A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  I spent the money I had hoped would get me through the week – starter, main, wine. Nicola wanted to go on drinking through the afternoon; we all did. And for a moment we lived in the thought of that possibility; in that instant we believed our lives had the kind of freedom that mattered, and we saw ourselves crashing down some alleyway at midnight promising never to return to work. But we are back in work. Mary Anne’s cheeks have gone purple, and she is swooning under the weight of a headache. Mary Anne has the finest shoe collection I have ever seen – all very high heels, all patent leather. I would like to have her feet in my lap some day. She has a sweet and unassuming face, but the way her heels go maddeningly bam-bam-bam from her desk to the copier makes me imagine her walking on men’s testicles.

  Thursday night, 16 October

  It is almost midnight. I have finished my last class for the week, and I’ve hurt one student’s feelings by telling her I’m sick of her grammatical mistakes, her lack of effort. So I am thinking of her at home, hating me. I’m thinking of every night to come from now until Christmas, of the money I ought not to be spending, of the mortgage. I feel as though I’m in a crowded house, and I’ve been in it for a year, having long, important semi-conversations over loud music, and people have been dancing on the furniture, but now it has gone a bit sour, and I want to tell everyone the party’s finally over, shove them out the door, turn the music off, and sit in a large chair in the darkness.

  Friday morning, 17 October

  Friday! Catching bus in ten minutes. Drinks tonight with Henrik and Mary Anne. Telling Henrik about the baby.

  Saturday midday, 18 October

  Up now a few hours. Tired but not hungover. Henrik was happy for me, but for about sixty seconds he was distressed. We were drinking in Neary’s, at the table by the door. After saying, This is a surprise, this is definitely a surprise; I’m not going to lie to you; it’s a surprise, he said: But if you’re happy, I’m happy. Later he told me that, after all the hard living, heavy drinking, womanizing, recklessness, sleeplessness, misery and self-evisceration, impregnating a stable, unselfish civil servant with a PhD, and being happy about it, might be considered a sell-out. We drank to that. Mary Anne showed up after an hour, having stayed on at the office late as usual. She wore a red dress and fishnet stockings and black high heels – she had worn these things to work. We instantly began a conversation in which I confessed a fetish for patent-leather heels, and a particular fondness for hers that sometimes caused me to stare at her in the office. The comment passed without response, but now I like to think that every morning she may glance a little longer while slipping them on, admiring herself, and know that I am watching out. Perhaps this will create a conversation of gestures between us. Mary Anne looks sophisticated but has the accent of an unsophisticated country woman. She has nice shoulders and gigantic blue eyes.

  The Helens arrived – black-haired Helen, who used to dance on my dining-room table and spend all morning washing her hair, and red-haired Helen. It was about nine. Mary Anne went to eat dinner with her boyfriend. The Helens wanted to go somewhere fun where we could smoke. It was chilly – winter is coming along nicely now – so we went to Bruxelles and stood under a heat lamp. The evening had been good. A year ago, I would have been out until four in the morning, but I was yawning and stayed out only because the Helens would have been disgusted if I left before midnight. And I wanted nobody else to show up. Four was enough. A year ago, four would have been a great failure.

  I had to sleep upright in bed beside Clare because I had indigestion and, though I had not felt drunk before I lay down, the spins. I woke myself up snoring once or twice. I had a dream that I was on a train, lying down, and watching out the window. City after city went by, Berlin, Paris, Prague, Krakow – I have never been to Krakow – and finally Vienna. It was winter in those cities, and very bright. I saw nothing but buildings and glare. When I woke, I felt as though I had had a vision of the life that has barely escaped me. Not the cities – I can visit any city I like – but the solitude of living in them on my own, and moving on with a suitcase, subsisting but not thriving, working but not saving, slowly falling out of touch with everyone.

  Monday morning (early), 20 October

  My alarm was set for six a.m., but I woke ten minutes early to the sound of heavy rain. Clare slept through it. For sixty seconds, it sounded like basketballs. Then it was finished. I sat in bed listening to the sound of my heart race – the stress is very bad on Monday mornings. Then the alarm went off, and Clare stirred. She’d had nightmares. It was the movie we watched late last night. I got up and put some clothes on, and have come up to the dining room, and suddenly the sky is clear – still dark above the houses, but orange-pink toward the city. The moon is out, and the light of it is glowing on the wet roof of the building opposite. Low clouds are racing out to the east, away from the city and illumination, toward dawn.

  Monday morning (later), 20 October

  Got distracted by laundry, and thwarted by an inability to fight through sleepiness. Had to take the dry stuff off the clothes horse, fold it, hang up new wet stuff, take a shower, get dressed, make some coffee, and now I am back, and have spent about ten or fifteen minutes on the web, reading stories that will be out of date by lunchtime. Somehow, in all that, I’ve lost the guts of an hour.

  But I have not eaten – just a cup of strong coffee and a glass of water. I need some toast, or an apple, because if I don’t eat I will vomit. But the toast will take another few minutes, and the last apple is rotten. When things are going poorly, and I lose an hour on bullshit, lost time seems like a catastrophe. I am so filled with self-hatred because of it, sitting here now, that I would vomit on top of myself just for punishment – just so I’d lose the rest of the morning having to clean myself up. So I do not eat.

  This morning my heart is going rapidly, and I can’t take a full breath. It will be like this all day. I hate myself today; I hate the whole human race. I am coursing with rage at the thought of every man and woman alive.

  Tuesday afternoon (the office), 21 October

  Saw a dead man at lunch today. He had a heart attack on James Joyce Bridge, just outside the Vespa dealership – a little shack on the south quays called Scooter Island, where the mechanics walk around with black hands and black faces, counting cash out of their pockets. The dead man had been walking along the footpath outside Scooter Island, and he wanted to cross to the north quays. He asked for help crossing the road. Mark, the owner, was outside on the telephone and helped him. Mark asked if he was all right. The man collapsed, and a few people knelt beside him and rang an ambulance. While they waited, the man said two names. I didn’t hear the names – I had only just arrived – but Mark did. The man continued to speak, but his voice was too weak for anyone to hear him. His mouth made shapes. The ambulance pulled up behind us, and the man died just as the paramedics got to him. Mark was very shaken, and he was talking to everyone, telling his story, inch by inch, exactly how it had happened, pointing to the spot where he first saw the man, where they crossed the road together, where he collapsed, just how quickly the ambulance arrived, and the last words he said to the man as the paramedics took over. I wanted to be sympathetic, but I had ten minutes left to get back to work, and a fifteen-minute walk, so I wrote a list of problems on a piece of paper – loose steering; back right blinker out; new front tire; engine needs service and cleaning; cutting out – and handed it to him, while he was telling a woman who witnessed it all that the man was trying to tell him something. His head was in his right hand. The phone was in his other. I’ve never seen anything like that, he told the woman.

  Wednesday night, 22 October

  Got home tonight at nine-thirty. Did not read on bus. Listened to John Coltrane, and watched the lights of the city go by in my window, and in the reflection of my window. In that moment I could breathe again. Then the lights – the neon Chinese takeout signs, the off-licences, the pubs, the shops, the offices with lights still on – dissolved to the
rear, and the bus climbed north, into the suburbs, and I had to change the music, because the landscape had ruined it. I am never content, but I approach contentment through longing, through disappointment.

  When the city was behind me, I sent Walter, my cousin in Vienna, a text telling him I had news for him. He wrote back: I am intrigued. Then I sent him a long text explaining that I was going to become a father, and that he would be an uncle. It feels strange to tell anyone that, if only because it is the first ounce of reality in my life.

  At home I found a letter from the Arts Council – they are giving me some money to go to Vienna. More money than I have ever received for my writing. I sent Walter another text: And another thing – I’m coming to Vienna in January.

  Thursday night, 23 October

  I sat down in a café on Baggot Street and opened a book of nonfiction by Saul Bellow. Evelyn had ordered it from the Strand for my birthday, but it had only just arrived. It could have been a year ago – the force of nostalgia was so strong I had to send Evelyn a text saying I was thinking of her. Even though it is over, completely, we communicate once a week or so, often on Saturday or Sunday mornings. I ask her if she got lucky, and she tells me everything. I have no interest in touching her. We have had as much of each other as two people can – we used each other up. But I am still in love with her desire. She watches pornography online and sticks her vibrator in herself for an hour. She sends me texts explaining what she has just done, or is just about to do.

  I read from Bellow’s essay about Dostoevsky and Paris: that for Dostoevsky the revelation of bias is a step toward truth. That liberalism is inherently deceitful: the principles of good compel us to lie.

  Saturday afternoon, 25 October

  Clare went to the beautician’s yesterday to get waxed. A tall beautiful Polish girl waxed her, with beautiful, soft hands and long fingers. She told me about the experience as I undressed her.

  Last year, in the weeks before Christmas, I lived on two hours of sleep a night. I was still teaching, writing, and going to work. In the three months before that, I’d been at the very same thing, if not so condensed – teaching every night of the week, drinking afterward, driving my scooter around drunk and singing songs to myself to stay awake, drinking on Fridays and Saturdays to four or five in the morning, working all day Sunday to get ready for classes. The more fatigue struck at me, the harder I struck back. I bludgeoned exhaustion with drinks and work. I was not trying to kill myself. If I were ever going to lie, that is the one I would tell: that the one truth left on earth is death – that dying is the carnal expression of honesty, a moment of tangible truth. But my onslaught was not a veneration of death. It was a veneration of disillusionment. I pushed myself because I wanted to pour pure poison into my history, kill it, wrench the hypocrisy out. And live with whatever was left, as the most honest man on this earth – I had already been the most dishonest. But an appreciation of death – a real one – is a softer, calmer equation. It is not explosive. It requires deliberation. It is a high, calm fearlessness. It hates all infatuation. And in the face of exhaustion, it tires. It needs sleep.

  Tuesday afternoon (the office), 28 October

  When I told Evelyn that Clare was pregnant, she cried for five minutes, not heavily, and she did not even know why she was crying. We were in Thomas Read’s, the place where we had had our first lunch together and she had given me that book. After five minutes she said she was happy for me.

  Tuesday night, 28 October

  I came home tonight, instead of going for drinks – even though it was my last Tuesday class – because there was something very definite in my thoughts. A sentence I wanted to get out. But it is almost eleven and I cannot stay awake.

  Thursday night, 30 October

  The week of teaching is finished. Three more weeks of heavy work, then I coast into Christmas. The chest pains are milder, and fatigue is starting to have its counter-intuitive effect on me again. The more I am down, the more fiercely I claw myself into existence.

  The drive home from work, in the rain, was uneventful, which was a surprise. Last year at this time, Halloween weekend, driving home on a Thursday night, there were large bonfires and drunk teenagers on all the open fields. On the last stretch to the entrance of my estate, the Hole in the Wall Road (a name that tells you what the area used to look like), a bunch of kids ambushed me with bottle rockets. I saw them line up along a fence and light the fuses. The rockets blazed across the road in front of me with blue and orange and green flames coming out of them.

  Saturday morning, 1 November

  Clare left for China this morning, and there is a palpable emptiness in the house. And in that emptiness, that sudden difference in the pattern of days, I desire to wind this up.

  The morning is bright and cold. I have opened the blinds upstairs and am sitting in pure white light. Last weekend the clocks changed, and now I remember the image that started this.

  10

  Disinformation

  It is the beginning of December now. A few weeks ago Clare and I found out our child will be a boy. We went for her twenty-week scan at the Rotunda, and there he was. The woman who performed the scan took measurements and captured photos. She said everything was looking good. I asked if she could tell the sex. She gave me a bit of a lashing: That doesn’t matter to me, she said; all that matters is the health of the baby. But can you tell? I asked. She sighed, and said it was a boy, then changed the subject. I asked again, about five minutes later, because I did not feel convinced that she was convinced, and she said yeah in the way old Irish ladies say it – breathing inward. The doctor later told us that this woman is a bit notorious for whipping men into shape at these scans.

  We spent a few days in west Cork to mark the end of my autumn teaching schedule. The B&B we stayed in was mildewy and frigid – the owner turned the heat on for an hour a day only, in the afternoon. I got a cold, and the cold got worse in our damp shivering room. I slept in my clothes, which became damp and smelly, and a winter cap. Clare could not have gone for long walks anyway – she gets breathless quickly – but I had hoped to make a few unexpected roadside stops and wander around some hilltop, and take in the scenery, and think about having a son. Instead, I spent my mornings in a sweaty, hungover, trembling half-sleep, filled the room with snotty tissues, and took so much paracetamol that, when I finally began to feel better, I had violent indigestion and spent all Sunday and Monday – back in Dublin – lying on the floor between the toilet and the bed.

  When Clare and I were leaving – it was a day earlier than we expected, because I was too sick to stay any longer – we took the Caha Pass, in the mountains between Glengarriff and Kenmare. The road goes up and up, high and narrow, and looks over a deep valley of grass and boulders. The sun was out and the sky was yellow. The light was so warm through the window that I cracked it open – and icy air filled the car. At the top of the pass, there is a tunnel cut through the mountain. It is roughly chiselled, not smooth, and the roof drips with condensation. Puddles form on the road. When we came out, and were in Kerry, the sky was black with clouds, and the distances – the valleys and mountains – were clogged with mist. The change was so sudden – the tunnel is only a hundred metres in length – that Clare and I both said whoa. A little sunlight from the Cork side of the pass was coursing through, and filled the air with rainbows. Nothing is ever striking to me for its own sake; I cannot leave well enough alone. I demand that images like this speak to a self in me that is consistent and unvariegated, when in fact it only speaks to the part of me that likes rainbows. I want this sight to wring out of me a feeling that is so big and clumsy that it is almost religious. And when I fail to find the reflection of the image in me, the understanding of myself in the image, I grow frustrated.

  A man does not encounter himself by his secret natures. Instead, he lives in adulterated memories. He does not know his truth; the mirror in which he gazes upon himself is distorted, too forgiving, and contaminated with bad light. He cannot
examine himself: he must first examine the mirror.

  For about ten months in 1996 and 1997, I lived in Brighton. My friend Jack, from Mississippi – whom I knew from my year abroad in Germany – was living in London at the time. I was in England to continue my studies as a graduate student at the University of Sussex; he was there to get something exotic on his CV. Brighton was a bore, and I found myself in London almost every weekend. Jack and I were and are very different people. Friends used to say that, while we lived in Germany and were almost never seen separately, we resembled those drama masks: he was always smiling, I was always frowning. Yet we were in love with the same woman, we liked the same authors, and we had the same proclivity toward drink.

  I was twenty-two at the time, and so was Jack. His first apartment – about five minutes from the Queensway tube stop – was something like half an attic at the top of a large building, not wide enough for me to lie down in. You could walk from the entrance to the window in four large steps. Jack is about three inches shorter than me, and could just fit on his bed, which was at the window end of the flat, if he bent his knees. But the ceiling was high, and the window overlooking the street was gigantic, and opened to a broad ledge we used to sit on to watch below.