by Steve Toltz
“Get me something to wear, and a beer if you’ve got it. Hurry up,” he said.
I went inside and sneaked into my father’s closet; he was sleeping facedown on the bed, a deep drunken sleep with such a shattering snore I almost stopped to check his nose for an amplifier and lead. I picked out an old suit, then went to the fridge for beers. When I returned, Harry was ankle deep in mud again.
“First thing I did was fake an illness: stabbing abdominal pains. What else was I going to use? Back pain? Middle-ear infection? Was I going to complain that I saw a drop of blood in my urine? No, they needed to think it was a matter of life and death. So I did it and found myself sent to the infirmary, at three in the morning, when only one man was on duty. So I’m in the infirmary, doubled up in pretend pain. At about five the guard on duty goes out for a piss. At once I leap out of bed and break the lock of the medicine cabinet and steal all the liquid tranquilizers I can. I jab the guard when he comes back and then go around looking for another guard to help me get out of there. I knew I’d never get out without a guard’s help, but these bastards were unbribable, for the most part. Not that they weren’t corrupt, they just didn’t like me. But a couple of weeks before, I called in all my old favors and got one of my cronies to supply me with information about a certain guard’s family. I chose one of the newer guys- Kevin Hastings is his name, he’s been with us only two months, so he was less likely to know his arse from his elbow. It’s hilarious how these bastards think they’re anonymous in prison. You can really freak them out when you tell them you know precisely what positions they use with their wives, duration, et cetera. Anyway, Hastings turned out to be perfect. The man has a daughter. I wouldn’t have done anything, but I had to scare the life out of the bugger. And even if he didn’t bite, what did I have to lose? Would they really bother giving me another life sentence? I already have six!” Harry paused here a moment, reflecting, and said quietly, “I’ll tell you something, Marty, there’s freedom in forever.”
I nodded. It sounded true.
“So anyway, I go right up to Hastings and whisper in his ear, ‘Get me out of here now or else your lovely little daughter Rachael will enjoy the pleasure of a very diseased man I know.’ His face went white and he slipped me the keys, let me bang him on the noggin so he wouldn’t be under suspicion, and that’s all there was to it. I don’t feel proud of myself, but it was just a threat. When I’m safely hidden away, I’ll call him and ease his mind that his daughter is safe.”
I said, “Good one.”
“So what’s next for you, Marty? I don’t suppose you want to come with me? Be an accessory. What do you say?”
I told Harry about the bond I’d made with my mother that prevented me from leaving town at present.
“Wait, what kind of bond?”
“Well, it was more like an oath.”
“You made an oath with your mother?”
“Well, what’s so strange about that?” I asked, annoyed. What was the big deal? It’s not like I had confessed to sleeping with my mother, I merely pledged allegiance not to leave her side.
Harry didn’t say anything. His mouth was half open and I could feel his eyes tunneling deep into my cranium. He slapped his hand on my shoulder. “Well, can’t talk you out of an oath, can I?”
I agreed that he couldn’t.
“Well, good luck, old boy,” he said before turning and disappearing into the dark bush. “See you next time,” his disembodied voice called out. He left without even asking after Terry.
***
A week later my mother came into my room with big news. “Your brother’s coming home today. Your father’s gone to collect him,” she said, as if he were a long-awaited parcel. Terry had become a sort of fictitious character to us in the year he’d been gone, and the psychiatrist, by reducing him to a catalogue of psychological symptoms, had robbed my brother of his individuality. True, the complexity of his psychosis impressed us- he was collateral damage in a war waged between his deeper instincts- but it posed a question that plagued us: which Terry would be coming home? My brother, my mother’s son, or the impotent destroyer desperate for transcendence of the self?
We were all on pins and needles.
I wasn’t prepared for the sight of him walking through the back door- he looked so happy you’d have thought he’d been in Fiji sipping margaritas out of a coconut. He sat at the kitchen table and said, “So what kind of welcome-home feast you got planned for the prodigal son? Some fattened calf?” My mother was in such a state she cried, “Fattened calf? Where am I going to get that?” and Terry jumped from the table and hugged her and spun her around the room and she almost screamed in terror, she was so frightened of her own son.
After lunch Terry and I walked the narrow dirt road that led into town. The sun beat violently down. All the flies in the district came out to greet him. He brushed them away and said, “Can’t do that strapped to a bed.” I related the story of Harry’s shifty escape and his appearance that night in the mud.
“And have you seen Caroline?” he asked.
“Now and then.”
“How is she?”
“Let’s go see.”
“Wait. How do I look?”
I gave him the once-over and nodded. As usual, he looked good. No, better than good. Terry was already looking like a man, whereas I, more a man in age than he was, looked more like a boy with an aging disease. We moved silently toward town. What do you say to someone who’s just got back from hell? “Was it hot enough for you?” I think in the end I blurted out something like “How are you?” with an emphasis on the are, and he muttered that the “mongrels couldn’t break me.” I knew he’d suffered through an experience he’d never be able to communicate.
We reached town and Terry gave every person on the street a challenging stare. There were bitterness and anger in that stare. Clearly the hospital “treatment” had done nothing to quiet his anger. He had it in for everyone. Terry had chosen not to blame our parents for his sentence but had fixed his fury on everyone who followed the word of the suggestion box.
Except one. Lionel Potts came bounding up, waving his arms wildly. “Terry! Terry!” He was the only person in town happy to see my brother. It was a welcome relief to feel the force of Lionel’s childlike enthusiasm. He was the sort of man you talk to about the weather and you still walk away smiling. “The Dean boys, together again! How are you, Terry? Thank God you got out of that hellhole. Cunt of a place, wasn’t it? Did you give that blond nurse my phone number?”
“Sorry, mate,” Terry said. “You’ll have to get committed yourself if you want that action.”
So Lionel had been up to see Terry.
“Maybe I will, Terry. She looked worth it. Hey, Caroline’s in the café, smoking. She pretends to hide it from me and I pretend to be fooled. Have you seen her?”
“We’re on our way now,” Terry said.
“Excellent! Wait here!” Lionel pulled out a packet of cigarettes. “These are lights. See if you can wean her off the Marlboro full-strengths, would you? If it doesn’t bother you, a little collusion.”
“Not at all. How’s your back?”
“Crap! My shoulders feel like clamps. A town masseuse, that’s the kind of suggestion that would do some good,” Lionel said as he massaged his own shoulders with both hands.
Terry and I arrived outside the café. It was closed. It was always closed now; the boycott had won in the end. Caroline was lurking inside; the café was her private hideout until her father managed to sell it. We saw her through the window: she was lying on the bar smoking, trying to blow perfect smoke rings. It was adorable. The rings came out as whirling semicircles. I tapped on the glass and reached out to put my hand on Terry’s shoulder in brotherly support, but my hand met with nothing but air. I turned to see Terry’s back moving away from me fast, and by the time Caroline had unlocked the door and stepped out on the street, Terry was gone.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Nothing
.”
“Do you want to come in? I’m smoking.”
“Maybe later.”
As I walked away I noticed a bad smell in the air, like dead birds rotting in the sun.
I found Terry sitting beneath a tree, holding a pile of letters in his hands. I sat beside him and didn’t say anything. He stared down at the letters.
“They’re from her,” he said.
So, Caroline’s letters! Love letters, no doubt.
I stretched out on the grass and closed my eyes. There was no wind, and next to no sound. I had the impression of being inside a bank vault.
“Can I take a look?” I asked.
A masochistic streak in me was dying to get my hands on those stinking letters. I was frantic to see how she expressed her love, even if it wasn’t for me.
“They’re private.”
I could feel something crawling on my neck, maybe an ant, but I didn’t move- I didn’t want to give it the moral victory.
“Well, can you summarize?” I asked.
“She says she only wants to be with me if I can give up crime.”
“And are you going to?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
I felt myself shrink a little. Of course I was pleased that Terry would be saved by the woman he loved, but I couldn’t rejoice. One brother’s success is another brother’s failure. Dammit. I didn’t think he had it in him.
“Only, the thing is…” he said.
I sat up and looked at him. His eyes were heavy. Maybe the hospital had changed him after all. I wasn’t sure how, exactly; maybe inside him something fluid had hardened, or something solid had melted. Terry gazed out in the direction of the town center. “There’s one thing I need to do first,” he said. “Just one little illegal thing.”
One thing. They all say that. Just one and he’ll be on to the next, and before you know it he’ll be like a snowball rolling downhill gathering yellow snow.
“Well, you’ll do whatever you want,” I said, not strictly encouraging him, though not discouraging him either.
“Maybe I shouldn’t do it,” Terry said.
“Maybe.”
“But I really want to.”
“Well,” I said, choosing my words very carefully, “sometimes people need to do things, you know, to get the things that they need to do out of their system.”
What was I saying? Absolutely nothing. It was simply impossible to recommend to Terry a course of action; this was my defense for the unconscionable act of bad brothering I was doing.
“Yeah,” he said, lost in thought, and I stood there like a stop sign, even though I was saying, Go!
Terry picked himself up and brushed the grass off his jeans. “I’ll see you a bit later on,” he said, and walked off slowly in the opposite direction from Caroline’s café. He was really dawdling, I think because he wanted me to stop him. I didn’t.
Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.
Hours later, I heard the explosion. Out my window I saw thick billows of smoke spiraling into the moon-drenched night. My stomach tightened as I ran into town. I wasn’t the only one. The entire populace had congregated in the main street outside the town hall. They all looked horrified, the preferred expression of a crowd of spectators who gather specifically for tragedies. My poisonous suggestion box was gone. There were bits of it all over the street.
An ambulance had arrived, though not for the broken box. A man was stretched out on the pavement, his face covered with a white cloth soaked in blood. At first I thought he was dead, but he removed the cloth to reveal a face of blood and powder burns. No, he wasn’t dead. He was blind. He’d been reaching into the box to place a suggestion when the whole thing exploded in his face.
“I can’t see! I can’t fucking see!” he was shouting, panicked.
It was Lionel Potts.
There were more than fifty men and women on the scene, and in their eyes was a sort of thrill, as if they had come to dance in the streets on an enchanted evening. Through the crowd I saw Terry sitting in the gutter with his head between his legs. The horror of his badly timed act of vandalism was too much for him. Lionel had been the one bright light in a world full of dim ones, and Terry had torn his eyes out. It felt strange to see shards of my suggestion box strewn all over the road, and the way my brother was slumped in the gutter, and Lionel sprawled on the pavement, and Caroline hunched over him; it seemed to me that my loved ones had all exploded too. Smoke still hung in the air, curling in the bluish light, and it smelled very much like firecracker night.
Only five days later our family was dressed in its Sunday best.
Juvenile courtrooms are just like regular courtrooms. The state tried a number of charges on Terry like a rich woman trying suits on her favorite gigolo: attempted murder, attempted manslaughter, malicious wounding- the prosecutors couldn’t decide. They should have arrested me too. I don’t know if egging on a crime for love is an offense punishable by law, but it should be.
In the end, Terry was sentenced to three years in a juvenile detention center. When they took him away, he gave me a little wink. Then he was gone, just like that. The rest of us stood hugging each other in the courtroom, totally bewildered. I tell you, the wheels of justice may turn slowly, but when the state wants you off the streets, the wheels that carry you away spin like comets.
Democracy
After Lionel’s blinding, I found myself haunted by questions, and after Terry’s incarceration, I felt those questions pressing down on me from all sides. I had to do something. But what? I had to be someone. But who? I didn’t want to imitate the stupidity of the people around me. But whose stupidity should I imitate? And why did I feel sick at night? Was I afraid? Was fear making me anxious? How could I think clearly if I was anxious? And how could I understand anything if I couldn’t think clearly? And how was I going to function in this world if I couldn’t understand anything?
It was in this besieged state that I arrived at school, but I couldn’t make my way through the gates. For a good hour I stood staring at the ugly brick buildings, the dim-witted students, the trees in the playground, the brown polyester pants of the teachers making a swishing sound on their fleshy thighs as they marched between classes, and I thought: If I study hard, I’ll pass my exams, but so what? What do I do between that moment and the moment of my death?
When I got home, neither my mother nor my father seemed to care very much that I had quit school. My father was reading the local paper. My mother was writing a letter to Terry, a long letter, forty pages or more. I had sneaked a peek but couldn’t get past the uncomfortable first paragraph, in which she wrote: “I love you I love you my darling son my life my love what have you done my love my lovely son?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said I’ve quit school,” I repeated in a hurt whisper.
They didn’t react. What was conspicuously lacking in the silence was the question, What are you going to do now? “I’m going to join the army!” I shouted ludicrously, for effect.
It worked, though in the manner of a firework that sizzles and sparks on the ground, then abruptly dies out. My father actually said “Ha!” while my mother half turned her head to me and said in a quiet, stern voice, “Don’t.” And that was it.
In retrospect, I see how desperately I need
ed attention after a lifetime of being small print to my brother’s headlines. I can think of no other reason for my stubborn, impetuous, self-destructive decision to follow up on my threat. Two days later, in the Australian Army Registration Office, I found myself answering stupid questions with stupider answers. “Tell me, sonny, what do you think makes good army material?” the recruiting officer asked. “Light cotton?” I offered, and after not laughing for ten straight seconds, he grudgingly sent me down to the doctor. Unfortunately, that was the end of my adventure. I failed the mandatory physical examination with flying colors. The doctor probed me with an astonished look on his face and concluded that he had never seen a body in as bad a shape as mine outside of wartime.
Against all reason, I took the rejection badly and plunged into a deep depression. What followed was a period of lost time: three years, during which I felt myself circling the questions that had been circling me, though I never found the answers I needed. While searching, I went for walks. I read. I taught myself the art of reading while walking. I lay under trees and watched the clouds creep across the sky through a veil of leaves. I passed whole months thinking. I discovered more about the properties of loneliness, how it is like the slow squeeze of testicles by a hand that has just been in a refrigerator. If I could not find a way to be authentically in the world, then I would find a superior way of hiding, and to that end I tried on different masks: shy, graceful, pensive, buoyant, jovial, frail- they were the simple masks that had one defining characteristic. Other times I tried on more complicated masks, somber and buoyant, vulnerable yet cheerful, proud yet brooding. These I ultimately abandoned as they required too much upkeep on an energy level. Take it from me: complex masks eat you alive in maintenance.
The months groaned by, turning into years. I wandered and wandered, going mad with the uselessness of my life. Having no income, I lived cheaply. I gathered unfinished cigarette butts from pub ashtrays. I let my fingers turn a rusty yellow. I gazed stupidly at the people of the town. I slept outside. I slept in the rain. I slept in my bedroom. I learned valuable lessons about life, such as that a person who is sitting is eight times more likely to give you a cigarette than a person who is walking and twenty-eight times more likely to give you a cigarette than a person inside a car stuck in traffic. No parties, no invitations, no socializing. I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure. It’s a two-step, you and the world. I didn’t look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It’s how I’m made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful.
