by Steve Toltz
“Bitch across the way looking at us.”
“Well, you’re looking at her.”
“Only to see if she’s looking.”
“Is she?”
“Not now.”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
Here’s the problem. He used to be funny. I mean, I know I’d complained about him my whole life, but I missed the old Dad. What happened to his lighthearted godlessness? That was funny. Reclusion is hysterical. Rebellion, a thousand laughs! But crying is rarely funny, and sociopathic rage never gets a chuckle—not from me, anyway. Now he was keeping the curtains humorlessly closed all day. No light penetrated the apartment. There were no longer middays or mornings or seasonal fluctuations of any kind. The only change was in the darkness. There were things breeding in it. Whatever mushrooms existed in his psyche were thriving in that dark, damp place. Not funny.
One night I spilled coffee on my bed. It was coffee, I swear, that soaked through the sheets and seeped into the mattress, but it looked like urine. I thought: Anouk will think it is urine. I tore the sheets off my bed and hid them. I went to the cupboard for clean sheets. There were none there.
Where did all the sheets go?
I asked Dad.
“Outside,” he said.
We didn’t have an outside. We lived in an apartment. I puzzled over this mystery awhile before arriving at a frightening conclusion. I went to check. I opened the curtains. There was no outside world. What I saw was sheets; he had hung them over the windows from the outside, maybe as a white flapping shield to hide us from prying eyes. But no, they weren’t white. They weren’t a shield either. They were a sign. There was something written on the other side of the sheets, in red. The words “Fucking Bitch.”
This was bad. I knew this was bad.
I took down the sheets and hid them with the others, the ones with urine on them. Shit, I wrote that, didn’t I? OK. I admit it. It was urine (it is not attention-seeking that makes children wet their beds, but fear of their parents).
Just so you know, you don’t have to be religious to pray. Prayer is not so much an article of faith anymore as it is something that is culturally inherited from film and television, like kissing in the rain. I prayed for my father’s recovery as a child actor might pray: on my knees, palms locked, head bowed, eyes closed. I went so far as to light a candle for him, not in a church—you can take hypocrisy only so far—but in the kitchen late one night, when his nocturnal rumblings had reached a fever pitch. I hoped the candle would unwrap whatever it was that bound him so tight.
Anouk was in the kitchen with me, cleaning it from top to bottom, muttering that she wanted to be not only paid but praised, and, citing mouse poo and cockroach nests as evidence, she implied that by cleaning the kitchen she was saving our lives.
Dad was stretched out on the couch with his hands covering his face.
She stopped cleaning and stood in the doorway. Dad could feel her staring at him and pressed the palms of his hands harder into his eyes.
“What the fuck is going on with you, Martin?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
“God, no.”
“You’re wallowing in self-pity, that’s what I think. You’re frustrated, OK. Your aspirations are unfulfilled. You think you’re this special person who deserves special treatment, only you’re just starting to see that no one in the whole wide world agrees with you. And to make matters worse, your brother is celebrated like the god you think you are, and that’s finally dropped you in this kind of bottomless pit of depression where all these dark thoughts are gnawing at you, feeding on each other. Paranoia, persecution complex, probably impotence too, I don’t know. But let me tell you. You have to do something about this before you do something you’ll regret.”
It was as excruciating as watching someone light a firecracker, then peer over it thinking it’s a dud. Only Dad wasn’t a dud.
“Stop bad-mouthing my soul, you meddlesome bitch!”
“Listen to me, Martin. Anyone else would get the hell out of here. But someone has to talk some sense into you. And besides, you’re scaring the kid.”
“He’s OK.”
“He’s not OK. He’s pissing his bed!”
Dad lifted his head over the top of the couch so all I could see was his receding hairline.
“Jasper, come here.”
I went over to the hairline.
“Haven’t you ever been depressed?” Dad asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re always so calm. It’s a façade, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me, what gnaws at you, Jasper?”
“You do!” I shouted, and ran to my room. What I didn’t yet understand was that Dad’s unhinged state had the potential to send me down the same precarious path.
Soon after that evening, Anouk took me to the Royal Easter Show to cheer me up. After the rides and the fairy floss and the show bags, we wandered over to see the judging of livestock. While staring at cattle, I suddenly pretended to be suffering from a bout of chronic disequilibrium, a new pastime of mine that involved bumping into people, stumbling, falling into shop displays, that kind of thing.
“What’s wrong?” she shrieked, grabbing me by the shoulders.
“I don’t know.”
Her hands clasped mine. “You’re shaking!”
It’s true, I was. The world was reeling, my legs bending like straw. My whole body was vibrating out of control. I’d worked myself into such a lather, the fabricated illness had taken over, and for a minute I forgot there was nothing wrong with me.
“Help me!” I screamed. A crowd of spectators rushed over, including some officials from the show. They hovered over me, gawking (in a real emergency, a thousand eyes pressing against your skull isn’t actually that helpful).
“Give him some air!” a voice cried.
“He’s having a fit!” exclaimed another.
I felt bewildered and nauseated. Tears rolled down my face. Then all of a sudden I remembered I was only playing around. My body relaxed, and the nausea was replaced by a fear of discovery. The eyes had moved a couple of feet back, but the force of their gaze was undiminished. Anouk was holding me in her arms. I felt ridiculous.
“Get off me!” I screamed, pushing her away. I returned to the cattle. They were being judged by a panel of leathery-looking folk in Akubra hats. I leaned over the fence. I heard Anouk whispering frantically behind me, but I refused to look. After a minute she joined me.
“You OK now?” she asked.
My answer wasn’t audible. We stood side by side, in silence. A minute later a brown cow with a white stain on his back won first prize for being the juiciest-looking steak in the paddock. We all applauded as if there were nothing absurd about applauding cows.
“You and your father are quite a pair,” Anouk said. “I’m ready to go as soon as you are.”
I felt terrible. What was I doing? So what if his head was an empty seashell in which you could hear the torment of the sea? What did that have to do with my mental well-being? His gestures had become crazy birds banging into windows. Did that mean mine needed to be too?
A couple of weeks later, Dad and I drove Anouk to the airport. She was going for a few months to be massaged on a beach in Bali. Just before she went through the departure gate, she took me aside and said, “I feel a little guilty leaving you at the moment. Your dad’s about to fall off the edge.”
I think she wanted me to say, “No, we’ll be fine. You go enjoy yourself.”
“Please don’t go,” I said.
Then she went anyway, and a week later he fell off the edge.
Dad went through his monthlong cycle of crying, pacing, screaming, watching me sleep, and shoplifting, though suddenly all within a week. Then it was compressed further and he ran through the whole cycle in a day, each stage taking about an hour. Then he went through the cycle in an hour, sighing and groaning and muttering and steal
ing (from the corner newsstand) in a blaze of tears, running home and tearing off his clothes and pacing naked in the apartment, his body looking like spare parts assembled in a hurry.
Eddie came banging on the door. “Why hasn’t your dad been coming into work? Is he sick?”
“You might say that.”
“Can I see him?”
Eddie went into the bedroom and closed the door. After half an hour, he came out scratching his neck as though Dad had given him a rash and said, “Jesus. When did this all start?”
I don’t know. A month ago? A year?
“How do we fix him?” Eddie asked himself. “We’ve really got to brainstorm. Let’s see. Let me think.”
We stood in a swampy silence for a full twenty minutes. Eddie was brainstorming. I was sick at the way he was breathing through his nostrils, which were partially blocked by something I could see. After another ten minutes Eddie said, “I’m going to think some more about this at home.” And then he left. I didn’t hear from him after that. If he had any brilliant ideas, they just didn’t come fast enough.
A week later there was a knock on the door. I went into the kitchen and made some toast and started shaking. I don’t know how I knew the universe had vomited up something special for me; I just knew. The banging on the door persisted. I didn’t want to overtax my imagination, so against my better judgment I answered it. A woman with a sagging face and big brown teeth was at the door, wearing a look of pity on her face. There was a policeman with her too. I guessed it wasn’t the policeman she felt sorry for.
“Are you Kasper Dean?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“Can we come in?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this. Your father is in the hospital.”
“Is he all right? What happened?”
“He’s not well. He’s going to stay awhile. I want you to come with us.”
“What are you talking about? What happened to him?”
“We’ll tell you about it in the car.”
“I don’t know who you are and what you want to do with me, but you can go fuck yourselves.”
“Come on, son,” the policeman said, clearly not in any mood to follow my suggestion.
“Where?”
“There’s a home you can stay in for a couple of days.”
“This is my home.”
“We can’t leave you alone here. Not until you’re sixteen.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been taking care of myself forever.”
“Come on, Kasper,” the policeman barked.
I didn’t tell him my name was Jasper. I didn’t tell him that Kasper was a fictional character of my dad’s invention and that Kasper had been killed off many years ago. I decided to play along until I worked out just what the situation was. I knew this much: I wasn’t sixteen, and that meant I had no rights. People are always talking about the rights of the child, but it’s never the rights you need when you need them.
I went with them in the police car.
On the way they explained that Dad had driven his car through the window of the Fleshpot. It was an act that might have been taken as an unfortunate accident, only when he got through the window, he locked the steering wheel in a tight circle and spun the car around the dance floor, into tables and chairs, smashing up the place, destroying the bar. The police had to drag him out of the car. Clearly he’d gone mad. And now he was in the madhouse. I wasn’t surprised. Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it. It’s OK from a mountaintop, but Dad was smack bang in the middle, and his berserk contradictions had finally butted each other insensible.
“Can I see him?”
“Not today,” the woman said. We pulled up to a house in the suburbs. “You’ll stay here a couple of days, until we see if any of your relatives can come and get you.”
Relatives? I didn’t know anyone like that.
The house was a one-story brick number and looked just like a regular family home. From the outside you couldn’t tell this was where they warehoused the broken-off pieces of shattered families. The policeman honked the horn when we pulled up. A woman with one enormous bosom came out with a smile that I predicted I would see again and again in a thousand awful nightmares. The smile said, “Your tragedy is my ticket to heaven, so come here and give me a hug.”
“You must be Kasper,” she said, and she was joined by a bald man who kept nodding as if he were Kasper.
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m Mrs. French,” the single-bosomed woman said, as if boasting, as if to be Mrs. French were a hard-earned achievement in itself.
When I didn’t respond, they walked me through the house. They showed me a bunch of kids watching television in the living room. Out of habit, I surveyed the female faces in the room. I do this even among the fragmented. I do this to see if there is any physical beauty I can dream about or lust over; I do this on buses, in hospitals, at the funerals of dear friends; I do this to lighten the load a little; I will do this as I lie dying. As it happened, everyone in the place was ugly, at least on the outside. All the kids peered at me as though I were up for sale. Half of them looked resigned to whatever it was their fate was dishing up to them; the other half snarled defiantly. For once I wasn’t interested in their stories. I’m sure they all had perfectly awful tragedies that I could weep over for centuries, but I was too busy aging ten years with every passing minute in this limbo for children.
The couple continued with their tour. They showed me the kitchen. They showed me the backyard. They showed me my room, a glorified closet. The people may have been nice and kind and soft-spoken, but I preferred to save some time and just assume they were perverts awaiting nightfall.
As I dropped my bag on the single bed, Mrs. French said, “You’ll be happy here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said back. I don’t like people telling me when and where I am to be happy. That’s not even for me to decide.
“So what now? Do I get my one phone call?” I asked.
“This isn’t prison, Kasper.”
“We’ll see.”
I telephoned Eddie to see if I could stay with him. He admitted that he had overstayed his visa and was illegal and therefore unable to make any application to be my legal guardian. I called Anouk’s house to hear her flatmate tell me what I already knew—she was still sunning herself in a Buddhist meditation center in Bali and wasn’t due home until her money ran out. I was stuck. I hung up the phone and went back to my little slab of darkness and cried. I’d never thought negatively about my future until that moment. I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.
There wasn’t a lock on the door, but I managed to wedge the chair under the handle. I sat awake all night, waiting for that ominous rattle. At about three in the morning I fell asleep, so I can only assume they came to sexually abuse me when I was far gone, dreaming of oceans and the horizons I would never reach.
IV
The next day, accompanied by Mrs. French, I went to see Dad. I admit, shamefully, that when we hopped in the car I was excited. I’d never been inside a mental hospital—was it like in the movies, with a symphony of high-pitched inhuman screams? I even went as far as to hope the patients were not too heavily sedated to bang wooden spoons against the back of saucepans.
In the car on the way, I didn’t say anything. Mrs. French kept glancing at me impatiently, irritated that I wasn’t pouring out my heart to her. Silence dogged us all the way to the hospital. She pulled over at the newsagent’s and said, “Why don’t you pick up your father some magazines to read?” and she gave me $10. I went inside and thought: What does a man who’s fallen off the brink want to read? Pornography? Entertainment news? I picked up an equestrian magazine but put it down again. That wasn’t right. In the end I settled for a book of puzzles, mazes, anagrams, and teasers to give his brain a workout.
&nb
sp; Inside the hospital we heard the kind of frenzied screams you generally associate with boiling rivers of blood. Stepping out of the elevator, I could see patients walking aimlessly through the corridors, legs twitching, tongues hanging out, mouths open wide as if at the dentist’s. I could see something yellow in their eyes. I could smell a smell unlike any smell I’ve ever smelled. These were people who had been tossed in the darkness, human leftovers starring in their own nightmares, covered in flimsy white gowns, their psyches poking through like ribs. They were the embers of a fire dying out. Where in the world could they go where they made sense?
The doctors walked briskly on the way to strip the patients of their crazy laughter. I studied the faces of the nurses: how could they work here? They must be either sadists or saints. They couldn’t be anything else, but could they be both? They and the doctors looked tired: draining heads of wrong ideas is obviously an exhausting business.
I thought: What human thing could emerge out of this edifice of violent nightmares and say, “OK, now back to work!”?
The nurse at reception sat eerily still with a pained expression, as if bracing herself for a punch in the face.
“Jasper Dean to see Martin Dean,” I said.
“Are you family?”
When I didn’t say anything for a while, she said, “I’ll call Dr. Greg.”
“I hope that’s his last name.”
She picked up a phone and paged Dr. Greg. I searched Mrs. French’s face for some acknowledgment that I hadn’t referred to myself as Kasper. If she had heard me, she wasn’t giving anything away.
A couple of minutes later, Dr. Greg arrived, looking sharp, smiling like someone who thinks he is always well liked, especially at first sight.
“I’m glad you’re here. Your father won’t talk to us,” he announced.
“And?”
“And I was wondering if you could come into the room and help us out.”
“If he doesn’t want to talk to you, it means he doesn’t care what you think. My presence won’t change that.”
“Why doesn’t he care what I think?”
“Well, you probably said things to him like ‘We’re on your side, Mr. Dean,’ and ‘We’re here to help you.’”
