by Steve Toltz
I agreed it seemed to be developing that way.
“Will you ever come out of the shadows and return to Australia?”
“One day I’ll come back and give them all the fright of their lives.”
“Come on, let’s go home,” Dad shouted from the deck.
Terry looked at Dad and held up a finger to say he needed one minute. “Jasper, before you go, I’d like to give you a word or two of advice.”
“All right.”
“From watching you these past months, I’ve worked out that there’s something you want above all things. You want not to be like your father.”
That wasn’t something I kept hidden, even from Dad.
“You’ve probably worked out by now that if you think courageous thoughts, you will cross busy streets without looking, and if you think sadistic, venal thoughts, you will find yourself pulling out the chair every time someone is about to sit down. You are what you think. So if you don’t want to turn into your father, you don’t want to think yourself into a corner like he did—you need to think yourself into the open, and the only way to do that is to enjoy not knowing whether you’re right or wrong, play the game of life without trying to work out the rules. Stop judging the living, enjoy futility, don’t be disillusioned with murder, remember that fasting men survive while starving men die, laugh as your illusions collapse, and above all, always bless every single minute of this silly season in hell.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I thanked him, hugged him one last time, and boarded the boat.
As we set off, through a heavy curtain of black engine smoke, I waved goodbye to Terry until he disappeared from sight. I looked at Dad to see if he was sad to never see his brother again, and I noticed that he was turned in the opposite direction, gazing out at the horizon and smiling an inappropriately optimistic smile.
IV
The terrible ocean! Weeks and weeks of it!
It seemed impossible for the captain to get the boat under control. Large waves threatened us on all sides. The trawler was tossed appallingly. It felt like she wasn’t just rocking back and forth but wheeling and spiraling and looping, doing mad circles in space.
Below deck, the portholes were welded shut and painted over with black tar. The floors were lined with soiled cardboard, and the passengers slept on mattresses as thin as sheets. I remembered how when I first arrived in Thailand everyone told me not to point my feet at anyone’s head. Now, in this cramped space, people were crowded together so closely that you ended up putting your feet not just at the heads of strangers but right into their faces too, day in, day out. Dad and I were jammed into a tight corner, sandwiched between bulky sacks of rice and a chain-smoking family from southern China.
In that hot and sweaty cage, the only oxygen we inhaled had been exhaled by other passengers. To be below deck was to be submerged in a nightmare. The crush of limbs and skeletal torsos was oppressive, especially in the suffocating darkness, where voices—peculiar, chilling, guttural sounds—made up conversations from which we were estranged. If you had to go outside for air, you didn’t so much move among them as were pushed remorselessly from one end of the hull to the other.
Sometimes, Dad and I slept up on the hard, ridged deck, using as pillows coils of wet, heavy rope caked in mud from one sea floor or another. It wasn’t much better up there; the days were stinking hot, it rained steadily, and who’d have imagined mosquitos could make it this far out to sea? They gnawed us incessantly. We could hardly hear ourselves swear at God against the loud, throbbing engine, which was belching out clouds of black smoke relentlessly.
At night we lay staring up at the sky, where the stars swam in shapes somehow made menacing by sobs, screams, and howls of delirium, mostly from Dad.
There’s nothing pleasant about the final stages of cancer. He was confused, delirious, convulsing; he had severe throbbing headaches, giddiness, slurred speech, dizzy spells, nausea, vomiting, trembling, sweating, unbearable muscle pain, extreme weakness, and sleeps as heavy as comas. He made me feed him from a pill bottle with an unreadable label. They were opiates, he said. So Dad’s various immortality projects had given way to the more important mortality project: to die with the least pain.
No one liked having the sick man on board. They knew the journey required strength and stamina, and besides, no matter what religion you followed, a dying man was a bad omen in every one. Perhaps because of this, the Runaways were reluctant to share their provisions with us. And it wasn’t just Dad’s health that bothered them—we emanated the smell of the alien. They knew we were Australians who had paid enormous sums of money to enter our own country illegally. They couldn’t wrap their minds around it.
One night on deck I was awoken by a voice shouting, “Why you here?” I opened my eyes to see the ship’s captain standing above us, smoking a cigarette. His face was a pulp novel I didn’t have the energy to read. “I don’t think he make it,” the captain’s voice persisted as his foot nudged Dad in the stomach. “Maybe we throw him off.”
“Maybe I throw you off,” I said.
One of the Runaways stood up behind me and shouted something to the captain in a language I didn’t recognize. The captain backed off. I turned around. The Runaway was around the same age as me, with large, beautiful eyes that were much too big for his drawn face. He had long curly hair and long curly eyelashes. Everything about him was long and curly.
“They say you’re Australian,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“I would like to take an Australian name. Can you think of one for me?”
“OK. Sure. How about…Ned.”
“Ned?”
“Ned.”
“All right. I am now Ned. Will you please call me by my new name and see if I turn around?”
“OK.”
Ned faced away from me and I called out “Shane!” as a test. He didn’t fall for it. After that I tried calling him Bob, Henry, Frederick, and Hot-pants21, but he didn’t even flinch. Then I called out “Ned!” and he spun around, grinning madly.
“Thank you,” he said politely. “May I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Why are you here? We would all like to know.”
I looked behind me. Others had emerged from the cabin below to wash their filthy lungs in the night air. Dad was sweating and feverish, and Ned held out a wet rag for my inspection.
“May I?” he asked me.
“Go ahead.”
Ned pressed the wet rag against Dad’s forehead. Dad let out a long sigh. Our fellow passengers yelled out questions to Ned, and he yelled back before waving them over. They shuffled closer, crowded around us, and wet our ears with a spattering of broken English. These strange ancillary characters, called in at the last minute to make a guest appearance in the epilogue of a man’s life, wanted to understand.
“What’s your name?” Ned asked Dad.
“I’m Martin. This is Jasper.”
“So, Martin, why do you go into Australia like this?” Ned asked.
“They don’t want me there,” Dad said weakly.
“What did you do?”
“I made some bad mistakes.”
“You kill someone?”
“No.”
“You rape someone?”
“No. It was nothing like that. It was a…financial indiscretion.” He winced. If only Dad had raped and killed. Those crimes would at least have been worth his life, and possibly mine.
Ned translated the phrase “financial indiscretion” to the others, and as if on cue a thick curtain of cloud parted, allowing the moon to illuminate their blank confusion. Watching them watching us, I wondered if they had the slightest clue what to expect in Australia. I supposed they knew they’d be living an underground existence, exploited in brothels, factories, building sites, restaurant kitchens, and by the fashion industry, who would get them sewing their fingers to the bone. But I doubted they were aware of the adolescent competition among political leade
rs to see who had the toughest immigration policies, the kind you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley. Or that public opinion was already set against them, because even if you’re running for your life you still have to wait in line, or that Australia, like everywhere, excelled in making arbitrary distinctions between people seem important.
If they knew this, there was no time to dwell on it. Surviving the journey was the only priority, and that was no easy trick. Things were getting steadily worse. Supplies were dwindling. Wind and rain battered the boat. Enormous swollen waves threatened to capsize us at every moment. There were times we could not let go of the rail or we would have been thrown overboard. We felt no closer to Australia than when we started, and it became hard to believe that our country even existed anymore, or any other country, for that matter. The ocean was growing bigger. It covered the whole earth. The sky got bigger too—it was raised even higher, stretched to breaking point. Our boat was the smallest thing in creation, and we were infinitesimal. Hunger and thirst shrank us further. The heat was a full-body fat suit we all wore together. Many were trembling with fever. We spotted land once or twice, and I screamed in the captain’s eardrum, “Let’s pull in there, for Chrissakes!”
“That’s not Australia.”
“Who cares? It’s land! Dry land! We won’t drown there!”
We pushed on, cutting a foamy trail through an ocean bubbling with hostile intentions.
It’s surprising just how placid the dying human animal can be in such a circus. I never would’ve believed it. I thought we’d be tearing each other’s flesh off, drinking the blood of our brothers, but it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone was too tired. Sure, there was crying and a fair amount of bitter frustration, but it was sad and quiet bitter frustration. We were tiny, shrunken creatures, too frail for any kind of serious protest.
Most of the time Dad lay motionless on deck, looking like a scary stuffed toy you give to a child on Halloween.
I stroked his forehead gently, but he summoned up just enough energy to shrug me off.
“I’m dying,” he said bitterly.
“Another couple of days and I’ll be dying too,” I said, to cheer him up.
“I’m sorry about that. I told you not to come,” he said, knowing full well he hadn’t.
Dad was trying to act remorseful for having selfishly aligned my fate to his. But I knew better. I knew something he would never admit—that he had never fully shaken off his old, sick delusion that I was the premature reincarnation of his still living self—and now he thought that if I died, he might live on.
“Jasper, I’m dying,” he said again.
“Jesus Christ, Dad! Look around! Everyone here is dying! We’re all going to die!”
That burned him up. He was furious that his death was not being regarded as a tragic isolated spectacle. To die among the dying, as a number, was really a thorn in his side. Mostly, though, it was the constant praying to God that was getting under his skin. “I wish these idiots would shut up,” he said.
“These are good people, Dad. We should be proud to drown among them.”
Nonsense. I was talking pure nonsense. But Dad was determined to leave the earth in a belligerent state, and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. Even with his life packed and its passport stamped, he rejected the religious world for the umpteenth time.
We were the only ones not praying, and the Runaways’ positivism really put Dad and me to shame. They still had the feeling that lovely things were stirring in the air. They were giddy in their ecstatic flight, blissful because their gods were not the inner kind, who can’t really help you out in a tangible, nonephemeral crisis like a sinking boat; their gods were old-fashioned, the kind who direct the whole of nature to the desires of the individual. What a lucky break! Their gods actually listened to people, and sometimes intervened. Their gods dealt out personal favors! It’s Who you know! That’s why their private experience had none of the cold terror of ours: we envisaged no big thumb and forefinger descending from the heavens to pluck us out of harm’s way.
I tended to Dad in a sort of trance. In the dark he laid out countless ideas about life and how to live it. They were slightly more confused and puerile than his usual diatribes, though, and I realized that when you’re falling, the only thing you have to hold on to is yourself. When he talked, I pretended to listen. If he wanted to sleep, I slept too. When Dad moaned, I gave him painkillers. There wasn’t anything else to do. He was suffering, his far-off eyes farther off than ever before. I knew he was thinking of Caroline. “Martin Dean—what a fool he was!” he said. It gave him some comfort to talk about himself in the third-person past tense.
Ned sometimes gave me a break. He took my place and gave Dad water and took over pretending to listen to his ceaseless droning. On those occasions I crawled over the half-conscious bodies of my companions to get to the deck for a breath of air. Above me the sky opened up like a cracked skull. The stars were glistening like beads of sweat. I was awake, but my senses were dreaming. My own sweat tasted of mango, then chocolate, then avocado. This was a disaster! Dad was dying too slowly and in too much pain. Why didn’t he just kill himself? Why do staunch atheists put up with so much futile agony? What was he waiting for?
Suddenly I remembered. The poison!
I ran down and climbed over the human mattress and whispered feverishly in his ear. “Do you want the poison?”
Dad sat up and looked at me with glowing eyes. Death can be controlled, the eyes sang. Our vital powers were somewhat recharged, contemplating the poison.
“Tomorrow morning at dawn,” he said. “We’ll do it together.”
“Dad—I’m not taking the poison.”
“No, of course not. I didn’t mean that you would take it. I just meant that I’d take it and you’d watch.”
Poor Dad. He always hated loneliness, and now he was faced with the deepest, most concentrated form of loneliness in existence.
But at dawn it was raining, and he didn’t want to commit suicide in the rain.
When the rain cleared, it was too hot to end it all.
At night he wanted to let out his final breath in the warm glare of the sun.
In short, he was never ready. He vacillated interminably. He always found a new excuse not to do it: too rainy, too cloudy, too sunny, too choppy, too early, too late.
Two or three days of agony passed in that way.
It finally happened just after sunset around two or three weeks at sea. A wave of foam crashed below deck. We were half drowned. The shrieking didn’t help anything. When the ocean settled, Dad sat up in the dark. He suddenly had trouble breathing. I gave him some more water.
“Jasper, I think this is it.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. I was always suspicious of the way in movies people knew when their time was coming, but it’s true. Death knocks. He actually knocks.”
“Can I do anything?”
“Take me up top, wait until I’m dead, and push me off the boat.”
“I thought you didn’t want a watery grave.”
“I don’t. But these bastards have been eyeing me like I’m just one big lamb chop.”
“Cancer hasn’t exactly made you appetizing.”
“Don’t argue with me. Once I’m dead, I don’t want to spend another minute on this boat.”
“Understood.”
The Runaways didn’t take their eyes off us. They spoke to each other in quiet, conspiratorial tones as Ned helped me get Dad out of there.
Up on deck his breathing grew easier. The Pacific air seemed to do him some good. The vast movement of the ocean pacified him. Well, at least I’d like to think so. These were his final moments, and I’d like to think that at the end he ceased to find his cosmic insignificance insulting, that finally he felt something whimsical in meaning nothing, that it was even somewhat amusing to be an accident in the appalling wasteland of space-time. This was my hope—that, staring out at the ocean’s majest
ical performance in surging blue and facing the mad sea wind, he might have cottoned on to the idea that the universal stage show was a bigger drama than he could ever have dreamed to land a key role in. But no, he didn’t put his existence into perspective at all—he was humorless about it right to the end. He went to his death a martyr to his own secret cause, unwilling to denounce himself.
I record his last minutes in the sad spirit of a biographer too close to his subject.
The night was silent, save for the creaking of the boat and the gentle lapping of the water. The moon hung brightly above the horizon. We were heading straight for it. The captain was steering us into the moon. I imagined a hatch door opening. I imagined us drifting inside. I imagined the door slamming shut behind us and the sound of crazy laughter. I imagined these things to distract me from the reality of my father’s death.
“Look, Martin, look at the moon,” Ned said. “Look at how it has been painted on the sky. God is truly an artist.”
That gave Dad a burst of energy. “I hope not, for all our sakes,” he said. “Honestly, Ned, have you ever actually met an artist? These are not nice people. They’re selfish, narcissistic, and vicious types who spend their good days in a suicidal depression. Tell him, Jasper.”
I sighed, knowing this speech by heart. “Artists are the kind of people who cheat on their mistresses, abandon their legitimate children, and make those who are underprivileged enough to know them suffer terribly for their efforts to show them kindness,” I said.
Dad raised his head to add, “And you proudly label God an artist and expect him to take care of you? Good luck!”
“You lack faith.”
“Have you ever wondered why your God requires faith? Is it that heaven has a limited seating capacity and the necessity of faith is God’s way of keeping the numbers down?”
Ned looked at him with pity, shook his head, and said nothing.
“Dad, give it a rest.”
I gave him another couple of painkillers. After swallowing, he gasped and fell unconscious. Ten minutes later he began ranting deliriously.
