But this discovery was made too late to cruel my mission. My nihilism had successfully liberated the Prime Minister. At 11.32pm, in the ballroom of Canberra’s Hyatt, the balloons fell. My man had won.
Astonishment muted the effect. Among the party supporters, there were no tears, hugs, or hollering, and only modest applause. It’s not that they weren’t happy. They were in shock, and presumably distracted as they calculated the weird implications of the victory.
Then I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. I turned. It belonged to a police officer.
‘Toby Beaverbrook?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re under arrest.’
‘That took you a while.’
In a way, I was relieved.
In the police station’s holding cell, I could hear the lobby’s television. The Prime Minister had taken the stage. Normally, the victor’s speech would joyously compete with the crowd’s euphoria. But not that night. That night, the speech went eerily unchallenged.*
[* ‘Mate, did you ever stop and think that you were fucken date-raping our democracy?’
‘I was giving the people what they wanted.’
‘But the people didn’t vote for you, mate. And they didn’t know what you were up to. They didn’t have the facts, ’cause you were a weird, sly prick.’
‘But they loved the result.’
‘Not the point, mate.’
‘Tell me, Garry: did the people ever know what was in their Chiko Rolls?’
Crown me, I thought. I’ve just bested the King. What I’ve cleverly done here, of course, is to recall Garry’s celebration of the Chiko Roll, and his indifference to the mysteriousness of its insides, while invoking the old saw about democracy being like the making of a sausage — generally satisfying, but you don’t want to know how it’s made — and in so doing, exposing his hypocrisy. And all this compressed in one line.
Okay, now it turns out Garry wasn’t bested, just really irritated. ‘Write this down exactly, you cunt. If you can’t see the fucken difference between what’s inside the bloodstream of a democratically fucken elected Prime Minister and the insides of a massive spring roll, then you’re a bigger cunt than I thought.’]
Sunshine and lollipops
America’s disintegration happened quickly. Or maybe it happened slowly, and then all at once. In the few months it’s taken me to write this memoir, it’s transitioned from democracy to fascism to anarchic slaughterhouse. In his constitutionally defiant third term, Trump transformed the Big Apple into America’s 51st state, renamed it ‘New Trump City’, and installed Ivanka as governor. The hymns and gavels and marble pillars once gave American democracy the appearance of solidity, but it was just one long miracle of consensus, more fragile and contingent than most knew. Now it had fully shit the bed.
When The Machines came, cable news dismissed them as a liberal conspiracy, much like the existence of hurricanes and the frontal cortex. The President followed. Governors asked for help, but none came. Mayors asked for help, but no dice. Well before my experiment, Uncle Sam had been accelerating the sickness on a massive scale. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,’ Yeats wrote, but there is no centre, that’s the fucking point. Everything’s contestable — vaccinations, the virtue of Nazis, the existence of The Machines.
A few days before Obama’s inauguration, The Boss and Beyonce had played at the feet of Lincoln in the Washington Mall. Now a septum-less Kid Rock was the Mall’s house band, playing five nights a week and sharing the space with a thousand refrigerated trucks stuffed with bodies.
I confess that America’s dreams of exceptionalism were my dreams, too, and The West Wing just one part of my pretentious enchantments. Last night, I read Garry another part — Walt Whitman. ‘I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.’
But he didn’t, did he? Walt didn’t sound them over the roofs of the world, because he didn’t have a fucking Facebook or Instagram account. And if our shoeless vagabond — who found poetry in all flesh, who preferred curiosity to judgement and who nursed the dying in the Civil War — if he could publish his songs of himself online, they’d be ignored for posts about how Bill Clinton once raped an orphaned lamb and the lyrics of Green Day prove it.
It was Mark Zuckerberg who profoundly and catastrophically liberated the barbaric yawps and sounded them over the roofs of the world. And these yawps aren’t warm and earthy, man, they don’t prefer curiosity to judgement or sing the body—
‘Shut the fuck up, Toby, and get to the bit where you talk about how insane you were.’
‘I was literally about to do that, Garry. I was just getting there, and now you’ve fucked my momentum. Can we remove this one interjection?’
‘No.’
‘Please?’
‘Fuck no. In fact, you’re gonna put this up in the main part of the page and not in that tiny fucking writing down the bottom.’
‘Garry, please. I had a good thing going on here.’
‘Put it in, then get the fuck on with it.’
Okay. Fine. I’ll expedite my confession: I succumbed. I yielded to pious frustrations. I became bitter, nihilistic, and criminal. But we really had spent too long debating water polo and pedos.
So here I am. In Sunshine. And it’s okay. Garry’s fucked my book, but I’m still grateful for his company. And in the time it’s taken to write this much, it’s become far safer inside. The world has experienced ‘exponential degradation’, according to Paul Krugman — in his last column before he vanished.
We have another theatre class tomorrow, and Penny’s suggested that I defuse tensions with Goblin beforehand ‘for the health of the troupe’. He has a point. There’s a chance, if everything becomes safer, that we’ll perform our version
