When I got home, neither my mother nor my father seemed to care very much that I had quit school. My father was reading the local paper. My mother was writing a letter to Terry, a long letter, forty pages or more. I had sneaked a peek but couldn’t get past the uncomfortable first paragraph, in which she wrote: “I love you I love you my darling son my life my love what have you done my love my lovely son?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said I’ve quit school,” I repeated in a hurt whisper.
They didn’t react. What was conspicuously lacking in the silence was the question, What are you going to do now? “I’m going to join the army!” I shouted ludicrously, for effect.
It worked, though in the manner of a firework that sizzles and sparks on the ground, then abruptly dies out. My father actually said “Ha!” while my mother half turned her head to me and said in a quiet, stern voice, “Don’t.” And that was it.
In retrospect, I see how desperately I needed attention after a lifetime of being small print to my brother’s headlines. I can think of no other reason for my stubborn, impetuous, self-destructive decision to follow up on my threat. Two days later, in the Australian Army Registration Office, I found myself answering stupid questions with stupider answers. “Tell me, sonny, what do you think makes good army material?” the recruiting officer asked. “Light cotton?” I offered, and after not laughing for ten straight seconds, he grudgingly sent me down to the doctor. Unfortunately, that was the end of my adventure. I failed the mandatory physical examination with flying colors. The doctor probed me with an astonished look on his face and concluded that he had never seen a body in as bad a shape as mine outside of wartime.
Against all reason, I took the rejection badly and plunged into a deep depression. What followed was a period of lost time: three years, during which I felt myself circling the questions that had been circling me, though I never found the answers I needed. While searching, I went for walks. I read. I taught myself the art of reading while walking. I lay under trees and watched the clouds creep across the sky through a veil of leaves. I passed whole months thinking. I discovered more about the properties of loneliness, how it is like the slow squeeze of testicles by a hand that has just been in a refrigerator. If I could not find a way to be authentically in the world, then I would find a superior way of hiding, and to that end I tried on different masks: shy, graceful, pensive, buoyant, jovial, frail- they were the simple masks that had one defining characteristic. Other times I tried on more complicated masks, somber and buoyant, vulnerable yet cheerful, proud yet brooding. These I ultimately abandoned as they required too much upkeep on an energy level. Take it from me: complex masks eat you alive in maintenance.
The months groaned by, turning into years. I wandered and wandered, going mad with the uselessness of my life. Having no income, I lived cheaply. I gathered unfinished cigarette butts from pub ashtrays. I let my fingers turn a rusty yellow. I gazed stupidly at the people of the town. I slept outside. I slept in the rain. I slept in my bedroom. I learned valuable lessons about life, such as that a person who is sitting is eight times more likely to give you a cigarette than a person who is walking and twenty-eight times more likely to give you a cigarette than a person inside a car stuck in traffic. No parties, no invitations, no socializing. I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure. It’s a two-step, you and the world. I didn’t look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It’s how I’m made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful.
The townspeople began to look on me with something resembling horror. I’ll admit, I cut a strange figure in those days: pale, unshaven, scraggly. One winter’s night I learned that I had been unofficially proclaimed the town’s first homeless lunatic, despite the fact that I still had a home.
And still the questions remained, and each month my demand for answers became louder and more insistent. I went on an uninterrupted bout of inward stargazing, where the stars were my own thoughts, impulses, and actions. I wandered in the dirt and the dust, cramming my head with literature and philosophy. The first true hint of relief had come from Harry, who first introduced me to Nietzsche back when I saw him in prison. “Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Dean,” he said, making the introductions while throwing a book. “People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings,” he said, quoting his idol.
I had since devoured many philosophy books from the library, and it seemed that most philosophy was petty argument about things you just couldn’t know. I thought: Why waste time on insoluble problems? What does it matter whether the soul is made up of smooth, round soul atoms or of Leggo, it’s unknowable, so let’s just drop it. I also found that, geniuses or not, most of the philosophers undermined their own philosophies, from Plato onward, because almost no one seemed willing to start with a blank slate or endure uncertainty. You could read the prejudices, the self-interest, and desires of every single one. And God! God! God! The most brilliant minds coming up with all these complicated theories and then they say, “But let’s just assume there’s a God and let’s assume he’s good.” Why assume anything? To me, it was obvious man created God in his own image. Man hasn’t the imagination to come up with a God totally unlike him, which is why in Renaissance paintings God looks like a skinny version of Santa Claus. Hume says that man only cuts and pastes, he doesn’t invent. Angels, for instance, are men with wings. In the same way, Bigfoot is man with big foot. This is why I could see in most of the “objective” philosophical systems man’s fears, drives, prejudices, and aspirations written all over them.
The only thing of value I did was read books to Lionel, whose eyes were irrevocably damaged, and one rainy afternoon I almost lost my virginity to Caroline, an event that precipitated her leaving town in the middle of the night. Here’s how it happened:
We were trying to read a book together to her father, but he kept interrupting to convince himself that his life had changed for the better. Lionel was doing his best to take blindness in his stride. “Judgmental faces! Condescending eyes I’ve felt on me since the day I moved into this rotten town! I’ll never have to see them again! Thank God- I was sick of the sight of them!” Lionel was finally letting loose on the people’s automatic antipathy to him as though his personality were an extension of his bank balance. They didn’t want to know him or his story. They didn’t care that two years before moving to our town, Caroline’s mother was discovered to be hoarding a basketful of inoperable tumors growing like plums in her insides. They didn’t care that she had been something of a cold, neurotic woman, and the process of dying had not turned her into a sweetie. They didn’t believe that a man with so much money could have human qualities worth sympathizing with. He was up against the smelliest prejudice in existence: wealth-haters. At least a racist, a man who hates black people, for instance- at least he isn’t harboring a secret desire to be black. His prejudice, while ugly and stupid, is at least thorough and honest. Hatred of the well-off, from those who would jump at the chance to swap places, is a textbook case of sour grapes.
“Hey- I’ll never have to see another disappointed face either! Now when I let someone down, if they don’t say, ‘Awwwww,’ I’ll never be burdened with it! Fuck disapproving eyes! I’ve escaped!”
Eventually he talked himself to sleep. While Lionel snored as if he were all nose, we crept silently into Caroline’s bedroom. She had decided to forget all about Terry, but she talked about forgetting him so much, it was the only thing on her mind. She rambled on, and as much as I loved the sound of her spongy voice, I just had to switch off. I lit a half-smoked cigarette I’d found in a puddle and dried in the sun. As I sucked on it I felt her eyes on me, and when I looked up, I saw her lower lip curl a little, like a leaf when hit with a single drop of rain.