by Steve Toltz
“It’s going to get bad,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, and I was starting to feel as though something frosty had been injected into my bloodstream. My father shuffled out of the back door in his pajamas and stood there glumly with an empty glass in his hand. “I want a cold drink. Have you seen the ice?”
“Try the freezer,” she said, then whispered to me, “Don’t leave me alone.”
“What?”
“Don’t leave me, with him, alone.”
That’s when I did an incredible thing that to this day I still can’t get my head around.
I took my mother’s hand in mine and I said, “I swear I’ll stay with you until the day you die.”
“You swear it?”
“I swear it.”
As soon as I’d said it, this seemed like a very bad, even self-castrating idea, but when your dying mother asks you to pledge undying devotion, what are you going to say? No? Especially since I knew that her future was the exact opposite of prosperity. What would it entail? Slow periods of deterioration broken by intermittent periods of false hope and convalescence, then recontinued degeneration, all under the weight of increasing agony and the terror of approaching death, which wasn’t sneaking up silently but was coming forward from a great distance trumpets blaring.
So why did I make this pledge? It’s not that I felt pity or was overwhelmed by emotion. It’s just that I seem to have at base a revulsion to the idea of a person being left alone to suffer and die, because I myself would hate to be left alone to suffer and die, and this revulsion is so deeply embedded within me that there was nothing fine about pledging devotion to my mother, as it constituted not a moral choice but rather a moral reflex. In short, I’m a sweetheart, but I’m cold about it.
“Are you cold?” she suddenly asked me. I said no. She pointed to the goose bumps on my arm. “Let’s get you inside,” she said, and swung her arm over my shoulder as if we were old drinking buddies going inside to rack up a game of pool. As we walked up toward the house and the prison bell rang out again across the valley, I felt that either a wall had come down between us or one had been taken away, and I couldn’t work out which it was.
With Terry in hospital, I spent almost every afternoon with Caroline. Not surprisingly, we talked about Terry interminably. Christ, when I think of it, there hasn’t been a time in my life when I haven’t had to talk about the bastard. It’s hard to keep loving someone, even after they’re dead, when you have to keep jabbering about them.
Whenever Caroline mentioned Terry’s name, heart molecules broke off and dissolved into my bloodstream—I could feel my emotional core getting progressively smaller. Caroline’s dilemma was this: should she be the girlfriend of a crazy gangster? Of course the drama and romance of it tickled her pink, but there was a sensible voice in Caroline’s head too, one that had the effrontery to seek her happiness, and that was the voice that was getting her down. It made her miserable. I listened without interrupting. Soon enough I was able to read between the lines; Caroline had no problem envisaging Bonnie and Clyde–style escapades, but she obviously didn’t hold out much hope for Terry’s luck. He was already behind bars and he hadn’t even been arrested yet. That didn’t sit well with her plans.
“What am I going to do?” she’d cry, pacing this way and that.
I was in a pickle. I wanted her for myself. I wanted my brother’s happiness. I wanted him safe. I wanted him free of crime and danger. But most of all I wanted her for myself.
“Why don’t you write to him and give him an ultimatum?” I said with trepidation, not really knowing whose cause I was aiding. It was the first concrete suggestion I’d made, and she pounced all over it.
“What do you mean? Tell him to choose between crime and me?”
Love is powerful, I’ll admit, but so is addiction. I was wagering that Terry’s absurd addiction to crime was stronger than his love for her. It was a bitter, cynical wager I made with myself, a bet I had no probable way of winning.
Because I spent so much time at Caroline’s house, Lionel Potts became our family’s only ally. In an attempt to get Terry released from the institution, he made phone calls to various legal firms on our behalf, and when that failed, he arranged through an associate for the most renowned psychiatrist in Sydney to go have a chat with Terry. That’s the psychiatrists’ version of doing a quote: they turn up in casual pants and chat like old friends. This psychiatrist, a middle-aged man with a floppy, worn-out face, even made his way to our house to pass on his findings. We all drank tea in the living room as he told us what he’d found under Terry’s hood.
“Terry has made it easy for me, far easier than most of my patients, not necessarily with his own self-awareness, which, to be honest, is nothing special, but with his candor and total willingness to answer without pause or detour any question I put to him. Actually, he may be the most straightforward patient I’ve ever had in my life. I would like to say at this point, you have done a tremendous job in raising a truly honest and open person.”
“So he’s not insane?” my father asked.
“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. He’s crazy as a coconut. But open!”
“We’re not violent people,” my father said. “This whole thing is a mystery to us.”
“No man’s life is a mystery. Believe me, there is order and structure in the most ostensibly chaotic skull. There seem to be two major events in Terry’s life that have shaped him more than any others. The first I would not have believed had I not unwavering faith in his honesty.” The doctor leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “Did he really spend the first four years of his life sharing a bedroom with a comatose boy?”
My parents looked at each other with a start.
“Was that wrong?” my mother asked.
“We didn’t have any room,” my father said, annoyed. “Where were we supposed to put Martin? In the shed?”
“Terry described the scene so vividly it actually gave me shivers. I know shivers aren’t a professional reaction, but there you have it. He talked about eyes rolled back that would spontaneously roll forward and stare. Sudden jerks and spasms, incessant drooling…” The psychiatrist turned to me and asked, “You would be the boy who was in the coma?”
“That’s me.”
He pointed a finger at me and said, “My professional opinion is that this faintly breathing corpse gave young Terry Dean what I can only diagnose as the permanent willies. This more than anything made him retreat into his own private fantasy life, in which he is the protagonist. You see, there are traumas that affect people, traumas that are sudden, but there are also prolonged, lingering traumas, and often they are the most insidious, because their effects grow alongside everything else and are as much a part of the sufferer as his own teeth.”
“And the second thing?”
“His injury, his inability to play sport. Deep down, although he was very young, Terry was convinced that excelling at sport was the reason he was here on earth. And when he was robbed of that, he turned from a creator to a destroyer.”
Nobody spoke—we all just soaked it up.
“I think at first, when Terry found he could no longer play football or cricket or swim, he embraced violence as a perversion of what he knew—to display skill. He wasn’t out to do anything other than show off, pure and simple. You see, his useless limping leg was an insult to his self-image, and he couldn’t accept the powerlessness without restoring his ability to act. So he acted, violently, the violence of the man who is denied positive expression,” the psychiatrist said with a pride that felt inappropriate for the occasion.
“What the hell are you talking about?” my father said.
“So how does he cease to be crippled?” I asked.
“Well, now you’re talking about transcendence.”
“Transcendence that could be, for instance, found in the expression of love?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
This conversation was really puzzling for
my parents, as they had never seen my brain before. They’d seen the shell, but not the goods inside. The answer to all this was obvious to me: a doctor couldn’t turn Terry around, nor a priest nor a rabbi nor any god nor my parents nor a fright nor a suggestion box nor even me. No, the only hope for Terry’s reform was Caroline. His hope was love.
Eternity
I hadn’t noticed it going up. You couldn’t see it from the town, owing to the high wall of thick leafy trees at the summit of Farmer’s Hill, but on Saturday night everyone wound up the track toward it for its opening. You should’ve seen us, all filing out of town as if in a fire drill no one believed in. No one was carrying on with the usual banter; there was something different in the air. We all felt it—anticipation. Some didn’t even know what an observatory was, and those who did were rightly excited. The most exotic thing in bush towns is the dim sum in those ubiquitous Chinese restaurants. This was something else.
Then we saw it, a large dome.
All trees had been removed from directly in front of it, because where telescopes are concerned, even a single leaf of an overhanging branch can obscure the galaxy. The observatory was painted white; the building walls were framed with two-by-fours and covered with roofing metal. The telescope itself I knew little of, other than it was thick, long, and white, had a simple spherically curved mirror, stood on an isolated pier for a stable platform to prevent the transmission of vibrations, was designed to include expansion capabilities, weighed in excess of 250 pounds, was 10 degrees from the southern horizon, could not be pointed down into the girls’ bathroom in the school gymnasium, was encased in a fiberglass dome, and had a glass roof that lifted on a hinge. To move the telescope, if you wanted to peek at another corner of the galaxy or follow the transit of celestial objects across the sky, the idea for rotation motors was dropped in favor of “putting your back into it.”
We all stepped up, one by one, to the big eye.
You had to climb up to it on a little stepladder. Each person pressed against the eyepiece, and when their time was up, they stepped down in a sort of trance, as though lobotomized by the vastness of the universe. It was one of the strangest nights I ever had in that town.
I had my turn at the telescope. It exceeded my expectations. I saw huge numbers of stars: faint and old and yellow. I saw brilliant hot stars, clusters of young blue stars. I saw streaks of globules and dust, sinuous dark lanes winding through luminous gas and scattered starlight, reminding me of all the visions I had seen in the coma. I thought: The stars are dots. Then I thought of every human being as a dot too, but realized sadly that most of us could barely light up a room. We’re too small to be dots.
Still, I returned to the telescope night after night, familiarizing myself with the southern sky, and after a while I understood that watching the universe expand is like watching grass grow, so I watched the townspeople instead. After they stepped up silently, poked around in the farthest reaches of our galaxy, let out a whistle, and stepped down, they came outside and smoked cigarettes and talked. Probably their ignorance of astronomy helped move the conversations onto other things; this is one of those areas where lack of trivial, useless knowledge—the names of the stars in this instance—is a huge benefit. The important thing is not what the stars are called but what they imply.
People began with some marvelous understatements of the universe, such as “Pretty big, isn’t it?” But I think they were purposefully laconic. They were filled with awe and wonder, and like a dreamer who has woken but lies unmoving in bed trying to return to the dream, they didn’t want inadvertently to shake themselves awake. But then, slowly, they began to talk, and it wasn’t about the stars or their place in the universe. I listened with astonishment as they said things like
“I should spend more time with my son.”
“When I was young, I used to look up at the stars too.”
“I don’t feel loved. I feel liked.”
“I wonder why I don’t go to church anymore.”
“My children turned out differently than I expected. Taller, maybe.”
“I’d like to take a holiday with Carol, like we did when we were first married.”
“I don’t want to be alone anymore. My clothes smell.”
“I want to accomplish something.”
“I’ve gotten so lazy. I haven’t learned anything since I was at school.”
“I’m going to plant a lemon tree, not for me but for my children’s children. Lemons are the future.”
It was thrilling to hear. The incessant universe had made them look at themselves, if not from the perspective of eternity, then at least with a bit more clarity. For a few minutes they were stirred to the depths, and I suddenly felt rewarded and compensated for all the damage my suggestion box had done.
It made me think too.
One night after I had come down from the observatory, I found myself frozen in the garden at midnight fretting on the future of my family, trying to come up with ideas of how to save them all. Unfortunately, the idea bank was empty. I had made too many withdrawals. Besides, how do you save a dying mother, an alcoholic father, and a criminally insane little brother? Anxiety threatened to damage my stomach lining and also my urethra.
I carried a bucket of water from the house and poured it in a shallow ditch at the end of the garden. I thought: I might not be able to make a better life for my loved ones, but I can still make mud. The dirt met the water and thickened appropriately. I plunged my feet in it. It was cold and gooey. The back of my neck tingled. I thanked my mother aloud for instructing me in the glories of mud. It’s so rare that people give you real, practical advice. Normally they say things like “Don’t worry,” and “Everything will be OK,” which is not only impractical, it’s exasperating, and you have to wait until they’re diagnosed with a terminal disease before you can say it back to them with any pleasure.
I sank deeper into the mud, using all my force, all the way to the tops of my ankles. I wanted to go farther into the cold sludge. A lot farther. I thought about getting more water. A lot more. Just then I heard footsteps running through the bush and I saw branches shuddering as if repulsed. A face popped out and said, “Marty?”
Harry stepped into the moonlight. He was wearing his prison denims and was badly cut and bleeding.
“I escaped! What are you doing? Cooling your feet in mud? Hang on.” Harry came over and sank his bare feet in the ditch next to mine. “That’s better. Well, there I was. Lying in my cell, contemplating how the best years of my life were behind me and how they weren’t that good. Then I contemplated how all I had to look forward to was decaying and dying in jail. You’ve seen the prison—it’s no sort of place at all. I thought: If I don’t at least try to make a break for it, I’ll never forgive myself. Fine. But how? In movies, prisoners always escape by smuggling themselves inside a laundry truck. Could it work? No. You know why? Because maybe in the old days prisons sent out their laundry, but we did ours in-house! So that was out. Second option, digging a tunnel. Now, I’ve dug enough graves in my time to know it’s tedious, backbreaking work, and besides, all my experience is in the first six feet, enough to hide a body. Who really knows what lies deeper? Molten lava? An unbreakable shelf of iron ore?”
Harry looked down at his feet. “I think the mud’s setting. Help me out of here,” he said, holding out his arm as if it were for sale. I helped him out and he collapsed on a small mound of grass.
“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.”
