Here Goes Nothing

by Steve Toltz

‘Was I staring?’ ‘Like you’re a lip reader waiting for me to say something.’

I shared a narrow bedroom with a sad-eyed foster sister, Emma. We used to cry at night together—they called us ‘soblings’.

I shrugged it off. Being called names has never particularly bothered me. I find insults amusing if they aren’t true, and a free life lesson if they are.

‘Ernie!’ Dr Fitzsimmons was standing at the bedroom door. ‘Don’t say things like that. You are all beautiful children.’ I thought: why does everyone on the planet earth have to be beautiful? What kind of value system is that?

It was also Beverly who often called me an old soul. I never took it as a compliment. To accuse a child of wisdom beyond their years is to imply they’re abnormally devoid of youthful enthusiasm and naiveté. I mean, what’s so great about saying to a kid, ‘Hey, old man…’?

Meanwhile, Dr Fitzsimmons always consoled us about our fucked-up biological families by saying, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ That made no sense. It’s pretty easy to understand why the devil is wily—but why must God be too?

We were both sentenced to community service in an aged-care facility in Ryde, where we witnessed the daily tragedy of people who’d come to the end of an unforgettable journey only to have completely forgotten it.

‘You’ve got to be careful what tricks you pick up in adolescence. You know what I mean?’ ‘No.’ ‘Skills are even more dangerous than habits.’ ‘How so?’ ‘When you go out in the world, not excelling at anything for years on end, you crave the satisfaction of a job well done.’

I said I also believed that life was meaningless but not worthless, and how that distinction had been enough to get me out of bed in the morning. I believed that gullibility was akin to a disability and should be treated accordingly. And that if everything happens for a reason, those reasons are chance, luck and chaos.

That there was no such thing as a reliable human witness and that all mystical visions were self-generated, which is why Buddhists didn’t get visions of Christ, Christians didn’t see the Buddha, and there’s not a single solitary instance recorded of a rabbi visited by Mohammed. Mainly, I believed that the very people who think they have special powers lack even the ordinary ones.

About those first years, I’ll say this: for the first time in my life I felt sorry for guys who weren’t me.

‘I’ll tell you what happened to you,’ he said, dully. ‘Oxygen deficiency triggered hallucinations. Release of endorphins gave you the calming effect. The light isn’t real, it’s just an ophthalmologic phenomenon created by the optic system. It’s a common reaction to mental and physical stress—women during labour often report the same symptoms. If you lie down, with a one-hundred-millilitre injection of ketamine, I can show you the same bright tunnel of light. You heard of REM intrusion, Gracie? When the mind awakens before the body, sensory information overloads the visual cortex.

What percentage of your proudest moment was you play-acting with your transitory self?

Name a single life choice not born of imitation.

What’s great about being decisive when you also have bad judgement?’

Moreover, I disliked when anyone tried to give me knowledge non-consensually;

If this had been a school concert, and one of these guys was your kid, you’d go home afterwards and sell his instrument. After the gloomy crescendo, Gracie applauded. The two doctors smiled triumphantly at each other. Another win for subjectivity.

He put his hand over my mouth and pinched my nose. What happened next is difficult to put into words. Think of a sea mist that’s entirely black. Now picture that black mist blooming inside you. Now consider how it would feel to change places with a shadow. Then visualise your heart circling a drain. Now imagine you’re a plant at the moment it’s pulled up by the roots. Following that, envision being a dawn in reverse and your lungs being erased atom by atom while your head is lowered into a pit of mud. Now conjure up an immense all-consuming silence. It is difficult to put into words, but you can see where this was going, and where it went. Reader, I was dead.

The more I know, the less I understand. It’s something I’ve always felt. Knowledge is not worth knowing. It’s possible to be over-informed. A full engagement with the world feels like a retreat from reality.

The whole discourse now seemed like someone’s overreaction to someone else’s overreaction to a hysterical response to an innocuous comment. She thought: surely the wisdom of crowds would not be a phrase if someone tried to coin it today.

‘It’s as Confucius says: “One dog barks at something and a hundred bark at his sound.”

your self-perception would fill your field of vision.

‘The reverse side also has a reverse side.’

‘Spilling secrets of the heart is like draining cerebrospinal fluid from the brain to reduce swelling. A life-saving procedure, to be sure, but it’s messy.

We are such needy creatures that attention, she knew, if properly administered, can provoke feelings of affection—even love.

‘What are you deceased sons-of-bitches even good at?’ ‘You tell me.’ ‘Being infuriated, squeezing moral significance from a stone, walking around with unrealistic ideals you can’t ever live up to and hating yourselves for it.’

She was making up traditions on the spot. It was ridiculous, and she knew it. ‘Now. I want the parents to stand in front of me.’ She slapped the father’s face, then the mother’s face, got them both to admit their worthlessness as parents in training, and when they cried, she applied their tears to the baby’s forehead. ‘Tears and laughter are the only common language between all people on earth.’ Everyone liked that. Whoever had a tear was welcome to moisten Jack’s precious brow.

She laid towels and pillows on the tiled kitchen floor, filled hot-water bottles, lit candles and told herself to trust her body, but then thought: Really? The same body that encourages me to eat a tub of ice-cream in one sitting?

You can be trapped in movement, just as inside a house. Come to think of it, she thought, this is how Homo sapiens has always spread out, beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago, from Africa to every corner of the earth. We were never really intrepid adventurers—all our magnificent migrations across the planet were just us running for our lives.

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by unceasing self-regard and a dopamine-addiction feedback loop. Remember the brief period when we thought multitasking would improve the human race and when low self-esteem was considered one of the western world’s greatest problems? We married our phones and waited for the external hardware to consummate the relationship. We evolved into a distracted species when our main task was watchfulness! Our bleakest doomsayers were too optimistic.

The truth was, I was embarrassed: as dazzling as it was to haunt the living, it was contemptible too. The ego it took to manifest on earth was reprehensible. Why make such a big song and dance about one individual destiny, even if it happened to be mine? My claim of ownership over Gracie’s life was mortifying. To remain in a place where I no longer materially existed was pathetic. It’s always humiliating to admit your utter selfishness. Every accusation that ‘you only ever think of yourself’ is absolutely true. This is an uncomplicated matter. Ask the question: cui bono? (who benefits?), and if the answer is: Me! I do! Only me!—then stop right there, whatever you’re doing.

Things would get better, she decided. The human race would start again. This time we’d work out how to be in a community without having in-group paranoia and hostility for the out-group. We’d nail how to become mindful without a fixation on the self. We’d rebuild while resisting the temptation to develop a personal brand.

She thought people were confused about whether life was fleeting or not, fearful that we may never reach a logical conclusion, frustrated to realise that God could not appear in human form because the pressure of what race, gender and sexual identity They’d pick would send the human race into an interminable grievance fit. Otherwise,

I had realised we were just walking barometers of other people’s opinions, I told her. How often I used to misinterpret people’s silence as judgement! It had occurred to me that all my self-criticisms were innuendo and hearsay, everything I’d ever pretended to be was for someone else’s benefit, and if people were ever looking at you, it was actually to see if you were looking at them, and if they were paying you attention, it was only to gauge your level of attention. We craved approval so unreasonably, we didn’t remove the labels others put on us, even though they were barely adhesive…