by Steve Toltz
“What do you mean?”
“Caroline- she’s all yours. We’re finished.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. You can be together now. I don’t mind.”
All the blood drained from Terry’s face, and he looked as if he’d just been told the plane he was on was making an emergency landing nose first in a volcano.
“Well…but…I can’t give up my prostitutes. I told you, love doesn’t work without possessiveness. No. No way. I can’t turn my back on my life now, after so long. No, I can’t be with Caroline.”
“Don’t you love her?”
“Leave me alone! What are you trying to do to me?” he said, and walked off into the jungle, but in the opposite direction to Caroline.
So the triangle had effectively broken up. Nobody was with anybody. The three points were single lines again, parallel, not touching.
Oops. My fault.
I didn’t witness the scene later that day between Terry and Caroline, but I saw Caroline afterward, walking as if tranquilized. “Are you OK?” I called out. Every now and then she’d stop and pound her head with her fists. “Caroline!” I called out again. She looked up at me with desperate eyes. Then Terry wandered past my window, looking bulldozed. He informed me that we were going back to Bangkok in the morning. At last, good news. I wondered if Terry’s curiosity about the terrible event to take place in Eddie’s house had been satisfied by the explosion of the triangle. Either way, I couldn’t wait to leave, nor could I spend the rest of the day in that house. I had to get out.
With no other option, I went with Eddie in his car as he went on his rounds. He seemed glad of the company and eagerly delivered a creepy monologue that compared doctors with gods. We visited a few farmers he’d finally discovered had chronic illnesses. After his consultations, to my disgust, he hit on their daughters right in front of the parents, girls who couldn’t be older than sixteen. Not knowing enough about the culture, I wasn’t sure of the perils of Eddie carrying on in this fashion, but it was hair-raising the way he went about trying to seduce, intimidate, and buy these poor girls. I couldn’t find his redeeming features anymore. The man I had grown up with was gone. As we left, he made up words about these girls, “fuckalicious” and “fuck-worthy” being the most common. Every word and gesture of his seemed saturated in frustration and fury. Back on the road, I thought: This man is a grenade waiting to detonate, and I hope I’m not around to see it.
Then he detonated.
I was around to see it.
My forehead was pressed against the car window, and I was wishing that the jungle around us was in fact the interior of a lavish, jungle-themed hotel and any time I liked I could go upstairs to my room and crawl between clean sheets and order room service and take an overdose of sleeping pills. I would have liked nothing better.
“What’s this?” Eddie said, breaking my reverie.
It was a girl of about fifteen running down the road waving her arms, signaling us to stop. Here’s trouble, I thought.
Eddie pulled over and we both got out of the car. She was motioning for Eddie to follow her. From what I could gather, her father was sick. Very sick. She was in a panic. She wanted Eddie to come right away. Eddie summoned his most professional posture. He translated for me, repeated the symptoms as she described them: fever, vomiting, powerful abdominal cramps, delirium, and lack of feeling in the legs and arms. Eddie grunted and sighed at the same time. Then he shook his head obstinately. The girl started shouting in a pleading voice.
What was he up to?
She turned and grabbed my arm. “Please, please.”
“Eddie, what’s going on?”
“I really don’t think I can make it today. Maybe tomorrow, if I have a minute.”
“No you understand?” she said in English. “My father. He is dying!”
“Eddie,” I said, “what are you doing?”
“Jasper, can you go for a little walk?”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was about to be an accomplice in the dirtiest piece of blackmail possible.
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
Eddie looked at me with crushing, concentrated hatred. It was a showdown. “Jasper,” he said behind clenched teeth, “I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here.”
“No way.”
Eddie went ballistic, ranting at me with the full extent of his lung capacity. He tried everything to get me to shove off and leave him alone to rape and pillage. I wouldn’t budge. This is it, I thought. My first physical confrontation with evil. I was eager to triumph.
I didn’t.
He pushed me. I pushed back. He pushed me again. It was getting tedious. I took a swing. Eddie ducked it. Then he took a swing at me. I tried ducking too, but instead of socking me in the jaw, his fist connected with my forehead. I staggered backward a little, and taking advantage of my wobbling, he let fly an unexpected kick that got me in the throat. I fell back and hit my head on the dirt. I heard the car door slam, and by the time I got to my feet, I couldn’t do anything but watch the car drive off.
Eddie, that disgusting bastard! That oily, rancid, horny bandit! I felt guilty for my failure to protect that poor girl, but if someone you’ve known since childhood is so determined to commit a crime he’s willing to kick you in the throat, what can you do? Anyway, it was too late now. That fiend had made away with the girl and left me stranded in the middle of nowhere. And where the hell was I, anyway, other than the exact place where all the heat in Thailand gathered for a meeting?
I walked for several hours. Swarms of overexcited mosquitos pursued me assiduously. There was no one in sight, no sign of human life. It was easy to imagine that I was the only one in existence, and it didn’t make me feel lonely at all. It’s exhilarating to imagine every human dead, to have it in your power to start a new civilization or not. I thought I’d choose not. Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race? Not me. I could see myself as the ant king, or the figurehead of a crab society- but Eddie had seriously turned me off humans altogether. One person can do that.
I walked on, oozing from the humidity but more or less content in my last-man-on-earth fantasy. I didn’t even mind so much that I was utterly lost in the jungle. How many times would this happen in my life? A lot, I predicted. This time it’s the jungle, next time it will be the ocean, then a department store parking lot, until finally I will be irretrievably lost in outer space. Mark my words.
But my solitude was short-lived. I heard the chattering of voices coming from the bottom of a hill. I went over the slope and could see a group of maybe twenty people, farmers mostly, in a circle next to a police van. There was nothing in this scene to suggest it had anything to do with me, but something told me not to go down there. I suppose this is what happens when you feel guilty all the time for no reason.
I stood up on my tiptoes to get a better view. As I did, I saw a shadow creeping up on me. I spun around. A middle-aged woman holding a basket of apples was staring at me. No, she wasn’t. She was stealing dark glances at the amulet around my neck.
“Stay down. Don’t let them see you,” she said in an accent as thick as the jungle around us.
She pushed me to the ground with her long, muscular arms. We lay side by side on the grassy slope.
“I know you.”
“Do you?”
“You’re the doctor’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked.
“What’s going on?”
“He’s in trouble,” she said.
So they knew he’d blackmailed the poor girl into sleeping with him. Well, good. I couldn’t care less if they threw him in jail so that he could be sodomized for the rest of his life. He deserved it.
“They dug up the bodies,” she said.
What bodies was she talking about?
“What bodies are you talking about?”
“The old doctor, and the young one too.”
“They dug them up? What made them do a creepy thing like that?”
“They thought it might be a plague of some new virus. A couple of years ago, we had an outbreak of chicken flu. Now there is much vigilance when it comes to multiple deaths of uncertain causes.”
Interesting, but what has this got to do with blackmail and rape? I wondered.
“And?”
“They did an autopsy. And I suppose you know what they found.”
“A hideous mess of decomposing organs?”
“Poison,” she said, looking at me carefully for my reaction.
“Poison?” Poison? “And so they think…” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. It was obvious what they thought. And moreover, it was obvious they were right. Eddie had done it, the despicable bastard. To realize his dead parents’ dream of his becoming a doctor, he had killed the old doctor and the young apprentice to get them out of the way.
“So the police are going to arrest him?”
“No. You see those people down there?” Did she want me to answer that one? They were right there.
“What about them?”
As she said this, the two policemen got into their van and drove away. The crowd filled in the space where the van had been.
“They just told the police your doctor friend had already moved to Cambodia.”
I really wished she’d refrain from describing Eddie as my “doctor friend,” although I understood it was good for clarification, as there were three doctors in this story. But was I being unbearably dense? Why had the farmers told the police that Eddie had moved to Cambodia? And why was she excited about it?
“Don’t you see? They’re going to take the law into their own hands!”
“Meaning?”
“They’re going to kill him. And not only him. You too.”
“Me?”
“And those other Australians who came here to help him.”
“Wait a minute! Those Australians are my family! They didn’t do anything. They didn’t know anything about it! I didn’t know anything about it.”
“You’d better not go home,” she said.
“But I didn’t do anything! It was Eddie! This is the second time Eddie has put a lynch mob onto us. My God- my father was right. People are so single-minded about their immortality projects, it brings them down and everyone around them too!”
She looked at me blankly.
What could I do? I couldn’t waste valuable time trying to find the police; I had to get home and warn everyone that an angry mob was coming to tear them apart.
What a dog’s breakfast this trip turned out to be!
“Hey, why are you helping me?”
“I want your necklace.”
Why not? I had been foolishly superstitious by wearing it at all. I took off the repugnant amulet and gave it to her. She hurried away. I’d worn it only out of desperation, I suppose. If you don’t keep your guard up and someone tells you it has magical qualities, you can find comfort in a grain of sand.
***
The group below set off on foot through the jungle. I followed them, thinking of Eddie and my family and of their surprise when the bloodthirsty mob turned up to kill them. I had to make sure the mob and I didn’t converge; it was unlikely, not being Thai myself, that I would be assimilated into their number. I would be swallowed whole, as an appetizer. So I kept my distance. But I didn’t know the way home- I’d have to follow the mob back to Eddie’s house. The inherent dilemma was obvious. How could I arrive in advance and warn everyone that a murderous mob was on the way when I had to follow the mob to get there?
Yet another life-or-death matter. Oh well.
As the group moved, others joined it, forming spontaneously into a mobile crowd, then a pack, a sturdy vessel of revenge. They were a kind of human tsunami, gathering speed and size. There was no dispersing them. It was a petrifying sight. Eerily, they seemed to be gearing up for a silent massacre. This was not a pack with a war cry, this was a tight-lipped group rolling wordlessly forward. As I ran, I thought how I hate any kind of mob- I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of supermodels, that’s how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.
Interestingly, it was a democratic crowd. Anyone could join in to mutilate Eddie and my family. There were even a few children. That surprised me. And some elderly gentlemen too, who despite being timid and frail were not struggling to keep up. It was as if they had been absorbed by the mob and taken on the energy of it, as if their thin, weak bodies were now nimble fingers of a powerful hand. But weren’t these people supposed to be Buddhists? Well, what of it? Buddhists can be pushed over the edge like anyone else, can’t they? To be fair, Eddie had burst into their inner serenity with poison and murder and blackmail and rape. Inner serenity isn’t impervious to a ferocious assault like that. Incidentally, none of them were smiling like the Buddha. They were smiling like the serpent, like a forty-headed dragon.
Even the sun took on a menacing quality. It was dropping fast. Naturally, I thought, this was to be no brightly lit spectacle of raw carnage. It was to take place in the dark.
But what’s this? The mob was picking up the pace! I was already pooped, and now I’d have to run at breakneck speed. How annoying! The last marathon I had intended to run was when I beat 200 million spermatozoa for the egg. Now here I was again. In truth, it was kind of exciting. I was so aware of what a relentless thinker I was that action felt surprisingly good. Murderous mob on its way- what are you going to do about it?
The dusk infused the sky with a soft, syrupy red: a head-wound red. As I ran, I wished I had a machete- it was heavy going, tunneling through all that thick vegetation. I was taking furtive passages through shaggy ferns, where the last of the sunlight only made it in random splotches. The jungle with its usual threatening noises had the surround sound of an expensive home entertainment system.
A half hour later I was losing them. Dammit. What was I going to do? What could I do? I ran, I fell, I vomited, I got up again. Why had we come here? Fucking Thais. An Australian mob might kick the shit out of you, but you’d crawl home afterward. This was murder! No, slaughter! My dad! And Caroline! And Terry! All alone up there, isolated and unprepared. I ran on to the point of exhaustion. And the heat. And the mosquitos. And the fear. I’m not going to make it. How can I warn them?
I suppose I could…
No.
Unless…
I had an idea. But it was foolish, desperate, impossible. I must be out of my mind. Or just my imagination amusing itself. But what an idea! Here it was: Dad and I were connected in deeper ways than just father and son, and I’d long had the suspicion that we were unintentionally reading each other’s minds every so often, and so if I concentrated intensely enough, if I only put in a little psychic effort, maybe I could send him a message. Absurd! Brilliant?
The problem was, it was difficult to summon up that kind of concentration while running, and if I stopped and it didn’t work, I might lose not only the mob but with them my way home. And everyone would die!
Did I really think we could read each other’s minds? Should I risk it? Running through the foliage was getting more difficult; I’d push aside a branch only to have it whip me in the face. The jungle was getting aggressive. The mob was getting away from me. I was wilting in the heat. My family was going to die.
Should I risk it?
Fuck it.
I stopped. The murdering rabble disappeared over a hill. My heart was aching in my chest. I breathed deeply to placate her.
In order to make contact with Dad, I needed to get myself into a deep meditative state. I needed to hurry, of course, but you can’t hurry absolute inner quiet. You have to coax it over time. You can’t transform the essential qualities of your mind as if you’re running to catch a bus.
I got myself in the textbook position. I sat on the ground cross-legged, concentrated on my breathing, and repeated my mantra, “Wow.” This brought about a quiet enough mind, but to be honest, I felt a bit blunt
in the head. I had some clarity, enough to drift to the edge of consciousness, but no further. I felt a twinge of bliss too- well, so what? I needed to go further than I ever had, and here I was, going through the motions. From everything I had read about insight meditation, I had learned that there was a system to be used- this is how you sit, this is how you breathe, this is how you concentrate on your breathing. But using this system was a routine that seemed the opposite of the true meditative state I needed. Now that I had practiced this meditation thing a number of times, always the same way, with the same breathing, the same concentration, I felt I might as well be working on a factory line screwing tops on Coca-Cola bottles. My mind was peaceful, hypnotized, numb. That was no good.
Trying to calm my excited mind meant that a conflict was going on in my head. That burned up essential energy I needed in order to communicate telepathically with Dad. So then maybe I had to stop concentrating, but how did I achieve a quiet mind without concentrating?
First of all, instead of sitting cross-legged, I stood up and leaned against a tree like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then I listened not to my breathing, as Anouk advised, but to the noises around me. I didn’t close my eyes either. I opened them wide.
I was observing the wet, shaggy trees in the late-afternoon sunlight without concentrating. I made my mind astonishingly alert. I didn’t just observe my breath, either, but kept an eye on my thoughts. They fell down like a shower of sparks. I watched them for a long time. I pursued them, not where they went but where they came from, back into the past. I could see how they held me together. I could see how they put me together, these thoughts- the true ingredients of the Jasper broth.
I started walking and the silence of my mind went with me, though it was not the absence-of-sound kind of silence. It was a huge, deafening, visual silence. No one had ever told me about this kind of silence. It was really loud. And as I walked through the jungle, I managed without effort to maintain this clarity.
Then my mind became quiet. Really, really quiet. It happened instantaneously. I was suddenly free of inner friction. Free of fear. That freedom somehow helped all my spineless impediments to melt away. I thought: The world is swelling, it is here, it is bursting in my mouth, it is running down my throat, it is filling up my eyes. Strangely, this big thing had entered me, though I was not bigger for it. I was smaller. It felt good to be small. Look, I know how this sounds, but take it from me, this was not a mystical experience. And I’m not kidding myself, either. I’m not a saint. Not for all the breasts in California would I, like Francis of Assisi, purify the lesions of lepers with my tongue, certainly not, but- and this is where I’m heading- I felt something I’d never experienced in my life before: love. I know this sounds crazy, but I think I actually loved my enemies: Eddie, my family, the murdering mob en route to slaughter my family, even the virulence of the recent outburst of hate by the Australian people. Now, let’s not get carried away; I didn’t adore my enemies, and while I loved them, I was not in love with them. But still, my instinctive revulsion toward them had evaporated somehow. This excess of feeling frightened me a little- this frenzy of love that tore through the butter of my hate. So then it seemed Anouk was wrong; the real fruit of meditation wasn’t inner peace but love. In fact, when you see life in its totality for the first time and you feel genuine love for that totality, inner peace seems like a kind of small, petty goal.