How Like A God

by Brenda W Clough

  Rob stroked her, appraising it. She was going to climax at the first thrust. How many times could he get her to orgasm? It might be kind of interesting to find out. He pushed her against the wall again and she clasped him, moaning into the tangle of beard where it hung over his chest. This was going to be a perfectly fair deal after all. He’d give her the best screw of her life, a stellar event that she’d remember fondly forever—far better than the entire basketball team could do.

  But standing was awkward. She was too short for him. No problem—Rob picked her up and tossed her lightly onto the white bed. When he climbed on top of her she wrapped wiry arms and legs around him. “Come on, come on!” she begged. He fumbled at her crotch to enter her. Her pubic hair was sparse under his fingers.

  Suddenly big soft things were falling on Rob, bouncing on his head and back. Startled, he flung one away. It was a blue teddy bear. The jounce of the tall bedposts had disrupted the balancing act up on the shelf, and the stuffed animals were tumbling off, bears and dinosaurs and walruses and beluga whales raining down onto the bed.

  He stared down at Courtenay in a welter of her old toys and thought, I’m having sex with a girl who still sleeps with teddy bears. “Oh, come on!” she wailed. Her fingernails dug into his bare buttocks. “What are you waiting for? I want it!”

  “No you don’t,” he said automatically. “Stop.” And she did, like a car slipping into neutral, lying still and blank on her pillow.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, his thoughts whirling. What am I doing? This girl is underage, only thirteen years old—a child! All the other stuff I’ve done is maybe marginal, but this is a crime, a genuine twenty-four-carat crime. I am raping her, the same as if I held a knife to her throat. Is this the kind of person I am?

  A sudden and overpowering self-disgust made him nauseous. He stumbled into Courtenay’s pink-tiled bathroom and hung over the basin, panting. Cold sweat trickled down his face into his beard, and goosebumps stood out on his naked legs. He stared into the mirror and didn’t recognize the person reflected there. A wild man, with hair matted down his back and tangles in his long disheveled beard, glared madly out of the glass. It was a mask of mindless malice, a horror.

  “No!” he cried out loud. “That is not me!” His own voice echoing in the tiled room rang oddly in his ears, and he reaffirmed his discovery. “That is not me.” From that statement the logical corollary came easily: “I have to find my real self.”

  He buttoned his shirt. Back in the bedroom he retrieved his ragged jeans. Courtenay still sprawled white and still on her bed. Rob didn’t feel even a twitch of desire. He drew the quilt up over her nakedness and told her,

  “Forget all this. Everything that happened in this room. You’re asleep, and you’ll wake naturally in time for dinner.”

  An hour ago that would have been enough, and more than enough. Now Rob thought about the dingbat druggie parents, the basketball team, the condoms in the sock drawer, and knew he had to do more. He sat on the edge of the bed again and looked at Courtenay’s sleeping face under the stringy orange-dyed fringe. She needed to straighten out and fly right. But how to

  achieve it?

  He spent a long time flipping through her memories and images. If this was going to work it had to be done carefully, working with the grain of her nature. He didn’t want to just pull the plug on her sex drive. She’d need that someday when she got married. What she needed now was some overriding interest, to keep her safe until her emotions matured to match her body.

  Sports? Not a good prospect in New York City. And in spite of her genes, music might be a bad move—her father hung with too many sleazeball musicians.

  Ah, but here was something. Courtenay wasn’t a complete ditz. She had liked books until fairly recently: Regency romances, Gothic novels, Rebecca and Gone With The Wind. He commanded, “You’re going to fall deeply in love with the works of—let me see, Jane Austen. Charles Dickens. Anthony Trollope. Read everything they wrote, those nineteenth-century writers. Write papers and book reports. Dive in and enjoy it.”

  That should do it. Her teachers will be stunned, Rob reflected. As he quietly closed the door on her he envisioned Denton and Sara MacQuie a decade from now, hippies sitting bewildered in a university audience while their daughter graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature. The picture made him laugh, a weak rusty laugh, but a laugh all the same.

  Stores in Manhattan do not open early. Rob couldn’t get a haircut until after ten. And barbers were apparently an extinct species uptown. There were only hair designers in salons. The Personal Skylines salon on Madison Avenue was far too campily cutting-edge for his taste. Fiberglass Liberty statues stood in the corners holding aprons on their upheld arms. And a large inflatable King Kong clutched a Barbie-doll Fay Wray as he scaled the wall behind the espresso machine. But it was the first open shop Rob found.

  He muscled the receptionist into overlooking his seedy appearance and giving him the first appointment. He sat down in an opulent white leather styling chair. A classic Billy Joel album popped into the CD player as the boyish young stylist said, “There’s nothing wrong with long hair on a man these days.”

  “I want it cut,” Rob insisted. “Short.”

  “But it’s so nice, so long! Look at mine.” He turned so that Rob could see the black ponytail bobbing at his nape. “You know how many weeks it took me to grow it that long? When did you last have a cut?”

  Rob had to think. “April.”

  “You’ve got roots to die for! Look, let me just trim it up nice for you, okay? Give you an idea how it’ll look. And if you’re not happy, we’ll buzz it, I promise.”

  The stylist pulled the same argument in favor of Rob’s jungly tangle of beard. “It’ll be far more comfortable for you, believe me, to take it off a step at a time!” Why did people always have to argue? But Rob curbed his impulse to muscle him. If you hired a pro, it was only sensible to heed his advice.

  Rob felt like a fool sitting here. The nostalgic Manhattan pop songs pouring out of the speakers, “A New York State of Mind” and “I’ve Loved These Days,” struck him as savagely ironic. The actual haircutting process was curiously unsettling. Rob had not realized until now how stressful it was to be touched, skin to skin. He had gotten into the habit of touching people only to exploit them. Now every time the stylist’s fingers brushed his neck he had to fight down an involuntary twitch of power.

  Forty-five minutes later Rob still didn’t recognize himself, but at least the reflected image was neat—a sharp silhouetted wedge of beard and a George Washington-style tail in back. Summer outdoors had glazed the light brown of his hair and beard with an almost butterscotch gold. “It’ll do, I guess.” He was too jittery now to demand changes.

  “I knew you’d love the look!” the stylist exclaimed. Rob tipped him heavily in quarters and made his escape.

  His new image flashed in each store window he passed, tattered clothing topped by an absurdly trendy head. But I’m still a wolf, Rob thought.

  Shearing the wolf to look like a sheep doesn’t make it a member of the flock. They touch me, and I want to bite. His isolation terrified him.

  Where can I go? he wondered. How do I end, and then begin? If I give up life as a wolf, how shall I live? I’ve built this wall around myself brick by brick, a prison, a bell jar, and now I can’t get out.

  And all his habits, body and mind, worked against him. Rob looked up after walking and thinking for hours, and found himself at Forty-second and Fifth, in front of the public library. With a grunt of annoyance, he climbed the steps between the big stone lions and went in. Then, it seemed only natural to walk down the cool high-ceilinged hall to the Periodicals Room, and look at today’s Times. On his way to his usual table, he heard the periodicals librarian calling, “Mr. Lewis? Is that you? There’s a note for you from upstairs. Your book has been found, the epic of Gilgamesh.”

  After waiting two months, it would be a pity to miss the book. Rob gave her
the newspaper back again. “Did you get your hair cut?” she asked kindly. “I don’t know how I recognized you.”

  “You don’t see me,” Rob responded without thinking. Now was that necessary? he thought. She was only making small talk. This tarnhelm trick makes it too easy to be a loner. I’ve got to get out of the habit. He went upstairs to the main Reading Room, shooed two men away from his favorite place, and sat down. The book arrived in five minutes.

  Reading Gilgamesh’s story was an eerie experience. For Rob it was like idling through the poetry section, opening a book here and a book there, and then suddenly finding his own biography in blank verse. My god, this guy is me, he realized. Enormous powers that isolate him from his hometown—that means another person had this problem, even if it was five thousand years ago! Of course it was all wrapped up in the usual epic-myth trappings, goddesses and angry demons and magical undersea plants that made you immortal if you ate them, but the skeleton of the story was weirdly familiar. Gilgamesh had even been a rapist.

  Rob sat riveted, reading late into the day. Gilgamesh coped with his bell jar by finding an equal, a companion named Enkidu. Rob knew that his instincts had been right. He had to break out of this killer solitude too, or it would twist him out of all recognition until he was a ravening monster. And he would need help to do it. When he was frozen and helpless on that park bench, Jim Deacon had rescued him. But now he had nobody to call on. No quarrelsome Mesopotamian dieties were going to drop an Enkidu into his life. He was stuck, a wolf trapped in the center of a tight tail-chasing circle.

  Wait—what about that guy in the park? Rob couldn’t recall the name, but he remembered the assurance, the sharp intelligent gaze. What had happened to that card? He felt in his coat pockets without result, then upended the duffel bag onto the table. Quarters rolled everywhere, tinkling to the marble floor. Half a very old soft pretzel fell squashily onto the book.

  People looked up at the noise, and a librarian came over, her glasses glittering sternly. “No food in the library!” she said.

  “You don’t see me,” Rob said absently. “Go away.” Here it was at the very bottom of the bag, a dirty and crumpled card. It read:

  Dr. Edwin Amadeus Barbarossa Microbiological Research Division National Institute of Infectious Diseases Building 5, Room 2C 993-A The National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892

  Holy mackerel! After all that worry about being dissected at NIH, would he actually have to go there? And in Maryland! Not only would he have to travel, but Maryland was next to Virginia, too close for comfort to—he broke off that line of thought. Probably the guy had already forgotten his extravagant promises of help. But I wouldn’t really be risking anything,

  Rob argued with himself. What the hell does it matter, where I am? And when this Barbarossa turns out to be a jerk I’ll just wipe him and move on.

  He stood up and swept all his possessions back into the duffel. The librarian walked by and stared right through him. If this isolation was strangling him, how did it help to be unseen? The tarnhelm trick was just a way to use the weirdness to lie. Rob realized he didn’t want to be a liar, that lying was no part of his true self. “I’m visible,” he told her,

  suddenly ashamed. This damned power! That was the entire problem. If he curbed the trawling in heads for information and the casual tarnhelming, surely that would force him to interact more naturally with people.

  The librarian took off her glasses, buffed them on her sleeve, and balanced them on her nose again, thrown for a loop. “That won’t happen again,” Rob told her impulsively. “I promise.” Then, already feeling he’d conceded too much, he pushed past her and hurried down the aisle towards the door.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 1

  The huge National Institutes of Health complex baffled Rob. If you number buildings, then they ought to be in numerical order, right? But no, the numbers seemed to be entirely random. Armed with a map and the exact address of where he was going, it still took Rob an hour to find Dr. Barbarossa’s office. When he found the right building, he wandered through the corridors trying to decipher the room numbering system.

  The entire building was chockablock crowded right out into the hallways, which were lined all down one side with padlocked refrigerators and freezers. These bore handwritten notices like Sterile Samples or The Storage of Radioactive Materials Is Prohibited In This Unit! Every refrigerator also had names and phone numbers taped on, in case of machine failure. The constant hum of the machinery made the hallways hot and

  claustrophobic.

  With a determination that surprised him, Rob tried stubbornly to stick to his rash resolution not to use the power lightly any more. Unfortunately he was driven to make endless exceptions. For instance, how could he possibly explain his errand to the NIH security guard? And without a proper building pass he couldn’t ask passersby for directions. Easier to walk unseen.

  At last he came to the correct room. The window in the door was blocked with a roller shade, and beside the door were four black plastic nameplates, one above the other. Edwin Barbarossa Ph.D. was the third one down. Rob stood for a long time staring at that door. I’m not nervous, far from it, he told himself. It’s just that my stomach is in a knot. The longer he stood there the worse he felt. With a sudden convulsive effort he dropped the invisibility and opened the door.

  Inside, surrounded by a welter of pipette trays and slide holders, a tiny swarthy woman in a white lab coat perched on a tall stool and peered through a microscope larger than she was. “Dr. Barbarossa?” Rob asked, and she silently pointed on towards the connecting room without looking up.

  The next room was full too, more bulging shelves and mysterious instruments and crammed-full filing cabinets. Nobody sat at any of the desks. But the room farther beyond had a light on. Rob peeked around the corner. This office was yet smaller, not much bigger than a decent bathroom. A large desk with a computer-stand ell took up half the space. Above it rose shelves piled with three-ring binders, glass laboratory jars, sheaves of electron micrographs, and microscope slides in boxes. Pinned to the wall were some family pictures, two postcards, and a large blowup of an unrecognizable oval object, possibly a plate of moldy spaghetti. On the floor a bitten doughnut perched on a napkin in an open soft-sided briefcase.

  Rob recognized immediately from Central Park the CD boom box perched precariously on top of a stack of scientific journals. Classical piano music tinkled from it very softly. Dr. Barbarossa himself was almost invisible, slumped in his office chair with his feet on the desk. Only the top of his head, with a slightly thin spot in the dark curls at the crown, could be seen. When he turned a little, Rob saw that he was typing at great speed on a small computer propped on his lap. Rob waited to see if he was going to stop or slow down. But Barbarossa could apparently keep it up for hours. So Rob knocked on the open door.

  “Come!” The voice was confident and cheery. Barbarossa sat up and turned as Rob stepped in.

  At least he had given his first words some thought. “How’s Katie?” Rob said.

  “Katie? My niece? She’s fine … Are you—holy mike, it’s the Heimlich guy from Central Park!” He bounced up and shook Rob’s hand. “How are you? You

  look to be in better shape than before! What’s your name, by the way? Mine’s Edwin.”

  Somehow it hadn’t occurred to Rob that he’d have to tell his name. And Barbarossa made an intimidating figure, in a white lab coat with pens and an X-acto knife stuck in the pocket. Under his tan the skin had an olive cast. He was a little shorter than Rob, but more strongly built, with a deep chest and powerful shoulders. In another decade or so, his round cheeks and clean-shaven chin would be imposing. But now his face was too open and youthful to merit the word—cute rather than handsome. He looked entirely capable of dissecting Rob at the drop of a hat. But there was no time to chicken out now. “I’m … Robertson Michael Lewis,” Rob said haltingly. “.. .call me Rob.”

  He stuck there, completely out of practic
e at normal conversation. Luckily Edwin had no difficulty holding up both ends of the talk. “I remember last time, you called me ‘Idiot!’ It was great, exactly true. I looked up the statistics on infant choking when I got back. Enough to make your blood run cold! Let’s go down to the cafeteria and grab a cup of coffee. You want to leave your bag? It’s safe enough while Dr. Lal is here.”

  He turned the CD player off, and swept Rob along the maze of stuffy corridors and down the stairs, chatting easily about nothing. But when they sat down in the cafeteria with their coffee, Edwin suddenly said, “I owe you, you know. You came here for a reason, didn’t you? What is it?”

  Rob forced the reluctant words out, one by one. “I guess … just to talk. It’s scary. I don’t… know anybody anymore. So I picked you.

  Because I had your card.”

  It didn’t make much sense, but Edwin said, “Okay.” Rob stuck here again a little, so Edwin continued, “Were you homeless in New York? How long have you been on the street?”

  “Not too long. Just the summer. I—I think that’s what I need to tell. How I hit bottom. I want to come back. And I can’t. Unless I tell.”

  Edwin nodded. “Confession is good for you.”

  Nettled, Rob retorted, “No, it isn’t. It’s going to be horrible. Because I’ve been horrible.”

  Edwin grinned at him over the brim of his plastic coffee cup. “You won’t shock me, Rob. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one,” Rob said, surprised.

  “I’m thirty-four. I’ve had three whole extra years on you, to pile up sins. Nothing you say can surprise me.”

  Now it was Rob’s turn to smile. “Want to bet?”

  After all his worries, Rob was astonished at how easy it was. With practice, the logjam on his tongue went away and his whole story poured out, painlessly and without stress, as if it had all happened to someone else. Edwin was a world-class listener, instinctively knowing when to be silent and when to ask a prompting question. Even the gravest difficulty Rob had foreseen—the complete impossibility of his entire situation— didn’t weigh on Edwin at all. “But isn’t the whole thing unbelievable?” Rob demanded.