Giorgio Faletti: I'm God

He resisted the temptation to light a cigarette.

The technical meeting that had just ended had upset him, aggravating the bad mood that had been dogging him since the beginning of the day.

The previous evening, he had gone to Madison Square Garden to see the Knicks go belly-up, losing to the Dallas Mavericks. He had come out feeling bitter, as he always did – leading him to wonder why he still insisted on going to games.

That old feeling of being part of a crowd, celebrating a shared passion, just wasn’t there any more. Whether his team won or lost, he always returned home thinking the same thing.

And alone.

Going in search of memories is never an easy matter. Whatever you dig up, it never really works. You can’t fully recapture the good memories, and you can’t kill the bad ones.

But he kept going back, feeding that instinct for self-harm that every human being, to a greater or lesser degree, carries within himself.

Several times during the game he had looked around at the bleachers until he gradually lost interest in what was happening in the game.

With a sad tub of popcorn in his hands, he had seen fathers and sons overjoyed at a slam dunk from Irons or a three-pointer by Jones and screaming in chorus with the rest of the fans, ‘Defence! Defence! Defence!’ when the other team attacked.

He had done exactly the same in the days when he went to games with his sons and felt that he meant something in their lives. But that had turned out to be an illusion. The truth was, they meant something in his.

When one of the Knicks had put in a three, he, too, had risen to his feet by sheer force of habit, rejoicing with a crowd of perfect strangers and using it as an opportunity to repress the tears rising to his eyes.

Then he had sat down again. On his right was an empty seat and on his left a boy and a girl with eyes for nobody but each other, clearly wondering why they were here instead of in bed, having a lot more fun.

When he’d come here with his sons, he’d always sat between them. John, the younger of the two, usually sat on his right and seemed equally interested in the game and the comings and goings of the people selling drinks, candy floss and all kinds of food. Jeremy had often compared him to a furnace that could burn hot dog and popcorn the way an old steam locomotive burned coal. More than once he had thought that the boy wasn’t really interested in basketball and the real reason he liked going to the stadium was his father’s generosity when they were there.

Sam, the older one, who was more like him, both physically and in character, and would soon be taller than him, was really fascinated by the game. Although they had never talked about it, he knew that his dream was to be a star of the NBA. Unfortunately, Jeremy was convinced it would remain a dream and nothing more. Sam had inherited his big bones and the kind of build that with time would tend to spread outwards rather than upwards, even though he was in the school team and regularly beat his father when they shot hoops behind the house.

Mortifying as that was, his pride as a parent always made Jeremy happy to be humiliated like that.

Then the things that had happened had happened. Actually, he didn’t feel any sense of guilt, and didn’t see why he should.

It had simply been a piece of demolition.

He and his wife Jenny had found themselves talking less and less and arguing more and more. Then the arguments had ended and only silence had remained. Without any real reason, they had become strangers. At that point, the demolition was over and they didn’t have the strength left to start rebuilding.

After the divorce, Jenny had moved closer to her parents and now lived in Queens with the boys. They had stayed on good terms, and in spite of what the judge had ruled, she allowed him to see his sons whenever he wanted. Except that Jeremy couldn’t always get away and before long the boys were seeing less and less of him and were less and less enthusiastic when they did. Their excursions had become less frequent, and going to games had stopped altogether.

It seemed that demolition had become his speciality, both at work and outside.

He shook himself free of these thoughts and tried to get back to the present.

Sonora Inc., the hugely successful construction company he worked for, had acquired two adjoining four-storey buildings on the corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street, paying a considerable sum to the owners and decent compensation to the few families who still lived in those buildings. In their place there would be a forty-two-storey condominium, with a gym, a roof swimming pool and other facilities.

The new was elbowing aside the old.

They had almost finished the demolition. Jeremy found this part of the process necessary but extremely boring. After months of effort and noise, it was as if the work hadn’t even started. He had even felt a touch of sadness as he watched those two old redbrick buildings come down, as if a chunk of history was disappearing with them. But the excitement of construction would soon put paid to that feeling. Before too long, the excavators would carve out sufficient space to throw down foundations appropriate to a building of that kind. And then the creation would begin, the gradual climb upwards, the adding of piece to piece, until the joyful moment when they planted a Stars and Stripes on the roof.

Standing in the doorway of the hut, he saw the workers downing tools one by one and walking towards him.

He looked at his watch. The argument with those assholes had lasted so long, he hadn’t realized it was lunchtime. He wasn’t hungry, but more than that, he had no desire right now to join in the chatter that always accompanied lunch. He’d always been on cordial, even friendly terms with his men. They didn’t share anything outside work, but work did take up most of their time, after all. And on the sites that he supervised he liked people to work as harmoniously as possible. That was why he had earned the esteem of his bosses and the respect of the workforce, even though they all knew that, when necessary, he was ready to take the gloves off and show an iron fist.

The fact that in his case it wasn’t a velvet glove, but a work glove, didn’t change anything.

Ronald Freeman, his deputy, came into the hut, making the floor sway slightly as he did so. He was a tall, well-built black man with a passion for beer and spicy food. Both tendencies had left their mark on his face and body. Freeman had married an Indian woman – something spicy to get his teeth into, as he put it. Jeremy had been to dinner at their house once. No sooner had he put in his mouth the first piece of something that had a name like masala than he had felt himself burst into flame and had been forced to take an immediate swig of beer. Then he had laughed and asked his host if you needed a firearms licence to serve food like that.

Ron took off his hard hat and went to the corner where he had put the thermal container his wife prepared for him every day. He sat down on the bench that ran along one side of the hut and placed the container on his knees. He saw Jeremy’s face and realized it was one of those days.

‘Trouble?’

Jeremy shrugged his shoulders, downplaying the situation. ‘The usual crap. When an architect and an engineer agree after arguing for hours, you can bet the next thing they’ll do is go off in search of a third pain in the ass, so they can put together a kind of Bermuda triangle.’

‘And did they find one?’

‘You know how it is. It isn’t hard to find a ballbuster.’

‘The Brokens woman?’

‘Yeah.’

‘If that woman understood double what she understands now, she’d still understand shit. She must be a sensation in bed, if her husband lets her off the leash like that.’