A Preparation for Death Read online

  A Preparation for Death

  GREG BAXTER

  PENGUIN

  IRELAND

  PENGUIN IRELAND

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2010

  Copyright © Greg Baxter, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96258-0

  For Walter

  He remembers being born somewhere, having believed in native errors, having proposed principles and preached inflammatory stupidities. He blushes for it … and strives to abjure his past, his real or imaginary fatherlands, the truths generated in his very marrow. He will find peace only after having annihilated in himself the last reflex of the citizen, the last inherited enthusiasm … The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational – that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility or despair.

  E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Two Working Days

  2 That Lovely Season Now Expired

  3 The City of Perpetual Night

  4 Health. Success. Children Every Year. Die in Ireland. (A Toast)

  5 Glitter Gulch

  6 The Sound of Water on a Body

  7 Satanism

  8 On a Short Stretch of Road in Letterfrack

  9 I Saw a Dead Man on My Lunch Break

  10 Disinformation

  11 Abschied

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  In August 2007, I found myself alone in a house I did not want in one of the bland boomtime estates of north Dublin. My marriage had ended. This book is mostly the story of what came after. I shall try to explain a few things, here, about what came before.

  I arrived in Ireland in 2003. I’d been living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the few years previous to that, writing a novel. When the book failed to sell, I decided to leave the US for Europe: I could not bear the humiliation of being an unpublished novelist in a country where bad writing, as it seemed to me, had become institutionalized. I resented everyone I knew – for their success, which I considered fraudulent, or for their stupidity, which I considered implacable.

  In Dublin, I was unemployed for seven months. During this period I revised the novel. I walked from the house I was sharing to a shopping centre down the road, where there was a small café that was never crowded. I plugged in my laptop and worked. I remember very little specifically about this time. I only remember that on the day I finished the revisions, I felt happy. The book had doubled in size, but I had, inarguably, dealt with every criticism it had received. It now answered everyone’s concerns. When I went up to pay, I informed the owner that I’d been working on my novel, and was finished, and I wanted to thank him personally for giving me the space. In front of other patrons, he screamed at me for using up his electricity without permission, and only drinking coffee when everyone else ate. He told me never to come back. It was not too long after this that I realized the revision of that novel had been a waste of time: all I had done was glue, clumsily, a great deal of conventionality around a book I believed was original.

  Eventually I got a job as a reporter on a weekly newspaper for doctors. This was a job I was not qualified for and did not want, yet I remain there today. I have tried quitting – serving verbal notice twice – and I have tried to get promotions, but my attempts at both were always half-hearted, and I always botched them.

  For about a year I worked very hard at becoming a good reporter. I did not want to become a good reporter, but I felt I ought to become good at something. I wrote a second novel, which an agent didn’t like, and I gave up trying to sell it before I had to face any more rejection. I realized that being a good reporter was not – to me – its own reward, and when I was passed over for an important promotion I felt I deserved, I saw my life heading toward an unbearable and unending monotony. Shortly after that, I spotted an ad for a job teaching evening creative writing courses at the Irish Writers’ Centre. I applied, and got the job. I did not know that getting this job was to become the most significant event in my life.

  I knew well from past experience that people who call themselves writers, and who teach creative writing, usually divorce creativity from learning. They prioritize writing over reading. I wanted to avoid this at all costs. I had no intention of teaching courses in which adults sat around taking blind stabs at creativity. I wanted to introduce students to the value of reading, and thinking about, great literature. I wanted them to understand that their lives were not sufficient preparation for writing, and that the desire to be a writer was not the same as writing. I had gone about becoming a writer in the worst way – with greed and overconfidence – and I suppose I wanted to teach patience and learning as a form of penance. But I achieved more than that: I discovered a little honesty within myself. I put a lot of effort into a rediscovery of literature that allowed me to admire books that jealousy and pettiness had required me to scorn. Most of my students arrived hoping to become fiction writers. But my new interest in honesty compelled me to introduce autobiography: I had them read Montaigne, Augustine and Seneca, along with some more recent masters. I asked them to tell the truth about themselves, because that’s what I was trying to do, and I needed to talk about it constantly. I began to write some true stories of my own.

  In those evenings I discovered, at long last, a part of me that was honest, and I began to resent the rest of my life for the dishonesty required to get through it. So, around December 2006, I began a campaign of personal sabotage (or rather, I intensified a campaign that had begun much earlier). I fell asleep on friends in bars. I began to drink in the mornings. I didn’t come home some nights. In February 2007, I bought that house in north Dublin, and further entrenched myself in a life I wanted to obliterate. In order to express my resentment for buying the house, I hardly ever came home. I bought a Vespa to get around town more easily – I had taken on three classes a week now, and was drinking after every one – and avoided the fact that my life was heading in two opposite directions.

  Once my marriage was over and I was alone in the house – from August onward – a curious thing happened. Selfishness – or at
least the kind of selfishness whose outward expression is the whining and childish jeremiad that had become the mode of my existence – seemed totally pointless. To whom would I express my selfishness? On whom would I take out my frustrations? I couldn’t leave Ireland, because I owed the bank half a million euro for a house that was worth far less than that, and thus unsellable. I started teaching four nights a week, and I wrote in the empty spaces of time I found around and within the act of living the story – late nights, lunchtimes, early mornings.

  Traditional autobiography is composed after the experience has passed. I wrote this book in the very panic of the experiences that inspired it. It reaches into memory and the past, but it is a constant rush into the darkness of the undiscovered. There was never an end in sight, until I landed in it. I was living a hectic life, and I presumed I would simply have a heart attack and die before the question of an end arose. That is not exaggeration – in fact, the urgency with which I pursued honesty is, in every sentence of this book, a preparation for death. Nevertheless, the story had momentum, because the annihilation of ambition and entitlement is a process that deepens. You think you’ve told an eviscerating truth about yourself, but all you’ve done is discover the lie that it was founded on, so you tell a new truth, and so on, until there are no guts left to rip out. And that is the end.

  1

  Two Working Days

  I

  On a rainy/sunny afternoon in mid-March 2007, I met Evelyn, a student, for lunch at Thomas Read’s, a pub not far from my office. She had been in New York the previous week to celebrate her twenty-ninth birthday.

  I got there early and ordered a bottle of red wine – the cheapest. The wine was warm and sour. I thought it might be corked, but what if it weren’t, and another bottle came that was the same? The pub was mildly busy. It’s a pleasant place to eat lunch, with big windows over Dame and Parliament streets, and you can watch the dense and aggravated flow of cars and buses and foot traffic. I chose a seat at the back, in the raised area, so we wouldn’t be spotted.

  At a quarter past one, Evelyn arrived. She is tall with dark brown hair, and sleepy and inconclusive blue-brown eyes. She has small breasts and broad shoulders, a tiny waist, and long arms and legs and fingers. She slipped easily into the scene, with the elegance, almost a shyness, of those women who can hide in dark restaurants, walk invisibly around the city, and sleep through afternoons in hotels.

  We finished the wine and ordered another bottle. It was as sour as the previous, but by then it didn’t matter. When my food came – cod and chips – I didn’t want to eat. My gut was a derelict mill. Some days it was hot and murky; on others, a dry wind blew through it. Nothing stayed put for long: I didn’t seem to process anything. I just ate and ran to the toilet. Over the previous six or eight weeks, I’d dropped ten pounds. My face had turned a shade or two greyer – I looked like a jar of old rainwater – and I had no energy. It wasn’t just the late nights during the week, though that was surely most of it. That January I’d been struck by glandular fever, and ignored it to save sick days for hangovers. Three months later the glands in my armpits were still like soft oranges.

  Evelyn got a plate of pasta and finished half of it with a scowl. She was living a secret life that involved two men, and I found her to be the most intriguing person I had ever met. She seemed a little shocked that she was twenty-nine.

  She talked about New York: museums she visited, restaurants and hotels. Her favourite spot was the Strand Bookstore; she spent hours in the section for rare and first edition books. She had one with her – a gift for me – and we sniffed it: that’s exactly what the whole place smelled like, she said. Her mother, who had never left Ireland before, was with her in New York. They took the subway everywhere, which terrified the mother: the lurking and shadowy implication of murder, the violence of crowds and ethnicity.

  By the time lunch ended, I was drunk again. We stood outside the pub for a moment and, to avoid being jostled by pedestrians, we stood very close together. Evelyn was drunk too. She tried to convince me to skip work and come with her to the Irish Film Institute, but taking the afternoon off would have meant quitting my job, and I wasn’t quite ready to do that. We casually discussed the possibility that we might meet later that night.

  I watched her disappear around the corner. Most women just walk away, but a few, like Evelyn, can vanish; and when they vanish, you watch the absence of them. I decided I needed quite a few cigarettes and a coffee and some chewing gum. At once I regretted my decision not to go to the cinema. I felt that if we’d stayed together for a few more hours, we would’ve got on a plane to Paris. In the little shop two doors down, I dropped change and must have looked like a clown, trying to gather it. I was surrounded by the naked calves of office girls and solicitors in high heels. It does not take too many naked calves to make one feel surrounded by them. I wanted to lick them. I often feel one drink away from whatever makes a dog hump women’s legs.

  The walk from Dame Street and Temple Bar to my office on Upper Ormond Quay takes you from a city – at least in daytime – that is clean and full of quirky cafés and small art galleries and oinking tourists to one that is grimy and dilapidated and full of lawyers and criminals and addicts orbiting the Four Courts. The Liffey is always murky and snotty, and if you are not feeling well it makes you want to vomit. And if the river does not make you want to vomit, then look along the quays, upon the sad and unambitious architecture of the city, and you will want to vomit. I got myself a coffee at a little soup place owned by two nice black-haired women, whom I suspect/hope are lovers. It is nice to have romance around. I spat out my gum and drank about half the coffee – I needed to be slightly alert – and smoked another cigarette, and by then my gut felt like an agitated beehive so I walked to the little crumbling potholed alley that lies behind my office building, where heroin addicts crawl harmlessly into shadowy garageways and shoot up, and I puked for a little while.

  The puking made me weak, and the walk up one flight of stairs to my desk left me breathless. I was very late. One of my bosses came out to glare at me – as though I would become so frightened by him that I’d never take a lunch again. I waved and burped. I sat at my desk and moved my mouse to wake up the screen. I entered my password. I watched as my email refreshed. Press releases, doctors complaining, spam, breaking news reports, on and on and on. Every hour of every day.

  I put on my headphones and hoped a text would come from Evelyn. One did. She said she wished we could’ve spent the afternoon together. I imagined her sitting somewhere in the back of a large empty cinema watching a subtitled Korean masterpiece with fighting and star-crossed lovers, and I went into the bathroom to masturbate. I had never done that before, and I went with trepidation. The problem, of course, is that once you find a comfortable spot, there’s no end to it. Pretty soon you go there just because you’re bored. Pretty soon it’s like a cigarette break. But I could not shake the image: Evelyn, on my lap in the back row of the cinema, holding onto the seat in front of her, watching the film, fucking me. I couldn’t sit down. The toilet seat was too disgusting, and the thought that anyone in my office had settled down there for a long and stinky shit was ghastly. The whole thing was ghastly (there was also a brown toilet brush on the floor), but I could not stop. Now I saw myself between her legs, masticating with bovine stupidity and single-mindedness. And she could not stop coming. I stood straight up in the tiny little room and yanked at myself for five minutes, until I was too exhausted to continue.

  I had a cigarette to catch my breath afterward, out in our grey little parking square. It was the only way I could breathe. Nobody ever cleans the space – though every week someone empties the big dumpster – and ten years or more of cigarettes and muck have accumulated in the corners. Every year the office forms a committee to clean it up – and every year the committee gets a different name – but nobody joins it.

  I left the office at five and walked toward a pub for a few drinks on my own; the friends I was
to meet weren’t coming in for a while. The cars on the quays had thirty minutes of gridlock to face before they reached O’Connell Bridge, which was less than half a mile away. Girls in suits and runners pounded up and down the footpaths. Tourists were lost – nobody came that way on purpose. The days were getting longer in a hurry. Summer was coming – there was no way back.

  I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. I took out a book – the one from Evelyn – and smelled it again: the scent of long-dead and forgotten authors. I imagined her on the floor, between high shelves, the tops of which you have to reach with ladders, surrounded by too many books to carry back to Ireland. She would buy them all. They would reappear in her bedroom. They would watch her slip into and out of her dressing gown. They would sleep beside her – she would read them until her eyes closed. At work, as she absent-mindedly filled out spreadsheets and calculated year-end whatevers, she would miss them, and daydream, and want to write her own.

  II

  Whenever I cover stories outside the office, I like to procrastinate in the city. Other journalists hail taxis while jotting down notes on their notes, or jog back to their computers while the memories are still fresh, but I take circuitous walks, window shop, browse bookstores. In April – it might have been May – I sat through a four-hour conference on healthcare in the Conrad Hotel. I had been out very late the previous night, so I hid in the back rows unshaven and smelling of sweet cheese and nicotine and sent texts to all the people I’d been with to blame them for my hangover. Now and again I’d write down something that was said by a man addressing the crowded room. He would say something like: The more money I make, the better patients feel. And everyone would clap like seals at a zoo.