by Steve Toltz
“I already have some.”
“This is a new sort. Apparently the locals use it.”
Dad turned to me. I stepped forward and put the jar of melted chin fat in his hand.
“You have to smear it over your whole body.”
Dad unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents. “It smells funny.”
“Dad—do you think we’re similar?”
“In what way—physically?”
“No, I don’t know. As people.”
“That would be your worst nightmare, wouldn’t it?”
“I have one or two worse ones.”
We heard a buzzing. We both looked around but couldn’t see where it was coming from. Dad took off his shirt and scooped a handful of the melted chin fat from the jar and started smearing it over his chest and belly.
“You want some?”
“No, I’m good.”
I started to feel queasy, now thinking of the woman who had died in childbirth. I wondered if her baby had lived, and if one day he might not be annoyed that he hadn’t been the one to inherit the fat of his mother’s chin.
“Eddie’s turned out to be a different sort of bloke than we thought, hasn’t he?” Dad said, coating his underarms.
I was tempted to recount Eddie’s sick monologue and menacing threats, but I didn’t want to add any further stress to his stressed-out body.
“It was still good for you to have a good friend, even if it was all a lie.”
“I know.”
“Eddie was the first person to tell me anything useful about Astrid.”
“Was he?”
“He led me to your Paris journal.”
“You read it?”
“Cover to cover.”
“Made you sick?”
“Extremely.”
“Well, that’s what you get for snooping.”
As he said this he removed his sandals and rubbed the chin fat between his toes. It made a squishy sound.
“In it you said you thought I might be the premature reincarnation of yourself.”
Dad cocked his head to one side, closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again. He looked at me as though he had just performed a magic trick in which I vanish and he was annoyed that it hadn’t worked. “What’s your point?”
“Do you still believe that?”
“I think it’s highly possible, even when you consider that I don’t believe in reincarnation.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Exactly.”
I felt an old fury welling up inside me. Who is this irritating man? I walked out and slammed the door. Then I opened it again.
“That’s not insect repellent,” I said.
“I know. You don’t think I recognize melted chin fat when I see it?”
I stood there, my mind a complete blank.
“I was eavesdropping, you little idiot,” he admitted.
“So what’s wrong with you? Why would you put that crap on your body?”
“I’m dying, Jasper! Don’t you get it? What do I care what I put on my body? Chin fat, stomach fat, goat feces. So what? When you’re dying, even disgust loses its meaning.”
Dad was hurrying to his doom, there was no denying that. He looked more ravaged each day. Ravaged mentally too—he couldn’t shake the fear that Caroline wanted to go back to Uncle Terry, or that we were all discussing this possibility behind his back. He was paranoid that we were constantly talking about him. This fear soon became a hot topic of conversation between the rest of us. That was how he breathed life into his own delusions and set them free.
Our dinners continued to be as silent as the first; the only noise was Dad sighing loudly in between spoonfuls of spicy soup. Reading between the sighs, I knew that he was growing increasingly furious because he wasn’t getting enough pity from anyone. He didn’t want a lot. Just the minimum would do. Terry was no help there—he was still stuck on the idea of giving Dad pleasure and stimulation; and Caroline was even less help—she pretended she’d stopped believing in his death altogether. She applied herself to the unenviable task of trying to reverse the course of his cancer; she was dragging in every sort of witchcraft—psychospiritual healing, visualization, karma repair. All around him was a loathsome form of positivism, anathema to a dying man. And probably because Caroline was obsessed with trying to save Dad’s life and Terry his soul, Dad became obsessed with suicide, saying that to die of natural causes was just plain lazy. The more they tried to save him with outlandish methods, the more he insisted on taking the matter of dying into his own hands.
One night I heard Dad screaming. I came out of my bedroom to see Terry chasing him around the living room with a pillow.
“What’s going on?”
“He’s trying to kill me!”
“I don’t want you to die. You want you to die. I’m just trying to help you out.”
“Stay away from me, you fucker! I said I wanted to commit suicide. I didn’t say I wanted to be murdered.”
Poor Dad. It’s not that he didn’t have clear ideas, it’s just that he had too many, and they contradicted, effectively canceling each other out. Dad didn’t want to be smothered by his brother, but he couldn’t bring himself to do his own smothering.
“Let me do this,” Terry said. “I was always there for you, and I always will be.”
“You weren’t there for me when our mother tried to kill me.”
“What are you talking about?”
Dad stared at Terry a long time. “Nothing,” he said finally.
“You know what? You don’t know how to die because you don’t know who you are.”
“Well, who am I?”
“You tell me.”
After some hesitation, Dad described himself as a “seer of limited epiphanies.” I thought that was pretty good, but Terry thought he was something else entirely: a Christ figure who couldn’t summon the courage to sacrifice himself, a Napoleon who didn’t have the stomach for battle, and a Shakespeare who didn’t have a gift with words. It was clear we were getting closer to defining who Dad was.
Dad let out a low moan and stared at the floor. Terry put his wide, thick hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“I want you to admit that despite having lived for so long on this earth, you don’t know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, how can you be what you are?”
Dad didn’t respond in words but let out another moan, like an animal who had just visited his parents in a butcher shop window.
I went to bed wondering, Do I know who I am? Yes, I do: I’m Kasper. No, I mean Jasper. Above all, I am not my father. I am not turning into my father. I am not a premature reincarnation of my father. I’m me, that’s all. No one more, no one less.
This thinking nauseated me, and it felt like the nausea was changing the shape of my face. I climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror. I wasn’t looking better or worse, simply different. Soon I might not be able to recognize myself at all, I thought. Something strange was happening to my face, something that was not simply the process of aging. I was turning into someone not myself.
There was a loud noise outside. Someone or something was in the chicken coop. I looked out but couldn’t see anything from the window, only the reflection of my own slightly unfamiliar face. I turned off the light but even with the moonlight it was too black. The noises continued. I certainly wasn’t going to go out there to investigate. Who knew what creatures existed in the jungles of Thailand, and who knew how hungry they were? All I could do was shut my eyes tight and try to go to sleep.
In the morning I sat up and looked out my window. The coop was still standing—I half expected it to be hanging from a giant slobbering mouth. I headed out the back door.
The grass under my feet was cold and wet. The air had a funny taste to it, like an old mint that had lost most of its flavor. I walked cautiously, readying myself to run back to the house if an animal should leap out at me. Inside, the coop was in chaos. The paint cans had been open
ed and their contents emptied onto the floor and onto my painting of the floating face, which had been torn into little pieces. Who had destroyed my painting? And why? There was nothing to do but go back to bed.
I wasn’t in bed five minutes when I heard someone breathing. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It didn’t do any good. The breathing came closer and closer, until I felt it on my neck. I hoped it wasn’t Eddie. It was. I turned over to see him leaning down over me. I jumped up.
“What do you want?”
“Jasper, what are you doing today?”
“Sleeping, hopefully.”
“I’m going out driving to see if I can drum up some business.”
“OK, then—have a good day.”
“Yeah. You too.”
And still Eddie didn’t move. Even though it was exhausting to do so, I felt sorry for him. There’s no other way to say it. He looked lovesick. It was a bad look.
“I don’t suppose you want to come along. Keep me company?” Eddie asked.
It was a daunting proposition. Spending the day alone with Eddie didn’t particularly appeal to me, and visiting sick people even less, but it turned out there was nothing I could imagine as disagreeable as staying in the house with Dad’s clanking death.
We went traipsing up and down the countryside in the pitiless sun. I thought Australia was hot! The humidity in the mountains was out of control—I could feel beads of sweat forming on my gallbladder. We rode along, not saying much. When Eddie was silent, I felt as if I were the only person alive in the world—although I had that feeling when he was talking too. Wherever we went, people watched us. They couldn’t understand a man in his mid-forties wanting to become a doctor—it was a violation of the natural order. Eddie tried to take it in his stride, but it was obviously wearing him down. He had only vicious, unfriendly words to say about the healthy, peaceful inhabitants of this tranquil village. He couldn’t stand their contentment. He even resisted the cutesy Thai custom of smiling like a cretin in every conceivable situation, although he had to if he wanted to lure patients. But his smile took up only one side of his divided face. I saw the real one, with the furious down-turned lips and restrained homicidal rage in his blinking eye.
We ate lunch by the side of the road. I could feel no wind, but the branches of the trees moved every so often. After lunch Eddie said, “Did you speak to Terry about taking you all out of here?”
“He wants us to stay. He thinks something bad is going to happen in your house and he wants to see what it is.”
“He thinks that, does he? That’s bad news for us.”
Before Eddie could add any more, we heard the roar of a motorcycle charging at full speed.
“Look who it is,” Eddie said.
“Who?”
“That antique doctor. Look how smug he is.”
The motorcycle screamed toward us, stirring up dust. It was hard to believe anyone antique could ride a bike so fast. As the doctor came to a shuddering stop, Eddie corrected his posture. It’s difficult to look like a winner when you’re clearly the loser, but posture plays a part.
The doctor may have been in his sixties, but he had the physique of an Olympic swimmer. I couldn’t detect anything smug about him. He and Eddie exchanged a few words. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I saw Eddie’s eyes widen in a way that darkened his face and made me somehow relieved I couldn’t understand the language. When the doctor had sped off, I asked Eddie, “What did he say? Will he retire soon?”
“There’s bad news. Fuck! Terrible news! The doctor already has a young apprentice, ready to fill his shoes.”
Well, that was the end of that. There was absolutely no use for Eddie in this community, and he knew it.
All I wanted to do was sleep, but the moment I returned to my room, I knew it would be impossible, mostly because Caroline was sitting on the edge of my bed.
“I went into the village today,” she said.
“Please, no more chin fat.”
She handed me a small leather pouch tied with a string. I took it and pulled out a necklace with three strange objects hanging off it.
“A piece of elephant tusk and some kind of tooth,” I guessed.
“Tiger’s tooth.”
“Sure. And what’s that third one?”
“A dried-out cat’s eye.”
“Nice. And I’m to get Dad to wear this, I suppose.”
“No, it’s for you.”
“For me?”
“It’s an amulet,” she said, and placed it around my neck and leaned back and gazed at me as if I were a sad-eyed puppy in a pet store window.
“What’s it for?”
“To protect you.”
“From what?”
“How do you feel?”
“Me? OK, I guess. A little tired.”
“I wish you could have met my son,” she said.
“I wish so too.”
Poor Caroline. It seemed she wanted to conduct several conversations but didn’t know which to pick.
She stood suddenly. “OK, then,” she said, and went out by the back door. I almost took the amulet off but for some reason was overcome with fear of being without it. I thought: The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all—it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.
The next few days I spent at the mirror, confirming my features with the touch of my hand. Nose? Here! Chin? Here! Mouth? Teeth? Forehead? Here! Here! Here! This inane facial roll call was the only valuable way I could think of to pass the time. Somewhere else in the house Caroline, Dad, and Terry were circling each other like rabid dogs. I stayed well away.
I spent many hours sitting with Eddie in his office. It seemed to me it was he, and not I, who had taken on the qualities of an accident in slow motion, and I didn’t want to miss the show. Besides, Caroline’s gift had put doubts about my health into my mind, and I thought it best if I let Eddie examine me. He gave me a thorough going-over. He tested the dull thumping of my heart, my sluggish reflexes; I even let him take my blood. Not that there was a pathology lab in the area where he could send it. He just filled a vial and gave it to me afterward as a keepsake. He said there was nothing wrong with me.
We were in the office listening to the radio through the stethoscope when something extraordinary and unexpected happened—a patient! A woman came in visibly upset and agitated. Eddie put on a solemn face that for all I know might’ve been genuine. I sat there on the edge of my seat while the woman gibbered on. “The doctor’s very sick,” Eddie translated to me. “Maybe dying,” he added, and stared at me for a long time, just to show me he wasn’t smiling.
The three of us piled into Eddie’s car and drove at breakneck speed to the doctor’s house. When we arrived, we heard the most awful screeching imaginable.
“It’s too late. He’s dead,” Eddie said.
“How do you know?”
“That wailing.”
Eddie was right. There was nothing ambiguous about that wailing.
He turned off the engine, grabbed his doctor’s bag, and combed his hair down with his hands.
“But he’s dead—what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to pronounce him dead.”
“Don’t you think that nightmarish howling has pretty much got that covered?”
“Even in a village as remote as this, there are rules. The dead must be officially declared dead,” he said. I took a deep breath and followed Eddie and the woman inside.
A dozen or so people were crowded around the dead doctor’s bed; either they had come to mourn him or had arrived earlier to watch him die. The doctor that I’d seen a few days earlier tearing around the countryside on his motorbike was now perfectly motionless. The man whose statuesque physique I had envied had caved in. His body looked as if someone had gone in with a powerful vacuum cleaner and just sucked everything out: heart, ribcage, spine, everything. Frankly, he didn’t even look like skin and bones, just skin.
I k
ept an eye on Eddie but he’d made himself look harmless and sincere, which was no small trick considering the vile thoughts going on in his head. The village doctor was gone—now it was between Eddie and the young doctor. I could see Eddie thinking, He shouldn’t be too hard to discredit. Eddie straightened himself up, ready to seduce the mourners. It was his first pronouncement as a doctor.
They all spoke to Eddie in quiet tones, and afterward he turned to me and I saw a flicker of derangement, ruthlessness, obstinacy, and deviousness. It’s astonishing the complexity that can be perceived in a face at the right time of day. Eddie took me aside and explained that the apprentice had been here when the doctor had died and had already proclaimed him dead.
“He didn’t waste any time, the little bastard,” Eddie whispered.
“Where’s the young doctor now?”
“He went home to bed. Apparently he’s sick too.”
This time Eddie couldn’t contain his glee. He asked directions to the young doctor’s house and went off, I was certain, to treat him in as negligent and slipshod a manner as possible.
He drove fast. I caught him practicing his sweetest possible smile in the rearview mirror, which meant he was gearing up to play the tyrant.
The young doctor lived by himself in a hut high up in the mountains. Eddie raced inside. It was a struggle to keep up with him. The young doctor was lying on the bed with his clothes on. By the time I entered, Eddie was leaning over him.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
Eddie walked around the bed as if he were doing a victory dance.
“I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
“What’s he got?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a virus, but an uncommon one. I don’t know how to treat it.”
“Well, if the old doctor had it and now the young doctor has it, it must be contagious. I’m getting out of here,” I said, covering my mouth as I left.
“It’s probably not contagious.”
“How do you know? You don’t know what it is.”
“Could be that something crawled inside them and laid eggs in their intestines.”
“That’s just disgusting.”
“Or else it’s something they ate together. I don’t think you have to worry.”
