A Fraction of the Whole

I

Why, oh why did I go on the run too? Why did I throw in my lot with Dad, after all that had happened between us? Because I’m the dutiful son? You never know. I loved my father, no matter how imperfectly. Is that any reason? I mean, loyalty is one thing, but the man had destroyed my life, after all. That should’ve reserved me the right to let him tear off into the wilderness without me. He had meddled unforgivably in my relationship. OK, it wasn’t his fault I was in love with a girl who was not a girl but a building on fire. And it wasn’t his fault either that she chose a man who was not me. I had no case; I was me, and embarrassingly so. It wasn’t Dad’s fault I couldn’t strong-arm her affections, that I couldn’t think of an offer she couldn’t refuse. So she refused me, that’s all. Was it my father’s fault that this flaming edifice loved her failed ex-boyfriend and sacrificed us on the altar of that love? No, it wasn’t. But I blamed him anyway. That’s the great thing about blame; she goes where you send her, no questions asked.

That Eddie had rigged the millionaires and dropped Dad in the shit was such a juicy stab in the back that I was dying to tell my girlfriend about it before the news broke, even if, strictly speaking, she wasn’t my girlfriend. Maybe it was just a good excuse to see her- the spilling of family secrets. And I needed an excuse. The Inferno had left me, and establishing contact with someone who has left you is a tricky business; it’s very, very hard not to come off looking pathetic. I’d already made two attempts at seeing her, and both times I’d come off looking pathetic. The first time I returned a bra that belonged to her that she’d left in my hut, and the second time I returned a bra belonging to her that I’d actually bought that morning in a department store. Neither time was she happy to see me- she looked at me as if I had no business in her line of vision.

The third time I went to her house and left my finger on the buzzer. I remember it was a beautiful day, with shreds of sinewy cloud twisting in fresh wind, the air smelling of a thick, heavy fragrance like the expensive perfume rich women put on their cats.

“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.

“Nothing. I just want to talk.”

“I can’t talk about us anymore because there is no more us. Well, there is an us, but it’s not you and me. It’s me and Brian.”

“Can’t we just be friends?” I asked (already pathetic).

“Friends,” she answered slowly, with a puzzled look on her face, as if I’d actually asked her if we could just be fish.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Just around the block?”

She relented, and on the walk I told her everything that had happened regarding the millionaires, how Eddie had scammed Dad badly by rigging the winners to include most of his friends, and how if anyone found out, he’d be crucified.

I remember at the time I simply wanted to be close to her again, if only for a moment, and spilling our potentially life-destroying secret seemed to be the way to achieve this. It achieved nothing of the kind. In actuality, as a cathartic unburdening of secrets goes, it was intensely unsatisfying. “Your father’s crazy anyway,” she said, as though that were somehow relevant. When we arrived back at her building, she got serious. I knew this because she took my hand. “I still have feelings for you,” she said. I was about to say something. I know this because I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “But I have stronger feelings for him.” So then I was to understand it was a competition for the relative strength of her feelings. Brian was getting all the potent ones; I was getting the leftovers, the tepid, hardly breathing, barely conscious affections. No wonder I couldn’t feel them.

Of course I made her swear not to tell anyone the secret I’d told her. And of course she told the man she loved, because without thinking, I had given her a breaking news story to salvage his flagging journalistic career.

So is that why I joined Eddie, Dad, and Caroline on the run? I went along seeking forgiveness? Maybe, though why should I have stayed? I’d just had the worst year of my life. When the Towering Inferno dumped me, I had moved from the spaciousness of Dad’s labyrinth into a long thin apartment that was not much more than a glorified corridor with a bathroom and an L-shaped space at the end where you could stick a single bed and anything L-shaped you happened to have lying around. The move from the bush to the city had an unexpected and serious destabilizing effect on me. In my hut, I had been close to the voice of the earth and never had to strive to feel at ease. Now, in the city, I found that I was cut off from all my favorite hallucinations. I’d left myself behind. Banished from the source, I felt entirely at sea.

Then, when Dad became a public figure adored by the nation, I’ll admit it- his fame hit me hard. How could twenty million people like that irritating man? I mean, six months before he couldn’t get ten friends in a room for a dinner! The world was yet to fall off its hinges, though; one mild afternoon Dad visited me at work, in his suit, stiff as if unable to bend his knees. He stood awkwardly in my cubicle, looking like a house boarded up, and our sad, silent confrontation climaxed with him telling me the awful news. He hardly had to say it. I don’t know how, but I already knew. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Couldn’t he see I knew as soon as he approached? I practically had to shield my eyes from the glare of death.

These were the strange, turbulent days; Dad married his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Anouk married the son of a billionaire, Dad was betrayed by his best friend, I was betrayed by my true love, and he was despised by an entire nation. In the media, the descriptions of him varied: a businessman, a swindler, a Jew. I remember he was often obsessed with his inability to define himself. Hearing himself compartmentalized in this way only served to remind him who he wasn’t.

Everything was going wrong. I was getting death threats from strangers. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was lonely. I wandered the streets endlessly and tried to pretend I saw the Inferno everywhere, but there just weren’t enough six-foot redheads in Sydney, and I wound up mistaking her for some laughable substitutes. Retreating to my apartment, I became so depressed that when it came time for eating, I thought: What’s in it for me? At night I kept dreaming of a single face, the same face I used to dream about in childhood, the ugly face contorted in a silent scream, the face that I sometimes see even when I’m awake. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to, and, worse, I couldn’t be bothered doing up my shoes. That’s when I started chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana, eating cereal out of the box, drinking vodka out of the bottle, vomiting myself to sleep, crying for no reason, talking to myself in a stern voice, and pacing the streets, which were crammed with people who, unlike me, were conspicuously not screaming inside and not paralyzed by indecision and not hated by every person on this vile island continent.

I took up my post in bed, under the covers, and stayed there, only shaken out of a drunken sleep one afternoon to see Anouk’s green eyes peering at me.

“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”

She was dressed in an old undershirt and tracksuit pants. The shock of marrying money was obviously forcing her to dress down.

“This is very strange, Jasper. I have the exact same feeling as when I first walked into your dad’s apartment after we met. Remember? Look at this place! It’s disgusting. Trust me on this- beer-can ashtrays are a sign you can’t ignore!”

She ran around the apartment, cleaning up energetically, undaunted by the moldy food and general debris of my day-to-day existence. “You’ll need to repaint these walls to get the smell out,” she said. I fell asleep listening to the rising and falling of her voice. The last thing I heard her say were the words “Just like your father.”

I woke a few hours later to find the whole apartment clean and smelling of incense. Anouk sat with her long legs crossed on the floor, her shoes kicked off, a sunbeam reflecting off her ankle bracelet. “Too much has happened. You’re overstimulated. Come down here,” she said.

“No thanks.”

“I taught you how to meditate, didn’t I?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Your dad could never turn off his mind- that’s why he was always breaking down. Unless you want to suffer the same mental deterioration, you’re going to have to achieve a stillness of the mind through meditation.”

“Leave me alone, Anouk.”

“Jasper. I’m just trying to help you. The only way you’re going to survive all this hatred is if you have inner peace. And to find inner peace, you first have to reach the higher self. And to find the higher self, you have to find the inner light. Then you join the light.”

“Join the light. To what?”

“No- you and the light become one.”

“What’s that going to feel like?”

“Bliss.”

“So it’s good, then.”

“Very.”

Anouk went on in this way, about inner peace, about meditation and the power of the mind not to bend spoons but to thwart hatred. She wasn’t fooling me. She was only a wannabe guru- hearing rumors of enlightenment was as far as she’d got. Still, we tried to find peace, light, our higher and lower selves, and all those in between. Anouk thought I might be a natural at meditation, since I’d confided in her that I suspected I could read my father’s thoughts and often saw faces where there should be none. She seized these revelations zealously, and her frenzied voice became more insistent. Just as in the old days, I was defenseless against her fanatical compassion. I let her buy flowers and wind chimes. I let her buy me books on different approaches to meditation. I even let her drag me to a rebirthing experience. “Don’t you want to remember your own birth?” she snapped, as if she were noting forgetfulness as another of my character traits. She took me to a center that had walls the color of an old woman’s gums, and we lay in a dimly lit room in a semicircle, chanting and regressing and struggling to recall the moment of birth as if we were trying to remember someone’s phone number. I felt like a fool. But I loved being around Anouk again, so I went along with it, and every day afterward, as we sat cross-legged in parks and on beaches, repeating our mantras over and over again like obsessive-compulsives. For those couple of weeks I did nothing but watch my breathing and attempt to empty my mind, but my mind was like a boat with a leak; every time I got rid of a bucket of thoughts, new ones poured in. And when I thought I might have achieved the slightest emptiness, I got scared. My emptiness was not blissful but felt malignant. The sound of my own breathing was faintly sinister. My posture seemed theatrical. Sometimes I’d shut my eyes only to see that strange and terrible face, or else I’d see nothing but I would hear, faint and muffled, my father’s voice, as if he were talking to me from inside a box. Clearly meditation couldn’t help me. Nothing could help me. I was beyond help, and not even a sudden sun shower could lift me up. In fact, I started wondering what I had seen in nature all that time I lived in the labyrinth. It suddenly seemed to be horrible and ostentatious, and I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

So that was my state of mind when Dad, Eddie, and Caroline turned up at my apartment building and honked the horn until I went down onto the street. The car just sat there, engine idling. I went over to the window. They were all wearing dark sunglasses, as though they shared a collective hangover.

“They’re coming to arrest me tomorrow,” Dad said. “We’re making a run for it.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, we just came to say goodbye,” Dad said.

Eddie was shaking his head. “You should come with us.”

That seemed a good reason to shake my head, so I did, and asked, “What are you crazy fugitives going to do in Thailand?”

“Tim Lung has offered to put us up for a while.”

“Tim Lung?” I shouted, then whispered softly, “Christ.”

That’s when an absurd and dangerous idea entered my head with an almost audible pop. Just as I loved the Inferno with clenched fists, I hated Tim Lung with open arms.

I thought: I will kill him. Kill him with an impersonal bullet to the head.

“Are you all right?” Dad asked.

In that instant I knew I was not above the fulfillment of a bloodthirsty fantasy. For months I’d been harboring vile ideas about people (I dreamed of filling their mouths with haggis), and now I knew actual violence was the next logical step. After years of witnessing my father’s seasonal dissolutions, I had eons ago resolved to avoid a lifetime of intense contemplation; an abrupt departure into murder seemed the way to go about this. Yes, suddenly I was no longer in the darkness, groping along the endless corridors of days. For the first time in a long time, the path ahead was well lit and clearly defined.

So when Dad said his dried-eyed goodbye for the last time, I said, “I’m coming with you.”

II

Take it from me: the thrill and anticipation of voyage is compounded when traveling on a fake passport. And we were taking a private plane- Dad’s famous face wasn’t going to get out of Australia without a hefty bribe. Hidden under hats and behind sunglasses, we arrived at the airport and went through a security gate straight out to the tarmac. Eddie said the plane belonged to a “friend of a friend,” and he handed envelopes of cash to a couple of unscrupulous customs officials, which was to be shared among the corrupt ground crew and baggage handlers. Frankly, everyone we met looked utterly at ease with the transaction.

As we waited for Eddie to finish the dispensation of bribes and the completion of phony paperwork, Caroline rubbed Dad’s back while Dad ironed out the wrinkles in his own forehead. Nobody would look at or talk to Eddie. I couldn’t help but feel a kind of grief for him. I knew he deserved the alternating fury and cold shoulder he was getting, but his congenital half smile made him look so hapless, so un-Machiavellian, I might have risen to defend his indefensible behavior if only the jury present weren’t so predisposed to a beheading. “Once we get in the air, we’ll be fine,” Dad said, to calm himself down. That surreal phrase stuck in my head: “Once we get in the air.” No one else said anything; we were all lost in thought, probably the same thought. The whole time we avoided talking about the future, as it was inconceivable.

We boarded the plane without incident (if you don’t count Dad’s inhuman sweating as an incident), afraid even to cough so as not to blow our cover. I beat Eddie to the window seat, as this was my first time leaving Australia and I wanted to wave goodbye. The engines started up. We took off with a roar. We climbed the sky. Then we leveled out. We were in the air. We were safe.

“Narrow escape,” I said.

Eddie looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten I was there. His gaze drifted past me to the window.

“Goodbye, Australia,” he said a little nastily.

So that was it- we had been hounded out of Australia. We were now fugitives. We would probably all grow beards, except Caroline, who would dye her hair; we would learn new languages and camouflage ourselves wherever we went, dark green for jungles, shiny brass for hotel lobbies. We had our work cut out for us.

I looked over at Dad. Caroline had her head resting on his shoulder. Every time he caught me looking at him, he gave me an “Isn’t this exciting?” look, as if he were taking me on a father-son bonding holiday. He’d forgotten we were already insidiously bonded, like prisoners in a chain gang. Outside, the sky was a flat color; stark, austere. I watched Sydney disappear from sight with something approximating grief.

Five hours later we were still flying over Australia, over the inconceivably bleak and uninviting landscape of our demented country. You can’t believe how it goes on and on. To appreciate the harrowing beauty of the interior you have to be in the middle of it, with a well-stocked escape vehicle. Topographically it’s incomprehensible and terrifying. Well, that’s the center of our country for you. It’s no Garden of Eden.

Then we were flying over water. That’s it, I thought. The stage on which our unbelievable lives played out has slipped away, under the clouds. The feeling ran deep inside my body until I felt it settle in and get comfortable. All that was left to think about was the future. I was apprehensive about it; it didn’t seem to be the type of future that would last long.

“What does he want with us?” I asked Eddie suddenly.

“Who?”

“Tim Lung.”

“I have no idea. He has invited you to be his guests.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, how long does he want us to stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

“He’s looking forward to meeting you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Christ, Eddie!”

We were giving ourselves up to the mysterious Tim Lung. Having used Dad to filch millions of dollars from the Australian people, did he now want to thank Dad for playing the sap so amiably? Was it curiosity- did he want to see how stupid a man could be? Or was there some darker purpose none of us had thought of?

The lights in the plane were turned off, and as we flew across the planet in darkness, I thought about the man I’d be killing. From media reports I’d learned that frustrated detectives in Thailand, unable to locate him, made assertions that he was the embodiment of evil, a true monster. Clearly, then, the world would be better off without him. Nevertheless, I was depressed by the realization that murder was the only utilitarian idea I’d ever had.

III

“There’s no one here to meet us,” Eddie said, scanning the airport crowd.

Dad, Caroline, and I exchanged looks- we hadn’t known there was supposed to be.

“Wait here,” Eddie said. “I’ll make a call.”

I watched Eddie’s face while he spoke to someone who I assumed was Tim Lung. He was nodding vigorously, bent over in an absurdly servile posture and with an apologetic grin on his face.

Eddie hung up and made another call. Dad, Caroline, and I watched him in silence. Occasionally we gave each other looks that said, “Things are out of our hands but we have to do something, and this knowing look is it.” Eddie hung up again and stared at the phone awhile. Then he came over, rubbing his hands together gloomily.

“We have to spend the night in a hotel. We’ll go to Mr. Lung’s place tomorrow.”

“OK. Let’s get a taxi,” Dad said.

“No- someone is coming to take us.”

Twenty minutes later a small Thai woman arrived, so wide-eyed it seemed she had no eyelids. She stepped toward us slowly, trembling. Eddie just stood there like a cow chewing its cud. The woman wrapped her arms around him, and as they hugged, low sobs escaped through her small mouth. I knew Eddie was lost in the moment because he suddenly ceased looking slippery. Their embrace went on and on until it became monotonous. We all felt painfully awkward.

“I have long wanted to meet you,” she said, turning to the rest of us.

“You have?” I asked doubtfully.

Then Eddie said, “Ling is my wife.”

“No, she’s not,” Dad said.

“Yes, I am,” she answered.

Dad and I were thrown into shock. Eddie was married?

“Eddie, how long have you been married?” I asked.

“Nearly twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-five years!”

“But you live in Australia,” Dad said.

“Not anymore.”

Dad couldn’t get his head around it. “Eddie,” he said, “twenty-five years. Would that mean you were married when we met in Paris?”

Eddie smiled, as if that were an answer and not another question.

We left the airport bewildered. We were not just in another country but another galaxy, one in which Eddie had been married for twenty-five years. Outside, the heat hit us forcefully. We all piled into an old olive-green Mercedes and sped off to the hotel. As it was my first time in a foreign country, my eyes soaked it up- but I’ll save you the travelogue description. It’s Thailand. You know the sights, you know the smells. You’ve read the books, you’ve seen the movies. Hot, sticky, sweaty, it smelled of spicy food, and everywhere there lurked a hint of drugs and prostitution, because like most travelers, we had brought our preconceived notions with us on the journey and did not check them, as we should have, into immigration as hazardous materials best suited for quarantine.

In the car, Eddie and Ling spoke quietly in Thai. We heard our names mentioned several times. Dad couldn’t take his eyes off Eddie and his wife. His wife!

“Hey, Eddie. You have any children?” Dad asked.

Eddie shook his head.

“You sure?”

Eddie turned back to Ling and continued speaking softly.

As we checked into the hotel, careful to sign our new names and not the old ones, it struck me that the strangest thing for me was not just to be traveling, suddenly well and truly out of Australia, but to be traveling in a group. I had always imagined leaving Australia would be the ultimate symbol of my independence, and yet here I was, with everybody. I know you can never escape yourself, that you carry your past with you, but I really had. Small mercy that I wound up getting my own room, which looked down on an eviscerated dog’s carcass.

That night I paced the hotel room. All I could think of was that by now news of our escape would be all over Australia, in every last watering hole, and despite our furtive exit, someone was bound to trace us without too much difficulty. I could easily imagine Australia’s reaction on hearing that we had absconded, and at around three in the morning I felt hit by what I was sure was a hot wave of loathing that had traveled from our homeland all the way to our air-conditioned hotel rooms on Khe Sahn Road.

I went out into Bangkok wondering how to buy a gun. I didn’t think it would prove too difficult; in my head this was a sordid metropolis, a Sodom and Gomorrah that served really good food. I was in a semi-delirious state, only looking at faces, and more specifically at eyes. Most of the eyes I saw were irritatingly innocent; only a few cauterized you just by looking. Those were the ones I wanted. I thought about murder and murderers. My victim was also a criminal; who would cry for him? Well, maybe many people. Maybe he was married too! I thought with a gasp. I don’t know why I should’ve been so surprised; why shouldn’t he be married? He wasn’t notorious for being ugly and unsociable, only for being amoral. That’s attractive in some circles.

It was four in the morning and still oppressively hot and I hadn’t yet found a single gun. I walked on, thinking, “Tim Lung- should I kill you straightaway, without even offering you an aperitif?” As I walked, I lit a cigarette. Why not? It’s not the number one preventable cause of death in the world for nothing.

I was tired and leaned against a post. I felt a pair of eyes on me. There was something frightening yet strangely invigorating about these eyes. These were the eyes I’d been looking for.

I went over to the young man and we spoke at the same time.

“Do you know where I can buy a gun?”

“Do you want to see a sex show?”

“Yes, please.”

He whisked me down the street and took me to Patpong. Large groups of Western men were going into strip clubs and I thought immediately of Freud, who believed that civilization develops in an ever-increasing contrast to the needs of man. Clearly Freud had never been to Patpong. Here the needs of man were scrupulously taken care of, every need, even the needs that made him sick.

I went into the first bar and sat on a stool and ordered a beer. A young woman came and sat on my lap. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. She put her hand between my legs and I asked her, “Do you know where I could buy a gun?” At once I knew I’d made a mistake. She hopped off my lap as if it had bitten her. I saw her talk excitedly to a couple of heavy types behind the bar. I made a run for it, thinking I had slipped into one of those unrealities where you can really hurt yourself, and after a few blocks I stopped running. In effect, these Thai characters were no more criminal than people you’d find at any corner fish-and-chips shop in Sydney, and simply purchasing a gun from them was impossible. In that case, when I met Tim Lung, I’d have to improvise.

When I went down to the hotel breakfast room in the morning, I deduced from the look on Dad’s and Caroline’s faces that they hadn’t slept either. They were wretched, sleepless faces. Faces pinched with worry. Over a large nonexotic breakfast of bacon, eggs, and stale croissants, our banter was light and meaningless, to try to overpower the dark mood. Whatever was in store for us, we wanted to weather it on a full stomach.

Eddie came in without his usual benign expression.

“You ready?”

“Where’s your wife?” Dad asked.

“Shut the fuck up, Martin. I’ve had enough of you. I’ve really, really had enough.”

That silenced us all.

IV

To get to Tim Lung’s place we had to catch a long-tail boat down a dirty, foul-smelling canal. As we passed wooden canoes laden with multicolored fruits and vegetables, I shielded my face from threatening splashes of murky water. My first impressions of Thailand were good, but I knew that my immune system wasn’t up to the challenge of its bacteria. Once beyond this ragged fleet of watercraft, we were alone in the canal, pressing forward. On either side, sitting lopsided on dusty streets, were houses that looked either semicompleted or semidilapidated. We passed women in large-brimmed straw hats washing their clothes in the brown water, evidently unfazed by the idea of encephalitis nesting in their underwear. Then there were long, deserted, dusty streets and huge trees with sprawling branches. The houses, now grand and flashy mansions, were spaced farther apart. I sensed we were getting close. I tried reading Eddie’s face. It was unreadable. Dad gave me a look, the subtext of which was “We’ve escaped, but into what?”

The boat stopped. We stepped off and walked up a small embankment to a large iron gate. Before Eddie could ring the buzzer, a sharp voice from a tinny intercom said something in Thai and Eddie answered it, looking at me, which gave me the feeling that we were on a road on which to go back was suicide and to go forward was probably suicide. I had goose bumps all over. Caroline took my hand. The gate swung open. We pressed on. Dad said something about the state of his bowels which I didn’t quite catch.

Tim Lung’s house had “drug cartel” written all over it. It was large, with huge whitewashed walls surrounded by encrusted pillars, gleaming orange and green roof tiles, and an enormous reclining Buddha nestled in a thick bamboo grove. It was reinforced that we were waltzing into a den of thieves when I spotted men hidden in the shade of trees with semiautomatic rifles, eyeing us as if we had come selling a product they knew didn’t work. The men wore short-sleeved shirts and long pants. I pointed out the armed men to Dad for his predictable response. “I know,” he said. “Long pants, in this weather!”

“This way,” Eddie said.

We walked down a set of steep stairs into a rectangular courtyard. Stuck on spikes were severed pigs’ heads with sticks of incense sprouting from their foreheads. Nice. On one wall of the courtyard was an extensive mural depicting a city razed by fire. Promising. At the end, large sliding doors were already open. I don’t know what I was expecting- snarling Dobermans, tables piled high with cocaine and bags of money, prostitutes sprawled on white leather couches, and a trail of bloodstains leading to the mutilated corpses of dead policemen. What I wasn’t expecting was the very last thing in the world I could have been expecting.

Dad saw it first. He said, “What the fuck?”

On both walls, in frames or stuck up with brown tape, were hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Dad and me.

I said it too: “What the fuck?”

V

“Marty! They’re photos of you!” Caroline shouted.

“I know!”

“And you too, Jasper!”

“I know!”

“Is this you as a baby? You were so cute!”

Our faces from various epochs peered out at us from all over the room. This perverse exhibition comprised all the photographs Eddie had taken over the past twenty years. There were images of a young Dad in Paris, lean and tall, with all his hair and a strange beard on his chin and neck that couldn’t or wouldn’t make its way onto his face; Dad, before he started collecting fat cells, smoking thin cigarettes in our first apartment. And there were just as many of me, as a baby and groping my way through childhood and adolescence. But it was the photos of Paris that interested me most: photographs and photographs of Dad with a young, pale, beautiful woman with a demoralizing smile.

“Dad, is that…?”

“Astrid,” he confirmed.

“Is this your mother, Jasper? She’s beautiful!” Caroline cooed.

“What’s this about?” Dad shouted, his voice echoing through the house. Dad was a bona fide paranoiac who had finally discovered, after all these years, that there really was a conspiracy against him.

“Come on,” Eddie said, leading us deeper into the house.

Dad and I were frozen. Had this something to do with Astrid’s suicide? With my mother dying on one of Tim Lung’s boats? We were thrust into the role of detectives, forced to investigate our own lives, but our mental journeys into the past were futile. We just didn’t get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac’s nightmare! A narcissist’s dream! We didn’t know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed. Obviously Eddie had infused this criminal overlord with an obsession for Dad and me, but what had he said? What could he have said? I imagined him in late-night drinking sessions with his boss: “You wouldn’t believe these characters. They’re insane. They shouldn’t be allowed to live!”

“Mr. Lung is waiting for you in there,” Eddie said, pointing to double wooden doors at the end of the hallway. He had the colossal nerve to be smirking.

Dad suddenly grabbed him violently by the shirt collar; it looked as if he were planning to pull the shirt over his head- Dad’s first official act of physical violence. Caroline pried his fingers loose. “What have you got us into, you bastard?” he shouted, though it wasn’t as threatening as he intended. Fury mingled with genuine curiosity just comes out strange.

An armed guard emerged from a doorway to investigate the commotion. Eddie disarmed him with a nod. Disappointed, the guard retreated into the shadows. Apparently Eddie had a nod that was irrefutable. That was news to us. We continued down the hallway toward the double wooden doors in a daze, examining more photos on the way. Until now, I’d never realized how much Dad resembled a dog being pushed unwillingly into a swimming pool. And me- suddenly my identity felt like a less solid thing. I found it almost impossible to connect with the pictorial history of ourselves. We looked like damaged relics of a failed civilization. We didn’t look comprehensible at all.

And my mother! My heart nearly burst open looking at her. In all the photos she looked silent and motionless; all the action went on behind the eyes, the kind of eyes that look as if they have come back from the farthest corners of the earth just to tell you not to bother going there. Her smile was like a staircase leading nowhere. Half obscured in the corners of frames, there was her sad beauty, she was resting her head in her hands, her tired eyes clouding over. Perhaps it was coincidence, but in each photo she seemed to be farther and farther away from the camera lens, as if she were shrinking. These images gave me a newfound respect for Dad- she looked like a distant and imposing woman whom no sensible person would enter into a relationship with. I took one photograph of her off the wall and broke it out of the frame. It was black-and-white, taken in a laundromat. My mother was sitting on a washing machine, legs dangling, looking directly into the camera lens with her strikingly large eyes. Suddenly I knew this mystery had something to do with her- here I would receive the first clue as to who she was, where she came from. One thing was clear to me: the riddle of my mother’s existence would be answered behind that door.

Dad opened it, and I followed close behind.

VI

We entered a large square room with so many pillows on the floor that part of me just wanted to lie down and be fed grapes. Large indoor ferns made me feel we were outside again. The walls didn’t quite reach the ceiling and sunlight poured through the space above them, except for the far wall, which was made of glass and looked out on the overgrown Buddha in the garden. There, at the wall of glass, was a man, his back to us, staring out at that Buddha. They were the same build. In the bright light that came through the window, we could see only the man’s giant silhouette. At least, I think it was a man. It looked more or less like one, only bigger.

“Mr. Lung,” Eddie said, “may I present Martin and Jasper Dean. And Caroline Potts.”

The man turned. He was not Thai, Chinese, or Asian at all. He had blond scraggly hair and a bushy beard covering pulpy, blemished skin, and he was wearing shorts and a cut-off flannelette shirt. He looked like an explorer recently returned from the wilds, enjoying his first taste of civilization. That’s an off-the-point description, though, one ignoring the elephant in the room, because most of all he was the elephant in the room, the fattest man I’d ever seen or was ever going to see, an astounding freak of nature. Either he had a hormone disorder or the man must have eaten fiendishly for decades with the express ambition of becoming the biggest man alive. His body shape was unreal to me- his hideousness was suffocating. I could no more kill this monstrosity with a bullet than I could dent a mountain by slapping it.

He stared at us without blinking an eye, even while he put out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. Clearly he was planning to stare us into submission. It was working. I felt exceedingly meek, as well as fantastically thin. I looked at Dad to see if he was feeling meek too. He wasn’t. He was squinting at the enormous man as if he were one of those magic puzzles that reveal a hidden image.

Dad spoke first, as though talking in his sleep. “Bloody hell,” he said, and at once I knew.

Caroline said it before anyone. “Terry,” she said.

Terry Dean, my uncle, looked from one of us to the other and broke into the widest smile I had ever seen.

VII

“Surprised? Of course you are,” he said, laughing. His echoey, powerful voice sounded like it came from deep within a cave. He limped toward us. “You should see the look on your faces. You really should. Do you want me to get a mirror? No? What’s the matter, Marty? You’re in shock? Understandable, very understandable. We’ll all just wait here until the shock dies down and makes way for anger and resentment. I don’t expect any of you to take this lying down. This isn’t one of those things you laugh about straightaway, right up front, but later, when it’s all sunk in. Don’t worry- it’ll sink. In a few days you’ll be hard-pressed to recall a single day I wasn’t alive. But tell me, did you suspect it? Even a little? What am I thinking? Here you are, seeing your long-dead brother after all these years, and not only does he have the effrontery to be living and breathing, he hasn’t even offered you a beer! Eddie, get us some beers, will you, mate? And Jasper! I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. Do you know who I am?”

I nodded.

“My nephew! You have your grandmother’s nose, did your dad ever tell you that? I’m so happy to see you. Eddie’s told me all about you. You must be some kind of rock, living with your dad without shattering into a million little pieces. But you look like you’ve turned out all right. You look so normal and healthy and adjusted. How is it that you’re not crazy? It’s crazy that you’re not crazy! Though maybe you are. That’s what I’m looking forward to finding out. And Caroline! Seeing you comes as a bit of a shock, I’ll admit. Of course Eddie told me you’d married…”

Terry stared at her for a long moment before snapping himself out of it.

“I know, you’re all caught off guard. Drink your beers, you’ll feel better. I’ll wait until you calm down. There’s time. Christ, if there’s one thing we all have, it’s time. Marty, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies with that look. You too, Caroline. But not you, Jasper, eh? Maybe because you’re still young. When you’re older, it’s a surprise that you can still be surprised. I wonder, what’s the bigger surprise, that I’m so wonderfully alive or that I’m so wonderfully fat? You can say it- I don’t mind. I like being fat. I’m Henry the Eighth fat. Buddha fat. Let’s get it out of the way so we’re not bogged down in it. I’m a fat fuck. I’ll just take off my shirt so you can see the extent of it. See? OK? I’m a whale. My belly is unrelenting! Invincible!”

It was true. He was so enormous he gave the impression he was indestructible, that he could survive any cataclysm. The zoo of animal tattoos Dad had described to me many years ago had stretched into shapeless swirls of color.

Dad had stiffened. He looked like he wanted to say something but his tongue wasn’t cooperating. “Alive…fat,” was all he could manage.

It dawned on me that Terry was sort of confused himself. He didn’t know who to look at. Every now and then he turned and gazed searchingly at me, perhaps his best chance of immediate love and acceptance. He wasn’t getting it, because despite the incredible news that a family member so thoroughly mythologized was alive and well, more than anything I felt a bitter disappointment that this had nothing to do with my mother after all.

“Isn’t anybody going to give me a hug?”

No one moved.

“So who is Tim Lung?” Dad said finally.

“Tim Lung doesn’t exist. Neither did Pradit Banthadthan or Tanakorn Krirkkiat, for that matter.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m doing it, Marty. I’m finally doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“The democratic cooperative of crime.”

Dad spasmed as though he’d been jump-started with cables. “You’re what?!” he screamed. This was the first emotive response he had given.

“Well, mate, the first time I stuffed it up good and proper. Harry was onto something, though. This thing works like a charm.”

“I can’t believe it! I can’t fucking believe it!”

This apparently was a bigger shock to Dad than the news that Terry had been alive all this time.

Caroline said, “What’s the democratic-”

“Don’t ask,” Dad interjected. “Oh my God.”

Terry clapped his chubby hands with delight and hopped up and down on his stumpy legs. I was thinking how utterly different he was from the young renegade who had so often appeared in my mind’s eye. This fat man was the same sporting hero, the same fugitive, the same vigilante worshipped by the nation?

Suddenly his knees locked up and he looked embarrassed.

“Eddie tells me you’ve been ill,” Terry said.

“Don’t change the subject,” Dad said, his voice turbulent with emotion. “I scattered your ashes, you know.”

“You did? Where?”

“I put them in bottles of cayenne pepper in a small supermarket. The rest I dumped in a puddle on the side of the road.”

“Well, I can’t say I deserved any better!” Terry laughed loudly and put his hand on Dad’s shoulder.

“Don’t touch me, you fat ghost!”

“Mate. Don’t be like that. Are you pissed off about the millionaires thing? Don’t be. I just couldn’t resist. As soon as I heard about what you were doing in Australia, Marty, I knew what I had to do. I’ve been rescuing you from one drama or another your entire life. And helping you has made me who I am. I don’t regret it. I love who I am, and just taking those millions in such an obvious scheme was the easiest way for me to rescue you one last time. You see, mate, I wanted you to come here. I thought it was high time we saw each other again, and I was long overdue to meet Jasper.”

I could see that Dad’s inward rage had almost made its way out. An evil storm was churning in him, and it had everything to do with Caroline. He noticed that she was demonstrating none of the rage; she was quiet, still literally gaping at Terry in horror and wonder. Terry, meanwhile, aimed his smiling eyes back at me.

“Hey, nephew. Why don’t you say something?”

“How did you get out of solitary confinement?”

Terry’s face looked empty of thought for a moment, before he said, “The fire! Of course! And Marty, you told him the whole story. Good for you! Good question, Jasper, right at the beginning.”

“Were you even in solitary?” Dad asked.

We all leaned forward with utter absorption as Terry began.

“I sure was! That was a close one. I almost did get baked- in solitary there are no windows, of course, but I heard a lot of screaming, guards shouting orders to each other, and when the smoke came under the door I knew I was cooked. It was pitch-black in that cement cage, hotter than hell and full of smoke. I was terrified. I started shouting, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ But no one came. I banged on the door and nearly burned my arm right off. There wasn’t anything I could do, and it took all the psychological effort I could muster to calm myself down enough to settle in for an unpleasant death. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor. It was one of the guards, Franklin. I recognized his voice: ‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted. ‘Terry Dean!’ I answered. Good old Franklin. He was a good man who loved cricket and he was a big fan of my rampage. He opened the door and said, ‘Come on!’ and in his panic to save me, he let down his guard. I knocked him unconscious, took his clothes, threw him in the cell, and locked the door.”

“You murdered the man who came to save you.”

Terry paused a moment and gave Dad a strange look, like a man deciding whether or not to explain a complex natural phenomenon to a child, then continued. “After that it was easy. The whole prison was on fire, and I didn’t even have to use the keys I’d stolen- all the doors were open. Somehow I made my way through the smoke-filled corridors and out of the prison, I saw the town up in flames and disappeared into the smoke. That was it.”

“So it was Franklin who burned in your cell.”

“Yeah, I guess it was his ashes you scooped up.”

“What happened next?”

“Oh yeah- I saw you in the fire. I called out to you, but you didn’t see me. Then I saw that you were running into a trap. I shouted, ‘Left, turn left!’ and you turned and disappeared.”

“I heard you! I thought it was your bloody ghost, you mongrel!”

“Spent a couple of days in Sydney lying very low. Caught a freighter to Indonesia. Worked my way around the globe checking out the other continents to see what they had to offer, and wound up here in Thailand. That’s when I started the democratic cooperative of crime.”

“What about Eddie?”

“Eddie started working for me at the beginning. I tried to track you down, Marty, but you’d already left Australia. So the best I could do was get Eddie to go and wait near Caroline. I had her address from a letter she’d sent me in jail, and Eddie took a room next to hers and waited for you to show up.”

“How could you be so sure I’d go see Caroline?”

“I wasn’t sure. But I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Why didn’t you just get Eddie to tell me you were alive?”

“By then I felt like I’d caused you enough trouble. You were really looking out for me back then, Marty, and you probably thought I didn’t notice, but I knew you’d worried yourself sick about me. I figured you’d had enough.”

“You told Eddie to make Caroline a millionaire!”

“Of course!” Turning to Caroline, he said, “When I heard about your son, I was so sorry.”

“Go on, Terry,” Dad said.

“That’s it. I had Eddie keep tabs on you. When he told me you were with some nutty lady who you got pregnant and you didn’t have any money, I told him to give you some. But you wouldn’t take it. I didn’t know how to help, so I gave you a job working for me. Unfortunately, it was a bad time- you waltzed right into the middle of a little gang warfare. I didn’t know your lunatic girlfriend was going to jump on the boat and blow herself up. It was a nutty way to do yourself in, wasn’t it? Sorry, Jasper.”

“What else?”

“Anyway. When you took Jasper to Australia, I got Eddie to follow. He came back with some crazy reports. I gave you a job again, running one of my strip clubs, and you smashed the place and wound up in hospital. Then I gave you some dosh so you could build your maze, and that’s that. Then you warped the whole of Australia with your strange ideas and here we are. That pretty much brings us up to date.”

As Dad absorbed his brother’s story, his whole being looked to me like a Hollywood façade, as if I were to take a step around him, I’d see he was only one inch wide.

“When I was in that cell,” Terry said, “and thought my death was seconds away, I saw clearly that everything I had tried to do, to tidy up the ethics in sport, was fucking meaningless. I realized that, barring accident, I could have lived for eighty or ninety years, and I had blown it. I was furious with myself! Furious! I tried to reason why I had done it, what I was thinking, and I realized that I’d been trying to leave a trace of myself so that after I was gone, I would still kind of be here. Everything is summed up in that idiotic ‘kind of.’ And you know what I realized on the very edge of death? That I couldn’t give a fuck. I didn’t want to build a statue of myself. I had an epiphany. Have you ever had one? They’re great! This was mine: I found out that I had killed myself because I wanted to live forever. I had tossed my life away in the name of some daft I don’t know what-”

“Project,” I said. Dad and I looked at each other.

“Project. Yeah. Anyway, I swore if I got out of there I’d live in the moment, fuck everyone, let my fellow man do whatever he wants, and I swore that I’d follow Harry’s advice and stay anonymous for the rest of my days.”

Terry suddenly turned to Caroline with clear, serious eyes.

“I wanted to call you, but every time I was about to, I remembered that cell, that death chamber, and I understood that the way I loved you was sort of possessive, and like my sporting rampage, it was a way of barricading myself against, I don’t know…death. That’s why I’ve chosen to love only prostitutes. There’s no chance of getting into that old routine of jealousy and possessiveness. I took myself out of the competition, like Harry said. I’m free, and I’ve been free since that day. And you know what I do now? When I wake up every day, I say to myself ten times, ‘I am a soulless dying animal with an embarrassingly short lifespan.’ Then I go out, as the world sinks or swims, and make myself a little more comfortable. In the cooperative our profits aren’t outstanding, but we make a fairly decent living, and we can afford to live like kings because Thailand’s cheap as chips!”

A long silence followed, in which no one knew where to look.

“Australia loves you,” Dad said finally.

“And they hate you,” Terry said back.

Despite their divergent paths in life- two diametrically opposed roads less traveled- the brothers had come to the same conclusion, Terry, naturally, through epiphany and the cathartic afterbirth of his near-death trauma, and Dad through reflection and thought and intellectually obsessing about death. Uneducated Terry, the man Dad had once described as being unable to write his name in the snow with his piss, had somehow intuited the traps of the fear of death and with ease sidestepped them, as if they were dog turds on a brightly lit street. Dad, on the other hand, had intellectually recognized the traps but still managed to fall into every one of them. Yes, I could see it in his face straightaway. Dad was crushed! Terry had lived the truth of Dad’s life, and Dad never had, even though it was his truth.

“So what happens now?” Dad asked.

“You stay with me. All of you.”

We looked at each other, knowing that it was a bad idea but that we had no other choice. Nobody moved. We were like a tribe of cave dwellers whose cave had just caved in. As my eyes shifted from my father to his brother, I thought: These sick characters are my family. Then I thought: Career criminals and philosophers have a surprising amount in common- they are both at odds with society, they both live uncompromisingly by their own rules, and they both make really lousy parent figures. A few minutes passed, and even though nobody budged in any direction, I felt like the two brothers were already tearing me apart.

VIII

Life in Thailand was easygoing. They call it the land of smiles. That’s not an empty tag: Thais never stop grinning, so much so that at first I thought we’d landed in a vast land of simpletons. Generally, though, the chaos of Bangkok was in harmony with my state of mind. There was only one thing I had to watch out for other than the tap water and those suspicious smiles: Thais have such a deep regard for heads and such a low opinion of feet that everyone kept telling me I should not point my tootsies at people’s noggins. They must have thought I was planning to.

A travel guide told me that foreigners can be ordained as Buddhist monks and I thought that sounded like an impressive addition to my résumé, but I found out that monks must abstain from murdering bugs (even if they invade your pajamas), stealing, lying, sex, luxuries, and intoxicants, including beer and double espressos, and I didn’t think that left anything except meditating and the ritual burning of incense. Their philosophy is based on the understanding that all life is suffering, and all life is, especially when you abstain from stealing, lying, sex, luxuries, beer, and double espressos. Anyway, I was too full of hate to be a Buddhist monk; in my thoughts I composed letters to the Towering Inferno that had compound words in them like “cunt-bitch” and “whore-nose” and curses such as “I hope you cough your uterus out your mouth.” Buddhists generally don’t think like that.

I told Terry of my plan to murder Tim Lung and we laughed until our sides ached. It was a great icebreaker. After that, we spent many days and nights together, and I would go to bed with my ears exhausted but buzzing. Like his brother, Terry was prone to unrelenting talking jags, crazy monologues on every conceivable subject. Sometimes they’d be broken by moments of introspection, when he’d hold up one finger as if to put the universe on mute; he’d sway on his fat stumpy legs in openmouthed silence, his pupils would narrow as though I’d shone a torch on his face, and minutes would pass like this before his finger would come down and he’d continue talking. He did this wherever we went: in restaurants and at vegetable markets, at the poppy fields and in the sex shows. The more time I spent with Terry, the more I saw behind his mischievous smile an inner strength and something ageless. Even the breaded-fish crumbs on his beard looked timeless, as if they had always been there.

He had unbelievable habits. He liked to roam the streets to see if someone would try to rip him off. Often he’d let them pick his pockets, then laugh about what was taken. Sometimes he’d stop the pickpockets and tell them what they did wrong. Sometimes he checked into backpacker hostels and partied in a German accent. And he never missed a single sunrise or sunset. One afternoon we watched a dark orange sun bleed into the horizon. “This is one of those sunsets made glorious by the pollution of a congested city. Someone has to say it and it might as well be me- Nature’s own work pales in comparison. The same goes for mass destruction. One day we’ll all be basking in the glow of a nuclear winter and God, won’t it be heaven on the eyes!”

In addition to heroin smuggling and prostitution, the democratic cooperative of crime’s main trade was gambling on Thai boxing matches, the national sport. Terry would take me along when he bribed the boxers to take a dive. I remember thinking about his legacy in Australia, how he had been obsessed with fighting corruption in sport, and I was impressed with the way he now shat all over it like this. Often, on the way to the matches, Terry tried to get a tuk-tuk to give the drivers a scare- none would take my mammoth uncle, so we would be forced to walk. He never once got angry; he’d be happy to have the opportunity to stop at a vegetable market and buy a fresh bunch of coriander to wear around his neck (“Better smell than any flower!”). During the boxing match he would ask me all about myself: what I liked, what I didn’t, what were my hopes, my fears, my aspirations. Despite prostitutes, gambling, and drugs being his bread-and-butter, Terry was the sort of man who inspired you to be honest. I revealed myself to him as I never had to anyone else. He listened to my confessions seriously, and when I recounted the horror/love story of the Towering Inferno, he said he thought that I had “loved her sincerely, though not really.” I couldn’t argue with that.

But what thrilled me most about my uncle was that he spoke of the real world- of prisons and bloodbaths and sweatshops and famines and slaughterhouses and civil wars and kings and modern-day pirates. It was a wonderful relief to be out of the philosophical realm for a change, the oppressive, suffocating universe of Dad’s thought culs-de-sac and thought outdoor toilets. Terry talked of his experiences in China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, and India, his forays into remote and dangerous territories, the murderers he’d met in dingy gambling joints, how he picked them to join the democratic cooperative of crime. He talked of his reading and how he started with all of Dad’s favorite books, how he’d struggled through them at first, how he’d fallen in love with the printed word, and how he read voraciously in deserts and jungles, on trains and on the backs of camels. He told me of the moment he decided to begin his prodigious eating (it was in the Czech Republic, a cold potato dumpling soup). He saw food as his link to humanity, and while traveling, he was invited to family dinners wherever he went; he ate ritualistically with all races, tasting every culture and custom across the globe. “To be fat is to love life,” he said, and I realized that his belly wasn’t an impenetrable fortification against the world but a reaching out to embrace it.

Most nights whores entered the house, sometimes two or three together. Their professionalism melted away at the sight of Terry’s enormous body, their famous Thai smiles morphing into grimaces on their young, fresh faces. The rest of us couldn’t help but feel sorry for these prostitutes as they led Terry to the bedroom like zookeepers conspiring to tranquilize an agitated gorilla. By the time they emerged though, he was vindicated; the girls were happy, exalted. They came out looking strengthened by the experience- rejuvenated, even. And he had his favorite whores too, ones who came back night after night. They often ate with us, and they never stopped smiling and laughing. You couldn’t deny that he loved them passionately. He showered them with affection and attention, and I really believed he didn’t feel icky that they went off to fuck and suck other men. His love really was uncomplicated. It was love without possessiveness. It was real love. And I couldn’t help comparing his love for the prostitutes with my love for the Towering Inferno, which was so bogged down in the issue of ownership, it could easily be argued that what I’d felt for her didn’t even resemble love at all.

Dad spent the first few months in Thailand remote and surly. On the rare occasions we risked outings and sat in restaurants frequented by Australian tourists, his name would pop up in their conversations, and hearing himself disparaged in the third person nauseated him. He often bought the Australian papers and read them while grinding his teeth, and afterward he wrote long letters to the editors, letters I begged him not to send. As for me, I stayed a mile away from the papers and swore to do so for all time. I’ve come to the conclusion that reading the newspaper is sort of like drinking your own piss. Some people say it’s good for you, but I don’t believe it.

Maybe the hate waves from Australia finally took their toll, because Dad started dying again. It was clear that the cancer had reemerged in his lungs and was spreading. Over a period of a few months, his body became the centerpiece in a theater of horror. It looked as if he were being eaten from the inside out. He moved gruesomely from flesh to bone. He became pale and looked as though his essence had been suffused with methane. Eventually he avoided mirrors altogether. He stopped shaving and wandered around Terry’s place like a castaway, so thin he was swimming in his clothes. Then, just as suddenly, his trajectory toward death plateaued. He didn’t get any better, but he stopped getting worse. It was clear to me that he was waiting for something, waiting to do something, and he wasn’t going to die until he did it. There’s a lot to be said for the power of obstinacy. People often will themselves to stay alive; cripples walk and dead men get erections. Look around. It happens.

At first Terry and Caroline did nothing but plead with him to see doctors and begin another course of chemotherapy, but Dad refused. I knew it was doubtful that I could persuade him to do anything, but I couldn’t help thinking of Anouk and her obsessive belief in the powers of meditation. I tried to convince him that the possibility remained that by extreme efforts of concentration he might vanquish the cancer on his own. To humor me, he tried one afternoon. We sat together at the foot of the Buddha. I instructed him that superhuman efforts of the most intense form of mind control were required, but Dad was never able to clear his mind of skeptical thoughts. In the middle of meditation, he opened one eyelid and said, “You know what Mencken said about the human body? He said this: ‘All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient machine. He has the worst kidneys known to comparative zoology, and the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it is called upon to do, is less efficient than the eye of the earthworm; an optical instrument maker, who made an instrument so clumsy would be mobbed by his customers.’ ”

“That sounds true,” I said.

“Well, then- what makes you think meditation can override my body’s congenital frailty?”

“I don’t know. It was just an idea.”

“It’s a useless idea. Remember how Heraclitus said a man’s character is his fate? That’s not true. It’s his body that is his fate.”

Dad pulled himself up, using the Buddha’s toes as leverage, and staggered back toward the house. Caroline was standing at the door, watching us.

“How did it go?” I heard her ask.

“It was great. I’m healed. I’ll live for another several billion years. I don’t know why I never tried it before.”

Caroline nodded wearily, then accompanied Dad back inside.

Poor Caroline. On top of her role as primary caregiver, she had her own problems. She surprised herself by succumbing to emotional outbursts and crying fits. She’d been profoundly shaken by the events in Australia. She had always seen herself as somewhat of a thick-skinned, carefree, unself-conscious woman who loved life and never took any aspect of it seriously, least of all public opinion. But the outpouring of hatred focused on her had a serious and permanent destabilizing effect. She had become cautious and introverted; she saw this difference and no longer liked herself. On top of that, the reappearance of Terry, her childhood love, had called her marriage to Dad into question. I wasn’t sleeping well, so I was often witness to their midnight soap operas. Caroline would go bleary-eyed into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Dad would sneak down the hallway after her and peer around the doorway. His soupy breathing always gave him away.

“What are you doing?” she’d ask.

“Nothing. Stretching my legs.”

“Are you spying on me?”

“I’m not spying. I missed you, that’s all. Isn’t it romantic?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I wait until you’re asleep and then…what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean!”

I tell you, you’ve never heard so much subtext in your life!

Caroline and Dad shared the bedroom next to mine. Often I’d hear the three a.m. opening of sliding doors. I’d sit up in bed and look out my window at the slim figure of Caroline crossing the lawn to the reclining Buddha. In the moonlight I could see everything. Sometimes she’d rest her head on Buddha’s shoulder, and if the night was still and the birds asleep, I could make out the soft sound of her voice drifting into my room. “He’s fat and disgusting. And a criminal. He’s a fat, disgusting criminal. And he’s dead. He’s fat and he’s dead and he likes whores.” Once I heard her say, “And who am I? Look at my body. I’m no prize.”

The most painful moments came when it was time for bed. We’d be sprawled on cushions on the floor, bloated and drunk from the evening meal. Suddenly conversations would become stillborn dialogues.

Dad: “I’m tired.”

Caroline: “Go to bed, then.”

Dad would stare at Terry in a faintly sinister way.

Dad: “In a little while.”

Caroline: “Well, I’m going to bed.”

Terry: “Me too.”

Dad: “Me too.”

Dad did everything he could not to leave Caroline and Terry alone together. It was awkward, although I suspected he secretly loved the idea of being betrayed by his brother. To be betrayed by his brother was cheap melodrama of Biblical proportions, and it would be a gift to the dying man- a gift that showed life had not forgotten to include him in her grubby comedies. Then one night I saw Caroline sneaking out of Terry’s room, her hair messed up, shirt half unbuttoned. She froze at the sight of me. I gave her a weary look- what was I supposed to do, wink? Still, I couldn’t bring myself to blame her for her treachery. It was an untenable situation all around. I just wished she could have waited; it wouldn’t be long before Dad was out of the way. Cancer thrives on broken hearts; it is a vulture waiting for you to give up on human warmth. Dad often talked about the shame of the unlived life, but it was the shame of his unloved life that was really killing him.

I wasn’t sure if Terry was aware of his role in this triangle, and I don’t think that in general he knew he had succeeded in doing what Dad had only dreamed about, and that by doing so he had irrevocably cut Dad off from himself. Otherwise, he maybe wouldn’t have harassed Dad as much as he did.

Some months after our arrival, Terry got it into his head that it was within his powers to make Dad’s final days a constant wonder and joy, and he recruited me to help. He dragged the three of us to bathe naked in the river, then to look at cloud formations, then to bet at a dogfight, then to wallow in flesh and booze at a drunken orgy. Dad seethed about all these interruptions to his dying in peace and threw Terry nothing but odious, hate-filled looks. As for me, I was relieved to be doing something. Maybe it was the sudden freedom of having someone else to worry about Dad, but ever since arriving in Thailand, I’d had an enormous amount of energy. I felt stronger too, as if I could wrestle an animal to the ground. I woke early each morning, spent the day walking from one side of Bangkok to the other, and went to bed late each night. I seemed to need very little sleep. I thrived on the activities Terry meant for Dad to thrive on.

One obscenely hot afternoon, after I had been on my feet for several hours, I lay down in the hammock, stared at that humongous Buddha, and made a sort of mental inventory of my life experiences to see if they in fact wove together seamlessly without my having noticed at the time. I thought if I could decode the order of the past, I could deduce what was coming next.

I couldn’t. A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Terry’s naked torso. It was always impressive to see him with his shirt off. It made me wonder if he hadn’t reversed the usual order of enlightenment and achieved his Buddha-like serenity from the outside in.

“You ready?” Terry said.

“For what?”

“We’re going to try kick-starting your father’s motor again.”

I swung my legs over the hammock and followed Terry into Dad’s room. He was lying on the bed stomach down. He didn’t acknowledge our presence in any way.

“Look, Marty, don’t you find yourself a heavy weight, pinning you down?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Don’t you want instead to be a leaf blown in the air, or a drop of rain, or a wispy cloud?”

“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

“You need to be reborn. You need to die and be reborn.”

“I’m too old for rebirth. And who do you think you are, anyway? You’re a murderer a hundred times over, you’re a drug pusher, a pimp, a gunrunner, yet you take yourself for a visionary and a sage! Why is it your hypocrisy doesn’t make you sick?”

“Good question. It’s an amiable contradiction, that’s all.”

God, how these unedifying discussions went on and on.

Terry hauled Dad out of bed and dragged us to a shooting range where you could use pump-action shotguns to hit the targets. Neither Dad nor I had much love for guns, and the force of the action sent Dad keeling over onto his back. Terry bent over him, and Dad looked up, his mouth open, trembling all over.

“Marty, tell me something- where has all this meditating on death got you?”

“Fucked if I know.”

“Jasper says you’re a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner.”

“Does he?”

“Tell me about the corner. What does it look like? How did you get there? And what do you think would get you out?”

“Help me up,” Dad said. When he was on his feet again, he said, “In brief, here it is. Because humans deny their own mortality to such an extent they become meaning machines, I can never be sure when something supernatural or religious in nature occurs that I did not manufacture my connection to it out of desperation to believe in my own specialness and my desire for continuance.”

“Maybe because you’ve never had mystical experiences.”

“But he has,” I said. “Once he saw everything in the universe simultaneously. But he never followed up on it.”

“So you understand the nature of the corner now? If men are constantly manufacturing meaning in order to deny death, then how can I know I didn’t manufacture that experience myself? I can’t know for sure, so I must assume I did.”

“But then your whole life you haven’t ever really taken your own soul seriously.”

“Stop talking about the soul. I don’t believe in it, and neither does Jasper.”

Terry turned to me. I shrugged. In truth, I simply could not make up my mind about its existence. Dad was right- the immortal soul didn’t wash with me. Its shelf life felt overestimated. I believed instead in the mortal soul, one that from the moment of birth is ceaselessly worn away and that will die when I die. Whatever its shortcomings, a mortal soul still seemed perfectly sublime to me, no matter what anyone said.

“Look, Marty. Let it go- the mind that wants to solve the mysteries of the universe. It’s over. You lost.”

“No, you look, Terry,” Dad said wearily. “If I did live wrongly, if I made blunders and still have blunders coming up, I think maintaining the status quo of my deficient personality would be a lot less tragic than changing at the eleventh hour. I don’t want to be the dying man who learns how to live five seconds before his death. I’m happy to be ridiculous, but I don’t want my life to assume the characteristics of a tragedy, thanks.”

I reloaded my shotgun and aimed at the target and, for the first time that day, hit the bull’s-eye. I turned back to Dad and Terry, but neither had seen it. They were both unmoving, two brothers standing together but alive in very different worlds.

That night I buried myself deep under the covers. The shots Terry was firing at Dad seemed to be missing the target and hitting me instead. It occurred to me that the uncompromising position Dad held in the face of death was likely to be my own someday. Despite my desire to be his mirror opposite, I had to admit there were disturbing similarities between us. I also had a restless inquiring mind that aimed to solve the mysteries of creation, and like him, I didn’t know how to find respite from this fruitless, unending investigation. I wasn’t so sure Terry wasn’t rocking my boat on purpose. He must have known Dad wasn’t going to change one atom of his personality, and that’s why he was intent on dragging me along for these outings. He was aiming at me and getting me square on. I knew that somewhere within me was a spiritual inclination that Dad lacked, but it was still faint and unresolved. It wouldn’t take much to wake up one day and find I’d drifted away from my own center and was now tracing my father’s footsteps like a zombie.

There was a knock on the door. I didn’t say anything, but the door opened anyway. Terry waddled into the bedroom sideways.

“Damn these narrow doorways. Hey, Jasper, I need to pick your brain. What can we do to make your father’s final days wonderful?”

“Fuck, Terry. We can’t. Just leave him be.”

“I know! Maybe we should go on a trip.”

“All of us? Together?”

“Yes! In the country! We could go visit Eddie, see how he’s getting on.”

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”

“Your father’s not doing so good. I think to be in the company of his oldest friend might be just what he needs. And besides, the countryside could freshen him up.”

“You can’t freshen him up. He’s putrefying.”

“I’m going to tell everyone.”

“Wait- what about the cooperative? Don’t you have prostitutes to pimp, opium to grow, guns to trade?”

“The others can take care of things until I get back.”

“Look, Terry. Dad doesn’t get lost in the beauty of nature. Natural phenomena make him sink into the worst kind of introspection. What he needs is distraction, not a journey into his interior. Besides, you’re sleeping with his wife and he knows it.”

“I’m not!”

“Come on, Terry. I saw her coming out of your room.”

“Look. Caroline’s frustrated. Your father doesn’t know how to cuddle, that’s all. He only uses one arm!”

It was pointless talking to Terry. His mind was made up. We would all of us go to a remote mountain village and stay with Eddie for a couple of weeks. I tore at my hair and overheard him break the news ungently to Dad and Caroline, and though it was a unanimously detested idea, the following morning he herded us all into the Jeep.

IX

During the drive I ruminated on what Terry had told me about Eddie’s history. His father had been the only doctor in the remote mountain village where they lived, and as a young man Eddie was expected to follow in his footsteps. It was his parents’ dream that Eddie would take over once his father retired, and such was the force of their will, it became Eddie’s dream too. Over the years they scraped and sacrificed to send their son to medical school, and he went along, filled with gratitude and enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, things went sour from the first day Eddie opened his medical textbooks. As much as he wanted to pursue “his” dream and please his parents, he found that he was offended by the slop inside the human body. So Eddie spent most of his internship dry-retching. There was really no part of human anatomy he could stomach: the lungs, the heart, the blood, the intestines were not simply repellent symbols of man’s animality, but so delicate and prone to disease and disintegration that he scarcely knew how people survived from one minute to the next.

In his second year of medical school he married a beautiful journalism student whom he had won over dishonestly by boasting about his future as a doctor and predicting a prosperous life together. What should have been a happy event was for Eddie a secret torture. He had serious doubts about entering the medical profession but didn’t trust that he was inherently lovable enough “as is.” Now he had something else to be confused and guilty over: he had begun a marriage based on a lie.

Then he met the man who would change his life. It was two a.m. when Terry Dean stumbled into the emergency room with a penknife stuck in the small of his back at such an awkward angle he couldn’t remove it himself. As Eddie pulled out the knife, Terry’s open and candid manner, combined with the late-night silence of the graveyard shift, made Eddie confide to his patient his confused feelings- how it felt to be torn between disgust and duty, between obligation and the fear of failure. Basically, Eddie moaned: did he want to be a fucking doctor or didn’t he? He admitted that he loathed the idea and it would in all probability drive him to suicide, but how could he get out of it now? How else could he make money? Terry listened sympathetically, and on the spot offered him a high-paying though unusual job: traveling the world and watching over his brother with the aim of helping him out when he needed it. In short, to be Martin Dean’s friend and protector.

While it broke his parents’ hearts and put an unbelievable strain on his relationship with his young bride, Eddie took the job and set off to Paris to wait near Caroline for Dad to turn up. The most astounding fact of all that was revealed to us was that in all those years, from the moment Eddie met Dad in Paris onward, he couldn’t tolerate him. All those years he hated my father, and this hatred never once let up. It was beyond belief. The more I thought about Eddie’s deception, pretending to like a man for twenty years, the more I thought it verged on virtuosity. Then I decided that people probably pretend to like their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for their entire lives, and twenty years is no great trick.

The traffic had been heavy leaving Bangkok, but now we were out of the city, it eased up. We were on an open road flanked by rice fields. Terry drove fast. We passed tiny mopeds with several generations of whole families on them and buses that looked to be veering dangerously out of control. For a while we were stuck behind a slow-moving tractor driven by a farmer who was languidly rolling a cigarette with both hands. Then we began winding up the mountains. As if to finish the story swilling around in my head, Terry gave us an update on what had happened to Eddie since he returned to Thailand.

Eddie’s jubilation at having completed a twenty-year mission dissipated as things went almost immediately pear-shaped. After a separation of two hundred and forty months because of Eddie’s work, it took just six weeks of togetherness to destroy his marriage. Eddie moved out of his wife’s apartment in Bangkok and into a house in the remote village where he grew up. It was a terrible mistake- the ghosts of his parents were everywhere, berating him for breaking their hearts. So what did the fool do? He picked up the thread of his old dream. Dreams can be as dangerous as anything else. If you go through the years, changing with age and experience, and you forget to overhaul your dreams as well, you might find yourself in Eddie’s unenviable position: a forty-seven-year-old pursuing the dreams of a twenty-year-old. In Eddie’s case it was worse. He’d forgotten that they weren’t even his dreams to begin with; he’d got them secondhand. And now he had returned to this outrageously isolated community with the intention of setting up shop, only to find that his father’s replacement, now sixty-five years old, had the job well and truly sewn up.

We arrived around sunset at Eddie’s place, a dilapidated house set in a small clearing. The hills surrounding it were covered by thick jungle. When Terry turned off the engine, I could hear a river running. We were really in the middle of nowhere. The isolation of the place made me vaguely ill. Having lived in a hut in the northwest corner of a labyrinth, I was no stranger to austerity or solitude, but this was something else. The house made me shudder. Maybe I’d read too much or seen too many films, but when you consider your life in terms of its dramatic attributes, as I did, everything becomes instantly loaded with meaning. A house is not just a house- it is a location where an episode of your life is staged, and I thought this remote house was an absolutely perfect setting for a menacing low point and possibly, if we stayed long enough, a tragic climax.

Terry honked the horn, and Eddie came out waving his arms in a truly berserk manner.

“What’s this? What do you want?”

“Didn’t you tell him we were coming?” I asked Terry.

“What for? Anyway, he knows now. Eddie! We’ve come to see how you’re getting on. Make up the spare rooms, will you? You have guests.”

“I don’t work for you anymore, Terry. You can’t tell me…you can’t just come here and expect…Look, I’m a doctor now. I don’t want any funny business up here.”

“My spies tell me you haven’t had one patient.”

“How did you…They’re a little suspicious of outsiders. And I haven’t lived here for many, many years. It takes time to build a reputation, that’s all. Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? You can’t stay. My position here is precarious enough. The last thing I need is you giving me a bad name.”

“My God, Eddie, we’re not going to run around the village in our underwear, we just want some peace and quiet, see a little scenery, and anyway, is it so strange for a doctor to take in a dying man and his family for a few weeks?”

“Weeks? You intend to stay for weeks?”

Terry laughed loudly and slapped Eddie on the back.

“Him too?” Eddie asked quietly, looking in Dad’s direction. Dad shot a look back that was lifeless and cold. Then Eddie looked at me with a half smile that approximated warmth but was not quite warm. I had recently experienced from the Australian people the concept of hate by association and so recognized the size and smell of it. Terry grabbed his bag and headed into the house. The rest of us followed cautiously. I paused at the door and turned back to Eddie. He hadn’t moved. He was standing next to the Jeep, perfectly still. He looked as if he couldn’t endure any of us. And who could blame him? Individually we were all quite pleasant people, but together we were unendurable.

I am not aware of what it is about my body that attracts mosquitos of all races and religions, I can only say that I doused my body in insect repellent and lit a thousand citronella candles, but for some reason they just kept coming. I removed the mosquito net from the bed and wrapped it like a shroud around my body. Through the diaphanous netting, I took in my surroundings. To say the furnishings were minimal was an understatement: four white walls, a creaky chair with a broken leg, a wobbly table, and a wafer-thin mattress. A window looked out on the thick vegetation of the jungle. I had insisted on the bedroom farthest away from everybody. There was a back door- good for entering and exiting without having to see anyone, I’d thought.

I felt a mosquito on my arm. They were tunneling through the net. I tore it off in disgust and thought: What am I going to do here? In Bangkok, between the sex shows and the Buddhist temples, there was plenty to keep me occupied. Here, Dad’s dying was likely to make all non-Dad-dying thoughts virtually impossible. What was there to do other than watch the man deteriorate?

After a silent dinner during which we all eyed each other suspiciously, where the air was thick with secret desires and no one said the unsayable so there was nothing much to be said, Eddie gave me a tour of the place.

There wasn’t much to see. Eddie’s father had been an amateur painter as well as a doctor and had, unfortunately, found a way to combine his two interests. On the walls hung hauntingly realistic depictions of the bowels, heart, lungs, and kidneys and one of an aborted fetus who, despite his bad luck, appeared to be smiling wickedly. I didn’t bother pretending I liked the paintings, and Eddie didn’t expect me to. I followed him into his office, a large, immaculate room with wooden shutters. It had the kind of order and tidiness one finds in extremely finicky people and in people who have absolutely nothing to do with their time. As I knew Eddie had been waiting here for weeks on end without a single patient, it was clear which case it was.

“This was my father’s office. This is where he saw patients, did his medical research, and avoided my mother. Everything is exactly how he left it. Actually, why did I say that? That’s not true. When he died, my mother packed everything into boxes, so I have rearranged everything exactly as I remember him having it.”

It was your standard doctor’s office: an oversized desk, a comfy padded chair for the doctor, a straight-backed uncomfortable one for the patient, a raised examination table, a bookshelf with thousand-page medical manuals, and, on a side table, perfectly arranged surgical implements from not only this century but the last two as well. Unfortunately, there were more vulgar paintings of body parts on the walls, paintings that seemed to vilify the human as a reputable organism. The atmosphere in the room was heavy, because of either the lingering death of the father or the present-day frustrations of the son.

“When I took up your uncle’s offer, my parents broke off all contact with me. Now, here they are.”

“Who?”

“My parents.” Eddie motioned to two earthenware pots I thought were bookends.

“Their ashes?”

“No, their spirits.”

“Less messy.”

So the spirits of Eddie’s deceased parents were kept on a high shelf. Out of reach of children.

“I wait here every day. Not one single patient has come by. I’ve introduced myself around, but they’re totally uninterested in trying out anyone new. I’m not even sure how much business they throw around anyway. These people don’t consult doctors for minor ailments, and hardly even for major ones. But I’m determined to stick it out. After all, I went to medical school, didn’t I? So why shouldn’t I be a doctor? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write off those five years of university as a learning experience?”

Apparently Eddie was completely oblivious of the glaring contradiction in his perspective on wasted time. He had chosen to fixate on the five years of medical school rather than the more obvious twenty years of chaperoning Dad and me.

He sat on the edge of his desk and picked something from his teeth with his finger. He stared at me solemnly, as though picking food from his teeth were something he had learned at medical school.

“There’re so many things I wanted to say to you over the years, Jasper. Things I could never say because they conflicted with the requirements of my job.”

“Such as?”

“Well, as you may have figured out, I hate your father. And that the Australian people bought his bullshit even for one minute degrades them as a nation, and degrades all people everywhere.”

“I suppose.”

“Anyway, the point is, I hate your father. No, I loathe him.”

“That’s your right.”

“But what you might not know is, I don’t like you much either.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“You see? You don’t even ask me why. That’s what I don’t like about you. You’re smug and condescending. In fact, you’ve been smug and condescending ever since you were five years old.”

“And that’s my right.”

Eddie leered at me menacingly. Now that he was no longer pretending to like us, it felt as if he had become sinister overnight.

“See? Smug and condescending. I’ve observed you your entire life. I probably know you better than you know yourself. You pride yourself on knowing people and what they’re thinking. But you don’t know yourself, do you? You know what it is that you especially don’t know? That you’re an extension of your father. When he dies, you will become him. I have no doubt about that. People can inherit thoughts- they can even inherent whole minds. Do you believe that?”

“Not really.” Maybe.

“When I met your father, he was just a little older than you are now. And you know what I see in you? The same exact man. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him in your core. That’s where you don’t know yourself. I’m sure every time you hear yourself say something that’s an echo of your father, you think it’s just habit. It’s not. It’s him inside you, waiting to come out. And that’s your blind spot, Jasper.”

I gulped, despite myself. The blind spot. The fucking blind spot. Everyone has one. Even the geniuses. Even Freud and Nietzsche had mile-wide blind spots that wound up corrupting some element of their work. So was this mine? That I was sickeningly similar to my father, that I was turning into him, that I was going to inherit not just his antisocial behavior but his diseased thought processes as well? I was already worried that my depression back in Australia had had echoes of his depression.

Eddie sat on his examination table and kicked his legs in the air.

“It’s so refreshing to be speaking my mind. Keeping secrets is exhausting. I would like to tell you the truth, not just about you, but about me and what you and your father and your uncle have done to my life. So you know. It’s important that you know. Because when I finish telling you, you’ll understand why you must convince everyone to leave this house at once. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to make everyone leave. Before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Just listen. When Terry offered me the job of looking after your dad, I took it as a way to escape a future I was uncertain of. ‘Help them out when they need help, make sure they keep out of trouble, and take photos of them, as many photographs as you can,’ Terry said. That was my mission. Didn’t sound too tough. How was I supposed to know it was going to ruin my life? It’s my own fault, though, I’ll admit. I accepted a devil’s bargain. Have you noticed that in books and movies the Devil is always depicted with a sense of humor while God is deadly serious? I think in reality it would be the other way around, don’t you?”

“Probably.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit. But watching your lives was like watching an accident in slow motion. It was compelling. When I was away from Australia, away from your dad and you, I felt I was missing episodes of my favorite TV show. It was maddening. I’d be making love to my wife and thinking, ‘What are they up to now? What trouble are they in? I’m missing it, dammit!’ And I found I made excuses to return earlier and earlier. And I’d go back to listen to your father’s insipid, unending diatribes, but I couldn’t drag myself away. I was hooked. I was a junkie, plain and simple. I was hopelessly addicted to you.”

Eddie was kicking wildly now and bouncing up and down. I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to. I just had to weather this outburst.

“For twenty years I tried to get away, to wean myself off this drug of your family. But I couldn’t. When I wasn’t with you, I didn’t know who I was. I was not a person, I was a nothing. When I went back to Australia and saw you both embroiled in some ridiculous episode, I felt alive. I felt such brightness it practically came out my eyes. My wife wanted a child, but how could I when I already had two children? Yes, I love you both as much as I hate you both, more than you will ever know. I can tell you, after I deposited you two in Terry’s lap, I was devastated. Mission accomplished. I knew as soon as I moved home that I could no longer stand to be with my wife. And I was right. She couldn’t understand why I was irritable, why I was empty. I couldn’t share the emptiness with her and I didn’t love her enough for her to fill it with love, so I left her and came up here. You see? I am completely empty, and I’ve come here in order to try to fill myself. Now do you understand why you must leave? I’ve come here to find myself again, to find out who I am. I’m building myself from the ground up. Your father is always talking about projects. You were my project. And now I need another one. That’s why I need patients. I’m continuing my life where I was interrupted, and obviously I can’t do it with you two here. That’s why you have to talk your uncle into taking you all out of here.”

“Why don’t you just throw us out?”

“Well, Mr. Smug, Mr. Condescension, I can’t. You might think your uncle’s all fun and games, but I’ve seen the violence he’s capable of.”

“Terry’s pretty stubborn. I don’t think I’d have much luck convincing him of anything.”

“Please, Jasper. Please. Your father’s dying. And he is going to do one more crazy thing, and it’s going to be a big one. You must know that too. You can feel it coming, can’t you? It’s like an approaching storm. It’s going to be something wild and unexpected and dangerous and stupid. I stay up nights thinking about it. What is he going to do? Do you know? What is it? I must know. But I can’t. You see? You must leave!”

“I’ll try to speak to Terry.”

“You don’t try, you do. What do you think will happen when your father dies? It’s you that will take up his heritage of doing crazy, unbelievable things. And you will turn out to be an even bigger spectacle than your dad. And that’s why I promise you, if you don’t leave now, I will follow you doggedly for your whole life until you have a son, and then I will have a son just so my son can follow your son. Don’t you see? This is an addiction that can go on for generations! For centuries! We’re at a crucial point here, Jasper. If I don’t get off you now, I will be attached to you forever.”

That was an unpleasant thought.

“Anyway. That’s it. Go speak to your uncle. If you stay, I don’t know what I’ll do. Slit your throats in your sleep, probably.” With that thought he let out a laugh, the kind where you don’t see any teeth. “Leave me alone now. I must pray to my parents.”

Eddie laid some brightly colored flowers on the floor and knelt in front of them and started muttering. He prayed daily for success, which was bad news- when a doctor in your neighborhood prays for business, you’d better hope his gods aren’t listening.

I poked my head into Terry’s room on the way to bed. Even though I’d knocked and he’d said come in, he hadn’t bothered to throw clothes on. He was standing naked in the center of the room.

“Hey, Jasper! What’s going on?”

“Never mind. Goodnight.”

I closed the door. I wasn’t in the mood for chatting to a fat naked man at the moment. Then again, I wasn’t in the mood for having my throat slit in my sleep either. I reopened the door. Terry hadn’t moved.

“Jesus, can’t you knock?”

“Eddie’s gone crazy. He’s threatening to slit our throats in our sleep.”

“That’s not especially hospitable, is it?”

“I don’t think he wants to kill us, I just think that by being here, Dad and I are likely to push him over the edge.”

“So?”

“So shouldn’t we get out of here?”

“Probably.”

“Good.”

“But we’re not going to.”

“Why not?”

His eyebrows were all bunched up, and his mouth was open as if any second he were going to speak. Any second now.

“Terry. Are you all right?”

“Of course I am. I’m a little agitated, that’s all. I’m not used to being agitated. You know, I’ve been away from my family for so long, it’s having a funny effect on me having you two here. I don’t feel quite myself. I don’t feel quite as…free. I’ve started fretting about you two, if you want to know the truth. And I haven’t fretted about anything or anyone in a long time.”

“And Caroline? Are you fretting about her too?”

Terry’s face turned purple in a split second. Then his eyes went all funny. I felt I was standing outside a house watching someone flick the lights on and off.

“You’re a pretty intuitive guy, Jasper. What is your intuition telling you? Mine is telling me that something is going to happen in this house. I’m not sure what. It could be a good thing, though I doubt it. It’ll probably be a bad thing. It could even be a very bad thing. And maybe we should get out of here, but I’m insanely curious. Aren’t you? Curiosity is one of my favorite things. Intense curiosity is like one of those tantric orgasms, a long, maddening, delayed pleasure. That’s what it is.”

I said goodnight, closed the door, and left him alone in his nakedness, thinking of normal families who have normal problems like alcoholism and gambling and wife-beating and drug addiction. I envied them.

I woke early the next morning. My throat was unslit. The sun was hot already at six-thirty. From my window I could see mist oozing out of the jungle. We were at a high altitude, and the mist hid the mountain peaks from sight. I’d had a bad night’s sleep, thinking about everything Eddie had said. I knew he was right. Dad was planning something, even if he was doing it subconsciously. But didn’t I already know what it was? I felt as though I did, but I couldn’t quite see it. It was concealed somewhere in my mind, somewhere dark and far away. In fact, suddenly I felt I knew everything that would happen in the future but had for some reason forgotten it, and further, I thought that everybody on the planet also knew the future, only they had forgotten it too, and that fortunetellers and prognosticators weren’t people with supernatural insights after all, they were just people with good memories.

I dressed and went out the back door so as not to run into anybody.

At the back of the house, at the edge of the jungle, was a shed. I went inside. There on rickety wooden shelves were paints and paintbrushes. Leaning against the wall were a number of blank canvases. So this was where Eddie’s father had painted his disgusting artworks. It appeared to have once been a chicken coop, although there were no chickens now. There were chicken feathers, though, and a couple of ancient broken eggshells. On the floor was a half-finished painting of a pair of kidneys; Eddie’s father had obviously got it into his head to use egg yolk to get the right kind of yellow.

I picked up a paintbrush. The bristles, caked in dried paint, were stiff as wood. Outside the chicken coop there was a trough filled with muddy rainwater, as if it had fallen from the sky that way, brown and gluggy. I rinsed the brush thoroughly in the water, flicking the hairs with my fingers. As I did this, I saw Caroline walking from the house down the hill. She was walking quickly, though every few steps she’d stop and stand perfectly still before continuing on her way, as if she were late for an appointment she dreaded keeping. I watched her until she disappeared into the jungle.

I went back into the chicken coop, opened a can of paint, dipped the brush in, and started attacking a canvas. I let my brush float across it, seeing what it wanted to paint. It seemed to favor eyes. Hollow eyes, eyes like juicy plums, eyes like germs seen through a microscope, eyes within eyes, concentric eyes, overlapping eyes. The canvas was sick with them. I had to look away; these thick painted eyes were burrowing into me in a way that was more than simply unsettling: they seemed to be moving something inside me. It took me another minute to work out that they were my father’s eyes. No wonder they made me sick.

I put the canvas down and lifted another in its place. The brush started up again. This time it went for a whole face. A smug, self-satisfied face with wide, mocking eyes, a bushy mustache, a twisted brown mouth, and yellow teeth. The face of either a white slave-owner or a prison warden. I stared at the painting and felt a pang of anxiety, but I couldn’t work out why. It was as if a thread in my brain had become loose, but I was afraid to pull on it in case my whole being unraveled. Then I realized: the painting- it was the face. The face I’d dreamed about in childhood. The imperishable floating face I had seen my whole life. As I painted, I was able to recall details I didn’t know I had actually seen before: bags under the eyes, a small gap between the front teeth, wrinkles at the corners of the smiling mouth. I had a premonition that one day this face would come down from the sky to head-butt me. Suddenly the heat in the chicken coop became unbearable. I felt stifled. Being inside a humid chicken coop with that haughty face and a thousand reproductions of my father’s eyes was suffocating.

That afternoon I was lying in my bed listening to the rain. I felt groundless. Traveling on a fake passport probably meant that I could never return to Australia. That made me nationless. And, worse, the fake name on my passport was one I didn’t like, that I was actually sickened by, and unless I organized another fake passport, I might be Kasper until the end of my days.

I stayed in bed all afternoon, unable to force Eddie’s words out of my head, his supposition that I was turning into my father. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him. That’s where you don’t know yourself. That’s your blind spot, Jasper. Could that be true? Wouldn’t that coincide with Dad’s old idea that I was actually him prematurely reincarnated? And now that I was thinking of it, wasn’t there perhaps already some frightening evidence of this? Ever since Dad had started dying again, hadn’t I gotten physically stronger? Were we on a kind of seesaw- he goes down, I go up?

There was a knock on my door. It was Caroline. She had been caught in the rain and was drenched from head to toe.

“Jasper- you don’t want your father to die, do you?”

“Well, I don’t have a specific day in mind, but I don’t like the idea of him living forever. So yes, if you put it that way, I suppose I do want him to die.”

She came over and sat on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been into the village. The people around here are deeply superstitious, and maybe not for nothing. There are still ways we might be able to cure him.”

“You want to make him late for his date with destiny?”

“I want your father to rub this all over his body.” She handed me a small jar with a glutinous, milk-colored substance in it.

“What is it?”

“Oil made of fat melted from the chin of a woman who died in childbirth.”

I looked at the container. I couldn’t tell if it actually contained what she said it did, and I wasn’t thinking of the poor woman who died in childbirth, either; I was thinking of the person who melted the fat from her chin.

“Where did you get this, and, more importantly, how much did you pay for it?”

“I got it from an old woman in the village. She said it’s great for cancer.”

Great for cancer?

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Your father isn’t listening to me right now. He doesn’t want me to help him. I can’t even give him a glass of water. You need to get him to rub this oil all over himself.”

“How am I supposed to excite him into rubbing a stranger’s chin fat on his body?”

“That’s what you have to work out.”

“Why me?”

“You’re his son.”

“And you’re his wife.”

“Things are not so good between us at the moment,” she said, without elaborating. Not that she needed to- I was thoroughly familiar with the sharp-edged love triangle threatening to cut us all to shreds.

I procrastinated in the hallway for a while, but finally I went into Dad’s room. He was bent over his desk, not reading or writing anything, just bending.

“Dad,” I said.

He didn’t give any sign he knew I was there. Citronella candles were spread all around the room. He had a mosquito net above the bed, and one over the armchair in the corner too.

“Are the insects bothering you?” I asked.

“Do you think I’m welcoming them like old friends?” he said, without turning around.

“It’s just that I have some insect repellent if you want it.”

“I already have some.”

“This is a new sort. Apparently the locals use it.”

Dad turned to me. I stepped forward and put the jar of melted chin fat in his hand.

“You have to smear it over your whole body.”

Dad unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents. “It smells funny.”

“Dad- do you think we’re similar?”

“In what way- physically?”

“No, I don’t know. As people.”

“That would be your worst nightmare, wouldn’t it?”

“I have one or two worse ones.”

We heard a buzzing. We both looked around but couldn’t see where it was coming from. Dad took off his shirt and scooped a handful of the melted chin fat from the jar and started smearing it over his chest and belly.

“You want some?”

“No, I’m good.”

I started to feel queasy, now thinking of the woman who had died in childbirth. I wondered if her baby had lived, and if one day he might not be annoyed that he hadn’t been the one to inherit the fat of his mother’s chin.

“Eddie’s turned out to be a different sort of bloke than we thought, hasn’t he?” Dad said, coating his underarms.

I was tempted to recount Eddie’s sick monologue and menacing threats, but I didn’t want to add any further stress to his stressed-out body.

“It was still good for you to have a good friend, even if it was all a lie.”

“I know.”

“Eddie was the first person to tell me anything useful about Astrid.”

“Was he?”

“He led me to your Paris journal.”

“You read it?”

“Cover to cover.”

“Made you sick?”

“Extremely.”

“Well, that’s what you get for snooping.”

As he said this he removed his sandals and rubbed the chin fat between his toes. It made a squishy sound.

“In it you said you thought I might be the premature reincarnation of yourself.”

Dad cocked his head to one side, closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again. He looked at me as though he had just performed a magic trick in which I vanish and he was annoyed that it hadn’t worked. “What’s your point?”

“Do you still believe that?”

“I think it’s highly possible, even when you consider that I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Exactly.”

I felt an old fury welling up inside me. Who is this irritating man? I walked out and slammed the door. Then I opened it again.

“That’s not insect repellent,” I said.

“I know. You don’t think I recognize melted chin fat when I see it?”

I stood there, my mind a complete blank.

“I was eavesdropping, you little idiot,” he admitted.

“So what’s wrong with you? Why would you put that crap on your body?”

“I’m dying, Jasper! Don’t you get it? What do I care what I put on my body? Chin fat, stomach fat, goat feces. So what? When you’re dying, even disgust loses its meaning.”

Dad was hurrying to his doom, there was no denying that. He looked more ravaged each day. Ravaged mentally too- he couldn’t shake the fear that Caroline wanted to go back to Uncle Terry, or that we were all discussing this possibility behind his back. He was paranoid that we were constantly talking about him. This fear soon became a hot topic of conversation between the rest of us. That was how he breathed life into his own delusions and set them free.

Our dinners continued to be as silent as the first; the only noise was Dad sighing loudly in between spoonfuls of spicy soup. Reading between the sighs, I knew that he was growing increasingly furious because he wasn’t getting enough pity from anyone. He didn’t want a lot. Just the minimum would do. Terry was no help there- he was still stuck on the idea of giving Dad pleasure and stimulation; and Caroline was even less help- she pretended she’d stopped believing in his death altogether. She applied herself to the unenviable task of trying to reverse the course of his cancer; she was dragging in every sort of witchcraft- psychospiritual healing, visualization, karma repair. All around him was a loathsome form of positivism, anathema to a dying man. And probably because Caroline was obsessed with trying to save Dad’s life and Terry his soul, Dad became obsessed with suicide, saying that to die of natural causes was just plain lazy. The more they tried to save him with outlandish methods, the more he insisted on taking the matter of dying into his own hands.

One night I heard Dad screaming. I came out of my bedroom to see Terry chasing him around the living room with a pillow.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s trying to kill me!”

“I don’t want you to die. You want you to die. I’m just trying to help you out.”

“Stay away from me, you fucker! I said I wanted to commit suicide. I didn’t say I wanted to be murdered.”

Poor Dad. It’s not that he didn’t have clear ideas, it’s just that he had too many, and they contradicted, effectively canceling each other out. Dad didn’t want to be smothered by his brother, but he couldn’t bring himself to do his own smothering.

“Let me do this,” Terry said. “I was always there for you, and I always will be.”

“You weren’t there for me when our mother tried to kill me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dad stared at Terry a long time. “Nothing,” he said finally.

“You know what? You don’t know how to die because you don’t know who you are.”

“Well, who am I?”

“You tell me.”

After some hesitation, Dad described himself as a “seer of limited epiphanies.” I thought that was pretty good, but Terry thought he was something else entirely: a Christ figure who couldn’t summon the courage to sacrifice himself, a Napoleon who didn’t have the stomach for battle, and a Shakespeare who didn’t have a gift with words. It was clear we were getting closer to defining who Dad was.

Dad let out a low moan and stared at the floor. Terry put his wide, thick hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“I want you to admit that despite having lived for so long on this earth, you don’t know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, how can you be what you are?”

Dad didn’t respond in words but let out another moan, like an animal who had just visited his parents in a butcher shop window.

I went to bed wondering, Do I know who I am? Yes, I do: I’m Kasper. No, I mean Jasper. Above all, I am not my father. I am not turning into my father. I am not a premature reincarnation of my father. I’m me, that’s all. No one more, no one less.

This thinking nauseated me, and it felt like the nausea was changing the shape of my face. I climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror. I wasn’t looking better or worse, simply different. Soon I might not be able to recognize myself at all, I thought. Something strange was happening to my face, something that was not simply the process of aging. I was turning into someone not myself.

There was a loud noise outside. Someone or something was in the chicken coop. I looked out but couldn’t see anything from the window, only the reflection of my own slightly unfamiliar face. I turned off the light but even with the moonlight it was too black. The noises continued. I certainly wasn’t going to go out there to investigate. Who knew what creatures existed in the jungles of Thailand, and who knew how hungry they were? All I could do was shut my eyes tight and try to go to sleep.

In the morning I sat up and looked out my window. The coop was still standing- I half expected it to be hanging from a giant slobbering mouth. I headed out the back door.

The grass under my feet was cold and wet. The air had a funny taste to it, like an old mint that had lost most of its flavor. I walked cautiously, readying myself to run back to the house if an animal should leap out at me. Inside, the coop was in chaos. The paint cans had been opened and their contents emptied onto the floor and onto my painting of the floating face, which had been torn into little pieces. Who had destroyed my painting? And why? There was nothing to do but go back to bed.

I wasn’t in bed five minutes when I heard someone breathing. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It didn’t do any good. The breathing came closer and closer, until I felt it on my neck. I hoped it wasn’t Eddie. It was. I turned over to see him leaning down over me. I jumped up.

“What do you want?”

“Jasper, what are you doing today?”

“Sleeping, hopefully.”

“I’m going out driving to see if I can drum up some business.”

“OK, then- have a good day.”

“Yeah. You too.”

And still Eddie didn’t move. Even though it was exhausting to do so, I felt sorry for him. There’s no other way to say it. He looked lovesick. It was a bad look.

“I don’t suppose you want to come along. Keep me company?” Eddie asked.

It was a daunting proposition. Spending the day alone with Eddie didn’t particularly appeal to me, and visiting sick people even less, but it turned out there was nothing I could imagine as disagreeable as staying in the house with Dad’s clanking death.

We went traipsing up and down the countryside in the pitiless sun. I thought Australia was hot! The humidity in the mountains was out of control- I could feel beads of sweat forming on my gallbladder. We rode along, not saying much. When Eddie was silent, I felt as if I were the only person alive in the world- although I had that feeling when he was talking too. Wherever we went, people watched us. They couldn’t understand a man in his mid-forties wanting to become a doctor- it was a violation of the natural order. Eddie tried to take it in his stride, but it was obviously wearing him down. He had only vicious, unfriendly words to say about the healthy, peaceful inhabitants of this tranquil village. He couldn’t stand their contentment. He even resisted the cutesy Thai custom of smiling like a cretin in every conceivable situation, although he had to if he wanted to lure patients. But his smile took up only one side of his divided face. I saw the real one, with the furious down-turned lips and restrained homicidal rage in his blinking eye.

We ate lunch by the side of the road. I could feel no wind, but the branches of the trees moved every so often. After lunch Eddie said, “Did you speak to Terry about taking you all out of here?”

“He wants us to stay. He thinks something bad is going to happen in your house and he wants to see what it is.”

“He thinks that, does he? That’s bad news for us.”

Before Eddie could add any more, we heard the roar of a motorcycle charging at full speed.

“Look who it is,” Eddie said.

“Who?”

“That antique doctor. Look how smug he is.”

The motorcycle screamed toward us, stirring up dust. It was hard to believe anyone antique could ride a bike so fast. As the doctor came to a shuddering stop, Eddie corrected his posture. It’s difficult to look like a winner when you’re clearly the loser, but posture plays a part.

The doctor may have been in his sixties, but he had the physique of an Olympic swimmer. I couldn’t detect anything smug about him. He and Eddie exchanged a few words. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I saw Eddie’s eyes widen in a way that darkened his face and made me somehow relieved I couldn’t understand the language. When the doctor had sped off, I asked Eddie, “What did he say? Will he retire soon?”

“There’s bad news. Fuck! Terrible news! The doctor already has a young apprentice, ready to fill his shoes.”

Well, that was the end of that. There was absolutely no use for Eddie in this community, and he knew it.

All I wanted to do was sleep, but the moment I returned to my room, I knew it would be impossible, mostly because Caroline was sitting on the edge of my bed.

“I went into the village today,” she said.

“Please, no more chin fat.”

She handed me a small leather pouch tied with a string. I took it and pulled out a necklace with three strange objects hanging off it.

“A piece of elephant tusk and some kind of tooth,” I guessed.

“Tiger’s tooth.”

“Sure. And what’s that third one?”

“A dried-out cat’s eye.”

“Nice. And I’m to get Dad to wear this, I suppose.”

“No, it’s for you.”

“For me?”

“It’s an amulet,” she said, and placed it around my neck and leaned back and gazed at me as if I were a sad-eyed puppy in a pet store window.

“What’s it for?”

“To protect you.”

“From what?”

“How do you feel?”

“Me? OK, I guess. A little tired.”

“I wish you could have met my son,” she said.

“I wish so too.”

Poor Caroline. It seemed she wanted to conduct several conversations but didn’t know which to pick.

She stood suddenly. “OK, then,” she said, and went out by the back door. I almost took the amulet off but for some reason was overcome with fear of being without it. I thought: The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all- it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.

The next few days I spent at the mirror, confirming my features with the touch of my hand. Nose? Here! Chin? Here! Mouth? Teeth? Forehead? Here! Here! Here! This inane facial roll call was the only valuable way I could think of to pass the time. Somewhere else in the house Caroline, Dad, and Terry were circling each other like rabid dogs. I stayed well away.

I spent many hours sitting with Eddie in his office. It seemed to me it was he, and not I, who had taken on the qualities of an accident in slow motion, and I didn’t want to miss the show. Besides, Caroline’s gift had put doubts about my health into my mind, and I thought it best if I let Eddie examine me. He gave me a thorough going-over. He tested the dull thumping of my heart, my sluggish reflexes; I even let him take my blood. Not that there was a pathology lab in the area where he could send it. He just filled a vial and gave it to me afterward as a keepsake. He said there was nothing wrong with me.

We were in the office listening to the radio through the stethoscope when something extraordinary and unexpected happened- a patient! A woman came in visibly upset and agitated. Eddie put on a solemn face that for all I know might’ve been genuine. I sat there on the edge of my seat while the woman gibbered on. “The doctor’s very sick,” Eddie translated to me. “Maybe dying,” he added, and stared at me for a long time, just to show me he wasn’t smiling.

The three of us piled into Eddie’s car and drove at breakneck speed to the doctor’s house. When we arrived, we heard the most awful screeching imaginable.

“It’s too late. He’s dead,” Eddie said.

“How do you know?”

“That wailing.”

Eddie was right. There was nothing ambiguous about that wailing.

He turned off the engine, grabbed his doctor’s bag, and combed his hair down with his hands.

“But he’s dead- what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to pronounce him dead.”

“Don’t you think that nightmarish howling has pretty much got that covered?”

“Even in a village as remote as this, there are rules. The dead must be officially declared dead,” he said. I took a deep breath and followed Eddie and the woman inside.

A dozen or so people were crowded around the dead doctor’s bed; either they had come to mourn him or had arrived earlier to watch him die. The doctor that I’d seen a few days earlier tearing around the countryside on his motorbike was now perfectly motionless. The man whose statuesque physique I had envied had caved in. His body looked as if someone had gone in with a powerful vacuum cleaner and just sucked everything out: heart, ribcage, spine, everything. Frankly, he didn’t even look like skin and bones, just skin.

I kept an eye on Eddie but he’d made himself look harmless and sincere, which was no small trick considering the vile thoughts going on in his head. The village doctor was gone- now it was between Eddie and the young doctor. I could see Eddie thinking, He shouldn’t be too hard to discredit. Eddie straightened himself up, ready to seduce the mourners. It was his first pronouncement as a doctor.

They all spoke to Eddie in quiet tones, and afterward he turned to me and I saw a flicker of derangement, ruthlessness, obstinacy, and deviousness. It’s astonishing the complexity that can be perceived in a face at the right time of day. Eddie took me aside and explained that the apprentice had been here when the doctor had died and had already proclaimed him dead.

“He didn’t waste any time, the little bastard,” Eddie whispered.

“Where’s the young doctor now?”

“He went home to bed. Apparently he’s sick too.”

This time Eddie couldn’t contain his glee. He asked directions to the young doctor’s house and went off, I was certain, to treat him in as negligent and slipshod a manner as possible.

He drove fast. I caught him practicing his sweetest possible smile in the rearview mirror, which meant he was gearing up to play the tyrant.

The young doctor lived by himself in a hut high up in the mountains. Eddie raced inside. It was a struggle to keep up with him. The young doctor was lying on the bed with his clothes on. By the time I entered, Eddie was leaning over him.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

Eddie walked around the bed as if he were doing a victory dance.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“What’s he got?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a virus, but an uncommon one. I don’t know how to treat it.”

“Well, if the old doctor had it and now the young doctor has it, it must be contagious. I’m getting out of here,” I said, covering my mouth as I left.

“It’s probably not contagious.”

“How do you know? You don’t know what it is.”

“Could be that something crawled inside them and laid eggs in their intestines.”

“That’s just disgusting.”

“Or else it’s something they ate together. I don’t think you have to worry.”

“I’ll decide when and where I worry,” I said, heading outside.

The young doctor died two days later. Eddie didn’t leave his bedside the whole time. Despite Eddie’s insistence that the virus wasn’t contagious, I refused to set foot inside the death chamber. I knew the very moment the young doctor died, though, because the same hideous gut-wrenching wails as before echoed through the village. Frankly, I was suspicious of all this showy mourning and finally decided it was just a cultural tic, like those smiles. It’s not actually uncontrollable grief, I thought, it’s a show of uncontrollable grief. Quite a different thing.

That’s how Eddie became the doctor of the village. He’d gotten what he wanted, but this didn’t soften him up. It was an error of judgment on my part to imagine it would. And it was an error on Eddie’s part to imagine that becoming the village doctor by default would warm the villagers to him. We went door-knocking. Some slammed the door in Eddie’s face; they thought he’d put a hex on the two doctors, a pox on both their houses. Eddie came out looking like a grave robber. We did the rounds anyway. There were no bites. And it was in no small part because the people didn’t seem ever to get sick.

I’d scarcely thought it was possible, but Eddie was becoming even more unpleasant. All this healthiness was getting to him. “Not one patient! All I want is for someone to get ill! Violently ill! What are these people, immortal? They could do with a little motor neuron disease. Show them what life’s really about.” Eddie meant badly. His heart was in the wrong place.

Thank God for farming accidents! After a few inadvertent amputations and the like, he eventually managed to scrounge up a couple of patients. The people were afraid of hospitals, so Eddie had to do things in the rice fields that I personally wouldn’t want done to me in anything other than the most sterile environment. But they didn’t seem to mind.

As Eddie began his official career as a doctor, all these years after finishing medical school, I went back to the house to confront the dramas that I was sure would have progressed in my absence to a nice, steamy boiling point.

“I’m in love with my husband’s brother,” Caroline said, as if she were on an American talk show and I didn’t know the names of the people involved. She straightened the chair I had unsuccessfully used to barricade the door.

“I know it’s hard, Caroline. But can you hold out a little longer?”

“Until your father’s dead? I’m so guilty. I’m counting the days. I want him to die.”

This explained her feverish efforts to prolong his life: guilt. I had a feeling that when Dad did finally die, she would mourn him more than all of us. In fact, my father’s death was likely to ruin this woman. I thought I should speak to him about it, cautiously of course, and entreat him to give her to Terry while he was still alive. The death of her husband could send her over the edge for wishing it. I knew this would be a sore point with him, but for Caroline’s sake, for the image of her sad crazy eyes, I had to broach the subject.

Dad was in bed with the lights out. The darkness helped me find the courage to go about my unenviable task. I launched right into it. I pretended that Caroline had said nothing to me and I had just deduced this all on my own. “Look,” I said, “I know this must be painful, and I know how you are- the last thing you want to do on the eve of your death is something noble- but the fact of the matter is, Caroline will be destroyed by your death if, as you die, she secretly wishes it. If you really love her, you must make a present of her to your brother. You must bequeath her, while you’re still alive.”

Dad didn’t say a word. As I made this appalling speech, I thought that if someone said this to me, I would probably stick a butter knife through his tongue.

“Leave me alone,” he said finally, in the dark.

The next day Terry decided Dad must look at a dead bird he had seen on an early morning walk, and he dragged me along. He thought Dad would look at the still bird and be glad to be moving. It was a childish idea. My father had already seen many dead things, and they’d never made him glad to be alive. They wordlessly invited him to join them in death. This I knew. I wondered why Terry didn’t.

“I think you should take Caroline off my hands,” Dad said, crouched over the unmoving bird.

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think she can maintain this farce any longer than I can,” Dad said wearily. “We might have gotten away with it had you remained dead, like a good boy, but you had to resurrect yourself, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what I have to do with it.”

“Don’t be obtuse. You take her, OK?”

Terry’s body made an unexpected jolt, as if he’d rested his hand upon a high-voltage fence.

“For argument’s sake, let’s say I agree to this bit of nonsense. What makes you think she’ll go along with it?”

“Cut it out, Terry. You’ve always been a self-serving bastard, so why not just continue the tradition and serve yourself again- a helping of the woman you love, who, incomprehensibly, loves you back. You know, I always put my failure with women down to the lack of symmetry in my facial features, and yet here you are, the fattest man alive, and you get her again!”

“So what do you want?”

“Just take care of her, OK?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terry said, and his mouth made several odd shapes, though no sound came out. He looked as if he were trying to commit a long and difficult equation to memory.

Caroline was sitting under a tree in the rain when Dad and I approached. I knew she was quietly tormenting herself. I thought I could hear her thoughts, fully articulated in my head. She was thinking of evil, whether she possessed evil herself or was possessed by it. She wanted to be good. She didn’t think she was good. She thought she was a victim of circumstance and that maybe all people who do evil are also victims of circumstance. She thought not only that Dad had cancer but that he was cancer. She wished he would fall in love with someone else and then die peacefully in his sleep. She felt Dad had taken over the story of her life and was rewriting it with messy handwriting so it became illegible. She thought her life had become illegible and incoherent.

This is what I was certain I heard her thinking. I felt so sympathetic, I wished the ground would open up and swallow her.

Dad strode up and laid it on the line. I should have guessed his first foray into noble deeds would blow up in his face. The truth is, his generosity of spirit extended only so far, and while magnanimously sacrificing himself on the altar of their love, he was unable to wipe the hurt look off his face, which killed the point of the whole exercise. It was this hurt look that made her explode.

“No! How can you say that? I love you! You! I love YOU!”

Dad pushed on. “Look. Terry was your first love, and I know you’ve never stopped loving him. It’s nobody’s fault. When you agreed to marry me, you thought he’d been dead for twenty years. We all did. So why pretend?”

Dad put forth a convincing case and got all worked up as he laid it out. He was so convincing that what seemed inconceivable suddenly became conceivable- and that threw Caroline into confusion.

“I don’t know. What do you want me to do? Is it that you don’t love me anymore? Yes, maybe it’s that.” And before Dad could answer, she said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I love you, and whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.”

Dad’s resolve was tested here. Why did she keep tormenting him like this? How could he keep it up?

“I want you to admit it,” he said.

“Admit what?”

“That you’re in love with him.”

“Martin, it’s-”

“Admit it!”

“OK! I admit it! First I started thinking, why does he have to be alive? Why couldn’t he have just stayed dead? And the more time I spent with Terry, the more I realized I was still in love with him. Then I started thinking, why do you have to be alive? Why are you dying so slowly? How unjust that someone who loved life, like my son, had to die so suddenly when someone who wants to die, like you, gets to live unendingly. Every time you talk about suicide my hopes jump up. But you never do it. You’re all talk! Why do you keep promising suicide if you won’t do it? You’re driving me crazy with all these promises of killing yourself! Do it or shut up about it, but stop getting my hopes up like that!” Suddenly Caroline stopped and covered her mouth with her hand, doubled over, and vomited. The vomit came through her fingers. When she straightened up, her face was twisted in shame. Every part of her face was magnified by it- her eyes were too round, her mouth too wide, her nostrils the same size as her mouth had been. Before anyone could say anything, she ran off into the jungle.

Dad swayed on his thin legs, and his complexion became what I can only describe as grainy. My life has been an unfair and humiliating series of losing propositions, his face lamented. Love was my noble suicide bid.

Just then Terry came out of the house. “Did I hear shouting?” he asked.

“She’s all yours,” Dad said.

“What do you mean?”

“Caroline- she’s all yours. We’re finished.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. You can be together now. I don’t mind.”

All the blood drained from Terry’s face, and he looked as if he’d just been told the plane he was on was making an emergency landing nose first in a volcano.

“Well…but…I can’t give up my prostitutes. I told you, love doesn’t work without possessiveness. No. No way. I can’t turn my back on my life now, after so long. No, I can’t be with Caroline.”

“Don’t you love her?”

“Leave me alone! What are you trying to do to me?” he said, and walked off into the jungle, but in the opposite direction to Caroline.

So the triangle had effectively broken up. Nobody was with anybody. The three points were single lines again, parallel, not touching.

Oops. My fault.

I didn’t witness the scene later that day between Terry and Caroline, but I saw Caroline afterward, walking as if tranquilized. “Are you OK?” I called out. Every now and then she’d stop and pound her head with her fists. “Caroline!” I called out again. She looked up at me with desperate eyes. Then Terry wandered past my window, looking bulldozed. He informed me that we were going back to Bangkok in the morning. At last, good news. I wondered if Terry’s curiosity about the terrible event to take place in Eddie’s house had been satisfied by the explosion of the triangle. Either way, I couldn’t wait to leave, nor could I spend the rest of the day in that house. I had to get out.

With no other option, I went with Eddie in his car as he went on his rounds. He seemed glad of the company and eagerly delivered a creepy monologue that compared doctors with gods. We visited a few farmers he’d finally discovered had chronic illnesses. After his consultations, to my disgust, he hit on their daughters right in front of the parents, girls who couldn’t be older than sixteen. Not knowing enough about the culture, I wasn’t sure of the perils of Eddie carrying on in this fashion, but it was hair-raising the way he went about trying to seduce, intimidate, and buy these poor girls. I couldn’t find his redeeming features anymore. The man I had grown up with was gone. As we left, he made up words about these girls, “fuckalicious” and “fuck-worthy” being the most common. Every word and gesture of his seemed saturated in frustration and fury. Back on the road, I thought: This man is a grenade waiting to detonate, and I hope I’m not around to see it.

Then he detonated.

I was around to see it.

My forehead was pressed against the car window, and I was wishing that the jungle around us was in fact the interior of a lavish, jungle-themed hotel and any time I liked I could go upstairs to my room and crawl between clean sheets and order room service and take an overdose of sleeping pills. I would have liked nothing better.

“What’s this?” Eddie said, breaking my reverie.

It was a girl of about fifteen running down the road waving her arms, signaling us to stop. Here’s trouble, I thought.

Eddie pulled over and we both got out of the car. She was motioning for Eddie to follow her. From what I could gather, her father was sick. Very sick. She was in a panic. She wanted Eddie to come right away. Eddie summoned his most professional posture. He translated for me, repeated the symptoms as she described them: fever, vomiting, powerful abdominal cramps, delirium, and lack of feeling in the legs and arms. Eddie grunted and sighed at the same time. Then he shook his head obstinately. The girl started shouting in a pleading voice.

What was he up to?

She turned and grabbed my arm. “Please, please.”

“Eddie, what’s going on?”

“I really don’t think I can make it today. Maybe tomorrow, if I have a minute.”

“No you understand?” she said in English. “My father. He is dying!”

“Eddie,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“Jasper, can you go for a little walk?”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was about to be an accomplice in the dirtiest piece of blackmail possible.

“I’m not leaving,” I said.

Eddie looked at me with crushing, concentrated hatred. It was a showdown. “Jasper,” he said behind clenched teeth, “I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here.”

“No way.”

Eddie went ballistic, ranting at me with the full extent of his lung capacity. He tried everything to get me to shove off and leave him alone to rape and pillage. I wouldn’t budge. This is it, I thought. My first physical confrontation with evil. I was eager to triumph.

I didn’t.

He pushed me. I pushed back. He pushed me again. It was getting tedious. I took a swing. Eddie ducked it. Then he took a swing at me. I tried ducking too, but instead of socking me in the jaw, his fist connected with my forehead. I staggered backward a little, and taking advantage of my wobbling, he let fly an unexpected kick that got me in the throat. I fell back and hit my head on the dirt. I heard the car door slam, and by the time I got to my feet, I couldn’t do anything but watch the car drive off.

Eddie, that disgusting bastard! That oily, rancid, horny bandit! I felt guilty for my failure to protect that poor girl, but if someone you’ve known since childhood is so determined to commit a crime he’s willing to kick you in the throat, what can you do? Anyway, it was too late now. That fiend had made away with the girl and left me stranded in the middle of nowhere. And where the hell was I, anyway, other than the exact place where all the heat in Thailand gathered for a meeting?

I walked for several hours. Swarms of overexcited mosquitos pursued me assiduously. There was no one in sight, no sign of human life. It was easy to imagine that I was the only one in existence, and it didn’t make me feel lonely at all. It’s exhilarating to imagine every human dead, to have it in your power to start a new civilization or not. I thought I’d choose not. Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race? Not me. I could see myself as the ant king, or the figurehead of a crab society- but Eddie had seriously turned me off humans altogether. One person can do that.

I walked on, oozing from the humidity but more or less content in my last-man-on-earth fantasy. I didn’t even mind so much that I was utterly lost in the jungle. How many times would this happen in my life? A lot, I predicted. This time it’s the jungle, next time it will be the ocean, then a department store parking lot, until finally I will be irretrievably lost in outer space. Mark my words.

But my solitude was short-lived. I heard the chattering of voices coming from the bottom of a hill. I went over the slope and could see a group of maybe twenty people, farmers mostly, in a circle next to a police van. There was nothing in this scene to suggest it had anything to do with me, but something told me not to go down there. I suppose this is what happens when you feel guilty all the time for no reason.

I stood up on my tiptoes to get a better view. As I did, I saw a shadow creeping up on me. I spun around. A middle-aged woman holding a basket of apples was staring at me. No, she wasn’t. She was stealing dark glances at the amulet around my neck.

“Stay down. Don’t let them see you,” she said in an accent as thick as the jungle around us.

She pushed me to the ground with her long, muscular arms. We lay side by side on the grassy slope.

“I know you.”

“Do you?”

“You’re the doctor’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s in trouble,” she said.

So they knew he’d blackmailed the poor girl into sleeping with him. Well, good. I couldn’t care less if they threw him in jail so that he could be sodomized for the rest of his life. He deserved it.

“They dug up the bodies,” she said.

What bodies was she talking about?

“What bodies are you talking about?”

“The old doctor, and the young one too.”

“They dug them up? What made them do a creepy thing like that?”

“They thought it might be a plague of some new virus. A couple of years ago, we had an outbreak of chicken flu. Now there is much vigilance when it comes to multiple deaths of uncertain causes.”

Interesting, but what has this got to do with blackmail and rape? I wondered.

“And?”

“They did an autopsy. And I suppose you know what they found.”

“A hideous mess of decomposing organs?”

“Poison,” she said, looking at me carefully for my reaction.

“Poison?” Poison? “And so they think…” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. It was obvious what they thought. And moreover, it was obvious they were right. Eddie had done it, the despicable bastard. To realize his dead parents’ dream of his becoming a doctor, he had killed the old doctor and the young apprentice to get them out of the way.

“So the police are going to arrest him?”

“No. You see those people down there?” Did she want me to answer that one? They were right there.

“What about them?”

As she said this, the two policemen got into their van and drove away. The crowd filled in the space where the van had been.

“They just told the police your doctor friend had already moved to Cambodia.”

I really wished she’d refrain from describing Eddie as my “doctor friend,” although I understood it was good for clarification, as there were three doctors in this story. But was I being unbearably dense? Why had the farmers told the police that Eddie had moved to Cambodia? And why was she excited about it?

“Don’t you see? They’re going to take the law into their own hands!”

“Meaning?”

“They’re going to kill him. And not only him. You too.”

“Me?”

“And those other Australians who came here to help him.”

“Wait a minute! Those Australians are my family! They didn’t do anything. They didn’t know anything about it! I didn’t know anything about it.”

“You’d better not go home,” she said.

“But I didn’t do anything! It was Eddie! This is the second time Eddie has put a lynch mob onto us. My God- my father was right. People are so single-minded about their immortality projects, it brings them down and everyone around them too!”

She looked at me blankly.

What could I do? I couldn’t waste valuable time trying to find the police; I had to get home and warn everyone that an angry mob was coming to tear them apart.

What a dog’s breakfast this trip turned out to be!

“Hey, why are you helping me?”

“I want your necklace.”

Why not? I had been foolishly superstitious by wearing it at all. I took off the repugnant amulet and gave it to her. She hurried away. I’d worn it only out of desperation, I suppose. If you don’t keep your guard up and someone tells you it has magical qualities, you can find comfort in a grain of sand.

The group below set off on foot through the jungle. I followed them, thinking of Eddie and my family and of their surprise when the bloodthirsty mob turned up to kill them. I had to make sure the mob and I didn’t converge; it was unlikely, not being Thai myself, that I would be assimilated into their number. I would be swallowed whole, as an appetizer. So I kept my distance. But I didn’t know the way home- I’d have to follow the mob back to Eddie’s house. The inherent dilemma was obvious. How could I arrive in advance and warn everyone that a murderous mob was on the way when I had to follow the mob to get there?

Yet another life-or-death matter. Oh well.

As the group moved, others joined it, forming spontaneously into a mobile crowd, then a pack, a sturdy vessel of revenge. They were a kind of human tsunami, gathering speed and size. There was no dispersing them. It was a petrifying sight. Eerily, they seemed to be gearing up for a silent massacre. This was not a pack with a war cry, this was a tight-lipped group rolling wordlessly forward. As I ran, I thought how I hate any kind of mob- I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of supermodels, that’s how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.

Interestingly, it was a democratic crowd. Anyone could join in to mutilate Eddie and my family. There were even a few children. That surprised me. And some elderly gentlemen too, who despite being timid and frail were not struggling to keep up. It was as if they had been absorbed by the mob and taken on the energy of it, as if their thin, weak bodies were now nimble fingers of a powerful hand. But weren’t these people supposed to be Buddhists? Well, what of it? Buddhists can be pushed over the edge like anyone else, can’t they? To be fair, Eddie had burst into their inner serenity with poison and murder and blackmail and rape. Inner serenity isn’t impervious to a ferocious assault like that. Incidentally, none of them were smiling like the Buddha. They were smiling like the serpent, like a forty-headed dragon.

Even the sun took on a menacing quality. It was dropping fast. Naturally, I thought, this was to be no brightly lit spectacle of raw carnage. It was to take place in the dark.

But what’s this? The mob was picking up the pace! I was already pooped, and now I’d have to run at breakneck speed. How annoying! The last marathon I had intended to run was when I beat 200 million spermatozoa for the egg. Now here I was again. In truth, it was kind of exciting. I was so aware of what a relentless thinker I was that action felt surprisingly good. Murderous mob on its way- what are you going to do about it?

The dusk infused the sky with a soft, syrupy red: a head-wound red. As I ran, I wished I had a machete- it was heavy going, tunneling through all that thick vegetation. I was taking furtive passages through shaggy ferns, where the last of the sunlight only made it in random splotches. The jungle with its usual threatening noises had the surround sound of an expensive home entertainment system.

A half hour later I was losing them. Dammit. What was I going to do? What could I do? I ran, I fell, I vomited, I got up again. Why had we come here? Fucking Thais. An Australian mob might kick the shit out of you, but you’d crawl home afterward. This was murder! No, slaughter! My dad! And Caroline! And Terry! All alone up there, isolated and unprepared. I ran on to the point of exhaustion. And the heat. And the mosquitos. And the fear. I’m not going to make it. How can I warn them?

I suppose I could…

No.

Unless…

I had an idea. But it was foolish, desperate, impossible. I must be out of my mind. Or just my imagination amusing itself. But what an idea! Here it was: Dad and I were connected in deeper ways than just father and son, and I’d long had the suspicion that we were unintentionally reading each other’s minds every so often, and so if I concentrated intensely enough, if I only put in a little psychic effort, maybe I could send him a message. Absurd! Brilliant?

The problem was, it was difficult to summon up that kind of concentration while running, and if I stopped and it didn’t work, I might lose not only the mob but with them my way home. And everyone would die!

Did I really think we could read each other’s minds? Should I risk it? Running through the foliage was getting more difficult; I’d push aside a branch only to have it whip me in the face. The jungle was getting aggressive. The mob was getting away from me. I was wilting in the heat. My family was going to die.

Should I risk it?

Fuck it.

I stopped. The murdering rabble disappeared over a hill. My heart was aching in my chest. I breathed deeply to placate her.

In order to make contact with Dad, I needed to get myself into a deep meditative state. I needed to hurry, of course, but you can’t hurry absolute inner quiet. You have to coax it over time. You can’t transform the essential qualities of your mind as if you’re running to catch a bus.

I got myself in the textbook position. I sat on the ground cross-legged, concentrated on my breathing, and repeated my mantra, “Wow.” This brought about a quiet enough mind, but to be honest, I felt a bit blunt in the head. I had some clarity, enough to drift to the edge of consciousness, but no further. I felt a twinge of bliss too- well, so what? I needed to go further than I ever had, and here I was, going through the motions. From everything I had read about insight meditation, I had learned that there was a system to be used- this is how you sit, this is how you breathe, this is how you concentrate on your breathing. But using this system was a routine that seemed the opposite of the true meditative state I needed. Now that I had practiced this meditation thing a number of times, always the same way, with the same breathing, the same concentration, I felt I might as well be working on a factory line screwing tops on Coca-Cola bottles. My mind was peaceful, hypnotized, numb. That was no good.

Trying to calm my excited mind meant that a conflict was going on in my head. That burned up essential energy I needed in order to communicate telepathically with Dad. So then maybe I had to stop concentrating, but how did I achieve a quiet mind without concentrating?

First of all, instead of sitting cross-legged, I stood up and leaned against a tree like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then I listened not to my breathing, as Anouk advised, but to the noises around me. I didn’t close my eyes either. I opened them wide.

I was observing the wet, shaggy trees in the late-afternoon sunlight without concentrating. I made my mind astonishingly alert. I didn’t just observe my breath, either, but kept an eye on my thoughts. They fell down like a shower of sparks. I watched them for a long time. I pursued them, not where they went but where they came from, back into the past. I could see how they held me together. I could see how they put me together, these thoughts- the true ingredients of the Jasper broth.

I started walking and the silence of my mind went with me, though it was not the absence-of-sound kind of silence. It was a huge, deafening, visual silence. No one had ever told me about this kind of silence. It was really loud. And as I walked through the jungle, I managed without effort to maintain this clarity.

Then my mind became quiet. Really, really quiet. It happened instantaneously. I was suddenly free of inner friction. Free of fear. That freedom somehow helped all my spineless impediments to melt away. I thought: The world is swelling, it is here, it is bursting in my mouth, it is running down my throat, it is filling up my eyes. Strangely, this big thing had entered me, though I was not bigger for it. I was smaller. It felt good to be small. Look, I know how this sounds, but take it from me, this was not a mystical experience. And I’m not kidding myself, either. I’m not a saint. Not for all the breasts in California would I, like Francis of Assisi, purify the lesions of lepers with my tongue, certainly not, but- and this is where I’m heading- I felt something I’d never experienced in my life before: love. I know this sounds crazy, but I think I actually loved my enemies: Eddie, my family, the murdering mob en route to slaughter my family, even the virulence of the recent outburst of hate by the Australian people. Now, let’s not get carried away; I didn’t adore my enemies, and while I loved them, I was not in love with them. But still, my instinctive revulsion toward them had evaporated somehow. This excess of feeling frightened me a little- this frenzy of love that tore through the butter of my hate. So then it seemed Anouk was wrong; the real fruit of meditation wasn’t inner peace but love. In fact, when you see life in its totality for the first time and you feel genuine love for that totality, inner peace seems like a kind of small, petty goal.

As nice as all this was, I realized I was not communicating with my father. I almost gave up and started wondering where that furious mob had gotten to when suddenly, without even trying, I conjured up Dad’s face. Then I saw his hunched body. He was in his room, bending over his desk. I looked closer. He was writing a letter to one of the Sydney newspapers. I could make out only the salutation at the beginning of the letter. “Dear cunts” was crossed out and replaced with “My dear cunts.” I was convinced this was not my imagination but a real image of Dad right now, in the present. I thought: Dad! Dad! It’s me! A riotous mob is coming to murder Eddie and everyone in the house! Get out! Get everyone out! I tried to send him an image of the rioting mob so he’d know what they looked like when they turned up. I sent him an image of the mob as one common body closing in on the house, armed with Old World farming implements. They had scythes, for God’s sake!

Without my permission, the vision faded away. I opened my eyes. It was a clouded-over black night, so dark I could have been underground. All around me the jungle was making formidable groaning sounds. How long had I been here? I had no way of knowing.

I started walking again, pushing branches out of my way, my eyes still full of visions, my nose filled with out-of-place odors (cinnamon and maple syrup), my tongue with out-of-place tastes (toothpaste and Vegemite). I had the sensation of being in the world as never before.

As I walked, I wondered, would they find the house empty? Had Dad heard my warning? Or had I just given up trying to save my family’s lives? I walked without knowing where I was going. I let my instinct guide me through the jungle, stomping on luscious plants that gave off a sweet, heady odor. I paused to drink the cold, delicious water of a small waterfall. Then I moved on again, stumbling over hills and through the dense foliage.

I felt no fear. I felt such a part of the jungle that it seemed it would have been rude of the animals to venture out to eat me. Then I moved into a clearing that ran down a long hill where I could see the moon rising. All the eyes of the flowers and the mouths of the trees and the chins of strange rock formations seemed to be telling me I was going in the right direction. That was a relief, because there were no tracks. Somehow the silent mass of vengeful people had left everything undisturbed, as if they had been floating through the jungle like some formless ancient substance.

When I finally found Eddie’s place, the lights were blazing inside. The wind was violently knocking at the windows and the doors. The sight of the house made my state of oneness vanish instantaneously. The world was hopelessly fragmented again; the absolute connectedness between me and all living things was gone. Now I felt indifferent to all living things. I couldn’t care less about them. The divisions between us were as thick as columns of bone and cartilage. There was me and there was them. Any fool could see it.

Hiding behind a tree, I felt the blood cells racing through my heart. I remembered something Dad had once promised to teach me: how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I hoped he actually knew this essential skill.

Of course I was too late. The door was wide open, and the mob was already leaving one by one, armed with scythes and hammers and pitchforks. There would be no point facing the mob or its decrystallized form, because presumably it had already done what it came to do. There was nothing to be gained in getting hacked to pieces myself.

Blood covered the hands and the faces of the mob. Their clothes were so stained, they would just have to be thrown away. I waited until the last intruder left and then waited a few moments longer. I watched the house and tried to feel no fear. Even after all Dad had taught me, I was not prepared for such a moment. Nothing had prepared me for walking into a place where my family had been butchered. I struggled to recall any nugget of wisdom from my early childhood that might offer me advice on how to proceed, but I couldn’t, so I went forward into the house, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually defenseless. Of course I had many times imagined them already dead (as soon as I feel an emotional attachment to someone, I imagine his death, so as not to be disappointed later on), but in my mind they were always relatively clean corpses, quite neat in fact, and until now it had not occurred to me to prepare myself by imagining my loved ones’ brains splattered against a wall, their bodies lying sprawled in a pool of blood/shit/guts, et cetera.

The first body I saw was Eddie’s. He looked as if he’d been run over a thousand times by a champion ice-skater. His face was so cut up I could barely make out it was him, except for his eyes, which had that frozen look of surprise characteristic of Botox and sudden death, staring up at the earthenware pots with his parents’ spirits in them, the ones who had purportedly been watching over him. It was easy to see the look of reproach in his eyes. Goodbye and good riddance, Eddie. You took your crumminess to its limit and it collapsed on top of you. Tough luck.

With superhuman effort, my legs took me to the next room. There I saw Uncle Terry on his knees, and from behind he looked like the back of a VW Beetle about to do a reverse park into a tight spot. Sweat poured off the fat folds in his neck. I could hear him crying. He spun around to look at me, then turned back and raised his chubby arm, motioning toward Dad’s bedroom.

I went in.

Dad was also on his knees, swaying gently over the mutilated body of Caroline. His eyes were as wide as they could go, as though pried open with matchsticks. The love of his life was on her back, blood seeping from a dozen slashes. Her dead eyes were fixed in an insupportable gaze. I had to look away. There was something disturbing in those eyes. She looked like someone who had said something offensive and wanted to take it back. Later I found out she had died trying to protect Eddie, of all people; she was killed inadvertently, and it was her death that had turned the mob on itself, split it into factions- those who thought that it was OK to kill a middle-aged woman and those who thought it was out of order. That had effectively ended their rampage and sent them home.

We buried Eddie and Caroline in the garden. It had started raining again, and we had no choice but to give them a wet, muddy burial, which was appropriate for Eddie maybe. But watching Caroline’s body disappear into the muck made us all sick and ashamed. Dad was having trouble breathing, as if something were blocking his airway- maybe his heart.

The three of us drove back to Bangkok in silence, lost in the kind of grief that makes every smile in your life afterward less sincere. On the way Dad sat in absolute stillness, though he made little noises to let us know that every minute left in his life would be an unendurable torture. I knew he was blaming himself for her death, and not only himself but Terry too, for employing Eddie to begin with, and not only Terry but fate, chance, God, art, science, humanity, the Milky Way. Nothing was exonerated.

When we arrived back at Terry’s house, we retired to our separate bedrooms to marvel at how quickly the human heart snaps shut and to wonder how we might ever pry it open again. It was only two days later, spurred either by Caroline’s murder or by the black dog barking in the manure of his heart, or by mourning crowding out rational thought, or maybe because even after a lifetime of reflecting on death, he still couldn’t quite comprehend the inevitability of his own, that Dad suddenly emerged from his grief-induced hypnosis and announced his final project. As Eddie had predicted, it was the looniest yet. And after a lifetime of watching Dad make improbable decision after improbable decision, and being in some way a victim of each one, what surprised me most was that I could still be surprised.