“Thank you!”

So that was my speech, for which I should have been lynched a hundred times over. But I was making them into millionaires and I could do nothing wrong. Even that stupid, incoherent, somewhat obvious and insulting speech of mine won their approval. They lapped it up greedily. Applauded like crazy. They’d never heard anything like it. Or maybe they had heard only the excited tone of my voice. Either way, I got away with it, and the only thing that night that overshadowed me and my crazy announcement was an impromptu speech by Oscar Hobbs, who wandered spontaneously up to the microphone and announced that he was getting married to the woman of his dreams- Anouk.

The habits of a man living alone for a lifetime are disgusting and difficult to break. If no one is around to hear it, a falling tree may make no sound, and neither will I make my bed. But Caroline moved into the labyrinth, and now I had to cook! And clean! And share the responsibilities! Honestly, I’ve never known how people do married life. I mean, when I go from the bedroom to the bathroom or the kitchen to the bedroom, the last thing I want to do is stop to have a chat.

Marriage was just one of many changes, though. How can I describe the most critical period of my life when it comes to me as a series of photographs taken from the window of a speeding train? Did I throw up octopus salad at my wedding or Anouk’s? Was it me or Oscar standing still at the altar like one carved out of wood? At whose wedding did Jasper and I get into a heated philosophical argument about thank-you notes? And I don’t know whether it was my newfound success or my new life with Caroline, but for some reason I was overcome with very dangerous wishful thinking and, going against everything I believed in, I began a struggle against death- I started fighting the cancer.

I let them suck out my blood; I peed into jars; I was bombarded by X-rays, buried in coffinlike beeping tunnels for CAT scans and MRIs, and underwent a combination of intravenous high-dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy which left me exhausted and breathless, dizzy and light-headed, with nausea, headaches, diarrhea and constipation. I had tingling in my hands and feet. I experienced a continuous noise in my ears which all but drowned out my interior monologues.

The doctors told me to rest, but how could I? I had a new wife and a country to pervert. So I dealt with all this the best I could. To protect my skin from the sun, I wore a hat and sunglasses. I avoided foods with a strong smell. I shaved my head so no one would notice my hair falling out. Blood transfusions gave me the pick-me-up I needed. Unfortunately, chemotherapy treatments sometimes cause infertility. Fortunately, I didn’t care. Neither did Caroline, and as we went back to Dr. Sweeny’s again and again, together, I remember thinking that she might be the first person who would take a bullet for me, if one came and I didn’t want it. Look, I’m not saying our relationship is as passionate as the relationship with the love of your life is supposed to be. It isn’t, but I can’t hold it against her. I am not actually the love of her life anyway; I am a stand-in, a surrogate for my brother. There was something complete in the way I was compared to him in the eyes of the nation and perhaps now in the bedroom.

So you’ll understand why I can’t tell you anything definite about those six months when my memories feel like botched memory implants. I don’t even remember the election, only that on every street corner were posters of my face peering out with a look of unambiguous rebuke. More than the television and newspaper coverage, nothing was as violent an affront to my former anonymity as those ubiquitous posters.

The unlikely result? I scraped in. That’s the wonderful thing about democracy: you can hold public office legitimately while still being despised by 49.9 percent of the suspicious eyes on the street.

Most people overseas think the capital of Australia is Sydney or Melbourne, but what they don’t know is that in the 1950s the village idiots opened their own village and called it Canberra. For every sitting of Parliament I traveled with Caroline to this dull city, and it was there I became (I can scarcely believe it myself) dynamic. I was a dynamo. The slugs of Canberra had a repellent force, a force that served to channel my routine chaos and disparity into a vision. I became a visionary. But why wasn’t I chased out of there with pitchforks and quicklime? Simple answer: the Australian people were diligently sending in their dollar coins, every week another twenty millionaires were made, and they had me to thank. This financial lure got people all caught up in a shared hysteria, which made them receptive to the ideas that fell thick and fast from my mouth.

I addressed unemployment, interest rates, trade agreements, women’s rights, child care, the health system, tax reform, defense budgets, indigenous affairs, immigration, prisons, environmental protection, and education- and, shockingly, almost all my reforms were agreed upon. Criminals would be allowed the option of going into the army instead of being locked up; cash rebates would be offered to those who could demonstrate self-awareness, and the stultified and fearful would be taxed higher; any politician caught breaking just one election promise would be punished in a back alley by a guy named Bruiser; every healthy person would have to look after at least one sick person until he died or got better; we would pick people indiscriminately to become prime minister for a day; all drugs would be legalized for one generation to see what happened. Even my most controversial idea was taken up: rearing any child in a religious belief, freezing the child’s mind when it is most vulnerable, would be treated as child abuse. I said all this and people said, “OK, we’ll see what we can do.” It was unbelievable!

Of course, as a public figure with a national audience for the humiliations that were previously the entertainment of a handful of close enemies, I had my critics. I was called every synonym of the word “insane” and worse. In Australia, the worst insult you can slander a person with, and the easiest way to dismiss every fiber of their being, is to call them a do-gooder. A do-gooder- let’s be clear- is a person who does good or wants to do good. Let’s be clear about this too, just so there are no misunderstandings: in the eyes of the slanderer, this is definitely an insult, not a compliment, and to be a do-gooder is something shameful, unlike in other places, such as heaven, where it’s considered an asset. Thus my critics resorted to this “insult” in order to diminish me. It was only the ugly sneers on their faces that stopped me from thanking them.

Mostly, though, people were on my side. They liked it that I went to the heart of the matter- that my principal reforms were in the areas of loneliness, death, and suffering. At least on some level they seemed to understand my main idea: that we become the first truly death-based society. They accepted that in order to have a proper perspective on life, every single person in the land had to come to terms with the fact that death is an insurmountable problem that we really won’t be solving by relentlessly making people- so that the name Smith can perpetuate throughout the eons- nor by hating neighboring countries, nor by chaining ourselves to a God with a long list of dislikes. I half managed to convince people that if instead of singing the national anthem we started each day with a little funeral service for ourselves, if we all resigned ourselves to our inevitable decay and stopped seeking a heroic transcendence of our unfortunate fate, we might not go as far as Hitler, who was so perturbed about dying that he tried to avoid thinking about it by killing six million Jews.