“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.