by Steve Toltz
“Yeah, well, I started on minimum wage. I never got a handout. I worked for what I have.”
“That’s a good speech. It’s a shame you can’t give your own eulogy.”
“OK. My patience has run out now.”
He nodded to the security guard, who helped me to my feet by squeezing my neck.
“One more thing!” I shouted.
Reynold sighed, but I could tell he was wondering what I was going to say. “Make it quick,” he said.
“My father wants to meet with you.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Martin Dean.”
“I never heard of him.”
“I didn’t say he was famous. I just said he wants to meet you.”
“What about?”
“Why don’t you let him tell you in person?”
“Because I don’t have time. My plate’s full right now.”
“You’re rich enough. Buy a bigger plate.”
Reynold nodded again, and the security officer dragged me from the table. Someone took my picture as I was “escorted” outside. I waited for Anouk on the casino steps for an hour, and to pass the time I swung by the car park to check for suffocating children. There weren’t any.
I came back up just as Anouk was coming out. I had never been flabbergasted before, so I didn’t know what it felt like to be flabbergasted and I didn’t even really believe people could be flabbergasted outside of books. That said, I was flabbergasted. Following closely behind Anouk were Oscar and Reynold Hobbs.
“And this is Jasper,” she said.
“We’ve met,” Reynold said, with an ephemeral sneer.
“Nice to meet you again,” I said, and I threw Oscar the warmest smile in my smile repertoire, but his eyes didn’t find my face worth dwelling on, so he missed it.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to Anouk.
“They’re coming with us,” she said, making her eyebrows wiggle.
“Where?”
“Home.”
VIII
In the stretch black limousine, both Reynold and his son spent the ride staring out their respective windows. Oscar’s three-quarter profile had me transfixed most of the way. What a burden, I thought. Imagine being filthy rich and impossibly good-looking. For all that, he exuded a sadness I was unable to account for.
“I’ve seen your picture in magazines,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“And you’ve always got some gorgeous model hanging off your arm.”
“So?”
“So where do I get an arm like that?”
Oscar laughed and looked at me for the first time. His eyes were coffee-colored and motionless.
“What’s your name again?”
“Jasper.”
He nodded, apparently agreeing that my name was Jasper.
“So how does it feel to be always watched?” I asked.
“You get used to it.”
“But don’t you feel restricted?”
“Not really.”
“You don’t miss the freedom?”
“Freedom?”
“Let me put it this way. You couldn’t take your penis out and wave it on a public train without it being front-page news. I could.”
“Why would I want to wave my penis on a public train?” Oscar asked me. It was a good question. Why would anyone?
Reynold Hobbs coughed, but it was no mere lung-clearing exercise. That cough was meant to put me down. I smiled. You may have all the money in the world, Mr. Hobbs, I thought, you might own the whole universe and its particles thereof, you might gain interest on the stars and reap dividends from the moon, but I’m young and you’re old and I have something you don’t—a future.
“I’ve heard about this place. It’s a labyrinth, isn’t it?” Reynold said as we hiked through the dense bush.
“How did you hear about it?” I asked, and he looked at me as though I were a shrunken head in an Amazonian exhibit. To him, my question was the same as asking God how he knew Adam and Eve had taken the apple.
“Your dad’s sure going to be surprised,” Anouk said, smiling at me.
I didn’t smile back. I was dreading a scene. Normally Dad didn’t like surprise guests, which ordinarily was fine because he never once had any, but there was no way of knowing how he was going to react. What Anouk didn’t understand was that just because Dad had once written in a notebook that he wanted to whisper ideas into an enormous golden ear didn’t mean that he hadn’t forgotten writing it two minutes later or that ten minutes later he didn’t write in a separate notebook that all he wanted was to defecate into an enormous golden ear. You couldn’t know.
We went inside. Luckily it wasn’t a disgusting mess, it was only mildly vile: books, scattered papers, a couple of days’ worth of rotting food, nothing too off-putting.
“He really is a genius,” Anouk said, as if preparing them for the type of genius who goes to the toilet on the coffee table.
“Dad!” I called out.
“Piss off!” came his throaty answer from the bedroom. Reynold and Oscar exchanged a silent dialogue with their eyes.
“Maybe you’d better go in and get him,” Anouk said.
While Reynold and Oscar made themselves uncomfortable on the couch, refusing to recline into the cushions, I went to find Dad.
He was lying on his bed, facedown in the starfish position.
I said, “Reynold Hobbs and his son are here to see you.”
Dad turned his head toward me and gave me a pretty sneer. “What do you want?”
“I’m not kidding. Anouk thought you were going into another suicidal depressive phase and was worried about you and so she went through your journals and found the bit about you wanting to whisper big ideas into an enormous golden ear and so she convinced me to go with her and find the biggest, most golden ear in the country and amazingly she pulled it off and now they’re waiting for you in the living room.”
“Who’s waiting?”
“Reynold Hobbs and his son, Oscar. They’re waiting to hear your big ideas.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. Take a look for yourself.”
Dad lifted himself off the bed and peered around the corner. If he thought he’d do it without being seen, he was wrong. Reynold turned his head slowly to us and scratched himself listlessly—who knows if he was really itchy or merely playing a part?—and as we approached he shaded his eyes with his hand, as if Dad and I were glowing apparitions too bright for the human eye to bear.
“Hey,” Dad said.
“Hey,” Reynold said back.
“Anouk’s been telling us you’ve got some great unrealized ideas you thought we’d be interested in,” Oscar said.
“We’re not wasting our time here, are we?” Reynold asked.
“No, you’re not wasting your time,” he said. “I swear on my son’s life.”
“Dad,” I said.
“Just give me a minute to get my notes together. Um, Anouk, can you come in here for a sec?”
Dad and Anouk went into Dad’s bedroom and closed the door. I wanted to follow them inside, but I didn’t want Reynold and Oscar to think I was afraid to be alone with them, even though I was afraid to be alone with them. We all kind of nodded at each other, but nodding gets old after a few seconds. So I said, “I wonder what’s keeping them?” and I went into the bedroom, where Anouk sat on Dad’s bed while he knelt on the floor, bent over a collection of old black notebooks, frantically turning pages. It was a disturbing sight. I could hear him hiss: he was leaking anxiety. Anouk made a face at me, a face overloaded with dread.
“What are you standing there for?” Dad snapped at me without looking up.
“Are you ready?”
“He hasn’t picked an idea yet,” Anouk said.
“They’re waiting.”
“I know!”
“You swore on my life, remember?”
“All right,” Anouk said, “let’s everybody calm down.”
>
There was a knock on the door.
“Turn off the light!” Dad whispered to me urgently.
“Dad, they saw us go in.”
“Why do I care anyway? This is foolishness.”
Dad picked up a handful of notebooks and went out into the living room. Anouk and I followed. Dad sat on the armchair, leafing through one of his notebooks slowly, making clicking noises with his tongue. “So…yes…the idea…I have a couple that I thought you’d be interested in…”
He shuffled through to the last page and snapped it shut—seems the idea wasn’t there after all, because he pulled out another black notebook, identical to the first. And again, flying through the pages, clicking his tongue, eyeballs sweating. That notebook also failed to produce. Another pocket held a third small black notebook. “I just…oh yeah, this is something you’ll—no, probably not…Hang on…just one more second…one more second…I swear…five seconds—five, four, three, two, one, and the winner is…um, just one more second.” A tiny worm of a smile slid onto Reynold’s face. I wanted to stamp it out with the foot of an elephant. At the best of times I hated watching my father squirm in a hell of his own construct, but in the face of derision from outsiders, it was unbearable. Dad was in a frenzy trying to break out of this paralysis of indecision, when Reynold snapped his fingers. Twice. That must be how rich people get things done, I thought. It worked. Dad stopped and immediately read what was written on the page he happened to have open at that exact moment.
“Idea for a cannibal-themed restaurant—every piece of food is shaped like a part of the human anatomy.”
The idea hung in the air. It was idiotic. No one responded, because there was no reason to. Dad’s eyes dove back to his notebook and continued to search. Reynold didn’t snap his fingers again. He didn’t have to. Dad started anticipating the fingers and would stop randomly at an idea and read it out loud.
“Drug education—have schoolchildren spend a week living with a junkie in a falling-down squat. Child will watch junkie shoot up, vomit, steal from his own family, break out in sores, and finally overdose. Child will write a report of five hundred words and read it at junkie’s funeral, which will be part of the daily school excursion. Every time a junkie dies, the class has to bury him, until association of heroin with death is embedded in the unconscious minds of the children.”
He wasn’t thinking. He was just spewing out ideas. And none of the good ones.
“Introduce conscription for community service where we let the homeless live in the homes of bankers and take the mentally ill off the streets and let them shit in the bathrooms of those in the advertising industry.”
“Next,” Reynold said quietly.
“Electronically tag celebrities like cattle, so when they’re walking down the street—”
“Next.”
“Based on car emissions and usage of water, sprays, and nonrecyclable materials, calculate how much damage each individual is doing to the environment and record it against that person’s name and sentence him or her to spend an equivalent in hours or money in doing something to repair the environment.”
Reynold’s eyes flickered just enough to let you know he was thinking. “How do you make money on that?”
“You can’t.”
“Next.”
“Make every man, woman, and child in this country a millionaire.”
Reynold didn’t say anything, and he said it with his eyes. His disdain became another entity in the room. “Even if you could do that,” he said, “why would you want to?”
It was a fair question. Dad was about to answer when Reynold said, “OK, Martin. We’ve heard you out. Now I want you to hear us out—is that fair?”
“All right.”
“We want to do a television special on Terry Dean. The real story, you know? Stuff we haven’t heard. Maybe a miniseries. Over two big nights. The story as you’ve never heard it before.”
The name of his brother made Dad stiffen up so he looked packed in ice. “So who’s stopping you?” he said, distressed.
“You are. We have the police and media reports from the time, but everyone else who was there died in the fire. You’re the ultimate insider. We can’t do it without your contribution. There’s so much we don’t know.”
“Is that why you came?”
“Yes.”
So this was how Anouk had convinced these two media giants to come home and listen to my father’s inane ideas. What a miscalculation! We all sat for the longest time in the most dreadful, ominous silence, during which I was afraid Dad might try to strangle every neck in the room. He shut his eyes, then opened them again. After several more minutes passed and it became obvious Dad wasn’t going to say another word, Oscar said, “Well, we’ll be off.”
Once they were gone, Dad rose from his chair as if levitating, walked out of the house, and disappeared into the labyrinth. Anouk ran after him. I didn’t move for an hour, struck immobile by visions of my father killing himself or doing some fucked-up thing that would get him interned for another round in a mental hospital, and I’m ashamed to say the thought of these appalling things didn’t frighten or sadden me as much as they bored me to tears. That’s how sick of him I was.
IX
I hadn’t seen or heard from the Inferno in almost a week. I played a waiting game with the telephone and lost. It had become, in my mind, a weird surrogate for her, a plastic representation. The telephone was silent because she was silent. I began to hate the telephone, as if she had sent it to me as her delegate because she was too important to come herself.
Shuffling around the labyrinth, I decided to bother Anouk. Shortly after we moved into the house, Dad had given her a spare room to use as a studio. Apart from being both sexy and annoying, Anouk was an artist of sorts, a sculptress. She was really into depicting the subjugation of women, the emasculation of men, and the subsequent ascension of women to a higher plane of consciousness. That is to say, the room was full of vaginas and dissected penises. It was an unsettling potpourri of genitalia; there were thin limping penises dressed in rags, bloody lifeless penises made to look like dead soldiers on a gloomy battlefield, penises with nooses tied around the shaft, charcoal drawings of terrified penises, melancholy penises, penises weeping at the funerals of dead penises…but they were nothing next to the victorious vaginas! Vaginas with wings, great ascending vaginas, twinkling vaginas flecked with golden light, vaginas on green stems with yellow petals protruding in place of pubic hair, vaginas with wide grinning mouths; there were dancing clay vaginas, exultant plaster-of-Paris vaginas, blissful candle vaginas with a wick like a tampon string. The most terrifying words you could hear in our house came out of Anouk’s mouth when you had a birthday coming up. “I’m making you something,” she’d say, and no smile was wide enough to conceal the oceans of dread bubbling underneath.
Anouk was lying on her daybed making SAVE THE FOREST signs when I shuffled in. I didn’t bother asking what forest.
“Hey, you free tonight?” she asked.
“Today’s not the day to ask me to save anything,” I said. “The way I’m feeling right now, wholesale destruction is more in my line.”
“It’s not for that. I’m doing the lighting for a play.”
Of course she was. Anouk was the busiest person I knew. She began every day making long lists of things to do, which by the end of the day she had actually done. She filled every minute of her life with meetings, protests, yoga, sculpting, rebirthing, reiki, dance classes; she joined organizations, she left organizations in a fury; she handed out pamphlets and still managed to squeeze in disastrous relationships. More than anyone I’ve ever known, she had a life rooted in activity.
“I don’t know, Anouk. Is it a professional play?”
“What do you mean?”
What did I mean? I meant that I respect the right of anyone to stand up onstage and speak in a booming voice, but that doesn’t make it a tolerable night out. From previous experience I could say without preju
dice that Anouk’s friends took amateur theater to new, incomprehensible lows.
“Is Dad speaking to you?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I thought after the other night he might have been inclined to murder you.”
“Not at all. He’s fine.”
“He’s fine? I thought he was depressed and suicidal.”
“So are you coming to the play or not? In fact, I’m not giving you an option. You’re coming, that’s all there is to it.”
There’s theater, there’s amateur theater, and then there’s just a group of people who bump into each other in a dark room and make you pay for the privilege of cringing for two hours. This was that kind, and every second hurt.
Anouk was responsible for the operation of a single spotlight, which she swung around the stage as if she were looking for an escaped prisoner going over the wall. Forty minutes in and I had exhausted all my sudden-apocalypse fantasies, so I swiveled around in my seat and looked at the faces of the audience. The faces I saw seemed to be enjoying the play. My bewilderment was indescribable. Then I really thought my eyes were playing tricks on me: sitting in the back row of the hall, perched on the edge of his chair, also seeming to enjoy the play, was Oscar Hobbs.
A loud, unbelievable laugh from one of the actors distracted me. It was the worst pretend laugh I’d ever heard, and I had to see who was responsible. For the next twenty minutes I was held spellbound by this minor character—his inauthentic smile, some plainly hilarious eyebrow acting, and then a whole scene of tearless sobbing—and when the play finished, the lights were turned on, the audience was applauding (perhaps sincerely) and I scanned the room in time to see Oscar Hobbs sneak out the back door.
The next day in the morning paper there was, surprisingly, a review of the play. It astonished everyone involved in the production—a play that small and shoddy in a theater that foul and dingy didn’t usually attract professional reviewers as much as it attracted homeless people looking for some soup, and having so little faith in the professionalism of their own work, the organizers hadn’t bothered to alert the media. The strangest and most suspicious thing wasn’t the review itself but the content: it focused solely on the play’s lighting: “deeply atmospheric,” “moody and arresting,” and “bold and shadowy.” Everyone who read it agreed it was the silliest they’d ever seen. The actors, the director, and the writer weren’t mentioned. Anouk was startled both by having been singled out in the review and by the ugly and childish reaction of her colleagues, who turned on her viciously, accusing her of planting the review, bribing a journalist, and “showing off with the spotlight.”
