Free Good to Be God by Tibor Fischer Page 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.
    60

    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