A Fraction of the Whole

I

It must have been that the maze outside infected everything within. Why else would Dad leave scraps of paper around the house with nonsensical messages written on them, such as “Can’t love ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”? These messages were easily decoded by using the most basic system of cryptology, the first letter of each word in the text spelling out the real message.

“Can’t love ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”

becomes

“Clean your room!”

Then he started with transposition, where the letters were jumbled and their normal order rearranged.

“Egon ot het sposh. Kabc ralet.”

becomes

“Gone to the shops. Back later.”

Then one night, a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I found the following message stuck to the bathroom mirror:

rezizsl ta ta ixs em teme

It took me a while to decode it, because he’d rearranged the words as well as the letters. After a few minutes of scrutiny, I cracked it:

“Meet me at Sizzler at six.”

Sizzler was where we preferred to eat to celebrate good news- that is to say, we’d been there once before, five years earlier, after Dad won $46 on lotto. I rode my bike through the labyrinth to the main road and took the bus into the city to the Hotel Carlos. This particular Sizzler was located on the top floor, although you didn’t need to stay in the hotel to eat there. You could if you wanted to, of course, but truth be told, once you’d finished eating and paid your bill, they didn’t really care where you slept.

When I got there, he was already sitting at a table by the window, I suppose so we could gaze out across the cityscape during the inevitable lulls in conversation.

“So how’s school?” he asked as I sat down.

“Not bad.”

“Learn anything today?”

“The usual stuff.”

“Such as?”

“You know,” I said, and became nervous when I realized that he wasn’t looking at me. Maybe he’d heard someone say you’re not supposed to look directly into the sun and took it the wrong way.

“I have something to show you,” he said. He laid an envelope on the table and drummed his fingers on it.

I picked up the already torn-open envelope and removed the note inside. The letterhead was from my high school. As I read it, I feigned confusion, but I think it came across as a confession.

Dear Mr. Dean,

This is to officially inform you that your son, Jasper Dean, has been involved in an assault that took place on a train in the afternoon of the twentieth of April, after school. We have indisputable evidence that your son, while wearing school uniform, assaulted a man without provocation. In addition, we are writing to inform you that your son has chosen of his own volition to leave school.

Yours sincerely,

Mr. Michael Silver

Principal

“Why did they write that you were wearing your school uniform? Why is that important?”

“That’s how they are.”

Dad clicked his tongue.

“I’m not going back,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I’ve already said my goodbyes.”

“And you attacked someone? Is that true?”

“You had to be there.”

“Were you defending yourself?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Look, everything I need to know I can teach myself. I can read books on my own. Those fools need someone to turn the pages for them. I don’t.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll think of something,” I said. How could I tell him that I now wanted what he had once wanted- to travel on trains and fall in love with girls with dark eyes and extravagant lips? It didn’t matter to me if at the end of it I had nothing to show but sore thighs. It wasn’t my fault that the life of the wanderer, the wayfarer, had fallen out of favor with the world. So what if it was no longer acceptable to drift with the wind, asking for bread and a roof, sleeping on bales of hay and enjoying dalliances with barefooted farmgirls, then running away before the harvest? This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites.

But unfortunately Dad didn’t like the concept of his only son floating aimlessly through space and time, as he came to describe my life plan. He leaned back in his chair and said, “You have to finish school.”

“You didn’t finish school.”

“I know. You don’t want to follow in my footsteps, do you?”

“I’m not following in your footsteps. You don’t own the rights to quitting school.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to put my soul on the open road. See what happens.”

“I’ll tell you what happens. Road rage.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“Look, Jasper. All I know is the exact pathway to frozen dinners and unwashed laundry. I left school. I wandered aimlessly over the whole earth. I gave myself no choice but to remain exiled from society. But I put you back in school for a reason: so you could have a foot in both worlds, ours and theirs. There’s no reason to leave now as if from the scene of a crime. Stay. Finish. Then do what you want. You want to go to university? You want to get a job and settle down? You want to travel to some of the world’s most exciting dictatorships? You want to drown in a foreign river during a monsoon? Whatever. Just give yourself the option. Stay within the system for now, OK?”

“You didn’t. How many times have I heard you say, ‘Fuck the system’? Well, that’s all I’m doing. Fucking it.”

Pity us, the children of rebels. Just like you, we have the right to rebel against our father’s ways, we too have anarchies and revolutions exploding in our hearts. But how do you rebel against rebellion? Does that mean turning back to conformity? That’s no good. If I did that, then one day my own son, in rebellion against me, would turn out to be my father.

Dad leaned forward as though about to confess a murder he was particularly proud of.

“Well, if you’re going out to put your soul on the open road, I’d like to give you a warning,” he said, his eyebrows arching unattractively. “Call it a road warning. I’m just not sure how to word it.”

Dad put his thinking face on. His breathing became shallow. He spun around and shushed the couple at the table behind us. Suddenly he proceeded with his warning.

“People always complain about having no shoes until they see a man with no feet, then they complain about not having an electric wheelchair. Why? What makes them automatically transfer themselves from one dull system to another, and why is free will utilized only on details and not on the broad outlines- not ‘Should I work?’ but ‘Where should I work?’ and not ‘Should I start a family?’ but ‘When should I start a family?’ Why is it we don’t suddenly swap countries so that everyone in France moves to Ethiopia and everyone in Ethiopia moves to Britain and everyone in Britain moves to the Caribbean and so on until we have finally shared the earth like we were supposed to and shed ourselves of our shameful, selfish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical loyalty to dirt? Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?

“Listen. People are like knees that are hit with tiny rubber hammers. Nietzsche was a hammer. Schopenhauer was a hammer. Darwin was a hammer. I don’t want to be a hammer, because I know how the knees will react. It’s boring to know. I know because I know that people believe. People are proud of their beliefs. Their pride gives them away. It’s the pride of ownership. I’ve had mystical visions and found they were all so much noise. I saw visions I heard voices I smelled smells but I ignored them just as I will always ignore them. I ignore these mysteries because I saw them. I have seen more than most people, yet they believe and I do not. And why don’t I believe? Because there’s a process going on and I can see it.

“It happens when people see Death, which is all the time. They see Death but they perceive Light. They feel their own death and they call it God. This happens to me too. When I feel deep in my guts that there’s meaning in the world, or God, I know it is really Death, but because I don’t want to see Death in the daylight, the mind plots and says Listen up you won’t die don’t worry you are special you have meaning the world has meaning can’t you feel it? And I still see Death and feel him too. And my mind says Don’t think about death lalalala you will always be beautiful and special and you will never die nevernevernever haven’t you heard of the immortal soul well you have a really nice one. And I say Maybe and my mind says Look at that fucking sunset look at those fucking mountains look at that goddamn magnificent tree where else could that have come from but the hand of God that will cradle you forever and ever. And I start to believe in Profound Puddles. Who wouldn’t? That’s how it begins. But I doubt. And my mind says Don’t worry. You won’t die. Not in the long term. The essence of you will not perish, not the stuff worth keeping. One time I saw all the world from my bed, but I rejected it. Another time I saw a fire and in that fire I heard a voice telling me I would be spared. I rejected that too, because I know that all voices come from within. Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death. It is during the fiery Process that belief is produced, and if the fires are really hot they produce Certainty- Belief’s ugly son. To feel you know with all your heart Who made the universe, Who manages it, Who pays for it, et cetera, is in effect to disengage from it. The so-called religious, the so-called spiritualists, the groups that are quick to renounce the Western tradition of ‘soul-deadening consumerism’ and point out that comfort is death think it applies only to material possessions. But if comfort is death, then that should apply most profoundly to the mother of all comforts, certainty of belief- far cushier than a soft leather couch or an indoor Jacuzzi, and sure to kill an active spirit faster than an electric garage door opener. But the lure of certainty is difficult to resist, so you need one eye on the Process like me so that when I see the mystical visions of all the world and hear the half-whispered voices, I can reject them out of hand and resist the temptation to feel special and trust in my immortality, as I know it is only the handiwork of Death. So you see? God is the beautiful propaganda made in the fires of Man. And it’s OK to love God because you appreciate the artistry of his creation, but you don’t have to believe in a character because you’re impressed by the author. Death and Man, God’s coauthors, are the most prolific writers on the planet. Their output is prodigious. Man’s Unconscious and Inevitable Death have co-penned Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, to name but a few. And that’s just the characters. They created heaven, hell, paradise, limbo, and purgatory. And that’s just the settings. And what more? Everything, maybe. This successful partnership has created everything in the world but the world itself, everything that exists except for what was originally here when we found it. You get it? Do you understand the Process? Read Becker! Read Rank! Read Fromm! They’ll tell you! Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful byproduct: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from a very early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. The meaning they feel becomes channeled into their immortality projects- such as their children, or their gods, or their artistic works, or their businesses, or their nations- that they believe will outlive them. And here’s the problem: people feel they need these beliefs in order to live but are unconsciously suicidal because of their beliefs. That’s why when a person sacrifices his life for a religious cause, he has chosen to die not for a god but in the service of an unconscious primal fear. So it is this fear that causes him to die of the very thing he is afraid of. You see? The irony of their immortality projects is that while they have been designed by the unconscious to fool the person into a sense of specialness and into a bid for everlasting life, the manner in which they fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them. This is where you have to be careful. This is my warning to you. My road warning. The denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and if you are not careful, they will take you with them.”

Dad stiffened, and his tempestuous face sent me torrents of inexhaustible anxiety while waiting for me to say something complimentary and obedient. I stayed mute. Sometimes there’s nothing as snide as silence.

“So, what do you think?”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

His breathing got loud, as if he’d just run a couple of marathons with me on his back. In truth, his speech made an impression on my mind so deep, a surgeon could probably still make out the grooves. And not just because it planted a seed that would eventually make me distrust any feelings or ideas of my own that might be viewed as spiritual, but because there’s nothing more distressing or uncomfortable to look at than a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner. And that was the night I first got a good, clear look at his corner, his terrible corner, his sad dead end, where Dad had inoculated himself against having anything mystical or religious ever happen to him, so that if God came down and boogied right in his face, he’d never allow himself to believe it. That was the night I understood he was not just a skeptic who doesn’t believe in a sixth sense, but he was the über-skeptic, who wouldn’t trust or believe in the other five either.

Suddenly he threw his napkin in my face and growled, “You know what? I wash my hands of you.”

“Don’t forget to use soap,” I said back.

I guess there’s nothing unusual about it- a father and son, two generations of men, growing apart. Still, I thought back to how it used to be when I was a kid, when he carried me on his shoulders to school, sometimes right into the classroom. He’d sit on the teacher’s desk with me balancing on his shoulders and ask the shocked kids, “Has anyone seen my son?” If you compare times like that with times like this, it just makes you sad.

The waiter came by. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked. Dad stabbed him with his eyes. The waiter backed away.

“Let’s go,” Dad snapped.

“Suits me.”

We pulled our coats off the chairs. A crowd of haunted eyes followed us to the door. We walked out into the cold night air. The eyes stayed in the restaurant, where it was warm.

I knew why he was upset. In his own paradoxically neglectful way, he’d always made a significant effort to try to mold me. This was the first night he saw clearly that I wanted nothing to do with his mold. He saw me spit inside it, and he took offense. The thing is, education was the first great battle of our relationship, our continuous duel, which is why he always vacillated between threatening the public school system with arson and abandoning me to it. By leaving school of my own volition, I had made a decision that he couldn’t. That’s why he gave me that speech: after all the confused and contradictory lectures Dad had bombarded me with over the years, on topics ranging from creation to gravy to purgatory to nipple rings, wherein he tried on ideas as if he were in a dressing room trying on shirts, he had finally let me hear the core idea on which his life was based.

What neither of us knew then, of course, was that we were on the verge of another scarcely credible sequence of disasters that could be traced back to single events. They say endings can be read in beginnings. Well, the beginning of this ending was my quitting school.

So why did I really quit? Because I always wound up sitting next to the kid with the baffling rash? Or because whenever I walked into class late, the teacher made a face as if he were defecating? Or was it simply the way every authority figure was so scandalized by my behavior all the time? No, on second thought, I quite liked that; one teacher’s veins throbbed in his neck: the height of comedy. Another one turned purple with rage: a zinger! Back then nothing was funnier to me than outrage, nothing got me feeling lighter or bouncier.

No, if I’m to be honest, all those irritations only stuck me in a grinding hell of dissatisfaction; no reason to walk away from that, that’s just regular unhappiness a person is lucky to have. My true motivation for quitting school began with all those pesky suicides.

Our school was pushed as far up against the eastern seaboard as possible without actually being in the water. We had to keep the classroom windows shut to avoid the distraction of the roaring sea below, but on summer days the stifling heat left us no choice but to open them, and the teacher’s voice could hardly compete with the crashing of the waves. The school buildings, a series of connected red brick blocks, were positioned high above the water, on the edge of the Cliffs of Despondency (“Cliffs of Despair” was already taken by a bleak cliff-face a few beaches around the headland). From the end of the school oval, treacherous paths led down to the beach. If you were disinclined to take the paths, if you were impatient or you didn’t want to brave the steep descent, or if you despised yourself and your life and saw no hope for a brighter future, you could always jump. Many did. Our school averaged one suicide every nine or ten months. Of course, youth suicide isn’t uncommon; young men and women have always been sneezing to their deaths from various influenzas of the soul. But there must have been some mythical hypnotic call drifting through those half-open classroom windows, because we really had more than our share of kids propelling themselves through the celestial gateway. Not that there’s anything unusual about teenagers calling it quits, as I said, but it’s the funerals that wear you down. Christ, I should know. Even now I still dream about one particular open casket, one that might not have happened if I hadn’t had to write an essay on Hamlet for my English class.

Hamlet’s Paralysis

by Jasper Dean

The story of Hamlet is an unambiguous warning of the dangers of indecision. Hamlet is a Danish prince who can’t decide whether he should avenge his father’s death, kill himself, not kill himself, etc., etc. You wouldn’t believe the way he goes on about it. Inevitably, this tedious behavior sends Hamlet mad, and by the end of the play everyone is dead, too bad for Shakespeare if he decided later he wanted to write a sequel. The brutal lesson of Hamlet’s indecision is one for all humanity, although if your uncle has murdered your father and married your mother, you might feel it is especially relevant.

Hamlet’s name is the same as his father who is also called Hamlet and who died unpleasantly when his brother poured poison in his ear. In his ear! Not nice. Clearly, sibling rivalry was what was rotten in the state of Denmark.

Later, when his dad’s ghost beckons Hamlet to follow him, Horatio advises against it in case the ghost tries driving Hamlet insane, which he does, and Horatio also notes that everybody looking down from an unprotected large height thinks about jumping to their death which made me think, Good, it’s not just me then.

In conclusion, Hamlet is about indecision. The truth is, indecisiveness affects us all, even if we are one of those people who have no trouble making decisions. In other words, impatient shits. We suffer too. Waiting for someone else to make a decision, for example, in a restaurant when the waiter is standing right there is among life’s greatest horrors, but we must learn patience. Tearing the menu out of your date’s hand and shouting “She’ll have the chicken” is no way to combat this affliction, and it certainly won’t get you sex.

That was it. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when my English teacher, Mr. White, failed me. What more could I have expected from him, or from any other of the sluggish educators who haunted that school? I can see them even now. One teacher looks like all his vital organs not only have been removed but are being held for a ransom he can’t afford to pay. Another looks like he entered a party two minutes after everyone left and can still hear their laughter tormenting him from down the street. One sits there defiantly, like a sole ant who refuses to carry a bread crumb. Some are as cheerful as despots, others as giddy as idiots.

Then there was Mr. White: he was the teacher with the small patch of gray hair that sat on his head like the ash of a cigarette, the one who often looked like he’d just glimpsed his future in a single-sex nursing home. But worse, he was the teacher with the son in our class. OK, you can’t plan for happiness in life, but you can take certain precautions against unhappiness, can’t you? At the beginning of every class, Mr. White had to do roll call. He had to call out his own son’s name. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? A father knows whether his own son is in the room or not, surely.

“White,” he’d say.

“Here,” Brett would answer. What a farce.

Poor Brett!

Poor Mr. White!

How could either of them stand it, to have to suppress their intimacy to the extent where one pretends daily not even to recognize the face of his own kin? And when Mr. White growled at the students for their stupidity, how did Brett feel to be mauled by his own father like that? Was it a game to them? Was it real? During Mr. White’s tirades, Brett’s face was too emotionless, too frozen- I’d say he knew as well as we did that his father was a petty tyrant who treated us students as though we had deprived him of his vital years and, as revenge, predicted our future failings, then failed us to prove himself prophetic. Yes, Mr. White, you were unquestionably my favorite teacher. Your awfulness was the most comprehensible to me. You were the one visibly raging in pain, and shamelessly you did it in front of your own child.

He handed me back my Hamlet essay with a livid face. He actually gave me a mighty zero. With my essay, I’d made a joke of something that was sacred to him: William Shakespeare. Deep down, I knew that Hamlet was an extraordinary work, but when I’m ordered to complete a task, I find myself straining dumbly at the leash. Writing garbage was the form of my petty rebellion.

That night I made the mistake of showing the essay to my father. He read it squinting, grunting, nodding- basically, as if he were lifting heavy timber. I stood beside him, waiting for approval, I suppose. I didn’t get it. He handed it back to me and said, “I read something interesting today in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Did you know before the Egyptians embalmed their pharaoh, they took his brain out? Yet they expected him to reemerge later on down the centuries. What do you think they imagined he’d do there, without his brain?”

It had been a long time since my father had tried to educate me himself. To make up for abandoning me to a system he had nothing but contempt for, Dad routinely dumped piles of books in my room with little Post-it notes (“Read this!” or “This man is a motherfucking god!”) pasted onto the covers: Plato, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Epictetus, Berkeley, Kant, Popper, Sartre, Rousseau, and so on. He seemed especially to favor any writer who was a pessimist, a nihilist, or a cynic, including Céline, Bernhard, and the ultimate pessimist-poet, James Thomson, with his darkly frightening “The City of Dreadful Night.”

“Where are the women?” I asked Dad. “Didn’t they think anything worth writing down?”

The next night I found Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag waiting on my pillow.

In this way I was not self-educated so much as I was force-fed, and in truth I liked them all well enough. The Greeks, for example, had fine ideas about how to run a society that are still valid today, especially if you think slavery is wonderful. As for the rest of them, all unquestionable geniuses, I have to admit that their enthusiasm for and celebration of one kind of human being (themselves) and their fear and revulsion of the other kind (everyone else) grated on my nerves. It’s not just that they petitioned for the halting of universal education lest it “ruin thinking,” or that they did everything they could to make their art unintelligible to most people, but they always said unfriendly things like “Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas!” (D. H. Lawrence) and “If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it” (G. B. Shaw) and “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats) and “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men” (Nietzsche). Everyone else or, in other words, everyone I knew was nothing more than a corpse rotting upright mainly because of his preference for watching football over reading Virgil. “Mass entertainment is the death of civilization,” those highbrows spat, but I say, if a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by a profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched? Honestly, who cares? That man just had a wonderful inner moment, and what’s more, he got it cheap. Good for him, you ponderous fuck! Basically they thought it would be lovely if the dehumanized masses, who made them literally sick, would please either pass into history or become slaves and be quick about it. They wanted to create a race of superbeings based on their own snobby, syphilitic selves, men who sit on mountaintops all day licking their inner god into a frenzy. Personally I think it wasn’t the “plebeian desire for happiness” of the masses they hated so much, but the secret, sour acknowledgment that the plebes sometimes found it.

That’s why, just as my father had abandoned me, I’d abandoned his learned friends, all those wonderful, bitter geniuses, and at school I’d settled in comfortably doing the bare minimum. Often I’d give myself the day off and walk around the throbbing city to watch it throb or to the racetrack to watch the horses eke out their unfortunate existence under the arses of small men. Occasionally the administration would send grave, unintentionally humorous letters to my father about my attendance.

“Got another letter,” Dad would say, waving it in the air like a $10 note he’d found in an old pair of pants.

“And?”

“And what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Five days a week is too much. It’s draining.”

“You don’t have to be the first in the state, you know. Just scrape by. That’s what you should be aiming for.”

“Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m scraping.”

“Great. Just make sure you turn up enough to get the little sliver of paper with your name on it.”

“What the hell for?”

“I told you a thousand times. You need society to think you’re playing along. You do what you like later, but you need to make them think you’re one of them.”

“Maybe I am one of them.”

“Yeah, and I’m going to the office tomorrow morning at seven.”

But he wasn’t always able to leave it alone. In fact, I had achieved a certain notoriety among the faculty because of the universally dreaded and personally mortifying visits of my father, whose face would appear suddenly pressed against the frosted glass of the classroom door.

The day after I showed my father my Hamlet essay, he came into my English class and took a seat in the back, squeezing himself into a wooden chair. Mr. White had been writing the word “intertextualization” on the blackboard when Dad came in, so when he turned back to us and saw a middle-aged man among all of us fresh-faced dopes, he was confused. He glowered at my father disapprovingly, as if getting ready to chastise one of his students for spontaneously aging in the middle of a lesson.

“Bit sluggish in here, isn’t it?” Dad said.

“Pardon me?”

“I said, it’s a bit difficult to think in here, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, you are…”

“A concerned parent.”

“You are a parent of a student in this class?”

“Maybe the word ‘concerned’ is an understatement. When I think of him under your tutelage, I start bleeding from the eyes.”

“Which child is yours?”

“I’m not ashamed to admit it. My son is the creature labeled ‘Jasper.’ ”

Mr. White shot me a stern glance just as I was trying to merge with my chair. “Jasper? Is this your father?”

I nodded. What choice did I have?

“If you would like to speak with me about your son, we could make an appointment,” he said to Dad.

“I don’t need to talk to you about my son. I know my son. Do you?”

“Of course. Jasper has been in my class all year.”

“And the others? So they can read and write: well done. That’s a lifetime of shopping lists taken care of. But do you know them? Do you know yourself? Because if you don’t know yourself, you can’t help them know themselves, and you’re probably pissing away everyone’s time here simply training an army of terrified copycats like all you lackluster teachers in this state-run fleapit are prone to do, telling the students what to think instead of how, and trying to fit them into the mold of a perfect taxpayer-to-be instead of bothering to find out who they are.”

The other students laughed, out of confusion.

“Keep quiet!” Mr. White yelled, as if it were the Day of Reckoning and he had the crucial role of sorting all the souls. We shut up. It didn’t do any good. Silence that has been commanded is still very noisy.

“Why should they respect you? You don’t have any respect for them,” Dad continued, and to the students he said, “To bow down to an authority figure is to spit in your own face.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“I’m looking forward to that moment.”

“Please leave.”

“I notice you have a crucifix around your neck.”

“What of it?”

“Do I really need to spell it out for you?”

“Simon.” Mr White addressed one of the baffled students. “Would you kindly run down to the principal’s office and explain to him that we have a disturbance in the classroom and the police should be called.”

“How can you encourage your students to think for themselves with an open mind if you’ve got an outdated belief system crushing your own head like an iron mask? Don’t you see? The flexibility of your mental movement is constricted by stringent dogmatic principles, so you might think you’re standing there telling them about Hamlet, but what they really hear is a man in fear of stepping outside the tight circle that was drawn around him by long-dead men who sold his ancestors a bunch of lies so they could molest all the little boys they wanted in the privacy of their confessional booths!”

I shot a look at Brett. He sat in his chair silently; his face was slender and delicate-looking, and I thought if it were not for the hair, eyes, nose, and mouth, his face could be a pianist’s hand. Brett caught me staring at him, but I don’t think he knew I was composing similes about his face, because he smiled at me. I smiled back. If I’d known that two months later Brett would take his own life, I would’ve cried instead.

We actually spoke the morning of his death.

“Hey, Brett, do you have that five dollars you owe me?”

“Can I pay you tomorrow?”

“Sure thing.”

People are amazingly adept at faking happiness. It’s almost second nature to them, like checking a public phone for coins after making a call. Brett was a champ at it, right up until the end. Hell, I spoke to a girl who chatted with him ten minutes before he jumped, and she said they talked about the weather!

“Hey, Kristin, d-do you think it’s a southerly wind?” Brett had a slight stutter that came and went in relation to fluctuating social pressures.

“How the hell would I know?”

“It’s p-p-pretty strong, eh?”

“Why are you talking to me, zitface?”

I don’t want to make a bigger production out of Brett’s death than it was for me. He wasn’t my closest friend or even my confidant. We were allies, which in a way made us closer than friends. Here’s how it happened:

One lunchtime a small crowd had formed a circle in the quadrangle, standing so close to each other they looked woven together like an ugly quilt. I winced in anticipation. There are no private humiliations in the schoolyard; they are all mercilessly public. I wondered who was being shamed this time. I peered over the flattop haircut of the shortest link to see Brett White on the ground, blood dribbling from his mouth. According to several delighted spectators, Brett had fallen while running from another student, Harrison. Now, peering down at Brett, all the students were laughing because their leader was laughing. It’s not that these were particularly cruel children; they’d just abandoned their egos to his, that’s all, submitted their will to the will of Harrison, a bad choice. Why groups never follow the sweet, gentle child is obvious, but I wish it would happen just once. Man, as Freud noted, has an extreme passion for authority. I think his secret yearning to be dominated could really work nicely, if he would just once allow himself to be dominated by a real sweetie. Because the truth is, in a group dynamic the leader could scream, “Let’s all give the bastard a tender kiss on the cheek!” and they’d run at the poor kid with their lips pursed.

As it was, Brett’s front teeth lay on the concrete. They looked like Tic Tacs. He picked up the teeth. You could see him struggling not to cry.

I looked at the other students and despaired that none had enough compassion to go about their business. It was painful to watch all those meager spirits harassing Brett in this way. I bent down beside him and said, “Laugh like you think it’s funny.”

He followed my advice and started laughing. He whispered in my ear, “Can they put them back in?” and I laughed loudly too, as if he’d made a joke. Once I’d gotten him to his feet, the humiliations persisted. A soccer ball came flying at his face.

“Open your mouth wide, I want to get it through the posts!” someone yelled.

It was true that his teeth looked like goal posts.

“Is that really necessary?” I shouted, pointlessly.

Harrison stepped out of the crowd and, towering over me, said, “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

I groaned. I had told just one person that my grandfather was slaughtered by Nazis, and I’d never heard the end of it. Generally speaking, there wasn’t too much anti-Semitism at school, just the usual jokes about money and noses, noses and money, great big noses with money falling out of them, grubby Jewish hands stuffing money into their big Jewish noses. That kind of thing. After a while you don’t care about the ugly sentiments behind the jokes, you just wish they were funnier.

“I think you have a stupid face, Jew.”

“And I’m short too,” I said, remembering that Dad once told me the way to confuse your enemies is to respond to their insults with your own.

“Why are you so stupid?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll get to that after I work out why I’m so ugly.”

Brett caught on fast and said to me, “I’m uglier than you, and I have bad hand-eye coordination.”

“I can’t run without tripping over,” I said back.

“I’ve never kissed a girl and I probably never will.”

“I have bad acne on my back. I think it will leave lifelong scars.”

“Really? Me too.”

Charlie Mills pushed through the mob and started up too. “That’s nothing,” he said. “I’m fat, ugly, smelly, stupid, and adopted.”

Harrison stood there, confused, thinking of something to say. We all looked at him and burst out laughing. It was a good moment. Then Harrison stepped toward me with the confidence of someone who has biology on his side. He pushed me, and I tried shifting my weight onto my front foot, but it made no difference. I wound up facedown on concrete. For the second time I went home with my white shirt splattered with blood.

Eddie, Dad, and Anouk were on the veranda drinking tea, looking exhausted. There was a heavy stillness. Something told me I had just missed a heated argument. The smoke from Eddie’s clove cigarettes hung in the air. As I approached, the sight of my blood reanimated them. They all leapt to attention, as if they were three wise sages who had waited ten years for someone to ask them a question.

Anouk shouted first. “Are you being picked on by a bully? Why don’t you give him my phone number and ask him to call me? I’m sure meditation would really calm him down.”

“Pay him money,” Eddie said. “Go back and talk to him with a paper bag filled with cash.”

Not to be outparented, Dad shouted from his armchair, “Come here, boy, I want to tell you something!” I walked up the veranda steps. He slapped his knee to indicate the all-clear to sit on it. I preferred to stand. Dad said, “You know who else used to get a rubbishing? Socrates. That’s right. Socrates. That’s right. This one time he was out philosophizing with some mates, and this bloke who didn’t like what he was saying came right up to him and kicked him in the arse so hard he fell to the ground. Socrates looked up at the man and smiled at him benignly. He was taking it with amazing calm. An onlooker said, ‘Why don’t you do something, or say something?’ and Socrates said back, ‘If you were kicked by a mule, would you reprimand him?’ ”

Dad broke into howls of laughter. His body shook so badly I was glad I had opted not to sit on his knee. It was bouncing like a rodeo bull. “Get it? Get it?” Dad asked me through peals of laughter.

I shook my head, although in secret I did get it. But truth be known, I would absolutely reprimand a mule for kicking me. I might even have it put down. It’s my mule, I can do what I want. Anyway, the point of the story is I got the point of the story, but it didn’t help my situation any more than Eddie’s or Anouk’s impossible suggestions. I tell you, Dad and Eddie and Anouk, the lights I had to guide me through childhood, did nothing but lead me into brick walls.

A few weeks later I went to Brett’s house. He’d lured me there with the promise of a chocolate cake. He said he wanted to try out his teeth. As we left the school grounds, he explained how, by wiring them back into his gums, the dentist had managed to prevent the nerve from dying. To finish the job he’d had root canal treatment, during which the dentist gave him lots of gas but not quite enough to make it worthwhile.

When we arrived at his house I was disappointed to find there was no cake, and shocked when he said we’d have to make it ourselves. I thought it best to come clean with him.

“Listen, Brett. You’re OK, but I feel a little funny baking a cake with you.”

“Don’t worry. We’re not really baking anything. We’re going to make the batter and just eat that. We won’t even use the oven.”

That sounded OK, but really in the end it was not that dissimilar to making a proper cake, and when he started sifting the flour, I nearly made a run for it. I didn’t though. I held out. We finished the mixture and were just digging into it with large wooden spoons when we heard the front door open and a voice say, “I’m home!”

My body froze and stayed that way until the kitchen door opened a crack and Mr. White’s head came through the door.

“Is that Jasper Dean?”

“Hello, Mr. White.”

“Hi, Dad,” Brett said, which struck me as odd. I had stupidly assumed he called his father Mr. White at home.

Mr. White pushed the door open and came into the kitchen. “You two making a cake?” he asked, and, looking at the mixture, added, “Let me know when it’s ready and maybe I can have a piece.”

“Ready? It’s almost finished,” Brett said, beaming at his father.

Mr. White laughed. First time I’d ever seen his teeth. They weren’t bad. He came over and stuck his finger into the bowl and tasted the thick chocolate.

“So, Jasper, how’s your father?”

“You know, he is what he is.”

“He certainly gave me a run for my money,” he said, chuckling to himself.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“The world needs passionate men,” Mr. White said, smiling.

“I suppose,” I said, and as Mr. White went upstairs, I thought of all Dad’s long catatonic periods when passion meant remembering to flush the toilet.

Brett’s room was more or less a typical teenager’s room, except it was so neat I felt my breath might make a mess. There were a couple of framed photographs on the desk, including one of Brett and Mr. White standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders on an oval- they looked like actors from a mushy television movie about a father and son. It didn’t look in the least bit real. Above Brett’s bed was a great big crucifix hanging on the wall.

“What’s that for?” I asked in horror.

“It was my mother’s.”

“What happened to her?”

“Stomach cancer.”

“Ouch.”

Brett walked to the window with slow, hesitant steps, as if crossing unfamiliar terrain at night.

“You don’t have a mother either, do you? What happened to yours?”

“The Arab mafia.”

“OK, don’t tell me.”

I took a closer look at Jesus strung up there, his long-suffering face looking down at an angle. He appeared to be studying those sentimental photographs of Brett and his father. His unhurried eyes seemed to be contemplating them with a certain sadness. Maybe it made him think of his own father, or of how sometimes you get resurrected when you least expect it.

“So you guys are religious?” I asked.

“We’re Catholics. You?”

“Atheists.”

“Do you like school?” Brett asked suddenly.

“What do you think?”

“It’s not forever. That’s what I keep thinking. It’s not forever.”

“Just be grateful you’re not fat. Once you’re out in the real world, you’ll be fine. No one hates a thin man.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Brett sat on the edge of his bed, biting his fingernails. I admit now, there must have been a fog in my perception that day. I missed all the signs. I didn’t interpret the nail-biting as a cry for help or as an indication that he would soon be rotting dumbly in the earth. After Brett’s death, I dissected that afternoon in my head countless times. I thought: If only I’d known, I could have said something, or done something, anything, to change his mind. Now I wonder, why do we wish our loved ones back to life if they were so obviously miserable? Did we really hate them that much?

The day of Brett’s suicide, a Monday.

It was recess and everyone was fondly reminiscing about a Saturday night party. I was smiling because I felt lonely and unwanted, and it seemed to me that everyone in the phone book from A. Aaron to Z. Zurichman had been invited except me. I imagined what it would be like to be popular for an afternoon, and decided it meant I’d have to high-five everybody as I walked down the hallways. I wouldn’t like that, I was thinking, when I heard a voice shouting, “Somebody jumped! Somebody jumped!”

“Another suicide!”

The school bell rang and wouldn’t let up. We all crossed the oval and ran toward the cliffs. A teacher ordered us to return, but there were too many of us. You’ve heard of mass hysteria- mass curiosity is even more powerful. There was no turning us back. We reached the edge of the cliff and peered down. The waves were smashing up against the rocks, as if digesting: there was a body down there, all right, a student. Whoever it was, all the bones must have shattered on impact. It seemed as if all we were looking at was a school uniform tossed about in a washing machine.

“Who is it? Who is it?”

People were crying, grieving for someone. But who? Who were we grieving for? Students were already climbing down the steep path to see.

I didn’t have to see. I knew it was Brett. How did I know? Because Charlie was standing beside me on the cliff edge, and the only other friend I had was Brett. I had personalized the tragedy; I knew it was something for me- and I was right.

“It’s Brett White!” a voice confirmed from below.

Mr. White was standing right there, peering down like the rest of us. He straightened up and swayed on his feet. Before he ran down the path and waded into the sea and took his dead son in his arms and sobbed until the police pried Brett from his cold, wet hands, there was a long moment when everyone gaped at him and he just stood there on the cliff edge crumbling, like a Roman ruin.

II

Brett’s suicide note fell into the wrong hands. It was found in his locker by a couple of nosy students, and before it was turned in to the proper authorities it had passed around the whole school. This was it:

Don’t be sad for me unless you’re prepared to be sad your whole lives. Otherwise forget it. What good’s a couple of hard weeks of tears and regret if a month later you’re laughing again? No, forget it. Just forget it.

Personally, I thought Brett’s suicide note was pretty good. It cut right to the heart of the matter. He had measured the depth of human feeling, found it shallow, and said so. Well done, Brett, wherever you are! He didn’t fall into the trap of most suicide notes- people are always assigning blame or asking forgiveness. Rarely does anyone leave any helpful tips on what to do with his pets. I suppose the most honest and lucid suicide note I ever heard of was by the British actor George Sanders, who wrote:

Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Isn’t that gorgeous? He’s so right. It is a sweet cesspool. And by addressing the note to the world, he doesn’t worry about leaving anyone out. He’s succinct and clear in his reasons for ending his own life, makes a final poetic insight, then generously and considerately wishes us luck. I’m telling you, this is the kind of suicide note I could really go for. It’s a hell of a lot better than the crappy suicide note I once wrote. It said:

So what if life’s a gift? Haven’t you ever returned a gift? It’s done all the time.

That was it. I thought: Why not be a surly smarty-pants right to the end? If I was all of a sudden magnanimous, it just wouldn’t ring true. But really, I’m not even the suicidal type. I have this stupid habit of thinking things are going to get better, even when all evidence is pointing to the contrary, even when they get worse and worse and worse and worse.

Brett was buried in tan slacks and a blue shirt. Smart casual. Mr. White had bought the clothes two days earlier. They were on sale, but I heard he wanted to pay full price. I heard the clerk had argued with him. “Ten percent off,” he’d said, and Mr. White refused the discount and the clerk laughed as Mr. White threw the full amount on the counter and ran out, demented with grief.

Brett laid out in his coffin, hair combed back. Odor? Hair gel. Expression molded on his half-bled white face? Peaceful slumber. I thought: This is your unblinking eclipse. The long frozen plunge. Your soft awkward stutter cured by oblivion. So what’s to be sad about?

The morning of the funeral was bright and sunny. A gentle fragrant wind made everything seem frothy and not worth worrying about, almost suggesting that grief was an overreaction. The whole class had the morning off; students in other years could come too, but it wasn’t compulsory. The cemetery was conveniently located only a kilometer from the school, so we all walked together, about one hundred students and a few teachers who were there either to mourn or to supervise- both, if they had it in them. Most of the group wouldn’t have said hello to Brett while he was alive, but now they were lining up to say goodbye.

We all gathered around the grave waiting for the priest to begin, standing in the kind of silence that’s so silent the clearing of a throat can frighten you to death. I thought our school uniforms made us look like postal workers congregated to mail a colleague back to God. I imagined “Return to Sender” stenciled neatly on the casket.

The priest began. His eulogy reached me as though through a coffee filter. I got drips. He described Brett as “weary of this world” (true), “mortal and weak” (also true), and “eager to join his Lord, Our Savior” (unlikely). Finally he said melodramatically that “suicide is a mortal sin.”

Now hang on a sec!

OK, Brett took his own life, but he also answered Hamlet’s question without tearing himself all up inside, and even if suicide is a sin, surely decisiveness is rewarded. I mean, let’s give credit where credit is due. Brett answered Hamlet’s dilemma as straightforwardly as ticking a box.

To be

Not to be

I knew this sermon was just an ancient scare tactic that had survived intact through the ages while practices like draining someone’s blood with leeches when they have a runny nose had long ago been dismissed as old-fashioned. If there is a God, I doubt he is such a hard-liner. Rather, I imagine him greeting the men and women who take their own lives like a police chief surprised when a wanted criminal turns himself in. “You!” he might say, not angry so much as slightly disappointed that he won’t get the credit or the satisfaction for the capture.

The casket was lowered, and the sound of hard clumps of dirt hitting its lid made it sound empty. Brett was thin. I’d told him that no one hates a thin man. No one, I thought now, except hungry worms.

Time passed. The sun like a golden lozenge dissolved as it slid across the sky. I watched Mr. White the whole time. He stood out as luminously as if he’d been highlighted in yellow fluorescence. He was suffering the ultimate public humiliation: through neglect or faulty parenting, he’d lost his son, as surely as if he’d put him on the roof of his car and driven away without remembering to take him off.

After the sermon, the principal, Mr. Silver, walked over and placed his hand on Mr. White’s shoulder. He twitched violently and shrugged off the hand. As he walked away, I thought: Well, Brett, there goes your father, there he goes to pack away your hollow shirts and your empty pants.

That’s what I really thought.

Back at school, a special assembly was held in the quadrangle. A counselor stood up and talked about youth suicide. He asked us all to reach out to our wobbly peers and be on the lookout for signs. His description of a suicidal teenager sent little shockwaves through the crowd. He had described every person there. That gave them something to think about. The bell rang and everyone wandered off to class except our year. The decision from above was that we were just too sad to learn calculus. I felt understandably unsettled. I could feel Brett’s presence. I saw him on the podium, then his face in the crowd. I was certain that pretty soon I’d be seeing his head on my own neck. I knew I’d have to abandon that place, just leave it behind and not look back. I could see the school gate was wide open, tempting me. What if I made a run for it? Or even better: what if I walked?

My reverie was interrupted by the sound of some metaphysical finger-pointing. Several students were discussing the possibilities of Brett’s current location. Where was he now? Some said he was in heaven; others supposed he was back where he started, in the subarctic darkness, wondering when he’d move up in the reincarnation queue. Then someone with Catholic tendencies said, “His soul will burn forever, you know,” and I couldn’t let such a nasty thought sit there without spitting on it, so I said, “I think you should find whoever does your thinking for you and ask them to update.”

“Well, what do you think happened to Brett’s soul, then?”

“Nothing. Because he hasn’t got one. Neither have I. Neither have you.”

“Yes I do!”

“No you don’t!”

“Do too!”

“Do not!”

“You don’t believe in the soul?”

“Why should I?” I asked.

You should’ve seen the looks I got! When you say you don’t believe in the soul, it’s hilarious! People look at you as if the soul, like Tinker Bell, needs to be believed in in order for it to exist. I mean, if I have a soul, is it really the kind of soul that needs my moral support? Is it as flimsy as all that? People seem to believe so; they think that doubting the soul means you are the Soulless, the one lone creature wandering the wasteland without the magic stuff of infinity…

III

So did I quit school out of some sort of magnanimous allegiance to my dead friend? A symbolic protest prompted by my heart? I wish.

It didn’t happen that way at all.

I suppose I’d better come clean.

The afternoon of the funeral I received a package in the mail. It contained a single red rose and a short letter. It was from Brett, my cold dead friend.

Dear Jasper,

There’s a tall, beautiful girl with long red flaming hair in the year above us. I don’t know her name. I’ve never spoken to her. I’m looking at her right now as I write this. I am staring right at her! She’s reading. She’s always so engrossed in reading, she doesn’t look up, even as I sit here mentally undressing her.

Now I have her right down to her underwear! It’s infuriating how she just keeps on reading like that, reading in the sun. Stark naked. In the sun.

Please hand her this rose and tell her I loved her, and will love her, always.

Your friend,

Brett

I folded the note and placed it in the bottom of a drawer. Then I went back to Brett’s grave and laid down the rose and left it there. Why didn’t I give it to the girl he loved? Why didn’t I carry out the dead kid’s final wish? Well, for one thing, I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of running all over town dotting i’s and crossing t’s for the deceased. Secondly, it seemed to me unreasonably cruel to implicate this poor girl in a suicide, this girl who never even knew he was alive. Whoever she was, I was sure she had enough on her plate without having to wear the guilt of the death of someone whom she couldn’t have picked out of a crowd of two.

The next day I went up to the plateau above the school- the flat, treeless patch of parched earth where the eldest students loitered arrogantly. That’s how they were. They held themselves above the rest of the school, as if making it all the way to the final year was comparable to surviving a third tour of duty in Vietnam. I went out of curiosity. Brett had taken his life while in love with a tall girl with red hair. Was she the cause? Who was she? Did he really die, not from the torment of bullies, but from frustrated desire? Secretly I hoped so, because every time I saw Harrison around school it made me sick to think that Brett had died because of him. I was eager to replace him with a worthier cause of death. That’s what I was searching for. A girl worth dying for.

Unfortunately for me, I found her.

While I’ve got a pretty good memory, I’m the first to admit that some of my recollections should be called in for questioning. The fact is, I’m not above deluding myself and getting away with it, which is why, as I visualize the girls from my high school, I can only guess that I’m romanticizing. In my mind’s eye they look like sexy-celebrity-hooker-fantasy-music-video schoolgirls. That can’t be right. I see them wearing white unbuttoned shirts with exposed black lacy bras and dark green miniskirts and long cream socks and black buckled shoes. I see them floating on pale legs through narrow halls, their hair billowing behind them like flames in a strong wind. That can’t be right either.

This I am sure of: the girl Brett loved was tall and pale-skinned, with flaming red hair falling down her back, shoulders as smooth as eggs, and legs as long as an underground pipeline. But her dark brown eyes, often hidden behind an unevenly cropped fringe, were her secret weapon: she had a look that could have toppled a government. She also had a habit of running her tongue around the tip of her pen. It was very erotic. One day I stole her pencil case and kissed every last biro. I know how that sounds, but it was a very intimate afternoon, just me and the pens. When Dad came home he wanted to know why my lips were stained with blue ink. Because she writes in blue, I wanted to tell him. Always blue.

She was half a foot taller than me, and with that flaming red hair she looked like a skyscraper on fire. Thus I called her the Towering Inferno, but not to her face. How could I? That beautiful face and I hadn’t been introduced. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen her before- maybe because I took every third day off school. Perhaps she did the same, only on alternate days. I followed her around the school grounds at a distance, trying to see her from every conceivable angle to get the three-dimensional mental image my fantasies deserved. Sometimes, as she moved lightly through the grounds, seeming to weigh only slightly more than her own shadow, she sensed I was there, but I was too quick for her. Whenever she turned I’d pretend to be looking at the sky, counting clouds.

But shit! I could suddenly hear my father’s grating voice telling me I was looking to deify the human because I hadn’t the stomach for God. Yeah, maybe. Maybe I was in a bid for self-transcendence, projecting onto this tall succulent woman in order to release myself from my solitary carnival of despair. Fine. That was my right. I just wish I could’ve been oblivious of my unconscious motivations. I wanted just to enjoy my lies like everyone else.

I couldn’t think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It’s just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn’t got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn’t that abnormal. That’s what a first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.

For a while the roles in our relationship were easily definable. I was the lover, the stalker, the sun-worshipper. She was loved, stalked, worshipped.

A couple of months passed in that way.

After Brett’s suicide, Mr. White went right back to teaching. It was a bad decision on his part. He didn’t do what everyone should do after a monumental personal tragedy- run away, grow a beard, sleep with a girl exactly half your age (unless you are twenty). Mr. White didn’t do anything like that. He just came into class, same as before. He didn’t even have the sense to order the removal of Brett’s desk- it just sat there, empty, tipping his scales of grief all the way over.

On his better days, he looked like he’d been woken from a deep sleep. Mostly like he’d been exhumed from his own grave. He didn’t yell anymore. We suddenly found ourselves straining to hear him, as if trying to pick up the beat of a weak pulse. Even though he was obviously suffering to the point of becoming a caricature of suffering, he got (not surprisingly) little empathy from his pupils. They only noticed that before he had been industrially furious and now he was utterly remote. Once he lost the essays the class had written. He pointed listlessly to me. “They’re somewhere in my car, Jasper, go look for them,” he said, throwing me the keys. I went to his car. A Volkswagen covered in dust. Inside I found empty food containers, wet clothes, and a prawn, but no essays. When I went back empty-handed, he gave the class an exaggerated shrug. That’s how he was. And at the sound of the bell, when the students rapidly stuffed their books into their bags, wasn’t Mr. White packing up his things faster than anyone? It was almost like a competition, and now he always won. Yet for some reason he stayed on in his job, day after miserable day.

On day after class he asked me to wait behind. All the other students winked at me to signify they thought I was in trouble and it pleased them to know it. But it was only that Mr. White wanted the recipe of the chocolate cake Brett and I had made that day. I told him I didn’t know it. Mr. White nodded for an unnaturally long time.

“Do you believe in the Bible, Jasper?” he asked suddenly.

“In the same way I believe in ‘Hound of the Baskervilles.’ ”

“I think I understand.”

“The problem is most of the time when God’s supposed to be the hero, he comes across as the villain. I mean, look at what he did to Lot ’s wife. What kind of divine being turns a man’s wife into a pillar of salt? What was her crime? Turning her head? You have to admit this is a God hopelessly locked in time, not free of it; otherwise he might have confounded the ancients by turning her into a flat-screen television or at least a pillar of Velcro.”

From the look on Mr. White’s face, I could tell he wasn’t following the lucid argument I was, not proudly, plagiarizing from one of Dad’s midnight sermons. Anyway, what was I talking about? Why was I haranguing a man who looked like the rotting stump of an old tree? It seemed I was able to do anything for a suffering man except be nice to his Deity.

What I should’ve said was this: “Why don’t you quit? Get out of here! Change schools! Change jobs! Change lives!”

But I didn’t.

I let him go on thrashing about in his cage.

“Well, anyway, I guess you’d better get to your next class,” he said, and the way he fiddled with his tie made me want to burst into tears. That’s the problem with people who suffer right in your face. They can’t so much as scratch their noses without its being poignant.

Not long after that, Dad came to pick me up from school. That wasn’t as rare as you might think. After exhausting his daily activities- waking up (an hour), breakfast (half hour), reading (four hours), walking (two hours), staring (two hours), blinking (forty-five minutes), he’d come and get me as “something to do.”

When I arrived at the school gate, Dad was already waiting for me in his unwashed clothes, his face carelessly shaven.

“Who is that grim man gaping at me?” he said as I arrived.

“Who?”

I turned to see Mr. White peering at us from the classroom window in a trance, as if we were doing something strange and fascinating, and I suddenly felt like a monkey to Dad’s organ grinder.

“That’s my English teacher. His son died.”

“He looks familiar.”

“He should. You harassed him for about forty minutes one day.”

“Really? What do you mean?”

“You came into the class and abused him for no reason. You don’t remember?”

“Honestly- no. But who keeps track of things like that? You say he lost his son, eh?”

“Brett. He was my friend.”

Dad looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“He wasn’t my best friend or anything,” I said. “We were just, you know, hated by the same people.”

“How did he die? Drug overdose?”

“Suicide.”

“Suicide by drug overdose?”

“He jumped off a cliff.”

Dad turned back to Mr. White’s sad face peering out the window. “I think I might go and talk to him.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not? The man’s grieving.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly,” Dad agreed, though to a totally different idea from mine, because the next thing I knew he was striding over to the classroom window. The two of them stared at each other through the glass. I could see it all. I could see Dad tap on the window. I could see Mr. White open the window. I could see them talking amiably at first, then seriously, then Mr. White was crying and Dad had his arm through the window, resting it on Mr. White’s shoulder, even though the angle was awkward and unnatural. Then Dad came back over to me, his lips pursed as if whistling, though he wasn’t. He was just pursing his lips.

After this shadowy conference, Mr. White went crazy in class. Of course, after his outburst, no matter how much they made short gasping sounds and said things like “I don’t believe it!,” no one on the staff was really surprised, and they couldn’t even see what I could see all over Mr. White’s sudden eruption: Dad’s influence.

It happened like this: One morning Mr. White came to class with the face of a thumb that had soaked too long in the bath. Then he commenced the lesson by staring wide-eyed and penetratingly, singling out students with his eyes without letting up, then moving on to the next student. No one could match him. You couldn’t sustain eye contact with a pair of peepers like his. All you could do was lower your eyes and wait for him to pass over you, like the Angel of Death. He was leaning against his desk, this hollow man with the X-ray eyes. It was morning and I remember the windows were open; a layer of milky mist wafted in, and the air was so thick with the sea you could almost taste the plankton. There was an oppressive silence, just the sound of the ocean rising up and falling on the shore. The students watched him in breathless suspense.

“It’s funny that you need training to be a doctor or a lawyer but not to be a parent. Any dolt can do it, without so much as a one-day seminar. You, Simon, you could be a father tomorrow if you wanted.”

Everyone laughed, and rightly so. Simon was not someone you could imagine fucking anyone, ever.

“Why are you here? Not just in this class, but in the world? Do you think your parents wondered why they had you? Listen to what people say when they have new babies: ‘It’s the best thing I ever did in my life,’ ‘It’s magical, blahblahblah.’ They’ve done it for their own enchantment, to satiate their own emotional needs. Have you ever noticed that? That you’re a projection of other people’s desires? How does that make you feel?”

No one said anything. It was the right thing to say. Mr. White moved through the desks to the back of the classroom. We didn’t know whether to keep our eyes forward or to turn them toward him or to tear them out.

“What do your parents want of you?” he shouted from the back. We swiveled to face him. “They want you to study. Why? They’re ambitious for you. Why? They look at you as their personal fucking property, that’s why! You and their cars, you and their washing machines, you and their televisions. You belong to them. And not one of you is any more to them than the opportunity to fulfill their failed ambitions! Ha-ha-ha! Your parents don’t love you! Don’t let them get away with saying ‘I love you’! It’s disgusting! It’s a lie! It’s just a cheap justification for manipulating you! ‘I love you’ is another way of saying, ‘You owe me, you little bastard! You represent the meaning of my life because I couldn’t give it to myself, so don’t fuck it up for me!’ No, your parents don’t love you- they need you! And a hell of a lot more than you need them, I can tell you that!”

The students had never heard anything like it. Mr. White stood there breathing noisily, as if through a clogged tube.

“Christ, I’m getting out of here,” he said suddenly, and left the room.

Unsurprisingly, within hours the whole school had feasted on the scandal, only it came all distorted: some said he had attacked his students; other said he tried to whip a whole bunch of them with his belt. And more than a few whispered that unmentionable word that people hate (read, “love”) to mention these days: pedophile!

I wish that was the end of it. I wish I could end on that happy note. Happy? In comparison with what happened next, yes. What took place that same afternoon sits solidly in history as my first official regret, remaining to this day number one. Any good I’d done in my life up to that afternoon was about to be demolished, and any good I’ve done since has been an attempt to make up for what I did.

Here’s what I did: I followed the Towering Inferno all day. I watched her reading in the sun, as Brett described, pulling compulsively at her stockings with her cobalt-blue fingernails. I followed her across the school grounds as she clutched the hand of a girl with a face like a spade. At lunch I stood behind her in the canteen while she ordered a meat pie, and when the woman wasn’t looking she grabbed a handful of squeezable tomato sauce packets and shoved them in her pocket, then sauntered off, having adorably stolen complimentary items.

In the afternoon I trailed Mr. Smart, the biology teacher, as he chased her through the musty halls. When he caught her, she held her head as if it were an heirloom.

“Why weren’t you in class?” he demanded.

“I have my period,” she replied defiantly, with a look that said, “Prove I don’t.” Good one! The broken man cast his eyes to the floor, wishing he were at home with that weird collection of moss he brought in one time.

After school we used to stand around at train stations for hours (try doing that into your twenties- the thrill is gone, believe me). The train guards were always telling us to go home, but there’s really no law against standing on the platform not catching trains. That afternoon I shadowed the Towering Inferno to the far end of the station. She was standing with her usual crowd and I was gaping from behind a pylon thinking my usual obsessive thoughts: wishing she would fall into some danger so I might rescue her, spitting on myself for fetishizing a girl I’d never met, longing to take a personal memento from her as a holy relic, indulging in a sexual fantasy in which we intersect at right angles, and generally planning a systematic exploration of her cathedral-like edifice.

She and her friends kept edging farther down the platform, so to keep my eyes on her I had to step out from my hiding place. One of her friends- Tony, a boy with a slight hunch I knew because he had once taken a pack of cigarettes from me in exchange for the observation that my eyes were set too close together- unzipped his fly and gyrated his crotch in the Towering Inferno’s general direction. She turned away in disgust and found herself trapped in my stare. It caught us both off guard. Then a strange thing happened: she stared back. Her eyes, unblinking and wild, dared me not to look away. The moment stretched its way into infinity, then snapped back to about a nanosecond and rebounded, so all in all it lasted about eight and a half seconds.

I turned away and moved to a public phone. I put some coins in the slot and dialed a number at random.

“Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s me. Is that you?”

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“Never mind that,” I said. “How are you?”

“Who is this?”

“I told you. It’s me.”

I could still feel the Towering Inferno’s eyes on me. I knew what to do: I shook my head vehemently and laughed a loud, unnatural laugh before pausing to nod sagely, as though the person on the other end of the phone had made a funny yet offensive comment that on further reflection proved wise. I turned casually to face her, but her back was turned. I felt a tiny thorn prick my ego.

It was getting dark. Everyone wordlessly agreed that loitering on the station platform had gone stale- until tomorrow- and when the next train arrived, we all filed in.

At the other end of the packed carriage there was a commotion, and a small crowd formed a circle- bad news for someone. Circles of people always are. Honestly, sometimes I think human beings should be prohibited from forming groups. I’m no fascist, but I wouldn’t mind at all if we had to live out our lives in single file.

I heard happy cheers and joyous laughter. That meant someone was suffering. My heart felt sick for the poor sucker. Thankfully Charlie was home sick and Brett was dead, so whoever they were humiliating this time had nothing to do with me. Still, I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.

Mr. White.

The students had torn the hat off his head and were waving it in the air, asserting their power over him. Mr. White was trying to get the hat back. Ordinarily even the most rebellious young crackhead can’t physically assault a teacher- emotionally and psychologically, sure; physically, no- but Mr. White was a teacher made evil by gossip, and that made him fair game.

“Hey!” I shouted.

Everyone looked over at me. This was my first stand against the bullies, against the ruthlessness of the human pack animal, and I was determined not to disappoint myself. But then four things happened in quick succession.

The first was that I noticed the person holding the hat was the Towering Inferno.

Second, my shouting “Hey!” was interpreted not as a heroic “Hey” but a “Hey, throw me the hat.”

She threw it to me.

I caught it with my cheek. It rolled on the floor, toward the door. Mr. White trudged through the carriage after it.

The third thing that happened was that the Towering Inferno yelled out, “Get it, Jasper!”

She knew my name. Oh my God. She knew my name. I ran like a maniac for the hat. I grabbed it. Mr. White stopped midcarriage.

Then the fourth thing, the final painful event, was her delicate high-pitched voice commanding me again: “Throw it out!” I was under a spell. I half pushed open the train door, enough for my hand to hang outside the carriage. The brim of the hat danced a waltz with the wind. Mr. White’s face had frozen with a sort of forced nonchalance. I felt sick.

Sick. Sick. Sick. Self-hatred was at an all-time high. Why was I doing this? Don’t do it, Jasper. Don’t do it. Don’t.

I did it.

I let go of the hat. The wind picked it up and threw it out of sight. Mr. White ran toward me. I bolted for the door at the end of the carriage. Rain smacked me in the face. I opened the door of the next carriage, ran in, and closed it behind me. He tried to follow, but I blocked the door with my foot. He stood in the rain on the tiny rattling platform between the two carriages, trying to force it open. I tied the strap from my bag to the door handle, held it down with my other foot, and let physics do the work. In no time he was drenched to the bone. He swore through the glass. Finally he gave up and turned back. The others had blocked the other door. It rained harder. He turned back to me, banged on the glass door again. I knew if I let him in, he’d have me for lunch. He was stuck. It rained even harder, a stiff hard rain. Mr. White stopped screaming and just looked at me with old-dog eyes. I felt something in me sink, but there was nothing I could do. At the next stop we both watched the Towering Inferno step onto the platform. Through the dusty window, she gave me a smile that said, “I’ll never forget what you did for me, Jasper Dean, Destroyer of Hats.”

The following morning I walked through the long, airless hallways and silent stairwells into the quadrangle for a special assembly. The headmaster stepped up to the podium. “Yesterday afternoon, our English teacher, Mr. White, was terrorized by students from this school!” A murmur snaked through the crowd. The headmaster continued his diatribe. “I would like the students involved to please step forward.” Everyone looked around to see if anyone was owning up. I looked around too. “Right. We’ll just have to find you. And we will find you. You are all dismissed. For now.”

I walked away thinking that my time at this school was almost up, and it wasn’t twenty minutes later in the science lab that the bell rang and rang and rang, and I heard that old delighted cry of “Someone’s jumped! Someone’s jumped!” I ran out of the classroom while the bell kept on ringing. It was the suicide bell- I think we were the first school in the country to have one; now they’re all the rage. Like inquisitive sheep, all the students ran to the cliff edge to see, and I had not just a bad feeling but the worst one, that feeling of dread, because I knew who it was and that I had put him there myself.

I peered over the cliff edge and saw Mr. White’s slumped body thrashed by the waves on the rocks.

That afternoon it was as if I were looking at life through a rolled-up newspaper. I had drained the remaining dregs of innocence from my heart. I had put a man in the ground, or at least aided his descent, and I loathed myself into the future and beyond. Well, why shouldn’t I? You shouldn’t forgive all your trespasses. You can’t always go too easy on yourself. In fact, in some circumstances, forgiving yourself is unforgivable.

I was sitting behind the gym with my head in my hands when a school prefect, a sort of benign Hitler youth, came up and told me the principal wanted to see me. Well, that’s that, I thought. I walked to the principal’s office and found that his pliable face had been shaped into a picture of weariness.

“Mr. Silver,” I said.

“I understand you were a friend of Brett’s.”

“That’s right.”

“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind reading a psalm at Mr. White’s funeral.”

Me? The murderer reading a psalm at the funeral of his victim? As the principal went on telling me about my role in the funeral proceedings, I wondered if this weren’t some sort of clever punishment, because I felt transparent sitting there, maybe even more see-through than that- I felt like the site of an archaeological dig, my old clay pot thoughts revealing all about the civilization that had ruled there in its ignorant and doomed way.

I said that I would be honored to read a psalm at the funeral.

What else was I going to say?

That night I read it over. It had everything you’d expect in a psalm: heavy-handedness, hit-you-over-the-head metaphors, and Old World symbolism. I tore it out of the Bible thinking: I’m not lending my voice to this oppressive nonsense. Instead I chose a passage from one of Dad’s favorite books, one he’d horrified me with a couple of years earlier, one that had seared my brain. It was a passage by James Thomson from his book of poetry, The City of Dreadful Night.

The morning of the funeral, I was called again to the principal’s office. I went thinking he wanted to go over the running order of the event. I was surprised to see the Towering Inferno waiting outside his office, leaning against the wall. So we’d been fingered for the crime after all. It’s just as well, I thought.

“We’re fucked,” she said.

“We deserve it,” I said back.

“I know. Who’d have thought he’d react so badly?”

“No talking,” Mr. Silver snapped as he opened the door and beckoned us in. The Towering Inferno flinched as though slapped, and I wondered at what age she had discovered she possessed the power to convince men to throw hats out of trains. If I asked her now, would she remember the day? The moment? The event? What I wouldn’t give to exchange the tale of her strength for the saga of my weakness.

In the office there was a skinny middle-aged woman sitting with her hands in her lap, her narrow eyes closing a quarter of an inch with every step I took into the room.

“Well, you two,” the principal said, “what do you have to say for yourselves?”

“She didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “It was me.”

“Is that true?” he asked the Inferno.

She nodded guiltily.

“That’s not true,” the woman said, pointing at me. “He did it, but she was ordering him around.”

I took offense at that, because it was true. I stood up and placed my hands on the principal’s desk. “Sir, just take one second and look at the girl you are accusing. Are you looking at her?” He was looking at her. “She’s a victim of her own beauty. Because why? Because beauty is power. And as we learned in history class, power corrupts. Therefore, absolute beauty corrupts absolutely.”

The Towering Inferno stared at me. Mr. Silver cleared his throat.

“Well, Jasper, it’s unforgivable what you’ve done.”

“I agree. And you don’t have to suspend me, because I’m quitting this place.” He bit his lip. “You still want me to read at the funeral?”

“I think you should,” he said, in a cold, serious voice.

Damn. I knew he was going to say that.

The funeral was more or less a repeat of Brett’s: everyone standing there as if dignity mattered, the polished smile of the priest making your eyes squint, the sight of the coffin closing in on you. The Towering Inferno was staring at me, though I didn’t want to be stared at just then. I wanted to be alone with my guilt. Despite myself, I looked at her, the Angel of Death with great legs. Without even knowing it, she was the central figure in demolishing a family.

I peered over the cold body of Mr. White and silently pleaded: Forgive me for throwing your hat out of the train! I didn’t know your head was still inside! Forgive me! Forgive me for throwing you out of a moving train!

The priest nodded at me, the nod of a man tight with Omniscience.

I got up to read.

They were all expecting the psalm. Instead, this is what I read:

“Who is the most wretched in this dolorous place?

I think myself; yet I would rather be

My miserable self than He, than He

Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

“The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou

From whom it had its being, God and Lord!

Creator of all woe and sin! Abhorred,

Malignant and implacable! I vow

“That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,

For all the temples to Thy glory built,

Would I assume the ignominious guilt

Of having made such men in such a world.”

I finished and looked up. The priest was gnashing his teeth just as it’s described in his favorite book.

IV

After returning home from Sizzler, I stood alone in the labyrinth, staring at the moon, which looked to be just an empty wreck of a rock, burned out, as if God had done it for the insurance.

“I’m worried,” Dad said, coming up behind me.

“What about?”

“My son’s future.”

“I’m not.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Go overseas.”

“You don’t have any money.”

“I know I don’t have any money. I know what an empty pocket feels like. I’ll make some.”

“How?”

“I’ll get a job.”

“What kind of job? You don’t have any skills.”

“Then I’ll get an unskilled job.”

“What kind of unskilled job? You don’t have any experience.”

“I’ll get some.”

“How? You need experience to get a job.”

“I’ll find something.”

“Who’ll employ you? No one likes a quitter.”

“That’s not true.”

“OK, then. Who likes a quitter?”

“Other quitters.”

Dad left me with a melodramatic sigh that trailed after him like a smell. I don’t know how long I stood in the cold trying to see past the veil covering my future. Should I be a baker of a male stripper? A philanthropist or a roadie? A criminal mastermind or a dermatologist? It was no joke. I was caught in a brainstorm, and ideas were clamoring for prime position. Television presenter! Auctioneer! Private investigator! Car salesman! Train conductor! They arrived without invitation, made their presentation, then made way for the others. Some of the more persistent ideas tried to sneak back in. Train conductor! Television presenter on a train! Car salesman! Train salesman!

I spent the next day staring into empty space. I get a lot of joy out of air, and if sunlight hits the floating specks of dust so you see the whirling dance of atoms, so much the better. During the day Dad breezed in and out of my room and clicked his tongue, which in our family means “You’re an idiot.” In the afternoon he came back in with a loaded grin. He had a brilliant idea and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to throw me out of the house, and what did I think of his brainwave? I told him I was concerned about him eating all his meals alone, because the clinking of cutlery on a plate echoing through an empty house is one of the top five depressing noises of all time.

“Don’t worry. I have a plan for throwing you out. We, you and me, are going to build you a hut to live in. Somewhere on the property.”

A hut? “How the hell are we going to build a hut? What do we know about building? Or huts?”

“The Internet,” he said.

I groaned. The Internet! Ever since the Internet, complete idiots have been building huts and bombs and car engines and performing complicated surgical procedures in their bathtubs.

We settled on a clearing in the maze next to a circle of sinewy gum trees and only a few meters from a freshwater creek, and the following morning, under an orange-copper sky, we started chopping trees as if we were mythic Germanic creatures in an early Leni Riefenstahl film.

I couldn’t stifle the thought that my life had taken a disappointing turn- I had only just left school and I was already doing hard manual labor. Every time the blade of the ax hit timber I felt my spine move a couple of millimeters to the left, and that first day for me was all about raising complaining to a high art. The second day was even worse- I dislocated my shoulder. The third day I said I needed to look for work and so I went into the city and saw three movies in a row, all of them bad, and when I returned I was shocked to see that an enormous amount of work had been done on the hut.

Dad was leaning on his ax, wiping sweat from his brow onto his pants. “I worked like a bastard today,” he said. I looked steadily into his eyes and knew at once that he had called in outside help.

“How’s the job hunt?” he asked.

“I’m closing in.”

“Attaboy.” Then he said, “Why don’t you have a crack at construction tomorrow? I’m going to spend the day in the library.”

And so I dug into the savings he kept in a hollowed-out copy of Rousseau’s Confessions and called a builder of my own.

“Just do as much as you can,” I said.

And in this manner the place was built. We’d alternate. One day I’d pretend to build the hut single-handed, then the next day he’d pretend to build the hut single-handed, and I don’t know what any of this meant, only that it proved we both had damaged, underhand characters. The upshot was, the shack was taking shape. The ground was cleared. The frame erected. The floor laid. The roof beams raised. The door fastened on with hinges. Windows where windows should be. Glass in them. The days growing longer and warmer.

During this time I went for a job with an advertising agency, even though there was something condescending about the way the ad wanted a “junior.” I entered a sterile cement shanty, shuffled along dark, joyless corridors where a large clone army slid by me, smiling with urgency. In the interview, a guy named Smithy told me I’d get four weeks off a year for cosmetic surgery. The job was data entry clerk. I started the next day. The ad didn’t lie- I entered data. My coworkers were a man who smoked cigarettes that were mysteriously lipstick-stained in the pack and an alcoholic woman who tried very hard to convince me that waking up in the revolving door of the Hyatt Hotel was something to be proud of. I loathed that job. The good days passed like decades, the so-so days like half centuries, but mostly it felt as if I were frozen in the eye of an everlasting time-storm.

The night the hut was finished, Dad and I, two lying fakers, sat on the front porch and toasted the achievement that was not our own. We saw a star fall and tear a long thin strip of white in the black sky.

“Did you see that?” Dad asked.

“Shooting star.”

“I made a wish,” he said. “Should I tell you what it was?”

“Better not.”

“You’re probably right. Did you make a wish?”

“I’ll make one later.”

“Don’t wait too long.”

“As long as I don’t blink, the power of the star is still good.”

My fingers held my eyelids wide open while I contemplated my wishing options. It was an easy choice. I wanted a woman. I wanted love. I wanted sex. Specifically, I wanted the Towering Inferno. I worked all this into one wish.

Dad must have read my mind, or made a similar wish, because he said, “You’re probably wondering why I’ve been single most all my life.”

“It’s kind of self-explanatory,” I said.

“Do you remember I told you one day about a girl I once loved?”

“Caroline Potts.”

“I still think about her.”

“Where is she now?”

“ Europe probably,” he said. “She was the love of my life.”

“And Terry was the love of hers.”

We finished our beers and listened to the gurgling of the creek.

“Make sure you fall in love, Jasper. It’s one of the greatest pleasures there is.”

“A pleasure? You mean like a hot bath in winter?”

“That’s right.”

“Anything else?”

“It makes you feel alive, really alive.”

“That sounds good. What else?”

“It confuses you so you don’t know your arse from your elbow.”

I thought about that. “Dad,” I said, “so far you’ve described love as a pleasure, a stimulant, and a distraction. Is there nothing else?”

“What more do you want?”

“I don’t know. Something higher or deeper?”

“Higher or deeper?”

“Something more meaningful?”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure.”

We had reached an impasse, and turned our eyes back to the heavens. The night sky just disappoints after a falling star has fallen from sight. Show’s over, the sky says. Go home.

That night I wrote a nice little blackmail note to the Towering Inferno:

I’m considering changing my story and telling the principal it was you who orchestrated the hat incident on the train. If you would like to talk me out of it, come to my house anytime. Come alone.

You don’t think you can blackmail a woman into loving you? Well, maybe you can’t, but it was my last card and I had to play it. I perused the note. It was just the way a blackmail letter should read: concise and demanding. But…my pen wriggled in my hand. It wanted to add something. OK, I conceded, but I remembered that brevity is the soul of extortion. I wrote: P.S. If you don’t show up, then don’t think I’ll be waiting like a fool. But if you do come, I’ll be there. And then I wrote on a little; I wrote about the nature of expectation and disappointment, about lust and memories; and about people who treat use-by dates as though they were holy commandments. It was a fine note. The blackmail element was short, only three lines. The P.S. was twenty-eight pages long.

On my way to work I popped it in the mailbox outside the post office and five minutes later almost broke my hand trying to get it out. Honestly, they knew what they were doing designing those mailboxes- you really can’t get into them. I tell you, those little red fortresses, they’re impenetrable!

Two days later I was in a deep sleep, trapped in an unpleasant dream where I was at a swimming carnival and when it came my turn to swim they drained the pool. I was on the swimmer’s block and the crowd booed me because I wasn’t wearing anything and they didn’t like what they saw. Then all of a sudden I was in a bed. My bed. In my hut. Dad’s voice had dragged me into consciousness, away from the disapproving eyes. “Jasper! You have a visitor!”

I pulled the covers over me. I didn’t want to see anyone. Dad started up again. “Jasper! You in there, son?” I sat up. His voice sounded funny. I couldn’t work out what it was at first, but then I realized. He sounded polite. Something must be up. I put a towel around me and stepped outside.

I squinted in the sun. Was I still dreaming? A vision soaked my eyes with cool delight. She was here: the Towering Inferno, in my home, next to my father. I froze. I couldn’t reconcile the two figures standing side by side. It was all so out of context.

“Hi, Jasper,” she said, her voice wriggling down my spine.

“Hi,” I countered. Dad was still standing there. Why was he still standing there? Why wouldn’t he move?

“Well, here he is,” he said.

“Come on in,” I said, and by her hesitant eyes remembered I was wearing only a towel.

“Are you going to put clothes on?” the Inferno asked.

“I think I can dig up some socks.”

“There’s a bushfire up in the mountains,” Dad said.

“We’ll stay away from there. Thanks for the tip,” I said dismissively, turning my back on him. As we walked into my hut, I whipped my head around to make sure Dad wasn’t going to follow us in. He wasn’t, but he winked at me conspiratorially. It annoyed me, that wink. He had given me no choice. You can’t not accept a wink. Then I saw Dad look at her legs. He glanced up and saw me see him looking at her legs. It was a weird moment that could’ve gone either way. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but smile. He smiled too. Then the Inferno looked up and caught us smiling at each other. We both glanced at her and caught her looking at us smiling at each other. Another weird moment.

“Come in,” I said.

As she stepped into the hut, the swoosh, drag, lift of her footsteps advancing on the wooden floorboards would have driven me to drink had there been a bar in my bedroom, and had it been open. I went into the bathroom and threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and when I came out she was still standing at the doorway. She asked me if I really lived in this place.

“Why not? I built it.”

“You did?”

I showed her where I’d cut myself helping my builder put in a window. It felt good showing her my scars. They were man scars.

“Your father seems nice.”

“He’s not really.”

“So what are you doing with yourself?”

“I got a job.”

“You’re not going back to school?”

“Why should I?”

“A high school certificate is a pretty handy thing.”

“If you like paper cuts.”

She gave me a half smile. It was the other half I was worried about.

She said, “So then, how does it feel to be a working man?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You might as well come up to me in a seven-story parking station and ask how it feels to be on the fourth level when before I was on the third.”

“I got your note.”

“We drove a man to suicide.”

“You don’t know that.”

She was only inches away. I couldn’t breathe. I was experiencing one of those horriblebeautifulterrifyingdisgustingwondrousinsaneunprecedentedeuphoricsensationaldisturbingthrillinghideoussublimenauseatingexceptional feelings that’s quite hard to describe unless you happen to chance upon the right word.

“Do you want to take a walk in my labyrinth?” I asked.

“I really don’t have much time.”

“I’ll give you the no-frills tour.”

Outside, everything shone brightly in the sun and there were no clouds spoiling the blue except one shaped like a goat’s head, a solitary cloud as if God had wiped down the sky and missed a spot. We walked to the creek and trailed along it and looked at the faces of half-submerged rocks. I told her they were called stepping-stones because man likes to think that all of nature was set up especially for his feet.

We followed the creek to where it poured tirelessly into the river. The sun was hammering away so you couldn’t look at the water without squinting. The Inferno knelt down beside the river and put her hand in it.

“It’s warm,” she said.

I picked up a flat stone and threw it away from the river. I would’ve skipped it across the water, but that scene was too cute for me. I was past all that. I was at the age where boys would put a body in the river, not a stone.

We walked on. She asked me how I found my way around the maze. I told her I had got lost for a long time, but now it was like navigating through the digestive system of an old friend. I told her I knew every wrinkle in every living rock. I was bursting to tell her the names of the plants and the flowers and the trees, but I wasn’t on a first-name basis with flora. I pointed out my favorites anyway. I said, There’s the silvery gray shrub with large clusters of vivid yellow ball flowers like bright furry microphones, and the small bushy bronze tree with white globular fruit I wouldn’t eat even for a dare, and this one has leaves glossy like they’ve been covered in contact paper, and a crouching shrub that’s wild and tangled and smells like a bottle of turpentine you drink at two in the morning when all the bottle shops are closed.

She looked at me strangely, standing there like my favorite tree: straight and tall, slim-stemmed and graceful.

“I’d better get going. Just point me in the right direction,” she said, putting a cigarette in her mouth.

“So I see you’re still smoking like an inmate on death row.”

Her eyes fixed on mine as she lit her cigarette. She had just taken the first puff when something black and nasty floated down to her face and landed on her cheek. She wiped it off. We both looked up at the sky. Ash was falling softly, dark ash falling and whirling crazily in the hot bright air.

“Looks like a bad one,” she said, looking at the orange glow over the horizon.

“I suppose.”

“Do you think it’s close?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I think it’s close,” she said.

All right, so what if we live in a flammable land? There’s always a fire, always houses lost, lives misplaced. But nobody packs up and moves to safer pastures. They just wipe their tears and bury their dead and make more children and dig in their heels. Why? We have our reasons. What are they? Don’t ask me. Ask the ash that sits on your nose.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’ve got some ash on your nose.”

She wiped it off. It left a black smear.

“Is it gone?”

I nodded. I wouldn’t tell her about the black smear. A raw, hungry silence descended, swallowing whole minutes.

“Well, I really have to go.”

“Why don’t you take your pants off and stay awhile?” I wanted to say but didn’t. There’s little doubt that when the defining moments arise in which character is molded, you’d better make the right decision. The mold dries and sets quickly.

We walked through a small clearing where the grass was so short it looked like green sand, and I led her to a cave. I walked in and she followed me. It was dark and cool inside.

“What are we doing in here?” she asked suspiciously.

“I want to show you something. Look. These are cave paintings.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I did them myself just last week.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you sound so disappointed? I don’t see why you have to be fifty thousand years old to paint on a cave wall.”

That’s when she leaned forward and kissed me. And that was that.

V

A few weeks later the Towering Inferno and I were lying in bed and I was feeling as secure as if we were both stored in a large vault. She was on her side, propped up on one elbow that was tireless, like a steel pole. She had her pen poised on a notebook, but she wasn’t writing anything.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about what you’re thinking about.”

“That’s no answer.”

“Well, what are you thinking about?”

“What you’re thinking about.”

She snorted. I didn’t press it. She was secretive, like me- not wanting anyone to know her every thought in case he used it against her. I imagined she’d discovered, as I had, that what people want from you is confirmation that you’re toeing the line, living by the same rules they are, and that you’re not going off on your own or awarding yourself any special privileges.

“I’m trying to write a birthday card,” she said. “It’s Lola’s birthday. You remember Lola, from school?”

“Oh yeah, Lola,” I said, not knowing who Lola was.

“Do you want to write something to her?” she asked.

“Sure,” I lied.

Just before I put pen to card the Inferno said, “Write something nice.” I nodded and wrote: “Dear Lola, I hope you live forever.” I handed the card back. The Inferno scrutinized it but didn’t say anything. If she knew my message was a curse and not a blessing, she didn’t let on.

Then the Inferno said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Brian wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“His name’s Brian.”

“That may be so, but I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“He’s sort of my ex-boyfriend.”

I sat up and looked at her. “Sort of?”

“We went out briefly.”

“And you still speak to him?”

“No, I mean, the other day I ran into him,” she said.

“You ran into him,” I repeated. I didn’t like the sound of this. No matter what anybody says, I know that people don’t really just run into each other.

“Well, why does he want to talk to me?”

“He thinks you might be able to help him get his job back.”

“His job? Me? How?”

“I don’t know, Jasper. Why don’t you meet him and find out?”

“No, thanks.”

She looked annoyed, rolled over, and turned away from me. I spent the next ten minutes watching her naked back, her red hair spilling over her shoulder blades, which jutted out like surfboard fins.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t put yourself out,” she said back.

Our honeymoon period mostly consisted of staring at each other’s faces for hours on end. Sometimes that’s all we did for the whole day. Sometimes her face drifted in and out of focus. Sometimes it looked like an alien face. Sometimes it didn’t look like a face at all, but a bizarre compendium of features on a blurry white background. At the time I remember thinking that we’d fastened onto each other in such a sticky fashion it would be impossible to separate without one of us losing a hand or a lip.

Things weren’t perfect, of course. She hated it that I’d not yet dropped the habit of mentally noting all the famous actresses I’d like to sleep with when my ship came in.

I hated it that she was too open-minded and half believed in a creationist theory that had God go “Ta-da!”

She hated it that I didn’t hate fake breasts.

I hated the way when she was mad or upset, she’d kiss me with her lips closed.

She hated the way I’d try everything to open them- lips, tongue, thumb and forefinger.

Whenever I’d heard anyone say “Relationships are work,” I’d always scoffed, because I thought relationships should grow wild like untended gardens, but now I knew they were work, and unpaid work too- volunteer work.

One morning a couple of weeks into the relationship, Dad ran into my hut as if he were taking refuge from a storm.

“Haven’t seen you in a while. Love must be pretty time-consuming, eh?”

“It is.”

He looked to be bursting with bad news that he couldn’t hold in much longer.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. You enjoy it while it lasts.”

“I will.”

He stood there like stagnant water and said, “Jasper, we’ve never talked about sex.”

“And thank God for that.”

“I just want to say one thing.”

“Get it over with.”

“Even though using a condom is as insulting to the senses as putting a windsock on your tongue before eating chocolate, use one anyway.”

“A windsock.”

“A condom.”

“OK.”

“To avoid paternity suits.”

“OK,” I said, although I didn’t need a sex talk. Nobody does. A beaver can make a dam, a bird can build a nest, a spider can spin its web at the first attempt without even fumbling. Fucking is like that. We’re born to do it.

“Want to read anything on love?” Dad asked.

“No, I just want to do it.”

“Suit yourself. Plato’s Symposium won’t be much use to you anyway, unless your girlfriend is a thirteen-year-old Greek boy. I’d avoid Schopenhauer too. He wants you to believe you’ve been had by the unconscious desire to propagate the species.”

“I don’t want to propagate anything. Least of all the species.”

“Attaboy.” Dad put his hands in the tattered pockets of his old tracksuit pants and went right on nodding at me with a half-open mouth.

“Dad,” I said, “remember how you said love is a pleasure, a stimulant, and a distraction?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, there’s something else you didn’t mention. And that’s that if you could save the person from ever having another splinter in her finger, you’d run around the world laminating all the wood with a fine, transparent surface, just to save her from that splinter. That’s love.”

Dad said, “Huh. I’ll make a note of that.”

The next night when I got into bed, I found something bulky under the pillow. It was thirteen books, from Shakespeare to Freud, and after staying up all night and skim-reading at least half of them, I learned that, according to the experts, you cannot be “in love” without fear, but love without fear is sincere, mature love.

I realized I’d completely idealized the Towering Inferno, but so what if I had? Sooner or later we have to idealize something- being lukewarm to everything is inhuman. So I idealized her. But did I love her or not? Was it a mature love or an immature love? Well, I had my own method of working it out. I decided: I know that I love and am in love when suddenly I fear her death as sharply as I fear my own. It would be lovely and romantic to say I fear hers more than mine, but that would be a lie, and anyway, if you knew how deep and complete is my desire to perpetuate through the eons with every particle intact, you’d agree it was a romantic enough fear, this terror of the death of the beloved.

So I called her sort-of-ex-boyfriend, Brian.

“It’s Jasper Dean here,” I said when he answered the phone.

“Jasper! Thanks for calling.”

“What’s this about?”

“I was wondering if we could meet for a drink.”

“What for?”

“Just for a chat. Do you know the Royal Batsman, near Central Station? We could meet tomorrow at five?”

“Five twenty-three,” I said, to exert some control over the situation.

“Done.”

“What’s this about me helping you get your job back?” I asked.

“I’d rather tell you face-to-face,” he said, and I hung up the phone thinking he must have either a low opinion of his voice or a high opinion of his face.

For the next twenty-four hours my whole body pulsated with curiosity; this idea that I could help him get back his job confounded me. Even if it was somehow possible, why assume I’d want to? The worst thing you can say about someone in a society like ours is that they can’t hold down a job. It conjures images of unshaven losers with weak grips watching sadly as the jobs slip free and float away. There’s nothing we respect more than work, and there’s nothing we denigrate more than the unwillingness to work, and if someone wants to dedicate himself to painting or writing poetry, he’d better be holding down a job at a hamburger restaurant if he knows what’s good for him.

I only just got through the doors of the Royal Batsman when I saw a middle-aged man with silver hair waving me over. He was in his late forties and wore a flashy pin-striped suit, almost as flashy as his hair. He smiled at me. That was flashy too.

“Sorry, do I know you?”

“I’m Brian.”

“You’re the ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re old!”

That made him smile unpleasantly. “I guess she has a little something for celebrities.”

“Celebrities? Who’s a celebrity?”

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“No.”

“Don’t you watch television?”

“No.”

He looked at me, puzzled, as if I’d actually said no to the question “Don’t you eat, shit, and breathe?”

“My name’s Brian Sinclair. I was on Channel Nine television for a couple of years. As a current affairs journalist. I’m taking a hiatus now.”

“Well so what?”

“Beer?” he asked.

“Thanks.”

He went to the bar and fetched me a beer and I was swept up in a sort of panic, dazzled by his silver hair and matching suit. I had to remind myself that he needed my help, and that put me in a position of power which I was free to abuse at any given time.

“Did you see the game last night?” I asked when he returned.

“No. What game?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what game- I was just making conversation. And he had to ask what game? Who cares what game? Any game. There’s always a game.

“So what can I do for you?” I asked.

“Well, Jasper, as I said, I used to be a current affairs journalist for Channel Nine. And I was fired.”

“What for?”

“Are you sure you don’t know about this? It was big news for a while. I was interviewing a twenty-six-year-old father of two who was not only not meeting his child-support payments but living off the dole so he could maintain his obsession with daytime television. I was just asking him a few simple questions, and right in the middle of the interview-”

“He pulled out a gun and shot himself.”

“Hey- I thought you didn’t watch television.”

“It’s the only way it could have gone down,” I said, although the truth was, I do sometimes watch television and I suddenly recalled seeing a repeat of that suicide in slow motion. “This is all very interesting,” I said, “but what’s it got to do with me?”

“Well, if I had a news story that no one else had, that could make me a valuable commodity again.”

“And?”

“And your father has never given an extensive interview about his brother.”

“Jesus.”

“If I could get the inside scoop on the Terry Dean story-”

“What are you doing now? Are you working?”

“In telesales.”

Ouch. “That’s a job as good as any other, isn’t it?”

“I’m a journalist, Jasper.”

“Listen, Brian. If there’s one thing my father doesn’t want to talk about, it’s his brother.”

“But can’t you-”

“No. I can’t.”

Brian suddenly looked as though life had worn him down, literally, with an enormous nail file. “All right.” He sighed. “What about you? You probably know a few things about the story that the rest of us don’t.”

“Probably.”

“Would you agree to an interview?”

“Sorry.”

“Give me something. The Handbook of Crime.”

“What about it?”

“There’s a theory your uncle didn’t write it.”

“I really wouldn’t know,” I said, and watched his face tighten into a fist.

When I got home, Dad was curled up on the couch, reading and breathing heavily. Instead of saying “Hello, son, how’s life?” he held up the book he was reading: it was called A History of Consciousness. Instead of saying “Hi, Dad, I love you,” I sneered and started searching the bookshelf for something to read myself.

As I browsed, I could detect the sweet, sickly odor of clove cigarettes. Was Eddie here? I heard muffled voices from the kitchen. I opened the door to see Anouk and Eddie huddled together, speaking in low tones. They looked surprised to see me, and while Eddie hit me with one of his dazzling smiles, Anouk beckoned me over with one finger over her lips.

“I just got back from Thailand,” Eddie said in a whisper.

“I didn’t know you’d gone,” I whispered back.

He frowned unexpectedly- the frown surprised his own face.

“Jasper, I’ve got bad news,” Anouk said in a barely audible voice.

“Say it all at once.”

“Your dad’s depressed again.”

I looked through the door at Dad. Even when there were people in the house he still came across as a complete recluse.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“He’s been crying. Staring into space. Talking to himself.”

“He always talks to himself.”

“Now he’s addressing himself formally as Mr. Dean.”

“Is that all?”

“You want a repeat of the last time? You want him to go back to the mental hospital?”

“The man’s depressed. What can we do?”

“I think it’s because his life is empty.”

“And?”

“And we need to help him fill it.”

“Not me,” I said.

“Jasper, you should talk to your father more,” Eddie said with surprising sternness.

“Not at this juncture,” I said, leaving the room.

My father’s depression could wait a couple of days. At present I was suddenly interested in having a look at The Handbook of Crime, by Terry Dean (Harry West). I figured that since my relationship with the Towering Inferno had begun with blackmail, maybe the book had some other relationship advice. I found it in a pile on the floor, in the middle of an unsteady igloo of printed word. With the book in hand, I wound through the labyrinth to my hut.

In bed, I flicked through the table of contents. Chapter 17 caught my eye. It was called “Love: The Ultimate Informer.” If there’s one thing a lawbreaker needs in his inventory, it’s secrets, and if there’s one enemy of secrets, it’s love, the chapter began.

The names of your informers, what backstabbing campaigns you’re embarking on, where you store your guns, your drugs, your money, the location of your hideout, the interchangeable lists of your friends and enemies, your contacts, the fences, your escape plans- all things you need to keep to yourself, and you will reveal every one if you are in love.

Love is the Ultimate Informer because of the conviction it inspires that your love is eternal and immutable- you can no more imagine the end of your love than you can imagine the end of your own head. And because love is nothing without intimacy, and intimacy is nothing without sharing, and sharing is nothing without honesty, you must inevitably spill the beans, every last bean, because dishonesty in intimacy is unworkable and will slowly poison your precious love.

When it ends- and it will end (even the most risk-embracing gambler wouldn’t touch those odds)- he or she, the love object, has your secrets. And can use them. And if the relationship ends acrimoniously, he or she will use them, viciously and maliciously- will use them against you.

Furthermore, it is highly probable that the secrets you reveal when your soul has all its clothes off will be the cause of the end of love. Your intimate revelations will be the flame that lights the fuse that ignites the dynamite that blows your love to kingdom come.

No, you say. She understands my violent ways. She understands that the end justifies the means.

Think about this. Being in love is a process of idealization. Now ask yourself, how long can a woman be expected to idealize a man who held his foot on the head of a drowning man? Not too long, believe me. And cold nights in front of the fire, when you get up and slice off another piece of cheese, you don’t think she’s dwelling on that moment of unflinching honesty when you revealed sawing off the feet of your enemy? Well, she is.

If a man could be counted on to dispose of his partner the moment the relationship is over, this chapter wouldn’t be necessary. But he can’t be counted on for that. Hope of reconciliation keeps many an ex alive who should be at the bottom of a deep gorge.

So, lawbreakers, whoever you are, you need to keep your secrets for your survival, to keep your enemies at bay and your body out of the justice system. Sadly- and this is the lonely responsibility we all have to accept- the only way to do this is to stay single. If you need sexual relief, go to a hooker. If you need an intimate embrace, go to your mother. If you need a bed warmer during cold winter months, get a dog that is not a Chihuahua or a Pekingese. But know this: to give up your secrets is to give up your security, your freedom, your life. The truth will kill your love, then it will kill you. It’s rotten, I know. But so is the sound of the judge’s gavel pounding a mahogany desk.

I closed the book and lay in bed thinking about honesty and lies and decided that my feelings were honest but I was toes to eyeballs with secret stories and secret thoughts, none of which I had revealed to the Towering Inferno. Why had I been instinctively following the book’s advice, a book written for criminals? Well, how could I reveal all the unimpressive things I’d done, like the time I was cornered by bullies and pretended to sleep through the beating they gave me? Or the time, just a week into our relationship, I was so jealous at the thought of the Towering Inferno sneaking off and sleeping with someone else that I went off and slept with someone else just so I wouldn’t have any right to be jealous? No, I wasn’t even going to tell her the good stuff, like how some mornings I came out of the labyrinth to the main road to find the streetlights still humming above me, an early wind tickling the trees, and the familiar scent of jasmine leading to a friendly confusion of the senses so it was as if my nose were full of the soft, heady smell of a light pink eyelid. I felt so fantastic bouncing in the warm morning air, I picked up a garden gnome from someone’s lawn and put it on the lawn across the street. Then I undid a garden hose from that family’s lawn and placed it on their neighbor’s front porch. I thought: We’re sharing today, people! What’s his is yours! What’s yours is his! Only later it did seem like a strange thing to have done, so I kept the story from penetrating my lover’s inner eardrum.

And because it was apparent to me just how thoroughly I was infected by Dad’s mistrust of everything, including his own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and intuitions- leading me to mistrust my own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and intuitions- neither could I tell her that every now and then I enter some dreamy trance state in which it’s as if all the opposing forces of the universe submit to a sudden and inexplicable ceasefire and melt together until I feel like I have a piece of creation stuck between my teeth. Maybe I’m out walking in the street or simply erasing porn site addresses from my Internet browser’s history, when suddenly it’s as if I am wrapped in a soft golden mist. What is it, exactly? A period of superconsciousness, where the I of Me becomes the Us of We, where We is either Me and a Cloud or Me and a Tree and sometimes Me and a Sunset or Me and the Horizon but rarely Me and Butter or Me and Chipped Enamel. How could I explain it to her? To attempt to communicate uncommunicable ideas is to risk oversimplifying them, and the organic thrill is just going to come off sounding like an organic cheap thrill, and what would she think of these enchanting incomprehensible hallucinations anyway? She might rush to the conclusion that I am actually at one with the universe while others are not. It’s like Dad said: moments of cosmic consciousness could simply be a natural reaction to a sudden unconscious awareness of our own mortality. For all we know, the feeling of unity might be the greatest proof of separateness there is. Who knows? Just because they feel like genuine apprehensions of Truth doesn’t mean they are. I mean, if you mistrust one sense, you must mistrust them all. There’s no reason the sixth sense might not be as misleading as smell or sight. That’s the lesson I’ve learned from my father, the headline news from the corner that he thought himself into: direct intuitions are as untrustworthy as they are potent.

So you see? How could I tell her about these things when I wasn’t sure whether I’d just put one over on myself? Neither could I tell her that sometimes I was certain I could read my father’s thoughts and other times I suspected he could read mine. Sometimes, I tried to tell him something just by thinking it, and I’d feel I could hear him respond in the negative; I sensed a “Fuck you” traveling through the ether. Nor could I tell the Inferno that more than once I’d had visions of a disembodied face. I first dreamed of the face in my childhood, a tanned, mustached, thick-lipped, wide-nosed face floating out of a dark void, his piercing eyes giving off an aura of sexual violence, his mouth contorted into a silent scream. I’m sure this has happened to everyone. Then one day you see the face even when you’re awake. You see it in the sun. You see it in the clouds. You see it in the mirror. You see it clearly, even though it’s not there. Then you feel it too. And you stand up and say, “Who’s there?” And when you receive no answer, you say, “I’m calling the police.” And what is this presence anyway if in fact it’s not a ghost? The most likely explanation: a fully exteriorized and manifested idea. There were things crawling inside my brain itching to get out, and, worse, they were getting out and I had no control over where and when.

No, why air every ugly, negative, loopy, idiotic thought that floats through the head? That’s why when you’re standing by the harbor and your lover says, in a tender embrace, “What are you thinking about?” you don’t respond, “That I hate people and I wish they’d fall down and never get up.” I’m telling you. You just can’t say it. I don’t know much about women, but I do know that.

I fell asleep, and at four in the morning I woke with a shocking realization: I’d never told the Towering Inferno that Terry Dean was my uncle.

I stared at the clock until eight a.m. without looking away once, then called Brian.

“Who is it?”

“How did you know I was Terry Dean’s nephew?”

“Jasper?”

“How did you know?”

“Your girlfriend told me.”

“Yeah, I know, I was just checking. So, um…you and her, then…”

“What about us?”

“She said you went out with her for just a little while.”

He didn’t say anything. In the silence I heard him breathing like someone who knows he has the upper hand, and I wound up breathing like someone stuck with the lower hand, and then he began telling me not just about him and her but things about her she had kept secret- her whole life, it seemed: how she ran away from home at fifteen and stayed two months with a drug dealer in Chippendale named Freddy Luxembourg and how she went back home one abortion later and changed schools and how when she was sixteen she started going out by herself to bars and that’s where they met and she ran away from home again and lived with him for one year until she caught him with another woman and totally freaked out and ran back home again and her parents sent her to a psychologist who declared her a human time bomb and how she’d been calling him and leaving strange messages on his answering machine about her new boyfriend who was going to kill him if he ever showed his face in her life again. It surprised me to learn that the killer boyfriend was me.

I took all this with pretend calm, saying things like “Uh-huh” and trying not to show alarm at the unsettling conclusions I was drawing. That she had been calling her old boyfriend and leaving surly messages on his phone meant that she was probably still hung up on him, and that he in return was talking to her about getting his old job back meant that he was probably still hung up on her.

I couldn’t get my head around it. She’d lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!

I hung up and threw my legs over the side of the bed like two anchors. I didn’t get up. I sat on that bed for hours, breaking the spell only to call in sick to work. At around five I finally got out of bed and sat on the back veranda emptying tobacco out of my cigarette and into a pipe. I stared at the sunset because I thought I saw a face in it, a face in the sun, that old familiar face I hadn’t seen in a long time. All around me cicadas were making a racket. It sounded like they were closing in. I thought about catching one and fixing it into the pipe and smoking it. I was wondering if it would get me high when I saw a red flare shoot into the sky. I put down the pipe and set off in the direction of the trail of vapor that hung in the air. It was her. I had given her a flare gun because she often got lost in the maze.

I found her near a large boulder and took her back to the hut. When we got inside, I told her everything Brian had told me. She looked at me, her eyes death-empty.

“Why didn’t you tell me you lived with him for a year?” I yelled.

“Well, you haven’t been honest with me either. You didn’t tell me that your uncle is Terry Dean!”

“Why would I? I never met him! It was a long time ago. I was minus two years old when he died. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me that you knew about my uncle?”

“Look. Let’s be honest with each other from now on,” she said.

“Yes, let’s.”

“Scrupulously honest.”

“We’ll tell each other everything.”

The door was wide open. Neither of us stepped through it. It was the time to ask questions and answer them, like two informants who’d just discovered that each had made separate immunity deals with the public prosecutor.

“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.

I watched her walk across the room, and when she bent over to pick up a towel from the floor, I noticed how the back of her jeans curved away from her body, like an evil grin.

VI

After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge right before he sentences you, but in a relationship they signify discomfort. And I was uncomfortable because she still hadn’t gotten over Brian. This was not baseless paranoia, either. She had started comparing me to him, unfavorably. For instance, she said I wasn’t as romantic as Brian, just because I’d once said in an intimate moment, “I love you with all of my brain.” Is it my fault she didn’t understand how the heart has stolen credit from the head, that wild passionate feelings actually come from the ancient limbic system in the brain, and that I was just trying to avoid referring to the heart as the actual storehouse of all my feelings when it is, after all, only a soggy, bloody pump and filter system? Is it my fault people can’t enjoy a symbol without turning it into a literal fact? Which is why, by the way, you should never waste your time giving the human race an allegorical tale- in less than one generation they’ll turn it into historical data, complete with eyewitnesses.

Oh, and then there was the jar.

I was at her place, in her bedroom. We’d just had sex very quietly because her mother was in the next room. I enjoyed doing it quietly because when you can make all the noise you like you sort of go faster. Silent sex makes you slow down.

Afterward, when I was fishing on the floor for all the coins that had fallen from my jeans pockets, I saw the jar underneath her bed, mustard-sized, with a misty liquid floating in it, like cloudy water from a Mexican tap. Removing the lid, I sniffed tentatively, irrationally expecting the odor of sour milk. It smelled of nothing at all. I turned and watched her thin body settle on the bed. “Don’t spill it,” she said, before giving me another in a long dynasty of perfect smiles.

I dipped my finger in the jar, whipped it out, and licked it.

Salty.

I thought I knew what that meant. But could it really mean what I thought it meant? Was I actually, in reality, holding a jar of tears? Her tears?

“Tears, huh?” I said, as though everybody I knew collected their own tears, as if the whole world did nothing but forge monuments to their own sadness. I could imagine her pressing the little jar against her cheek, when the inaugural tear looked like the first raindrop sliding down a windowpane.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I just collect my tears, that’s all.”

“Come on. There’s something more.”

“There’s not. Don’t you believe me?”

“Absolutely not.”

She stared at me a moment. “OK- I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

“OK.”

“Promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”

“That’s a hard promise to make. How will I know if I’m taking it the wrong way?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“OK.”

“OK. I’m collecting my tears because…I’m going to make Brian drink them,” she said.

I gritted my teeth and looked out the window. Outside, the drooping autumn trees looked like golden brown shrugs. “You’re still in love with him!” I shouted.

“Jasper!” she screamed. “You’re taking it the wrong way!”

About two weeks later she heaped another insult on top of the last one. We were in my hut, making love, making a hell of a racket this time, and as if going out of her way to confirm my worst suspicions, right in the middle of it she called out his name. “Brian!” she moaned breathlessly.

“Where?” I asked, startled, and started looking around the room for him.

“What are you doing?”

I stopped when I realized my stupid error. She gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness, uninvited and tireless.

She climbed naked out of bed and made herself a cup of tea, grimacing with guilt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I don’t think you should close your eyes during sex anymore.”

“Hmm.”

“I want you to look at me the whole time. OK?”

“You don’t have any milk,” she said, squatting in front of the bar fridge.

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s lumpy.”

“But it’s still milk.”

She hadn’t finished sighing when I went out of the hut and walked in the darkness to Dad’s house. We were always breaking into each other’s houses to steal milk. It has to be said: I was the better thief. He would always come in while I was sleeping, but because he was paranoid about sell-by dates, I would awake to the sound of thunderous sniffing.

The night was the kind of thick, all-encompassing black that renders concepts such as north, south, east, and west unusable. After I’d stumbled over tree stumps and been slapped in the face by thorny branches, the lights of Dad’s house welcomed me and depressed me at the same time; they meant he was awake and I’d get stuck talking, that is, listening to him. I groaned. I was aware of our growing estrangement. It had started after I quit school and gradually worsened. I’m not sure why, but he’d unexpectedly resorted to normal parenting, especially in the use of emotional blackmail. He even once said the phrase “After all I’ve done for you.” Then he listed all that he’d done for me. It sounded like a lot, but many were small sacrifices such as “bought butter even though I like margarine.”

The truth was, I could no longer stand him: his unrelenting negativity, his negligence of both our lives, his inhuman reverence for books over people, his fanatical love for hating society, his inauthentic love for me, his unhealthy obsession with making my life as unpleasant as his. It occurred to me that he hadn’t made my life distressing as an afterthought, either, but had gone about dismantling me laboriously, as if he were being paid overtime to do it. He had a concrete pylon for a head, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It seems to me you should be able to look at the people in your life and say “I owe you my survival” and “You owe me your survival,” and if you can’t say that, then what the hell are you doing with them? As it stood, I could only look at my father and think, “Well, I survived in spite of your meddling, you son of a bitch.”

The light was on in his living room. I peered through the window. Dad was reading the newspaper and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, opening the sliding doors.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Stealing milk.”

“Well, steal your own milk!” he said.

I walked in and tore the newspaper out of his hands. It was one of the daily tabloids. Dad got up and went into the next room. I looked closer at the newspaper. The story Dad had been reading was about Frankie Hollow, the recently murdered rock star who, coming home from a tour, had been confronted by a crazed fan who shot him twice in the chest, once in the head, and once “for good luck.” Every single day since then the story had managed to make the front page, despite there being no additional facts after day one. Some days the papers included interviews with people who didn’t know anything and who in the course of the interview revealed nothing. Then they squeezed every last drop of blood out of the story by digging up the dead star’s past, and when there was absolutely, positively nothing left to report, they reported some more. I thought: Who prints this toe jam? And then I thought: Why is Dad crying over this celebrity death? I stood there with a thousand belittling phrases swimming in my head, trying to decide if I should lay the boot in. I decided against it; death is death, and mourning is mourning, and even if people choose to shed tears over the loss of a popular stranger, you can’t mock a sad heart.

I closed the paper, more clueless than before. From the next room I could hear the television; it sounded like Dad was testing the volume to see how high it could go. I went in. He was watching a late-night soft porn series about a female detective who solves crimes by showing her clean-shaven legs. He wasn’t looking at the screen, though; he was staring into the tiny oval mouth of a can of beer. I sat next to him, and we didn’t talk for a while. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked.

“Thanks, Dad,” Dad said.

I sat there trying to think of something sarcastic to say in retort, but when you put two sarcastic comments side by side, they just sound nasty. I went back into the labyrinth and to the Inferno in my bed.

“Where’s the milk?” she asked as I crawled in beside her.

“It had lumps in it,” I said, thinking of Dad and the lumps within. Anouk and Eddie were right- he had slipped back into a depressed state. Why this time? Why was he grieving over this rock star he’d never heard of? Was he going to start mourning every death on the planet Earth? Could there be a more time-consuming hobby?

In the morning when I woke up, the Inferno was gone. That was new. We had obviously fallen to a new low- in the old days we would’ve shaken each other out of a diabetic coma to announce our departure. Now she sneaked out, probably to avoid the question “What are you doing later?” My hut had never felt so empty. I buried my head in my pillow and shouted, “She’s falling out of love with me!”

To distract myself from this sour-smelling reality, I picked up the newspaper and browsed through it, cringing. I’ve always hated our newspapers, mostly for their insulting geography. For example, on page 18 your eyes fall on the story of a terrible earthquake in some place like Peru with an insult hidden between the lines; twenty thousand human beings buried under broken rubble, then buried again, this time under seventeen pages of local blabber. I thought: Who prints this gum disease?

Then I heard a voice. “Knock knock,” the voice said.

That put me instantly on edge. I shouted back. “Don’t stand at the door and say ‘Knock knock’! If I had a doorbell, would you stand there saying, ‘Brrrring’?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Anouk asked, entering.

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me.”

Should I confide in her? I knew Anouk was having troubles in her own love life. She was in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always breaking up with people I never knew she’d even been seeing. If anyone had an eye for the beginning of the end, it would be Anouk. But I decided against asking for her advice. Some people sense when you’re drowning, and when they step forward to get a clear view, they can’t help putting their foot on your head.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I want to talk to you about your dad’s depression.”

“I’m not really in the mood.”

“I know how to fill his emptiness. His notebooks!”

“I’ve snooped enough in his notebooks to last a lifetime! His writings are the stains of dripping juices from all the tangled meat in his head. I won’t do it!”

“You don’t have to. I already did.”

“You did?”

Anouk pulled one of Dad’s little black notebooks from her pocket and waved it in the air as if it were a winning lottery ticket. The sight of the notebook produced in me the same effect as the sight of my father’s face: an overwhelming weariness.

“OK,” Anouk said, “listen to this. Are you sitting down?”

“You’re looking right at me, Anouk!”

“OK! OK! Jesus, you’re in a bad mood.”

She cleared her throat and read: “ ‘In life, everyone’s doing exactly what they’re supposed to. I mean, look closely when you meet an accountant- he looks exactly like an accountant! Never did there exist an accountant who looked like he should have been a fireman, a clerk in a clothing store who looked like a judge, or a vet who looked like he belonged behind the counter at McDonald’s. One time at a party I met this guy and I said, “So then, what do you do for a crust?” and he said loudly, so everyone could hear, “I’m a tree surgeon,” just like that, and I took a step back and gave him the once-over and I’ll be damned if he didn’t fit the image precisely- he looked like a tree surgeon, even though I’d never met one before. This is what I’m saying- absolutely everyone is as they should be, and this is also the problem. You never find a media mogul with the soul of an artist or a multibillionaire with the raving, fiery compassion of a social worker. But what if you could whisper in a billionaire’s ear and reach the raving, fiery compassion that’s lying dormant and unused, where empathy is stored, and you could whisper in his ear and fuel that empathy until it catches alight, and then you douse that empathy with ideas until it’s transformed into action. I mean, excite him. Really excite him. That’s what I’ve been dreaming about. To be the man who excites rich and powerful men with his ideas. That’s what I want- to be the man who whispers thrilling ideas into an enormous golden ear.’ ”

Anouk closed the notebook and looked at me as though expecting a standing ovation. Was this what she was excited about? His megalomania was old news to me. I’d learned the same when I’d helped him out of the asylum. Of course, it was just a lucky break that time- taking the contents of those insane notebooks literally and using them on its owner was a very hazardous business- as we were about to find out.

“So what?” I said.

“So what?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t get it?”

“Stop repeating everything I say.”

“It’s the answer, Jasper.”

“It is? I’ve forgotten the question.”

“How to fill your dad’s emptiness. It’s simple. We go out and find one.”

“Find what?”

“A golden ear,” she said, smiling.

VII

That night, on my way over to Anouk’s house, I thought about her plan. The golden ear she had decided on belonged to the head of Reynold Hobbs, who, in case you live in a cave that doesn’t get cable television, was the richest man in Australia. He owned newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, movie studios, and television stations that recorded sporting events that he broadcast through his cable networks. He owned football clubs, nightclubs, hotel chains, restaurants, a fleet of taxis, and a chain of record companies that produced music that he sold in his music stores. He owned resorts, politicians, apartment buildings, mansions, racehorses, and a yacht the size of the Pacific island of Nauru. Half the time Reynold lived in New York, but he was so secretive, you never knew which half. He was the rare sort of celebrity who didn’t have to worry about the paparazzi because he owned them. I tell you, Reynold Hobbs could take a shit off the Harbor Bridge and you’d never see a picture of it in the paper.

I don’t know how long Anouk had been planning this unpromising mission, but she showed me an article that said Reynold and his son, Oscar, were going to be in the Sydney casino that night to celebrate their purchase of it. Her plan was for us to go to the casino and try to convince Reynold Hobbs, Australia ’s richest man, to meet with Dad, Australia ’s poorest.

At this time Anouk was back living with her parents in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in a nice cul-de-sac with a nice park next door and lots of children playing in the street and neighbors chatting over fences and big front lawns and big backyards and swings and a nice comfortable family car in every driveway and dogs who knew where to shit and where not to shit and in nice symmetrical piles too, like a Boy Scout’s campfire. It was the kind of middle-class exterior people love to peel back the layers of, looking for worms- and the worms are there, sure. Where aren’t there worms? And yes, Anouk’s family had a worm. They had a big worm. A worm that wouldn’t go away. It was Anouk. She was the worm.

Her father was working in the garden when I turned up. He was a healthy man in his fifties, so healthy that the sight of him always made me resolve to do fifty push-ups every morning. Muscles bulging, he was bent over the flower bed ripping up weeds, and even his workman’s crack was taut and glowing rosily underneath strong, virile tufts of bum hair.

“Hey, Jasper, what are you all dressed up for?”

“Anouk and I are going to the casino.”

“What the hell for?”

“To break the bank.”

He chuckled. “You can’t beat those corrupt bastards. They’ve got it rigged.”

“There aren’t many corrupt bastards you can beat.”

“Too true.”

Anouk’s mother, a beautiful woman with streaks of gray through her thick black hair, came out with a glass of water that she might have intended for her husband but that she gave to me.

“Here you go. Hey, am I shrinking or are you still growing?”

“I think I’m still growing.”

“Well, don’t stop now!”

“I won’t.”

I liked Anouk’s family. They didn’t make a great effort to make you feel welcome, they just looked at you as though you’d always been there. They were honest and earnest and enthusiastic and cheerful and hardworking and never had a bad word to say about anyone. They were the kind of people it’s impossible not to like, and often I’ve felt like marching them up and down the street, daring people not to like them.

“Where’s Anouk?”

“In her room. Go on in.”

I walked through the nice cool house, up the stairs, and into Anouk’s bedroom. Anouk always returned here after unsuccessful outings into the world- usually after jobs or relationships went bust. They kept it for her. It was strange to see her here in her family home, and in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old girl. Let’s be clear- Anouk was now thirty-two, and each time she moved out, she swore she’d never return, but things always had a way of going sour for her, and she was never able to resist going back for a while, to take a breather.

I had been to several of Anouk’s apartments, and she was always in the middle of throwing out a man who’d disgusted her, or washing the sheets because a man she’d been sleeping with had been with someone else, or waiting by the phone for a man to ring, or not answering the phone because a man was ringing. I remember one who refused to leave; he’d tried to invoke squatter’s rights in her bedroom. In the end she got rid of him by throwing his mobile phone out the window, and he followed closely behind it.

When I went in, Anouk was in her walk-in closet getting changed.

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

I snooped around. There was a photograph beside her bed of a man with a square head and dark sunglasses and the kind of sideburns that killed Elvis.

“Who’s this horror show?”

“He’s history. Throw him in the bin for me, will you?”

I had considerable satisfaction tossing his photograph in the bin.

“What happened with this one?”

“I’ll tell you what happened. I have no luck. My relationships always fall into one of two categories: either I’m in love with him and he’s not in love with me, or he’s in love with me and he’s shorter than my grandmother.”

Poor Anouk. She couldn’t stand being eternally single and she couldn’t stand that she couldn’t stand it. Love was tantalizingly absent from her life, and she was trying her best not to conclude that she was three-eighths through an eighty-year losing streak. She was humiliated to have joined the legions of single women obsessed with trying not to obsess about their singular obsession. But she couldn’t help obsessing. She was now in her thirties and single. But it wasn’t a question of the biological clock. It was a question of the other ticking clock-the clock, the Big Clock. And while she was always looking deep into herself for answers, just as the sages advise, what she came up with wasn’t one single reason, and it wasn’t as if she were stuck in a vicious circle, but rather in a pattern of several conjoined vicious circles. In one, she always singled out the wrong type- either “bourgeois yuppie bastards” or just “bastards,” or, more often than not, a “man-child.” In fact, for a while she seemed to be meeting only men-children in various guises. She also had a habit of being the other woman and not the woman. She was the kind that men like to sleep with but not have a relationship with. She was one of the boys, not one of the girls. And I don’t know the psychology behind it, but anecdotal evidence proves it: she wanted it too much. But because no one seems sure how it works, you just have to go about trying to beat this mysterious force by pretending not to want what you really want.

Anouk stepped out of her closet looking spectacular. She was wearing a diaphanous green dress with a floral print and a black slip underneath. It looked like she had bought it two sizes too small on purpose; it showed every curve of her body. They were hairpin curves. My God, she was voluptuous, and if you had the right kind of imagination you couldn’t think of anything other than sleeping with her, if only to get her off your mind. I admit I’d enjoyed masturbatory fantasies about her from the age of fourteen onward, ever since she had tired of her phase as shaven-headed, Doc Martens-wearing, pierced angry girl. The green eyes were still shining, but over the years she had grown her black hair out so it was long and flowing. She removed her piercings and went from stick-thin to spongy and now sauntered around like a promiscuous cloud in a tight dress. Even though I was there to help combat my father’s depression and encroaching suicide, I couldn’t help but think: Maybe it’s high time Anouk and I slept together. Should I try to seduce her? Can you seduce someone who’s seen you go through puberty?

“Maybe you should give relationships a break for a little while,” I said.

“I don’t want to be celibate, though. I like sex. I’ve slept with a lot of men and I want to keep sleeping with them. I tell you, whoever talks about the carnality of human beings and excludes women should come by my place one night and see me at it.”

“I’m not saying you should be celibate. You could find a lover, like they have in France.”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea. But where do I find a no-strings-attached lover?”

“Well- and don’t say no straightaway- what about me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re like a son to me.”

“No, I’m not. We’re more like distant cousins secretly checking each other out.”

“I’ve never checked you out.”

“You should think about it.”

“What about your girlfriend?”

“I think she’s falling out of love with me. You see, I need a confidence boost, and I think if we became lovers, that would do it.”

“Jasper, I don’t want to.”

“Is that any reason?”

“Yes.”

“Haven’t you ever slept with someone as a gesture of goodwill?”

“Of course.”

“Or out of pity?”

“More often than not.”

“Well, I don’t mind if it’s a charity fuck.”

“Can we drop the subject?”

“I never knew you were so selfish and ungiving. Didn’t you volunteer one year with the Salvation Army?”

“Collecting money door to door, not screwing the down and out.”

We were at an impasse. Well, I was at an impasse.

“Come on, stupid,” she said, and with Anouk leading the charge, we made our way to the Sydney casino.

Let’s not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade. At blackjack tables and sitting in front of poker machines were tense and desperate men and women looking like droids, who didn’t seem to be gambling for pleasure. As I watched them, I remembered the casino was famous for having its patrons lock their children in their cars while they gambled. I had read a news story about it, and I hoped all these sad, desperate people rolled the windows down a little while they put their rent money in the pockets of the state government, which rakes in huge profits and then puts half a percent of it back into the community for counseling services for gamblers.

“There they are,” Anouk said.

She pointed to a crowd of paparazzi, businessmen, and politicians. Obviously Reynold Hobbs, a seventy-year-old man with square wire-framed glasses and a perfectly round, bald, Charlie Brown head, had taken some advice that it might be good for his public image if he tried to pass himself off as an “ordinary guy just like you,” which was why he was hunched over the $10-minimum blackjack table. The way his shoulders were slumped, it seemed as if he’d lost his posture in the last hand. Anouk and I walked up a little closer. He might be Australia ’s richest man, but it didn’t look like he had got there by gambling.

His son, Oscar Hobbs, was a few meters away, trying his luck at a poker machine, holding himself upright as only a celebrity can- a man that can be photographed at any moment, that is, a man not picking his nose or shifting his genitals. I quickly gave myself a stern warning: Don’t compare your life to his! You haven’t a chance! I looked around the room for a comparison I could live with. There. I saw him: old guy, not many teeth, not much hair, boil on his neck, nose like a conch shell; he would be my anchor. Otherwise I’d be in trouble. There was no way I could stand comparison to Oscar Hobbs, because it was a matter of public record that with women he was the luckiest son of a bitch alive. From my furtive readings of tabloid magazines I had seen his string of girlfriends- a long, beautiful, enviable string. If you saw some of the honeys he’d been intimate with, you’d eat your own arm up to the elbow. Fuck. I can’t even stand to think about it. He wasn’t a social-butterfly kind of heir apparent; you’d never see him at art openings or A-list bars or movie premieres. Oh sure, every now and then you’d see the corner of his chin in the social pages of the Sunday papers, but even from the way the chin was looking out at you, you’d just know he’d been caught unawares, like a thief surprised by a security camera in a bank. But the women! After seeing photos of them, I’d go back into my bedroom and tear at my pillow savagely. More than once I tore it to shreds, literally to shreds, and it is very hard to actually tear a pillow.

“So how do you want to tackle this?” I asked Anouk.

“We should attack on two fronts. One of us takes the father, the other one the son.”

“This is never going to work.”

“You want to try Reynold or Oscar?”

“Neither, but I suppose I’ll try Reynold. I want to ask him something anyway.”

“OK. But what should I say to the son? What kind of opening do you think will work?”

“I don’t know. Pretend you met before.”

“He’ll think I’m trying to pick him up.”

“Then insult him.”

“Insult him?”

“Dissect him the way you always do. Tell him what’s wrong with his soul.”

“How do I know what’s wrong with his soul?”

“Make it up. Tell him his soul’s got one of those stains on it that smudges when you try to wipe it clean.”

“No, that’s no good.”

“All right. Then tell him he’s so rich he’s cut off from reality. That’ll get him going. Rich people hate that.”

“But he is so rich he’s cut off from reality.”

“Anouk, believe it or not, financial hardship is not actually the one official reality.”

“Let’s not argue. Let’s just get going on this.”

“OK. Good luck.”

I went over to the table where Reynold Hobbs was hunched, but there were no empty seats. I stood around, breathing on the players’ necks. A security guard eyed me suspiciously, and with good cause too. I was acting suspicious, muttering to myself, “What the hell am I going to say to this media giant? How can I convince him to see my father? As an act of charity? Reynold Hobbs is a famous philanthropist, sure, but his is the kind of charity you phone in.”

A reporter sitting next to Reynold finished an interview, stood up, and shook his hand. I took the opportunity and squeezed in beside him. Reynold smiled cordially at me, but I immediately sensed his discomfort. Some people are just no good talking to anyone under twenty years old, and the closer you are to zero, the greater their discomfort. He turned away from me and became instantly engrossed in a conversation with his lawyer about the average point size of small print in a legal contract. Reynold wanted to put in some clause in Times New Roman but drag it down to four points. His lawyer was debating the ethics of the proposed move, and argued that any print needs to be no smaller than seven points to be “all aboveboard.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hobbs?” I said.

He turned slowly, as if to say “Everything I breathe on turns to gold, so I’m doing you a big favor just facing in your direction,” and when his eyes reached me, they did so with an infinite stillness that told me in no uncertain terms that despite our proximity, he was inaccessible.

“What is it?”

“You own some of our newspapers, don’t you?”

“And?”

“Well, I thought power was supposed to corrupt, Mr. Hobbs. But what you do isn’t corrupt- selling diarrhea isn’t corrupt, it’s just a baffling waste of power. With all the influence you exert, with the infinite choices you have up your sleeve, you could print anything, and yet you choose to print armpit sweat. Why?”

Reynold didn’t know what to say. I looked over to see how Anouk was doing. She seemed to be faring better than I was. Oscar had an embarrassed look on his face. I wondered what she was saying.

Reynold was still ignoring me. I said, “OK, you want to sell papers. I get it. You sell fresh phlegm because the public has an indefatigable taste for fresh phlegm. But can’t you make your papers a little bit liberating? What about sticking in a quarter page of Tibetan wisdom between the rehashed headlines and the daily horrorscopes? Would it kill sales?”

The security officer’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“It’s OK,” Reynold said, without taking his eyes off me.

I pushed on. “Take the shamelessly sensationalist rehashing of the Frankie Hollow story. You don’t have any more insight than you had on the first day, but you plop it on the front page anyway, turning it round and round, now from the point of view of the turd in the hotel toilet, now that of a bird flying past the window. Honestly, Mr. Hobbs, it’s like reading dick cheese. How can you live with yourself? You must hire someone to look in the mirror for you.”

“Listen to me, sonny, whoever you are. A newspaper is there to report, not to enlighten men’s souls. Tabloids are sensationalist because men’s lives are not sensational. That’s the long and the short of it. The death of a celebrity is the best paper-seller we have. Do you know why? Because it’s as if the headline reads: ‘Gods Die Too.’ Do you get me?”

“Sure. Can I borrow thirty thousand dollars?”

“What for?”

“To wander aimlessly over the whole earth. Ten thousand would get me started.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“You shouldn’t be looking for handouts. You should be inspired to do it on your own.”

“There’s nothing inspiring about minimum wage.”

“Yeah, well, I started on minimum wage. I never got a handout. I worked for what I have.”

“That’s a good speech. It’s a shame you can’t give your own eulogy.”

“OK. My patience has run out now.”

He nodded to the security guard, who helped me to my feet by squeezing my neck.

“One more thing!” I shouted.

Reynold sighed, but I could tell he was wondering what I was going to say. “Make it quick,” he said.

“My father wants to meet with you.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Martin Dean.”

“I never heard of him.”

“I didn’t say he was famous. I just said he wants to meet you.”

“What about?”

“Why don’t you let him tell you in person?”

“Because I don’t have time. My plate’s full right now.”

“You’re rich enough. Buy a bigger plate.”

Reynold nodded again, and the security officer dragged me from the table. Someone took my picture as I was “escorted” outside. I waited for Anouk on the casino steps for an hour, and to pass the time I swung by the car park to check for suffocating children. There weren’t any.

I came back up just as Anouk was coming out. I had never been flabbergasted before, so I didn’t know what it felt like to be flabbergasted and I didn’t even really believe people could be flabbergasted outside of books. That said, I was flabbergasted. Following closely behind Anouk were Oscar and Reynold Hobbs.

“And this is Jasper,” she said.

“We’ve met,” Reynold said, with an ephemeral sneer.

“Nice to meet you again,” I said, and I threw Oscar the warmest smile in my smile repertoire, but his eyes didn’t find my face worth dwelling on, so he missed it.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Anouk.

“They’re coming with us,” she said, making her eyebrows wiggle.

“Where?”

“Home.”

VIII

In the stretch black limousine, both Reynold and his son spent the ride staring out their respective windows. Oscar’s three-quarter profile had me transfixed most of the way. What a burden, I thought. Imagine being filthy rich and impossibly good-looking. For all that, he exuded a sadness I was unable to account for.

“I’ve seen your picture in magazines,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“And you’ve always got some gorgeous model hanging off your arm.”

“So?”

“So where do I get an arm like that?”

Oscar laughed and looked at me for the first time. His eyes were coffee-colored and motionless.

“What’s your name again?”

“Jasper.”

He nodded, apparently agreeing that my name was Jasper.

“So how does it feel to be always watched?” I asked.

“You get used to it.”

“But don’t you feel restricted?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t miss the freedom?”

“Freedom?”

“Let me put it this way. You couldn’t take your penis out and wave it on a public train without it being front-page news. I could.”

“Why would I want to wave my penis on a public train?” Oscar asked me. It was a good question. Why would anyone?

Reynold Hobbs coughed, but it was no mere lung-clearing exercise. That cough was meant to put me down. I smiled. You may have all the money in the world, Mr. Hobbs, I thought, you might own the whole universe and its particles thereof, you might gain interest on the stars and reap dividends from the moon, but I’m young and you’re old and I have something you don’t- a future.

“I’ve heard about this place. It’s a labyrinth, isn’t it?” Reynold said as we hiked through the dense bush.

“How did you hear about it?” I asked, and he looked at me as though I were a shrunken head in an Amazonian exhibit. To him, my question was the same as asking God how he knew Adam and Eve had taken the apple.

“Your dad’s sure going to be surprised,” Anouk said, smiling at me.

I didn’t smile back. I was dreading a scene. Normally Dad didn’t like surprise guests, which ordinarily was fine because he never once had any, but there was no way of knowing how he was going to react. What Anouk didn’t understand was that just because Dad had once written in a notebook that he wanted to whisper ideas into an enormous golden ear didn’t mean that he hadn’t forgotten writing it two minutes later or that ten minutes later he didn’t write in a separate notebook that all he wanted was to defecate into an enormous golden ear. You couldn’t know.

We went inside. Luckily it wasn’t a disgusting mess, it was only mildly vile: books, scattered papers, a couple of days’ worth of rotting food, nothing too off-putting.

“He really is a genius,” Anouk said, as if preparing them for the type of genius who goes to the toilet on the coffee table.

“Dad!” I called out.

“Piss off!” came his throaty answer from the bedroom. Reynold and Oscar exchanged a silent dialogue with their eyes.

“Maybe you’d better go in and get him,” Anouk said.

While Reynold and Oscar made themselves uncomfortable on the couch, refusing to recline into the cushions, I went to find Dad.

He was lying on his bed, facedown in the starfish position.

I said, “Reynold Hobbs and his son are here to see you.”

Dad turned his head toward me and gave me a pretty sneer. “What do you want?”

“I’m not kidding. Anouk thought you were going into another suicidal depressive phase and was worried about you and so she went through your journals and found the bit about you wanting to whisper big ideas into an enormous golden ear and so she convinced me to go with her and find the biggest, most golden ear in the country and amazingly she pulled it off and now they’re waiting for you in the living room.”

“Who’s waiting?”

“Reynold Hobbs and his son, Oscar. They’re waiting to hear your big ideas.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. Take a look for yourself.”

Dad lifted himself off the bed and peered around the corner. If he thought he’d do it without being seen, he was wrong. Reynold turned his head slowly to us and scratched himself listlessly- who knows if he was really itchy or merely playing a part?- and as we approached he shaded his eyes with his hand, as if Dad and I were glowing apparitions too bright for the human eye to bear.

“Hey,” Dad said.

“Hey,” Reynold said back.

“Anouk’s been telling us you’ve got some great unrealized ideas you thought we’d be interested in,” Oscar said.

“We’re not wasting our time here, are we?” Reynold asked.

“No, you’re not wasting your time,” he said. “I swear on my son’s life.”

“Dad,” I said.

“Just give me a minute to get my notes together. Um, Anouk, can you come in here for a sec?”

Dad and Anouk went into Dad’s bedroom and closed the door. I wanted to follow them inside, but I didn’t want Reynold and Oscar to think I was afraid to be alone with them, even though I was afraid to be alone with them. We all kind of nodded at each other, but nodding gets old after a few seconds. So I said, “I wonder what’s keeping them?” and I went into the bedroom, where Anouk sat on Dad’s bed while he knelt on the floor, bent over a collection of old black notebooks, frantically turning pages. It was a disturbing sight. I could hear him hiss: he was leaking anxiety. Anouk made a face at me, a face overloaded with dread.

“What are you standing there for?” Dad snapped at me without looking up.

“Are you ready?”

“He hasn’t picked an idea yet,” Anouk said.

“They’re waiting.”

“I know!”

“You swore on my life, remember?”

“All right,” Anouk said, “let’s everybody calm down.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Turn off the light!” Dad whispered to me urgently.

“Dad, they saw us go in.”

“Why do I care anyway? This is foolishness.”

Dad picked up a handful of notebooks and went out into the living room. Anouk and I followed. Dad sat on the armchair, leafing through one of his notebooks slowly, making clicking noises with his tongue. “So…yes…the idea…I have a couple that I thought you’d be interested in…”

He shuffled through to the last page and snapped it shut- seems the idea wasn’t there after all, because he pulled out another black notebook, identical to the first. And again, flying through the pages, clicking his tongue, eyeballs sweating. That notebook also failed to produce. Another pocket held a third small black notebook. “I just…oh yeah, this is something you’ll- no, probably not…Hang on…just one more second…one more second…I swear…five seconds- five, four, three, two, one, and the winner is…um, just one more second.” A tiny worm of a smile slid onto Reynold’s face. I wanted to stamp it out with the foot of an elephant. At the best of times I hated watching my father squirm in a hell of his own construct, but in the face of derision from outsiders, it was unbearable. Dad was in a frenzy trying to break out of this paralysis of indecision, when Reynold snapped his fingers. Twice. That must be how rich people get things done, I thought. It worked. Dad stopped and immediately read what was written on the page he happened to have open at that exact moment.

“Idea for a cannibal-themed restaurant- every piece of food is shaped like a part of the human anatomy.”

The idea hung in the air. It was idiotic. No one responded, because there was no reason to. Dad’s eyes dove back to his notebook and continued to search. Reynold didn’t snap his fingers again. He didn’t have to. Dad started anticipating the fingers and would stop randomly at an idea and read it out loud.

“Drug education- have schoolchildren spend a week living with a junkie in a falling-down squat. Child will watch junkie shoot up, vomit, steal from his own family, break out in sores, and finally overdose. Child will write a report of five hundred words and read it at junkie’s funeral, which will be part of the daily school excursion. Every time a junkie dies, the class has to bury him, until association of heroin with death is embedded in the unconscious minds of the children.”

He wasn’t thinking. He was just spewing out ideas. And none of the good ones.

“Introduce conscription for community service where we let the homeless live in the homes of bankers and take the mentally ill off the streets and let them shit in the bathrooms of those in the advertising industry.”

“Next,” Reynold said quietly.

“Electronically tag celebrities like cattle, so when they’re walking down the street-”

“Next.”

“Based on car emissions and usage of water, sprays, and nonrecyclable materials, calculate how much damage each individual is doing to the environment and record it against that person’s name and sentence him or her to spend an equivalent in hours or money in doing something to repair the environment.”

Reynold’s eyes flickered just enough to let you know he was thinking. “How do you make money on that?”

“You can’t.”

“Next.”

“Make every man, woman, and child in this country a millionaire.”

Reynold didn’t say anything, and he said it with his eyes. His disdain became another entity in the room. “Even if you could do that,” he said, “why would you want to?”

It was a fair question. Dad was about to answer when Reynold said, “OK, Martin. We’ve heard you out. Now I want you to hear us out- is that fair?”

“All right.”

“We want to do a television special on Terry Dean. The real story, you know? Stuff we haven’t heard. Maybe a miniseries. Over two big nights. The story as you’ve never heard it before.”

The name of his brother made Dad stiffen up so he looked packed in ice. “So who’s stopping you?” he said, distressed.

“You are. We have the police and media reports from the time, but everyone else who was there died in the fire. You’re the ultimate insider. We can’t do it without your contribution. There’s so much we don’t know.”

“Is that why you came?”

“Yes.”

So this was how Anouk had convinced these two media giants to come home and listen to my father’s inane ideas. What a miscalculation! We all sat for the longest time in the most dreadful, ominous silence, during which I was afraid Dad might try to strangle every neck in the room. He shut his eyes, then opened them again. After several more minutes passed and it became obvious Dad wasn’t going to say another word, Oscar said, “Well, we’ll be off.”

Once they were gone, Dad rose from his chair as if levitating, walked out of the house, and disappeared into the labyrinth. Anouk ran after him. I didn’t move for an hour, struck immobile by visions of my father killing himself or doing some fucked-up thing that would get him interned for another round in a mental hospital, and I’m ashamed to say the thought of these appalling things didn’t frighten or sadden me as much as they bored me to tears. That’s how sick of him I was.

IX

I hadn’t seen or heard from the Inferno in almost a week. I played a waiting game with the telephone and lost. It had become, in my mind, a weird surrogate for her, a plastic representation. The telephone was silent because she was silent. I began to hate the telephone, as if she had sent it to me as her delegate because she was too important to come herself.

Shuffling around the labyrinth, I decided to bother Anouk. Shortly after we moved into the house, Dad had given her a spare room to use as a studio. Apart from being both sexy and annoying, Anouk was an artist of sorts, a sculptress. She was really into depicting the subjugation of women, the emasculation of men, and the subsequent ascension of women to a higher plane of consciousness. That is to say, the room was full of vaginas and dissected penises. It was an unsettling potpourri of genitalia; there were thin limping penises dressed in rags, bloody lifeless penises made to look like dead soldiers on a gloomy battlefield, penises with nooses tied around the shaft, charcoal drawings of terrified penises, melancholy penises, penises weeping at the funerals of dead penises…but they were nothing next to the victorious vaginas! Vaginas with wings, great ascending vaginas, twinkling vaginas flecked with golden light, vaginas on green stems with yellow petals protruding in place of pubic hair, vaginas with wide grinning mouths; there were dancing clay vaginas, exultant plaster-of-Paris vaginas, blissful candle vaginas with a wick like a tampon string. The most terrifying words you could hear in our house came out of Anouk’s mouth when you had a birthday coming up. “I’m making you something,” she’d say, and no smile was wide enough to conceal the oceans of dread bubbling underneath.

Anouk was lying on her daybed making SAVE THE FOREST signs when I shuffled in. I didn’t bother asking what forest.

“Hey, you free tonight?” she asked.

“Today’s not the day to ask me to save anything,” I said. “The way I’m feeling right now, wholesale destruction is more in my line.”

“It’s not for that. I’m doing the lighting for a play.”

Of course she was. Anouk was the busiest person I knew. She began every day making long lists of things to do, which by the end of the day she had actually done. She filled every minute of her life with meetings, protests, yoga, sculpting, rebirthing, reiki, dance classes; she joined organizations, she left organizations in a fury; she handed out pamphlets and still managed to squeeze in disastrous relationships. More than anyone I’ve ever known, she had a life rooted in activity.

“I don’t know, Anouk. Is it a professional play?”

“What do you mean?”

What did I mean? I meant that I respect the right of anyone to stand up onstage and speak in a booming voice, but that doesn’t make it a tolerable night out. From previous experience I could say without prejudice that Anouk’s friends took amateur theater to new, incomprehensible lows.

“Is Dad speaking to you?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I thought after the other night he might have been inclined to murder you.”

“Not at all. He’s fine.”

“He’s fine? I thought he was depressed and suicidal.”

“So are you coming to the play or not? In fact, I’m not giving you an option. You’re coming, that’s all there is to it.”

There’s theater, there’s amateur theater, and then there’s just a group of people who bump into each other in a dark room and make you pay for the privilege of cringing for two hours. This was that kind, and every second hurt.

Anouk was responsible for the operation of a single spotlight, which she swung around the stage as if she were looking for an escaped prisoner going over the wall. Forty minutes in and I had exhausted all my sudden-apocalypse fantasies, so I swiveled around in my seat and looked at the faces of the audience. The faces I saw seemed to be enjoying the play. My bewilderment was indescribable. Then I really thought my eyes were playing tricks on me: sitting in the back row of the hall, perched on the edge of his chair, also seeming to enjoy the play, was Oscar Hobbs.

A loud, unbelievable laugh from one of the actors distracted me. It was the worst pretend laugh I’d ever heard, and I had to see who was responsible. For the next twenty minutes I was held spellbound by this minor character- his inauthentic smile, some plainly hilarious eyebrow acting, and then a whole scene of tearless sobbing- and when the play finished, the lights were turned on, the audience was applauding (perhaps sincerely) and I scanned the room in time to see Oscar Hobbs sneak out the back door.

The next day in the morning paper there was, surprisingly, a review of the play. It astonished everyone involved in the production- a play that small and shoddy in a theater that foul and dingy didn’t usually attract professional reviewers as much as it attracted homeless people looking for some soup, and having so little faith in the professionalism of their own work, the organizers hadn’t bothered to alert the media. The strangest and most suspicious thing wasn’t the review itself but the content: it focused solely on the play’s lighting: “deeply atmospheric,” “moody and arresting,” and “bold and shadowy.” Everyone who read it agreed it was the silliest they’d ever seen. The actors, the director, and the writer weren’t mentioned. Anouk was startled both by having been singled out in the review and by the ugly and childish reaction of her colleagues, who turned on her viciously, accusing her of planting the review, bribing a journalist, and “showing off with the spotlight.”

Anouk was confused, though I wasn’t. I’d seen Oscar Hobbs at the hall, and it wasn’t hard to see his fingerprints all over this thing. What did I make of it? It was no more than amusing. The gods can step down and salivate over the mortals like the rest of us, can’t they? Anouk had one of those bodies that demanded, as a man, your rapt attention, and Oscar Hobbs was just a man, after all. As I said, it was amusing, nothing more, and while I enjoy watching the befuddlement of my family, friends, and peers, I can’t hold on to secrets for very long. So that night, after Anouk hung up the phone at the end of a long argument with the play’s producer, I told her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she screamed.

“I just did.”

She scrunched up her face so her eyes, nose, and mouth were no bigger than a mandarin.

“What the hell does he want?” she said quietly.

I gestured at her body and said, “Take a guess.”

“But he can get anyone he wants!”

“Maybe because of something you said to him in the casino. What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on.”

“All right,” she said. “I told him his soul’s got one of those stains on it that smudges when you try to wipe it clean.”

Two days later I was at work, standing outside the building smoking a cigarette with my boss, Smithy, and I was thinking I’d have to leave the job soon and I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t announce my coworkers’ faults on the way out. I was wondering whether they’d give me a quitting-in-a-huff party when I saw a Porsche Spyder drive up to a no-stopping zone and stop there. It was the kind of car James Dean died in. It was a nice car. I’d die in there too, if I could afford it.

Smithy said, “Feast your eyes on that.”

“I’m feasting.”

Oscar stepped out of the car and walked up to us. “Jasper.”

“You’re Oscar Hobbs!” Smithy said in shock.

“That’s right,” he said back.

“That must be the problem with being famous,” I said. “Everyone tells you your own name.”

“Jasper. Can I talk to you a minute?”

“Sure,” I answered and, turning to Smithy, excused myself. Smithy nodded at me enthusiastically, still wearing that shell-shocked face, the one that looked as if he’d just found a vagina among his own genitalia.

Oscar and I stepped into a small patch of sunlight. He looked nervous.

“I feel kind of funny coming to see you about this.”

“About what?” I asked, sensing the answer.

“Anouk came into my office and really let me have it for that review.”

“She did?”

“I also made sure the media reported an environmental demonstration she went on. But she was furious. I don’t understand it. She really hates me, doesn’t she?”

“It’s not personal. She hates the rich.”

“How can I get her to like me?”

“If you could demonstrate that you’re oppressed in some way, that would help.”

He nodded rhythmically, as if to a beat.

“What do you really want with Anouk, anyway? It seems that you’re making a lot of effort here. I’ve seen the women you go for. Anouk’s nice, and she has her own style of beauty, but it doesn’t really make any sense. You can rake in the über-women anytime you like. What gives?”

“The thing is, Jasper, the world is full of ordinary people. Some are beautiful, some are not. What’s rare is extraordinary, interesting, original, and creative people who think their own thoughts. Now, while waiting for this extraordinary woman, if I have to spend my time with an ordinary woman, do you think I’d be with a beautiful ordinary woman or an unattractive ordinary woman?”

There was no need to answer that, so I didn’t.

“Women like Anouk are rarer than you think.”

After he left, Smithy said, with forced nonchalance, “How do you know Oscar Hobbs?” and I said, “You know, from around,” and because I’m as pitiful as the next man, with the same howling ego, I felt for the rest of that day like someone important.

Still, I was confounded. This man wasn’t just running after Anouk like a snorting dragon, he was actually infatuated with her, and she was shooting him down! Power may be an aphrodisiac, but one’s own prejudice is a turnoff, and evidently the more potent of the two. I remember her dragging me once to a rally where the speaker said the media barons were in the pocket of the government, and then a month later to another rally where this speaker said the government was in the pockets of the media barons (she agreed with both), and I remember trying to explain to her that it only looks like they are, because by coincidence the government and the newspapers just happen to have the exact same agenda: to scare the shit out of people and then to keep them in constant freezing terror. She didn’t care. She decreed her everlasting hatred for both groups, and nothing could persuade her otherwise. I began to think of Oscar’s rich and handsome face as an amusing test of the strength and vitality of her prejudices.

I arrived home around sunset and walked dreamily through the advancing shadows of the labyrinth. It was one of my favorite times in the bush- the edge of night. As I approached my hut, I saw the Towering Inferno on the veranda waiting for me. We hurried inside and made love and I studied her face vigilantly during it, to make sure she wasn’t thinking of anyone other than me. To be honest, I couldn’t tell.

Half an hour later a voice was at the door. “Knock knock,” the voice said.

I grimaced. It was Dad this time. I climbed out of bed and opened the door. He was in a bathrobe he’d bought months earlier, and the price tag was still hanging off the sleeve.

“Hey, tell me something about that girlfriend of yours,” he said.

“Shhh, she’s asleep.” I stepped onto the veranda and closed the door behind me. “What about her?” I asked.

“Is she on the pill?”

“What business could that possibly be of yours?”

“Is she?”

“As it happens, she’s not. She has an allergic reaction to it.”

“Great!”

I took a deep breath, determined to bear him with as much patience as I had stored in my depths. His grin drained the pool.

“All right. You win. I’m curious. Why is it great that my girlfriend is not on the pill? And this better be good.”

“Because that means you use condoms.”

“Dad. So fucking what?”

“So- can I borrow some?”

“Condoms? What for?”

“To put on my-”

“I know what they’re for! I just- I thought prostitutes brought their own condoms.”

“You don’t think I can sleep with anyone who isn’t a prostitute?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t think I can attract a regular citizen?”

“As I said, no.”

“What a son!”

“Dad,” I began, but I couldn’t think of an end to that sentence.

“Anyway,” he said, “have you got any?”

I went into my bedroom and grabbed a couple of condoms from the bedside table and took them back to him.

“Just two?”

“All right, take the whole pack. Have a party. I’m not a pharmacy, you know.”

“Thank you.”

“Wait- this woman. It is a woman, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s a woman.”

“Is she in the house now?”

“Yes.”

“Who is she? Where did you meet?”

“I can’t see what business that could possibly be of yours,” he said, and walked off the veranda with a slight lilt in his step.

Strange things were afoot. Anouk was being pursued by a man dubbed by Guess Who magazine as Australia ’s most eligible bachelor, and Dad was sleeping with unprofessional person or persons unknown. New dramas were stirring in the labyrinth.

The morning birds, those little feathery alarm clocks, woke me around five. The Towering Inferno wasn’t in bed beside me. I could hear her crying on the veranda. I lay in bed, listening to those little deep gulping sobs. It was kind of rhythmic. Suddenly I knew what she was up to. I leapt out of bed and ran outside. I was right! She had her little mustard-sized jar pressed up against her cheek and she was depositing a new batch of tears. It was almost full now.

“This is no good,” I said.

Her eyes blinked innocently. That pushed me over the edge. I stepped forward and ripped the jar out of her hand.

“Give it back!”

“You’ll never get him to drink it. What are you going to tell him it is- lemonade?”

“Give it back, Jasper!”

I unscrewed the lid, gave her a defiant look, and poured the contents down my throat.

She screamed.

I swallowed.

It was awful-tasting. I tell you, those were some bitter tears.

She looked at me with such intense hatred that I realized I’d done an unforgivable thing. I thought it had the potential to curse me for life, like disturbing a mummy in his tomb. I had drunk tears that were not shed for me. What would happen to me now?

We sat in our respective corners watching the sunrise and the bursting of the day. The bush began to seethe with life. A wind picked up and the trees whispered to themselves. I could hear the Inferno thinking. I could hear her eyelids fluttering. I could hear her heart beating. I could hear the ropes and pulleys lifting the sun into the sky. At nine she rose wordlessly and dressed. She kissed me on the forehead as if I were a son she was duty-bound to forgive, and left without a word.

Not ten minutes later I sensed something, a disturbance. I strained my ears and heard distant voices. I threw on my bathrobe and left the hut and wove my way toward them.

Then I saw them together.

Dad had locked the Inferno in a conversation. Dad, a labyrinth within a labyrinth, was talking at her as if he were engaged in some vigorous activity like a tree-sawing competition. Should I do something? Should I stop him? Should I scare him away? How?

He’d better not be asking her about her allergy to the pill or about her preference for ribbed over flavored condoms, I thought. No, he wouldn’t dare. But whatever he was saying, I was certain he was doing me more harm than good. I watched them anxiously for a couple more minutes, then the Inferno walked away while he was still talking. Good for her.

That night we were in a pub. It was a busy night, and when I went to get the drinks, I kept getting elbowed. Everyone crowded the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention. Some pushy customers waved their money in the air as if to say, “Look! I have hard currency! Serve me first! The rest of them want to pay with eggs!”

When I returned to the Inferno, she said, “We need to talk.”

“I thought we were talking.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t even confirm or deny that we had just been talking.

“Anyway,” I said, “why do you need to preface talking by saying we need to talk? You want to talk? Talk!” I was getting worked up, because I knew more or less what was coming next. She was going to break up with me. Winter had entered my body all of a sudden.

“Go on,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

“Of course I’m not. What am I, a saint? Do you think of me as an especially unselfish person? Do I love my enemies? Do I volunteer in soup kitchens?”

“Shut up, Jasper, and let me think.”

“First you want to talk. Now you want to think. Haven’t you thought this out? Didn’t you at least compose a speech in your head prior to coming out tonight? Don’t tell me you’re improvising! Don’t tell me this is something you’re just winging on the spot!”

“Jesus Christ! Just be silent for one minute!”

When I sense someone is about to hurt me emotionally, it’s very difficult to resist the temptation to act like a five-year-old. Right then, for example, it was everything I could do to stop myself counting down the sixty seconds out loud.

“I think we need a break,” she said.

“A break meaning a lengthy pause, or a break meaning a severing?”

“I think we need to stop seeing each other.”

“Has this got something to do with my father?”

“Your father?”

“I saw you talking to him this morning after you left the hut. What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“He didn’t say nothing. The man has never said nothing in his life. Besides, you were talking to him for, like, ten minutes. Did he say something against me?”

“No- nothing. Honest.”

“Then what’s this about? Is it because I drank your tears?”

“Jasper- I’m still in love with Brian.”

I didn’t say anything. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to work that out. Or a rocket scientist. Or an Einstein. Then I thought: I don’t think brain surgeons, rocket scientists, or even Einstein are that brilliant when it comes to charting the map of human emotions. And why always brain surgeons, rocket scientists, and Einstein anyway? Why not architects or criminal lawyers? And why not, instead of Einstein, Darwin or Heinrich Böll?

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“You’re in love with your ex-boyfriend. I don’t have to be Heinrich Böll to work that out.”

“Who?”

I shook my head, stood up, and walked out of the pub. I heard her calling my name, but I didn’t turn around.

Outside, I broke into tears. What a hassle! Now I’d have to become rich and successful just so she could regret dumping me. That’s another thing to do in this short, busy life. Christ. They’re adding up.

I couldn’t believe the relationship was over. And the sex! That fortuitous conjunction of our bodies, finished! I supposed it was better this way. I really never wanted anyone to shout at me, “I gave you the best years of my life!” This way, the best years of her life were still ahead of her.

And why? Maybe she was pissed off that I had drunk her tears and was in love with her ex-boyfriend, but I knew Dad had said something that had pushed her over the edge. What had he said? What the fuck had he said? That’s it, I thought. I don’t care what he does- he can write a handbook of crime, put in a suggestion box, set a town on fire, smash up a nightclub, be interned in a mental hospital, build a labyrinth, but he absolutely cannot touch one hair on the head of my love life.

He was a stinky concentrated form of pandemonium and I would no longer let him ruin my life. If the Inferno could break up with me, I could break up with him. I don’t care what anybody says, you absolutely can break up with family.

I went home planning to gather up all the particles of energy I could muster and release them right in his fucking face!

I marched straight into his house. The lights were off. I unlocked the door and sneaked in. I heard a strange sound from his bedroom. He must be crying again. But it didn’t sound like mere crying. It sounded like sobbing. Well, so what? I hardened myself against the lure of sympathy. I went and opened the door, and what I saw was so shocking, I didn’t have the common decency to close the door. Dad was in bed with Anouk.

“Get out!” he screamed.

I just couldn’t get my head around it. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Jasper, get the fuck out of here!” Dad yelled again.

I know I should have, but my feet seemed to be as dumbfounded as my head. “What a joke!”

“Why is this a joke?” Dad asked.

“What’s she getting out of it?”

“Jasper, leave us alone!” Anouk shouted.

I stepped back out of the room and slammed the door. This was really insulting. Anouk hadn’t wanted to sleep with me and yet she had jumped into bed with my father. And ewww- with my condoms! And what was she doing with Dad when Oscar Hobbs had been trying to get into her bed? Was some pitiful soap opera going on? Dad was a man who had spent the majority of his life absent from human relationships, who finally embarked on one with his only confidant, merely to find himself as the dullest point of a love triangle where, if logic prevailed, he would lose her.

Well, this was no longer my problem.

The next morning I woke early. I decided the practical thing would be to find a room in a share house with junkies, something cheap and affordable so I wouldn’t drain my meager savings just on shelter. I answered a bunch of ads in the newspaper. There weren’t many that didn’t specifically ask for, in capital letters, a FEMALE. It seemed to be common knowledge that men hadn’t made the right kind of evolutionary leap, the one that allowed them to tidy up after themselves. The apartments and houses that did permit males to exist there weren’t so bad, but they all had people living in them. Of course I knew this beforehand, but it wasn’t until I was face-to-face with the other humans that I realized I needed to be alone. We were expected to be civil to each other, not just once in a while, but every day. And what if I wanted to sit in my underwear and stare out the kitchen window for six hours? No, the solitude of living in a hut in the center of a labyrinth had ruined me for cohabitation.

In the end I decided on a studio apartment and took the first one I saw. One room and a bathroom and a partition between the main area and the little kitchen, which ran alongside a wall. It was nothing to get excited about. There was not one feature of it about which you could say, “But look at this! It has a ____________________!” It had nothing. It was just a room. I signed the lease, paid the rent and the security deposit, and took the keys. I went inside and sat in the empty room on the floor and smoked one cigarette after another. I rented a van and drove home to my hut and threw all my possessions worth keeping into it.

Then I went up to the house. Dad was standing in the kitchen wearing his dressing gown that still had the price tag on. He was whistling atonally while cooking pasta.

“Where’s Anouk?” I asked.

“Not sure.”

Maybe with Oscar Hobbs, I thought.

The pasta sauce was spluttering, and in another pan he seemed to be overboiling vegetables so as to bleed every last nuance of flavor out of them. He gazed at me with a rare look of affection and said, “I understand you were a bit shocked. We should’ve told you. But anyway, you know now. Hey- maybe the four of us can go out sometime?”

“The four of who?”

“Anouk and me and you and your plaything.”

“Dad, I’m leaving.”

“I didn’t mean tonight.”

“No. I’m leaving leaving.”

“Leaving leaving? You mean…leaving?”

“I’ve found an apartment in the city. A studio.”

“You already found a place?”

“Yeah- put down a security deposit and the first two weeks’ rent.”

There was a shiver running through him, a shiver I could see.

“And you’re moving out when?”

“Now.”

“Right now?”

“I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“What about your stuff?”

“I hired a van. I packed everything I need.”

Dad stretched his limbs strangely, and in a dull, artificial voice he said, “You’re not giving me much say in the matter.”

“I suppose not.”

“What about your hut?”

“I’m not taking it with me.”

“No, I mean…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he meant. Dad started breathing heavily through his nostrils. He was trying not to look wretched. I was trying not to feel guilty. I knew that by losing me he was losing the only person who understood him. But I was guilty for other reasons too; I wondered what was going to happen to his mind. And how could I leave him with that face? That sad and lonely and terrified face?

“You need help moving?”

“No, it’s OK.”

It was as if we had been playing a game all our lives and the game was ending, and we were going to take off our masks and our uniforms and shake hands and say, “Great game.”

But we didn’t.

Suddenly all my bitterness and hatred for him evaporated. I felt enormously sorry for him. I saw him as a spider who woke up thinking he was a fly and didn’t understand he was caught in his own web.

“Well, I’d better get going,” I said.

“Do you have a phone number?”

“Not yet. I’ll call you when I get the phone on.”

“Right. Well, bye.”

“See ya.”

As I turned and walked out, Dad let out a little rumbling grunt, like the sound of troubled bowels.