by Steve Toltz
“The room’s fine. It’s this country.”
The three of us were eating chicken laksas and watching the sun set over the polluted metropolis. As usual, Dad was nauseated and managed to make it seem as though his vomiting were a gut reaction not to the food but to the company.
“Well, we don’t want you to die either, do we, Jasper?”
“No,” I said, and waited a full thirty seconds before adding, “not at the moment.”
Dad wiped the corners of his mouth with my sleeve and said, “I want to die at home.”
“When you say home, you mean…”
“Australia.”
Terry and I looked at each other with dread.
“Well, mate,” Terry said slowly, “that’s just not practical.”
“I know. Nevertheless, I’m going home.”
Terry took a deep breath and spoke to Dad calmly and deliberately, as though gently chastising his grown-up mentally disturbed son for smothering the family pet by overhugging.
“Marty. Do you know what would happen the minute the plane landed on Aussie soil? You’d be arrested at the airport.” Dad didn’t say anything. He knew this was true. Terry pushed on: “Do you want to die in jail? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you fly back home.”
“No, I don’t want to die in jail.”
“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You’ll die here.”
“I have another idea,” Dad said, and at once any glimmer of hope died and I knew that a nice, quiet, peaceful death followed by an intimate funeral and a respectable period of restrained mourning was now out of the question. Whatever was coming was going to be dangerous, messy, and frantic and would drive me to the edge of insanity.
“So, Marty, what are you suggesting?”
“We sneak back into Australia.”
“What?”
“By boat,” he clarified. “Terry, I know you know who the people-smugglers are.”
“This is nuts!” I said. “You can’t want to risk your life just to die in Australia! You hate Australia!”
“Look, I know this is world-class hypocrisy. But I don’t fucking care. I’m homesick! I miss the landscape and the smell of it. I even miss my countrymen and the smell of them!”
“Be careful now,” I said. “Your final act will be a direct contradiction of everything you’ve ever thought, said, and believed.”
“I know,” he said almost cheerfully, not minding at all. In fact, he seemed enlivened by it. He was up on his feet now, swaying a little, daring us with his eyes to raise objections so he could shoot them down.
“Didn’t you tell me nationalism is a disease?” I asked.
“And I stand by it. But it’s a disease that, as it turns out, I have contracted, along with everything else. And I don’t see the point of trying to cure myself of a minor ailment when I’m about to die of a major one.”
I didn’t say anything to that. What could I say?
I had to get out the big guns to help me. Luckily, Dad had packed a suitcase full of books, and I found the very quote I needed in his well-thumbed copy of Fromm’s The Sane Society. I went into his room but he was on the toilet, so I read it to him through the bathroom door: “Hey, Dad. ‘The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their and his own human reality.’”
“It doesn’t matter. When I die, my failures and weaknesses die with me. You see? My failures are dying too.”
I continued: “‘Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism”…is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.’”
“So?”
“So you don’t love humanity, do you?”
“No. Not really.”
“Well, there you are!”
Dad flushed the toilet and came out without washing his hands. “You can’t change my mind, Jasper. This is what I want. Dying men get dying wishes even if it irritates the living. And this is mine—I want to expire in my country, with my people.”
Caroline, I thought. It was obvious that Dad was in the grip of a pain that would arrive forever. He had made himself perpetually vigilant against his own comfort, and this mission to Australia was a directive from a sadness that must be obeyed.
But not only that. By tiptoeing back into Australia as human cargo in a risky smuggling operation, Dad had found one last stupid project, one that was sure to expedite his death.
II
The people-smugglers orchestrated their nasty enterprise out of an ordinary restaurant on a congested street that looked like seventy other congested streets I saw as we drove in. Terry gave Dad and me a warning at the door: “We’ve got to be careful with these guys. They’re absolutely brutal. They’ll cut your head off first, ask questions later, mostly about where to send your head.” With that in mind, we took a table and ordered jungle curries and beef salad. I had always imagined that fronts for criminal activity were merely façades, but here they actually served food, and it wasn’t bad.
We ate without speaking. Dad coughed in between spoonfuls and in between coughs called repeatedly to a waiter for bottled water. Terry was shoveling down prawns and breathing through his nose. The King was glaring at me disapprovingly from a portrait on the far wall. A couple of English backpackers at the next table were discussing the physical and psychological differences between Thai prostitutes and a girl named Rita from East Sussex.
“So, Terry,” I asked, “what happens now? We just sit here until closing time?”
“Leave it to me.”
We left it to him. All the communication happened wordlessly, according to a preestablished set of rules: Terry gave a conspiratorial nod to a waiter, who in turn gave it to the chef through an open window into the kitchen. The chef then passed the nod on to a man out of our line of vision, who for all we knew passed it on to twenty more men who lined a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine of hell. After a few anxious minutes, a man with a slightly malformed bald head came out and sat down, biting his lip and staring at us threateningly. Terry produced an envelope brimming with money and pushed it across the table. That softened the smuggler up a little. Grabbing the envelope, he rose from the table. We followed him, our footsteps sounding prolonged echoes as we walked down a hallway that eventually led to a small windowless room where two armed men greeted us with cold stares. One of them molested us, searching for weapons, and when none were found a flabby middle-aged man in an expensive suit entered and gazed at us quietly. His impressive stillness made me feel I was in a story by Conrad, as if I were looking into the heart of darkness. Of course he was just a businessman, with the same love of profit and indifference to human suffering as his Western corporate counterparts. I thought that this man could be a midlevel executive at IBM or a legal adviser to the tobacco industry.
Without warning, one of the bodyguards cracked the butt of a rifle over Terry’s head. His massive body crashed to the floor. He was unconscious but alive, his torso heaving with slow, deep breaths. When they aimed the guns at me, I thought how this was exactly the type of room I had always imagined I’d die in: small, airless, and crammed with strangers looking on indifferently.
“You are police,” the boss said in English.
“No. Not police,” Dad protested. “We are wanted criminals. Like you. Well, not like you. We don’t know if you’re wanted or not. Perhaps nobody wants you.”
“You are police.”
“No. Christ, listen. I have cancer. Cancer, you know. The big C. Death.” Dad then proceeded to tell them the whole absurd story of his fall from grace and escape from Australia.
I thought it was commonly accepted that stories this ridiculous had to be true, but the smugglers seemed skeptical. As they deliberat
ed our fate, I remembered how Orwell described the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever, and I thought that all around me were boots, people so terrible that the whole human race should be punished for doing nothing to curb their existence. The job of these people-smugglers was to recruit desperate people, strip them of every penny, lie to them before shoving them onto boats that routinely sank. Each year they sent hundreds to their terror-stricken deaths. These pure exploiters were the irritable bowel syndrome of the cosmos, I thought, and looking at these men as if they were examples of all men, I decided I’d be happy to disappear if it meant they also could not exist.
The boss spoke quietly in Thai just as Terry regained consciousness. We helped him up off the floor, which was no easy task. Rubbing his head, he said, “They said it’ll cost you twenty-five thousand.”
“Fifty thousand,” I said.
“Jasper,” Dad whispered, “don’t you know anything about bargaining?”
“I’m going too,” I said.
Dad and Terry exchanged looks. Dad’s was dark and silent while his brother’s was wide and mystified.
“Plenty of these boats sink long before they get to Australia,” Terry said anxiously. “Marty! I absolutely forbid this! You can’t let Jasper go with you.”
“I can’t stop him,” Dad said, and I detected in his voice an enthusiasm to be reckless with my life now that his was over.
“Jasper, you’re a fool. Don’t do this,” Terry protested.
“I have to.”
Terry sighed, and muttered that I was more like my father every day. The deal was sealed with a handshake and fifty grand in cold, hard cash, and once the transaction was made, the smugglers seemed to relax and even offered us beers “on the house.” Watching these villains, I imagined that I had branched off the evolutionary line at an earlier age and evolved in secret, parallel to man but always apart.
“Tell me one thing, Jasper,” Terry said after we left the restaurant. “Why are you going?”
I shrugged. It was complicated. I didn’t want the people-smugglers, those fucking ghouls, to double-cross Dad and throw his body into the water half an hour out to sea. But this was not just an altruistic outburst; it was a form of preemptive strike. I didn’t want Dad’s resentment haunting me from beyond the grave, or little waves of guilt lapping at my future serenity. But above all, it was to be a sentimental journey: if he was to die, either at sea or among “his people” (whoever the fuck they were), I wanted to see it for myself, eyeball to vacant eyeball. My whole life I’d been pushed beyond rational limits by this man, and I was offended by the notion that I could be so implicated in his lifelong drama and not be present for the grand finale. He might have been his own worst enemy, but he was my worst enemy too, and I’d be damned if I was going to wait patiently by the riverbank, as in the Chinese proverb, for his corpse to float by. I wanted to see him die and bury him and pat the earth with my bare hands.
I say this as a loving son.
III
Our last night in Thailand, Terry prepared a feast, but the night was ruined early by Dad’s failure to show up. We searched the house thoroughly, especially the bathrooms and toilets, any hole he might have fallen into, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, on his desk, we found a short note: “Dear Jasper and Terry. Gone to a brothel. Back later.”
Terry took it personally that his brother was avoiding him on their last night together, and I couldn’t quite convince him that each dying man must perform his own archaic ritual. Some hold hands with loved ones; others prefer unprotected and exploitative third world sex.
Before bed, I packed a few things for the trip. We had taken very little to Thailand, and I put together even less for the return trip—one change of clothes each, two toothbrushes, one tube of toothpaste, and two vials of poison, procured by Terry, who had presented them to me with shaky hands over dinner. “Here you are, nephew,” he said, handing me little plastic tubes filled with a cloudy liquid. “In case the voyage drifts on without end or winds up on the bottom of the sea floor and you can look forward only to starvation or drowning, voilà! A third option!” He assured me it was a quick and relatively painless poison, though I pondered the word “relatively” for some time, unconsoled that we’d be howling in agony for a briefer period than offered by the other poisons in the shop. I hid the plastic tubes in a zipped pocket on the side of my bag.
I didn’t close my eyes all night. I thought about Caroline and my inability to save her. What a disappointment my brain turned out to be. After everything I had witnessed in my life, I had almost convinced myself that the wheel of personal history spins on thought, and therefore my history was muddy because my thinking had been muddy. I imagined that everything I’d experienced to date was likely to be a materialization of my fears (especially my fear of Dad’s fears). In short, I had briefly believed that if man’s character is his fate, and if his character is the sum of his actions, and his actions are a result of his thoughts, then man’s character, actions, and fate are dependent on what he thinks. Now I wasn’t so sure.
An hour before dawn, when it was time to leave to catch the boat, Dad still hadn’t returned. I imagined he was either lost in Bangkok, weary at having spent the night bargaining down prostitutes, or else soaking in a bubble bath in a fancy hotel, having changed his mind about the voyage without telling us.
“What do we do?” Terry asked.
“Let’s get down to the dock. Maybe he’ll turn up there.”
It was a half-hour drive to the dock through the stacked-up city and then through ramshackle suburbs that looked like an enormous house of cards that had fallen down. We parked next to a long pier. The sun, emerging over the horizon, glowed through the fog. Above us we could just make out clouds the shape of lopped-off heads.
“There she is,” Terry said.
When I saw the fishing trawler, our dilapidated would-be coffin, all the joints in my body stiffened. It was a crappy wooden boat that looked like an ancient relic restored in a hurry just for show. I thought: This is where we’re to be stored like the cod livers we are.
It wasn’t long before the asylum-seekers, the Runaways, began appearing in fearful, suspicious groups of two and three. There were men, women, and children. I did my own head count as they crowded the dock—eight…twelve…seventeen…twenty-five…thirty…They kept coming. There seemed no way this little boat could accommodate us all. Mothers hugged their sons and daughters tightly. I felt like crying. You can’t overlook the poignancy of a family risking its children’s existence to give them a better life.
But here they were! The Runaways! Here they were, demonstrating twin expressions of human desperation and human hope, huddling together furtively, examining the trawler with profound mistrust. They weren’t fools. They knew they were riding on a coin toss. They were deeply suspicious that this rusty vessel could possibly be their deliverance. I checked them out, wondering: Will we resort to cannibalism before the journey’s done? Will I be eating that man’s thigh and drinking that woman’s spinal fluid with a bile chaser?
I waited with Terry on the pier. The smugglers appeared as if from nowhere, all wearing khaki. The captain stepped off the boat. He was a slim man with a tired face who stood rubbing the back of his neck over and over as if it were a genie’s bottle. He ordered us all on board.
“I’m not going if Dad’s not going,” I said with enormous relief.
“Wait! There he is.”
Dammit, yes, there he was, coming down the dock, staggering toward us.
Someone once said that at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. Well, I’m sorry, but no one at any age deserves the face my father had as he walked toward us. It was as though the force of gravity had gone haywire and was pulling his face down to the earth and up to the moon at the same time.
“Is that it? Is that the boat? Is that the fucking boat? Is it watertight? It looks pretty loose to me.”
“That’s her, all right.”
“It loo
ks like it couldn’t float in space.”
“I agree. It’s not too late to chuck this whole idea.”
“No, no. We’ll carry on.”
“Right.” Fuck.
The sun was rising. It was almost morning. The captain came over and urged us on board again. Terry put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it like a lemon.
“All right. Remember what I told you: if these two men do not reach Australia in tip-top condition, I will kill you.”
“And if he doesn’t,” Dad said, “my ghost will come back and kick you in the balls.”
“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You got it?”
The captain nodded wearily. He seemed used to threats.
Terry and Dad stood facing each other like two men about to wrestle. Dad tried to smile, but his face couldn’t support the sudden strain. Terry puffed a little, as if he were climbing stairs, and slapped Dad lightly on the arm.
“Well. This was a hell of a reunion, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry dying’s made me such a shit,” Dad said. He looked awkward with this goodbye, and put his hand on his head as if he were worried it would blow away. Then they gave each other a smile. You could see their whole lives in that smile: their childhood, their adventures. The smile said, “Didn’t we turn out to be two different and amusing creatures?”
“Just have a nice peaceful death,” Terry said, “and try not to take Jasper with you.”
“He’ll be OK,” Dad said, and turning away from his brother, he boarded the boat, which knocked gently against the pier.
Terry grabbed me by the shoulders and smiled. He leaned forward, smelling of coriander and lemongrass, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “You take care of yourself.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I think I’ll get out of Thailand. Maybe move to Kurdistan or Uzbekistan, one of those places I can’t spell. I’ll try setting up a cooperative there. This whole thing with your dad and Caroline has shaken me up a little. I think I need to go on a long, rough journey. See what’s up. I have a funny feeling the world’s about to go up in smoke. The war has started, Jasper. Take my word for it. The have-nots are getting their act together. And the haves are in for a rough trot.”
