Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  Gerard had privately confirmed that twenty-five per cent of chemical engineers were to be kept on but that I was not going to be one of them. Nothing had been communicated officially to me. I did not know anything about the others who were not going to be kept on. Either they were waiting at home to be formally terminated or else they were still at work and keeping a low profile. I clung to faint hopes. Perhaps, and at times this did not seem too ridiculous to me, if nobody saw much of me, didn’t see me come in first thing in the morning, leave for lunch or go to catch the train at the end of the day, then maybe they might just keep me on inadvertently, by accident, by mistake. Perhaps they were dismissing only the first seventy-five per cent they saw?

  There was no work for me to do when I crept into my office. I had considered leaving the lights off but it occurred to me that I would have a problem explaining it if someone came in. So I sat in my room with the lights on but the door closed, trying to make my desk look messy. I spread out old memos in a manner calculated to give the impression of industrious chaos, the chaos they reward. Even as I did it I knew it was a hopeless strategy. It was not strategy. It was madness.

  I thought of calling my parents but was unsure of how long I could keep up the pretence. My mother would hear it in my voice and if she did I would not be able to think fast enough to satisfy her with anything but the truth. Several times I picked up the phone anyway and put it down again. I had nothing to do. I wanted to talk to them. I looked at the desk calendar, a distant relative of the digital clock radio in the bedroom. What was going on with my father?

  I had the receiver in my hand and had even started to press the area code when, fortunately for my parents, I was interrupted. Gerard opened the door and walked in a few paces. There were two men in suits behind him who stayed at the doorway. His voice was uncharacteristically friendly, almost affectionate. I realised that this was probably because there was no sport left in me for him. But nonetheless it was strange: that he came to my office instead of summoning me, that he came unexpectedly with two men I had never seen before and that he spoke in that voice, a voice he had probably used with Amanda.

  ‘Harnovey, come on, old son. You know the score.’

  ‘Well I haven’t actually been … haven’t received any formal—’

  ‘But I told you personally.’

  ‘Yes, but I still expected—’

  ‘It’s in the mail.’

  ‘Oh I … there are entitlements, aren’t there?’

  ‘You mean the ETP?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘ETP—eligible termination payment.’

  ‘Yes, aren’t I entitled to a termination payment, after all …’

  ‘It’s all dealt with in the letter. Should be at your home …’ he looked at his watch, ‘should be there today. But from memory, most of what you’re getting is tied up.’

  ‘Tied up?’

  ‘In superannuation.’

  ‘What about the rest?’

  ‘I don’t think there is going to be all that much left, not after the disbursements had been recovered from you.’

  ‘What disbursements?’

  ‘Well, when you were at Spensers Gulf, you frequently went over your allocated travel allowance, planes, hotels—that sort of thing. Given the number of trips you made, you ended up owing the department quite a bit. Nobody knows quite how much. There will need to be a departmental investigation to determine your precise net entitlement. It will take some time. We will let you know the results.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ I said involuntarily, sotto voce.

  ‘Look,’ he said almost sympathetically, ‘Harnovey, one door closes … You know the saying. One never knows what’s behind the next door. Let’s make a clean break of it. There’s a good chap.’

  ‘What, right now?’

  ‘I think so. Better that way. Do you need any boxes? We could get you some boxes, different sizes if you like.’

  Of course there have been other periods, not merely in this century but in earlier, far worse-recorded, though now often fondly remembered centuries (the rights to the more recent of which have been sold to Merchant-Ivory) in which shallowness and moral vacuity went out together one night in the pitch black of unreason and dancing cheek to cheek very quickly spawned grotesque idiot children, children whose incapacity for self-doubt enabled them to push the concerns of honest people (or at least the concerns of those who would not ape them) off the front page of the times and gradually back through the world, beyond the weather, finally making sport of them before using them to wrap up something dead. Then they were thrown away. Gerard must have felt I was beyond sport. But I was not yet beyond the weather.

  CHAPTER 29

  Winter, always so generous with its time, had come early. I waited in William Street outside Flagstaff Station with a number of different-sized boxes which in aggregate contained my career. The wind found the unsecured papers from inside the boxes. I chased some and let others go. I was not waiting for a train but for an idea. How was I going to get the boxes home? How was I going to explain coming home so early? How was I going to keep from coming home early every day from now on? How much sadder could Tanya get? How was I going to find the money for the next mortgage repayment? How did the young Orson Welles manage to finance Citizen Kane? Did he mean us to know what ‘Rosebud’ meant? Did he care as long as we talked about it? And who was it who first conceived of a deity whose indifference knew no bounds, whose ill-temper begat so much pain? I would never in a million years have done to one person what he did every day to so many.

  The station hummed. How much of my life had I spent at this station? Days, but it felt like years.

  What was I going to do that day and then on the days after it? By the banks of the station I sat on one of my boxes but did not weep. I attracted very little attention. After all, just across LaTrobe Street there were men who slept in boxes in Flagstaff Gardens, or at least they did in the warmer months. In winter they all moved at least five hundred metres or so past the Customs Office building to the Salvation Army hostel in Wills Street.

  The ignore of the passersby induced the illusion of freedom. But in what sense was I a free man? I did not know what to do but it occurred to me that whatever I was going to do was, or had been, determined by previous events beyond my control. Everything had been. A woman, about my age or a little younger, with long straight dark hair, was walking a brown dog. She had him on a lead but the dog was leading her. She had red lipstick, black jeans, a purple jumper with matching scarf. They passed me as they sauntered down William Street heading for the gardens. Everyone else was dressed for their business. Walking her dog was this woman’s business. As I watched them cross LaTrobe Street heading away from me, I thought that I was a chance to cry.

  A gust of wind hit me in the face and took a few nascent tears to another place. I was not even free to cry. Who is ever free to cry? There are always people around, people who might turn a blind eye to a man at that station of his cross, his career in boxes, but who would not be able to resist the visual feast of a crying man being blown about in the winter of his discontent. But neither were they themselves free to take in the spectacle and return to their places of business to cry lest they be seen by their colleagues crying at their terminals. The last one to cry is the winner. We all know this. Children know this as an article of faith. Adults can no longer articulate it but they know it instinctively. So no one is free to cry. No one except Tanya.

  It occurred to me outside the station that it is possible that no one is really free, not merely where tears are concerned, but with respect to anything. If one event or situation determines or causes another, in what sense can it be said that we are free to do or not to do anything? If our behaviour is determined by every factor from our genetic structure to the type of birth we experienced, our perception of the love, attention, material comfort we received as children, all the way up to our current blood sugar levels and immediate exposure to the prevailing weat
her conditions, then in what sense is our behaviour free?

  And even if we could calculate the effect of all these factors and predict our behaviour, we would still not be free. For to be able to predict a future event does not make it possible to influence that event if the variables that determine it are beyond our control.

  I watched more papers fly from one of the boxes.

  There is, of course, a sense in which our behaviour can be regarded as free even if it is completely causally determined, indeed only if it is determined. We can regard our behaviour as free if it is determined by our will or choice. What we do is surely free if it is determined by what we want to do, given all the external factors operating. My tick on a ballot paper is free provided its position on the paper is determined by my will.

  The question is, is there a sense in which our will is free, presuming that it too is causally determined? But perhaps it doesn’t matter.

  So why talk about it? Why even think about free will? Well, for a start it delayed having to think about what I should do to save my family and, anyway, it made me feel better. If Kant and I both wrestled with the problem then perhaps I was more than the sum of the boxes. Actually Kant had never given the issue a thorough going over in William Street, outside Flagstaff Station. But I was sure that if he had he would have reasoned that neither of us was free to do anything about these boxes, especially me. Neo-classical economists have succeeded in getting most people to accept as an axiom that it is preferable to forgo a guarantee of the things we need in order to survive than to forgo free choice. But then von Hayek never addressed the purchase of a little girl’s overcoat or a mortgage repayment.

  I had problems but the problem of free will was not one of them. And that was precisely why thinking about it was so attractive.

  It was growing increasingly overcast. As I saw it, the only real use we could have for free will as a concept was in an ethical or moral sense. Free will, although we really mean free action, is the construct we have to use to assess whether or not an action is an appropriate candidate for an ethical judgment. For, it seemed clear to me, it is the purpose of an ethical judgment to influence the psychological states of people in such a way that they choose to do the things a system of ethics prescribes and not to do the things it proscribes. And if a person’s action is not determined by his or her will or choice, if it is not a free action, then affecting the person’s will will not affect his or her action and hence there is no point to subjecting it, or the person, to an ethical judgment. Only if an action is the result of a person’s will or choice is it a candidate for an ethical judgment. And so long as an individual feels free from other people’s coercion in his or her choice to do or not to do something, it does not matter that innumerable previous and present events have determined which choice the individual ultimately makes. For among the causal events will be past ethical judgments and the present expectation of future ones. Such an understanding of free will makes it possible for us to describe people’s behaviour as moral or immoral. Without it everyone is amoral.

  I wondered how Kant and Hume and the others did this stuff without the benefit of a railway station.

  The woman with the purple jumper and scarf had let her dog lead her past me and my boxes again, only this time they were going away from the gardens, and still I had come to no conclusions with respect to any of my problems, other than perhaps the problem of free will and much good that would do me. I watched the woman and her brown dog. I knew them or wanted to. I wanted her to talk to me. I wanted to pat the dog. I smiled at them as they passed but neither of them noticed.

  What dogs do is not undetermined either. They lap water from a puddle. The dryness in their mouths causes them to. Why are their mouths dry? They have been running. Why were they running? At a particular moment the chemical state of their brains was such as to cause them exuberance. How did that chemical state come about? I didn’t know. Would it ever again come for Tanya? It was possible, at least theoretically, for these things to be known even if I did not know them.

  The purple-clad woman with long black hair stopped because the dog had stopped. One thing determined another. The dog stopped because it was thirsty. Sitting in front of him watching him drink, I understood why he was drinking. But why, when he was through, did he turn around and stare at me? There had been no sudden loud noise, no onset of cats, no delivery of prime-grade mince. What suddenly compelled this stare in the middle of William Street from a brown dog with a white patch on its head?

  I needed the attention. I needed more than that. With self-doubt, the great cancer of the psyche, whispering to me above the trams and the traffic, I needed help, I needed an answer. I looked around. Everyone was moving, on their way to somewhere, on their way to nowhere. The only person relatively motionless was a one-legged man propped up against a pillar of the station selling magazines. Even he kept shaking his head involuntarily every few seconds or so. The coins in front of him stayed still but the pages of the magazines would not keep to the topic. I’m too fat alleged Elle Macpherson, then Trust Your Stars urged the staff astrologer at the whim of the wind. If it were true that the fault was not in the stars but in myself then I was indeed back where I had started, with ten days, by my reckoning, until the next repayment was due.

  I left my career unguarded and took the escalator further into the station, to the next level down. There were three empty telephone booths. One of the two with an Out of Order sign still had the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory. Under Employment Consultants I found that the agency with the largest share of the page was in William Street, not far from that very station. The first available appointment was for the following morning. I wondered then whether this might not indeed be the best of all possible worlds, and if it were, whether that was the ultimate in pessimism.

  CHAPTER 30

  It took three round trips with arms full from the station nearest our house to the front door to get all the boxes home. Dividing the load into three, I had left the boxes I couldn’t carry with the station master. Once home for the third time I relied on Tanya’s reticence in social intercourse to enable me to ensconce them in the study, the room which had become a shrine to our respective professional futilities. It was the room wherein my Spensers Gulf report had been stillborn and where Tanya’s Tamil Tigers were stacked on top of each other waiting under the cover of dust for liberation.

  Once that was done I went in to see her.

  ‘Eddie? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, my dear, I am afraid it is me, now that you mention it—would that it were something more.’

  I sat down on the bed. She had her back turned. It was dark. The curtains were drawn. I knew the drill.

  ‘I thought I heard you.’

  ‘Heard me?’

  ‘Heard the sounds you make coming home. But then it wasn’t you and I drifted back to sleep or somewhere near it. Then a little while later I thought I heard you again and again it wasn’t you. It wasn’t anyone. I started thinking—imagining that maybe you were not coming home. I mean—what must you think as you make your way home? What do you think as you walk to Flagstaff Station? After the second false home-coming I wondered why you would want to come home at all. I felt sure that sooner or later you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Home is wherever you are, the two of you. It’s not the place that matters. It’s not the place that’s important, is it?’

  ‘It just couldn’t be today.’

  ‘What couldn’t?’

  ‘It couldn’t be today that you didn’t come home.’

  ‘Tanya, I’m always coming home. I may never leave it again.’

  ‘’Cause I decided to do something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To try … Eddie.’ She began to cry.

  ‘It’s alright. We’re … you’re going to be fine. Tell me what you did.’

  ‘It started with Kate.’

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘She came over this afternoon after school in quite a state.
She’s been calling for days, you know, leaving messages on the machine. I just haven’t been up to calling her back. Finally, she just came over. She said she was worried something terrible had happened to Abby after the night we took her to hospital or else that she’d done something wrong, something that had really hurt me, and that I wasn’t speaking to her. She really is a good friend.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she is,’ I agreed without enthusiasm.

  ‘She’s gone back to Paul. I think she wants to have a child.’

  ‘That’ll solve everything.’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe it will.’

  It was good to hear Tanya talk about someone else, someone other than herself, even in that tiniest of voices, not that her depression had given her any great insight into herself. She had bypassed the familiarity that breeds contempt and gone straight to contempt. She had found it the way some people find God. Having always been predisposed to loathing herself, full-blown self-contempt would have seemed like a revelation. I looked at my hands and then at my shoes.

  ‘She’s wanted children for a long time, long before she left him. Paul didn’t want them or not yet, not then. What does she think has changed? You don’t create human life by blackmail, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘You sound annoyed with her, Eddie. Are you?’

  ‘No, of course not. Why should I be annoyed with her?’

  ‘Maybe not annoyed then, jealous.’

  My pectorals were tired from carrying my career around the city. ‘Jealous! Jealous … of what?’

  She took her time answering, more time than I needed her to take.

  ‘That … they’re okay.’

  ‘They’re not okay. Shit, Tanya! People don’t just get okay. They have to be born okay and no one’s born okay.’

  ‘Eddie, what’s wrong with you?’ she asked sympathetically.

  ‘Me? There’s nothing wrong with me but don’t go thinking that they’re okay. It’s just like people at kitsch weddings, everybody assumes that the marriage of the two cutesy kids must be a good idea because somebody’s given half their house to the caterer and the other half to the florist. No one’s got the guts to say “you’re both making a huge mistake”.’