by Steve Toltz
That Eddie had rigged the millionaires and dropped Dad in the shit was such a juicy stab in the back that I was dying to tell my girlfriend about it before the news broke, even if, strictly speaking, she wasn’t my girlfriend. Maybe it was just a good excuse to see her- the spilling of family secrets. And I needed an excuse. The Inferno had left me, and establishing contact with someone who has left you is a tricky business; it’s very, very hard not to come off looking pathetic. I’d already made two attempts at seeing her, and both times I’d come off looking pathetic. The first time I returned a bra that belonged to her that she’d left in my hut, and the second time I returned a bra belonging to her that I’d actually bought that morning in a department store. Neither time was she happy to see me- she looked at me as if I had no business in her line of vision.
The third time I went to her house and left my finger on the buzzer. I remember it was a beautiful day, with shreds of sinewy cloud twisting in fresh wind, the air smelling of a thick, heavy fragrance like the expensive perfume rich women put on their cats.
“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.
“Nothing. I just want to talk.”
“I can’t talk about us anymore because there is no more us. Well, there is an us, but it’s not you and me. It’s me and Brian.”
“Can’t we just be friends?” I asked (already pathetic).
“Friends,” she answered slowly, with a puzzled look on her face, as if I’d actually asked her if we could just be fish.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just around the block?”
She relented, and on the walk I told her everything that had happened regarding the millionaires, how Eddie had scammed Dad badly by rigging the winners to include most of his friends, and how if anyone found out, he’d be crucified.
I remember at the time I simply wanted to be close to her again, if only for a moment, and spilling our potentially life-destroying secret seemed to be the way to achieve this. It achieved nothing of the kind. In actuality, as a cathartic unburdening of secrets goes, it was intensely unsatisfying. “Your father’s crazy anyway,” she said, as though that were somehow relevant. When we arrived back at her building, she got serious. I knew this because she took my hand. “I still have feelings for you,” she said. I was about to say something. I know this because I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “But I have stronger feelings for him.” So then I was to understand it was a competition for the relative strength of her feelings. Brian was getting all the potent ones; I was getting the leftovers, the tepid, hardly breathing, barely conscious affections. No wonder I couldn’t feel them.
Of course I made her swear not to tell anyone the secret I’d told her. And of course she told the man she loved, because without thinking, I had given her a breaking news story to salvage his flagging journalistic career.
So is that why I joined Eddie, Dad, and Caroline on the run? I went along seeking forgiveness? Maybe, though why should I have stayed? I’d just had the worst year of my life. When the Towering Inferno dumped me, I had moved from the spaciousness of Dad’s labyrinth into a long thin apartment that was not much more than a glorified corridor with a bathroom and an L-shaped space at the end where you could stick a single bed and anything L-shaped you happened to have lying around. The move from the bush to the city had an unexpected and serious destabilizing effect on me. In my hut, I had been close to the voice of the earth and never had to strive to feel at ease. Now, in the city, I found that I was cut off from all my favorite hallucinations. I’d left myself behind. Banished from the source, I felt entirely at sea.
Then, when Dad became a public figure adored by the nation, I’ll admit it- his fame hit me hard. How could twenty million people like that irritating man? I mean, six months before he couldn’t get ten friends in a room for a dinner! The world was yet to fall off its hinges, though; one mild afternoon Dad visited me at work, in his suit, stiff as if unable to bend his knees. He stood awkwardly in my cubicle, looking like a house boarded up, and our sad, silent confrontation climaxed with him telling me the awful news. He hardly had to say it. I don’t know how, but I already knew. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Couldn’t he see I knew as soon as he approached? I practically had to shield my eyes from the glare of death.
These were the strange, turbulent days; Dad married his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Anouk married the son of a billionaire, Dad was betrayed by his best friend, I was betrayed by my true love, and he was despised by an entire nation. In the media, the descriptions of him varied: a businessman, a swindler, a Jew. I remember he was often obsessed with his inability to define himself. Hearing himself compartmentalized in this way only served to remind him who he wasn’t.
Everything was going wrong. I was getting death threats from strangers. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was lonely. I wandered the streets endlessly and tried to pretend I saw the Inferno everywhere, but there just weren’t enough six-foot redheads in Sydney, and I wound up mistaking her for some laughable substitutes. Retreating to my apartment, I became so depressed that when it came time for eating, I thought: What’s in it for me? At night I kept dreaming of a single face, the same face I used to dream about in childhood, the ugly face contorted in a silent scream, the face that I sometimes see even when I’m awake. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to, and, worse, I couldn’t be bothered doing up my shoes. That’s when I started chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana, eating cereal out of the box, drinking vodka out of the bottle, vomiting myself to sleep, crying for no reason, talking to myself in a stern voice, and pacing the streets, which were crammed with people who, unlike me, were conspicuously not screaming inside and not paralyzed by indecision and not hated by every person on this vile island continent.
I took up my post in bed, under the covers, and stayed there, only shaken out of a drunken sleep one afternoon to see Anouk’s green eyes peering at me.
“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”
She was dressed in an old undershirt and tracksuit pants. The shock of marrying money was obviously forcing her to dress down.
“This is very strange, Jasper. I have the exact same feeling as when I first walked into your dad’s apartment after we met. Remember? Look at this place! It’s disgusting. Trust me on this- beer-can ashtrays are a sign you can’t ignore!”
She ran around the apartment, cleaning up energetically, undaunted by the moldy food and general debris of my day-to-day existence. “You’ll need to repaint these walls to get the smell out,” she said. I fell asleep listening to the rising and falling of her voice. The last thing I heard her say were the words “Just like your father.”
I woke a few hours later to find the whole apartment clean and smelling of incense. Anouk sat with her long legs crossed on the floor, her shoes kicked off, a sunbeam reflecting off her ankle bracelet. “Too much has happened. You’re overstimulated. Come down here,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“I taught you how to meditate, didn’t I?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Your dad could never turn off his mind- that’s why he was always breaking down. Unless you want to suffer the same mental deterioration, you’re going to have to achieve a stillness of the mind through meditation.”
“Leave me alone, Anouk.”
“Jasper. I’m just trying to help you. The only way you’re going to survive all this hatred is if you have inner peace. And to find inner peace, you first have to reach the higher self. And to find the higher self, you have to find the inner light. Then you join the light.”
“Join the light. To what?”
“No- you and the light become one.”
“What’s that going to feel like?”
“Bliss.”
“So it’s good, then.”
“Very.”
Anouk went on in this way, about inner peace, about meditation and the power of the min
d not to bend spoons but to thwart hatred. She wasn’t fooling me. She was only a wannabe guru- hearing rumors of enlightenment was as far as she’d got. Still, we tried to find peace, light, our higher and lower selves, and all those in between. Anouk thought I might be a natural at meditation, since I’d confided in her that I suspected I could read my father’s thoughts and often saw faces where there should be none. She seized these revelations zealously, and her frenzied voice became more insistent. Just as in the old days, I was defenseless against her fanatical compassion. I let her buy flowers and wind chimes. I let her buy me books on different approaches to meditation. I even let her drag me to a rebirthing experience. “Don’t you want to remember your own birth?” she snapped, as if she were noting forgetfulness as another of my character traits. She took me to a center that had walls the color of an old woman’s gums, and we lay in a dimly lit room in a semicircle, chanting and regressing and struggling to recall the moment of birth as if we were trying to remember someone’s phone number. I felt like a fool. But I loved being around Anouk again, so I went along with it, and every day afterward, as we sat cross-legged in parks and on beaches, repeating our mantras over and over again like obsessive-compulsives. For those couple of weeks I did nothing but watch my breathing and attempt to empty my mind, but my mind was like a boat with a leak; every time I got rid of a bucket of thoughts, new ones poured in. And when I thought I might have achieved the slightest emptiness, I got scared. My emptiness was not blissful but felt malignant. The sound of my own breathing was faintly sinister. My posture seemed theatrical. Sometimes I’d shut my eyes only to see that strange and terrible face, or else I’d see nothing but I would hear, faint and muffled, my father’s voice, as if he were talking to me from inside a box. Clearly meditation couldn’t help me. Nothing could help me. I was beyond help, and not even a sudden sun shower could lift me up. In fact, I started wondering what I had seen in nature all that time I lived in the labyrinth. It suddenly seemed to be horrible and ostentatious, and I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
So that was my state of mind when Dad, Eddie, and Caroline turned up at my apartment building and honked the horn until I went down onto the street. The car just sat there, engine idling. I went over to the window. They were all wearing dark sunglasses, as though they shared a collective hangover.
“They’re coming to arrest me tomorrow,” Dad said. “We’re making a run for it.”
“You’ll never make it.”
“We’ll see. Anyway, we just came to say goodbye,” Dad said.
Eddie was shaking his head. “You should come with us.”
That seemed a good reason to shake my head, so I did, and asked, “What are you crazy fugitives going to do in Thailand?”
“Tim Lung has offered to put us up for a while.”
“Tim Lung?” I shouted, then whispered softly, “Christ.”
That’s when an absurd and dangerous idea entered my head with an almost audible pop. Just as I loved the Inferno with clenched fists, I hated Tim Lung with open arms.
I thought: I will kill him. Kill him with an impersonal bullet to the head.
“Are you all right?” Dad asked.
In that instant I knew I was not above the fulfillment of a bloodthirsty fantasy. For months I’d been harboring vile ideas about people (I dreamed of filling their mouths with haggis), and now I knew actual violence was the next logical step. After years of witnessing my father’s seasonal dissolutions, I had eons ago resolved to avoid a lifetime of intense contemplation; an abrupt departure into murder seemed the way to go about this. Yes, suddenly I was no longer in the darkness, groping along the endless corridors of days. For the first time in a long time, the path ahead was well lit and clearly defined.
So when Dad said his dried-eyed goodbye for the last time, I said, “I’m coming with you.”
II
Take it from me: the thrill and anticipation of voyage is compounded when traveling on a fake passport. And we were taking a private plane- Dad’s famous face wasn’t going to get out of Australia without a hefty bribe. Hidden under hats and behind sunglasses, we arrived at the airport and went through a security gate straight out to the tarmac. Eddie said the plane belonged to a “friend of a friend,” and he handed envelopes of cash to a couple of unscrupulous customs officials, which was to be shared among the corrupt ground crew and baggage handlers. Frankly, everyone we met looked utterly at ease with the transaction.
As we waited for Eddie to finish the dispensation of bribes and the completion of phony paperwork, Caroline rubbed Dad’s back while Dad ironed out the wrinkles in his own forehead. Nobody would look at or talk to Eddie. I couldn’t help but feel a kind of grief for him. I knew he deserved the alternating fury and cold shoulder he was getting, but his congenital half smile made him look so hapless, so un-Machiavellian, I might have risen to defend his indefensible behavior if only the jury present weren’t so predisposed to a beheading. “Once we get in the air, we’ll be fine,” Dad said, to calm himself down. That surreal phrase stuck in my head: “Once we get in the air.” No one else said anything; we were all lost in thought, probably the same thought. The whole time we avoided talking about the future, as it was inconceivable.
We boarded the plane without incident (if you don’t count Dad’s inhuman sweating as an incident), afraid even to cough so as not to blow our cover. I beat Eddie to the window seat, as this was my first time leaving Australia and I wanted to wave goodbye. The engines started up. We took off with a roar. We climbed the sky. Then we leveled out. We were in the air. We were safe.
“Narrow escape,” I said.
Eddie looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten I was there. His gaze drifted past me to the window.
“Goodbye, Australia,” he said a little nastily.
So that was it- we had been hounded out of Australia. We were now fugitives. We would probably all grow beards, except Caroline, who would dye her hair; we would learn new languages and camouflage ourselves wherever we went, dark green for jungles, shiny brass for hotel lobbies. We had our work cut out for us.
I looked over at Dad. Caroline had her head resting on his shoulder. Every time he caught me looking at him, he gave me an “Isn’t this exciting?” look, as if he were taking me on a father-son bonding holiday. He’d forgotten we were already insidiously bonded, like prisoners in a chain gang. Outside, the sky was a flat color; stark, austere. I watched Sydney disappear from sight with something approximating grief.
Five hours later we were still flying over Australia, over the inconceivably bleak and uninviting landscape of our demented country. You can’t believe how it goes on and on. To appreciate the harrowing beauty of the interior you have to be in the middle of it, with a well-stocked escape vehicle. Topographically it’s incomprehensible and terrifying. Well, that’s the center of our country for you. It’s no Garden of Eden.
Then we were flying over water. That’s it, I thought. The stage on which our unbelievable lives played out has slipped away, under the clouds. The feeling ran deep inside my body until I felt it settle in and get comfortable. All that was left to think about was the future. I was apprehensive about it; it didn’t seem to be the type of future that would last long.
“What does he want with us?” I asked Eddie suddenly.
“Who?”
“Tim Lung.”
“I have no idea. He has invited you to be his guests.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how long does he want us to stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
“He’s looking forward to meeting you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Christ, Eddie!”
We were giving ourselves up to the mysterious Tim Lung. Having used Dad to filch millions of dollars from the Australian people, did he now want to thank Dad for playing the sap so amiably? Was it curiosity- di
d he want to see how stupid a man could be? Or was there some darker purpose none of us had thought of?
The lights in the plane were turned off, and as we flew across the planet in darkness, I thought about the man I’d be killing. From media reports I’d learned that frustrated detectives in Thailand, unable to locate him, made assertions that he was the embodiment of evil, a true monster. Clearly, then, the world would be better off without him. Nevertheless, I was depressed by the realization that murder was the only utilitarian idea I’d ever had.
III
“There’s no one here to meet us,” Eddie said, scanning the airport crowd.
Dad, Caroline, and I exchanged looks- we hadn’t known there was supposed to be.
“Wait here,” Eddie said. “I’ll make a call.”
I watched Eddie’s face while he spoke to someone who I assumed was Tim Lung. He was nodding vigorously, bent over in an absurdly servile posture and with an apologetic grin on his face.
Eddie hung up and made another call. Dad, Caroline, and I watched him in silence. Occasionally we gave each other looks that said, “Things are out of our hands but we have to do something, and this knowing look is it.” Eddie hung up again and stared at the phone awhile. Then he came over, rubbing his hands together gloomily.