to show you,” says the father.

  I still have some slim chance of turning it around. I don’t believe that, but I have to. There is such evil within us, waiting to be called upon. If you said to me, “Your happiness can be arranged but your happiness depends on everyone else in this shop dying now,” I wouldn’t agree to it, but I wouldn’t agree to it because, while a part of me would welcome the happiness, another part wouldn’t – in other words I wouldn’t really be happy. Because a part of me still would hope I could reach happiness without a horror like that.

  But if you said to me, “You will be in extreme pain until these three die,” I wonder how long I would hold out. Ten seconds?

  Ten hours? Ten days?

  “Thank you for showing it to me,” says the florist with a smile, still not wrapping up my flowers. I can’t detect any signs of insincerity. She has a business to run and it’s impressive she can stop and be so kind to someone who’s not going to be any use to her. She’s a very decent soul and that’s why she’ll always run a small shop.

  On my way back, it occurs to me that I should have checked to see if Gulin will be home that evening. She only comes back sporadically. I fear the flowers will go to waste, but I had to buy them while I had the strength. Gulin doesn’t return that night.

  I pray hard. I pray for everyone. Just in case.

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  G

  The most wearing aspect of being a pastor is that your flock expects you to talk a lot. Being a deity or a sage entitles you to continental silences, but, more than anything else, your audience expects you to talk, to enthuse. Saying goodbye to each and every member of the congregation after the service, fondly and with accurate knowledge of their occupations, dwellings and doings, is expected.

  “Acts 11:14,” says Ben.

  Is there anything more irritating than quoters of scripture?

  He waits for a response. I pretend I know what he is talking about by saying nothing and smiling.

  At first I decided that as I was running a Church, I should take a look at the Bible, but then I came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth the effort, since there would always be hordes of pedants like Ben who’ve been at it for years and who could outscripture me. I’ve memorized one or two phrases so general they could be a response to any question from “Would you like a radish?” to

  “Is there a hell?” But I save them for ecclesiastical emergencies.

  “I’m a pastor as well,” says Ben, thus revealing that he’s irked about a confirmed space-waster like me having charge of a church, however ramshackle, and at the same time seeking to establish consanguinity – we both hover between the deity and the masses.

  His complaint is about Georgia, the one attractive member of the congregation, who hardly ever appears, but who has saucer-sized areolae and a fondness for see-through tops. This is one question I have never been able to resolve: are there women who are honestly unaware that see-through tops are actually see-through and that they are a universal invitation to wanking?

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  I nod sympathetically, but as far as I’m concerned we need more, not fewer see-through tops in this church. I restrain myself from counselling Ben to go home and ease one out. Self-service is, after all, quite possibly God’s greatest favour to us.

  When I shake the hand of Mrs Barrodale, her young daughter comments: “God is boring.” Her mother is embarrassed. She could be embarrassed because her daughter might have said something untrue. But she is embarrassed because her daughter is quite right. Religion, regrettably, like our existence, is mostly dull. Until it isn’t. And then you start begging for it to be dull again.

  I shouldn’t be here gossiping with my flock. I should be making miracles. While I’m locking up the church, Gert runs up.

  “It’s a miracle,” he pants. He is holding a mug.

  “What?”

  “I was driving along the Palmetto, drinking my coffee when this truck changed lanes. If I hadn’t have been driving more slowly because of the coffee…”

  He’s very shaken.

  “What happened?”

  “Most mornings I see this homeless guy, and I was always thinking I should buy him some food. I was in a rush, but I said to myself, you’re always in a rush, you’re always thinking you’re going to buy him a sandwich, but you never do. So I say today, today I will. I stop and say, ‘You want some food?’ ‘No man,’ he says, ‘what I need is a latte’. Okay, I buy him a latte, if he wants a latte, give him a latte, I’m already late now. But I buy myself a latte too, and I have it in my own mug, because I hate that styrofoam stuff. I’m not irresponsible. I’m driving real slowly and carefully because I’m drinking a coffee, because I don’t have proper control. Then this truck changes lanes and 216

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  smashes into two cars. I slam on the brakes and stop inches from the burning wrecks. The coffee’s spilt, but this face forms on the side of the mug and I understand it’s a miracle – the coffee saved me.”

  He shows me the mug. The foam has shaped itself into the face of a bearded, long-haired man. It does look like a work of art. It’s not one of those stains that might be something if you look at it from the right angle and a distance – it’s very much the traditional image of Christ; it’s curious that he’s portrayed that way. He’s never a short, paunchy, bald guy.

  “You should tell the papers,” I say.

  Gert nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah.” I was joking, but I can see he will. It occurs to me that we could contact the sour chronicler of religious affairs, Virginia. A bit of publicity for the Church can’t do any harm, and if some decoration on a mug was not the sort of miracle I was contemplating, well, we all have to start somewhere.

  I let Gert make the call, because I can’t bring myself to recount the incident of the foam Jesus. To my surprise, Virginia comes round immediately. It must be a slow news day.

  “So you think it’s divine intervention?” she asks. She looks sceptical and superior, but that’s her default setting. Gert doesn’t notice, or doesn’t mind. He’s a mixture of shock and mania. He regales her with his near miss which killed three people.

  Virginia doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be on a big paper working on a big story, covering it a big distance from Miami. Fair enough. She’s smart and she’s ruthless, but even that’s not enough. Doubtless, she’s as smart and determined as most of the reporters who are covering wars, famines or the activities of presidential penises. Hard work just isn’t enough.

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  She thinks she’s better than this, because she probably is. Not everyone who graduates from journalism school can make it: there are only so many chocolate bars to go round. That’s one of the problems, there aren’t enough chocolate bars, so people either have to accept something other than chocolate bars or they are going to be unhappy.

  Close to distaste, she shakes my hand farewell.

  Driving home later, I’m surprised to hear Gert on the radio, now claiming to be a habitual feeder and succourer of the down-and-out.

  Napalm is watching the television when I get back home and again I hear a snatch of Gert’s
voice as the miraculous mug is picked up by the local television. Napalm is watching television the way he watched television the week before.

  I observe Napalm closely. I expect some posturese to signal that he has been transformed. A straighter gait. A bounce. A whistle. He goes to the fridge and takes out some pineapple juice and pours it as if he hasn’t just spent the weekend with one of Miami’s most accomplished prostitutes.

  “How are things?” I ask.

  “Fine,” he says shuffling off upstairs. Has something gone wrong? But even if something has gone wrong, there should be some debris of despair, some glinting shards of ecstasy, not this flatness. I want to probe further, but I don’t want to act suspiciously.

  Everyone, whether they’re a fourteen-year-old living in a dreary provincial town where the greatest danger is aggressive gnats or a world-famous starlet with a stable of bodyguards, has the same weaknesses and challenges: meeting people, and meeting people they like. It’s just scale. We all have our ruts, some smaller, some larger. It just depends which league we play 218

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  in. Everyone has done something bad, whether it’s drinking the last of the pineapple juice or murdering their spouse.

  I don’t understand myself, so it’s no surprise I can’t understand others.

  I call to arrange a meeting with Shy in a diner. I want a debrief.

  I’m in bed when Sixto taps on my door to inform me that Gert has made the national channels.

  That a simple stunt like this can generate so much hoo-ha surprises me and makes me quite angry. Why am I investing so much time in a major miracle when some spilt coffee can grab everyone’s attention? But I’m not entirely displeased. I repeat to myself that it’s all useful publicity for the church, and thus me.