by Steve Toltz
As she said this, the two policemen got into their van and drove away. The crowd filled in the space where the van had been.
“They just told the police your doctor friend had already moved to Cambodia.”
I really wished she’d refrain from describing Eddie as my “doctor friend,” although I understood it was good for clarification, as there were three doctors in this story. But was I being unbearably dense? Why had the farmers told the police that Eddie had moved to Cambodia? And why was she excited about it?
“Don’t you see? They’re going to take the law into their own hands!”
“Meaning?”
“They’re going to kill him. And not only him. You too.”
“Me?”
“And those other Australians who came here to help him.”
“Wait a minute! Those Australians are my family! They didn’t do anything. They didn’t know anything about it! I didn’t know anything about it.”
“You’d better not go home,” she said.
“But I didn’t do anything! It was Eddie! This is the second time Eddie has put a lynch mob onto us. My God—my father was right. People are so single-minded about their immortality projects, it brings them down and everyone around them too!”
She looked at me blankly.
What could I do? I couldn’t waste valuable time trying to find the police; I had to get home and warn everyone that an angry mob was coming to tear them apart.
What a dog’s breakfast this trip turned out to be!
“Hey, why are you helping me?”
“I want your necklace.”
Why not? I had been foolishly superstitious by wearing it at all. I took off the repugnant amulet and gave it to her. She hurried away. I’d worn it only out of desperation, I suppose. If you don’t keep your guard up and someone tells you it has magical qualities, you can find comfort in a grain of sand.
The group below set off on foot through the jungle. I followed them, thinking of Eddie and my family and of their surprise when the bloodthirsty mob turned up to kill them. I had to make sure the mob and I didn’t converge; it was unlikely, not being Thai myself, that I would be assimilated into their number. I would be swallowed whole, as an appetizer. So I kept my distance. But I didn’t know the way home—I’d have to follow the mob back to Eddie’s house. The inherent dilemma was obvious. How could I arrive in advance and warn everyone that a murderous mob was on the way when I had to follow the mob to get there?
Yet another life-or-death matter. Oh well.
As the group moved, others joined it, forming spontaneously into a mobile crowd, then a pack, a sturdy vessel of revenge. They were a kind of human tsunami, gathering speed and size. There was no dispersing them. It was a petrifying sight. Eerily, they seemed to be gearing up for a silent massacre. This was not a pack with a war cry, this was a tight-lipped group rolling wordlessly forward. As I ran, I thought how I hate any kind of mob—I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of supermodels, that’s how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.
Interestingly, it was a democratic crowd. Anyone could join in to mutilate Eddie and my family. There were even a few children. That surprised me. And some elderly gentlemen too, who despite being timid and frail were not struggling to keep up. It was as if they had been absorbed by the mob and taken on the energy of it, as if their thin, weak bodies were now nimble fingers of a powerful hand. But weren’t these people supposed to be Buddhists? Well, what of it? Buddhists can be pushed over the edge like anyone else, can’t they? To be fair, Eddie had burst into their inner serenity with poison and murder and blackmail and rape. Inner serenity isn’t impervious to a ferocious assault like that. Incidentally, none of them were smiling like the Buddha. They were smiling like the serpent, like a forty-headed dragon.
Even the sun took on a menacing quality. It was dropping fast. Naturally, I thought, this was to be no brightly lit spectacle of raw carnage. It was to take place in the dark.
But what’s this? The mob was picking up the pace! I was already pooped, and now I’d have to run at breakneck speed. How annoying! The last marathon I had intended to run was when I beat 200 million spermatozoa for the egg. Now here I was again. In truth, it was kind of exciting. I was so aware of what a relentless thinker I was that action felt surprisingly good. Murderous mob on its way—what are you going to do about it?
The dusk infused the sky with a soft, syrupy red: a head-wound red. As I ran, I wished I had a machete—it was heavy going, tunneling through all that thick vegetation. I was taking furtive passages through shaggy ferns, where the last of the sunlight only made it in random splotches. The jungle with its usual threatening noises had the surround sound of an expensive home entertainment system.
A half hour later I was losing them. Dammit. What was I going to do? What could I do? I ran, I fell, I vomited, I got up again. Why had we come here? Fucking Thais. An Australian mob might kick the shit out of you, but you’d crawl home afterward. This was murder! No, slaughter! My dad! And Caroline! And Terry! All alone up there, isolated and unprepared. I ran on to the point of exhaustion. And the heat. And the mosquitos. And the fear. I’m not going to make it. How can I warn them?
I suppose I could…
No.
Unless…
I had an idea. But it was foolish, desperate, impossible. I must be out of my mind. Or just my imagination amusing itself. But what an idea! Here it was: Dad and I were connected in deeper ways than just father and son, and I’d long had the suspicion that we were unintentionally reading each other’s minds every so often, and so if I concentrated intensely enough, if I only put in a little psychic effort, maybe I could send him a message. Absurd! Brilliant?
The problem was, it was difficult to summon up that kind of concentration while running, and if I stopped and it didn’t work, I might lose not only the mob but with them my way home. And everyone would die!
Did I really think we could read each other’s minds? Should I risk it? Running through the foliage was getting more difficult; I’d push aside a branch only to have it whip me in the face. The jungle was getting aggressive. The mob was getting away from me. I was wilting in the heat. My family was going to die.
Should I risk it?
Fuck it.
I stopped. The murdering rabble disappeared over a hill. My heart was aching in my chest. I breathed deeply to placate her.
In order to make contact with Dad, I needed to get myself into a deep meditative state. I needed to hurry, of course, but you can’t hurry absolute inner quiet. You have to coax it over time. You can’t transform the essential qualities of your mind as if you’re running to catch a bus.
I got myself in the textbook position. I sat on the ground cross-legged, concentrated on my breathing, and repeated my mantra, “Wow.” This brought about a quiet enough mind, but to be honest, I felt a bit blunt in the head. I had some clarity, enough to drift to the edge of consciousness, but no further. I felt a twinge of bliss too—well, so what? I needed to go further than I ever had, and here I was, going through the motions. From everything I had read about insight meditation, I had learned that there was a system to be used—this is how you sit, this is how you breathe, this is how you concentrate on your breathing. But using this system was a routine that seemed the opposite of the true meditative state I needed. Now that I had practiced this meditation thing a number of times, always the same way, with the same breathing, the same concentration, I felt I might as well be working on a factory line screwing tops on Coca-Cola bottles. My mind was peaceful, hypnotized, numb. That was no good.
Trying to calm my excited mind meant that a conflict was going on in my head. That burned up essential energy I needed in order to communicate telepathically with Dad. So then maybe I had to stop concentrating, but how did I achieve a quiet mind without concentrating?
First of all, instead of sitting cross-legged, I stood up and leaned against a
tree like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then I listened not to my breathing, as Anouk advised, but to the noises around me. I didn’t close my eyes either. I opened them wide.
I was observing the wet, shaggy trees in the late-afternoon sunlight without concentrating. I made my mind astonishingly alert. I didn’t just observe my breath, either, but kept an eye on my thoughts. They fell down like a shower of sparks. I watched them for a long time. I pursued them, not where they went but where they came from, back into the past. I could see how they held me together. I could see how they put me together, these thoughts—the true ingredients of the Jasper broth.
I started walking and the silence of my mind went with me, though it was not the absence-of-sound kind of silence. It was a huge, deafening, visual silence. No one had ever told me about this kind of silence. It was really loud. And as I walked through the jungle, I managed without effort to maintain this clarity.
Then my mind became quiet. Really, really quiet. It happened instantaneously. I was suddenly free of inner friction. Free of fear. That freedom somehow helped all my spineless impediments to melt away. I thought: The world is swelling, it is here, it is bursting in my mouth, it is running down my throat, it is filling up my eyes. Strangely, this big thing had entered me, though I was not bigger for it. I was smaller. It felt good to be small. Look, I know how this sounds, but take it from me, this was not a mystical experience. And I’m not kidding myself, either. I’m not a saint. Not for all the breasts in California would I, like Francis of Assisi, purify the lesions of lepers with my tongue, certainly not, but—and this is where I’m heading—I felt something I’d never experienced in my life before: love. I know this sounds crazy, but I think I actually loved my enemies: Eddie, my family, the murdering mob en route to slaughter my family, even the virulence of the recent outburst of hate by the Australian people. Now, let’s not get carried away; I didn’t adore my enemies, and while I loved them, I was not in love with them. But still, my instinctive revulsion toward them had evaporated somehow. This excess of feeling frightened me a little—this frenzy of love that tore through the butter of my hate. So then it seemed Anouk was wrong; the real fruit of meditation wasn’t inner peace but love. In fact, when you see life in its totality for the first time and you feel genuine love for that totality, inner peace seems like a kind of small, petty goal.
As nice as all this was, I realized I was not communicating with my father. I almost gave up and started wondering where that furious mob had gotten to when suddenly, without even trying, I conjured up Dad’s face. Then I saw his hunched body. He was in his room, bending over his desk. I looked closer. He was writing a letter to one of the Sydney newspapers. I could make out only the salutation at the beginning of the letter. “Dear cunts” was crossed out and replaced with “My dear cunts.” I was convinced this was not my imagination but a real image of Dad right now, in the present. I thought: Dad! Dad! It’s me! A riotous mob is coming to murder Eddie and everyone in the house! Get out! Get everyone out! I tried to send him an image of the rioting mob so he’d know what they looked like when they turned up. I sent him an image of the mob as one common body closing in on the house, armed with Old World farming implements. They had scythes, for God’s sake!
Without my permission, the vision faded away. I opened my eyes. It was a clouded-over black night, so dark I could have been underground. All around me the jungle was making formidable groaning sounds. How long had I been here? I had no way of knowing.
I started walking again, pushing branches out of my way, my eyes still full of visions, my nose filled with out-of-place odors (cinnamon and maple syrup), my tongue with out-of-place tastes (toothpaste and Vegemite). I had the sensation of being in the world as never before.
As I walked, I wondered, would they find the house empty? Had Dad heard my warning? Or had I just given up trying to save my family’s lives? I walked without knowing where I was going. I let my instinct guide me through the jungle, stomping on luscious plants that gave off a sweet, heady odor. I paused to drink the cold, delicious water of a small waterfall. Then I moved on again, stumbling over hills and through the dense foliage.
I felt no fear. I felt such a part of the jungle that it seemed it would have been rude of the animals to venture out to eat me. Then I moved into a clearing that ran down a long hill where I could see the moon rising. All the eyes of the flowers and the mouths of the trees and the chins of strange rock formations seemed to be telling me I was going in the right direction. That was a relief, because there were no tracks. Somehow the silent mass of vengeful people had left everything undisturbed, as if they had been floating through the jungle like some formless ancient substance.
When I finally found Eddie’s place, the lights were blazing inside. The wind was violently knocking at the windows and the doors. The sight of the house made my state of oneness vanish instantaneously. The world was hopelessly fragmented again; the absolute connectedness between me and all living things was gone. Now I felt indifferent to all living things. I couldn’t care less about them. The divisions between us were as thick as columns of bone and cartilage. There was me and there was them. Any fool could see it.
Hiding behind a tree, I felt the blood cells racing through my heart. I remembered something Dad had once promised to teach me: how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I hoped he actually knew this essential skill.
Of course I was too late. The door was wide open, and the mob was already leaving one by one, armed with scythes and hammers and pitchforks. There would be no point facing the mob or its decrystallized form, because presumably it had already done what it came to do. There was nothing to be gained in getting hacked to pieces myself.
Blood covered the hands and the faces of the mob. Their clothes were so stained, they would just have to be thrown away. I waited until the last intruder left and then waited a few moments longer. I watched the house and tried to feel no fear. Even after all Dad had taught me, I was not prepared for such a moment. Nothing had prepared me for walking into a place where my family had been butchered. I struggled to recall any nugget of wisdom from my early childhood that might offer me advice on how to proceed, but I couldn’t, so I went forward into the house, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually defenseless. Of course I had many times imagined them already dead (as soon as I feel an emotional attachment to someone, I imagine his death, so as not to be disappointed later on), but in my mind they were always relatively clean corpses, quite neat in fact, and until now it had not occurred to me to prepare myself by imagining my loved ones’ brains splattered against a wall, their bodies lying sprawled in a pool of blood/shit/guts, et cetera.
The first body I saw was Eddie’s. He looked as if he’d been run over a thousand times by a champion ice-skater. His face was so cut up I could barely make out it was him, except for his eyes, which had that frozen look of surprise characteristic of Botox and sudden death, staring up at the earthenware pots with his parents’ spirits in them, the ones who had purportedly been watching over him. It was easy to see the look of reproach in his eyes. Goodbye and good riddance, Eddie. You took your crumminess to its limit and it collapsed on top of you. Tough luck.
With superhuman effort, my legs took me to the next room. There I saw Uncle Terry on his knees, and from behind he looked like the back of a VW Beetle about to do a reverse park into a tight spot. Sweat poured off the fat folds in his neck. I could hear him crying. He spun around to look at me, then turned back and raised his chubby arm, motioning toward Dad’s bedroom.
I went in.
Dad was also on his knees, swaying gently over the mutilated body of Caroline. His eyes were as wide as they could go, as though pried open with matchsticks. The love of his life was on her back, blood seeping from a dozen slashes. Her dead eyes were fixed in an insupportable gaze. I had to look away. There was something disturbing in those eyes. She looked like someone who had said something offensive and wanted to take it back. Later I found ou
t she had died trying to protect Eddie, of all people; she was killed inadvertently, and it was her death that had turned the mob on itself, split it into factions—those who thought that it was OK to kill a middle-aged woman and those who thought it was out of order. That had effectively ended their rampage and sent them home.
We buried Eddie and Caroline in the garden. It had started raining again, and we had no choice but to give them a wet, muddy burial, which was appropriate for Eddie maybe. But watching Caroline’s body disappear into the muck made us all sick and ashamed. Dad was having trouble breathing, as if something were blocking his airway—maybe his heart.
The three of us drove back to Bangkok in silence, lost in the kind of grief that makes every smile in your life afterward less sincere. On the way Dad sat in absolute stillness, though he made little noises to let us know that every minute left in his life would be an unendurable torture. I knew he was blaming himself for her death, and not only himself but Terry too, for employing Eddie to begin with, and not only Terry but fate, chance, God, art, science, humanity, the Milky Way. Nothing was exonerated.
When we arrived back at Terry’s house, we retired to our separate bedrooms to marvel at how quickly the human heart snaps shut and to wonder how we might ever pry it open again. It was only two days later, spurred either by Caroline’s murder or by the black dog barking in the manure of his heart, or by mourning crowding out rational thought, or maybe because even after a lifetime of reflecting on death, he still couldn’t quite comprehend the inevitability of his own, that Dad suddenly emerged from his grief-induced hypnosis and announced his final project. As Eddie had predicted, it was the looniest yet. And after a lifetime of watching Dad make improbable decision after improbable decision, and being in some way a victim of each one, what surprised me most was that I could still be surprised.
SEVEN
I don’t want to die here,” Dad said.
“What’s the matter?” Terry asked. “Don’t you like your room?”
