by Steve Toltz
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Thailand. You’d like Thailand, you know. You should think of going there one day.”
“Why the hell would I like Thailand? I’ll tell you where I think I’d like: Vienna, Chicago, Bora Bora, and St. Petersburg in the 1890s. Thailand I’m not so sure about. What were you doing there?”
“Did I see your picture on the front page of the paper today?”
“You might have.”
“What’s going on?”
I told him what was going on. As Eddie listened, his eyes seemed to sink deeper into his skull.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not doing anything right now. Things have been a little bad for me lately, as you know. I don’t suppose you need any help in there, making people millionaires?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Why not?”
It was true Eddie had been down on his luck. He had bungled his life too; the strip clubs he’d been managing (one of which I had partially destroyed with my car in a moment of mental collapse) had been shut down by police because underage girls were stripping. The clubs were also known for drug deals, and one night there was a fatal shooting, the worst kind. Throughout these calamities Eddie had kept remarkably cool, and I suspected it wasn’t a façade, either. He had a way of remaining aloof from physical disturbances. It was as though they were happening in a reality he was watching through binoculars.
So when he asked me if he could be a part of the millionaire scheme, of course I said yes. When someone close to you who has never asked you for anything finally does, it’s quite touching. Besides, I still owed him all the money he’d loaned me, and this was a way to pay him back.
Considering he had managerial experience, I suggested he take care of the administrative aspect. In truth I was greatly relieved. I only wanted to see the idea realized; I personally wanted nothing to do with administering anything.
“I can’t believe we’re going to make people millionaires,” Eddie said, slapping his hands together. “It’s a bit like playing God, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. For a second I thought it was.”
If we were playing God in the movie of his life, would it be in character to hand out money? I suppose with an eternity on his hands, even God would run out of ideas eventually.
Oscar wasn’t keen on the idea of Eddie running the administrative side of the enterprise, but he was inhumanly busy running two television stations, an Internet service, and three newspapers. I couldn’t help but be impressed. If you knew how hard these bastards worked, you’d never say anything negative about privilege again, and you wouldn’t even want it for yourself. So he okayed Eddie and gave us a large office each in the Hobbs News Building. We were able to pick our own staff, and though we only hired females with great cleavage (a habit from our strip-club days) we weren’t just clowning around in there. Eddie got right to it. He really took charge. With Oscar’s influence, he obtained the electoral rolls for every state, made a database, and rigged up some system where the names would be jumbled around in the computer much like balls in a lottery bubble. Then, quite at random, the computer would somehow pick the first twenty names. Actually, even though I can’t be precise in my explanation of how it worked, it wasn’t that complicated. Nothing surprising about that. There’s plenty of uncomplicated things I don’t understand.
That was it, really. The newspapers publicized the details of the scheme, and by the end of the week the dollar coins came streaming in. Our poor staff was snowed under opening envelopes and counting millions of those round cold dollars. We were also all gearing up for the opening-night party, when the names of the first millionaires would be read out on national television. It was going to be one of those A-list parties where the guests either make a fool out of you or pretend you don’t exist. I wasn’t looking forward to it. And there was my public role as mastermind behind the unsophisticated scheme; standing next to Oscar Hobbs, I was to read out the list of names, then the new millionaires, rounded up earlier that day by Eddie’s crew, would come up onstage and shriek appropriately. That was the plan. Today was Thursday. The party was next Friday. Oscar had organized a deal with all the TV stations. It would be like the moon landing. For one night there was going to be peace between the warring networks. Oscar was incredible—all this he did in between managing everything else.
I was revitalized, but my energy was still easily exhaustible, and I collapsed in bed each night, with Anouk often waiting for me. We quickly wore each other out.
“Are you happy, Martin? Are you happy?” she’d ask.
What an odd question to ask me, of all people. I shook my head. “Happy? No. But my life has become a curious shape that interests me for the first time.”
That made her smile with relief.
On the Tuesday before the party, I was sitting motionless behind my desk as if I were some extraneous piece of office furniture when the phone rang. I picked it up.
“Hello?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t give interviews.”
“Dad—it’s me.”
“Oh, Jasper. Hi.”
“What are you planning?”
“Planning?”
“There’s no way you’re just making people millionaires for no reason.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I know you better than you know yourself.”
“You think so, do you?”
“It’s your opening gambit, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like talking on the phone. Am I going to see you soon?”
“Yeah—soon,” he said.
He hung up and I stared wistfully at the telephone until someone saw me, then I pretended to clean it. The truth is, I missed Jasper: he was the only one who understood that making people millionaires was an entirely calculated bit of shenanigans, simply a means to an end—the end being to get people on my side, then follow that with something that would surprise even Death. Yes, all along this was a conscious strategy for winning their approval, which would be pitted against their unconscious strategy for destroying me. What Jasper guessed was that I had a simple plan:
1. Make everyone in Australia a millionaire, thus winning everyone’s support, trust, and perhaps adoration, also having
2. The media barons on my side, while simultaneously
3. Becoming a politician and winning a seat in Parliament at the upcoming federal election and then
4. Commence wholesale reformation of Australian society based on my ideas and thus
5. Impress Jasper, who would apologize, weeping, while I
6. Had sex as often as possible with Anouk and
7. Died painlessly, content that a week after my death construction would begin on
8. Statues erected in public squares to the peculiar specifications of my head and body.
That was it: a plan to put an exclamation mark at the end of my life. Before I died, I would expel all my ideas from my head—every idea, no matter how silly—so that my process of dying would be a process of emptying. When I was feeling optimistic about the success of my plan, the image of my death intertwined with an image of Lenin in his tomb. In pessimistic moments, the image of my death mingled with an image of Mussolini hung from an Esso gas station in Milan.
While waiting for the big night, I hung around the office, slightly annoyed that I had nothing to do. I’d delegated everything. All I could do was work on my look of conscientious deliberation, ask at various junctures “How’s it going?” and pretend to care about the answers.
Eddie, on the other hand, was working himself into the ground preparing for the party. I watched him scribbling industriously and I was wondering if he ever felt like I did, like a few misplaced molecules cobbled together to form an implausible person, when I suddenly had a great idea.
“Eddie,” I said. “That list of will-be millionaires—are there any in Sydney?”
“Three,” he said. “Why?”
“Give me their files, will you?”
The first millionaire was in Camperdown. His name was Deng Agee. He was from Indonesia. He was twenty-eight years old and had a wife and a three-month-old baby. The house looked completely deserted. There was no answer when I knocked, but ten minutes later I saw him coming home with heavy shopping bags. Ten meters from the house, the plastic bag in his left hand broke and his groceries went crashing onto the pavement. He looked down at his dented tins of tuna like one heartbroken, as if the tins of tuna just wanted to be friends.
I smiled warmly so he wouldn’t recognize me from the newspapers.
“How’s life, Deng?” I sang.
“Do I know you?” he said, looking up.
“You doing OK, then? Got everything you need?”
“Fuck off.”
He had no idea that in a week’s time he’d be a millionaire. It was hilarious.
“Are you happy in this place, Deng? It’s kind of a dump, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“What do you want? I’ll call the police.”
I walked over, stooped down, and pretended to pick up $10 from the ground. “Did you drop this?”
“That’s not mine,” he said, and went inside and slammed the door in my face. He’s going to make a terrific millionaire, I thought, as if it were necessary for me that my millionaires (as I thought of them) be incorruptible.
The second Sydney millionaire was a biology teacher. She had maybe the ugliest face I’d ever seen. I almost cried at the sight of it. I could feel the wind of a thousand doors closing in that ugly face. She didn’t see me come into her classroom. I took a desk in the back row and grinned madly.
“Who are you?”
“How long have you been teaching here, Mrs. Gravy?”
“Sixteen years.”
“And in that time have you ever forced a child to swallow chalk?”
“No, never!”
“Really. That’s not what they’re saying down at the Board of Education.”
“It’s a lie!”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“You’re not from the Board of Education.”
Mrs. Gravy walked up and peered at me as if I were an illusion. I looked for a wedding ring on her finger and saw nothing but naked wedges of flesh. I stood and walked to the door. The thought of money’s being the only thing in heaven and earth to bring Mrs. Gravy joy was so depressing to me, I almost didn’t visit the third Sydney millionaire, but seeing as I had nothing else to do, I leaned my back against the school lockers, a long row of vertical coffins, and opened up the file.
Miss Caroline Potts, the file said.
I don’t remember many instances of gasping like they do in the movies, but then fiction has a habit of making the real world seem made up. People gasp. It’s no lie. And I gasped on seeing that name, with all its connotations and implications. Connotations: My brother’s death. Frustrated desire. Satisfied desire. Loss. Regret. Bad luck. Missed opportunities. Implications: She had divorced or been widowed from her Russian husband. She was not lost in Europe. She had been living in Sydney, maybe for years.
Christ!
These thoughts did not come in any order but arrived simultaneously—I couldn’t hear where one ended and another began. They all spoke over each other, like a large family at a dinner table. Of course, reason told me that there could be up to twenty or thirty Caroline Pottses living minutes from each other at any given time, as it’s not as unusual a name as Prudence Bloodhungry or Heavenly Shovelbottom. Had Eddie thought it was one of the other Caroline Pottses? I refused to believe it was anyone other than she, because in moments of personal crisis you find out what you believe, and it turned out that I believed in something after all, and it’s that I am a ball of string and life is a cat’s paw toying with me. How could it be otherwise? Go! a voice screamed. Go!
In the taxi on the way, I read the file over a dozen times. Eddie wasn’t very thorough. All it said was: Caroline Potts 44 Librarian. Mother of Terrence Beletsky, age 16. Mother! And her son’s name: Terrence. Terry. Crap! That took the wind out of my sails. She had named her son after Terry. As if the bastard didn’t have enough accolades!
Just incredible!
Caroline lived in one of those buildings that hadn’t an intercom system, so you could wander unrestricted right up the shit-colored stairwell, right up to the apartment door. I reached 4A without having thought too much about which would be the greater shock, seeing me or learning that in less than a week’s time she was going to be a million dollars richer. I knocked impatiently, and immediately we launched into our old habit of screaming excitedly at each other.
“Who is it?”
“Me!”
“Me who?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”
“Marty!” she screamed, and that threw me off balance, the fact that after all these years she so swiftly recognized my voice.
She opened the door and I gasped again. Nature had barely laid a finger on her. Then I saw that that wasn’t entirely accurate—Nature had given her a bigger bottom and longer boobs, and her face was slightly wider, and her hair wasn’t what you would call in good order, but she was still beautiful, she had the same light behind her eyes. Looking at her, I felt as if all the years since Paris had not really happened, that the past eighteen years were like an absurdly long afternoon.
“Oh my God, look at you!” she said.
“I’m old!”
“Not at all. You have the same face!”
“No I don’t!”
“Wait. You’re right! Your ear’s new!”
“I had some skin grafts done!”
“Wonderful!”
“And I’m losing my hair!”
“Well, I have a fat arse!”
“You still look beautiful!”
“You’re not just saying that?”
“No!”
“I saw your name on the news!”
“Why didn’t you come see me?”
“I wanted to! But after all these years, I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me! Besides, I saw a photo of you with a woman’s arms around you and she’s young and beautiful!”
“That’s Anouk!”
“Not your wife?”
“Not even my girlfriend. She’s our housekeeper! What about your husband?”
“We divorced! I just assumed you were still in Europe!”
“I thought the same!”
“And hey—we were supposed to meet in Paris a year after that night in the hotel! Remember?”
“I was here! In Australia! Don’t tell me you went!”
“I did, actually!”
“Oh my God!”
“I couldn’t believe when I saw Terry’s name! People are talking about him again! Then I saw it was you! What’s this nonsense you’re involved in?”
“It’s not nonsense!”
“You’re going to make every person in Australia a millionaire!”
“You’re right! It is nonsense!”
“What made you think of doing such a silly thing?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “Wait! You’re one of them!”
“Martin!”
“I’m serious! That’s why I came!”
“You rigged it!”
“I didn’t! I didn’t pick the names!”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“What am I going to do with a million dollars?”
“Wait! It says in my file here you have a son! Where is he?”
“He’s dead.” Those two words that escaped her mouth sounded as if they had come from a different place. She bit her lip and her eyes filled up. I could see her thoughts like subtitles on her face. Can I talk about this now? I tried to make things easier for her by guessing, so she wouldn’t have to tell me the whole sad story. Let’s see—teenagers die in only three ways: suicide, drunk driving, peanut allergy. Which was it?
“Drunk driving,” I said, and watched as her face whitened and she gave an almost imperceptible nod. We stood silent for a long moment, not quite ready to put the memory back in its jar. Grief is a strange entity in a reunion.
I felt sick that I had never known her son. I still loved her, and I imagined I would have loved her child too.
She stepped forward and wiped tears from my eyes with her sleeve. I didn’t know I’d been crying.
She made a sad sound, like from a tiny flute. The next minute we were hugging, with our hips, and I found sanctuary in her embrace and a cozier sanctuary in her bed. Lying in each other’s arms afterward, we set about confiding our secrets and in this way found a method of falsifying history—by ignoring it. We focused only on the present; I confided my plan to run for parliament and bring about a total transformation of society in the shortest possible time before I was overcome by cancer, and Caroline spoke of her dead son.
Is the mother of a dead child still a mother? There are words for widow and orphan, but not for the parent of a dead kid.
Hours passed. We made love a second time. It was agreed that we were no longer young and fresh, we both had telltale signs of wear and tear, but we were confident that we had been ruined by our personal tragedies in an adorable way—that our sagging faces and bodies wore our heartaches well. We decided we would never be apart again, and since no one knew of our connection, no one would make a fuss and think the drawing was rigged, and we would keep our relationship a secret until after the millionaires’ dinner, when we would get married in a small, private ceremony in the middle of my labyrinth. In short, it was a productive afternoon.
If you were in Australia and you weren’t watching TV the night the names of the millionaires were announced, it was because your eyes had been ripped out by vandals or you were dead. Caroline, Mrs. Gravy, Deng, and the rest of the millionaires became instant celebrities.
The party was held in a cavernous ballroom with chandeliers and seventies floral wallpaper and a stage where I would make my historic speech. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the Harbor Bridge and a big yellow moon hanging over it. It was one of those parties I’d never dreamed of going to, where the partygoers were talking themselves up big, and when they ran out of ways to aggrandize themselves directly, they did it indirectly, by making everyone else small. Reynold Hobbs was there with his young confused bride. People cruelly called her a trophy wife, as if he’d won her in a contest. That just wasn’t fair or true. He hadn’t won her at all; he’d earned her through hard work and enterprise.
