by Steve Toltz
• • •
Remember when Henry died, I said, God, You just lost a customer. And since then I haven’t prayed—I preferred to communicate through solicitors—but after Leila’s death I shouted to the sky, I’m not afraid to die but I’m afraid of dying. And a voice shouted back, it’s a routine procedure—I perform 150,000 of them every single day. Was that You, or was that in my head?
• • •
Or wait—am I being disproportionately punished for the night of Liam’s out-of-control party, upstairs in that bedroom in that empty house, after Stella mocked me because I could not define the word labia and I said, some are born me, some become me, and some have me thrust upon them, then I prematurely ejaculated, and was so spent that when I saw Natasha out the window running down the street screaming for help I did nothing, and never told anyone?
• • •
Or is it because later, Stella and I crossed every smutty frontier? Or because I made her mad by giving her a shoddy ceremony and then quoting Lacan in our wedding vows: Love is giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist? Or because at Wave Rock I told her to sing with a dead baby in her womb? (About love, I was on the fence—until You electrified it. In any case, the map of the human heart does not match the terrain.) Is it because after the divorce, I was bummed I would never be able to write a suicide note that started Dear Widow Benjamin?
• • •
Or because I took total advantage of my friends? I thought all you needed to be a good friend in this life was to know a little cognitive therapy and pharmapsychology—was I wrong? Is it because of my business ambitions, that it’s unseemly to reach the age of forty and not lower your expectations? Is it because I’ve pitied people who remind me of me? Is it because of the palpable sense of relief I feel passing children’s hospitals—because I’ve outgrown them? Is it because I’ve been the tenant in a landlord-tenant biting dispute and the romantic who stole flowers from roadside memorials? Is it because I’ve preemptively apologized so I could treat someone like shit, told insulting punchlines without setups, used repugnance as my moral compass, veiled my barefaced lies, interrupted, shushed, monologued, cut in line? Is it because I’ve found racial biases to be as stubborn to remove as red wine from a carpet and wondered if two ugly people should adopt to give a child a better life? Is it because having ridden bicycles into clotheslines, had doggy doors slammed in my face and laughed stitches open, I’ve looked at the sky and wished geocruisers would slam into us—that I half prayed for mass extinction so I’d know I wouldn’t be missing anything upon my death?
• • •
Tell me once and for all: Is bad luck self-harm by another name? Is it? Is it? Is it? Lord, You made me perceptive. You gave me the power to know things. I know you shouldn’t listen when someone tells you to be true to yourself—instead of to other, kinder people. I know that the proper behavior when one meets a celebrity is to mistake them for another celebrity. I know the great surprise of life is that the inevitable and the inconceivable always turn out to be the same thing. I know that unconditional love is impossible without unconditional fear; that congested housing leads to incest; that the only thing that can save us from our more unsavory desires is observing those same desires in the faces of others, but Lord, why did You make me one of the few people who forget how to ride a bike? And why wouldn’t You just deactivate me like I asked? The future is some kind of newfangled yesterday I want no part of, that’s why I’ve always envied insects and flowers who live for a single day, and I only never wanted to die on public transportation or during a vasectomy reversal. Now I see! I should’ve just married a black widow!
• • •
Didn’t Freud suggest that the aim of the organism is to die in its own way? Why can’t I die in mine? Why are You holding me up to impossible standards? It’s somehow my own fault. I won’t say “self-sabotage”—that’s a phrase you use to flatter yourself while admitting blame. Freud again: The psychical significance of a drive rises in proportion to its frustration. Lord, I don’t have to tell You. I have not enough agency to wiggle a toe. Frustration is where I live. Is this punishment? For what? Did my mother spawn a monster? I know whenever a beggar asked me for money on the street I often said, no thanks, as if he had offered me money, but that was an involuntary response. Similarly, in relation to seeing deformed people, a gag reflex is not inherently judgemental. Be fair.
• • •
Or wait—there’s one more possibility. Was it because I was not a good brother to my sister? When she turned on me, was it really only the storm of female adolescence? How is it possible a girl can go from laughing till she almost tears her stomach lining to crouching on the bottom of a drained swimming pool with her head in her hands? When Veronica was fifteen and refused to go to our cousin Devin’s wedding (for fear of bumping into him), Henry took us aside and bellowed his personal maxim, one I’ve never forgotten: Friends don’t care whether you live or die. It’s only family that counts. Was this true? Personally, I found his reverence for blood ties psychologically suspect. After Veronica’s death, Leila dragged me away from the compound—why did we move away? I thought it was because the Benjamins were gossips and petty thieves and cat torturers, because they were only a facial feature away from being total strangers to us. But was there another reason? I see nothing in the old home movies to give me pause. (I love Super 8. Our home movies are nearly indistinguishable from Hitler’s.) There’s us chasing huntsmen and Bogong moths and herding ants with rivulets of hose water, and there’s Uncle Brett, whose nose hairs were as thick and twangy as harp strings, and Great-Uncle Gary with his long ink-black hair who adored out of all proportion his Chinese snuff bottles, and there’s cousin Paul who put his cigarette out on the back of his hand at a party. There they all are, the Benjamin men, waving their wet, anonymous eyes and ergodynamic heads around. Was it one of them? or none of them? Veronica bathed with the lights out, it occurs to me now—is that something I should have asked about? I peered in as the funeral parlor readied her repatriated body for the service and I was shocked to see her head shaved and a tattoo of A Flock of Seagulls between her shoulderblades. What happened in Indonesia, exactly? Why didn’t I ask Leila when I had the chance?
• • •
I don’t know. I don’t know.
• • •
I don’t know anything other than that the greatest misconception about the apocalypse is that it is a sudden, brief event. It is not. It is slow. Grindingly slow. It goes for generations.
• • •
I can’t quite put my finger on it, Lord, can I borrow Yours? The log-sized one from the Sistine Chapel? Am I insane? Has the pain rewired my brain? Human endurance is absurd. It can take ANYTHING. You know this. Can’t there please be a point where once a person has reached a maximum of suffering they just explode?
• • •
Lord, give me a doll and I’ll show You where You touched me.
Amen.
• • •
Silence. Just silence. Maybe my prayer went to his spam file. In any case, then it was morning and one of the least pleasant guards turned up at my door. He said, S’pose you’re excited, Legless. I said, What about, Bitch Tits? He said, You’re out, Cunt. I laughed and said, Don’t you mean in about eighteen months, you Horror of a Human Being? He squinted with all the toxicity he could drain from his unbearable existence. You’ve been here two and a half years, Fuckface. Time’s up. I sat up with a surprised expression one usually sees on a head rolling into a basket. An ungraspable turn of events—had I been praying that long? In the showers, I broke my third commandment and looked in the mirror. My legs had grown thinner, my knees knobblier, my eyes googlier, my hair sparser, but all those crunches, squats, rows, and presses had made my chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps and quads weirdly yet impressively inflated. Then I dressed in my civilian clothes and made my way out the gates where absolutely no one asked me to sign the guestbook. But who cared? I was in r
emission. And free!
XXXII
From the passenger’s window of the wheelchair-accessible taxi, the outside world looked digitally colorized. Ochre sky; faraway, tepid sun. The office buildings buffeted the frenzied winds that tore in from the east. On the streets, people who looked like they wanted to interbreed with their screens; women with yoga backs pushing strollers while berating husbands or personal assistants on phones; war veterans living stump to mouth, and I could perceive their suffering—their sore balls and sinus headaches, I could hear their brief pleas for hard currency and tight bodies and loving hearts. Then into the suburbs, past houses where once I could sense the death of a family pet or an impending divorce but could never pinpoint the exact location—now I could. The taxi took me to the coast, a glimpse of the breathless sea, and clouds that looked like sopping bath towels. Then we arrived. That rambling freestanding house, that sun-dappled wild garden on all sides, that camphor tree: the residence, on what would be the deceased’s last night on earth.
It’s hard to describe the disorientation of that chaos. A WELCOME BACK ALDO banner hung over the portico, and I was inundated with handshakes, nods, cheek kisses, backslaps, hair ruffles, shoulder rubs, from both familiar and unfamiliar drunk artists—imagine if Goya painted the faces found inside a casino at dawn—who moved as if on conveyor belts to show me sculptures, drawings, still-wet paintings of yours truly: caged and beady-eyed, oddly thin and bleeding in magentas and crimsons and indigos, in cadmium yellows and lava reds. The artists were either proud of their ingenuity or apologized for misrepresenting their intentions. The packs of new dogs and fresh rubble and sleep-deprived children and the muted hysteria and combined beards and near nakedness of both genders made me feel harried and confused, being neither in the hospital nor the prison universe, and I could barely talk to anybody—their twisted, crunchy smiles terrified me—and navigated my way around poorly, rolling over feet. I was hurried into inebriation, a joint and a beer thrust in my hand, cocaine pushed up my nostrils, as I scanned the room for Elliot’s inside man, but to me everyone looked like a “person of interest” you might see “helping police with their inquiries.” In addition, I felt embarrassed at seeing everybody, as if in this interim period I ought to have found a replacement body.
Mimi herself looked bad, her hair like seaweed and her eyes dried-out puddles, while Stella tucked and retucked her breasts into her leather corset and kissed Frank Rubinstein—they were a couple! The unexpectedness of this completely destabilized me. I wheeled over to Morrell, who was naked under his polyester poncho and groping everybody, apparently adjusting to his burnt-out exhibition by going insane. Where was I exactly? Freedom had never seemed so turbulent or repulsive, never so chaotic and formless a thing. I made a mad dash out to the balcony and I remained there until the rusted sunset sky went dark and stars sweated in the glassy moonlight. Down in the beach parking lot, headlights tunneled through the mist. Mimi came out and stood beside my chair and stared with slumberous eyes at the sea as if through a windshield at an endless desert road. For a long time she didn’t blink or budge. Then without asking she wheeled me back inside, through the party and into her bedroom where we both took sleeping pills and held each other. I lay there listening to her chest rise and fall, and to the wind that grew intense, to sand-swept seagulls that flew onto the windowsill for a breather. Mimi slept erect, strangely rigid in the bed. Finally I passed out and dreamed, I think, of the herped mouths of New York mohels.
I woke up and heard the sea on its permanent war footing. There was a sickening smell, like burnt heroin. I turned to Mimi: rivulets of blood from her mouth down her chin, glazed eyes bulging in their sockets. Except for the blood and the eyes, she was untrammeled and peaceful, but her face was no longer her face, her body not her body.
Mimi was dead.
No trace elements of her anguish. Just an empty slate. I suddenly felt ashamed that I didn’t really love her because I knew her, I loved her because I needed to.
I called for help. The artists rushed in and crowded the bed and yelled, Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!
Ech. The worst.
The police were called. My insistence that I should be treated as an eyewitness, not a suspect, and that the police should be interrogating the artists to deduce who placed a knife into my unconscious hand was ignored; the attending detective seemed bored and distracted, as if he’d been listening to a story in which his favorite character inexplicably disappeared from the narrative. Liam arrived just in time to stand helplessly as the detective arrested me on the spot. I was taken back into custody because, I was told, murder was a violation of my parole.
Hauled back to prison. After only eleven hours of freedom.
It was that very night, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in my cell, downwind to myself, covered in blue-tinted shadows, at my lowest moment, lower than the floor of the abyss, listening to the irregular breathing of my new cellmate, Gary (convicted of witness tampering and whose head had all the hallmarks of a forceps birth), when I heard it.
A voice.
No, not just a voice.
A cold trumpet blast of wonder that dwelled in my inner ear! A sonar beam of divine wattage that had the UV-brightness of unveiled truth! A sound that left me feeling lighter, less creaturely. This was no wordless experience of the divine. In truth, it was quite verbose. I didn’t just hear it. I inhaled, imbibed, suckled at it. Now I understand those mystics who talk about loving God physically, like they want to straddle him right there on his throne. Of course you might say: What lesion spoke to you thus? Or are you sure this wasn’t a psychotic episode or that your primary auditory cortex wasn’t on the blink? Are you sure it wasn’t just a part of you speaking that had been removed, like a phantom consciousness or a surplus soul? Either way, I could hear it plain as day in my fucking cochlear, a cattle prod of a voice. It was delicious, stupefying! I was traumatized by its beauty. I yielded totally. Whether it was divine or extraterrestrial or from this or that side of the human–angel divide does not matter. It came from on high, in any case. Sometimes the voice was like a poet reading me a work-in-progress. Other times it was businesslike and hesitant, like a doctor who gives you just two weeks to live but is also going through a personal crisis. It was a voice that wore a ponytail. It was sea air blown through a bong. The cell filled with light, and I was whistling “Hallelujah.” Only now is the measureless joy beginning to wear off. Quite the comedown, I assure you.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: This verdict is overripe. Pronounce it already. The defense rests; the defense, frankly, is exhausted. The defense has been beaten, raped, paralyzed, bankrupted, and enslaved. Just say I’m innocent, will you? Let it be known that Aldo Benjamin has only butchered and decapitated people in Photoshop. My charm wears off like a local anesthetic, I know—and that was hours ago. I sincerely thank you for your attention, your patience, your impressive lack of toilet breaks. Just remember: You can’t convict simply because a custodial sentence will reduce the risk of running into me at the supermarket.
Unless—just before I go, do you want to know the substance of my conversation with the divine? Would you like me to reveal the amazing truths I heard?
I certainly don’t want to take much more of the court’s valuable time.
As you wish.
Your Honor, I now submit my final piece of evidence—exhibit E—the transcript of the conversation I had with the voice, a transcript I made the following morning while the details were still freshly and indelibly imprinted in my mind:
Voice:
Aldo.
Me:
Piss off.
Voice:
Aldo.
Me:
I said piss off!
Voice:
It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Me:
Why?