by Steve Toltz
Then I saw it.
The sky.
Fat cones of dense smoke spiraled into thin trails. Layers of hazy orange overlapping gray fingers stretching out from the horizon.
Then I felt it. The heat. I winced. The land was on fire!
A bushfire!
A big one!
Standing on top of the hill, I saw another in a quick series of searing images that I knew at once would never leave my mind. I saw the fire split. One half raced toward my parents’ house, the other to the prison.
I don’t know what possessed me as I watched that fire encircle my town—but I became convinced that it was within my power to rescue at least part of my family. I knew that I probably couldn’t help Terry, and that he die violently and unpleasantly in the prison my father helped build just so cleanly rounded off the issue, my choice was clear. I would go and try to save my mother, even though she had just tried to kill me, and my father, even though he had not.
The bushfire season had started early that year. Soaring temperatures and strong winds saw to it that small fires had sprung up along the periphery of northwestern New South Wales throughout the summer. It takes only one sudden gust of searing wind to fan the isolated fires, pushing them rapidly into raging uncontrollable infernos. That’s how it always happens. The Fire had some shifty strategies up its flaming sleeve: It threw embers into the air. The embers were then couriered by winds to a destination a few miles ahead, with the intention of starting fresh fires, so by the time the main Fire caught up, its child was already raging and taking lives. The Fire was no dummy. It evolved like crazy.
Smoke crept over the town in an opaque cloud. I ran toward my parents’ house, passing fallen trees, poles, and power lines. Flames crept along both sides of the road. Smoke licked my face. Visibility was zero. I didn’t slow down.
The fallen trees made the road impassable. I took a path through the bush. I couldn’t see the sky; a thick curtain of smoke had been drawn over it. All around me was a sound, a crackle, like someone was jumping on old newspapers. Burning debris blew across the tops of trees. It was impossible to know which way to go. I went on anyway until I heard a voice call out, “Stop!”
I stopped. Where was the voice coming from? It was hard to tell if it was from far away or inside my own head.
“Go left,” the voice said. “Left!”
Normally, demanding voices who don’t introduce themselves would have had me go the other way, but I felt this voice had my best interests at heart. Terry was dead, I just knew it, and the voice was his, his last words to me on his way to the other world.
I went left, and as I did, I saw the right-hand path consumed by flames.
Around the next bend I came across a group of men shooting water into the trees. They held swollen wild pythons that jutted from the bellies of two firetrucks and wore wet rags over their mouths. I wanted one. Then I thought: There’s almost no situation you can get yourself into when you don’t want what the other guy has.
“Martin!” a voice called.
“Don’t go that way!” another shouted.
“My mum and dad are in there!” I shouted back, and as I ran on, I thought I heard someone call out, “Say hello for me!”
I saw the fire jumping a dry creek bed. I passed the flaming carcass of a sheep. I had to slow down. The smoke had thickened to a gray wall; it was suddenly impossible to tell where the flames were. My lungs seared. I knew if I didn’t get a whiff of air soon, this was the end. I gagged and vomited smoke. There were carrots in it.
When I reached my street, a jagged wall of flame blocked the entrance. Through it I could make out a group of people standing on the other side. The wall of fire stood like fortress gates. I squinted against the intense glare as yellow-black smoke billowed over the people.
“Have you seen my parents?” I shouted.
“Who are you?”
“Martin Dean!”
“Marty!” I thought I heard my mother’s voice. It was hard to tell. The fire swallowed words. Then the air grew very still.
“The wind!” someone screamed. They froze. They were all waiting to see which direction the fire would run next. A flame whirling up behind them, standing tall, was ready to pounce. I felt like a man about to be guillotined hoping that his head could be stuck back on later. A hot breeze touched my face.
Before I could scream, the flames leapt on top of me. In a split second my head was on fire. And then, just as quickly, the wind changed direction and the flames leapt away toward the group of people. This time it kept going.
Though the fire was gone, my eyes and my lungs were filled with smoke and my hair was in flames. I wailed at the pain of it. I tore the clothes off my body, threw myself on the ground, and rubbed my head in the dirt. It took a few seconds to extinguish myself, and by then the fire had devoured an ear and scorched my lips. Through puffed-up eyelids I could see the flaming hurricane sweep over the group of people, my parents included, and devour them. Naked and burned, I dragged myself to my knees and screamed in a helpless, frenzied rage.
Most of the prisoners had made it out, except those in solitary confinement. They were blocked in on the lower level of the prison, and there wasn’t time to save them.
As I suspected, Terry was gone.
While small fires still burned away from the town, the media wasted no time in making a big deal of Terry Dean’s perishing in the prison. He was nothing but a pile of ashes. After the police photographers had taken photos of the cell, I went in. The bones were there too. But all the good stuff was in the ash. With a broom, a pan, and a small cardboard box, I scooped up my brother. It wasn’t easy. Some of Terry’s ashes mingled with the ashes of the wooden bunk beds. Poor Terry. You couldn’t distinguish him from a bed. That’s just sad.
I left the bones. Let the state bury them. I took the rest. Like I said, all the good stuff was in the ash.
Outside the prison, black cinders whirled crazily in the air, climbed into the sky, and when the wind died down settled on the ground and on the cars and on the journalists. Red-hot sparks lay on the hot bitumen. I looked at the smoking black acres of burned grassland and the parched hills. Everywhere was smoldering ashes. Every house was filthy with ash and burned debris. Every smell was acrid. Every color eerie.
Mother dead. Father dead. Brother dead. Harry dead. Caroline gone. Lionel gone. Town gone. Oath gone too; the sacred bond finally broken.
Free.
A man was heard to be barbecuing a steak on the embers of his own home. Reporters were all crowded around him. They thought it was hilarious. I suppose it was.
A brief thunderstorm came. A group of survivors standing in the remains of town were talking about the origin of the fire. What had started it this time? I had just assumed it was arsonists. It’s nearly always arsonists. What is it with these fucking arsonists? I supposed they are less likely to be malignant smudges of evil than just dumb and bored: a deadly combination. And whatever happens in their upbringing, they emerge from adolescence with no sense of empathy whatsoever. These dumb, bored, unempathetic people are all around us. We can’t trust anyone to behave himself. We always have to be on the lookout. Here’s the case-winning example: it doesn’t happen every day, but every now and again, people shit in public swimming pools. That just says it all to me.
But no, the survivors were saying, this time it wasn’t arsonists.
It was the observatory.
My blood turned cold.
I moved closer. This is what I heard:
Over the years, the novelty of the observatory had worn off; the whole thing had gone to seed, left to ruin up there on the hill, abandoned to nature. The roof of the observatory lifted on a hinge. Someone had left it open. The lens had concentrated the summer sun’s rays into a hot beam of light and ignited the structure, the wind came in to do her bit, and we ended with this current catastrophe.
It was the observatory.
My observatory!
The observatory I had suggested
into existence was the direct cause of my mother’s, father’s, and brother’s deaths. It was the final nail in the coffin of that odious suggestion box of mine, that slimy box that had turned the town against my family, put my brother in a mental institution, then into a young offenders’ home, and now into the grave (figuratively speaking; literally speaking, into a cardboard box that had once contained seedless grapes). I had thought that with the observatory I could change people’s souls for the better, but instead I succeeded only in accelerating their obliteration. When my brother went into the hospital, I should have destroyed the suggestion box that put him there; and when he destroyed the suggestion box, blinding our only friend, I should have then and there destroyed everything connected to the box, the box that suddenly reminded me of the box that was now in my hands, the box with my brother in it.
I walked on.
I didn’t forget Stanley’s warnings, or the detectives and their determination to prosecute me. Time to leave for good. Besides, there was nothing more to learn here. Time to travel to new lands to practice old habits. New longings! New disappointments! New trials and failures! New questions! Would toothpaste taste the same everywhere? Would loneliness feel less bitter in Rome? Would sexual frustration be less of a grind in Turkey? Or Spain?
This I thought as I moved through the silence of the dead town, the dreamless town, the town that was charred and black like burned toast. Don’t scrape it! Don’t save it! Toss my town into the garbage. It’s carcinogenic.
The embers of my childhood were fading to cold, hard lumps. No wind could fan them to life now. It was gone. I had not a person in the world. Australia was still an island, but I was no longer marooned on it. I was finally adrift. And it was endless, the sea beyond. No horizons.
No one knew me where I was going, no one knew my story, my brother’s story. My life was reduced to no more than a secret anecdote I could reveal or keep hidden for all time. That was up to me.
I walked the long, windy, dusty road out of town.
I had the feeling of leaving an amusement park without having been on any of the rides. While I’d always hated the town, the people, their lives, I had existed beside them nonetheless, and yet I had not immersed myself in the stream of life, and that was regrettable, because even if it’s the worst amusement park in the world, if you’re going to take the trouble to spend twenty-two years there, you might as well at least have a go. The problem was, every ride made me sick. What could I do?
Then I remembered that I still held Terry in a cardboard box.
I was definitely not going to have a nervous breakdown deciding what to do with the ashes of my downsized little brother: I would just get rid of them, quickly, secretly, without ceremony. If a child passed me in the street, I would give him the box. If I saw a suitable ledge, I would leave it on the ledge. I continued this line of thought until I became so fascinated by the overall idea of ashes that I got thirsty.
Up ahead I saw a gas station and grocery store. I went inside. The fridge was at the back. I walked down the aisle and grabbed a Coke. Turning back, I saw beside me a shelf that contained small jars of Indian spices, cayenne pepper, and Italian herbs. Obscured from the shopkeeper’s view, I opened up the jars one by one and emptied half their contents onto the floor. Then I poured Terry’s ashes into the jars with little precision, spilling much of him on my feet, so that when I finished, I walked out with my brother on my shoes. And then—I have this image in my head forever—I wiped my brother off my shoes with my hands and finished him off by washing him into a nearby puddle, thereby leaving my brother’s last remnants floating in a shallow puddle of rainwater on the side of the road.
It’s funny.
People have always asked me, “What was Terry Dean like as a child?” but no one has ever posed the more pertinent question, What was he like as a puddle?
The answer: still, copper-brown, and surprisingly unreflective.
The End!
Out the window I could see a pink dawn sky covering the backyard and probably farther, at least to the corner store. The morning birds, unaware of the concept of sleepins, were chirping their usual dawn chirps. Dad and I sat in silence. Talking for seventeen hours and covering almost every minute of his first twenty-two years on earth had worn him out. Listening had done the same to me. I don’t know which of us was more exhausted. Suddenly Dad brightened and said, “Hey, guess what?”
“What?”
“The blood’s congealed!”
Blood? What blood? Oh, that’s right—I was in a fight, wasn’t I? I did get beaten senseless by my peers, didn’t I? I reached up and felt my face. There was a hard, crusty substance on my lower lip all right. I ran to the bathroom mirror to look. Woo-hoo! Yes, sometime during Dad’s story the blood on my face had turned black and globular. I looked revolting. I smiled for the first time since way before the story began.
“You want me to take a photo before you wash it off?” Dad called from my room.
“Nah, there’ll be plenty more blood where that came from.”
“Too true.”
I got the corner of a towel and held it under hot water and sponged off the crusted blood. As I cleaned up my face and the water turned the black blood red and stained the white towel too, I thought about Dad’s story: the story of Terry Dean. It seemed to me I hadn’t learned as much about Uncle Terry as you’d think you would in a seventeen-hour monologue, but I had learned an awful lot about my father.
I had the uneasy feeling that maybe every word he said was true. Certainly he believed it all. There’s something disturbing about a thirty-two-year-old man putting his thirty-two-year-old soul into the mouth of a child, even if that child is himself as a boy. Was my father an eight-year-old anarchist? A nine-year-old misanthrope? Or was the boy in the story an unconscious reinvention, a man with a man’s experience of the world trying to make sense of his childhood, obliterating along the way any of the thoughts or perspectives he would really have experienced during that time? Maybe. After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don’t have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, what an arsehole!
But Dad was not one to airbrush his memories. He liked to preserve everything in its natural state, from his hair to his past. That’s how I knew every word he said was true, and why I still feel sick when I remember the shocking revelation that came after this one, the crazy bombshell about the most important woman who was never in my life: my mother.
TWO
I was taking a forty-five-minute shower. I know I was being unforgivably inconsiderate of the environment, but I’d read in New Scientist that in a couple of billion years the expanding universe will have stretched to breaking point and will start contracting like a rubber band, time will run backward, and (therefore) the water will eventually return to the showerhead.
“Jasper! I completely forgot!” I heard Dad shouting.
“I’m in the shower!”
“I know. Do you know what the date is?”
“No.”
“Guess.”
“The second of December.”
“No. It’s the seventeenth of May! I can’t believe I forgot all about it! Hurry up!”
The seventeenth of May, my mother’s birthday. Inexplicably, Dad always bought her a present. Inexplicably, he’d make me unwrap it. I never knew whether to say thank you. Usually it was a book or chocolates, and after I opened it and said something like “Good one,” Dad would suggest we give it to her in person. That meant a trip out to the cemetery. This morning, since the significance of the date had slipped his mind, Dad ran around the house looking for something to wrap. In the end he found a bottle of whisky with two decent sips left. I stood there on edge while he wrapped it, and moments later he stood there eagerly while I unwrapped it and said, “Good one.”
My mother was buried in a Jewish cemetery, a possible nod to my grandparents. In case you don’t know, the Jewish religion wants you to put an old rock
on the grave of your loved ones. I never saw any reason to quibble with oddball ancient traditions as cheap as this one, so I went outside and wondered what kind of filthy rock my dead mother might want as a token of my devotion.
When we finally got to the cemetery, we couldn’t find the grave. The maze of gray stones confused us, but in the end we found her lying where she always was, between Martha Blackman, who had breathed in and out for a tedious ninety-eight years, and Joshua Wolf, whose heart had unfairly stopped beating at the age of twelve. We stared at a slab of stone with her name on it.
Astrid.
No last name, no date of birth nor date of death—just her name all alone on the headstone, speaking volumes of silence.
I tried to imagine what life would have been like with a mother around. I couldn’t picture it. The mother I mourned was an amalgam of manufactured remembrances, photographs of silent movie actresses, and the warm, loving image of the maternal archetype. She transmogrified constantly, a vision in constant motion.
Beside me, Dad was bouncing on his toes as if waiting for a game result. He stepped forward and brushed the star-shaped autumn leaves off the headstone.
I looked at him. I looked at his feet. “Hey!” I shouted.
He turned to me, startled, and snapped, “Don’t make sudden loud noises in a cemetery, you ghoul. You want me to die of fright?”
“Your feet!” I shouted, pointing at them. He lifted up the heels to inspect for dog shit.
“You’re standing on her!”
“No, I’m not.”
He was. He was standing right on top of my mother. Any fool could see it.
“You’re fucking standing on her grave! Get off!”
Dad smiled but didn’t do anything to make his feet move. I grabbed his arm and dragged him off to the side. That only made him laugh.
“Whoa. Relax, Jasper. She’s not in there.”
“What do you mean, she’s not in there?”
“She’s not buried there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s a coffin. Only it’s empty!”
