by Steve Toltz
I heard Elliot stub out a cigarette on something that crackled, and for a split second I entertained the notion it was human skin. My head started to hurt. On the other end of the phone, there was shouting, a chanting of deep powerful voices, the sound of footsteps, a scuffle, and several emphatic no’s. Then a long silence. And in that silence, more silence.
—You don’t know anything about Mimi, do you?
—No, I suppose I don’t.
—Did you know she has a tilted uterus?
—So?
—I was there when her mother died. She took photos of the burial.
—That’s not so strange.
—She made her father hold the reflector board throughout the service.
—She’s an artist.
—She ran away from home at ten. You know that? At eleven. At fifteen. Almost every year she packed a bag. Hurried out. Came back. Bid those needy shits an au revoir. Ran away. Buggered off. Came back. Mother passed out. Cousin banging something sharp against something hollow. Hello! Fuck off! Adios! Hello! Taking care of them even when she started taking drugs. And found boyfriends. Older ones. Much older ones. Homeless ones. Imagine. Those rosebud lips. At that age. Can’t stand to think about it. One day: took every dollar out of her father’s wallet. Shredded them. Tossed the cunt-thin strips of paper. Here, Daddy, saved you a trip to the track. From then on, she rescued them from drowning in their own vomit. Then pierced their ears as they dribbled in narcotic stupors. Yeah. She yielded to their needs, all right. Then emptied their bank accounts. Followed their crappy orders, then pawned their shit. Pushback. Payback . . .
I was relieved when Elliot stopped speaking. Not only did he make me uncomfortable, I felt downright spooked by him. His voice was a huge eraser and every time he spoke a part of me was wiped clean.
—How did you know about Morrell?
—How? How? Let me ask you something. Have you noticed? That you’re not perceptible? You know. By all the senses at the same time? That some people—they can’t smell you? And to others you emit no sound? None whatsoever?
That was it. Elliot had drifted off on some incomprehensible tangent and confirmed for me what I already suspected: He was not a narcissist or antisocial but a plain old meat-and-potatoes psychopath.
By dawn Mimi still hadn’t returned to her bedroom and I went down to the beach and saw Morrell emerge from the surf and pick up his towel where the retreating waves left crescents of foam in the wet sand. The bastard was inexcusably fit for his age and as he bounded over toward me, I found evidence of his intention to make love to Mimi in his gait. While I’ll admit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not unusual for a man to feel a modicum of grudging respect for the cheeky bugger who has bedded his intended, this was way out of order.
—Listen, Mr. Morrell.
—The less you think, the more you talk, Montesquieu said, but go on, what were you saying?
—Why don’t you leave us alone?
—Mimi told me that you’re suicidal.
—So?
—Mimi also said you’re having trouble dying.
—So?
—Mimi also said that it was due to some kind of condition of immortality?
Morrell turned his head upward as if to appraise the azure, featureless sky and nodded, apparently approving of God’s use of negative space.
—The infinite is synonymous with the perfection of form. Do you feel like someone who is slowly perfecting?
I had to admit that I didn’t.
—You think your will is more stubborn than anybody else’s? You, Aldo Francis Benjamin, who has no unusual passion for living?
Again, I shook my head. He stroked an imaginary beard. There was nothing indecisive about his gestures.
—You have horror infiniti. Or perhaps, as Leopardi suggested, you have confused the infinite with the indefinite. You are perishable, Aldo. Like I always used to tell my more hopeless students, you just need to follow your heart, get out of your comfort zone. Your problem is that you lack inspiration and the passion to achieve your goal. That’s what all your nonsensical justifications and frankly incredible rationalizations are about. Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art—Camus. Empty your mind, be yourself, Aldo. This immortality thing. That’s just suicide’s block.
With his back to the shrieking blast of sea Morrell spoke to me as neither teacher nor artist, but as Mimi’s lover.
—I can’t persuade you to live but I can persuade you, however, to leave.
When I got back inside, Mimi’s face gave me the news that I was a fast depreciating currency.
—You should go, Aldo, right now, and don’t come back.
—I’m a realist with a background in evolutionary psychology! I know my market worth and I demand to be left for someone better. Stella’s new man is handsomer, richer, more virile, and physically robust. Evolutionarily beyond reproach. But Morrell!
Mimi didn’t respond. She took some tightly framed photos of me gathering my things into green garbage bags, closeups of the look in my rejected eyes as she was rejecting me, a panoramic in the bathroom as I shoveled her clutter of sleeping pills into my pockets. Then I kissed her moist, downcast eyes good-bye.
—I’ll miss your cold sort of love and your breast-wielding sashays to the bathroom framed by the sea.
—Please, Aldo. Just go.
There was no point arguing—I’d been beaten. Out in the main room nobody gathered to watch me pathetically drag the plastic garbage bags behind me. The same no one offered me comfort. I shouted good-bye to the few who were lying on the sofas. They had their mental fly swatters out. Not being an artist myself, I didn’t warrant a grand adieu. I was merely another artist’s fuckthing. A recreation, like the Ping-Pong table.
—Bye-bye, I said, soberly, to no one.
Morrell emerged from downstairs dressed in black jeans, black T-shirt, black duffle coat, like the ferryman in Hades, and patted me on the back with the embarrassment of the victor. I couldn’t loiter with exaggerated sadness a moment longer. Not a key to relinquish, no locks would need to be changed. I waved vaguely at all the artists whose names I had learned but whose arrogance made them mostly indistinguishable from one another, and allowed myself to be exorcised, like a demon from the body of a frightened child.
XXII
Unable to face my apartment, its smell of meat and loneliness, the terrifying biodiversity in the fridge, the banality of weevils, I set out on a long, purposeless ramble, cutting an oblique path through the city, committing thought crimes, thought genocides, thought human-rights abuses. That was easy; the city was clogged with businesssapiens all living one single idea of a human life, men and women who looked so buttoned up and restrained I imagined they could each hold in an epileptic seizure for up to an hour apiece. Sydney was awash in a gray rain and I walked in no specific direction, along with the prevailing herd, the other saddults like me, cheering as a car went the wrong way down a one-way street, laughing at the doomed monorail that sped overhead. When night fell crisply, I collapsed on a bench in Hyde Park. It was cold and wet and around two a.m., I woke to find a young junkie rummaging through my pockets. Let him. I’d simply left Mimi in Morrell’s hands without a fight. Was I evil? What kind of a man was I? All I knew was that if legal slavery had persisted into the twenty-first century I’d be on eBay buying a person right now. Dawn couldn’t come fast enough.
The next morning, I found my old fake limp was acting up again. I hobbled north to Circular Quay where I used to applaud Stella busking, and I sat at the harbor’s edge and watched the ferries coming in and out all day and into the night, through a splashy sunset and a cold bath of stars blinking in code. I decided Morrell was right: I wasn’t slowly perfecting. I’d confused the infinite with the indefinite. Everybody is perishable and I would be the dying proof of it. I was on the road to eternity after all, and like Kafka said, coasting along it downhill. I sat there in my own hinterland and did the heavy lifti
ng of mourning myself. I tipped my hat at everything I’d failed to understand. Well played, Sir.
Stella’s veranda light burned pointlessly. On the overgrown lawn our old red couch was black with mold. I crept around the side and peered through the open slats of the shuttered windows; in the living room was enough paraphernalia for a dozen babies: change table, yellow plastic tractors, prams, a white wooden bassinet. The same house that once felt like a hospital for the insane now exuded warmth and love. Good for her. I left a note—Dear Stella, love Aldo—and pinned it to the door. Despite my feelings for Mimi, I had never let go of Stella and I wanted to do something ceremonial to allow my love for her dissipate once and for all, but I couldn’t think of anything. I stood frozen in the breezy night, half-wanting to run in and pledge to become a born-again Christian if we could do it together as Siamese twins, when The Smiths’ lyric about the joy of dying beside the beloved sung in the sweetness of Stella’s voice played in my brain as if from an old radio, but I’d already tried that once on her hospital bed, and now, standing there, conjuring her scent and imagining it was wafting over from the rotting veranda, I realized I had never asked her if, like me, she’d had ghastly encounters with parents of children who’d died at the age of eight or ten and was made to feel ridiculous for mourning a daughter who never even saw the sky or took a breath, for having a comparatively trivial tragedy to be defined by. My guess was she had, but now I recalled her immunity to self-pity and her ability to subtract herself from any equation, as a method of self-defense, and this reflection triggered more memories—her hard gaze, her ferocious loyalty, her sleek thighs, her cold intelligence, her almost genius ability to be in on every joke, her bewildering dance moves, her electric smile, her kissable throat, her heavy sighs . . . It was the sound of a motorcycle raging down a nearby street that brought me back into the present. I noticed a hazy moon in the sky above the treetops, and I feared Stella and Craig would be returning soon, so I turned and hurried away, the spreading shame on my face and upper body telling me where I was going.
XXIII
How quickly habits form! Before each suicide attempt, before kicking myself to the biological curb, I’ve become accustomed to yielding once more to this lifelong libidinal urge, to one last go on the opposite-sex roller coaster. Thank God for the oldest profession—after war-mongering—in our quarter-million years on the clock!
Enigma Variations, the familiar pink room with its coal fireplace and deceased-estate furniture, discolored armchairs and died-upon sofas, and its faded wallpaper stained from fire damage. The room still had the quality of the inside of a wet cheek, notwithstanding it being redolent of condoms and cigarettes. I asked the Korean madam for Gretel and was told she was with a client and to choose another girl, but they all had overadventured, unrefreshable, unsurprisable faces that tried to look inviting but had the opposite effect. I ran my eyes over rope burns, bite marks, hickeys, bruises, general sores, and an obvious lack of camaraderie.
—I’ll wait.
Forty minutes later, Gretel came down the stairs with her kind eyes and her wonderful hook nose.
—Hi, Gretel.
—Hey! Simon Simonson!
Up the same carpeted staircase, along the same dreary hallway where on the other side of closed doors orgasms sounded like bitter protests, with the same fire exit and its partial view of a cement staircase, and, at the end of the hallway, that same old room with the sinister padlock on it. (What the fuck was in there?) Into the same bedroom with the curtainless windows that looked onto a brick wall and rusted drainpipe. Only the chair was new. They’d bothered to refurnish! Gretel stripped down to her underwear and kicked off her shoes and asked me what I wanted to do with her. I had no great ideas. She led the charge—we reverse-cowgirled—during which she let out a few credible moans and I thought, I am incongruous here in this place. Morrell is incongruous in the residency. Liam is incongruous in the police force. Elliot is incongruous in his prison cell. Yet at the same time, we are all exactly where we belong.
—We’ve still got half an hour. You want to talk a while, Simon?
—Aldo.
Gretel smiled, lit a cigarette and dragged the glass ashtray onto her naked stomach, and told me about the last client, a regular who always fucked her in a corkscrewing motion as if upon penetration his penis had to navigate a spiraling warren of vaginas. Then about another client’s penis that was hard but strangely ice-cold. I laughed.
—Everybody fucks at a snail’s pace these days. Viagra’s made the job unbearable. Men, for the first time, are able to get their money’s worth. Sorry, I shouldn’t be sharing this with you.
—That’s all right, go on.
—Do you know there are still people who come here and just want to masturbate! Can you imagine? In this economy?
She stroked my arm lifelessly and rambled on about about emotionless men who gave the blankest stares while she was riding them; about creepy hair strokers and love declarers, men who wanted to go from zero to a hundred in terms of emotional intimacy. She explained how it was worse to be dependent on one man (marriage) than on hundreds (prostitution). I loved listening to her. This was the last conversation I was ever going to have and I was grateful that it was so interesting.
Back in the hallway I felt a violent disquiet when I saw her next client, a man built like an old steamer trunk. All of a sudden I felt like one of the endured horrors she won’t be telling her grandkids about.
—Good-bye, Aldo.
—Good-bye, Gretel.
As the man trudged into the bedroom, she leaned in close to me and brushed a feather of a kiss on my cheek.
—Saffron, she whispered, with an awkward smile.
With almost contented resignation, I left Enigma Variations to go to the abandoned supermarket near Princess Highway where I could do a perfectly clean two-kilometer run into a brick wall.
XXIV
My unregistered car near Luna Park was graffitied and radioless, with about a dozen tickets on it. I flagged down a plumber’s van and an amiable apprentice with jumper cables helped me get it started. It was a damp, weak-sunned morning in Sydney. There was a steady, somnolent stream of four-door sedans, the sound of wheels on wet asphalt. I took a handful of sleeping pills and accelerated down the windswept road with nothing but factories, apartment blocks, empty parks, and bandaged trees on either side, then swallowed a second handful, filled with a fear that was no longer frightening. I felt like a beloved musical group disbanding after years of infighting. Clouds and the humungous shadows of skyscrapers conspired to keep us in a dark-gray air-locked dome. I pressed my foot on the accelerator and took a third handful of pills. The car swerved and slid sideways as I overtook in fast lanes, shot over roundabouts, turned treacherously without signaling. I can’t explain the unwavering faith I had in my driving reflexes—no living being would be harmed in the production of this suicide, I said out loud. The city flew by—first trees, then whole buildings. I sped down a street flanked by refrigerator showrooms, a service station, veterinary hospital, pub, bottle shop, real estate agent, pharmacy, rug warehouse, pub, smash repairs, police station, pub, pub, office supplies, upended supermarket carts on traffic islands, underwear billboards, telephone wires like exposed nerves. I soared past people who should have been subterranean dwellers but who were right out there on the earth’s surface. I imagined I was drifting through the universe like in my old dream, as a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye. I accelerated over speed bumps, crossed the cabled bridge, thinking, You can’t stuff a suicide back into its tube. The car veered as if tottering along a high ridge in high winds, and the cold air stung through the sliver of open window. I thought of the burning love I felt for Mimi, and the love I felt for Stella flared up even brighter. I would drive into the ocean, or into the metaphor of the ocean. I could now see the silhouette of the shipping containers against the slate-gray sky, huge flocks of birds flying in a tight arc. Removing my seat belt, I drove faster and downed another handful
of pills. They’d never think to pump my stomach in all that twisted metal. This was it. No more notes. No more preparations. No more good-byes. So many of us die like spoiled children, in a tantrum, over nothing—obdurate, melodramatic, curt deaths. I was swerving all over the place, bursting through intersections, cutting corners. I was on the sidewalk now—I could barely keep my eyes open. To suicide is to die from complications after one’s birth. I spotted a sign on an overpass: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIRANDA. I thought, Fuck Miranda and her shitty birthday. At which moment my mental fog cleared and I screeched to a halt, inches in front of a chain of hand-holding preschoolers in yellow raincoats.
The children burst into tears. At the window of an empty sushi restaurant, a waitress pressed her head against the glass. I turned off the engine and took the keys out of the ignition. My body was numb but I was OK. Except I was dying. Once and for all. The dying epiphanies, only five in number, came thick and fast:
1. There must be bacteria on plastic banknotes. I’m sure I got E. coli from a fiver.
2. Idea for a neurotic ladies’ man: a product line of condoms made of antibiotic-laced polymer.
3. Whenever someone said to me, What would Jesus do? I should have said, They say that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior, and then just walked away.
4. All those times people pretended to be impressed, nobody really believed that I could tickle myself—they all thought I was faking.
5. Birth is irreversible because death is not its true opposite.
The last epiphany I swear was not said by me. As I drifted off to sleep I heard a voice, or the echo of a voice, say my name. The voice came over the radio but there was no radio. And wasn’t it funny how my keys were in my hand but the last thing I remember is the sound of the car engine thrumming and a voice on the radio saying my name?
This, random citizens who have nothing to do on a Tuesday morning, is where my story gets sad.