by Steve Toltz
“This is Jasper Dean. He’s here to claim his father’s estate.”
“I’m not here to claim anything,” I said. “Only to give it the once-over.”
“ID,” the guard said.
I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. The guard examined it and tried to equate the face on the license with the face attached to my head. They weren’t a clear match, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt.
We drove to the front of the building.
“You’ll probably be awhile,” Gavin Love said.
“Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to wait.”
I got out of the car, and Gavin Love wished me luck, which he seemed to think was pretty decent of him. A small, pudgy man in a gray uniform opened the door. His pants were pulled up higher than what I deem standard practice.
“Can I help you?”
“My name’s Jasper Dean. My father’s possessions are stuffed in one of your airless rooms. I’ve come for a poke around.”
“His name?”
“Martin Dean.”
The man’s eyes widened a little, then contracted. He went into the office and came out with a large blue ledger.
“Dean, Dean…here it is, Room-”
“One-oh-one?” I asked, thinking of Orwell.
“Ninety-three,” he said. “This way.”
I followed him to an elevator. He got in with me. We didn’t have much to say to each other, so we both watched the lift numbers illuminate in turn and I saw that he mouthed each number silently. On the fourth floor we got out and walked down a long, brightly lit corridor. About halfway down he said, “Here we are,” and stopped at a door.
“There’re no numbers on these doors. How do you know this is ninety-three?”
“It’s my job to know,” he said.
That was no kind of job. He took out a set of keys and unlocked the door and pushed it ajar.
“You can close the door behind you if you want.”
“That’s OK,” I said. It didn’t look like the kind of place you want to be closed into.
The room was dark and cluttered and I couldn’t see the end of it- I imagined it stretched endlessly to the brink of existence. I couldn’t think how they’d managed to get everything in here: books, lamps, maps, photographs, furniture, empty picture frames, a portable X-ray machine, life jackets, telescopes, old cameras, bookshelves, pipes, and potato sacks filled with clothes. The space was entirely occupied by Dad’s possessions, everything jumbled up together and in complete disarray- papers on the floor, cupboard drawers emptied and turned over. Obviously the authorities had searched for clues of Dad’s whereabouts and where he had left the money. Every dusty cubic meter was occupied by Dad’s worthless junk. I felt a kind of diluted heartache navigating through the maze of bric-a-brac. None of the anxiety that he had infused each item with had ebbed away. I could smell his intense frustration everywhere. I was taken over by the delusion that I was walking around in my father’s head.
It really was a no-man’s-land. I felt I had stumbled upon undiscovered continents- for example, a large blue sketchbook had me captivated for hours. Inside there were designs and sketches for unbelievable contraptions: a homemade guillotine, a large plastic collapsible bubble worn on the head so you could smoke in airplane toilets, a question-mark-shaped coffin. I also found a box filled with thirty or forty teen romance novels as well as his unfinished autobiography, and underneath a manuscript in his handwriting entitled “Love at Lunchtime,” a nauseating story of unrequited love written for thirteen-year-old girls. I felt completely lost. I felt I was meeting a few more of his well-hidden selves for the first time. Even before the idea of writing a book about him had occurred to me, even before I had set down one line, I had seen myself as his unwilling chronicler. The only thing I was an expert on was my father. Now it seemed there was a life to him I hadn’t known. In this way he mocked me from beyond the grave.
The guard appeared in the doorway and asked, “How are you getting on in here?” I didn’t know quite how to answer the particular phrasing of that question, though I said I was getting on fine.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, and left me to it.
What was I supposed to do with all this rubbish? The journals were worth keeping, certainly. Without them, I might never prove to anyone that my life with him had been as manic as I remembered it. And not only for outsiders- for myself too. I took them and his autobiography, placed them by the door, and continued scavenging.
Underneath a moth-eaten duffel coat I found a large wooden crate, rotted away at the corners. It looked damaged by water and time. A padlock was hanging off it, and a crowbar lay on the floor. The authorities, looking for missing millions, had cracked open this crate and rummaged through it. I looked closer. On the side was some yellowing paperwork written in French, with Dad’s name and, underneath, an address in Australia.
I opened it up.
On the top was a painting. In the dim light, I couldn’t make it out at first, but when I did, I was so shocked I may even have said something like “What the-?”
It was the painting I’d painted in the chicken coop in Thailand. The painting of the disembodied face that had haunted me my whole life. The painting that had been destroyed.
My head was spinning. I looked again. It was definitely my painting. How could this be?
I lifted it up to see what was underneath. There were more paintings of the same face. That was strange. I had painted only one. Then I understood.
They weren’t my paintings. They were my mother’s!
I took a deep breath and thought it out. I remembered Dad’s green notebook, his Paris journal. Dad had bought Astrid paints, brushes, and canvases and she had become obsessed with painting. The words of his journal were etched in my mind. I recalled that he had written: Each painting a rendition of hell- she had many hells & she painted them all. But hell was just a face- and it was just the face she painted. One face. One terrible face. Painted many times.
A moment of terror stretched into a solid minute of terror and kept going. I looked again at the face; it was like a big bruise, purple and splotchy. Then I studied all the paintings carefully. It was undeniable. The lashes on the lower eyelid, curled like fingers; the nose hairs like nerve fibers; its eyes in a trancelike state; the oppressive closeness of its flattened nose; its uncomfortable gaze. It looked as if the face threatened to break out of the painting and actually come into the room. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that I could smell it- its odor poured off the canvas in waves.
My mother and I had painted the same face, that same ghoulish face! What did it mean? Had I seen these paintings in my youth? No. The journal said she had given up painting after my birth, and since Dad and I left Paris just after her death, I definitely hadn’t seen them. So Astrid had seen a face and painted that face. And I had seen the same face and also painted it. I examined the paintings again. With sharp edges and horizontal lines broken up to make its geometrically off-putting head, done in a vile green and thick, wavy lines of black and red and brown, it wasn’t a passive face she’d painted, it was face as function- the function being to scare you.
I turned away from the paintings and tried to work it out. It was totally reasonable to assume that (a) my mother was haunted by the face in the same manner I was or (b) my mother hadn’t seen it floating in the clouds but had actually known the person it belonged to.
Pacing the warehouse, I forced my way through the junk and came across an old broken cabinet. In the bottom drawer I found half a packet of Marlboros and a lighter in the shape of a woman’s torso. I lit a cigarette but was too preoccupied to inhale. I stood there in that place totally immobilized by thought until the cigarette burned my fingers.
My eyes sprang open. I hadn’t realized they’d been closed. An idea had been inserted into my brain. But what an idea! What an idea! Why didn’t I think of it straightaway? I circled the room shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God,” like a contestant
on a game show. I examined the paintings again. This had never happened to me- a lightning-bolt moment! It was incredible! “Why assume I’m turning into my father,” I shouted, “when there’s an equal chance I’m turning into my mother?” I stomped my feet to shake up the whole building. The thought was absolutely liberating. What had I been worried about all this time? And even if I was turning into my father, it wouldn’t ever have been the whole of me but only a section or a subsection- maybe a quarter of me would turn into him, another quarter into my mother, one eighth into Terry, or into the face, or into all the other me’s I hadn’t met yet. The existence of these paintings suggested a scope to my being I had not previously imagined. I think you can appreciate my indescribable joy. The period when my father threatened to dominate my personality- the Occupation- was a mirage. It had never been just me and him. I was a goddamn paradise of personalities! I sat down on a couch and closed my eyes and pictured myself. I couldn’t see anything clearly. Wonderful! That’s how it should be! I am a blurry image constantly trying to come into focus, and just when, for an instant, I have myself in perfect clarity, I appear as a figure in my own background, fuzzy as hair on a peach.
I suddenly knew what it meant. My mission was clear: fly to Europe and find my mother’s family. The face was the starting point. This was the first clue. Find the face, I thought, and I’ll find my mother’s family.
In a daze, I grabbed as many of the canvases as I could handle and called a taxi and took them home. I stared at them all night. I felt a mixture of feelings so conflicting in nature I was threatened with being torn apart by them: a deep grief for the loss of my mother, a snug feeling of comfort that we were close in mind, spirit, and psychosis, an abhorrence of and revulsion for the face, a pride that I’d uncovered a secret, and a furious frustration that I didn’t understand the secret I’d uncovered.
Around midnight, the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it. The journalists wouldn’t leave me alone. The phone stopped ringing and I heaved a sigh of relief. My sigh was short-lived. A minute later the phone started up again. This was going to go on all night. I picked it up.
“Mr. Dean?” a male voice said.
I supposed I’d better get used to that. “Listen,” I said, “I’m not giving interviews, quotes, comments, or sound bites, so why don’t you go hound a gang-raping footballer.”
“I’m not a journalist.”
“Who are you, then?”
“I was wondering if we could meet.”
“And I was wondering who you are.”
“I can’t say. Your phone is probably bugged.”
“Why would my phone be bugged?” I asked, looking suspiciously at the phone. I couldn’t tell whether it was bugged or not.
“Could you be outside Central Railway Station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“If the phone’s bugged, won’t whoever is listening be there too?”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m not. I thought you might be.”
“So will you be there?”
“All right, then. I’ll be there.”
He hung up. I stared at the phone awhile, hoping it might start speaking on its own, explaining to me all the things I didn’t understand. It didn’t.
***
At nine o’clock the next morning I was at Central Station, waiting for God knows who. I sat on a bench and observed the people who hurried into the station to catch the trains and the people who hurried out of the station to get away from the trains. They seemed to be the same people.
A car honked its horn. I turned to see a black Mercedes with tinted windows. The driver was leaning out of his window, beckoning me with his finger. I didn’t recognize him. When I didn’t move, he stopped with his finger and started beckoning me with his whole hand. I went over. Even standing right up against the car, I couldn’t see who was in the backseat.
“Mr. Dean, would you get in the back, please?”
“Why should I?”
“Jasper! Get in!” a voice called out from the back. I smiled instantly, which felt strange because I hadn’t smiled for a long time. I opened the back door and dived in, and as the car moved off, Anouk and I hugged for ten minutes without speaking and without letting go.
When we pulled away, we stared at each other with our mouths half open. There was simply too much to say to know how to go about saying it. Anouk didn’t look like a rich widow. She was wearing a silk sari of deep red and had shaved her head again. Her enormous green eyes peered crazily out of her skull like symbols of an ancient catastrophe. Her face looked both old and young, foreign and familiar.
“You must think I’ve become paranoid with all this mystery stuff,” she said. “But it’s awful, Jasper. Everyone wants me to put on a brave face, but I don’t have one of those. I only have a distraught face. After Oscar and now your father it’s the only one I’ve got left.”
I sat trying to think of a way to start speaking. I squeezed her hand instead.
“I own it all, Jasper. I don’t know how this happened. I’m the richest woman in Australia.”
“The richest woman in the world,” the driver said.
“Stop listening!”
“Sorry, Anouk.”
“I won’t let anyone call me Mrs. Hobbs. Well, that’s another story. But isn’t it funny that I’m so rich?” It was more than funny. It was more than ironic too. I hadn’t forgotten how we’d met- she’d been running a key along Dad’s sports car because she outright hated the rich. “But you’re so thin!” she exclaimed. “What’s happened to you? I’ve only heard bits and pieces.”
I asked the driver to stop and he pulled the car over in a dead-end alley. Anouk and I climbed out, and standing in the alleyway next to a sleeping drunk clutching a broken television set, I told her everything about Eddie and Terry and the democratic cooperative and Thailand and poison and the murdering mob and Caroline and the people-smugglers. By the time I got to the boat trip she was biting her lower lip, and at my description of Dad’s death she sucked it into her mouth. For the rest of the story she kept her eyes closed and left a sad, bittersweet smile on her face. I didn’t mention my mother’s paintings, because I needed to keep something just for myself.
“As for me,” she said, “I’m in hiding. Everyone wants me to make a decision as to what to do. Am I going to take on running this megabusiness or aren’t I?”
“Do you want to?”
“Some of it might be kind of cool. It might be fun to run a movie studio. I produced a short film once, do you remember?”
I remembered. It was a dreadful, pretentious mesh of abstract images and obvious symbolism about a rich man who convinces a poor woman to sell him her breast, and once he’s bought it, he sits with the breast in his favorite armchair, stroking it, kissing it, trying to make the nipple erect, but when the nipple doesn’t rise, in frustration and despair he throws the breast on the barbecue and eats it with tomato sauce.
“What do you think, Jasper? You think I could run a movie studio?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m giving a lot away to friends- the music companies, the bookstores, the restaurants, the hotel chains, the cruisers- and my dad always wanted an island, but I’m going to wait for his birthday.”
“Aren’t you keeping anything?”
“Of course. I’m not a bloody fool. I’m keeping the newspapers, the magazines, the radio stations, the cable and free-to-air TV stations, and the movie studio for myself. Can you believe it, Jasper? The most powerful propaganda machines in the history of civilization, and they’ve fallen into our hands!”
“What do you mean, our?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. What are you going to do now?”
“I want to go to Europe and search for my mother’s family. But I need money. Anouk, can I have some money? I won’t pay you back.”
Anouk suddenly peered up and down the alley, and I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a
celebrity or a wanted criminal, excess attention makes you paranoid. She leaned forward and solemnly uttered, “Of course, Jasper. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“Really?”
“On one condition.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You have to help me out.”
“No.”
“You’ll have lots of power.”
“Power? Yuck.”
“Please.”
“Look. I really just want to leave the country and live the rest of my days floating in an anonymous fog. I don’t want to help you with- what is it you want help with?”
“With the media.”
“What media?”
“All of it.”
“I’m going to Europe. I don’t want to be stuck in some office.”
“This is the twenty-first century, so if you want-”
“I know what century it is. Why do people always tell me what century it is?”
“- so if you want to keep moving, you can. You’ll have a laptop, an assistant, a mobile. You can do it all on the road. Please, Jasper. I don’t trust anyone else. You’ve never seen so many people who want so much so openly. They all have their hands out, all my old friends included. And no one will give me an honest opinion. You’re the only one I can count on. And besides, I think your father was preparing you your whole life for something like this. Maybe for this exact thing. Maybe he knew all along. This feels like fate, don’t you think? You and me, we’re completely the wrong people to be in this position- that’s what’s so great about it.”
“Anouk, this is crazy. I don’t know anything about newspapers or television!”
“And I don’t know anything about being a media mogul, but here I am! How is it possible that I’m in this position? And why? I didn’t claw my way to get here. I fell into it. I feel I’m supposed to do something.”
“Like what?”
She made a very hard and serious face, the kind that makes your own face hard and serious just from looking at it.