by Steve Toltz
Miss Caroline Potts, the file said.
I don’t remember many instances of gasping like they do in the movies, but then fiction has a habit of making the real world seem made up. People gasp. It’s no lie. And I gasped on seeing that name, with all its connotations and implications. Connotations: My brother’s death. Frustrated desire. Satisfied desire. Loss. Regret. Bad luck. Missed opportunities. Implications: She had divorced or been widowed from her Russian husband. She was not lost in Europe. She had been living in Sydney, maybe for years.
Christ!
These thoughts did not come in any order but arrived simultaneously- I couldn’t hear where one ended and another began. They all spoke over each other, like a large family at a dinner table. Of course, reason told me that there could be up to twenty or thirty Caroline Pottses living minutes from each other at any given time, as it’s not as unusual a name as Prudence Bloodhungry or Heavenly Shovelbottom. Had Eddie thought it was one of the other Caroline Pottses? I refused to believe it was anyone other than she, because in moments of personal crisis you find out what you believe, and it turned out that I believed in something after all, and it’s that I am a ball of string and life is a cat’s paw toying with me. How could it be otherwise? Go! a voice screamed. Go!
In the taxi on the way, I read the file over a dozen times. Eddie wasn’t very thorough. All it said was: Caroline Potts 44 Librarian. Mother of Terrence Beletsky, age 16. Mother! And her son’s name: Terrence. Terry. Crap! That took the wind out of my sails. She had named her son after Terry. As if the bastard didn’t have enough accolades!
Just incredible!
Caroline lived in one of those buildings that hadn’t an intercom system, so you could wander unrestricted right up the shit-colored stairwell, right up to the apartment door. I reached 4A without having thought too much about which would be the greater shock, seeing me or learning that in less than a week’s time she was going to be a million dollars richer. I knocked impatiently, and immediately we launched into our old habit of screaming excitedly at each other.
“Who is it?”
“Me!”
“Me who?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”
“Marty!” she screamed, and that threw me off balance, the fact that after all these years she so swiftly recognized my voice.
She opened the door and I gasped again. Nature had barely laid a finger on her. Then I saw that that wasn’t entirely accurate- Nature had given her a bigger bottom and longer boobs, and her face was slightly wider, and her hair wasn’t what you would call in good order, but she was still beautiful, she had the same light behind her eyes. Looking at her, I felt as if all the years since Paris had not really happened, that the past eighteen years were like an absurdly long afternoon.
“Oh my God, look at you!” she said.
“I’m old!”
“Not at all. You have the same face!”
“No I don’t!”
“Wait. You’re right! Your ear’s new!”
“I had some skin grafts done!”
“Wonderful!”
“And I’m losing my hair!”
“Well, I have a fat arse!”
“You still look beautiful!”
“You’re not just saying that?”
“No!”
“I saw your name on the news!”
“Why didn’t you come see me?”
“I wanted to! But after all these years, I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me! Besides, I saw a photo of you with a woman’s arms around you and she’s young and beautiful!”
“That’s Anouk!”
“Not your wife?”
“Not even my girlfriend. She’s our housekeeper! What about your husband?”
“We divorced! I just assumed you were still in Europe!”
“I thought the same!”
“And hey- we were supposed to meet in Paris a year after that night in the hotel! Remember?”
“I was here! In Australia! Don’t tell me you went!”
“I did, actually!”
“Oh my God!”
“I couldn’t believe when I saw Terry’s name! People are talking about him again! Then I saw it was you! What’s this nonsense you’re involved in?”
“It’s not nonsense!”
“You’re going to make every person in Australia a millionaire!”
“You’re right! It is nonsense!”
“What made you think of doing such a silly thing?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “Wait! You’re one of them!”
“Martin!”
“I’m serious! That’s why I came!”
“You rigged it!”
“I didn’t! I didn’t pick the names!”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“What am I going to do with a million dollars?”
“Wait! It says in my file here you have a son! Where is he?”
“He’s dead.” Those two words that escaped her mouth sounded as if they had come from a different place. She bit her lip and her eyes filled up. I could see her thoughts like subtitles on her face. Can I talk about this now? I tried to make things easier for her by guessing, so she wouldn’t have to tell me the whole sad story. Let’s see- teenagers die in only three ways: suicide, drunk driving, peanut allergy. Which was it?
“Drunk driving,” I said, and watched as her face whitened and she gave an almost imperceptible nod. We stood silent for a long moment, not quite ready to put the memory back in its jar. Grief is a strange entity in a reunion.
I felt sick that I had never known her son. I still loved her, and I imagined I would have loved her child too.
She stepped forward and wiped tears from my eyes with her sleeve. I didn’t know I’d been crying.
She made a sad sound, like from a tiny flute. The next minute we were hugging, with our hips, and I found sanctuary in her embrace and a cozier sanctuary in her bed. Lying in each other’s arms afterward, we set about confiding our secrets and in this way found a method of falsifying history- by ignoring it. We focused only on the present; I confided my plan to run for parliament and bring about a total transformation of society in the shortest possible time before I was overcome by cancer, and Caroline spoke of her dead son.
Is the mother of a dead child still a mother? There are words for widow and orphan, but not for the parent of a dead kid.
Hours passed. We made love a second time. It was agreed that we were no longer young and fresh, we both had telltale signs of wear and tear, but we were confident that we had been ruined by our personal tragedies in an adorable way- that our sagging faces and bodies wore our heartaches well. We decided we would never be apart again, and since no one knew of our connection, no one would make a fuss and think the drawing was rigged, and we would keep our relationship a secret until after the millionaires’ dinner, when we would get married in a small, private ceremony in the middle of my labyrinth. In short, it was a productive afternoon.
***
If you were in Australia and you weren’t watching TV the night the names of the millionaires were announced, it was because your eyes had been ripped out by vandals or you were dead. Caroline, Mrs. Gravy, Deng, and the rest of the millionaires became instant celebrities.
The party was held in a cavernous ballroom with chandeliers and seventies floral wallpaper and a stage where I would make my historic speech. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the Harbor Bridge and a big yellow moon hanging over it. It was one of those parties I’d never dreamed of going to, where the partygoers were talking themselves up big, and when they ran out of ways to aggrandize themselves directly, they did it indirectly, by making everyone else small. Reynold Hobbs was there with his young confused bride. People cruelly called her a trophy wife, as if he’d won her in a contest. That just wasn’t fair or true. He hadn’t won her at all; he’d earned her through hard work and enterprise.
My attention was mostly focused on studying the erra
tic behavior of my ego in unstable conditions; under the stress of compliments and smiles and repeated blasts of direct eye contact, its propensity was to become engorged. I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.
It was too crowded to pace nervously. I was thinking that my speech would more than likely backfire, and also that I had to tell Anouk about Caroline. Of course I knew it was almost unthinkable that a man like me could reject anyone, let alone a woman like Anouk. How could I tell her I would never taste her again, especially when she gave me the kind of supreme gratification one can get only from freeing slaves or sleeping with a really sexy woman a decade younger than yourself? Luckily, I remembered I was in love with Caroline, so I was able to walk over to Anouk and point her out. Caroline was standing in the corner of the room in a red chiffon dress, pretending not to look at me. Anouk remembered who she was from one of our postcoital confession sessions, and I explained that we were going to get married in a couple of weeks. She said nothing, a loud unpleasant nothing which made my monologue grow louder and incoherent.
“After all,” I said, “we don’t want to jeopardize our friendship.”
Her face became a stone veiled in a smile. She laughed suddenly, a hideously exaggerated laughter that made me take a half step back. Before I had the chance to say anything, to dig myself deeper into a hole, everyone in the room was calling me to make a speech.
This was it. Time to put my plan into action. I stepped up onstage. After all, you’ve made them rich. My head weighed somewhere between a droplet of water and a gallon of air. Who doesn’t love a man who’s made you rich? You can’t lose. I stood there, looking dumbly at the eager crowd, stuck in a dizzying immobility.
I searched the crowd for Caroline, who gave me an encouraging nod. That made me feel really low. And then I saw Jasper. I didn’t know he was coming and hadn’t seen him arrive. Fortunately for me, he had the same expression a dog has when you pretend to throw the ball but still have it in your hand. That gave me the boost I needed.
I cleared my throat, though it did not need it, and began.
“Thank you. I accept your applause and adoration. You’re greedy to escape your prisons, and you think that by making you rich, I set you free. I haven’t; I have only let you out of your cell, into the corridor. The prison still exists, your prison that you don’t know you love so much. All right. Let’s talk about me in relation to the tall-poppy syndrome. It’s best to address this tricky issue right off the bat. Look, don’t cut my head off, you shits. You love me now, but you’ll hate me tomorrow. You know how you are- actually, you don’t. That’s why I’d like to suggest an unusual exercise for the nation, and the exercise is to love me in perpetuity. OK? In this spirit, I have an announcement to make. My God, my entire life has led up to this moment. Of course five minutes ago I went to the toilet and my entire life led up to that moment too. But here it is. I am running for Senate. That’s right, Australia, I give you my wasted gifts! My squandered potential! I’ve always led a degraded existence, and now I offer it to you. I would like to be a part of our horrendous Parliament, our collective hoax! I want to put myself among the swine, and why shouldn’t I? I am unemployed, after all, and senator is a job as good or bad as any other, isn’t it? Just so you know, I’m not tied to any party. I will be running as an independent. And I’ll be honest with you. I think politicians are weeping sores. And when I look at our politicians in our country, I can’t believe that all of these unendurable people were actually chosen. So what can we say about democracy, except that it’s not a good enough system to hold people accountable for their lies? Supporters of this inadequate system say, well, punish them at the polls, then! But how can we when most likely the single opponent at the polls is another in a long line of unelectable gormless bandits, and so we wind up voting the liars in again, voting with our teeth clenched? Of course, the most disagreeable thing about being an atheist is that according to my nonbeliefs, I know that all these sons of bitches have no retribution coming to them in the hereafter- that everyone gets away with everything. It’s very distressing; what goes around doesn’t come around but stays where it went when it first went around.
“Are you all following me? We puzzlingly overestimate our elected representatives. Don’t overestimate me! I’ll make blunder after stupid blunder! But it is necessary for you to know where I stand on certain contentious issues so you’ll know what kind of blunders I’ll be making. Well, I am certainly not on the right. I don’t care if gays get married or get divorced. Not that I’m not for gay rights specifically, I’m just against the phrase ‘family values.’ In fact, when someone says the phrase ‘family values,’ I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face with a condom from 1953. Well, then, am I on the left? Sure, they’re the first to sign petitions and in international affairs will always support the perceived underdog, even if the underdog is a bunch of cannibals- as long as they have less money and fewer resources- and these deeply caring individuals on the left will do anything for the betterment of the disenfranchised except make a personal sacrifice. So you see? I’m neither left nor right. I’m just an ordinary person who goes to sleep feeling guilty every night. Why shouldn’t I? Eight hundred million people went to bed hungry today. All right, I’ll admit for a while our roles as massively wasteful consumers seemed to be doing us a world of good- we were slimming down, a good half of us had breast implants; frankly, we were looking good- but now we’re all fatter and more cancerous than ever, so what’s the point of it? The world is getting hotter, the ice caps are melting, because man keeps saying to nature, Hey, our whole idea of a cozy future is to have jobs. That’s all we’ve got planned. What’s more, we will pursue this aim at any cost, even, paradoxically, if it means the eventual destruction of our workplace. Man says, Sacrifice industry and economy and jobs? For what? Future generations? I don’t even know those guys! I’ll tell you something for free- it makes me ashamed that our species, which is so finely ennobled by its sacrifices, winds up sacrificing it all for the wrong things and comes off just looking like a race of people who like to use the hair dryer while taking a bath. I’m only sorry I was born three-quarters through this self-inflicted tragedy and not at the very beginning or at the very end. I’m fucking sick of watching this tragedy in slow motion. The other planets aren’t, though- they’re on the edge of their suns. The reason we’ve never had visitors from outer space isn’t that they don’t exist but that they don’t want to know us. We’re the village idiots of all the teeming galaxies. On a quiet night you can hear their crackled laughter. And what are they laughing at? Let me put it this way: humanity is the guy who shits in his own pants and then walks around saying, ‘So, do you like my new shirt?’ What’s my point? To let you know I am an environmentalist insofar as I wouldn’t like to live in a caldron of boiling piss. Believe me, there’s no politics in staying alive. That’s why I’m an apolitical person entering the world of politics. But I’m not perfect. Tell me, why have we been infected by that American disease of wanting our politicians to be pure as monks? Society went through the sexual revolution decades ago, but for some reason we judge the people who manage our economy by Victorian standards, and this doesn’t seem strange to us. Let me get this out of the way- if I see a chance of having an illicit affair with an intern or a colleague’s wife, I will jump at it with both feet. As far as I’m concerned, ‘getting away with it’ has nothing to do with no one finding out and everything to do with no one falling pregnant. OK? I deny nothing. I admit everything. And let me say this to you too: I will not pretend that I’m not attracted to certain high school girls. Some of them are seventeen, for Chrissakes. They’re not children! They’re sexy, blossoming young women, most of whom lost their virginity at fourteen! There’s a difference between inappropriate sex with a minor and pedophilia. It’s stupid and dangerous to bundle them up in the same sack.
“What else? OK. I want to put this on the record, right from
the outset: if I can give my son advantages- a book of cab charges, for instance, or free vacations- then I will. And why shouldn’t I? If you are a mechanic and your son has a car, won’t you fix it for him, won’t you give him the advantage of having a father who is a mechanic? Or if you’re a plumber, are you going to leave your son elbow deep in shit because you want him to do it on his own?
“What’s my point? I render all smear campaigns redundant. Why throw dirt at a man caked in mud? For the record, I have been to prostitutes, fathered an illegitimate child- stand up, Jasper, and take a bow. I have lost control of my mind and my bladder. I have broken laws. I have built a labyrinth. I have loved my brother’s girlfriend. I believe not in war but in the horrors of war! I believe not in an eye for an eye but in a large cash settlement for an eye! I believe in sexual humiliation education in schools! I believe that counterterrorism experts should be allowed to look up anyone’s skirt they like! I believe in standing quietly, thanking our Aboriginal hosts, and every one of us migrating to another country! I believe that inequality is not the product of capitalism but the product of the fact that in a group of two men and one woman, one of the men will be taller and will have straighter teeth than the other, and he’ll get the woman. Thus I believe that economics isn’t the basis of inequality, straight teeth are!
“When democracy works, the government does what the people want. The problem with that is that people want shitty things! People are scared and greedy and self-centered and only concerned about their financial security! Yes, the truth of the matter is THERE HAS YET TO BE A GREAT DEMOCRATIC NATION BECAUSE THERE HAS YET TO BE A GREAT BUNCH OF PEOPLE!
“Thank you!”
***
So that was my speech, for which I should have been lynched a hundred times over. But I was making them into millionaires and I could do nothing wrong. Even that stupid, incoherent, somewhat obvious and insulting speech of mine won their approval. They lapped it up greedily. Applauded like crazy. They’d never heard anything like it. Or maybe they had heard only the excited tone of my voice. Either way, I got away with it, and the only thing that night that overshadowed me and my crazy announcement was an impromptu speech by Oscar Hobbs, who wandered spontaneously up to the microphone and announced that he was getting married to the woman of his dreams- Anouk.