by Steve Toltz
“Less messy.”
So the spirits of Eddie’s deceased parents were kept on a high shelf. Out of reach of children.
“I wait here every day. Not one single patient has come by. I’ve introduced myself around, but they’re totally uninterested in trying out anyone new. I’m not even sure how much business they throw around anyway. These people don’t consult doctors for minor ailments, and hardly even for major ones. But I’m determined to stick it out. After all, I went to medical school, didn’t I? So why shouldn’t I be a doctor? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write off those five years of university as a learning experience?”
Apparently Eddie was completely oblivious of the glaring contradiction in his perspective on wasted time. He had chosen to fixate on the five years of medical school rather than the more obvious twenty years of chaperoning Dad and me.
He sat on the edge of his desk and picked something from his teeth with his finger. He stared at me solemnly, as though picking food from his teeth were something he had learned at medical school.
“There’re so many things I wanted to say to you over the years, Jasper. Things I could never say because they conflicted with the requirements of my job.”
“Such as?”
“Well, as you may have figured out, I hate your father. And that the Australian people bought his bullshit even for one minute degrades them as a nation, and degrades all people everywhere.”
“I suppose.”
“Anyway, the point is, I hate your father. No, I loathe him.”
“That’s your right.”
“But what you might not know is, I don’t like you much either.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“You see? You don’t even ask me why. That’s what I don’t like about you. You’re smug and condescending. In fact, you’ve been smug and condescending ever since you were five years old.”
“And that’s my right.”
Eddie leered at me menacingly. Now that he was no longer pretending to like us, it felt as if he had become sinister overnight.
“See? Smug and condescending. I’ve observed you your entire life. I probably know you better than you know yourself. You pride yourself on knowing people and what they’re thinking. But you don’t know yourself, do you? You know what it is that you especially don’t know? That you’re an extension of your father. When he dies, you will become him. I have no doubt about that. People can inherit thoughts—they can even inherent whole minds. Do you believe that?”
“Not really.” Maybe.
“When I met your father, he was just a little older than you are now. And you know what I see in you? The same exact man. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him in your core. That’s where you don’t know yourself. I’m sure every time you hear yourself say something that’s an echo of your father, you think it’s just habit. It’s not. It’s him inside you, waiting to come out. And that’s your blind spot, Jasper.”
I gulped, despite myself. The blind spot. The fucking blind spot. Everyone has one. Even the geniuses. Even Freud and Nietzsche had mile-wide blind spots that wound up corrupting some element of their work. So was this mine? That I was sickeningly similar to my father, that I was turning into him, that I was going to inherit not just his antisocial behavior but his diseased thought processes as well? I was already worried that my depression back in Australia had had echoes of his depression.
Eddie sat on his examination table and kicked his legs in the air.
“It’s so refreshing to be speaking my mind. Keeping secrets is exhausting. I would like to tell you the truth, not just about you, but about me and what you and your father and your uncle have done to my life. So you know. It’s important that you know. Because when I finish telling you, you’ll understand why you must convince everyone to leave this house at once. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to make everyone leave. Before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Just listen. When Terry offered me the job of looking after your dad, I took it as a way to escape a future I was uncertain of. ‘Help them out when they need help, make sure they keep out of trouble, and take photos of them, as many photographs as you can,’ Terry said. That was my mission. Didn’t sound too tough. How was I supposed to know it was going to ruin my life? It’s my own fault, though, I’ll admit. I accepted a devil’s bargain. Have you noticed that in books and movies the Devil is always depicted with a sense of humor while God is deadly serious? I think in reality it would be the other way around, don’t you?”
“Probably.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit. But watching your lives was like watching an accident in slow motion. It was compelling. When I was away from Australia, away from your dad and you, I felt I was missing episodes of my favorite TV show. It was maddening. I’d be making love to my wife and thinking, ‘What are they up to now? What trouble are they in? I’m missing it, dammit!’ And I found I made excuses to return earlier and earlier. And I’d go back to listen to your father’s insipid, unending diatribes, but I couldn’t drag myself away. I was hooked. I was a junkie, plain and simple. I was hopelessly addicted to you.”
Eddie was kicking wildly now and bouncing up and down. I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to. I just had to weather this outburst.
“For twenty years I tried to get away, to wean myself off this drug of your family. But I couldn’t. When I wasn’t with you, I didn’t know who I was. I was not a person, I was a nothing. When I went back to Australia and saw you both embroiled in some ridiculous episode, I felt alive. I felt such brightness it practically came out my eyes. My wife wanted a child, but how could I when I already had two children? Yes, I love you both as much as I hate you both, more than you will ever know. I can tell you, after I deposited you two in Terry’s lap, I was devastated. Mission accomplished. I knew as soon as I moved home that I could no longer stand to be with my wife. And I was right. She couldn’t understand why I was irritable, why I was empty. I couldn’t share the emptiness with her and I didn’t love her enough for her to fill it with love, so I left her and came up here. You see? I am completely empty, and I’ve come here in order to try to fill myself. Now do you understand why you must leave? I’ve come here to find myself again, to find out who I am. I’m building myself from the ground up. Your father is always talking about projects. You were my project. And now I need another one. That’s why I need patients. I’m continuing my life where I was interrupted, and obviously I can’t do it with you two here. That’s why you have to talk your uncle into taking you all out of here.”
“Why don’t you just throw us out?”
“Well, Mr. Smug, Mr. Condescension, I can’t. You might think your uncle’s all fun and games, but I’ve seen the violence he’s capable of.”
“Terry’s pretty stubborn. I don’t think I’d have much luck convincing him of anything.”
“Please, Jasper. Please. Your father’s dying. And he is going to do one more crazy thing, and it’s going to be a big one. You must know that too. You can feel it coming, can’t you? It’s like an approaching storm. It’s going to be something wild and unexpected and dangerous and stupid. I stay up nights thinking about it. What is he going to do? Do you know? What is it? I must know. But I can’t. You see? You must leave!”
“I’ll try to speak to Terry.”
“You don’t try, you do. What do you think will happen when your father dies? It’s you that will take up his heritage of doing crazy, unbelievable things. And you will turn out to be an even bigger spectacle than your dad. And that’s why I promise you, if you don’t leave now, I will follow you doggedly for your whole life until you have a son, and then I will have a son just so my son can follow your son. Don’t you see? This is an addiction that can go on for generations! For centuries! We’re at a crucial point here, Jasper. If I don’t get off you now, I will be attached to you forever.”
That was
an unpleasant thought.
“Anyway. That’s it. Go speak to your uncle. If you stay, I don’t know what I’ll do. Slit your throats in your sleep, probably.” With that thought he let out a laugh, the kind where you don’t see any teeth. “Leave me alone now. I must pray to my parents.”
Eddie laid some brightly colored flowers on the floor and knelt in front of them and started muttering. He prayed daily for success, which was bad news—when a doctor in your neighborhood prays for business, you’d better hope his gods aren’t listening.
I poked my head into Terry’s room on the way to bed. Even though I’d knocked and he’d said come in, he hadn’t bothered to throw clothes on. He was standing naked in the center of the room.
“Hey, Jasper! What’s going on?”
“Never mind. Goodnight.”
I closed the door. I wasn’t in the mood for chatting to a fat naked man at the moment. Then again, I wasn’t in the mood for having my throat slit in my sleep either. I reopened the door. Terry hadn’t moved.
“Jesus, can’t you knock?”
“Eddie’s gone crazy. He’s threatening to slit our throats in our sleep.”
“That’s not especially hospitable, is it?”
“I don’t think he wants to kill us, I just think that by being here, Dad and I are likely to push him over the edge.”
“So?”
“So shouldn’t we get out of here?”
“Probably.”
“Good.”
“But we’re not going to.”
“Why not?”
His eyebrows were all bunched up, and his mouth was open as if any second he were going to speak. Any second now.
“Terry. Are you all right?”
“Of course I am. I’m a little agitated, that’s all. I’m not used to being agitated. You know, I’ve been away from my family for so long, it’s having a funny effect on me having you two here. I don’t feel quite myself. I don’t feel quite as…free. I’ve started fretting about you two, if you want to know the truth. And I haven’t fretted about anything or anyone in a long time.”
“And Caroline? Are you fretting about her too?”
Terry’s face turned purple in a split second. Then his eyes went all funny. I felt I was standing outside a house watching someone flick the lights on and off.
“You’re a pretty intuitive guy, Jasper. What is your intuition telling you? Mine is telling me that something is going to happen in this house. I’m not sure what. It could be a good thing, though I doubt it. It’ll probably be a bad thing. It could even be a very bad thing. And maybe we should get out of here, but I’m insanely curious. Aren’t you? Curiosity is one of my favorite things. Intense curiosity is like one of those tantric orgasms, a long, maddening, delayed pleasure. That’s what it is.”
I said goodnight, closed the door, and left him alone in his nakedness, thinking of normal families who have normal problems like alcoholism and gambling and wife-beating and drug addiction. I envied them.
I woke early the next morning. My throat was unslit. The sun was hot already at six-thirty. From my window I could see mist oozing out of the jungle. We were at a high altitude, and the mist hid the mountain peaks from sight. I’d had a bad night’s sleep, thinking about everything Eddie had said. I knew he was right. Dad was planning something, even if he was doing it subconsciously. But didn’t I already know what it was? I felt as though I did, but I couldn’t quite see it. It was concealed somewhere in my mind, somewhere dark and far away. In fact, suddenly I felt I knew everything that would happen in the future but had for some reason forgotten it, and further, I thought that everybody on the planet also knew the future, only they had forgotten it too, and that fortunetellers and prognosticators weren’t people with supernatural insights after all, they were just people with good memories.
I dressed and went out the back door so as not to run into anybody.
At the back of the house, at the edge of the jungle, was a shed. I went inside. There on rickety wooden shelves were paints and paintbrushes. Leaning against the wall were a number of blank canvases. So this was where Eddie’s father had painted his disgusting artworks. It appeared to have once been a chicken coop, although there were no chickens now. There were chicken feathers, though, and a couple of ancient broken eggshells. On the floor was a half-finished painting of a pair of kidneys; Eddie’s father had obviously got it into his head to use egg yolk to get the right kind of yellow.
I picked up a paintbrush. The bristles, caked in dried paint, were stiff as wood. Outside the chicken coop there was a trough filled with muddy rainwater, as if it had fallen from the sky that way, brown and gluggy. I rinsed the brush thoroughly in the water, flicking the hairs with my fingers. As I did this, I saw Caroline walking from the house down the hill. She was walking quickly, though every few steps she’d stop and stand perfectly still before continuing on her way, as if she were late for an appointment she dreaded keeping. I watched her until she disappeared into the jungle.
I went back into the chicken coop, opened a can of paint, dipped the brush in, and started attacking a canvas. I let my brush float across it, seeing what it wanted to paint. It seemed to favor eyes. Hollow eyes, eyes like juicy plums, eyes like germs seen through a microscope, eyes within eyes, concentric eyes, overlapping eyes. The canvas was sick with them. I had to look away; these thick painted eyes were burrowing into me in a way that was more than simply unsettling: they seemed to be moving something inside me. It took me another minute to work out that they were my father’s eyes. No wonder they made me sick.
I put the canvas down and lifted another in its place. The brush started up again. This time it went for a whole face. A smug, self-satisfied face with wide, mocking eyes, a bushy mustache, a twisted brown mouth, and yellow teeth. The face of either a white slave-owner or a prison warden. I stared at the painting and felt a pang of anxiety, but I couldn’t work out why. It was as if a thread in my brain had become loose, but I was afraid to pull on it in case my whole being unraveled. Then I realized: the painting—it was the face. The face I’d dreamed about in childhood. The imperishable floating face I had seen my whole life. As I painted, I was able to recall details I didn’t know I had actually seen before: bags under the eyes, a small gap between the front teeth, wrinkles at the corners of the smiling mouth. I had a premonition that one day this face would come down from the sky to head-butt me. Suddenly the heat in the chicken coop became unbearable. I felt stifled. Being inside a humid chicken coop with that haughty face and a thousand reproductions of my father’s eyes was suffocating.
That afternoon I was lying in my bed listening to the rain. I felt groundless. Traveling on a fake passport probably meant that I could never return to Australia. That made me nationless. And, worse, the fake name on my passport was one I didn’t like, that I was actually sickened by, and unless I organized another fake passport, I might be Kasper until the end of my days.
I stayed in bed all afternoon, unable to force Eddie’s words out of my head, his supposition that I was turning into my father. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him. That’s where you don’t know yourself. That’s your blind spot, Jasper. Could that be true? Wouldn’t that coincide with Dad’s old idea that I was actually him prematurely reincarnated? And now that I was thinking of it, wasn’t there perhaps already some frightening evidence of this? Ever since Dad had started dying again, hadn’t I gotten physically stronger? Were we on a kind of seesaw—he goes down, I go up?
There was a knock on my door. It was Caroline. She had been caught in the rain and was drenched from head to toe.
“Jasper—you don’t want your father to die, do you?”
“Well, I don’t have a specific day in mind, but I don’t like the idea of him living forever. So yes, if you put it that way, I suppose I do want him to die.”
She came over and sat on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been into the village. The people around
here are deeply superstitious, and maybe not for nothing. There are still ways we might be able to cure him.”
“You want to make him late for his date with destiny?”
“I want your father to rub this all over his body.” She handed me a small jar with a glutinous, milk-colored substance in it.
“What is it?”
“Oil made of fat melted from the chin of a woman who died in childbirth.”
I looked at the container. I couldn’t tell if it actually contained what she said it did, and I wasn’t thinking of the poor woman who died in childbirth, either; I was thinking of the person who melted the fat from her chin.
“Where did you get this, and, more importantly, how much did you pay for it?”
“I got it from an old woman in the village. She said it’s great for cancer.”
Great for cancer?
“Why don’t you do it?”
“Your father isn’t listening to me right now. He doesn’t want me to help him. I can’t even give him a glass of water. You need to get him to rub this oil all over himself.”
“How am I supposed to excite him into rubbing a stranger’s chin fat on his body?”
“That’s what you have to work out.”
“Why me?”
“You’re his son.”
“And you’re his wife.”
“Things are not so good between us at the moment,” she said, without elaborating. Not that she needed to—I was thoroughly familiar with the sharp-edged love triangle threatening to cut us all to shreds.
I procrastinated in the hallway for a while, but finally I went into Dad’s room. He was bent over his desk, not reading or writing anything, just bending.
“Dad,” I said.
He didn’t give any sign he knew I was there. Citronella candles were spread all around the room. He had a mosquito net above the bed, and one over the armchair in the corner too.
“Are the insects bothering you?” I asked.
“Do you think I’m welcoming them like old friends?” he said, without turning around.
“It’s just that I have some insect repellent if you want it.”
