Deadlock

I’ve been asked the same question again and again. Everyone wants to know the same thing: What was Terry Dean like as a child? They expect tales of kiddy violence and corruption in the heart of an infant. They imagine a miniature criminal crawling around the playpen perpetrating acts of immorality between feedings. Ridiculous! Was Hitler goose-stepping all the way to his mother’s breast? OK, it’s true, there were signs if you chose to read into them. At seven years old, when Terry was the cop in cops and robbers, he’d let you go if you greased his palm with a lolly. In games of hide-and-seek, he hid like a fugitive. But so what? It doesn’t mean a predisposition to violence is printed on a man’s DNA. Yes, people are always disappointed when I tell them that as far as I’m aware, Terry was a normal infant; he slept and cried and ate and shat and pissed and gradually discerned that he was a different entity from, say, the wall (that’s your first lesson in life: you are not the wall). As a child he ran around screaming that high-pitched noise that children scream. He loved reaching for poisonous substances to put in his mouth (an infant’s instinct for suicide is razor-sharp), and he had an uncanny ability to cry just as our parents were falling asleep. By all accounts, he was just another baby. I was the remarkable one, if only for my inabilities.

Before Terry arrived, our lives were dominated by illness. It amazes me now how little I knew about my own condition, and how little I wanted to know. The only thing that interested me were the symptoms (violent stomach pains, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness); the underlying causes seemed totally irrelevant. They had nothing to do with me. Encephalitis? Leukemia? Immune deficiency? To this day I don’t really know. By the time it occurred to me to get a straight answer, everyone who might have had one was long dead. I know the doctors had theories, but I also remember they couldn’t make up their minds. I can only recall certain phrases, such as “muscle abnormality,” “disorder of the nervous system,” and “euthanasia,” that made little impact on me at the time. I remember being jabbed with needles and force-fed pills the size and shape of swollen thumbs. I remember that when they took X-rays, the doctors ducked out of the way very quickly, as if they’d just set off a firework.

This all happened before Terry was born.

Then one day I took a turn for the worse. My breathing was short and labored. Swallowing took a century; my throat was a wasteland, and I would have sold my soul for some saliva. My bladder and my bowels had minds of their own. A pasty-faced doctor visited me twice a day, speaking to my anxious mother at the foot of my bed, always as if I were in the other room. “We could take him to hospital,” he’d say. “But really, what’s the point? He’s better off here.”

It was then I began to wonder if I would die and if they would bury me in the new town’s new cemetery. They were still clearing the trees when I was at death’s door. I wondered: Would it be finished in time? If I carked it before it was ready, they’d have to ship my body off to a cemetery in some distant town I had never lived in, whose populace would walk past my grave without thinking, “I remember him.” Unbearable! So I thought maybe if I held off death for a couple of weeks, maybe if I got the timing right, I could be the first body to transform the empty field into a functional cemetery, the inaugural corpse. Then I wouldn’t be forgotten. Yes, I was making plans while lying in wait for death. I thought about all the worms and maggots in that field and how they were in for a treat. Don’t snack, you maggots! Human flesh is coming! Don’t ruin your dinner!

Lying in bed as the sun slid through the crack in the curtains, I thought about nothing else. I reached up and threw open the curtains. I called out to people walking past. What’s going on with that cemetery? How’s the progress? I was keeping tabs. And it was good news. The trees were gone. Iron gates fastened onto blocks of stone were erected as the entrance to the cemetery. Granite tablets had been shipped from Sydney; all they needed was a name! The shovels were standing by. It was all go!

Then I heard some terrible news. My parents were talking in the kitchen. According to my father, the old woman who ran the local pub had had a massive stroke in the middle of the night. Not a little one, but massive! I dragged myself upright. What’s this? Yes, my father said, she was barely hanging on. She wasn’t just at death’s door, she was pounding on it! Oh no! A catastrophe! It was going to be a race to the finish line! Who would be first? The old biddy was nearly eighty, so she’d been practicing dying for a lot longer than me. She had nature on her side. I had nothing but luck to hold out for. I was too young to die of old age but too old for infant mortality. I was stuck in the middle, that terrible stretch of time where people can’t help but breathe.

The next day, when my father stopped into my room to check on me, I asked how the old woman was traveling. “Not good,” he said. “She isn’t expected to last the weekend.” I knew I had at least another week, maybe ten days in me. I hit the bed. I tore the sheets. He had to hold me down. “What the hell’s got into you?” he shouted. I let him in on it, explained that if I were to die, I wanted to be the first in the cemetery. He laughed right in my face, the bastard. He called my mother in. “Guess what your son’s been saying to me?” Then he told her. She gazed at me with infinite pity and sat on the edge of the bed and hugged me as if she were trying to stop me from falling. “You won’t die, honey. You won’t.”

“He’s pretty sick,” my father said.

“Shut up!”

“It’s best to prepare for the worst.”

The next day my smug father told the men at his worksite what I’d said. They laughed too, the bastards. At night the men told their wives. They also laughed, the bitches. They thought it was adorable. Don’t children say the cutest things? Soon the whole town was laughing. Then they stopped laughing and started wondering. It was a good question, they decided: who would be the first? Shouldn’t there be a ceremony to commemorate the inaugural corpse? Not just a regular funeral. A real show! A big turnout! Maybe a band? The first burial is a big moment for a town. A town that buries its own is a living town. Only dead towns export their dead.

Queries on the state of my health poured in from all directions. People came in droves to see the exhibit. “How’s he doing?” I heard them ask my mother. “He’s fine!” she said tensely. They pushed past her into my bedroom. They had to see for themselves. Dozens of faces passed through my bedroom, peering at me expectantly. They came to see me lying prostrate, motionless, dying. Regardless, they were all very chatty. When people think your days are numbered, they’re really very nice to you. It’s only when you’re trying to get on in the world that they bring their claws out.

That was only the adults, of course; the kids of the town couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me. That taught me something worth noting: the healthy and the sick are not peers, whatever else they might have in common.

Apparently everyone hassled the old woman too. I heard they crowded around her bed looking at their watches. I couldn’t understand why they’d taken such an interest. Later I learned bets had been laid. The old woman was the favorite. I was the long shot. I ran at over 100 to 1. Hardly anyone bet on me. I guess no one, not even in a morbid game of Guess Who’ll Die First, liked contemplating the death of a child. It just didn’t sit well with anyone.

“He’s dead! He’s dead!” a voice shouted one afternoon. I checked my pulse. Still ticking. I pulled myself up and called through the window at old George Buckley, our nearest neighbor.