Free Good to Be God by Tibor Fischer

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

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    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

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    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