Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

Tuesday afternoon (the office), 21 October

Saw a dead man at lunch today. He had a heart attack on James Joyce Bridge, just outside the Vespa dealership — a little shack on the south quays called Scooter Island, where the mechanics walk around with black hands and black faces, counting cash out of their pockets. The dead man had been walking along the footpath outside Scooter Island, and he wanted to cross to the north quays. He asked for help crossing the road. Mark, the owner, was outside on the telephone and helped him. Mark asked if he was all right. The man collapsed, and a few people knelt beside him and rang an ambulance. While they waited, the man said two names. I didn’t hear the names — I had only just arrived — but Mark did. The man continued to speak, but his voice was too weak for anyone to hear him. His mouth made shapes. The ambulance pulled up behind us, and the man died just as the paramedics got to him. Mark was very shaken, and he was talking to everyone, telling his story, inch by inch, exactly how it had happened, pointing to the spot where he first saw the man, where they crossed the road together, where he collapsed, just how quickly the ambulance arrived, and the last words he said to the man as the paramedics took over. I wanted to be sympathetic, but I had ten minutes left to get back to work, and a fifteen-minute walk, so I wrote a list of problems on a piece of paper — loose steering; back right blinker out; new front tire; engine needs service and cleaning; cutting out — and handed it to him, while he was telling a woman who witnessed it all that the man was trying to tell him something. His head was in his right hand. The phone was in his other. I’ve never seen anything like that, he told the woman.

Wednesday night, 22 October

Got home tonight at nine-thirty. Did not read on bus. Listened to John Coltrane, and watched the lights of the city go by in my window, and in the reflection of my window. In that moment I could breathe again. Then the lights — the neon Chinese takeout signs, the off-licences, the pubs, the shops, the offices with lights still on — dissolved to the rear, and the bus climbed north, into the suburbs, and I had to change the music, because the landscape had ruined it. I am never content, but I approach contentment through longing, through disappointment.

When the city was behind me, I sent Walter, my cousin in Vienna, a text telling him I had news for him. He wrote back: I am intrigued. Then I sent him a long text explaining that I was going to become a father, and that he would be an uncle. It feels strange to tell anyone that, if only because it is the first ounce of reality in my life.

At home I found a letter from the Arts Council — they are giving me some money to go to Vienna. More money than I have ever received for my writing. I sent Walter another text: And another thing — I’m coming to Vienna in January.

Thursday night, 23 October

I sat down in a café on Baggot Street and opened a book of nonfiction by Saul Bellow. Evelyn had ordered it from the Strand for my birthday, but it had only just arrived. It could have been a year ago — the force of nostalgia was so strong I had to send Evelyn a text saying I was thinking of her. Even though it is over, completely, we communicate once a week or so, often on Saturday or Sunday mornings. I ask her if she got lucky, and she tells me everything. I have no interest in touching her. We have had as much of each other as two people can — we used each other up. But I am still in love with her desire. She watches pornography online and sticks her vibrator in herself for an hour. She sends me texts explaining what she has just done, or is just about to do.

I read from Bellow’s essay about Dostoevsky and Paris: that for Dostoevsky the revelation of bias is a step toward truth. That liberalism is inherently deceitful: the principles of good compel us to lie.

Saturday afternoon, 25 October

Clare went to the beautician’s yesterday to get waxed. A tall beautiful Polish girl waxed her, with beautiful, soft hands and long fingers. She told me about the experience as I undressed her.

Last year, in the weeks before Christmas, I lived on two hours of sleep a night. I was still teaching, writing, and going to work. In the three months before that, I’d been at the very same thing, if not so condensed — teaching every night of the week, drinking afterward, driving my scooter around drunk and singing songs to myself to stay awake, drinking on Fridays and Saturdays to four or five in the morning, working all day Sunday to get ready for classes. The more fatigue struck at me, the harder I struck back. I bludgeoned exhaustion with drinks and work. I was not trying to kill myself. If I were ever going to lie, that is the one I would tell: that the one truth left on earth is death — that dying is the carnal expression of honesty, a moment of tangible truth. But my onslaught was not a veneration of death. It was a veneration of disillusionment. I pushed myself because I wanted to pour pure poison into my history, kill it, wrench the hypocrisy out. And live with whatever was left, as the most honest man on this earth — I had already been the most dishonest. But an appreciation of death — a real one — is a softer, calmer equation. It is not explosive. It requires deliberation. It is a high, calm fearlessness. It hates all infatuation. And in the face of exhaustion, it tires. It needs sleep.

Tuesday afternoon (the office), 28 October

When I told Evelyn that Clare was pregnant, she cried for five minutes, not heavily, and she did not even know why she was crying. We were in Thomas Read’s, the place where we had had our first lunch together and she had given me that book. After five minutes she said she was happy for me.

Tuesday night, 28 October

I came home tonight, instead of going for drinks — even though it was my last Tuesday class — because there was something very definite in my thoughts. A sentence I wanted to get out. But it is almost eleven and I cannot stay awake.

Thursday night, 30 October

The week of teaching is finished. Three more weeks of heavy work, then I coast into Christmas. The chest pains are milder, and fatigue is starting to have its counter-intuitive effect on me again. The more I am down, the more fiercely I claw myself into existence.

The drive home from work, in the rain, was uneventful, which was a surprise. Last year at this time, Halloween weekend, driving home on a Thursday night, there were large bonfires and drunk teenagers on all the open fields. On the last stretch to the entrance of my estate, the Hole in the Wall Road (a name that tells you what the area used to look like), a bunch of kids ambushed me with bottle rockets. I saw them line up along a fence and light the fuses. The rockets blazed across the road in front of me with blue and orange and green flames coming out of them.

Saturday morning, 1 November

Clare left for China this morning, and there is a palpable emptiness in the house. And in that emptiness, that sudden difference in the pattern of days, I desire to wind this up.

The morning is bright and cold. I have opened the blinds upstairs and am sitting in pure white light. Last weekend the clocks changed, and now I remember the image that started this.

It is the beginning of December now. A few weeks ago Clare and I found out our child will be a boy. We went for her twenty-week scan at the Rotunda, and there he was. The woman who performed the scan took measurements and captured photos. She said everything was looking good. I asked if she could tell the sex. She gave me a bit of a lashing: That doesn’t matter to me , she said; all that matters is the health of the baby. But can you tell? I asked. She sighed, and said it was a boy, then changed the subject. I asked again, about five minutes later, because I did not feel convinced that she was convinced, and she said yeah in the way old Irish ladies say it — breathing inward. The doctor later told us that this woman is a bit notorious for whipping men into shape at these scans.