Next morning I woke in phase three is it? Depression. Dark sky, dark thoughts in a dark world. Unwilling to move, scared of everything. It was depression, or else I was getting the ‘flu. I’d looked up Carolyn’s—Alison’s house on Google Earth and there it was, a big place right on the harbour, looking across to the city. Could have been on the moon. I’ll never get there, not ever. My book, The Black Hole War, had had the last word, when two revered scientists had convincingly proved that “everything in our physical world—this book, your house, yourself—is actually a hologram projected from the farthest realm of space.” Space that is flying apart at an increasing rate of acceleration.

      “Tell me this, Max,” I asked the dog, who now clearly saw me as God. “Let’s say you’re living in hell. You want to die. So you kill yourself, but nothing changes. You’re still where you were. Does that mean you’ve gone to Hell?”

      I took my Black Hole War book into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid—I’m well trained—and a rat was swimming in the bowl. A sizeable rat, noisily struggling to climb the porcelain wall. I’ve read they can swim well over a mile, but those walls defeated him. Should I flush him away? He’ll swim back. If I get him out he’ll help clean up the mess outside, he’ll feed the dogs and they’ll help even more. I lifted him out with the toilet plunger and he scuttled away. It’s his world now.

      Later I was sitting on the toilet, crying instead of reading or crapping, when the phone rang.

      “Is this the bloke in Canada?” A leisurely Okker voice. Young, a young man from up North, likely a banana-bender.

      No point in demanding How did you get this number?

      “I seen you on the Web. Jeez! Reckoned I was the only one around. What the bloody hell’s going on, mate?”

      “Holy shit! This is so great. Congrats on still being alive, mate! So who the fuck are you?”

      Sid Stosur, he told me and laboriously spelt it out. I explained particle physics, quantum mechanics, string theory and the Geneva supercollider in words of one syllable, and he got the gist, that some egg-heads in Switzerland had screwed up and set off a nuclear explosion that spread through the world and killed everybody.

      “Cast your mind back to May First,” I said. “Anything funny happen to you?”

      He thought. “Start of May I did have a spot of bother with a brown snake. Me arm’s still swollen. But now I’m all on me own. There’s bugger-all left here.”

      “You’re not on your own, mate. I’m in Canada, but there’s a girl in Sydney, fifteen, a real dish—I used to date her mother. She would love to meet you. Why don’t you drive down to see her. Beggars can’t be choosers, you won’t do better than her.”

      “She’s really a looker?”

      “Gorgeous. Blonde, blue eyes, tits out to here. You got a pen?”

      Her located one and I gave him her address, half-regretfully her phone number, plus a few tips on what she likes. “Her mum used to go wild if you scratch her back, I bet Carolyn does too.”

      “How’m I gunna get down to Sydney? It’s a thousand miles, mate. All the cars are out of petrol. I can’t just take the train, you know!”

      Really? I hadn’t thought of that; it just might work. Nah, not with this bozo. I said try any petrol station with just-filled-up cars, but then he started whingeing there aren’t any out in the bush where he lives.

      “Ride a horse, ride a bloody bicycle to Sydney,” I said, then remembered a line from the great movie Roadhouse that should do the trick.

      “And she can suck-start a Harley.”

      It worked. He was on his way.

     

                       ***

      My depression was thickening. I could hardly eat and was only milking Dolly because she’d stand on my front garden and make such a din. My food was crap anyway. The raccoons had got into the convenience store and trashed it, my favourite cornflakes all over the floor. Rats, and every kind of flying and crawling thing feasting on the dry stuff, the rock-solid bread. How much past-date yoghurt can you eat? Kubler-Ross was right about depression; you don’t miss out on it. But she omitted a key stage, maybe the last one: madness. When you lose a cat you keep seeing its ghost around the house. Ditto a wife. A dead wife talking cheerfully to a dead cat. Puttering about, muttering as always while looking for her keys, or energetically washing up. You sort of hear her singing to herself when she doesn’t know you’re there.

      But now I could her hear singing loud and clear when I knew she wasn’t there. I’d lie in bed exhausted, waiting for her to yell up the stairs, “Come and get it!” I’d keep looking behind me. Her steps mounted the stairs and she handed me in a cup of tea with a chocolate biscuit melting on the saucers. “You’ve been writing for hours,” she said, “Thought you might appreciate a cuppa.” I reached for the tray, which melted into air. Going mad, losing you grip on time is... discouraging.

      Depression is no fun, that feeling that you’re removed from things, from people, even the dead, separated by a thick wall of glass that keeps growing thicker. You could call out for help, bang on the glass, but what would be the point?

      And that other unfunny thing, when your head won’t leave you alone, not even in bed. O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful, so the expense of spirit in a waste of shame doesn’t sound like such a bad use for the hands, when you can neither stand, nor lie, nor sit, convinced, with Huxley, that this world is some other planet’s Hell.

      Writing this out didn’t make it go away either. It doesn’t, as I’d found years back when I wrote a couple of novels, one judged too short for publication, the other too long. I couldn’t read now, and with a houseful of CDs and DVDs there was nothing I wanted to hear or watch. Maybe Roadhouse, or The Quiet Earth, or Smash Palace, but I couldn’t be bothered climbing out of bed to dig for them.

      I made an effort. I got up and milked Dolly, fed half the bucket to the giant sow, who was now down to one piglet. Could I grab the squealing little guy, kill him and slice bacon rashers off his rump? Never: I’m no survivalist. I forced down a sort of breakfast with the blender running on frappe so I couldn’t hear my dead wife shuffling about. Get out of the house. Move into another?Took Max for his run, and tried some fun stuff: together we flew a fancy fish kite from Riverdale Park East. Played dog Frisbee, not very successfully; he could catch but then took it for a run. I should get a model aeroplane, one of these radio-controlled jobs and fly it around. Or a Formula One racing game where you sit in front of your screen and work a steering wheel.

      Already the day was blazing hot and I didn’t like the look of the pools at Regent Park and up the hill at Broadview—blackened copses floating about—so Max and I swam in the Don, which was now running clear and clean.

      I found my old ukulele and tried to play “Up a Lazy River” which got Max howling. Drove the truck down to Leslie Street and picked tomatoes and beans from the public garden lots. Did all the right things. The city was mine, everything laid out for me. And no, I wasn’t lonely, never have been.

      But nothing was fun.. Survival only, and what’s the point of surviving if there’s nothing and nobody to survive for? Or to impress with what a great job I was doing? Time to wrap it up. Time to check out. At night my life runs by me in black and white.

      And guilt. Not survivor guilt, just plain guilt. There’s another stage you left out, Doctor Death. When you have no future, everything you did wrong and didn’t do right crashes down on you like a wave. I should have loved my wife. God knows I tried, I did my best impression of a loving hubby for twenty-seven years, because I knew it was the right thing to do. For her. My philosophy goes beyond First do no harm. It’s Be Kind.

      Just that.

      Cost me my next job as ethics correspondent’s, that philosophy. But always I was kind to my wife Diana. My life was spent trying to make her happy, supporting her through her ambitions, fears, insomnia, “complaints.” Often it felt like nursing a sick dog.

      But first I had to go and lose my brilliant car writer’s job, just because one of my columns pointed out the obvious, that our car-based society is destroying any possibility of becoming human—that, and my crashing a Dodge Viper I was road-testing with excessive derring-do. I had simply been overtaking a Hummer at, admittedly, three times its speed when its texting driver let it wander to the left, leaving nearly enough room between it and the guardrail. But not quite. The damn Hummer was just too wide for safety. The Viper dug in and rolled end-over-end in a shower of plastic, and that wonderful 8.4 litre V10 truck engine flew out up the road. The Hummer and its idiot driver were fine. She claimed the scratches on her insurance and I got to know the Sunnybrook Hospital nurses rather too well. A road tester without a driving license is less than useful, and I made things worse in print.

      I burned my last bridge with what became known as the “Hummer rant.” When the editor refused to print it I read the piece on my website and it somehow went viral on U-tube. The monstrous diesel-guzzling obscenity, I told the electric universe, is an ideal armoured vehicle for the ever-fearful American. In all the years since that bold bunch of Saudi morons scored a lucky hit on two New York buildings, Americans have lived in a state of high alert, terrified that someone might hurt them. Not that anybody ever had, except for that all-American survivalist who blew up the Oklahoma civic building, and of course all those other Americans who carry guns to protect themselves from all those other Americans.

      And the most frightened of all, I wrote—and this had been shown experimentally, with their freakishly sensitive startle response to stimuli such as a picture of a spider—are the Republicans. We left-wing freakos don’t need an army vehicle, we’re happy to drive a foreign car, or in my case a bicycle, and feel no urge to bomb other countries. Let’s see, since the Russians won WWII (my job took wings at this point) America has in safety bombed nineteen countries and overthrown fourteen governments: South Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq...Who’s up next?

      Why in hell should we Canucks, we proud “unarmed Americans with health care” encourage our mad neighbour’s right-wing righteous leanings by building and selling them the nearest thing you can buy to a tank? Our conservative Prime Minister, once his government had bought a share in GM, which discontinued the line, had a brilliant idea: why not us? Jobs jobs jobs. But why? And why do we keep making guns, guidance systems for missiles, robot arms to weaponise space? Hell, why keep selling them our dirty tar-sands oil? We burn to get it out so they can burn it. Why? Are we planning to buy ourselves another, cleaner planet with better weather? In retrospect I think I may have been having a nervous breakdown, some male menopause thing.

      This rant did not sit well, except with my readers, who became hugely excited, pro and con, mostly con. I hadn’t known how many Americans read the Toronto Star. The owner called me in to see if I really was losing my mind, and told me that bad-mouthing Ontario’s car owners and our car manufacturing base, and Alberta’s reason for existence, was pissing off his advertisers big-time. Ontario lives or dies by the car, his paper by the ads. He had me clean out my desk and take some “quiet time” then called me at home to ask me to come in and show the new motoring correspondent the ropes. It was a she, a hockey-playing United Church minister with an engineering degree who adored cars. Never met her.

      So then the Ethics Correspondent job, and after that, my head buzzing with Right and Wrong, I taught at a community College, a decade-long nightmare that makes me wince just to remember that I did it. I pretended to teach and they pretended to learn. Complaints came in at once that I was giving F’s, instead of the standard C, to students who failed. And nearly all of them did fail; a huge problem because, in an attempt to keep English the language of instruction rather than, say, Cantonese, the college had decreed that until a student passed English, he or she could not graduate. So here in my office stands a snarling kid with A’s in every subject and an F in my class, and he won’t leave. Some cry.

      I suggested that the Department head check out that string of A’s each of my failures claimed: English is the only subject impossible to cheat in. I knew, from their entrance letter, exactly how poorly each student wrote, and whenever one handed in a grammatically sound essay, I assumed it was written by a friend (not that the foreign students seemed to have any Canadian friends) or, more likely, had been bought online. I won no supporters by offering to give an A to whoever actually wrote it.

      “But surely,” my boss squawked, red-faced, “They’re writing better because you’ve taught them to write better!” I laughed, another mistake. The union kept them from firing me. To be dismissed with cause, the joke went, you’d have to be caught actively having homosexual sex with a student in front of the class. But the day early retirement became possible I was out without even cleaning up my desk, happily swopping lots of money with no time for lots of time with no money.

      It was only later that I realised, and admitted to myself that some, perhaps many of the students with their A plus averages really had earned them, in the non-English subjects, business strategy, business ethics (Ha!), micro-and-macro economics, investment counselling—all that crap. I had just seen too much cheating: final exams with the invigilator grading papers while wary students thumbed their cell-phones under the desk, the new models with the screen. Or removed the traditional baseball cap and thoughtfully inspected its lining.

      In a calculus test I had even spotted one of my students improbably wearing his baseball cap the right way round, and had wondered whether he had equations written under the brim, so it could be consulted in situ. I was right, but the offending cap could not be accepted as evidence, because it was his possession, not mine.

      I had not been kind to my students. Many were to be trusted. I was guilty of what I protested so loudly about.

      Apparently the Globe’s reason for offering me the ethics spot all those years before was to demonstrate how forward-thinking and “with it” they were becoming. An atheist writing an ethics column! For the first year I gave what I thought sound advice on the stream of ethical dilemmas that choked my inbox. I showed how easy life becomes, once you drop the absurd Ten Commandments: Worship only me, don’t swear, take Sunday off, be nice to your parents, don’t kill anybody, or screw your neighbour’s wife or even think about it, ditto his stuff and don’t lie to him.

      Okay, I wrote, but these break down to a single rule: “Be kind.” Killing people is not kind to them, though letting them kill you is not kind to yourself. Killing animals is not kind but humans can’t digest grass, so we have to. Be kind.

      Cheating on your wife is not kind to her, you or your lovers. (I had found this out early in my marriage.) Lying is never kind. Never! All advertising is based on a lie, so encouraging it, or letting yourself be influenced by reading ads is not kind to yourself or others. Therefore tax breaks for advertising should end. Lotteries are not kind to losers or winners and should not continue. Neither should computer games, credit card points, having children you don’t really want, not in a heating-up world. If you accept “Be kind” you’ll see this. And vote only for people who see this. (Already I was in trouble with my boss.)

      But the religious crazies moved in. How dare I not Believe? was their theme, Where’s your Faith? their mantra. Faith? The willingness to pretend to believe things you know can’t possibly be true? Never had any. (Still don’t, though all the world’s dead and I’m writing this.) Their challenge was always the same: Tell us how we can know what’s right and what’s wrong if you don’t believe in God? Without the Ten Commandments and God’s will, how can there be right and wrong? You say playing the lottery and killing our enemies is wrong. Without the word of the Bible (or the Koran or whatever old book they worship) who has the authority?

      “I do,” I wrote, which encouraged a splendid spate of letters, emails, and horns blaring outside my house. Nobody seemed to have read on, to where I explained that I have the authority because I say so.. And so does your dad when he told you not to go round killing people (assuming he did.) And your mum.

      Nonsense! They snorted all over my computer screen. Sacrilege! Just what we’d expect from a depraved Darwinian. I thanked my readers for their interesting comments, quoted a few, and struggled to explain in clear English that “right” and “wrong” are not words like “rape” and “randy.” Logically (that deadly word) a “should not” statement like “You should not kill him” can’t be derived from any factual statement such as “He’s a real prick” unless you’ve already accepted an ethical rule such as “You should not kill people just for being real pricks.” No “is” implies “ought.”

      This sort of talk sailed over my opponents’ heads, and though my editor was delighted by all the attention and emails, he soon became concerned by the number of the religious righteous who threatened to cancel their subscription, and then did. Advertisers, too, were complaining, especially after my insistence that advertising is wrong (because I say so). I expanded my views to What is Wrong with the World: Overpopulation. (Pretty obvious: The planet can’t keep supporting eight billion humans.) Even this caused a flurry of objections: what am I saying: should we kill off half the people? No, my next column explained, just stop having the unwanted ones. Nearly one in two kids born is from an unintended pregnancy, and most of those kids are not wanted, not loved, and only going to cause misery and trouble. What?! My faithful readers demanded. You’re not suggesting eugenics?! Hitler this, Hitler that and so on.

      My editor was feeling the heat.. He lost interest in rewriting my columns to soften their impact, and gave my job to a professional agnostic.

      Agnostic! But how could you not know for certain that there’s no bearded old man who lives in the sky and always has trouble with money? And that if there is some inhuman collection of molecules and electrons that wrote the Bible, that’s not God? Or that threatening to fry you in Hell forever for not doing what he orders sounds more like the Devil than God. That’s what my final column would have said, had it appeared.