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.