by Steve Toltz
I saw all the dawns come up too early and all the middays reminding you you’d better get a hurry on and all the dusks whisper “I don’t think you’re going to make it” and all the shrugging midnights say “Better luck tomorrow.” I saw all the hands that ever waved to a stranger thinking it was a friend. I saw all the eyes that ever winked to let someone know their insult was only a joke. I saw all the men wipe down toilet seats before urinating but never after. I saw all the lonely men stare at department store mannequins and think “I’m attracted to a mannequin. This is getting sad.” I saw all the love triangles and a few love rectangles and one crazy love hexagon in the back room of a sweaty Parisian café. I saw all the condoms put on the wrong way. I saw all the ambulance drivers on their off hours caught in traffic wishing there was a dying man in the backseat. I saw all the charity-givers wink at heaven. I saw all the Buddhists bitten by spiders they wouldn’t kill. I saw all the flies bang uselessly into the screen doors and all the fleas laughing as they rode in on pets. I saw all the broken dishes in all the Greek restaurants and all the Greeks thinking “Culture’s one thing, but this is getting expensive.” I saw all the lonely people scared by their own cats. I saw all the prams, and anyone who says all babies are cute didn’t see the babies I saw. I saw all the funerals and all the acquaintances of the dead enjoying their afternoon off work. I saw all the astrology columns predicting that one twelfth of the population of earth will be visited by a relative who wants to borrow money. I saw all the forgeries of great paintings but no forgeries of great books. I saw all the signs forbidding entrance and exit but none forbidding arson or murder. I saw all the carpets with cigarette burns and all the kneecaps with carpet burns. I saw all the worms dissected by curious children and eminent scientists. I saw all the polar bears and the grizzly bears and the koala bears used to describe fat people you just want to cuddle. I saw all the ugly men hitting on all the happy women who made the mistake of smiling at them. I saw inside all the mouths and it’s really disgusting in there. I saw all the bird’s-eye views of all the birds who think humanity looks pretty active for a bunch of toilet heads…
What was I supposed to make of all this? I know that most people would have taken it as a divine vision. They might even have found God in there, jumping out at them like a holy jack-in-the-box. Not me. All I saw was man and all his insignificant sound and fury. What I saw shaped my perspective of the world, sure, but I don’t think it was a supernatural gift. A girl once told me that in thinking this I was turning a blind eye to a message from God and I should be walking around filled with a spiritual welling in my soul. That sounds nice, but what can I do about it? I don’t have it in me. If it was his intent to tell me something in all that visual noise, God picked the wrong guy. My inability to make a leap of faith is carved into my DNA. Sorry, Lord. I guess one man’s burning bush is another man’s spot fire.
Six months must have passed in that state. In the outside world I was bathed and fed through tubes; my bowels and bladder were emptied, my appendages massaged, and my body manipulated into whatever shape amused my caretakers.
Then a change occurred: the Aleph, if that’s what it was, was unexpectedly and unceremoniously sucked back down into its hiding place and all the visions departed in an instant. Who knows what mechanism was behind the lifting of the lid to the barrel, but it opened a crack wide enough for a stream of sound to come flooding in; my hearing returned and I was wide awake but still blind and mute and paralyzed. But I could hear. And what I heard was the voice of a man I didn’t recognize coming through loud and clear, and his words were powerful and old and terrifying:
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes. Why died I not from the womb?
I might have been paralyzed, but I could feel my internal organs tremble. The voice continued:
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul. Which long for death but it cometh not: and dig for it more than for hid treasures; Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God has hedged in?
(I later discovered that the voice belonged to Patrick Ackerman, one of our town’s councillors, and he was reading me the Bible, from beginning to end. As you well know, Jasper, I don’t believe in fate or destiny, but I do find it interesting that the very moment my ears cleared and were primed for listening, these words were the first that greeted them.)
With the return of consciousness and hearing, instinctively I knew that soon would come vision, followed by the ability to touch myself. In short, life. I was on my way back.
But before I returned, there was still a long road to go, and that road was paved with voices. A real cavalcade—old seductive voices, young expressive voices, scratchy throat-cancerish voices—and the voices were full of words and the words were telling stories. Only much later did I learn that the town had taken me on as a sort of community project. Some doctor had pronounced it necessary that I be spoken to, and with our new bush town dying of unemployment, all those semi-altruistic souls who didn’t have anything to do with their days turned up in droves. The funny thing was, I asked some of them afterward and not one of them thought I was really listening. But I was listening. More than listening, I was absorbing. And more than absorbing, I was remembering. Because the peculiar detail of all this is, perhaps because of the sightless, paralyzed state I was imprisoned in, the books read to me when I was in that coma burned into my memory. This was my supernatural education: the words of those books read to me in my coma I can quote to you word for word.
As it became clear that I wasn’t going to die any day soon and might be in this petrified state forever, the voices became fewer and fewer, until only one voice remained: my mother’s. The rest of the town gave me up for a block of wood, but my mother kept on reading. My mother, a woman who had only several years earlier left her native land having never read an English book in her life, was now churning through them by the hundreds. And the unexpected consequence was, as she stocked up my mind with words, thoughts, ideas, and sensations, she did as much to her own. It was as though great big trucks filled with words drove up to our heads and dumped their contents directly into our brains. All that unbound imagination brightened and stretched our minds with incredible tales of heroic deeds, painful loves, romantic descriptions of remote lands, philosophies, myths, the histories of nations rising, falling, chafing, and tumbling into the sea, adventures of warriors and priests and farmers and monsters and conquerors and barmaids and Russians so neurotic you wanted to pull out your own teeth. It was a prodigious jumble of legends my mother and I discovered simultaneously, and those writers and philosophers and storytellers and prophets became idols to us both.
Only much later, when my mother’s sanity came under scrutiny, did it occur to me what might have happened to her lonely and frustrated head, reading aloud all those astonishing books to her motionless son. What did those words mean to her in the painful quiet of my bedroom with the product of her loins lying there like a leg of lamb? I imagine her mind aching with the pains of growth like a tortured body stretched on a rack. I imagine her dwelling on what she read. I imagine her smashing through the confines of her cemented ideas with all those brutal, beautiful truths. It must have been a slow and confounding torment. When I think of what she transformed into much later, what demented tragedy she had become by the end of her young life, I can envisage in my mother the agonizing delight of the reader who hears for the first time all the ramblings of the soul, and recognizes them as her own.
The Game
Shortly after my eighth birthday, I woke up. Just like that. Four years and four months after I slipped into a coma, I slipped out again. Not only could my eyes see, but I used the lids to blink. I opened my mouth and asked for cordial—I wanted to taste something sweet. Only people regaining
consciousness in movies ask for water. In real life you think of cocktails with pineapple chunks and little umbrellas.
There were a lot of joyous faces in my bedroom the week I returned to the land of the living. People seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and they all said “Welcome back,” as if I’d been away on a long voyage and any moment I was going to pull out the presents. My mother hugged me and covered my hands in wet kisses that I could now wipe on my pajamas. Even my father was jubilant, no longer the unfortunate man with the freak-show stepson, the Amazing Sleeping Kid. But little four-year-old Terry: he was in hiding. My sudden rebirth was too much of a shock. My mother breathlessly called for him to come and meet his brother, but Terry was a no-show. I was still too tired and weak to be offended. Later, when everything went into the toilet, I was forced to consider what it must have been like for Terry’s developing mind to grow up next to a corpse and then to be told “That creepy mummy over there is your brother.” It must have been spooky, especially at night when the moonlight hit my frozen face and my unmoving eyeballs fixed on the poor kid, as if they had solidified that way on purpose, just to stare.
On the third day after my resurrection, my father thundered in and said, “Let’s get you up and about.” He and my mother grabbed my arms and helped me out of bed. My legs were sad, dead things, so they dragged me around the room as if I were a drunk friend they were escorting out of a bar. Then my father got an idea. “Hey! You’ve probably forgotten what you look like!” It was true. I had. A vague image of a little boy’s face drifted somewhere in my mind, but I couldn’t be sure if it was me or someone who had once hated me. With my bare feet trailing behind, my father dragged me into the bathroom to look at myself in a mirror. It was a crushing spectacle. Even ugly people know beauty when they don’t see it.
Terry couldn’t avoid me forever. It was about time we were properly introduced. Soon after everyone had lost interest in congratulating me on waking up, he came into the room and sat on his bed, bouncing rhythmically, hands pressed down on his knees as if to keep them from flying away.
I lay back in bed gazing at the ceiling and pulled the covers over me. I could hear my brother breathing. I could hear myself breathing too—so could anyone; the air whistled noisily through my throat. I felt awkward and ridiculous. I thought: He’ll speak when he’s ready. My eyelids weighed a ton, but I wouldn’t allow them the satisfaction of closing. I was afraid the coma was waiting.
It took an hour for Terry to bridge the distance between us.
“You had a good sleep,” he said.
I nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. The sight of my brother was overpowering. I felt impossibly tender and wanted a hug, but decided it was better to remain aloof. More than anything, I just couldn’t get over how unrelated we looked. I know we had different fathers, but it was as if our mother hadn’t a single dominant gene in her whole body. While I had an oily yellow complexion, a pointed chin, brown hair, slightly protruding teeth, and ears pressed flat against my head like they were waiting for someone to pass, Terry had thick blond hair and blue eyes and a smile like a dental postcard and fair skin dotted with adorable orange freckles; his features had a perfect symmetry to them, like a child mannequin’s.
“Do you want to see my hole?” he said suddenly. “I dug a hole in the backyard.”
“Later on, mate. I’m a bit tired.”
“Go on,” my father said, scowling. He was standing at the door glaring at me. “You need fresh air.”
“I can’t now,” I said. “I feel too weak.”
Disappointed, Terry slapped my atrophied leg and ran outside to play. I watched him from the window, a little ball of energy trampling on flower beds, a little streak of fire jumping in and out of the hole he’d dug. While I watched him, my father remained hovering at the bedroom door, with burning eyes and fatherly sneers.
Here’s the thing: I had peered over the abyss, stared into the yellow eyes of death, and now that I was back in the land of the living, did I want sunshine? Did I want to kiss flowers? Did I want to run and play and shout, “To be alive! To be alive!” Actually, no. I wanted to stay in bed. It’s difficult to explain why. All I know is a powerful laziness seeped into me during my coma, a laziness that ran through my blood and solidified into my core.
It was only six weeks after my groggy reawakening when—even though the pain it caused me to walk was reshaping my body to resemble a eucalypt twisted by fire—my parents and doctors decided it was time for me to return to school. The boy who had slept through a sizable chunk of his childhood was expected to slip unnoticed into society. At first the children greeted me with curiosity: “Did you dream?” “Could you hear people talking to you?” “Show us your bedsores! Show us your bedsores!” But the one thing a coma doesn’t teach you is how to blend into your surroundings (unless everyone around you is sleeping). I had only a few days to work it out. Obviously, I failed miserably, because it wasn’t two weeks later when the attacks started. The pushing, the beating, the intimidation, the insults, the jeers, the wedgies, the tongue poking, and, worst of all, the agonizing silence: there were almost two hundred students at our school, and they gave me four hundred cold shoulders. It was the kind of cold that burned like fire.
I longed for school to be over so I could go to bed. I wanted to spend all my time there. I loved lying down, the reading lamp shining, just a sheet over me, the blankets bunched up at the bottom of the bed like fat rolls. My father was unemployed then (the prison was completed and had its grand opening while I was in the coma), and he burst into my room at all hours and screamed, “GET OUT OF BED! CHRIST! IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE!” His fury multiplied tenfold when directed at Terry, who would lie in bed too. You see, it might be difficult for anyone to believe now, but somehow, juvenile invalid though I was, I still managed to be a hero to Terry. He adored me. He idolized me. When I lay all day in bed, Terry lay all day in bed. When I threw up, Terry plunged his fingers down his own throat. I’d be under the sheets curled up into a ball, shivering uncontrollably with fever, and Terry would be curled and shivering too. It was sweet.
My father was scared stiff for him, for his actual son, and he concentrated all his mental forces into predicting terrible futures, all because of me.
One day he had an idea, and for a parent, it wasn’t a bad one. If your child has an unhealthy obsession, the only way to wean him off it is to replace it with a healthy one. The obsession my father chose to lure Terry away from wanting to be an invalid was as Australian as a funnel-web spider bite on the kneecap.
Sport.
It was Christmas. Terry was given a football. My father said to him, “Well, let’s you and me go throw the ball around, eh?” Terry didn’t want to go because he knew I would stay inside. My father put his foot down and dragged him kicking and screaming out into the sunshine. I watched them through the window. Terry put on a fake limp. Whenever my father threw the ball, Terry hobbled miserably across the field to catch it.
“Now stop that limping!”
“I can’t help it!”
“There’s nothing wrong with your leg!”
“Yes there is!”
My father spat with revulsion and grumbled his way back into the house, plotting and scheming the way fathers do, out of love. He decided that for a spell he needed to keep his unhealthy stepson away from his healthy actual son; he saw disease as a combination of laziness and weakness, as an inclination, and in our house you couldn’t so much as cough without him seeing it as a reflection of your disgusting interior. He wasn’t normally an unsympathetic man, and he had his fair share of struggle, but he was one of those people who had never been sick a day in his life (only in his unpaid-bill-induced nausea) and had never even known anybody who had been sick. Even his own parents died without protracted illness (bus crash). I know I’ve said it before: if my childhood taught me one thing, it’s that the differences between the rich and the poor are nothing. It’s the chasm between the healthy and the sick that
you just can’t breach.
The next morning, with my father dragging two suitcases and Terry dragging his leg, they climbed into the family car and disappeared in wild swirls of dust. Two months later, when they returned, Terry told me that they had followed the local football team around the state, going to all the games. After a couple of weeks the team began to notice them, and, touched by the devotion of an apparently lame child, they elected my little limping brother their unofficial mascot. At the first opportunity, my father unburdened his troubles to the players, told them all about me and the insidious influence I had on Terry, and begged them to help him restore the hearty Australian spirit that had left his younger son’s left leg. The whole team rose to the occasion and answered the call proudly. They carried Terry onto the unblemished green of the field and in the hot breath of sunshine coached him in the finer elements of the game, inspiring him to limp less and less in his desire to impress them. After two months on the road, he was limpless and a true little sportsman. My father was no dummy. Terry had caught the bug.
On his return, Terry joined the local football club. They played rough in those days—the parents watched the battered heads of their children crash together in chilly autumn dusks, and they writhed in ecstasy. Their kids were proving themselves, and even when they came off the field wearing wigs of dried blood, nobody could have been more pleased. In Australia, as anywhere, rites of passage are no small thing.
It was immediately apparent that Terry was a naturally outstanding player, a star on the field. To watch him tackle, pass, dummy, duck and weave through the skinny legions of little athletes would give your eyes spots. He ran like one possessed, his concentration absolute. In fact, on the field Terry underwent a transformation of character and disposition. Though he played the clown in just about every situation conceivable, he had no sense of humor about the game whatsoever; once the whistle blew, he was as serious about that tough oval ball as a cardiovascular surgeon is about squishy oval hearts. Like me and probably most Australians, Terry had an innate opposition to authority. Discipline was abhorrent to his nature. If someone told him to sit down just as he was reaching for a chair, he’d probably have tossed it out the nearest window. But in the realm of self-discipline he was a Zen master. You couldn’t stop him. Terry would do laps of the garden even while the magnified moon rose up like a soap bubble. In storms he’d power on with sit-ups and push-ups, and as the sun sank behind the prison, his boots chomped through clumps of thick wet grass and lakes of mud.
