by Steve Toltz
I didn’t let up. I let loose. I let all the cats out of all the bags. I asked in turn about their marriage counselors, penile implants, hair transplants, cosmetic surgery, about one who had cheated his brother out of his inheritance, about seven who had cocaine addictions and one who’d left his wife just after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. By humiliating them one by one, I turned the assembled crowd into individuals again. They were unprepared, squirming and sweating under the glare of their own spotlight.
“Didn’t you tell your psychologist just last week that you’ve always wanted to rape a woman? I have the recording right here,” I said, tapping my briefcase. What were a few defamation and invasion-of-privacy charges when I was going down for fraud? “And you, Clarence Jennings from 2CI. I heard from a certain hairdresser that you only like to sleep with your wife when she’s menstruating. Why is that? Come on! Out with it! The public has a right to know!”
They were swinging their cameras and microphones on each other. They wanted to shut them off, but they couldn’t miss the scoop when the competition was right there beside them. They didn’t know what to do or how to act. It was chaos! You can’t erase a live broadcast; their secret lives were dripping through television sets and radio speakers everywhere, and they knew it. They condemned each other out of habit, but then it was their turn in the sick limelight. They stared at me, at each other, disbelieving, ridiculed, like gnawed bones positioned upright. One removed his jacket and tie. Another sobbed. The majority wore terrified smiles. They appeared reluctant to move an inch. Caught with their pants down! Finally! These people had for too long taken on the importance of the subjects they reported on, strutting around as if they were celebrities themselves, yet laboring under the misapprehension that their lives were exclusively their own. Well, not anymore. They were caught in the morality traps they themselves had set. Branded by their own cruel irons.
I gave them a leering wink so they could be certain I had thoroughly enjoyed invading the sanctuary of their lives. Fear was in their throats—they were petrified. It was magnificent to watch the falling of great masses of pride.
“Now go home,” I said, and they did. They went off to drown their sorrows in beer and shadows. I stayed alone, with the silence saying everything it always says.
That night I celebrated by myself in Caroline’s apartment. She was there but wouldn’t inhale so much as a champagne bubble in the name of victory.
“Well, that was childish,” she said, standing at the fridge eating ice cream from the carton. Of course she was right. Nevertheless, I felt sublime. As it turned out, hateful revenge was the only pure aspiration from my youth that had survived intact, and its satisfaction, however puerile, deserved at least one glass of Moët et Chandon. But the awful inevitability of the situation had dawned on me: they’d be coming for me soon with redoubled strength. I must right now choose between the reality of prison and the reality of suicide. I thought I really would have to kill myself this time. I couldn’t do prison. I have a horror of all forms of uniform and most forms of sodomy. So suicide it was. According to the conventions of this society, I’d seen my son reach adulthood, so my death would be sad but not tragic. Dying parents are allowed to moan about not seeing their children grow up, but not about not seeing them grow old. Well, fuck—maybe I wanted to see my son graying and shrinking, even if I had to witness it through the foggy frosted glass of a cryogenic deep freeze.
What’s that? I hear a car. Shit. I hear footsteps. The haunting percussive beat of footsteps! They stop. Now I hear knocking! Someone’s knocking at the door! Suicide? Prison?
Well, what do you know: a third option!
I have to finish this off quick. There isn’t much time.
I came out of the bedroom to see Caroline curled up on the couch like a long skinny dog. “Don’t answer it,” she said, not speaking these words out loud but mouthing them noiselessly. I took off my shoes and crept up to the door. The floorboards complained under me. I gritted my teeth, took a few more creaky steps, and peeped through the peephole.
Anouk, Oscar Hobbs, and Eddie were standing there with big convex heads. I opened the door. They all hurried inside.
“OK. I’ve spoken to a friend in the federal police,” Oscar said. “I had a tip-off. They’re coming to arrest you tomorrow.”
“Morning or afternoon?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe a little. I can get a lot done in five or six hours.” That was just bravado. The truth was, I’ve never been able to get anything done in five or six hours. I need eight.
“And what’s he doing here?” I asked, pointing at Eddie.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Eddie said.
“You mean—run?”
Eddie nodded with such energy he lifted up onto his toes.
“Well, if I decide to run, what makes you think I’d run with you? And where could we go anyway? The whole of Australia knows my face now, and it’s not something they cherish.”
“Thailand,” Eddie said. “Tim Lung has offered to hide you.”
“That crook! What makes you think—”
“You’ll die here in jail, Marty.”
That settled things. Not even I would go to jail simply to be able to tell Eddie to fuck off. “But we’ll get stopped at the airport. They’ll never let me leave the country.”
“Here,” Eddie said, handing me a brown envelope. I looked inside and pulled out the contents. Australian passports. Four of them. One for me, one for him, one for Caroline, and one for Jasper. Our photos were there but the names were different. Jasper and I were Kasper and Horace Flint, Caroline was Lydia Walsh, and Eddie was Aroon Jaidee.
“How did you get these?” I asked.
“Courtesy of Tim Lung.”
Yielding to an impulse, I picked up an ashtray and hurled it against the wall. It didn’t change anything substantial.
“But it’s still my face on the passport!” I shouted.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Eddie said. “I have it all worked out.”
Caroline put her arms around me and we assaulted each other with whispered questions, each terrified to acknowledge the desires of the other lest they contradict.
“Would you like me to come with you?” Caroline asked.
“What do you want to do?”
“Will I make life hard for you on the run? Will I be in the way?”
“Do you want to stay?” I asked wearily.
“Dammit, Martin, just tell me one way or the other. Do you want me to work on your case from here?” Caroline offered, the idea having arrived at her lips at the same time it struck her brain. I understood that her questions were thinly veiled answers.
“Caroline,” Anouk said, “if Martin goes missing, the police are going to give you a pretty hard time.”
“So will the public,” Oscar added.
Caroline was suffering. The shape of her face seemed to lengthen like a shadow. I watched conflicting thoughts play out in her eyes.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“So am I.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want to be left.”
“I do love you.”
“I was beginning to think…”
She put her finger on my lips. Normally I hate it when people shut me up, but I love it when women put their fingers on my lips.
“We’ll go together,” she said breathlessly.
“OK, we’re coming,” I said to Eddie “But why did you get a passport for Jasper? He doesn’t need to go on the run.”
“I think he should,” Eddie said.
“He wouldn’t.”
“The family that sticks together…” he said, without finishing. Maybe he thought I’d finish it for him. How could I? I have no idea what happens to the family that sticks together.
It was perhaps the saddest moment of my life, saying goodbye to Anouk. It was awful not to be able to say I would see her soon, or even later.
There would be no soon. Nor a later. This was it. It was growing dark. The sun was setting with urgency. Everything had sped up. The air was charged. Oscar never forgot that he was taking a risk coming here; he tapped his finger on his leg with increasingly rapid intensity. The sand was racing through the hourglass. Anouk was desolate. We didn’t hug so much as we grasped each other. It’s only at the moment of goodbye that you understand the function of a person: Anouk had been there to save my life and she had done it, many times over.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
I didn’t even know how to say “I don’t know what to say.” I just hugged her tighter while Oscar cleared his throat a dozen times. Then they left.
Now I am packed and waiting. The plane leaves in about four hours. Caroline is calling me. Though for some reason she is calling me Eddie. Eddie answers. They aren’t talking to me.
I think I’ll leave this manuscript here in a box in the apartment, and maybe one day it’ll be found and someone will have the smarts to publish it posthumously. Maybe it can act as a makeover from beyond the grave. Certainly the media and public will take our escape as concrete evidence of our guilt—they don’t have enough insight into human psychology to know that escape is evidence only of fear.
And now, on our way to the airport, we have to stop by Jasper’s apartment and say goodbye to him too. How am I going to say goodbye to my son? It was hard enough when he moved out of home, but what words will form the goodbye that says I’m going to live the rest of my days as Horace Flint in Thailand in a nest of seedy criminals? I suppose I’ll warm him with the consolation that his father, Martin Dean, will never be eradicated after all, but it will be Horace Flint who will earn himself a grave in some swampy Thai cemetery. That should cheer him up. OK. Now Caroline is really calling me. We have to go. The sentence I am now writing is the last sentence I will write.
SIX
Why, oh why did I go on the run too? Why did I throw in my lot with Dad, after all that had happened between us? Because I’m the dutiful son? You never know. I loved my father, no matter how imperfectly. Is that any reason? I mean, loyalty is one thing, but the man had destroyed my life, after all. That should’ve reserved me the right to let him tear off into the wilderness without me. He had meddled unforgivably in my relationship. OK, it wasn’t his fault I was in love with a girl who was not a girl but a building on fire. And it wasn’t his fault either that she chose a man who was not me. I had no case; I was me, and embarrassingly so. It wasn’t Dad’s fault I couldn’t strong-arm her affections, that I couldn’t think of an offer she couldn’t refuse. So she refused me, that’s all. Was it my father’s fault that this flaming edifice loved her failed ex-boyfriend and sacrificed us on the altar of that love? No, it wasn’t. But I blamed him anyway. That’s the great thing about blame; she goes where you send her, no questions asked.
That Eddie had rigged the millionaires and dropped Dad in the shit was such a juicy stab in the back that I was dying to tell my girlfriend about it before the news broke, even if, strictly speaking, she wasn’t my girlfriend. Maybe it was just a good excuse to see her—the spilling of family secrets. And I needed an excuse. The Inferno had left me, and establishing contact with someone who has left you is a tricky business; it’s very, very hard not to come off looking pathetic. I’d already made two attempts at seeing her, and both times I’d come off looking pathetic. The first time I returned a bra that belonged to her that she’d left in my hut, and the second time I returned a bra belonging to her that I’d actually bought that morning in a department store. Neither time was she happy to see me—she looked at me as if I had no business in her line of vision.
The third time I went to her house and left my finger on the buzzer. I remember it was a beautiful day, with shreds of sinewy cloud twisting in fresh wind, the air smelling of a thick, heavy fragrance like the expensive perfume rich women put on their cats.
“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.
“Nothing. I just want to talk.”
“I can’t talk about us anymore because there is no more us. Well, there is an us, but it’s not you and me. It’s me and Brian.”
“Can’t we just be friends?” I asked (already pathetic).
“Friends,” she answered slowly, with a puzzled look on her face, as if I’d actually asked her if we could just be fish.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just around the block?”
She relented, and on the walk I told her everything that had happened regarding the millionaires, how Eddie had scammed Dad badly by rigging the winners to include most of his friends, and how if anyone found out, he’d be crucified.
I remember at the time I simply wanted to be close to her again, if only for a moment, and spilling our potentially life-destroying secret seemed to be the way to achieve this. It achieved nothing of the kind. In actuality, as a cathartic unburdening of secrets goes, it was intensely unsatisfying. “Your father’s crazy anyway,” she said, as though that were somehow relevant. When we arrived back at her building, she got serious. I knew this because she took my hand. “I still have feelings for you,” she said. I was about to say something. I know this because I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “But I have stronger feelings for him.” So then I was to understand it was a competition for the relative strength of her feelings. Brian was getting all the potent ones; I was getting the leftovers, the tepid, hardly breathing, barely conscious affections. No wonder I couldn’t feel them.
Of course I made her swear not to tell anyone the secret I’d told her. And of course she told the man she loved, because without thinking, I had given her a breaking news story to salvage his flagging journalistic career.
So is that why I joined Eddie, Dad, and Caroline on the run? I went along seeking forgiveness? Maybe, though why should I have stayed? I’d just had the worst year of my life. When the Towering Inferno dumped me, I had moved from the spaciousness of Dad’s labyrinth into a long thin apartment that was not much more than a glorified corridor with a bathroom and an L-shaped space at the end where you could stick a single bed and anything L-shaped you happened to have lying around. The move from the bush to the city had an unexpected and serious destabilizing effect on me. In my hut, I had been close to the voice of the earth and never had to strive to feel at ease. Now, in the city, I found that I was cut off from all my favorite hallucinations. I’d left myself behind. Banished from the source, I felt entirely at sea.
Then, when Dad became a public figure adored by the nation, I’ll admit it—his fame hit me hard. How could twenty million people like that irritating man? I mean, six months before he couldn’t get ten friends in a room for a dinner! The world was yet to fall off its hinges, though; one mild afternoon Dad visited me at work, in his suit, stiff as if unable to bend his knees. He stood awkwardly in my cubicle, looking like a house boarded up, and our sad, silent confrontation climaxed with him telling me the awful news. He hardly had to say it. I don’t know how, but I already knew. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Couldn’t he see I knew as soon as he approached? I practically had to shield my eyes from the glare of death.
These were the strange, turbulent days; Dad married his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Anouk married the son of a billionaire, Dad was betrayed by his best friend, I was betrayed by my true love, and he was despised by an entire nation. In the media, the descriptions of him varied: a businessman, a swindler, a Jew. I remember he was often obsessed with his inability to define himself. Hearing himself compartmentalized in this way only served to remind him who he wasn’t.
Everything was going wrong. I was getting death threats from strangers. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was lonely. I wandered the streets endlessly and tried to pretend I saw the Inferno everywhere, but there just weren’t enough six-foot redheads in Sydney, and I wound up mistaking her for some laughable substitutes. Retreating to my apartment, I became so depress
ed that when it came time for eating, I thought: What’s in it for me? At night I kept dreaming of a single face, the same face I used to dream about in childhood, the ugly face contorted in a silent scream, the face that I sometimes see even when I’m awake. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to, and, worse, I couldn’t be bothered doing up my shoes. That’s when I started chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana, eating cereal out of the box, drinking vodka out of the bottle, vomiting myself to sleep, crying for no reason, talking to myself in a stern voice, and pacing the streets, which were crammed with people who, unlike me, were conspicuously not screaming inside and not paralyzed by indecision and not hated by every person on this vile island continent.
I took up my post in bed, under the covers, and stayed there, only shaken out of a drunken sleep one afternoon to see Anouk’s green eyes peering at me.
“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”
She was dressed in an old undershirt and tracksuit pants. The shock of marrying money was obviously forcing her to dress down.
“This is very strange, Jasper. I have the exact same feeling as when I first walked into your dad’s apartment after we met. Remember? Look at this place! It’s disgusting. Trust me on this—beer-can ashtrays are a sign you can’t ignore!”
She ran around the apartment, cleaning up energetically, undaunted by the moldy food and general debris of my day-to-day existence. “You’ll need to repaint these walls to get the smell out,” she said. I fell asleep listening to the rising and falling of her voice. The last thing I heard her say were the words “Just like your father.”
I woke a few hours later to find the whole apartment clean and smelling of incense. Anouk sat with her long legs crossed on the floor, her shoes kicked off, a sunbeam reflecting off her ankle bracelet. “Too much has happened. You’re overstimulated. Come down here,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“I taught you how to meditate, didn’t I?”
“I don’t remember.”
