Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

Tuesday night, 14 October

Everything I did today was substandard. I drove my Vespa without passion. I wrote the news without the slightest contempt for myself. My little class of top talents, which I finished teaching an hour ago, is bored. I sense that they hate me for boring them.

Wednesday morning, 15 October

I ate two very old bananas, grey on the outside but a little yellow on the inside, still, and drank some coffee. I had a cigarette on the terrace and read from a book a student gave me, Sartre’s What is Literature? My student has underlined and annotated the book with an energetic seriousness that suggests she thinks she’s actually having a conversation. As though she and Sartre are sitting in a café and he is saying these things and she is either nodding contemplatively or waving her hands at him in disgust.

Wednesday afternoon (the office), 15 October

Mary Anne, Nicola and I had a long lunch with wine. It was the first time Mary Anne has spent her lunch hour outside the office since she started ten months ago. Normally she gets soup from the place next door and goes right back to work. We went to a Tex-Mex place near Jervis Street. I ordered a cheeseburger, and the waiter had to run to the shops when I asked for mayonnaise and mustard. The thought of ketchup on a cheeseburger enrages me.

I spent the money I had hoped would get me through the week — starter, main, wine. Nicola wanted to go on drinking through the afternoon; we all did. And for a moment we lived in the thought of that possibility; in that instant we believed our lives had the kind of freedom that mattered, and we saw ourselves crashing down some alleyway at midnight promising never to return to work. But we are back in work. Mary Anne’s cheeks have gone purple, and she is swooning under the weight of a headache. Mary Anne has the finest shoe collection I have ever seen — all very high heels, all patent leather. I would like to have her feet in my lap some day. She has a sweet and unassuming face, but the way her heels go maddeningly bam-bam-bam from her desk to the copier makes me imagine her walking on men’s testicles.

Thursday night, 16 October

It is almost midnight. I have finished my last class for the week, and I’ve hurt one student’s feelings by telling her I’m sick of her grammatical mistakes, her lack of effort. So I am thinking of her at home, hating me. I’m thinking of every night to come from now until Christmas, of the money I ought not to be spending, of the mortgage. I feel as though I’m in a crowded house, and I’ve been in it for a year, having long, important semi-conversations over loud music, and people have been dancing on the furniture, but now it has gone a bit sour, and I want to tell everyone the party’s finally over, shove them out the door, turn the music off, and sit in a large chair in the darkness.

Friday morning, 17 October

Friday! Catching bus in ten minutes. Drinks tonight with Henrik and Mary Anne. Telling Henrik about the baby.

Saturday midday, 18 October

Up now a few hours. Tired but not hungover. Henrik was happy for me, but for about sixty seconds he was distressed. We were drinking in Neary’s, at the table by the door. After saying, This is a surprise, this is definitely a surprise; I’m not going to lie to you; it’s a surprise, he said: But if you’re happy, I’m happy. Later he told me that, after all the hard living, heavy drinking, womanizing, recklessness, sleeplessness, misery and self-evisceration, impregnating a stable, unselfish civil servant with a PhD, and being happy about it, might be considered a sell-out. We drank to that. Mary Anne showed up after an hour, having stayed on at the office late as usual. She wore a red dress and fishnet stockings and black high heels — she had worn these things to work. We instantly began a conversation in which I confessed a fetish for patent-leather heels, and a particular fondness for hers that sometimes caused me to stare at her in the office. The comment passed without response, but now I like to think that every morning she may glance a little longer while slipping them on, admiring herself, and know that I am watching out. Perhaps this will create a conversation of gestures between us. Mary Anne looks sophisticated but has the accent of an unsophisticated country woman. She has nice shoulders and gigantic blue eyes.

The Helens arrived — black-haired Helen, who used to dance on my dining-room table and spend all morning washing her hair, and red-haired Helen. It was about nine. Mary Anne went to eat dinner with her boyfriend. The Helens wanted to go somewhere fun where we could smoke. It was chilly — winter is coming along nicely now — so we went to Bruxelles and stood under a heat lamp. The evening had been good. A year ago, I would have been out until four in the morning, but I was yawning and stayed out only because the Helens would have been disgusted if I left before midnight. And I wanted nobody else to show up. Four was enough. A year ago, four would have been a great failure.

I had to sleep upright in bed beside Clare because I had indigestion and, though I had not felt drunk before I lay down, the spins. I woke myself up snoring once or twice. I had a dream that I was on a train, lying down, and watching out the window. City after city went by, Berlin, Paris, Prague, Krakow — I have never been to Krakow — and finally Vienna. It was winter in those cities, and very bright. I saw nothing but buildings and glare. When I woke, I felt as though I had had a vision of the life that has barely escaped me. Not the cities — I can visit any city I like — but the solitude of living in them on my own, and moving on with a suitcase, subsisting but not thriving, working but not saving, slowly falling out of touch with everyone.

Monday morning (early), 20 October

My alarm was set for six a.m., but I woke ten minutes early to the sound of heavy rain. Clare slept through it. For sixty seconds, it sounded like basketballs. Then it was finished. I sat in bed listening to the sound of my heart race — the stress is very bad on Monday mornings. Then the alarm went off, and Clare stirred. She’d had nightmares. It was the movie we watched late last night. I got up and put some clothes on, and have come up to the dining room, and suddenly the sky is clear — still dark above the houses, but orange-pink toward the city. The moon is out, and the light of it is glowing on the wet roof of the building opposite. Low clouds are racing out to the east, away from the city and illumination, toward dawn.

Monday morning (later), 20 October

Got distracted by laundry, and thwarted by an inability to fight through sleepiness. Had to take the dry stuff off the clothes horse, fold it, hang up new wet stuff, take a shower, get dressed, make some coffee, and now I am back, and have spent about ten or fifteen minutes on the web, reading stories that will be out of date by lunchtime. Somehow, in all that, I’ve lost the guts of an hour.

But I have not eaten — just a cup of strong coffee and a glass of water. I need some toast, or an apple, because if I don’t eat I will vomit. But the toast will take another few minutes, and the last apple is rotten. When things are going poorly, and I lose an hour on bullshit, lost time seems like a catastrophe. I am so filled with self-hatred because of it, sitting here now, that I would vomit on top of myself just for punishment — just so I’d lose the rest of the morning having to clean myself up. So I do not eat.

This morning my heart is going rapidly, and I can’t take a full breath. It will be like this all day. I hate myself today; I hate the whole human race. I am coursing with rage at the thought of every man and woman alive.