by Steve Toltz
I took a cab to Harry’s, thinking I was going to have to tread very, very carefully. Harry loved me, and I loved him, but that didn’t mean he was above putting a bullet between my eyes. That’s what love is all about, after all. I rolled down the taxi window. Outside, the air was supernaturally still, as in a windowless room. Nothing stirred. It was as if the hatch on the world had been hermetically sealed and we were, all of us, shut in.
I did the secret knock and then the not-so-secret knock, the one anyone can do. I hollered his name. I hollered an apology. It was a waste of hollering—he wasn’t home. What should I do? A cab sailed past and I hailed it and went back into the city, where I wandered aimlessly through the streets, deep in my tumult. The level of activity made my head spin, and it irritated me that no one else looked lost. A little sad and lonely, maybe, but they knew where they were going. I bumped into people on purpose, in the irrational hope of eliciting some kind of sympathetic reaction. The faces of a city take on a supremely cruel and indifferent quality when you wander through it in the midst of a personal crisis. It’s depressing that nobody stops to hold your hand.
I went into a pub, the Park View, took a seat at the bar, and didn’t dwell on the lack of a park or a view. I ordered a beer. A song was on the radio, a nice cheery love song that clashed with my mood. I drained the beer quickly. The pub was empty except for two old drunk men who were bickering about someone named Gazza; one of the old men thought Gazza was pussy-whipped by his new bride, while the other thought Gazza had her on the ropes. Either way, the upshot was that Gazza wasn’t coming out to the pub as often as he used to, and it just wasn’t the same without him. I nodded in sadness, and stared at my empty glass as if it had wronged me for the last time.
Then the news came over the radio and my ears went into high alert. Fugitive Terry Dean had written a scandalous book instructing would-be criminals on how to break the law. The most recent development in the story: the publisher of The Handbook of Crime was under arrest.
So! Stanley was under arrest! Just as well, I decided. At least that would keep him safe from Harry for a while. I supposed they couldn’t hold him long. When the police are hunting for someone they can’t find, it just gives them relief to arrest someone connected to him.
While I contemplated Stanley behind bars, and the possibility that as the credited editor, I might be the one they came for next, the last story of the news came on: fugitive Harry West had climbed to the top of the Harbor Bridge armed to the teeth and was threatening to jump. The story added a little afterthought which put it all into perspective: if Harry West plummeted to his death, he would be the first person to commit suicide from the Sydney Harbor Bridge on live television. Yes, it made perfect sense. Terry had robbed him of the democratic cooperative, and Stanley had pulled The Handbook of Crime from under his feet. Harry was desperate to leave his legacy, any legacy. First person to be broadcasted suiciding off Sydney’s bridge and in color too. No wonder Harry had taken his arsenal up there. Anyone tried to jump first, Harry would shoot them before they got a toe near the edge.
I ran out of the pub, leapt into a moving cab, and hightailed it to the bridge. If he was armed I supposed there’d be a chance he’d shoot me, but I had to explain that this was a mistake that could be cleared up in a day or two. I had the nauseating feeling that something terrible was going to happen on that bridge. He was going to toss himself into the drink; that seemed unavoidable. But knowing Harry, he’d want to drag as many souls into the abyss with him as possible. He wanted to turn the harbor red, I just knew it.
The midday sun was in my eyes, and through the glare I saw the bridge in the distance. Police blocked entry on either side and were scratching their heads over what to do with commuters trapped in the middle. Panicky policemen were directing people all over the place, but there was too much chaos. One of the bewildered cops seemed to be pointing in the direction of the water.
As I left my cab in the traffic jam, the driver made it clear he didn’t like it that I was ending our relationship so unexpectedly. People in uniforms were pouring in from everywhere. More policemen, firemen, ambulances, and media trucks weaved through parked cars. The emergency services were in a muddle. None of them knew what they were supposed to do. The intended victim was also the alleged perpetrator. It was confusing. On the one hand, he had a gun, but on the other hand, he was only threatening to use it on himself. They wanted to shoot him down, but can you shoot a man threatening suicide? That’s just what he wants.
I ran through the narrow passageway between halted cars and quickly found myself at a line of policemen. I ran right through their long yellow ribbon of tape and explained to the cop screaming at me that I was a close friend of Harry West and might be able to talk him down. In their confusion, they let me through.
I could see him, way up top. He was just a little speck up there, like a little plastic groom on a wedding cake. It was a long way up, but I had to go to him.
A tremendous wind was blowing. It was difficult to hold on. As I climbed, my stomach became the dominant organ, and I could feel nothing but its grind. Below I could see the ocean, the green suburbs, a smattering of houses. The wind made the whole bridge creak and did her best to throw me off balance. I thought: What am I doing here? It’s not my business! I wondered why I didn’t just let him take his big dive. I felt this was my fault, he was my responsibility, as were the people he might kill. But why? How do I fit in? I’m no Christ figure. I don’t have a savior complex. The whole human race could get acute angina for all I care.
Ruminations such as these and the realization that the men in my life, Harry and Terry and Stanley, with their little projects were dragging me with them down into the void, should be kept for after the event, over a mug of hot chocolate, not during the event, at the edge of a terrifying precipice. I had stopped my ascent to contemplate the existential meaning of it all. As usual, I couldn’t help myself. On that shaky metal stepladder I thought: One man’s dream is another man’s anchor. One swims, the other sinks, and in the swimmer’s pool too—a double insult. Meanwhile, the wind was threatening to toss me into the harbor. I knew then and there that pondering the significance of an action in the middle of the action is just not right.
I climbed on. I could hear him now. Harry was yelling, the wind carrying his voice to me before I could even see his face. At least I think it was Harry. Either that or the wind had just called me a bastard.
My shoe slipped. I looked down at the water and trembled from top to bottom. It looked like a flat blue slab of concrete.
“Thanks for the backstab, mate!”
Harry was leaning against a steel rail, the one I was white-knuckled clutching for dear life. To drag his leg all the way up that bridge must have been a nightmare. Maybe it was out of exhaustion that he let himself sway, and nearly topple over, with the wind.
His face was all shriveled up. He’d frowned so much he’d actually broken his face. His worry lines had snapped.
“Harry, it was a mistake!” I shouted.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But we can fix it! Come down and everyone will know the book is yours!”
“It’s too late, Martin! I’ve seen it!”
“Seen what?”
“The hour of my death!”
“When?”
“What time is it now?”
“Harry, don’t jump!”
“I won’t! I’ll fall! You can’t tell a person not to fall! That’s gravity’s business, not mine!” He was laughing from fear, from hysteria. His eyes were on all those guns pointing up at him from below. His paranoia had finally reached enlightenment. The paranoid fantasies and reality were experiencing absolute fusion.
“I fall…I’m gone…there’s another war…an earthquake…and the return of the Madonna…only now she’s a singer…but still a virgin…and now sexual revolution…and marble-wash jeans…”
His ESP was reaching into the infinite, blinding him to the present. Hi
s small, twitchy eyes, which usually darted around in their sockets, had finally frozen solid; they were traveling, exploring and seeing everything. Everything.
“Computers…everyone has one…in their homes…and they’re fat…everyone’s so fat…”
He was out of control, prognosticating like crazy! He could see the whole of human future mapped out. He was flicking through the pages! It was too much for him. “She’s dead! She’s dead!” Who? He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. “A third world war! A fourth! A fifth! A tenth! It never ends! They’re dead!” Who’s dead? “The astronaut! The president! The princess! Another president! Your wife! Now you! Now your son! Everyone! Everyone!” It went on for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. So humanity was going to persist after all. His eyes were pushing through space and time. He wasn’t missing a thing.
Harry’s line of communication with the infinite was broken by the wail of sirens starting up again. We looked down and saw the police and the media trucks backing away. Everyone was leaving.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Harry screamed to the world below.
“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll go see.”
Halfway down I ran into a petrified reporter who’d been overcome with vertigo during his climb and couldn’t move up or down the rail.
“What’s going on?”
“Haven’t you heard? They’ve got Terry Dean trapped! He’s taken hostages! There’s going to be a showdown!”
The reporter’s voice was excited, but he had the kind of deadpan face you usually see behind the wheel of a hearse. I climbed back up to Harry.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Terry,” I said, dreading his reaction.
Harry lowered his head, watched wistfully as the last of the reporters sped away.
“Mate,” I said, “I have to go and see if I can help Terry.”
“Fine. Go.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Go!”
I climbed down, my eyes focused on the handrail and my feet, and before I reached the bottom I heard the blast of a gun, the sound of a body whistling through the air, and a splash below that was really more of a thud.
That was it.
That was Harry.
Goodbye, Harry.
The police had Terry cornered in a bowling alley. I knew the whole of Australia would be rushing there as if they were water and my brother was the drain, so I jumped in a taxi and promised the driver untold riches if he could get as close to the speed of light as a V6 will get you. When you’re hurrying off to save your brother’s life you don’t fret over pennies, so every time his foot touched the brakes, I threw money in his lap. When he reached for the street directory, I tore exactly one third of my remaining hair out. It’s a bad sign when the driver cranes his head back to look at a street sign he’s just passed.
No directions were necessary, though; a real cavalcade of vehicles and bodies was surging through the streets in one direction: police cars, ambulances, fire engines, army Jeeps, media trucks, ice cream vans, spectators, gardeners, rabbis, anyone in Sydney who owned a radio and wanted to take part in a historical event.
Everyone wants a ringside seat for history in the making. Who’d turn down the opportunity to watch the back of Kennedy’s head explode if given a ticket to Dallas in ’63, or the falling of the Berlin Wall? People who were there speak as if their clothes were stained with JFK’s cerebrum, as if the Berlin Wall fell from their own persistent nudging. No one wants to have missed anything, like sneezing during a small earthquake and wondering why everyone is screaming. The capture and possible killing of Terry Dean was Australia’s biggest earthquake in fifty years, which is why they got to that bowling alley any way they could.
I leapt from the taxi and slid ungracefully over the bonnets of cars, cracking my hip on the side mirror of a Ford. I could see it: the bowling alley. It looked like the whole New South Wales police force was there. Snipers were taking their positions on the roof and in the trees in the children’s park opposite. One sniper was climbing up the jungle gym, two were balancing on a seesaw.
I couldn’t get through the mob. I was stuck. I shouted, “I’m Martin Dean! Terry Dean’s brother!” They caught on. They cleared a path and let me through, then I got stuck again. A few people around me made getting me inside their life’s mission, lifting me up on top of the crowd—I rode on a hundred shoulders like a rock god. I was getting closer, but sometimes the crowd pushed me in different directions. At one point I was going across, not forward. I shouted, “Forward! Forward!” as if I were Captain Ahab and that bowling alley was my great white whale.
Then I heard the crowd shouting something new: “Let her through! Let her through!” I craned my neck around. I couldn’t see who they were referring to. “It’s his mother! Terry Dean’s mother!” they cried. Then I saw her: my mother, coming from the opposite direction, rising and falling on the roll of the human sea. She waved to me. I waved back. We were both being propelled toward our family’s destiny. I could hear her now. She was shouting: “It’s the double! The double! We’ve got him cornered!” She was off her head! And the crowd was rushing us so fast now we almost collided. They dropped us on the ground in front of the police, who were trying to keep the crowd and the media back at the same time. Both groups were screaming outrage. We had to squeeze into the circle of police and start answering questions. We showed them ID. I just wanted to get inside, but my mother wasn’t helping with her crazy ranting about the doppelgänger. She was Terry Dean’s mother, she said, but the man inside was not her son. They couldn’t work it out. I had to shout over her: “I can get him to come out peacefully! Just give me a chance!” But the cops had different ideas. It dawned on me that they didn’t want him to leave that bowling alley alive. I had to snap into action. I said, “So what, you want to make a martyr out of him? You want his name to go down in history as another outlaw massacred by the police? If you kill him, no one will remember his crimes! You’ll turn him into a hero! Like Ned Kelly! And you’ll be the bad guys. Let him go to trial, where all his brutality will come to light. Then the hero will be the man who captures him alive! Anyone can shoot a man, just as anyone can shoot a wild boar, then run around screaming, I got him! I got him! But capturing a wild boar with your bare hands—that takes guts!”
I had to say this whole speech with my hand over my mother’s mouth, and she was biting me viciously. She’d really gone crazy. “Shoot to kill!” she screamed when I took my hand away. “Aren’t you his mother?” they asked, confused. They couldn’t grasp the meaning of this evil-twin business.
Holding my brother’s fate in the balance, the policemen conferred among themselves, whispering malignantly, almost violently.
“OK, you can go in,” they said to me, and unfortunately, they let my mother in too.
The bowling alley was on the second floor. There was a policeman on every step of the concrete staircase, eyes glowering. I thought: These men are unspeakably dangerous, like understudies waiting to be called to be the star, their raging egos determined not to be undone by performance anxiety. On the way up, a detective filled us in. As far as he knew, Terry had gone into the alley while Kevin Hardy, the three-time world champion, was rolling a few. There were unsubstantiated rumors that during competition Hardy had paid someone behind the pins to take out those he missed with the end of a broomstick. Because the accusations were shaky, Terry hadn’t gone in there to kill him, only to snap his bowling fingers, including the pinkie, just in case he was one of those rare bowlers who used the pinkie for extra spin. Afterward, Terry was tempted by a pair of pretty girls working behind the counter. The groupie phenomenon, the undeniable perk of celebrity, had always been too much for Terry to resist. Unfortunately, once he’d made his choice between the two girls, the jilted one called the police almost immediately, so by the time Terry had broken Kevin’s hand, had sex with the groupie, and was ready to leave, he was already trapped.
Now Terry was kneeling down
in the middle of the last lane, gun in his hand, using four hostages as a human shield. Police were positioned at every point of the bowling alley; you could even see the black nozzle of a sniper’s rifle poking out between the pins. They had him covered, and I knew instantly that if they could take the shot, they would, but he was well hidden behind a row of faces contorted in terror.
“You!” my mother shouted. The police held her back. They didn’t trust Terry not to shoot his own mother, especially given her crazy story that he was not her real son but some insidious clone.
“Terry,” I shouted, “it’s me, Marty.” I didn’t get the chance to say anything else before my mother started up.
“Who are you?” she cried.
“Mum? Shit, Marty, get her out of here, will you?”
He was right, of course. When a man is staging his final bloody showdown, he doesn’t want his mother loitering around.
I tried persuading her to leave, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“Stop cowering behind those poor people, you impostor!” she screamed.
“Mum, get out of here!” Terry shouted.
“Don’t call me Mum! I don’t know who you are or how you got my son’s face, but you can’t fool me!”
“Terry, give yourself up!” I shouted.
“Why?”
“They’ll kill you!”
“And? Look, mate, the only thing that’s bugging me is that this whole scene is getting a bit boring. Hang on a sec.”
There was frantic whispering over at the human shield. Suddenly they started to move. They edged to the bowling ball racks, then back to the lane. Then it went! A ball flew down the center of the lane. Terry was bowling! The policemen’s eyes watched the ball fly toward the pins. There was a profound silence that verged on the religious. A strike! Terry had done it! He took out all ten pins! The crowd seemed to shout with one voice, reminding me how man is often stupid alone, but in packs he is absolutely cretinous. They might have been police at the dénouement of a long manhunt, but they were also sport-loving Australians—and nothing starts the heart beating faster than a victory, no matter how bloodthirsty the victor.
