Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

The enthusiasm of the tourists depresses me, because it makes me think of the tedium of wherever they are from. I think of a single civilization linked by grey intersections and manicured parks, and the world becomes inescapable — its inescapability is a fact.

There are too many days in the week. Too many weeks in the year. Too much space to fill. I would like to have lived for an afternoon only, born at the age of twenty, dead eight hours later, experienced life, all by myself, in a corner apartment with a high view of a busy junction, an ambulance route, a metro entrance, the back of a restaurant, warring neighbours in the corridors, a broken television, an empty bookshelf, and learned only sensitivity, because I would have missed nothing, gained the same experience of life, and would not have grown so addicted to existence that the thought of not existing gives me indigestion and bad dreams.

He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave. [Montaigne]

But I am like anyone else — fear and apprehension rule many of my hours. And addiction to the dispensable. Because it is more agreeable to be in bondage to the superficial, and have a thing or two in common with the man sitting beside you on the bus — whose acts are repetitions, whose memories are souvenirs, whose entertainment is palatable — than to become incomprehensible.

Never did a man prepare to leave the world more utterly and completely, nor detach himself from it more universally, than I propose to do. [Montaigne]

I want to peel my skin off with my fingernails, nail it down, batter it with a mallet until it is the consistency of stomach, and wrap it around every shaft and every curve and every angle of every letter in this sentence. I want this sentence to forgive me. Instead, it becomes a reminder of my incapability as a man.

This morning, while sitting on a bench in the grounds of Dublin Castle, eating one of the sandwiches I made at home, I took in some sun while other reporters chased doctors around: between the keynote speaker and the first panel discussion, there was a twenty-minute coffee break. The fraternity of eminent Irish cancer specialists had gathered — Hollywood, Reynolds, Lawler, Keane, Armstrong — to deliver updates and arguments to a banquet hall full of empty chairs and half a dozen journalists. After the keynote speech, the organizer addressed us all — thank you for contributing to one of the largest conferences in our history, he said. During the Q&A afterwards, a woman in a white suit with large, freckled, sunburned cleavage and unnecessarily high heels dashed around with a microphone, though all the questions came from one very annoying woman and one very annoying man — and they were not even questions, just noise. When it finished, I found a free bench in the courtyard. The doctors watched me leave with disappointment — how could they pretend to want to avoid the press, if the press was going to decamp? But it was not contempt for them — I have no feelings personally toward them — but for my own unpreparedness for death. And the loathing for the whole race that quickens in me, listening to its obsession with survival.

I am the dream of what I see, now, from a folding metal chair on my terrace: gigantic white clouds, moving fast toward the sea. Above the sea, they are slate-coloured, the colour of glaciers. Rooftops to my right. To my left, a cluttered dining room and kitchen. A dead strawberry plant that belongs to Helen. A gathering of pathetic vegetation, including an overgrown rosemary bush, and three pots of dirt. It is a Saturday, and the estate is empty. I haven’t heard a person walking all morning, or a car drive by. By now — it is noon — the neighbourhood kids should be drinking and smoking in my driveway. It is better to let them. Helen found herself a handsome boyfriend and is never around anymore. The other day she told me she plans to move out in a month — I live too far away from the city. Katie, who moved in briefly, has left to live with a musician friend in Smithfield. If she were here, she’d be playing the fiddle downstairs, in the room she slept in, which has no bed. I’m listening to Niel Gow to make up for her absence. My vision of a summer with two pretty twentysomething girls with funny accents sunning on my terrace is gone. The washing machine, from time to time, spins and drowns everything out. Now it is beeping. It is time to hang up my boring blue shirts.

Yesterday at the office I checked email: Clare had been overjoyed by the sight of a tall woman and a dwarf smoking cigarettes outside a pub — the dwarf was standing on a short wall, so they were the same height. Katie’s life in the city, playing sessions every night, was wonderful, but she missed the acoustics in my house. John was flying to Prague for a stag — that man surrounds himself with trouble. Some students had questions about assignments. At ten to one I ate my sandwiches, and at one I left the office for my work local, and read two stories by new students. I had a short chat with the bartender, a fat and wise and irascible and lazy man who is always stoned. At two, I was back at my desk. My list of things to do seemed longer, but only because I now had half a day to accomplish them. Outside, the weather changed, and the bright clear day was suddenly full of hail and wind and darkness.

The deputy editor, Mary Anne, who is two years younger than me, stared out the window contemplatively. It was almost time to go, and she — like all of us — would get caught in it. Sometimes she is pretty, and sometimes she is exceptionally pretty. She is pale with large blue eyes and her cheeks go bright red for no reason that I know of. She wears skirts and has beautiful legs, which move slowly and luxuriously under her desk when she is concentrating — and when I notice this happening I spend the next few minutes being the dream of her high patent-leather grey heels.

On the first warm day of the year, Clare and I took the Dart to Howth. The walk from my house to Howth Junction winds through two bleakly repetitive estates. I don’t mind the vulgarity of suburbs, only my imprisonment in one. I don’t hate peace and quiet, or children, just my proximity to them.

Clare is a constant anthropologist. Her mind is always decoding her surroundings. Sometimes this leads her to outlandish conclusions, and experimental solutions to the problem of suburbs, such as destroying them all. I sense that she is great company for herself, and that other people tend to get in the way. She walks twice as fast as me, and admits that she does so because she is small, and doesn’t like to slow tall people down.

I had hoped that we might have a bit of seaside to ourselves, but Howth was swarmed with day trippers, particularly foreigners: eastern Europeans, Italians, Americans, Germans. Outside the station, traffic was jammed in both directions. The bar underneath the station was overrun — people were sitting in windows and on rails; it was like a third-world train carriage. There was a posh market selling cheeses and jams and jewellery. I saw a French flag and heard some accordion music. It was as busy as a city street at rush hour, except no one was in a hurry. Everyone was in shorts and sunglasses. We headed toward the yacht club, an ugly yellow pentagonal building, to look at some of the sailboats docked in the marina. Sailboats are a kind of aphrodisiac to Clare. The fact that I crew for a boat in Dun Laoghaire — this is a remnant of my old life — makes the sight of them that much more alluring, since she feels that if only we could get our hands on a small dinghy, I could sail her around Ireland. But it was low tide, and the marina was full of sludge and stank of sea-fish. And a soccer game that seemed to have neither goals nor boundaries had usurped all the nice places to sit.