A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  When I arrived at the restaurant – a small and deliberately untidy spot that serves big cheap archetype mains: lamb stew, roast chicken, beef Bourguignon – Clare was seated at the very back, in an emerald-green top and an amber-coloured costume necklace, hair pulled back, reading. I was badly ravelled – none of my thoughts would dissipate, or retreat into unconscious space. It is always like this. They sardine together in a room and speak at the same volume. So she spoke about herself for a while and I listened. She had been working at a conference all week – hundreds of countries had gathered to ban cluster bombs. This seemed more important than my headache. I drank some wine. Slowly I came out of myself, and it was wonderful to be eating dinner in the city on a weeknight. And all the better since I could not afford it. The restaurant emptied. It grew dark, finally, and began to rain with equanimity.

  After dinner, we went to a Russian wine bar on Wicklow Street. I’d been on beer heavily for the previous three nights and could not fit any more bubbles. Inside, there was a man playing muzak on a saxophone, sad and sexy versions of Europop. There was a tall woman with a beautiful and skinny body, but then we saw that she was not at all pretty. Next to us, an old foreign man began singing to his female companion. She inched away from him, and he swallowed her up in his arms. His mouth was so wide open as he sang that I thought he might try to fit her head inside it, and eat her like a snake eats a rat.

  When the wine was finished, we walked to Clare’s flat, which she shares with another girl. It is tiny, clean but city-centre-grimy – old carpets, mildew in the bathroom, gunk in the sink, the smell of rental living. The ceilings are low, the windows are single-glazed. I feel thoroughly pleased by it, thinking of what is to become of me, once I sell the house. Weak showers. Small, squeaky beds. Ice-cold rooms in winter, sleeping by electric heaters. A room with a small desk. My books will overcrowd the room.

  14

  Clare’s room, which is a yellow rectangle, has interesting but forgettable prints on the walls, a bookshelf that is neatly decorated with things she has gathered on her travels and a great deal of costume jewellery, a small bed beside which are piled the many new books she has bought in a jagged and unstable chimney stack. There is a mirror beside her bed, in front of which she does her make-up, and in which I am always watching ourselves in bed – I love to watch the way she desires to be fucked, her at-homeness in desire. Nothing is beyond her. I wish we were in love. Her closets are so overstuffed with outfits and coats that she must hang things everywhere. But she spends very little time in her apartment, only to sleep, bathe, and watch videos. She likes to read outdoors, or in pubs, and eat in inexpensive cafés. She lives in the city. She takes up all of it.

  My house is tall and narrow. The bottom two floors are like the bowels of a ship. Everything is tight and poorly lit. I don’t even use the bedroom on the first floor, which was – what a long time ago that seems, but only a year – my study. Now it holds a few books, some winter coats, and an American football. The second floor has two bedrooms, one – mine – an ensuite, and a large bathroom, which is Helen’s, but I shave there, since my bathroom lacks a mirror. My bedroom is large, but so is the bed, so there is not much room. There are some old papers and a cluttered closet where nothing is folded, merely thrown in bunches gathered off the clothes horse. I have a few books stacked on the window sill. The shower has no shield – just a box cut out of the wall. The bathroom floor is streaked with stains and dirt. The sink is festering in soap scum. The toilet is filthy.

  15

  My bosses think I hide behind apathy, and that is why I’m going nowhere in journalism. But it is through apathy that I endure journalism.

  It has become the understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellow man. [Hazlitt]

  I will squander whatever I can make of journalism.

  In the evenings, teaching, my apathy becomes mania. It is like my skin is yanked inside out. My repudiation finds something worth talking about, and is armed with the pieces of writing I give to students to read, salvos that, momentarily, reverse the flow of civilization: Gogol, Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Schulz, Kafka, Borges, Conrad, Augustine, Baldwin, Orwell, Woolf, Faulkner, Bunin, Miller, Seneca, Plutarch, Kharms, Tanizaki, Lu Hsun, Kenko, Nietzsche, Mansfield, Cioran, Montaigne. Whatever society degrades, a genius ennobles; whatever society embraces, a genius obliterates. It makes my heart clamour now just to think of them. We gather around a few mismatched tables in a small, green-grey second-floor room with windows that look south over the gravity of excess and wealth. We are the enraptured state of failure.

  But here I am talking about geniuses, and savages, at midnight, at my dining-room table, drinking tea, wearing two jumpers because it is cold again and has rained all day.

  16

  After a short heatwave that had everyone in T-shirts and lunching on the Liffey boardwalk, the city grew cool and grouchy. Coats and umbrellas returned. For two days the drop in temperature brought the most fantastic heavy fog into the city. It altered the nature of everything. Pedestrians, cars, motorcycles – they were all like ghost ships. The tops of buildings evaporated. And in this reorganization my acuity became so over-enhanced that every image, every sound, became the overflowing bulk of the proof and contradiction of the proof of perception, of the act of perceiving, and the solidity and liquidity of meaning. And I wanted nothing from this equilibrium but to live in it for a while.

  The fog broke in the late evening of the second day. After class I skipped drinks to bus home and get some sleep. At a quarter past nine there was still a lot of muted daylight. But it seemed to come from nowhere. We rumbled up the Malahide Road in a torpor. I put away the assignments I was trying to mark and turned my music up very loud – Piaf. What an ability to render herself. I don’t understand a word of it. I don’t want to.

  17

  Clare and I came to my house after abandoning a Saturday night early – we had been kissing in crowded bars and when I lifted her dress in a half-crowded alleyway and pulled the crotch of her underwear to one side, she decided it was time to go. She was in a soft and tight blue-and-white dress with long sleeves and a low neck. Every time I see her she is wearing a new outfit – she has a great knack for finding unusual things that look good on her. She tells me she can go a year without wearing the same thing twice. And I have seen her room, which is like a wardrobe closet on a movie set, so I believe her. We got a taxi and I put my hand up her dress and she closed her eyes and spread her legs open and leaned her head back, and the taxi man saw this without really looking; after a few minutes of politenesses he shut up. I moved her underwear and put a finger inside her. She was very wet, and the smell of her filled the taxi. The driver opened a window. My mind had opened like a large mouth. Blind and bottom-feeding.

  We got out and I had trouble unlocking my door because Clare was behind me with a hand down my jeans. We stepped inside and I put her on the staircase and unzipped my jeans and lifted her dress and pulled her underwear off and fucked her. She came immediately as I entered her. She was so wet it was like fucking in mud. It was coming down my legs, pooling on the staircase. I told her I was going to come inside her; she nodded. Come inside me, she said. I came. I could feel the head of my dick pressed into her cervix, and I fed every drop of myself to her. We lay on the stairs for a little while. The only thing that kept us from falling asleep was the desire to drink some more wine. I zipped up. I had her walk ahead of me and kept my hands on her ass, up her dress, and even pulled her down again to kiss her, but she said I’d better not start what I couldn’t finish. We poured some wine and turned on some music, and sat outside in the half-warm night. Neither of us ever remembers our conversations: we ask each other questions we have answered several times. She sat on my lap after a while and I pulled down the shoulder of her dress. She was wearing a black silk slip. Are you wearing a slip? I asked. She nodded, as th
ough it were nothing. I began to kiss her again with purpose. Does it turn you on? she asked. I supposed that it did, but I couldn’t explain it. I felt her breasts and stomach through the silk as I kissed her. Then she told me to fuck her. Something original. I brought her inside and bent her over the dining-room table, flat, breasts and face flat down, arms out, hands holding the other side of the table, tiptoes gripping the floor, and I pulled the back of her slip up.

  I woke, on Sunday, to find her commingled in my white sheets, naked and asleep on her side. The grey blinds in my bedroom are opaque, but around the edges there are apertures where the light cuts through obliquely and violently. Generally, on weekends, I cover my head in pillows, but somehow Clare had them all under her. She also had almost the whole bed to herself. I put my hand on her waist, and she backed into me. I moved her hair away from her neck.

  There was no future in it. But the future and I have nothing in common.

  18

  Dublin is sunbathing. June began yesterday. I have run out of housemates – I am sending Helen texts because it fills the house with her wet black hair – and the clutter is gathering without any reason to tidy it. I do not create disorder; I make room so that it may pass.

  7

  Satanism

  ‘… that thou may’st know

  What misery the inabstinence of Eve

  Shall bring on men.’

  John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XI

  I wrote my first short story at the age of eleven. It was ten pages, longhand, about a group of teenagers on a journey to a cabin in the woods, who are murdered, one by one, gruesomely, by a Satanic cult. I set it on Friday the 13th, and, after some consideration, decided it must also be Halloween. My uncle Troy, a preacher and welder, who went around people’s yards rebuking Satan in the name of Jesus Christ and whose wife had visions of Satan at her bedside, typed the story out for me. He owned a machine that was half typewriter, half word processor. He typed all the characters of a sentence, which appeared on a tiny screen, then pressed a button and the globe of the typewheel began to batter ink onto paper. Rendered this way, my story, disappointingly, covered only a single page. Uncle Troy, a short but large man with side-parted black hair, handed it to me as though the event were of such little significance that it did not even deserve reflection. I asked, feeling rather humiliated, if the story was at all scary. Boy, he said – and he squeezed his face together very seriously – I have seen the future, and nothing scares me but the will of God. I did not believe him, and told him so. He said, Let me show you. He opened the bible on the desk – there were bibles all over the house – walked me to the kitchen table, and introduced me to the Book of Revelation.

  I come to this imperfect memory – I have no idea how much of it is true; I only broadly know that I am not lying – from two directions: I remember the day for my first short story, and for my first encounter with the Apocalypse. That may sound a little precious. I only mean to say that no matter which path I take back to that anecdote, my recollection of one always leads me to the other.

  My mother and I had only just moved to Conroe, following her divorce from my father. In San Antonio, as a Catholic and altar boy, I had drearily studied the Bible and held long and torpid discussions on Jesus with Sunday School teachers. I was intuitively disconnected from Christ. I once told a teacher that even Jesus made mistakes; she corrected me. When we moved to Conroe, I found that people were intensely more religious, or more outwardly religious, but Satan had supplanted Jesus as the central character, and the Apocalypse was more celebrated than the crucifixion. People spoke of Jesus effusively and kindly, but if you let them go on long enough they turned the conversation to Satan. And of all the figures in the drama, Satan was, to me, the most captivating: intuitively he was my man.

  It is important to say this: Satan is not an idea in east Texas, nor a myth, nor a figure you must face beyond death, nor a reason not to sin, nor even a metaphor for the capability of wrong and cruelty that exists in the hearts of all men. He is a man who stands in the woods behind your house, or walks your streets, or comes to your bed. Sometimes he wears jeans and cowboy boots, and sometimes he has wings and hooves. I heard of young women who were raped by Satan in the middle of the night – and I met two of them – because they were impure of thought. While Satan, in many cases, was surely a father or stepfather (a stepfather raped one of the girls I knew), in others the experience was purely imaginative or hallucinatory – something from the fever of religion and guilt and loneliness and inadequacy. But there was also something purely wonderful in the thought of it. The stories, which were often passed down by scaremongering adults, turned all of us – at various ages – to impure thoughts. Girls secretly adored him, and formulated rape fantasies. Boys, who were jealous, passed on rumours with pornographic, exaggerative zeal. I still find it pleasurable to visualize Satan with young women. I know it is reprehensible to find sexual gratification in rape, but in my fantasies Satan is always handsome, and the women always want him.

  Now and again, my cousins and I filled whole evenings, whole nights, with talk of the Apocalypse. We sat outside in darkness, or in dark rooms, quoting lines from the Book of Revelation, lying about the seven signs beginning. Some said they had seen a red moon, others that a trumpet had howled in the clouds; I told them all that a machine in Switzerland that made credit cards was called the Beast. I am not ashamed to say that I joined rebuking excursions around our houses. Satan had to flee if you rebuked him, but only if your faith was pure. Since ours was not, these excursions were about seeing him. But I think I was alone in the belief, which I dared not share, that if I met Satan, he and I would get along.

  I was as fascinated then as I am now with thoughts of annihilation. Beyond the Book of Revelation, I was also obsessed with the certainty of nuclear war. I used to climb on top of the roof of whatever house or trailer home we were living in, and with a pair of old binoculars – my father’s – I watched the sky for incoming Soviet ICBMs. I examined vapour trails. My friend Grayson often joined me, and we would say things to each other such as, That is not the vapour trail of an airplane. We would call each other and say we’d spotted mushroom clouds. For many years my mother and I lived in a house whose previous owner had installed a bomb shelter – a large steel tank buried thirty feet deep and connected by a staircase to the living room. But I knew that when war did start, the best place to be was near the blast, so that you were immediately incinerated.

  I associate all these things with the manifestation of eroticism, specifically my relationship with masturbation. When I look back on it – the world under threat, Satan haunting the hallways of my house, and the birth of storytelling in me – I see myself and my eroticism as doomed lovers, gathering what beauty we could before it was all over. I know, of course, that there was also something of Orwell’s common toad in me: He goes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms around something, and if you offer him a stick, or even a finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad.

  In some of my nuclear holocaust fantasies – those in which I survived – I was left to wander the smouldering chaos of east Texas alone. I had a motorcycle, and went around siphoning gas from burned-down stations. I had many firearms. I began to find pockets of survivors – including popular girls I knew from school, who threw themselves at me. We fucked around little campfires, often in plain sight of the others – usually her parents. Sometimes I fucked the mothers of my friends while their husbands (often wounded) watched wantonly. I believed the act of masturbation was a sin, and this made me perform the act with more abandon. I masturbated to the fantasy of Satan and me masturbating in a bed together, and once tried (unsuccessfully) to enact this with a friend – with me playing the role of Satan.

  One night, at a Baptist church near the interstate – so close you could hear eighteen-wheelers – after the preacher had
shouted and frothed and spoken in tongues, and whacked women on the head with an open palm, causing them to collapse and have convulsions on the ground, while the parishioners raised their arms and their eyes rolled back in their heads, I decided to be born again. I believed it was going to be essentially the same as Catholic confession, which I had done on several occasions – though I never confessed anything of substance. The preacher told everyone to bow their heads, and those who wished to be born again should come forward and accept Jesus. I was with my cousin Chris and his mother, Linda, and when I stepped out of the pew, Chris beheld me with derision. Because we never spoke of it, I do not know if he felt I had betrayed an unspoken pact of indifference to this nonsense, or if he, perhaps, had wanted to be born again, and I had stolen a very serious moment from his life. I was guided into a room behind the altar, where men with bibles sat forward on their chairs, waiting for sinners, with the great earnestness of men trying to sell you a deal you cannot afford to pass up. I was not the only person who chose that night to be born again. The little room was full of us, some weeping happily, some quiet. The men with bibles did all the talking. I sat down across from a man with a large moustache and yellow cowboy boots. I didn’t want to admit that I masturbated many times a day, sometimes holding pairs of panties stolen from my female cousins, who were older and had large breasts, to my nose and mouth. I didn’t want to say that I was fond of Satan. But it was nothing like confession. I was told that God knew all my sins and flaws, and loved me nevertheless. I was asked to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. I accepted. The man read some lines from the Bible – none of them from the Book of Revelation – and it was over. He shook my hand. I was reborn. I was sinless, completely and profoundly, for a few hours. The weight was diabolical. Seduction toward another foul revolt is always uncoiling from the tree.