by Steve Toltz
One obscenely hot afternoon, after I had been on my feet for several hours, I lay down in the hammock, stared at that humongous Buddha, and made a sort of mental inventory of my life experiences to see if they in fact wove together seamlessly without my having noticed at the time. I thought if I could decode the order of the past, I could deduce what was coming next.
I couldn’t. A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Terry’s naked torso. It was always impressive to see him with his shirt off. It made me wonder if he hadn’t reversed the usual order of enlightenment and achieved his Buddha-like serenity from the outside in.
“You ready?” Terry said.
“For what?”
“We’re going to try kick-starting your father’s motor again.”
I swung my legs over the hammock and followed Terry into Dad’s room. He was lying on the bed stomach down. He didn’t acknowledge our presence in any way.
“Look, Marty, don’t you find yourself a heavy weight, pinning you down?”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Don’t you want instead to be a leaf blown in the air, or a drop of rain, or a wispy cloud?”
“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”
“You need to be reborn. You need to die and be reborn.”
“I’m too old for rebirth. And who do you think you are, anyway? You’re a murderer a hundred times over, you’re a drug pusher, a pimp, a gunrunner, yet you take yourself for a visionary and a sage! Why is it your hypocrisy doesn’t make you sick?”
“Good question. It’s an amiable contradiction, that’s all.”
God, how these unedifying discussions went on and on.
Terry hauled Dad out of bed and dragged us to a shooting range where you could use pump-action shotguns to hit the targets. Neither Dad nor I had much love for guns, and the force of the action sent Dad keeling over onto his back. Terry bent over him, and Dad looked up, his mouth open, trembling all over.
“Marty, tell me something—where has all this meditating on death got you?”
“Fucked if I know.”
“Jasper says you’re a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner.”
“Does he?”
“Tell me about the corner. What does it look like? How did you get there? And what do you think would get you out?”
“Help me up,” Dad said. When he was on his feet again, he said, “In brief, here it is. Because humans deny their own mortality to such an extent they become meaning machines, I can never be sure when something supernatural or religious in nature occurs that I did not manufacture my connection to it out of desperation to believe in my own specialness and my desire for continuance.”
“Maybe because you’ve never had mystical experiences.”
“But he has,” I said. “Once he saw everything in the universe simultaneously. But he never followed up on it.”
“So you understand the nature of the corner now? If men are constantly manufacturing meaning in order to deny death, then how can I know I didn’t manufacture that experience myself? I can’t know for sure, so I must assume I did.”
“But then your whole life you haven’t ever really taken your own soul seriously.”
“Stop talking about the soul. I don’t believe in it, and neither does Jasper.”
Terry turned to me. I shrugged. In truth, I simply could not make up my mind about its existence. Dad was right—the immortal soul didn’t wash with me. Its shelf life felt overestimated. I believed instead in the mortal soul, one that from the moment of birth is ceaselessly worn away and that will die when I die. Whatever its shortcomings, a mortal soul still seemed perfectly sublime to me, no matter what anyone said.
“Look, Marty. Let it go—the mind that wants to solve the mysteries of the universe. It’s over. You lost.”
“No, you look, Terry,” Dad said wearily. “If I did live wrongly, if I made blunders and still have blunders coming up, I think maintaining the status quo of my deficient personality would be a lot less tragic than changing at the eleventh hour. I don’t want to be the dying man who learns how to live five seconds before his death. I’m happy to be ridiculous, but I don’t want my life to assume the characteristics of a tragedy, thanks.”
I reloaded my shotgun and aimed at the target and, for the first time that day, hit the bull’s-eye. I turned back to Dad and Terry, but neither had seen it. They were both unmoving, two brothers standing together but alive in very different worlds.
That night I buried myself deep under the covers. The shots Terry was firing at Dad seemed to be missing the target and hitting me instead. It occurred to me that the uncompromising position Dad held in the face of death was likely to be my own someday. Despite my desire to be his mirror opposite, I had to admit there were disturbing similarities between us. I also had a restless inquiring mind that aimed to solve the mysteries of creation, and like him, I didn’t know how to find respite from this fruitless, unending investigation. I wasn’t so sure Terry wasn’t rocking my boat on purpose. He must have known Dad wasn’t going to change one atom of his personality, and that’s why he was intent on dragging me along for these outings. He was aiming at me and getting me square on. I knew that somewhere within me was a spiritual inclination that Dad lacked, but it was still faint and unresolved. It wouldn’t take much to wake up one day and find I’d drifted away from my own center and was now tracing my father’s footsteps like a zombie.
There was a knock on the door. I didn’t say anything, but the door opened anyway. Terry waddled into the bedroom sideways.
“Damn these narrow doorways. Hey, Jasper, I need to pick your brain. What can we do to make your father’s final days wonderful?”
“Fuck, Terry. We can’t. Just leave him be.”
“I know! Maybe we should go on a trip.”
“All of us? Together?”
“Yes! In the country! We could go visit Eddie, see how he’s getting on.”
“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”
“Your father’s not doing so good. I think to be in the company of his oldest friend might be just what he needs. And besides, the countryside could freshen him up.”
“You can’t freshen him up. He’s putrefying.”
“I’m going to tell everyone.”
“Wait—what about the cooperative? Don’t you have prostitutes to pimp, opium to grow, guns to trade?”
“The others can take care of things until I get back.”
“Look, Terry. Dad doesn’t get lost in the beauty of nature. Natural phenomena make him sink into the worst kind of introspection. What he needs is distraction, not a journey into his interior. Besides, you’re sleeping with his wife and he knows it.”
“I’m not!”
“Come on, Terry. I saw her coming out of your room.”
“Look. Caroline’s frustrated. Your father doesn’t know how to cuddle, that’s all. He only uses one arm!”
It was pointless talking to Terry. His mind was made up. We would all of us go to a remote mountain village and stay with Eddie for a couple of weeks. I tore at my hair and overheard him break the news ungently to Dad and Caroline, and though it was a unanimously detested idea, the following morning he herded us all into the Jeep.
IX
During the drive I ruminated on what Terry had told me about Eddie’s history. His father had been the only doctor in the remote mountain village where they lived, and as a young man Eddie was expected to follow in his footsteps. It was his parents’ dream that Eddie would take over once his father retired, and such was the force of their will, it became Eddie’s dream too. Over the years they scraped and sacrificed to send their son to medical school, and he went along, filled with gratitude and enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, things went sour from the first day Eddie opened his medical textbooks. As much as he wanted to pursue “his” dream and please his parents, he found that he was offended by the slop inside the human body. So Eddie spent most of his internship dry-retching. There was really
no part of human anatomy he could stomach: the lungs, the heart, the blood, the intestines were not simply repellent symbols of man’s animality, but so delicate and prone to disease and disintegration that he scarcely knew how people survived from one minute to the next.
In his second year of medical school he married a beautiful journalism student whom he had won over dishonestly by boasting about his future as a doctor and predicting a prosperous life together. What should have been a happy event was for Eddie a secret torture. He had serious doubts about entering the medical profession but didn’t trust that he was inherently lovable enough “as is.” Now he had something else to be confused and guilty over: he had begun a marriage based on a lie.
Then he met the man who would change his life. It was two a.m. when Terry Dean stumbled into the emergency room with a penknife stuck in the small of his back at such an awkward angle he couldn’t remove it himself. As Eddie pulled out the knife, Terry’s open and candid manner, combined with the late-night silence of the graveyard shift, made Eddie confide to his patient his confused feelings—how it felt to be torn between disgust and duty, between obligation and the fear of failure. Basically, Eddie moaned: did he want to be a fucking doctor or didn’t he? He admitted that he loathed the idea and it would in all probability drive him to suicide, but how could he get out of it now? How else could he make money? Terry listened sympathetically, and on the spot offered him a high-paying though unusual job: traveling the world and watching over his brother with the aim of helping him out when he needed it. In short, to be Martin Dean’s friend and protector.
While it broke his parents’ hearts and put an unbelievable strain on his relationship with his young bride, Eddie took the job and set off to Paris to wait near Caroline for Dad to turn up. The most astounding fact of all that was revealed to us was that in all those years, from the moment Eddie met Dad in Paris onward, he couldn’t tolerate him. All those years he hated my father, and this hatred never once let up. It was beyond belief. The more I thought about Eddie’s deception, pretending to like a man for twenty years, the more I thought it verged on virtuosity. Then I decided that people probably pretend to like their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for their entire lives, and twenty years is no great trick.
The traffic had been heavy leaving Bangkok, but now we were out of the city, it eased up. We were on an open road flanked by rice fields. Terry drove fast. We passed tiny mopeds with several generations of whole families on them and buses that looked to be veering dangerously out of control. For a while we were stuck behind a slow-moving tractor driven by a farmer who was languidly rolling a cigarette with both hands. Then we began winding up the mountains. As if to finish the story swilling around in my head, Terry gave us an update on what had happened to Eddie since he returned to Thailand.
Eddie’s jubilation at having completed a twenty-year mission dissipated as things went almost immediately pear-shaped. After a separation of two hundred and forty months because of Eddie’s work, it took just six weeks of togetherness to destroy his marriage. Eddie moved out of his wife’s apartment in Bangkok and into a house in the remote village where he grew up. It was a terrible mistake—the ghosts of his parents were everywhere, berating him for breaking their hearts. So what did the fool do? He picked up the thread of his old dream. Dreams can be as dangerous as anything else. If you go through the years, changing with age and experience, and you forget to overhaul your dreams as well, you might find yourself in Eddie’s unenviable position: a forty-seven-year-old pursuing the dreams of a twenty-year-old. In Eddie’s case it was worse. He’d forgotten that they weren’t even his dreams to begin with; he’d got them secondhand. And now he had returned to this outrageously isolated community with the intention of setting up shop, only to find that his father’s replacement, now sixty-five years old, had the job well and truly sewn up.
We arrived around sunset at Eddie’s place, a dilapidated house set in a small clearing. The hills surrounding it were covered by thick jungle. When Terry turned off the engine, I could hear a river running. We were really in the middle of nowhere. The isolation of the place made me vaguely ill. Having lived in a hut in the northwest corner of a labyrinth, I was no stranger to austerity or solitude, but this was something else. The house made me shudder. Maybe I’d read too much or seen too many films, but when you consider your life in terms of its dramatic attributes, as I did, everything becomes instantly loaded with meaning. A house is not just a house—it is a location where an episode of your life is staged, and I thought this remote house was an absolutely perfect setting for a menacing low point and possibly, if we stayed long enough, a tragic climax.
Terry honked the horn, and Eddie came out waving his arms in a truly berserk manner.
“What’s this? What do you want?”
“Didn’t you tell him we were coming?” I asked Terry.
“What for? Anyway, he knows now. Eddie! We’ve come to see how you’re getting on. Make up the spare rooms, will you? You have guests.”
“I don’t work for you anymore, Terry. You can’t tell me…you can’t just come here and expect…Look, I’m a doctor now. I don’t want any funny business up here.”
“My spies tell me you haven’t had one patient.”
“How did you…They’re a little suspicious of outsiders. And I haven’t lived here for many, many years. It takes time to build a reputation, that’s all. Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? You can’t stay. My position here is precarious enough. The last thing I need is you giving me a bad name.”
“My God, Eddie, we’re not going to run around the village in our underwear, we just want some peace and quiet, see a little scenery, and anyway, is it so strange for a doctor to take in a dying man and his family for a few weeks?”
“Weeks? You intend to stay for weeks?”
Terry laughed loudly and slapped Eddie on the back.
“Him too?” Eddie asked quietly, looking in Dad’s direction. Dad shot a look back that was lifeless and cold. Then Eddie looked at me with a half smile that approximated warmth but was not quite warm. I had recently experienced from the Australian people the concept of hate by association and so recognized the size and smell of it. Terry grabbed his bag and headed into the house. The rest of us followed cautiously. I paused at the door and turned back to Eddie. He hadn’t moved. He was standing next to the Jeep, perfectly still. He looked as if he couldn’t endure any of us. And who could blame him? Individually we were all quite pleasant people, but together we were unendurable.
I am not aware of what it is about my body that attracts mosquitos of all races and religions, I can only say that I doused my body in insect repellent and lit a thousand citronella candles, but for some reason they just kept coming. I removed the mosquito net from the bed and wrapped it like a shroud around my body. Through the diaphanous netting, I took in my surroundings. To say the furnishings were minimal was an understatement: four white walls, a creaky chair with a broken leg, a wobbly table, and a wafer-thin mattress. A window looked out on the thick vegetation of the jungle. I had insisted on the bedroom farthest away from everybody. There was a back door—good for entering and exiting without having to see anyone, I’d thought.
I felt a mosquito on my arm. They were tunneling through the net. I tore it off in disgust and thought: What am I going to do here? In Bangkok, between the sex shows and the Buddhist temples, there was plenty to keep me occupied. Here, Dad’s dying was likely to make all non-Dad-dying thoughts virtually impossible. What was there to do other than watch the man deteriorate?
After a silent dinner during which we all eyed each other suspiciously, where the air was thick with secret desires and no one said the unsayable so there was nothing much to be said, Eddie gave me a tour of the place.
There wasn’t much to see. Eddie’s father had been an amateur painter as well as a doctor and had, unfortunately, found a way to combine his two interests. On the walls hung hauntingly realistic depictions of the bowels, heart, lun
gs, and kidneys and one of an aborted fetus who, despite his bad luck, appeared to be smiling wickedly. I didn’t bother pretending I liked the paintings, and Eddie didn’t expect me to. I followed him into his office, a large, immaculate room with wooden shutters. It had the kind of order and tidiness one finds in extremely finicky people and in people who have absolutely nothing to do with their time. As I knew Eddie had been waiting here for weeks on end without a single patient, it was clear which case it was.
“This was my father’s office. This is where he saw patients, did his medical research, and avoided my mother. Everything is exactly how he left it. Actually, why did I say that? That’s not true. When he died, my mother packed everything into boxes, so I have rearranged everything exactly as I remember him having it.”
It was your standard doctor’s office: an oversized desk, a comfy padded chair for the doctor, a straight-backed uncomfortable one for the patient, a raised examination table, a bookshelf with thousand-page medical manuals, and, on a side table, perfectly arranged surgical implements from not only this century but the last two as well. Unfortunately, there were more vulgar paintings of body parts on the walls, paintings that seemed to vilify the human as a reputable organism. The atmosphere in the room was heavy, because of either the lingering death of the father or the present-day frustrations of the son.
“When I took up your uncle’s offer, my parents broke off all contact with me. Now, here they are.”
“Who?”
“My parents.” Eddie motioned to two earthenware pots I thought were bookends.
“Their ashes?”
“No, their spirits.”
