by Steve Toltz
No, why air every ugly, negative, loopy, idiotic thought that floats through the head? That’s why when you’re standing by the harbor and your lover says, in a tender embrace, “What are you thinking about?” you don’t respond, “That I hate people and I wish they’d fall down and never get up.” I’m telling you. You just can’t say it. I don’t know much about women, but I do know that.
I fell asleep, and at four in the morning I woke with a shocking realization: I’d never told the Towering Inferno that Terry Dean was my uncle.
I stared at the clock until eight a.m. without looking away once, then called Brian.
“Who is it?”
“How did you know I was Terry Dean’s nephew?”
“Jasper?”
“How did you know?”
“Your girlfriend told me.”
“Yeah, I know, I was just checking. So, um…you and her, then…”
“What about us?”
“She said you went out with her for just a little while.”
He didn’t say anything. In the silence I heard him breathing like someone who knows he has the upper hand, and I wound up breathing like someone stuck with the lower hand, and then he began telling me not just about him and her but things about her she had kept secret—her whole life, it seemed: how she ran away from home at fifteen and stayed two months with a drug dealer in Chippendale named Freddy Luxembourg and how she went back home one abortion later and changed schools and how when she was sixteen she started going out by herself to bars and that’s where they met and she ran away from home again and lived with him for one year until she caught him with another woman and totally freaked out and ran back home again and her parents sent her to a psychologist who declared her a human time bomb and how she’d been calling him and leaving strange messages on his answering machine about her new boyfriend who was going to kill him if he ever showed his face in her life again. It surprised me to learn that the killer boyfriend was me.
I took all this with pretend calm, saying things like “Uh-huh” and trying not to show alarm at the unsettling conclusions I was drawing. That she had been calling her old boyfriend and leaving surly messages on his phone meant that she was probably still hung up on him, and that he in return was talking to her about getting his old job back meant that he was probably still hung up on her.
I couldn’t get my head around it. She’d lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!
I hung up and threw my legs over the side of the bed like two anchors. I didn’t get up. I sat on that bed for hours, breaking the spell only to call in sick to work. At around five I finally got out of bed and sat on the back veranda emptying tobacco out of my cigarette and into a pipe. I stared at the sunset because I thought I saw a face in it, a face in the sun, that old familiar face I hadn’t seen in a long time. All around me cicadas were making a racket. It sounded like they were closing in. I thought about catching one and fixing it into the pipe and smoking it. I was wondering if it would get me high when I saw a red flare shoot into the sky. I put down the pipe and set off in the direction of the trail of vapor that hung in the air. It was her. I had given her a flare gun because she often got lost in the maze.
I found her near a large boulder and took her back to the hut. When we got inside, I told her everything Brian had told me. She looked at me, her eyes death-empty.
“Why didn’t you tell me you lived with him for a year?” I yelled.
“Well, you haven’t been honest with me either. You didn’t tell me that your uncle is Terry Dean!”
“Why would I? I never met him! It was a long time ago. I was minus two years old when he died. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me that you knew about my uncle?”
“Look. Let’s be honest with each other from now on,” she said.
“Yes, let’s.”
“Scrupulously honest.”
“We’ll tell each other everything.”
The door was wide open. Neither of us stepped through it. It was the time to ask questions and answer them, like two informants who’d just discovered that each had made separate immunity deals with the public prosecutor.
“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.
I watched her walk across the room, and when she bent over to pick up a towel from the floor, I noticed how the back of her jeans curved away from her body, like an evil grin.
VI
After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge right before he sentences you, but in a relationship they signify discomfort. And I was uncomfortable because she still hadn’t gotten over Brian. This was not baseless paranoia, either. She had started comparing me to him, unfavorably. For instance, she said I wasn’t as romantic as Brian, just because I’d once said in an intimate moment, “I love you with all of my brain.” Is it my fault she didn’t understand how the heart has stolen credit from the head, that wild passionate feelings actually come from the ancient limbic system in the brain, and that I was just trying to avoid referring to the heart as the actual storehouse of all my feelings when it is, after all, only a soggy, bloody pump and filter system? Is it my fault people can’t enjoy a symbol without turning it into a literal fact? Which is why, by the way, you should never waste your time giving the human race an allegorical tale—in less than one generation they’ll turn it into historical data, complete with eyewitnesses.
Oh, and then there was the jar.
I was at her place, in her bedroom. We’d just had sex very quietly because her mother was in the next room. I enjoyed doing it quietly because when you can make all the noise you like you sort of go faster. Silent sex makes you slow down.
Afterward, when I was fishing on the floor for all the coins that had fallen from my jeans pockets, I saw the jar underneath her bed, mustard-sized, with a misty liquid floating in it, like cloudy water from a Mexican tap. Removing the lid, I sniffed tentatively, irrationally expecting the odor of sour milk. It smelled of nothing at all. I turned and watched her thin body settle on the bed. “Don’t spill it,” she said, before giving me another in a long dynasty of perfect smiles.
I dipped my finger in the jar, whipped it out, and licked it.
Salty.
I thought I knew what that meant. But could it really mean what I thought it meant? Was I actually, in reality, holding a jar of tears? Her tears?
“Tears, huh?” I said, as though everybody I knew collected their own tears, as if the whole world did nothing but forge monuments to their own sadness. I could imagine her pressing the little jar against her cheek, when the inaugural tear looked like the first raindrop sliding down a windowpane.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I just collect my tears, that’s all.”
“Come on. There’s something more.”
“There’s not. Don’t you believe me?”
“Absolutely not.”
She stared at me a moment. “OK—I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”
“OK.”
“Promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”
“That’s a hard promise to make. How will I know if I’m taking it the wrong way?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“OK.”
“OK. I’m collecting my tears because…I’m going to make Brian drink them,” she said.
I gritted my teeth and looked out the window. Outside, the drooping autumn trees looked like golden brown shrugs. “You’re still in love with him!” I shouted.
“Jasper!” she screamed. “You’re taking it the wrong way!”
About two weeks later she heaped another insult on top of the last one. We were in my hut, making love, making a hell of a racket this time, and as if going out of her way to confirm my worst suspicions, right in the middle of it she called out his na
me. “Brian!” she moaned breathlessly.
“Where?” I asked, startled, and started looking around the room for him.
“What are you doing?”
I stopped when I realized my stupid error. She gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness, uninvited and tireless.
She climbed naked out of bed and made herself a cup of tea, grimacing with guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I don’t think you should close your eyes during sex anymore.”
“Hmm.”
“I want you to look at me the whole time. OK?”
“You don’t have any milk,” she said, squatting in front of the bar fridge.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s lumpy.”
“But it’s still milk.”
She hadn’t finished sighing when I went out of the hut and walked in the darkness to Dad’s house. We were always breaking into each other’s houses to steal milk. It has to be said: I was the better thief. He would always come in while I was sleeping, but because he was paranoid about sell-by dates, I would awake to the sound of thunderous sniffing.
The night was the kind of thick, all-encompassing black that renders concepts such as north, south, east, and west unusable. After I’d stumbled over tree stumps and been slapped in the face by thorny branches, the lights of Dad’s house welcomed me and depressed me at the same time; they meant he was awake and I’d get stuck talking, that is, listening to him. I groaned. I was aware of our growing estrangement. It had started after I quit school and gradually worsened. I’m not sure why, but he’d unexpectedly resorted to normal parenting, especially in the use of emotional blackmail. He even once said the phrase “After all I’ve done for you.” Then he listed all that he’d done for me. It sounded like a lot, but many were small sacrifices such as “bought butter even though I like margarine.”
The truth was, I could no longer stand him: his unrelenting negativity, his negligence of both our lives, his inhuman reverence for books over people, his fanatical love for hating society, his inauthentic love for me, his unhealthy obsession with making my life as unpleasant as his. It occurred to me that he hadn’t made my life distressing as an afterthought, either, but had gone about dismantling me laboriously, as if he were being paid overtime to do it. He had a concrete pylon for a head, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It seems to me you should be able to look at the people in your life and say “I owe you my survival” and “You owe me your survival,” and if you can’t say that, then what the hell are you doing with them? As it stood, I could only look at my father and think, “Well, I survived in spite of your meddling, you son of a bitch.”
The light was on in his living room. I peered through the window. Dad was reading the newspaper and crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, opening the sliding doors.
“What are you doing in here?”
“Stealing milk.”
“Well, steal your own milk!” he said.
I walked in and tore the newspaper out of his hands. It was one of the daily tabloids. Dad got up and went into the next room. I looked closer at the newspaper. The story Dad had been reading was about Frankie Hollow, the recently murdered rock star who, coming home from a tour, had been confronted by a crazed fan who shot him twice in the chest, once in the head, and once “for good luck.” Every single day since then the story had managed to make the front page, despite there being no additional facts after day one. Some days the papers included interviews with people who didn’t know anything and who in the course of the interview revealed nothing. Then they squeezed every last drop of blood out of the story by digging up the dead star’s past, and when there was absolutely, positively nothing left to report, they reported some more. I thought: Who prints this toe jam? And then I thought: Why is Dad crying over this celebrity death? I stood there with a thousand belittling phrases swimming in my head, trying to decide if I should lay the boot in. I decided against it; death is death, and mourning is mourning, and even if people choose to shed tears over the loss of a popular stranger, you can’t mock a sad heart.
I closed the paper, more clueless than before. From the next room I could hear the television; it sounded like Dad was testing the volume to see how high it could go. I went in. He was watching a late-night soft porn series about a female detective who solves crimes by showing her clean-shaven legs. He wasn’t looking at the screen, though; he was staring into the tiny oval mouth of a can of beer. I sat next to him, and we didn’t talk for a while. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked.
“Thanks, Dad,” Dad said.
I sat there trying to think of something sarcastic to say in retort, but when you put two sarcastic comments side by side, they just sound nasty. I went back into the labyrinth and to the Inferno in my bed.
“Where’s the milk?” she asked as I crawled in beside her.
“It had lumps in it,” I said, thinking of Dad and the lumps within. Anouk and Eddie were right—he had slipped back into a depressed state. Why this time? Why was he grieving over this rock star he’d never heard of? Was he going to start mourning every death on the planet Earth? Could there be a more time-consuming hobby?
In the morning when I woke up, the Inferno was gone. That was new. We had obviously fallen to a new low—in the old days we would’ve shaken each other out of a diabetic coma to announce our departure. Now she sneaked out, probably to avoid the question “What are you doing later?” My hut had never felt so empty. I buried my head in my pillow and shouted, “She’s falling out of love with me!”
To distract myself from this sour-smelling reality, I picked up the newspaper and browsed through it, cringing. I’ve always hated our newspapers, mostly for their insulting geography. For example, on page 18 your eyes fall on the story of a terrible earthquake in some place like Peru with an insult hidden between the lines; twenty thousand human beings buried under broken rubble, then buried again, this time under seventeen pages of local blabber. I thought: Who prints this gum disease?
Then I heard a voice. “Knock knock,” the voice said.
That put me instantly on edge. I shouted back. “Don’t stand at the door and say ‘Knock knock’! If I had a doorbell, would you stand there saying, ‘Brrrring’?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Anouk asked, entering.
“Nothing.”
“You can tell me.”
Should I confide in her? I knew Anouk was having troubles in her own love life. She was in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always breaking up with people I never knew she’d even been seeing. If anyone had an eye for the beginning of the end, it would be Anouk. But I decided against asking for her advice. Some people sense when you’re drowning, and when they step forward to get a clear view, they can’t help putting their foot on your head.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I want to talk to you about your dad’s depression.”
“I’m not really in the mood.”
“I know how to fill his emptiness. His notebooks!”
“I’ve snooped enough in his notebooks to last a lifetime! His writings are the stains of dripping juices from all the tangled meat in his head. I won’t do it!”
“You don’t have to. I already did.”
“You did?”
Anouk pulled one of Dad’s little black notebooks from her pocket and waved it in the air as if it were a winning lottery ticket. The sight of the notebook produced in me the same effect as the sight of my father’s face: an overwhelming weariness.
“OK,” Anouk said, “listen to this. Are you sitting down?”
“You’re looking right at me, Anouk!”
“OK! OK! Jesus, you’re in a bad mood.”
She cleared her throat and read: “‘In life, everyone’s doing exactly what they’re supposed to. I mean, look closely when you meet an accountant—he looks exactly like an accountant! Never did there exist an accountant who looked like he should have been a fireman, a clerk in a clothing store who looked like a judge, or a vet who looked like he belonged behind the counter at McDonald’s. One time at a party I met this guy and I said, “So then, what do you do for a crust?” and he said loudly, so everyone could hear, “I’m a tree surgeon,” just like that, and I took a step back and gave him the once-over and I’ll be damned if he didn’t fit the image precisely—he looked like a tree surgeon, even though I’d never met one before. This is what I’m saying—absolutely everyone is as they should be, and this is also the problem. You never find a media mogul with the soul of an artist or a multibillionaire with the raving, fiery compassion of a social worker. But what if you could whisper in a billionaire’s ear and reach the raving, fiery compassion that’s lying dormant and unused, where empathy is stored, and you could whisper in his ear and fuel that empathy until it catches alight, and then you douse that empathy with ideas until it’s transformed into action. I mean, excite him. Really excite him. That’s what I’ve been dreaming about. To be the man who excites rich and powerful men with his ideas. That’s what I want—to be the man who whispers thrilling ideas into an enormous golden ear.’”
Anouk closed the notebook and looked at me as though expecting a standing ovation. Was this what she was excited about? His megalomania was old news to me. I’d learned the same when I’d helped him out of the asylum. Of course, it was just a lucky break that time—taking the contents of those insane notebooks literally and using them on its owner was a very hazardous business—as we were about to find out.
