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Once David had figured out how to fabricate the surveys and get away with it, he had plenty of time on his hands. He spent a lot of it in the Quarter, pretending to be an undercover cop.
That was how he came to notice the homeless people scavenging in the trash cans. They had to be profiting, somehow. Those shiny cans, those newspapers, they converted to money. Not much of it. But there were a lot of homeless people. "But it's not my kind of thing," said David. He couldn't imagine himself beating up a homeless person. Blood all over his shirt. His mother would have a fit! And, besides, if you hit someone, you might break the skin on your knuckles. Red wet stuff flying around. Exchange of body fluids. Bad news. So David was just there, thinking, toying with the idea, and one day a homeless guy came up to him, bowed really low, and laid five bright coins in the dust at his feet. "Lord," said the homeless one, in a husky voice. "Master." Small change. But there were a lot of homeless people. David came daily, and got into the habit of bringing along a small backpack to tote away the haul. He didn't seem to be doing any harm to anyone. The homeless probably worked harder now that they had an extrapersonal goal to satisfy. Nobody had told David the nature of that extrapersonal goal, but, if you're in the process of becoming a god (or something similar to a god) then it doesn't take long to figure out what's going on. Then came the night when he heard the footsteps on the stairs, his mother's muffled protest, a scream. Then they were in his bedroom. At least, the first of them were in his bedroom. The others were lined up down the stairs, down the hallway and out in the streets, hundreds of them. Bearing globs of sacred spittle in plastic bags, and chunks of the sacred earth, and spiritually numinous shards of broken bottle glass, and blessed turds of canine origin, and other things, many of them, precious, all sacred to the Lord, to the Master. "No," said David, denying his divinity. And that's when things turned nasty. These days, David can move the little finger of his left hand, at least in the mornings, before he gets too tired. The doctors have great hopes for him. Given another five or twenty years or so, he might recover enough to talk. And he might live that long, perhaps, providing he can survive the next round of skin grafts. |
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