A Fraction of the Whole

You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom. I can handle the enthusiastic brutality of the guards, the wasted erections, even the suffocating heat. (Apparently air-conditioning offends society’s notion of punishment- as if just by being a little cool we are getting away with murder.) But what can I do here to kill time? Fall in love? There’s a female guard whose stare of indifference is alluring, but I’ve never been good at chasing women- I always take no for an answer. Sleep all day? When my eyes are closed I see the menacing face that’s haunted me my whole life. Meditate? After everything that’s happened, I know the mind isn’t worth the membrane it’s printed on. There are no distractions here- not enough, anyway- to avoid catastrophic introspection. Neither can I beat back the memories with a stick.

All that remains is to go insane; easy in a theater where the apocalypse is performed every other week. Last night was a particularly stellar show: I had almost fallen asleep when the building started shaking and a hundred angry voices shouted as one. I stiffened. A riot, yet another ill-conceived revolution. It hadn’t been going two minutes when my door was kicked open and a tall figure entered, wearing a smile that seemed merely ornamental.

“Your mattress. I need,” he said.

“What for?” I asked.

“We set fire to all mattress,” he boasted, thumbs up, as if this gesture were the jewel in the crown of human achievement.

“So what am I supposed to sleep on? The floor?”

He shrugged and started speaking in a language I didn’t understand. There were odd-shaped bulges in his neck; clearly something terrible was taking place underneath his skin. The people here are all in a bad way and their clinging misfortunes have physically misshaped them. Mine have too; my face looks like a withered grape, my body the vine.

I waved the prisoner away and continued listening to the routine chaos of the mob. That’s when I had the idea that I could pass the time by writing my story. Of course, I’d have to scribble it secretly crouched behind the door, and only at night, and then hide it in the damp space between the toilet and the wall and hope my jailers aren’t the type to get down on their hands and knees. I’d settled on this plan when the riot finally took the lights out. I sat on my bed and became mesmerized by the glow from burning mattresses illuminating the corridor, only to be interrupted by two grim, unshaven inmates who strode into my cell and stared at me as if I were a mountain view.

“Are you the one who won’t give up his mattress?” the taller of the two growled, looking like he’d woken up with the same hangover three years running.

I said that I was.

“Step aside.”

“It’s just that I was about to have a lie-down,” I protested. Both prisoners let out deep, unsettling laughs that sounded like the tearing of denim. The taller one pushed me aside and yanked the mattress from my bed while the other stood as if frozen and waiting to thaw. There are certain things I’ll risk my neck for, but a lumpy mattress isn’t one of them. Holding it between them, the prisoners paused at the door.

“Coming?” the shorter prisoner asked me.

“What for?”

“It’s your mattress,” he said plainly. “It is your right to be one who sets it on fire.”

I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he’s so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.

“I’ll pass.”

“As you like,” he said, a little disappointed. He muttered something in a foreign tongue to his cohort, who laughed as they left.

It’s always something here- if there isn’t a riot, then someone’s usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don’t have to feel ashamed of our day-to-day unhappiness. Here we have someone visible to blame- someone wearing shiny boots. That’s why, on consideration, freedom leaves me cold. Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a stinker.

Where to begin my story? Negotiating with memories isn’t easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized? One thing’s for sure: not writing about my father would take a mental effort that’s beyond me. All my non-Dad thoughts feel like transparent strategies to avoid thinking about him. And why should I avoid it anyway? My father punished me for existing, and now it’s my turn to punish him for existing. It’s only fair.

But the real difficulty is, I feel dwarfed by our lives. They loom disproportionately large. We painted on a broader canvas than we deserved, across three continents, from obscurity to celebrity, from cities to jungles, from rags to designer rags, betrayed by our lovers and our bodies, and humiliated on a national then cosmic scale, with hardly a cuddle to keep us going. We were lazy people on an adventure, flirting with life but too shy to go all the way. So how to begin to recount our hideous odyssey? Keep it simple, Jasper. Remember, people are satisfied- no, thrilled- by the simplification of complex events. And besides, mine’s a damn good story and it’s true. I don’t know why, but that seems to be important to people. Personally, if someone said to me, “I’ve got this great story to tell you, and every word is an absolute lie!” I’d be on the edge of my seat.

I guess I should just admit it: this will be as much about my father as it is about me. I hate how no one can tell the story of his life without making a star of his enemy, but that’s just the way it is. The fact is, the whole of Australia despises my father perhaps more than any other man, just as they adore his brother, my uncle, perhaps more than any other man. I might as well set the story straight about both of them, though I don’t intend to undermine your love for my uncle or reverse your hatred for my father, especially if it’s an expansive hatred. I don’t want to spoil things if you use your hate to quicken your awareness of who you love.

I should also say this just to get it out of the way:

My father’s body will never be found.

Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge, or murder my father. His mystifying behavior left me wavering right up until the end. He had conflicting ideas about anything and everything, especially my schooling: eight months into kindergarten he decided he didn’t want me there anymore because the education system was “stultifying, soul-destroying, archaic, and mundane.” I don’t know how anyone could call finger painting archaic and mundane. Messy, yes. Soul-destroying, no. He took me out of school with the intention of educating me himself, and instead of letting me finger-paint he read me the letters Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo right before he cut off his ear, and also passages from the book Human, All Too Human so that together we could “rescue Nietzsche from the Nazis.” Then Dad got distracted with the time-chewing business of staring into space, and I sat around the house twiddling my thumbs, wishing there was paint on them. After six weeks he plopped me back in kindergarten, and just as it started looking like I might have a normal life after all, suddenly, in the second week of first grade, he walked right into the classroom and yanked me out once again, because he’d been overcome with the fear that he was leaving my impressionable brain “in the folds of Satan’s underpants.”

This time he meant it, and from our wobbly kitchen table, while flicking cigarette ash into a pile of unwashed dishes, he taught me literature, philosophy, geography, history, and some nameless subject that involved going through the daily newspapers, barking at me about how the media do something he called “whipping up moral panics” and demanding that I tell him why people allowed themselves to be whipped into panicking, morally. Other times he gave classes from his bedroom, among hundreds of secondhand books, pictures of grave-looking dead poets, empty long necks of beer, newspaper clippings, old maps, black stiff banana peels, boxes of unsmoked cigars, and ashtrays full of smoked ones.

This was a typical lesson:

“OK, Jasper. Here it is: The world’s not falling apart imperceptibly anymore, these days it makes a loud shredding noise! In every city of the world, the smell of hamburgers marches brazenly down the street looking for old friends! In traditional fairy tales, the wicked witch was ugly; in modern ones, she has high cheekbones and silicone implants! People are not mysterious because they never shut up! Belief illuminates the way a blindfold does! Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you’ll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!”

Each class was equally bewildering, covering a diverse range of topics. He tried to encourage me to engage him in Socratic dialogues, but he wound up doing both parts himself. When there was a blackout during an electrical storm, Dad would light a candle and hold it under his chin to show me how the human face becomes a mask of evil with the right kind of lighting. He taught me that if I had to meet someone for an appointment, I must refuse to follow the “stupid human habit” of arbitrarily choosing a time based on fifteen-minute intervals. “Never meet people at 7:45 or 6:30, Jasper, but pick times like 7:12 and 8:03!” If the phone rang, he’d pick it up and not say anything- then, when the other person said hello, he would put on a wobbly, high-pitched voice and say, “Dad not home.” Even as a child I knew that a grown man impersonating his six-year-old son to hide from the world was grotesque, but many years later I found myself doing the same thing, only I’d pretend to be him. “My son isn’t home. What is this regarding?” I’d boom. Dad would nod in approval. More than anything, he approved of hiding.

These lessons continued into the outside world too, where Dad tried to teach me the art of bartering, even though we weren’t living in that type of society. I remember him taking me by the hand to buy the newspaper, screaming at the baffled vendor, “No wars! No market crashes! No killers on the loose! What are you charging so much for? Nothing’s happened!”

I also remember him sitting me on a plastic yellow chair and cutting my hair; to him, it was one of those things in life that was so unlike brain surgery he refused to believe that if a man had a pair of hands and a pair of scissors he couldn’t cut hair. “I’m not wasting money on a barber, Jasper. What’s to know? Obviously, you stop at the scalp.” My father the philosopher- he couldn’t even give a simple haircut without reflecting on the meaning of it. “Hair, the symbol of virility and vitality, although some very flaccid people have long hair and many vibrant baldies walk the earth. Why do we cut it anyway? What have we got against it?” he’d say, and let fly at the hair with wild, spontaneous swipes. Dad cut his own hair too, often without use of a mirror. “It doesn’t have to win any prizes,” he’d say, “it just has to be shorter.” We were father and son with such demented, uneven hair- embodiments of one of Dad’s favorite ideas that I only truly understood much later: there’s freedom in looking crazy.

At nightfall, the day’s lessons were capped with a bedtime story of his own invention. Yuck! They were always dark and creepy tales, and each had a protagonist that was clearly a surrogate me. Here’s a typical one: Once upon a time there was a little boy named Kasper. Kasper’s friends all had the same ideas about a fat kid who lived down the street. They hated him. Kasper wanted to remain friends with the group, so he started hating the fat kid too. Then one morning Kasper woke up to find his brain had begun to putrefy until eventually it ran out his bottom in painful anal secretions. Poor Kasper! He really had a tough time of it. In that series of bedtime stories, he was shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, dipped in boiling seas, dragged over fields of shattered glass, had his fingernails ripped out, his organs devoured by cannibals; he vanished, exploded, imploded, and often succumbed to violent spasms and hearing loss. The moral was always the same: if you follow public opinion without thinking for yourself, you will die a sudden and horrific death. For ages I was terrified of agreeing with anyone about anything, even the time.

Kasper never triumphed in any significant way. Sure, he won little battles now and then and was rewarded (two gold coins, a kiss, the approval of his father), but never, not once, did he win the war. Now I realize it was because Dad’s philosophy had won him few personal victories in life: not love, not peace, not success, not happiness. Dad’s mind couldn’t imagine a lasting peace or a meaningful victory; it wasn’t in his experience. That’s why Kasper was doomed from the outset. He didn’t stand a chance, poor bastard.

One of the most memorable classes began when Dad entered my bedroom with an olive-green shoebox under his arm, and said “Today’s lesson is about you.”

He took me to the park opposite our apartment building, one of those sad, neglected city parks that looked as if it had been the location of a war between children and junkies and the children got their arses kicked. Dead grass, broken slides, a couple of rubber swings drifting in the wind on tangled, rusty chains.

“Look, Jasper,” Dad said as we settled on a bench. “It’s about time you found out how your grandparents fucked up, so you can work out what you did with the failures of your antecedents: did you run with them or ricochet against their errors, instead making your own huge gaffes in an opposing orbit? We all crawl feebly away from our grandparents’ graves with their sad act of dying ringing in our ears, and in our mouths we have the aftertaste of their grossest violation against themselves: the shame of their unlived lives. It’s only the steady accumulation of regrets and failures and our shame or our unlived lives that opens the door to understanding them. If by some quirk of fate we led charmed lives, bounding energetically from one masterful success to another, we’d never understand them! Never!”

He opened the shoebox. “I want you to look at something,” Dad said, scooping out a pile of loose photographs. “This is your grandfather,” he continued, holding up a black-and-white picture of a young man with a beard leaning against a streetlamp. The man wasn’t smiling; it looked like he was leaning on that streetlamp for fear of falling.

Dad switched to a photograph of a young woman with a plain, oval face and a weak smile. “This is your grandmother,” he said before he flipped through the photographs as if he were being timed. What glimpses of the monochromatic past I caught were puzzling. Their expressions were unchanging; my grandfather wore a permanently angst-ridden grimace, while my grandmother’s smile looked more depressing than the saddest frown.

Dad pulled out another photograph. “This is father number two. My real father. People always think biological is more ‘real’ than a man who actually raised you, but you’re not raised by a potent drop of semen, are you?”

He held the photograph under my eyes. I don’t know if faces can be the polar opposite of each other, but in contrast to the solemn face of the first grandfather, this one grinned as if he’d been photographed on the happiest day of not just his life but all life everywhere. He wore overalls splattered with white paint, had wild blond hair, and was streaming sweat.

“Actually, the truth is I don’t look at these photos much, because all I see when I look at photographs of dead people is that they’re dead,” Dad said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s Napoleon or my own mother, they are simply the Dead.”

That day I learned that my grandmother had been born in Poland right at the unlucky time Hitler annihilated his delusions of grandeur by making them come true- he emerged as a powerful leader with a knack for marketing. As the Germans advanced, my grandmother’s parents fled Warsaw, dragged her across Eastern Europe, and, after a few harrowing months, arrived in China. That’s where my grandmother grew up- in the Shanghai Ghetto during the war. She was raised speaking Polish, Yiddish, and Mandarin, suffering the soggy diseases of monsoon seasons, severe rationing, and American air raids, but surviving.

After the U.S. troops entered Shanghai with the bad news of the Holocaust, many in the Jewish community left China for all corners of the globe, but my great-grandparents decided to stay, having established themselves as owners of a successful multilingual cabaret and kosher butcher shop. This perfectly suited my young grandmother, who was already in love with my grandfather, an actor in their theater. Then, in 1956, when she was just seventeen, my grandmother got pregnant, forcing her and my grandfather’s families to rush through the wedding preparations as you had to do in the Old World when you didn’t want people to do the math. The week following her wedding, the family decided to return to Poland, to raise the coming child, the cluster of cells that would become my father, in their homeland.

They weren’t welcomed back with open arms, to say the least. Who knows whether it was guilt or fear of retribution or simply the unwelcome surprise of a family ringing the doorbell and saying, “You’re in my house,” but they had been home less than ten minutes when, in front of my grandmother, her parents were beaten to death with an iron pipe. My grandmother ran but her husband remained, and he was shot for praying in Hebrew over their bodies, though he had yet to say “Amen,” so the message wasn’t transmitted. (“Amen” is like the Send button on an e-mail.)

Suddenly a widow and an orphan, she fled Poland for the second time in her young life, this time on a boat bound for Australia, and after two months of staring at the daunting circumference of the horizon, she went into labor just as someone shouted, “There it is!” Everyone ran to the side of the boat and leaned over the rail. Steep cliffs crowned with clusters of green trees lined the coast. Australia! The younger passengers let out cries of joy. The older passengers knew that the key to happiness lay in keeping your expectations low. They booed.

“Are you with me so far?” Dad asked, interrupting himself. “These are the building blocks of your identity. Polish. Jewish. Persecuted. Refugee. These are just some of the vegetables with which we make a Jasper broth. You got it?”

I nodded. I got it. Dad continued.

Though she could still hardly speak a word of English, my grandmother hooked up with my grandfather number two after only six months. It’s debatable whether this should be a source of pride or a source of shame, but he was a man who could trace his family back to the last boatload of English-born convicts dumped on Australian soil. While it’s true that some criminals were sent down for petty crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, my father’s ancestor had not been one of them- or that is, he might have been, but he also raped three women, and if after raping those women he swiped a loaf of bread on his way home, it is not known.

Their courtship was fast. Apparently unperturbed by acquiring a child not of his own making, within a month, armed with a Polish dictionary and a book on English grammar, he asked my grandmother to marry him. “I’m just a battler, which means it’ll be us against the world, and the world will probably win hands down every time, but we’ll never give up fighting, no matter what, how does that sound?” She didn’t answer. “Come on. Just say, ‘I do,’ ” he pleaded. “It comes from the verb ‘to do.’ That’s all you need for now. Then we’ll move you on to ‘I did.’ ”

My grandmother considered her situation. She didn’t have anybody to help look after her baby if she went out to work, and she didn’t want her child to grow up fatherless and poor. She thought, “Do I have the necessary ruthlessness to marry a man I don’t really love for my son’s welfare? Yes, I do.” Then, looking at his hapless face, she thought, “I could do worse,” one of the most ostensibly benign though chilling phrases in any language.

He was unemployed when they married, and when she moved into his apartment, my grandmother was dismayed to discover it was filled with a terrifying potpourri of macho toys: rifles, replica pistols, model war planes, weights and dumbbells. When immersed in bodybuilding, kung fu training, or cleaning his gun, he whistled amiably. In the quiet moments when the frustration of unemployment settled in and he was absorbed with anger and depression, he whistled darkly.

Then he found a job with the New South Wales Prison Services near a small town being settled four hours away. He wasn’t going to work in the jail- he was going to help build it.

Because a prison was soon to loom on the town’s outskirts, an unkind publication in Sydney dubbed the settlement (in which my father was to grow up) the least desirable place to live in New South Wales.

The road entered town on a descent, and as my grandparents drove in, they saw the foundations of the penitentiary on top of a hill. Set amid huge, mute trees, that half-built prison looked to my grandmother to be half demolished, and the thought struck her as an unpleasant omen. It strikes me as one too, considering that my grandfather moved to this town to build a prison and I am now writing from one. The past is truly an inoperable tumor that spreads to the present.

They moved into a boxy, weatherboard house, and the following day, while my grandmother explored the town, inadvertently frightening the residents with her aura of the survivor, my grandfather began his new job. I’m not exactly sure what role he had, but apparently for the next several months he spoke incessantly of locked doors, cold halls, cell measurements, and grilled windows. As the building neared completion, he became obsessed with everything to do with prisons, even checking out books from the newly established local library on their construction and history. At the same time, my grandmother put as much energy into learning English, and this was the beginning of a new catastrophe. As her understanding of the English language grew, she began to understand her husband.

His jokes turned out to be stupid and racist. Moreover, some of them weren’t even jokes but long pointless stories that ended with my grandfather saying things like “And then I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ ” She realized he bitched endlessly about his lot in life, and when he wasn’t being nasty, he was merely banal; when not paranoid, he was boring. Soon his conversation made his handsome face grow ugly; his expression took on a cruel quality; his mouth, half open, became an expression of his stupidity. From then on every day was worsened by the new language barrier that had grown up between them- the barrier of speaking the same language.

Dad put the photographs back in the box with a dark expression, as if he had wanted a trip down memory lane but when he got there he remembered it was his least favorite street.

“OK, that’s your grandparents. All you have to know about grandparents is that they were young once too. You have to know they didn’t mean to be the embodiment of decay or even want especially to hold on to their ideas until their final day. You have to know they didn’t want to run out of days. You have to know they are dead and that the dead have bad dreams. They dream of us.”

He stared at me for a while, waiting for me to say something. Now, of course, I know that everything he told me was merely an introduction. I didn’t understand back then that after a good, cleansing monologue, Dad wanted nothing more than for me to prod him into another one. I just pointed to the swings and asked him to push me.

“You know what?” he said. “Maybe I’ll throw you back into the ring for another round.”

He was returning me to school. Maybe he knew it was there I would learn the second part to that story, that I would inevitably discover another, crucial ingredient to my own distinctive identity soup.

A month into my new school I was still trying to adjust to being among other children again, and I decided I’d never comprehend why Dad went from ordering me to despise these people to ordering me to blend in with them.

I had made only one friend, but I was trying to accumulate more, because to survive you needed no fewer than two, in case one was away sick. One day at lunchtime I was standing behind the canteen watching two boys fight over a black water pistol.

One of the boys said, “You can be the cop. I wanna be Terry Dean.”

The other boy said, “No, you’re the cop. I’m Terry Dean.”

I wanted to play too. I said, “Maybe I should be Terry Dean. It’s my name anyway.” They looked at me in that snide, superior way eight-year-olds look at you. “I’m Jasper Dean,” I added.

“Are you related?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then piss off.”

That hurt.

I said, “Well, I’ll be the cop then.”

That grabbed their attention. Everyone knows that in games of cops and robbers, the robber is always the default hero while the cops are fodder. You can never have too much fodder.

We played all lunchtime and at the sound of the bell I betrayed my ignorance by asking, “Who’s Terry Dean?”- a question that made my playmates sick.

“Shit! You don’t even know who he is!”

“He’s the baddest man in the whole world.”

“He was a bank robber.”

“And a killer!” the other one said, before they ran off without saying goodbye, in the same way as when you go to a nightclub with friends and they get lucky.

That afternoon I went home to find Dad hitting the edge of a cabinet with a banana so it made a hard knocking sound.

“I froze a banana,” he said listlessly. “Take a bite…if you dare.”

“Am I related to the famous bank robber Terry Dean?” I asked. The banana dropped like a chunk of cement. Dad sucked his lips into his mouth, and from somewhere inside, a small, hollow voice I strained to hear said, “He was your uncle.”

“My what? My uncle? I have an uncle?” I asked, incredulous. “And he’s a famous bank robber?”

“Was. He’s dead,” Dad said, before adding, “He was my brother.”

That was the first time I heard of him. Terry Dean, cop killer, bank robber, hero to the nation, pride of the battler- he was my uncle, my father’s brother, and he was to cast an oblong shadow over both our lives, a shadow that for a long time prevented either of us from getting a decent tan.

If you’re Australian, you will at least have heard of Terry Dean. If you aren’t, you won’t have, because while Australia is an eventful place, what goes on there is about as topical in world newspapers as “Bee Dies in New Guinea After Stinging Tree by Mistake.” It’s not our fault. We’re too far away. That’s what a famous Australian historian once called the “tyranny of distance.” What he meant was, Australia is like a lonely old woman dead in her apartment; if every living soul in the land suddenly had a massive coronary at the exact same time and if the Simpson Desert died of thirst and the rainforests drowned and the barrier reef bled to death, days might pass and only the smell drifting across the ocean to our Pacific neighbors would compel someone to call the police. Otherwise we’d have to wait until the Northern Hemisphere commented on the uncollected mail.

Dad wouldn’t talk to me about his brother. Every time I asked him for details he’d sigh long and deep, as though this were another setback he didn’t need, so I embarked on my own research.

First I asked my classmates, but I received answers that differed from each other so wildly, I just had to discount them all. Then I examined the measly collection of family photographs that I had seen only fleetingly before, the ones that lay in the green shoebox stuffed into the hall closet. This time I noticed that three of the photographs had been butchered to remove someone’s head. The operation could hardly be described as seamless. I could still see the neck and shoulders in two photos, and a third was just two pieces clumsily stuck together with uneven strips of brown packing tape. I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable. Fortunately, Dad couldn’t erase the newspaper articles I found in the state library that described Terry’s escapades, his killing spree, his manhunt, his capture, and his death. I made photocopies and pasted them to the walls of my bedroom, and at night I fantasized that I was my uncle, the fiercest criminal ever to hide a body in the soil and wait for it to grow.

In a bid to boost my popularity, I told everyone at school about my connection to Terry Dean, doing everything to broadcast it short of hiring a publicist. It was big news for a while, and one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made. At first, in the faces of my peers, I inspired awe. But then kids of all ages came out of the woodwork wanting to fight me. Some wanted to make reputations for beating the nephew of Terry Dean. Others were eager to wipe the proud smile off my face; pride must have magnified my features unappealingly. I talked my way out of a number of scuffles, but one day before school my assailants tricked me by flouting the regulation time code for beatings: it always happens after school, never in the morning, before an eight-year-old has had his coffee. Anyway, there were four of them, four bruisers grim-faced and fist-ready. I didn’t stand a chance. I was cornered. This was it: my first fight.

A crowd had gathered around to watch. They chanted in their best Lord of the Flies manner. I searched the faces for allies. No luck. They all wanted to see me go down screaming. I didn’t take it personally. It was just my turn, that’s all. I tell you, it’s indescribable the joy children get from watching a fight. It’s a blinding Christmas orgasm for a child. And this is human nature undiluted by age and experience! This is mankind fresh out of the box! Whoever says it’s life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven’t yet had their dose of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn’t trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine.

My enemies closed in. The fight was seconds away from starting, and probably as many seconds away from finishing. I had nowhere to go. They came closer. I made a colossal decision: I would not put up a fight. I would not take it like a man. I would not take it like a battler. Look, I know people like reading about those outclassed in strength who make up for it in spirit, like my uncle Terry. Respected are those who go down fighting, right? But those noble creatures still get a hell of a clobbering, and I didn’t want a clobbering of any kind. Also, I remembered something Dad had taught me in one of our kitchen-table classes. He said, “Listen, Jasper. Pride is the first thing you need to do away with in life. It’s there to make you feel good about yourself. It’s like putting a suit on a shriveled carrot and taking it out to the theater and pretending it’s someone important. The first step in self-liberation is to be free of self-respect. I understand why it’s useful for some. When people have nothing, they can still have their pride. That’s why the poor were given the myth of nobility, because the cupboards were bare. Are you listening to me? This is important, Jasper. I don’t want you to have anything to do with nobility, pride, or self-respect. They’re tools to help you bronze your own head.”

I sat on the ground with my legs crossed. I didn’t even straighten my back. I slouched. They had to bend down to punch me in the jaw. One of them got on his knees to do it. They took turns. They tried to get me to my feet; I let my body go limp. One of them had to hold me up, but I had become slippery and slid greasily through their fingers back onto the ground. I was still taking a beating, and my head was stunned by strong fists pounding at it, but the pummeling was sloppy, confused. Eventually my plan worked: they gave up. They asked what was wrong with me. They asked me why I wouldn’t fight back. Maybe the truth was I was too busy fighting back tears to be fighting back people, but I didn’t say anything. They spat at me and then left me to contemplate the color of my own blood. Against the white of my shirt, it was a luminous red.

When I got home, I found Dad standing by my bed, staring witheringly at the newspaper clippings on the walls.

“Jesus. What happened to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“No, I want to see what happens to blood when you leave it overnight.”

“Sometimes it turns black.”

“I want to see that.”

I was just about to rip down the pictures of Uncle Terry when Dad said, “I wish you’d take these down,” so of course I kept them right where they were. Then Dad said, “This isn’t who he was. They’ve turned him into a hero.”

Suddenly I found myself loving my degenerate uncle again, so I said, “He is a hero.”

“A boy’s father is his hero, Jasper.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Dad turned and snorted at the headlines.

“You can’t know what a hero is, Jasper. You’ve grown up in a time when that word has been debased, stripped of all meaning. We’re fast becoming the first nation whose populace consists solely of heroes who do nothing but celebrate each other. Of course we’ve always made heroes of excellent sportsmen and -women- if you perform well for your country as a long-distance runner, you’re heroic as well as fast- but now all you need to do is be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like that poor bastard covered by an avalanche. The dictionary would label him a survivor, but Australia is keen to call him a hero, because what does the dictionary know? And now everyone returning from an armed conflict is called a hero too. In the old days you had to commit specific acts of valor during war; now you just need to turn up. These days when a war is on, heroism seems to mean ‘attendance.’ ”

“What’s this got to do with Uncle Terry?”

“Well, he falls into the final category of heroism. He was a murderer, but his victims were well chosen.”

“I don’t get it.”

Dad turned toward the window, and I could tell by the way his ears wiggled up and down that he was talking to himself in that weird way where he did the mouth movements but kept all the sound in. Finally he spoke like a person.

“People don’t understand me, Jasper. And that’s OK, but it’s sometimes irritating, because they think they do. But all they see is the façade I use in company, and in truth, I have made very few adjustments to the Martin Dean persona over the years. Oh sure, a touch-up here, a touch-up there, you know, to move with the times, but it has essentially remained intact from day one. People are always saying that a person’s character is unchangeable, but mostly it’s the persona that doesn’t change, not the person, and underneath that changeless mask exists a creature who’s evolving like crazy, mutating out of control. I tell you, the most consistent person you know is more than likely a complete stranger to you, blossoming and sprouting all sorts of wings and branches and third eyes. You could sit beside that person in an office cubicle for ten years and not see the growth spurts going on right under your nose. Honestly, anyone who says a friend of theirs hasn’t changed in years just can’t tell a mask from an actual face.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Dad walked to my bed and, after doubling over the pillow, lay down and made himself comfortable.

“I’m saying it’s always been a little dream of mine for someone to hear firsthand about my childhood. For instance, did you know that my physical imperfections almost did me in? You’ve heard the expression ‘When they made him, they threw away the mold’? Well, it was as if someone picked up a mold that had already been thrown away, and even though it was cracked and warped by the sun and ants had crawled inside it and an old drunk had urinated on it, they reused it to make me. You probably didn’t know either that people were always abusing me for being clever. They’d say, ‘You’re too clever, Martin, too clever by half, too clever for your own good.’ I smiled and thought they must be mistaken. How can a person be too clever? Isn’t that like being too good-looking? Or too rich? Or too happy? What I didn’t understand was that people don’t think; they repeat. They don’t process; they regurgitate. They don’t digest; they copy. I had only a splinter of awareness back then that no matter what anybody says, choosing between the available options is not the same as thinking for yourself. The only true way of thinking for yourself is to create options of your own, options that don’t exist. That’s what my childhood taught me and that’s what it should teach you, Jasper, if you hear me out. Then afterward, when people are talking about me, I’m not going to be the only one to know they are wrong, wrong, wrong. Get it? When people talk about me in front of us, you and I will be able to give each other sly, secret looks across the room, it will be a real giggle, and maybe one day, after I’m dead, you’ll tell them the truth, you’ll reveal everything about me, everything I’ve told you, and maybe they’ll feel like fools, or maybe they’ll shrug and go, ‘Oh really, interesting,’ then turn back to the game show they were watching. But in any case, that’s up to you, Jasper. I certainly don’t want to pressure you into spilling the secrets of my heart and soul unless you feel it will make you richer, either spiritually or financially.”

“Dad, are you going to tell me about Uncle Terry or not?”

“Am I- what do you think I’ve just been saying?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well, sit down and shut up and I’ll tell you a story.”

This was it. Time for Dad to open up and spill his version of the Dean family chronicles, his version that was contrary to the mythologizing gossip of the nation. So he started to talk. He talked and talked nonstop until eight in the morning, and if he was breathing underneath all those words, I couldn’t see it or hear it but I sure could smell it. When he’d finished, I felt as though I’d traveled through my father’s head and come out somehow diminished, just slightly less sure of my identity than when I went in. I think, to do justice to his unstoppable monologue, it’d be better if you heard it in his own words- the words he bequeathed me which have become my own, the words I’ve never forgotten. That way you get to know two people for the price of one. That way you can hear it as I did, only partially as a chronicle of Terry Dean, but predominantly as a story of my father’s unusual childhood of illness, near-death experiences, mystical visions, ostracism, and misanthropy, followed closely by an adolescence of dereliction, fame, violence, pain, and death.

Anyway, you know how it is. Every family has a story like this one.

Deadlock

I’ve been asked the same question again and again. Everyone wants to know the same thing: What was Terry Dean like as a child? They expect tales of kiddy violence and corruption in the heart of an infant. They imagine a miniature criminal crawling around the playpen perpetrating acts of immorality between feedings. Ridiculous! Was Hitler goose-stepping all the way to his mother’s breast? OK, it’s true, there were signs if you chose to read into them. At seven years old, when Terry was the cop in cops and robbers, he’d let you go if you greased his palm with a lolly. In games of hide-and-seek, he hid like a fugitive. But so what? It doesn’t mean a predisposition to violence is printed on a man’s DNA. Yes, people are always disappointed when I tell them that as far as I’m aware, Terry was a normal infant; he slept and cried and ate and shat and pissed and gradually discerned that he was a different entity from, say, the wall (that’s your first lesson in life: you are not the wall). As a child he ran around screaming that high-pitched noise that children scream. He loved reaching for poisonous substances to put in his mouth (an infant’s instinct for suicide is razor-sharp), and he had an uncanny ability to cry just as our parents were falling asleep. By all accounts, he was just another baby. I was the remarkable one, if only for my inabilities.

Before Terry arrived, our lives were dominated by illness. It amazes me now how little I knew about my own condition, and how little I wanted to know. The only thing that interested me were the symptoms (violent stomach pains, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness); the underlying causes seemed totally irrelevant. They had nothing to do with me. Encephalitis? Leukemia? Immune deficiency? To this day I don’t really know. By the time it occurred to me to get a straight answer, everyone who might have had one was long dead. I know the doctors had theories, but I also remember they couldn’t make up their minds. I can only recall certain phrases, such as “muscle abnormality,” “disorder of the nervous system,” and “euthanasia,” that made little impact on me at the time. I remember being jabbed with needles and force-fed pills the size and shape of swollen thumbs. I remember that when they took X-rays, the doctors ducked out of the way very quickly, as if they’d just set off a firework.

This all happened before Terry was born.

Then one day I took a turn for the worse. My breathing was short and labored. Swallowing took a century; my throat was a wasteland, and I would have sold my soul for some saliva. My bladder and my bowels had minds of their own. A pasty-faced doctor visited me twice a day, speaking to my anxious mother at the foot of my bed, always as if I were in the other room. “We could take him to hospital,” he’d say. “But really, what’s the point? He’s better off here.”

It was then I began to wonder if I would die and if they would bury me in the new town’s new cemetery. They were still clearing the trees when I was at death’s door. I wondered: Would it be finished in time? If I carked it before it was ready, they’d have to ship my body off to a cemetery in some distant town I had never lived in, whose populace would walk past my grave without thinking, “I remember him.” Unbearable! So I thought maybe if I held off death for a couple of weeks, maybe if I got the timing right, I could be the first body to transform the empty field into a functional cemetery, the inaugural corpse. Then I wouldn’t be forgotten. Yes, I was making plans while lying in wait for death. I thought about all the worms and maggots in that field and how they were in for a treat. Don’t snack, you maggots! Human flesh is coming! Don’t ruin your dinner!

Lying in bed as the sun slid through the crack in the curtains, I thought about nothing else. I reached up and threw open the curtains. I called out to people walking past. What’s going on with that cemetery? How’s the progress? I was keeping tabs. And it was good news. The trees were gone. Iron gates fastened onto blocks of stone were erected as the entrance to the cemetery. Granite tablets had been shipped from Sydney; all they needed was a name! The shovels were standing by. It was all go!

Then I heard some terrible news. My parents were talking in the kitchen. According to my father, the old woman who ran the local pub had had a massive stroke in the middle of the night. Not a little one, but massive! I dragged myself upright. What’s this? Yes, my father said, she was barely hanging on. She wasn’t just at death’s door, she was pounding on it! Oh no! A catastrophe! It was going to be a race to the finish line! Who would be first? The old biddy was nearly eighty, so she’d been practicing dying for a lot longer than me. She had nature on her side. I had nothing but luck to hold out for. I was too young to die of old age but too old for infant mortality. I was stuck in the middle, that terrible stretch of time where people can’t help but breathe.

The next day, when my father stopped into my room to check on me, I asked how the old woman was traveling. “Not good,” he said. “She isn’t expected to last the weekend.” I knew I had at least another week, maybe ten days in me. I hit the bed. I tore the sheets. He had to hold me down. “What the hell’s got into you?” he shouted. I let him in on it, explained that if I were to die, I wanted to be the first in the cemetery. He laughed right in my face, the bastard. He called my mother in. “Guess what your son’s been saying to me?” Then he told her. She gazed at me with infinite pity and sat on the edge of the bed and hugged me as if she were trying to stop me from falling. “You won’t die, honey. You won’t.”

“He’s pretty sick,” my father said.

“Shut up!”

“It’s best to prepare for the worst.”

The next day my smug father told the men at his worksite what I’d said. They laughed too, the bastards. At night the men told their wives. They also laughed, the bitches. They thought it was adorable. Don’t children say the cutest things? Soon the whole town was laughing. Then they stopped laughing and started wondering. It was a good question, they decided: who would be the first? Shouldn’t there be a ceremony to commemorate the inaugural corpse? Not just a regular funeral. A real show! A big turnout! Maybe a band? The first burial is a big moment for a town. A town that buries its own is a living town. Only dead towns export their dead.

Queries on the state of my health poured in from all directions. People came in droves to see the exhibit. “How’s he doing?” I heard them ask my mother. “He’s fine!” she said tensely. They pushed past her into my bedroom. They had to see for themselves. Dozens of faces passed through my bedroom, peering at me expectantly. They came to see me lying prostrate, motionless, dying. Regardless, they were all very chatty. When people think your days are numbered, they’re really very nice to you. It’s only when you’re trying to get on in the world that they bring their claws out.

That was only the adults, of course; the kids of the town couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me. That taught me something worth noting: the healthy and the sick are not peers, whatever else they might have in common.

Apparently everyone hassled the old woman too. I heard they crowded around her bed looking at their watches. I couldn’t understand why they’d taken such an interest. Later I learned bets had been laid. The old woman was the favorite. I was the long shot. I ran at over 100 to 1. Hardly anyone bet on me. I guess no one, not even in a morbid game of Guess Who’ll Die First, liked contemplating the death of a child. It just didn’t sit well with anyone.

“He’s dead! He’s dead!” a voice shouted one afternoon. I checked my pulse. Still ticking. I pulled myself up and called through the window at old George Buckley, our nearest neighbor.

“Who? Who’s dead?”

“Frank Williams! He fell off the roof!”

Frank Williams. He lived four houses down on the same street. From my window I could see the whole town running to his house to look. I wanted to look too. I dragged myself out of bed and moved like a greasy slug along the floor of my bedroom, into the hallway, out the front door into dazzling sunlight. Keeping my pajama pants on was an issue, but then it always is. Wiggling across the patchy grass lawn, I thought about Frank Williams, the late entry and surprise winner of our little contest. Father of four. Or was it five? All boys. He was always trying to teach his sons to ride a bike. When it wasn’t one son wobbling past my window with a hysterically tense grimace, it was another. I always hated the Williams boys for being slow learners. Now I felt sorry for them. No one should lose a parent through clumsiness. Their whole lives, those boys are going to have to say, “Yeah. My father fell off a roof. Lost his balance. What? What does it matter what he was doing up there?” Poor kids. Clearing gutters is no reason for a man to die. There’s just no honor in it.

The curious horde crouching around the dead man took no notice of the sick little worm crawling toward them. I made it through the legs of Bruce Davies, the town butcher. He peered down just as I peered up. Our eyes locked. I thought someone should tell him to get far away from the lifeless carcass of our neighbor. I didn’t like the glint in that butcher’s eye.

I looked closer. Frank’s neck was broken. His head had rolled back in a pool of dark blood and hung limp across the shoulders. When a neck breaks, it really breaks. I looked closer still. His eyes were wide open but there was nothing behind them, just a stupefying cavern. I thought: That will be me soon. Nothingness will envelop me just as it has enveloped him. Because of the contest and my own part in it, I saw this death not just as a preview of my own, but as an echo. Frank and I were in this together, chained to one another in some macabre marriage for all eternity- deadlock, I now call it, the affinity the living have with the dead. It’s not for everyone. You either feel it or you don’t. I did then and I do now. I feel it profoundly: this sacred, insidious bond. I feel they are waiting for me to join them in holy deadlock.

I rested my head on Frank’s lap and closed my eyes and let the voices of the townspeople soothe me to sleep.

“Poor Frank,” someone said.

“He’d had a good innings.”

“What was he doing up on that roof?”

“He was forty-two.”

“Is that my ladder?”

“Forty-two is young. He didn’t have a good innings. He had a shit innings.”

“I’m forty-four next week.”

“What are you doing?”

“Let go of that!”

“This is my ladder. I lent it to him last year, but when I asked about it he swore he’d returned it.”

“What about the boys?”

“Oh geez…the boys.”

“What’s going to happen to them?”

“They’ll be OK. They still have their mother.”

“But they won’t have this ladder. It’s mine.”

Then I fell asleep.

I awoke back in bed, sicker than ever. The doctor said that by crawling half a kilometer to see my first dead body, I had set my health back, as if it were a clock I had adjusted for daylight saving. After he left, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, her unstrung face an inch from mine, and she told me in an almost guilty voice that she was pregnant. I was too weak to say congratulations, and I just lay there as she stroked my forehead, which I really liked and still do, although there’s nothing soothing in stroking your own forehead.

Over the following months, as my condition gradually worsened, my pregnant mother sat down beside me and let me touch her belly, which was swelling horribly. Occasionally I felt the kick or perhaps head butt of the fetus inside. Once, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her whisper, “It’s a shame you won’t get to meet him.”

Then, just when I was at my weakest and death was licking her lips, something unexpected happened.

I didn’t die.

But I didn’t live either.

Quite by accident, I took the third option: I slipped into a coma. Bye-bye world, bye-bye consciousness, bye-bye light, too bad death, hello ether. It was a hell of a thing. I was hiding right in between death’s open arms and life’s folded ones. I was nowhere, absolutely nowhere at all. Honestly, you can’t even get to limbo from a coma.

Coma

My coma was nothing like those I’ve read about since: I’ve heard of people who fell into a coma in the middle of telling a joke and forty-two years later woke up and told the punch line. For them, those decades of oblivion were an instant of nothingness, as if they had passed through one of Sagan’s wormholes, time had curled around on itself, and they had flown through it in a sixteenth of a second.

Describing the thoughts, visions, and sensations I had inside that coma is near impossible. It wasn’t the nothingness, because there was quite a bit of somethingness (when you’re in a coma, even anyness is good), but I was too young to make sense of the experience. I can say, though, that I had as many dreams and visions as if I’d consumed a canyonful of peyote.

No, I won’t try to describe the indescribable, only so much as to say there were sounds I heard that I could not have heard and things I saw that I could not have seen. What I’m about to say is going to sound insane- or, worse, mystical, and you know I’m not that way inclined- but here it is: if you look at the unconscious mind as a big barrel, in the normal run of things the lid is open and sights, sounds, experiences, bad vibes, and sensations pour in during the waking hours, but when there aren’t any waking hours, none at all, for months or even years, and the lid is sealed, it’s possible that the restless mind, desperate for activity, might reach deep into the barrel, right down to the bottom of the unconscious, dredging up stores of things that were left there by previous generations. This is a Jungian explanation and I don’t even know if I like Jung, but there’s very little else out there on the shelves that could go any way to explain the things I saw that I could not have seen, to justify the things I heard that I could not have heard.

Let me try to put it another way. There is a short story by Borges called “The Aleph.” In the story, the Aleph, hidden under the nineteenth step of a cellar staircase, is an ancient mysterious portal to every point in the universe- I’m not kidding, every single point- and if you look into it, you see, well, absolutely everything. I’m hypothesizing that somewhere in the ancient parts of ourselves there could exist a similar porthole, resting quietly in a crack or a crevice or within the folds of the memory of your own birth, only the thing is, normally we never get to reach it or see it because the usual business of living piles mountains of crap on top of it. I’m not saying I believe this, I’m only giving you the best explanation I’ve come up with so far for the root of the extraordinarily dizzying hodgepodge of sights and sounds that flashed and whirled before my mind’s eye and ear. If the mind can have eyes, why not ears? You probably think there’s no such thing as the mind’s nose, either. Well, there is. And like Borges in his story, I can’t accurately describe it because my visions were simultaneous, and language, being successive, means I have to record it that way. So use your imagination, Jasper, when I tell you one gazillionth of what I saw:

I saw all the dawns come up too early and all the middays reminding you you’d better get a hurry on and all the dusks whisper “I don’t think you’re going to make it” and all the shrugging midnights say “Better luck tomorrow.” I saw all the hands that ever waved to a stranger thinking it was a friend. I saw all the eyes that ever winked to let someone know their insult was only a joke. I saw all the men wipe down toilet seats before urinating but never after. I saw all the lonely men stare at department store mannequins and think “I’m attracted to a mannequin. This is getting sad.” I saw all the love triangles and a few love rectangles and one crazy love hexagon in the back room of a sweaty Parisian café. I saw all the condoms put on the wrong way. I saw all the ambulance drivers on their off hours caught in traffic wishing there was a dying man in the backseat. I saw all the charity-givers wink at heaven. I saw all the Buddhists bitten by spiders they wouldn’t kill. I saw all the flies bang uselessly into the screen doors and all the fleas laughing as they rode in on pets. I saw all the broken dishes in all the Greek restaurants and all the Greeks thinking “Culture’s one thing, but this is getting expensive.” I saw all the lonely people scared by their own cats. I saw all the prams, and anyone who says all babies are cute didn’t see the babies I saw. I saw all the funerals and all the acquaintances of the dead enjoying their afternoon off work. I saw all the astrology columns predicting that one twelfth of the population of earth will be visited by a relative who wants to borrow money. I saw all the forgeries of great paintings but no forgeries of great books. I saw all the signs forbidding entrance and exit but none forbidding arson or murder. I saw all the carpets with cigarette burns and all the kneecaps with carpet burns. I saw all the worms dissected by curious children and eminent scientists. I saw all the polar bears and the grizzly bears and the koala bears used to describe fat people you just want to cuddle. I saw all the ugly men hitting on all the happy women who made the mistake of smiling at them. I saw inside all the mouths and it’s really disgusting in there. I saw all the bird’s-eye views of all the birds who think humanity looks pretty active for a bunch of toilet heads…

What was I supposed to make of all this? I know that most people would have taken it as a divine vision. They might even have found God in there, jumping out at them like a holy jack-in-the-box. Not me. All I saw was man and all his insignificant sound and fury. What I saw shaped my perspective of the world, sure, but I don’t think it was a supernatural gift. A girl once told me that in thinking this I was turning a blind eye to a message from God and I should be walking around filled with a spiritual welling in my soul. That sounds nice, but what can I do about it? I don’t have it in me. If it was his intent to tell me something in all that visual noise, God picked the wrong guy. My inability to make a leap of faith is carved into my DNA. Sorry, Lord. I guess one man’s burning bush is another man’s spot fire.

Six months must have passed in that state. In the outside world I was bathed and fed through tubes; my bowels and bladder were emptied, my appendages massaged, and my body manipulated into whatever shape amused my caretakers.

Then a change occurred: the Aleph, if that’s what it was, was unexpectedly and unceremoniously sucked back down into its hiding place and all the visions departed in an instant. Who knows what mechanism was behind the lifting of the lid to the barrel, but it opened a crack wide enough for a stream of sound to come flooding in; my hearing returned and I was wide awake but still blind and mute and paralyzed. But I could hear. And what I heard was the voice of a man I didn’t recognize coming through loud and clear, and his words were powerful and old and terrifying:

Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes. Why died I not from the womb?

I might have been paralyzed, but I could feel my internal organs tremble. The voice continued:

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul. Which long for death but it cometh not: and dig for it more than for hid treasures; Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God has hedged in?

(I later discovered that the voice belonged to Patrick Ackerman, one of our town’s councillors, and he was reading me the Bible, from beginning to end. As you well know, Jasper, I don’t believe in fate or destiny, but I do find it interesting that the very moment my ears cleared and were primed for listening, these words were the first that greeted them.)

With the return of consciousness and hearing, instinctively I knew that soon would come vision, followed by the ability to touch myself. In short, life. I was on my way back.

But before I returned, there was still a long road to go, and that road was paved with voices. A real cavalcade- old seductive voices, young expressive voices, scratchy throat-cancerish voices- and the voices were full of words and the words were telling stories. Only much later did I learn that the town had taken me on as a sort of community project. Some doctor had pronounced it necessary that I be spoken to, and with our new bush town dying of unemployment, all those semi-altruistic souls who didn’t have anything to do with their days turned up in droves. The funny thing was, I asked some of them afterward and not one of them thought I was really listening. But I was listening. More than listening, I was absorbing. And more than absorbing, I was remembering. Because the peculiar detail of all this is, perhaps because of the sightless, paralyzed state I was imprisoned in, the books read to me when I was in that coma burned into my memory. This was my supernatural education: the words of those books read to me in my coma I can quote to you word for word.

As it became clear that I wasn’t going to die any day soon and might be in this petrified state forever, the voices became fewer and fewer, until only one voice remained: my mother’s. The rest of the town gave me up for a block of wood, but my mother kept on reading. My mother, a woman who had only several years earlier left her native land having never read an English book in her life, was now churning through them by the hundreds. And the unexpected consequence was, as she stocked up my mind with words, thoughts, ideas, and sensations, she did as much to her own. It was as though great big trucks filled with words drove up to our heads and dumped their contents directly into our brains. All that unbound imagination brightened and stretched our minds with incredible tales of heroic deeds, painful loves, romantic descriptions of remote lands, philosophies, myths, the histories of nations rising, falling, chafing, and tumbling into the sea, adventures of warriors and priests and farmers and monsters and conquerors and barmaids and Russians so neurotic you wanted to pull out your own teeth. It was a prodigious jumble of legends my mother and I discovered simultaneously, and those writers and philosophers and storytellers and prophets became idols to us both.

Only much later, when my mother’s sanity came under scrutiny, did it occur to me what might have happened to her lonely and frustrated head, reading aloud all those astonishing books to her motionless son. What did those words mean to her in the painful quiet of my bedroom with the product of her loins lying there like a leg of lamb? I imagine her mind aching with the pains of growth like a tortured body stretched on a rack. I imagine her dwelling on what she read. I imagine her smashing through the confines of her cemented ideas with all those brutal, beautiful truths. It must have been a slow and confounding torment. When I think of what she transformed into much later, what demented tragedy she had become by the end of her young life, I can envisage in my mother the agonizing delight of the reader who hears for the first time all the ramblings of the soul, and recognizes them as her own.

The Game

Shortly after my eighth birthday, I woke up. Just like that. Four years and four months after I slipped into a coma, I slipped out again. Not only could my eyes see, but I used the lids to blink. I opened my mouth and asked for cordial- I wanted to taste something sweet. Only people regaining consciousness in movies ask for water. In real life you think of cocktails with pineapple chunks and little umbrellas.

There were a lot of joyous faces in my bedroom the week I returned to the land of the living. People seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and they all said “Welcome back,” as if I’d been away on a long voyage and any moment I was going to pull out the presents. My mother hugged me and covered my hands in wet kisses that I could now wipe on my pajamas. Even my father was jubilant, no longer the unfortunate man with the freak-show stepson, the Amazing Sleeping Kid. But little four-year-old Terry: he was in hiding. My sudden rebirth was too much of a shock. My mother breathlessly called for him to come and meet his brother, but Terry was a no-show. I was still too tired and weak to be offended. Later, when everything went into the toilet, I was forced to consider what it must have been like for Terry’s developing mind to grow up next to a corpse and then to be told “That creepy mummy over there is your brother.” It must have been spooky, especially at night when the moonlight hit my frozen face and my unmoving eyeballs fixed on the poor kid, as if they had solidified that way on purpose, just to stare.

On the third day after my resurrection, my father thundered in and said, “Let’s get you up and about.” He and my mother grabbed my arms and helped me out of bed. My legs were sad, dead things, so they dragged me around the room as if I were a drunk friend they were escorting out of a bar. Then my father got an idea. “Hey! You’ve probably forgotten what you look like!” It was true. I had. A vague image of a little boy’s face drifted somewhere in my mind, but I couldn’t be sure if it was me or someone who had once hated me. With my bare feet trailing behind, my father dragged me into the bathroom to look at myself in a mirror. It was a crushing spectacle. Even ugly people know beauty when they don’t see it.

Terry couldn’t avoid me forever. It was about time we were properly introduced. Soon after everyone had lost interest in congratulating me on waking up, he came into the room and sat on his bed, bouncing rhythmically, hands pressed down on his knees as if to keep them from flying away.

I lay back in bed gazing at the ceiling and pulled the covers over me. I could hear my brother breathing. I could hear myself breathing too- so could anyone; the air whistled noisily through my throat. I felt awkward and ridiculous. I thought: He’ll speak when he’s ready. My eyelids weighed a ton, but I wouldn’t allow them the satisfaction of closing. I was afraid the coma was waiting.

It took an hour for Terry to bridge the distance between us.

“You had a good sleep,” he said.

I nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. The sight of my brother was overpowering. I felt impossibly tender and wanted a hug, but decided it was better to remain aloof. More than anything, I just couldn’t get over how unrelated we looked. I know we had different fathers, but it was as if our mother hadn’t a single dominant gene in her whole body. While I had an oily yellow complexion, a pointed chin, brown hair, slightly protruding teeth, and ears pressed flat against my head like they were waiting for someone to pass, Terry had thick blond hair and blue eyes and a smile like a dental postcard and fair skin dotted with adorable orange freckles; his features had a perfect symmetry to them, like a child mannequin’s.

“Do you want to see my hole?” he said suddenly. “I dug a hole in the backyard.”

“Later on, mate. I’m a bit tired.”

“Go on,” my father said, scowling. He was standing at the door glaring at me. “You need fresh air.”

“I can’t now,” I said. “I feel too weak.”

Disappointed, Terry slapped my atrophied leg and ran outside to play. I watched him from the window, a little ball of energy trampling on flower beds, a little streak of fire jumping in and out of the hole he’d dug. While I watched him, my father remained hovering at the bedroom door, with burning eyes and fatherly sneers.

Here’s the thing: I had peered over the abyss, stared into the yellow eyes of death, and now that I was back in the land of the living, did I want sunshine? Did I want to kiss flowers? Did I want to run and play and shout, “To be alive! To be alive!” Actually, no. I wanted to stay in bed. It’s difficult to explain why. All I know is a powerful laziness seeped into me during my coma, a laziness that ran through my blood and solidified into my core.

It was only six weeks after my groggy reawakening when- even though the pain it caused me to walk was reshaping my body to resemble a eucalypt twisted by fire- my parents and doctors decided it was time for me to return to school. The boy who had slept through a sizable chunk of his childhood was expected to slip unnoticed into society. At first the children greeted me with curiosity: “Did you dream?” “Could you hear people talking to you?” “Show us your bedsores! Show us your bedsores!” But the one thing a coma doesn’t teach you is how to blend into your surroundings (unless everyone around you is sleeping). I had only a few days to work it out. Obviously, I failed miserably, because it wasn’t two weeks later when the attacks started. The pushing, the beating, the intimidation, the insults, the jeers, the wedgies, the tongue poking, and, worst of all, the agonizing silence: there were almost two hundred students at our school, and they gave me four hundred cold shoulders. It was the kind of cold that burned like fire.

I longed for school to be over so I could go to bed. I wanted to spend all my time there. I loved lying down, the reading lamp shining, just a sheet over me, the blankets bunched up at the bottom of the bed like fat rolls. My father was unemployed then (the prison was completed and had its grand opening while I was in the coma), and he burst into my room at all hours and screamed, “GET OUT OF BED! CHRIST! IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE!” His fury multiplied tenfold when directed at Terry, who would lie in bed too. You see, it might be difficult for anyone to believe now, but somehow, juvenile invalid though I was, I still managed to be a hero to Terry. He adored me. He idolized me. When I lay all day in bed, Terry lay all day in bed. When I threw up, Terry plunged his fingers down his own throat. I’d be under the sheets curled up into a ball, shivering uncontrollably with fever, and Terry would be curled and shivering too. It was sweet.

My father was scared stiff for him, for his actual son, and he concentrated all his mental forces into predicting terrible futures, all because of me.

One day he had an idea, and for a parent, it wasn’t a bad one. If your child has an unhealthy obsession, the only way to wean him off it is to replace it with a healthy one. The obsession my father chose to lure Terry away from wanting to be an invalid was as Australian as a funnel-web spider bite on the kneecap.

Sport.

It was Christmas. Terry was given a football. My father said to him, “Well, let’s you and me go throw the ball around, eh?” Terry didn’t want to go because he knew I would stay inside. My father put his foot down and dragged him kicking and screaming out into the sunshine. I watched them through the window. Terry put on a fake limp. Whenever my father threw the ball, Terry hobbled miserably across the field to catch it.

“Now stop that limping!”

“I can’t help it!”

“There’s nothing wrong with your leg!”

“Yes there is!”

My father spat with revulsion and grumbled his way back into the house, plotting and scheming the way fathers do, out of love. He decided that for a spell he needed to keep his unhealthy stepson away from his healthy actual son; he saw disease as a combination of laziness and weakness, as an inclination, and in our house you couldn’t so much as cough without him seeing it as a reflection of your disgusting interior. He wasn’t normally an unsympathetic man, and he had his fair share of struggle, but he was one of those people who had never been sick a day in his life (only in his unpaid-bill-induced nausea) and had never even known anybody who had been sick. Even his own parents died without protracted illness (bus crash). I know I’ve said it before: if my childhood taught me one thing, it’s that the differences between the rich and the poor are nothing. It’s the chasm between the healthy and the sick that you just can’t breach.

The next morning, with my father dragging two suitcases and Terry dragging his leg, they climbed into the family car and disappeared in wild swirls of dust. Two months later, when they returned, Terry told me that they had followed the local football team around the state, going to all the games. After a couple of weeks the team began to notice them, and, touched by the devotion of an apparently lame child, they elected my little limping brother their unofficial mascot. At the first opportunity, my father unburdened his troubles to the players, told them all about me and the insidious influence I had on Terry, and begged them to help him restore the hearty Australian spirit that had left his younger son’s left leg. The whole team rose to the occasion and answered the call proudly. They carried Terry onto the unblemished green of the field and in the hot breath of sunshine coached him in the finer elements of the game, inspiring him to limp less and less in his desire to impress them. After two months on the road, he was limpless and a true little sportsman. My father was no dummy. Terry had caught the bug.

On his return, Terry joined the local football club. They played rough in those days- the parents watched the battered heads of their children crash together in chilly autumn dusks, and they writhed in ecstasy. Their kids were proving themselves, and even when they came off the field wearing wigs of dried blood, nobody could have been more pleased. In Australia, as anywhere, rites of passage are no small thing.

It was immediately apparent that Terry was a naturally outstanding player, a star on the field. To watch him tackle, pass, dummy, duck and weave through the skinny legions of little athletes would give your eyes spots. He ran like one possessed, his concentration absolute. In fact, on the field Terry underwent a transformation of character and disposition. Though he played the clown in just about every situation conceivable, he had no sense of humor about the game whatsoever; once the whistle blew, he was as serious about that tough oval ball as a cardiovascular surgeon is about squishy oval hearts. Like me and probably most Australians, Terry had an innate opposition to authority. Discipline was abhorrent to his nature. If someone told him to sit down just as he was reaching for a chair, he’d probably have tossed it out the nearest window. But in the realm of self-discipline he was a Zen master. You couldn’t stop him. Terry would do laps of the garden even while the magnified moon rose up like a soap bubble. In storms he’d power on with sit-ups and push-ups, and as the sun sank behind the prison, his boots chomped through clumps of thick wet grass and lakes of mud.

In summer Terry joined the local cricket team. Again he shone from the first day. As a bowler he was fast and accurate; as a batter he was deadly and powerful; as a fielder his eye was exacting and his reflexes sharp. It was unnatural how natural he was. Everyone talked about him. And when they opened the new swimming pool, guess who was the first in the water? The guy who built it! And guess who was second? Terry! I ask you: Can a person’s body be genius? Can muscles? Can sinew? Can bones? You should’ve seen him in the pool. And calm! At the start of a race, while the other boys trembled on the swimmer’s block, Terry stood there as if he were waiting for a bus. But suddenly the gun fired! He was so quick you wouldn’t remember seeing him dive; he glossed through the water as though towed by a jet ski. So that Terry could have his hero cheer him on, I went, always half concealing myself in the back of the stands, roaring louder than anyone. God, those swimming carnivals! It’s like I’m there now: the echo of the splashing bodies and the wet feet trotting along the cold sopping tiles of the indoor swimming pool, the pungent stench of chlorine that would make an embalmer nostalgic, the sound of a swimming cap sucked from a head, the dribbling of water emptied from a pair of goggles. And those boys loved it. It was as if someone had said to them, “Human beings need water to live, so get in!” And they got in. And they were happy.

Terry was the happiest of them all. Why wouldn’t he be? Football star, cricket star, swimming star. The town had its first local celebrity, made all the more remarkable because he was a seven-year-old boy. Seven! Only seven! He was the Mozart of sport, a prodigy unlike anybody ever seen. The town adored him, all its lovesick eyes caressing him, encouraging him. There’s no point denying it was out-and-out worship. The local paper made a big hullabaloo of the amazing Terry Dean too. When one of the city papers did a story on young athletes most likely to make sporting history and Terry was listed among them, my father almost died from delight.

In case you’re wondering, there was no sibling rivalry between us, not a speck of jealousy on my part, and even though I felt forgotten like those burned-out cars in derelict suburbs, I was proud of my brother, the sporting hero. But I was concerned too; I was the only one to notice there was more to Terry and sport than mere skill and athleticism.

It wasn’t the way he played that keyed me into it, but the way he watched when he was a spectator. First of all, you couldn’t get two words out of him before a game. It was the only time in my life I can say I saw him display anything that resembled anxiety. And I’ve seen him stand in court about to be given a life sentence, so I know what I’m talking about.

We’d arrive to watch a football game and a deep excitement would come over him- for Terry an empty oval was a shadowy, mystical place. The match would begin, and he would sit upright and expectant, his mouth half open and his eyes glued to every action. He was genuinely moved. It was as if he were hearing a language only he understood. He sat with a quiet intensity, like he was seeing something holy- as if scoring a goal in the last thirty seconds was an immortal act. After a game, win or lose, his whole soul seemed filled with satisfaction. He was in a religious fervor! When his team scored a goal, he would actually shudder. I saw him do it with my own eyes, and I don’t care what anyone says, a young boy shuddering with religious fervor is just plain creepy. He couldn’t stand a draw. You couldn’t talk to him after a draw. Bad calls from the umpire set him off into a violent temper too. I’d say, “Can we go home now?” and he’d turn slowly to face me, his eyes full of pain, his breath shallow; he seemed to be suffering. At home, after unsatisfactory games, we all had to walk on tiptoes (which isn’t easy when you’re on crutches).

As I’ve said, Terry and I were different in our bodies. His gestures were loose, effortless, honest, and agile while mine were laborious, painful, hesitant, and inept. But our differences were most keenly felt in our obsessions, and contrary obsessions can be a real divider. For example, if you have one friend in a monomania about not having found love and another is an actor who can only talk about whether God gave him the right nose, a little wall comes between them and conversations disintegrate into competing monologues. In a way, this is what was beginning to happen to Terry and me. Terry talked only of sporting heroes. I took some interest, but a significant part of having a hero is imagining his heroic deeds as your own. The fact was, I got only nominal pleasure from imagining myself scoring a goal or running the four-minute mile. Daydreams in which effusive crowds cried, “Isn’t he fast?” just weren’t that satisfying for me. It was clear I was in need of another kind of hero altogether.

Terry’s obsession eventually took over his life; everything from meals to going to the toilet was an unwanted interval between the times he could play, practice, or think about sport. Card games bored him, books bored him, sleep bored him, God bored him, food bored him, affection bored him, our parents bored him, and eventually I bored him too. We started arguing about silly things, mostly about my behavior: now that he was out enjoying life in the company of children who weren’t lying in bed moaning, my pervasive negativity and my incapacity for joy became wearisome to him. He started criticizing me for every little thing: he didn’t like the way I gently tapped people on the shoulder with my crutch when I wanted to get by them, he didn’t like how I quickly discovered the thing a person was most proud of and immediately ridiculed it as a way of undermining them, he was tired of my deep suspicion of everyone and everything, from church doors to smiles.

Sadly, in the space of a few months, Terry finally saw me for what I was: an eleven-year-old grump, a sour, depressive, aggressive, proud, ugly, mean, myopic, misanthropic kid- you know the type. The days of following me around, imitating my cough, and pretending to share in my stabbing abdominal pains were but a sweet, distant memory. Of course, looking back, it’s easy to see that Terry’s anger and reproaches were born of frustration and love; he didn’t understand why I couldn’t be as easy and happy in the world as he was. But at the time all I could see was the betrayal. It seemed that all the world’s injustices were rushing at me like a strong wind.

Now that I was losing my only ally, all I wanted to do was hide, but the fucked thing is that in a small town, there is no such thing as anonymity. Obscurity, yes. Anonymity, no. It’s really rotten the way you can’t walk down the street without someone saying hello and smiling at you. The best thing you can do is find places everyone hates and go there. And yes, even in a small town there are areas that people avoid en masse- make a mental list, and there you can live your life undisturbed without having to wall yourself into your bedroom. There was a place in our town that Lionel Potts had opened. Nobody ever set foot inside because Lionel was the most despised man in the district. Everyone had it in for him, but I didn’t understand why. They said it was because he was a “rich bastard.” They thought, “Who does he think he is, not struggling over the rent? What cheek!”

I thought there must be something secret and sinister about Lionel Potts. I couldn’t believe people hated him for being rich, because I’d noticed most people were aching to be rich too; otherwise they wouldn’t buy lottery tickets and plan get-rich-quick schemes and play the horses. It made no sense to me that people would hate the very thing they aspired to become.

His café was dimly lit, and its dark wooden tables and long wooden benches made it look like a Spanish tavern or a stable for people. There were indoor ferns, paintings of overdressed men on horseback, and a series of black-and-white photographs of a cluster of ancient, majestic trees where the pharmacy now stood. The place was empty from morning to night; I was the only customer. Lionel would complain to his daughter that it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to close up and go out of business, while peering at me curiously, obviously wondering why I was the only one in town not adhering to the boycott. Sometimes his daughter stared at me too.

Caroline was eleven years old and tall and thin, and she always stood leaning against the counter with her mouth half open as if in surprise. She had green eyes and hair the color of a golden delicious apple. She was flat-chested and her arms and shoulders were muscular; I remember thinking she could probably beat me in a fight and that would be very embarrassing if it ever came to pass. At eleven, she had that thing that was eventually perfected on Parisian catwalks- a pout. I didn’t know it then, but pouts operate like this: they suggest a temporary dissatisfaction that entices you to satisfy it. You think: If only I could satisfy that pout, I would be happy. It’s only a recent blip in evolution, the pout. Paleolithic man never heard of it.

I sat in the darkest corner of the café and watched her carry crates of bottles up from the cellar. Neither she nor her father fussed over me or treated me that nicely, considering I was their only client, but I drank milk shakes and Coca-Cola and read books and thought my thoughts, and with an empty notebook in front of me struggled to make sense in words of the visions that had come to me in the coma. Every day she brought me drinks, but I was too shy to talk to her. When she said “Hello,” I said “OK.”

One day she sat down opposite me with a face that seemed about to burst into cruel laughter. “Everyone thinks your brother is hot shit,” she said.

I almost fell over, I was so unused to being talked to. I regained my composure and said wisely, “Well, you know how people are.”

“I think he’s a show-off.”

“Well, you know how people are.”

“And up himself.”

“Well,” I said.

That was it. The one person in town who didn’t fall all over my brother was the girl I chose to love. Why not? Even the Kennedys must have had some sibling rivalry. Caroline went to the games like everyone else, but I could see she really did hate him, because whenever the crowd jumped and clapped for Terry, she sat as still as a library shelf and only moved to put her hand over her mouth as if stunned by bad news. And the time Terry rushed into the café to take me home for dinner, you should’ve seen her! She wouldn’t talk to him or even look at him, and I’m ashamed to say I found that scene delicious, because for five minutes Terry was getting a little taste of the slimy frog I was forced to swallow day after miserable day.

This is why Caroline Potts goes down in history as my first friend. We talked in that dark café every day, and I was finally able to unleash many of my banked-up thoughts, so I felt a tangible improvement in my mental state. I met her with sweaty palms and prepubescent lechery, and even when I walked slowly toward her, the sight of her smiling, slightly androgynous face was as visceral a shock as if she’d sneaked up on me. Of course I knew she had befriended me because she was friendless too, but I think she really appreciated my snide observations, and we were in total agreement when we compulsively discussed the boundless stupidity of our town’s sappy devotion to my brother. I volunteered her the one secret I knew about him: his spooky, religious reverence for sport. It felt good that I wasn’t the only one who knew there was something not quite right with Terry Dean, but soon after Caroline and I met, something terrible happened, and then everyone knew.

It was at a birthday party. The host was turning five, a big occasion. I’d missed my own because of the coma, but I wasn’t looking forward to it because I anticipated a somber affair, you know, when a child’s innocence shows signs of strain and the five-year-old begins, with sadness and alarm, to question why he’s suddenly torn between ambition and the desire to sleep longer. Depressing! But I was now off the crutches and could no longer use my illness as an excuse for avoiding life. Terry, on the other hand, was so excited, at dawn he was already standing by the front door in his party clothes. By now you should know the answer to that irritating question, what was Terry Dean like as a child? Was he an outcast? An antiauthoritarian stubborn prick? No, that was me.

When we arrived at the party, the sound of laughter led us through the cool, bright house to the back, where all the children were seated in the large fenceless garden, in front of a magician in an ostentatious black-and-gold cape. He was doing all sorts of cheap tricks. When he exhausted his doves, he went around the crowd and read palms. Trust me, if you haven’t experienced it, there’s nothing more stupid than a fortune-teller at a children’s party. “You will grow up big and strong,” I heard him say at one point, “but only if you eat all your vegetables.” It was obvious the fraud was taking cues from the parents and scamming the kids with phony futures. It’s disheartening to see lies and corruption at a kid’s birthday, but it’s nothing surprising.

Then we played pass the parcel, in which everyone sits in a circle and passes around some shoddy gift wrapped in newspaper like a dead fish, and each time the music stops, whoever is holding the parcel removes a layer. It’s a game of greed and impatience. I caused a stir when I stopped the game to read the newspaper. There was a headline about an earthquake in Somalia: seven hundred dead. The children were screaming at me to pass it on, their bitter recriminations ringing in my ears. I tell you, children’s games are no joke. You can’t fool around. I passed the parcel to the next boy, but every time another layer was shed, I picked it up hoping to find out more about the earthquake. The other children didn’t care about the lives of seven hundred fellow human beings; they just wanted the gift. Finally it was revealed: a fluorescent green water pistol. The winner cheered. The losers cheered through clenched teeth.

The November sun was making us all sweat, so some children leapt into the clear blue swimming pool for a game of Marco Polo, wherein one child with eyes closed swims around trying to catch the children with eyes open. He shouts “Marco!” and they shout “Polo!” and if he says “Fish out of water!” and opens his eyes to see a child out of the pool that child becomes the poor sap who has to swim around with his eyes shut. I don’t know how it relates to the life and times of Marco Polo, but there seems to be a criticism in there somewhere.

While Terry joined the others in the pool, I subjected myself to a dreadful thing called musical chairs, another cruel game. There’s one chair short, and when the music stops you have to run for a seat. The life lessons never stop at a children’s party. The music blares. You never know when it’s going to stop. You’re on edge the whole game; the tension is unbearable. Everyone dances in a circle around the ring of chairs, but it’s no happy dance. Everyone has his eyes on the mother over by the radio, her hand poised on the volume control. Now and then a child wrongly anticipates her and dives for a chair. He’s shouted at. He jumps off the seat again. He’s a wreck. The music plays on. The children’s faces are contorted in terror. No one wants to be excluded. The mother taunts the children by pretending to reach for the volume. The children wish she were dead. The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe…and yet the music goes on.

I was one of the first to lose, and I was thinking how in life you should always carry your own chair with you so you don’t have to share dwindling common resources, when I heard a commotion by the swimming pool. I walked over. Terry’s arms were plunged deep into the water and two little hands were reaching up from the crystal depths trying to scratch his eyes out. The scene wasn’t open to interpretation: Terry was trying to drown someone.

The other children were now standing on the lawn, all fish out of water. A dismayed parent dived in, pulled Terry off the boy, and dragged both of them out of the pool, where the horrified mother of the half-drowned boy whacked Terry across the face. Later that afternoon, in a huddle of outraged parents, Terry, in his own defense, explained that he had seen his victim cheating.

“I was not!” he cried.

“I saw you! Your left eye was open!” Terry shouted.

“Even so, mate,” my father said, “it’s just a game.”

What my father didn’t know was that the phrase “just a game” was never to hold any meaning whatsoever for Terry Dean. To Terry, life was a game and games would always be life, and if I hadn’t figured that out, I wouldn’t have manipulated the information for my own sad revenge fantasy, which unexpectedly altered the course of my brother’s life.

This is one of those memories that I could go blind thinking about- when all the worst of my impulses fused together for one stunningly shameful moment. It was only a month later, when after years of home tutoring between sports practice, Terry finally started at school (an event I had been dreading, as I had been so successful in keeping my spectacular unpopularity a secret from my family). Dave and Bruno Browning, fraternal twins, had tied me to a thick branch of a tree behind the gym. They were not only the official school bullies, they were also thieves, wannabe criminals, and streetfighters, and I always thought they belonged in jail or in graves so shallow that when people walked over them they would actually be stepping on Dave’s and Bruno’s cold dead faces. As they finished their knots, I said, “How did you know this was my favorite tree? Oh my God, what a view! This is beautiful!” I continued my glib rant as they climbed down. “Honestly, fellas,” I shouted, “you don’t know what you’re missing!” I gave the thumbs-up sign to a small crowd gathered at the base of the trunk.

My frozen smile melted at the sight of Terry’s face in the mob, gazing up at me. Because he was an adored sporting hero, the crowd cleared a space to let him through. I fought back tears but kept up the act. “Hey, Terry, this is fantastic. Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”

He climbed the tree, sat on the branch opposite me, and started untying the knots.

“What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone hates you!”

“All right. I’m not popular. So what?”

“So why does everyone hate you?”

“They have to hate someone. Who else are they going to hate, if not me?”

We sat in that tree all afternoon, for five hours, during two of which I had acute vertigo. The bell rang every now and then, and we watched children move from one class to another, obedient yet casual, like soldiers in peacetime. We watched them all day, neither of us talking. In the silence all our differences suddenly seemed unimportant. Terry’s balancing on the branch beside me was an enormously significant gesture of solidarity. His presence said to me: You are alone but not utterly alone. We are brothers, and nothing can change that.

The sun moved across the sky. Wispy clouds were transported on fast winds. I looked at my classmates as through a double-glazed bulletproof window and thought: There is no more chance of communication between us than between an ant and a stone.

Even after three, when the school day ended, Terry and I stayed put, silently watching as a cricket game started up below us. Bruno and Dave and five or six other children were arranged in a semicircle, running and jumping and diving in the dirt as if there were nothing fragile about the human body. They let out roars, in crescendo, and occasionally the twins would look up at the tree and call out my name in a singsong voice. I winced at the thought of all the beatings I still had ahead of me, and tears came to my eyes. They were tears of fear. How could I get out of this situation? I watched those two bullies below and wished I had dangerous, mysterious powers that they could feel in their guts. I imagined them singing their taunts with mouthfuls of blood.

Suddenly I had the idea.

“They’re cheating,” I said to Terry.

“They are?”

“Yeah. I hate cheats, don’t you?”

Terry’s breathing became slow and irregular. It was a remarkable thing to witness; his face spluttered like hot grease in a pan.

It’s not melodramatic to say the entire fate of the Dean family was decided that afternoon in the tree. I’m not proud of myself for inciting my little brother to attack my attackers, and of course if I had had any way of knowing that by manipulating his fanatical reverence for sport, I was effectively ordering dozens of body bags direct from the manufacturers, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

I can’t tell you much about what happened next. But I can tell you that Terry climbed down, grabbed the cricket bat from an astonished Bruno, and slammed it into the side of his head. I can tell you that the fight had been going for only about fifteen seconds when Dave, the uglier of the nonidentical twins, pulled a butterfly knife and thrust it hard into Terry’s leg. I can tell you what the scream sounded like, because it was mine. Terry didn’t let out a sound. Even as blood pissed from the wound and I climbed down and ran into the mix and dragged him away, he was silent.

The next day, in hospital, an unsympathetic doctor casually told Terry that he’d never play football again.

“What about swimming?”

“Not likely.”

“Cricket?”

“Maybe.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Can you play cricket without running?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

I heard Terry swallow. We all heard it. It was pretty loud. A softness in his eight-year-old face became instantly hard. We witnessed the exact moment he was forcibly disengaged from his dreams. A moment later tears poured out of him and he made unpleasant guttural noises I’ve had the misfortune to hear once or twice since, inhuman noises that accompany the sudden arrival of despair.

Philosophy

Terry’s old wish had been granted: he was a cripple, just like his big brother. Only now that I’d returned to normal health, Terry was on his own. He used my discarded crutches to get from A to B, but sometimes he preferred to stay at A for days on end, and then when he no longer needed the crutches, he switched to a varnished cane of dark wood. He cleared his room of all the sporting paraphernalia: the posters, the photographs, the newspaper clippings, his football, cricket bat, and swimming goggles. Terry wanted to forget. But how could he? You can’t run from your own leg, especially a leg that carries the weight of broken dreams.

My mother tried to console her son (and herself) by infantilizing him- making his favorite meal (sausages and baked beans) every day, trying to snuggle him, speaking to him in baby talk, and constantly touching his hair. If he had let her, she would have stroked his forehead until the skin came off. My father was depressed too- sulking, overeating, speed-drinking beer, and cradling Terry’s sporting trophies in his arms like dead babies. These were the days my father got fat. In a frenzy, he ate every meal as if it were his last. For the first few months it all pushed out the front and his naturally skinny frame shook with the sudden alteration, but finally it buckled so that his waist and hips fell into line too, expanding to a width exactly one quarter of an inch wider than the average doorway. Blaming me for the calamity cheered him up a little. It wasn’t one of those revelations that would need to be drawn out of him in psychotherapy, either. He didn’t bury his blame but expressed it outright, over dinner, waving his fork menacingly at me like an exorcist’s crucifix.

Fortunately, he was soon distracted by a return to his old obsession: the prison on the hill. He and the warden were drinking buddies and for years they played pool every night, for fun making $100,000 bets on each game. The warden was into my father for an astronomical amount of pretend money. One day my father surprised his friend by demanding he pay up, but instead of insisting his debt be met with money, my father made a strange and dark bargain: he’d forget the $27 million owed to him, and in exchange the warden must bring copies of the inmates’ files down from his office. With his son’s future blown, the only thing my father was proud of was having helped build that prison, a solid achievement he could see from our front porch. So of course he felt he had a right to know who the guests were. The warden photocopied the files, and night after night my father pored over the case histories of murderers and rapists and thieves and imagined them rattling the bars he himself had welded. If you ask me, this was the beginning of the end for my father, although there was an incredibly long fall yet to come. This was also when he began to rave at my mother in public so much that she could no longer bear being with him outside the house; and so she wasn’t, ever again, and on the rare occasion they bumped into each other in the street, an awkwardness fell over them and they were eerily polite. It was only back at home that their normal selves would reappear and they’d yak on insultingly ad nauseam.

Things were strange at school for a while too. As you know, I never fit in; I couldn’t even squeeze in. Terry, on the other hand, had been accepted and embraced from day one, but now, after he lost the use of his leg for athletic purposes, he squeezed himself out. I kept an eye on him as he hobbled around the school grounds, squashing the tip of his cane into classmates’ toes and putting all his weight on it. Personally, I think it wasn’t only his own disappointment that was turning him cold and nasty. It was also a reaction to the endless compassion he had to deal with. You see, people were all very sympathetic to him on account of his loss, plying him with huge dollops of aggravating kindness. It was the worst thing for him. Some people are body-and-soul repulsed at being a figure of pity. Others, such as me, can soak it up greedily, mostly because having pitied themselves for so long, it seems right that everyone else is finally getting on the bandwagon.

Bruno and Dave glared menacingly at Terry whenever they crossed paths. Terry stood his ground and gave them his slipperiest smile. That led into a stare-off, one of those battles of masculinity that looks very silly to a passerby. Later, as I trailed Terry through the school corridors, I realized he followed Bruno and Dave wherever they went. What did he want with them? Revenge? A rematch? I implored him to leave them alone. “Fuck off, Marty!” he spat back at me.

I went back up in the tree. Now I’d put myself there. It had become my secret hiding place. I’d learned a valuable lesson: people almost never look up. Who knows why? Maybe they’re looking at the soil for a preview of coming attractions. And so they should. I think anyone who says he looks to the future and doesn’t have one eye on the dirt is being shortsighted.

One day I saw a commotion below: the students were running haphazardly around the playground, in and out of the classrooms, calling out. I strained my ears in the weird way humans can strain their ears when they want to. They were shouting my name. I hugged the branch so hard I got a full-body splinter. Every student in school was after me for something. But what now? What now? Two students stopped under the tree for a breather and I caught the news: Bruno and Dave had requested my presence behind the school gym. It’s about time, I heard the students say. If stabbing my brother was a statement, maybe I was to be the exclamation point. The consensus was that they were going to tear me apart. Everyone wanted to do his bit.

Then one girl caught sight of me, and two minutes later a crowd was carrying me on their shoulders as if I were a hero, but they were really delivering meat to the butcher. They bounced like puppies as they ferried me to Bruno and Dave, who waited behind the gym. “Here he is!” the children cried, dropping me unceremoniously in the dirt. I slowly rose to my feet, just for the hell of it. You could have sold tickets- it was the hottest show in town.

“Martin,” Dave shouted, “if anyone…anyone…ever… touches you…or hits you…or pushes you…or even so much as looks at you funny, you come to me and I will ANNIHILATE them! You understand?”

I didn’t understand. Neither did the crowd.

“You are now under our protection, OK?”

I said OK.

The mob was silent. Dave spun around to face them. “Anyone have a problem with that?”

No one had a problem with that. They squirmed like they were all caught on a hook.

“Right.” Then Dave turned to me and said, “Smoke?”

I didn’t move. He had to put the cigarette in my mouth and light it.

“Now inhale.”

I inhaled and coughed violently. Dave patted me on the back in a friendly manner. “You’re all right, mate,” he said, with a toothy smile. Then he walked away. The crowd was too stunned to move. I struggled to keep my equilibrium. I’d thought I was in for a beating, not a saving. I was a protected species now. It puffed me up like a blowfish. I turned to the confused horde and offered them a challenge with my eyes. They all looked away, every last eye.

Eight-year-old Terry Dean had made a deal with the devils for his twelve-year-old brother, that’s what saved my skin. He’d seen me cowering behind garbage bins one day and suffering the monotonous grind of invisibility the next, so- loyal brother that he was- Terry proposed a deal: if they’d offer me protection, he’d join their demented crew. He suggested that he be their apprentice, a trainee thug. Who knows why they accepted? Maybe they liked his spirit. Maybe they were confused by the audacity of his request. Whatever the reason, when they asked him to write a little memo detailing the arrangement in his own blood, without hesitation Terry cut into himself with a Stanley knife and spelled it out so the pact was all there in red and white.

This was my brother’s premature entry into a life of crime. Over the next couple of years he spent all of his after-school time with Bruno and Dave, and since Terry was too young to keep their kind of hours alone, I had to tag along. At first the twins tried to coerce me to run errands for them, but at Terry’s insistence I was allowed to sit under a tree and read, even during the street fights. And there were always fights. The gang couldn’t sleep well if they hadn’t smashed someone’s face in at some point during the day. Once they’d fought every likely candidate in our town, Bruno would steal his father’s Land Rover and drive them to nearby towns for the face-smashing. There were plenty of kids to fight. Every town has tough guys, a new generation of prison filler waiting to happen.

Each afternoon they taught Terry how to fight. They had constructed a whole philosophical system based on violence and combat, and as Terry’s fists formed bony bricks, Bruno and Dave became a double act, one asking a question while the other answered it.

“What are your hands for?”

“Curling into fists.”

“What are your legs for?”

“Kicking.”

“And the feet?”

“Stomping in a face.”

“Fingers?”

“Gouging.”

“Teeth?”

“Biting.”

“Head?”

“Head-butting.”

“Elbow?”

“Jamming into jaws.”

Et cetera.

They preached the human body as not only a weapon but an entire arsenal, and as I watched them drum this oily gospel into Terry’s head, I thought about my own body in comparison- an arsenal aimed inward, at myself.

When they weren’t fighting, they were stealing- anything and everything. With no discerning eye for value, they swiped junked cars, broken car parts, school supplies, sporting goods; they broke into bakeries and stole bread, and if there wasn’t any bread they stole dough; they broke into hardware stores and stole hammers and ladders and lightbulbs and showerheads; they broke into butchers’ and stole sausages and meat hooks and lamb shanks; they robbed the post office of stamps and uncollected mail; they broke into the Chinese restaurant and took chopsticks and hoisin sauce and fortune cookies; and from the service station they stole ice and frantically tried to sell it before it melted.

If you were unlucky enough to be around after one of their stealing expeditions, you’d have to get ready to go shopping. Their sales technique was impressive. For Bruno and Dave, business was always booming, because they’d found a niche market: terrified children.

Terry got in the thick of it too, crawling through windows and air vents, getting into those hard-to-reach places while I waited outside and pleaded internally for them to hurry. I pleaded so hard I hurt myself. Over the months, while Terry was developing muscles, agility, and hand-to-hand combat skills, I was degenerating again. My parents, fearing a return of my old sickness, called a doctor. He was stumped. “It looks like nerves,” he said, “but what does a twelve-year-old have to be nervous about?” The doctor peered curiously at my scalp. “What happened to your hair?” he asked. “Looks like some of it’s fallen out.” I shrugged and looked around the room as if searching for the hair. “What’s this?” my father shouted. “He’s losing his hair? Oh my God, what a child!” A Pandora’s box of angst opened whenever I witnessed my brother in mid-robbery, but when there was a street fight, I put my whole soul into fretting. Every day when we walked home I pleaded with Terry to break away. I was absolutely convinced I was going to watch my brother die right before my eyes. Because of Terry’s age and size, Bruno and Dave armed him with a cricket bat, which he waved in the air as he let out a war cry and fast-limped it to their enemies. Rarely would an opponent stick around to see what he’d do with the bat, although some did stand their ground, and during one fight, Terry got slashed with a knife. Gasping, I ran into the middle of the fight and dragged him away. Bruno and Dave slapped him around to toughen him up, then sent him back in while the blood was still flowing. I screamed in protest until my voice ran out, then I shouted air.

These weren’t schoolyard fights, this was gang warfare. I’d look at the snarling faces of the young as they flung themselves into battle, having the time of their lives. Their indifference to violence and pain mystified me. I couldn’t comprehend these creatures, rabid with joy, squashing each other into the dust. And the way they adored their injuries- it was baffling. They gazed at their gaping wounds like lovers reunited after a long separation. It was nuts.

Caroline couldn’t understand them either. She was livid at me for letting my little brother join these thugs, even though she was happy the gang was protecting me. Her furious words left an afterglow on my cheek: her attention was all I needed. I still admired myself for my friendship with Caroline. Our conversations were the best thing about me and the only thing I loved about my life, especially since every afternoon Bruno and Dave would flick lit cigarettes at me and threaten me with various ingenious tortures, my favorite being that they would bury me alive in a pet cemetery. They never followed up, though, because Terry had made it clear that if I suffered so much as one scratch, he would quit. Clearly the twins could spot talent. They figured he was a criminal prodigy; why else would these two thugs obey him? If you asked them, they might have said it was a mixture of his energy, his sense of humor, his willingness to follow every order, his utter fearlessness. Whatever it was, they felt good having him around, even if it meant putting up with his brooding older brother who’d do nothing but read. Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.

“How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?” Dave asked me once.

I explained that there was a line. “If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and-”

“All right!”

“All books are in some way about other books.”

“I get it!”

It was an endless search, and endlessly fruitful; the dead sent me hurtling through time, through the centuries, and while Bruno seethed at my wide-eyed reverence for something as inert and unmanly as a book, Dave was intrigued. Sometimes he’d flop down beside me after a fight, and with blood streaming down his face he’d say, “Tell me what you’re reading about.” And I’d tell him, keeping an eye on Bruno, who burned with white-hot ignorant hate. More than once he tore my books into shreds. More than once I sat horrified as one of them flew off the edge of a cliff. There goes Crime and Punishment! There goes Plato’s Republic! The pages may have spread like wings as they fell, but they wouldn’t fly.

The boys demanded that while reading, I keep one eye out for police and tourists. Terry nudged me in a way that said, “Do this one small thing to keep the peace,” so I acquiesced, though as a lookout I was terrible. I was too busy observing the gang and coming to conclusions that I was burning to share. Bruno, Dave, and Terry had smashed their way into supremacy of the district and now were undefeated and bored. They had big plans for themselves; they wanted to climb the underworld ladder- which I suppose is a descent- but they were aimless and drowning in the tedium and didn’t know why. I knew why, and I couldn’t stand it that nobody asked me. After raiding my father’s shed, I had even worked out the solution.

One day, despite myself, I spoke up, and pushed my brother in a new terrible direction.

“I know why you’re bored,” I said.

“He speaks!” Dave shouted.

“Yeah,” Bruno said. “Now shut up!”

“Hang on,” Dave said, “I want to hear what he has to say. Go on, you sorry sack of shit, tell us why we’re bored.”

“You’ve stopped learning,” I said. No one responded, so I braved the silence and sliced right through it. “You’ve peaked. You know how to fight. You know how to steal. You keep doing the same thing day in and day out. You’re no longer stimulated. What you need is a mentor. You need someone in the crime scene to tell you how to get to the next level.”

Everyone absorbed my advice. I returned to my book, but I was only pretending to read. I was too excited! There was a warm river trickling through my veins. What was this feeling all about? It was brand-new.

Bruno threw a stone so it hit the tree inches above my head.

“Look around, dickhead. This isn’t the city. Where the fuck do we find someone like that?”

Without looking up from my book, and concealing my inner fire, I pointed up to my father’s proudest achievement- the prison on the hill.

Creation

“So how are we supposed to know who to ask to mentor us?” Dave asked.

“I already know,” I said.

My father’s shed was furnished with every conceivable detail about the prison and prison life, including, thanks to his whipping the warden at pool, files on the prisoners themselves. After coming up with my idea, I had studied every file on the whole menagerie of scum up there and had stolen the file of the clear winner.

“First I ruled out white-collar criminals, domestic abusers, and anyone who’d committed a single act of passion,” I said.

“And?”

“And I also excluded rapists.”

“Why?”

“Because there really isn’t any money in it.”

“Have you bloody picked one or not?” Bruno shouted.

I put down my book and reached into my bag for the file. My heart was beating so wildly I could feel it against my chest. I slid the file across a grassy patch of ground to Bruno and with my mouth dry as a new towel said, “This is your man.”

Bruno took a look. The others crowded around. The inmate’s name was Harry West; he was doing life. If there was a crime, he’d committed it: shoplifting, assault and battery, breaking and entering, possession of an illegal firearm, malicious wounding, grievous bodily harm, drug possession, drug dealing, drug making, attempting to bribe an officer of the court, successfully bribing an officer of the court, tax evasion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, arson, larceny, manslaughter, murder- the whole shebang. He’d set fire to brothels. He shot a man on the dance floor of a bar for doing a fox-trot during a waltz. He stabbed a horse at the racetrack. He’d broken arms, legs, feet, toes, broken ligaments, fragments, particles, matter; his charge sheet stretched back fifty years.

“Why him?”

I sprang to my feet. “The criminal underworld runs the industries of gambling and prostitution. Brothels, strip clubs, bars- these are the venues where the action takes place. You need to find someone who has links to all these things. And someone who’s a career criminal. You don’t want some fly-by-nighter.”

You had to hand it to me, I knew what I was talking about. The boys were impressed. They took another look at the life and times of Harry West. It looked like he’d spent more than half his life in a cell. That’s a life without a lot of running.

I went on: “It’s impossible to know how high up he is in the criminal underworld, but even if he was just answering phones, he’s been in it for long enough to know how the whole system operates. I’m telling you, this is the guy!”

I was electrified. No one had ever seen me like that. Their eyes scrutinized me. A little voice in my head tut-tutted me for encouraging them, but I had spent nearly my entire waking life hatching quirky ideas, and no one other than Caroline had ever heard a single one, until now.

“Let’s do it,” Bruno said, and immediately my stomach tightened. Why? A strange physical reaction was going on inside me. As soon as my idea was embraced, I no longer liked it. It now seemed to be a stupid idea, really awful. I liked it much better when it was in my head all alone. Now that it was going out in the world, I would be responsible for something I no longer had any control over.

This was my first of a lifetime of battles with ideas: the battle of which ones to air and which ones to bury, burn, destroy.

It was decided that because Bruno and Dave had juvenile records, it would be safer if Terry went to meet Harry West and report his findings back to the gang. One early morning in the middle of winter, before school, I accompanied Terry up to the prison. I was keen to go, not only because it was my idea, but because I had never been to the Palace (as it was often referred to in our home) that my father built.

You couldn’t see it from the town that day. A heavy layer of gray fog swallowed half the hill, including the jail, and snaked down to meet us as we fought our way up toward it. When we reached the halfway mark, we could see the shifting wall of fog in front of us. It curled into knots. We walked right into it, right into the soup. For a good twenty minutes we couldn’t get a fix on anything. To make the ascent harder, it had been raining and the winding dirt road that led up to the peak was a river of mud. I was cursing my own head the whole way up. What a big mouth!

When we saw the heavy gates of the prison emerge out of the fog, a long shiver swept over my body. Terry smiled optimistically. Why wasn’t he worried? How can the same situation make one person garrote himself with nerves and another person bright and cheery?

On the other side of the gate, a solitary guard was standing erect. He peered curiously at us as we leaned up against the bars.

“We’d like to see Harry West,” I said.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Martin and Terry Dean.”

The guard eyed us suspiciously. “Are you family?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want to see him for?”

“School project,” Terry said, giving me a surreptitious wink. Behind the gate a gust of wind blew the fog around, and for the first time we saw up close the prison that made a weekend magazine call our town “ Least Desirable Place to Live in New South Wales.” It didn’t look as much like a fortified castle as it did from the town. In fact, it was not one but four large red brick buildings of the same dimensions, as innocuous and ugly as our own school, and without the wire fence in the foreground, it appeared as ordinary as a government office block.

The guard leaned forward, pressing his head against the cold gate. “School project, eh? What subject?”

“Geography,” Terry said.

The guard scratched his head listlessly. I supposed the friction on his scalp started his brain like an outboard motor.

“All right, then.”

He unlocked the gate and it made a shuddering sound as it opened. I made a shuddering sound too as Terry and I walked into the prison compound.

“Follow the path until you reach the next station,” the guard said behind us.

We moved slowly. Two high wire fences ornamented with barbed wire lined the pathway on either side. Behind the fence to the right was a concrete yard where prisoners moved around, swiping at the fog lethargically. Their denim uniforms made them look like blue ghosts floating in a netherworld.

We reached the second guard station. “We’re here to see Harry West.”

The bearded guard had a sad, weary expression that told us he was underpaid, unappreciated, and hadn’t had a hug in over a decade. He plunged his hands into my pockets and rummaged around without so much as a how-do-you-do. His hands went into Terry’s pockets too. Terry giggled.

When the guard finished, he said, “All right, Jim, take them in.”

A man stepped out of the fog. Jim. We followed him inside the prison. The fog came inside too. It was everywhere, floating through the barred windows and crawling in thin trails along the narrow corridors. We were led through an open doorway into the visiting room.

“Wait in here.”

Other than a long table with chairs on either side, the room was bare. We sat down next to each other, expect that Harry West would take a chair on the opposite side, but I started to worry. What if he defied expectation and sat down beside us so we all sat staring at the wall?

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Before Terry could answer, Harry West entered and stood glaring at us from the doorway. His nose looked like it had been squashed, then yanked, then squashed again. This was a face that had a story to tell, a story of fists. As he moved closer, I noted that like Terry (and as I used to), Harry had a terrible limp. He carried his leg like luggage. You know how some animals drag their anuses along the ground to mark it? Well, it seemed to me that Harry was onto the same trick, digging grooves in the dusty floor with that leg. Thankfully, he took a chair opposite, and when I got a front view of him, I realized that his was a terribly misshapen head, like an apple with a bite taken out of it.

“What can I do for you fellas?” he asked cheerily.

Terry took a long time to speak, but when he did he said, “Well, sir, me and my friends, we have this gang in town, and we’ve been doing a little breaking and entering, and some street fighting, although sometimes it’s in the bush, and uh…” He drifted off.

I said, “The gang are young. They’re inexperienced. They need guidance. They need to hear from someone who’s been in the game awhile. In a nutshell, they’re looking for a mentor.”

Harry sat for a while, thinking. He scratched his tattoo. It wouldn’t come off. He stood and walked to the window.

“Damned fog. Can’t see a thing. It’s a pretty shitty little town you got here, isn’t it? Still, I wouldn’t mind looking at it.”

Before we could say anything, Harry turned and smiled at us, revealing a mouth missing every second tooth.

“Anyone who says the young don’t have any initiative has his head up his own arse! You boys restore my faith! I’ve come across legions of up-and-comers over the decades, and none of them have ever asked me for advice. Not one. I never heard of anyone with the guts to say, ‘I want knowledge. Gimme some.’ No, those bastards out there, they’re loafers. They breeze through life taking orders. They know how to break a leg, sure! But you have to tell them which one. They know how to dig a grave too, but if you’re not standing over them, they’d dig it right in the middle of a city park, two blocks from the cop shop. Hell, they’d do it in broad daylight if you weren’t standing over them shouting, ‘Night, you idiots! Do it at night!’ They’re the worst kind of drones. And disloyal! Like you wouldn’t believe! How many of my former colleagues have visited me since I’ve been locked up in this miserable place? Not one! Not a letter! Not a word! And you should have seen them before they met me! They were stealing change out of the cups of beggars! I took them in, tried to show them the ropes. But they don’t want to know the ropes. They want to drink and gamble and lie all day with whores. An hour or two is enough, isn’t it? Hey, have you got guns?”

Terry shook his head. It looked like Harry was warming to his task; he’d had a lot bottled up. The stopper was out.

“Well, that there’s your first mission. Get guns! You need guns! You need lots of guns! And here’s your first lesson. Once you’ve got the guns, find hiding places all over town and stash them- in the back of pubs, up trees, down manholes, in mailboxes. Because if you’re embarking on a life of crime, you never know when your enemies are going to attack. You’re never going to be able to walk through life without glancing over your shoulder. Are you up for that? Your neck gets a lot of exercise, take it from me. Any place you go- the pub, the cinema, the bank, the dentist- as soon as you walk into a room, you better find a wall and stand with your back to it. Get ready. Be aware. Don’t let anyone get behind you, you hear me? Even when you’re getting a haircut: always make the barber do it from in front.”

Harry slammed his hands on the table and bore down on us.

“That’s the way of life for us boys. It would shake the foundations of common folk, but we have to be tough and prepared to live against the wall with our eyes blazing and our fingers twitching. After a while it becomes an unconscious act, you know. You develop a sixth sense. It’s true. Paranoia makes a man evolve. Bet they don’t teach you that in the classroom! Precognition, ESP, telepathy- we criminals have prophetic souls. We know what’s coming even before it happens. You have to. It’s a survival mechanism. Knives, bullets, fists, they come out of the woodwork. Everyone wants your name on a headstone, so on your toes, boys! It’s a cunt of a life! But there are rewards. You don’t want to be a regular Joe. You just have to look out a window and see. I’ll tell you what’s out there: a bunch of slaves in love with the freedom they think they have. But they’ve chained themselves to some job or another, or to a squad of rug rats. They’re prisoners too, only they don’t know it. And that’s what the criminal world is turning into. A routine! A grind! The whole ball of wax lacks spark! Imagination! Chaos! It’s sealed from the inside. It’s chained to the wheel. Nothing unexpected happens. That’s why, if you follow my advice, you’ll have an edge. They won’t be prepared for it. The smartest thing you can do is surprise them- that’s the ticket. Smarts, brawn, courage, bloodlust, greed: all fine, necessary characteristics. But imagination! That’s what the criminal world lacks! Just look at the staples: larceny, theft, breaking and entering, gambling, drugs, prostitution. You call that innovation?”

Terry and I looked at each other helplessly. There was nothing stopping this eruption of words.

“God, it’s good to see you two boys. You’ve really pumped me full of piss! And vinegar! And just when things were tasting so stale, you’ve given me hope! The organization is in ruins. No one wants new ideas. All they want is more of the same. They’re their own worst enemies. It’s their appetites- insatiable! That leads me to my next tip. Keep your appetites down and you’ll live to be a thousand. Accumulate what you need to be comfortable and then go enjoy life awhile. Blaze like a furnace, then hide your light from the world. Have the strength to smother your own flame. You understand? Retreat and attack! Retreat and attack! That’s the key! And keep your crew small, that’s another tip. Bigger your crew, the more chance one of them will double-cross you and leave you for dead in some shallow ditch. You know why? Because everyone wants to be on top! Everyone! Well, here’s your next lesson: don’t be on top. Be on the side! That’s right. You heard me correctly. Let the others chew through their days charging each other like bulls. You put your heads down and get on with it. There’s nothing, you gorgeous unlawful children, nothing I can tell you more important than what I’ve already said: avoid the treacherous ladder! That’s the best advice I can give you. I wish someone had said as much to me when I was your age. I wouldn’t be in here. If only I’d known it was the ladder that would get me in the end. That ladder has blades for rungs!”

I struggled to keep up. What was I doing talking to this madman when I should be in school?

“Look. Take it from me, don’t make a name for yourself, be as anonymous as possible. Everyone will tell you it’s all about reputation- that’s the trap! Everyone wants to be Capone or Netti or Squizzy Taylor. They want their names to echo through eternity, like Ned Kelly. Well, I’ll tell you, the only way to get your name echoing like that is to be massacred in a hail of bullets. Is that what you want? Of course not. Here’s a new one: are you ready for it? Don’t let the world know who’s boss. That will throw them! They’ll be eating their hearts out. Be a leaderless gang. Give the impression that you belong to a democratic cooperative of crime! That’ll spin their heads. They won’t know who to come gunning for. This is irrefutable advice, boys. Don’t be showy! Be a faceless entity! Hell, be a nonentity. You’ll show those clowns. Let them speculate, but don’t let them know. The paradox of the crime world is that you need a reputation to get things done, but having a reputation gets you killed. But if your reputation is mysterious, if you’re in a secret society, like the Templars…do you know who the Templars were? Of course you don’t. Well-”

“The Templars were an international military order formed in 1118, during the Crusades,” I said.

Harry’s eyes stuck on mine.

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“A boy with an education! Wonderful! That’s what the criminal class lacks! A bit of goddamn smarts.”

“I’m just here for moral support. Crime is Terry’s thing.”

“Ah, a pity, a pity. Well, you make sure your brother gets educated. We don’t need any more empty heads running around the industry, that’s for sure. Terry, listen to your brother, OK?”

“OK.”

“This is just fine. It’s a good thing you boys came to me. Anyone else would’ve told you a bunch of rehashed crap that would get you dead or in here with me.”

“Time’s up!” a guard shouted from the hallway.

“Well, this looks like the end of class for today. Come back next week and I’ll tell you how to obtain and maintain loyalty from the cops.”

“I said time’s up!” the guard shouted. Now he was standing at the door, blinking irritably.

“OK, boys, you heard the man. Get out of here. Come back, though, I’ve got lots more stuff. And you never know, maybe we can work together one day. Just because I’m in here for life doesn’t mean I won’t be out one day. Life doesn’t really mean life. It’s just a figure of speech. It means an eternity which is actually shorter than life, if you know what I mean.”

Harry was still talking when we were escorted out of the room.

Bruno and Dave thought Harry’s advice was rubbish. An anonymous underworld figure? A democratic cooperative of crime? What was that shit? Of course their names were going to echo through eternity! Infamy was high on their to-do lists. No, the only part of Harry’s monologue appealing to Bruno and Dave was his reference to the accumulation and hiding of guns. “We’re nothing without guns. We need to move up to the next level,” Bruno sang. I shook at the thought of what that level involved, and I didn’t know how to reason with them, particularly because I was the one who had suggested they see Harry. I couldn’t get my brother out of a life of violence either. It was like trying to persuade a short man to be taller. I knew Terry wasn’t cruel, however, only reckless. He wasn’t concerned for his own physical well-being, and he extended that indifference to the bodies of others.

He visited Harry once a month, always alone. As much as he wanted me to, and as much as the inmate’s rants often seemed to make sense, I refused to return to the prison. I thought Harry was a dangerous maniac and/or an unendurable idiot. I could do without listening to him ever again.

That said, about six months after the original visit I went back up to the prison, this time without Terry. Why? Harry had requested my attendance. I reluctantly agreed because Terry had pleaded with me to go, and when Harry limped into the visiting room, I noticed he had fresh cuts and bruises on his face.

“You should see the other guy. He looks pretty good, actually,” Harry said, lowering himself into a chair. He stared at me curiously. I stared back at him impatiently. Our stares were totally different in character.

“Well, Martin, do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a kid who wants to remain hidden. Look. You’ve covered part of your hand with your sleeve. You’re slouching down. Here, I think, is a kid who wishes to be invisible.”

“Is this why you wanted to see me?”

“Terry talks about you a lot. He’s told me everything about you. You’ve started to intrigue me.”

“That’s nice.”

“He told me how you don’t have any friends.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Look at the way you’re scrunching up your face! It’s very slight. Almost nothing. Just in the eyes. You’re judging me, aren’t you? Well, go ahead, my little misanthrope. Fairly obviously I’ve been judged before, judged and tried and sentenced! God, I’ve never met such a disturbed thing in its infancy before. Quite premature, aren’t you?”

“What do you want?” I said. “I already told you I’m not interested in crime.”

“But I’m interested in you. I want to see how you’re managing out there in the big bad world. Certainly not like your brother. He’s a chameleon, remarkably adaptable, and a dog, very loyal, happy as a lark. Wonderful disposition your brother’s got, even though…” Harry leaned forward and said, “There’s something unstable about him. You’ve noticed it, of course.”

I had.

“Not much gets past you, I’ll bet. No, I won’t use that hackneyed phrase that you remind me of myself when I was a boy, because, frankly, you don’t. You remind me of myself now, as a man, in jail, and it’s pretty frightening for me to be able to make that comparison, Martin, don’t you think? Considering, well, you’re just a kid.”

I could see his point, but I pretended I didn’t.

“You and your brother are unique. You are not, either of you, influenced in any significant way by those around you. You don’t try to imitate them. You stand apart, even from each other. That kind of fierce individualistic streak is rare. You are both born leaders, you know.”

“Terry might be.”

“You too, Marty! Problem is, mate, you’re in the fucking sticks! The type of followers you might have had just don’t grow here. Tell me something- you don’t like people very much, do you?”

“They’re OK.”

“Do you think you’re superior to them?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you like them?”

I wondered if I should open up to this lunatic. It occurred to me that nobody had ever taken an interest in what I thought or felt before. Nobody had ever taken an interest in me.

“Well, for one,” I said, “I’m jealous of their happiness. And second, it infuriates me that they seem to have made up their minds without thinking first.”

“Go on.”

“It seems that they’re just keeping themselves busy at any and every task that distracts them from the impulse of thinking about their own existence. Why else would they smash the heads of their neighbors together over different football teams, if it didn’t serve the purpose of helping them avoid the thought of their own impending deaths?”

“You know what you’re doing?”

“No.”

“You’re philosophizing.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. You’re a philosopher.”

“No I’m not!” I shouted. I didn’t want to be a philosopher. All they do is sit around and think. They grow fat. They don’t know how to do anything practical like weed their own gardens.

“Yes, Martin, you are. I’m not saying you’re a good one, just that you’re a natural one. It’s not an insult, Marty. Listen. I’ve been labeled many times a criminal- an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that’s what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that- I don’t even know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?” Harry leaned forward and I could smell his stale cigarette breath. “You’ve felt it too, Marty. As you say, you don’t know why people act without thinking. You ask why. That’s an important question for you. Now I ask you- why the why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. It’s all right, Martin. Tell me- why the why?”

“Well, as long as I can remember, in the afternoons, my mother served me up cold glasses of milk. Why not warm? Why milk? Why not coconut juice or mango lassis? I asked her once. She said that this was what children at my age drank. And another time, during dinner, she chastised me for placing my elbows on the table while eating. I asked why. She said, ‘It’s rude.’ I said, ‘Rude to who? To you? In what way?’ Again she was stumped, and as I went to bed ‘because seven p.m. is bedtime for children under seven,’ I realized that I was blindly following the orders of a woman who herself was blindly following rumors. I thought: Maybe things don’t have to be this way. They could be done another way. Any other way.”

“So you feel people have accepted things that may not be true?”

“But they have to accept things, otherwise they can’t live their daily lives. They have to feed their family, and put a roof over their heads. They don’t have the luxury of sitting around thinking and asking why.”

Harry clapped his hands in delight. “And now you take the opposite view in order to hear the counterargument! You’re arguing with yourself! That also is the sign of a philosopher!”

“I’m not a fucking philosopher!”

Harry came and sat down beside me, his frighteningly pummeled face close to mine.

“Look, Marty, let me tell you something. Your life isn’t going to get any better. In fact, think of your worst moment. Are you thinking of it? Well, let me tell you. It’s all downhill from there.”

“Maybe.”

“You know you haven’t a chance in hell of happiness.”

That was upsetting news to hear, and I took it badly, maybe because I had the uncomfortable feeling that Harry understood me. Tears came to my eyes, but I fought them. Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? Is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can’t hide our melancholy? Why? What’s the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak? After a big cry, you always feel drained and exhausted and sometimes embarrassed, especially if the tears come after watching a television commercial for tea bags. Is it evolution’s design to humble us? To humiliate us?

Fuck.

“You know what I think you should do?” Harry asked.

“What?”

“Kill yourself.”

“Time!” the guard called.

“Two more minutes!” Harry shouted back.

We sat glaring at each other.

“Yep, I advise you to commit suicide. It’s the best thing for you. There is no doubt a cliff or something you can jump from around here.”

My head moved slightly, though it wasn’t a nod or a shake. It was a slight reverberation.

“Go alone. When no one is with you. Don’t write a note. Many potential suiciders spend so much time composing their final words they wind up dying of old age! Don’t let this be your mistake. When it comes to taking your own life, preparation is procrastination. Don’t say goodbye. Don’t pack a bag. Just walk to the cliff alone one late afternoon- afternoon is best because it sits solidly at the end of a day when nothing in your life has changed for the better, so you aren’t suffering the tender illusion of potential and possibility that morning often brings. So then, you’re at the edge of the cliff now, and you’re alone, and you don’t count down from ten or a hundred, and you don’t make a big thing of it, you just go, don’t jump, this isn’t the Olympics, this is a suicide, so just step off the edge of the cliff like you’re climbing the steps of a bus. Have you ever been on a bus? Fine. Then you know what I’m talking about.”

“I said time’s up!” the guard shouted, this time from the door.

Harry gave me a look that set off an intestinal chain reaction. “Well,” he said, “I suppose this is goodbye, then.”

There’s no shortage of potential suicide jump points when you live in a valley. Our town was surrounded by cliff walls. I made my way up the steepest I could find, an exhausting, almost vertical climb to a ridge flanked by tall trees. After leaving the prison, I had conceded that Harry was right: I probably was a philosopher, or at least some kind of perennial outsider, and life wasn’t going to get any easier for me. I’d separated myself from the flow, ejected my pod from the mother ship. Now I was hurtling through space that loomed endlessly ahead.

The mood of the brightening morning was incongruous to suicide, but maybe that’s just what it wanted me to think. I took a last look around. I saw, in the hazy distance, the jagged ridge of the surrounding hills, and above, the sky, which seemed to be a high, unattainable plate-glass window. A light breeze carried the warm fragrance of flowers in waves, and I thought: Flowers really are lovely but not lovely enough to excuse the suffocating volume of paintings and poems inspired by them while there are still next to no paintings and poems of children throwing themselves off cliffs.

I took a step closer to the edge. High in the trees I could hear the sounds of birds. They weren’t chirping, they were just moving around making everything rustle. Down near the earth brown beetles were rummaging in the dirt, not thinking of death. It didn’t seem to me I’d be missing out on much. Existence is humiliating anyway. If Someone was watching us build, decay, create, degenerate, believe, and wither as we do, he’d never stop laughing. So why not? What do I know about suicide? Only that it is a melodramatic act, as well as an admission that the heat is too hot so I’m getting out of this crazy kitchen. And why shouldn’t a fourteen-year-old commit suicide? Sixteen-year-olds do it all the time. Maybe I’m just ahead of my time. Why shouldn’t I end it all?

I stepped right out to the edge of the precipice. I thought that when Caroline saw me afterward she’d cry, “I loved that mashed-up piece of human wreckage.” I looked over at the terrifying drop and my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.

I stepped away from the cliff and ran in the opposite direction, stopping only to trip over a large stone.

I went back to see Harry West to give him a piece of my mind. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

“So you didn’t do it, eh? You think you will wait until you hit rock bottom before taking your own life? Well, let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. You’ll never get there, and that’s why I know you’ll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he’ll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don’t think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they’re the ones who can’t do it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldn’t dare. Look, Marty, you’re in an untenable situation. You don’t have the resources to live a full life, yet you can’t bring yourself to die. So what do you do?”

“I don’t know! I’m fourteen!”

“You and me, we’re in the same boat. Here in this prison a man cannot live properly. He can’t meet girls or cook his own meals or make friends or go out dancing or do any of the skimming-the-surface-of-life things that gather leaves and lovely memories. So I, like you, can’t live. And like you, I can’t die. I ask you again, what’s a man to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You create!”

“Oh.”

“Can you draw or paint?”

“Not at all.”

“Can you make up stories and write them down?”

“No.”

“Can you act?”

“No.”

“Can you write poetry?”

“Nope.”

“Can you play music?”

“Not a note.”

“Can you design buildings?”

“Afraid not.”

“Well, something will come to you. In fact, I think you already know.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

“Really, I don’t.”

“You know you do. Now hurry up. Get out of here. I’m sure you’re in a hurry to get started.”

“No, I’m not because I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I left the prison all dazed and emptied out, on the verge of either a shocking fit or a wonderful discovery. Create, the man said.

Create what?

I needed to think. I needed an idea. Feeling heavy, I trudged into town and walked up and down our five measly streets. When I reached the end of one and almost continued into the bush, I spun around and walked the streets again. Why wouldn’t I venture into the bush that surrounded our town on all sides? Well, I wished I could draw my inspiration from Mother Nature’s well, but to tell you the truth, the bitch leaves me dry. Always has, always will. I just don’t get any great ideas looking at trees or at possums fucking. Sure, the sleeping angel in my breast stirs just like everyone else’s when confronted by a breathtaking sunset or a bubbling brook, but it doesn’t lead me anywhere. A shivering blade of grass is lovely, but it leaves me with a big mental blank. Socrates must have thought the same when he said, “The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing.” Instinctively I knew that I could draw inspiration only from man and manmade things. It’s unromantic, but that’s just how I’m built.

I stood at the crossroads and watched the people drag themselves about their business. I looked at the cinema. I looked at the general store. I looked at the barbershop. I looked at the Chinese restaurant. That all of this had sprouted from the primordial soup was a profound and impossible mystery. There’s nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that a post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.

Then I had it.

They call it inspiration: sudden ideas that explode into your brain just when you are convinced you’re a moron.

I had my idea, and it was a biggie. I ran home thinking Harry was instructing both of us, Terry and me, in different lessons, but to be honest, I don’t think Terry got anything out of Harry at all. Oh, a few practical pointers, sure, but none of the philosophy, none of the juice!

First Project

I’m not a handyman by nature. The objects constructed by me that exist in the world are few; scattered in garbage pits across the country lie a misshapen ashtray, an unfinished scarf, a crooked crucifix just big enough for a cat to sacrifice his life for all the future sins of unborn kittens, a deformed vase, and the object I made the night after visiting Harry in his stinking prison: a suggestion box.

I built it optimistically; it was a real cavern, 50 centimeters across, 30 centimeters in depth, enough space inside to fit literally thousands of suggestions. The box looked like an enormous square head, and after I gave it a varnish I took the handsaw and widened the mouth farther, opening up the corners a couple of centimeters on either side so the mouth was smiling. First thing I considered was attaching it to a stick and pounding it into the earth somewhere in the town, but when you’re building something for public access, you have to take vandals into account; every place on earth has them, and beyond too.

Consider the layout of our town: one wide, tree-lined main street with four smaller streets running off in the middle. At this crossroads was the epicenter- the town hall. No one could go about his business without passing it. Yes, it had to be the town hall to give the suggestion box an official air. But to achieve permanence, so no one could remove it easily, it had to become part of the structure, part of the town hall itself. It had to be welded, that was obvious, but just try welding wood to concrete! Or to brick!

I scavenged around the backyard for scraps of corrugated iron that hadn’t made it onto the roof of my father’s shed. With his grinder I cut them into four pieces and with his welding torch I entombed the top, back, and sides of the box. I put a padlock on it, and at three in the morning, when every last person in the town was sleeping and the lights in the houses were off, I welded it to the bottom of the handrail that ran up the steps to the door of the town hall.

I placed the key to the padlock in an envelope and laid it on the front-door step of Patrick Ackerman, our lackluster town councilman. On the outside of the envelope I wrote his name and inside the following words:

I am entrusting you with the key to unlocking the potential of our town. You are the key master. Do not abuse your privilege. Do not be slow or lazy or neglectful. Your town is counting on you.

I thought it was an elegant little note. As dawn rose over the hills and the prison was backlit by a sinister orange glow, I sat on the steps and composed the inaugural suggestions. They needed to be beauties; they needed to inspire, to excite, and they needed to be within reason. So I refrained from putting in some of my more outlandish and unworkable suggestions, such as that we should move the whole town out of this dismal valley and closer to some water- a good idea, but beyond the jurisdiction of our three-man council, one of whom no one had seen since the last big rain. No, the first suggestions needed to set the tone and encourage the populace to follow suit. They were:

1. Turn to our advantage that desultory tag “ Least Desirable Place to Live in New South Wales.” We should boast about it. Put up signs. Maybe even exaggerate it in order to turn it into a unique tourist attraction.

2. For Jack Hill, the town barber. While it is admirable that you continue to cut our hair despite the crippling arthritis afflicting you, the result is that this town has more bad, uneven, and downright mysterious haircuts than any town in the world. You are turning us into freaks. Please- retire your vibrating scissors and hire an apprentice.

3. For Tom Russell, proprietor of our general store, Russell and Sons. First off, Tom, you don’t have a son. And not only that, you don’t have a wife, and now that you’re getting on in years, it looks like you will never have a son. True, you have a father and it’s possible you yourself are the son your shop refers to, but as I understand it, your father died long ago, decades before you moved to this town, so the title is a misnomer. Secondly, Tom, who is doing your inventory? I was in your shop just yesterday and there exist items that no human being could possibly have any use for. Empty barrels, oversized pewter mugs, thong-shaped fly swatters, and by God your souvenirs are curious: one normally buys a model of the Eiffel Tower in France, at the Eiffel Tower, not in small Australian towns. I know it is a general store, but you have gone beyond that. Your store is more vague than general.

4. For Kate Milton, manager of the Paramount, our beloved local cinema. Once a film has been running for eight months, Kate, you can pretty much take it for granted that we’ve all seen it. Order some new films, for Chrissakes. Once a month would be nice.

I reread my suggestions and decided I needed one more. A big one. It’s impossible to articulate what I thought was wrong with the people of my town on a level deeper than bad haircuts and vague supermarkets- deeper problems, existence problems. I couldn’t think of a suggestion that addressed these directly. It was simply impossible to point to the bedrock of existence, show the crack, and hope that we could all ponder its significance without everyone acting all sensitive about it. Instead I thought of an idea to address it indirectly. I guessed that their problems had something to do with priorities that needed shifting, and if so, the underlying cause of that must be linked with vision, with what parts of the world they were taking in and what they were leaving out.

My idea was this: I wanted to adjust their perspective, if I could. That led me to suggestion number five.

5. On Farmer’s Hill, build a small observatory.

I offered no explanation, but I threw in the following quotes by Oscar Wilde and Spinoza, respectively: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars” and “Look at the world through the perspective of eternity.”

I reread the suggestions and with great satisfaction slid them into the awaiting mouth of my newly constructed addition to the town.

The suggestion box became the town’s conversation piece. Patrick Ackerman held an impromptu meeting where he read out my suggestions in a solemn voice, as if they had come from above, not below, where I was sitting. No one knew who had put the box there. They guessed, but they couldn’t agree. The townspeople whittled their friends and neighbors down to a short list of about eight possibilities, but nobody was a sure thing. They certainly didn’t suspect little old me. While I had been out of my coma a good many years, they still saw me as asleep.

Amazingly, Patrick Ackerman was enthusiastic about the whole thing. He was the kind of leader who desperately wanted to be fresh and progressive, but he lacked motivation and ideas and he seemed to adopt my suggestion box as his surrogate brain. He violently shouted down any derision and opposition, and because of his unexpected outburst of enthusiasm, the council, mostly from shock, agreed to every one of my suggestions. It was wild! I really wasn’t expecting it. For instance, it was decided that Paul Hamilton, the unemployed one-legged seventeen-year-old son of Monica and Richard Hamilton, would start immediately as Jack Hill’s apprentice barber. It was decided that Tom Russell had one year to remove the words “and Sons” from his signs, or marry and reproduce or adopt a child, provided that the son was white and from England or Northern Europe. It was decided that Kate Milton, the manager of the local cinema, should be diligent in procuring at least one new film every two months. It was unbelievable! But the real shock was to come. It was decided that plans should be immediately drawn up for an observatory to be built on Farmer’s Hill, and while the budget allocated was a paltry $1000, the spirit was there. I couldn’t believe it. They were really going to do it.

Patrick decided that the box would be opened only once a month, by him. He would peruse suggestions to ensure he didn’t inadvertently read out anything profane or offensive, and at a public meeting he would announce them to the town, after which there would be discussions and debates and votes on which were to be carried out and which were to be ignored.

It was a tremendous thrill! I can tell you, I’ve had one or two successes in life thus far, but none has given me the absolute feeling of satisfaction of that first victory.

While the observatory would take some time in planning, my idea of using the dubious title “ Least Desirable Place to Live in New South Wales ” as a tourist attraction was immediately put into effect. Signs were erected on the road where it fell into town, and on the other side, where it rose out of it.

Then we waited for the tourists to come.

Amazingly, they did.

As their cars pulled into our streets, the townspeople put on dour faces and shuffled their feet.

“Hey, what’s it like here? Why is it so bad?” the tourists asked.

“It just is,” came the mopey reply.

Day-trippers wandered the streets and saw in every face a look of despair and loneliness. Inside the pub, the locals acted miserable.

“What’s the food here like?” the tourists would ask.

“Terrible.”

“Can I just have a beer, then?”

“We water it down and charge extra. OK?”

“Hey- this really is the least desirable place to live in New South Wales!”

When the tourists moved on, the smiles returned and the whole town felt like it had played a great prank.

Everyone looked forward to the box’s monthly opening, and more often than not, it was brimming. The meetings were open to all, and it was usually standing room only. They routinely began as Councilman Ackerman announced his disappointment at the things found in the box that weren’t suggestions- orange peels, dead birds, newspapers, chip packets, and chewing gum- and then he’d read out the suggestions, an astounding array of blueprints for possibilities. It seemed everyone was caught up in the spell of ideas. The potential for the town to reach a higher place, to improve itself, to evolve, had caught on. People started carrying little notepads with them wherever they went; you would see them stop abruptly in the middle of the street, or leaning against the streetlamp, or crouched over the pavement, struck by an idea. Everyone was jotting down his ideas, and in such secrecy! The anonymity of the suggestion box allowed people to articulate their longings and desires, and really, they came up with the strangest things.

First were the practical suggestions pertaining to infrastructure and general municipal matters: dismantling all parking restrictions, lowering taxes and petrol prices, and fixing the cost of beer at one cent. There were suggestions aimed at ending our reliance on the city by having our own hospital, our own courthouse, and our own skyline. There were proposals for entertainment events such as community barbecues, fireworks nights, and Roman orgies, and there were countless suggestions for the construction of things: better roads, a town mint, a football stadium, a horse track, and, despite the fact that we were located inland, a harbor bridge. The list just ran on and on with ultimately useless proposals that our town’s council simply wasn’t fat enough to satisfy.

Then, when municipal matters bored them, the people began to turn on each other.

It was suggested that Mrs. Dawes shouldn’t walk around like “she’s better than everyone else,” and that Mr. French, the town grocer, stop pretending he was “not good with numbers” when caught out shortchanging us, and that Mrs. Anderson immediately cease overexposing her grandson by shoving photographs of him under everyone’s noses because while he might be only three years old, “we’re all beginning to groan at the sight of him.” Things turned so quickly because Patrick Ackerman was struck down with pneumonia and his second-in-command, Jim Brock, took up the task. Jim was old and bitter and mischievous and read out the most profane, personal, idiotic, and provocative suggestions in an innocent voice, but you could hear him smile, even if you couldn’t see it. Jim was shit-stirring, and because anonymity guarantees honesty (as Oscar Wilde said, “Give a man a mask and he will tell the truth”), everyone in the town was really letting loose.

One suggestion said: Linda Miller, you whore. Stop fucking our men or we’ll organize a lynch mob to cut your great big knockers off.

And there was this one: Maggie Steadman, you old bat. You shouldn’t be allowed to park your car anywhere near our town if you can’t judge the dimensions of things.

And this one: Lionel Potts should stop showing off his money and buying everything in town.

And another: Andrew Christianson, you have no neck! I don’t have a suggestion for fixing it, I just wanted to point it out.

And this: Mrs. Kingston, stop bothering us with jealous concerns about your husband’s fidelity. His breath smells like rotten eggs after they’ve been shat out a runny bottom. You have no worries there.

And this: Geraldine Trent, despite your promises of “I won’t tell a soul,” you are a horrendous gossip and you have betrayed the confidence of just about everyone in town. P.S. Your daughter is a drug addict and a lesbian. But don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul.

People came to dread the reading of the suggestions in case they themselves were to be mentioned. They started to feel vulnerable, exposed, and eyed each other suspiciously in the streets until they spent less time socializing and more time hiding in their homes. I was furious. In the space of a few months, my suggestion box had really made our town the least desirable place to live in New South Wales, or for that matter anywhere at all.

Meanwhile, the twins had turned sixteen and celebrated the occasion by quitting school. Bruno and Dave were saving up for guns and planning a move to the city, and Terry wanted to join them. As for me, I’d finally managed to extricate myself from the gang. There was no reason for me to pretend I was doing any good watching over Terry, Bruno had finally reached the point of wanting to “vomit his whole stomach up” at the sight of me, and frankly, I’d had a gutful of the whole stinking lot of them. The benefit I derived from my association with the gang was firmly secured; I was left in peace by my schoolmates. I didn’t wake with dread every day, so now my mind was free to do other things. It’s not until it’s gone that you appreciate how time-consuming dread really is.

I spent every spare millisecond with Caroline. I was fascinated not only by her increasingly succulent body but by her idiosyncrasies. She was obsessed with the idea that people were holding out on her. She relentlessly squeezed their stories out of them; she thought that older people, having lived in many places and cities, had experienced all that life has to offer and she wanted to hear about it. She didn’t care about the children in the town; they didn’t know anything. It was easy to get the adults talking. They seemed ever watchful for a receptacle in which to pour the banked-up untreated sewage of their lives. But after she heard them, she’d incinerate them with an unimpressed look that said very clearly, “Is that all?”

She read too, only she gleaned very different things from books than I did. She obsessed over the lives of the characters, how they ate, dressed, drank, traveled, explored, smoked, fucked, partied, and loved. She longed for exoticism. She wanted to travel the world. She wanted to make love in an igloo. It was comical the way Lionel Potts encouraged his daughter. “One day I’m going to drink champagne hanging upside-down on a trapeze,” she’d say. “Good for you! I know you’ll get there! It’s important to have goals! Think big!” he’d ramble on endlessly. She really set him off.

But Caroline wasn’t as totally discontented with her surroundings as I was. She found beauty in things I just couldn’t see. Tulips in a flowerpot, old people holding hands, an obvious toupee- the littlest thing would send her squealing in delight. And the women of the town adored her. She was always adjusting their hats and picking flowers for them. But when she was alone with me, she was different. I realized that her sweetness, the way she carried on with the people of the town, was her mask. It was a good one, the best kind of mask there is: a true lie. Her mask was a weave of tattered shreds torn from all the beautiful parts of herself.

One morning I went over to Caroline’s and was surprised to see Terry standing outside her house, throwing stones so they landed in the garden bed underneath the front windows.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Terry Dean! Stop throwing stones in our garden!” Caroline shouted from the upstairs window.

“It’s a free world, Caroline Potts!”

“Not in China!”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing. I can throw stones here if I want.”

“I guess.”

Caroline watched from the window. She waved at me. I waved back. Then Terry waved too, only his was a sarcastic wave, if you can imagine it. Caroline waved ironically, which is totally different in tone. I wondered what Terry had against Caroline.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

“In a little while. I want to keep throwing stones.”

“Leave her alone,” I said, annoyed. “She’s my friend.”

“Big deal.” Terry spat, threw down the stones, and walked off. I watched him go. What was that all about? I couldn’t figure it out. Of course, back then I didn’t know anything about young love. I had no idea, for instance, that it was possible to express love by puerile aggression and spite.

Around this time I went up to see Harry, and I didn’t know it then, but it was to be my last visit. He was already in the visitors’ room, waiting and gaping at me expectantly, as if he’d put a whoopee cushion under my mattress at home and he wanted to know if it had gone off yet. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “You’ve been really stirring things up down there!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The suggestion box. They’ve gone crazy, haven’t they?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Oh, you can see quite a lot from up here,” he said, his voice waltzing in three-four time. It wasn’t true. You could see fuck all. “It’s all going to end badly, of course, but you can’t hate yourself for it. That’s why I called you here today. I wanted to tell you not to beat yourself up about it.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“I didn’t?”

“No.”

“Well, I didn’t call the clouds either, but there they are,” he said, pointing to the window. “All I’m saying, Marty, is don’t let it destroy you. Nothing chews at a man’s soul more ravenously than guilt.”

“What do I have to be guilty about?”

Harry shrugged, but it was the most loaded shrug I’d ever seen.

It turned out the shrug was right; by creating something as innocuous as an empty box, I had once again nudged my family’s destiny in a really unpleasant direction.

It started about a month later, when Terry’s name first appeared in the suggestion box.

Mr. Dean should learn to control his son. Terry Dean has fallen under the influence of young men impossible to turn around. But Terry is young. It’s not too late. All he needs is some parental guidance, and if his parents can’t do it, we’ll find some that can.

Everyone in the hall applauded. The townspeople regarded the box as a sort of oracle; because the suggestion didn’t come directly out of the mouths of our neighbors but was on paper and pulled ceremoniously from the box and read in the authoritarian tone of Jim Brock, the words were taken more seriously than they deserved, and were often followed with a frightening religious obedience.

“It’s not my fault it’s a titanic waste of effort raising sons under strict moral guidelines when children are so heavily influenced by their peers,” my father said that night over dinner. “One wrong friend and your kid could be knocked off balance for good.”

We all sat listening to him with trepidation, watching his thoughts whirl around his head like dust in the wind.

The next day he turned up at the playground at lunchtime. Both Terry and I ran for cover, but he wasn’t looking for us. Notebook in his lap, he sat on the swings and watched the children play; he was making a list of young boys he thought suitable to befriend his sons. Of course the children must have thought he was insane (these were the days before they would have simply assumed him a pedophile), but watching his fervent efforts to put me and Terry on the straight-and-narrow made me pity and admire him in equal measure. Every now and then he’d call over a boy and have a chat with him, and I remember being secretly impressed by his commitment to what was a seriously weird idea.

Who knows what they talked about during these informal interviews, but after a week my father’s list contained fifteen potentials: fine, upstanding children from good families. He presented us the results of his intensive research. “These are suitable friends,” he said. “Go out and befriend them.”

I told him I couldn’t make a friend out of plasticine.

“Don’t tell me that,” my father barked. “I know what making friends is about. You just go up and talk to them.”

He wouldn’t let up. He wanted updates. He wanted results. He wanted to see lifelong friendships parade before his eyes, and that was an order! Finally Terry had his gang “persuade” a couple of unsuspecting kids from the list to come over and hang out in the backyard after school. They came, shaking all afternoon, and for a while my father was placated.

But the suggestion box wasn’t. Eyes all over the town could see Terry carrying on with Bruno and Dave as before.

The next suggestion that came was this: I suggest that while his parents are not religious, Terry could use some spiritual guidance. It isn’t too late. Terry can still be reformed.

Once again my father was furious, though strangely obedient. This was to be the pattern, and as the quantity of the suggestions about Terry’s errant behavior increased and our family became a constant object of attention and scrutiny, my father cursed both the box and the “serpent” who put it there, but still he obeyed.

After arriving home from the town hall, my father argued with my mother. She wanted a rabbi to come talk to Terry. He thought a priest would do the job better. In the end my mother won out. A rabbi came over to the house and talked to Terry about violence. Rabbis know a lot about violence because they work for a deity who is famous for his wrath. Problem is, Jews don’t believe in hell, so there isn’t the same readily accessible chamber of fear the Catholics have up their sleeve to poison the nervous system of their youth. You can’t turn to a young Jewish boy and say, “You see that pit of fire? That’s where you’re going.” You have to tell him stories of the vengeance of the Almighty and hope he gets the hint.

Terry didn’t, and there were more suggestions to come, but don’t think the box was aimed only at my brother. One Monday night in the middle of summer, my own name was mentioned.

Someone should tell young Martin Dean that it’s rude to stare, the suggestion began, inspiring the whole room to burst into applause. He’s a grumpy boy who unnerves everyone by glaring at them. And he doesn’t give Caroline Potts a moment’s peace. I tell you, I’m no stranger to humiliation, but nothing has ever surpassed that mortifying moment.

A month later another Dean family suggestion was drawn from the box, this time aimed at, of all people, my mother.

Mrs. Dean should stop wasting our time with lengthy justifications as to why her husband and children are no-hopers. Terry isn’t just “wild,” he’s a degenerate. Martin doesn’t “march to his own drum,” he’s a sociopath, and their father hasn’t got “a healthy imagination,” he’s a bald-faced liar.

There’s no doubt about it. Our family was a popular target, and the townspeople really seemed to have it in for Terry. My mother became frightened for him, and I became frightened of her fear. Her fear was terrifying. She would sit on Terry’s bed and whisper “I love you” as he slept, from midnight until dawn, as though trying to alter his behavior subconsciously, before it was altered for him. She could see that the townspeople took her son’s reformation as one of their top priorities; he had been their number-one pride and was now their number one disappointment, and when it was obvious that Terry was continuing to run around with the gang, stealing and fighting, another suggestion was offered to tackle the problem: I suggest the renegade Terry Dean be taken up to the prison on the hill to talk to one of the inmates and hear the horror of the life inside. Maybe scare tactics will work.

For safety, my father forced me along too, in case I took it into my head to follow my brother into a life of crime. We moved up the hill toward the prison, our real school, on the dirt road that came down the hill like an open wound.

It was arranged for us to meet the worst criminal in the prison. His name was Vincent White. He’d had a bad time inside: stabbed seven times with a shiv, face sliced open, blinded in one eye and left with a lip that dangled from his face like a label you just want to tug off. The three of us sat down in front of him in the visitors’ room. Terry had met Vincent once before, with Harry. “Bit surprised you want to see me,” Vincent said straightaway. “You and Harry having maritals?” Terry shook his head imperceptibly, trying to signal him, but Vincent’s one functioning eye was darting around the room, surveying my father. “Who’s this you got with you? This your old man?”

My father dragged us out of the prison as if it were on fire, and from that day on the Dean boys were forbidden to visit anyone inside. I tried to return once or twice to see Harry, but I was knocked back. It was a crushing blow. Now more than ever, I desperately needed his advice. I knew things were building to a climax that was obviously not going to go down in our favor. Maybe if I’d had the presence of mind, I’d have encouraged my brother to leave town when, soon after the prison incident, he had an opportunity to escape this awful mess I’d created.

It was a Friday afternoon, and Bruno and Dave drove up in a stolen Jeep loaded with their possessions and also other people’s possessions. They honked the horn. Terry and I went out to meet them.

“Come on, mate, we’re getting out of this shitty town,” Dave called out to Terry.

“I’m not going.”

“Why?”

“I’m just not.”

“You pussy!”

“You’ll never fuck her, you know,” Bruno said.

Terry didn’t say anything to that.

Bruno and Dave revved the car gratuitously before screeching off. We watched them disappear. I was in awe at how, after all the pain and heartache and drama and anxiety people cause, they so unceremoniously leave your life. Terry looked on the empty road without emotion.

“Who won’t you fuck?” I asked him.

“No one,” he said.

“Me neither.”

The next town hall meeting was on the Monday, and we were all dreading it. We knew the oracle had one more suggestion for Terry Dean. As we entered, we avoided the eyes of all those unfriendly faces, which looked to have experienced a fit of rage in childhood, then harnessed it for their entire lives. They cleared a space for us as we moved through. Four seats were left in the front, and my parents and I took three of them. Terry had stayed at home, sensibly boycotting the proceedings. I sat on the uncomfortable wooden chair with my eyes half closed, peering beneath my eyelids at a photograph on the wall of the Queen on her twenty-first birthday. She looked to be in a state of dread too. The Queen and I waited impatiently as we listened to the other suggestions. They held Terry’s off until last. Then it came.

I suggest Terry Dean be taken to Portland Mental Institution and be treated by a team of psychiatrists for his violent, antisocial behavior.

I hurried out of the hall into the unexpected brightness of the evening. The night sky was lit by a huge moon, not full so much as fat, hovering above deserted streets. My footsteps were the only sound in town, other than the barking of a dog that followed me for a while, excited by my panic. I didn’t stop running until I reached the house- no, I didn’t stop there. I charged through the front door and barreled down the hall into our bedroom. Terry was sitting on the bed reading.

“You have to get out of here!” I shouted. I found a sports bag and threw his clothes into it. “They’re coming! They’re going to put you in a mental institution!”

Terry looked up at me quietly. He said, “Stupid bastards. Was Caroline there tonight?”

“Yes, she was, but-”

I heard footsteps tearing down the hallway. “Hide!” I whispered. Terry didn’t move. The footsteps were almost at the door. “Too late!” I shouted uselessly. The bedroom door swung open and Caroline ran in.

“You have to get out of here!” she shouted.

Terry gazed at her with bright eyes. That threw her off balance. They stared at each other, unmoving, looking like strangely arranged mannequins. I was utterly isolated from the energy in the room. This was a shock to me. Caroline and Terry had a thing for each other? When did this happen? I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.

“I’m helping him pack,” I said, breaking the moment. My own voice was unrecognizable. Caroline liked Terry, maybe even loved him. I was furious! I felt drenched by all the world’s rain. I coughed impatiently. No one looked at me, or gave any hint that I was among them.

She sat on the edge of his bed and drummed her fingers on the blankets. “You have to leave,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

I looked to Caroline to see what her response would be. “I can’t go,” she said finally. “But I’ll visit you.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Sydney. Go to Sydney.”

“And hurry up about it!” I shouted so loudly that we didn’t hear the second round of footsteps.

Two men came in, eager early members of a lynch mob. They took on the role of a strong-arm taxi service. Terry put up a futile struggle while more people filed into our house, all with hostile, determined faces. They dragged him outside, his face bled white in the moonlight.

Caroline didn’t cry but held her hand over her mouth in a twenty-minute gasp while I was in a frenzy, screaming myself hoarse at my parents, who stood helplessly by.

“What are you doing? Don’t let them take him!”

My mother and father cowered like frightened dogs. They were afraid of going against the oracle’s command and the unstoppable will of the townspeople. Public opinion had them on the back foot.

My father said, “It’s for the best. He’s unbalanced. They know how to fix him.”

He said this as he signed the necessary paperwork and my mother looked on, resigned. Both wore obstinate grimaces you couldn’t have removed with a hammer.

“He doesn’t need fixing! I think he’s already fixed! He’s in love!”

No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves it’s unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you’d think it was burning them.

Transcendence

It’s not that insanity is contagious, although human history is littered with tales of mass hysteria- like the time everyone in the Western world was wearing white loafers with no socks- but as soon as Terry disappeared into the crazy house, our own house became a place of darkness as well, starting with my father, who came to his senses a week later and did everything in his power to spring Terry from the hospital, only to discover that once you put someone under forced psychiatric care, the administrators take that care as seriously as the money the government pays them to do the caring. My little brother was judged to be a danger to himself and others- the others mostly being the hospital staff he fought to break himself out. My father petitioned the courts and consulted numerous lawyers but soon realized he’d lost his son in a tangle of red tape. He was stuck. As a result, he started drinking more and more, and though my mother and I tried to slow the momentum of his downward spiral, you can’t stop someone from taking the role of alcoholic father simply by telling them it’s a cliché. Twice in the months following Terry’s internment he lost his temper and hit my mother, knocking her to the floor, but you can no more easily wean a man off the part of Wife Beater than you can convince a woman to flee her own home by assuring her she has Battered Wife Syndrome. It just doesn’t do any good.

Like my father, my mother oscillated between madness and sadness. A couple of nights after Terry was taken away, I was preparing for bed and said aloud, “Maybe I won’t brush my teeth. Why should I? Fuck teeth. I’m sick of teeth. I’m sick of my teeth. I’m sick of other people’s teeth. Teeth are a burden, and I’m sick of polishing them every night like they’re the royal jewels.” When I threw my toothbrush down in disgust, I saw a shapely shadow outside the bathroom. “Hello?” I said to the shadow. My mother came into the room and stood behind me. We looked at each other in the bathroom mirror.

“You talk to yourself,” she said, placing her hand on my forehead. “Do you have a temperature?”

“No.”

“A little warm,” she said.

“I’m a mammal,” I mumbled. “That’s how we are.”

“I’m going to the pharmacy, get you some medicine,” she said.

“But I’m not sick.”

“You won’t be if you catch it early.”

“Catch what early?” I asked, examining her sad face. My mother’s reaction to having put her son away in a mental asylum was to become a maniac for my welfare. It didn’t happen gradually but all at once, when I found I couldn’t pass her on the stairs without her crushing me in an embrace. Nor could I leave the house without her buttoning up my jacket to the top, and when that still left a little expanse of neck exposed to the elements, she sewed an extra button on so I would be always covered to the lower lip.

She went to the city almost every day to visit Terry and always came home with good news that somehow sounded bad.

“He’s doing a little better,” she said in a distraught voice.

I soon discovered these were nothing but lies. I had been forbidden to go to the hospital because it was assumed that my weak psyche wasn’t up to a battering. But Terry was my brother, so one morning I went through all the motions of a boy preparing for school, and when the bus thundered by I hid behind a thorny bush I later burned for pricking me. Then I made my way to the asylum by hitching a ride with a refrigerator repairman who laughed snidely the whole way about people who don’t defrost.

Seeing my brother was a shock. His smile was a little too wide, his hair unkempt, his eyes vague, his skin pale. They made him wear a hospital gown so he might remember at all times that he was too unstable for a zipper or button-up fly. Only when he joked about the electricity bills for his shock therapy was I convinced that this experience wasn’t going to destroy him. We ate lunch together in a surprisingly cozy room filled with potted plants and with a large picture window that had the perfect view of a teenager with a persecution mania.

Terry turned dark in reference to the suggestion box. “What fucking tit put that there, I’d like to know,” he growled.

At the end of the visit he told me that he had not had one visit from our mother and that while he wasn’t blaming her, he thought mothers were supposed to be better than that.

When I arrived home, she was in the backyard. It had rained all afternoon, and I saw she had her shoes off and was digging her toes in the mud. She urged me to do the same because cold mud oozing through toes is a pleasure greater than anyone could imagine. She was not lying.

“Where are you going every day?” I asked.

“To visit Terry.”

“I saw him today. He said he hasn’t seen you.”

She said nothing and squelched her feet as deep in mud as they would go. I did the same. A bell rang out. We both looked up at the prison and watched it a long time, as though the sound had woven a visible path across the sky. Life up there was regulated by bells that could be heard inside every house in town. This bell signified it was time for prisoners’ afternoon exercise. There would be another bell shortly to stop it.

“You can’t tell your father.”

“Tell him what?”

“That I’ve been to the hospital.”

“Terry said you haven’t.”

“No, a regular hospital.”

“Why?”

“I think I’ve got something.”

“What?”

In the silence that followed, her eyes fell to her hands. They were white wrinkled things with blue veins the width of telephone cords. She let out a little gasp. “I have my mother’s hands!” she said suddenly with surprise and disgust, as if her mother’s hands hadn’t actually been hands but hand-shaped lumps of shit.

“Are you sick?” I asked.

“I have cancer,” she said.

When I opened my mouth, the wrong words came out. Practical words, none of the words I really wanted to say.

“Is it something they can take out with a sharp knife?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“How long have you got?”

“I don’t know.”

It was a dreadful moment that got more dreadful with every passing second. But hadn’t we had this conversation before? I felt a strange sort of déjà vu. Not the type where you feel as though you’ve already experienced an event, but the feeling that you’ve already experienced the déjà vu about the event.

“It’s going to get bad,” she said.

I didn’t say anything, and I was starting to feel as though something frosty had been injected into my bloodstream. My father shuffled out of the back door in his pajamas and stood there glumly with an empty glass in his hand. “I want a cold drink. Have you seen the ice?”

“Try the freezer,” she said, then whispered to me, “Don’t leave me alone.”

“What?”

“Don’t leave me, with him, alone.”

That’s when I did an incredible thing that to this day I still can’t get my head around.

I took my mother’s hand in mine and I said, “I swear I’ll stay with you until the day you die.”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

As soon as I’d said it, this seemed like a very bad, even self-castrating idea, but when your dying mother asks you to pledge undying devotion, what are you going to say? No? Especially since I knew that her future was the exact opposite of prosperity. What would it entail? Slow periods of deterioration broken by intermittent periods of false hope and convalescence, then recontinued degeneration, all under the weight of increasing agony and the terror of approaching death, which wasn’t sneaking up silently but was coming forward from a great distance trumpets blaring.

So why did I make this pledge? It’s not that I felt pity or was overwhelmed by emotion. It’s just that I seem to have at base a revulsion to the idea of a person being left alone to suffer and die, because I myself would hate to be left alone to suffer and die, and this revulsion is so deeply embedded within me that there was nothing fine about pledging devotion to my mother, as it constituted not a moral choice but rather a moral reflex. In short, I’m a sweetheart, but I’m cold about it.

“Are you cold?” she suddenly asked me. I said no. She pointed to the goose bumps on my arm. “Let’s get you inside,” she said, and swung her arm over my shoulder as if we were old drinking buddies going inside to rack up a game of pool. As we walked up toward the house and the prison bell rang out again across the valley, I felt that either a wall had come down between us or one had been taken away, and I couldn’t work out which it was.

With Terry in hospital, I spent almost every afternoon with Caroline. Not surprisingly, we talked about Terry interminably. Christ, when I think of it, there hasn’t been a time in my life when I haven’t had to talk about the bastard. It’s hard to keep loving someone, even after they’re dead, when you have to keep jabbering about them.

Whenever Caroline mentioned Terry’s name, heart molecules broke off and dissolved into my bloodstream- I could feel my emotional core getting progressively smaller. Caroline’s dilemma was this: should she be the girlfriend of a crazy gangster? Of course the drama and romance of it tickled her pink, but there was a sensible voice in Caroline’s head too, one that had the effrontery to seek her happiness, and that was the voice that was getting her down. It made her miserable. I listened without interrupting. Soon enough I was able to read between the lines; Caroline had no problem envisaging Bonnie and Clyde-style escapades, but she obviously didn’t hold out much hope for Terry’s luck. He was already behind bars and he hadn’t even been arrested yet. That didn’t sit well with her plans.

“What am I going to do?” she’d cry, pacing this way and that.

I was in a pickle. I wanted her for myself. I wanted my brother’s happiness. I wanted him safe. I wanted him free of crime and danger. But most of all I wanted her for myself.

“Why don’t you write to him and give him an ultimatum?” I said with trepidation, not really knowing whose cause I was aiding. It was the first concrete suggestion I’d made, and she pounced all over it.

“What do you mean? Tell him to choose between crime and me?”

Love is powerful, I’ll admit, but so is addiction. I was wagering that Terry’s absurd addiction to crime was stronger than his love for her. It was a bitter, cynical wager I made with myself, a bet I had no probable way of winning.

Because I spent so much time at Caroline’s house, Lionel Potts became our family’s only ally. In an attempt to get Terry released from the institution, he made phone calls to various legal firms on our behalf, and when that failed, he arranged through an associate for the most renowned psychiatrist in Sydney to go have a chat with Terry. That’s the psychiatrists’ version of doing a quote: they turn up in casual pants and chat like old friends. This psychiatrist, a middle-aged man with a floppy, worn-out face, even made his way to our house to pass on his findings. We all drank tea in the living room as he told us what he’d found under Terry’s hood.

“Terry has made it easy for me, far easier than most of my patients, not necessarily with his own self-awareness, which, to be honest, is nothing special, but with his candor and total willingness to answer without pause or detour any question I put to him. Actually, he may be the most straightforward patient I’ve ever had in my life. I would like to say at this point, you have done a tremendous job in raising a truly honest and open person.”

“So he’s not insane?” my father asked.

“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. He’s crazy as a coconut. But open!”

“We’re not violent people,” my father said. “This whole thing is a mystery to us.”

“No man’s life is a mystery. Believe me, there is order and structure in the most ostensibly chaotic skull. There seem to be two major events in Terry’s life that have shaped him more than any others. The first I would not have believed had I not unwavering faith in his honesty.” The doctor leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “Did he really spend the first four years of his life sharing a bedroom with a comatose boy?”

My parents looked at each other with a start.

“Was that wrong?” my mother asked.

“We didn’t have any room,” my father said, annoyed. “Where were we supposed to put Martin? In the shed?”

“Terry described the scene so vividly it actually gave me shivers. I know shivers aren’t a professional reaction, but there you have it. He talked about eyes rolled back that would spontaneously roll forward and stare. Sudden jerks and spasms, incessant drooling…” The psychiatrist turned to me and asked, “You would be the boy who was in the coma?”

“That’s me.”

He pointed a finger at me and said, “My professional opinion is that this faintly breathing corpse gave young Terry Dean what I can only diagnose as the permanent willies. This more than anything made him retreat into his own private fantasy life, in which he is the protagonist. You see, there are traumas that affect people, traumas that are sudden, but there are also prolonged, lingering traumas, and often they are the most insidious, because their effects grow alongside everything else and are as much a part of the sufferer as his own teeth.”

“And the second thing?”

“His injury, his inability to play sport. Deep down, although he was very young, Terry was convinced that excelling at sport was the reason he was here on earth. And when he was robbed of that, he turned from a creator to a destroyer.”

Nobody spoke- we all just soaked it up.

“I think at first, when Terry found he could no longer play football or cricket or swim, he embraced violence as a perversion of what he knew- to display skill. He wasn’t out to do anything other than show off, pure and simple. You see, his useless limping leg was an insult to his self-image, and he couldn’t accept the powerlessness without restoring his ability to act. So he acted, violently, the violence of the man who is denied positive expression,” the psychiatrist said with a pride that felt inappropriate for the occasion.

“What the hell are you talking about?” my father said.

“So how does he cease to be crippled?” I asked.

“Well, now you’re talking about transcendence.”

“Transcendence that could be, for instance, found in the expression of love?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

This conversation was really puzzling for my parents, as they had never seen my brain before. They’d seen the shell, but not the goods inside. The answer to all this was obvious to me: a doctor couldn’t turn Terry around, nor a priest nor a rabbi nor any god nor my parents nor a fright nor a suggestion box nor even me. No, the only hope for Terry’s reform was Caroline. His hope was love.

Eternity

I hadn’t noticed it going up. You couldn’t see it from the town, owing to the high wall of thick leafy trees at the summit of Farmer’s Hill, but on Saturday night everyone wound up the track toward it for its opening. You should’ve seen us, all filing out of town as if in a fire drill no one believed in. No one was carrying on with the usual banter; there was something different in the air. We all felt it- anticipation. Some didn’t even know what an observatory was, and those who did were rightly excited. The most exotic thing in bush towns is the dim sum in those ubiquitous Chinese restaurants. This was something else.

Then we saw it, a large dome.

All trees had been removed from directly in front of it, because where telescopes are concerned, even a single leaf of an overhanging branch can obscure the galaxy. The observatory was painted white; the building walls were framed with two-by-fours and covered with roofing metal. The telescope itself I knew little of, other than it was thick, long, and white, had a simple spherically curved mirror, stood on an isolated pier for a stable platform to prevent the transmission of vibrations, was designed to include expansion capabilities, weighed in excess of 250 pounds, was 10 degrees from the southern horizon, could not be pointed down into the girls’ bathroom in the school gymnasium, was encased in a fiberglass dome, and had a glass roof that lifted on a hinge. To move the telescope, if you wanted to peek at another corner of the galaxy or follow the transit of celestial objects across the sky, the idea for rotation motors was dropped in favor of “putting your back into it.”

We all stepped up, one by one, to the big eye.

You had to climb up to it on a little stepladder. Each person pressed against the eyepiece, and when their time was up, they stepped down in a sort of trance, as though lobotomized by the vastness of the universe. It was one of the strangest nights I ever had in that town.

I had my turn at the telescope. It exceeded my expectations. I saw huge numbers of stars: faint and old and yellow. I saw brilliant hot stars, clusters of young blue stars. I saw streaks of globules and dust, sinuous dark lanes winding through luminous gas and scattered starlight, reminding me of all the visions I had seen in the coma. I thought: The stars are dots. Then I thought of every human being as a dot too, but realized sadly that most of us could barely light up a room. We’re too small to be dots.

Still, I returned to the telescope night after night, familiarizing myself with the southern sky, and after a while I understood that watching the universe expand is like watching grass grow, so I watched the townspeople instead. After they stepped up silently, poked around in the farthest reaches of our galaxy, let out a whistle, and stepped down, they came outside and smoked cigarettes and talked. Probably their ignorance of astronomy helped move the conversations onto other things; this is one of those areas where lack of trivial, useless knowledge- the names of the stars in this instance- is a huge benefit. The important thing is not what the stars are called but what they imply.

People began with some marvelous understatements of the universe, such as “Pretty big, isn’t it?” But I think they were purposefully laconic. They were filled with awe and wonder, and like a dreamer who has woken but lies unmoving in bed trying to return to the dream, they didn’t want inadvertently to shake themselves awake. But then, slowly, they began to talk, and it wasn’t about the stars or their place in the universe. I listened with astonishment as they said things like

“I should spend more time with my son.”

“When I was young, I used to look up at the stars too.”

“I don’t feel loved. I feel liked.”

“I wonder why I don’t go to church anymore.”

“My children turned out differently than I expected. Taller, maybe.”

“I’d like to take a holiday with Carol, like we did when we were first married.”

“I don’t want to be alone anymore. My clothes smell.”

“I want to accomplish something.”

“I’ve gotten so lazy. I haven’t learned anything since I was at school.”

“I’m going to plant a lemon tree, not for me but for my children’s children. Lemons are the future.”

It was thrilling to hear. The incessant universe had made them look at themselves, if not from the perspective of eternity, then at least with a bit more clarity. For a few minutes they were stirred to the depths, and I suddenly felt rewarded and compensated for all the damage my suggestion box had done.

It made me think too.

One night after I had come down from the observatory, I found myself frozen in the garden at midnight fretting on the future of my family, trying to come up with ideas of how to save them all. Unfortunately, the idea bank was empty. I had made too many withdrawals. Besides, how do you save a dying mother, an alcoholic father, and a criminally insane little brother? Anxiety threatened to damage my stomach lining and also my urethra.

I carried a bucket of water from the house and poured it in a shallow ditch at the end of the garden. I thought: I might not be able to make a better life for my loved ones, but I can still make mud. The dirt met the water and thickened appropriately. I plunged my feet in it. It was cold and gooey. The back of my neck tingled. I thanked my mother aloud for instructing me in the glories of mud. It’s so rare that people give you real, practical advice. Normally they say things like “Don’t worry,” and “Everything will be OK,” which is not only impractical, it’s exasperating, and you have to wait until they’re diagnosed with a terminal disease before you can say it back to them with any pleasure.

I sank deeper into the mud, using all my force, all the way to the tops of my ankles. I wanted to go farther into the cold sludge. A lot farther. I thought about getting more water. A lot more. Just then I heard footsteps running through the bush and I saw branches shuddering as if repulsed. A face popped out and said, “Marty?”

Harry stepped into the moonlight. He was wearing his prison denims and was badly cut and bleeding.

“I escaped! What are you doing? Cooling your feet in mud? Hang on.” Harry came over and sank his bare feet in the ditch next to mine. “That’s better. Well, there I was. Lying in my cell, contemplating how the best years of my life were behind me and how they weren’t that good. Then I contemplated how all I had to look forward to was decaying and dying in jail. You’ve seen the prison- it’s no sort of place at all. I thought: If I don’t at least try to make a break for it, I’ll never forgive myself. Fine. But how? In movies, prisoners always escape by smuggling themselves inside a laundry truck. Could it work? No. You know why? Because maybe in the old days prisons sent out their laundry, but we did ours in-house! So that was out. Second option, digging a tunnel. Now, I’ve dug enough graves in my time to know it’s tedious, backbreaking work, and besides, all my experience is in the first six feet, enough to hide a body. Who really knows what lies deeper? Molten lava? An unbreakable shelf of iron ore?”

Harry looked down at his feet. “I think the mud’s setting. Help me out of here,” he said, holding out his arm as if it were for sale. I helped him out and he collapsed on a small mound of grass.

“Get me something to wear, and a beer if you’ve got it. Hurry up,” he said.

I went inside and sneaked into my father’s closet; he was sleeping facedown on the bed, a deep drunken sleep with such a shattering snore I almost stopped to check his nose for an amplifier and lead. I picked out an old suit, then went to the fridge for beers. When I returned, Harry was ankle deep in mud again.

“First thing I did was fake an illness: stabbing abdominal pains. What else was I going to use? Back pain? Middle-ear infection? Was I going to complain that I saw a drop of blood in my urine? No, they needed to think it was a matter of life and death. So I did it and found myself sent to the infirmary, at three in the morning, when only one man was on duty. So I’m in the infirmary, doubled up in pretend pain. At about five the guard on duty goes out for a piss. At once I leap out of bed and break the lock of the medicine cabinet and steal all the liquid tranquilizers I can. I jab the guard when he comes back and then go around looking for another guard to help me get out of there. I knew I’d never get out without a guard’s help, but these bastards were unbribable, for the most part. Not that they weren’t corrupt, they just didn’t like me. But a couple of weeks before, I called in all my old favors and got one of my cronies to supply me with information about a certain guard’s family. I chose one of the newer guys- Kevin Hastings is his name, he’s been with us only two months, so he was less likely to know his arse from his elbow. It’s hilarious how these bastards think they’re anonymous in prison. You can really freak them out when you tell them you know precisely what positions they use with their wives, duration, et cetera. Anyway, Hastings turned out to be perfect. The man has a daughter. I wouldn’t have done anything, but I had to scare the life out of the bugger. And even if he didn’t bite, what did I have to lose? Would they really bother giving me another life sentence? I already have six!” Harry paused here a moment, reflecting, and said quietly, “I’ll tell you something, Marty, there’s freedom in forever.”

I nodded. It sounded true.

“So anyway, I go right up to Hastings and whisper in his ear, ‘Get me out of here now or else your lovely little daughter Rachael will enjoy the pleasure of a very diseased man I know.’ His face went white and he slipped me the keys, let me bang him on the noggin so he wouldn’t be under suspicion, and that’s all there was to it. I don’t feel proud of myself, but it was just a threat. When I’m safely hidden away, I’ll call him and ease his mind that his daughter is safe.”

I said, “Good one.”

“So what’s next for you, Marty? I don’t suppose you want to come with me? Be an accessory. What do you say?”

I told Harry about the bond I’d made with my mother that prevented me from leaving town at present.

“Wait, what kind of bond?”

“Well, it was more like an oath.”

“You made an oath with your mother?”

“Well, what’s so strange about that?” I asked, annoyed. What was the big deal? It’s not like I had confessed to sleeping with my mother, I merely pledged allegiance not to leave her side.

Harry didn’t say anything. His mouth was half open and I could feel his eyes tunneling deep into my cranium. He slapped his hand on my shoulder. “Well, can’t talk you out of an oath, can I?”

I agreed that he couldn’t.

“Well, good luck, old boy,” he said before turning and disappearing into the dark bush. “See you next time,” his disembodied voice called out. He left without even asking after Terry.

A week later my mother came into my room with big news. “Your brother’s coming home today. Your father’s gone to collect him,” she said, as if he were a long-awaited parcel. Terry had become a sort of fictitious character to us in the year he’d been gone, and the psychiatrist, by reducing him to a catalogue of psychological symptoms, had robbed my brother of his individuality. True, the complexity of his psychosis impressed us- he was collateral damage in a war waged between his deeper instincts- but it posed a question that plagued us: which Terry would be coming home? My brother, my mother’s son, or the impotent destroyer desperate for transcendence of the self?

We were all on pins and needles.

I wasn’t prepared for the sight of him walking through the back door- he looked so happy you’d have thought he’d been in Fiji sipping margaritas out of a coconut. He sat at the kitchen table and said, “So what kind of welcome-home feast you got planned for the prodigal son? Some fattened calf?” My mother was in such a state she cried, “Fattened calf? Where am I going to get that?” and Terry jumped from the table and hugged her and spun her around the room and she almost screamed in terror, she was so frightened of her own son.

After lunch Terry and I walked the narrow dirt road that led into town. The sun beat violently down. All the flies in the district came out to greet him. He brushed them away and said, “Can’t do that strapped to a bed.” I related the story of Harry’s shifty escape and his appearance that night in the mud.

“And have you seen Caroline?” he asked.

“Now and then.”

“How is she?”

“Let’s go see.”

“Wait. How do I look?”

I gave him the once-over and nodded. As usual, he looked good. No, better than good. Terry was already looking like a man, whereas I, more a man in age than he was, looked more like a boy with an aging disease. We moved silently toward town. What do you say to someone who’s just got back from hell? “Was it hot enough for you?” I think in the end I blurted out something like “How are you?” with an emphasis on the are, and he muttered that the “mongrels couldn’t break me.” I knew he’d suffered through an experience he’d never be able to communicate.

We reached town and Terry gave every person on the street a challenging stare. There were bitterness and anger in that stare. Clearly the hospital “treatment” had done nothing to quiet his anger. He had it in for everyone. Terry had chosen not to blame our parents for his sentence but had fixed his fury on everyone who followed the word of the suggestion box.

Except one. Lionel Potts came bounding up, waving his arms wildly. “Terry! Terry!” He was the only person in town happy to see my brother. It was a welcome relief to feel the force of Lionel’s childlike enthusiasm. He was the sort of man you talk to about the weather and you still walk away smiling. “The Dean boys, together again! How are you, Terry? Thank God you got out of that hellhole. Cunt of a place, wasn’t it? Did you give that blond nurse my phone number?”

“Sorry, mate,” Terry said. “You’ll have to get committed yourself if you want that action.”

So Lionel had been up to see Terry.

“Maybe I will, Terry. She looked worth it. Hey, Caroline’s in the café, smoking. She pretends to hide it from me and I pretend to be fooled. Have you seen her?”

“We’re on our way now,” Terry said.

“Excellent! Wait here!” Lionel pulled out a packet of cigarettes. “These are lights. See if you can wean her off the Marlboro full-strengths, would you? If it doesn’t bother you, a little collusion.”

“Not at all. How’s your back?”

“Crap! My shoulders feel like clamps. A town masseuse, that’s the kind of suggestion that would do some good,” Lionel said as he massaged his own shoulders with both hands.

Terry and I arrived outside the café. It was closed. It was always closed now; the boycott had won in the end. Caroline was lurking inside; the café was her private hideout until her father managed to sell it. We saw her through the window: she was lying on the bar smoking, trying to blow perfect smoke rings. It was adorable. The rings came out as whirling semicircles. I tapped on the glass and reached out to put my hand on Terry’s shoulder in brotherly support, but my hand met with nothing but air. I turned to see Terry’s back moving away from me fast, and by the time Caroline had unlocked the door and stepped out on the street, Terry was gone.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to come in? I’m smoking.”

“Maybe later.”

As I walked away I noticed a bad smell in the air, like dead birds rotting in the sun.

I found Terry sitting beneath a tree, holding a pile of letters in his hands. I sat beside him and didn’t say anything. He stared down at the letters.

“They’re from her,” he said.

So, Caroline’s letters! Love letters, no doubt.

I stretched out on the grass and closed my eyes. There was no wind, and next to no sound. I had the impression of being inside a bank vault.

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

A masochistic streak in me was dying to get my hands on those stinking letters. I was frantic to see how she expressed her love, even if it wasn’t for me.

“They’re private.”

I could feel something crawling on my neck, maybe an ant, but I didn’t move- I didn’t want to give it the moral victory.

“Well, can you summarize?” I asked.

“She says she only wants to be with me if I can give up crime.”

“And are you going to?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I felt myself shrink a little. Of course I was pleased that Terry would be saved by the woman he loved, but I couldn’t rejoice. One brother’s success is another brother’s failure. Dammit. I didn’t think he had it in him.

“Only, the thing is…” he said.

I sat up and looked at him. His eyes were heavy. Maybe the hospital had changed him after all. I wasn’t sure how, exactly; maybe inside him something fluid had hardened, or something solid had melted. Terry gazed out in the direction of the town center. “There’s one thing I need to do first,” he said. “Just one little illegal thing.”

One thing. They all say that. Just one and he’ll be on to the next, and before you know it he’ll be like a snowball rolling downhill gathering yellow snow.

“Well, you’ll do whatever you want,” I said, not strictly encouraging him, though not discouraging him either.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do it,” Terry said.

“Maybe.”

“But I really want to.”

“Well,” I said, choosing my words very carefully, “sometimes people need to do things, you know, to get the things that they need to do out of their system.”

What was I saying? Absolutely nothing. It was simply impossible to recommend to Terry a course of action; this was my defense for the unconscionable act of bad brothering I was doing.

“Yeah,” he said, lost in thought, and I stood there like a stop sign, even though I was saying, Go!

Terry picked himself up and brushed the grass off his jeans. “I’ll see you a bit later on,” he said, and walked off slowly in the opposite direction from Caroline’s café. He was really dawdling, I think because he wanted me to stop him. I didn’t.

Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.

Hours later, I heard the explosion. Out my window I saw thick billows of smoke spiraling into the moon-drenched night. My stomach tightened as I ran into town. I wasn’t the only one. The entire populace had congregated in the main street outside the town hall. They all looked horrified, the preferred expression of a crowd of spectators who gather specifically for tragedies. My poisonous suggestion box was gone. There were bits of it all over the street.

An ambulance had arrived, though not for the broken box. A man was stretched out on the pavement, his face covered with a white cloth soaked in blood. At first I thought he was dead, but he removed the cloth to reveal a face of blood and powder burns. No, he wasn’t dead. He was blind. He’d been reaching into the box to place a suggestion when the whole thing exploded in his face.

“I can’t see! I can’t fucking see!” he was shouting, panicked.

It was Lionel Potts.

There were more than fifty men and women on the scene, and in their eyes was a sort of thrill, as if they had come to dance in the streets on an enchanted evening. Through the crowd I saw Terry sitting in the gutter with his head between his legs. The horror of his badly timed act of vandalism was too much for him. Lionel had been the one bright light in a world full of dim ones, and Terry had torn his eyes out. It felt strange to see shards of my suggestion box strewn all over the road, and the way my brother was slumped in the gutter, and Lionel sprawled on the pavement, and Caroline hunched over him; it seemed to me that my loved ones had all exploded too. Smoke still hung in the air, curling in the bluish light, and it smelled very much like firecracker night.

Only five days later our family was dressed in its Sunday best.

Juvenile courtrooms are just like regular courtrooms. The state tried a number of charges on Terry like a rich woman trying suits on her favorite gigolo: attempted murder, attempted manslaughter, malicious wounding- the prosecutors couldn’t decide. They should have arrested me too. I don’t know if egging on a crime for love is an offense punishable by law, but it should be.

In the end, Terry was sentenced to three years in a juvenile detention center. When they took him away, he gave me a little wink. Then he was gone, just like that. The rest of us stood hugging each other in the courtroom, totally bewildered. I tell you, the wheels of justice may turn slowly, but when the state wants you off the streets, the wheels that carry you away spin like comets.

Democracy

After Lionel’s blinding, I found myself haunted by questions, and after Terry’s incarceration, I felt those questions pressing down on me from all sides. I had to do something. But what? I had to be someone. But who? I didn’t want to imitate the stupidity of the people around me. But whose stupidity should I imitate? And why did I feel sick at night? Was I afraid? Was fear making me anxious? How could I think clearly if I was anxious? And how could I understand anything if I couldn’t think clearly? And how was I going to function in this world if I couldn’t understand anything?

It was in this besieged state that I arrived at school, but I couldn’t make my way through the gates. For a good hour I stood staring at the ugly brick buildings, the dim-witted students, the trees in the playground, the brown polyester pants of the teachers making a swishing sound on their fleshy thighs as they marched between classes, and I thought: If I study hard, I’ll pass my exams, but so what? What do I do between that moment and the moment of my death?

When I got home, neither my mother nor my father seemed to care very much that I had quit school. My father was reading the local paper. My mother was writing a letter to Terry, a long letter, forty pages or more. I had sneaked a peek but couldn’t get past the uncomfortable first paragraph, in which she wrote: “I love you I love you my darling son my life my love what have you done my love my lovely son?”

“Didn’t you hear me? I said I’ve quit school,” I repeated in a hurt whisper.

They didn’t react. What was conspicuously lacking in the silence was the question, What are you going to do now? “I’m going to join the army!” I shouted ludicrously, for effect.

It worked, though in the manner of a firework that sizzles and sparks on the ground, then abruptly dies out. My father actually said “Ha!” while my mother half turned her head to me and said in a quiet, stern voice, “Don’t.” And that was it.

In retrospect, I see how desperately I needed attention after a lifetime of being small print to my brother’s headlines. I can think of no other reason for my stubborn, impetuous, self-destructive decision to follow up on my threat. Two days later, in the Australian Army Registration Office, I found myself answering stupid questions with stupider answers. “Tell me, sonny, what do you think makes good army material?” the recruiting officer asked. “Light cotton?” I offered, and after not laughing for ten straight seconds, he grudgingly sent me down to the doctor. Unfortunately, that was the end of my adventure. I failed the mandatory physical examination with flying colors. The doctor probed me with an astonished look on his face and concluded that he had never seen a body in as bad a shape as mine outside of wartime.

Against all reason, I took the rejection badly and plunged into a deep depression. What followed was a period of lost time: three years, during which I felt myself circling the questions that had been circling me, though I never found the answers I needed. While searching, I went for walks. I read. I taught myself the art of reading while walking. I lay under trees and watched the clouds creep across the sky through a veil of leaves. I passed whole months thinking. I discovered more about the properties of loneliness, how it is like the slow squeeze of testicles by a hand that has just been in a refrigerator. If I could not find a way to be authentically in the world, then I would find a superior way of hiding, and to that end I tried on different masks: shy, graceful, pensive, buoyant, jovial, frail- they were the simple masks that had one defining characteristic. Other times I tried on more complicated masks, somber and buoyant, vulnerable yet cheerful, proud yet brooding. These I ultimately abandoned as they required too much upkeep on an energy level. Take it from me: complex masks eat you alive in maintenance.

The months groaned by, turning into years. I wandered and wandered, going mad with the uselessness of my life. Having no income, I lived cheaply. I gathered unfinished cigarette butts from pub ashtrays. I let my fingers turn a rusty yellow. I gazed stupidly at the people of the town. I slept outside. I slept in the rain. I slept in my bedroom. I learned valuable lessons about life, such as that a person who is sitting is eight times more likely to give you a cigarette than a person who is walking and twenty-eight times more likely to give you a cigarette than a person inside a car stuck in traffic. No parties, no invitations, no socializing. I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure. It’s a two-step, you and the world. I didn’t look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It’s how I’m made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful.

The townspeople began to look on me with something resembling horror. I’ll admit, I cut a strange figure in those days: pale, unshaven, scraggly. One winter’s night I learned that I had been unofficially proclaimed the town’s first homeless lunatic, despite the fact that I still had a home.

And still the questions remained, and each month my demand for answers became louder and more insistent. I went on an uninterrupted bout of inward stargazing, where the stars were my own thoughts, impulses, and actions. I wandered in the dirt and the dust, cramming my head with literature and philosophy. The first true hint of relief had come from Harry, who first introduced me to Nietzsche back when I saw him in prison. “Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Dean,” he said, making the introductions while throwing a book. “People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings,” he said, quoting his idol.

I had since devoured many philosophy books from the library, and it seemed that most philosophy was petty argument about things you just couldn’t know. I thought: Why waste time on insoluble problems? What does it matter whether the soul is made up of smooth, round soul atoms or of Leggo, it’s unknowable, so let’s just drop it. I also found that, geniuses or not, most of the philosophers undermined their own philosophies, from Plato onward, because almost no one seemed willing to start with a blank slate or endure uncertainty. You could read the prejudices, the self-interest, and desires of every single one. And God! God! God! The most brilliant minds coming up with all these complicated theories and then they say, “But let’s just assume there’s a God and let’s assume he’s good.” Why assume anything? To me, it was obvious man created God in his own image. Man hasn’t the imagination to come up with a God totally unlike him, which is why in Renaissance paintings God looks like a skinny version of Santa Claus. Hume says that man only cuts and pastes, he doesn’t invent. Angels, for instance, are men with wings. In the same way, Bigfoot is man with big foot. This is why I could see in most of the “objective” philosophical systems man’s fears, drives, prejudices, and aspirations written all over them.

The only thing of value I did was read books to Lionel, whose eyes were irrevocably damaged, and one rainy afternoon I almost lost my virginity to Caroline, an event that precipitated her leaving town in the middle of the night. Here’s how it happened:

We were trying to read a book together to her father, but he kept interrupting to convince himself that his life had changed for the better. Lionel was doing his best to take blindness in his stride. “Judgmental faces! Condescending eyes I’ve felt on me since the day I moved into this rotten town! I’ll never have to see them again! Thank God- I was sick of the sight of them!” Lionel was finally letting loose on the people’s automatic antipathy to him as though his personality were an extension of his bank balance. They didn’t want to know him or his story. They didn’t care that two years before moving to our town, Caroline’s mother was discovered to be hoarding a basketful of inoperable tumors growing like plums in her insides. They didn’t care that she had been something of a cold, neurotic woman, and the process of dying had not turned her into a sweetie. They didn’t believe that a man with so much money could have human qualities worth sympathizing with. He was up against the smelliest prejudice in existence: wealth-haters. At least a racist, a man who hates black people, for instance- at least he isn’t harboring a secret desire to be black. His prejudice, while ugly and stupid, is at least thorough and honest. Hatred of the well-off, from those who would jump at the chance to swap places, is a textbook case of sour grapes.

“Hey- I’ll never have to see another disappointed face either! Now when I let someone down, if they don’t say, ‘Awwwww,’ I’ll never be burdened with it! Fuck disapproving eyes! I’ve escaped!”

Eventually he talked himself to sleep. While Lionel snored as if he were all nose, we crept silently into Caroline’s bedroom. She had decided to forget all about Terry, but she talked about forgetting him so much, it was the only thing on her mind. She rambled on, and as much as I loved the sound of her spongy voice, I just had to switch off. I lit a half-smoked cigarette I’d found in a puddle and dried in the sun. As I sucked on it I felt her eyes on me, and when I looked up, I saw her lower lip curl a little, like a leaf when hit with a single drop of rain.

Suddenly she lowered her voice. “What’s going to happen to you, Martin?”

“To me? I don’t know. Nothing bad, I hope.”

“Your future!” she gasped. “I can’t stand to think of it!”

“Well, don’t.”

She ran over and hugged me. Then she pulled away and we looked into each other’s eyes and breathed into each other’s nostrils. Then she kissed me with her eyes closed- I know because mine were wide open. Then she opened her eyes too, so I shut mine quickly. The whole thing was unbelievable! My hands went for her breasts, something I’d wanted to do even before she had them. Her hands, meanwhile, went straight for my belt, and she fumbled to undo it. For a split second I thought she wanted to hit me with it. Then I got into the swing of things, and reached up her skirt and pulled off her underpants. We crashed on the bed like fallen soldiers. There we struggled together, laboring to rid ourselves of unwanted garments, until she suddenly pushed herself from me and screamed, “What are we doing!” Before I could answer, she ran out of the room crying.

I lay bewildered on her bed for half an hour, smelling her pillow with my eyes closed, engrossed in the spectacle of a lifelong dream slipping away. When she didn’t return, I got dressed and went to sit under my favorite tree to think suicidal thoughts and tear up weeds.

I avoided Caroline for the next week. Since she was the one who went hysterical, it was up to her to find me. Then on Saturday, Lionel phoned me in a panic. He couldn’t find his toothbrush, and while he might be blind, that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid of gingivitis. I went over and found it floating in the toilet bowl, specked with feces. I told him I was very sorry, he’d have to kiss that toothbrush goodbye, but not literally.

“She’s gone,” he said. “I woke up yesterday morning and there was a strange person breathing in my bedroom. I can recognize a person by their breathing patterns, you know. It gave me the fright of my life. I shouted, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Shelly was her name, a nurse Caroline had organized to look after me. I shouted at Shelly to get out, and she left, the bitch. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m afraid, Martin. Darkness is boring and surprisingly brown.”

“Where did Caroline go?”

“Damned if I know! Still, I’ll bet she’s having fun. That’s what you get when you give your child a liberal upbringing, I suppose. Liberation.”

“I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” I lied. I didn’t think she was ever coming back. I always knew Caroline would vanish one day, and finally that day had come.

Over the following months we received postcards from her from all over. The first was of a river in Bucharest, the word “ Bucharest ” stamped across it, and on the back Caroline had scrawled, “I’m in Bucharest!” The same kind came every second week from Italy, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris.

Meanwhile, I visited Terry often. It was a long journey, from our town by bus, through the city by train, then another bus to a poor outer suburb. The detention center looked like a low-rise residential block. Each time I signed in, the administrator greeted me like the patriarch of a distinguished family and took me personally to the visiting room, through a long series of corridors, where I felt physically threatened at all moments by young criminals who never stopped looking furious, as if they’d been arrested after crossing the Himalayas on foot. Terry would be waiting for me in the visitors’ room. Sometimes he had fresh purple bruises around his eyes. One day I sat down with him to see the imprint of a fist on his cheek, which was only slowly beginning to fade. He looked at me with great intensity. “Caroline visited me before she left, and she said that even though I blinded her father, she’ll always love me.” When I didn’t respond, he talked about his crime of blinding Lionel as a one-way ticket into a criminal life. “You don’t burn your bridges with normal society,” he said. “You blow your bridges up.” He spoke quickly, as if dictating in an emergency. He was eager to justify, to confide, to seek approval from me for his new plan. You see, he was picking up the pieces of that suggestion box and with it building the story of his life. He’d fit the pieces together into a pattern he could live with.

“Can’t you just keep your head down and apply yourself to studying?” I pleaded.

“I’m studying, all right. A few of us, we got big plans when we get out of here,” he said, winking. “I’ve met a couple of blokes who are teaching me a thing or two.”

I left wringing my hands, thinking about detention centers, boys’ homes, prisons; it’s through these punishments that up-and-coming criminals get to do most of their schmoozing. The state is always going about the business of introducing dangerous criminals to each other; they plug them right into the network.

If my father had an idea of how to accelerate his own deterioration, taking a job at a pest extermination business was it. For the past few years he had become the town handyman, mowing lawns, fixing fences, doing a little brickwork, but now, finally, he’d found the perfect job for himself: exterminating vermin. He breathed toxic fumes all day, handling poisonous substances such as bug powder and lethal little blue pellets, and I got the impression he was delighted by his own toxicity. He’d come home, his hands out, and say, “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! I have poison on my hands! Quick! Someone run the taps!” Sometimes if he was feeling especially mischievous, he would run at us with his poisonous hands outstretched and threaten to touch our tongues. “I’m going for your tongue! You’re done for!”

“Why don’t you wear gloves?!” my mother screamed.

“Gloves are for proctologists!” he’d say back as he chased us around the house. I deduced that this was his bizarre way of dealing with my mother’s cancer, pretending she was a sick child and he was the clown called in to cheer her up. She’d finally told my father the bad news, and while he had become compassionate enough to stop hitting her when he was drunk, her cancer, treatment, remission, and relapse cycle had made him increasingly unstable. Now, as my father threatened us with his poisonous hands, my mother would stare at me long and hard, making me feel like a mirror that reflects death back on the dying.

That’s how it was in our house; with my mother fading, my father becoming a carrier of lethal toxins, and Terry going from mental hospital to prison, what had previously been a poisonous environment only metaphorically became one literally too.

When at last Terry was released from the detention center, for no good reason I had renewed hope he’d be rehabilitated, and might even want to come home and help with our dying mother. I went to an address he’d given me over the phone. To get there I had to travel the four hours to Sydney, then change buses to ride another hour to a suburb in the south. It was a quiet and leafy neighborhood; families were out walking dogs and washing cars, and a newspaper boy pulled a yellow cart up the street, casually tossing newspapers so they landed with admirable accuracy on the doormat of every home with the front-page headline facing up. The house where Terry was residing had a beige Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. A sprinkler languidly watered an immaculately manicured lawn. A boy’s silver bicycle rested against the steps leading up to the front porch. Could this be right? Could Terry have been adopted by a lower-middle-class family by mistake?

A woman with rollers in her brown hair and a pink nightgown answered the door. “I’m Martin Dean,” I stammered with uncertainty, as though perhaps I wasn’t. Her kind smile disappeared so quickly, I wondered if I hadn’t imagined it. “They’re out the back,” she said. As the woman led me down a dark hallway, she threw off the rollers with the hair too- it was a wig. Her real hair, tied up in a tight bun and fastened with bobby pins, was flaming red. She dropped the pink nightgown too and revealed black lingerie hugging a curvy body that I wanted to take home as a pillow. When I followed her into the kitchen, I saw there were bullet holes in the walls, the cupboards, the curtains; sunlight streamed through the tiny perfect circles and stretched diagonally across the room in golden rods. A plump half-naked woman sat at the table with her head in her hands. I stepped past her and went out into the backyard. Terry was turning sausages on a barbecue. A shotgun was leaning against the wooden fence next to him. Two men with shaved heads lay on banana chairs drinking beers.

“Marty!” Terry screamed. He strode over and gave me a bear hug. With an arm over my shoulder, he made enthusiastic introductions. “Boys, this is my brother, Marty. He got all the brains. I got whatever was left. Marty, this is Jack, and this timid-looking bloke over here is Meat-ax.”

I smiled nervously at the powerfully built men, thinking an ax was rarely necessary when cutting meat. Looking at my vigorous, muscular brother, I automatically straightened my back. Sometime over the last few years I had become conscious that I’d developed a slight hunch, so I looked, from a distance, approximately seventy-three years old.

Terry said, “And now for the grand finale…”

He removed his shirt and I reeled in shock. Terry had gone tattoo mad! Head to toe, my brother was a maze of crazy artwork. From visiting days, I had already seen the tattoos crawling down his arms below the shirtsleeves, but I’d never before seen what he’d done to his body. Now I could make out, from his Adam’s apple to his belly button, a grinning Tasmanian tiger, a snarling platypus, an emu growling menacingly, a family of koalas brandishing knives in their clenched paws, a kangaroo dripping blood from its gums, with a machete in its pouch. All those Australian animals! I never realized that my brother was so horribly patriotic. Terry flexed his muscles, and it appeared as though the rabid animals were breathing; he’d learned to contort his body in particular ways to make the animals come alive. It had a frightening, magical effect. The swirling colors made me dizzy.

“It’s getting a bit crowded here in the old zoo, isn’t it?” Terry said, anticipating my disapproval. “Oh, guess who else is here!”

Before I could answer, a familiar voice cried out from somewhere above me. Harry was leaning out an upstairs window, smiling so widely, his mouth seemed to swallow his nose. A minute later he joined us in the yard. Harry had aged badly since I saw him last. Every hair had turned a gloomy gray, and the features on his tired, wrinkled face looked to have been pushed deeper into his skull. I noticed that his limp had gotten worse too: he dragged his leg behind him like a sack of bricks.

“We’re doing it, Marty!” Harry cried.

“Doing what?”

“The democratic cooperative of crime! It’s a historic moment! I’m glad you’re here. I know we can’t coerce you to join up, but you can be a witness, can’t you? God, it’s wonderful to have your brother out. I’d been having a shit of a time. Being a fugitive is lonely.” Harry explained how he eluded the police by phoning in anonymous sightings of himself. There were patrols conducting street-by-street searches in Brisbane and Tasmania. Harry exploded with laughter at the thought of it. “The police are so easy to throw off the scent. Anyway, I was just biding my time until Terry’s term was up. And now here we are! It’s like the Greek senate! We meet every afternoon at four by the swimming pool.”

I looked over at the pool. It was an aboveground number, the water a snaky green. A beer can floated in it. Democracy obviously had nothing to do with hygiene. The place was a sewer. The lawn was overgrown, there were empty pizza boxes strewn about and bullet holes in everything, and in the kitchen I could see the whore sitting at the table listlessly scratching herself.

Terry smiled at her through the window. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Can I have a word with you?”

We walked around to the other side of the swimming pool. On the brick barbecue the sausages had been incinerated and were withering in the sun.

“Terry,” I said, “what are you doing? Why don’t you give up crime, go get a normal job somewhere? The cooperative is never going to work, you must know that. Besides, Harry’s mad,” I added, though I knew I wasn’t convinced. The truth was, as I gazed at Terry’s wild eyes I began to suspect that my brother was the real madman and Harry just an old goat with strange ideas.

“What about you?” Terry asked.

“What about me?”

“What are you doing with your life? I’m not the one trapped in a cage- you are. I’m not the one living in a town I hate. I’m not the one ignoring his potential. What’s your destiny, mate? What’s your mission in life? You don’t belong in that town. You can’t hang around there forever. You can’t protect Mum from Dad, or from death. You’ve got to cut them loose. You’ve got to get out of there and live your life. My life is mapped out, more or less. But you- you’re the one sitting around doing nothing.”

That struck me cold. The little bugger was right. I was the one trapped. I had no clue where to go or what to do. I didn’t want to get locked into some grind, but I wasn’t a criminal either. Plus I had made that unbreakable bond with our mother, and I was beginning to strain against it.

“Marty, have you thought about university?”

“I’m not going to university. I didn’t even finish school.”

“Well fuck, mate, you have to do something! Why don’t you start by leaving that shit hole of a town?”

“I can’t leave town.”

“Why the hell not?”

Against my better judgment, I told Terry about the promise I had made. I explained that I was stuck in no uncertain way. Viciously and immovably stuck. What could I do? Leave my mother alone to die with my unfeeling father? The woman who read to me while I lay in a coma all those years? The woman who had risked everything for my sake?

“How is she?” Terry asked me.

“She’s OK, considering,” I said, but that was a lie. Impending death was having a strange effect on her. Occasionally she crept into my room at night and read to me. I couldn’t stand it. The sound of a voice reading a book reminded me of that other prison, that rotten living death: the coma. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I was sound asleep I was woken by a violent shaking. It was my mother, wanting to make sure I hadn’t fallen into another coma. It really was impossible to sleep.

“What are you going to do?” Terry asked. “Stay there until she’s dead?”

It was an awful thought, both that she would one day die and that I’d made this vow that was now strangling me. How could I go on in this way without succumbing to the ugliest thought: “Hey, Mum. Hurry up and die!”

Terry discouraged me from visiting his house again. At his insistence, we met at either cricket or rugby games, depending on the season. During these games Terry filled me in on the democratic cooperative’s antics: how they changed their modus operandi all the time, never doing the same job twice, or if they did, not doing it in the same way. For instance, once they did two bank jobs in a row. The first was at the end of the day, and they all ran in wearing balaclavas and forced customers and staff facedown on the floor. The next job they pulled at lunchtime, and they wore gorilla masks, spoke only in Russian to each other, and made customers and staff hold hands and stand in a circle. They were fast. They were successful. And above all they were anonymous. It was Harry’s idea for the gang to learn a couple of languages- not the whole thing, but just the kind of vocabulary you’d need in a robbery situation: “Get the money,” “Tell them to put their hands up,” “Let’s go,” that kind of thing. Harry really was a genius at throwing people off the scent. It was a mystery how he’d spent so long in jail. He also found a couple of police informers and fed them misinformation. And the one or two enemies they had to deal with from Harry’s old days, they attacked when they were most vulnerable: when they had more than two items on the stove.

The only problem was that the establishment of the democratic cooperative, the fulfillment of Harry’s dream, seemed to inflame his world-class paranoia. You couldn’t get behind him! He’d slide against the wall, and if he was ever in an open space, he’d spin like a top. He panicked in crowds, and when he was caught up in the throng, he’d really go into violent spasms. The funniest thing was when he had to take a piss outdoors. He wouldn’t go behind a tree, because his back was exposed; Harry leaned against the tree facing out, one hand on his dick, the other holding a.45. And at home he rigged up bells and ropes so you couldn’t enter his bedroom without setting off an alarm. He checked the newspapers every day to see if he got a mention. He flicked through them frantically, eyes bulging.

“Don’t underestimate the value of the daily news,” Harry said to me once. “It’s saved many a wanted man’s skin. The police are always trying to prove they’re making progress: ‘Oh, we have a sighting here, we’ve picked up this clue or that one.’ Put that together with the public’s indefatigable hunger for news that has nothing to do with them, and you’ve got the best thing for a fugitive out on a crime spree. You think I’m paranoid? Check out the general public. They demand up-to-date news on investigations because they think the authorities are holding out on them, hiding information about criminals who are in their backyards with their guns and cocks out, ready to party.”

He accused the others in the cooperative of harboring mercenary thoughts. He said he could smell greed on all of them; he said it clung to them like beads of sweat. “A thousand dollars in your hand isn’t good enough?” he’d scream. Harry predicted that their little Greek senate would go down in flames. Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal. The cooperative was getting into constant disputes over the share of profits and the distribution of dirty jobs like filing the serial numbers off a thousand stolen cameras. Its members were learning that, like their manifestations in whole countries, profit-driven democracies create imbalances, encourage greed and impatience, and because no one’s going to vote to be the one who cleans the public toilets, lead to faction-splitting and ganging up on the weakest and most unpopular members. Moreover, Harry smelled that anonymity was frustrating them. That’s how Harry discovered everything, through his nostrils. “You’re the worst!” he’d say, pointing at Terry.

“Mate, I didn’t say a word,” Terry said.

“You didn’t have to! I can smell it!”

And maybe he could smell it. What did Harry once say about long-term paranoia earning a man telepathic powers? Maybe he was really onto something there. Maybe Harry was seeing the future. Or maybe he was just stating the bloody obvious: that my brother had ideas, and those ideas were going to destroy him and everyone along with him. To be honest, though, it wasn’t obvious to me then. I just didn’t see it coming. Well, maybe Bob Dylan was wrong. Maybe you do have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Second Project

Normally, there is your life, and you turn on the television and there is news, and no matter how grave it is, or how deep in the toilet the world has fallen, or how relevant the information might be to your own existence, your life remains a separate entity from that news. You still have to wash your underpants during a war, don’t you? And don’t you still have to fight with your loved ones and then apologize when you don’t mean it even when there’s a hole in the sky burning everything to a crisp? Of course you do. As a rule, there’s no hole big enough to interrupt this interminable business of living, but there are exceptions, grim instances in the lives of a few select unlucky bastards when the news in the papers and the news in their bedrooms intersect. I tell you, it’s a daunting and appalling moment when you have to read the newspapers to find out about your own struggle.

It started far from home. One morning headlines shouted that key players in the Australian cricket team had been caught taking bribes from bookmakers to underperform in international matches. It was big news, perhaps bigger than it deserved, mostly because if sport is Australia ’s national religion, as it has been said, then it was like all the Christian fundamentalists finding out that God made the trees and mountains without first washing his hands. It rocked a lot of cores. There was public outcry and mass disappointment and saber-rattling and everywhere people said it was disgusting and rotten and corrupt and an unremovable stain on sport. The voices on the radio bayed for blood. They wanted to hear the snapping of necks: the necks of the bookies and the necks of the real traitors, the players themselves. The politicians cried for justice and vowed to get to the bottom of things, and even the prime minister promised “a thorough and exhaustive inquiry into corruption in sport.”

For me, this sporting scandal was mere background noise. I was too preoccupied with my own problems: my mother was dying and shutting herself up like a mad queen, my father was disappearing into a bottle, and my brother was tearing through the world with a gun in one hand and an ax in the other.

The next Saturday that Terry and I met at a game, it was Australia vs. Pakistan. There had been a question as to whether it would still be on, considering the scandal, but the innocent-until-proven-guilty technicality meant it was going ahead as scheduled. The sky was bright and the air full of spring- the kind of day that lulls you into a false sense of security, but I still felt the apprehension I always feel in groups of thirty-five thousand people apt to pool their collective fury at a moment’s notice.

When the players walked onto the field, the crowd started to boo like mad, because these were the men implicated in the scandal. Some of the players ignored the crowd, while others gave the fuck-you sign, the one where you use both arms. It was a hoot. I love booing. Who doesn’t? Some of the boos were chock-full of fury, while others were more lighthearted boos mingled with laughter. Beside me Terry didn’t make a sound.

When the captain came out to bowl, there wasn’t just booing but hissing, and people started throwing things, like beer cans and shoes- their own shoes! One of the spectators jumped the fence, ran onto the field, and tried to tackle the captain. Then a crowd spilled out too. Someone blew a whistle, and the game was clearly over when Terry turned to me and said, “Let’s go.” I thought he meant “Let’s go home,” so I agreed, but before I knew what was happening, Terry was bolting down the grandstand toward the cricket oval. I tried to follow, but for a long time I couldn’t see him in the madness of the crowd that had come from all sides and blocked the teams’ exit. It was all very tribal and nerve-jangling. You know how rioting mobs are.

Then I heard some yelling that was different in character from the stock murmuring of the furious mob. I saw what they were looking at, an image that has never left the inside of my eyelids: Terry had pulled out a gun and was pointing it at the Australian captain. Terry’s eyes were wide and clear, his face refreshed, as if he’d just bathed in crystal waters. He wore an uncharacteristic look of self-admiration. The mob watched on, frozen. They wanted to run, but curiosity wanted them to stay. Curiosity won. Police were fighting their way down the grandstand steps when my brother shot the captain of the Australian cricket team in the stomach.

I don’t know how we got out of there. I remember Terry seeing me in the crowd and waving. I remember running. I remember Terry laughing and suggesting we split up and just before disappearing into the crowd saying, “Let’s see if he can underperform his own death!”

There was no bigger story in Australia, before or since. Not even the Federation got as much press. And the worst thing was, they had pictures. Someone took a beauty of Terry standing there, eyes shining, arm outstretched, the gun held out in front of him and a friendly smile on his face, as if he were about to give the captain an amiable piece of advice. Every newspaper and television station ran that picture. From then on, he was a wanted man. This was the real beginning of Terry’s infamy.

Our little town was inundated with police and reporters. The reporters were a nuisance. They wouldn’t take “Fuck off” for an answer. The police were irritating too. They asked me all sorts of questions, and for a while I was under suspicion. I admitted having gone to the game with my brother but said I’d lost him as soon as he ran into the crowd. No, I said, I didn’t see the shooting. No, I said, I hadn’t heard from him since. No, I said, I didn’t know where he lived. No, we weren’t close. No, I didn’t know who his friends or associates were. No, I didn’t know where he got the gun. No, I didn’t even know he had a gun. No, I didn’t expect to be hearing from him again. No, if I did hear from him I wouldn’t call the police, because after all, he was still my brother. Yes, I had heard of obstruction of justice. Yes, I knew what being an accessory was all about. Yes, I would be willing to go to jail, but I’d really rather not.

The police gave my mother a good grilling too, but she wouldn’t answer their simplest questions- when the chief detective asked, she wouldn’t even tell him the time.

Terry could never come home again. That was the thing that killed my mother. She cried inconsolably, and from then on slept most nights in Terry’s old bed. She made one of his favorite dishes every mealtime, and, perhaps to punish herself, she stuck the newspaper article with Terry’s picture to the fridge under a pineapple magnet. She obsessed over that picture, even going so far as to measure it with a ruler. One morning I came down and saw my mother studying it. I said, “Let me throw that away.” She didn’t say anything, but when I reached over to take it she elbowed me in the stomach. My own mother! Later, around four in the morning, I woke to see her sitting at the edge of my bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you remember William Wilson by Poe? And The Double by Dostoyevsky?”

These were books she’d read to me while I was in the coma. I remembered them perfectly, almost word for word.

“I think Terry has a double,” she said.

I shook my head and said, “I don’t think so.”

“Listen to me. Everyone has a double somewhere in the world. That’s what’s happened here. Terry didn’t shoot anyone. It was him, the double!”

“Mum, I was there. It was Terry.”

“I admit it looks like him. That’s what doubles are. Look-alikes. Identical look-alikes. Not look-a-little-alikes.”

“Mum…”

Before I could say any more, she was gone.

So where was Terry? At Harry’s? The next morning at breakfast I decided to go see for myself. When I stepped outside I saw that the reporters had gone home, but on the bus to the city it occurred to me I was probably being followed. I peered at the cars on the road. Sure enough, I saw it: a blue Commodore following. I got off at the next stop and went into the movies. It was a comedy about a husband who dies but comes back as a ghost and haunts his wife whenever she looks at another man. Everyone was laughing but me; I found it grotesque, and it made me really hate the dead, the selfish pricks. Two hours later, when I stepped into the sunshine, the car was still there. I knew I had to lose them, to “shake my tail,” so I ducked into a shop. It was a tailor’s. I tried on a black dinner jacket and I looked good but the sleeves were just a little too short. Out the window, through mannequin legs, I could see my blue hound dog. I asked if they had a back entrance, even though I wanted to use it as an exit. They had one. In the alleyway there was another Commodore, only this one was white with leather seats that I could almost smell. I fast-walked it down the street and looked for another shop to duck into.

The whole day passed in this way. It was very, very irritating. I just couldn’t shake them. They seemed always to guess my every move. Dejected, I caught the bus back home and decided I’d try it again when the Terry Dean story had died down a little, when it wasn’t so fresh. It had to peter out eventually, I reasoned. The public has attention deficit disorder. It’s famous for it. But what I hadn’t figured was that the Terry Dean story wouldn’t stop there because Terry Dean wouldn’t stop there.

The next day there was more news, and more police and more reporters. The two bookies named in the affair had been found shot dead in their apartments. Witnesses had seen a young man of Terry’s description leaving the scene. In the newspapers and on the radio, language used to describe Terry Dean indicated a subtle shift in public opinion- he was no longer a “lone madman.” He was now a “vigilante.”

Meanwhile, the eyes of the nation were fixed sharply on the inquiry into corruption in sport, which was being conducted with uncustomary speed. It had escaped nobody’s attention that any bookie or cricketer named in the report would become a potential target for Terry Dean, Vigilante at Large.

The report of inquiry into corruption in sport was released and made a matter of public record. It named names. Three more cricketers were mentioned: some for throwing games, some for passing on match information. More bookies were named too. Everyone was on guard. They were put on twenty-four-hour police surveillance. The police thought they were ready to catch Terry, because if they had deduced one thing, it was that he had started something he felt he had to finish. But Terry was one step ahead of them.

The thing was, no one really paid close attention to the inquiry into corruption in sport. They read about the cricketers and waited eagerly for Terry to make his move. But the prime minister had promised an exhaustive inquiry, and they delivered an exhaustive report that also contained sections and subsections detailing corruption in horse racing, rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules, soccer, the Commonwealth Games, lawn bowls, snooker, cycling, rowing, boxing, wrestling, yacht racing, hockey, basketball…If it involved an Australian running or sweating or handling balls not his own, it was in there.

The first time Terry showed the breadth of his passion was with the murder of a jockey named Dan Wonderland; he was found beaten and force-fed enough horse tranquilizer to kill a stampede. I gazed searchingly at the photograph of this man whose life my brother had taken, in the hope of seeing something evil, something that rose up out of the picture signaling unequivocally that the fucker deserved to die. It was taken after winning a race, and in it Dan Wonderland was beaming and holding up his arms in triumph. Even if I hadn’t known my brother had killed him, I’d have seen something infinitely sad in the face of this jockey, the look of a man who has just achieved a lifelong dream only to realize that his dream was really nothing special.

The next day there was another killing: middleweight champion Charlie Pulgar, who’d taken a very obvious dive in the ring, falling when, at the sound of the bell, his opponent smacked his gloves together. With Terry’s help, Charlie Pulgar took his last dive- off the roof of his seventeen-story apartment building into a steady flow of traffic.

Just as investigators started anticipating Terry’s next moves, he changed tactics once again. The inquiry into corruption in sport had also uncovered a phenomenon seeping into the world of professional sport: performance-enhancing drugs. With a little detective work, Terry ascertained who was purchasing and administering them: the coaches. Men who had always worked tirelessly behind the scenes shifted from the background to the foreground; their square jaws and haggard faces appeared more and more in the papers, as one by one they turned up dead.

But the most dangerous aspect of Terry’s crusade was that, understandably, the bookies did not go quietly. Their links to the underworld guaranteed them guns and protection, and reports of gun battles in the backs of restaurants and bars filtered through the news. Terry had broken the last of Harry’s laws- not only was he as far from anonymity as a person could be, but he had won the ire of the criminal world. He was not just on the ladder, he was shaking it. Along with the state and federal police, the criminal superstructure wanted him dead.

My parents dealt with the situation in their own way. Rather than face up to the awful truth, they extended their delusions about their son. While my mother doggedly pursued her double theory, my father put a positive spin on the whole dirty mess, turning rationalizing into a high art. If Terry shot a policeman in the leg, my father praised his mercy for not going for the heart; if Terry shot a policeman in the heart, my father praised his aim. To hear him talk, his son’s eluding the police was evidence of his brains, his craftiness, his blanket superiority.

Lionel Potts was calling me five times a day, begging me to come to his house and give him updates. As I read him every newspaper report, he would remove his dark sunglasses. His dead eyes seemed to see for miles, and he’d lean back and vigorously shake his head. “I know a great lawyer- he’d defend Terry. I’m only sorry I didn’t recommend him last time. I was a little pissed off. He did blind me, after all. Still, this lawyer would be perfect for him.” I sat listening to Lionel go on and on, gritting my teeth. I couldn’t stand it. As crazy as it sounds, I was overcome with jealousy. Terry was doing something with his life. He had found his calling; insane and bloodthirsty as it may have been, it was still a calling, and he was pursuing it vigilantly.

Every morning I ran to the corner shop for the newspaper to read about his atrocities. Not all his victims were dead. The snooker player who allegedly sank the white after the black accidentally on purpose only had his right hand broken, and strangely, he, along with some of Terry’s other victims, came out in support of Terry’s crusade. Through a public emotional hazing, they confessed their sins and said that Terry Dean was cleaning up an institution that had once been pure but had become soiled by the lure of big money. They weren’t the only ones.

Sportsmen, commentators, intellectuals, talk-show hosts, writers, academics, politicians, and radio shock jocks- everyone was talking about sporting ethics, ideals, heroes, and the Australian spirit. Terry had jump-started a dialogue in the nation, and all the sportsmen and -women were on their best behavior.

One day during this chaos, Caroline came back into town, dragging a suitcase. I was sitting on the town hall steps counting the lines on my index finger when I spotted her coming down the street. She saw me, dragged that suitcase in a run, and threw her arms around me, plastering my cheeks with platonic kisses. I knew then and there that we would never discuss that night in her bedroom. I took a good look at her. She had really blossomed into a woman, but there were strange changes too: her hair was a lighter color, almost blond, and though her face was fuller and her lower lip more mature, there seemed to be something that had left her, a light or a glow. I thought maybe on her travels she had seen something that had scared it away.

“You heard about Terry?” I asked.

“It’s incredible.”

“Is that why you came home?”

“No, I only heard when I saw a newspaper at the airport, and the bus driver filled me in on the rest. You don’t hear about Australia in Europe, Marty. It’s strange. No one knows anything about us.”

That’s when I first discovered that living in Australia is like having a faraway bedroom in a very big house. All the better for us, I thought.

“I only came to pick up Dad. I’m taking him back overseas.”

“Where?”

“ Paris.”

I drew my name on the ground with a stick. Martin Dean. Little clumps of earth lay in brown piles around it.

“Have you heard from him?” she asked.

“No.”

“He’s going to get himself killed.”

“That seems likely.”

Next to my name I wrote her name in the dirt. Our names were lying side by side.

“He’s doing something important,” she said.

“He’s a murderer.”

“But he believes.”

“So?”

“So nothing. He believes in something, that’s all.”

“Rapists and pedophiles believe in something too. Hitler believed in something. Every time Henry the Eighth cut off another wife’s head, he believed in something. It’s not hard to believe in something. Everyone believes in something.”

“You don’t.”

“No, I don’t.”

The words had left my mouth before I realized what I’d said. On reflection, I could see that this was absolutely true. I couldn’t name a single thing I believed in. For me, 1 percent of doubt has the same effect as 100 percent. So then, how could I believe in anything when what might not be true might as well not be true?

I drew a heart around our names in the dirt.

“If you’d heard from Terry, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

I quickly covered our names with dirt. I was being foolish. She didn’t love me. She loved him. I suddenly flushed with embarrassment.

“You’ve heard from him.”

She grabbed my wrist, but I jerked it away from her.

“I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have!”

“I haven’t, I tell you!”

She pulled me toward her and grabbed my face with both hands and gave me a long, long kiss on the lips. She pulled away, leaving me stunned and speechless. I couldn’t open my eyes.

“If you see Terry, give him that for me.”

That opened my eyes. I smiled to stop myself foaming at the mouth. I hated her. I wanted to throw her in the dirt. I said something like “I hate you and will hate you for all remembered time” and walked away, toward home, even though home was the last place I wanted to go. It had transformed into a place of minor historical importance, like the restaurant toilet Hitler used before the Reichstag fire, and thus the reporters were back with their bad manners and zero empathy, shouting their inane questions through the front windows.

When I got home, it became clear that my father had had enough. He was standing at the door, swaying on his feet, drunk. His face was stiff, as if he had lockjaw.

“You want to come in, you cunts? Well, come in!” he shouted.

The reporters looked at each other before stepping tentatively into the house. They thought it was a trap. It wasn’t. It was merely a man teetering off the precipice of his sanity.

“Here. Take a shot of this,” my father said, opening the kitchen cupboards. He ripped up the floorboards. He led them into our bedroom. He shoved a pair of Terry’s underpants under their noses. “Sniff it! Sniff it!” He turned everything inside out. “You need to see where he originated from.” My father unbuttoned his fly, pulled out his penis, and waved it around. “Here, you maggots! He was a delinquent sperm! Beat the other sperms to the egg! He came out of here! Film it! Film it, you grubby parasites!” The reporters laughed while my mother chased them around the house. But they didn’t want to leave. They were having a high old time doubled over in laughter. This man’s drunken maudlin despair was the best thing they’d seen in ages. Couldn’t they see my mother crying? Oh yes, they could see it all right; they could see it through the zoom lens.

Once we got them back out onto the front lawn, I tried talking reasonably with them.

“Please go home,” I pleaded.

“Where’s your brother?” they asked.

“There he is!” I shouted, pointing behind them. They spun their heads around like fools. When they turned back to me I said, “Made you look.”

A petty victory.

I hadn’t lied to Caroline. All this time I’d had no word from Terry or Harry and I still hadn’t managed to get myself over to the suburban hideout. I felt cut off, and my natural curiosity was burning steadily inside me. I was sick of relying on unreliable newspaper reports and talk-back gossip. I wanted the inside scoop. I suppose there was also a part of me that wanted to join in somehow, if not in the actual killing, then at least as a witness. Everything that happened in Terry’s life up to this point had included me in one way or another. I wanted back in. I knew that the moment I stepped into his world, my life would be altered forever.

And I was right.

It was time to try again. I couldn’t assume the police had tired of watching me. I spent the afternoon threading a labyrinthine trail through the bush, then I made my way on foot across a wide, empty clearing, spinning around to check behind me every few minutes. Nothing. Nobody there. Just to be safe, I walked the five miles to the next town and caught the bus from there.

I was surprised to see that the front lawn of the suburban hideout was no longer immaculately groomed. The station wagon in the driveway was gone. The blinds were drawn. It looked as if the nice normal family they’d been emulating had fallen on hard times.

The door opened as soon as I turned up the driveway. Harry must have been watching from the window.

“Quick! In! In!”

I hurried inside, and Harry dead-bolted the door behind me.

“Is he here?” I asked.

“No, he’s fucking not, and he’d better not set foot within my periphery if he doesn’t want a bullet in the head!”

I followed Harry into the living room, where he flopped down on the sofa. I flopped too. “Marty, your brother is an attention-grabber. I can’t stop him. The cooperative is in ruins! It’s a shambles! My dream! The whole thing’s a downright failure. Terry’s fucked it. He wants to be famous, doesn’t he? He’s turned his back on all my advice. I thought he was like a son to me. But no son of mine would piss in my face like that. I mean, I don’t have children, but when you have kids you don’t expect a golden shower! The first couple of years, sure, but after that you let down your guard. And look at what he’s blown it all for! He’s attacking sportsmen, football players, bookies! He’s not even robbing them, he’s just ripping them apart for no reason! Where the hell’s the money in that? And you know what else? Have you seen the papers? The world thinks it’s his gang! Not mine, his. Well, it’s not his. It’s mine! Mine, dammit! OK, sure I wanted us to be anonymous, but we all have to be anonymous, and if we can’t, then I want the credit I deserve! Now it’s too late. He’s casting a shadow over me. And crims I’ve known for fifty years think I’m working for him! How’s that for a slap in the face? It’s humiliating! But I’ve got a plan. I need your help. Come in here, I want to show you something.”

Harry got to his feet and limped off in the direction of his bedroom. I followed him in. This was the first time I’d been in Harry’s bedroom. Other than his bed, there was nothing in it. Nothing at all. He was anonymous even in his own room.

He reached under his mattress and pulled out a thick wad of paper.

“I thought just maybe the anonymous democratic cooperative of crime might be a unique gift to give to the world. But now I see it was doomed from the start. It was never going to work. You can’t help human nature. People think they need limelight to grow. No one can stand anonymity. So here’s Plan B, a backup I’ve been working on for ten years. It’s something that’s never been done. No one’s ever thought of it. This is going to be my legacy. This is it, Marty. But I need help. I can’t do it on my own. That’s where you come in.”

He hit me in the chest with the stack of pages.

“What is this?”

“This, my boy, is my opus. A handbook for criminals! Everything I’ve learned I’ve written down here. It’s going to be a book! A textbook! I’ve written the textbook on crime! The definitive work!”

I took the collection of handwritten pages and picked a page at random.

Kidnapping

If the media catches whiff of the story, you’re in deep trouble if you haven’t picked your victim wisely. Never take someone young and attractive, the last thing a kidnapper needs is a public outcry…

…find a suitable location to stash your victims…avoid the temptation to use motel or hotel rooms in case the victim breaks free long enough to order room service or fresh towels.

“As you can see, Marty, I need these thoughts to be expanded and put into chapters…”

I picked up another page.

Burn, Baby, Burn: Arson and You

Everyone likes to watch a fire, even you. Avoid the temptation! After you’ve set a building alight, don’t peek from around the corner so you can admire the conflagration…It’s a common trap…most arsonists have been caught within meters of the scene of the crime and police are always on the lookout for shady characters standing around saying to bystanders, “Some fire, huh?”

His masterpiece was written on scraps of paper, on the backs of receipts, on napkins, paper towels, newspapers, toilet paper, and hundreds of loose-leaf pages, reams of the stuff. There were instructions, diagrams, flowcharts, thoughts, reflections, maxims, and aphorisms on every possible aspect of the criminal life. Each thought had an underlined title, which was the only hint at how one might make some order of the chaos.

Home Break-in

Don’t enter a home unless you’re sure the resident hasn’t just gone out to pick up a carton of milk…be quick…don’t stop to browse in the bookshelves…

“Of course there’ve been countless books on the subject of crime, but they’re either sociological studies or written to help criminologists and police. Crime-fighting, basically. No one’s written a book by and for the criminals themselves.” He stuffed the papers into a brown satchel and cradled it like a baby. “I’m entrusting this to you.”

I took the satchel. It was heavy, the weight of the meaning of Harry’s life.

“I’m not doing this for the money, so I’ll split the profit with you fifty-fifty, straight down the line.”

“Harry, I don’t know if I want to do this.”

“Who cares what you want? I’ve got a lot of knowledge to impart! I have to get it out there in the world before I die! Otherwise my life will have been for nothing! If it’s money you’re thinking about, then forget the fifty percent. Take it all! I don’t care! I really don’t. Here.”

Harry ran to the bed and grabbed a pillow and shook it until money fell out of the pillowcase, spilling onto the floor. On his one good leg, he squatted and bounced around the room, scooping up the money. “You want cash? You want the shirt off my back? You want the heart from my chest? Name it. It’s yours. Only for God’s sake, help me! Help me! Help me!” He thrust the money in my face. How could I refuse him? I took the money and his opus but thought: There’s always time to change my mind later.

That night, in my father’s shed, I pored over Harry’s scrawls in amazement. Some of his notes were short and appeared to be written with morons in mind.

Car Theft

If you can only drive an automatic, don’t steal manuals.

Others were more in-depth and not only concentrated on how to perform the crime but included psychological insights into the intended victim.

Mugging

Be prepared! Despite what common sense tells us, people will risk their lives to chase after the two dollars in their wallets or handbags…and if the mugging takes place in broad daylight, they are especially incensed…the audacity of a criminal to steal while the sun is high in the sky is so irritating to them, they will run at you like an action hero, even if you are holding a knife or a gun…also, it seems the hassle of canceling a credit card and the thought of applying for a new driver’s license are so unbearable to the majority of the general public, they are more than willing to die to avoid it…in their minds, a slow agonizing death by knife wound is infinitely preferable to dealing with the bureaucracy of the motor registry…that’s why you need to be as fit as a long-distance runner.

This was either rubbish or it was brilliant, and I couldn’t decide which. I stood up from the table, intending to have a break, but I found myself standing hunched over Harry’s notes reading through them feverishly. Something about this insanity got under my skin. There seemed to be a pattern forming: my father built a prison; Terry became a criminal influenced by a prisoner he met in the prison my father built. And me? Maybe this was my role. Maybe this book was finally something I could stake my life on, something to take with me into the cold, abandoned furnace of death. I couldn’t drag myself away. The pages were beckoning me like the glint of light from a coin at the bottom of a swimming pool. I knew I had to dive in to see if the coin was valuable or if it was just some aluminum foil blown in by the wind.

I lit a cigarette and stood at the door of the shed and looked up at the sky. It was a dark night with only three stars visible, and not the famous ones. I put a hand in my pocket and felt the scrunched-up wads of cash. After all the lectures I’d given Terry about crime, how could I do this? Wouldn’t that make me a hypocrite? And so what if it did? Is being a hypocrite such a terrible thing? Doesn’t hypocrisy actually demonstrate flexibility in a person? If you stand by your principles, doesn’t that mean you’re rigid and close-minded? Yes, I have principles, but so what? Does that mean I have to live my life unbendingly by them? I chose the principles unconsciously to guide my behavior, but can’t a person assert his conscious mind to override the unconscious? Who’s the boss here, anyway? And am I to trust my young self to dictate the standards of my behavior throughout my whole life? And might I not be wrong about everything? Why should I bind myself to the musings of my own brain? Am I not now, at this moment, rationalizing because I want the money? And why shouldn’t I rationalize? Isn’t the benefit of evolution that we possess a rational mind? Wouldn’t the chicken be happier if he had one too? Then he could say to mankind, “Would you please stop chopping off my head to see if I will run around without it? How long is that going to amuse you?”

I rubbed my head. I felt an existential migraine coming on, a real blinder.

I went out and walked along the dark road into the town. With his newfound celebrity, Terry had given the criminal world a face. With this book, Harry and I would be giving it a brain. It felt good to be a part of something bigger than myself. The lights from the town were flicking off, one by one. I could see the silhouette of the prison on the hill. It loomed large and grotesque, like an enormous stone head of some long-dead god eroding on a cliff. I spoke out loud: “Why shouldn’t I do what I want? What’s stopping me?”

I felt a lump in my throat the size of a fist. It was the first time I’d ever questioned myself so rigorously, and it seemed as if the questions were being articulated by someone older than myself.

I continued to speak out loud: “People trust too much in themselves. What they take for truth, they let rule their lives, and if I set out to find a way to live so I will be in control of my life, then I actually lose control, because the thing I have decided on, my truth, becomes the ruler and I become its servant. And how can I be free to evolve if I’m submitting myself to a ruler, any ruler, even if that ruler is me?”

I was scared by my own words, because their implications were beginning to sink in. “Lawlessness, aimlessness, chaos, confusion, contusion,” I said to no one, to the night. I was talking myself in circles. My head throbbed. I was thinking the kind of thoughts that caused throbbing.

All of a sudden, with blinding clarity, I knew that Harry was a genius. A prophet, maybe even a martyr- that would be decided later, depending on the nature of his death. He was innovating. That’s why Harry chose me to bring his asinine tablets down from the mountain. He was showing me the way. By example, he was showing me that it doesn’t take a god to innovate, create, invert, destroy, crush, and inspire; a man can do the job just as well, and in his own good time. Not in six days, like You-Know-Who. It needn’t be a rush job. And even if, at the end of my toils, I wound up inspiring only hatred or indifference, I knew then and there it was my duty to try, because this was my awakening, and that’s what an awakening is all about: getting up. There’s no use having an awakening and then hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep.

These were big thoughts, really obese. I found a half-smoked cigarette on the ground. I picked it up. It felt strong in my hand, like an Olympic torch. I lit it and walked around town. It was cold. I stamped my feet and held my hands under my armpits to keep warm. This book of Harry’s was the first small step in a nameless revolution that was taking place, and I had been chosen because of the excellence of my mind. I wanted to praise myself without guilt. I wanted to kiss my own brain. I felt thousands of years old. I felt older than soil. I was overcome with the strength and power of words and ideas. I thought about my first father, father number one, back in Poland, and I thought about his insanity: dying for a god. What a stupid reason to die: for a god, a lousy god! I shouted loudly to a tree, “I want to die because I am a creature with a sell-by date! I want to die because I am a man and that’s what men do; they crumble, decay, disappear!” I walked on, cursing my father’s blind stupidity. I screamed, “To die for an idea! To take a bullet for a deity! What an idiot!”

Our town had streetlamps only on the main street- the roads leading into and out of it were left to the mercy of the moon and the stars, and when there were neither it was black through and through. The trees rattled in the wind that blew from the west. I walked to a house and sat on the veranda and waited. For what? Not what: who. I was at Caroline’s house. I realized suddenly that romantics are dickheads. There’s nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it’s shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn’t return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it’s unbearably boring. I’ll tell you what’s exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn’t dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad.

I waited for Caroline to awaken and come out onto the veranda and wrap her arms around me. I thought the power of my mind was so strong I could will her from her slumber and draw her to the window. I would tell her my ideas and she would finally know who I was. I thought I was as good as my mind and she would be bowled over by both; I forgot entirely about my body and my face, which were not so hot. I stepped up to the front window and saw my reflection and changed my mind. I stepped away and walked back home. This was my awakening, Jasper! Harry, poor Harry, he was enormously important for me: an unfettered mind. Up until I met him, all the minds I knew were fettered, shockingly fettered. The freedom of Harry’s mind was exhilarating. It was a mind absolutely true to itself, that ran on its own steam. I’d never before encountered a timeless mind, impervious to the influence of its surroundings.

I went home and sifted through Harry’s notes some more. They were impossibly silly! This book, his handbook for criminals, it was an aberration. It shouldn’t exist. It couldn’t exist. That’s why I had to help him bring it to life. I had to! I divided the book into two major sections: Crime and Punishment. Then within these sections I made chapters, an index, and added footnotes, just like in a real textbook. I was completely faithful to Harry’s notes. Every now and then as I typed I’d come across a passage and I’d laugh out loud, a huge belly laugh. It was wonderful! His words were stupendous! They bored right into my brain.

On Home Break-ins

Once inside, be fast and methodical. Wear gloves and keep them on. Never take them off under any circumstances. You’d be surprised at how many burglars remove their gloves in order to pick their nose. I cannot stress this strongly enough: Don’t leave fingerprints anywhere! Not even in your nose!

I typed it all up, word for word. I didn’t leave anything out. I did the whole thing without sleep. There was electricity running through me. I couldn’t turn it off. Here’s another one I remember:

On Bribery

When bribing officers of the law, a common technique is to drop the money on the floor in front of the officer in question and say in a casual voice, “Did you drop that?” This is risky because of the possibility of the officer saying, “Yes I did. Cheers,” and arresting you after he’s pocketed the money. While no bribery ploy is guaranteed, I recommend just coming out and saying, “So. You take bribes or what?” This way, if he doesn’t, and charges you with attempting to bribe an officer, you can defend yourself by explaining that you never actually offered a bribe, which you didn’t; you were inquiring about the honesty of the person arresting you and were simply on the lookout for hypocrisy.

His logic was infallible. Even the chapter headings made me whirl with joy:

Motiveless Crimes: Why?

Armed Robbery: Laughing All the Way from the Bank

Crime and Fashion: Balaclavas Are Always In

The Police and You: How to Spot a Crooked Cop by His Shoes

The chapter titled “Pickpocketing: An Intimate Crime” had a line in it that said, “If you have to unzip it, it’s not a pocket. Remove your hand immediately!” Can you argue with that? No, you can’t. I can remember some of the other chapter headings. There was

Assault: Bruising Your Enemies

Blame: Framing Your Friends

Manslaughter: Oops!

Escaping Custody: Walk, Don’t Run

Love: The Real Informer

Crimes of Passion: Hot-Headed Murder

Crimes of Perversion: For Lovers Only

It was an exhaustive tome. He’d left nothing out. No crime was too small, as was covered in Chapter 13: “Misdemeanors and Other Nonprofit Crimes: Jaywalking, Loitering, Graffiti, Littering, Joyriding, and Public Nudity.” When Harry said this was to be the definitive work, he wasn’t kidding!

I left the house at dawn, buzzing with speculation. Would Harry ever get this crazy book published? Who would publish it? How would the public react?

When I stepped outside, I noticed a campfire smoking in the cold morning and, beside it, four sleeping reporters camped out under the trees. When did they get there? A shiver ran through me. Their presence meant one of only three things: either Terry had committed another crime or he’d been arrested or he was dead. I wanted to shake them awake and ask them which it was, but I didn’t dare, not when I was on my way over to Harry’s- a lesser fugitive, sure, but a fugitive all the same. I let the reporters have their sleep, wished them all nightmares, and walked to the bus stop.

I heard footsteps behind me. I grimaced, expecting police or a gaggle of reporters. It was neither. It was my mother in her beige nightgown and bare feet. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in decades. She must have sneaked past the reporters too.

“Where are you going at this hour of the morning? Are you going to see Terry?”

“No, Mum, I don’t know where he is.”

She gripped me by the arm. I saw something terrible in her eyes. They looked like they’d been crying, draining her body of salt and other essential minerals. Her illness was taking its toll. She was already thinner, already old. She said somberly, “There’s been another attack. It was on the radio. This time another cricketer- they found him with his head bashed in and a cricket ball stuffed in his mouth. They’re saying your brother did it. Why, why are they saying he did it?”

“Because he probably did it.”

She slapped me hard across the face. “Don’t say that! It’s a lie! Find Terry and tell him to go to the police. If he hides, it just makes him look guilty.”

The bus came while she was still babbling hysterically. “And if you can’t find Terry, then for God’s sake, find that double!”

I stepped onto the bus and found a seat. As it drove off, I looked out the window at my mother. She rested one hand against a tree while picking gravel off the soles of her feet with the other.

I arrived at Harry’s to see him glaring at me through the front window. As I entered, I resisted a powerful urge to hug him.

“What are you doing here?” Harry shouted in my face. “I was hoping I wouldn’t see you until you finished! You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you? Fucker! Traitor! You’ve had an attack of conscience! Why don’t you get out of here and go join a monastery, you bloody hypocrite!”

Resisting a smile, I pulled the manuscript from the brown satchel and waved it in his face. His eyes widened.

“Is this…”

My smile couldn’t contain itself any longer. I let it explode.

“So quick?”

“I had great words to work with.”

Harry dived for the manuscript and flicked through it excitedly. When he reached the end, he turned back to the front page. I stood there awhile before realizing that he was going to read the thing to the end. I went into the backyard, which was drenched in sunlight. The pool was now an enormous fetid swamp. The lawn was overgrown with weeds. The metal frames of the banana chairs were brown with rust. I stretched out on one and looked up at the sky. Clouds shaped like pregnant bellies were floating through it. My lids closed and I drifted languidly into sleep. Before I got there, in the half dreamworld, I thought I saw Terry hiding out in one of the clouds. I saw him pull the soft fluffy veil over his face whenever a plane sailed by. Then I fell asleep.

I woke sweating. The sun was sitting on me. Blinking through the bright light, I could see the silhouette of Harry’s head. It seemed enormous. When he leaned into the shadows, I saw him beaming at me. He sat on the edge of my banana chair and locked me in a tight embrace, covering me in kisses. He even kissed me on the mouth, which was revolting, but I took it in the spirit it was given.

“You’ve done me a wonderful service, Martin. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”

“There was another attack,” I said.

“Yeah, heard it on the radio. Stupid bugger.”

“Any word from him? Any idea where he might be?”

Harry shook his head sadly. “He’s become a true-blue celebrity. He can’t avoid the coppers too much longer. Famous faces make lousy fugitives.”

“Do you think, if they catch up with him, he’ll go quietly?”

“Not bloody likely,” he said, picking up his manuscript and stroking it as though it were a thigh. “Come on. Let’s go make some noise of our own.”

Finding a publisher wasn’t going to be easy, and not only because of the risky content. Harry was a fugitive. If we went to a publisher with Harry’s name plastered all over the manuscript, we might get more than a simple rejection. It was possible one of the publishers might call the police. A double rejection! After much arguing, I managed to persuade Harry that we should keep his identity secret until the last possible minute- right up to the moment of printing we’d withhold the author’s name. But Harry still wanted to come along to choose the publishing house most worthy of his tome. It seemed impossible. He was a wanted man- not in Terry’s league, but police don’t forget to look for escaped criminals just because the press isn’t in love with them. On top of that, Harry’s leg had gotten so bad he could hardly walk. Unfortunately, nothing I could say would dissuade him from personally guiding his legacy into print. It was all too vital to leave in my inexperienced hands.

We went out the following day. With his limp and scraggly beard, he looked like a castaway. I suggested he shave and make himself more presentable, but he insisted that authors always look unfit for society so it was actually to our benefit that he looked like shit. He threw on an old coat despite the hot sun and hid a sawed-off shotgun in the inside pocket. I didn’t say anything. “Let’s go then, eh.” I offered my services as a human crutch and he put all his weight on me, apologizing profusely. It felt like I was lugging a dead body.

The first publisher’s building looked like it would cost you just to enter it, and inside, the lobby was full of mirrors that proved you were a slob. We made our way up to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men trapped inside them. The publisher’s offices hogged the whole floor. The top of the receptionist’s head asked if we had an appointment. What little of her face we could see was smiling cruelly as we fumbled a no. “Well, he’s too busy to see you today,” she said in a non-negotiable voice. Harry went into his thing.

“See here. This is one of those opportunities you’ll be kicking yourself about. Just like the publisher who rejected that famous book which went on to sell a gazillion copies. What was the name of that book, Martin? You know, the one that got rejected and went on to sell a gazillion copies?”

I didn’t know but thought I’d better play along. I joined in by naming the best seller of all time.

“The Bible, King James edition.”

“Yes, by God, that was it. The Bible! The receptionist wouldn’t let the apostle through, even though he had a gold mine in his hands.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” the receptionist said, sighing. She glanced down at her appointment book. “He has an appointment at the end of the day, and if that runs short, you can see him for five minutes before he goes home.”

“Good enough, kind lady,” Harry said, winking. I helped him to a chair in the waiting room.

We waited.

Harry was shivering and his hands were hiding deep inside his coat, which made me nervous, knowing what else was in there. His teeth were clenched together as if someone had asked him to smile for a photo twelve hours earlier and hadn’t taken it yet.

“Are you OK?” I asked him.

I could tell his paranoia was firing on all circuits. His eyes circled the room while his neck swung his head from doorway to hallway. Around lunchtime I noticed that Harry had his fingers in his ears. When I asked him about it, he muttered something about a noise. I couldn’t hear anything. A split second later there was a loud bang. I craned my head and through one of the doorways saw a young man kicking the life out of a photocopier machine. I looked at Harry incredulously, and remembered again that when Terry and I had first gone to the prison to meet him, Harry had mentioned something about telepathy being highly developed in the minds of career criminals. Long-term paranoia earns people a certain level of ESP, he had said, or something to that effect. Was it true? I hadn’t taken him seriously then, but now? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized Harry’s face. He nodded at me with an almost imperceptible smugness.

At five minutes to five we were ushered into the publisher’s office. Everything about it made you feel small and unimportant. It was spacious and quiet and air-conditioned and newly carpeted, and instead of a window there was a wall of glass you couldn’t open and jump out of, even if you wanted to; at best you could press your face against it and dream of falling. The publisher looked as if someone had told him if he smiled he’d lose everything he had ever worked for.

“You’ve written a book. I publish books. You think that means we’re a match made in heaven. It doesn’t. I have to be bowled over by whatever you’ve got, and I don’t fall easily,” he said.

Harry demanded that the publisher take a quick look while we waited. The publisher laughed without smiling. Harry tossed in the line about missing golden opportunities that went straight to the man’s heart, the one in his back pocket. He picked up the manuscript and browsed through it, clicking his tongue as if he were calling his dog. He stood and walked to the glass wall and read it while leaning against it. I worried the glass would crack and send him tumbling into the street. After a minute he threw the manuscript at us as if it were making his hands dirty.

“Is this a joke?”

“I assure you it’s not.”

“To publish this would be suicide. You’re instructing people how to break the law.”

“Why is he telling me what my book is about?” Harry asked me.

I shrugged.

“Get out of here before I call the police!” the publisher screamed at us.

In the elevator on the way down, Harry shook with fury. “That cunt,” he muttered.

I felt similarly dented, and I didn’t know much about the publishing world, but I tried to explain to him that we had to expect some rejections. “This is normal. It would have been too much to expect that the first place fell all over it.”

At the second floor the elevator stopped. “What are we stopping for?” Harry yelled at me.

The doors slid open and a man stepped in. “You can’t walk down one fucking floor?” Harry shouted, and the man leapt out again just before the doors closed.

On the street it was impossible to get a cab. It was really not advisable to be lingering on the street like this with a known fugitive, but neither of us seemed able to make a taxi materialize just by wishing it.

“We’ve been made!” he whispered.

“What?”

“They’re onto me!”

“Who?”

“All of them!”

He was out of control. He was trying to hide behind me, but the crowd was on all sides. He circled my body like a shark. He was drawing too much attention to himself in his panicked attempt to remain inconspicuous.

“There!” he screamed, and pushed me into a stream of traffic, into a taxi. Cars halted and honked their horns as we jumped in.

I really put my foot down after that. Harry was to stay at home. I simply refused to help him anymore if he insisted on coming along. He put up a struggle, but it was a weak one. The last incident had added seventeen years to his face. Even he could see it.

The following weeks were a nightmare. I tripped from office to office in a blur. They were all the same. I couldn’t get over how quiet they were. Everyone spoke in a whisper, and the way they tiptoed around, you’d think you’d wandered into a sacred temple if it weren’t for the telephones. The receptionists all wore the same condescending sneers. Often I sat in waiting rooms with other authors. They were the same too. They all emanated fear and desperation and looked so hungry they would have signed away the rights to their children for a lozenge, poor bastards.

In one of the publishing houses, where I waited all day for two days in a row and still wasn’t granted an audience with the king, a writer and I swapped manuscripts to pass the time. His was set in a small country town and was about a doctor and a pregnant schoolteacher who passed each other on the street every day but were too inward to say hello. It was unreadable. It was almost all description. My spirits lifted when, on page 85, he’d deigned to put in a smattering of dialogue between the characters. His novel was a real struggle to wade through, but he was sitting right beside me so I had to persist, out of politeness. Every now and then we glanced at each other to see how we were getting on. Finally, around lunchtime, he turned to me and said, “This is a peculiar book. Is it a satire?”

“Not at all. Yours is interesting too. Are the characters mute?”

“Not at all.”

We each handed back the other’s manuscript and looked at our watches.

Every morning I endured the four-hour bus ride into Sydney, where I spent the day going from publisher to publisher. Most laughed right in my face. One guy had to come out from behind his desk to do it because my face was too far away. It was discouraging. Also, the publishers didn’t like the idea of my hiding the author’s name from them right up to the day of printing. It made them suspicious. Many thought it was some kind of plot to drop them in the shit. You never met a greasier bunch of paranoid, unimaginative, dull-witted merchants in your life. The ones who took the manuscript seriously, who didn’t think it was a hoax or a prank or a plot, called me the worst possible names. They thought the work was an abomination and I was a dangerous, irresponsible anarchist for trying to peddle it. Before they threw me out on the street, they all said the same thing: this book would never be published, not in their lifetimes. I guess that meant that once they were dead, the world could fall into the toilet for all they cared about it.

Harry took it badly. He flew into fits, accused me of being lazy or sabotaging the meetings with ineptitude. That burned. I was slaving my guts out peddling that book of his, but it was the book they didn’t like, not me. Then, and after the tenth rejection, he started cursing the Australian publishing industry instead of me. “Maybe we need to take this to America. Freedom of expression is big over there right now. They have a thing called the right to free press. They have amendments enforcing it. Ideas are encouraged to flourish. Here the industry’s as stale as week-old bread crusts. This country’s so fucking conservative it makes you want to puke. It’s a wonder anyone gets anything published at all.” He might have had a point. Maybe the local publishers were just scared. He started talking about buying me a plane ticket to New York, but I shot that idea down the best I could. I didn’t want to go to New York. I couldn’t leave my sick mother or Terry, wherever he was. I was convinced that someday, soon, Terry was going to need me, maybe to save his life. I had to be on hand.

Caroline felt no such duty. She and Lionel arrived at my front door in the near-darkness of twilight to say goodbye. They had sold the house and were moving off. Lionel gave me a hug while Caroline stood shaking her head. “I’m not going to hang around and see Terry killed,” she said. “No one’s asking you to,” I said back, although I did think about it. It began to rain softly. She gave me a hug too, though it wasn’t the squeeze I needed, and as I watched her guiding her blind father out into the night, I felt as though I had renounced my humanity. I called out “Bye!” as she disappeared into the darkness, but it was as though I meant, You go ahead, I’m not a man anyway. There’s nothing human about me, so you be off.

A week later I was at Harry’s watching television when Terry called. After giving him an earful, Harry threw me the phone.

“How are you holding up?” I asked frantically. “They’re saying you got shot.”

“In the ankle! Who shoots ankles? Look, don’t worry about me, mate. I got a bird who does wonders with iodine. I’m tired, that’s about it. Otherwise I’m OK.”

“You’re famous.”

“Isn’t it wild?”

“It’s going to get you caught.”

“I know.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Look. Maybe I started this thing without too much thought, but I realized pretty quick that I’m doing something here, something I feel is important. Everyone’s on their best behavior. No one’s cheating. No one’s playing dirty. No one’s ripping anyone off. No one’s screwing anyone. Sport’s going through a reformation. Everyone’s taking the ethics seriously.”

“How can you talk about ethics! You’re a cold-blooded murderer! I think you should give yourself up.”

“Are you nuts? This is who I am! This is what I was put here to do!”

“Caroline came home.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. I could hear Terry moving around, dragging a chair across the floor. Then I heard him sit.

“Where is she? Does she know? Can you take her a message?”

“She left again.”

He took another breath, this time deeper, and I waited a full thirty seconds before I heard him let it out. He cracked open a can of something, then swallowed maybe half by the sound of it. He still didn’t say anything. Caroline’s absence seemed to weigh more heavily on both of us than murder.

“So are you going to stop or not?” I asked.

“Listen, Marty, one day you’ll understand all this. The day you believe in something. Oops. Gotta go. Pizza’s here.”

“Hey, I believe in-”

Click.

I put down the receiver and kicked the wall. It’s normal to think that the laws of physics don’t apply when you’re angry, that your furious foot will pass through brick. Nursing my injured toe, I felt extremely agitated. The sound of profound gratification in Terry’s voice was enough to put me on edge. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d found my belief. I was doing something important too. He didn’t know I’d been irresistibly drawn to Harry’s book and was instrumental in getting it published. Well, how could he? I wasn’t getting it published. And why not? Terry was doing everything possible to murder those sportsmen, but was I really doing everything I could for the book? The idea began gnawing at me that I didn’t have it in me to go all the way, to go with total devotion down a road on which it was impossible to do a U-turn. Terry was displaying absolute ruthlessness and obstinacy in pursuit of his goal, and I needed to apply the same ruthless obstinacy to follow my path incessantly; otherwise I was just another frightened worthless hypocrite unwilling to put himself on the line for his cause.

I made a groundbreaking decision.

If the next publisher rejected the book, I simply wouldn’t accept his rejection. I would reject his rejection. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t take never for an answer. I’d demand he publish it, and if that meant holding him hostage until it was in the stores, then so be it. It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harry’s or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn’t honor my father either. They couldn’t very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?

That night before going home, while Harry was out cold on vodka and sleeping pills, I plunged my hand deep into the sugar bowl. The pistol inside came out covered in sticky crystals. I brushed them off into a cup of tea and drank it. I could taste the gun.

The next day I left my house when it was still dark. Terry hadn’t made a whisper in the world for at least a week and there were no reporters camping in our yard, although their cigarette butts were wet with dew. I took the bus into the city. The office building of the next publisher on the list was across the road from Central Station. Before going in, I studied the train timetable in case I might need to make a hasty getaway. One train or another was leaving every three minutes, if I wasn’t too particular about the destination. I bought a whole bunch of tickets, gateways to everywhere.

The lobby had a blackboard under glass listing the building’s residents in white letters. There, on the fourth floor, was the name of my last hope. Strangeways Publicati ns. The “o” was missing. It wasn’t too difficult to see why. On the sixth floor was a company called Voodoo Cooperative Clothing, while on the second floor resided another company called Ooooops! Stain Remover Inc.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor. There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor. I went inside and hung my head over the toilet bowl for a good twenty minutes, strategizing, before going back out into the corridor and making my way to the door of Strangeways Publications. Before knocking, I reached into my bag. The gun was still there, but the sugar was gone. There was nothing sweet about it anymore.

I knocked. I heard a voice say, “Come in.”

A man was sitting behind a desk reading. Without looking up, he motioned for me to sit down. I was too nervous to sit. My knees wouldn’t bend. They hardened. I looked around the office. It was no bigger than a closet, and was a pigsty. Newspapers were stacked up from the floor to the ceiling. A pile of clothes and a brown suitcase sat in one corner. The window was shut and there was no air in the place. The publisher was in his forties. Whatever he was reading made him smile like a senile goat. There was a toothbrush and a white bowl filled with green water on the desk. The toothbrush made me sick. It had a hair in it.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, looking up.

I reached into my bag, felt the gun, and pulled out the manuscript. I plopped it on his desk and went through my routine. The author, I said, who shall remain anonymous for the moment, was seeking the right publisher for his groundbreaking masterpiece, and because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, I couldn’t possibly leave the manuscript with him, but if he had an ounce of curiosity and didn’t want to miss out on the most sensational opportunity of a lifetime, he’d really need to look through the manuscript now, while I waited. I had made this speech so many times I said it without thinking. He stared at me the whole time, with half-drunk eyes, smiling that old-goat smile as if he were thinking of bubble baths.

“Well, let’s have a look at her then, shall we?”

He turned to the first page. Through the window behind him I could see a train snake into the station. The publisher flicked to the middle of the manuscript, giggled at something, then put it down.

“A satire, eh? I love a good satire. It’s well written and it’s pretty funny, but to be honest, not really in my line.”

My hand, grasping the gun, was all sweat.

“Thanks for coming in anyway.”

I didn’t move. A minute dragged by. He made gestures with his eyes that directed me out the door. I ignored them.

“Look,” he said. “Things are a bit rough for me right now. I couldn’t afford to publish my own obituary if I wanted to, so why don’t you fuck off.”

I didn’t move. It was as though the air in the room had turned solid and trapped me where I was standing.

“You know what I was reading when you came in? No? Nothing- that’s what! I was pretending to read so I’d look busy. Sad, huh?” When I still didn’t so much as visibly breathe, he said, “Take a look at this.”

A pile of books towered beside his desk, and he picked the top one and handed it to me. I took a look. It was a biology textbook.

“Back in London I was working for the tabloids. That was a long time ago.” He came around and sat on the edge of his desk, his eyes darting around the room. “This is a small publishing company. Nothing too flash. We publish science textbooks. Physics, biology, chemistry, the usual suspects. Me and my wife, we shared this business fifty-fifty. Her money, inherited from her father, and my money, saved through blood and sweat. So ten years we ran our little company, and sure, we had our domestic disputes, and I had my indiscretions, but I was discreet about them, so what was the harm? Look at this. Feast your eyes on the instrument of my destruction!” He motioned to the biology textbook in my hands and said, “Page ninety-five.”

I turned to page 95. It was a picture of the human body, with all the parts labeled and their functions explained. It looked like a booklet of stereo instructions. “See anything unusual?” he asked.

I couldn’t. It looked like a pretty standard human body. Sure, it was lacking some common elements like love handles, wrinkles, and stretch marks, but otherwise it was relatively comprehensive.

“She did it on purpose. She knew I’d be too pissed to check through it before printing.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“The brain! Look at what she’s called the brain!”

I looked. It said “The Testicle.” And where the testicles were, it was labeled not just “The Brain” but “ Stanley ’s Brain.” In fact, now that he’d pointed it out, almost every organ in the human male was a critique of Stanley’s drinking, gambling, and womanizing: the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, the intestines, you name it, she had accompanying notes that described his excessive alcohol consumption, his bad diet, his aggressiveness and poor sexual performance. It went on and on. I could see how this wouldn’t be appropriate for certain schoolchildren.

“She sabotaged me. All on account of me sleeping with a barmaid at our local. OK, I shouldn’t have done it, but to ruin my livelihood! Ten thousand books I can’t sell! And I can’t sue anyone because I signed the approval form. I delivered the book to the printers myself. Of course she lost everything too, but she doesn’t care. That’s how vindictive women are. It was worth it, she says, just to put me in the ground. Have you ever heard such venom? You’re not likely to. Now I’m waiting for the creditors to come knocking. I can’t even pay the rent on this office. So as much as I’d like to publish your delightful little satire…”

“It’s not a satire.”

“It’s not?”

“No.”

He looked down at the manuscript and thumbed through it quickly.

“This is on the level?”

I nodded.

“Then this would be a textbook for young criminals?”

I nodded again.

“You could get both of us arrested for publishing this.”

“I’m willing to risk it if you are.”

He leaned back into his chair and said, “How about that.” He looked at the manuscript again, and a little while later he said, “Well, well.”

He closed his eyes a moment before opening them again. The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.

“What made you come to me?” he asked.

“Everyone else said no.”

“Of course they did,” he said, chuckling. That seemed to please him no end.

His mouth widened into a smile, and he jumped up as though answering a call to duty, that smile just kept on widening and widening, until my mouth hurt.

I ran all the way to Harry’s and stumbled up the front steps. I was so excited I almost forgot the secret knock. It was too elaborate. Four knocks, a pause, one knock, a pause, three knocks, then my voice saying, “Hey, Harry. It’s me, Martin.” If you ask me, we could’ve done just as well without the knocks, but Harry was inflexible about it. I fumbled the knocks all right: two…pause…three- no, better start again…I heard the ominous sound of a shotgun pumping into readiness. “It’s me, Harry!” I said in a fluster. Realizing my mistake, I ducked down, waiting for the spray of bullets. They didn’t come. A series of clicks and slides. Harry was going through the tedious routine of unlocking the dead bolts. It took longer than usual. He must’ve added a couple of new ones. The door crept open. Harry stood there in his underwear, shotgun in one hand and an ax in the other. His eyes were full of fire and fear. I couldn’t wait. I told him the news.

“I found a publisher! He loves it! He’s from England, so he grew up on a diet of scandal! He’s not afraid to put himself on the line. He loves your book! He’s putting everything into it! The book’s going straight into publication!”

Harry was too stunned to speak. He was frozen solid. Have you ever seen a man congeal from good news? It’s hilarious.

“Waaa- what did you say?”

“We did it! Your book is going to be a book!”

Relief and fear and love and terror and elation crowded his face. Even the most self-confident egotists have a secret part of themselves that doubts anything will ever go right. That part of Harry was going into tumult. It was just so unexpected. Harry’s ESP had a blind spot because of that pessimistic voice, which shouted louder than the prophetic whispers of his third eye. He laughed and cried and raised his shotgun in the air and fired. The ceiling came down in large plaster chunks. It was terrifying. He hugged me. We danced around the hallway, but it was hard to enjoy it because Harry still held the shotgun and the ax. He tried to kiss me on the mouth again, but this time I was ready for it. I gave him my cheek instead. He kissed my ear. As we kept on spinning, Harry’s dead leg swung around and knocked over the side table. This was it! His book! His baby! His legacy! His immortality!

The next few weeks passed in a blur. Thrilling times! I went into Stanley ’s office almost every day. We did everything together: chose the typeface, reorganized the chapters. He asked me to ask the mystery author to pen a preface and Harry went to work on it, day and night, guarding it from my eyes. Stanley had sold everything he owned to get the money to pay the printers. “They won’t know what hit them,” he kept saying. “They’ll be in an uproar when it lands on the shelves. Then it’ll be banned. Free publicity! There’s nothing like censorship to boost a book’s sales. There’ll be moral outrage! Banned copies will pass surreptitiously from hand to hand! The book will live in the shadows and grow like mushrooms in the dark and the damp! Then a lone voice, someone will say, ‘Ho! This is genius!’ Then the other heads who were shaking in disgust will start nodding in assent! Our champion will be someone who may not believe a word of what he’s saying. That doesn’t matter to us. Luckily, some critics just have to go against the grain, no matter what the grain is. The grain could be ‘Love your neighbor’ and the critic will say, ‘No! Detest him, the worm!’ ”

Stanley went into this rant every day. It was always the same. He was predicting big things for Harry’s book, although he kept pressing me to reveal the author’s name. “Nothing doing,” I always said. “On the day of printing, all will be revealed.” Stanley hit the desk. He did everything he could to wheedle it out of me. “I’m putting myself on the line here, Marty- how do I know the author isn’t a pedophile? I mean, scandal is one thing, you know I’m not afraid of it, but no one would touch the book if the author’s hands had been all over some kid.”

I gave him my word Harry was just an ordinary run-of-the-mill murdering thief.

One day Stanley ’s wife came in to see what he was up to. She was a thin attractive woman with a pointy nose that didn’t look sculpted so much as it looked like it had been sharpened on a grinder. She circled the office and tried to take a peek at the manuscript on his desk, but he threw a newspaper on top of it.

“What do you want, hag?”

“You’re up to something.”

He didn’t answer, just gave her a smile that said, “Maybe I am, you rotten wench, but it’s none of your fucking business.”

She turned to me and started examining. “I know you from somewhere.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you ask me for money on a train once?”

I said I had never asked anyone for money on a train, which was not true, because once I had asked someone for money on a train.

“All right, visit over,” Stanley said, grabbing her by the shoulders and pushing her out of the office.

“OK, OK! I just came to ask you for a divorce!”

“Whenever you want. Although I’d prefer to be a widower.”

“Fuck up and die, you bastard!”

Once he had her in the corridor, he slammed the door in her face and said to me, “Call a locksmith. We have to get the locks changed, then let’s get back to work.”

Stanley had given Harry a couple of little tasks to do. The first was the title, and Harry had handed me a sheet of paper with his suggestions. I sat down and read over the list. A Handbook for Criminals, A Handbook for Young Criminals, The Handbook of Crime for Young Criminals and Toddlers, Crime: How to Do It, Breaking the Law by Numbers, Felony for Dummies, Step-by-Step Guide to Crime, Lawlessness Is Easy!… The list went on.

Then came the problem of the preface. Harry had given me his first draft and asked me to pass it on to Stanley untouched. I couldn’t touch it even if I wanted to. It was the outpouring of a man on the edge. It went like this:

There are men put on this earth to make laws designed to break the spirits of men. Then there are those put here to have their spirits broken by those put here to break them. Then there are those who are here to break the laws that break the men who break the spirits of other men. I am one of those men.

– the author

Stanley sent it back and told him to try again. Harry’s second attempt was no better.

They have you in their sights. They have you on their list. They want to turn the product of your semen’s blood into steam engines that churn out power to light up their lives. Well I’m here to tell you if you read this book and follow its advice you can fill your own pockets with gold for a change and let someone else’s children carry the stone tablets for the corpulent Egyptian taskmasters. I say, why not get them first?

– the author

Stanley didn’t think anything that sounded bitter or insane would be good for sales. I could see his point. I gently asked Harry to take one more crack at it. His third attempt I opened and read as the bus rolled toward the city. It read simply:

Ah-ha! Worship me! You cunts!

– the author

I tore it up and composed my own preface and put Harry’s name to it.

The world’s a fat place, so fat you’d think there’s enough to go around. There isn’t. So some have to grab what they can without following the rules because the rules state that they get next to nothing. Most stumble along this path unguided, unmapped. By writing this book, I am not trying to cause a revolution, just giving some roadside assistance to the disadvantaged on the road less traveled by lighting it a little, showing the potholes and the pitfalls, putting up entry and exit signs and speed limits.

Drive well, you young thugs, drive well…

– the author

Finally the day of printing arrived. I had to go to Stanley ’s office and disclose the author’s name. Harry and I sat in the backyard smoking cigarettes for breakfast. He had gone beyond anxiety; his hands were shaking vigorously. We both tried not to notice it, and when I had to light his cigarette for him, we pretended it was because I was his long-serving houseboy. I said, “There you go, sir,” and he replied, “Thanks, boy.”

Above us the sky was a strange color, the same algae green as his swimming pool.

“This publisher. Can we trust him?” Harry asked.

“Implicitly.”

“Is he going to screw us?”

“No.”

“When you speak to him next, tell him I’ve killed seventeen men, two women, and a child.”

“You killed a child?”

“Well- a young adult.”

Harry handed me a sheet of paper. On it was a list of acknowledgments. I took it and went off to fulfill our destinies, hitting the streets with my arms swinging at both sides. That’s how you walk when you’re doing destiny’s dirty work.

I met Stanley at his office. He was too excited to sit. In the first two minutes after I arrived, he went from the door to the window three times, making strange gestures with his hands as if strangling chickens.

“This is it, mate- the printers are standing by. I’m ready for the name now.”

“OK, here it is. The man who wrote The Handbook of Crime is Harry West.”

Stanley ’s mouth opened and stayed that way as he let out a long throaty exhale.

“Who?”

“Harry West!”

“Never heard of him.”

I ran through his rap sheet, not leaving anything out. “Harry West,” Stanley said as he wrote the name down, sounding a little disappointed. Then, as I fed him information, Stanley composed a biography for the “about the author” section. It ran like this:

Harry West was born in Sydney in 1922. For the next fifty-five years he broke every law in the Southern Hemisphere. He escaped from custody and is currently a fugitive from justice.

“And Harry’s written a list of acknowledgments he wants to go in the front,” I said.

“Fine.”

Stanley took a look at it. It was just your standard page of thanks that precedes a life’s work.

I would like to acknowledge my father for giving me a taste for violence, my grandfather for giving my father a taste for violence, who in turn gave it to me. I have no children, so I’ve had to give it to acquaintances and passersby. I would also like to acknowledge the New South Wales criminal justice system for teaching me about injustice, the New South Wales police force for their indefatigable corruption and tireless brutality, violence in cinema for desensitizing my victims so they take longer to say ouch, my victims for losing, my victors for showing me there is no dishonor in a bullet in the thigh, and finally my editor, friend, and brother in isolation, Martin Dean.

“Are you sure you want your name on this?” Stanley asked me.

“Why not?” I asked stupidly, knowing why not. I was practically admitting to a crime: harboring a known fugitive and editing his opus. “I think so,” I said.

“Think about it a second.”

I thought about it. Was I making a mistake? It was obvious there was no real reason my involvement needed to be mentioned in any way. But this was my work too. I had broken my back to get this book this far, and I wanted the world to know it.

“Yeah, leave it in.”

“OK then, well, we’re all ready to go. I’m going to run this down to the printers. Afterward, can I meet him?”

“I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea right now.”

“Why?”

“He’s not well at the moment. He’s a little…on edge. Maybe when the book’s out in the stores. When will that be, by the way?”

“Three weeks.”

“I can’t believe it’s really happening.”

“You bet your arse,” he said, and just before he left the office, Stanley turned to me with a strange, far-off look on his face and said, “Tell Harry I think he’s a genius.”

I said that I would.

“What did he say when you told him my name? What was the look on his face? Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out,” Harry said breathlessly from his front door as I headed up the drive.

“He was impressed,” I lied. “He’d heard of you.”

“Of course he’s heard of me. A man doesn’t kill steadily for fifty years without making a name for himself. So when’s it in the stores?”

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks! Fuck!”

There was nothing left to be done but wait. Everything was sorted. I had that feeling of satisfaction and anticlimax that comes with the completion of a job. Now I knew how all those Egyptian slaves must have felt when the pointy stone was put on top of the pyramid of Giza and they all had to stand around waiting for the cement to dry. Also I felt a sense of disquiet. I had been involved in something meaningful for the second time in my life, after the suggestion box; now what the fuck was I going to do? The ambition rising in my chest had no further outlet. That was annoying.

After a few hours of forecasting our phenomenal success one minute and dismal failure the next, I dragged myself back home to look after my mother. The chemotherapy and regular bombardments of radiation left her fatigued all the time, she had lost weight and some of her hair, and moved around the house by groping the walls. It was clear the body she was inhabiting was fast becoming uninhabitable. The only pleasant surprise was my father, who actually turned out to be not that dissimilar to a human being, and one of the nice ones too. He became kind to my mother, loving, and supportive at a level far deeper and more committed than either she or I had expected of him. So did I really need to linger there all the time? Now that I had been in the world, every fiber of my being revolted at the idea of spending another second in that miserable town. That’s why you should never make an unbreakable bond. You never know what the fibers of your being are going to feel like doing later on down the track.

Those weeks of waiting were an intricate and elaborate torture. I’d always known there are 1,440 minutes in a day, but during those three weeks I felt them, profoundly. I was as jumpy as naked wires. I could nibble, but I couldn’t eat. I could close my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. I could stand under the shower, but I couldn’t get wet. The days stood their ground like monuments to timelessness.

Somehow, magically, the day of publication arrived. At three in the morning, I caught a bus into the city. On the way I had the smug feeling that I was a famous person who had sat down in a public place and was only waiting for someone to turn around and scream, “Hey! There’s so-and-so!” That was me: I was So-and-So. It felt good.

A city is a strange place for dawn. The sun just can’t seem to make any headway in the cold streets, and it took two hours to get sunny. I walked down George Street past a crowd of partygoers falling over each other and kissing and cursing the unwanted arrival of daytime. They sang in my face as they walked by, a drunken song, to which I did a little dance that must have been OK because they all cheered me. I cheered them back. It was cheery.

Dymocks bookshop had promised to put a copy in the window. I was two hours early. I smoked some cigarettes. I smiled, just for something to do. I pushed the crescent moons of my fingernails down into the fingers. A thread from my shirt took me through from eight to eight-thirty. Then, at a few minutes to nine, a woman appeared inside the shop. I don’t know how she got in. Maybe there was a back entrance. Maybe she slept there overnight. But what was she doing in there? She was just leaning against the counter, as if she were a customer. And then, why was she messing around with the cash register? Why was that important now? When bookstores have a new book to put in a window, that should be the first priority. It’s obvious!

She got down on her knees and cut open the lid of a cardboard box with a knife. She took a handful of copies and walked toward the window. This was it! Stepping up on the little podium, she placed the copies on an empty stand. When I saw the books, my heart fell out.

This is what I saw:

The Handbook of Crime, by Terry Dean

What’s this? What’s this? I had to take a closer look. Terry Dean? Terry Dean! How the hell did this happen? I ran to the doors. They were still locked. I banged on the glass. The woman inside the shop peered at me from the other side.

“What do you want?”

“That book! The Handbook of Crime! I have to see it!”

“We don’t open for another ten minutes.”

“I need it now!” I shouted as I pounded on the door. She muttered a cruel insult under her breath. I think it was “book lover.” There was nothing I could do. She wouldn’t open the door. I ran back to the window and pressed my eyeballs against the glass. I could see the front cover. It said, in color with a star around it,

A book by fugitive Terry Dean- written on the lam!

I couldn’t work it out. Nowhere on the cover was there any mention of Harry. Shit! Harry! He’d…A steel door slammed shut inside my head. My brain wouldn’t let me think about Harry. It was too perilous.

On the nose of nine o’clock the store opened and I rushed inside, grabbed a copy of The Handbook of Crime, and flicked through it frenetically. The “about the author” section was entirely different. It was Terry’s life story, and the dedication said simply, “To Martin, my brother and editor.”

Stanley had double-crossed us! But how? I’d never mentioned that I was Terry’s brother! I pushed some money at the clerk and ran out of the store without waiting for change. I ran all the way to Stanley ’s office. When I burst through the front door, he was standing at his desk, talking on the phone, saying, “No, he can’t give an interview. He just can’t. He’s a fugitive, that’s why.”

He hung up and beamed at me triumphantly. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook! There’s a shit storm! It’s better than I ever anticipated!”

“What have you done?”

“I guarantee every copy will be gone by this afternoon. I’ve just ordered another fifty thousand to be printed. First day, and it’s a hit!”

“BUT TERRY DIDN’T WRITE IT!”

“OK, come on, Martin. The cat’s out of the bag. I know you’re Terry’s brother. You tried to keep that secret from me, you naughty boy. Actually, believe it or not, you know what put me onto the idea? My fucking ex-wife! She recognized you from the papers. It hit her a couple of hours after she left that day and she called me, demanding to know what I was publishing with Terry Dean. Then it hit me. Of course! It was so obvious! Harry West was a pseudonym for Terry Dean! It’s not clever like an anagram or anything, but it is bullshit. Problem is, pseudonyms aren’t going to sell books, my friend. Not when the author is as famous as your brother is!”

I moved closer to Stanley ’s desk, wondering if I was strong enough to pick it up and squash him with it.

“Listen to me, you dopey bastard,” I growled. “Terry didn’t write it! Harry did! Oh my God! Harry! Harry is going to explode!”

“Really. And who is this Harry?”

“He was Terry’s mentor.”

Stanley looked at me curiously for a long time. “Come on, mate, give it up.”

“I’m telling you. You’ve fucked up! Harry’s going to go on a rampage! He’ll tear us all to pieces, you idiot!”

Stanley ’s face looked as if it were tossing up between smiling and frowning and finally settled for an uncomfortable combination of the two. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious.”

“You’re saying, then, that Terry didn’t write this book?”

“Terry can’t write his name in the snow with his piss!”

“Really?”

“Really!”

“Oh,” Stanley said, before burying his face behind a pile of papers. He picked up a pencil and started scrawling something. I went over and ripped it out of his hands. This is what he’d written: “Oops!”

“Oops! Oops? You don’t know! You don’t know Harry! He’ll kill me! Then he’ll kill you! Then he’ll kill Terry and then he’ll kill himself!”

“Why can’t he be first?” Stanley cried absurdly. He stood, buttoned up his jacket, unbuttoned it, and sat down. He finally had the sense to panic.

“Didn’t you think of at least checking my story? Didn’t you think to find out about Harry?”

“Now, hang on…”

“Call them back!”

“Who?”

“The press! The publishers! Everyone!”

“Now, wait a tic!”

“Do it!”

“I can’t!”

“But it’s a lie!”

“Sit down. Calm down. We have to think about this. Are we thinking? Let’s think. OK. Think. Are you thinking? I’m not. I don’t have a thought in my head. Stop looking at me for a second. I can’t think when someone’s looking at me. Turn around. I mean it, Martin, turn around.”

Reluctantly, I half swiveled my body so I was facing the wall. I wanted to smash my head against it. I couldn’t believe it! Here was Terry again! Taking center stage again! What about me? When was it going to be my time?

Stanley rattled off thoughts that stank up the room. “OK. OK. OK. So…what we had, with The Handbook of Crime, was a literary scandal. Spectacular. Controversial. Polemical. That we already have. But now it turns out the author is in fact not the author. That means…what we now have, on top of the scandal…is a literary hoax.”

“A what?”

“OK. You can turn around now.”

When I swiveled back, Stanley was beaming at me triumphantly. “Two in one!” he shouted joyously.

“ Stanley -” I started.

“This is brilliant! It’ll serve us well. Tell Harry to be patient- in a year or two, we’ll leak out the truth. He’ll be famous.”

“A year or two!”

“Sure, what’s the rush?”

“You still don’t get it! Harry will think I was in on this. He’ll think I’ve betrayed him. This is his legacy to the world! You have to tell him! You have to tell him it was your own fault, that you made a mistake! You fool- he’s going to kill us!”

“So what? Let him come. I’m not afraid! If I have to die, let it be for a book. Yes, I like it! Let it be for this book. Yes! Bring him on!”

Stanley held his fist up in the air as if it were an award he’d just won. Can you beat that? This was the worst crisis imaginable, and I was in the company of a man right at the time he’d found something to die for. He looked disgustingly, inappropriately peaceful. I wanted to tear his lips off.

I took a cab to Harry’s, thinking I was going to have to tread very, very carefully. Harry loved me, and I loved him, but that didn’t mean he was above putting a bullet between my eyes. That’s what love is all about, after all. I rolled down the taxi window. Outside, the air was supernaturally still, as in a windowless room. Nothing stirred. It was as if the hatch on the world had been hermetically sealed and we were, all of us, shut in.

I did the secret knock and then the not-so-secret knock, the one anyone can do. I hollered his name. I hollered an apology. It was a waste of hollering- he wasn’t home. What should I do? A cab sailed past and I hailed it and went back into the city, where I wandered aimlessly through the streets, deep in my tumult. The level of activity made my head spin, and it irritated me that no one else looked lost. A little sad and lonely, maybe, but they knew where they were going. I bumped into people on purpose, in the irrational hope of eliciting some kind of sympathetic reaction. The faces of a city take on a supremely cruel and indifferent quality when you wander through it in the midst of a personal crisis. It’s depressing that nobody stops to hold your hand.

I went into a pub, the Park View, took a seat at the bar, and didn’t dwell on the lack of a park or a view. I ordered a beer. A song was on the radio, a nice cheery love song that clashed with my mood. I drained the beer quickly. The pub was empty except for two old drunk men who were bickering about someone named Gazza; one of the old men thought Gazza was pussy-whipped by his new bride, while the other thought Gazza had her on the ropes. Either way, the upshot was that Gazza wasn’t coming out to the pub as often as he used to, and it just wasn’t the same without him. I nodded in sadness, and stared at my empty glass as if it had wronged me for the last time.

Then the news came over the radio and my ears went into high alert. Fugitive Terry Dean had written a scandalous book instructing would-be criminals on how to break the law. The most recent development in the story: the publisher of The Handbook of Crime was under arrest.

So! Stanley was under arrest! Just as well, I decided. At least that would keep him safe from Harry for a while. I supposed they couldn’t hold him long. When the police are hunting for someone they can’t find, it just gives them relief to arrest someone connected to him.

While I contemplated Stanley behind bars, and the possibility that as the credited editor, I might be the one they came for next, the last story of the news came on: fugitive Harry West had climbed to the top of the Harbor Bridge armed to the teeth and was threatening to jump. The story added a little afterthought which put it all into perspective: if Harry West plummeted to his death, he would be the first person to commit suicide from the Sydney Harbor Bridge on live television. Yes, it made perfect sense. Terry had robbed him of the democratic cooperative, and Stanley had pulled The Handbook of Crime from under his feet. Harry was desperate to leave his legacy, any legacy. First person to be broadcasted suiciding off Sydney ’s bridge and in color too. No wonder Harry had taken his arsenal up there. Anyone tried to jump first, Harry would shoot them before they got a toe near the edge.

I ran out of the pub, leapt into a moving cab, and hightailed it to the bridge. If he was armed I supposed there’d be a chance he’d shoot me, but I had to explain that this was a mistake that could be cleared up in a day or two. I had the nauseating feeling that something terrible was going to happen on that bridge. He was going to toss himself into the drink; that seemed unavoidable. But knowing Harry, he’d want to drag as many souls into the abyss with him as possible. He wanted to turn the harbor red, I just knew it.

The midday sun was in my eyes, and through the glare I saw the bridge in the distance. Police blocked entry on either side and were scratching their heads over what to do with commuters trapped in the middle. Panicky policemen were directing people all over the place, but there was too much chaos. One of the bewildered cops seemed to be pointing in the direction of the water.

As I left my cab in the traffic jam, the driver made it clear he didn’t like it that I was ending our relationship so unexpectedly. People in uniforms were pouring in from everywhere. More policemen, firemen, ambulances, and media trucks weaved through parked cars. The emergency services were in a muddle. None of them knew what they were supposed to do. The intended victim was also the alleged perpetrator. It was confusing. On the one hand, he had a gun, but on the other hand, he was only threatening to use it on himself. They wanted to shoot him down, but can you shoot a man threatening suicide? That’s just what he wants.

I ran through the narrow passageway between halted cars and quickly found myself at a line of policemen. I ran right through their long yellow ribbon of tape and explained to the cop screaming at me that I was a close friend of Harry West and might be able to talk him down. In their confusion, they let me through.

I could see him, way up top. He was just a little speck up there, like a little plastic groom on a wedding cake. It was a long way up, but I had to go to him.

A tremendous wind was blowing. It was difficult to hold on. As I climbed, my stomach became the dominant organ, and I could feel nothing but its grind. Below I could see the ocean, the green suburbs, a smattering of houses. The wind made the whole bridge creak and did her best to throw me off balance. I thought: What am I doing here? It’s not my business! I wondered why I didn’t just let him take his big dive. I felt this was my fault, he was my responsibility, as were the people he might kill. But why? How do I fit in? I’m no Christ figure. I don’t have a savior complex. The whole human race could get acute angina for all I care.

Ruminations such as these and the realization that the men in my life, Harry and Terry and Stanley, with their little projects were dragging me with them down into the void, should be kept for after the event, over a mug of hot chocolate, not during the event, at the edge of a terrifying precipice. I had stopped my ascent to contemplate the existential meaning of it all. As usual, I couldn’t help myself. On that shaky metal stepladder I thought: One man’s dream is another man’s anchor. One swims, the other sinks, and in the swimmer’s pool too- a double insult. Meanwhile, the wind was threatening to toss me into the harbor. I knew then and there that pondering the significance of an action in the middle of the action is just not right.

I climbed on. I could hear him now. Harry was yelling, the wind carrying his voice to me before I could even see his face. At least I think it was Harry. Either that or the wind had just called me a bastard.

My shoe slipped. I looked down at the water and trembled from top to bottom. It looked like a flat blue slab of concrete.

“Thanks for the backstab, mate!”

Harry was leaning against a steel rail, the one I was white-knuckled clutching for dear life. To drag his leg all the way up that bridge must have been a nightmare. Maybe it was out of exhaustion that he let himself sway, and nearly topple over, with the wind.

His face was all shriveled up. He’d frowned so much he’d actually broken his face. His worry lines had snapped.

“Harry, it was a mistake!” I shouted.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“But we can fix it! Come down and everyone will know the book is yours!”

“It’s too late, Martin! I’ve seen it!”

“Seen what?”

“The hour of my death!”

“When?”

“What time is it now?”

“Harry, don’t jump!”

“I won’t! I’ll fall! You can’t tell a person not to fall! That’s gravity’s business, not mine!” He was laughing from fear, from hysteria. His eyes were on all those guns pointing up at him from below. His paranoia had finally reached enlightenment. The paranoid fantasies and reality were experiencing absolute fusion.

“I fall…I’m gone…there’s another war…an earthquake…and the return of the Madonna…only now she’s a singer…but still a virgin…and now sexual revolution…and marble-wash jeans…”

His ESP was reaching into the infinite, blinding him to the present. His small, twitchy eyes, which usually darted around in their sockets, had finally frozen solid; they were traveling, exploring and seeing everything. Everything.

“Computers…everyone has one…in their homes…and they’re fat…everyone’s so fat…”

He was out of control, prognosticating like crazy! He could see the whole of human future mapped out. He was flicking through the pages! It was too much for him. “She’s dead! She’s dead!” Who? He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. “A third world war! A fourth! A fifth! A tenth! It never ends! They’re dead!” Who’s dead? “The astronaut! The president! The princess! Another president! Your wife! Now you! Now your son! Everyone! Everyone!” It went on for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. So humanity was going to persist after all. His eyes were pushing through space and time. He wasn’t missing a thing.

Harry’s line of communication with the infinite was broken by the wail of sirens starting up again. We looked down and saw the police and the media trucks backing away. Everyone was leaving.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Harry screamed to the world below.

“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll go see.”

Halfway down I ran into a petrified reporter who’d been overcome with vertigo during his climb and couldn’t move up or down the rail.

“What’s going on?”

“Haven’t you heard? They’ve got Terry Dean trapped! He’s taken hostages! There’s going to be a showdown!”

The reporter’s voice was excited, but he had the kind of deadpan face you usually see behind the wheel of a hearse. I climbed back up to Harry.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Terry,” I said, dreading his reaction.

Harry lowered his head, watched wistfully as the last of the reporters sped away.

“Mate,” I said, “I have to go and see if I can help Terry.”

“Fine. Go.”

“I’m sorry, I-”

“Go!”

I climbed down, my eyes focused on the handrail and my feet, and before I reached the bottom I heard the blast of a gun, the sound of a body whistling through the air, and a splash below that was really more of a thud.

That was it.

That was Harry.

Goodbye, Harry.

The police had Terry cornered in a bowling alley. I knew the whole of Australia would be rushing there as if they were water and my brother was the drain, so I jumped in a taxi and promised the driver untold riches if he could get as close to the speed of light as a V6 will get you. When you’re hurrying off to save your brother’s life you don’t fret over pennies, so every time his foot touched the brakes, I threw money in his lap. When he reached for the street directory, I tore exactly one third of my remaining hair out. It’s a bad sign when the driver cranes his head back to look at a street sign he’s just passed.

No directions were necessary, though; a real cavalcade of vehicles and bodies was surging through the streets in one direction: police cars, ambulances, fire engines, army Jeeps, media trucks, ice cream vans, spectators, gardeners, rabbis, anyone in Sydney who owned a radio and wanted to take part in a historical event.

Everyone wants a ringside seat for history in the making. Who’d turn down the opportunity to watch the back of Kennedy’s head explode if given a ticket to Dallas in ’63, or the falling of the Berlin Wall? People who were there speak as if their clothes were stained with JFK’s cerebrum, as if the Berlin Wall fell from their own persistent nudging. No one wants to have missed anything, like sneezing during a small earthquake and wondering why everyone is screaming. The capture and possible killing of Terry Dean was Australia ’s biggest earthquake in fifty years, which is why they got to that bowling alley any way they could.

I leapt from the taxi and slid ungracefully over the bonnets of cars, cracking my hip on the side mirror of a Ford. I could see it: the bowling alley. It looked like the whole New South Wales police force was there. Snipers were taking their positions on the roof and in the trees in the children’s park opposite. One sniper was climbing up the jungle gym, two were balancing on a seesaw.

I couldn’t get through the mob. I was stuck. I shouted, “I’m Martin Dean! Terry Dean’s brother!” They caught on. They cleared a path and let me through, then I got stuck again. A few people around me made getting me inside their life’s mission, lifting me up on top of the crowd- I rode on a hundred shoulders like a rock god. I was getting closer, but sometimes the crowd pushed me in different directions. At one point I was going across, not forward. I shouted, “Forward! Forward!” as if I were Captain Ahab and that bowling alley was my great white whale.

Then I heard the crowd shouting something new: “Let her through! Let her through!” I craned my neck around. I couldn’t see who they were referring to. “It’s his mother! Terry Dean’s mother!” they cried. Then I saw her: my mother, coming from the opposite direction, rising and falling on the roll of the human sea. She waved to me. I waved back. We were both being propelled toward our family’s destiny. I could hear her now. She was shouting: “It’s the double! The double! We’ve got him cornered!” She was off her head! And the crowd was rushing us so fast now we almost collided. They dropped us on the ground in front of the police, who were trying to keep the crowd and the media back at the same time. Both groups were screaming outrage. We had to squeeze into the circle of police and start answering questions. We showed them ID. I just wanted to get inside, but my mother wasn’t helping with her crazy ranting about the doppelgänger. She was Terry Dean’s mother, she said, but the man inside was not her son. They couldn’t work it out. I had to shout over her: “I can get him to come out peacefully! Just give me a chance!” But the cops had different ideas. It dawned on me that they didn’t want him to leave that bowling alley alive. I had to snap into action. I said, “So what, you want to make a martyr out of him? You want his name to go down in history as another outlaw massacred by the police? If you kill him, no one will remember his crimes! You’ll turn him into a hero! Like Ned Kelly! And you’ll be the bad guys. Let him go to trial, where all his brutality will come to light. Then the hero will be the man who captures him alive! Anyone can shoot a man, just as anyone can shoot a wild boar, then run around screaming, I got him! I got him! But capturing a wild boar with your bare hands- that takes guts!”

I had to say this whole speech with my hand over my mother’s mouth, and she was biting me viciously. She’d really gone crazy. “Shoot to kill!” she screamed when I took my hand away. “Aren’t you his mother?” they asked, confused. They couldn’t grasp the meaning of this evil-twin business.

Holding my brother’s fate in the balance, the policemen conferred among themselves, whispering malignantly, almost violently.

“OK, you can go in,” they said to me, and unfortunately, they let my mother in too.

The bowling alley was on the second floor. There was a policeman on every step of the concrete staircase, eyes glowering. I thought: These men are unspeakably dangerous, like understudies waiting to be called to be the star, their raging egos determined not to be undone by performance anxiety. On the way up, a detective filled us in. As far as he knew, Terry had gone into the alley while Kevin Hardy, the three-time world champion, was rolling a few. There were unsubstantiated rumors that during competition Hardy had paid someone behind the pins to take out those he missed with the end of a broomstick. Because the accusations were shaky, Terry hadn’t gone in there to kill him, only to snap his bowling fingers, including the pinkie, just in case he was one of those rare bowlers who used the pinkie for extra spin. Afterward, Terry was tempted by a pair of pretty girls working behind the counter. The groupie phenomenon, the undeniable perk of celebrity, had always been too much for Terry to resist. Unfortunately, once he’d made his choice between the two girls, the jilted one called the police almost immediately, so by the time Terry had broken Kevin’s hand, had sex with the groupie, and was ready to leave, he was already trapped.

Now Terry was kneeling down in the middle of the last lane, gun in his hand, using four hostages as a human shield. Police were positioned at every point of the bowling alley; you could even see the black nozzle of a sniper’s rifle poking out between the pins. They had him covered, and I knew instantly that if they could take the shot, they would, but he was well hidden behind a row of faces contorted in terror.

“You!” my mother shouted. The police held her back. They didn’t trust Terry not to shoot his own mother, especially given her crazy story that he was not her real son but some insidious clone.

“Terry,” I shouted, “it’s me, Marty.” I didn’t get the chance to say anything else before my mother started up.

“Who are you?” she cried.

“Mum? Shit, Marty, get her out of here, will you?”

He was right, of course. When a man is staging his final bloody showdown, he doesn’t want his mother loitering around.

I tried persuading her to leave, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“Stop cowering behind those poor people, you impostor!” she screamed.

“Mum, get out of here!” Terry shouted.

“Don’t call me Mum! I don’t know who you are or how you got my son’s face, but you can’t fool me!”

“Terry, give yourself up!” I shouted.

“Why?”

“They’ll kill you!”

“And? Look, mate, the only thing that’s bugging me is that this whole scene is getting a bit boring. Hang on a sec.”

There was frantic whispering over at the human shield. Suddenly they started to move. They edged to the bowling ball racks, then back to the lane. Then it went! A ball flew down the center of the lane. Terry was bowling! The policemen’s eyes watched the ball fly toward the pins. There was a profound silence that verged on the religious. A strike! Terry had done it! He took out all ten pins! The crowd seemed to shout with one voice, reminding me how man is often stupid alone, but in packs he is absolutely cretinous. They might have been police at the dénouement of a long manhunt, but they were also sport-loving Australians- and nothing starts the heart beating faster than a victory, no matter how bloodthirsty the victor.

At the moment the ball hit the pins, a bullet hit Terry. That ball was Terry’s ploy to make a run for it, but not all police are that gullible or even like bowling.

He lay on the lane, smeared in his own blood, shouting, “My ankle! Again in the ankle! The exact same spot, you mongrels! That’s never gonna heal!” and he lay there while overcome by forty policemen all competing to be the one to walk him outside in the bright flashing glare of the paparazzi, to get their little dose of immortality.

Farewell

I’m no expert on linguistics or the etymology of words, so I have no idea if the word “banana” really was the best-sounding collection of syllables around to describe a long yellow arc-shaped fruit, but I can say that whoever coined the phrase “media circus” really knew what he was talking about. There’s simply no better description of a bunch of journalists clamoring for quotes and photographs, although “media primates,” “media rioting mob,” or “explosion of a media supernova” might do just as well. Outside the courthouse where Terry’s trial was to take place, there were hundreds of them- sweaty-faced leering men and women of the press, pushing and elbowing and jeering and by their appalling behavior generally degrading the human race in the name of public interest.

Inside, the courtroom was standing room only. As Terry denied none of the charges, it was more a process than a trial, and his court-appointed barrister was there to navigate Terry through the bureaucracy of the system rather than aid him in an actual defense. Terry had no defense. He admitted everything; he had to- his infamy was tied up in it. To deny what he had been trying to do would have been like the crusaders explaining their journey into the Islamic world by saying they were just out for a long walk.

Terry sat defiantly next to his lawyer, and when the judge began his deliberations, he rubbed his hands together as though he were about to be sentenced to two scoops of vanilla ice cream. Speaking slowly and solemnly, like a seasoned actor getting his one and only chance to deliver Hamlet’s soliloquy, the judge projected his voice to the back of the courtroom with the words, “I sentence you to life imprisonment.” It was a bravura performance. Everyone let out the typical murmur that follows sentencing, though it was just for show. No one was surprised. There was no other way it could have gone down. What did come as a surprise, however- though you’d think by now I would’ve been accustomed to the taste of ironies squeezed from the cosmic juicer- is that the prison Terry was sentenced to was the one in our hometown.

That’s right.

Our prison. In our town.

Automatically, I looked to my father. Terry was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in the prison his father had built, the prison that lay 1½ miles from our front door.

With their prodigal son home but not home, detained in a building that we could see from both the front veranda and the kitchen window, the sweaty grip that my mother and father had on their sanity began to loosen at an alarming rate. While there was some comfort having him safe from eager police snipers, to have him so tantalizingly out of reach was a torment that made it impossible to tell which of my parents had drifted further from light and life; they were dissolving so fast, each in his or her own sad way, you’d have thought it was a competition. It was like living with two ghosts who had recently accepted their death, who had given up trying to blend with the living. They had finally recognized their transparency for what it was.

With a curious, crazed look of joy on her face, my mother took up a new project: she framed every photograph of Terry and me as children and nailed them to every available wall space in the house. There was not a photo in the house of us over the age of thirteen, as if by growing up we had betrayed her. And I can see my father now too, sitting on the far right corner of the veranda, which allowed a view of the prison unobscured by treetops, binoculars pressed up against his eyeballs, trying to catch a glimpse of his son. He spent so many hours a day peering through those binoculars that when he finally put them down to rest, his eyes strained to see us. Sometimes he’d shout, “There he is!” I’d come running out to see, but he always refused me permission to use his precious binoculars. “You’ve done enough damage,” he’d say inexplicably, as if my gaze were like that of an ugly Greek witch. After a while I stopped asking, and when I heard my father shout, “There he is again! He’s in the yard! He’s telling a joke to a group of inmates! They’re laughing! He looks like he’s having a ball!” I didn’t move a muscle. Of course, I could’ve gotten my own binoculars, but I didn’t dare. In truth, I didn’t think he could see anything at all.

Our town became a place of pilgrimage for journalists, historians, students, and scores of curvy women with teased hair and excessive makeup who turned up at the prison gates to visit Terry. Most were turned away and wound up wandering around town, many clutching first and only editions of The Handbook of Crime. The book had been ripped from the shelves on the day of publication and quickly banned for all time. It was already a collector’s item. The obsessive fans were searching the town for guess who? Me! They wanted me, as credited editor, to sign it! At first it gave me a thrill to finally be the focus of attention, but I rapidly couldn’t stand it. Every autograph fiend hounded me with endless questions about Terry.

Again, Terry.

It was in this throng of star-hungry morons that I ran into Dave! He was wearing a suit but no tie, and his hair was neatly combed back. He’d really cleaned himself up. He was going for a new life. Apparently he’d found God, which made him less violent but no less unendurable. I couldn’t get away from him; he was hell-bent on saving me. “You like books, Martin. You always did. But have you read this one? It’s good. In fact, it’s the Good Book.” He held a Bible so close to my face I didn’t know if he wanted me to read it or eat it.

“I saw your brother this morning,” he said. “That’s why I’ve come back. I led him into temptation and now I’ve got to lead him out.” This Biblical talk was making me irritable, so I switched subjects and inquired after Bruno. “Bad news there, I’m afraid,” Dave said sadly. “He was shot dead during a knife fight. Martin, how’s your family? In all honesty, seeing Terry was only half my mission. I’ve also come to see your parents and beg their forgiveness.”

I strenuously advised him against it, but he was unswayable. It was God’s will, he said, and I couldn’t think of a persuasive argument against that, apart from saying I’d heard otherwise. Religious nuts! It isn’t enough that they believe in God, they have to go all the way, seeing into his vast mind. They think faith gives them access to his glorious to-do lists.

Dave didn’t come up to the house in the end; by chance he ran into my father outside the post office, and before he’d so much as pulled his Bible from his back pocket, my father’s hands were already wrapped around the poor bastard’s throat. Dave didn’t fight back. He thought it was God’s will he be strangled on the post office steps, and when my father pushed him to the ground and kicked him in the face, he thought that was God’s afterthought.

You see, my father really did have a list, and Dave was on it. The list fell out of his pocket during the fight. I picked it up. There were six names.

People who destroyed my son

(in no particular order)

1. Harry West

2. Bruno

3. Dave

4. The inventor of the suggestion box

5. Judge Phillip Krueger

6. Martin Dean

Given that he hadn’t been shy in blaming me with every look and gesture for most of my life, I wasn’t surprised to see my own name on the list, and it was only fortunate for me that my father didn’t realize I actually appeared on it twice.

After the fight, my father stumbled off into the dark, muttering threats. “I’ll get every last one of you!” he shouted to nobody, to the night. The police wandered up as they always do, like garbagemen after a street party, and as soon as Dave’s breath returned, he shouted, “I don’t want to press charges! Let him come back! You’re impeding God’s will!”

I grimaced, hoping for Dave’s sake that God wasn’t listening to his presumptuous rant. I don’t imagine God likes a sycophant any more than anyone else.

To tell you the truth, that episode saved me from death by boredom. With The Handbook of Crime finished and promptly buried, with Caroline gone, Terry locked away, and Harry dead, the town had little to recommend itself to me. My loves were all out of reach and I had nothing to keep me occupied. In short, I had no projects left.

Yet I couldn’t leave. True, I couldn’t stand cohabitating with the living dead too much longer, but what to do about my regrettable oath not to leave my mother under any circumstances? Certainly while she was decaying so unpleasantly, it seemed impossible.

There was nothing I could do to help her condition or ease her physical suffering in any way, but I was very aware that my presence in the house gave my mother considerable peace of mind. Jasper, do you know the burden of being able to make someone happy by your mere presence? No, probably not. Well, my mother was always visibly affected by her sons- the light in her eyes was unmistakable, every time either Terry or I entered a room. What a heavy load for us! We felt we had to enter said room or else be held responsible for her sadness. What a drag! Of course, when someone needs you to the point that your very existence acts as a sort of life support, it’s actually not bad for your self-esteem. But then, Jasper, do you know what it’s like to see that same loved one deteriorate before your very eyes? Have you ever tried to recognize someone across the street in a heavy rain? It became like that. Her body became too thin to support life. And with her approaching death came the approaching death of that need for me. But it wouldn’t go quietly. Not by a long shot. The course of her life had produced two things: me and Terry, and Terry had not only slipped through her fingers long ago, he was now languishing indefinitely just out of her reach. That left me. Out of her two boys, whom she once said she wished to “pin to her skin so as never to lose them,” I was the only one left, the only thing that gave her any meaning. I wasn’t going to abandon her, no matter how revolting the notion that I was only waiting in that dusty house for her to expire.

Besides, I was broke. I couldn’t go anywhere.

Then a letter delivered by courier complicated matters. It was from Stanley.

Dear Martin,

Well! What a shit storm!

The book is out of print, out of the stores, out of circulation. The state is suing me, the bastards. You’re in the clear, though, for about five minutes. If I were you, I’d make myself scarce for a while. Go overseas, Martin. I’ve been listening very carefully to these clowns. They’re not done yet. They will come after you. I told you not to put your damn name on the book! Now they’ve got you for harboring a known fugitive and correcting his syntax. But you’ve got a little breathing time left. The cops don’t know the first thing about publishing. They’re looking for a way to beat the defense that the whole thing was done by mail. Plus, how about this for a kick, they don’t want to know about Harry. They slap me in the face every time I mention his name. They refuse to believe that Terry didn’t write the book. I guess they figure it gives the case a bigger profile. No wonder the world’s a mess. How can you trust anyone to act decent when all they want is to push you out of the way so they can get to the spotlight? Oh well.

Honestly, Martin, listen to me on this one. GET OUT OF THE COUNTRY. They’re coming for you with a briefcase full of bullshit charges.

I’m giving you everything from the initial sales. Don’t think I’m being generous. The truth is, there’s no point in me holding on to it, the courts are going to take it all anyway. But I know how much you put into it. I know how much it meant to you. Plus, I want to thank you for the ride of my life. We did something! We made some noise! I felt for the first time that I was involved in something meaningful. For that, I thank you.

Enclosed is a check for $15,000. Take it and go. They’re coming for you, Martin. They’re coming soon.

Warm regards,

Stanley

I shook the manila envelope until something nice fell out. The check. There it was: $15,000. Not a huge amount of money, but by the standards of a man who was in the habit of recycling old cigarettes, it was considerable.

So that was that. I was leaving. The hell with my unbreakable bond- I was breaking it. I didn’t think I’d be doing my mother any good rotting in jail next to her other rotting son. Besides, jail was Terry’s thing. I wouldn’t last one shower.

I hadn’t even been up to see him since he’d been in. That may sound strange, after all the fretting and running around I did after him, but to tell you the truth, I was sick to death of everything to do with Terry Dean. The public accolades had got to me in the end. And now there wasn’t anything more I could do for him. I needed a breather. I had, however, received a note, and I remember thinking it was the first time I’d seen his handwriting.

Dear Marty,

What’s this shit about a book? No one will shut up about it. If you get a sec, straighten that out, will you? I don’t want to be known as a writer. I want to be known as a vigilante who liberated sport from the dirty hands of corruption. Not for scribbling some stupid book.

Prison- blah. Still, I can see our house from up here. The warden treats me well on account of me being a kind of celebrity and he lent me his binoculars the other day, and guess what I saw? Dad looking at me through a pair of binoculars! Weird!

Anyway, don’t forget to get the hell out of town and do something with your life. Politics, mate. I reckon that’s for you. You’re the only one with brains in this whole silly circus.

Love,

Terry

P.S. Come up and see me sometime.

I started packing immediately. I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. Fuck that. I didn’t want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were too heavy.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked. I spun around, shamefaced, as if she’d caught me masturbating.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Paris,” I said, surprising myself. “I’m going to track down Caroline Potts and ask her to marry me.”

She didn’t say anything to that, just swayed back and forth on her feet.

“Lunch in half an hour.”

“OK,” I said, and when she was gone, the gaping mouth of my open suitcase looked up at me accusingly.

After a silent lunch, I made my final journey up the hill to say goodbye to Terry. It was the hottest day of summer, so hot you could fry bacon on a leaf. The wind was hot too, and it felt like I was walking into a hair dryer. Sweat ran into my eyes. As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you’re really missing is just time itself.

The guard wouldn’t let me in.

“No visitors. Terry’s in solitary confinement,” he said.

“Why?”

“Fighting.”

“Well, how long is he going to be in there for?”

“I dunno. A month?”

“A month! In solitary confinement! Is that legal?”

“I dunno.”

Christ! I couldn’t wait a month just to say goodbye. I was terrified of putting the brakes on my momentum.

“Well, can you tell him his brother came to say goodbye?”

“But his brother hasn’t been here.”

“I’m his brother.”

“Oh. And what’s the message?”

“Tell him I’ve gone overseas.”

“But now you’re back, eh. How long have you been away?”

“I don’t know. A couple of years maybe. But when you tell him, put it in the future tense, OK?”

“Why?”

“Private joke.”

“All right. I’ll say his brother is going overseas for a couple of years,” he said, winking at me.

“Perfect,” I said, and turning away from the prison, I made the steep descent down the treeless hill and took in a full, unobscured view of our town. Nice town. Nice little town.

Fuck you, nice little town.

I hope you burn.

I walked through the streets, entertaining various revenge fantasies of returning one day rich and successful, but I quickly got over that idea. In truth, all I ever wanted was for everyone to like me, and coming back to a place rich and successful never won anyone any hearts.

As I was thinking these pointless thoughts, I noticed a queer sensation in my interior, and an odd noise that sounded like a little man was gargling mouthwash in my abdomen. The sensation quickly developed into an awful pain. I doubled over and rested my hand against a streetlamp. What was this? It felt as if all the glands in my body had started secreting battery acid.

Just as suddenly the pain subsided, and feeling light-headed, I groped my way back home.

When I got into my bedroom, the pain returned worse than before. I lay down and shut my eyes with the thought that a twenty-minute nap was all I needed to get over this.

But it was just the beginning.

By the morning I was still unwell. Some crazy sickness had struck me down suddenly, with debilitating stomach cramps, vomiting, then fever. At first I was diagnosed as having the flu, but my mother and I were worried; these were the symptoms I’d had as a child that had led me into the black arms of the terrifying coma. Once again I was confined to bed, and I feared that my brief flicker of light was growing prematurely dim, and every time I shat my pants from the stomach cramps, I shat my pants from fear. There’s no two ways about it. Sickness and fear were making me incontinent. It was while lying in bed that I realized that illness is our natural state of being. We’re always sick and we just don’t know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.

Now I want you to know, I do not agree with the theory that all illness is made in the mind. Whenever someone says that to me, and blames all sickness on “negative thoughts,” I think one of the ugliest, most uncharitable, angriest thoughts in my ugly, uncharitable, angry thought repertoire. I think: I hope to see you at your child’s funeral so you can explain to me how your six-year-old daughter fabricated her own leukemia. Like I said, not nice, but that’s how furious that particular theory makes me. Old age means nothing to those theorists. They think matter decays because it’s down in the mouth.

The problem with people is that they are so in love with their beliefs that their epiphanies have to be absolute and comprehensive or nothing. They can’t accept the possibility that their truths may have only an element of truth in them. It follows, therefore, that it’s possible that some illnesses are born in the mind, and since desperation makes a man still more desperate, I was even willing to consider a supernatural cause for my deteriorating state.

When you’re lying in agony, it gives you some relief to diagnose yourself; you get some of the illusion of power back. But if you know as much about the intricacies of the human body as you do about jet engines, you have to get creative. First, I meditated on plain old simple anxiety. But other than a exhausted concern for my mother and an unease about the possibility of being charged in a police investigation, I really wasn’t that anxious. In truth, the slamming of the cell door in Terry’s face was an enormous relief to me. That cell door signified the end of my days of fretting. I was relieved he was shut away.

The second tier of investigation brought me to the spiritual world. My thinking was this: I had sought to break the bond I had made with my mother, and if this was the cause of my illness, I had psychological and supernatural roots to choose from. Perhaps unconsciously I had made myself sick about it. Maybe my body revolted at the act of betrayal. Or, supernaturally, possibly the link with my mother was so strong, our bond had doomed me to keeping my word. Perhaps I had been suckered into a Polish mother’s curse, and I didn’t know it.

Either way, I was really sick. Name a symptom, I had it: vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever, dizziness, shortness of breath, blurry vision, aching joints, groaning muscles, sore toes, chattering teeth, white tongue. I had everything short of bleeding from the eyeballs, and I didn’t doubt that was next. I was so weak, I couldn’t stand up to go to the bathroom. Beside my bed were two white bowls, one for vomit, one for piss and shit. I lay in a stupor, eyeing my half-packed suitcase and watching through a blurry haze a parade of noxious childhood memories pass before my eyes. I was right back where I started! That was the most painful part of being ill again, realizing that I had come full circle, and all I could think about was how I’d squandered my years of good health by just moping around and not climbing Everest.

My mother came into my room with an armful of books and began reading to me again, just like in the old days. Barely alive herself, she sat in the thin light of the lamp and read to me, beginning with an ominous choice, The Man in the Iron Mask. Lying in that dazed state, I had little trouble imagining a similar metallic apparatus constricting my own poor head. She read from morning to night, and after a while began sleeping in Terry’s old bed next to mine, so there was hardly a time that we weren’t together.

Her conversation often drifted to her early life in Shanghai, before she was pregnant with me, when she was still pregnant with possibility. She spoke often of Father Number One and remembered moments of intimacy between them when he stroked her hair while saying her name as if it were a sacred thing. It was the only time she liked the sound of her own name. She told me I had a similar-sounding voice, and one night she asked me to call her by her first name. It made me very uncomfortable, as I was already familiar with the works of Freud, but I did it to make her happy. Then she began unburdening herself by my bedside with lots of awful confessions like this one:

“I feel like I took a wrong turn but went so far down the road I didn’t have the energy to turn back. Please, Martin, you must remember this. It’s never too late to turn back if you make a wrong turn. Even if it takes you a decade to backtrack, you must do it. Don’t get stuck because the road back seems too long or too dark. Don’t be afraid to have nothing.”

And this one:

“I have stayed faithful to your father all these years, even though I don’t love him. Now I see I should’ve fucked around. Don’t let morality get in the way of living your life. Terry killed those men because that’s what he wanted to do with his life. If you need to cheat, cheat. If you need to kill, kill.”

And this:

“I married your father because of fear. I stayed because of fear. Fear has ruled my life. I am not a brave woman. It’s a bad thing to come to the end of your life and discover you are not brave.”

I never knew what to say when my mother unloaded herself in this way. I only smiled into her face that was once a well-tended garden, and patted her bony hands not without some embarrassment, because it is embarrassing to watch a life that scrutinizes itself at the end and realizes all it has to take into death is the shame of not having fully lived.

One day I imagined I was at my execution after a long and costly trial. I thought: On a clear day you can see me dying. I was thinking of Caroline too, that I might never see her again, that she would never understand the width and depth of my feelings. I thought about how I was dying a virgin. Damn. I took a deep breath. There was a repulsive, sickening smell in the air. It was me.

Was I dreaming? I didn’t hear them come in. Standing over me were two men in brown suits, jackets off, sleeves rolled up, sweat dripping into their eyes. One had a jutting-out jaw so extreme I didn’t know whether to shake his hand or his chin. The other one had small eyes set in a small head, and a small nose sitting above a small mouth with lips so thin they looked drawn on by a pencil, a 2B.

“We want to talk to you, Mr. Dean,” the chin said, and that sentence was notable for being the first time in my life I was called Mr. Dean. I didn’t like it. “Can you hear me? What’s wrong with you?”

“Childhood illness,” my mother said.

“Isn’t he a bit old for that?”

“Listen, Mr. Dean. We’d like a statement from you concerning the exact nature of your editing of the book.”

“What book?” I groaned obtusely.

The small one wiped sweat from his face and smeared it on his pants. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Dean. You did considerable work editing The Handbook of Crime for Terry Dean.”

“Harry West,” I said.

“What?”

“The Handbook of Crime was written by Harry West, not Terry Dean.”

“The guy who took a dive off the harbor bridge,” the chin said to the thin lips.

“Blaming it on a dead man because he can’t corroborate your story is a little too convenient. I don’t like it.”

“Do you have to like something before it becomes fact?” I asked, and before they could respond, I said, “Excuse me a minute.” I could feel my lunch coming up for air. I grabbed a bowl and threw up into it. A long silver thread of saliva connected my lower lip to the edge of the bowl.

“Listen, Dean. Are you going to make a statement or not?”

I motioned to the bowl and said, “I just made it.”

“Look. There’s no need to be hostile. We’re not charging you with anything, we’re just making some preliminary inquiries. Could you tell us how exactly you edited the book? Where did you and Terry meet?”

“Your brother isn’t the most educated man in the world, Mr. Dean. There must have been a lot of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and the like.”

I looked over to my mother, who was staring out the window in a sort of trance.

“We’ve looked into it. Editors work closely with their authors.”

“Did your brother have any accomplices? We’re investigating some new crimes.”

I said nothing, but I too had read the small print in the newspapers. Just like artists, murderers are seduced by the dazzling, unexpected fusion of originality and success, and one or two would-be criminals had taken to plagiaristic copycat killings in the months after Terry’s arrest, but they lacked spark and innovation. When the Australian chess champion was found with the bishop and two pawns lodged in his throat, the nation gave it scant attention, not least because the wannabe vigilante hadn’t realized that chess is a game, not a sport.

Observing that I was in no state to answer their questions, one of the detectives said, “We’ll come back when you’re feeling a little better, Mr. Dean.”

After they left, my father shuffled down the hallway in his pajamas and paused at the door, looking from me to my mother and back at me, with a look on his face that I couldn’t quite read, before shuffling off again. For the record, I did not see the look as something sinister, and for all his bitterness and resentment toward me, I was still his son in a way. I never gave too much weight to his infamous list, nor to the possibility that his madness had taken him to a place where he could actually, willingly do me harm.

The following morning I heard my mother’s voice calling me in a half whisper, half gurgle, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that my suitcase was now fully packed and sitting by the door with my brown boots beside it, toes pointing into the corridor. My mother, with her paper-white face, was peering down at me. “Quick. You should go now,” she said, staring at me fixedly, but not at my eyes- at some other point on my face, perhaps my nose. “What’s happening?” I croaked, but she just pulled the sheets off the bed and tugged at my arm with surprising force. “Time to go, Marty. You go catch the bus now.” She kissed my sweaty forehead. “I love you very much, but don’t come back here,” she said. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. “We came a long way together, Marty. I carried you, remember? But I can’t carry you this time. You have to go on your own. Come on, get a move on. You’re going to miss the bus.” She cupped her hand around the back of my head and gently eased me upright.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

We heard footsteps in the hallway, the floorboards creaking. My mother threw the sheets over me again and leapt into Terry’s bed. My father’s face appeared at the door, and he saw me still half propped up in bed.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

I shook my head, and when he left, I swiveled my head to see my mother’s eyes closed; she was pretending to be asleep.

Later I had only a vague, fleeting memory of all this, but the residual feeling remained, a feeling like walking into the middle of a Harold Pinter play and being asked immediately by a tribunal to explain it or be executed. My mother, for her part, seemed to remember none of it, and when I brought it up she told me I had been laid up all night in a crazy fever, babbling like a lunatic. I didn’t know what to believe.

Then things went from worse to cataclysmic.

It was hot, 104 degrees. A blazing southerly wind blew through the open window. I tried to eat some vegetable soup my father had made. My mother brought it in. I drank only two spoonfuls, but I couldn’t hold it down. I reached for the bowl and threw it all up. My head hung over the bowl and I left it there, staring stupidly into the kaleidoscopic face of my own vomit. There, in the spew, I saw perhaps the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and since then I’ve seen dogs sawn in half.

This is what I saw:

Two. Blue. Pellets.

That’s right, rat poison.

That’s right, rat poison.

I struggled for a while to figure out how I may have inadvertently swallowed them myself. But having not put one foot out of bed since my illness began, I just had to rule it out. That left only one answer. My stomach tightened like a vise. I’m being poisoned, I thought. He, my father, is poisoning me.

Let’s not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. That’s right. That this man who I’d lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!

I dropped the bowl so the vomit spilled onto the carpet and dribbled down the cracks in the floorboards. I looked and looked again, each time confirming that I was not hallucinating, as my mother had assured me the previous night.

My mother! What was her part in all this? She obviously knew- that was why she wanted me to escape, a desire that ended abruptly when she feared that if the murderer knew I was fleeing, he would abandon his languid plan on the spot and just take a knife to my guts or a pillow to my face.

Christ! What a pickle!

Keeping your calm while your stepfather tries to kill you is quite impossible. Watching your murderer scrunch up his face in disgust as he silently cleans up your vomit may have its darkly comic elements, but it’s also just so damn chilling, you want to curl into a fetal position and remain there until the next ice age.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was consumed by a perverse curiosity to see what he’d do. I should say something, I thought, but what? Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you don’t want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest.

“Next time, try to get it into the bowl,” he said blandly.

I said nothing, just stared at him as if he’d broken my heart.

When he was gone, my rational mind came home. What the fuck was I going to do? It seemed sensible, as the intended victim, to remove myself from the scene of the crime, so as to avoid the crime. Yes, it was time to test the theory of superhuman strength being bestowed on people in life-threatening situations. Because my body was no use, I was counting on my will to live to get me out of this Shakespearean family drama. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got to my feet, using the side table for balance. I winced through the pain as my stomach contracted and twisted horribly. I went for my suitcase and noted it was still packed from the episode the night before. My feet struggled into my boots, and with great effort I began to walk: when you haven’t worn footwear in a while, even sandals feel as heavy as cement blocks. Trying to sneak out without a sound, I crept down the hallway. I could hear arguing from the living room. They were both screaming, my mother crying. There was the sound of breaking glass. They were fighting, physically. Maybe my mother had confronted him about his plot! At the door, I put down the suitcase and headed for the kitchen. What else could I do? I couldn’t leave my mother in my father’s psychotic hands. My course was clear. I had to kill my father (by marriage).

I tell you, I’ve taken more time choosing an item on a menu than I took making the decision to end my father’s life. And as someone who has always battled the pernicious vice of indecision- beginning the moment my mother dangled the raw nipples of two milk-filled tits in my face and said, “Choose one”- I found that having suddenly made a quick choice, however dreadful, gave me a supremely satisfying sense of empowerment.

In the kitchen I grabbed the carving knife. It smelled of onions. Through a crack in the door, I could see my parents struggling. They were really going for it. He’d hit my mother before many times, always late at night, in the privacy of their bedroom, but not since she’d told him she had cancer. My mother was clawing at him as best as she could in her half-dead state, and in return he gave her such a backhander, she fell to the floor in a crumpled heap.

My strength flowing, I burst through the door unsteadily but kept a clean, tight grip on the knife handle. They saw me- first my mother, then my father- but paid no attention to the knife in my hands. I might just as well have been holding a feather, they simply were so deep in their own private nightmare.

“Martin! Get out of here!” my mother wailed.

At the sight of me, my father’s face did something I’ve never seen a face do before. It contracted to half its normal size. He looked back at my mother, picked up a chair, and smashed it to pieces on the ground so the fragments shattered around her.

“Get away from her!” I yelled, my voice cracking and wobbling at the same time.

“Martin…” he said in a strange voice.

My mother was sobbing hysterically.

“I said get away!” I repeated.

Then he said, in a voice like a grenade, “Your fucking crazy mother has been putting rat poison in your food!”

I stood there like a wall.

“It was you,” I said.

He just shook his head sadly.

I turned, confused, to my mother, whose face was partially covered by her hand. Her eyes streamed with tears; her body heaved with sobs. Immediately I knew it was true.

“Why?” my father yelled, punching the wall next to her. She screamed. He looked at me with tenderness and confusion and sobbed, “Martin, why?”

My mother was shivering. Her free hand clutched a copy of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. That was the next book she’d planned on reading to me. “So she could look after me,” I said, almost inaudibly.

He looked at me blankly. He didn’t get it. He didn’t get it at all.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said, in the first display of love he’d ever shown me.

It was all too much. I stumbled through the kitchen and down the hall and, grabbing my suitcase, burst through the front door.

If I’d been in any kind of reasonable state at all, I would’ve immediately noticed something wrong in the world around me. I walked in a daze, feeling the heat of the day on my face. I walked and walked, fast, as if carried by a strong current. My thoughts broke in half, then replicated- anger dividing into horror and rage, then again into pity and disgust, and so on. All the time I kept walking, feeling stronger and stronger with every step. I walked to the top of Farmer’s Hill.

Then I saw it.

The sky.

Fat cones of dense smoke spiraled into thin trails. Layers of hazy orange overlapping gray fingers stretching out from the horizon.

Then I felt it. The heat. I winced. The land was on fire!

A bushfire!

A big one!

Standing on top of the hill, I saw another in a quick series of searing images that I knew at once would never leave my mind. I saw the fire split. One half raced toward my parents’ house, the other to the prison.

I don’t know what possessed me as I watched that fire encircle my town- but I became convinced that it was within my power to rescue at least part of my family. I knew that I probably couldn’t help Terry, and that he die violently and unpleasantly in the prison my father helped build just so cleanly rounded off the issue, my choice was clear. I would go and try to save my mother, even though she had just tried to kill me, and my father, even though he had not.

The bushfire season had started early that year. Soaring temperatures and strong winds saw to it that small fires had sprung up along the periphery of northwestern New South Wales throughout the summer. It takes only one sudden gust of searing wind to fan the isolated fires, pushing them rapidly into raging uncontrollable infernos. That’s how it always happens. The Fire had some shifty strategies up its flaming sleeve: It threw embers into the air. The embers were then couriered by winds to a destination a few miles ahead, with the intention of starting fresh fires, so by the time the main Fire caught up, its child was already raging and taking lives. The Fire was no dummy. It evolved like crazy.

Smoke crept over the town in an opaque cloud. I ran toward my parents’ house, passing fallen trees, poles, and power lines. Flames crept along both sides of the road. Smoke licked my face. Visibility was zero. I didn’t slow down.

The fallen trees made the road impassable. I took a path through the bush. I couldn’t see the sky; a thick curtain of smoke had been drawn over it. All around me was a sound, a crackle, like someone was jumping on old newspapers. Burning debris blew across the tops of trees. It was impossible to know which way to go. I went on anyway until I heard a voice call out, “Stop!”

I stopped. Where was the voice coming from? It was hard to tell if it was from far away or inside my own head.

“Go left,” the voice said. “Left!”

Normally, demanding voices who don’t introduce themselves would have had me go the other way, but I felt this voice had my best interests at heart. Terry was dead, I just knew it, and the voice was his, his last words to me on his way to the other world.

I went left, and as I did, I saw the right-hand path consumed by flames.

Around the next bend I came across a group of men shooting water into the trees. They held swollen wild pythons that jutted from the bellies of two firetrucks and wore wet rags over their mouths. I wanted one. Then I thought: There’s almost no situation you can get yourself into when you don’t want what the other guy has.

“Martin!” a voice called.

“Don’t go that way!” another shouted.

“My mum and dad are in there!” I shouted back, and as I ran on, I thought I heard someone call out, “Say hello for me!”

I saw the fire jumping a dry creek bed. I passed the flaming carcass of a sheep. I had to slow down. The smoke had thickened to a gray wall; it was suddenly impossible to tell where the flames were. My lungs seared. I knew if I didn’t get a whiff of air soon, this was the end. I gagged and vomited smoke. There were carrots in it.

When I reached my street, a jagged wall of flame blocked the entrance. Through it I could make out a group of people standing on the other side. The wall of fire stood like fortress gates. I squinted against the intense glare as yellow-black smoke billowed over the people.

“Have you seen my parents?” I shouted.

“Who are you?”

“Martin Dean!”

“Marty!” I thought I heard my mother’s voice. It was hard to tell. The fire swallowed words. Then the air grew very still.

“The wind!” someone screamed. They froze. They were all waiting to see which direction the fire would run next. A flame whirling up behind them, standing tall, was ready to pounce. I felt like a man about to be guillotined hoping that his head could be stuck back on later. A hot breeze touched my face.

Before I could scream, the flames leapt on top of me. In a split second my head was on fire. And then, just as quickly, the wind changed direction and the flames leapt away toward the group of people. This time it kept going.

Though the fire was gone, my eyes and my lungs were filled with smoke and my hair was in flames. I wailed at the pain of it. I tore the clothes off my body, threw myself on the ground, and rubbed my head in the dirt. It took a few seconds to extinguish myself, and by then the fire had devoured an ear and scorched my lips. Through puffed-up eyelids I could see the flaming hurricane sweep over the group of people, my parents included, and devour them. Naked and burned, I dragged myself to my knees and screamed in a helpless, frenzied rage.

Most of the prisoners had made it out, except those in solitary confinement. They were blocked in on the lower level of the prison, and there wasn’t time to save them.

As I suspected, Terry was gone.

While small fires still burned away from the town, the media wasted no time in making a big deal of Terry Dean’s perishing in the prison. He was nothing but a pile of ashes. After the police photographers had taken photos of the cell, I went in. The bones were there too. But all the good stuff was in the ash. With a broom, a pan, and a small cardboard box, I scooped up my brother. It wasn’t easy. Some of Terry’s ashes mingled with the ashes of the wooden bunk beds. Poor Terry. You couldn’t distinguish him from a bed. That’s just sad.

I left the bones. Let the state bury them. I took the rest. Like I said, all the good stuff was in the ash.

Outside the prison, black cinders whirled crazily in the air, climbed into the sky, and when the wind died down settled on the ground and on the cars and on the journalists. Red-hot sparks lay on the hot bitumen. I looked at the smoking black acres of burned grassland and the parched hills. Everywhere was smoldering ashes. Every house was filthy with ash and burned debris. Every smell was acrid. Every color eerie.

Mother dead. Father dead. Brother dead. Harry dead. Caroline gone. Lionel gone. Town gone. Oath gone too; the sacred bond finally broken.

Free.

A man was heard to be barbecuing a steak on the embers of his own home. Reporters were all crowded around him. They thought it was hilarious. I suppose it was.

A brief thunderstorm came. A group of survivors standing in the remains of town were talking about the origin of the fire. What had started it this time? I had just assumed it was arsonists. It’s nearly always arsonists. What is it with these fucking arsonists? I supposed they are less likely to be malignant smudges of evil than just dumb and bored: a deadly combination. And whatever happens in their upbringing, they emerge from adolescence with no sense of empathy whatsoever. These dumb, bored, unempathetic people are all around us. We can’t trust anyone to behave himself. We always have to be on the lookout. Here’s the case-winning example: it doesn’t happen every day, but every now and again, people shit in public swimming pools. That just says it all to me.

But no, the survivors were saying, this time it wasn’t arsonists.

It was the observatory.

My blood turned cold.

I moved closer. This is what I heard:

Over the years, the novelty of the observatory had worn off; the whole thing had gone to seed, left to ruin up there on the hill, abandoned to nature. The roof of the observatory lifted on a hinge. Someone had left it open. The lens had concentrated the summer sun’s rays into a hot beam of light and ignited the structure, the wind came in to do her bit, and we ended with this current catastrophe.

It was the observatory.

My observatory!

The observatory I had suggested into existence was the direct cause of my mother’s, father’s, and brother’s deaths. It was the final nail in the coffin of that odious suggestion box of mine, that slimy box that had turned the town against my family, put my brother in a mental institution, then into a young offenders’ home, and now into the grave (figuratively speaking; literally speaking, into a cardboard box that had once contained seedless grapes). I had thought that with the observatory I could change people’s souls for the better, but instead I succeeded only in accelerating their obliteration. When my brother went into the hospital, I should have destroyed the suggestion box that put him there; and when he destroyed the suggestion box, blinding our only friend, I should have then and there destroyed everything connected to the box, the box that suddenly reminded me of the box that was now in my hands, the box with my brother in it.

I walked on.

I didn’t forget Stanley ’s warnings, or the detectives and their determination to prosecute me. Time to leave for good. Besides, there was nothing more to learn here. Time to travel to new lands to practice old habits. New longings! New disappointments! New trials and failures! New questions! Would toothpaste taste the same everywhere? Would loneliness feel less bitter in Rome? Would sexual frustration be less of a grind in Turkey? Or Spain?

This I thought as I moved through the silence of the dead town, the dreamless town, the town that was charred and black like burned toast. Don’t scrape it! Don’t save it! Toss my town into the garbage. It’s carcinogenic.

The embers of my childhood were fading to cold, hard lumps. No wind could fan them to life now. It was gone. I had not a person in the world. Australia was still an island, but I was no longer marooned on it. I was finally adrift. And it was endless, the sea beyond. No horizons.

No one knew me where I was going, no one knew my story, my brother’s story. My life was reduced to no more than a secret anecdote I could reveal or keep hidden for all time. That was up to me.

I walked the long, windy, dusty road out of town.

I had the feeling of leaving an amusement park without having been on any of the rides. While I’d always hated the town, the people, their lives, I had existed beside them nonetheless, and yet I had not immersed myself in the stream of life, and that was regrettable, because even if it’s the worst amusement park in the world, if you’re going to take the trouble to spend twenty-two years there, you might as well at least have a go. The problem was, every ride made me sick. What could I do?

Then I remembered that I still held Terry in a cardboard box.

I was definitely not going to have a nervous breakdown deciding what to do with the ashes of my downsized little brother: I would just get rid of them, quickly, secretly, without ceremony. If a child passed me in the street, I would give him the box. If I saw a suitable ledge, I would leave it on the ledge. I continued this line of thought until I became so fascinated by the overall idea of ashes that I got thirsty.

Up ahead I saw a gas station and grocery store. I went inside. The fridge was at the back. I walked down the aisle and grabbed a Coke. Turning back, I saw beside me a shelf that contained small jars of Indian spices, cayenne pepper, and Italian herbs. Obscured from the shopkeeper’s view, I opened up the jars one by one and emptied half their contents onto the floor. Then I poured Terry’s ashes into the jars with little precision, spilling much of him on my feet, so that when I finished, I walked out with my brother on my shoes. And then- I have this image in my head forever- I wiped my brother off my shoes with my hands and finished him off by washing him into a nearby puddle, thereby leaving my brother’s last remnants floating in a shallow puddle of rainwater on the side of the road.

It’s funny.

People have always asked me, “What was Terry Dean like as a child?” but no one has ever posed the more pertinent question, What was he like as a puddle?

The answer: still, copper-brown, and surprisingly unreflective.

The End!

Out the window I could see a pink dawn sky covering the backyard and probably farther, at least to the corner store. The morning birds, unaware of the concept of sleep-ins, were chirping their usual dawn chirps. Dad and I sat in silence. Talking for seventeen hours and covering almost every minute of his first twenty-two years on earth had worn him out. Listening had done the same to me. I don’t know which of us was more exhausted. Suddenly Dad brightened and said, “Hey, guess what?”

“What?”

“The blood’s congealed!”

Blood? What blood? Oh, that’s right- I was in a fight, wasn’t I? I did get beaten senseless by my peers, didn’t I? I reached up and felt my face. There was a hard, crusty substance on my lower lip all right. I ran to the bathroom mirror to look. Woo-hoo! Yes, sometime during Dad’s story the blood on my face had turned black and globular. I looked revolting. I smiled for the first time since way before the story began.

“You want me to take a photo before you wash it off?” Dad called from my room.

“Nah, there’ll be plenty more blood where that came from.”

“Too true.”

I got the corner of a towel and held it under hot water and sponged off the crusted blood. As I cleaned up my face and the water turned the black blood red and stained the white towel too, I thought about Dad’s story: the story of Terry Dean. It seemed to me I hadn’t learned as much about Uncle Terry as you’d think you would in a seventeen-hour monologue, but I had learned an awful lot about my father.

I had the uneasy feeling that maybe every word he said was true. Certainly he believed it all. There’s something disturbing about a thirty-two-year-old man putting his thirty-two-year-old soul into the mouth of a child, even if that child is himself as a boy. Was my father an eight-year-old anarchist? A nine-year-old misanthrope? Or was the boy in the story an unconscious reinvention, a man with a man’s experience of the world trying to make sense of his childhood, obliterating along the way any of the thoughts or perspectives he would really have experienced during that time? Maybe. After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don’t have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, what an arsehole!

But Dad was not one to airbrush his memories. He liked to preserve everything in its natural state, from his hair to his past. That’s how I knew every word he said was true, and why I still feel sick when I remember the shocking revelation that came after this one, the crazy bombshell about the most important woman who was never in my life: my mother.