He records less about himself and his own quotidian life and, increasingly, as the journal goes on, more of his reflections on the current state of the world. He wrote, “Whether temporary or not, I can’t say, but for some time now the culture of every man for himself has so triumphed that any concern for the common good is referred to a psychiatrist. Emotionally we live in the darkness of the shadows of ourselves. We are always cold and, for the most part, we don’t know why.
“I keep looking for the footprints of the small steps forward man was taking, but they have vanished. The Enlightenment is over. It doesn’t take a genius to see this. I am not, by any means, the best of the ones who used to believe. I am just the last. Fundamentalism, be it religious or of the market variety, is everywhere and everywhere there is a reaction to complexity, an attempt to ignore the contradictions and conundrums of our existence. People crave the simplicity of easily assimilable black-and-white paradigms and any blurring, any ambiguity, is viewed with hostility.”
This is the sort of thing he was writing. Occasionally, the entries are preceded or followed by a clipping from a newspaper. This one has above it an article about a fire in an institution for the intellectually impaired. Nine intellectually impaired residents were incinerated. An inquiry found the government guilty of neglect. The sprinkler system was found to be faulty. It hadn’t been examined or maintained for years and nine men, nine of those least able to care for themselves, met a horrible death. There is a scribbled comment next to the clipping: “It wasn’t neglect. Governments have relinquished their responsibility for the provision of health and welfare and education to the user. It is ‘user pays,’ and so these users paid.”
16. I thought you could lead me to him. So I sat in my car and watched anxiously as you carried the box you’d put in your car to the front door of the little terrace house with the pebble path and rang the doorbell. I should not, of course, have expected Sam to open the door. If he was staying at someone’s house then it was likely that that someone would be the one to open the door. But, even so, when it wasn’t Sam my heart sank, and it sank still further when I saw it was a woman. She was a woman I had never seen before, and I felt sick. This was what came from acting on hunches and following people. You got to know things you didn’t want to know. It didn’t make any sense. Sam had female friends and even a couple of ex-girlfriends, but I knew or at least had met them all. This wasn’t one of them. I was thinking that he couldn’t possibly be seeing anyone else, not yet, and then I realized that Sam wasn’t there at all and that I had followed you to a place that had nothing at all to do with him.
I should have been relieved by this realization. But I wasn’t because it was immediately overtaken by what, sitting there behind the wheel of my car, I saw next. What I saw was you embracing and kissing her.
I was outraged. There was no telling what I would have done had I been able to get out of the car in time. After all that you had put my father through, not to mention all the others with your insufferable obsession with Anna, you then have to go and cheat on her. “You bastard! You fucking bastard!” I shouted on my father’s behalf from inside my car. No one could hear me.
One in four leaves a note. This means three in four suicides do not leave notes. So it’s more likely that a suicide won’t leave a note than that he will. Most notes seem like parodies of notes anyway. They can embarrass you with their banality. If your last act of communication with the world was as banal as some suicide notes, you’d want to kill yourself too. But what if the note is so long we don’t even recognize it as a note? You think I’m hysterical to think he intended to die. You’re too motivated to think otherwise. You want, you need, to think it was an accident. Gina is similarly motivated, but she’s not as far gone as you. She thinks he meant to. She hasn’t said it in so many words, but I know that’s what she thinks.
Depression is at the throbbing heart of most suicides. His first mistake was to treat his own depression himself. The records show things clearly enough. He was treating himself with Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. Presumably because it wasn’t working, he switched to one of the more classic antidepressants still being used in this country at that time, Nardil, which isn’t an SSRI but a member of the family of drugs known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors, or MAOI. In changing his medication, he started taking Nardil too soon. The level of SSRI was still too high in his bloodstream, causing a fatal synergy with the MAOI. That’s what killed him. It’s called “serotonin syndrome.” This is not his daughter’s speculation twelve years after the fact. That’s what the coroner’s report shows. He didn’t wait long enough after finishing the Prozac before starting the Nardil.
Who should have known better the half-lives of these drugs than a practicing psychiatrist? Who should have known better the toxic and even fatal consequences of getting it wrong? Who should have known better the foolishness of treating your own mental illness? Come with me to the Jewish section of the Springvale Cemetery. We’ll stand in the rain with a handful of small stones, and you can tell me it was an accident.
Perhaps when he wrote this it was also by accident:
“This is the single greatest achievement of the last twenty-five years, better than Prozac or Zoloft—the enslavement of millions of people, under the aegis of globalization, to the tyranny of an unregulated market and an unprotected economy, and calling it a blow for freedom.
“From every corner they come to the city. And in every city from every corner they come, day after day—unknowing, broken, and heartsick moving things, to look for the work that is no longer there, the steady, adequately rewarded work. But it is gone. It has gone to countries where toil is dirt cheap. Do not be mistaken, do not be blinded by the glare of the everywhere-lights, cruelly never not on. There is no warmth to them. It is a cold and brutish age.”
17. One in every four leaves a note. The last time I saw my father it was late at night. I sat on his lap, and then I went to get a glass of water. I should’ve stayed. I should never have gotten off. When was the last time you saw him, and why wasn’t it later than that? Gina doesn’t think it was an accident. She thinks it was intentional. That’s what she thinks now that I have told her what I know. She didn’t say so, but I know that’s what she thinks. She can’t remember anymore exactly why she didn’t see him again either. She tries not to think about it, but when I look at her over dinner I know that the question lingers with her still. That’s why three weeks after I last saw her, she sent me a check for the money he’d left with her. As much as I could use it, you know I can’t keep it.
My sister won’t accept that it was intentional. She says that the coroner’s report only indicates that his reasoning was probably impaired. The facts accumulate until there are enough of them to constitute a history. The history, like all histories, supports conflicting views.
I thought you would lead me to Sam, so I sat in my car and watched anxiously as you carried a box to the terrace house with the pebble path. You rang the doorbell, the door opened, and from my car I saw you kiss the woman who opened the door. I didn’t know the woman. I’d never seen her before. She was pretty. Too young to be your mother, and you have no sister, but she let you in as though she knew you. I waited, almost apoplectic, while you disappeared inside. The door was left open and in a moment you came back carrying empty pots and pans, which you put back in your car. Then you went back to the front door, where she met you and closed the door behind her so that the two of you were standing outside on the doorstep. You locked your arm in hers, her one free arm. The hand of her other arm gripped a cane. Even with the cane she walks with a heavy limp.
I know this because I watched the two of you walk, arm in arm, slowly and with difficulty twice around the park, stopping only to feed some crusts from a bag to the sparrows. And it was only when you were halfway around the first time that I began to cry. I wasn’t angry anymore. I knew who this woman was, and I knew that Anna knew who she was and why you were there. It was An
gelique, the woman you called Angel.
I’ve nearly called you so many times. Sam is missing still, and I am still missing my father. So it seemed like the perfect time. Especially now, because I know what to do with the money Gina sent me. It’s hers. I don’t know how badly injured she was or whether, as my father would’ve predicted, her incapacity was exacerbated by a health-care system that had both eyes on the bottom line rather than on her.
I think that, next to my sister and me, you probably miss him most. The three of us are what’s left of his life’s work. Especially you. How did it go? “If you save a life . . .” Will you help me get in touch with Sam? You tend to know where he is when nobody else does.
I want to know if you will help me with something else. I’d like to read you the last entry in Dad’s journal. Its meaning is far from clear, but given your closeness to him and your expertise, you perhaps have a better chance of knowing what it means than anyone else. It might mean nothing at all. I don’t know.
The pleasure lives there when the sense has died.
The pleasure lives there when the sense has died.
Sired, hired, inspired, fired, mired, tired.
I reasoned, but it will not rhyme.
There are some for whom the pleasure cannot live when the sense has died.
What do you make of it?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their help in various ways (sometimes unknown to them), the author wishes to express his gratitude to: the Australia Council for the Arts, the Bevilacqua family, Andrea Brookes, Craig L. Brookes, Sarah Chalfant, Nikki Christer, Barbara Cirignano, Virginia Fay, Doug Ferguson, Simone Ford, Rick Goldberg, David Grace, Julie Grau, Carmen Gurner, Deborah Gurner, Fred Gurner, Jack Gurner, George Halasz, Liv Perlman Handfield, Toby Handfield, Trevor Hildebrand, Mark Irving, Jo Jarrah, Wendy Koleits, Dorothy Kovacs, Susan Lehman, Mark Lock, Peter Marfleet, Liz Marley, Lena Martin, Ross Martin, Martine Murray, Zoë Pagnamenta, Janine Perlman, the Prostitutes’ Collective of Victoria, Glen Ramos, Nos Sacks, Saud A. Sadiq, Rod Saunders, Suzie Sharp, Ted Woodward, Andrew Wylie, and Brent Young.
An early version of Part One appeared in Granta, and thanks are owed to Ian Jack, Liz Jobey, and Sophie Harrison for their help in its preparation.
Harry Perlman deserves to be singled out for the critical attention he lavished on the many incarnations of this book over the years of its creation. His close reading and thoughtful advice proved invaluable, and cannot be repaid in words alone.
Elliot Perlman was born in Australia in 1964. He lives in New York City and Melbourne, Australia, where he works as a barrister.
Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity
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