Giorgio Faletti - I'm God

He took a deep breath, as if he needed a lot of air to say what he was about to say.

‘I curse myself because I’m like this, but most of all because I’d give the lives of millions of those people just to have my legs back.’

He looked him in the eyes again.

‘What happened, Wen? More than that, why did it happen?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone will ever know, not really.’

Jeff placed his hands on the wheels and moved the chair back and forth a little, as if that gesture was enough to remind him that he was still alive. Or maybe it was just a moment of distraction, one of those moments when he thought he could stand up and walk away. He was pursuing his own thoughts and it took a while before they became words.

‘They used to say the Communists ate children.’

As he spoke, he looked at Wendell without seeing him, as if he was visualizing the image those words evoked.

‘We fought the Communists. Maybe that’s why they didn’t eat us.’

He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was a whisper.

‘Only chewed us up and spat us out.’

He pulled himself together and held out his hand. Wendell shook it: Jeff had a firm grip.

‘Good luck, Jeff.’

‘Now fuck off, Wen. And go quickly. I hate crying in front of a white man. On my skin, even the tears look black.’

Wendell walked away, with the distinct feeling that he was losing something. That both of them were losing something. He had only taken a few steps when Jeff’s voice forced him to stop.

‘Hey, Wen.’

He turned and saw him, the silhouette of a man and a machine against the sunset.

‘Get laid for me,’ Jeff said, making an unambiguous gesture with his hand.

Wendell smiled in reply. ‘OK. When I do, it’ll be in your name.’

Corporal Wendell Johnson walked away, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his walk still, in spite of himself, a soldier’s walk. He reached the accommodation block without greeting or talking to anyone else. He entered his quarters. The bathroom door was closed. He always kept it closed, because the mirror faced the main door and he preferred to avoid his face being the first image to greet him.

He forced himself to remember that from the next day onwards he would have to get used to it. There were no charitable mirrors, only surfaces that reflected exactly what they saw. Without pity, and with the involuntary cruelty of indifference.

He took off his shirt and threw it on a chair, away from the masochistic spell of the other mirror, the one inside the wall closet. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed with his hands behind his head, rough skin against rough skin, a sensation he was used to.

Through the half-open windows, like an emanation of the darkening sky, came the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker hidden somewhere in the trees.

tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …

Memory turned in its vicious circle, and the sound became the muted splutter of an AK-47 and then a tangle of voices and images.

‘ Matt , where the fuck are those bastards? Where are they firing from? ’

‘ I don ’ t know. I can ’ t see a thing. ’

‘ Hey , you with the M-79 , throw a grenade into those bushes on the right. ’

‘ What happened to Corsini? ’

Farrell ’ s voice , stained with earth and fear , came from some point on their right. ‘Corsini’s gone. Mac, too

tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …

And Farrell ’ s voice, too, dissolved into the air.

‘Come on. Wen, let ’ s get our asses out of here. They ’ re tearing us to pieces.’

tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …

‘No, not that way. There ’ s no cover.’

‘Holy shit, they ’ re everywhere.’

He opened his eyes again and let the things around him return. The closet, the chair, the table, the bed, the windows with the unusually clean panes. And here, too, a smell of rust and disinfectant. This room had been his one landmark for months, after all the time spent in a ward, with doctors and nurses bustling around him trying to alleviate the pain of his burns. It was there that he had let his mind, almost intact, back into his ravaged body, and had made himself a promise.

The woodpecker conceded a truce to the tree it had been torturing. It seemed like a good omen, the end of hostilities, a part of the past that he could somehow leave behind him.

That he had to leave behind him.

The next day he would be leaving.

He didn’t know what kind of world he would find beyond the walls of the hospital, nor did he know how that world would greet him. In fact, neither of those two things mattered. All that mattered was the long journey he had ahead of him, because at the end of that journey an encounter with two men awaited him. They would look at him with eyes full of fear and astonishment. Then he would talk, to that fear and that astonishment.

And finally he would kill them.

A smile, again devoid of pain. Without realizing it, he drifted into sleep. That night, he slept without hearing voices, and for the first time didn’t dream about rubber trees.

What surprised him during the journey was the corn.

As he rode north, getting closer and closer to home, stretches of it started to appear at the sides of the road, meek in the shadow of the Greyhound bus. The ripples of the wind and the shadows of the clouds made it come alive. He remembered how resistant it felt when you ran your hand through it. An unexpected travelling companion, the colour of cold beer, the warm shelter of the hayloft.

He knew that sensation.

And he remembered how, with other hands, he had run his fingers through Karen’s hair and breathed in her scent, which smelled like nothing else in the world. He had felt it like a painful spasm when he had left after being at home on leave for a month, a fleeting illusion of invulnerability the army granted everyone before they shipped out. They had been offered thirty days of paradise and possible dreams, before the Army Terminal at Oakland became Hawaii and finally turned into Bien-Hoa, the troop selection centre twenty miles from Saigon.

And then Xuan-Loc, the place where everything had started, where he had found his own small plot of hell.

He took his eyes away from the road and lowered the peak of his baseball cap. He wore sunglasses held on with an elastic band because he had practically no ears left to rest the arms of the glasses on. He closed his eyes and hid himself in that tenuous semi-darkness. All he got in return were more images.

There was no corn in Vietnam.

There were no blondes. Just a few nurses at the hospital, but by then he had almost no feeling left in his fingers or any desire to touch their hair. Above all, he was sure no woman would ever again want to be touched by him.

Ever again.

A long-haired young man in a flowered shirt, who had been sleeping across the aisle from him, to his right, woke up. He rubbed his eyes and allowed himself a yawn that smelled of sweat and sleep and pot. He turned and started to look in a canvas bag he had placed on the free seat beside him. He took out a portable radio and switched it on. After some searching he found a station, and the strains of The Iron Maiden by Barclay James Harvest joined the noise of the wheels.

Instinctively, the corporal turned to look at him. When the young man, who must have been about his own age, noticed him and saw his face, the reaction was the usual one: the one he saw every time on other people’s faces. The young man dived back into his bag, pretending to look for something. Then he turned to sit with his back to him, listening to the music and looking out the window on his side.