by Steve Toltz
The current affairs show ran the story anyway. Oscar Hobbs gave an interview. Apparently he wasn’t going to let my misanthropy ruin everything. To my horror, they dug up footage of me from the time of Terry’s rampage; because I wasn’t watching television then, I’d never seen it. There it was: our town that no longer exists, that I’d burned down with my observatory, and right there on television everyone was alive- my mother, my father, Terry, and even me! Even seventeen-year-old me! It’s impossible to believe I was ever that young. And that skinny. And that ugly. On the television I’m all skin and bones and walking away from the camera with the steady steps of someone moving toward a future he doesn’t know will hurt him. I instantly formed a love-hate relationship with my former self. I loved me for moving so optimistically toward the future, and hated me for getting there and fucking it up.
The following morning I made my way to the Hobbs building, a hushed, seasonless fortress in the city center, seventy-seven floors of soundproof, smell-proof, and poor-proof offices. As soon as I stepped into the lobby, I knew I had grown old inside my nanosecond of eternity. The people racing past me were so young and healthy, I had a coughing fit just looking at them. This was a new type of working man and woman, wholly different from the breed of worker who waits in a fever of impatience for five o’clock to release him from bondage. These were pathologically stressed-out consumers who worked all the time, in industries called new media, digital media, and information technologies. In this place, old methods and technologies were not even remembered, and if they were, they were talked about fondly, as if discussing the death of embarrassing relatives. One thing was certain: this new culture of workers would have baffled the hell out of Marx.
Contrary to expectations, neither Oscar’s nor Reynold’s office was on the top floor, but somewhere in the middle of the building. Entering the stark yet stylish reception area, I was all ready to put on my waiting face when the secretary with cone-shaped breasts said, “Go right in, Mr. Dean.”
Oscar’s office was surprisingly small and simple, with a view of the building opposite. He was on the phone with someone I assumed was his father, who was giving him an earful and doing it so loudly I heard the words “Are you completely stupid?” Oscar raised his eyebrows, waved me in, and motioned for me to sit on a beautiful and uncomfortable-looking flat-backed antique chair. I went to his bookshelf instead. He had an impressive collection of first editions- Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (in German), Tolstoy (in Russian), and Leopardi (in Italian)- that called to mind some lines of the last’s uplifting poetry:
What was that acid spot in time
That went by the name of Life?
Oscar hung up the phone with an expression that was not entirely clear to me. I launched my attack. “Listen, Oscar, I didn’t give you permission to start bandying around my brother’s name. This has nothing to do with him.”
“I’m funding this scheme. I don’t need your permission.”
“Hey- that’s true. You don’t.”
“Listen, Martin. You should be thankful. Your brother, while he was, in my opinion, a dangerous maniac that Australia has no business celebrating-”
“That’s just what he was!” I shouted, thrilled to my bones. For it’s a fact that nobody had ever expressed this very obvious opinion.
“Well, blind Freddy can see that. The point is, he is plain adored by this country, and your close association with him gives you the credentials you need to be taken seriously.”
“OK, but I-”
“You don’t want us to go on and on about it. This is your scheme, this is your turn in the spotlight, and you don’t want your long-dead brother overshadowing you from beyond the grave.”
“Mate, that’s it exactly.”
“After this first week, Marty, you’ll come into your own, don’t worry.”
I had to admit, Oscar Hobbs was a real gentleman. In fact, he was charming me more each time I met him. He seemed to understand me right away. I thought: Maybe people need to grasp that nepotism doesn’t necessarily mean the ascension of an idiot.
“Anyway, let’s get into details. What’s your scheme?”
“OK. It’s simple. Are you ready?”
“Ready.”
“OK. Listen to this. With our population of roughly twenty million people, if everyone in Australia mailed just one dollar a week to a certain address and that money was divided by twenty, every single week of the year twenty Australian families would become millionaires.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it!”
“That’s your idea?”
“That’s my idea!”
Oscar leaned back in his chair and put on a thinking face. It was the same as his regular face, only a little smaller and a little tighter.
The silence made me uncomfortable. I gave him a few more details to fill it.
“Now what if, after the first week, the people who have just become millionaires from the previous week put in a one-time payment of a thousand dollars as a thank-you. That means after the first week we’ll always have a weekly budget of twenty thousand dollars to support the administrative costs of the enterprise.”
Oscar started nodding rhythmically. I pushed on: “So by my calculations, at the end of the first year 1,040 families would have become millionaires, by year two 2,080 millionaires, by year three 3,120 millionaires, and so on. Now 3,120 new millionaires in three years is pretty good, but at that rate it would still take roughly 19,230 years for every Australian to become a millionaire, not even factoring in the rate of population growth.”
“Or decline.”
“Or decline. Obviously, for the number of Australian millionaires to grow exponentially, we need to increase the payment each year by a dollar, so in year two we put in two dollars a week- that’s 40 millionaires a week, or 2,080 millionaires for the year; year three we put in three dollars-60 millionaires a week, or 3,120 millionaires for the year; and so on until every Australian is a millionaire.”
“That’s your idea.”
“That’s my idea!”
“You know what?” he said. “It’s so simple it might actually work.”
“Even if it doesn’t,” I said, “what else are we going to do with this acid spot in time that goes by the name of Life?”
“Martin. Don’t say that in an interview, OK?”
I nodded, embarrassed. Maybe he didn’t recognize the quote because I didn’t say it in Italian.
***
That night Eddie turned up at the house in his usual freshly ironed pants and wrinkle-free shirt with his face that made me wonder if they have Asian mannequins in Asian department stores. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Eddie was always disappearing and reappearing. That’s what he did. Seeing him, I suddenly remembered my idea that all along he’d hated my guts. I watched him closely. He wasn’t giving himself away. Maybe he’d been pretending to like me for so long he’d forgotten that he didn’t. Why would he pretend to like me anyway? For what sinister trap? Probably none- to soften up his loneliness, that was all. I suddenly felt sorry for the whole lot of us.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“ Thailand. You’d like Thailand, you know. You should think of going there one day.”
“Why the hell would I like Thailand? I’ll tell you where I think I’d like: Vienna, Chicago, Bora Bora, and St. Petersburg in the 1890s. Thailand I’m not so sure about. What were you doing there?”
“Did I see your picture on the front page of the paper today?”
“You might have.”
“What’s going on?”
I told him what was going on. As Eddie listened, his eyes seemed to sink deeper into his skull.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not doing anything right now. Things have been a little bad for me lately, as you know. I don’t suppose you need any help in there, making people millionaires?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Why not?”
It was true Eddie had been down on his luck. He
had bungled his life too; the strip clubs he’d been managing (one of which I had partially destroyed with my car in a moment of mental collapse) had been shut down by police because underage girls were stripping. The clubs were also known for drug deals, and one night there was a fatal shooting, the worst kind. Throughout these calamities Eddie had kept remarkably cool, and I suspected it wasn’t a façade, either. He had a way of remaining aloof from physical disturbances. It was as though they were happening in a reality he was watching through binoculars.
So when he asked me if he could be a part of the millionaire scheme, of course I said yes. When someone close to you who has never asked you for anything finally does, it’s quite touching. Besides, I still owed him all the money he’d loaned me, and this was a way to pay him back.
Considering he had managerial experience, I suggested he take care of the administrative aspect. In truth I was greatly relieved. I only wanted to see the idea realized; I personally wanted nothing to do with administering anything.
“I can’t believe we’re going to make people millionaires,” Eddie said, slapping his hands together. “It’s a bit like playing God, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. For a second I thought it was.”
If we were playing God in the movie of his life, would it be in character to hand out money? I suppose with an eternity on his hands, even God would run out of ideas eventually.
***
Oscar wasn’t keen on the idea of Eddie running the administrative side of the enterprise, but he was inhumanly busy running two television stations, an Internet service, and three newspapers. I couldn’t help but be impressed. If you knew how hard these bastards worked, you’d never say anything negative about privilege again, and you wouldn’t even want it for yourself. So he okayed Eddie and gave us a large office each in the Hobbs News Building. We were able to pick our own staff, and though we only hired females with great cleavage (a habit from our strip-club days) we weren’t just clowning around in there. Eddie got right to it. He really took charge. With Oscar’s influence, he obtained the electoral rolls for every state, made a database, and rigged up some system where the names would be jumbled around in the computer much like balls in a lottery bubble. Then, quite at random, the computer would somehow pick the first twenty names. Actually, even though I can’t be precise in my explanation of how it worked, it wasn’t that complicated. Nothing surprising about that. There’s plenty of uncomplicated things I don’t understand.
That was it, really. The newspapers publicized the details of the scheme, and by the end of the week the dollar coins came streaming in. Our poor staff was snowed under opening envelopes and counting millions of those round cold dollars. We were also all gearing up for the opening-night party, when the names of the first millionaires would be read out on national television. It was going to be one of those A-list parties where the guests either make a fool out of you or pretend you don’t exist. I wasn’t looking forward to it. And there was my public role as mastermind behind the unsophisticated scheme; standing next to Oscar Hobbs, I was to read out the list of names, then the new millionaires, rounded up earlier that day by Eddie’s crew, would come up onstage and shriek appropriately. That was the plan. Today was Thursday. The party was next Friday. Oscar had organized a deal with all the TV stations. It would be like the moon landing. For one night there was going to be peace between the warring networks. Oscar was incredible- all this he did in between managing everything else.
I was revitalized, but my energy was still easily exhaustible, and I collapsed in bed each night, with Anouk often waiting for me. We quickly wore each other out.
“Are you happy, Martin? Are you happy?” she’d ask.
What an odd question to ask me, of all people. I shook my head. “Happy? No. But my life has become a curious shape that interests me for the first time.”
That made her smile with relief.
On the Tuesday before the party, I was sitting motionless behind my desk as if I were some extraneous piece of office furniture when the phone rang. I picked it up.
“Hello?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t give interviews.”
“Dad- it’s me.”
“Oh, Jasper. Hi.”
“What are you planning?”
“Planning?”
“There’s no way you’re just making people millionaires for no reason.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I know you better than you know yourself.”
“You think so, do you?”
“It’s your opening gambit, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like talking on the phone. Am I going to see you soon?”
“Yeah- soon,” he said.
He hung up and I stared wistfully at the telephone until someone saw me, then I pretended to clean it. The truth is, I missed Jasper: he was the only one who understood that making people millionaires was an entirely calculated bit of shenanigans, simply a means to an end- the end being to get people on my side, then follow that with something that would surprise even Death. Yes, all along this was a conscious strategy for winning their approval, which would be pitted against their unconscious strategy for destroying me. What Jasper guessed was that I had a simple plan:
1. Make everyone in Australia a millionaire, thus winning everyone’s support, trust, and perhaps adoration, also having
2. The media barons on my side, while simultaneously
3. Becoming a politician and winning a seat in Parliament at the upcoming federal election and then
4. Commence wholesale reformation of Australian society based on my ideas and thus
5. Impress Jasper, who would apologize, weeping, while I
6. Had sex as often as possible with Anouk and
7. Died painlessly, content that a week after my death construction would begin on
8. Statues erected in public squares to the peculiar specifications of my head and body.
That was it: a plan to put an exclamation mark at the end of my life. Before I died, I would expel all my ideas from my head- every idea, no matter how silly- so that my process of dying would be a process of emptying. When I was feeling optimistic about the success of my plan, the image of my death intertwined with an image of Lenin in his tomb. In pessimistic moments, the image of my death mingled with an image of Mussolini hung from an Esso gas station in Milan.
While waiting for the big night, I hung around the office, slightly annoyed that I had nothing to do. I’d delegated everything. All I could do was work on my look of conscientious deliberation, ask at various junctures “How’s it going?” and pretend to care about the answers.
Eddie, on the other hand, was working himself into the ground preparing for the party. I watched him scribbling industriously and I was wondering if he ever felt like I did, like a few misplaced molecules cobbled together to form an implausible person, when I suddenly had a great idea.
“Eddie,” I said. “That list of will-be millionaires- are there any in Sydney?”
“Three,” he said. “Why?”
“Give me their files, will you?”
***
The first millionaire was in Camperdown. His name was Deng Agee. He was from Indonesia. He was twenty-eight years old and had a wife and a three-month-old baby. The house looked completely deserted. There was no answer when I knocked, but ten minutes later I saw him coming home with heavy shopping bags. Ten meters from the house, the plastic bag in his left hand broke and his groceries went crashing onto the pavement. He looked down at his dented tins of tuna like one heartbroken, as if the tins of tuna just wanted to be friends.
I smiled warmly so he wouldn’t recognize me from the newspapers.
“How’s life, Deng?” I sang.
“Do I know you?” he said, looking up.
“You doing OK, then? Got everything you need?”
“Fuck off.”
He h
ad no idea that in a week’s time he’d be a millionaire. It was hilarious.
“Are you happy in this place, Deng? It’s kind of a dump, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“What do you want? I’ll call the police.”
I walked over, stooped down, and pretended to pick up $10 from the ground. “Did you drop this?”
“That’s not mine,” he said, and went inside and slammed the door in my face. He’s going to make a terrific millionaire, I thought, as if it were necessary for me that my millionaires (as I thought of them) be incorruptible.
The second Sydney millionaire was a biology teacher. She had maybe the ugliest face I’d ever seen. I almost cried at the sight of it. I could feel the wind of a thousand doors closing in that ugly face. She didn’t see me come into her classroom. I took a desk in the back row and grinned madly.
“Who are you?”
“How long have you been teaching here, Mrs. Gravy?”
“Sixteen years.”
“And in that time have you ever forced a child to swallow chalk?”
“No, never!”
“Really. That’s not what they’re saying down at the Board of Education.”
“It’s a lie!”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“You’re not from the Board of Education.”
Mrs. Gravy walked up and peered at me as if I were an illusion. I looked for a wedding ring on her finger and saw nothing but naked wedges of flesh. I stood and walked to the door. The thought of money’s being the only thing in heaven and earth to bring Mrs. Gravy joy was so depressing to me, I almost didn’t visit the third Sydney millionaire, but seeing as I had nothing else to do, I leaned my back against the school lockers, a long row of vertical coffins, and opened up the file.