by Steve Toltz
“We have to spend the night in a hotel. We’ll go to Mr. Lung’s place tomorrow.”
“OK. Let’s get a taxi,” Dad said.
“No- someone is coming to take us.”
Twenty minutes later a small Thai woman arrived, so wide-eyed it seemed she had no eyelids. She stepped toward us slowly, trembling. Eddie just stood there like a cow chewing its cud. The woman wrapped her arms around him, and as they hugged, low sobs escaped through her small mouth. I knew Eddie was lost in the moment because he suddenly ceased looking slippery. Their embrace went on and on until it became monotonous. We all felt painfully awkward.
“I have long wanted to meet you,” she said, turning to the rest of us.
“You have?” I asked doubtfully.
Then Eddie said, “Ling is my wife.”
“No, she’s not,” Dad said.
“Yes, I am,” she answered.
Dad and I were thrown into shock. Eddie was married?
“Eddie, how long have you been married?” I asked.
“Nearly twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-five years!”
“But you live in Australia,” Dad said.
“Not anymore.”
Dad couldn’t get his head around it. “Eddie,” he said, “twenty-five years. Would that mean you were married when we met in Paris?”
Eddie smiled, as if that were an answer and not another question.
We left the airport bewildered. We were not just in another country but another galaxy, one in which Eddie had been married for twenty-five years. Outside, the heat hit us forcefully. We all piled into an old olive-green Mercedes and sped off to the hotel. As it was my first time in a foreign country, my eyes soaked it up- but I’ll save you the travelogue description. It’s Thailand. You know the sights, you know the smells. You’ve read the books, you’ve seen the movies. Hot, sticky, sweaty, it smelled of spicy food, and everywhere there lurked a hint of drugs and prostitution, because like most travelers, we had brought our preconceived notions with us on the journey and did not check them, as we should have, into immigration as hazardous materials best suited for quarantine.
In the car, Eddie and Ling spoke quietly in Thai. We heard our names mentioned several times. Dad couldn’t take his eyes off Eddie and his wife. His wife!
“Hey, Eddie. You have any children?” Dad asked.
Eddie shook his head.
“You sure?”
Eddie turned back to Ling and continued speaking softly.
As we checked into the hotel, careful to sign our new names and not the old ones, it struck me that the strangest thing for me was not just to be traveling, suddenly well and truly out of Australia, but to be traveling in a group. I had always imagined leaving Australia would be the ultimate symbol of my independence, and yet here I was, with everybody. I know you can never escape yourself, that you carry your past with you, but I really had. Small mercy that I wound up getting my own room, which looked down on an eviscerated dog’s carcass.
That night I paced the hotel room. All I could think of was that by now news of our escape would be all over Australia, in every last watering hole, and despite our furtive exit, someone was bound to trace us without too much difficulty. I could easily imagine Australia’s reaction on hearing that we had absconded, and at around three in the morning I felt hit by what I was sure was a hot wave of loathing that had traveled from our homeland all the way to our air-conditioned hotel rooms on Khe Sahn Road.
I went out into Bangkok wondering how to buy a gun. I didn’t think it would prove too difficult; in my head this was a sordid metropolis, a Sodom and Gomorrah that served really good food. I was in a semi-delirious state, only looking at faces, and more specifically at eyes. Most of the eyes I saw were irritatingly innocent; only a few cauterized you just by looking. Those were the ones I wanted. I thought about murder and murderers. My victim was also a criminal; who would cry for him? Well, maybe many people. Maybe he was married too! I thought with a gasp. I don’t know why I should’ve been so surprised; why shouldn’t he be married? He wasn’t notorious for being ugly and unsociable, only for being amoral. That’s attractive in some circles.
It was four in the morning and still oppressively hot and I hadn’t yet found a single gun. I walked on, thinking, “Tim Lung- should I kill you straightaway, without even offering you an aperitif?” As I walked, I lit a cigarette. Why not? It’s not the number one preventable cause of death in the world for nothing.
I was tired and leaned against a post. I felt a pair of eyes on me. There was something frightening yet strangely invigorating about these eyes. These were the eyes I’d been looking for.
I went over to the young man and we spoke at the same time.
“Do you know where I can buy a gun?”
“Do you want to see a sex show?”
“Yes, please.”
He whisked me down the street and took me to Patpong. Large groups of Western men were going into strip clubs and I thought immediately of Freud, who believed that civilization develops in an ever-increasing contrast to the needs of man. Clearly Freud had never been to Patpong. Here the needs of man were scrupulously taken care of, every need, even the needs that made him sick.
I went into the first bar and sat on a stool and ordered a beer. A young woman came and sat on my lap. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. She put her hand between my legs and I asked her, “Do you know where I could buy a gun?” At once I knew I’d made a mistake. She hopped off my lap as if it had bitten her. I saw her talk excitedly to a couple of heavy types behind the bar. I made a run for it, thinking I had slipped into one of those unrealities where you can really hurt yourself, and after a few blocks I stopped running. In effect, these Thai characters were no more criminal than people you’d find at any corner fish-and-chips shop in Sydney, and simply purchasing a gun from them was impossible. In that case, when I met Tim Lung, I’d have to improvise.
When I went down to the hotel breakfast room in the morning, I deduced from the look on Dad’s and Caroline’s faces that they hadn’t slept either. They were wretched, sleepless faces. Faces pinched with worry. Over a large nonexotic breakfast of bacon, eggs, and stale croissants, our banter was light and meaningless, to try to overpower the dark mood. Whatever was in store for us, we wanted to weather it on a full stomach.
Eddie came in without his usual benign expression.
“You ready?”
“Where’s your wife?” Dad asked.
“Shut the fuck up, Martin. I’ve had enough of you. I’ve really, really had enough.”
That silenced us all.
IV
To get to Tim Lung’s place we had to catch a long-tail boat down a dirty, foul-smelling canal. As we passed wooden canoes laden with multicolored fruits and vegetables, I shielded my face from threatening splashes of murky water. My first impressions of Thailand were good, but I knew that my immune system wasn’t up to the challenge of its bacteria. Once beyond this ragged fleet of watercraft, we were alone in the canal, pressing forward. On either side, sitting lopsided on dusty streets, were houses that looked either semicompleted or semidilapidated. We passed women in large-brimmed straw hats washing their clothes in the brown water, evidently unfazed by the idea of encephalitis nesting in their underwear. Then there were long, deserted, dusty streets and huge trees with sprawling branches. The houses, now grand and flashy mansions, were spaced farther apart. I sensed we were getting close. I tried reading Eddie’s face. It was unreadable. Dad gave me a look, the subtext of which was “We’ve escaped, but into what?”
The boat stopped. We stepped off and walked up a small embankment to a large iron gate. Before Eddie could ring the buzzer, a sharp voice from a tinny intercom said something in Thai and Eddie answered it, looking at me, which gave me the feeling that we were on a road on which to go back was suicide and to go forward was probably suicide. I had goose bumps all over. Caroline took my hand. The gate swung open. We pressed on. Dad said something about th
e state of his bowels which I didn’t quite catch.
Tim Lung’s house had “drug cartel” written all over it. It was large, with huge whitewashed walls surrounded by encrusted pillars, gleaming orange and green roof tiles, and an enormous reclining Buddha nestled in a thick bamboo grove. It was reinforced that we were waltzing into a den of thieves when I spotted men hidden in the shade of trees with semiautomatic rifles, eyeing us as if we had come selling a product they knew didn’t work. The men wore short-sleeved shirts and long pants. I pointed out the armed men to Dad for his predictable response. “I know,” he said. “Long pants, in this weather!”
“This way,” Eddie said.
We walked down a set of steep stairs into a rectangular courtyard. Stuck on spikes were severed pigs’ heads with sticks of incense sprouting from their foreheads. Nice. On one wall of the courtyard was an extensive mural depicting a city razed by fire. Promising. At the end, large sliding doors were already open. I don’t know what I was expecting- snarling Dobermans, tables piled high with cocaine and bags of money, prostitutes sprawled on white leather couches, and a trail of bloodstains leading to the mutilated corpses of dead policemen. What I wasn’t expecting was the very last thing in the world I could have been expecting.
Dad saw it first. He said, “What the fuck?”
On both walls, in frames or stuck up with brown tape, were hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Dad and me.
I said it too: “What the fuck?”
V
“Marty! They’re photos of you!” Caroline shouted.
“I know!”
“And you too, Jasper!”
“I know!”
“Is this you as a baby? You were so cute!”
Our faces from various epochs peered out at us from all over the room. This perverse exhibition comprised all the photographs Eddie had taken over the past twenty years. There were images of a young Dad in Paris, lean and tall, with all his hair and a strange beard on his chin and neck that couldn’t or wouldn’t make its way onto his face; Dad, before he started collecting fat cells, smoking thin cigarettes in our first apartment. And there were just as many of me, as a baby and groping my way through childhood and adolescence. But it was the photos of Paris that interested me most: photographs and photographs of Dad with a young, pale, beautiful woman with a demoralizing smile.
“Dad, is that…?”
“Astrid,” he confirmed.
“Is this your mother, Jasper? She’s beautiful!” Caroline cooed.
“What’s this about?” Dad shouted, his voice echoing through the house. Dad was a bona fide paranoiac who had finally discovered, after all these years, that there really was a conspiracy against him.
“Come on,” Eddie said, leading us deeper into the house.
Dad and I were frozen. Had this something to do with Astrid’s suicide? With my mother dying on one of Tim Lung’s boats? We were thrust into the role of detectives, forced to investigate our own lives, but our mental journeys into the past were futile. We just didn’t get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac’s nightmare! A narcissist’s dream! We didn’t know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed. Obviously Eddie had infused this criminal overlord with an obsession for Dad and me, but what had he said? What could he have said? I imagined him in late-night drinking sessions with his boss: “You wouldn’t believe these characters. They’re insane. They shouldn’t be allowed to live!”
“Mr. Lung is waiting for you in there,” Eddie said, pointing to double wooden doors at the end of the hallway. He had the colossal nerve to be smirking.
Dad suddenly grabbed him violently by the shirt collar; it looked as if he were planning to pull the shirt over his head- Dad’s first official act of physical violence. Caroline pried his fingers loose. “What have you got us into, you bastard?” he shouted, though it wasn’t as threatening as he intended. Fury mingled with genuine curiosity just comes out strange.
An armed guard emerged from a doorway to investigate the commotion. Eddie disarmed him with a nod. Disappointed, the guard retreated into the shadows. Apparently Eddie had a nod that was irrefutable. That was news to us. We continued down the hallway toward the double wooden doors in a daze, examining more photos on the way. Until now, I’d never realized how much Dad resembled a dog being pushed unwillingly into a swimming pool. And me- suddenly my identity felt like a less solid thing. I found it almost impossible to connect with the pictorial history of ourselves. We looked like damaged relics of a failed civilization. We didn’t look comprehensible at all.
And my mother! My heart nearly burst open looking at her. In all the photos she looked silent and motionless; all the action went on behind the eyes, the kind of eyes that look as if they have come back from the farthest corners of the earth just to tell you not to bother going there. Her smile was like a staircase leading nowhere. Half obscured in the corners of frames, there was her sad beauty, she was resting her head in her hands, her tired eyes clouding over. Perhaps it was coincidence, but in each photo she seemed to be farther and farther away from the camera lens, as if she were shrinking. These images gave me a newfound respect for Dad- she looked like a distant and imposing woman whom no sensible person would enter into a relationship with. I took one photograph of her off the wall and broke it out of the frame. It was black-and-white, taken in a laundromat. My mother was sitting on a washing machine, legs dangling, looking directly into the camera lens with her strikingly large eyes. Suddenly I knew this mystery had something to do with her- here I would receive the first clue as to who she was, where she came from. One thing was clear to me: the riddle of my mother’s existence would be answered behind that door.
Dad opened it, and I followed close behind.
VI
We entered a large square room with so many pillows on the floor that part of me just wanted to lie down and be fed grapes. Large indoor ferns made me feel we were outside again. The walls didn’t quite reach the ceiling and sunlight poured through the space above them, except for the far wall, which was made of glass and looked out on the overgrown Buddha in the garden. There, at the wall of glass, was a man, his back to us, staring out at that Buddha. They were the same build. In the bright light that came through the window, we could see only the man’s giant silhouette. At least, I think it was a man. It looked more or less like one, only bigger.
“Mr. Lung,” Eddie said, “may I present Martin and Jasper Dean. And Caroline Potts.”
The man turned. He was not Thai, Chinese, or Asian at all. He had blond scraggly hair and a bushy beard covering pulpy, blemished skin, and he was wearing shorts and a cut-off flannelette shirt. He looked like an explorer recently returned from the wilds, enjoying his first taste of civilization. That’s an off-the-point description, though, one ignoring the elephant in the room, because most of all he was the elephant in the room, the fattest man I’d ever seen or was ever going to see, an astounding freak of nature. Either he had a hormone disorder or the man must have eaten fiendishly for decades with the express ambition of becoming the biggest man alive. His body shape was unreal to me- his hideousness was suffocating. I could no more kill this monstrosity with a bullet than I could dent a mountain by slapping it.
He stared at us without blinking an eye, even while he put out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. Clearly he was planning to stare us into submission. It was working. I felt exceedingly meek, as well as fantastically thin. I looked at Dad to see if he was feeling meek too. He wasn’t. He was squinting at the enormous man as if he were one of those magic puzzles that reveal a hidden image.
Dad spoke first, as though talking in his sleep. “Bloody hell,” he said, and at once I knew.
Caroline said it before anyone. “Terry,” she said.
Terry Dean, my uncle, looked from one of us to the other and broke into the widest smile I had ever seen.
VII
“Surprised? Of course you are,” he said, laughing. His echo
ey, powerful voice sounded like it came from deep within a cave. He limped toward us. “You should see the look on your faces. You really should. Do you want me to get a mirror? No? What’s the matter, Marty? You’re in shock? Understandable, very understandable. We’ll all just wait here until the shock dies down and makes way for anger and resentment. I don’t expect any of you to take this lying down. This isn’t one of those things you laugh about straightaway, right up front, but later, when it’s all sunk in. Don’t worry- it’ll sink. In a few days you’ll be hard-pressed to recall a single day I wasn’t alive. But tell me, did you suspect it? Even a little? What am I thinking? Here you are, seeing your long-dead brother after all these years, and not only does he have the effrontery to be living and breathing, he hasn’t even offered you a beer! Eddie, get us some beers, will you, mate? And Jasper! I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. Do you know who I am?”
I nodded.
“My nephew! You have your grandmother’s nose, did your dad ever tell you that? I’m so happy to see you. Eddie’s told me all about you. You must be some kind of rock, living with your dad without shattering into a million little pieces. But you look like you’ve turned out all right. You look so normal and healthy and adjusted. How is it that you’re not crazy? It’s crazy that you’re not crazy! Though maybe you are. That’s what I’m looking forward to finding out. And Caroline! Seeing you comes as a bit of a shock, I’ll admit. Of course Eddie told me you’d married…”
Terry stared at her for a long moment before snapping himself out of it.
“I know, you’re all caught off guard. Drink your beers, you’ll feel better. I’ll wait until you calm down. There’s time. Christ, if there’s one thing we all have, it’s time. Marty, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies with that look. You too, Caroline. But not you, Jasper, eh? Maybe because you’re still young. When you’re older, it’s a surprise that you can still be surprised. I wonder, what’s the bigger surprise, that I’m so wonderfully alive or that I’m so wonderfully fat? You can say it- I don’t mind. I like being fat. I’m Henry the Eighth fat. Buddha fat. Let’s get it out of the way so we’re not bogged down in it. I’m a fat fuck. I’ll just take off my shirt so you can see the extent of it. See? OK? I’m a whale. My belly is unrelenting! Invincible!”