Good to Be God (26 page)

We construct a plot. Napalm meets Shy, a meek librarian from Iowa on her last-but-one day of holiday. Shy falls for Napalm, spends night with him, but before leaving explains that her fiancé, with whom she split up just before her holiday, has got in touch and begged her to come back and, although Napalm has taken her to undreamt ecstatics, Shy has been through so much with her fiancé that she has to give him another chance, blah, blah, blah. So dumped, but dumped lovingly, wistfully.

Napalm gets a memory of astonishing wriggling and gasping that he can cherish and build on.

“Do you have the right gear?”

“You’d be surprised how often I play the librarian. Everyone wants to do a librarian. CIM.”

I don’t ask. I produce a picture of Napalm.

“You weren’t exaggerating,” she comments. As we renego-tiate the price, I observe her breasts and it occurs to me that the appeal of youth isn’t entirely the tenacity of flesh, it’s its unsoiled quality (not in Shy’s case obviously); when we hit the forties it’s hard not to be a sack of poison, ears dripping disillusion.

We agree a price, a price I wouldn’t have agreed to if I hadn’t already invested so much time in the project. Shy takes the down payment with a minimum of courtesy.

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Back home, I fall to my knees and pray hard. I see no hope. Is that because there is no hope, or it’s just out of sight?

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I arrange to meet Napalm in an internet café that afternoon.

Shy can engineer contact when I fail to show up.

“You can pretend to be having trouble with your computer, or—” I suggest.

“Hey. I have it under control,” Shy assures. I am worried however. I’m worried that even a toned-down Shy will be too good to be true. That like all of us Napalm’ll miss the opportunity of a lifetime. He won’t believe he can board.

It’s a grim morning. I’ve been asked to conduct a memorial service for one of the congregation’s brother. Heavy traffic caused by a suicide made me late. A guy jumped off the tenth floor of a hotel with his four-year-old son: a lawyer in good health.

That’s what makes it especially sad: someone healthy, well-off.

If you’re old and ill, why not check out at your convenience? But otherwise it’s probably lack of someone to back you, to listen to you, to say to you with sincerity “fuck ’em” and give you a hearty slap on the back. It often is that simple. Just as the right drug can stop an ailment dead, so a few words from the right person at the right time can save a life.

You can’t understand it when you’re younger. But as you age you do understand how you get tired: your existence might not be that awful, but you just get tired. And you understand how you might get so disillusioned that you’d want to protect your child from that.

The memorial service is for Wilson’s brother. I was reluctant to accept the commission because I wasn’t sure Wilson had 208

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ever attended the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. I didn’t remember ever seeing Wilson at the services, but he claims he was. He probably, like most of us, is a crisis worshipper. I agreed, probably because it was easier to say yes than no.

According to Wilson, his brother didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs. He was a keen swimmer, mostly vegetarian and he helped out at a shelter for stray dogs once a week. He was twenty-three and he collapsed changing television channels. Just like that. It’s the sort of incident that makes you feel you should be out raping, robbing, stubbing out cigarettes on kids, because patently there’s no benefit in living sensibly.

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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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?