by Steve Toltz
My soul is ambitious and mercenary in its desire to know itself. Dad’s journal left this aim unsatisfied, and my mother’s story was more of a mystery than when I knew nothing at all. I had ascertained that my mother was probably insane and of unknown origins. Other than that, my investigation had led only to more questions. About my father, it didn’t surprise me that I had been violently unwanted. The only concrete thing I learned about her was that my birth was the final item on her to-do list, and once she’d checked it off, it allowed her to die. I was born to clear the obstacles on her pathway to death.
It got cold. I shivered a little.
The rhythms of the universe were perceptible in the way the boats were nodding at me.
A few years later I went back to the cemetery. My mother’s grave was gone. There was someone new there, wedged in between old Martha Blackman and little Joshua Wolf. Her name was Frances Pearlman. She’d been forty-seven years old. She left behind two sons, a daughter, and a husband.
Since finding the journal I had read it over several more times.
The most disturbing element in that unpleasant little book was his assertion that I was possibly a premature reincarnation of his still living self, that I was my father: what did it all mean? That somewhere inside him, the man feared my autonomy would be the death of him?
I thought this staring at the grave of Frances Pearlman.
There were fresh flowers spread out over her grave. This was no misshapen love or empty coffin. I thought about my father, and how one of us was the host, the other the parasite, and I did not know who was who. It seemed to me we could not both survive. It seemed to me that one day, inevitably, one of us had to go. It seemed to me we were going to fight each other for supremacy of the soul. It seemed to me I’d be willing to kill him to survive.
They were creepy thoughts, but I was in a cemetery, after all.
THREE
In the newspaper and television reports made immediately after my father’s death, much was made of the years of the early to mid-1990s, the period covering the worst excesses of his so-called insanity. Not only was this epoch notable for the arrival of Anouk Furlong (as she was known then)—a woman who played no small part in provoking his mental collapse—but this was the eventful slab of years that included strip clubs, mental asylums, plastic surgery, arrests, and what occurred when my father tried to hide our house.
Here’s how it all happened:
One day without warning Dad struck a resounding blow to our peaceful squalor: he got a job. He did it for my sake and never stopped reminding me. “I could milk the social welfare system dry if it was just me, but it’s insufficient for two. You’ve driven me into the workforce, Jasper. I’ll never forgive you!”
It was Eddie again who found him work. A year after Dad’s return from Paris, Eddie turned up at our apartment door, which surprised Dad, who’d never had an enduring friendship in all his life, certainly not one that spanned continents. Eddie had left Paris just after we did and had returned to Thailand before moving to Sydney.
Now, eleven years later, he had found Dad employment for the second time. I had no idea if this new gig was with equally murky characters and just as dangerous. Frankly, I didn’t care. I was twelve years old, and for the first time in my life, Dad was out of the apartment. His heavy presence was suddenly lifted from my life, and I felt free to eat my cornflakes without hearing over and over again why man was the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity.
Dad worked all the time, and it wasn’t that his long hours away from me were making me lonely (I was lonely already), but there was something to it that didn’t feel right. Of course, it’s not unusual for fathers to work all the time because they are bringing home the bacon, and it can’t be helped that the bacon lurks in offices and coal mines and building sites, but in our home there was a mystery regarding the location of our bacon. I started thinking about it every day. Where the hell’s our bacon? I thought this because my friends lived in houses, not apartments, and their fridges were always full of food while ours was full of space. Dad worked all day every day, even on weekends, but we didn’t seem to have any more money than when he was unemployed. Not a cent. One day I asked him, “Where’s all the money go?”
He said, “What money?”
I said, “The money you make from your job.”
He said, “I’m saving.”
I said, “For what?”
He said, “It’s a surprise.”
I said, “I hate surprises.”
He said, “You’re too young to hate surprises.”
I said, “All right, I like surprises, but I also like knowing.”
He said, “Well, you can’t have both.”
I said, “I can if you tell me and then I forget it.”
He said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you choose. You can have the surprise, or I can tell you what I’m saving for. It’s up to you.”
That was a killer. In the end, I decided to wait.
While I waited, Eddie let it slip that Dad was managing a strip club in Kings Cross called the Fleshpot. A strip joint? My dad? How could this happen? And as a manager? My dad? How could Eddie have convinced his shady connections to hire Dad for such a position? With responsibilities? My dad? I had to see it for myself.
One night I wound through the Cross, up side streets that were nothing more than long public urinals, past the drunken English tourists, a couple of glassy-eyed junkies, and a skinhead who looked weary of his own persona. As I entered the bar, a middle-aged hooker shouted something about sucking, her croaky voice lending the suggestion a nauseating picture of withered lips. A bouncer grabbed me by the shirt and squeezed the collar until I told him I was here to see my father. He let me in.
My first time in a strip club and I was visiting family.
It wasn’t what I imagined. The strippers were shaking their bodies, unenthused, bobbing up and down to repetitive dance music under glaring spotlights in front of leering muted men in suits. Sure, I felt elated to see so much smooth, pliable flesh in one place, but I wasn’t as aroused as I’d expected. In real life, almost naked women straddling poles just isn’t as sexy as you’d think.
I spotted Dad yelling into the phone behind the bar. As I walked over, he sent a frown to intercept me.
“What are you doing here, Jasper?”
“Just looking around.”
“Like what you see?”
“I’ve seen better.”
“In your dreams.”
“No, on video.”
“Well you can’t stay in here. You’re underage.”
“What do you actually do here?” I asked.
He showed me. It wasn’t easy. There was the running of the bar, and while there were naked women floating in front of it, it had to be run just like a regular bar. He chose the women too; they came and auditioned for him. As if he knew anything about dancing! Or women! And how could he stand it, all those supple sexual creatures bending and flaunting their haunting slopes and curves day in, day out? The life force is like a hot potato, and while impure thoughts may make you burn in hell for all eternity once you die, here in life what gets you baked and fried is your inability to act on them.
Of course, I don’t know everything. Maybe he indulged his lecherous fantasies. Maybe he fucked every dancer there. I can’t picture it, but then, what son could?
So working in this lovely den of sin was how he chose to support his family—me—and save. But for what? To help stave off my curiosity, Dad broke into his bank account to buy me a little present: four bloated fish in a grubby little tank. They were like goldfish, only black. They survived in our apartment just three days. Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible gluttons with absolutely no self-control who just don’t know when they’ve had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled “fish food.”
Dad didn’t join me in mourning th
eir passing. He was too busy with his strippers. For a man who had spent the majority of his working life not working, he was really working himself to the bone. It turned out I had to wait more than a year to find out what he was saving for. Sometimes it drove me crazy wondering, but I can be tremendously patient when I think the reward might be worth the wait.
It wasn’t worth the wait. Really, it wasn’t.
I was thirteen when I came home one day to see my father holding up a large glossy photograph of an ear. This, he explained, was what he’d been saving for. An ear. A new ear to replace the one that had been scarred in the fire that consumed his town and family. He was going to a plastic surgeon to undeform himself. This is what we’d been sacrificing for? What a letdown. There’s nothing fun about a skin graft.
Dad spent one night in hospital. The pressure was on to buy flowers even though I knew he wouldn’t appreciate them. Flora always seemed to me a non sequitur of a present for someone in pain anyway (how about a flagon of morphine?), but I found a couple of huge sunflowers. He didn’t appreciate them. I didn’t care. The important thing was that the operation was a success. The doctor was very pleased, he said. That’s a tip for you: never bother asking after the patient; it’s a waste of time. The important thing is to discover how the doctor is feeling. And Dad’s was on top of the world.
I was there when the bandages came off. To tell you the truth, the anticipation had built to such a level I was sort of expecting something on a grander scale: a colossal ear that doubled as a bottle-opener, or a time-traveling ear picking up conversations from the past, or a universal ear hearing for everyone alive, or a Pandora’s ear, or an ear with a tiny red light that showed when it was recording. Basically, an ear to end all ears. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was just a regular ear.
“Speak into it,” Dad said. I moved around to the side of the bed and leaned into the new arrival.
“Hello. Testing. Testing. Two. Two. Two.”
“Good. It works,” he said.
When he was released from hospital, he ventured out in the world eager to catch a glimpse of himself. The world provided. Dad lost the ability to walk in a straight line. A to B was now always via the side mirrors on passing cars, shop windows, and stainless-steel kettles. When you obsess about your appearance, you notice just how many reflective surfaces exist in the cosmos.
One night he came to the doorway of my room and stood there, breathing loudly.
“Feel like playing around with my camera?”
“Are you making porn?”
“Why would I be making porn?”
“That’s between you and your biographer.”
“I just want you to get a few snaps of my ear, for the album.”
“The ear album?”
“Forget it.” Dad made a beeline for the hall.
“Wait.”
I felt bad for him. Dad didn’t seem able to recognize himself. The outside of him may have been more presentable, but the inside shrank down a size. I felt there was something ominous in all this, as if by adding on a new ear, he’d actually broken off a fundamental part of himself.
Even after the plastic surgery, he worked every day. Once again there was no money. Once again our lives were unchanged.
I said, “OK. What are you doing with the money now?”
He said, “I’m saving again.”
I said, “Saving for what?”
He said, “It’s a surprise.”
I said, “The last surprise sucked.”
He said, “This one you’ll like.”
I said, “It better be worth it.”
It wasn’t. It was a car. A slick red sports car. When I went outside to look at it, he was standing beside it, patting it as if it had just done a trick. Honestly, I couldn’t have been more shocked if he had blown the money on political donations. My dad? A sports car? Pure lunacy! It wasn’t just frivolous, it was meticulously frivolous. Was it a distraction? Was he announcing his dissolution? Was it a surrender or a conquest? Which part of him was this meant to fix? One thing was clear: he was breaking his own taboos.
It was comical, the sight of him getting into that sports car, a 1979 MGB convertible. Then, strapped into his seat, he looked as apprehensive as the first astronaut.
Now I think it was a brave attempt, an ingenious act in total defiance of himself and the voices within him intent on categorizing him. Dad in that sports car was a man reinventing himself from the outside in. A rebirth doomed to miscarriage.
“Are you coming?”
“Where?”
“Let’s take her for a spin.”
I get in. I’m young. I’m not a machine. Of course I love the car. I fucking love it. But there’s something about it that just isn’t right, like if you walk in on your kindergarten teacher getting a lap dance.
“Why did you buy this?” I asked him.
“Why?” he repeated, picking up speed. He’s trying to leave himself behind in the dust, I thought, and on some level I could already hear the tendons and joints of his sanity split and tear. His job, his regular hours, his suit, his new ear, and now his car: he was creating unbearable tension between the selves. Something’s going to give, I thought, and it won’t be pretty.
II
Then it gave. It wasn’t pretty.
We were in a crowded Chinese restaurant and Dad was ordering lemon chicken.
“Anything else?” the waiter asked.
“Just some boiled rice and the check.”
Dad always liked to pay before he ate so the second he finished swallowing he could leave. There was something about sitting in a restaurant not eating that he just couldn’t stand. Impatience seized him like a fit. Unfortunately, some restaurants make you pay at the end no matter what. In those situations Dad stood next to the table to show that he no longer wanted anything to do with the table. Then he called for the bill as if he were pleading for mercy. Sometimes he’d carry his plate to the kitchen. Sometimes he’d wave money under the waiter’s nose. Sometimes he’d open the cash register, pay the bill, and give himself change. They hated that.
This night Dad had a table by the window and was staring out, his face set on “boredom incarnate.” I was there, but he was eating alone. I was on a hunger strike for some heroic cause I can’t remember now, but this was probably in the period we ate out eighty-seven nights in a row. Dad used to cook in the old days, but they were old, those days.
We both looked out onto the street because it required so much less effort than talking. Our car was out there, parked behind a white van, and beside it a couple were fighting as they walked. She was pulling his black ponytail and he was laughing. They came right up to the window and fought in front of us, as if they were putting on a show. It was a bold performance. The guy was bent over with a big grin on his face, trying to get her to let go of his hair. It looked painful, having your hair pulled like that, but he wouldn’t stop laughing. Of course, now that I’m older, I know why he had to keep laughing like that; I know he’d have kept on laughing even if she’d pulled his whole head off and dropped it in the gutter and pissed on it and set it on fire. Even with the sting of piss in his dying eyes, he’d have kept on chuckling, and I know why.
The lemon chicken arrived.
“Sure you don’t want any?” Dad asked, a taunting lift in his voice.
The smell of hot lemon made my stomach and my head mortal enemies. Dad threw me a look that was smug and victorious and I gave him one back that was conceited and triumphant. After a grueling five seconds, we both turned our heads quickly to the window, as if for air.
On the street, the fight was in intermission. The girl was sitting on the bonnet of a black Valiant; the guy was standing beside her, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t see her hands because she had them bunched up under her arms, but I imagined they were clutching pieces of his scalp. Then I heard scraping metal. There was a figure in the background, behind the couple, someone in a red parka, hunched over Dad’s car. The red parka move
d alongside the car slowly. It was hard to tell exactly what he was doing, but it seemed that he was scratching the paint off with a key.
“Hey, look!” I shouted, and pointed out the scene to Dad, but his lanky body was already up, running for the door. I leapt out of my chair and followed his trail. This was to be my first chase scene through the streets of Sydney. There have been others over the years, and I’m not always the one in pursuit, but this was the first, so it remains special in my memory.
We did not run gracefully, of course; rather we staggered at great speed, down the main strip, almost toppling over, bursting through couples who strolled absently toward us, ricocheting off them. I remember humming a tune while I ran, a spy tune. We sped through the city like men on fire. People looked on as if they’d never seen running before. Maybe they hadn’t. Outside a cinema, businessmen and -women indistinguishable from each other stood their ground as we approached, as if that square meter of pavement had been handed down to them by their ancestors. We pushed them aside as we ran through. Some of them shouted. Maybe they’d never been touched before either.
The man in the red parka had feet like a gust of wind. He blew across a congested street, dodging the steady stream of traffic. I had taken only one step off the pavement when Dad’s hand grabbed my wrist and almost yanked it off.
“Together,” he said.
Beware the father and son in pursuit of the mysterious villain in the red parka. Beware the menacing duo who hold hands as they make chase. We turned a corner and came into an empty street. Our presence somehow deepened the emptiness of it. There was no one in sight. It felt as though we had stumbled upon a remote and forgotten part of the city. We took a moment to catch our breath. My heart pounded on my chest wall like a shoulder trying to break down a wooden door.
“In there,” Dad said.
Halfway down the street was a bar. We walked to the front. There was no sign on the window. Evidently the bar didn’t have a name. The windows were blacked out and you couldn’t see in. It was a place made dangerous by low lighting. You could tell from the outside. It was the kind of place where nefarious characters knife anyone who asks them for the time, where serial killers go to forget their troubles, where whores and drug dealers exchange phone numbers and sociopaths laugh at the times they’ve been confused with naturopaths.
