by Steve Toltz
Chapter Three
The habits of a man living alone for a lifetime are disgusting and difficult to break. If no one is around to hear it, a falling tree may make no sound, and neither will I make my bed. But Caroline moved into the labyrinth, and now I had to cook! And clean! And share the responsibilities! Honestly, I’ve never known how people do married life. I mean, when I go from the bedroom to the bathroom or the kitchen to the bedroom, the last thing I want to do is stop to have a chat.
Marriage was just one of many changes, though. How can I describe the most critical period of my life when it comes to me as a series of photographs taken from the window of a speeding train? Did I throw up octopus salad at my wedding or Anouk’s? Was it me or Oscar standing still at the altar like one carved out of wood? At whose wedding did Jasper and I get into a heated philosophical argument about thank-you notes? And I don’t know whether it was my newfound success or my new life with Caroline, but for some reason I was overcome with very dangerous wishful thinking and, going against everything I believed in, I began a struggle against death- I started fighting the cancer.
I let them suck out my blood; I peed into jars; I was bombarded by X-rays, buried in coffinlike beeping tunnels for CAT scans and MRIs, and underwent a combination of intravenous high-dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy which left me exhausted and breathless, dizzy and light-headed, with nausea, headaches, diarrhea and constipation. I had tingling in my hands and feet. I experienced a continuous noise in my ears which all but drowned out my interior monologues.
The doctors told me to rest, but how could I? I had a new wife and a country to pervert. So I dealt with all this the best I could. To protect my skin from the sun, I wore a hat and sunglasses. I avoided foods with a strong smell. I shaved my head so no one would notice my hair falling out. Blood transfusions gave me the pick-me-up I needed. Unfortunately, chemotherapy treatments sometimes cause infertility. Fortunately, I didn’t care. Neither did Caroline, and as we went back to Dr. Sweeny’s again and again, together, I remember thinking that she might be the first person who would take a bullet for me, if one came and I didn’t want it. Look, I’m not saying our relationship is as passionate as the relationship with the love of your life is supposed to be. It isn’t, but I can’t hold it against her. I am not actually the love of her life anyway; I am a stand-in, a surrogate for my brother. There was something complete in the way I was compared to him in the eyes of the nation and perhaps now in the bedroom.
So you’ll understand why I can’t tell you anything definite about those six months when my memories feel like botched memory implants. I don’t even remember the election, only that on every street corner were posters of my face peering out with a look of unambiguous rebuke. More than the television and newspaper coverage, nothing was as violent an affront to my former anonymity as those ubiquitous posters.
The unlikely result? I scraped in. That’s the wonderful thing about democracy: you can hold public office legitimately while still being despised by 49.9 percent of the suspicious eyes on the street.
Most people overseas think the capital of Australia is Sydney or Melbourne, but what they don’t know is that in the 1950s the village idiots opened their own village and called it Canberra. For every sitting of Parliament I traveled with Caroline to this dull city, and it was there I became (I can scarcely believe it myself) dynamic. I was a dynamo. The slugs of Canberra had a repellent force, a force that served to channel my routine chaos and disparity into a vision. I became a visionary. But why wasn’t I chased out of there with pitchforks and quicklime? Simple answer: the Australian people were diligently sending in their dollar coins, every week another twenty millionaires were made, and they had me to thank. This financial lure got people all caught up in a shared hysteria, which made them receptive to the ideas that fell thick and fast from my mouth.
I addressed unemployment, interest rates, trade agreements, women’s rights, child care, the health system, tax reform, defense budgets, indigenous affairs, immigration, prisons, environmental protection, and education- and, shockingly, almost all my reforms were agreed upon. Criminals would be allowed the option of going into the army instead of being locked up; cash rebates would be offered to those who could demonstrate self-awareness, and the stultified and fearful would be taxed higher; any politician caught breaking just one election promise would be punished in a back alley by a guy named Bruiser; every healthy person would have to look after at least one sick person until he died or got better; we would pick people indiscriminately to become prime minister for a day; all drugs would be legalized for one generation to see what happened. Even my most controversial idea was taken up: rearing any child in a religious belief, freezing the child’s mind when it is most vulnerable, would be treated as child abuse. I said all this and people said, “OK, we’ll see what we can do.” It was unbelievable!
Of course, as a public figure with a national audience for the humiliations that were previously the entertainment of a handful of close enemies, I had my critics. I was called every synonym of the word “insane” and worse. In Australia, the worst insult you can slander a person with, and the easiest way to dismiss every fiber of their being, is to call them a do-gooder. A do-gooder- let’s be clear- is a person who does good or wants to do good. Let’s be clear about this too, just so there are no misunderstandings: in the eyes of the slanderer, this is definitely an insult, not a compliment, and to be a do-gooder is something shameful, unlike in other places, such as heaven, where it’s considered an asset. Thus my critics resorted to this “insult” in order to diminish me. It was only the ugly sneers on their faces that stopped me from thanking them.
Mostly, though, people were on my side. They liked it that I went to the heart of the matter- that my principal reforms were in the areas of loneliness, death, and suffering. At least on some level they seemed to understand my main idea: that we become the first truly death-based society. They accepted that in order to have a proper perspective on life, every single person in the land had to come to terms with the fact that death is an insurmountable problem that we really won’t be solving by relentlessly making people- so that the name Smith can perpetuate throughout the eons- nor by hating neighboring countries, nor by chaining ourselves to a God with a long list of dislikes. I half managed to convince people that if instead of singing the national anthem we started each day with a little funeral service for ourselves, if we all resigned ourselves to our inevitable decay and stopped seeking a heroic transcendence of our unfortunate fate, we might not go as far as Hitler, who was so perturbed about dying that he tried to avoid thinking about it by killing six million Jews.
OK, I admit my revolution was a farce, but it was a deadly serious farce. If people laughed or went along with my ideas just to see what would happen, perhaps it was because underneath their chuckling, they saw a grain of truth. Perhaps not. Anyway, I know utopias don’t work. Just for society to be a little more fluid and less hypocritical, that was really the sum total of my goal. Now I know it wasn’t at all modest; I was reaching for the moon. Still, while churning out millionaires, I continued to soothe the hip-pocket nerve of the electorate and somehow managed to convince people that not to listen to me was a threat to the fabric of society.
Let’s make no bones about it. Society was mutating. You could see it happening, everywhere you looked. Someone even opened up a cannibal-themed restaurant in Surry Hills. I’m telling you, the whole of Australia went crazy. The national obsession became reform. I even think they understood that it wasn’t the ideas themselves but the idea of the ideas, the idea that we might as well restlessly innovate and wherever possible obliterate our slavish connection with the past. Why? Because the past is always the worst thing happening to the present at any given time.
What delusion and denial came over me at this time of my life! The chemotherapy seemed to be working; the cancer cells were all shrinking nicely. My own death began to recede. I felt so good, I didn’t even mind the cruel cartoonists
who exaggerated my mouth so it was almost the size of my whole head. They say power corrupts- and how! The me I have always loved, despite my phony self-deprecation, was being mirrored in the eyes around me. It was an egoist’s fantasy! My spirit was flying! I was so caught up in my own reformation I didn’t realize I was losing the very ingredients that had led me to success- relentless negativity about the human spirit, cynicism and pragmatism about the human mind and how it is constrained. Success had thrown me off balance, and as a result I started having faith in people, and worse- I began to have faith in the people. All right. I’ll say it. I should’ve listened to my son, who told me by a look and tone of voice, if not in actual words, “Dad, you’re fucking it up!”
And where was my dutiful son during all this? Let’s analyze him a little: if the first order of business in assuring self-perpetuation is to be greater than the father, the unexpected possibility that I, formerly the embodiment of failure, might suddenly achieve fame and fortune crystallized Jasper’s hostility. The higher I rose, the more impossible his mission to supersede me became. In short, my success put him in mortal danger.
I remember very early on, just after the millionaires’ party, he called me on the phone.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said when I picked up.
“Hello, son,” I said back, knowing how to hit him where it hurts.
“This is going to end badly. You must know that.”
“You coming to my wedding?”
“You’re joking. Who would marry you?”
“Caroline Potts.”
“Your brother’s old girlfriend?”
Son of a bitch! Would it kill him to be a little more generous? OK, over the years I had repeatedly molested him with mental violence, but I hadn’t done it out of some perverse compulsion, only out of love. He could at least be a little supportive of me in my one single moment of happiness, and not mention my fucking brother. Though it wasn’t just Jasper. Every single news article about me, every single one, referred to me as Terry Dean’s brother. They just wouldn’t let it go. The fucker had been dead for twenty years!
I wanted to make an angry appeal to the Australian people to forget about him, but memory simply isn’t that pliable. So I had to grin and bear it, even when I saw Caroline get a dreamy look on her face every time Terry Dean was mentioned.
When Jasper turned up at the wedding, he stared at Caroline as if trying to understand the psychology of a suicide bomber. I didn’t see him for a long time after that. He avoided me completely in the chaos and disorder of those days in the limelight. Never once did he congratulate me or even make mention of all my reforms, interviews, debates, speeches, and public coughing fits. He said zilch in regards to my obviously haggard and beaten appearance from all the chemotherapy, and as I began, ever so slightly, to fall out of favor with the people, Jasper ceased phoning me altogether. Maybe he saw that I was suffering from a bad case of hubris and was going to pay the penalty. Maybe he sensed the inevitable fall. Maybe he was ducking for cover. But why couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t I duck for cover?
When several editorials suggesting that my head was swelling popped up, I should’ve taken the first space shuttle out of there. And when they made accusations of “extraordinary vanity” just because I carried a mirror in my briefcase (when the eyes of the nation are on you, you can’t help but worry there’s spinach in your teeth), I should have known that one wrong step would make them lynch me with all their collective souls. I did not, as some people suggested, have a persecution mania. No, I had no such mania for those persecuting me. If anything, I was crazy not to see them. Hadn’t I said it all my dumb life: that the manner in which people fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them? That the denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and often they take their loved ones with them?
Never once did I think of Caroline or Jasper. If I have made one unpardonable error in my life, it’s to deny, all the time, that there are people who might genuinely love me.
Chapter Four
One day I turned up at Jasper’s work. I had not seen him in many months, not since my wedding, and not since I had subjected myself to medical science. I had not even told him I had cancer, and I thought by telling him in an inappropriate setting like his workplace I could avoid a scene. He was sitting in his office cubicle staring out the window on the opposite side of the room, looking as if he were waiting for humans to evolve to the next level. As I watched him, I had the strange idea I could read his thoughts. They came in a whisper into my head: Why is it that as soon as we shed fur and learned to stand upright, we gave up evolving, as if smooth skin and a good posture were everything?
“Jasper,” I said.
He spun around and looked at me disapprovingly. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve got the big C.”
“The what?”
“The big cliché.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got cancer,” I said. “It’s found a crawl space in my lungs. I’m fucked.” I tried to sound blasé, as if I had had cancer once a month for my entire life and now- what a hassle- I had it again.
Jasper opened his mouth, but no sound came out. We did not move. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The wind rustled papers on his desk. Jasper swallowed. I could hear saliva slide down his esophagus. We remained motionless. We were like humans before language, Paleolithic men in an office cubicle.
Finally he spoke. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Jasper understood what most people don’t: that the dying still have important decisions to make. I knew he was asking me if I was going to ride it out to the end or beat death to the punch. And then he gave me his view. I was touched.
“Dad, please don’t die slowly and painfully. Please commit suicide,” he said.
“I’m thinking about it,” I snapped, both relieved and irritated he’d said the unsayable.
That night Jasper and Caroline and I sat down to dinner as a family. There was so much we had to say, we couldn’t say any of it. Jasper eyed me the whole time. He was looking to catch a glimpse of Death red-handed. I am almost certain now that Jasper and I can read each other’s minds, and it is far worse than speaking.
I suggested that he and I go for a drive, even though I had never gone for a drive in my whole life. It was a black night, the stars buried in the clouds. We drove without purpose or destination, and all the while I blabbered an inane monologue about how traffic is nothing but a rioting mob, each member with his own mobile weapon in which he dreams of perpetual motion.
“Hey! Stop the car!” Jasper shouted.
Without thinking, I had driven us to our first apartment, a place where my mental engine had conked out countless times. We knocked on the door, and Jasper told a man in stained boxer shorts that we wanted to look around for the same reason that a person looks through a photo album. The bloke let us in. As we wandered through the rooms, I thought that we had ruined the place by living there, that it had our gloomy residue in every airless corner. I thought we had exuded the essence of our core problems into the air, and our lightly wafting disease of the spirit had probably infected every poor bastard who had lived there since.
Back in the car we drove on, pinballing from one old haunt to another- squats, parks, supermarkets, bookstores, barbers, grocers, psychiatric hospitals, newsagents, chemists, banks, every place that had once housed our confusions. I can’t tell you the purpose of this compelling, nonmetaphorical journey down memory lane, but I can tell you that in each place I could see our past selves clear as day; it was as though we were retracing our steps and finding in every vanished footprint our actual feet. There’s nothing like a nostalgia trip to make you feel alien from both your past and your present. You also see what’s static in you, what you hadn’t the courage or strength to change, and all your old fears, the ones you still carry. The disappointment of your failure i
s palpable. It’s terrible to go around bumping into yourself like that.
“This is weird, isn’t it?” Jasper said.
“Weird isn’t the word.”
We looked at each other and laughed. The only upside of the drive was that it turned out our mutual antagonism wasn’t as inexhaustible as we thought. In the car we were talking, reminiscing, laughing. It was the only night that I felt in my son I had a friend.
Around three in the morning we were getting tired and losing enthusiasm. We decided to finish up with a beer at the Fleshpot, the strip club I had managed and nearly destroyed with my red sports car some years earlier.
A doorman standing outside said, “Come in! Beautiful dancers, boys! Come in!”
We went in, down the familiar black corridor with the red flashing bulbs, into the club. The room was full of smoke, mostly from cigars, but there was a little curling out of a machine onstage. The strippers were doing their usual sexless thing around poles and in businessmen’s faces. You’d never have thought some crazy idiot had once driven a red MG onto the dance floor. I looked around- the bouncer was different. Same bulk, same bozo expression, different face. The girls were different too. They seemed younger than the girls I used to hire. Me! Hiring strippers! With eyes popping out of my head! Me! Unleashed! On a conga line of scantily dressed females barely teetering over the age of consent! Although the truth was, in my two years of auditioning, hiring, firing, and managing girls I had not slept with any of the strippers, except three. In this business, that’s nothing.