by Steve Toltz
“Dad, are you going to tell me about Uncle Terry or not?”
“Am I—what do you think I’ve just been saying?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Well, sit down and shut up and I’ll tell you a story.”
This was it. Time for Dad to open up and spill his version of the Dean family chronicles, his version that was contrary to the mythologizing gossip of the nation. So he started to talk. He talked and talked nonstop until eight in the morning, and if he was breathing underneath all those words, I couldn’t see it or hear it but I sure could smell it. When he’d finished, I felt as though I’d traveled through my father’s head and come out somehow diminished, just slightly less sure of my identity than when I went in. I think, to do justice to his unstoppable monologue, it’d be better if you heard it in his own words—the words he bequeathed me which have become my own, the words I’ve never forgotten. That way you get to know two people for the price of one. That way you can hear it as I did, only partially as a chronicle of Terry Dean, but predominantly as a story of my father’s unusual childhood of illness, near-death experiences, mystical visions, ostracism, and misanthropy, followed closely by an adolescence of dereliction, fame, violence, pain, and death.
Anyway, you know how it is. Every family has a story like this one.
Deadlock
I’ve been asked the same question again and again. Everyone wants to know the same thing: What was Terry Dean like as a child? They expect tales of kiddy violence and corruption in the heart of an infant. They imagine a miniature criminal crawling around the playpen perpetrating acts of immorality between feedings. Ridiculous! Was Hitler goose-stepping all the way to his mother’s breast? OK, it’s true, there were signs if you chose to read into them. At seven years old, when Terry was the cop in cops and robbers, he’d let you go if you greased his palm with a lolly. In games of hide-and-seek, he hid like a fugitive. But so what? It doesn’t mean a predisposition to violence is printed on a man’s DNA. Yes, people are always disappointed when I tell them that as far as I’m aware, Terry was a normal infant; he slept and cried and ate and shat and pissed and gradually discerned that he was a different entity from, say, the wall (that’s your first lesson in life: you are not the wall). As a child he ran around screaming that high-pitched noise that children scream. He loved reaching for poisonous substances to put in his mouth (an infant’s instinct for suicide is razor-sharp), and he had an uncanny ability to cry just as our parents were falling asleep. By all accounts, he was just another baby. I was the remarkable one, if only for my inabilities.
Before Terry arrived, our lives were dominated by illness. It amazes me now how little I knew about my own condition, and how little I wanted to know. The only thing that interested me were the symptoms (violent stomach pains, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness); the underlying causes seemed totally irrelevant. They had nothing to do with me. Encephalitis? Leukemia? Immune deficiency? To this day I don’t really know. By the time it occurred to me to get a straight answer, everyone who might have had one was long dead. I know the doctors had theories, but I also remember they couldn’t make up their minds. I can only recall certain phrases, such as “muscle abnormality,” “disorder of the nervous system,” and “euthanasia,” that made little impact on me at the time. I remember being jabbed with needles and forcefed pills the size and shape of swollen thumbs. I remember that when they took X-rays, the doctors ducked out of the way very quickly, as if they’d just set off a firework.
This all happened before Terry was born.
Then one day I took a turn for the worse. My breathing was short and labored. Swallowing took a century; my throat was a wasteland, and I would have sold my soul for some saliva. My bladder and my bowels had minds of their own. A pasty-faced doctor visited me twice a day, speaking to my anxious mother at the foot of my bed, always as if I were in the other room. “We could take him to hospital,” he’d say. “But really, what’s the point? He’s better off here.”
It was then I began to wonder if I would die and if they would bury me in the new town’s new cemetery. They were still clearing the trees when I was at death’s door. I wondered: Would it be finished in time? If I carked it before it was ready, they’d have to ship my body off to a cemetery in some distant town I had never lived in, whose populace would walk past my grave without thinking, “I remember him.” Unbearable! So I thought maybe if I held off death for a couple of weeks, maybe if I got the timing right, I could be the first body to transform the empty field into a functional cemetery, the inaugural corpse. Then I wouldn’t be forgotten. Yes, I was making plans while lying in wait for death. I thought about all the worms and maggots in that field and how they were in for a treat. Don’t snack, you maggots! Human flesh is coming! Don’t ruin your dinner!
Lying in bed as the sun slid through the crack in the curtains, I thought about nothing else. I reached up and threw open the curtains. I called out to people walking past. What’s going on with that cemetery? How’s the progress? I was keeping tabs. And it was good news. The trees were gone. Iron gates fastened onto blocks of stone were erected as the entrance to the cemetery. Granite tablets had been shipped from Sydney; all they needed was a name! The shovels were standing by. It was all go!
Then I heard some terrible news. My parents were talking in the kitchen. According to my father, the old woman who ran the local pub had had a massive stroke in the middle of the night. Not a little one, but massive! I dragged myself upright. What’s this? Yes, my father said, she was barely hanging on. She wasn’t just at death’s door, she was pounding on it! Oh no! A catastrophe! It was going to be a race to the finish line! Who would be first? The old biddy was nearly eighty, so she’d been practicing dying for a lot longer than me. She had nature on her side. I had nothing but luck to hold out for. I was too young to die of old age but too old for infant mortality. I was stuck in the middle, that terrible stretch of time where people can’t help but breathe.
The next day, when my father stopped into my room to check on me, I asked how the old woman was traveling. “Not good,” he said. “She isn’t expected to last the weekend.” I knew I had at least another week, maybe ten days in me. I hit the bed. I tore the sheets. He had to hold me down. “What the hell’s got into you?” he shouted. I let him in on it, explained that if I were to die, I wanted to be the first in the cemetery. He laughed right in my face, the bastard. He called my mother in. “Guess what your son’s been saying to me?” Then he told her. She gazed at me with infinite pity and sat on the edge of the bed and hugged me as if she were trying to stop me from falling. “You won’t die, honey. You won’t.”
“He’s pretty sick,” my father said.
“Shut up!”
“It’s best to prepare for the worst.”
The next day my smug father told the men at his worksite what I’d said. They laughed too, the bastards. At night the men told their wives. They also laughed, the bitches. They thought it was adorable. Don’t children say the cutest things? Soon the whole town was laughing. Then they stopped laughing and started wondering. It was a good question, they decided: who would be the first? Shouldn’t there be a ceremony to commemorate the inaugural corpse? Not just a regular funeral. A real show! A big turnout! Maybe a band? The first burial is a big moment for a town. A town that buries its own is a living town. Only dead towns export their dead.
Queries on the state of my health poured in from all directions. People came in droves to see the exhibit. “How’s he doing?” I heard them ask my mother. “He’s fine!” she said tensely. They pushed past her into my bedroom. They had to see for themselves. Dozens of faces passed through my bedroom, peering at me expectantly. They came to see me lying prostrate, motionless, dying. Regardless, they were all very chatty. When people think your days are numbered, they’re really very nice to you. It’s only when you’re trying to get on in the world that they bring their claws out.
That was only the adults, of course; the kids of the tow
n couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me. That taught me something worth noting: the healthy and the sick are not peers, whatever else they might have in common.
Apparently everyone hassled the old woman too. I heard they crowded around her bed looking at their watches. I couldn’t understand why they’d taken such an interest. Later I learned bets had been laid. The old woman was the favorite. I was the long shot. I ran at over 100 to 1. Hardly anyone bet on me. I guess no one, not even in a morbid game of Guess Who’ll Die First, liked contemplating the death of a child. It just didn’t sit well with anyone.
“He’s dead! He’s dead!” a voice shouted one afternoon. I checked my pulse. Still ticking. I pulled myself up and called through the window at old George Buckley, our nearest neighbor.
“Who? Who’s dead?”
“Frank Williams! He fell off the roof!”
Frank Williams. He lived four houses down on the same street. From my window I could see the whole town running to his house to look. I wanted to look too. I dragged myself out of bed and moved like a greasy slug along the floor of my bedroom, into the hallway, out the front door into dazzling sunlight. Keeping my pajama pants on was an issue, but then it always is. Wiggling across the patchy grass lawn, I thought about Frank Williams, the late entry and surprise winner of our little contest. Father of four. Or was it five? All boys. He was always trying to teach his sons to ride a bike. When it wasn’t one son wobbling past my window with a hysterically tense grimace, it was another. I always hated the Williams boys for being slow learners. Now I felt sorry for them. No one should lose a parent through clumsiness. Their whole lives, those boys are going to have to say, “Yeah. My father fell off a roof. Lost his balance. What? What does it matter what he was doing up there?” Poor kids. Clearing gutters is no reason for a man to die. There’s just no honor in it.
The curious horde crouching around the dead man took no notice of the sick little worm crawling toward them. I made it through the legs of Bruce Davies, the town butcher. He peered down just as I peered up. Our eyes locked. I thought someone should tell him to get far away from the lifeless carcass of our neighbor. I didn’t like the glint in that butcher’s eye.
I looked closer. Frank’s neck was broken. His head had rolled back in a pool of dark blood and hung limp across the shoulders. When a neck breaks, it really breaks. I looked closer still. His eyes were wide open but there was nothing behind them, just a stupefying cavern. I thought: That will be me soon. Nothingness will envelop me just as it has enveloped him. Because of the contest and my own part in it, I saw this death not just as a preview of my own, but as an echo. Frank and I were in this together, chained to one another in some macabre marriage for all eternity—deadlock, I now call it, the affinity the living have with the dead. It’s not for everyone. You either feel it or you don’t. I did then and I do now. I feel it profoundly: this sacred, insidious bond. I feel they are waiting for me to join them in holy deadlock.
I rested my head on Frank’s lap and closed my eyes and let the voices of the townspeople soothe me to sleep.
“Poor Frank,” someone said.
“He’d had a good innings.”
“What was he doing up on that roof?”
“He was forty-two.”
“Is that my ladder?”
“Forty-two is young. He didn’t have a good innings. He had a shit innings.”
“I’m forty-four next week.”
“What are you doing?”
“Let go of that!”
“This is my ladder. I lent it to him last year, but when I asked about it he swore he’d returned it.”
“What about the boys?”
“Oh geez…the boys.”
“What’s going to happen to them?”
“They’ll be OK. They still have their mother.”
“But they won’t have this ladder. It’s mine.”
Then I fell asleep.
I awoke back in bed, sicker than ever. The doctor said that by crawling half a kilometer to see my first dead body, I had set my health back, as if it were a clock I had adjusted for daylight saving. After he left, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, her unstrung face an inch from mine, and she told me in an almost guilty voice that she was pregnant. I was too weak to say congratulations, and I just lay there as she stroked my forehead, which I really liked and still do, although there’s nothing soothing in stroking your own forehead.
Over the following months, as my condition gradually worsened, my pregnant mother sat down beside me and let me touch her belly, which was swelling horribly. Occasionally I felt the kick or perhaps head butt of the fetus inside. Once, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her whisper, “It’s a shame you won’t get to meet him.”
Then, just when I was at my weakest and death was licking her lips, something unexpected happened.
I didn’t die.
But I didn’t live either.
Quite by accident, I took the third option: I slipped into a coma. Bye-bye world, bye-bye consciousness, bye-bye light, too bad death, hello ether. It was a hell of a thing. I was hiding right in between death’s open arms and life’s folded ones. I was nowhere, absolutely nowhere at all. Honestly, you can’t even get to limbo from a coma.
Coma
My coma was nothing like those I’ve read about since: I’ve heard of people who fell into a coma in the middle of telling a joke and forty-two years later woke up and told the punch line. For them, those decades of oblivion were an instant of nothingness, as if they had passed through one of Sagan’s wormholes, time had curled around on itself, and they had flown through it in a sixteenth of a second.
Describing the thoughts, visions, and sensations I had inside that coma is near impossible. It wasn’t the nothingness, because there was quite a bit of somethingness (when you’re in a coma, even anyness is good), but I was too young to make sense of the experience. I can say, though, that I had as many dreams and visions as if I’d consumed a canyonful of peyote.
No, I won’t try to describe the indescribable, only so much as to say there were sounds I heard that I could not have heard and things I saw that I could not have seen. What I’m about to say is going to sound insane—or, worse, mystical, and you know I’m not that way inclined—but here it is: if you look at the unconscious mind as a big barrel, in the normal run of things the lid is open and sights, sounds, experiences, bad vibes, and sensations pour in during the waking hours, but when there aren’t any waking hours, none at all, for months or even years, and the lid is sealed, it’s possible that the restless mind, desperate for activity, might reach deep into the barrel, right down to the bottom of the unconscious, dredging up stores of things that were left there by previous generations. This is a Jungian explanation and I don’t even know if I like Jung, but there’s very little else out there on the shelves that could go any way to explain the things I saw that I could not have seen, to justify the things I heard that I could not have heard.
Let me try to put it another way. There is a short story by Borges called “The Aleph.” In the story, the Aleph, hidden under the nineteenth step of a cellar staircase, is an ancient mysterious portal to every point in the universe—I’m not kidding, every single point—and if you look into it, you see, well, absolutely everything. I’m hypothesizing that somewhere in the ancient parts of ourselves there could exist a similar porthole, resting quietly in a crack or a crevice or within the folds of the memory of your own birth, only the thing is, normally we never get to reach it or see it because the usual business of living piles mountains of crap on top of it. I’m not saying I believe this, I’m only giving you the best explanation I’ve come up with so far for the root of the extraordinarily dizzying hodgepodge of sights and sounds that flashed and whirled before my mind’s eye and ear. If the mind can have eyes, why not ears? You probably think there’s no such thing as the mind’s nose, either. Well, there is. And like Borges in his story, I can’t accurately describe it because my visions were simultaneous, and languag
e, being successive, means I have to record it that way. So use your imagination, Jasper, when I tell you one gazillionth of what I saw:
