OK, I admit my revolution was a farce, but it was a deadly serious farce. If people laughed or went along with my ideas just to see what would happen, perhaps it was because underneath their chuckling, they saw a grain of truth. Perhaps not. Anyway, I know utopias don’t work. Just for society to be a little more fluid and less hypocritical, that was really the sum total of my goal. Now I know it wasn’t at all modest; I was reaching for the moon. Still, while churning out millionaires, I continued to soothe the hip-pocket nerve of the electorate and somehow managed to convince people that not to listen to me was a threat to the fabric of society.

Let’s make no bones about it. Society was mutating. You could see it happening, everywhere you looked. Someone even opened up a cannibal-themed restaurant in Surry Hills. I’m telling you, the whole of Australia went crazy. The national obsession became reform. I even think they understood that it wasn’t the ideas themselves but the idea of the ideas, the idea that we might as well restlessly innovate and wherever possible obliterate our slavish connection with the past. Why? Because the past is always the worst thing happening to the present at any given time.

What delusion and denial came over me at this time of my life! The chemotherapy seemed to be working; the cancer cells were all shrinking nicely. My own death began to recede. I felt so good, I didn’t even mind the cruel cartoonists who exaggerated my mouth so it was almost the size of my whole head. They say power corrupts- and how! The me I have always loved, despite my phony self-deprecation, was being mirrored in the eyes around me. It was an egoist’s fantasy! My spirit was flying! I was so caught up in my own reformation I didn’t realize I was losing the very ingredients that had led me to success- relentless negativity about the human spirit, cynicism and pragmatism about the human mind and how it is constrained. Success had thrown me off balance, and as a result I started having faith in people, and worse- I began to have faith in the people. All right. I’ll say it. I should’ve listened to my son, who told me by a look and tone of voice, if not in actual words, “Dad, you’re fucking it up!”

And where was my dutiful son during all this? Let’s analyze him a little: if the first order of business in assuring self-perpetuation is to be greater than the father, the unexpected possibility that I, formerly the embodiment of failure, might suddenly achieve fame and fortune crystallized Jasper’s hostility. The higher I rose, the more impossible his mission to supersede me became. In short, my success put him in mortal danger.

I remember very early on, just after the millionaires’ party, he called me on the phone.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said when I picked up.

“Hello, son,” I said back, knowing how to hit him where it hurts.

“This is going to end badly. You must know that.”

“You coming to my wedding?”

“You’re joking. Who would marry you?”

“Caroline Potts.”

“Your brother’s old girlfriend?”

Son of a bitch! Would it kill him to be a little more generous? OK, over the years I had repeatedly molested him with mental violence, but I hadn’t done it out of some perverse compulsion, only out of love. He could at least be a little supportive of me in my one single moment of happiness, and not mention my fucking brother. Though it wasn’t just Jasper. Every single news article about me, every single one, referred to me as Terry Dean’s brother. They just wouldn’t let it go. The fucker had been dead for twenty years!

I wanted to make an angry appeal to the Australian people to forget about him, but memory simply isn’t that pliable. So I had to grin and bear it, even when I saw Caroline get a dreamy look on her face every time Terry Dean was mentioned.

When Jasper turned up at the wedding, he stared at Caroline as if trying to understand the psychology of a suicide bomber. I didn’t see him for a long time after that. He avoided me completely in the chaos and disorder of those days in the limelight. Never once did he congratulate me or even make mention of all my reforms, interviews, debates, speeches, and public coughing fits. He said zilch in regards to my obviously haggard and beaten appearance from all the chemotherapy, and as I began, ever so slightly, to fall out of favor with the people, Jasper ceased phoning me altogether. Maybe he saw that I was suffering from a bad case of hubris and was going to pay the penalty. Maybe he sensed the inevitable fall. Maybe he was ducking for cover. But why couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t I duck for cover?

When several editorials suggesting that my head was swelling popped up, I should’ve taken the first space shuttle out of there. And when they made accusations of “extraordinary vanity” just because I carried a mirror in my briefcase (when the eyes of the nation are on you, you can’t help but worry there’s spinach in your teeth), I should have known that one wrong step would make them lynch me with all their collective souls. I did not, as some people suggested, have a persecution mania. No, I had no such mania for those persecuting me. If anything, I was crazy not to see them. Hadn’t I said it all my dumb life: that the manner in which people fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them? That the denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and often they take their loved ones with them?

Never once did I think of Caroline or Jasper. If I have made one unpardonable error in my life, it’s to deny, all the time, that there are people who might genuinely love me.

Chapter Four

One day I turned up at Jasper’s work. I had not seen him in many months, not since my wedding, and not since I had subjected myself to medical science. I had not even told him I had cancer, and I thought by telling him in an inappropriate setting like his workplace I could avoid a scene. He was sitting in his office cubicle staring out the window on the opposite side of the room, looking as if he were waiting for humans to evolve to the next level. As I watched him, I had the strange idea I could read his thoughts. They came in a whisper into my head: Why is it that as soon as we shed fur and learned to stand upright, we gave up evolving, as if smooth skin and a good posture were everything?

“Jasper,” I said.

He spun around and looked at me disapprovingly. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got the big C.”

“The what?”

“The big cliché.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got cancer,” I said. “It’s found a crawl space in my lungs. I’m fucked.” I tried to sound blasé, as if I had had cancer once a month for my entire life and now- what a hassle- I had it again.

Jasper opened his mouth, but no sound came out. We did not move. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The wind rustled papers on his desk. Jasper swallowed. I could hear saliva slide down his esophagus. We remained motionless. We were like humans before language, Paleolithic men in an office cubicle.

Finally he spoke. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jasper understood what most people don’t: that the dying still have important decisions to make. I knew he was asking me if I was going to ride it out to the end or beat death to the punch. And then he gave me his view. I was touched.

“Dad, please don’t die slowly and painfully. Please commit suicide,” he said.

“I’m thinking about it,” I snapped, both relieved and irritated he’d said the unsayable.

That night Jasper and Caroline and I sat down to dinner as a family. There was so much we had to say, we couldn’t say any of it. Jasper eyed me the whole time. He was looking to catch a glimpse of Death red-handed. I am almost certain now that Jasper and I can read each other’s minds, and it is far worse than speaking.