A Fraction of the Whole

I

I don’t want to die here,” Dad said.

“What’s the matter?” Terry asked. “Don’t you like your room?”

“The room’s fine. It’s this country.”

The three of us were eating chicken laksas and watching the sun set over the polluted metropolis. As usual, Dad was nauseated and managed to make it seem as though his vomiting were a gut reaction not to the food but to the company.

“Well, we don’t want you to die either, do we, Jasper?”

“No,” I said, and waited a full thirty seconds before adding, “not at the moment.”

Dad wiped the corners of his mouth with my sleeve and said, “I want to die at home.”

“When you say home, you mean…”

“ Australia.”

Terry and I looked at each other with dread.

“Well, mate,” Terry said slowly, “that’s just not practical.”

“I know. Nevertheless, I’m going home.”

Terry took a deep breath and spoke to Dad calmly and deliberately, as though gently chastising his grown-up mentally disturbed son for smothering the family pet by overhugging.

“Marty. Do you know what would happen the minute the plane landed on Aussie soil? You’d be arrested at the airport.” Dad didn’t say anything. He knew this was true. Terry pushed on: “Do you want to die in jail? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you fly back home.”

“No, I don’t want to die in jail.”

“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You’ll die here.”

“I have another idea,” Dad said, and at once any glimmer of hope died and I knew that a nice, quiet, peaceful death followed by an intimate funeral and a respectable period of restrained mourning was now out of the question. Whatever was coming was going to be dangerous, messy, and frantic and would drive me to the edge of insanity.

“So, Marty, what are you suggesting?”

“We sneak back into Australia.”

“What?”

“By boat,” he clarified. “Terry, I know you know who the people-smugglers are.”

“This is nuts!” I said. “You can’t want to risk your life just to die in Australia! You hate Australia!”

“Look, I know this is world-class hypocrisy. But I don’t fucking care. I’m homesick! I miss the landscape and the smell of it. I even miss my countrymen and the smell of them!”

“Be careful now,” I said. “Your final act will be a direct contradiction of everything you’ve ever thought, said, and believed.”

“I know,” he said almost cheerfully, not minding at all. In fact, he seemed enlivened by it. He was up on his feet now, swaying a little, daring us with his eyes to raise objections so he could shoot them down.

“Didn’t you tell me nationalism is a disease?” I asked.

“And I stand by it. But it’s a disease that, as it turns out, I have contracted, along with everything else. And I don’t see the point of trying to cure myself of a minor ailment when I’m about to die of a major one.”

I didn’t say anything to that. What could I say?

I had to get out the big guns to help me. Luckily, Dad had packed a suitcase full of books, and I found the very quote I needed in his well-thumbed copy of Fromm’s The Sane Society. I went into his room but he was on the toilet, so I read it to him through the bathroom door: “Hey, Dad. ‘The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their and his own human reality.’ ”

“It doesn’t matter. When I die, my failures and weaknesses die with me. You see? My failures are dying too.”

I continued: “ ‘Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism”…is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.’ ”

“So?”

“So you don’t love humanity, do you?”

“No. Not really.”

“Well, there you are!”

Dad flushed the toilet and came out without washing his hands. “You can’t change my mind, Jasper. This is what I want. Dying men get dying wishes even if it irritates the living. And this is mine- I want to expire in my country, with my people.”

Caroline, I thought. It was obvious that Dad was in the grip of a pain that would arrive forever. He had made himself perpetually vigilant against his own comfort, and this mission to Australia was a directive from a sadness that must be obeyed.

But not only that. By tiptoeing back into Australia as human cargo in a risky smuggling operation, Dad had found one last stupid project, one that was sure to expedite his death.

II

The people-smugglers orchestrated their nasty enterprise out of an ordinary restaurant on a congested street that looked like seventy other congested streets I saw as we drove in. Terry gave Dad and me a warning at the door: “We’ve got to be careful with these guys. They’re absolutely brutal. They’ll cut your head off first, ask questions later, mostly about where to send your head.” With that in mind, we took a table and ordered jungle curries and beef salad. I had always imagined that fronts for criminal activity were merely façades, but here they actually served food, and it wasn’t bad.

We ate without speaking. Dad coughed in between spoonfuls and in between coughs called repeatedly to a waiter for bottled water. Terry was shoveling down prawns and breathing through his nose. The King was glaring at me disapprovingly from a portrait on the far wall. A couple of English backpackers at the next table were discussing the physical and psychological differences between Thai prostitutes and a girl named Rita from East Sussex.

“So, Terry,” I asked, “what happens now? We just sit here until closing time?”

“Leave it to me.”

We left it to him. All the communication happened wordlessly, according to a preestablished set of rules: Terry gave a conspiratorial nod to a waiter, who in turn gave it to the chef through an open window into the kitchen. The chef then passed the nod on to a man out of our line of vision, who for all we knew passed it on to twenty more men who lined a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine of hell. After a few anxious minutes, a man with a slightly malformed bald head came out and sat down, biting his lip and staring at us threateningly. Terry produced an envelope brimming with money and pushed it across the table. That softened the smuggler up a little. Grabbing the envelope, he rose from the table. We followed him, our footsteps sounding prolonged echoes as we walked down a hallway that eventually led to a small windowless room where two armed men greeted us with cold stares. One of them molested us, searching for weapons, and when none were found a flabby middle-aged man in an expensive suit entered and gazed at us quietly. His impressive stillness made me feel I was in a story by Conrad, as if I were looking into the heart of darkness. Of course he was just a businessman, with the same love of profit and indifference to human suffering as his Western corporate counterparts. I thought that this man could be a midlevel executive at IBM or a legal adviser to the tobacco industry.

Without warning, one of the bodyguards cracked the butt of a rifle over Terry’s head. His massive body crashed to the floor. He was unconscious but alive, his torso heaving with slow, deep breaths. When they aimed the guns at me, I thought how this was exactly the type of room I had always imagined I’d die in: small, airless, and crammed with strangers looking on indifferently.

“You are police,” the boss said in English.

“No. Not police,” Dad protested. “We are wanted criminals. Like you. Well, not like you. We don’t know if you’re wanted or not. Perhaps nobody wants you.”

“You are police.”

“No. Christ, listen. I have cancer. Cancer, you know. The big C. Death.” Dad then proceeded to tell them the whole absurd story of his fall from grace and escape from Australia.

I thought it was commonly accepted that stories this ridiculous had to be true, but the smugglers seemed skeptical. As they deliberated our fate, I remembered how Orwell described the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever, and I thought that all around me were boots, people so terrible that the whole human race should be punished for doing nothing to curb their existence. The job of these people-smugglers was to recruit desperate people, strip them of every penny, lie to them before shoving them onto boats that routinely sank. Each year they sent hundreds to their terror-stricken deaths. These pure exploiters were the irritable bowel syndrome of the cosmos, I thought, and looking at these men as if they were examples of all men, I decided I’d be happy to disappear if it meant they also could not exist.

The boss spoke quietly in Thai just as Terry regained consciousness. We helped him up off the floor, which was no easy task. Rubbing his head, he said, “They said it’ll cost you twenty-five thousand.”

“Fifty thousand,” I said.

“Jasper,” Dad whispered, “don’t you know anything about bargaining?”

“I’m going too,” I said.

Dad and Terry exchanged looks. Dad’s was dark and silent while his brother’s was wide and mystified.

“Plenty of these boats sink long before they get to Australia,” Terry said anxiously. “Marty! I absolutely forbid this! You can’t let Jasper go with you.”

“I can’t stop him,” Dad said, and I detected in his voice an enthusiasm to be reckless with my life now that his was over.

“Jasper, you’re a fool. Don’t do this,” Terry protested.

“I have to.”

Terry sighed, and muttered that I was more like my father every day. The deal was sealed with a handshake and fifty grand in cold, hard cash, and once the transaction was made, the smugglers seemed to relax and even offered us beers “on the house.” Watching these villains, I imagined that I had branched off the evolutionary line at an earlier age and evolved in secret, parallel to man but always apart.

“Tell me one thing, Jasper,” Terry said after we left the restaurant. “Why are you going?”

I shrugged. It was complicated. I didn’t want the people-smugglers, those fucking ghouls, to double-cross Dad and throw his body into the water half an hour out to sea. But this was not just an altruistic outburst; it was a form of preemptive strike. I didn’t want Dad’s resentment haunting me from beyond the grave, or little waves of guilt lapping at my future serenity. But above all, it was to be a sentimental journey: if he was to die, either at sea or among “his people” (whoever the fuck they were), I wanted to see it for myself, eyeball to vacant eyeball. My whole life I’d been pushed beyond rational limits by this man, and I was offended by the notion that I could be so implicated in his lifelong drama and not be present for the grand finale. He might have been his own worst enemy, but he was my worst enemy too, and I’d be damned if I was going to wait patiently by the riverbank, as in the Chinese proverb, for his corpse to float by. I wanted to see him die and bury him and pat the earth with my bare hands.

I say this as a loving son.

III

Our last night in Thailand, Terry prepared a feast, but the night was ruined early by Dad’s failure to show up. We searched the house thoroughly, especially the bathrooms and toilets, any hole he might have fallen into, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, on his desk, we found a short note: “Dear Jasper and Terry. Gone to a brothel. Back later.”

Terry took it personally that his brother was avoiding him on their last night together, and I couldn’t quite convince him that each dying man must perform his own archaic ritual. Some hold hands with loved ones; others prefer unprotected and exploitative third world sex.

Before bed, I packed a few things for the trip. We had taken very little to Thailand, and I put together even less for the return trip- one change of clothes each, two toothbrushes, one tube of toothpaste, and two vials of poison, procured by Terry, who had presented them to me with shaky hands over dinner. “Here you are, nephew,” he said, handing me little plastic tubes filled with a cloudy liquid. “In case the voyage drifts on without end or winds up on the bottom of the sea floor and you can look forward only to starvation or drowning, voilà! A third option!” He assured me it was a quick and relatively painless poison, though I pondered the word “relatively” for some time, unconsoled that we’d be howling in agony for a briefer period than offered by the other poisons in the shop. I hid the plastic tubes in a zipped pocket on the side of my bag.

I didn’t close my eyes all night. I thought about Caroline and my inability to save her. What a disappointment my brain turned out to be. After everything I had witnessed in my life, I had almost convinced myself that the wheel of personal history spins on thought, and therefore my history was muddy because my thinking had been muddy. I imagined that everything I’d experienced to date was likely to be a materialization of my fears (especially my fear of Dad’s fears). In short, I had briefly believed that if man’s character is his fate, and if his character is the sum of his actions, and his actions are a result of his thoughts, then man’s character, actions, and fate are dependent on what he thinks. Now I wasn’t so sure.

An hour before dawn, when it was time to leave to catch the boat, Dad still hadn’t returned. I imagined he was either lost in Bangkok, weary at having spent the night bargaining down prostitutes, or else soaking in a bubble bath in a fancy hotel, having changed his mind about the voyage without telling us.

“What do we do?” Terry asked.

“Let’s get down to the dock. Maybe he’ll turn up there.”

It was a half-hour drive to the dock through the stacked-up city and then through ramshackle suburbs that looked like an enormous house of cards that had fallen down. We parked next to a long pier. The sun, emerging over the horizon, glowed through the fog. Above us we could just make out clouds the shape of lopped-off heads.

“There she is,” Terry said.

When I saw the fishing trawler, our dilapidated would-be coffin, all the joints in my body stiffened. It was a crappy wooden boat that looked like an ancient relic restored in a hurry just for show. I thought: This is where we’re to be stored like the cod livers we are.

It wasn’t long before the asylum-seekers, the Runaways, began appearing in fearful, suspicious groups of two and three. There were men, women, and children. I did my own head count as they crowded the dock- eight…twelve…seventeen…twenty-five…thirty…They kept coming. There seemed no way this little boat could accommodate us all. Mothers hugged their sons and daughters tightly. I felt like crying. You can’t overlook the poignancy of a family risking its children’s existence to give them a better life.

But here they were! The Runaways! Here they were, demonstrating twin expressions of human desperation and human hope, huddling together furtively, examining the trawler with profound mistrust. They weren’t fools. They knew they were riding on a coin toss. They were deeply suspicious that this rusty vessel could possibly be their deliverance. I checked them out, wondering: Will we resort to cannibalism before the journey’s done? Will I be eating that man’s thigh and drinking that woman’s spinal fluid with a bile chaser?

I waited with Terry on the pier. The smugglers appeared as if from nowhere, all wearing khaki. The captain stepped off the boat. He was a slim man with a tired face who stood rubbing the back of his neck over and over as if it were a genie’s bottle. He ordered us all on board.

“I’m not going if Dad’s not going,” I said with enormous relief.

“Wait! There he is.”

Dammit, yes, there he was, coming down the dock, staggering toward us.

Someone once said that at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. Well, I’m sorry, but no one at any age deserves the face my father had as he walked toward us. It was as though the force of gravity had gone haywire and was pulling his face down to the earth and up to the moon at the same time.

“Is that it? Is that the boat? Is that the fucking boat? Is it watertight? It looks pretty loose to me.”

“That’s her, all right.”

“It looks like it couldn’t float in space.”

“I agree. It’s not too late to chuck this whole idea.”

“No, no. We’ll carry on.”

“Right.” Fuck.

The sun was rising. It was almost morning. The captain came over and urged us on board again. Terry put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it like a lemon.

“All right. Remember what I told you: if these two men do not reach Australia in tip-top condition, I will kill you.”

“And if he doesn’t,” Dad said, “my ghost will come back and kick you in the balls.”

“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You got it?”

The captain nodded wearily. He seemed used to threats.

Terry and Dad stood facing each other like two men about to wrestle. Dad tried to smile, but his face couldn’t support the sudden strain. Terry puffed a little, as if he were climbing stairs, and slapped Dad lightly on the arm.

“Well. This was a hell of a reunion, wasn’t it?”

“I’m sorry dying’s made me such a shit,” Dad said. He looked awkward with this goodbye, and put his hand on his head as if he were worried it would blow away. Then they gave each other a smile. You could see their whole lives in that smile: their childhood, their adventures. The smile said, “Didn’t we turn out to be two different and amusing creatures?”

“Just have a nice peaceful death,” Terry said, “and try not to take Jasper with you.”

“He’ll be OK,” Dad said, and turning away from his brother, he boarded the boat, which knocked gently against the pier.

Terry grabbed me by the shoulders and smiled. He leaned forward, smelling of coriander and lemongrass, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “You take care of yourself.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I think I’ll get out of Thailand. Maybe move to Kurdistan or Uzbekistan, one of those places I can’t spell. I’ll try setting up a cooperative there. This whole thing with your dad and Caroline has shaken me up a little. I think I need to go on a long, rough journey. See what’s up. I have a funny feeling the world’s about to go up in smoke. The war has started, Jasper. Take my word for it. The have-nots are getting their act together. And the haves are in for a rough trot.”

I agreed it seemed to be developing that way.

“Will you ever come out of the shadows and return to Australia?”

“One day I’ll come back and give them all the fright of their lives.”

“Come on, let’s go home,” Dad shouted from the deck.

Terry looked at Dad and held up a finger to say he needed one minute. “Jasper, before you go, I’d like to give you a word or two of advice.”

“All right.”

“From watching you these past months, I’ve worked out that there’s something you want above all things. You want not to be like your father.”

That wasn’t something I kept hidden, even from Dad.

“You’ve probably worked out by now that if you think courageous thoughts, you will cross busy streets without looking, and if you think sadistic, venal thoughts, you will find yourself pulling out the chair every time someone is about to sit down. You are what you think. So if you don’t want to turn into your father, you don’t want to think yourself into a corner like he did- you need to think yourself into the open, and the only way to do that is to enjoy not knowing whether you’re right or wrong, play the game of life without trying to work out the rules. Stop judging the living, enjoy futility, don’t be disillusioned with murder, remember that fasting men survive while starving men die, laugh as your illusions collapse, and above all, always bless every single minute of this silly season in hell.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I thanked him, hugged him one last time, and boarded the boat.

As we set off, through a heavy curtain of black engine smoke, I waved goodbye to Terry until he disappeared from sight. I looked at Dad to see if he was sad to never see his brother again, and I noticed that he was turned in the opposite direction, gazing out at the horizon and smiling an inappropriately optimistic smile.

IV

The terrible ocean! Weeks and weeks of it!

It seemed impossible for the captain to get the boat under control. Large waves threatened us on all sides. The trawler was tossed appallingly. It felt like she wasn’t just rocking back and forth but wheeling and spiraling and looping, doing mad circles in space.

Below deck, the portholes were welded shut and painted over with black tar. The floors were lined with soiled cardboard, and the passengers slept on mattresses as thin as sheets. I remembered how when I first arrived in Thailand everyone told me not to point my feet at anyone’s head. Now, in this cramped space, people were crowded together so closely that you ended up putting your feet not just at the heads of strangers but right into their faces too, day in, day out. Dad and I were jammed into a tight corner, sandwiched between bulky sacks of rice and a chain-smoking family from southern China.

In that hot and sweaty cage, the only oxygen we inhaled had been exhaled by other passengers. To be below deck was to be submerged in a nightmare. The crush of limbs and skeletal torsos was oppressive, especially in the suffocating darkness, where voices- peculiar, chilling, guttural sounds- made up conversations from which we were estranged. If you had to go outside for air, you didn’t so much move among them as were pushed remorselessly from one end of the hull to the other.

Sometimes, Dad and I slept up on the hard, ridged deck, using as pillows coils of wet, heavy rope caked in mud from one sea floor or another. It wasn’t much better up there; the days were stinking hot, it rained steadily, and who’d have imagined mosquitos could make it this far out to sea? They gnawed us incessantly. We could hardly hear ourselves swear at God against the loud, throbbing engine, which was belching out clouds of black smoke relentlessly.

At night we lay staring up at the sky, where the stars swam in shapes somehow made menacing by sobs, screams, and howls of delirium, mostly from Dad.

There’s nothing pleasant about the final stages of cancer. He was confused, delirious, convulsing; he had severe throbbing headaches, giddiness, slurred speech, dizzy spells, nausea, vomiting, trembling, sweating, unbearable muscle pain, extreme weakness, and sleeps as heavy as comas. He made me feed him from a pill bottle with an unreadable label. They were opiates, he said. So Dad’s various immortality projects had given way to the more important mortality project: to die with the least pain.

No one liked having the sick man on board. They knew the journey required strength and stamina, and besides, no matter what religion you followed, a dying man was a bad omen in every one. Perhaps because of this, the Runaways were reluctant to share their provisions with us. And it wasn’t just Dad’s health that bothered them- we emanated the smell of the alien. They knew we were Australians who had paid enormous sums of money to enter our own country illegally. They couldn’t wrap their minds around it.

One night on deck I was awoken by a voice shouting, “Why you here?” I opened my eyes to see the ship’s captain standing above us, smoking a cigarette. His face was a pulp novel I didn’t have the energy to read. “I don’t think he make it,” the captain’s voice persisted as his foot nudged Dad in the stomach. “Maybe we throw him off.”

“Maybe I throw you off,” I said.

One of the Runaways stood up behind me and shouted something to the captain in a language I didn’t recognize. The captain backed off. I turned around. The Runaway was around the same age as me, with large, beautiful eyes that were much too big for his drawn face. He had long curly hair and long curly eyelashes. Everything about him was long and curly.

“They say you’re Australian,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I would like to take an Australian name. Can you think of one for me?”

“OK. Sure. How about…Ned.”

“Ned?”

“Ned.”

“All right. I am now Ned. Will you please call me by my new name and see if I turn around?”

“OK.”

Ned faced away from me and I called out “Shane!” as a test. He didn’t fall for it. After that I tried calling him Bob, Henry, Frederick, and Hot-pants21, but he didn’t even flinch. Then I called out “Ned!” and he spun around, grinning madly.

“Thank you,” he said politely. “May I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you here? We would all like to know.”

I looked behind me. Others had emerged from the cabin below to wash their filthy lungs in the night air. Dad was sweating and feverish, and Ned held out a wet rag for my inspection.

“May I?” he asked me.

“Go ahead.”

Ned pressed the wet rag against Dad’s forehead. Dad let out a long sigh. Our fellow passengers yelled out questions to Ned, and he yelled back before waving them over. They shuffled closer, crowded around us, and wet our ears with a spattering of broken English. These strange ancillary characters, called in at the last minute to make a guest appearance in the epilogue of a man’s life, wanted to understand.

“What’s your name?” Ned asked Dad.

“I’m Martin. This is Jasper.”

“So, Martin, why do you go into Australia like this?” Ned asked.

“They don’t want me there,” Dad said weakly.

“What did you do?”

“I made some bad mistakes.”

“You kill someone?”

“No.”

“You rape someone?”

“No. It was nothing like that. It was a…financial indiscretion.” He winced. If only Dad had raped and killed. Those crimes would at least have been worth his life, and possibly mine.

Ned translated the phrase “financial indiscretion” to the others, and as if on cue a thick curtain of cloud parted, allowing the moon to illuminate their blank confusion. Watching them watching us, I wondered if they had the slightest clue what to expect in Australia. I supposed they knew they’d be living an underground existence, exploited in brothels, factories, building sites, restaurant kitchens, and by the fashion industry, who would get them sewing their fingers to the bone. But I doubted they were aware of the adolescent competition among political leaders to see who had the toughest immigration policies, the kind you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley. Or that public opinion was already set against them, because even if you’re running for your life you still have to wait in line, or that Australia, like everywhere, excelled in making arbitrary distinctions between people seem important.

If they knew this, there was no time to dwell on it. Surviving the journey was the only priority, and that was no easy trick. Things were getting steadily worse. Supplies were dwindling. Wind and rain battered the boat. Enormous swollen waves threatened to capsize us at every moment. There were times we could not let go of the rail or we would have been thrown overboard. We felt no closer to Australia than when we started, and it became hard to believe that our country even existed anymore, or any other country, for that matter. The ocean was growing bigger. It covered the whole earth. The sky got bigger too- it was raised even higher, stretched to breaking point. Our boat was the smallest thing in creation, and we were infinitesimal. Hunger and thirst shrank us further. The heat was a full-body fat suit we all wore together. Many were trembling with fever. We spotted land once or twice, and I screamed in the captain’s eardrum, “Let’s pull in there, for Chrissakes!”

“That’s not Australia.”

“Who cares? It’s land! Dry land! We won’t drown there!”

We pushed on, cutting a foamy trail through an ocean bubbling with hostile intentions.

It’s surprising just how placid the dying human animal can be in such a circus. I never would’ve believed it. I thought we’d be tearing each other’s flesh off, drinking the blood of our brothers, but it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone was too tired. Sure, there was crying and a fair amount of bitter frustration, but it was sad and quiet bitter frustration. We were tiny, shrunken creatures, too frail for any kind of serious protest.

Most of the time Dad lay motionless on deck, looking like a scary stuffed toy you give to a child on Halloween.

I stroked his forehead gently, but he summoned up just enough energy to shrug me off.

“I’m dying,” he said bitterly.

“Another couple of days and I’ll be dying too,” I said, to cheer him up.

“I’m sorry about that. I told you not to come,” he said, knowing full well he hadn’t.

Dad was trying to act remorseful for having selfishly aligned my fate to his. But I knew better. I knew something he would never admit- that he had never fully shaken off his old, sick delusion that I was the premature reincarnation of his still living self- and now he thought that if I died, he might live on.

“Jasper, I’m dying,” he said again.

“Jesus Christ, Dad! Look around! Everyone here is dying! We’re all going to die!”

That burned him up. He was furious that his death was not being regarded as a tragic isolated spectacle. To die among the dying, as a number, was really a thorn in his side. Mostly, though, it was the constant praying to God that was getting under his skin. “I wish these idiots would shut up,” he said.

“These are good people, Dad. We should be proud to drown among them.”

Nonsense. I was talking pure nonsense. But Dad was determined to leave the earth in a belligerent state, and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. Even with his life packed and its passport stamped, he rejected the religious world for the umpteenth time.

We were the only ones not praying, and the Runaways’ positivism really put Dad and me to shame. They still had the feeling that lovely things were stirring in the air. They were giddy in their ecstatic flight, blissful because their gods were not the inner kind, who can’t really help you out in a tangible, nonephemeral crisis like a sinking boat; their gods were old-fashioned, the kind who direct the whole of nature to the desires of the individual. What a lucky break! Their gods actually listened to people, and sometimes intervened. Their gods dealt out personal favors! It’s Who you know! That’s why their private experience had none of the cold terror of ours: we envisaged no big thumb and forefinger descending from the heavens to pluck us out of harm’s way.

I tended to Dad in a sort of trance. In the dark he laid out countless ideas about life and how to live it. They were slightly more confused and puerile than his usual diatribes, though, and I realized that when you’re falling, the only thing you have to hold on to is yourself. When he talked, I pretended to listen. If he wanted to sleep, I slept too. When Dad moaned, I gave him painkillers. There wasn’t anything else to do. He was suffering, his far-off eyes farther off than ever before. I knew he was thinking of Caroline. “Martin Dean- what a fool he was!” he said. It gave him some comfort to talk about himself in the third-person past tense.

Ned sometimes gave me a break. He took my place and gave Dad water and took over pretending to listen to his ceaseless droning. On those occasions I crawled over the half-conscious bodies of my companions to get to the deck for a breath of air. Above me the sky opened up like a cracked skull. The stars were glistening like beads of sweat. I was awake, but my senses were dreaming. My own sweat tasted of mango, then chocolate, then avocado. This was a disaster! Dad was dying too slowly and in too much pain. Why didn’t he just kill himself? Why do staunch atheists put up with so much futile agony? What was he waiting for?

Suddenly I remembered. The poison!

I ran down and climbed over the human mattress and whispered feverishly in his ear. “Do you want the poison?”

Dad sat up and looked at me with glowing eyes. Death can be controlled, the eyes sang. Our vital powers were somewhat recharged, contemplating the poison.

“Tomorrow morning at dawn,” he said. “We’ll do it together.”

“Dad- I’m not taking the poison.”

“No, of course not. I didn’t mean that you would take it. I just meant that I’d take it and you’d watch.”

Poor Dad. He always hated loneliness, and now he was faced with the deepest, most concentrated form of loneliness in existence.

But at dawn it was raining, and he didn’t want to commit suicide in the rain.

When the rain cleared, it was too hot to end it all.

At night he wanted to let out his final breath in the warm glare of the sun.

In short, he was never ready. He vacillated interminably. He always found a new excuse not to do it: too rainy, too cloudy, too sunny, too choppy, too early, too late.

Two or three days of agony passed in that way.

It finally happened just after sunset around two or three weeks at sea. A wave of foam crashed below deck. We were half drowned. The shrieking didn’t help anything. When the ocean settled, Dad sat up in the dark. He suddenly had trouble breathing. I gave him some more water.

“Jasper, I think this is it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. I was always suspicious of the way in movies people knew when their time was coming, but it’s true. Death knocks. He actually knocks.”

“Can I do anything?”

“Take me up top, wait until I’m dead, and push me off the boat.”

“I thought you didn’t want a watery grave.”

“I don’t. But these bastards have been eyeing me like I’m just one big lamb chop.”

“Cancer hasn’t exactly made you appetizing.”

“Don’t argue with me. Once I’m dead, I don’t want to spend another minute on this boat.”

“Understood.”

The Runaways didn’t take their eyes off us. They spoke to each other in quiet, conspiratorial tones as Ned helped me get Dad out of there.

Up on deck his breathing grew easier. The Pacific air seemed to do him some good. The vast movement of the ocean pacified him. Well, at least I’d like to think so. These were his final moments, and I’d like to think that at the end he ceased to find his cosmic insignificance insulting, that finally he felt something whimsical in meaning nothing, that it was even somewhat amusing to be an accident in the appalling wasteland of space-time. This was my hope- that, staring out at the ocean’s majestical performance in surging blue and facing the mad sea wind, he might have cottoned on to the idea that the universal stage show was a bigger drama than he could ever have dreamed to land a key role in. But no, he didn’t put his existence into perspective at all- he was humorless about it right to the end. He went to his death a martyr to his own secret cause, unwilling to denounce himself.

I record his last minutes in the sad spirit of a biographer too close to his subject.

The night was silent, save for the creaking of the boat and the gentle lapping of the water. The moon hung brightly above the horizon. We were heading straight for it. The captain was steering us into the moon. I imagined a hatch door opening. I imagined us drifting inside. I imagined the door slamming shut behind us and the sound of crazy laughter. I imagined these things to distract me from the reality of my father’s death.

“Look, Martin, look at the moon,” Ned said. “Look at how it has been painted on the sky. God is truly an artist.”

That gave Dad a burst of energy. “I hope not, for all our sakes,” he said. “Honestly, Ned, have you ever actually met an artist? These are not nice people. They’re selfish, narcissistic, and vicious types who spend their good days in a suicidal depression. Tell him, Jasper.”

I sighed, knowing this speech by heart. “Artists are the kind of people who cheat on their mistresses, abandon their legitimate children, and make those who are underprivileged enough to know them suffer terribly for their efforts to show them kindness,” I said.

Dad raised his head to add, “And you proudly label God an artist and expect him to take care of you? Good luck!”

“You lack faith.”

“Have you ever wondered why your God requires faith? Is it that heaven has a limited seating capacity and the necessity of faith is God’s way of keeping the numbers down?”

Ned looked at him with pity, shook his head, and said nothing.

“Dad, give it a rest.”

I gave him another couple of painkillers. After swallowing, he gasped and fell unconscious. Ten minutes later he began ranting deliriously.

“Hundreds…millions…Christians salivating…heaven a fancy hotel where…won’t be bumping into Muslims and Jews at the ice machine…Muslims and the Jews…no better…no budging…modern man…good teeth…short attention span…supposed to be…turmoil of alienation…no religious worldview…neurosis…insanity…not true…always religion among creatures…who…die.”

“Save your energy,” Ned said. He could have said “Shut up” and I wouldn’t have held it against him.

Dad’s head fell back into my lap. He couldn’t have had more than a couple of minutes left and he still couldn’t believe it.

“This is really incredible,” he said, and took a deep breath. I could tell by his face that the painkillers were kicking in.

“I know.”

“But really! Death! My death!”

He slipped into sleep for a few minutes, then his eyes sprang open with a blank expression behind them, as bland as a bureaucrat’s. I think he was trying to convince himself that the day he died was not the worst day of his life but just an average so-so day. He couldn’t keep it up, though, and groaned once more through clenched teeth.

“Jasper.”

“I’m here.”

“Chekhov believed that man will become better when you show him what he is like. I don’t think that’s turned out to be true. It’s just made him sadder and lonelier.”

“Look, Dad- don’t feel pressured to be profound with your dying words. Just take it easy.”

“I’ve said a lot of drivel in my life, haven’t I?”

“It wasn’t all drivel.”

Dad took a few wheezing breaths while his eyes rolled around in his head as if they were searching for something in the corner of his skull.

“Jasper,” he croaked, “I have to admit something.”

“What?”

“I heard you,” he said.

“You heard what?”

“In the jungle. When they came. I heard your voice warning me.”

“You heard me?” I shouted. I couldn’t believe it. “You heard that? Why didn’t you do anything? You could have saved Caroline’s life!”

“I didn’t believe it was real.”

We didn’t say anything for a long while. We both gazed silently into the moving waters of the sea.

Then the pain started up again. He howled in agony. I felt afraid. Then fear grew into panic. I thought: Don’t die. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. You’re breaking up a partnership. Can’t you see it? Please, Dad. I’m absolutely dependent on you, even as your opposite, especially as your opposite- because if you’re dead, what does that make me? Is the opposite of nothing everything? Or is it nothing?

And I don’t want to be mad at a ghost, either. That’ll never end.

“Dad, I forgive you.”

“What for?”

“For everything.”

“What everything? What did I ever do to you?”

Who is this irritating man? “It doesn’t matter.”

“OK.”

“Dad, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

There. We said it. Good.

Or not so good- strangely unsatisfying. We’d just said “I love you.” Father and son, at the deathbed of the former, saying we love each other. Why didn’t that feel good? This is why: because I knew something that nobody knew or would ever know- what a strange and wonderful man he was. And that’s what I really wanted to say.

“Dad.”

“I should have killed myself,” he said between clenched teeth; then he repeated it, as if it were his private mantra. He would never forgive himself for not committing suicide. In my mind, that was appropriate. I think all people on their deathbeds should not forgive themselves for not committing suicide, even one day earlier. To let yourself be murdered by Nature’s hand is the only real apathy there is.

His actual death was quick- sudden, even. His body trembled a little, then spasmed in fear, he gasped, his teeth snapped shut as if trying to bite death, the lights of his eyes flickered and went out.

That was it.

Dad was dead.

Dad was dead!

Unbelievable!

And I never said I liked him. Why hadn’t I said it? I love you- blah. How hard is it to say “I love you”? It’s a fucking song lyric. Dad knew I loved him. He never knew I liked him. Even respected him.

Saliva was left unswallowed on his lips. His eyes, devoid of soul or consciousness, still managed to look dissatisfied. His face, deformed by death, damned the rest of humanity with a twist of his mouth. It was impossible to believe that the long, inglorious tumult in his head was over.

A couple of the Runaways came forward to help me throw him off the side.

“Don’t touch him!” I screamed.

I was determined to perform the burial at sea by myself, without assistance. It was a worthless idea, but I was stubborn about it. I knelt down beside his body, cupped my arms underneath him. He went all sinewy in my hands. His long, loose limbs dangled over my shoulders. The waves swelled up, as if licking their lips. All the passive, sunken faces of the Runaways looked respectfully on. The wordless ceremony roused them from their own languid dying.

I put my shoulder into it, flung his body over the edge and buried him in the roar of waves. He floated momentarily on the surface, bobbing up and down a little like a carrot thrown whole into a boiling stew. Then he went under, as if taken by invisible hands, and went off hurrying to greet himself in strange corners of the sea.

That was it.

Goodbye, Dad. I hope you knew how I felt.

Ned put his hand on my shoulder. “He’s with God now.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“Your father never understood what it’s like to be part of something bigger than himself.”

That shit me. People always say, “It’s good to be a part of a something bigger than yourself,” but you already are. You’re part of a huge thing. The whole of humanity. That’s enormous. But you couldn’t see it, so you pick, what? An organization? A culture? A religion? That’s not bigger than you. It’s much, much smaller!

The moon and the sun had just begun to share the sky when the boat approached the shoreline. I made eye contact with Ned and waved my arms around majestically, motioning to the bushland that surrounded the cove. Ned stared blankly at me, not understanding that I was suddenly overcome with the irrational feeling that I was his host and, almost bursting with pride, wanted to show him around.

The captain stepped out of the darkness and urged everyone to return below deck. Before I disappeared, I paused at the top of the steps. There were silhouettes on the shoreline. They stood frozen in clusters along the beach, dark figures wedged like poles in the wet sand. Ned joined me at the railing and clutched my arm.

“They might be fishermen,” I said.

We watched silently. The human statues grew in size. There were too many of them to be fishermen. They had spotlights too, and were shining them right in our faces. The boat had made it to land, but we were sunk.

V

The federal police and coast guard were all over the beach. They took no time in rounding us up. The coast guards strutted and shouted to one another like trout fishermen who had unexpectedly landed a sperm whale. The spectacle of them sickened me, and I knew my fellow travelers were in for a nightmare of bureaucracy they might never awaken from. To be poor and foreign and illegal and at the mercy of the generosity of an affluent Western people is to be on very shaky ground.

Now that Dad was absolutely gone, no longer there to make my life a living hell, I automatically took on that role myself. Just as I had always feared and Eddie had predicted, with Dad dead, it was up to me now to be indecent with my future. That’s why it seemed perfectly natural on that beach at dawn not to do what I didn’t do.

I had plenty of opportunities to speak up, to explain that I was an Australian and had every right to walk free. I should have separated myself from the Runaways. I mean, there’s no law prohibiting an Australian from returning to Australia on a leaky boat. Theoretically, I should be able to return from Asia propelled by a giant slingshot if it works, but for some reason I chose to say nothing. I simply kept my mouth shut and allowed myself to be rounded up with the others.

But how was it that they mistook me for a Runaway? My father’s genetic hand-me-down black hair and olive skin worked marvelously with the inability of my own countrymen to shake the idea that we are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. Everyone assumed I was from Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq, and no one thought to question whether I was. So away we went.

And that’s how I came to the strange prison surrounded by a seemingly endless stretch of desert on all sides. They call it a detention center, but try telling a prisoner he’s only a detainee and see if he feels consoled by the distinction.

They had difficulty classifying me, as I refused to speak to them. They were dying to deport me from day one, but they didn’t know where to. Various interpreters hounded me in many different languages. Who was I, and why wouldn’t I tell them? They guessed country after country, save one- no one ever guessed that my point of origin and point of destination were the same.

For weeks, when I wasn’t in English classes pretending to struggle through the alphabet, I wrote my story, on pages stolen from class. At first I wrote crouched on the floor behind the cell door, but I soon realized that between the hunger strikes and the suicide attempts and the recurring riots, I was hardly noticed. They thought I was just depressed; you were allowed, if not encouraged, to mope in your cell. As far as they were concerned, I was just a sad, unwanted enigma left unsolved.

When Ned received one of the coveted temporary protection visas, he kept hounding me to admit my citizenship. The day he left, he begged me to leave with him. And why didn’t I? What was I doing in this awful place? Maybe I was just fascinated- you never knew when someone might slash himself, or swallow detergent or pebbles. And there were three hearty riots in my time; a burst of furious energy compelled the Runaways to try impossible things like pulling down the fence, before they were torn away by the strong hands of the guards. After the last riot settled down, the administration built stronger walls and a higher-voltage electric fence. I thought about what Terry said, that the have-nots are getting their act together. I wished they’d hurry.

Every now and then I tried to convince myself I was in this prison as the ultimate protest against government policy, but I knew I was only rationalizing. The truth was, Dad’s lack of existence terrified me. This was an aloneness that required time to adjust to. I was hiding in here, avoiding facing up to the next step. I knew staying was perverse, shameless, and cowardly. Still, I couldn’t leave.

As usual, God comes up in many conversations. To the guards, the Runaways let out endless proclamations: “God is great!,” “God will punish you,” and “Wait until God hears about this.” Sickened by the treatment of the Runaways here and in their homelands, contemplating with horror the sad state of compassion in the world, one night I spoke to this God of theirs. I said, “Hey! Why is it that you don’t ever say, ‘If one more man suffers at the hands of another, it’s all over. I will finish it.’ Why don’t you ever say, ‘If one more man cries in pain because another man is standing on his neck, I’m pulling the plug.’ How I wish you would say that, and mean it. A three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy is really what the human race needs to pull its act together. It’s time to get tough, O Lord. No more half measures. No more ambiguous floods and unclear mud slides. Zero tolerance. Three strikes. We’re out.”

I said all this to God, but there was so much silence afterward, a cold silence that seemed to get caught in my throat, and I heard myself suddenly whisper, “It’s time.” Enough was enough. It was duing English class, in a small, bright room with a U-shaped arrangement of long desks. The teacher, Wayne, was standing in front of the blackboard instructing the class on the use of clauses. The students were silent, though not respectfully so; it was the bewildered silence of a group of people who had no clear idea what they were being taught.

I stood up. Wayne looked at me as though readying himself to take off his belt and start whipping me with it. I said, “Why are you bothering to teach us about clauses? We won’t need them.”

His face turned pale, and he tilted his head back as though I had just grown a meter taller. “You speak English,” he said dumbly.

“Don’t take it as a testament to your teaching abilities,” I said.

“You’ve got an Australian accent,” he said.

“Yeah, mate, I do. Now tell those mongrels to come in here. I’ve got something to say to them.”

Wayne ’s eyes widened; then he did an exaggerated dash from the classroom like a cartoon tiger. People act like children when you surprise them, and bastards are no exception.

Ten minutes later they came running in, two guards in tight trousers. They had looks of surprise too, but theirs were already beginning to fade.

“I hear you’ve been running off at the mouth,” one said.

“Let’s hear it,” the other commanded.

“My name is Jasper Dean. My father was Martin Dean. My uncle was Terry Dean.”

Their looks of surprise got all freshened up. They hauled me away, down the long gray corridors into a stark room with only one chair in it. Was that for me, or would I be forced to stand while an inquisitor drilled me with his feet up?

I won’t detail all seven days of the interrogation. All I will tell you is that I was like an actor trapped by contract in a bad play with a long run. I said my lines over and over and over. I told them the whole story, though leaving out all mention of Uncle Terry being alive. It wouldn’t have done me any good to resurrect him. The government leaned heavily on me to tell them Dad’s whereabouts. They had leverage too: I had committed two crimes, traveling on a false passport and consorting with known criminals, although the second was not actually a crime but just a bad habit, so they let it go. I was hounded by groups of detectives, and agents from ASIO, our unimpressive spy agency, which Australians know very little about because it is never the subject of movies or television shows. For days I had to put up with all the clichéd tricks in their repertoire: the staccato questioning, the good cop/bad cop routine and its variations (bad cop/worse cop, worse cop/Satan in a clip-on tie), performances so terrible I wanted to boo. We don’t torture people in our country, which is a good thing unless you’re an interrogator pressured to get results. I could tell one of them would have given anything to be able to tear out my fingernails. I caught another gazing forlornly at my groin while dreaming of electrodes. Well, too bad for them. Anyway, they didn’t need to torture me. I played along. I spoke myself hoarse. They listened themselves deaf. Pretty soon we were all running on empty. Every now and then they let me pace the room and shout out things like “How many more times do I have to say it?” It was embarrassing. I felt silly. I sounded silly. It was so corny. Movies have made real life corny.

They searched my cell and found what I’d written, two hundred pages about our lives; I had only gotten as far as my early childhood, when I learned the Terry Dean story. They studied the pages intensely, read them carefully for clues, but they were looking for Dad’s crimes, not his flaws, and in the end they thought it was nothing but fiction, an exaggerated story of my father and uncle composed as a clever defense; they concluded that I had depicted him as a lunatic so no one could find him guilty of anything by reason of insanity. They ultimately couldn’t believe in him as a character, saying that it was impossible for a person to be a megalomaniac and an underachiever. I can only assume they didn’t understand human psychology.

In the end they gave the pages back to me; then they interviewed all my fellow travelers to see if my story of Dad’s death held up. The Runaways confirmed it. They all told the same story. Martin Dean was on the boat, he was very sick, and he died. I threw his body into the sea. I could tell this news was a tremendous disappointment to the authorities- they hadn’t caught me out lying. Dad would have been the ultimate prize for them. The Australian people would have loved to see my father served up to them on a plate. Dad’s death left a conspicuous hole in their lives, an important vacancy that needed filling. Who the hell were they going to hate now?

Eventually they decided to let me go. It wasn’t that they had no real interest in charging me but that they wanted to shut me up. I’d seen firsthand how the Runaways were treated inside the detention center, and the government didn’t want me talking about the systematic abuse of men, women, and children, so they bought my silence by dropping the charges against me. I went along with it. I don’t feel bad about my complicity, either. I couldn’t conceive that the facts would make a difference to the voting public. I can’t imagine why the government thought they would. I guess they had more faith in people than I had.

In exchange for my silence, they gave me a dirty little one-bedroom apartment in a dirty government housing block in a dirty little suburb. The federal police flew me from the desert into Sydney and dropped me off here, and, along with the keys to my grubby, minuscule flat, handed over a box of papers raided from my old apartment when we’d skipped the country: my real passport, my driver’s license, and a couple of telephone bills they hinted I should pay. When they left me alone, I sat in the living room and stared out the barred windows into the apartment opposite. It seemed I had not done all right out of the government. I had blackmailed them for this shitty place and a welfare allowance of $350 a fortnight. It seemed to me I could’ve done a lot better.

I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. My cheeks were sunken; my eye sockets went deep into my head. I’d gotten so thin I looked like a javelin. I needed to fatten myself up again. Apart from that, what was my plan? What was I going to do now?

I tried calling Anouk, the only person left on the planet I had any connection with, but this proved far more difficult than I’d anticipated. It’s not easy getting in touch with the richest woman in the country, even if she once cleaned your toilet. Her home number was unsurprisingly unlisted, and it was only after calling the Hobbs Media Group and speaking to several secretaries, that it finally occurred to me to ask for Oscar instead. I received a few noes before one young woman said, “Is this a prank call?”

“No, it’s not a prank call. Why shouldn’t I speak to him?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Where’ve you been living the last six months, in a cave?”

“No, a prison in the middle of the desert.”

That got me a long silence. “He’s dead,” she said finally. “They both are.”

“Who?” I asked, my heart freezing block-solid.

“Oscar and Reynold Hobbs. Their private jet crashed.”

“And Mrs. Hobbs?” I asked, shaking. Please don’t let her be dead. Please don’t let her be dead. In that moment I realized that of all the people I had ever known in my whole life, Anouk deserved to die the least.

“I’m afraid so.”

I felt everything pour out of me. Love. Hope. Spirit. There was nothing left.

“Are you still there?” the woman asked.

I nodded. No words to speak. No thought to think. No air to breathe.

“Are you OK?”

This time I shook my head. How could I ever be OK now?

“Hang on,” she said. “Which Mrs. Hobbs do you mean?”

I gulped.

“Reynold’s wife, Courtney, was on the plane, not the other one.”

“So Anouk?” I gasped.

“No, she wasn’t with them.”

I sucked all that love, hope, and spirit back into my lungs with one deep breath. Thank you!

“When was this?”

“About five months ago.”

“I have to speak to her. Tell her Jasper Dean is trying to call her.”

“Jasper Dean? Son of Martin Dean?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you skip the country? When did you get back? Is your father with you?”

“JUST LET ME SPEAK TO ANOUK!”

“I’m sorry, Jasper. She’s uncontactable.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s traveling at the moment.”

“Where is she?”

“We think she’s in India.”

“You think?”

“To be honest, nobody knows where she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“After the plane crash, she just vanished. There’re a lot of people who want to talk to her, as you can imagine.”

“Well, if she calls in, can you tell her I’m home and I need to speak to her?”

I left my telephone number and hung up. Why was Anouk in India? I supposed she was mourning out of the spotlight. Understandable. The spotlight is the last place anyone wants to mourn. Anouk would be well aware that as a widow, if you’re not a mascara-running hysteric, the public will just assume you’re a murderer.

I felt desolate, unreal. Dad was dead, Eddie was dead, now even the indestructible Oscar and Reynold were dead, and none of it made me feel especially alive. In truth, I didn’t feel much of anything. It was as if I had been anesthetized head to toe, so I didn’t feel the contrast between life and death anymore. Later, in the shower, I wasn’t even certain I knew the difference between hot and cold.

A day into my new life and I already hated it. There was no way I could become anything other than permanently disgusting in this disgusting apartment. I resolved to get out of there. And go where? Well, overseas. I remembered my original plan- to drift aimlessly through time and space. For that, I needed money. Problem was, I didn’t have any money and didn’t know how to go about making it fast. All I had to sell was the same as everybody else who hasn’t an asset to his name: I could sell my time or I could sell my story. Having no marketable skills, I knew my time wouldn’t fetch me one dollar over minimum wage, but with not one but two infamous men in my immediate family, my story might get me a higher price than most. Of course I could’ve gone the easy route, agreeing to a television interview, but I’d never squeeze the whole story into the twenty minutes of a television half hour. No, I had to keep writing it down to be sure the story got told right, without leaving anything out. My only chance was to finish the book I’d started, find a publisher, and set sail with a hefty advance. That was my plan. I took out the pages my interrogators had read and dismissed as fiction. Where was I up to? I hadn’t gotten very far at all- I had a lot of writing to do.

I went out to the shops to buy a couple of reams of A4 paper. I like white pages- they shame me into filling them. Outside, the sun was a hand of light slapping me in the face. Looking at all the people, I thought: What a strenuous life. Now that I had nobody I was close to, I’d have to make do with some of these strangers, turn a couple of them into either friends or lovers. What a lot of work life is when you’re always starting from scratch.

The streets of my city felt like a foreign country. The toxic effects of being in a detention center were still with me, because I found out that while I needed individuals, I was terrified of crowds, with an intense physical anxiety that left me hugging streetlamps. What was I afraid of? They didn’t mean me any harm. I suppose I was afraid of their indifference. Believe me, you don’t want to fall over in front of man. He won’t pick you up.

I passed a newsstand and my heart sank- everything had gone public. Dad was officially declared dead. I decided not to read any of the tabloid eulogies. “Bastard Dies!” “Woo-Hoo! He’s Dead!” and “The End of a Scumbag!” didn’t seem worthy of my $1.20. Anyway, I’d heard it all before. As I walked away, it occurred to me that there was a certain unreal quality to those headlines, like a prolonged déjà vu. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt as if I was either at the end of something I’d thought endless or at the beginning of something I could have sworn had started long ago.

The next few days I sat by the barred window and wrote day and night, and as I did, I remembered Dad’s ugly, pontificating head and laughed hysterically until the neighbors banged on the walls. The phone rang nonstop- journalists. I ignored it and I wrote ceaselessly for three weeks, each page a fresh unloading of nightmares that it was a great relief to be rid of.

One night I was lying on the couch, feeling displaced, like an eyelid trapped inside an eye, when I heard the neighbors arguing through the walls. A woman shouted, “What did you do that for?” and a man shouted back, “I saw it on TV! Can’t you take a joke?” I was using up what felt like my last remaining brain cell trying to work out what he’d done when there was a knock at the door. I answered it.

Standing there with enviable posture was a young, prematurely balding man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit. He said his name was Gavin Love, and I accepted that at face value: I couldn’t think of any reason someone would call himself Gavin Love if that wasn’t his name. He said he was a lawyer too, which lent his Gavin Love story all the more weight. He said he had some papers for me to sign.

“What kind of papers?”

“Your father’s things are being held in a storage room. They’re all yours. You just have to sign for them.”

“And if I don’t want them?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I don’t want them, I guess there’s no point signing.”

“Well…” His face was blank. “I just need your signature,” he said hesitatingly.

“I understand that. I’m not sure I want to give it to you.”

Right away his confidence evaporated. I could tell he was going to get into trouble for this.

“Mr. Dean, don’t you want your inheritance?”

“Did he have any money? That’s what I really need.”

“No, I’m afraid not. His bank account is empty. And everything of value would have been sold. What remains of his possessions is probably, well…”

“Worthless.”

“But worth a look, though,” he said, trying to sound positive.

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. Anyway, I didn’t know why I was torturing this poor dope. I went ahead and signed my name. It was only later I realized I’d signed “Kasper.” He didn’t seem to notice.

“So where is this storage room?”

“Here’s the address,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “If you’d like to go now, I could give you a lift.”

We drove to a lonely-looking government building stuck out near furniture warehouses and packaged food wholesalers. A guard in a little painted white cubbyhole had carte blanche on the raising and lowering of a wooden beam at the entrance to the parking lot. Gavin Love rolled the window down.

“This is Jasper Dean. He’s here to claim his father’s estate.”

“I’m not here to claim anything,” I said. “Only to give it the once-over.”

“ID,” the guard said.

I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. The guard examined it and tried to equate the face on the license with the face attached to my head. They weren’t a clear match, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt.

We drove to the front of the building.

“You’ll probably be awhile,” Gavin Love said.

“Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to wait.”

I got out of the car, and Gavin Love wished me luck, which he seemed to think was pretty decent of him. A small, pudgy man in a gray uniform opened the door. His pants were pulled up higher than what I deem standard practice.

“Can I help you?”

“My name’s Jasper Dean. My father’s possessions are stuffed in one of your airless rooms. I’ve come for a poke around.”

“His name?”

“Martin Dean.”

The man’s eyes widened a little, then contracted. He went into the office and came out with a large blue ledger.

“Dean, Dean…here it is, Room-”

“One-oh-one?” I asked, thinking of Orwell.

“Ninety-three,” he said. “This way.”

I followed him to an elevator. He got in with me. We didn’t have much to say to each other, so we both watched the lift numbers illuminate in turn and I saw that he mouthed each number silently. On the fourth floor we got out and walked down a long, brightly lit corridor. About halfway down he said, “Here we are,” and stopped at a door.

“There’re no numbers on these doors. How do you know this is ninety-three?”

“It’s my job to know,” he said.

That was no kind of job. He took out a set of keys and unlocked the door and pushed it ajar.

“You can close the door behind you if you want.”

“That’s OK,” I said. It didn’t look like the kind of place you want to be closed into.

The room was dark and cluttered and I couldn’t see the end of it- I imagined it stretched endlessly to the brink of existence. I couldn’t think how they’d managed to get everything in here: books, lamps, maps, photographs, furniture, empty picture frames, a portable X-ray machine, life jackets, telescopes, old cameras, bookshelves, pipes, and potato sacks filled with clothes. The space was entirely occupied by Dad’s possessions, everything jumbled up together and in complete disarray- papers on the floor, cupboard drawers emptied and turned over. Obviously the authorities had searched for clues of Dad’s whereabouts and where he had left the money. Every dusty cubic meter was occupied by Dad’s worthless junk. I felt a kind of diluted heartache navigating through the maze of bric-a-brac. None of the anxiety that he had infused each item with had ebbed away. I could smell his intense frustration everywhere. I was taken over by the delusion that I was walking around in my father’s head.

It really was a no-man’s-land. I felt I had stumbled upon undiscovered continents- for example, a large blue sketchbook had me captivated for hours. Inside there were designs and sketches for unbelievable contraptions: a homemade guillotine, a large plastic collapsible bubble worn on the head so you could smoke in airplane toilets, a question-mark-shaped coffin. I also found a box filled with thirty or forty teen romance novels as well as his unfinished autobiography, and underneath a manuscript in his handwriting entitled “Love at Lunchtime,” a nauseating story of unrequited love written for thirteen-year-old girls. I felt completely lost. I felt I was meeting a few more of his well-hidden selves for the first time. Even before the idea of writing a book about him had occurred to me, even before I had set down one line, I had seen myself as his unwilling chronicler. The only thing I was an expert on was my father. Now it seemed there was a life to him I hadn’t known. In this way he mocked me from beyond the grave.

The guard appeared in the doorway and asked, “How are you getting on in here?” I didn’t know quite how to answer the particular phrasing of that question, though I said I was getting on fine.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, and left me to it.

What was I supposed to do with all this rubbish? The journals were worth keeping, certainly. Without them, I might never prove to anyone that my life with him had been as manic as I remembered it. And not only for outsiders- for myself too. I took them and his autobiography, placed them by the door, and continued scavenging.

Underneath a moth-eaten duffel coat I found a large wooden crate, rotted away at the corners. It looked damaged by water and time. A padlock was hanging off it, and a crowbar lay on the floor. The authorities, looking for missing millions, had cracked open this crate and rummaged through it. I looked closer. On the side was some yellowing paperwork written in French, with Dad’s name and, underneath, an address in Australia.

I opened it up.

On the top was a painting. In the dim light, I couldn’t make it out at first, but when I did, I was so shocked I may even have said something like “What the-?”

It was the painting I’d painted in the chicken coop in Thailand. The painting of the disembodied face that had haunted me my whole life. The painting that had been destroyed.

My head was spinning. I looked again. It was definitely my painting. How could this be?

I lifted it up to see what was underneath. There were more paintings of the same face. That was strange. I had painted only one. Then I understood.

They weren’t my paintings. They were my mother’s!

I took a deep breath and thought it out. I remembered Dad’s green notebook, his Paris journal. Dad had bought Astrid paints, brushes, and canvases and she had become obsessed with painting. The words of his journal were etched in my mind. I recalled that he had written: Each painting a rendition of hell- she had many hells & she painted them all. But hell was just a face- and it was just the face she painted. One face. One terrible face. Painted many times.

A moment of terror stretched into a solid minute of terror and kept going. I looked again at the face; it was like a big bruise, purple and splotchy. Then I studied all the paintings carefully. It was undeniable. The lashes on the lower eyelid, curled like fingers; the nose hairs like nerve fibers; its eyes in a trancelike state; the oppressive closeness of its flattened nose; its uncomfortable gaze. It looked as if the face threatened to break out of the painting and actually come into the room. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that I could smell it- its odor poured off the canvas in waves.

My mother and I had painted the same face, that same ghoulish face! What did it mean? Had I seen these paintings in my youth? No. The journal said she had given up painting after my birth, and since Dad and I left Paris just after her death, I definitely hadn’t seen them. So Astrid had seen a face and painted that face. And I had seen the same face and also painted it. I examined the paintings again. With sharp edges and horizontal lines broken up to make its geometrically off-putting head, done in a vile green and thick, wavy lines of black and red and brown, it wasn’t a passive face she’d painted, it was face as function- the function being to scare you.

I turned away from the paintings and tried to work it out. It was totally reasonable to assume that (a) my mother was haunted by the face in the same manner I was or (b) my mother hadn’t seen it floating in the clouds but had actually known the person it belonged to.

Pacing the warehouse, I forced my way through the junk and came across an old broken cabinet. In the bottom drawer I found half a packet of Marlboros and a lighter in the shape of a woman’s torso. I lit a cigarette but was too preoccupied to inhale. I stood there in that place totally immobilized by thought until the cigarette burned my fingers.

My eyes sprang open. I hadn’t realized they’d been closed. An idea had been inserted into my brain. But what an idea! What an idea! Why didn’t I think of it straightaway? I circled the room shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God,” like a contestant on a game show. I examined the paintings again. This had never happened to me- a lightning-bolt moment! It was incredible! “Why assume I’m turning into my father,” I shouted, “when there’s an equal chance I’m turning into my mother?” I stomped my feet to shake up the whole building. The thought was absolutely liberating. What had I been worried about all this time? And even if I was turning into my father, it wouldn’t ever have been the whole of me but only a section or a subsection- maybe a quarter of me would turn into him, another quarter into my mother, one eighth into Terry, or into the face, or into all the other me’s I hadn’t met yet. The existence of these paintings suggested a scope to my being I had not previously imagined. I think you can appreciate my indescribable joy. The period when my father threatened to dominate my personality- the Occupation- was a mirage. It had never been just me and him. I was a goddamn paradise of personalities! I sat down on a couch and closed my eyes and pictured myself. I couldn’t see anything clearly. Wonderful! That’s how it should be! I am a blurry image constantly trying to come into focus, and just when, for an instant, I have myself in perfect clarity, I appear as a figure in my own background, fuzzy as hair on a peach.

I suddenly knew what it meant. My mission was clear: fly to Europe and find my mother’s family. The face was the starting point. This was the first clue. Find the face, I thought, and I’ll find my mother’s family.

In a daze, I grabbed as many of the canvases as I could handle and called a taxi and took them home. I stared at them all night. I felt a mixture of feelings so conflicting in nature I was threatened with being torn apart by them: a deep grief for the loss of my mother, a snug feeling of comfort that we were close in mind, spirit, and psychosis, an abhorrence of and revulsion for the face, a pride that I’d uncovered a secret, and a furious frustration that I didn’t understand the secret I’d uncovered.

Around midnight, the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it. The journalists wouldn’t leave me alone. The phone stopped ringing and I heaved a sigh of relief. My sigh was short-lived. A minute later the phone started up again. This was going to go on all night. I picked it up.

“Mr. Dean?” a male voice said.

I supposed I’d better get used to that. “Listen,” I said, “I’m not giving interviews, quotes, comments, or sound bites, so why don’t you go hound a gang-raping footballer.”

“I’m not a journalist.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I was wondering if we could meet.”

“And I was wondering who you are.”

“I can’t say. Your phone is probably bugged.”

“Why would my phone be bugged?” I asked, looking suspiciously at the phone. I couldn’t tell whether it was bugged or not.

“Could you be outside Central Railway Station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”

“If the phone’s bugged, won’t whoever is listening be there too?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I’m not. I thought you might be.”

“So will you be there?”

“All right, then. I’ll be there.”

He hung up. I stared at the phone awhile, hoping it might start speaking on its own, explaining to me all the things I didn’t understand. It didn’t.

At nine o’clock the next morning I was at Central Station, waiting for God knows who. I sat on a bench and observed the people who hurried into the station to catch the trains and the people who hurried out of the station to get away from the trains. They seemed to be the same people.

A car honked its horn. I turned to see a black Mercedes with tinted windows. The driver was leaning out of his window, beckoning me with his finger. I didn’t recognize him. When I didn’t move, he stopped with his finger and started beckoning me with his whole hand. I went over. Even standing right up against the car, I couldn’t see who was in the backseat.

“Mr. Dean, would you get in the back, please?”

“Why should I?”

“Jasper! Get in!” a voice called out from the back. I smiled instantly, which felt strange because I hadn’t smiled for a long time. I opened the back door and dived in, and as the car moved off, Anouk and I hugged for ten minutes without speaking and without letting go.

When we pulled away, we stared at each other with our mouths half open. There was simply too much to say to know how to go about saying it. Anouk didn’t look like a rich widow. She was wearing a silk sari of deep red and had shaved her head again. Her enormous green eyes peered crazily out of her skull like symbols of an ancient catastrophe. Her face looked both old and young, foreign and familiar.

“You must think I’ve become paranoid with all this mystery stuff,” she said. “But it’s awful, Jasper. Everyone wants me to put on a brave face, but I don’t have one of those. I only have a distraught face. After Oscar and now your father it’s the only one I’ve got left.”

I sat trying to think of a way to start speaking. I squeezed her hand instead.

“I own it all, Jasper. I don’t know how this happened. I’m the richest woman in Australia.”

“The richest woman in the world,” the driver said.

“Stop listening!”

“Sorry, Anouk.”

“I won’t let anyone call me Mrs. Hobbs. Well, that’s another story. But isn’t it funny that I’m so rich?” It was more than funny. It was more than ironic too. I hadn’t forgotten how we’d met- she’d been running a key along Dad’s sports car because she outright hated the rich. “But you’re so thin!” she exclaimed. “What’s happened to you? I’ve only heard bits and pieces.”

I asked the driver to stop and he pulled the car over in a dead-end alley. Anouk and I climbed out, and standing in the alleyway next to a sleeping drunk clutching a broken television set, I told her everything about Eddie and Terry and the democratic cooperative and Thailand and poison and the murdering mob and Caroline and the people-smugglers. By the time I got to the boat trip she was biting her lower lip, and at my description of Dad’s death she sucked it into her mouth. For the rest of the story she kept her eyes closed and left a sad, bittersweet smile on her face. I didn’t mention my mother’s paintings, because I needed to keep something just for myself.

“As for me,” she said, “I’m in hiding. Everyone wants me to make a decision as to what to do. Am I going to take on running this megabusiness or aren’t I?”

“Do you want to?”

“Some of it might be kind of cool. It might be fun to run a movie studio. I produced a short film once, do you remember?”

I remembered. It was a dreadful, pretentious mesh of abstract images and obvious symbolism about a rich man who convinces a poor woman to sell him her breast, and once he’s bought it, he sits with the breast in his favorite armchair, stroking it, kissing it, trying to make the nipple erect, but when the nipple doesn’t rise, in frustration and despair he throws the breast on the barbecue and eats it with tomato sauce.

“What do you think, Jasper? You think I could run a movie studio?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m giving a lot away to friends- the music companies, the bookstores, the restaurants, the hotel chains, the cruisers- and my dad always wanted an island, but I’m going to wait for his birthday.”

“Aren’t you keeping anything?”

“Of course. I’m not a bloody fool. I’m keeping the newspapers, the magazines, the radio stations, the cable and free-to-air TV stations, and the movie studio for myself. Can you believe it, Jasper? The most powerful propaganda machines in the history of civilization, and they’ve fallen into our hands!”

“What do you mean, our?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. What are you going to do now?”

“I want to go to Europe and search for my mother’s family. But I need money. Anouk, can I have some money? I won’t pay you back.”

Anouk suddenly peered up and down the alley, and I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a celebrity or a wanted criminal, excess attention makes you paranoid. She leaned forward and solemnly uttered, “Of course, Jasper. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“Really?”

“On one condition.”

“Uh-oh.”

“You have to help me out.”

“No.”

“You’ll have lots of power.”

“Power? Yuck.”

“Please.”

“Look. I really just want to leave the country and live the rest of my days floating in an anonymous fog. I don’t want to help you with- what is it you want help with?”

“With the media.”

“What media?”

“All of it.”

“I’m going to Europe. I don’t want to be stuck in some office.”

“This is the twenty-first century, so if you want-”

“I know what century it is. Why do people always tell me what century it is?”

“- so if you want to keep moving, you can. You’ll have a laptop, an assistant, a mobile. You can do it all on the road. Please, Jasper. I don’t trust anyone else. You’ve never seen so many people who want so much so openly. They all have their hands out, all my old friends included. And no one will give me an honest opinion. You’re the only one I can count on. And besides, I think your father was preparing you your whole life for something like this. Maybe for this exact thing. Maybe he knew all along. This feels like fate, don’t you think? You and me, we’re completely the wrong people to be in this position- that’s what’s so great about it.”

“Anouk, this is crazy. I don’t know anything about newspapers or television!”

“And I don’t know anything about being a media mogul, but here I am! How is it possible that I’m in this position? And why? I didn’t claw my way to get here. I fell into it. I feel I’m supposed to do something.”

“Like what?”

She made a very hard and serious face, the kind that makes your own face hard and serious just from looking at it.

“Jasper, I believe that life is based on love. And that orderly love is the fundamental law of the universe.”

“Which universe is that and where is it? I’d love to pop by and say hello.”

Anouk sat on the edge of an empty beer keg. She was radiating pure joy and enthusiasm. Yes, she might have been pretending to hate this strange turn of events which had transformed her into a rich and powerful woman, but I wasn’t buying it.

“I believe that a person’s thoughts often manifest into actual events- that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, twenty-four-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?”

“I get it. Go on.”

“In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people’s addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there’re no developments is disappointed. They’re checking the news two or three times a day- they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secret parts of himself, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don’t you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.”

The homeless man in the gutter had woken up and was moving his half-open eyes furtively from Anouk to me, a bored smile on his face, as if to say in response to Anouk’s theory that he’d heard it all before. Maybe he had.

“So what do you intend to do?”

“We have to wean people off their addiction, or else there’ll be hell to pay.”

“We.”

“Yes, Jasper.”

I looked at the drunk in the alley to make sure I wasn’t imagining all this. Did I want to help Anouk in her plan? Sure, I could take control of the newspapers and put in fun headlines like “This Newspaper Makes Independent Thinking Impossible” and pursue Anouk’s aim of combating this addiction to “news” by making news dry and boring- limiting broadcasts and reporting banal and positive events (grandmothers planting new gardens, football stars eating dinner with their families) and not allowing mass murderers their turn on the celebrity wonder wheel.

However, the last thing I wanted was to take on a public role doing anything. The general public was still apt to turn apoplectic with rage at the mention of my father, and thus people would hate me for whatever I did. All I wanted was to melt into vast crowds of non-English-speaking people and taste the many flavors of women filling tight-fitting T-shirts in all the cities of the globe. And Anouk wanted the news division to be under my control?

“Anouk, I’ll tell you what. You start without me. I’ll give you a call in six months, see how you’re getting along, and then maybe I’ll come and help you out. But it’s a big maybe.”

She made a weird sound in her throat and started breathing hard. Her eyes somehow got rounder. I almost weakened. It’s hard enough to go through life disappointing yourself every second day, but disappointing others takes it out of you too. That’s why you should never answer the phone or the door. So you don’t have to say no to whoever’s on the other side.

“OK, Jasper. But I want you to do one thing before you leave.”

“What’s that?”

“Write an obituary for your dad that I can print in the paper.”

“What for? People don’t care.”

“I care. And so do you. And I know you- you probably haven’t let yourself grieve in any way for your father. I know he was a pain in the arse, but he did love you and he made you what you are and you owe it to him and to yourself to write something about him. Doesn’t matter if what you write is flattering or insulting. As long as it’s true and it comes from the heart and not from the brain.”

“OK.”

We climbed back into the car, and the homeless man watched us with smiling eyes that said in no uncertain terms that he had just overheard a conversation between two people who took themselves too seriously.

The car pulled up outside my building and we sat in the backseat facing each other, with barely a blink between us, barely the slightest movement.

“Sure I can’t convince you to stay in Australia for a few months?”

It was obvious that what she needed more than anything was to have a friendly face around, and I felt bad because I was taking mine to Europe.

“Sorry, Anouk. This is something I have to do.”

She nodded, then wrote me a check for $25,000. I was eternally grateful, but not so grateful I didn’t wish it were more.

We kissed goodbye, and I almost fell to pieces watching the black Mercedes disappear from sight, but I pulled myself together, out of habit. I walked to the bank and put the check in my account. I would have to wait three days before I could access the money to buy myself a one-way ticket to somewhere else. Three days seemed too long.

When I got home, I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about the fact that there were cat hairs on the couch that weren’t there yesterday. Not having a cat, I had no explanation for it. Just another of life’s inscrutable and pointless mysteries.

I tried to go to sleep, and when I couldn’t go there, I tried to get sleep to come to me. That didn’t work either. I got up and drank two beers and lay down on the couch again. My mind took over and dug up a few fragile images that seemed ready to crack if I thought about them hard enough. I decided to think about the future instead. In three days I would be on a plane to Europe, just as my father had once been, at roughly the same age, when almost everyone he knew was dead. Well, you have to follow in people’s footsteps sometimes. You can’t expect every cough, scratch, and sneeze to be your own.

Around midnight I started working on the obituary for my father that Anouk could print in the paper. After staring at a blank page for two days, I began.

Martin Dean, 1956-2001

Who was my father?

The offal of the universe.

The fatty rind.

An ulcer on the mouth of time.

He was sorry he never had a great historical name like Pope Innocent VIII or Lorenzo the Magnificent.

He was the man who first told me that no one would buy life insurance if it was called death insurance.

He thought the best definition of thoroughness is having your ashes buried.

He thought that people who don’t read books don’t know that any number of dead geniuses are waiting for their call.

He thought that there seems to be no passion for life, only for lifestyle.

About God- he thought that if you live in a house, it’s of only nominal interest to know the name of the architect who designed it.

About evolution- he thought it was unfair that man is at the top of the food chain when he still believes the newspaper headlines.

About pain and suffering- he thought that you can bear it all. It’s only the fear of pain and suffering that is unbearable.

I took a break and read over what I’d written. All true. Not bad. This was coming along nicely. But I should be more personal. After all, he wasn’t just a brain in a jar spitting out ideas, he was also a human being with emotions that made him sick.

He never achieved unlonely aloneness. His aloneness was terrible for him.

He could not hear a mother calling for her child in the park without calling out too, sick with the ominous feeling that something awful had happened to little Hugo (or whoever).

He was always proud of things that shamed others.

He had a fairly complex Christ complex.

His worldview seemed to be something like “This place sucks. Let’s refurbish.”

He was impossibly energetic but lacked the kind of hobbies that actually required energy, which is why he often read books while walking and watched TV while pacing back and forth between rooms.

He could empathize with anyone, and if he found out someone in the world was suffering, Dad had to go home and lie down.

OK. What else?

I looked over what I had written and decided it was time to get to the heart of the man.

The concept of Dad’s death ruined his whole life. The very thought of it struck him down like some toxic jungle fever.

My God. This topic made my whole body feel heavy. Just as Terry had realized that the terror of death had almost killed him, Dad had often repeated his conviction that it was the base cause of all human beliefs. I saw now that I had developed a nasty mutation of this disease, namely, the terror of the terror of death. Yes, unlike Dad and unlike Terry, I don’t fear death so much as I fear the fear of it. The fear that makes people believe, and kill each other, and kill themselves; I am afraid of this fear that could make me unconsciously manufacture a comforting or confusing lie that I might base my life on.

Wasn’t I going off to chase the face from my nightmares?

Wasn’t I going on a journey to learn more about the face? And about my mother? And about myself?

Or was I?

Dad always maintained that people don’t go on journeys at all but spend a lifetime searching for and gathering evidence to rationalize the beliefs they’ve held in their hearts since day one. They have new revelations, certainly, but these rarely shatter their core belief structure- they just build on it. He believed that if the base remains intact, it doesn’t matter what you build on it, it is not a journey at all. It is just layering. He didn’t believe that anyone ever started from scratch. “People aren’t looking for answers,” he often said. “They’re looking for facts to prove their case.”

This made me think of his journey. What was it all about? He may have traveled the globe, but he didn’t seem to go very far. He may have dipped himself in different pools of experience, but his spirit stayed the same flavor. All his plans, plots, and schemes centered on man in relation to society, or larger- to civilization, or smaller- to community. He aspired to change the world around him, but he saw his being as solid and unchangeable. He wasn’t interested in testing the limits within himself. How far can someone expand? Can his essence be found and enlarged? Can the heart get an erection? Can your soul pour out your mouth? Can a thought drive a car? It hardly seems to have occurred to him.

Finally I knew how to revolt against my father’s ways! The nature of my anarchy was clear. Like Terry, I would live as though on the edge of death, as the world sank or swam. Civilization? Society? Who cares. I would turn my back on progress, and unlike my father, I would concentrate my attention not on the outside but on the inside.

To get to the bottom of myself. To get to the bottom of thought. To get beyond time. Like everyone, I’m saturated in time, I’m soaking in it, I’m drowning in it. To annihilate this profound, all-encompassing, psychological trick would really be an ace up my sleeve.

I had communicated my thoughts successfully to Dad from the jungle in Thailand, though he chose not to believe it. That means the manipulation of thought exists. That’s why you have to be careful what you think. That’s why most doctors quietly admit that depression, stress, and grief affect our immune systems, as does loneliness. In fact, loneliness is linked to higher death rates through heart disease, cancer, and suicide, and even to accidental death, meaning that feeling lonely may lead to fatal clumsiness. See your doctor if loneliness persists.

We ignorantly indulge in negative thoughts, unaware that thinking over and over again “I suck” is probably as carcinogenic as sucking down a carton of unfiltered Camels. So then, should I rig up a device where I can give myself little electric shocks every time I have a negative thought? Would that work? What about self-hypnosis? Even in my fantasies, beliefs, ideas, and hallucinations, can I stop my mind from running in old grooves? Can I emancipate myself? Renew myself? Replace myself like old skin cells? Is that too ambitious? Does self-awareness have an off switch? I have no idea. Novalis said that atheism is when you don’t believe in yourself. OK, in this respect I am probably an agnostic, but either way, is this my project? To test the limit of the power of thought and see what the material world really looks like? What then? Can I be of the world and in the world even when I have crashed through time and space? Or do I have to live on a mountaintop? I really don’t want to. I want to stay at the bottom and bribe seven-year-olds to buy me half-price tickets for the movies. How do I deal with such incompatible desires? And I know that to achieve enlightenment I’m supposed to witness the dissolution of my wants, but I like my wants, so what’s a guy to do?

I packed my bags and manuscript and put in a photograph of Astrid, my mother. She was remarkably beautiful. I have that on my side. Society hangs its tongue out at the sight of a pretty face; all I have to do is walk up the tongue into the mouth that will tell me everything I need to know. This woman touched lives, and not just my father’s. Some would be dead. Some would be too old. But somewhere were childhood friends, boyfriends, lovers. Somebody would remember her. Somewhere.

Neither Dad nor I had much love for religion, because we preferred the mystery to the miracle, but Dad didn’t really love the mystery either- it was like a pebble in his shoe. Well, I won’t ignore mysteries like he did. But I won’t try to solve them, either. I just want to see what happens when you peer into their core. I’m going to follow in my own stupid, uncertain footsteps. I’m going to wander the earth awhile and find my mother’s family and the man who belongs to the face in the sky and see where these mysterious affinities take me- closer to understanding my mother or to some unimaginable evil.

I looked out the window. It was dawn. I made myself a coffee and reread the obituary one last time. I needed a conclusion. But how do you conclude a life like his? What did he mean? What idea could finish this off? I decided I should address all those thoughtless, ignorant people who had called Dad a bastard without even knowing he actually was one.

Martin Dean was my father.

The act of writing this sentence knocked the wind out of me. All of a sudden I felt something I’d never felt before- privileged. I suddenly felt better off than a billion other sons, privileged that I had had the good fortune to be raised by an odd, uncompromising, walking stew of ideas. So what if he was a philosopher who thought himself into a corner? He was also a natural-born empathizer who would have rather been buried alive than have his imperfections ever seriously hurt anyone. He was my father. He was a fool. He was my kind of fool.

There’s no way to sum him up. How could I? If I was only a part of him, how could I possibly ever know who he was a part of?

I wrote on:

My father has been called a lot of terrible names by the people of this country. OK, he wasn’t a Gandhi or a Buddha, but honestly, he wasn’t a Hitler or a Stalin either. He was somewhere in the middle. But what I want to know is, what does your view of my father say about you?

When someone comes into the world who reaches the worst depths that humans can sink to, we will always call him a monster, or evil, or the embodiment of evil, but there is never any serious hint or suggestion that there is something actually supernatural or otherworldly about this individual. He may be an evil man, but he is just a man. But when an extraordinary person operating on the other side of the spectrum, the good, rises to the surface, like Jesus or Buddha, immediately we elevate him to God, a deity, something divine, supernatural, otherworldly. This is a reflection of how we see ourselves. We have no trouble believing that the worst creature who has done the most harm is a man, but we absolutely cannot believe that the best creature, who tries to inspire imagination, creativity, and empathy, can be one of us. We just don’t think that highly of ourselves, but we happily think that low.

That should do it. A nice confusing off-the-point conclusion. Well done, me. I popped this in the mail to Anouk at the Hobbs News Division, went to the bank to check that the money was in my account, then caught a taxi to the airport. This time I was leaving the country under my own name.

“I’d like to buy a ticket to Europe,” I said to the unsmiling woman at the counter.

“Where in Europe?”

“Good question. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Really,” she said, then leaned back in her chair and looked past me, over my shoulder. I think she was looking for a television camera.

“What’s the next flight that gets me in the Europe vicinity?”

She stared at me another couple of seconds before typing at lightning speed on the computer keyboard. “There’s a flight leaving for the Czech Republic in an hour and a half.”

The Czech Republic? For some reason I had thought she was going to say Paris, and then I’d say, “I believe Paris is lovely this time of year.”

“You want the ticket or not?”

“Sure. I believe the Czech Republic is lovely this time of year.”

After I bought my ticket and checked in my bags, I ate a $10 vegetable samosa that tasted worse than a seven-course meal of postage stamps. Then I went to the phone box and looked in the white pages to see if Strangeways Publications still existed and if Stanley was still running it, the man who had published Harry West’s The Handbook of Crime all those years ago.

It was there in black and white. I called the number.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Is that Stanley?”

“Yeah.”

“You still publishing books?”

“Men’s magazines.”

“I’ve written a book I think you might be interested in.”

“Men’s magazines, I said. You deaf? I don’t publish books.”

“It’s a biography.”

“I don’t care. Of who?”

“Martin Dean.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. It was so sharp, it almost sucked me right into the receiver.

“Who are you?”

“His son.”

Silence. Then I could hear the sound of someone moving a number of papers around a desk, and the sound of someone stapling something that didn’t sound like paper.

“Jasper, isn’t it?” Stanley said.

“That’s right.”

“You want to come into my office?”

“I’m just going to put it in the post, if that’s all right with you. I’m about to head overseas and I don’t know how long I’ll be or if I’ll ever be back. You go ahead and do whatever you want with it.”

“All right. You got my address?”

“I’ve got it.”

“I’ll look forward to reading it. Hey, I’m sorry about your dad.”

I hung up the phone without responding. To be honest, I didn’t know if he was sorry Dad died or if he was just sorry that he was my dad.

Right now I’m sitting at the airport bar, drinking an expensive Japanese beer for no good reason. Sitting at the next table is a woman with a cat in a little cat carrier. She’s talking to the cat, calling him John. People who name their pets ordinary human names depress the hell out of me. I listen to her carry on and it gets worse. The cat’s name isn’t just John. It’s John Fitzpatrick. That’s too much.

Now that I’ve told our story in all its fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail, I wonder: was it worth it? It’s not like I want to start a revolution or finish one that’s dragging on. I wasn’t a writer before I began, but writing a book makes a writer out of you. Anyway, I don’t know if I want to be a writer. Herman Hesse once said, “True creative power isolates one and demands something that has to be subtracted from the enjoyment of life.” That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

An announcement just told me my flight is boarding. I’ll write a few last words before I pop this in the postbox to Stanley. What could be an appropriate thought to finish on?

Maybe I should conclude with some semiprofound observation about my life.

Or about how sometimes dropped anchors hit slow-moving fish.

Or about how often the swallowing of saliva is really the suppression of a violent longing.

Or about how people mourn the recent dead but never mourn the long-term dead.

Or about how idiot savants surprise their doctors, losers blame their fathers, and failures blame their children.

Or about how if you listen closely, you discover that people aren’t really ever for something but instead are just opposed to its opposite.

Or about how when you’re a child, to stop you from following the crowd you’re assaulted with the line “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” but when you’re an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, “Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren’t you?”

Or about how when women who’ve had extensive plastic surgery die, God greets them with puzzlement, saying, “I’ve never seen that woman before in my life.”

Or should I finish on a positive note and say that even if you find yourself with no loved ones left to bury, it’s good to be optimistic and carry a shovel with you, just in case?

No, none of that seems right. I’ve run out of time anyway. My plane’s boarding in ten minutes. This paragraph will have to be the end of it. Sorry, whoever you are. Hey- that’s a question: who might actually read this if Stanley actually publishes it? Anyone? Surely there’s got to be one measly person out of six billion who has a couple of days to spare. One bored soul out of the shocking number of humans cluttering up this little blue-green ball of ours. You know, I read somewhere that by the year 2050 there will be another couple of billion. What a conceited outburst of humanity! I tell you, you don’t have to be a misanthrope to be chilled at the idea of that many people bumping into each other on the street, but it helps.