by Steve Toltz
“We’re fucked,” she said.
“We deserve it,” I said back.
“I know. Who’d have thought he’d react so badly?”
“No talking,” Mr. Silver snapped as he opened the door and beckoned us in. The Towering Inferno flinched as though slapped, and I wondered at what age she had discovered she possessed the power to convince men to throw hats out of trains. If I asked her now, would she remember the day? The moment? The event? What I wouldn’t give to exchange the tale of her strength for the saga of my weakness.
In the office there was a skinny middle-aged woman sitting with her hands in her lap, her narrow eyes closing a quarter of an inch with every step I took into the room.
“Well, you two,” the principal said, “what do you have to say for yourselves?”
“She didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “It was me.”
“Is that true?” he asked the Inferno.
She nodded guiltily.
“That’s not true,” the woman said, pointing at me. “He did it, but she was ordering him around.”
I took offense at that, because it was true. I stood up and placed my hands on the principal’s desk. “Sir, just take one second and look at the girl you are accusing. Are you looking at her?” He was looking at her. “She’s a victim of her own beauty. Because why? Because beauty is power. And as we learned in history class, power corrupts. Therefore, absolute beauty corrupts absolutely.”
The Towering Inferno stared at me. Mr. Silver cleared his throat.
“Well, Jasper, it’s unforgivable what you’ve done.”
“I agree. And you don’t have to suspend me, because I’m quitting this place.” He bit his lip. “You still want me to read at the funeral?”
“I think you should,” he said, in a cold, serious voice.
Damn. I knew he was going to say that.
***
The funeral was more or less a repeat of Brett’s: everyone standing there as if dignity mattered, the polished smile of the priest making your eyes squint, the sight of the coffin closing in on you. The Towering Inferno was staring at me, though I didn’t want to be stared at just then. I wanted to be alone with my guilt. Despite myself, I looked at her, the Angel of Death with great legs. Without even knowing it, she was the central figure in demolishing a family.
I peered over the cold body of Mr. White and silently pleaded: Forgive me for throwing your hat out of the train! I didn’t know your head was still inside! Forgive me! Forgive me for throwing you out of a moving train!
The priest nodded at me, the nod of a man tight with Omniscience.
I got up to read.
They were all expecting the psalm. Instead, this is what I read:
“Who is the most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
“The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
Creator of all woe and sin! Abhorred,
Malignant and implacable! I vow
“That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.”
I finished and looked up. The priest was gnashing his teeth just as it’s described in his favorite book.
IV
After returning home from Sizzler, I stood alone in the labyrinth, staring at the moon, which looked to be just an empty wreck of a rock, burned out, as if God had done it for the insurance.
“I’m worried,” Dad said, coming up behind me.
“What about?”
“My son’s future.”
“I’m not.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Go overseas.”
“You don’t have any money.”
“I know I don’t have any money. I know what an empty pocket feels like. I’ll make some.”
“How?”
“I’ll get a job.”
“What kind of job? You don’t have any skills.”
“Then I’ll get an unskilled job.”
“What kind of unskilled job? You don’t have any experience.”
“I’ll get some.”
“How? You need experience to get a job.”
“I’ll find something.”
“Who’ll employ you? No one likes a quitter.”
“That’s not true.”
“OK, then. Who likes a quitter?”
“Other quitters.”
Dad left me with a melodramatic sigh that trailed after him like a smell. I don’t know how long I stood in the cold trying to see past the veil covering my future. Should I be a baker of a male stripper? A philanthropist or a roadie? A criminal mastermind or a dermatologist? It was no joke. I was caught in a brainstorm, and ideas were clamoring for prime position. Television presenter! Auctioneer! Private investigator! Car salesman! Train conductor! They arrived without invitation, made their presentation, then made way for the others. Some of the more persistent ideas tried to sneak back in. Train conductor! Television presenter on a train! Car salesman! Train salesman!
I spent the next day staring into empty space. I get a lot of joy out of air, and if sunlight hits the floating specks of dust so you see the whirling dance of atoms, so much the better. During the day Dad breezed in and out of my room and clicked his tongue, which in our family means “You’re an idiot.” In the afternoon he came back in with a loaded grin. He had a brilliant idea and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to throw me out of the house, and what did I think of his brainwave? I told him I was concerned about him eating all his meals alone, because the clinking of cutlery on a plate echoing through an empty house is one of the top five depressing noises of all time.
“Don’t worry. I have a plan for throwing you out. We, you and me, are going to build you a hut to live in. Somewhere on the property.”
A hut? “How the hell are we going to build a hut? What do we know about building? Or huts?”
“The Internet,” he said.
I groaned. The Internet! Ever since the Internet, complete idiots have been building huts and bombs and car engines and performing complicated surgical procedures in their bathtubs.
We settled on a clearing in the maze next to a circle of sinewy gum trees and only a few meters from a freshwater creek, and the following morning, under an orange-copper sky, we started chopping trees as if we were mythic Germanic creatures in an early Leni Riefenstahl film.
I couldn’t stifle the thought that my life had taken a disappointing turn- I had only just left school and I was already doing hard manual labor. Every time the blade of the ax hit timber I felt my spine move a couple of millimeters to the left, and that first day for me was all about raising complaining to a high art. The second day was even worse- I dislocated my shoulder. The third day I said I needed to look for work and so I went into the city and saw three movies in a row, all of them bad, and when I returned I was shocked to see that an enormous amount of work had been done on the hut.
Dad was leaning on his ax, wiping sweat from his brow onto his pants. “I worked like a bastard today,” he said. I looked steadily into his eyes and knew at once that he had called in outside help.
“How’s the job hunt?” he asked.
“I’m closing in.”
“Attaboy.” Then he said, “Why don’t you have a crack at construction tomorrow? I’m going to spend the day in the library.”
And so I dug into the savings he kept in a hollowed-out copy of Rousseau’s Confessions and called a builder of my own.
“Just do as much as you can,” I said.
And in this manner the place was built. We’d alternate. One day I’d pretend to build the hut single-handed, then the next day he’d pretend to build the
hut single-handed, and I don’t know what any of this meant, only that it proved we both had damaged, underhand characters. The upshot was, the shack was taking shape. The ground was cleared. The frame erected. The floor laid. The roof beams raised. The door fastened on with hinges. Windows where windows should be. Glass in them. The days growing longer and warmer.
During this time I went for a job with an advertising agency, even though there was something condescending about the way the ad wanted a “junior.” I entered a sterile cement shanty, shuffled along dark, joyless corridors where a large clone army slid by me, smiling with urgency. In the interview, a guy named Smithy told me I’d get four weeks off a year for cosmetic surgery. The job was data entry clerk. I started the next day. The ad didn’t lie- I entered data. My coworkers were a man who smoked cigarettes that were mysteriously lipstick-stained in the pack and an alcoholic woman who tried very hard to convince me that waking up in the revolving door of the Hyatt Hotel was something to be proud of. I loathed that job. The good days passed like decades, the so-so days like half centuries, but mostly it felt as if I were frozen in the eye of an everlasting time-storm.
The night the hut was finished, Dad and I, two lying fakers, sat on the front porch and toasted the achievement that was not our own. We saw a star fall and tear a long thin strip of white in the black sky.
“Did you see that?” Dad asked.
“Shooting star.”
“I made a wish,” he said. “Should I tell you what it was?”
“Better not.”
“You’re probably right. Did you make a wish?”
“I’ll make one later.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
“As long as I don’t blink, the power of the star is still good.”
My fingers held my eyelids wide open while I contemplated my wishing options. It was an easy choice. I wanted a woman. I wanted love. I wanted sex. Specifically, I wanted the Towering Inferno. I worked all this into one wish.
Dad must have read my mind, or made a similar wish, because he said, “You’re probably wondering why I’ve been single most all my life.”
“It’s kind of self-explanatory,” I said.
“Do you remember I told you one day about a girl I once loved?”
“Caroline Potts.”
“I still think about her.”
“Where is she now?”
“ Europe probably,” he said. “She was the love of my life.”
“And Terry was the love of hers.”
We finished our beers and listened to the gurgling of the creek.
“Make sure you fall in love, Jasper. It’s one of the greatest pleasures there is.”
“A pleasure? You mean like a hot bath in winter?”
“That’s right.”
“Anything else?”
“It makes you feel alive, really alive.”
“That sounds good. What else?”
“It confuses you so you don’t know your arse from your elbow.”
I thought about that. “Dad,” I said, “so far you’ve described love as a pleasure, a stimulant, and a distraction. Is there nothing else?”
“What more do you want?”
“I don’t know. Something higher or deeper?”
“Higher or deeper?”
“Something more meaningful?”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.”
We had reached an impasse, and turned our eyes back to the heavens. The night sky just disappoints after a falling star has fallen from sight. Show’s over, the sky says. Go home.
***
That night I wrote a nice little blackmail note to the Towering Inferno:
I’m considering changing my story and telling the principal it was you who orchestrated the hat incident on the train. If you would like to talk me out of it, come to my house anytime. Come alone.
You don’t think you can blackmail a woman into loving you? Well, maybe you can’t, but it was my last card and I had to play it. I perused the note. It was just the way a blackmail letter should read: concise and demanding. But…my pen wriggled in my hand. It wanted to add something. OK, I conceded, but I remembered that brevity is the soul of extortion. I wrote: P.S. If you don’t show up, then don’t think I’ll be waiting like a fool. But if you do come, I’ll be there. And then I wrote on a little; I wrote about the nature of expectation and disappointment, about lust and memories; and about people who treat use-by dates as though they were holy commandments. It was a fine note. The blackmail element was short, only three lines. The P.S. was twenty-eight pages long.
On my way to work I popped it in the mailbox outside the post office and five minutes later almost broke my hand trying to get it out. Honestly, they knew what they were doing designing those mailboxes- you really can’t get into them. I tell you, those little red fortresses, they’re impenetrable!
Two days later I was in a deep sleep, trapped in an unpleasant dream where I was at a swimming carnival and when it came my turn to swim they drained the pool. I was on the swimmer’s block and the crowd booed me because I wasn’t wearing anything and they didn’t like what they saw. Then all of a sudden I was in a bed. My bed. In my hut. Dad’s voice had dragged me into consciousness, away from the disapproving eyes. “Jasper! You have a visitor!”
I pulled the covers over me. I didn’t want to see anyone. Dad started up again. “Jasper! You in there, son?” I sat up. His voice sounded funny. I couldn’t work out what it was at first, but then I realized. He sounded polite. Something must be up. I put a towel around me and stepped outside.
I squinted in the sun. Was I still dreaming? A vision soaked my eyes with cool delight. She was here: the Towering Inferno, in my home, next to my father. I froze. I couldn’t reconcile the two figures standing side by side. It was all so out of context.
“Hi, Jasper,” she said, her voice wriggling down my spine.
“Hi,” I countered. Dad was still standing there. Why was he still standing there? Why wouldn’t he move?
“Well, here he is,” he said.
“Come on in,” I said, and by her hesitant eyes remembered I was wearing only a towel.
“Are you going to put clothes on?” the Inferno asked.
“I think I can dig up some socks.”
“There’s a bushfire up in the mountains,” Dad said.
“We’ll stay away from there. Thanks for the tip,” I said dismissively, turning my back on him. As we walked into my hut, I whipped my head around to make sure Dad wasn’t going to follow us in. He wasn’t, but he winked at me conspiratorially. It annoyed me, that wink. He had given me no choice. You can’t not accept a wink. Then I saw Dad look at her legs. He glanced up and saw me see him looking at her legs. It was a weird moment that could’ve gone either way. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but smile. He smiled too. Then the Inferno looked up and caught us smiling at each other. We both glanced at her and caught her looking at us smiling at each other. Another weird moment.
“Come in,” I said.
As she stepped into the hut, the swoosh, drag, lift of her footsteps advancing on the wooden floorboards would have driven me to drink had there been a bar in my bedroom, and had it been open. I went into the bathroom and threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and when I came out she was still standing at the doorway. She asked me if I really lived in this place.
“Why not? I built it.”
“You did?”
I showed her where I’d cut myself helping my builder put in a window. It felt good showing her my scars. They were man scars.
“Your father seems nice.”
“He’s not really.”
“So what are you doing with yourself?”
“I got a job.”
“You’re not going back to school?”
“Why should I?”
“A high school certificate is a pretty handy thing.”
“If you like paper cuts.”
She gave me a half smile. It was the other half I was worr
ied about.
She said, “So then, how does it feel to be a working man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You might as well come up to me in a seven-story parking station and ask how it feels to be on the fourth level when before I was on the third.”
“I got your note.”
“We drove a man to suicide.”
“You don’t know that.”
She was only inches away. I couldn’t breathe. I was experiencing one of those horriblebeautifulterrifyingdisgustingwondrousinsaneunprecedentedeuphoricsensationaldisturbingthrillinghideoussublimenauseatingexceptional feelings that’s quite hard to describe unless you happen to chance upon the right word.
“Do you want to take a walk in my labyrinth?” I asked.
“I really don’t have much time.”
“I’ll give you the no-frills tour.”
Outside, everything shone brightly in the sun and there were no clouds spoiling the blue except one shaped like a goat’s head, a solitary cloud as if God had wiped down the sky and missed a spot. We walked to the creek and trailed along it and looked at the faces of half-submerged rocks. I told her they were called stepping-stones because man likes to think that all of nature was set up especially for his feet.
We followed the creek to where it poured tirelessly into the river. The sun was hammering away so you couldn’t look at the water without squinting. The Inferno knelt down beside the river and put her hand in it.
“It’s warm,” she said.
I picked up a flat stone and threw it away from the river. I would’ve skipped it across the water, but that scene was too cute for me. I was past all that. I was at the age where boys would put a body in the river, not a stone.
We walked on. She asked me how I found my way around the maze. I told her I had got lost for a long time, but now it was like navigating through the digestive system of an old friend. I told her I knew every wrinkle in every living rock. I was bursting to tell her the names of the plants and the flowers and the trees, but I wasn’t on a first-name basis with flora. I pointed out my favorites anyway. I said, There’s the silvery gray shrub with large clusters of vivid yellow ball flowers like bright furry microphones, and the small bushy bronze tree with white globular fruit I wouldn’t eat even for a dare, and this one has leaves glossy like they’ve been covered in contact paper, and a crouching shrub that’s wild and tangled and smells like a bottle of turpentine you drink at two in the morning when all the bottle shops are closed.