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.