I Am God Read Free Page B

face that the corporal granted to the world, but instead had showed him the indifference due to any anonymous passenger – which was just what he wanted.
    But when he had pushed the banknotes across the counter with a hand covered in a light cotton glove, the clerk, a slight man with not much hair and thin lips and lightless eyes, had looked up. He had lingered for a moment on his face and then lowered his head again.
    ‘Vietnam?’
    The corporal had waited a moment before replying. ‘Yes.’
    The ticket clerk had given him back his money.
    He had ignored Wendell’s surprise. Maybe he had taken it for granted. He had simply said a few words to smooth things over. Words that, for both of them, said everything there was to say.
    ‘I lost my son there, two years ago tomorrow. You keep that. I think you need it more than the company.’
    The corporal had walked away, feeling the same thing he’d felt when he’d turned his back on Jeff Anderson. Two men alone for ever, one in his wheelchair and the other in his ticket office, in a twilight that seemed destined to become endless.
    He had stopped in third-class motels, sleeping little and badly, with his teeth clenched and his jaws tensed, dreaming recurring dreams. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, someone had called it. Science always found a way to turn the destruction of a flesh-and-blood person into a statistic. But the corporal had learned the hard way that the body never completely gets used to pain. Only the mind sometimes manages to accustom itself to horror. And soon there would be a way to show certain people exactly what he himself had been through.
    Mile after mile, Mississippi had become Tennessee, which had then turned into Kentucky. Soon, he was promised the familiar landscape of Ohio. Around him, and in his mind, the different panoramas fell into place, a succession of strange locations, a line traced by a coloured pencil across the map of an unknown territory. Beside the road ran electricity and telephone wires, carrying energy and words above his head. There were houses and people, and the people were likepuppets in a toy theatre, and the wires helped them to move, gave them the illusion of being alive.
    From time to time, he had asked himself what energy and what words he needed right now. Maybe, while he was lying on Colonel Lensky’s couch, all the words had been said and all the forces evoked and invoked. It had been a surgical liturgy, which his reason had rejected the way a believer rejects a pagan practice. The doctor had celebrated that liturgy in vain, while he, the corporal, had hidden what little faith he had, his faith in nothingness, in a safe place in his mind, a place where nothing could hurt him or destroy him.
    What had been couldn’t be changed or forgotten.
    Only repaid.
    The slight lurch forward of the bus as it slowed down brought him back to where he was. The time was now, and there was no escaping it. The place, according to a sign, was called Florence. Judging by the outskirts, the town was like a lot of others, and laid no claim to being anything like its Italian namesake. One night, lying with Karen on the bed in his room, he had looked at a travel brochure.
    France, Spain, Italy …
    And it had been Florence, the one in Italy, that had most drawn their attention. Karen had told him things he didn’t know about the place and made him dream things he had never imagined he could dream. That was a time when he still believed that hope cost nothing, before he’d learned that it could cost a lot.
    It could even cost you your life.
    By the inexhaustible irony of existence, he had finally come to a place called Florence. But nothing was the way it should have been. He remembered words he’d heard spoken by Ben, the man who had been closest to a father figure for him.
    Time is like a shipwreck and only what really matters stays afloat …
    His own time had turned out to be a question of clinging to a raft, trying to find a desperate