The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla Read Free Book Online

surrounds you. Women throw themselves at you, but you’re crazy in love with your woman. You live under the same roof, know you were meant to be together, but there’s one small problem—she isn’t willing to give of herself, if you know what I mean.”
    “How long were you together?”
    “One year,” Robert said, dragging the two syllables out of his mouth, as though they could connote the true duration of the term. “One year I lived with the most beautiful woman the human race has ever known. The woman who makes all others pale in comparison. The woman who, with one look, makes you think all her peers are a genetic scam. That she and she alone was what God had in mind when he used the rib. Ah, mon dieu , but this is the catastrophe. Every day I sang her songs of praise, saluted her beauty. Even when I knew I’d gone too far, I couldn’t stop. She laughed at me, said Paris is full of beautiful women, and retreated to her room.”
    “Hold up, what do you mean to her room? You lived under the same roof, you were in love, and you’re telling me you had separate rooms?”
    Robert smiled bitterly. “We were platonic lovers. We never touched. She said she was saving herself for someone else.”
    “Someone else?”
    Robert raised his finger to the heavens, waiting for the nickel to drop. Ben held his belly and laughed. “God? Catherine was in love with God?”
    Robert tried to stifle his own laugh, which was a hoarse echo of Ben’s. “What did you expect? A whole year I told her that God had created her in his image, I called her divine, begged for a piece of paradise, and she … what is she up to? Locking herself up in her room all night with her dildo, moaning with the wild passion of a Georgian monk in the throes of religious ecstasy. I’m talking about the pinnacle of spiritual life—in the morning a theology student, in the afternoon caring for a sick priest, and at night Mary Magdalene.”
    “God,” Ben said.
    “Don’t mention him. You tell me, how can I, flesh and blood, compete with Him? Just try to imagine the torment: Day after day I gaze into that stunning face. A year slips by and I can’t be sure if she’s real, if she was born this way, or if she is just an evil plan hatched by her true love who created her just for Himself.”
    Ben smiled. “And what about other women? I’m sure that at some point you let nature run its course and…”
    “I had no natural needs!” Robert said, slamming the armrest of his wheelchair. “None but her. She was all I needed in life. I knew you wouldn’t understand. As soon as I met her—that was it! All else was dead to me! The entire female sex! It’s as though I had seen the master plan … her very existence negated the existence of others. And the more she held out, the more feverish my love became.”
    “Rejection is the ultimate aphrodisiac, everyone knows that.”
    “Oh, how I was drawn to her room at night and how soundly I was denied.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “She used to lock her door at night. ‘So that I wouldn’t get in their way,’ at least that’s what she said.”
    Ben, recognizing the potential in the cripple’s life story, the man who waited on the arrival lawn of the Other World for ten years, knew that they had reached the pivotal moment.
    “And then?” Ben cradled the words on the way out of his mouth. He used them often, in fact, when squeezing the life out of false plotlines.
    “You remember I told you how I dreamed of being an actor? There wasn’t a show in Paris I didn’t audition for. Two weeks before the event that changed my life, I auditioned for a small part in a movie rendition of The Miser . Molière. It was the worst audition of my life. I was wound so tight that instead of playing the part of the well-mannered gentleman, I came off as a tic-ridden madman. After a minute of reading, I dropped the text and walked out of the room. It was clear I’d missed another opportunity. Two weeks later I got a call. The