by Steve Toltz
My attention was mostly focused on studying the erratic 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.
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 standin, 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.