A Fraction of the Whole

I

In the newspaper and television reports made immediately after my father’s death, much was made of the years of the early to mid-1990s, the period covering the worst excesses of his so-called insanity. Not only was this epoch notable for the arrival of Anouk Furlong (as she was known then)- a woman who played no small part in provoking his mental collapse- but this was the eventful slab of years that included strip clubs, mental asylums, plastic surgery, arrests, and what occurred when my father tried to hide our house.

Here’s how it all happened:

One day without warning Dad struck a resounding blow to our peaceful squalor: he got a job. He did it for my sake and never stopped reminding me. “I could milk the social welfare system dry if it was just me, but it’s insufficient for two. You’ve driven me into the workforce, Jasper. I’ll never forgive you!”

It was Eddie again who found him work. A year after Dad’s return from Paris, Eddie turned up at our apartment door, which surprised Dad, who’d never had an enduring friendship in all his life, certainly not one that spanned continents. Eddie had left Paris just after we did and had returned to Thailand before moving to Sydney.

Now, eleven years later, he had found Dad employment for the second time. I had no idea if this new gig was with equally murky characters and just as dangerous. Frankly, I didn’t care. I was twelve years old, and for the first time in my life, Dad was out of the apartment. His heavy presence was suddenly lifted from my life, and I felt free to eat my cornflakes without hearing over and over again why man was the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity.

Dad worked all the time, and it wasn’t that his long hours away from me were making me lonely (I was lonely already), but there was something to it that didn’t feel right. Of course, it’s not unusual for fathers to work all the time because they are bringing home the bacon, and it can’t be helped that the bacon lurks in offices and coal mines and building sites, but in our home there was a mystery regarding the location of our bacon. I started thinking about it every day. Where the hell’s our bacon? I thought this because my friends lived in houses, not apartments, and their fridges were always full of food while ours was full of space. Dad worked all day every day, even on weekends, but we didn’t seem to have any more money than when he was unemployed. Not a cent. One day I asked him, “Where’s all the money go?”

He said, “What money?”

I said, “The money you make from your job.”

He said, “I’m saving.”

I said, “For what?”

He said, “It’s a surprise.”

I said, “I hate surprises.”

He said, “You’re too young to hate surprises.”

I said, “All right, I like surprises, but I also like knowing.”

He said, “Well, you can’t have both.”

I said, “I can if you tell me and then I forget it.”

He said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you choose. You can have the surprise, or I can tell you what I’m saving for. It’s up to you.”

That was a killer. In the end, I decided to wait.

While I waited, Eddie let it slip that Dad was managing a strip club in Kings Cross called the Fleshpot. A strip joint? My dad? How could this happen? And as a manager? My dad? How could Eddie have convinced his shady connections to hire Dad for such a position? With responsibilities? My dad? I had to see it for myself.

One night I wound through the Cross, up side streets that were nothing more than long public urinals, past the drunken English tourists, a couple of glassy-eyed junkies, and a skinhead who looked weary of his own persona. As I entered the bar, a middle-aged hooker shouted something about sucking, her croaky voice lending the suggestion a nauseating picture of withered lips. A bouncer grabbed me by the shirt and squeezed the collar until I told him I was here to see my father. He let me in.

My first time in a strip club and I was visiting family.

It wasn’t what I imagined. The strippers were shaking their bodies, unenthused, bobbing up and down to repetitive dance music under glaring spotlights in front of leering muted men in suits. Sure, I felt elated to see so much smooth, pliable flesh in one place, but I wasn’t as aroused as I’d expected. In real life, almost naked women straddling poles just isn’t as sexy as you’d think.

I spotted Dad yelling into the phone behind the bar. As I walked over, he sent a frown to intercept me.

“What are you doing here, Jasper?”

“Just looking around.”

“Like what you see?”

“I’ve seen better.”

“In your dreams.”

“No, on video.”

“Well you can’t stay in here. You’re underage.”

“What do you actually do here?” I asked.

He showed me. It wasn’t easy. There was the running of the bar, and while there were naked women floating in front of it, it had to be run just like a regular bar. He chose the women too; they came and auditioned for him. As if he knew anything about dancing! Or women! And how could he stand it, all those supple sexual creatures bending and flaunting their haunting slopes and curves day in, day out? The life force is like a hot potato, and while impure thoughts may make you burn in hell for all eternity once you die, here in life what gets you baked and fried is your inability to act on them.

Of course, I don’t know everything. Maybe he indulged his lecherous fantasies. Maybe he fucked every dancer there. I can’t picture it, but then, what son could?

So working in this lovely den of sin was how he chose to support his family- me- and save. But for what? To help stave off my curiosity, Dad broke into his bank account to buy me a little present: four bloated fish in a grubby little tank. They were like goldfish, only black. They survived in our apartment just three days. Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible gluttons with absolutely no self-control who just don’t know when they’ve had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled “fish food.”

Dad didn’t join me in mourning their passing. He was too busy with his strippers. For a man who had spent the majority of his working life not working, he was really working himself to the bone. It turned out I had to wait more than a year to find out what he was saving for. Sometimes it drove me crazy wondering, but I can be tremendously patient when I think the reward might be worth the wait.

It wasn’t worth the wait. Really, it wasn’t.

I was thirteen when I came home one day to see my father holding up a large glossy photograph of an ear. This, he explained, was what he’d been saving for. An ear. A new ear to replace the one that had been scarred in the fire that consumed his town and family. He was going to a plastic surgeon to undeform himself. This is what we’d been sacrificing for? What a letdown. There’s nothing fun about a skin graft.

Dad spent one night in hospital. The pressure was on to buy flowers even though I knew he wouldn’t appreciate them. Flora always seemed to me a non sequitur of a present for someone in pain anyway (how about a flagon of morphine?), but I found a couple of huge sunflowers. He didn’t appreciate them. I didn’t care. The important thing was that the operation was a success. The doctor was very pleased, he said. That’s a tip for you: never bother asking after the patient; it’s a waste of time. The important thing is to discover how the doctor is feeling. And Dad’s was on top of the world.

I was there when the bandages came off. To tell you the truth, the anticipation had built to such a level I was sort of expecting something on a grander scale: a colossal ear that doubled as a bottle-opener, or a time-traveling ear picking up conversations from the past, or a universal ear hearing for everyone alive, or a Pandora’s ear, or an ear with a tiny red light that showed when it was recording. Basically, an ear to end all ears. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was just a regular ear.

“Speak into it,” Dad said. I moved around to the side of the bed and leaned into the new arrival.

“Hello. Testing. Testing. Two. Two. Two.”

“Good. It works,” he said.

When he was released from hospital, he ventured out in the world eager to catch a glimpse of himself. The world provided. Dad lost the ability to walk in a straight line. A to B was now always via the side mirrors on passing cars, shop windows, and stainless-steel kettles. When you obsess about your appearance, you notice just how many reflective surfaces exist in the cosmos.

One night he came to the doorway of my room and stood there, breathing loudly.

“Feel like playing around with my camera?”

“Are you making porn?”

“Why would I be making porn?”

“That’s between you and your biographer.”

“I just want you to get a few snaps of my ear, for the album.”

“The ear album?”

“Forget it.” Dad made a beeline for the hall.

“Wait.”

I felt bad for him. Dad didn’t seem able to recognize himself. The outside of him may have been more presentable, but the inside shrank down a size. I felt there was something ominous in all this, as if by adding on a new ear, he’d actually broken off a fundamental part of himself.

Even after the plastic surgery, he worked every day. Once again there was no money. Once again our lives were unchanged.

I said, “OK. What are you doing with the money now?”

He said, “I’m saving again.”

I said, “Saving for what?”

He said, “It’s a surprise.”

I said, “The last surprise sucked.”

He said, “This one you’ll like.”

I said, “It better be worth it.”

It wasn’t. It was a car. A slick red sports car. When I went outside to look at it, he was standing beside it, patting it as if it had just done a trick. Honestly, I couldn’t have been more shocked if he had blown the money on political donations. My dad? A sports car? Pure lunacy! It wasn’t just frivolous, it was meticulously frivolous. Was it a distraction? Was he announcing his dissolution? Was it a surrender or a conquest? Which part of him was this meant to fix? One thing was clear: he was breaking his own taboos.

It was comical, the sight of him getting into that sports car, a 1979 MGB convertible. Then, strapped into his seat, he looked as apprehensive as the first astronaut.

Now I think it was a brave attempt, an ingenious act in total defiance of himself and the voices within him intent on categorizing him. Dad in that sports car was a man reinventing himself from the outside in. A rebirth doomed to miscarriage.

“Are you coming?”

“Where?”

“Let’s take her for a spin.”

I get in. I’m young. I’m not a machine. Of course I love the car. I fucking love it. But there’s something about it that just isn’t right, like if you walk in on your kindergarten teacher getting a lap dance.

“Why did you buy this?” I asked him.

“Why?” he repeated, picking up speed. He’s trying to leave himself behind in the dust, I thought, and on some level I could already hear the tendons and joints of his sanity split and tear. His job, his regular hours, his suit, his new ear, and now his car: he was creating unbearable tension between the selves. Something’s going to give, I thought, and it won’t be pretty.

II

Then it gave. It wasn’t pretty.

We were in a crowded Chinese restaurant and Dad was ordering lemon chicken.

“Anything else?” the waiter asked.

“Just some boiled rice and the check.”

Dad always liked to pay before he ate so the second he finished swallowing he could leave. There was something about sitting in a restaurant not eating that he just couldn’t stand. Impatience seized him like a fit. Unfortunately, some restaurants make you pay at the end no matter what. In those situations Dad stood next to the table to show that he no longer wanted anything to do with the table. Then he called for the bill as if he were pleading for mercy. Sometimes he’d carry his plate to the kitchen. Sometimes he’d wave money under the waiter’s nose. Sometimes he’d open the cash register, pay the bill, and give himself change. They hated that.

This night Dad had a table by the window and was staring out, his face set on “boredom incarnate.” I was there, but he was eating alone. I was on a hunger strike for some heroic cause I can’t remember now, but this was probably in the period we ate out eighty-seven nights in a row. Dad used to cook in the old days, but they were old, those days.

We both looked out onto the street because it required so much less effort than talking. Our car was out there, parked behind a white van, and beside it a couple were fighting as they walked. She was pulling his black ponytail and he was laughing. They came right up to the window and fought in front of us, as if they were putting on a show. It was a bold performance. The guy was bent over with a big grin on his face, trying to get her to let go of his hair. It looked painful, having your hair pulled like that, but he wouldn’t stop laughing. Of course, now that I’m older, I know why he had to keep laughing like that; I know he’d have kept on laughing even if she’d pulled his whole head off and dropped it in the gutter and pissed on it and set it on fire. Even with the sting of piss in his dying eyes, he’d have kept on chuckling, and I know why.

The lemon chicken arrived.

“Sure you don’t want any?” Dad asked, a taunting lift in his voice.

The smell of hot lemon made my stomach and my head mortal enemies. Dad threw me a look that was smug and victorious and I gave him one back that was conceited and triumphant. After a grueling five seconds, we both turned our heads quickly to the window, as if for air.

On the street, the fight was in intermission. The girl was sitting on the bonnet of a black Valiant; the guy was standing beside her, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t see her hands because she had them bunched up under her arms, but I imagined they were clutching pieces of his scalp. Then I heard scraping metal. There was a figure in the background, behind the couple, someone in a red parka, hunched over Dad’s car. The red parka moved alongside the car slowly. It was hard to tell exactly what he was doing, but it seemed that he was scratching the paint off with a key.

“Hey, look!” I shouted, and pointed out the scene to Dad, but his lanky body was already up, running for the door. I leapt out of my chair and followed his trail. This was to be my first chase scene through the streets of Sydney. There have been others over the years, and I’m not always the one in pursuit, but this was the first, so it remains special in my memory.

We did not run gracefully, of course; rather we staggered at great speed, down the main strip, almost toppling over, bursting through couples who strolled absently toward us, ricocheting off them. I remember humming a tune while I ran, a spy tune. We sped through the city like men on fire. People looked on as if they’d never seen running before. Maybe they hadn’t. Outside a cinema, businessmen and -women indistinguishable from each other stood their ground as we approached, as if that square meter of pavement had been handed down to them by their ancestors. We pushed them aside as we ran through. Some of them shouted. Maybe they’d never been touched before either.

The man in the red parka had feet like a gust of wind. He blew across a congested street, dodging the steady stream of traffic. I had taken only one step off the pavement when Dad’s hand grabbed my wrist and almost yanked it off.

“Together,” he said.

Beware the father and son in pursuit of the mysterious villain in the red parka. Beware the menacing duo who hold hands as they make chase. We turned a corner and came into an empty street. Our presence somehow deepened the emptiness of it. There was no one in sight. It felt as though we had stumbled upon a remote and forgotten part of the city. We took a moment to catch our breath. My heart pounded on my chest wall like a shoulder trying to break down a wooden door.

“In there,” Dad said.

Halfway down the street was a bar. We walked to the front. There was no sign on the window. Evidently the bar didn’t have a name. The windows were blacked out and you couldn’t see in. It was a place made dangerous by low lighting. You could tell from the outside. It was the kind of place where nefarious characters knife anyone who asks them for the time, where serial killers go to forget their troubles, where whores and drug dealers exchange phone numbers and sociopaths laugh at the times they’ve been confused with naturopaths.

“Do you want to wait outside?”

“I’m coming in.”

“Things might get ugly.”

“I don’t mind.”

“OK, then.”

Only a few steps in and we were at the cloakroom- we could see the red parka swinging on a hanger, swinging like a tune.

There was a band on the stage, the singer’s voice like the feeling of biting tinfoil. Musical instruments were stuck on the wall above the spirit bottles at the bar- a violin, an accordion, a ukulele. It looked like a pawnbroker’s. Two exhausted bartenders paused every now and then to pour themselves tequila shots. Dad ordered a beer for himself, lemonade for me. I wanted a beer too, but I got lemonade. My whole life’s been like that.

Dad and I kept one eye apiece on the cloakroom and spent a couple of hours guessing who might be our man, but you can’t pick a vandal from a room of faces any more than you can pick an adulterer or a pedophile. People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness, if there’s room. We made our guesses anyway, based on what, I don’t know. Dad chose a short nuggety guy with a goatee. He’s our man, Dad insisted. I begged to differ and picked a guy with long brown hair and an ugly purple mouth. Dad thought he looked like a student, not a vandal. What’s he studying, then?

“Architecture,” Dad said. “One day he’ll build a bridge that will collapse.”

“Will people die?” I asked.

“Yes, a thousand.”

While I contemplated the thousand dead, Dad ordered another drink and noticed a woman with peroxide blond hair and lipstick-stained teeth leaning on the bar. He gave her the number-three smile, the one usually reserved for getting out of speeding fines. She looked him over without moving her head.

“Hi,” Dad said.

As a response she lit a cigarette, and Dad scooted over a stool to get closer.

“What do you think of the band?” he asked. “It’s not really my type of music. Can I buy you a drink? What do you think of the band?”

She let out a laugh that was more like gargling in that it never left her throat. After a whole fat minute when nothing happened, Dad got sick of staring at her profile, so he scooted back to his original stool. He drank his beer in one go.

“Do you think you’ll ever get married?” I asked.

“I don’t know, mate.”

“Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure. On the one hand, I don’t want to be alone forever.”

“You’re not alone. I’m here.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, smiling.

“What’s on the other hand?” I asked.

“What?”

“You said, ‘On the one hand, I don’t want to be alone forever.’ ”

“Oh, um. Shit. I can’t remember. It’s gone.”

“Maybe there’s nothing on the other hand.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

I watched Dad’s eyes follow the blonde as she moved from the bar to a table of women. She must have said something about us, because they all looked over, and it seemed pretty obvious they were mentally spitting on Dad. He pretended to drink from his empty glass. The whole scene made me sick, so I turned one eye back to the cloakroom and the other to the mean, purple, murderous mouth of the architecture student, and I imagined him high up in an office, looking down on a thousand dead bodies and the silver arms of his broken bridge.

The red parka was still hanging around, killing time. It was getting late. I was tired. My eyelids wanted closure.

“Can we go?”

“What time does this bar close?” Dad asked the bartender.

“About six.”

“Fuck,” Dad said to me, and ordered another drink. Clearly he would stay out all night if need be. And why shouldn’t he? There was no one at home waiting up for us. No forehead crinkled with worry. No lips waiting to kiss us goodnight. No one to miss us if we never went back at all.

I laid my head on the bar. There was something wet and sticky under my cheek, but I was too tired to move. Dad sat erect on the bar stool, vigilant, watching the cloakroom. I drifted off to sleep. I dreamed of a face floating out of the dark. Nothing more than a face. The face was screaming, except the dream was silent. It was terrifying. I woke with a damp cloth at my nose.

“Move your head, please.”

It was the bartender wiping down the counter.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m closing up.”

I tasted salt. I reached up and wiped my eyes. I’d been crying in my sleep. This confused me. I don’t remember the face being sad, only scary. The bartender gave me a look that said I wouldn’t be a real man as long as I cried in my sleep. I knew he spoke the truth, but what could I do about it?

“What’s the time?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Have you seen my-”

“He’s over there.”

Dad was standing beside the cloakroom, bouncing on his toes. I craned my neck and saw the red parka still hanging around. There was only a handful of people left in the bar: the guy with the purple mouth, a woman with an angry face and a shaved head, a bearded man with a face full of rings, a Chinese girl in a jumpsuit, and a guy with the biggest potbelly I’d ever seen.

“I’m closing up now,” the bartender shouted to them. “Go home to your wives and children.”

That made everyone laugh. I didn’t see what was so funny about it. I went over and waited with Dad.

“How did you sleep?” he asked.

“I feel sick.”

“What’s the matter?”

“What are you going to do when you find him?”

Dad indicated with his eyebrows that he found my question ignorant. The patrons started leaving one by one. Finally the girl with the shaved head leaned on the cloakroom counter.

“That’s mine,” she said, pointing. “The red one.”

This was our man- or I should say woman. The culprit. The vandal. The clerk handed her the parka. Now what?

“Hello,” Dad said.

She turned her face to him. We got a good look at her. She had bright green eyes set in the boniest face I’d ever seen. I thought she should thank God for those eyes; they were the only beautiful things about her. Her lips were thin, almost nonexistent. Her face was gaunt and pale. She’d be nothing more than white skin stretched over a long skull if it weren’t for those eyes. They were translucent. Dad said hello again. She ignored him, opened the door with her foot, and went into the street.

Outside, a light rain was falling from a metal-yellow sky. I couldn’t see it but I knew the sun was around there somewhere- its yawn had lit the air. I took a deep breath. There’s no doubt about it, the dawn smells different from the rest of the day; there’s a certain freshness about it, like when you take a bite out of a head of lettuce and put it back in the fridge bite side down so no one will notice.

The girl was standing under the awning, doing up her famous red parka.

“Hello there.” Dad’s voice had no impact on her. I thought clearing my throat might help. It did. Her bright green eyes shone a spotlight on Dad and me.

“What do you want?”

“You scratched my car,” Dad said.

“What car?”

“My car.”

“When?”

“Earlier tonight, around a quarter to nine.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” Dad said, then moved a step closer to the red parka with the green headlights. “I know it was you.”

“Get the fuck away from me before I call the police.”

“Ho-ho, you want to call the police, do you?”

“Yeah, maybe I do, moneybags.”

“What did you call me?”

“I called you moneybags, moneybags.”

“Every time you open your mouth, you’re incriminating yourself. Why do you think I’m a moneybags unless you’ve seen my car?”

Good one, Dad, I thought. She’s on the run now.

“Your suit looks like something a fat rich bastard would wear.”

Good one, Green Eyes. She got you there, Dad.

“For your information, I’m not a moneybags,” Dad said.

“I don’t care what you are.”

This ludicrous evening seemed to be reaching a dead end. Dad had crossed his arms and was trying to stare down Green Eyes, but she had crossed her arms and was glaring right back at him with eyes so wide they were positively lidless. Was that it? Could we go home now?

“How old are you?”

“Fuck off.”

“I only want two things from you.”

“Well, you aren’t getting them.”

“I want a confession and an explanation. That’s all.”

This is exactly the kind of thing a single man can do at five-thirty in the morning, I thought- this is exactly why people have wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, so they don’t allow themselves to get too creepy. But leave a man alone for long enough and there is nothing odd he won’t do. A life lived alone weakens the mind’s immune system, and your brain becomes susceptible to an attack of strange ideas. “I want a confession and an explanation,” Dad repeated, and placed his hand on her shoulder as if he were a security guard surprising a shoplifter. She started screaming, “Help! Police! Rape!”

Then Dad had yet another dubious idea: he started shouting for the police too. He nudged me. He wanted me to join in. I shouted along with the other two, calling out rape, calling for the cops. But I didn’t stop there. I called for a SWAT team too. I called for helicopters. I called for Satan. I called for the ground to swallow the sky. That quieted her down. She stepped off the pavement into the rain. Dad and I walked into the street beside her without talking. Every now and then Green Eyes took a peek at me.

“What are you doing with this fuckwit?” she asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“Is he your father?”

“He says he is.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Hey, vandal. Don’t you talk to him. You have some confessing to do.”

“You can’t prove anything, moneybags.”

“Can’t I? Can’t I? Well, vandal, you have in your pocket a key of some description, don’t you? Wouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds for a forensic scientist to match the specks of paint on your key to the missing paint from the side of my car.”

Green Eyes pulled a key from her pocket and dropped it in a puddle of water.

“Oops, clumsy me,” she said, kneeling down beside the puddle, scrubbing the key, then wiping it on the sleeve of her parka. She put the key back in her pocket. “Sorry, moneybags,” she sang.

We crossed Hyde Park as it went through a transformation of light and color. Dawn was melting into the shadows of the trees. As Green Eyes strode briskly, Dad took my hand and urged me to keep up the pace. At the time I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. Now, looking back at his determination to follow this strange woman, it seems as if he somehow understood the mess she was going to make of our future, and he was not going to let her wriggle out of it.

When we reached the top of the park, guess who we saw hanging over Taylor ’s Square? The huge deep orange blazing sun, that’s who. Green Eyes lit a cigarette. The three of us watched the sunrise in silence, and I thought: One day the earth is going to get sucked into that lurid sun, and all the Chinese restaurants and all the peroxide blond women and all the seedy bars and all the single men and all the vandals and all the sports cars will be obliterated in a brilliant white flash and that will be that. Suffice it to say, it was a hell of a sunrise. I felt like a naked eyeball standing there, an eyeball the size of a boy, an eyeball with ears and a nose and a tongue and a thousand nerves sticking out like uncut hairs touching everything. I was all the senses at once, and it felt good.

Suddenly I was glad there was no one at home waiting up for us. Normal fathers and sons can’t stay out all night to watch the sun rise if there’s a wife and mother fretting by an open window, her long bony finger hovering over the button that speed-dials the police. I turned to Dad and said, “It’s good that you’re alone.”

Without looking at me he said, “I’m not alone. You’re here.”

I felt Green Eyes staring at me, before she fixed her stare on Dad. Then she walked on. We followed her up Oxford Street and into Riley. We followed her to a terrace house in Surry Hills. “Thanks for walking me home, moneybags. Now you know where I live. Now you know where my boyfriend lives too. He’ll be home soon and he’ll make a meal out of you. So fuck off!” she screamed. Dad sat on the front porch and lit a cigarette.

“Can we please go home now?” I begged.

“Not yet.”

About twenty minutes later, Green Eyes came back out in tracksuit pants and a yellow undershirt. She was holding a jug of water with something floating in it. On closer look, it was a tampon. A used tampon floating in the jug. A thin trail of blood wove through the water, dissolving into layers of misty red.

“What are you going to do with that?” Dad asked, horrified.

“Calm down, moneybags. I’m just watering my plants.”

She stirred the tampon in the jug and then poured the red water over what looked like marijuana plants sitting on the railing.

“That’s sick,” Dad said.

“From this body I give life,” she said back.

“Why did you scratch my car?”

“Piss off,” she spat; then, turning to me, “Do you want a drink?”

“Not if it’s out of that jug.”

“No, from the fridge.”

“What have you got?”

“Water or orange juice.”

“ Orange juice, please.”

“Don’t give your dad any. I’m hoping he’ll die of thirst.”

“I know what you mean.”

Dad’s hand slapped the back of my head. Hey! Why shouldn’t I say stupid things? I was tired and embarrassed and bored. Why wasn’t Dad tired and embarrassed and bored? It was a weird thing we were doing, hanging out on a stranger’s porch waiting for a confession.

The front door opened again. “Remember what we talked about, now,” she said, handing me a glass of orange juice.

“I won’t give him a drop,” I promised.

She smiled warmly. In her other hand was a black sports bag. She knelt down beside Dad and opened the bag. Inside were envelopes and letters. “If you’re going to stalk me, might as well make yourself useful. Put these in envelopes.”

Dad took the envelopes without a word. He made himself comfortable and started licking envelopes as if it were the most natural thing in the world to lick envelopes on a stranger’s porch, his tongue working like it was the tongue’s reason for being, the reason we came all the way over here at six in the morning.

“What about you, kid, you want to help us out?”

“My name’s Jasper.”

“You want to lick some envelopes, Jasper?”

“Not really, but OK.”

The three of us sat on the porch stuffing envelopes with deftness and precision. It was impossible to articulate what exactly was happening here; it was as if we were all actors improvising in a student play, and every so often we’d all look at each other with barely concealed amusement.

“How much do you get paid for doing this?” Dad asked.

“Five bucks for every one hundred envelopes.”

“That’s not so good.”

“No, it’s not.”

As she said this, I noticed how her serious, severe face had become serene and gentle.

I asked, “Why do you hate rich people so much?”

She narrowed her green eyes and said, “Because they get all the breaks. Because poor people are struggling while the rich complain about the temperature of their pools. Because when ordinary people get into trouble, the law fucks them over, and when the rich get into trouble, they get an easy ride.”

“Maybe I’m not rich,” Dad said. “Maybe I have a red sports car but it’s the only thing of value I own.”

“Who cares about you?”

“My son does.”

“Is that true?” she asked me.

“I suppose.”

There was something about this conversation that wasn’t working. It was as if language were failing us when we needed it most.

“We need a housekeeper,” Dad said suddenly. Green Eyes’s tongue froze mid-lick.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. It’s so.”

Green Eyes put down the envelopes and her face hardened again. “I don’t know if I want to work for some rich bastard.”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate you.”

“So?”

“So it’ll be hypocrisy.”

“No, it won’t.”

“It won’t?”

“No, it’ll be irony.”

Green Eyes thought about that awhile, and her lips started moving soundlessly, to let us know that she was thinking it over. “I have a boyfriend, you know.”

“Does that prevent you from cleaning?”

“Plus you’re much too old and much too ugly for me. I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“Listen. I’m just looking for someone to clean our apartment and cook for Jasper and me occasionally. Jasper’s mother is dead. I work all the time. I don’t have time to cook. Also, for the record, I’m not interested in you sexually. Your shaved head makes you look sort of mannish. Plus your face is oval. I only like round faces. Oval turns me off. Ask anyone.”

“Maybe I will.”

“So you want the job?”

“All right.”

“Why did you scratch my car?”

“I didn’t scratch your car.”

“You’re a liar.”

“You’re a weirdo.”

“You’re hired.”

“Fine.”

I looked at Dad who had a strange look on his face, as if we had trekked all night to arrive at a secret waterfall and this was it. We kept on with the envelopes as the dawn became morning.

The first night Anouk came in to cook and clean, her confusion was hilarious; she was expecting a wealthy man’s spacious house, only to step into our small and disgusting apartment, which was rotting like the bottom of an old boat. After she cooked us dinner she asked, “How can you live like this? You’re pigs. I’m working for pigs,” and Dad said, “Is that why you cooked us this slop?” She was furious, but for reasons that I’ve never completely understood (there are other jobs), she came back week after week, returning to us always with tireless and aggressive disapproval and a face that looked like it had just sucked a basket of lemons. She came in, opening curtains and dumping light into our hole in the wall, and as she stepped over Dad’s overdue library books, which carpeted the floor, she looked searchingly at me, as if I were a captive she was considering freeing.

At first Anouk came in for a few hours on Mondays and Fridays, though gradually the routine fell apart and she just started turning up whenever she felt like it, not only to cook and clean but often to eat and make a mess. She ate with us regularly, argued with us constantly, and introduced me to a breed I’d never encountered before: a left-wing, art-loving, self-proclaimed “spiritual person” who chose to convey her gentle ideas about peace and love and nature by screaming at you.

“You know what your problem is, Martin?” she asked Dad one night after dinner. “You’re choosing books over life. I don’t think books are supposed to be a substitute for life, you know. They’re more of a complement.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know when I see someone who doesn’t know how to live.”

“And you do?”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

In her view, Dad and I were problems waiting to be solved, and she began by trying to turn us into vegetarians, parading pictures of howling mutilated animals in front of us while we were in the middle of tucking into a juicy steak. When that failed, she sneaked meat substitutes onto our plates. And it wasn’t just food; Anouk dished out all forms of spirituality like a Hun: art therapy, rebirthing, therapeutic massage, strange-smelling oils. She recommended we go and get our auras massaged. She dragged us to criminally obscure plays, including one where the actors performed with their backs to the audience during the entire production. It was as if a lunatic were holding the key to our brains, stuffing things inside like crystals and wind chimes and pamphlets advertising lectures by one mystical left-wing levitating Gucci guru after another. That’s when she started with escalating urgency to critically assess our way of life.

Every week she inspected a new corner of our airless lives and gave us a review. It was never a rave. We never got a thumbs-up. The thumbs were always pointing to the sewer. After she discovered that Dad was managing a strip club, the reviews became savage, starting on the outside and working in. She critiqued our habit of impersonating each other on the phone, and the way, whenever there was a knock on the door, we both froze in terror as if we lived in a totalitarian regime and were running an underground newspaper. She pointed out that living like art students while Dad had an expensive sports car was borderline insane; she shot down Dad’s habit of kissing books and not me, as well as the way he’d go weeks without acknowledging my existence, then weeks when he wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace. She picked apart everything, from the way Dad slouched in his chair, to how he’d spend an hour weighing the advantages and disadvantages of having a shower, to his sociopathic manner of dressing (it was Anouk who first spotted that Dad was wearing his pajamas underneath his suit), to his lazy way of shaving, so he left tufts of hair sprouting in random patches on his face.

Maybe it was her arctic, belittling tone of voice, but he’d just stare sullenly into his coffee as she unveiled her latest damning report from the front lines. Her most unsettling and damaging form of reproach, though, was when she critiqued Dad’s criticism; that sent him reeling. You see, he’d spent nearly his whole life honing his contempt for others and had nearly perfected his “guilty” verdict on the world when Anouk came in and leveled it. “You know what your problem is?” she’d say (that’s how she always began). “You hate yourself and so you hate others. It’s just sour grapes. You’re too busy reading and thinking about big things. You don’t care about the little things in your own life, and that means you’re contemptuous of anyone who does. You’ve never struggled like they have, because you’ve never cared like they do. You don’t really know what people go through.” Often as she dished it out Dad would be strangely quiet, and he rarely rose to his own defense.

“You know what your problem is?” she asked after Dad told her his life story one afternoon. “You’re rehashing your old thoughts. Do you realize that? You’re quoting yourself, your only friend is a sleazy sycophant”- Eddie-“who agrees with everything you say, and you never air your ideas in a forum where they might be challenged, you just say them to yourself and then congratulate yourself when you agree with what you said.”

She went on and on like this, and over the following months, as I squeezed uncomfortably into adolescence and my relationship with Dad weakened daily, as if it had osteoporosis, Anouk didn’t just pour acid all over his ideas, hopes, and self-esteem, she took aim at me too. She was the one who told me I was only good-looking enough to attract about 22 percent of the female population. I thought that was a dismal figure, really abominable. It wasn’t until I was able to spot the loneliness in the faces of men that I realized that being attractive to 22 percent of women is a whopping success story. There are legions of ugly, wretchedly lonely, hopelessly inept sociopaths out there who fall in the 0-2 percent category- armies of them- and every one would kill for my 22 percent.

Oh, and she also berated me for neglecting the second batch of fish.

You see, Dad’s bank balance was swelling again, and undaunted by the previous episode of fish homicide (suicide?), he bought three more fish, this time simple goldfish, as if he thought that the ownership of fish went through degrees of difficulty depending on the species and the previous disaster had been caused by the fact that he had bought me fish that were simply too hard for my level. To him, goldfish were fish with training wheels: immortal, impossible to kill.

He was wrong. In the end I disposed of those fish quite easily too, though this time from underfeeding. They starved to death. But we argued right up to and including the day Dad died on the issue of whose fault it was. I went away for a week to stay at my friend Charlie’s house, and I swear to God, as I was leaving the apartment I said to Dad, “Don’t forget to feed the fish.” Dad remembers it very differently, and in his version, when leaving the apartment I had actually said, “OK, bye.” Whatever the case, sometime during my weeklong absence the fish came down with a bad case of starvation and, unlike humans in the same fix, did not think to resort to cannibalism. They just let themselves waste away.

Anouk took Dad’s side on this one, and I noticed that the only time Dad enjoyed the benefits of a ceasefire was when he could team up with Anouk against me. I have to admit, their relationship perplexed me. They were an improbable pairing, as if a rabbi and a man who raised pit bulls were marooned together on a desert island; incompatible strangers thrown together during a time of crisis, only Dad and Anouk’s was a nameless crisis without beginning or end.

A year into her employment with us, Dad received an unexpected phone call.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Jesus Christ, no. Absolutely not. Not if you raped and tortured me. How much is a lot? Well, all right, then. Yes, yes, I said yes, didn’t I? When do I start?”

It was good news! An American film production company had heard of the Terry Dean story and wanted to make it into a Hollywood blockbuster. They wanted Dad’s help to make sure they got it right, even though they were setting it in America as the story of a dead baseball player who comes back from hell to take revenge on his teammates who battered him to death.

So it seemed Dad could make good money off his memories, but why now? There had already been a couple of wildly inaccurate Australian movies based on the story, and Dad had refused to cooperate with any of them. Why this surrender, this sudden willingness to exploit his private dead? It was another in an alarming series of abrupt about-faces, allowing a writer to come with a nice check in exchange for picking the scabs off Dad’s brain to see what was underneath. Anouk, with her uncanny gift for identifying the worm in the apple, said, “You know what your problem is? You’re living in your brother’s shadow,” and when the twenty-three-year-old gum-chewing writer bounded cheerily into the apartment the following week, he only had to say, “So, tell me what Terry Dean was like as a child,” for Dad to grab him by the shirtsleeves and throw him exuberantly out the door with his laptop after him. One court appearance later, his new “job” cost him $4,000 and some unwanted press. “You know what your problem is?” Anouk said that night. “You’re a fanatic, but you’re fanatical about everything. Don’t you see? You’re spreading your fanaticism too thin.”

But you want to know what our real problem was? You can’t drift blissfully along in a blind haze when someone’s standing beside you shouting: That’s lust! That’s pride! That’s sloth! That’s habit! That’s pessimism! That’s jealousy! That’s sour grapes! Anouk was stuffing up our deeply entrenched custom of scraping and wheezing our way unenthusiastically around our claustrophobic apartment. The only way we knew how to get ahead was to plod toward our paltry desires and pant loudly to get attention. And the endlessly optimistic Anouk wanted to turn creatures like us into superbeings! She desired us to be considerate, helpful, conscientious, moral, strong, compassionate, loving, selfless, and brave, and she never let up, until gradually we fell into the regrettable habit of watching what we did and what we said.

After months of her boring us and boring into us, we no longer used plastic bags, and rarely ate anything that bled; we signed petitions, joined fruitless protests, inhaled incense, bent ourselves into difficult yoga positions- all worthy ascents up the mountain of self-improvement. But there were crap changes too, deep plummets into the gorge. Because of Anouk, we lived in fear of ourselves. Whoever first equated self-knowledge with change has no respect for human weakness and should be found and bitten to death. I’ll tell you why: Anouk highlighted our problems but didn’t have the resources or the know-how to help us fix them. We certainly didn’t know. So thanks to Anouk, not only were we stuck with the slippery menagerie of problems we already had, we were now imbued with an appalling awareness of them. This, of course, led to new problems.

III

There was something really wrong with my father. He was crying; he was in his bedroom, crying. I could hear him sobbing through the walls. I could hear him pacing back and forth over the same small space. Why was he crying? I’d never heard him cry before; I thought he couldn’t. Now it was every night after work and every morning before work. I took it as a bad omen. I felt that he was crying prophetically- not for what had happened but for what was about to take place.

In between sobs he talked to himself. “Fucking apartment. Too small. Can’t breathe. It’s a tomb. Must wage war. Who am I? How can I define myself? Choices are infinite and therefore limited. Forgiveness is big in the Bible, but nowhere does it say you should forgive yourself. Terry never forgave himself, and everyone loves him. I forgive myself daily, and nobody loves me. All this dread and insomnia. I can’t teach my brain how to sleep. How’s your confusion these days? It’s put on weight.”

“Dad?”

I pushed open his door a little, and in the shadows his face was severe and his head looked like a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Jasper. Do me a favor. Pretend you’re an orphan.”

I closed the door, went into my bedroom, and pretended I was an orphan. It didn’t feel too bad.

Then, as abruptly as it started, the crying stopped. Suddenly he started going out at night. That was new. Where did he go? I followed him. He was walking the streets with a bounce in his step and waving to people as he passed. They didn’t wave back. He stopped at a small, crowded pub. I peeked through the window and saw him perched at the bar, drinking. And he wasn’t sulking alone in a corner either; he was chatting to people, laughing. That was brand spanking new. The color of his face had gone all rosy, and after he polished off a couple of beers, he stood up on the bar stool and turned off the football game and said something to the crowd while laughing and shaking his fist like a dictator telling a joke at the execution of his favorite dissident. When he finished he bowed (though nobody applauded) and went to another pub, shouting “Hello there!” as he entered, then “I’ll see what I can do!” as he left. Then he popped into a dimly lit bar and paced around in circles before leaving without ordering anything. Then a nightclub! Christ! Is this what Anouk had driven him to?

He disappeared up the escalator of the Fishbowl, a concept disco designed as an enormous glass bowl with a platform around its perimeter. I climbed up onto the platform and peered into the bowl. At first I couldn’t see him. At first I couldn’t see anything but immaculately sculpted beautiful people illuminated in brief moments under strobe lights. Then I spotted him. He was fucking dancing. He was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath, moving clumsily and making strange, drowsy arm movements, like a lumberjack chopping trees in space, but he was having fun. Or was he? His smile was twice the size of normal smiles and he was gazing lustfully at cleavage of all sizes and religions. But what was this? He wasn’t dancing alone! He was dancing with a woman! Or was he? He was dancing behind her, gyrating at her back. She was ignoring him a little too effortlessly for comfort, so he swiveled around so he was in front and tried to sweep her up in that mile-wide smile. I wondered if he was going to invite her back to our sad and filthy apartment. But no, she wasn’t taken in. So he moved on to another woman, a shorter, rounder one. He swooped down and escorted her to the bar. He bought her a drink and handed over the cash as if he were paying a ransom. As they talked, he placed his hand on her back and drew her toward him. She resisted and walked away and Dad’s smile grew even wider, making him look like a chimpanzee who’d had peanut butter smeared on his gums for a television commercial.

A flat-nosed, no-neck bouncer in a tight black T-shirt arrived. His Goliath’s hand wrapped around the back of Dad’s neck, and he forcefully escorted him out of the club. On the street, Dad told him to fuck his mother if he hadn’t already. That did it for me. I’d seen enough. It was time to go home.

At around five in the morning he banged on the door. He’d lost his key. I opened up to see him sweating and yellow and in the middle of a sentence. I went back to bed without hearing the end of it. That was the only night I followed him, and when I recounted the story to Anouk, she said it was either “quite a good sign” or a “very bad sign.” I don’t know what he did the rest of those nights out on the town. I can only assume they were variations on the same fruitless theme.

A month later he was home again, crying. But what was worse, he started watching me sleep. The first night he did it he came into the room just as I was drifting off and took a seat by the window.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing. You just go to sleep.”

“What, with you sitting there?”

“I’m going to read in here awhile,” he said, holding up a book.

He turned on the lamp and started reading. I watched him for a minute, then put my head back down and shut my eyes. I could hear him turning the pages. A few minutes later I sneaked one eyelid open and almost recoiled. He was staring at me. My face was in shadows, so he couldn’t see I was watching him watching me. Then he turned the page again. I realized he was pretending to read, as an excuse for watching me sleep. This happened night after night, Dad pretending to read in my bedroom while I stayed awake with my eyes closed, feeling his eyes on me and listening to the sound of turning pages in the quiet. I tell you, they were some eerie, sleepless nights.

Then he started shoplifting. It began well enough. Dad came home, his bag stuffed with avocados and apples and fat nobs of cauliflower. Fruit and vegetables, nothing to complain about. Then he stole combs, throat lozenges, and Band-Aids- pharmaceutical goods. Useful. Then he stole nonsense items from gift shops: an old piece of driftwood with the words “My home is my castle” etched onto a plaque, a thong-shaped flyswatter, and a mug that said “You never know how many friends you have until you own a beach house,” which might be fun to put in a beach house, if you had one. We didn’t.

Then he was in bed crying again.

Then he was watching me sleep again.

Then he was at the window. I don’t know when exactly he took up post there, or why, but he was vigilant about his new role. Half his face was looking out the window, the other half buried in the bunched-up curtains. We should have had venetian blinds, the perfect accessory for sudden outbursts of acute paranoia; there’s nothing quite as atmospheric as those slits with their thin bars of shadow falling across your face. But what was he looking at out the window anyway? Mostly the backs of people’s shitty apartments. Mostly bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms. Nothing fascinating. Man with pale skinny legs stands in underwear devouring apple, woman puts on makeup arguing with person unseen, old couple brushes teeth of uncooperative German shepherd, that kind of thing. Staring out, Dad had a dark look in his eye. It wasn’t jealousy, that much I know. For Dad, the grass was never greener on the other side of the fence. If anything, it was browner.

Everything had taken a darker turn. His mood was dark. His face was dark. His vocabulary, dark and menacing.

“Fucking bitch,” he said one day at the window. “Fucking cunt.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Bitch across the way looking at us.”

“Well, you’re looking at her.”

“Only to see if she’s looking.”

“Is she?”

“Not now.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

Here’s the problem. He used to be funny. I mean, I know I’d complained about him my whole life, but I missed the old Dad. What happened to his lighthearted godlessness? That was funny. Reclusion is hysterical. Rebellion, a thousand laughs! But crying is rarely funny, and sociopathic rage never gets a chuckle- not from me, anyway. Now he was keeping the curtains humorlessly closed all day. No light penetrated the apartment. There were no longer middays or mornings or seasonal fluctuations of any kind. The only change was in the darkness. There were things breeding in it. Whatever mushrooms existed in his psyche were thriving in that dark, damp place. Not funny.

One night I spilled coffee on my bed. It was coffee, I swear, that soaked through the sheets and seeped into the mattress, but it looked like urine. I thought: Anouk will think it is urine. I tore the sheets off my bed and hid them. I went to the cupboard for clean sheets. There were none there.

Where did all the sheets go?

I asked Dad.

“Outside,” he said.

We didn’t have an outside. We lived in an apartment. I puzzled over this mystery awhile before arriving at a frightening conclusion. I went to check. I opened the curtains. There was no outside world. What I saw was sheets; he had hung them over the windows from the outside, maybe as a white flapping shield to hide us from prying eyes. But no, they weren’t white. They weren’t a shield either. They were a sign. There was something written on the other side of the sheets, in red. The words “Fucking Bitch.”

This was bad. I knew this was bad.

I took down the sheets and hid them with the others, the ones with urine on them. Shit, I wrote that, didn’t I? OK. I admit it. It was urine (it is not attention-seeking that makes children wet their beds, but fear of their parents).

Just so you know, you don’t have to be religious to pray. Prayer is not so much an article of faith anymore as it is something that is culturally inherited from film and television, like kissing in the rain. I prayed for my father’s recovery as a child actor might pray: on my knees, palms locked, head bowed, eyes closed. I went so far as to light a candle for him, not in a church- you can take hypocrisy only so far- but in the kitchen late one night, when his nocturnal rumblings had reached a fever pitch. I hoped the candle would unwrap whatever it was that bound him so tight.

Anouk was in the kitchen with me, cleaning it from top to bottom, muttering that she wanted to be not only paid but praised, and, citing mouse poo and cockroach nests as evidence, she implied that by cleaning the kitchen she was saving our lives.

Dad was stretched out on the couch with his hands covering his face.

She stopped cleaning and stood in the doorway. Dad could feel her staring at him and pressed the palms of his hands harder into his eyes.

“What the fuck is going on with you, Martin?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“God, no.”

“You’re wallowing in self-pity, that’s what I think. You’re frustrated, OK. Your aspirations are unfulfilled. You think you’re this special person who deserves special treatment, only you’re just starting to see that no one in the whole wide world agrees with you. And to make matters worse, your brother is celebrated like the god you think you are, and that’s finally dropped you in this kind of bottomless pit of depression where all these dark thoughts are gnawing at you, feeding on each other. Paranoia, persecution complex, probably impotence too, I don’t know. But let me tell you. You have to do something about this before you do something you’ll regret.”

It was as excruciating as watching someone light a firecracker, then peer over it thinking it’s a dud. Only Dad wasn’t a dud.

“Stop bad-mouthing my soul, you meddlesome bitch!”

“Listen to me, Martin. Anyone else would get the hell out of here. But someone has to talk some sense into you. And besides, you’re scaring the kid.”

“He’s OK.”

“He’s not OK. He’s pissing his bed!”

Dad lifted his head over the top of the couch so all I could see was his receding hairline.

“Jasper, come here.”

I went over to the hairline.

“Haven’t you ever been depressed?” Dad asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re always so calm. It’s a façade, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me, what gnaws at you, Jasper?”

“You do!” I shouted, and ran to my room. What I didn’t yet understand was that Dad’s unhinged state had the potential to send me down the same precarious path.

Soon after that evening, Anouk took me to the Royal Easter Show to cheer me up. After the rides and the fairy floss and the show bags, we wandered over to see the judging of livestock. While staring at cattle, I suddenly pretended to be suffering from a bout of chronic disequilibrium, a new pastime of mine that involved bumping into people, stumbling, falling into shop displays, that kind of thing.

“What’s wrong?” she shrieked, grabbing me by the shoulders.

“I don’t know.”

Her hands clasped mine. “You’re shaking!”

It’s true, I was. The world was reeling, my legs bending like straw. My whole body was vibrating out of control. I’d worked myself into such a lather, the fabricated illness had taken over, and for a minute I forgot there was nothing wrong with me.

“Help me!” I screamed. A crowd of spectators rushed over, including some officials from the show. They hovered over me, gawking (in a real emergency, a thousand eyes pressing against your skull isn’t actually that helpful).

“Give him some air!” a voice cried.

“He’s having a fit!” exclaimed another.

I felt bewildered and nauseated. Tears rolled down my face. Then all of a sudden I remembered I was only playing around. My body relaxed, and the nausea was replaced by a fear of discovery. The eyes had moved a couple of feet back, but the force of their gaze was undiminished. Anouk was holding me in her arms. I felt ridiculous.

“Get off me!” I screamed, pushing her away. I returned to the cattle. They were being judged by a panel of leathery-looking folk in Akubra hats. I leaned over the fence. I heard Anouk whispering frantically behind me, but I refused to look. After a minute she joined me.

“You OK now?” she asked.

My answer wasn’t audible. We stood side by side, in silence. A minute later a brown cow with a white stain on his back won first prize for being the juiciest-looking steak in the paddock. We all applauded as if there were nothing absurd about applauding cows.

“You and your father are quite a pair,” Anouk said. “I’m ready to go as soon as you are.”

I felt terrible. What was I doing? So what if his head was an empty seashell in which you could hear the torment of the sea? What did that have to do with my mental well-being? His gestures had become crazy birds banging into windows. Did that mean mine needed to be too?

A couple of weeks later, Dad and I drove Anouk to the airport. She was going for a few months to be massaged on a beach in Bali. Just before she went through the departure gate, she took me aside and said, “I feel a little guilty leaving you at the moment. Your dad’s about to fall off the edge.”

I think she wanted me to say, “No, we’ll be fine. You go enjoy yourself.”

“Please don’t go,” I said.

Then she went anyway, and a week later he fell off the edge.

Dad went through his monthlong cycle of crying, pacing, screaming, watching me sleep, and shoplifting, though suddenly all within a week. Then it was compressed further and he ran through the whole cycle in a day, each stage taking about an hour. Then he went through the cycle in an hour, sighing and groaning and muttering and stealing (from the corner newsstand) in a blaze of tears, running home and tearing off his clothes and pacing naked in the apartment, his body looking like spare parts assembled in a hurry.

Eddie came banging on the door. “Why hasn’t your dad been coming into work? Is he sick?”

“You might say that.”

“Can I see him?”

Eddie went into the bedroom and closed the door. After half an hour, he came out scratching his neck as though Dad had given him a rash and said, “Jesus. When did this all start?”

I don’t know. A month ago? A year?

“How do we fix him?” Eddie asked himself. “We’ve really got to brainstorm. Let’s see. Let me think.”

We stood in a swampy silence for a full twenty minutes. Eddie was brainstorming. I was sick at the way he was breathing through his nostrils, which were partially blocked by something I could see. After another ten minutes Eddie said, “I’m going to think some more about this at home.” And then he left. I didn’t hear from him after that. If he had any brilliant ideas, they just didn’t come fast enough.

A week later there was a knock on the door. I went into the kitchen and made some toast and started shaking. I don’t know how I knew the universe had vomited up something special for me; I just knew. The banging on the door persisted. I didn’t want to overtax my imagination, so against my better judgment I answered it. A woman with a sagging face and big brown teeth was at the door, wearing a look of pity on her face. There was a policeman with her too. I guessed it wasn’t the policeman she felt sorry for.

“Are you Kasper Dean?” she asked.

“What is it?”

“Can we come in?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this. Your father is in the hospital.”

“Is he all right? What happened?”

“He’s not well. He’s going to stay awhile. I want you to come with us.”

“What are you talking about? What happened to him?”

“We’ll tell you about it in the car.”

“I don’t know who you are and what you want to do with me, but you can go fuck yourselves.”

“Come on, son,” the policeman said, clearly not in any mood to follow my suggestion.

“Where?”

“There’s a home you can stay in for a couple of days.”

“This is my home.”

“We can’t leave you alone here. Not until you’re sixteen.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been taking care of myself forever.”

“Come on, Kasper,” the policeman barked.

I didn’t tell him my name was Jasper. I didn’t tell him that Kasper was a fictional character of my dad’s invention and that Kasper had been killed off many years ago. I decided to play along until I worked out just what the situation was. I knew this much: I wasn’t sixteen, and that meant I had no rights. People are always talking about the rights of the child, but it’s never the rights you need when you need them.

I went with them in the police car.

On the way they explained that Dad had driven his car through the window of the Fleshpot. It was an act that might have been taken as an unfortunate accident, only when he got through the window, he locked the steering wheel in a tight circle and spun the car around the dance floor, into tables and chairs, smashing up the place, destroying the bar. The police had to drag him out of the car. Clearly he’d gone mad. And now he was in the madhouse. I wasn’t surprised. Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it. It’s OK from a mountaintop, but Dad was smack bang in the middle, and his berserk contradictions had finally butted each other insensible.

“Can I see him?”

“Not today,” the woman said. We pulled up to a house in the suburbs. “You’ll stay here a couple of days, until we see if any of your relatives can come and get you.”

Relatives? I didn’t know anyone like that.

The house was a one-story brick number and looked just like a regular family home. From the outside you couldn’t tell this was where they warehoused the broken-off pieces of shattered families. The policeman honked the horn when we pulled up. A woman with one enormous bosom came out with a smile that I predicted I would see again and again in a thousand awful nightmares. The smile said, “Your tragedy is my ticket to heaven, so come here and give me a hug.”

“You must be Kasper,” she said, and she was joined by a bald man who kept nodding as if he were Kasper.

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m Mrs. French,” the single-bosomed woman said, as if boasting, as if to be Mrs. French were a hard-earned achievement in itself.

When I didn’t respond, they walked me through the house. They showed me a bunch of kids watching television in the living room. Out of habit, I surveyed the female faces in the room. I do this even among the fragmented. I do this to see if there is any physical beauty I can dream about or lust over; I do this on buses, in hospitals, at the funerals of dear friends; I do this to lighten the load a little; I will do this as I lie dying. As it happened, everyone in the place was ugly, at least on the outside. All the kids peered at me as though I were up for sale. Half of them looked resigned to whatever it was their fate was dishing up to them; the other half snarled defiantly. For once I wasn’t interested in their stories. I’m sure they all had perfectly awful tragedies that I could weep over for centuries, but I was too busy aging ten years with every passing minute in this limbo for children.

The couple continued with their tour. They showed me the kitchen. They showed me the backyard. They showed me my room, a glorified closet. The people may have been nice and kind and soft-spoken, but I preferred to save some time and just assume they were perverts awaiting nightfall.

As I dropped my bag on the single bed, Mrs. French said, “You’ll be happy here.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said back. I don’t like people telling me when and where I am to be happy. That’s not even for me to decide.

“So what now? Do I get my one phone call?” I asked.

“This isn’t prison, Kasper.”

“We’ll see.”

I telephoned Eddie to see if I could stay with him. He admitted that he had overstayed his visa and was illegal and therefore unable to make any application to be my legal guardian. I called Anouk’s house to hear her flatmate tell me what I already knew- she was still sunning herself in a Buddhist meditation center in Bali and wasn’t due home until her money ran out. I was stuck. I hung up the phone and went back to my little slab of darkness and cried. I’d never thought negatively about my future until that moment. I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.

There wasn’t a lock on the door, but I managed to wedge the chair under the handle. I sat awake all night, waiting for that ominous rattle. At about three in the morning I fell asleep, so I can only assume they came to sexually abuse me when I was far gone, dreaming of oceans and the horizons I would never reach.

IV

The next day, accompanied by Mrs. French, I went to see Dad. I admit, shamefully, that when we hopped in the car I was excited. I’d never been inside a mental hospital- was it like in the movies, with a symphony of high-pitched inhuman screams? I even went as far as to hope the patients were not too heavily sedated to bang wooden spoons against the back of saucepans.

In the car on the way, I didn’t say anything. Mrs. French kept glancing at me impatiently, irritated that I wasn’t pouring out my heart to her. Silence dogged us all the way to the hospital. She pulled over at the newsagent’s and said, “Why don’t you pick up your father some magazines to read?” and she gave me $10. I went inside and thought: What does a man who’s fallen off the brink want to read? Pornography? Entertainment news? I picked up an equestrian magazine but put it down again. That wasn’t right. In the end I settled for a book of puzzles, mazes, anagrams, and teasers to give his brain a workout.

Inside the hospital we heard the kind of frenzied screams you generally associate with boiling rivers of blood. Stepping out of the elevator, I could see patients walking aimlessly through the corridors, legs twitching, tongues hanging out, mouths open wide as if at the dentist’s. I could see something yellow in their eyes. I could smell a smell unlike any smell I’ve ever smelled. These were people who had been tossed in the darkness, human leftovers starring in their own nightmares, covered in flimsy white gowns, their psyches poking through like ribs. They were the embers of a fire dying out. Where in the world could they go where they made sense?

The doctors walked briskly on the way to strip the patients of their crazy laughter. I studied the faces of the nurses: how could they work here? They must be either sadists or saints. They couldn’t be anything else, but could they be both? They and the doctors looked tired: draining heads of wrong ideas is obviously an exhausting business.

I thought: What human thing could emerge out of this edifice of violent nightmares and say, “OK, now back to work!”?

The nurse at reception sat eerily still with a pained expression, as if bracing herself for a punch in the face.

“Jasper Dean to see Martin Dean,” I said.

“Are you family?”

When I didn’t say anything for a while, she said, “I’ll call Dr. Greg.”

“I hope that’s his last name.”

She picked up a phone and paged Dr. Greg. I searched Mrs. French’s face for some acknowledgment that I hadn’t referred to myself as Kasper. If she had heard me, she wasn’t giving anything away.

A couple of minutes later, Dr. Greg arrived, looking sharp, smiling like someone who thinks he is always well liked, especially at first sight.

“I’m glad you’re here. Your father won’t talk to us,” he announced.

“And?”

“And I was wondering if you could come into the room and help us out.”

“If he doesn’t want to talk to you, it means he doesn’t care what you think. My presence won’t change that.”

“Why doesn’t he care what I think?”

“Well, you probably said things to him like ‘We’re on your side, Mr. Dean,’ and ‘We’re here to help you.’ ”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Look. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

“And?”

“He’s read books written by your predecessors: Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Fromm, and Becker. Those guys. You need to convince him that you’re cut from the same cloth.”

“Well, I’m not Freud.”

“And there’s your problem right there.”

Mrs. French waited in the reception area while I followed the doctor through the gloomy corridors and the opening and closing of countless locked doors. We got to Dad’s room and he unlocked it with a key. Inside was a single bed, a desk, a chair, and half-chewed morsels of indefinable food mangled on a plate. Dad stood with his back to us, staring out the window. Watching him was like looking at a naked tree in winter.

“Look, Martin. Your son’s here to see you,” Dr. Greg said.

When he turned, I let out a little gasp. It looked as if all the bones and muscles in his face had been taken out.

“How are you?” I asked, as if we were meeting for the first time. He stepped forward with the dazed look of a mother after childbirth.

Any vow of silence Dad had taken he abandoned at the sight of me. “Jasper. Listen. You can never really kill your old selves. They lie there in a mass grave, buried alive, one on top of the other, waiting for the opportunity for resurrection, and then, because they’ve once been dead, they drive you like a zombie, as they themselves are zombies. Do you see what I’m getting at? All your old failures squirming to life!”

I looked over at Dr. Greg and said, “You wanted him talking. Well, he’s talking.”

Dad sucked in his lip as a sign of defiance. I went over to him and whispered, “Dad, you have to get out of here. They’ve got me in a state-run home. It’s horrible.”

He didn’t say anything. Dr. Greg didn’t say anything either. I looked around the room and thought it was the worst possible environment for a collapsed mind, as it would give him more time to reflect, and if his disease had a cause, it was excessive reflection; too much thinking had broken his brain. I looked back at Dr. Greg: he was leaning against the desk, as if watching a play where none of the actors knew whose turn it was to speak.

“Here. I brought you something,” I said, handing Dad the book of puzzles. He gave me a sad glance as he took it and then began studying the book and making little “hmm” sounds.

“A pencil,” he said in a scratchy whisper, holding out his hand without looking up.

I stared at Dr. Greg until he reluctantly fished in his shirt pocket and handed me a pencil as delicately as if it were a machete. I gave it to Dad. He opened the book and started going through the first maze. I tried to think of something to say, but I didn’t come up with anything other than “You’re welcome,” even though he hadn’t said thank you.

“Done,” he said to himself when he finished.

“Martin,” Dr. Greg said. Dad flinched, turned the page, and started on the second maze. From where I sat the book was upside down, and I got dizzy watching him.

After a minute he said, “Too easy,” turned the page, and began to tackle the third maze. “They get progressively harder as you go through the book,” he said to no one.

He was now attacking the puzzles compulsively. Dr. Greg gave me a look as if to say, “What made you give a mentally confused man a compendium of conundrums?” and I had to agree I would’ve done much better with my first instinct, to buy porn.

“Eddie says you can come back to work when you’re ready,” I said.

Without looking up, Dad said, “Son of a bitch.”

“He’s being pretty good to you, I think, considering you smashed up his club.”

“The first day I met him in Paris he offered me money, then he offered me a job. Then he found me a job. Then later he followed me here to Australia and gave me money to feed you. Not much, a hundred here, a hundred there, but he keeps helping me out.”

“Sounds like you have a very good friend,” Dr. Greg said.

“What do you know about it?” Dad snapped.

Enough of this small talk, I thought. I walked close to Dad and tried whispering in his ear again. “Dad, I need you to get out of here. They’ve put me in a home.” He didn’t say anything, and turned to the last maze in the book and started working through it. “It’s dangerous. Some guy made a pass at me,” I lied.

He still didn’t say anything, only scrunched up his face in annoyance, not at my distasteful lie but at the puzzle he was failing to solve.

“Martin,” Dr. Greg chimed in, “don’t you want to look at your son?”

“I know what he looks like,” Dad said.

It was clear that Dr. Greg’s lacerating mediocrity was suffocating Dad. The doctor was treading the unlit terrain of Dad’s mind with muddy boots, trampling over everything, understanding nothing. As I said, Dad wanted to be prodded by a Freud or a Jung, and if there was no further evidence of his unhinged mind, expecting that an undiscovered genius would be languishing here in this state-run hovel was proof enough.

He was still having trouble with the last maze. His pencil worked through it, but he kept hitting dead ends. “What the fuck?” he said. He was grinding his teeth so loudly we could hear it.

“Martin, why don’t you put the book away and talk to your son?”

“Shut up!”

Suddenly Dad jumped up and stamped his foot. He grabbed a chair and held it above his head, breathing so deeply his whole body heaved. “Get me out of here now!” he screamed, waving the chair in the air.

“Put it down!” Dr. Greg shouted. “Jasper, don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said, although I was a little afraid. “Dad,” I said, “don’t be a dickhead.”

Then the reinforcements arrived, like they do in the movies. An orderly ran in and grabbed Dad and pushed him onto the table. Another grabbed me and pushed me out of the room. I could still see Dad through the little window in the door. The orderlies had him pinned to the table and were sticking a needle in his arm. He was kicking and screaming; whatever was in that needle was taking its time. Dad’s stubborn hyped-up metabolism was slow to react, his agitation far too electric. Then I couldn’t see his face because one of the orderlies was in the way, and I thought how when the apocalypse comes there’s bound to be someone with big hair standing in front of me. Finally the orderly moved to the side, and I saw that Dad was all slobbery and drowsy and medicated into ambivalence. When, a couple of spasms later, he was blissfully at peace, Dr. Greg came out to talk to me. His face was red and sweaty, and I detected a subtle look of exhilaration behind his eyes, as if he were saying to himself, “This is what it’s all about!”

“You can’t keep him here!” I shouted.

“Actually, we can.”

He showed me some paperwork. There was plenty of technical mumbo jumbo. I couldn’t understand it. It was all pretty dull. Even the font was boring.

“Listen. What will it take to get him out of here?”

“He needs to be better than he is now.”

“Well, fuck, can you be more specific?”

“More balanced. We need to be confident he’s not going to do any harm to himself, or to you, or to others.”

“And how do you intend to do that? Be specific, now.”

“By getting him to talk to me. And by medicating him to maintain his stability.”

“This all sounds time-consuming.”

“It isn’t going to happen overnight.”

“Well, how long? An estimate.”

“I don’t know, Jasper. Six months? A year? Two years? Look at him- your father’s pretty far gone.”

“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Live in a fucking state-run home?”

“Don’t you have any relatives who can look after you?”

“No.”

“Uncles or aunts?”

“Dead.”

“Grandparents?”

“Dead! Dead! Everyone’s fucking dead!”

“I’m sorry, Jasper. This is just not something that can be moved along quickly.”

“It has to.”

“I don’t see how.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot,” I said, and stormed down the corridors, not stopping to contemplate the loud groaning on either side. At the reception area, Mrs. French was studiously examining her fingernails like someone who doesn’t like to be left alone with her thoughts. Those fingernails were a way out. I left her with them and crept silently to the elevator. On the way down, I thought of all the people I’d heard pompously call themselves crazy and I wished them lots and lots and lots of bad luck.

I caught a bus home. The other passengers looked as tired and worn-out as I felt. I thought about my problem: this hospital, rather than being a road to wellness, would only accelerate the decay of his body, mind, and spirit, and if Dad was going to get well, he had to get out of there, but to get out of there, he needed to be well. To get him well, I needed to discover exactly what had made him sick, the means by which he had rendered himself useless.

Back in the apartment I searched for Dad’s more recent notebooks. I needed an idea, and no textbook could better aid me than one he wrote himself. But I couldn’t find them. They weren’t in his wardrobe, or under his bed, or wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in the top of the toilet- none of his usual hiding places. After an hour of general ransacking, I had to admit they weren’t in the apartment at all. What had he done with them? I turned the bedroom upside-down again, which only transformed it from one state of chaos to another. Exhausted, I lay on his bed. The atmosphere reeked of Dad’s collapse, and I did my best to avoid the sticky notion that this was not the beginning of the end but the actual definitive conclusive end, the end of the end.

On Dad’s bedside table was a postcard from Anouk. It had “ Bali ” printed in bold red letters over a picture of rice workers in a field. On the other side she had written “You guys need a holiday,” and that was all. We sure did.

I rolled over. Something in his pillowcase dug into my skull. I shook the pillow- out fell a black notebook! There were 140 pages, all numbered. Okay, I was the only one who could free Dad, and this book was going to tell me how. The problem was, entering my father’s mental state implied a certain danger, because his was the kind of thinking that closed around you, not slowly or surreptitiously but quick like the snap of a rusty bear trap. My defense, then, was to read ironically, and with this in mind, I braced myself and began.

Not surprisingly, it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience, as all journeys into dissolution and madness must be. I read it through twice. There were general frustrations, as on page 88:

I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That’s why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain.

and disturbing observations pertaining to me, as on page 21:

Poor Jasper. Watching him sleep while I’m pretending to read, I don’t think he realizes yet that every day his pile of minutes lightens. Maybe he should die when I die?

and observations about himself:

My problem is I can’t sum myself up in one sentence. All I know is who I’m not. And I’ve noticed there is a tacit agreement among most people that they’ll at least try to adjust to their environment. I’ve always felt the urge to rebel against it. That’s why when I’m in the movies and the screen goes dark I get an irresistible impulse to read a book. Luckily, I carry a pocket torch.

The most recurrent thoughts were Dad’s desire to hide, to be alone, to be isolated, not to be bothered by noise and people. The usual Dad rant. But surprisingly, there were also hints at a megalomania I hadn’t heard him articulate before, passages in his notebook that alluded to a longing to dominate and change the world- this appeared to be an evolution of his obsessive thoughts- which shed new light on his usual longing to be alone. I understood it now as a desire to have an isolated headquarters where he could plan his attack. There was, for instance, this:

No symbolic journey can take place in an apartment. There’s nothing metaphorical about a trip to the kitchen. There’s nothing to ascend! Nothing to descend! No space! No verticality! No cosmicity! We need a roomy, airy house. We need nooks and crannies and corners and hollows and garrets and staircases and cellars and attics. We need a second toilet. The essential important idea that will shift me from Thinking Man to Doing Man is impossible to apply here. The walls are too close to my head, and the distractions too many- the noise of the street, the doorbell, the telephone. Jasper and I need to move to the bush so I can lay the plans for my major task which I have lying in egg form. I am also lying in egg form. I am a halfway man, and I need a place of intense concentration if I am to whisper into a golden ear and change the face of this country.

and this:

Emerson understood! “The moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction,” he said. That’s my problem. I’m ¼ of who I should be! Maybe even ¹/8th. Then he said, “The voices which we hear in solitude grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.” This is my problem exactly: I can’t hear myself! He also said, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I can’t do this!

And then, on my second reading, I found a quote that was so frighteningly to the point, I actually shouted “Ah-ha!” which is something I’d never said before and have never said since. It was this, on page 101:

Pascal notes that during the French Revolution, all the nuthouses were emptied. The inmates suddenly had meaning in their lives.

I closed the notebook and walked to the window and looked down at the twisted roofs and roads and the city skyline, then moved my eyes to the sky, to the clouds dancing on it. I felt as though I had drawn a new and fresh source of strength into my body. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I had to do.

I caught the bus to Eddie’s and trod a narrow path winding between expensive jungles of fern to the front of his sandstone house. I rang the bell. You couldn’t hear its call from the outside. Eddie must have made a lot of money himself from strip clubs- only rich people can afford to mute like that; the silence is due to the thickness of the door, and the more money you have, the chunkier your door is. It’s the way of the world. The poor get thinner and the rich get chunkier.

Eddie opened the door, combing his thin hair. Gel dripped off the comb in large dollops I could smell. I cut straight to the point.

“Why are you always so good to my father?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re always offering money and help and kindness. Why? Dad says it started the day you met him in Paris.”

“He said that?”

“Yes.”

“So I don’t understand- what is it you want to know?”

“This generosity of yours. What’s behind it?”

Eddie’s face was strained. He finished combing his hair while searching for the right words to answer me.

“And while you’re answering that one, answer this: why are you always taking photographs of us? What do you want with us?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“So it’s just plain friendship.”

“Of course!”

“Then you might be able to give us a million dollars.”

“That’s too much.”

“Well, how much can you get?”

“Maybe, I don’t know, a sixth of that.”

“How much is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, Dad’s been saving, and I don’t know how much he’s got, but it won’t be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To help him.”

“Jasper, you have my word. Whatever I can do, or give you.”

“So you’ll give us a sixth of a million dollars?”

“If it would help you and your father.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’m not the one in hospital, Jasper.”

I suddenly felt bad about harassing Eddie. He really was a rare person, and clearly their friendship meant a lot to him. I even got the impression he thought it contained a deep spiritual quality that was in no way lessened by the fact that Dad occasionally hated his guts.

When I went back to the hospital, Dad was strapped to a bed in the same olive-green room. I peered over him. His eyes rolled around in his head like marbles tossed into a teacup. I bent over and whispered in his ear. I wasn’t certain he was listening, but I whispered myself hoarse. Afterward, I pulled the chair up next to him and put my head on his rising and falling stomach and fell asleep. When I woke, I realized that someone had put a blanket over me and a croaky voice was talking. I don’t know when Dad had started his monologue, but he was already in the middle of a sentence.

“…and that’s why they said that architecture was like reproducing the universe, and all the old churches and monasteries were attempting the divine task of replicating heaven.”

“What? What’s going on? Are you OK?”

I could see only the odd shape of his head. He was straining to hold it up. I stood, turned on the light, and undid the bed straps. He turned his head from side to side, trying out his neck.

“We are going to construct a world, Jasper, of our own design, where no one can come in unless we ask them.”

“We’re going to build a world of our own?”

“Well, a house. All we have to do is design it. What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s great,” I said.

“And you know what else, Jasper? I want this to be your dream too. I want you to help me. I want your input. I want your ideas.”

“OK. Yeah. Great,” I said.

It had worked. In his sandstorm, Dad had found a new project. He’d decided to build a house.

V

Per his instructions, I brought Dad every book on the theory and history of architecture I could find, including weighty tomes on animal buildings such as birds’ nests, beaver dams, honeycombs, and spiders’ burrows. He took the books with delight. We were going to build a container for our moldy souls!

Dr. Greg came in and noted the piles of architectural literature. “What’s going on here, then?”

Proudly, Dad told him the idea.

“The Great Australian Dream, huh?”

“Sorry?”

“I said, you’re going to pursue the Great Australian Dream. I think that’s a very good idea.”

“What do you mean? There’s a collective dream? How come nobody told me? What is it again?”

“Owning your own home.”

“Owning your own home? That’s the Great Australian Dream?”

“You know it is.”

“Wait a minute. Haven’t we merely appropriated the Great American Dream and just substituted the name of our country?”

“I don’t think so,” Dr. Greg said, looking worried.

“Whatever you say,” Dad said, rolling his eyes so we both could see it.

A week later I went back. The books were open and pages torn up and scattered all over the room. When I entered, Dad held up his head like a hoisted sail. “Glad you’re here. What do you think of manifesting the symbolic paradise of the womb, a house huge and glistening, and we’ll bury ourselves inside where we can really rot in privacy?”

“Sounds good,” I said, moving a pile of books off the chair so I could sit down.

“Tell me if any of these say anything to you: French chateau, English cottage, Italian villa, German castle, peasant simplicity.”

“Not really.”

“But geometric simplicity, OK? Fundamentally simple, uncluttered, loud, pretentious, and gaudy, without being dispiritingly tasteless.”

“Whatever you like.”

“Above all, I don’t want anything angular, so maybe it should be round.”

“Good idea.”

“You think so? Do you feel like living in an orb?”

“Yeah, that sounds fine.”

“What we want is to blend into the natural surroundings. An organic synthesis, that’s what we’re after. And inside I think two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a dark room, not to develop photos, just so we can sit in the dark. Now, what else? Let’s talk about the threshold.”

“The what?”

“The portal into the home.”

“You mean the front door?”

“How many times do I have to say it?”

“Just once would be good.”

Dad’s eyes narrowed into thin slits and the edges of his mouth curled downward. “If you’re going to be that way about it, we’ll just scrap the whole design. What about living in a cave?”

“A cave?”

“I thought we agreed we’d live in a uterine symbol.”

“Dad.”

“Well, what if we live in the trunk of an old tree, like Merlin? Or wait. I know. We could construct platforms in the trees. What do you say, Jasper- are we tree-dwellers?”

“Not especially.”

“Since when don’t you want to live in leafy sensuality?”

Dr. Greg had come into the room. He was ogling us like a Supreme Court judge watching a couple of neo-Nazis wash his car at traffic lights.

“Dad, let’s just have an ordinary house. Just a nice, normal, ordinary house.”

“You’re right. We don’t need to go over the top. OK. Which do you prefer? A cubical ordinary house or a cylindrical ordinary house?”

I sighed. “Cubical.”

“Have you ever seen the Tower of Samara in Iraq?”

“No. Have you?”

“OK. Here’s a structural dilemma we have to overcome. I want to hear the echo of my own footsteps, but I don’t want to hear yours. What can we do about that?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, then. Let’s talk ceilings. Do you want high ceilings?”

“Of course. Why would anyone want a low ceiling?”

“To hang yourself. OK? Hang on a sec. Let’s see…” Dad rummaged through his books. “Tepee?”

“Come on, Dad, what’s happened to your brain? You’re all over the place.”

“You’re right. You’re right. We need to focus. We need to be sensible. We need to be logical. So let’s be logical. What are the objectives inherent in the design of a house? To meet your physical needs. Eating, sleeping, shitting, and fucking. That translates to comfort, utility, efficiency. But our psychological needs? The same, really. In fact, I don’t see why we should separate ourselves from primitive man in this. Our goal should be to exist in a consistent climate and to keep out predators.”

“Great.”

“Just remember that the form of our habitat will inflict undue influence on our behavior. We have to be smart about this. What about an igloo?”

“No.”

“A house on wheels! A drawbridge! A moat!”

“No! Dad! You’re out of control here!”

“OK! OK! Have it your way. We’ll do something simple. The only thing I insist on, though, is that the ideology behind the design of our house should be the old Italian proverb.”

“What proverb?”

“That the best armor is to keep out of range.”

This idea was clearly backfiring. Dr. Greg looked on quietly through these brainstorming sessions with half-closed, judgmental eyes. Dad had become luminous with ideas, but he’d made the undesirable leap from manic-depressive to obsessive-compulsive.

Meanwhile I decided to play along and be a good provisional orphan, so I returned to the house for lost children. It made sense, because if I played truant they’d be lying in wait for me every time I visited Dad in hospital, and breaking into an insane asylum is just as difficult as breaking out. I also had to return to school. Mrs. French drove me in the mornings, and throughout the school day I scrupulously avoided telling anyone about Dad’s meltdown or about how my father and I were now living in separate homes for cracked eggs- talking about it would have meant surrendering myself to reality. I just went on as if it were business as usual. Of course, returning from school every afternoon was a nightmare, though as it happened, absolutely everyone at the house neglected to sexually abuse me in any way, and nothing of interest occurred there except I eventually gave in to my gnawing curiosity and listened to everyone’s stories, which were far worse than mine. In this way all the abandoned children robbed me of self-pity. That’s when I really bottomed out. Without being able to feel sorry for myself, I had nothing left.

And worse, every now and then the fools at the hospital granted Dad access to a telephone. I’d answer it and suffer through a conversation like this:

My voice: “Hello?”

Dad’s voice: “Here’s a spatial dilemma: how to arrange the house so that at the same time it is comfortable for us but discourages guests from staying more than forty-five minutes.”

Mine: “Not sure.”

Dad’s: “Jasper! This is to be a hard, practical exercise! No messing about! Something that reflects my personality, no, my dilemma, my lie, which is, of course, my personality. And the color. I want it white! Blindingly white!”

Mine: “Please, can we do something simple?”

Dad’s: “I couldn’t agree with you more. We want something simple that can be eroded by the elements. We don’t want anything more durable than we are.”

Mine: “OK.”

Dad’s: “Open living space. No. That discourages human intimacy. No, hang on, I want that. I want…”

Long silence.

Mine: “Dad? You still there?”

Dad’s: “Bullfighting ring! Gothic cathedral! Mud hovel!”

Mine: “Are you taking your medicine?”

Dad’s: “And no mantelpieces! They always make me think of urns with ashes in them.”

Mine: “OK! Jesus!”

Dad’s: “Which do you prefer, a porch or a veranda? What’s the difference, anyway? Wait. I don’t care. We’ll have both. And I’ll tell you something else. Ornamental detail can go to hell. We are the ornamental detail!”

Then I’d hang up and curse myself for sending Dad down what I thought was another ruinous path. These conversations certainly did not prepare me for the abrupt change that was about to follow.

One day I visited the hospital and was shocked to see that Dad had arranged the books into a neat pile. All the pages of erratic designs had been thrown away, and when I sat down in that eerily organized room, he presented me with a single piece of paper with a shockingly normal design for a shockingly normal family home. No moats, drawbridges, igloos, or stalagmites. No bullfighting rings, indoor slides, trenches, or underwater grottos. It was just a normal house. The construction was clear and simple: a classic boxy structure with a central living space and several rooms arranged off it. I might even go so far as to say it summed up the national character, right down to the veranda on all sides.

He had finally seen his situation clearly: to build his house he must get out, and to get out he must convince the powers that be that he was once again mentally healthy and fit for society. So he faked it. It must have been a strenuous period for him, putting all his energy into pretending to be normal; he did this single-mindedly, and talked about the Great Australian Dream and interest rates and mortgage repayments and sports teams and his employment prospects; he expressed outrage at the things that outraged his countrymen: taxpayer-funded ministerial blowjobs, corporate greed, fanatical environmentalists, logical arguments, and compassionate judges. He was so convincing in his portrayal of Mr. Average that Dr. Greg swallowed every droplet of bullshit my father sweated out for him, swelling with triumph at the conclusion of each session.

And so, four months after he entered the hospital, he was released. Dad and I went to Eddie’s house and secured his loan, which really consisted of Dad saying, “So you got the money?” and Eddie saying, “Yeah.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Dad said, after an uncomfortable silence. “Double. I’ll pay you back double.”

“Martin, don’t worry about it.”

“Eddie. You know what Nietzsche said about gratitude.”

“No, Marty, I don’t.”

“He said a man in debt wants his benefactor dead.”

“OK. Pay me back.”

After we left Eddie’s, Dad tore his design for his dream house into pieces.

“What are you doing?”

“That was just a hoax. That was just to make those bastards think I was normal,” Dad said, laughing.

“But you’re better now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I feel good. This house idea has really got me back on top.”

“So if that was a hoax, where’s the real design for our house?”

“There isn’t one. Look. Why bother fucking around with building your own house? That sounds like an enormous pilgrim’s headache.”

“So we’re not getting a house?”

“Yeah. We’re just going to buy one.”

“OK. Yeah. That sounds really good, Dad. We’ll buy a house.”

“And then we’re going to hide it,” he said, smiling so proudly I finally understood why pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and such was the repellent force of his grin, I wondered why it shouldn’t be all seven.

VI

According to him, it was an idea that arrived in one piece, completely formed: we will buy a house and hide it in a maze. The idea came to him during a psychological game of word association with Dr. Greg.

“Health.”

“Sickness.”

“Ball.”

“Testicle.”

“Ideas.”

“Complexity.”

“Home.”

“House. Hidden in a labyrinth of my own design that I will build on a large property in the bush.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I have to go back to my room for a while. Can we continue this later?”

And why did he get the idea in the first place? Maybe because labyrinths have always been a facile metaphor for the soul, or the human condition, or the complexity of a process, or the pathway to God. I discounted these as being too profound, and if I know one thing, it’s that men don’t do things for profound reasons- the things they do are sometimes profound, but their reasons are not. No, I must have inspired this whole ridiculous plan by making a gift of that silly book of mazes. The failure to complete a child’s puzzle infuriated him so that it lodged in his brain, and when the idea for designing and constructing a house came in, it either merged with the idea of the maze or wrapped around it, somehow fusing so that the two ideas became one.

“Dad. Can’t we just get a house like everyone else and not hide it?”

“Nah.”

No one could talk him out of it, not me or Eddie and especially not Dr. Greg, who learned the truth when Dad went back for a checkup. He told Dad in no uncertain terms that a labyrinth wasn’t the Great Australian Dream, which is quite right, it isn’t, but in the end no one objected too strongly, because no one but me really thought he would actually build it.

We went looking at properties out of Sydney in all directions, and each time he dashed out along the property lines, exploring the bushland, nodding his head approvingly at the trees and the space and the potential for solitude. The houses themselves seemed to be unimportant to him, and he took only a cursory look through them. Colonial? Federation? Victorian? Modern? He didn’t care. He only required that the house be surrounded on all sides by dense bushland. He wanted trees and bushes and rocks fused together, bushland so dense that even without the labyrinth walls, the natural landscape would be almost impassable.

While searching for the perfect site, he accumulated dozens of mazes from everywhere from puzzle books to old manuscripts of the labyrinths of antiquity, from Egypt to medieval England, using them mainly as inspiration, not wanting merely to copy an existing design. He labored furiously in pencil to invent a complex pattern of his own imagining that he would actually reproduce on the land. This was his first major step in altering the existing universe with his own brain, so he obsessed about the structure of the house: not only did it need to be locked up in the protective custody of the maze, but it had to serve as a palace of thinking, where Dad could wander and plot without interruption- a base for his “operations,” whatever they were. He also wanted dead ends and passages where an intruder, or “guest,” would be forced into making several critical choices between paths, resulting in disorientation and/or starvation and madness. “The unpassable path!” became his new motto. “Bloody hell!” became mine. Why? Those designs stalked my nightmares. It seemed all our future disasters were prefigured in them, and depending on which he chose, we would suffer a different disaster. At night I pored over the designs myself, trying to read our impending calamities in them.

One afternoon we went to inspect some land half an hour northwest of the city. To reach the property you had to take a private road that was a long wiggling dirt track, over which you had to bounce unevenly through burned-out forests, their charred tree trunks a warning: by living in the bush, you are living in a war zone during an unreliable ceasefire.

The property seemed custom-built for his purpose: it was dense, dense, dense. Hills with steep climbs and sudden descents, twisting gullies, large rocky outcrops, winding creeks you had to wade across, a foliage of thick scrub and waist-high grass that would require special footwear. As we surveyed the property we got lost straightaway, which Dad took as a good sign. Standing on ground that sloped gently downward, he looked at the dirt, the trees, the sky. Yes, he even examined the sun. He looked right into it. He turned to me and gave me the thumbs-up. This was the one!

Unfortunately, the house wasn’t subjected to examination at all. Me, I would’ve failed it mercilessly. It was a drafty, dilapidated old thing- no more than your classic two-story shoebox. The shag carpet was thick and ugly, and crossing the living room floor felt like walking on a hairy chest. The kitchen stank like a toilet. The toilet, covered in moss, looked like a garden. The garden was a cemetery for weeds and dead grass. The staircase creaked like drying bones. The ceiling paint had dried midbubble. Each room I encountered was smaller and darker than the room before. The upstairs hallway narrowed as you moved down it, so much that the very end of it was almost a point.

Worst of all, to get to school I would need to trek a half a kilometer through the maze, then down our long private road to the nearest bus stop so I could travel twenty minutes to the train, then ride a further forty-five minutes to the coast, where my school was located, but the bus came only three times a day, only once in the morning, and if I missed it, I missed it. I rejected Dad’s suggestion that I move to a new school in the area, because I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of making a whole new set of enemies. Better the bully you know, I reasoned.

Dad signed the papers that afternoon, and I had to accept that this insane folly was going to happen. I knew I wouldn’t last long in exile on this property, and it was only a matter of time before I’d have to move out and leave him alone, an uncomfortable thought that made me feel wretchedly guilty. I wondered if he realized it too.

He wasted no time hiring the builders, and the fact that he was not the kind of man who had any business at a building site (even if it was his own) did not stop Dad from aggravating them. They gritted their teeth as he passed on his gigantic compositions. Dad had adjusted his maze designs to fit into the natural configurations of the landscape and insisted that few trees were to be harmed. He had narrowed down his mazes to four, and instead of reducing the choices to one, he incorporated them all in one section of the property or another, so that four equally confounding conundrums were to be forced onto the land: mazes within mazes, and in the center our rather ordinary house.

I won’t go into all the dull details- the zoning ordinances, the building codes, the delineation of boundaries, the delays, the unforeseen problems like hailstorms and the unrelated disappearance of the builder’s wife, but I will say the labyrinth walls were constructed from hedges and countless rocks and massive stones and boulders and sandstone slabs and granite and thousands and thousands of bricks. Because Dad mistrusted the workmen intensely, he broke up the design and gave each section to a different team to construct. The men themselves frequently got lost among the thousand alleys and paths that emerged, and Eddie often joined us on our search parties. He would always photograph their irritated faces when we found them.

Gradually, though, the tall stone walls and oversized hedges were erected, and the house was hidden from sight. A synthesis of house and shell. Psychologically complex. Virtually inaccessible. We moved inside, willing victims of Dad’s vast and hazardous imagination.

When Anouk came back from Bali, she wasn’t surprised so much as absolutely furious that she’d missed everything: the collapse, the home for children, the mental hospital, and the building of this outrageous place. But, incredibly, she came back to work as if none of it had happened. She made Dad install an intercom system so that when she or any wanted visitors arrived, we could go and lead them through the maze to our fortified homestead. I’ll never understand that woman, I thought, but if she wants to cook and clean in a place of endless wanderings, that’s her choice.

So this is where we lived.

We were cut off and had only the natural sounds of the bush to placate, stimulate, and terrify us. The air here was different, and I surprised myself: I loved the quiet (as opposed to Dad, who developed the habit of leaving the radio on all the time). For the first time I felt the truth that the sky begins a quarter of an inch from the ground. In the mornings the bush smelled like the best underarm deodorant you ever smelled, and I quickly got used to the mysterious movements of the trees, which heaved rhythmically like a man chloroformed. From time to time the night sky seemed uneven, closer in points, then smoothed out, like a tablecloth bunched up, then suddenly pulled taut. I’d wake up to see low-lying clouds balanced precariously on the tops of trees. Sometimes the wind was so gentle it seemed to come from a child’s nostril, while other times it was so strong all the trees seemed held tenuously to the earth by roots as weak as doubled-over sticky tape.

I felt the promise of catastrophe weaken, even break, and I dared to think optimistically again about our softly stirring futures.

During a long walk around the grounds the idea hit me like a mud slide: the most striking difference between my father and me was that I preferred simplicity and he preferred complexity. Not to say I often, or ever, succeeded in achieving simplicity, only to say that I preferred it, just as he enjoyed muddying everything when he could, complicating everything until he couldn’t see straight.

One evening he was standing in the back garden staring out. It was a liquid night and the moon was just a smudge out of focus.

I said, “What are you thinking about?”

He said, “It’s a surprise.”

I said, “I don’t like surprises. Not anymore.”

He said, “You’re too young to-”

I said, “I’m not kidding. No more surprises.”

He said, “I’m not going to get another job.”

I said, “How will we live?”

He said, “We’ll live fine.”

I said, “What about food and shelter?”

He said, “We have shelter. Eddie said he’s not in a hurry for me to pay back the loan, and thanks to him, we own this property.”

I said, “And what about Anouk? How will you pay her?”

He said, “I’m giving her the back room to use as a studio. She wants somewhere to sculpt.”

I said, “And food? What about food?”

He said, “We’ll grow food.”

I said, “Steaks? We’ll grow steaks?”

Then he said, “I’m thinking about cleaning up the pond.”

In the back garden, there was a pond in the shape of a figure eight with small white stones around its perimeter. “And I might put some fish in it,” he added.

“Shit, Dad, I don’t know.”

“But this time I’ll take care of them, OK?”

I agreed.

As promised, he cleaned up the pond and put in three rare Japanese fish. They were not goldfish; they were so big and colorful they must have been the most advanced form of fish before great white sharks, and Dad fed them once a day, sprinkling the flakes in a semicircle across the pond as if in a simple, dignified ceremony.

A month or two later, I was in the kitchen with Anouk and I could see Dad in the back garden with a tub full of a white substance that he was dishing into the pond in large spoonfuls. He was whistling contentedly.

Anouk pressed her face against the window, then turned to me with a stunned look. “That’s chlorine,” she said.

“Well, that can’t be good for the fish,” I said.

“MARTIN!” Anouk screamed through the window. Dad turned swiftly, with an air of perplexity. You could see in his face, even from that distance, that the man had tasted the collapse of his own mind, a taste that hadn’t yet left his mouth. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU GREAT BIG IDIOT?” Anouk shouted. Dad continued to stare at her as if she were a puppet he had made out of wood that had startled him by speaking.

We ran outside. It was too late. The three of us stood over the dead fish, which lay on their sides, eyes bulging with disbelief.

“You know what your problem is?” Anouk asked.

“Yes,” Dad said in a soft voice. “I think I do.”

That night I was numb with cold. The fire was dying out, so I went upstairs to bed fully clothed and piled blankets on top of me. From my bed I could see a soft glow emanating from the back garden. I went to the window and looked out. Below, Dad stood in his pajamas holding a kerosene lamp that bobbed in the dark.

He was mourning those fish. He went so far as to stare at his hands in a dramatic show of guilt, looking like he was in a student production of Macbeth. For a while I watched him standing down there in the back garden, the thin sliver of moon casting a pale light on his minikingdom. The wind cut through the trees. The cicadas sang a monotonous song. Dad threw stones in the pond. I felt disgusted, but it was compelling, the sight of him.

I heard a noise behind me.

There was something in my room: a bat, a possum, or a rat. I knew I’d never sleep until it was dead or removed; I knew I’d be lying in bed in the dark awaiting the sensation of sharp, jagged teeth on my toes. That was our new house for you. Our house, where from every little crack and orifice, every hole and slit, a living thing crawled out.

I went downstairs and made myself comfortable on the couch just as Dad came in from the garden.

“I’m going to sleep down here tonight,” I said.

He nodded. I watched him browsing along his bookshelves for something to read. I turned over on my side and thought the completion of his project had introduced a new danger- he might once again render himself susceptible to a lethal twiddling of thumbs. What was he going to do now? With all that activity in his head? The house and the labyrinth had sustained him for a time and would continue to sustain him for a while longer, but they would not do so forever. Sooner or later he’d need a new project, and if one considered the progressive scale of the projects he’d already embarked on- the suggestion box, The Book of Crime, the construction of the labyrinth- it was clear that the next one would have to be enormous. Something that would, ironically, sustain him to his death and probably be the thing that killed him.

Dad settled into the reclining chair and pretended to read. I knew exactly what he was doing; he was watching me sleep. It used to bother me, that creepy habit of his. Now I found it strangely comforting- the sound of turning pages in the quiet, his wheezy breathing and heavy presence filling the corners of the room.

He turned the pages quickly. Now he was not only pretending to read, he was pretending to skim-read. I felt his eyes like a sandbag on my head, and I stretched out on the couch, let out a little moan, and after a believable period of time, pretended to dream.