A Fraction of the Whole

Author’s note: My original version of this chapter went hurtling into the shredder as soon as I discovered among my father’s papers the first five chapters of his unfinished autobiography. I’d just finished pouring out my entire story and I was frankly annoyed- mostly because his account covered this period better than my version of the events. Not only was his version more concise, because it did not contain my long digression on the recent glut of calendars featuring sexy priests, but I was irritated that Dad’s version of events contradicted much of my own, and even some of the previous chapter (four), which I’d really labored over. Nevertheless, under the influence of my two guiding stars, impatience and laziness, I’ve not amended any part of Chapter Four, and decided to print Dad’s unfinished autobiography here, slightly edited, as Chapter Five. My version of Chapter Five is still around somewhere- I didn’t really throw it in the shredder. Hopefully, in years to come it will be of curiosity value- to the highest bidder.

My Life by Martin Dean

A Loner’s Story by Martin Dean

A Loser’s Story by Martin Dean

Born to Be Snide by Martin Dean

Untitled Autobiography of Martin Dean by Martin Dean

Chapter One

Why write this autobiography? Because it’s the privilege of my class. Now before you start screaming, I’m not talking about working, middle-, or upper-middle class. I’m talking about the real class struggle: the celebrity vs. the ordinary schmo. Like it or not, I am a celebrity, and that means that you are interested in how many sheets of toilet paper I use to wipe my arse, whereas I have no interest in whether you wipe your arse at all or just leave it as is. You know how the relationship works. Let’s not pretend it’s any different.

All celebrities who write their biographies play the same trick on readers: they tell you some terrible degrading truth about themselves, putting you in a position where you think they must be honest chaps, then they turn on the lies. I won’t do that. I’ll tell you only the truth, even if I come off smelling like lawn fertilizer. And, just so you know, I understand that an autobiography should cover the early years of my life (e.g., Martin Dean was born on such-and-such a date, went to such-and-such a school, accidentally got such-and-such a woman pregnant, and so on), but I won’t be doing that either. My life up until one year ago is none of your business. Instead, I’ll start from where my life was at the moment when the great change occurred.

I was forty-one at the time, unemployed and living off child support even though I was the parent. Admittedly, this is not the spirit that has made our country great, but it is the spirit that has made it so you can go to the beach on a weekday and see it full of people. Once a week I would make myself busy at the dole office showing them a list of jobs I hadn’t gone for, and this was taking increasing amounts of energy and imagination. I tell you, the jobs out there are getting harder and harder not to get. Some bosses will hire anyone!

On top of this, I was going through the humiliating process of aging. Everywhere I went I met my memories, and I had that old sinking feeling of betrayal, of having betrayed my destiny. I wasted many months thinking about my death, until it began to feel like the death of a great-uncle I didn’t know I had. It was at this time I became addicted to talk-back radio, listening to mostly elderly people who stepped out of their houses one day and just didn’t recognize anything, and the more I listened to their interminable griping, the more I realized they were, in their way, doing the same thing I was: protesting the present as if it were a future one still has the option of voting against.

There were no two ways about it: I was in a crisis. But recent shifts in behavioral patterns of different age groups had made it difficult for me to determine what type of crisis I was in. How could it be a midlife crisis when the forties were the new twenties, the fifties were the new thirties, and the sixties were the new forties? Where the fuck was I? I had to read the lifestyle supplement in the Sunday papers to make sure I wasn’t actually going through puberty.

If only that was the worst of it!

I suddenly was mortified by how ridiculous I was to live in a labyrinth of my own design. I was scared I would one day be remembered for it, and equally terrified I would not be remembered at all, unlike my fucking brother, who was still being talked about, still the focus of my countrymen’s affections, still popping up in semischolarly books about the characters that typify Australia, in paintings, novels, comic books, documentaries, telemovies, and the occasional student thesis. In fact, my brother had become an industry. I went to the library and found no fewer than seventeen books that chronicled (incorrectly) the Terry Dean story, as well as countless references to him in books on Australian sport, Australian crime, and those that tackled the tedious, narcissistic topic of pinning down our cultural identity. And the pinnacle of my creative life was to build a stupid labyrinth!

I wondered why nobody had stopped me. I wondered why my friend Eddie loaned me the money so willingly, knowing full well that a man who lives in a labyrinth of his own design must necessarily go mad. On top of which, I had not paid him back, and since then he had continued to support me. In fact, when I thought about it, he had mercilessly loaned me money ever since I’d met him in Paris, and worse than that, he had brutally, without conscience, never asked for it back. Never! I became convinced that he had an ulterior motive. I worked myself up into a paranoid frenzy about it, and I realized that I hated my closest friend. When I thought about his gestures and expressions in my company, it occurred to me that he hated me too, and I thought friends must hate each other the world over and I shouldn’t be bothered by it, but I was bothered by this sudden conviction that Eddie actually loathed me. I was bothered by the question of why the hell I’d never noticed it before.

To top this off, I found to my shame that I had all but lost interest in my son as a person. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe the novelty of seeing what my eyes and nose looked like on someone else’s face had finally worn off. Or maybe because I felt there was something sleazy, gutless, restless, and horny about my son, something that I recognized in myself. Or maybe because despite a lifetime of my trying to wield my personality as an influence on him, he’d managed to turn out utterly different from me. He somehow became dreamy and positive and took sunsets dead seriously, as though the outcome of the event might not always be that the sun sets but that it might freeze just above the horizon and start going up again. He seemed to be amused by walking in the outdoors, listening to the earth, and fondling plants. Imagine! A son of mine! Isn’t that a reason to turn away? Maybe, but to be honest, the reason I lost interest in him is that he’d lost interest in me.

I was increasingly unable to talk to him, or even at him, and more and more regularly the intervals of silence between us lengthened, and then I couldn’t utter a single word without disgusting him, or make even a single sound, not even “Oh” or “Hmm.” In every look and gesture, I could feel he was accusing me of every possible parenting crime there is short of infanticide. He absolutely refused to talk to me about his love life, sex life, work life, social life, or inner life. In fact, there were now so many subjects he forbade me to discuss, I was waiting for him to outlaw “Good morning.” I thought: It’s not my conversation he finds distasteful, it’s my very existence. If I greeted him smiling, he’d frown. If I frowned, he’d smile. He was fervently working to become my mirror opposite. What ingratitude! After all I’d tried to teach him: that there are four kinds of people in this world, those who are obsessed by love, those who have it, those who laugh at retarded people when they are children, and those who laugh at them right into adulthood and old age. A veritable wisdom bonanza, right? But this ungrateful son of mine had chosen to reject everything, totally. Of course, I knew he couldn’t help but be confused by the contradictory directives I’d boomed at him his whole life: Don’t follow the herd, I’d preached, but don’t be as miserably apart as I’ve been. Where could he go? Neither of us knew. But look- even if you’re a total shit of a parent, you are still burdened by your children, still vulnerable to the pain of their suffering. Believe me, even if you suffer from your chair in front of the television, you still suffer.

This was where I was placed psychologically when the great change occurred.

I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. I didn’t feel nauseous and I wasn’t in any pain. I didn’t have any buildup of phlegm or odd-colored feces. It was completely different from both my childhood illness and the time my mother slipped rat poison into my food. I just felt a little off-kilter, a similar feeling to the one I had when I realized four months late that I’d forgotten my own birthday. But was there really nothing physically wrong with me? Well, there was one thing, though it was more odd than anything else. I detected a faint, strange odor rising out of my skin. Very faint. Hardly an odor at all, really. Sometimes I couldn’t smell it. But other times I caught a whiff and yelled out, “There it is again!”

One morning I worked out what it was.

Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they’re warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing? This is just what my imagination did that morning. It saw all the possible tomorrows, then narrowed them down in a short instant to only one. That one I spoke aloud: “Fuck me! I’ve got a terminal disease!”

I guessed further- cancer. It had to be cancer; it couldn’t be anything other than cancer, because it was always cancer that haunted my waking nightmares, ever since I saw my mother devoured by that king of diseases. Even if you fear death on a daily basis, there are certain deaths that you dismiss- scurvy, giant squid, falling piano- but no one with a brain cell left rattling in his head can ever dismiss cancer.

So! This was it! Death! I always knew that one day my body would kick the shit out of me! My whole life I’d felt like a lone soldier trapped in hostile territory. Everywhere were enemies to my cause- back, legs, kidneys, lungs, heart- and they would eventually conclude that the only way to kill me was a kamikaze mission. All of us were going down.

I rushed out of the house and drove fast out of the labyrinth. Speeding through the green suburbs, I was horrified to see that everything was bathed in gorgeous summer sunlight. Of course it was- nothing brings out sunshine faster than cancer. I took myself straight to the doctor’s. I hadn’t been for years and I went to the one closest to my house. I needed any doctor, just as long as he wasn’t too fat (one must be as suspicious of obese doctors as of bald hairdressers). I didn’t need him to be a genius either; I just needed him to confirm what I already knew. DR. P. SWEENY the brass plaque said on the door. I sprinted into his office. It was dark inside, the dark of a room in which everything is brown: the furniture, the carpet, the doctor’s mood. Brown. He was there drumming his fingers on his desk, a middle-aged man with a placid expression and a full head of thick brown hair. He was one of those men who never go bald, who go to the grave needing a haircut.

“I’m Dr. Peter Sweeny,” he said.

“I know you’re a doctor. You don’t have to wave it in my face. Don’t you know the title is only useful for directing mail, to distinguish you from all the unpretentious Mr. Peter Sweenys of the world?”

The doctor reclined his head a couple of millimeters, as if I had been spitting.

“Sorry,” I said, “I guess I’m a little stressed out. So what if you call yourself doctor? You worked hard for the right to plunge your hand inside the human body! Elbow deep in viscera all day, maybe you want to let everyone know you’re a doctor so they won’t offer you offal or a plate of haggis. What right have I to cast judgment on a man’s prefix?”

“You seem pretty wound up, there. What can I do for you?”

“I’m pretty sure I have cancer,” I said. “And I just want you to do whatever you have to do to confirm or deny it.”

“What kind of cancer do you think you have?”

“What kind? I don’t know. What’s the worst sort?”

“Well, prostate cancer’s the most common for men in your age bracket.”

“You’re the same age as me!”

“OK-our age bracket.”

“Well, my cancer won’t be the most common, that much I can tell you. What’s the worst one? And I mean the absolute worst.”

“Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes.”

“If I smoked, the cancer I wouldn’t want for myself, for fear of kicking myself all the way to the grave, is lung cancer.”

“Lung cancer. I knew it! That’s the one. That’s what I’ve got.”

“You seem pretty certain.”

“I am certain.”

Even though he was obscured behind his desk, he made a shift as though he’d put his hand on his hip. “All right,” he said finally, “I’ll order the tests. They aren’t pleasant.”

“Neither is lung cancer.”

“You’re right about that.”

I won’t detail the weeks that followed- the intrusive tests, the cruel waiting periods, the stomach-pummeling anxiety. Of course Jasper didn’t notice anything, but Anouk sensed something was wrong. She kept hounding me to tell her what it was, but I was tight-lipped about it. I wanted to be 100 percent sure before I told anyone. I didn’t want to get their hopes up.

It was a month later when I went back to Dr. Sweeny’s office to hear the results. In the waiting period I had been plagued with hope, and nothing I could do could put those pesky optimistic feelings to rest.

“Come in, Mr. Dean. How are you feeling?”

“Let’s not waste time. It’s cancer, isn’t it?”

“It sure is.”

In the old days the medical profession didn’t tell you that you were dying. It was considered a breach of ethics. Now the reverse is true. Now they can’t wait to tell you.

“Lung cancer?”

“I’m afraid so. How did you know?”

Christ! It was true! I was being murdered by my own body! I burst out laughing.

Then I stopped laughing- I remembered why I had started.

I left the doctor’s office in a daze. So! It turned out my lifelong pessimistic stance was entirely justified. Imagine if I had been optimistic all this time! Wouldn’t I be feeling ripped off right about now? Yes, I was in for a slow, violent death. And I don’t sleep peacefully, so dying peacefully in my sleep was out of the question. The best I could hope for was that maybe I’d die fitfully in my sleep. Oh my God- suddenly all the other possible deaths had slipped into the unlikely. How often does a man dying of cancer suddenly choke to death on a chicken bone? Or get decapitated by jumping up and down on his bed, forgetful of the ceiling fan? Or die from asbestos poisoning or obesity? No, there just wasn’t enough time to get really, fatally fat. If anything, my illness was probably going to make me thinner.

Over the following weeks I was an emotional wreck. The slightest thing sent me into tears. I cried at television ads, at the autumn leaves turning brown. One night Jasper came in and caught me sobbing over the death of some idiotic pop star I’d never even heard of. He’d been shot in the head and died instantly, lucky bastard!

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 men 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.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s Jasper.”

“So?”

“So don’t you think we should keep this between us?”

Anouk studied my face for a long time. “Why?”

Somehow I knew he’d take it badly. I was terrified that his hysterics might prejudice Anouk against me, might turn her off the whole idea. She might conclude that sleeping with me wasn’t worth the trouble. That’s why a couple of days later I went about the bizarre, unenviable chore of interfering in my son’s love life. A part of me knew that no matter what I did, no matter how honorable or dishonorable my intentions were, it would inevitably backfire. Well, so what? It’s not like I’d be breaking up the world’s most rock-solid couple. Isn’t their incompatibility evident by the mere fact that she has risen to the moral challenge of acquiring a lover and he hasn’t? I’m rationalizing, of course. The truth was, I preferred his storming furiously out of my life to the prospect of Anouk slipping out of my arms.

I couldn’t call the girlfriend up, and there was no way of asking Jasper for her phone number without his taking out a restraining order against me, so one morning I woke early and staked out his hut, waiting for her to leave, and when she did I trailed her. The frequency of their relations, if not the seriousness, I was able to ascertain by the adroit way she navigated through the labyrinth. I walked behind her, watching her curvaceous body swing this way and that. As I followed her, I wondered how you go about addressing someone’s treachery. I decided you just come out with it.

“Hey, you!” I said.

She turned quickly and gave me the kind of smile that can really castrate a man. “Hello, Mr. Dean.”

“Don’t give me that. I have something to say to you.”

She looked at me with all the sweet, innocent patience in the world. I launched right into it. “I saw you the other day.”

“Where?”

“Kissing someone I didn’t father.”

She let out an uncertain gulp of air and lowered her eyes. “Mr. Dean,” she said, but that’s all she said.

“So what have you got to say for yourself? Are you going to tell Jasper, or am I?”

“There’s no reason to tell Jasper. The thing is, we used to go out together, and I’ve had a hard time forgetting about him, and I thought…well, it doesn’t matter what I thought, but he doesn’t want me. And I don’t want him anymore. And I do love Jasper. I just…Please don’t tell him. I’ll break up with him, but I won’t tell him.”

“I don’t want you to break up with him. I don’t care if you’re my son’s girlfriend or not. But if you are, you can’t cheat on him. And if you do, you have to tell him. Look- let me tell you a story. One time I was in love with my brother’s girlfriend. Her name was Caroline Potts. Hang on, maybe I’d better start at the beginning. People always want to know what Terry Dean was like as a child. They expect tales of kiddie violence and corruption in the heart of an infant. They imagine a miniature criminal crawling around the playpen perpetrating acts of immorality in between feedings. Ridiculous! Was Hitler goose-stepping all the way to his mother’s breast?”

“Mr. Dean, I have to go.”

“Oh, well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” I said, and as she walked away, I couldn’t work out for the life of me what we had cleared up, if anything.

Later that night Jasper walked in on Anouk and me in bed. He flipped out. I don’t know why it caused him such profound embarrassment- maybe the Oedipal project is most effective in broken families such as ours; the son’s desire to kill the father and fuck the mother is less repulsive an idea if it is the mother-substitute the boy desires to sleep with. As if to confirm my revolting theory, Jasper acted very hurt and even furious. I suppose at some point in life we give in to a senseless outburst that serves to rob us of all credibility, and this was Jasper’s. There was no logical reason why he should oppose this occasional physical and sweaty union of Anouk’s and mine, and he knew it too, but the next thing he came and told me was that he was moving out. We stood in silence for a minute. It was a large minute, not long but wide and cavernous.

I smiled. I felt the weight of my smile. It was exceedingly heavy.

His exit threatened to last a century but was over surprisingly quickly. After he said, “I’ll phone you,” I listened to the furious song of his footsteps retreating and I wanted to call him back and guilt-trip him into staying in contact with me.

He was gone.

I was alone.

My presence weighed as heavily on me as my concrete smile.

So! He’s left me in my dark crevice, in my solitary whirlwind. Children are a complete failure, aren’t they? I don’t know how people can derive any lasting satisfaction out of them.

I couldn’t believe he was gone.

My son!

The sperm that got away!

My failed abortion!

I stepped outside and looked at the stars tattooed on the night sky. It was one of those magnetic nights when you feel everything is either drawn to your body or is repelled by it. All this time I had thought my son was striving to be my mirror opposite, but he wasn’t- he had become my polar opposite instead, and that had sent him careering away.

A week later I felt lost in a dark and heavy cloud. Anouk hadn’t turned up for a couple of days and I sat in her studio, surrounded by plaster genitalia, feeling deeply ashamed because I was bored. What right does a dying man have to be bored? Time was killing me and I retaliated by killing time. Jasper was gone; Anouk had abandoned me. The only person I had left was Eddie, but I really could stand him only for short bursts. It’s a shame you can’t go out and see people for just ten minutes. That’s all the human contact I need to carry me through life for three days- then I need ten minutes more. But you can’t invite someone over for ten minutes. They stay and stay and never leave, and I always have to say something jarring like “You go now.” For many years I tried the favorite, “I won’t keep you any longer,” or “I don’t want to take up any more of your time,” but that never worked. There are far too many people who don’t have anything to do and have nowhere to go and who would like nothing better than to squander their whole lives chatting. I’ve never understood it.

When I heard Anouk’s voice calling my name, a gust of pure joy blew through my heart and I shouted, “I’m here! In the studio!” and I felt the pulse of sexual desire fire up. At once I had the imprudent notion that I should take off my clothes. I hardly even remember peeling them off, I was in such a fervor for union, and by the time she came to the doorway I was fully naked, beaming at her. At first I didn’t understand the frown on her face; then I thought about how I’d been lurking in ambush among the world’s largest collection of genitals, and my own, by comparison, didn’t compare. In my defense, the genitals around me were not to scale.

Then she said, “Um, I’m not alone.” And who should stick his impeccable head through the doorway but Oscar Hobbs.

In a testament to his unshakable coolness, he launched right into it. “I have some news for you,” he said. “I’d like to help you realize one of your ideas.”

I felt about to either shatter or freeze into a solid block. “For God’s sake, why?” I said briskly, then, “Which one?”

“I thought we’d discuss it. Which one would you most like to see realized?”

Good question. I had no clue. I closed my eyes, took a long breath, and dove into my brain. I swam down deep, and in the space of a minute I must have picked up and discarded over a hundred silly schemes. Then I found the one I wanted- an idea with handles. My eyelids sprang open.

“I’d like to start making everyone in Australia a millionaire,” I announced.

“Smart choice,” he said, and I understood immediately that we understood each other. “How do you intend to do that?”

“Trust me. I’ve got it all worked out.”

“Trust you?”

“Obviously, since you’re a major player in a multinational conglomerate, I can’t trust you. So you’ll have to trust me. When it’s time, I’ll tell you the details.”

Oscar gave Anouk the briefest of looks before his eyes returned to me.

“OK,” he said.

“OK? Wait a minute- are you serious about this?”

“Yes.”

In the awkward silence that followed this improbable turn of events, I noticed how the customarily expressionless Oscar was looking at Anouk as if he were struggling against something in his nature. What did it mean? Had Anouk promised him sexual favors? Had she made some strange, unpleasant pact for my benefit? The niggling suspicion compromised my sudden success. That’s how it always is- you never get a complete victory; there are always strings attached. Still, I didn’t hesitate to accept his offer. That was followed by another unexpected slug in the guts, the crushing look of disillusionment on Anouk’s face, as if by accepting Oscar’s offer I had proved myself to be less than she imagined. That I couldn’t understand. This was her idea, wasn’t it?

Anyway, I had to accept it. What choice did I have?

I was time-poor.

Chapter Two

We went straight into battle mode. First there was the publicity; we had to whet the public’s appetite. Oscar was smart; he didn’t mess around. The very next day, before we’d even properly discussed how this ludicrous scheme was going to function, he put my picture on the front page of the daily tabloid with the headline “This Man Wants to Make You Rich.” A little clunky, not very elegant, but effective. And that was it for me. The official end to my life as the invisible man.

There was the briefest outline of my idea, without specifics, but most infuriatingly, I was introduced to the Australian public as “Brother of Iconic Outlaw Terry Dean.”

I tore the newspaper into ribbons. Then the telephone started ringing and the lowest forms of human life were on the other end- journalists. What had I gotten myself into? Becoming a public figure is like befriending a rottweiler with meat in your pockets. They all wanted details on how I planned to do it. The first to pick up on the story was a TV producer for a current affairs show, wanting to know if I would be interviewed for a segment. “Of course not,” I said, and hung up. This was just reflex.

“You have to publicize your scheme,” Anouk said.

“Fuck that,” I said weakly. I knew she was right. But how could I speak to these journalists when all I could hear in my head, drowning out their questions, was noisy echoes of an old rage? It turned out I was the kind of person who could hold a grudge for a lifetime. I was still fuming over how the media had relentlessly harassed my family during Terry’s rampage. What was I going to do? They called and called and called. They asked me about myself, my scheme, my brother. Different voices, same questions. When I walked outside, I heard them calling from somewhere within the labyrinth. Helicopters circled overhead. I went inside and locked the door and climbed into bed and turned off the lights. I felt my whole world was on fire. I’d done this to myself, I knew, but that didn’t make it any easier. It made it worse.

The current affairs show ran the story anyway. Oscar Hobbs gave an interview. Apparently he wasn’t going to let my misanthropy ruin everything. To my horror, they dug up footage of me from the time of Terry’s rampage; because I wasn’t watching television then, I’d never seen it. There it was: our town that no longer exists, that I’d burned down with my observatory, and right there on television everyone was alive- my mother, my father, Terry, and even me! Even seventeen-year-old me! It’s impossible to believe I was ever that young. And that skinny. And that ugly. On the television I’m all skin and bones and walking away from the camera with the steady steps of someone moving toward a future he doesn’t know will hurt him. I instantly formed a love-hate relationship with my former self. I loved me for moving so optimistically toward the future, and hated me for getting there and fucking it up.

The following morning I made my way to the Hobbs building, a hushed, seasonless fortress in the city center, seventy-seven floors of soundproof, smell-proof, and poor-proof offices. As soon as I stepped into the lobby, I knew I had grown old inside my nanosecond of eternity. The people racing past me were so young and healthy, I had a coughing fit just looking at them. This was a new type of working man and woman, wholly different from the breed of worker who waits in a fever of impatience for five o’clock to release him from bondage. These were pathologically stressed-out consumers who worked all the time, in industries called new media, digital media, and information technologies. In this place, old methods and technologies were not even remembered, and if they were, they were talked about fondly, as if discussing the death of embarrassing relatives. One thing was certain: this new culture of workers would have baffled the hell out of Marx.

Contrary to expectations, neither Oscar’s nor Reynold’s office was on the top floor, but somewhere in the middle of the building. Entering the stark yet stylish reception area, I was all ready to put on my waiting face when the secretary with cone-shaped breasts said, “Go right in, Mr. Dean.”

Oscar’s office was surprisingly small and simple, with a view of the building opposite. He was on the phone with someone I assumed was his father, who was giving him an earful and doing it so loudly I heard the words “Are you completely stupid?” Oscar raised his eyebrows, waved me in, and motioned for me to sit on a beautiful and uncomfortable-looking flat-backed antique chair. I went to his bookshelf instead. He had an impressive collection of first editions- Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (in German), Tolstoy (in Russian), and Leopardi (in Italian)- that called to mind some lines of the last’s uplifting poetry:

What was that acid spot in time

That went by the name of Life?

Oscar hung up the phone with an expression that was not entirely clear to me. I launched my attack. “Listen, Oscar, I didn’t give you permission to start bandying around my brother’s name. This has nothing to do with him.”

“I’m funding this scheme. I don’t need your permission.”

“Hey- that’s true. You don’t.”

“Listen, Martin. You should be thankful. Your brother, while he was, in my opinion, a dangerous maniac that Australia has no business celebrating-”

“That’s just what he was!” I shouted, thrilled to my bones. For it’s a fact that nobody had ever expressed this very obvious opinion.

“Well, blind Freddy can see that. The point is, he is plain adored by this country, and your close association with him gives you the credentials you need to be taken seriously.”

“OK, but I-”

“You don’t want us to go on and on about it. This is your scheme, this is your turn in the spotlight, and you don’t want your long-dead brother overshadowing you from beyond the grave.”

“Mate, that’s it exactly.”

“After this first week, Marty, you’ll come into your own, don’t worry.”

I had to admit, Oscar Hobbs was a real gentleman. In fact, he was charming me more each time I met him. He seemed to understand me right away. I thought: Maybe people need to grasp that nepotism doesn’t necessarily mean the ascension of an idiot.

“Anyway, let’s get into details. What’s your scheme?”

“OK. It’s simple. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“OK. Listen to this. With our population of roughly twenty million people, if everyone in Australia mailed just one dollar a week to a certain address and that money was divided by twenty, every single week of the year twenty Australian families would become millionaires.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it!”

“That’s your idea?”

“That’s my idea!”

Oscar leaned back in his chair and put on a thinking face. It was the same as his regular face, only a little smaller and a little tighter.

The silence made me uncomfortable. I gave him a few more details to fill it.

“Now what if, after the first week, the people who have just become millionaires from the previous week put in a one-time payment of a thousand dollars as a thank-you. That means after the first week we’ll always have a weekly budget of twenty thousand dollars to support the administrative costs of the enterprise.”

Oscar started nodding rhythmically. I pushed on: “So by my calculations, at the end of the first year 1,040 families would have become millionaires, by year two 2,080 millionaires, by year three 3,120 millionaires, and so on. Now 3,120 new millionaires in three years is pretty good, but at that rate it would still take roughly 19,230 years for every Australian to become a millionaire, not even factoring in the rate of population growth.”

“Or decline.”

“Or decline. Obviously, for the number of Australian millionaires to grow exponentially, we need to increase the payment each year by a dollar, so in year two we put in two dollars a week- that’s 40 millionaires a week, or 2,080 millionaires for the year; year three we put in three dollars-60 millionaires a week, or 3,120 millionaires for the year; and so on until every Australian is a millionaire.”

“That’s your idea.”

“That’s my idea!”

“You know what?” he said. “It’s so simple it might actually work.”

“Even if it doesn’t,” I said, “what else are we going to do with this acid spot in time that goes by the name of Life?”

“Martin. Don’t say that in an interview, OK?”

I nodded, embarrassed. Maybe he didn’t recognize the quote because I didn’t say it in Italian.

That night Eddie turned up at the house in his usual freshly ironed pants and wrinkle-free shirt with his face that made me wonder if they have Asian mannequins in Asian department stores. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Eddie was always disappearing and reappearing. That’s what he did. Seeing him, I suddenly remembered my idea that all along he’d hated my guts. I watched him closely. He wasn’t giving himself away. Maybe he’d been pretending to like me for so long he’d forgotten that he didn’t. Why would he pretend to like me anyway? For what sinister trap? Probably none- to soften up his loneliness, that was all. I suddenly felt sorry for the whole lot of us.

“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.

My attention was mostly focused on studying the erratic behavior of my ego in unstable conditions; under the stress of compliments and smiles and repeated blasts of direct eye contact, its propensity was to become engorged. I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.

It was too crowded to pace nervously. I was thinking that my speech would more than likely backfire, and also that I had to tell Anouk about Caroline. Of course I knew it was almost unthinkable that a man like me could reject anyone, let alone a woman like Anouk. How could I tell her I would never taste her again, especially when she gave me the kind of supreme gratification one can get only from freeing slaves or sleeping with a really sexy woman a decade younger than yourself? Luckily, I remembered I was in love with Caroline, so I was able to walk over to Anouk and point her out. Caroline was standing in the corner of the room in a red chiffon dress, pretending not to look at me. Anouk remembered who she was from one of our postcoital confession sessions, and I explained that we were going to get married in a couple of weeks. She said nothing, a loud unpleasant nothing which made my monologue grow louder and incoherent.

“After all,” I said, “we don’t want to jeopardize our friendship.”

Her face became a stone veiled in a smile. She laughed suddenly, a hideously exaggerated laughter that made me take a half step back. Before I had the chance to say anything, to dig myself deeper into a hole, everyone in the room was calling me to make a speech.

This was it. Time to put my plan into action. I stepped up onstage. After all, you’ve made them rich. My head weighed somewhere between a droplet of water and a gallon of air. Who doesn’t love a man who’s made you rich? You can’t lose. I stood there, looking dumbly at the eager crowd, stuck in a dizzying immobility.

I searched the crowd for Caroline, who gave me an encouraging nod. That made me feel really low. And then I saw Jasper. I didn’t know he was coming and hadn’t seen him arrive. Fortunately for me, he had the same expression a dog has when you pretend to throw the ball but still have it in your hand. That gave me the boost I needed.

I cleared my throat, though it did not need it, and began.

“Thank you. I accept your applause and adoration. You’re greedy to escape your prisons, and you think that by making you rich, I set you free. I haven’t; I have only let you out of your cell, into the corridor. The prison still exists, your prison that you don’t know you love so much. All right. Let’s talk about me in relation to the tall-poppy syndrome. It’s best to address this tricky issue right off the bat. Look, don’t cut my head off, you shits. You love me now, but you’ll hate me tomorrow. You know how you are- actually, you don’t. That’s why I’d like to suggest an unusual exercise for the nation, and the exercise is to love me in perpetuity. OK? In this spirit, I have an announcement to make. My God, my entire life has led up to this moment. Of course five minutes ago I went to the toilet and my entire life led up to that moment too. But here it is. I am running for Senate. That’s right, Australia, I give you my wasted gifts! My squandered potential! I’ve always led a degraded existence, and now I offer it to you. I would like to be a part of our horrendous Parliament, our collective hoax! I want to put myself among the swine, and why shouldn’t I? I am unemployed, after all, and senator is a job as good or bad as any other, isn’t it? Just so you know, I’m not tied to any party. I will be running as an independent. And I’ll be honest with you. I think politicians are weeping sores. And when I look at our politicians in our country, I can’t believe that all of these unendurable people were actually chosen. So what can we say about democracy, except that it’s not a good enough system to hold people accountable for their lies? Supporters of this inadequate system say, well, punish them at the polls, then! But how can we when most likely the single opponent at the polls is another in a long line of unelectable gormless bandits, and so we wind up voting the liars in again, voting with our teeth clenched? Of course, the most disagreeable thing about being an atheist is that according to my nonbeliefs, I know that all these sons of bitches have no retribution coming to them in the hereafter- that everyone gets away with everything. It’s very distressing; what goes around doesn’t come around but stays where it went when it first went around.

“Are you all following me? We puzzlingly overestimate our elected representatives. Don’t overestimate me! I’ll make blunder after stupid blunder! But it is necessary for you to know where I stand on certain contentious issues so you’ll know what kind of blunders I’ll be making. Well, I am certainly not on the right. I don’t care if gays get married or get divorced. Not that I’m not for gay rights specifically, I’m just against the phrase ‘family values.’ In fact, when someone says the phrase ‘family values,’ I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face with a condom from 1953. Well, then, am I on the left? Sure, they’re the first to sign petitions and in international affairs will always support the perceived underdog, even if the underdog is a bunch of cannibals- as long as they have less money and fewer resources- and these deeply caring individuals on the left will do anything for the betterment of the disenfranchised except make a personal sacrifice. So you see? I’m neither left nor right. I’m just an ordinary person who goes to sleep feeling guilty every night. Why shouldn’t I? Eight hundred million people went to bed hungry today. All right, I’ll admit for a while our roles as massively wasteful consumers seemed to be doing us a world of good- we were slimming down, a good half of us had breast implants; frankly, we were looking good- but now we’re all fatter and more cancerous than ever, so what’s the point of it? The world is getting hotter, the ice caps are melting, because man keeps saying to nature, Hey, our whole idea of a cozy future is to have jobs. That’s all we’ve got planned. What’s more, we will pursue this aim at any cost, even, paradoxically, if it means the eventual destruction of our workplace. Man says, Sacrifice industry and economy and jobs? For what? Future generations? I don’t even know those guys! I’ll tell you something for free- it makes me ashamed that our species, which is so finely ennobled by its sacrifices, winds up sacrificing it all for the wrong things and comes off just looking like a race of people who like to use the hair dryer while taking a bath. I’m only sorry I was born three-quarters through this self-inflicted tragedy and not at the very beginning or at the very end. I’m fucking sick of watching this tragedy in slow motion. The other planets aren’t, though- they’re on the edge of their suns. The reason we’ve never had visitors from outer space isn’t that they don’t exist but that they don’t want to know us. We’re the village idiots of all the teeming galaxies. On a quiet night you can hear their crackled laughter. And what are they laughing at? Let me put it this way: humanity is the guy who shits in his own pants and then walks around saying, ‘So, do you like my new shirt?’ What’s my point? To let you know I am an environmentalist insofar as I wouldn’t like to live in a caldron of boiling piss. Believe me, there’s no politics in staying alive. That’s why I’m an apolitical person entering the world of politics. But I’m not perfect. Tell me, why have we been infected by that American disease of wanting our politicians to be pure as monks? Society went through the sexual revolution decades ago, but for some reason we judge the people who manage our economy by Victorian standards, and this doesn’t seem strange to us. Let me get this out of the way- if I see a chance of having an illicit affair with an intern or a colleague’s wife, I will jump at it with both feet. As far as I’m concerned, ‘getting away with it’ has nothing to do with no one finding out and everything to do with no one falling pregnant. OK? I deny nothing. I admit everything. And let me say this to you too: I will not pretend that I’m not attracted to certain high school girls. Some of them are seventeen, for Chrissakes. They’re not children! They’re sexy, blossoming young women, most of whom lost their virginity at fourteen! There’s a difference between inappropriate sex with a minor and pedophilia. It’s stupid and dangerous to bundle them up in the same sack.

“What else? OK. I want to put this on the record, right from the outset: if I can give my son advantages- a book of cab charges, for instance, or free vacations- then I will. And why shouldn’t I? If you are a mechanic and your son has a car, won’t you fix it for him, won’t you give him the advantage of having a father who is a mechanic? Or if you’re a plumber, are you going to leave your son elbow deep in shit because you want him to do it on his own?

“What’s my point? I render all smear campaigns redundant. Why throw dirt at a man caked in mud? For the record, I have been to prostitutes, fathered an illegitimate child- stand up, Jasper, and take a bow. I have lost control of my mind and my bladder. I have broken laws. I have built a labyrinth. I have loved my brother’s girlfriend. I believe not in war but in the horrors of war! I believe not in an eye for an eye but in a large cash settlement for an eye! I believe in sexual humiliation education in schools! I believe that counterterrorism experts should be allowed to look up anyone’s skirt they like! I believe in standing quietly, thanking our Aboriginal hosts, and every one of us migrating to another country! I believe that inequality is not the product of capitalism but the product of the fact that in a group of two men and one woman, one of the men will be taller and will have straighter teeth than the other, and he’ll get the woman. Thus I believe that economics isn’t the basis of inequality, straight teeth are!

“When democracy works, the government does what the people want. The problem with that is that people want shitty things! People are scared and greedy and self-centered and only concerned about their financial security! Yes, the truth of the matter is THERE HAS YET TO BE A GREAT DEMOCRATIC NATION BECAUSE THERE HAS YET TO BE A GREAT BUNCH OF PEOPLE!

“Thank you!”

So that was my speech, for which I should have been lynched a hundred times over. But I was making them into millionaires and I could do nothing wrong. Even that stupid, incoherent, somewhat obvious and insulting speech of mine won their approval. They lapped it up greedily. Applauded like crazy. They’d never heard anything like it. Or maybe they had heard only the excited tone of my voice. Either way, I got away with it, and the only thing that night that overshadowed me and my crazy announcement was an impromptu speech by Oscar Hobbs, who wandered spontaneously up to the microphone and announced that he was getting married to the woman of his dreams- Anouk.

Chapter Three

The habits of a man living alone for a lifetime are disgusting and difficult to break. If no one is around to hear it, a falling tree may make no sound, and neither will I make my bed. But Caroline moved into the labyrinth, and now I had to cook! And clean! And share the responsibilities! Honestly, I’ve never known how people do married life. I mean, when I go from the bedroom to the bathroom or the kitchen to the bedroom, the last thing I want to do is stop to have a chat.

Marriage was just one of many changes, though. How can I describe the most critical period of my life when it comes to me as a series of photographs taken from the window of a speeding train? Did I throw up octopus salad at my wedding or Anouk’s? Was it me or Oscar standing still at the altar like one carved out of wood? At whose wedding did Jasper and I get into a heated philosophical argument about thank-you notes? And I don’t know whether it was my newfound success or my new life with Caroline, but for some reason I was overcome with very dangerous wishful thinking and, going against everything I believed in, I began a struggle against death- I started fighting the cancer.

I let them suck out my blood; I peed into jars; I was bombarded by X-rays, buried in coffinlike beeping tunnels for CAT scans and MRIs, and underwent a combination of intravenous high-dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy which left me exhausted and breathless, dizzy and light-headed, with nausea, headaches, diarrhea and constipation. I had tingling in my hands and feet. I experienced a continuous noise in my ears which all but drowned out my interior monologues.

The doctors told me to rest, but how could I? I had a new wife and a country to pervert. So I dealt with all this the best I could. To protect my skin from the sun, I wore a hat and sunglasses. I avoided foods with a strong smell. I shaved my head so no one would notice my hair falling out. Blood transfusions gave me the pick-me-up I needed. Unfortunately, chemotherapy treatments sometimes cause infertility. Fortunately, I didn’t care. Neither did Caroline, and as we went back to Dr. Sweeny’s again and again, together, I remember thinking that she might be the first person who would take a bullet for me, if one came and I didn’t want it. Look, I’m not saying our relationship is as passionate as the relationship with the love of your life is supposed to be. It isn’t, but I can’t hold it against her. I am not actually the love of her life anyway; I am a stand-in, a surrogate for my brother. There was something complete in the way I was compared to him in the eyes of the nation and perhaps now in the bedroom.

So you’ll understand why I can’t tell you anything definite about those six months when my memories feel like botched memory implants. I don’t even remember the election, only that on every street corner were posters of my face peering out with a look of unambiguous rebuke. More than the television and newspaper coverage, nothing was as violent an affront to my former anonymity as those ubiquitous posters.

The unlikely result? I scraped in. That’s the wonderful thing about democracy: you can hold public office legitimately while still being despised by 49.9 percent of the suspicious eyes on the street.

Most people overseas think the capital of Australia is Sydney or Melbourne, but what they don’t know is that in the 1950s the village idiots opened their own village and called it Canberra. For every sitting of Parliament I traveled with Caroline to this dull city, and it was there I became (I can scarcely believe it myself) dynamic. I was a dynamo. The slugs of Canberra had a repellent force, a force that served to channel my routine chaos and disparity into a vision. I became a visionary. But why wasn’t I chased out of there with pitchforks and quicklime? Simple answer: the Australian people were diligently sending in their dollar coins, every week another twenty millionaires were made, and they had me to thank. This financial lure got people all caught up in a shared hysteria, which made them receptive to the ideas that fell thick and fast from my mouth.

I addressed unemployment, interest rates, trade agreements, women’s rights, child care, the health system, tax reform, defense budgets, indigenous affairs, immigration, prisons, environmental protection, and education- and, shockingly, almost all my reforms were agreed upon. Criminals would be allowed the option of going into the army instead of being locked up; cash rebates would be offered to those who could demonstrate self-awareness, and the stultified and fearful would be taxed higher; any politician caught breaking just one election promise would be punished in a back alley by a guy named Bruiser; every healthy person would have to look after at least one sick person until he died or got better; we would pick people indiscriminately to become prime minister for a day; all drugs would be legalized for one generation to see what happened. Even my most controversial idea was taken up: rearing any child in a religious belief, freezing the child’s mind when it is most vulnerable, would be treated as child abuse. I said all this and people said, “OK, we’ll see what we can do.” It was unbelievable!

Of course, as a public figure with a national audience for the humiliations that were previously the entertainment of a handful of close enemies, I had my critics. I was called every synonym of the word “insane” and worse. In Australia, the worst insult you can slander a person with, and the easiest way to dismiss every fiber of their being, is to call them a do-gooder. A do-gooder- let’s be clear- is a person who does good or wants to do good. Let’s be clear about this too, just so there are no misunderstandings: in the eyes of the slanderer, this is definitely an insult, not a compliment, and to be a do-gooder is something shameful, unlike in other places, such as heaven, where it’s considered an asset. Thus my critics resorted to this “insult” in order to diminish me. It was only the ugly sneers on their faces that stopped me from thanking them.

Mostly, though, people were on my side. They liked it that I went to the heart of the matter- that my principal reforms were in the areas of loneliness, death, and suffering. At least on some level they seemed to understand my main idea: that we become the first truly death-based society. They accepted that in order to have a proper perspective on life, every single person in the land had to come to terms with the fact that death is an insurmountable problem that we really won’t be solving by relentlessly making people- so that the name Smith can perpetuate throughout the eons- nor by hating neighboring countries, nor by chaining ourselves to a God with a long list of dislikes. I half managed to convince people that if instead of singing the national anthem we started each day with a little funeral service for ourselves, if we all resigned ourselves to our inevitable decay and stopped seeking a heroic transcendence of our unfortunate fate, we might not go as far as Hitler, who was so perturbed about dying that he tried to avoid thinking about it by killing six million Jews.

OK, I admit my revolution was a farce, but it was a deadly serious farce. If people laughed or went along with my ideas just to see what would happen, perhaps it was because underneath their chuckling, they saw a grain of truth. Perhaps not. Anyway, I know utopias don’t work. Just for society to be a little more fluid and less hypocritical, that was really the sum total of my goal. Now I know it wasn’t at all modest; I was reaching for the moon. Still, while churning out millionaires, I continued to soothe the hip-pocket nerve of the electorate and somehow managed to convince people that not to listen to me was a threat to the fabric of society.

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 infected 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! And 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?”

Who?

Here’s what I found out. The two nightclubs formerly managed by Eddie and for a short time by myself were owned by a Thai businessman named Tim Lung. So far, out of the 640 millionaires made, 18 had at one time or another been employees of this Tim Lung. Eddie had worked for him for many years and obviously was still working for him. The money Eddie had loaned me to build my labyrinth had in reality come directly from Tim Lung. This man whom I had never heard of had, unbeknownst to me, financed my house. He had given me a job as manager of his club. There was nothing I could say. I was tied to him. Or rather, for some unknown reason, he was tied to me. The evidence was circumstantial yet incriminating. Was that all? No, that wasn’t all. It was enough to hang me, but it wasn’t all.

Further investigations brought to light that Tim Lung had owned a small fleet of fishing trawlers seized by French authorities for trafficking guns and ammunition from France to North Africa. This meant the work I had done some twenty years earlier, in Paris, loading and unloading crates on the banks of the Seine, was done for this same fucking guy. Tim Lung- he had been responsible for the underworld battle that led to Astrid’s death all those years ago! My head was spinning. I kept replaying the revelations over in my head. Tim Lung: I had worked for him in France, he had given me a job in Australia, he had financed my house and had finally called in the favor by ripping off the millionaires scheme. Was that what he’d wanted all along? How could that be possible? And how was anyone to believe the unbelievable fact that I had never heard of him? And how could I never have heard of him? A man whom I had been tied to almost all my adult life? This shadowy Thai businessman turned out to be one of the key figures in my life, and this was the first I was hearing of him. Incredible!

I went online to do a search and found a couple of grainy photos and a link to an old interview on a Thai-language corporate website. He was a tall, thin man in his late fifties. He had a gentle smile. There was nothing about his features to suggest criminality. His eyes weren’t even set too close together or too far apart. I turned off the computer, having learned nothing, and not long after the police raided our offices and all the computers were taken. They went on to dig up people I’d known and purposefully forgotten; people I’d worked with in short-lived minimum-wage jobs, inmates at the mental hospital, even prostitutes came out of the woodwork to throw in their two cents. Everyone was on the warpath that led to me.

It was the white-collar crime of the century. I was cooked! I was the personification of everything hated in this country- another fat cat milking decent, hardworking, ordinary Australians of their wages. I was officially a scumbag. A bag of scum! A shitheel. A heel of shit! I was all these things, and more. To my surprise, I was identified racially. A Jew! Even though I had never had any contact with the Jewish community, any more than I’d had with the Amish, the newspapers referred to “Jewish businessman Martin Dean.” And for the first time I was accurately called “half brother” of Terry Dean. That’s it. That’s how I knew I was done for; they were distancing my crimes from those of my iconic brother. They wouldn’t stand for me taking Terry’s legacy down with me.

A lifetime of my fearing people was finally validated- people proved themselves to be absolutely frightening. The whole country was in a whirlwind of hate, a hatred so intense and all-encompassing, you couldn’t imagine any of them were still able to kiss their loved ones at night. This was the instant I felt my destiny- to be an object of loathing- arrive and also the moment I realized there was something to this business of negative energy after all. I felt the waves of detestation profoundly, in my guts. Honestly, you wonder how they ever sneaked the abolishment of the death penalty past a mob like that. I was not unaccustomed to witnessing my countrymen’s hatred focused like death rays over the years: I remember the minister whose wife had paid for designer sunglasses with taxpayers’ money, and that practically was the end of the minister’s career. His son’s phone bill! Or the MP who was forced to deny claims that she tried to get into the Royal Easter Show for free. The people were upset that she didn’t pay her twelve dollars. Twelve lousy dollars! Imagine what they’d do to me!

Of course the appalled faces of my political opponents barely concealed their delight; they adored anything that allowed them to look indignant on behalf of the electorate. It was effortless the way they ground me to dust. They were spared the trouble of having to cook up a scandal to fry me. All they had to do was express shock and act swiftly, to appear to be the one with his foot on my neck. They were all lining up to denounce me, their voices dipped in sewage, pushing each other out of the way to take credit for my downfall.

Oscar was powerless to stop all this, assuming he even wanted to. Reynold had taken over the matter. Anouk tried to reason with her father-in-law and asked him to help me, but Reynold was resolute. “It’s too late now,” he said. “You can’t stop a tidal wave of hatred once it’s reached the shore.” He was right. There was no point making a foolish protestation of innocence. I knew how it worked. I was already sliced and diced in everyone’s mind, so what was I still doing here? You could see it in their eyes- they were astonished that I was still breathing. What a nerve! I considered appealing to the charitable parts of themselves. I even toyed with the idea of telling them I had cancer, but I dropped it. I’d assaulted their pockets, and nothing would soften them to my case. They could learn that my skin was being peeled away by a blind cook who had mistaken me for a giant potato, and they would cheer. Cheer! It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.

The biggest irony about this whole thing was that the chemotherapy sessions were over and were successful. So just when I had my life back again, it became unlivable. The Buddhists are right. Guilty men are not sentenced to death, they are sentenced to life.

Sadly, Jasper too was the hapless recipient of a severe hammering. I’m ashamed to say he finally had to pay for the sins of the father. He began receiving messages like “Please tell your father that I am going to kill him!” Poor bastard! He became a death-threat messenger service. And don’t think my wife got off any easier. Poor Caroline! Poor babe in the woods! She foolishly agreed to interviews, thinking she could set the record straight. She didn’t understand that they had her role clearly defined and would not stand for it to be corrected or amended. By pitting ourselves against the battler, we had lost our talent to be Australians, and thus our right to a fair go was forfeited. They savaged her. My one actual lie was uncovered and it became public knowledge that Caroline and I had grown up together. Thus her being made a millionaire made her look as guilty as I was. She was left weeping on national television. My love! Women spat on her in the street. Saliva! Actual saliva! And sometimes the saliva wasn’t even white but the dirty dark-green of long-term smokers. Caroline was not prepared for this; at least I’d had a childhood of persecution to prepare me, many mouthfuls of bitter experience to line my stomach. I started out as a figure of contempt and that’s how I ended up- hard to be too upset about it.

And now the saddest part, the tragedy: all my reforms were systematically dismantled, all my innovations, all my warped progress. That was it! The shortest social revolution in history! This little slice of Australian history was going down as a blight. They no longer liked the farce I had orchestrated. It was all coming clear to them now: they’d been hoodwinked. We were right back where we started. Further back, even. They were fast reducing me to a meaningless aberration, rewriting history at supersonic speed. Whole months were wiped out with every thirty-minute current affairs report. Every TV channel had the sad face of a pensioner telling of her sacrifice in sending in her one dollar a week, all the things lost she could have bought: milk, dishwashing liquid, and, with no trace of irony, lottery tickets. Yes, the national lottery was back in business. People had their crummy odds again.

In the mirror, I tried to smile; the smile made my sadness look like a permanent disfigurement. It was my own fault! I shouldn’t have fought against my meaninglessness any more than I should’ve fought against those tumors. I should’ve nursed my tumors until they grew huge and meaty.

I spent the majority of those days stretched out on the floor of my bedroom, my chin resting on the beige carpet until my chin felt beige, and my insides too: beige lungs, beige heart pumping beige blood through my beige veins. I was on the floor when Jasper charged in, intruding on my peaceful beige existence to pass on all the death threats he’d received on my behalf.

“And who the fuck is Tim Lung?” he asked.

Rolling over onto my back, I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t much.

“So my mother died on one of his boats in the middle of one of his gang wars.”

“You could put it that way.”

“So this man murdered my mother.”

“She committed suicide.”

“Either way, this bastard has ruined our lives. Without him, I might have a mother, and you might not be Australia ’s newest love-to-hate-him guy.”

“Maybe.”

“What does Eddie say about him?”

“Eddie’s not saying anything.”

It was true. The authorities were giving him a hard time too, not only as the administrator of the scheme. Having overstayed his visa, he was already a criminal- they confiscated his passport, called him in for questioning every other day, but had not yet deported him to Thailand, as he was needed for their investigations. Even so, he was the only calm one among us. His calm was natural and impermeable. I suddenly admired him, because even though I suspected that his tranquillity was just a mask, it was the most solid and durable mask I had ever seen.

“This is some mess,” Jasper said. “What are you going to do?”

Good point. This was major fraud. Everyone said it: Martin, you will have to prepare yourself for prison. How do you prepare yourself for such a thing? By locking yourself in the closet with some stale bread and water? But I’d have to do something. The odds against me were stacking up- stupidly, the state was even reopening the file on The Handbook of Crime. It suddenly occurred to them that they had a case after all. I was like a derelict building scheduled for demolition, and everyone was crowding around to watch.

My only hope was to try to pay back some of the money, on the off-chance that would appease the people a little. I would maintain that I had been as duped as they had, that I would do everything in my power to pay back every cent, even if I spent my life doing it. It was a weak ploy, but I gave it a shot. I had to sell my labyrinth. It was heartbreaking to have to part with what I had so meticulously designed and brought to life, not to achieve a dream of happiness but to achieve a dream of deep suspicion and loathing, a dream of hiding, a dream I had realized- it had hidden me loyally for years.

The day of the auction, I was advised by everyone with a mouth not to show up, but I couldn’t resist seeing who would be the new owner. Jasper was there too; after all, his hut would be sold in the bargain, the hut that we had both pretended to build with our bare hands. The prospective buyers numbered a thousand. I don’t know how many were bona fide bidders and how many turned up just to gawk.

I was overcome with queasy shivers as I arrived. Everyone looked at me and murmured. I yelled out that murmur is the devolution of speech. No one said anything after that. I took my place under my favorite tree, but it didn’t soothe my defeat; the enemy was drinking sparkling wine in the middle of the fortress designed to keep him out. People soon got caught in its teeth, though; it was satisfying how many had to be rescued from the maze. That delayed the proceedings. When the auction finally began, the auctioneer made a little speech referring to the house and the labyrinth as “the kingdom of one of Australia ’s most controversial minds,” which gave me an uneasy, anxious feeling as well as a perverse sense of pride. I folded my arms regally, even though I knew they found me laughable and not like some dethroned king. This labyrinth betrayed the extent of my inflated fears, insecurities, and paranoia, so I felt psychologically naked standing there. Did they know they were all gathered in the place that proved my contention that I was the most scared man alive?

In the end, because of its curiosity, insanity, or infamy, my labyrinth and the two properties hidden within went for an astounding $7.5 million, nearly ten times their worth. This predictably convinced both the press and its loyal subjects, the people, that I was a wealthy man, which of course only served to reinforce their hatred of me. The buyers, I learned, ran a chain of overpriced furniture stores, and they intended to open the place as a tourist attraction. Oh well. As indignities go, it’s not the worst.

I moved my books and my junk into storage and myself into an apartment Anouk rented for me and Caroline. I didn’t even get a chance to offer my $7.5 million to the people like a piece of meat to a dog who’d much rather bite off my leg. The government seized all my assets and froze my bank account. Seized and frozen, and just waiting for the authorities to charge me, I couldn’t be more powerless.

So, then- if I was being taken all the way down, I wanted to take someone with me. But who? I didn’t bother hating my countrymen for hating me. I saved every droplet in my vast reservoir of fury for my abhorrence for journalists, those phony, self-righteous moral watchdogs in heat. For what they did to my mother, to my father. For loving Terry. For hating me. Yes, I would have my revenge against them. I obsessed about this revenge. That’s why I didn’t crack. I wasn’t ready to fall apart yet. I conceived one last project. A hate project. A revenge project, despite the fact that I’ve never been good at revenge, even if it is mankind’s oldest pastime. I’ve never been into defending my honor, either. Personally, I don’t know how anyone can even say the word “honor” with a straight face. I ask you- what’s the difference between “stained honor” and “dented ego”? Does anyone really still believe this shit? No, I wanted revenge simply because the media had repeatedly wounded my ego, my id, and my superego, the whole shebang. And I was going to get them good.

I borrowed money from Caroline and told her it was for legal expenses. Then I called on a private detective named Andrew Smith. He worked out of his home with his wife and poodle and looked like an accountant, not a private investigator. In fact, he looked like he did nothing privately. When I sat down in his office and removed the hood and glasses, he asked what he could do for me. I laid it all out for him. And consummate professional that he was, he refrained completely from judging me for my little, mean-spirited, hate-filled plan. He listened quietly, and at the end gave me a thin-lipped smirk where only one side of his lips raised, and he said, “I’ll get right on it.”

Only two weeks later Andrew Smith came to me with that quasi-smile of his. He was as thorough in his mission as I’d hoped- he had broken I don’t know how many privacy laws and presented me with a dossier. While he fed his dog, I went through the files, giggling, gasping, and guffawing. It was an incredible dossier, and if I hadn’t had other plans for it, I could’ve published it as fiction and made the bestseller list. Now all I had left was to memorize it.

Then I set off to do the only really nasty thing I have ever done.

The live press conference was held on the steps of the Opera House, for no good reason. The smell of the harbor and of the media scrum mingled in the cold morning air. Every reporter, current affairs host, shock jock, and media personality in Sydney had shown up, and we all stood dwarfed by the bizarre geometry of that iconic theater. This reunion, it was something. Me and the media, like a divorced husband and wife meeting for the first time in years at the funeral of their only child.

As soon as I swaggered up to the podium, they posed their loaded questions, as if defending a high ideal. I cut them off.

“Hermaphrodites of the press. I have prepared a short statement: you wouldn’t know decency if it came up and shat on your face. That’s it. I told you it was short. But I’m not here to explain to you why you are parodies of your former selves, I’m here to answer your questions. And knowing how you all like to shout your questions at the same time with little or no regard for your comrades who might have small, fragile voices, I will address each of you individually, and you may ask your questions that way, one by one.”

I gestured to the journalist standing closest to me. “Ah, Mr. Hardy, I’m glad to see you here and not at your gambling counselor’s, where you go Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. What is your question? No? No question?”

They looked at each other in confusion.

“OK. What about you, Mr. Hackerman? I hope you’re not too tired- after all, a man with a wife and two mistresses must have a lot of energy. Your first mistress, twenty-four-year-old journalism student Eileen Bailey, and your second mistress, your wife’s sister June, obviously aren’t keeping you as busy as one would think.

“What’s going on? Where are the questions? What about you, Mr. Loader? I hope you’re not going to hit me with a question in the same way you hit your wife- five times, one police intervention. Did your wife drop the charges because she loves you or because she’s afraid of you? Anyway, what do you want to know? Nothing?”

I didn’t let up. I let loose. I let all the cats out of all the bags. I asked in turn about their marriage counselors, penile implants, hair transplants, cosmetic surgery, about one who had cheated his brother out of his inheritance, about seven who had cocaine addictions and one who’d left his wife just after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. By humiliating them one by one, I turned the assembled crowd into individuals again. They were unprepared, squirming and sweating under the glare of their own spotlight.

“Didn’t you tell your psychologist just last week that you’ve always wanted to rape a woman? I have the recording right here,” I said, tapping my briefcase. What were a few defamation and invasion-of-privacy charges when I was going down for fraud? “And you, Clarence Jennings from 2CI. I heard from a certain hairdresser that you only like to sleep with your wife when she’s menstruating. Why is that? Come on! Out with it! The public has a right to know!”

They were swinging their cameras and microphones on each other. They wanted to shut them off, but they couldn’t miss the scoop when the competition was right there beside them. They didn’t know what to do or how to act. It was chaos! You can’t erase a live broadcast; their secret lives were dripping through television sets and radio speakers everywhere, and they knew it. They condemned each other out of habit, but then it was their turn in the sick limelight. They stared at me, at each other, disbelieving, ridiculed, like gnawed bones positioned upright. One removed his jacket and tie. Another sobbed. The majority wore terrified smiles. They appeared reluctant to move an inch. Caught with their pants down! Finally! These people had for too long taken on the importance of the subjects they reported on, strutting around as if they were celebrities themselves, yet laboring under the misapprehension that their lives were exclusively their own. Well, not anymore. They were caught in the morality traps they themselves had set. Branded by their own cruel irons.

I gave them a leering wink so they could be certain I had thoroughly enjoyed invading the sanctuary of their lives. Fear was in their throats- they were petrified. It was magnificent to watch the falling of great masses of pride.

“Now go home,” I said, and they did. They went off to drown their sorrows in beer and shadows. I stayed alone, with the silence saying everything it always says.

That night I celebrated by myself in Caroline’s apartment. She was there but wouldn’t inhale so much as a champagne bubble in the name of victory.

“Well, that was childish,” she said, standing at the fridge eating ice cream from the carton. Of course she was right. Nevertheless, I felt sublime. As it turned out, hateful revenge was the only pure aspiration from my youth that had survived intact, and its satisfaction, however puerile, deserved at least one glass of Moët et Chandon. But the awful inevitability of the situation had dawned on me: they’d be coming for me soon with redoubled strength. I must right now choose between the reality of prison and the reality of suicide. I thought I really would have to kill myself this time. I couldn’t do prison. I have a horror of all forms of uniform and most forms of sodomy. So suicide it was. According to the conventions of this society, I’d seen my son reach adulthood, so my death would be sad but not tragic. Dying parents are allowed to moan about not seeing their children grow up, but not about not seeing them grow old. Well, fuck- maybe I wanted to see my son graying and shrinking, even if I had to witness it through the foggy frosted glass of a cryogenic deep freeze.

What’s that? I hear a car. Shit. I hear footsteps. The haunting percussive beat of footsteps! They stop. Now I hear knocking! Someone’s knocking at the door! Suicide? Prison?

Well, what do you know: a third option!

I have to finish this off quick. There isn’t much time.

I came out of the bedroom to see Caroline curled up on the couch like a long skinny dog. “Don’t answer it,” she said, not speaking these words out loud but mouthing them noiselessly. I took off my shoes and crept up to the door. The floorboards complained under me. I gritted my teeth, took a few more creaky steps, and peeped through the peephole.

Anouk, Oscar Hobbs, and Eddie were standing there with big convex heads. I opened the door. They all hurried inside.

“OK. I’ve spoken to a friend in the federal police,” Oscar said. “I had a tip-off. They’re coming to arrest you tomorrow.”

“Morning or afternoon?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe a little. I can get a lot done in five or six hours.” That was just bravado. The truth was, I’ve never been able to get anything done in five or six hours. I need eight.

“And what’s he doing here?” I asked, pointing at Eddie.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Eddie said.

“You mean- run?”

Eddie nodded with such energy he lifted up onto his toes.

“Well, if I decide to run, what makes you think I’d run with you? And where could we go anyway? The whole of Australia knows my face now, and it’s not something they cherish.”

“ Thailand,” Eddie said. “Tim Lung has offered to hide you.”

“That crook! What makes you think-”

“You’ll die here in jail, Marty.”

That settled things. Not even I would go to jail simply to be able to tell Eddie to fuck off. “But we’ll get stopped at the airport. They’ll never let me leave the country.”

“Here,” Eddie said, handing me a brown envelope. I looked inside and pulled out the contents. Australian passports. Four of them. One for me, one for him, one for Caroline, and one for Jasper. Our photos were there but the names were different. Jasper and I were Kasper and Horace Flint, Caroline was Lydia Walsh, and Eddie was Aroon Jaidee.

“How did you get these?” I asked.

“Courtesy of Tim Lung.”

Yielding to an impulse, I picked up an ashtray and hurled it against the wall. It didn’t change anything substantial.

“But it’s still my face on the passport!” I shouted.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Eddie said. “I have it all worked out.”

Caroline put her arms around me and we assaulted each other with whispered questions, each terrified to acknowledge the desires of the other lest they contradict.

“Would you like me to come with you?” Caroline asked.

“What do you want to do?”

“Will I make life hard for you on the run? Will I be in the way?”

“Do you want to stay?” I asked wearily.

“Dammit, Martin, just tell me one way or the other. Do you want me to work on your case from here?” Caroline offered, the idea having arrived at her lips at the same time it struck her brain. I understood that her questions were thinly veiled answers.

“Caroline,” Anouk said, “if Martin goes missing, the police are going to give you a pretty hard time.”

“So will the public,” Oscar added.

Caroline was suffering. The shape of her face seemed to lengthen like a shadow. I watched conflicting thoughts play out in her eyes.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“So am I.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“I don’t want to be left.”

“I do love you.”

“I was beginning to think…”

She put her finger on my lips. Normally I hate it when people shut me up, but I love it when women put their fingers on my lips.

“We’ll go together,” she said breathlessly.

“OK, we’re coming,” I said to Eddie “But why did you get a passport for Jasper? He doesn’t need to go on the run.”

“I think he should,” Eddie said.

“He wouldn’t.”

“The family that sticks together…” he said, without finishing. Maybe he thought I’d finish it for him. How could I? I have no idea what happens to the family that sticks together.

It was perhaps the saddest moment of my life, saying goodbye to Anouk. It was awful not to be able to say I would see her soon, or even later. There would be no soon. Nor a later. This was it. It was growing dark. The sun was setting with urgency. Everything had sped up. The air was charged. Oscar never forgot that he was taking a risk coming here; he tapped his finger on his leg with increasingly rapid intensity. The sand was racing through the hourglass. Anouk was desolate. We didn’t hug so much as we grasped each other. It’s only at the moment of goodbye that you understand the function of a person: Anouk had been there to save my life and she had done it, many times over.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

I didn’t even know how to say “I don’t know what to say.” I just hugged her tighter while Oscar cleared his throat a dozen times. Then they left.

Now I am packed and waiting. The plane leaves in about four hours. Caroline is calling me. Though for some reason she is calling me Eddie. Eddie answers. They aren’t talking to me.

I think I’ll leave this manuscript here in a box in the apartment, and maybe one day it’ll be found and someone will have the smarts to publish it posthumously. Maybe it can act as a makeover from beyond the grave. Certainly the media and public will take our escape as concrete evidence of our guilt- they don’t have enough insight into human psychology to know that escape is evidence only of fear.

And now, on our way to the airport, we have to stop by Jasper’s apartment and say goodbye to him too. How am I going to say goodbye to my son? It was hard enough when he moved out of home, but what words will form the goodbye that says I’m going to live the rest of my days as Horace Flint in Thailand in a nest of seedy criminals? I suppose I’ll warm him with the consolation that his father, Martin Dean, will never be eradicated after all, but it will be Horace Flint who will earn himself a grave in some swampy Thai cemetery. That should cheer him up. OK. Now Caroline is really calling me. We have to go. The sentence I am now writing is the last sentence I will write.