by Steve Toltz
***
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 bough
t 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 remaini
ng 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.