by Steve Toltz
Let’s make no bones about it. Society was mutating. You could see it happening, everywhere you looked. Someone even opened up a cannibal-themed restaurant in Surry Hills. I’m telling you, the whole of Australia went crazy. The national obsession became reform. I even think they understood that it wasn’t the ideas themselves but the idea of the ideas, the idea that we might as well restlessly innovate and wherever possible obliterate our slavish connection with the past. Why? Because the past is always the worst thing happening to the present at any given time.
What delusion and denial came over me at this time of my life! The chemotherapy seemed to be working; the cancer cells were all shrinking nicely. My own death began to recede. I felt so good, I didn’t even mind the cruel cartoonists who exaggerated my mouth so it was almost the size of my whole head. They say power corrupts—and how! The me I have always loved, despite my phony self-deprecation, was being mirrored in the eyes around me. It was an egoist’s fantasy! My spirit was flying! I was so caught up in my own reformation I didn’t realize I was losing the very ingredients that had led me to success—relentless negativity about the human spirit, cynicism and pragmatism about the human mind and how it is constrained. Success had thrown me off balance, and as a result I started having faith in people, and worse—I began to have faith in the people. All right. I’ll say it. I should’ve listened to my son, who told me by a look and tone of voice, if not in actual words, “Dad, you’re fucking it up!”
And where was my dutiful son during all this? Let’s analyze him a little: if the first order of business in assuring self-perpetuation is to be greater than the father, the unexpected possibility that I, formerly the embodiment of failure, might suddenly achieve fame and fortune crystallized Jasper’s hostility. The higher I rose, the more impossible his mission to supersede me became. In short, my success put him in mortal danger.
I remember very early on, just after the millionaires’ party, he called me on the phone.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said when I picked up.
“Hello, son,” I said back, knowing how to hit him where it hurts.
“This is going to end badly. You must know that.”
“You coming to my wedding?”
“You’re joking. Who would marry you?”
“Caroline Potts.”
“Your brother’s old girlfriend?”
Son of a bitch! Would it kill him to be a little more generous? OK, over the years I had repeatedly molested him with mental violence, but I hadn’t done it out of some perverse compulsion, only out of love. He could at least be a little supportive of me in my one single moment of happiness, and not mention my fucking brother. Though it wasn’t just Jasper. Every single news article about me, every single one, referred to me as Terry Dean’s brother. They just wouldn’t let it go. The fucker had been dead for twenty years!
I wanted to make an angry appeal to the Australian people to forget about him, but memory simply isn’t that pliable. So I had to grin and bear it, even when I saw Caroline get a dreamy look on her face every time Terry Dean was mentioned.
When Jasper turned up at the wedding, he stared at Caroline as if trying to understand the psychology of a suicide bomber. I didn’t see him for a long time after that. He avoided me completely in the chaos and disorder of those days in the limelight. Never once did he congratulate me or even make mention of all my reforms, interviews, debates, speeches, and public coughing fits. He said zilch in regards to my obviously haggard and beaten appearance from all the chemotherapy, and as I began, ever so slightly, to fall out of favor with the people, Jasper ceased phoning me altogether. Maybe he saw that I was suffering from a bad case of hubris and was going to pay the penalty. Maybe he sensed the inevitable fall. Maybe he was ducking for cover. But why couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t I duck for cover?
When several editorials suggesting that my head was swelling popped up, I should’ve taken the first space shuttle out of there. And when they made accusations of “extraordinary vanity” just because I carried a mirror in my briefcase (when the eyes of the nation are on you, you can’t help but worry there’s spinach in your teeth), I should have known that one wrong step would make them lynch me with all their collective souls. I did not, as some people suggested, have a persecution mania. No, I had no such mania for those persecuting me. If anything, I was crazy not to see them. Hadn’t I said it all my dumb life: that the manner in which people fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them? That the denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and often they take their loved ones with them?
Never once did I think of Caroline or Jasper. If I have made one unpardonable error in my life, it’s to deny, all the time, that there are people who might genuinely love me.
Chapter Four
One day I turned up at Jasper’s work. I had not seen him in many months, not since my wedding, and not since I had subjected myself to medical science. I had not even told him I had cancer, and I thought by telling him in an inappropriate setting like his workplace I could avoid a scene. He was sitting in his office cubicle staring out the window on the opposite side of the room, looking as if he were waiting for humans to evolve to the next level. As I watched him, I had the strange idea I could read his thoughts. They came in a whisper into my head: Why is it that as soon as we shed fur and learned to stand upright, we gave up evolving, as if smooth skin and a good posture were everything?
“Jasper,” I said.
He spun around and looked at me disapprovingly. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve got the big C.”
“The what?”
“The big cliché.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got cancer,” I said. “It’s found a crawl space in my lungs. I’m fucked.” I tried to sound blasé, as if I had had cancer once a month for my entire life and now—what a hassle—I had it again.
Jasper opened his mouth, but no sound came out. We did not move. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The wind rustled papers on his desk. Jasper swallowed. I could hear saliva slide down his esophagus. We remained motionless. We were like humans before language, Paleolithic men in an office cubicle.
Finally he spoke. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Jasper understood what most people don’t: that the dying still have important decisions to make. I knew he was asking me if I was going to ride it out to the end or beat death to the punch. And then he gave me his view. I was touched.
“Dad, please don’t die slowly and painfully. Please commit suicide,” he said.
“I’m thinking about it,” I snapped, both relieved and irritated he’d said the unsayable.
That night Jasper and Caroline and I sat down to dinner as a family. There was so much we had to say, we couldn’t say any of it. Jasper eyed me the whole time. He was looking to catch a glimpse of Death red-handed. I am almost certain now that Jasper and I can read each other’s minds, and it is far worse than speaking.
I suggested that he and I go for a drive, even though I had never gone for a drive in my whole life. It was a black night, the stars buried in the clouds. We drove without purpose or destination, and all the while I blabbered an inane monologue about how traffic is nothing but a rioting mob, each member with his own mobile weapon in which he dreams of perpetual motion.
“Hey! Stop the car!” Jasper shouted.
Without thinking, I had driven us to our first apartment, a place where my mental engine had conked out countless times. We knocked on the door, and Jasper told a man in stained boxer shorts that we wanted to look around for the same reason that a person looks through a photo album. The bloke let us in. As we wandered through the rooms, I thought that we had ruined the place by living there, that it had our gloomy residue in every airless corner. I thought we had exuded the essence of our core problems into the air, and our lightly wafting disease of the spirit had probably infect
ed every poor bastard who had lived there since.
Back in the car we drove on, pinballing from one old haunt to another—squats, parks, supermarkets, bookstores, barbers, grocers, psychiatric hospitals, newsagents, chemists, banks, every place that had once housed our confusions. I can’t tell you the purpose of this compelling, nonmetaphorical journey down memory lane, but I can tell you that in each place I could see our past selves clear as day; it was as though we were retracing our steps and finding in every vanished footprint our actual feet. There’s nothing like a nostalgia trip to make you feel alien from both your past and your present. You also see what’s static in you, what you hadn’t the courage or strength to change, and all your old fears, the ones you still carry. The disappointment of your failure is palpable. It’s terrible to go around bumping into yourself like that.
“This is weird, isn’t it?” Jasper said.
“Weird isn’t the word.”
We looked at each other and laughed. The only upside of the drive was that it turned out our mutual antagonism wasn’t as inexhaustible as we thought. In the car we were talking, reminiscing, laughing. It was the only night that I felt in my son I had a friend.
Around three in the morning we were getting tired and losing enthusiasm. We decided to finish up with a beer at the Fleshpot, the strip club I had managed and nearly destroyed with my red sports car some years earlier.
A doorman standing outside said, “Come in! Beautiful dancers, boys! Come in!”
We went in, down the familiar black corridor with the red flashing bulbs, into the club. The room was full of smoke, mostly from cigars, but there was a little curling out of a machine onstage. The strippers were doing their usual sexless thing around poles and in businessmen’s faces. You’d never have thought some crazy idiot had once driven a red MG onto the dance floor. I looked around—the bouncer was different. Same bulk, same bozo expression, different face. The girls were different too. They seemed younger than the girls I used to hire. Me! Hiring strippers! With eyes popping out of my head! Me! Unleashed! On a conga line of scantily dressed females barely teetering over the age of consent! Although the truth was, in my two years of auditioning, hiring, firing, and managing girls I had not slept with any of the strippers, except three. In this business, that’s nothing.
We took a seat in front of the stage and ordered drinks and sipped them slowly.
“I don’t like it here,” Jasper said.
“Me neither,” I answered. “Why don’t you like it?”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t understand the logic of strip clubs. Brothels make sense. Brothels I understand. You want to fuck, you go there and you fuck, you orgasm, you leave. Sexual satisfaction. Easy. Understandable. But strip clubs—at best, if you don’t find them disgusting, you get sexually excited, then because you can’t actually fuck these women, you leave sexually frustrated. Where’s the thrill in that?”
“Maybe we’re not as different as you think,” I said, and he smiled. Honestly, with all the noise a father makes about demanding respect and obedience, I don’t think there can be a father in the world who doesn’t, at the bottom of his heart, want a simple thing: for his son to like him.
“Oh my God,” Jasper said. “Look at that bartender.”
“What bartender?”
“That one. Isn’t he one of the millionaires?”
I took a good look at the thin Asian man behind the bar. Was he or wasn’t he? I wasn’t sure. I don’t want to say anything racist like “They all look alike,” but you can’t deny the similarities.
“Look at him,” Jasper said. “He’s working his arse off. Why would a millionaire be doing that?”
“Maybe he spent all the money already.”
“On what?”
“How should I know?”
“I know. Maybe he’s one of those people who have worked so hard their whole lives they don’t know how to do anything else.”
We sat there for a while thinking of people who need hard work to give them self-esteem, and we felt lucky we weren’t one of them. Then Jasper said, “Wait. There’s another fucking one.”
“Another fucking what?”
“Another fucking millionaire! And this one’s taking out the garbage!”
This one I recognized, as he was in the first batch of winners. It was Deng Agee! I’d been to his house! I’d personally tormented him!
“What are the odds that…” My voice trailed off. It wasn’t worth saying. We knew what the odds were. Like a horse race with one horse in it.
“Bastard,” I said.
“Who?”
“Eddie. He’s fucked us.”
We drove straight to the Hobbs building and grabbed the files of the millionaires. We read them and reread them, but there was no way of knowing how many friends Eddie had made rich through my scheme. He’d screwed me. He’d really screwed me. There was no way that eventually someone wasn’t going to find out about this. That snake! That’s friendship for you! It was a truly annihilating betrayal. I wanted to pull down the night with my bare hands.
As we hurried over to Eddie’s house, I assumed that Eddie, my so-called friend, had dropped me unceremoniously into the shit on a whim. What I didn’t know then, of course, was that it was so much worse than that.
We were halfway up the path to his house, hidden behind a jungle of fern, when we saw him waving from the window. We were expected. Naturally.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” Eddie said, opening the door.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“We went to the club! We saw all the goddamn millionaires!”
Eddie was silent for a minute before saying, “You took your son to a strip club?”
“We’re fucked! And you fucked us!”
Eddie walked into the kitchen and we followed.
“It’s not the end of the world, Marty—no one knows.”
“I know. And Jasper knows. And it’s only a matter of time before someone else knows!”
“I think you’re overreacting. Tea?” Eddie put the kettle on.
“Why did you do it? That’s what I want to know.”
Eddie’s explanation was poor. He said, with no hint of shame, “I wanted to do something nice for my friends.”
“You wanted to do something nice for your friends?”
“That’s right. These guys have had a really rough time of it. You can’t imagine what a million dollars means to them and their families.”
“Jasper, do you think there’s something not right with his explanation?”
“Eddie,” Jasper said, “your explanation sucks.”
“See? Even Jasper thinks so, and you know we don’t agree on anything. Jasper, tell him why his explanation sucks.”
“Because if you made all your friends millionaires, why are they all still working at a strip club?”
Eddie seemed unprepared for this excellent question. He lit a cigarette and wore an industrious expression, as if he were trying to suck the smoke into his right lung only.
“You got me there.”
He’s guilty as hell, I thought, and there’s something sinister he’s not telling me. He was oozing the worst kind of bullshit—obvious, but not transparent enough to see the reason behind it.
“Answer the question, Eddie. Why the fuck are these millionaires all working in minimum-wage jobs in a sleazy rundown strip club?”
“Maybe they spent all the money already,” Eddie said.
“Bullshit!”
“Christ, Martin, I don’t know! Maybe they’re the kind of people who’ve worked all their lives and don’t know how to do anything else!”
“Eddie. Twenty million people are sending in twenty million dollars every week, and when they find out their money isn’t being distributed fairly but is going into the pockets of your friends, whom they will consider my friends, what do you think will happen?”
“Maybe they won’t find out.”
“People will find out! A
nd we’ll all go down!”
“That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“Eddie, where’s the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have it!”
“Honestly, I don’t.”
None of us said anything. Eddie finished making his tea and sipped it with a dreamy look on his face. I was getting madder and madder. He seemed to have forgotten we were there.
“How can we bury this?” Jasper asked.
“We can’t!” I said. “We just have to hope no one figures it out.”
As I said this, I realized my mother was wrong when she once told me no matter how far down a road you’ve gone, you can always turn back. I was on a one-way road with no exits and no room to turn around. It was an entirely justifiable feeling, as it happened, because two weeks later everyone figured it out.
Chapter Five
Enter the cannibalistic vigor of the press into my life once again. The story broke all at once, in every paper, on every radio and television station. I was masticated, and good. Leading the charge was none other than Brian Sinclair, the has-been current affairs reporter whom I’d seen with my son’s girlfriend.
Caroline and I were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant, at a table by the window. We were digging into an enormous slab of veal in lemon sauce when his slick silver head popped into my line of vision. We locked eyes through the window. As a public figure, I was accustomed to the odd camera pointing at me like a judge’s finger, but the slippery eagerness on Brian’s face had an effect on me similar to the sudden drop of cabin pressure in an airplane. He signaled furiously at his cameraman. I took Caroline’s hand and we bolted out the back door. By the time we got home, the phone was ringing off the hook. That night we saw our backs disappear on the six-thirty news.
As it turns out, the fourth estate has nothing better to do these days than to boast like weekend fishermen. And Brian was there, his arms outstretched, declaring that he had landed the exclusive story of the biggest scandal in Australia’s history. He had no trouble linking at least eighteen of the millionaires to the Fleshpot—each a bartender or an accountant or a bouncer or a dishwasher, all running around on camera with their hands over their faces, the physical gesture that’s as good as a confession. Yet the story that developed later that night was not what I had expected, mainly because when I confronted Eddie with his crime, he hadn’t told me the true nature of his plot. The report was not, as I had anticipated, about Eddie’s friends receiving the benefits that belonged in the pockets of ordinary Australians. I knew it was more complicated and dangerous than that when I finally answered the phone and the journalist on the other end asked the out-of-the-blue question “Just what is your relationship with Tim Lung?”
