by Steve Toltz
What made me cry was the fear that I’d be unable to kill myself when my quality of life dropped below par, when my daily task became choosing between pain and painkillers, between the ravages of the disease and the destruction of the treatment. Even with my lifelong meditation on death, my existence had still seemed something permanent and stable on the planet Earth—something dependable, like igneous rock. Now that cancers were metastasizing to their heart’s content, atheism seemed like a pretty cruel thing to do to myself. I begged my brain to reconsider. I thought: Won’t I survive somewhere, in some form? Can I believe it? Please? Pretty please can I believe in the everlasting soul? In heaven or angels or paradise with sixteen beautiful virgins waiting for me? Pretty please can I believe that? Look, I don’t even need the sixteen beautiful virgins. There could be just one woman, old and ugly, and she doesn’t even have to be a virgin, she could be the town bike of the ever-after. In fact, there could be no women at all, and it doesn’t have to be paradise, it could be a wasteland—hell, it could even be hell, because while suffering the torments of a lake of fire, at least I’d be around to yell “Ouch!” Could I believe in that, please?
All the other afterlife scenarios are just not comforting. Reincarnation without continuance of this consciousness—I just don’t see the point in getting excited about it. And the least comforting eternity scenario of all time, one that is growing daily in popularity, one that people never stop telling me about, is that I will die but my energy will live on.
My energy, ladies and gentlemen.
Is my energy going to read books and see movies? Is my energy going to sink languidly into a hot bath or laugh until its sides ache? Let’s be clear: I die, my energy scatters and dissolves into Mother Earth. And I’m supposed to be thrilled by this idea? That’s as good to me as if you told me my brain and body die but my body odor lives on to stink up future generations. I mean, really. My energy.
But can’t I prolong my existence anywhere? My actual existence, not some positively charged shadow? No, I just can’t convince myself that the soul is anything other than the romantic name we have given to consciousness so we can believe it doesn’t tear or stain.
So, then, the rest of my life was going to be an accumulation of physical pain, mental anguish, and suffering. Normally I could handle it. But the problem was, until I died I’d be thinking only about my death. I decided that if I couldn’t spend one single day without thinking, I’d kill myself. Why not? Why should I struggle against my death? I couldn’t possibly win. And even if by some miracle I did beat this round with cancer, what about the next? And the next? I have no talent for futility. What’s the point of fighting a losing battle? To give a man dignity? I have no talent for dignity either. Never saw the point in it, and when I hear someone say, “At least I have my dignity,” I think, “You just lost it by saying that.”
The next day I woke and resolved not to think about anything the whole day. Then I thought: I’m thinking now, aren’t I? Then I thought: My death my death my death my death my gruesome painful sobbing death!
Fuck!
I had to do it. I would kill myself.
And I had an idea: maybe I should kill myself publicly. Why not fob off my suicide on one cause or another, pretending to die in protest over, I don’t know, the WTO’s wasteful agricultural policies, or third world debt, anything. Remember the photograph of that self-immolating monk? Now there’s an enduring image! Even if you’re killing yourself so your family will be sorry, pick a worthy cause, call the media, find a public spot, and kill yourself. Then even if your life has been a totally meaningless affair, your death doesn’t have to be.
The following morning by chance the radio told me that there was a protest on in the city around lunchtime. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a protest against the WTO’s wasteful agricultural policies or about erasing third world debt, it was about primary school teachers wanting a pay raise and more vacation. I tried to see the bright side. That was as worth dying for as anything, wasn’t it? I didn’t suppose any of the teachers themselves were passionate enough to self-immolate, but I imagined they’d welcome my contribution to their cause. I found an old canvas bag and threw in a can of petrol, a lighter in the shape of a woman’s torso, and some painkillers. I wasn’t trying to cheat death; I was hoping to cheat pain.
Sydney is one of the most beautiful modern cities in the world, but I always manage to find myself at the corner of Drab and Bleak Streets, and always in the section of the city where there’s nowhere to sit down, so I spent the morning walking and staring into people’s faces as I passed by them, thinking, “See you soon!” I was going to die now, but by the look of those triple chins, I knew they wouldn’t be far behind.
I arrived at the protest around twelve. It was a poor turnout. Forty or so people were holding up signs demanding respect. I didn’t think anybody who had to demand respect ever got it. There were a couple of television cameramen too. They looked young, probably cadets in their first year on the job. Since I didn’t require a seasoned journalist who’d ducked sniper bullets in Vietnam to film me, I took a place in the protest next to a couple of angry-looking women I wouldn’t want teaching my kid and psyched myself into the state I needed to be in to do myself in. All I had to do was think relentlessly negative thoughts about the inhabitants of the planet Earth. When I felt almost ready, I took out the painkillers but discovered I’d forgotten to bring a bottle of water. I walked to a nearby café and asked for a glass. “You have to eat something,” a waitress said, so I ordered a late breakfast: bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, baked beans, toast, and coffee. I ate too much; the food in my belly made me sleepy. I had just ordered a second espresso when I saw someone famous coming out of a restaurant on the other side of the street: an old television journalist. I vaguely remembered that this journalist had been disgraced owing to one scandal or another. What had happened? It was nagging me. Did he wet his pants on TV? Did he lie about the state of the world and say on national television that everything would work out well for everyone? No, that wasn’t it.
I paid the bill and walked toward him and was just about to ask him to clarify the details of his public humiliation when a girl came out of the restaurant, flung her arms around his neck, and kissed him passionately. I thought: Sure, I’ve been kissed, but no one has ever flung her arms around my neck. Women have placed them there gently or lowered them over my head as if they were putting on a jumper, but never flung them. Then the girl pulled away and I recognized her too. Christ, I thought. What do these celebrities do, join forces to double their fame?
Then it hit me. She’s not famous! She’s my son’s girlfriend!
Well, so what? Why should I care? This wasn’t very big on the tragedy scale. It was just a teen drama, the type you might see on a nightly soap opera. But by being an eyewitness, I had become a character in the cheap melodrama; I had to play out my part to the end, to the dénouement. How irritating! I just wanted to peacefully self-immolate. And now I had to “get involved.”
I dropped the matches and the petrol in disgust and went home, enormously relieved that an excuse for staying alive had dropped in my lap.
When I arrived home, Anouk was in her studio, stretched out on the daybed she’d made for herself, propped up on a mountain of pillows. I could always count on Anouk for good conversation. We each had our favorite topics, our default topics. Mine was the gnawing fear of dropping so low in my own estimation that I would no longer acknowledge myself in mirrors, but would pass on by, pretending I hadn’t seen me. For Anouk it was always a new horror story from the chronicles of modern relationship hell. She often had me in stitches recounting recent love affairs, and I felt a strange pity for those men, even though they were the ones who left her. She was always creating complications for herself—putting the wrong people together, sleeping with her girlfriends’ ex-boyfriends, sleeping with her ex-boyfriend’s friends, always just on the line of fair play, teetering on the line, sometimes falling.
�
��What do you think of this girl Jasper’s seeing?” I asked.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Is that the best we can say about her?”
“I’ve hardly had two words with her. Jasper keeps her hidden from us.”
“That’s natural. I embarrass him,” I said.
“What’s natural about that?”
“I embarrass myself.”
“Why are you interested?”
“I saw her today—with another man.”
Anouk sat up and looked at me with bright eyes. Sometimes I think the human animal doesn’t really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t.”
“I think I have to, don’t I? I can’t sit back and watch my son be made a fool of by someone other than me.”
“I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t talk to him. Talk to her. Tell her you saw her. Tell her she has to tell him or you will.”
“I don’t know.”
“Telling him yourself will be disastrous. If nothing else, he won’t believe it. He’ll think you’re jealous and competing with him.”
“Do you think fathers and sons compete for sex?”
“Yes, though not in the Oedipal way. Just in the ordinary way.”
Anouk brought her knees up and rested her chin on them and stared at me as if debating whether to tell me I had something stuck between my teeth.
“I’ve had enough of relationships,” she said. “I want to take some time out. I think I’ve become a serial monogamist. It’s embarrassing. What I’d really like is a lover.”
“Yes, I think that would suit you.”
“A friendly fuck with someone I know.”
“Good idea. Do you have anyone in mind?”
“Not sure. Maybe someone like you.”
She really said this. And I really didn’t get it. Slow, slow, slow. “Someone like me,” I mused. “Do you know anyone like me?”
“One person.”
“Like me? I wouldn’t want to meet him.” Jasper? It couldn’t be Jasper, could it? “Who do you know like me?”
“You!”
“I’ll admit there’s a similarity,” I said slowly, starting to get the hint. It was coming to me now, as if through a dense cloud. I sat forward in my chair. “You don’t mean…”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“No, really?”
That’s how it began between Anouk and me.
It became a regular thing. Lying in bed with this young, beautiful woman, I felt a pathetic, adolescent form of pride—this is me kissing this neck! These breasts! These are my worn-out hands groping their way along the length of this sublime body! This liaison really saved me. I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.
When you sleep with a friend, the trickiest part is getting started. You can’t just jump into fucking without kissing, and kissing is very intimate. If you kiss in the wrong way, it sends the wrong message. But we had to kiss, to get the engines warm, so to speak. We never kissed after sex, obviously. What would be the point? You don’t warm the engine after you’ve reached your destination, do you? But then we started doing it anyway. I was confused. I thought a friendly fuck was supposed to be passionate and revitalizing. I was all ready for that. Sex as fun—sinful but harmless, like chocolate ice cream for breakfast. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was tender and loving, and afterward we lay in each other’s arms, and sometimes we even caressed each other. I didn’t know what to make of it. Neither of us knew what to say, and it was to fill an awkward silence that I confided to Anouk my big secret, that I was finally actually dying.
She took it worse than I had imagined. In fact, she almost took it even worse than I did. “No!” she screamed, then launched feverishly into a catalogue of alternative therapies: acupuncture, strange-sounding herbs, some terrifying cure called soul-flossing, meditation and the curative potency of positive thinking. But you can’t positive-think your death away; you might as well try thinking “Tomorrow the sun will rise in the west. In the west. In the west.” It doesn’t do any good. Nature has laws which she’s maniacal about enforcing.
“Look, Anouk. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting death,” I said.
She asked me all the details. I gave them to her, as I knew them. She felt so sorry for me, I wept.
Then we made love in a frenzy of desire that was downright violent. We were fucking death.
“Have you told Jasper?” she asked afterward.
“About us?”
“No—about you.”
I shook my head feeling shamefully elated, because I was enjoying a fantasy in which he would be sorry for despising me. He would break down and weep, half torn open by remorse. This thought perked me up a bit. Someone else’s soul-destroying guilt can be a reason for living.
After this initial discussion, we didn’t talk about my upcoming death much, although I could tell it was on her mind by the way she would try to convince me to donate my cancerous organs to researchers. Then one frosty night, while warming our hands on the afterglow of ferocious sex, she asked, “What are you going to do for the rest of your life?”
It was a good question; now that the rest of my life wasn’t the few billion years I had assumed it would be, what was I going to do? For the first time in my life, I was at a real loss. A total loss. I couldn’t even read anymore. What was the point of deepening my understanding of the universe and the shitheads in it when I would no longer be around to snarl at my findings? I already felt my nonexistence with bitterness. There was so much I wanted to do. I thought of all the things I could’ve been. As I said them to Anouk, each sounded as ludicrous as the next: a mountaineer, a writer of historical romances, an inventor credited with a great discovery, like Alexander Graham Bell, who pioneered phone sex.
“Anything else?”
“There’s one thing.”
“What?”
“I always thought I would make a really good Rasputin character.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I dug through my notebooks and showed her an idea I’d had about influencing rich and powerful men with my ideas, whispering spectacular ideas into an enormous golden ear. She latched on to this with a lunatic’s energy. She seemed to think that if I achieved just one of my dreams, I would go to the grave feeling satisfied. Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? True satisfaction can’t exist as long as there’s one itch left to scratch. And I don’t care who you are, there’s always an itch.
Then one empty night Jasper burst into my room with the unlikely news that Oscar and Reynold Hobbs were here to see me. Apparently Anouk had brought home two of the most powerful men on earth. An intense hatred for Anouk surged up in me. What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don’t you realize he doesn’t want it? His real wish is not to die.
I went out and saw them. Reynold, imperious and resolute; he even blinked with authority. And his son, the heir apparent, Oscar—sharp and serious, with aesthetically jarring good looks, he was the perfect product of the modern dynasty (in modern dynasties every second generation breeds with supermodels to ensure that the bloodline has high cheekbones). I felt an intense hatred for those two men too, so secure in their destiny. I had finally come around to believing in my death, but I couldn’t fathom theirs. They seemed impervious to everything.
Reynold looked at me, sizing me up. I was two sizes too small.
And why were they in my house? To listen to my ideas. How had Anouk pulled that off? It was remarkable. It was the most anyone had ever done for me. I dug out some old notebooks and read a couple of asinine ideas I’d had over the years. It’s not important what they were, only that they fell flat. As I read, the two me
n looked to have faces made of a sturdy wood. There was really nothing human about them.
After hearing me out, Reynold violently lit a cigar and I thought: What is it with wealthy men and cigars? Are they thinking that lung cancer is for the plebs while tongue cancer puts them in a higher echelon? Then Reynold mentioned to me the real reason they were here. Not to listen to my ideas after all, but to get my input on a television miniseries they were hoping to make on, what else, the Terry Dean story.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say anything.
Reynold brushed one hand down his thigh and suddenly the son said, “Now we’ll be off!”
What teamwork! What superconsciousness!
Then they left.
I went out into the labyrinth, furious at my dead brother, begging the cosmos to allow me to travel back in time just for five minutes, long enough to spit in his eye. I mean, how tireless a ghost was he? He had turned my past into a vast open wound, unhealed and unhealable. Infected and infectious.
It was cold out. I waded through the night as through a river. My disappointment was not so surprising; of course a part of me wanted to succeed. You can’t be a failure all your life, can you? Actually, you can. That was the problem right there.
“Marty!”
Anouk. She was running toward me. The sight of her was a great relief. I was no longer angry at her for fanning the flame of my brother’s ghost. I had Anouk. I had ferocious passion on my résumé. Our lovemaking was so exciting you’d think we were committing adultery.
“I’m sorry. I thought they might really be interested.”
“They just wanted Terry. They always do.”
Anouk put her arms around me. I felt desire moving through the rooms of my body, a bright sun casting its light on the shadows of my cancer, and I grew fresh and young and Anouk could feel this was happening because she hugged me tighter and nestled her face in my neck and left it there for what seemed like a long time.
We heard footsteps somewhere in the bush. I pushed her away.
