by Steve Toltz
Tim Lung’s house had “drug cartel” written all over it. It was large, with huge whitewashed walls surrounded by encrusted pillars, gleaming orange and green roof tiles, and an enormous reclining Buddha nestled in a thick bamboo grove. It was reinforced that we were waltzing into a den of thieves when I spotted men hidden in the shade of trees with semiautomatic rifles, eyeing us as if we had come selling a product they knew didn’t work. The men wore short-sleeved shirts and long pants. I pointed out the armed men to Dad for his predictable response. “I know,” he said. “Long pants, in this weather!”
“This way,” Eddie said.
We walked down a set of steep stairs into a rectangular courtyard. Stuck on spikes were severed pigs’ heads with sticks of incense sprouting from their foreheads. Nice. On one wall of the courtyard was an extensive mural depicting a city razed by fire. Promising. At the end, large sliding doors were already open. I don’t know what I was expecting—snarling Dobermans, tables piled high with cocaine and bags of money, prostitutes sprawled on white leather couches, and a trail of bloodstains leading to the mutilated corpses of dead policemen. What I wasn’t expecting was the very last thing in the world I could have been expecting.
Dad saw it first. He said, “What the fuck?”
On both walls, in frames or stuck up with brown tape, were hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Dad and me.
I said it too: “What the fuck?”
V
“Marty! They’re photos of you!” Caroline shouted.
“I know!”
“And you too, Jasper!”
“I know!”
“Is this you as a baby? You were so cute!”
Our faces from various epochs peered out at us from all over the room. This perverse exhibition comprised all the photographs Eddie had taken over the past twenty years. There were images of a young Dad in Paris, lean and tall, with all his hair and a strange beard on his chin and neck that couldn’t or wouldn’t make its way onto his face; Dad, before he started collecting fat cells, smoking thin cigarettes in our first apartment. And there were just as many of me, as a baby and groping my way through childhood and adolescence. But it was the photos of Paris that interested me most: photographs and photographs of Dad with a young, pale, beautiful woman with a demoralizing smile.
“Dad, is that…?”
“Astrid,” he confirmed.
“Is this your mother, Jasper? She’s beautiful!” Caroline cooed.
“What’s this about?” Dad shouted, his voice echoing through the house. Dad was a bona fide paranoiac who had finally discovered, after all these years, that there really was a conspiracy against him.
“Come on,” Eddie said, leading us deeper into the house.
Dad and I were frozen. Had this something to do with Astrid’s suicide? With my mother dying on one of Tim Lung’s boats? We were thrust into the role of detectives, forced to investigate our own lives, but our mental journeys into the past were futile. We just didn’t get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac’s nightmare! A narcissist’s dream! We didn’t know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed. Obviously Eddie had infused this criminal overlord with an obsession for Dad and me, but what had he said? What could he have said? I imagined him in late-night drinking sessions with his boss: “You wouldn’t believe these characters. They’re insane. They shouldn’t be allowed to live!”
“Mr. Lung is waiting for you in there,” Eddie said, pointing to double wooden doors at the end of the hallway. He had the colossal nerve to be smirking.
Dad suddenly grabbed him violently by the shirt collar; it looked as if he were planning to pull the shirt over his head—Dad’s first official act of physical violence. Caroline pried his fingers loose. “What have you got us into, you bastard?” he shouted, though it wasn’t as threatening as he intended. Fury mingled with genuine curiosity just comes out strange.
An armed guard emerged from a doorway to investigate the commotion. Eddie disarmed him with a nod. Disappointed, the guard retreated into the shadows. Apparently Eddie had a nod that was irrefutable. That was news to us. We continued down the hallway toward the double wooden doors in a daze, examining more photos on the way. Until now, I’d never realized how much Dad resembled a dog being pushed unwillingly into a swimming pool. And me—suddenly my identity felt like a less solid thing. I found it almost impossible to connect with the pictorial history of ourselves. We looked like damaged relics of a failed civilization. We didn’t look comprehensible at all.
And my mother! My heart nearly burst open looking at her. In all the photos she looked silent and motionless; all the action went on behind the eyes, the kind of eyes that look as if they have come back from the farthest corners of the earth just to tell you not to bother going there. Her smile was like a staircase leading nowhere. Half obscured in the corners of frames, there was her sad beauty, she was resting her head in her hands, her tired eyes clouding over. Perhaps it was coincidence, but in each photo she seemed to be farther and farther away from the camera lens, as if she were shrinking. These images gave me a newfound respect for Dad—she looked like a distant and imposing woman whom no sensible person would enter into a relationship with. I took one photograph of her off the wall and broke it out of the frame. It was black-and-white, taken in a laundromat. My mother was sitting on a washing machine, legs dangling, looking directly into the camera lens with her strikingly large eyes. Suddenly I knew this mystery had something to do with her—here I would receive the first clue as to who she was, where she came from. One thing was clear to me: the riddle of my mother’s existence would be answered behind that door.
Dad opened it, and I followed close behind.
VI
We entered a large square room with so many pillows on the floor that part of me just wanted to lie down and be fed grapes. Large indoor ferns made me feel we were outside again. The walls didn’t quite reach the ceiling and sunlight poured through the space above them, except for the far wall, which was made of glass and looked out on the overgrown Buddha in the garden. There, at the wall of glass, was a man, his back to us, staring out at that Buddha. They were the same build. In the bright light that came through the window, we could see only the man’s giant silhouette. At least, I think it was a man. It looked more or less like one, only bigger.
“Mr. Lung,” Eddie said, “may I present Martin and Jasper Dean. And Caroline Potts.”
The man turned. He was not Thai, Chinese, or Asian at all. He had blond scraggly hair and a bushy beard covering pulpy, blemished skin, and he was wearing shorts and a cut-off flannelette shirt. He looked like an explorer recently returned from the wilds, enjoying his first taste of civilization. That’s an off-the-point description, though, one ignoring the elephant in the room, because most of all he was the elephant in the room, the fattest man I’d ever seen or was ever going to see, an astounding freak of nature. Either he had a hormone disorder or the man must have eaten fiendishly for decades with the express ambition of becoming the biggest man alive. His body shape was unreal to me—his hideousness was suffocating. I could no more kill this monstrosity with a bullet than I could dent a mountain by slapping it.
He stared at us without blinking an eye, even while he put out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. Clearly he was planning to stare us into submission. It was working. I felt exceedingly meek, as well as fantastically thin. I looked at Dad to see if he was feeling meek too. He wasn’t. He was squinting at the enormous man as if he were one of those magic puzzles that reveal a hidden image.
Dad spoke first, as though talking in his sleep. “Bloody hell,” he said, and at once I knew.
Caroline said it before anyone. “Terry,” she said.
Terry Dean, my uncle, looked from one of us to the other and broke into the widest smile I had ever seen.
VII
“Surprised? Of course you are,” he said, laughing. His echoey, powerful voice sounded like it came from
deep within a cave. He limped toward us. “You should see the look on your faces. You really should. Do you want me to get a mirror? No? What’s the matter, Marty? You’re in shock? Understandable, very understandable. We’ll all just wait here until the shock dies down and makes way for anger and resentment. I don’t expect any of you to take this lying down. This isn’t one of those things you laugh about straightaway, right up front, but later, when it’s all sunk in. Don’t worry—it’ll sink. In a few days you’ll be hard-pressed to recall a single day I wasn’t alive. But tell me, did you suspect it? Even a little? What am I thinking? Here you are, seeing your long-dead brother after all these years, and not only does he have the effrontery to be living and breathing, he hasn’t even offered you a beer! Eddie, get us some beers, will you, mate? And Jasper! I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. Do you know who I am?”
I nodded.
“My nephew! You have your grandmother’s nose, did your dad ever tell you that? I’m so happy to see you. Eddie’s told me all about you. You must be some kind of rock, living with your dad without shattering into a million little pieces. But you look like you’ve turned out all right. You look so normal and healthy and adjusted. How is it that you’re not crazy? It’s crazy that you’re not crazy! Though maybe you are. That’s what I’m looking forward to finding out. And Caroline! Seeing you comes as a bit of a shock, I’ll admit. Of course Eddie told me you’d married…”
Terry stared at her for a long moment before snapping himself out of it.
“I know, you’re all caught off guard. Drink your beers, you’ll feel better. I’ll wait until you calm down. There’s time. Christ, if there’s one thing we all have, it’s time. Marty, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies with that look. You too, Caroline. But not you, Jasper, eh? Maybe because you’re still young. When you’re older, it’s a surprise that you can still be surprised. I wonder, what’s the bigger surprise, that I’m so wonderfully alive or that I’m so wonderfully fat? You can say it—I don’t mind. I like being fat. I’m Henry the Eighth fat. Buddha fat. Let’s get it out of the way so we’re not bogged down in it. I’m a fat fuck. I’ll just take off my shirt so you can see the extent of it. See? OK? I’m a whale. My belly is unrelenting! Invincible!”
It was true. He was so enormous he gave the impression he was indestructible, that he could survive any cataclysm. The zoo of animal tattoos Dad had described to me many years ago had stretched into shapeless swirls of color.
Dad had stiffened. He looked like he wanted to say something but his tongue wasn’t cooperating. “Alive…fat,” was all he could manage.
It dawned on me that Terry was sort of confused himself. He didn’t know who to look at. Every now and then he turned and gazed searchingly at me, perhaps his best chance of immediate love and acceptance. He wasn’t getting it, because despite the incredible news that a family member so thoroughly mythologized was alive and well, more than anything I felt a bitter disappointment that this had nothing to do with my mother after all.
“Isn’t anybody going to give me a hug?”
No one moved.
“So who is Tim Lung?” Dad said finally.
“Tim Lung doesn’t exist. Neither did Pradit Banthadthan or Tanakorn Krirkkiat, for that matter.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m doing it, Marty. I’m finally doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“The democratic cooperative of crime.”
Dad spasmed as though he’d been jump-started with cables. “You’re what?!” he screamed. This was the first emotive response he had given.
“Well, mate, the first time I stuffed it up good and proper. Harry was onto something, though. This thing works like a charm.”
“I can’t believe it! I can’t fucking believe it!”
This apparently was a bigger shock to Dad than the news that Terry had been alive all this time.
Caroline said, “What’s the democratic—”
“Don’t ask,” Dad interjected. “Oh my God.”
Terry clapped his chubby hands with delight and hopped up and down on his stumpy legs. I was thinking how utterly different he was from the young renegade who had so often appeared in my mind’s eye. This fat man was the same sporting hero, the same fugitive, the same vigilante worshipped by the nation?
Suddenly his knees locked up and he looked embarrassed.
“Eddie tells me you’ve been ill,” Terry said.
“Don’t change the subject,” Dad said, his voice turbulent with emotion. “I scattered your ashes, you know.”
“You did? Where?”
“I put them in bottles of cayenne pepper in a small supermarket. The rest I dumped in a puddle on the side of the road.”
“Well, I can’t say I deserved any better!” Terry laughed loudly and put his hand on Dad’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, you fat ghost!”
“Mate. Don’t be like that. Are you pissed off about the millionaires thing? Don’t be. I just couldn’t resist. As soon as I heard about what you were doing in Australia, Marty, I knew what I had to do. I’ve been rescuing you from one drama or another your entire life. And helping you has made me who I am. I don’t regret it. I love who I am, and just taking those millions in such an obvious scheme was the easiest way for me to rescue you one last time. You see, mate, I wanted you to come here. I thought it was high time we saw each other again, and I was long overdue to meet Jasper.”
I could see that Dad’s inward rage had almost made its way out. An evil storm was churning in him, and it had everything to do with Caroline. He noticed that she was demonstrating none of the rage; she was quiet, still literally gaping at Terry in horror and wonder. Terry, meanwhile, aimed his smiling eyes back at me.
“Hey, nephew. Why don’t you say something?”
“How did you get out of solitary confinement?”
Terry’s face looked empty of thought for a moment, before he said, “The fire! Of course! And Marty, you told him the whole story. Good for you! Good question, Jasper, right at the beginning.”
“Were you even in solitary?” Dad asked.
We all leaned forward with utter absorption as Terry began.
“I sure was! That was a close one. I almost did get baked—in solitary there are no windows, of course, but I heard a lot of screaming, guards shouting orders to each other, and when the smoke came under the door I knew I was cooked. It was pitch-black in that cement cage, hotter than hell and full of smoke. I was terrified. I started shouting, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ But no one came. I banged on the door and nearly burned my arm right off. There wasn’t anything I could do, and it took all the psychological effort I could muster to calm myself down enough to settle in for an unpleasant death. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor. It was one of the guards, Franklin. I recognized his voice: ‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted. ‘Terry Dean!’ I answered. Good old Franklin. He was a good man who loved cricket and he was a big fan of my rampage. He opened the door and said, ‘Come on!’ and in his panic to save me, he let down his guard. I knocked him unconscious, took his clothes, threw him in the cell, and locked the door.”
“You murdered the man who came to save you.”
Terry paused a moment and gave Dad a strange look, like a man deciding whether or not to explain a complex natural phenomenon to a child, then continued. “After that it was easy. The whole prison was on fire, and I didn’t even have to use the keys I’d stolen—all the doors were open. Somehow I made my way through the smoke-filled corridors and out of the prison, I saw the town up in flames and disappeared into the smoke. That was it.”
“So it was Franklin who burned in your cell.”
“Yeah, I guess it was his ashes you scooped up.”
“What happened next?”
“Oh yeah—I saw you in the fire. I called out to you, but you didn’t see me. Then I saw that you were running into a trap. I shouted, ‘Left, turn left!’ and you turned and disappeared.”
“Spent a couple of days in Sydney lying very low. Caught a freighter to Indonesia. Worked my way around the globe checking out the other continents to see what they had to offer, and wound up here in Thailand. That’s when I started the democratic cooperative of crime.”
“What about Eddie?”
“Eddie started working for me at the beginning. I tried to track you down, Marty, but you’d already left Australia. So the best I could do was get Eddie to go and wait near Caroline. I had her address from a letter she’d sent me in jail, and Eddie took a room next to hers and waited for you to show up.”
“How could you be so sure I’d go see Caroline?”
“I wasn’t sure. But I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Why didn’t you just get Eddie to tell me you were alive?”
“By then I felt like I’d caused you enough trouble. You were really looking out for me back then, Marty, and you probably thought I didn’t notice, but I knew you’d worried yourself sick about me. I figured you’d had enough.”
“You told Eddie to make Caroline a millionaire!”
“Of course!” Turning to Caroline, he said, “When I heard about your son, I was so sorry.”
“Go on, Terry,” Dad said.
“That’s it. I had Eddie keep tabs on you. When he told me you were with some nutty lady who you got pregnant and you didn’t have any money, I told him to give you some. But you wouldn’t take it. I didn’t know how to help, so I gave you a job working for me. Unfortunately, it was a bad time—you waltzed right into the middle of a little gang warfare. I didn’t know your lunatic girlfriend was going to jump on the boat and blow herself up. It was a nutty way to do yourself in, wasn’t it? Sorry, Jasper.”
“What else?”
“Anyway. When you took Jasper to Australia, I got Eddie to follow. He came back with some crazy reports. I gave you a job again, running one of my strip clubs, and you smashed the place and wound up in hospital. Then I gave you some dosh so you could build your maze, and that’s that. Then you warped the whole of Australia with your strange ideas and here we are. That pretty much brings us up to date.”
