by Steve Toltz
“No, it’s not a prank call. Why shouldn’t I speak to him?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Where’ve you been living the last six months, in a cave?”
“No, a prison in the middle of the desert.”
That got me a long silence. “He’s dead,” she said finally. “They both are.”
“Who?” I asked, my heart freezing block-solid.
“Oscar and Reynold Hobbs. Their private jet crashed.”
“And Mrs. Hobbs?” I asked, shaking. Please don’t let her be dead. Please don’t let her be dead. In that moment I realized that of all the people I had ever known in my whole life, Anouk deserved to die the least.
“I’m afraid so.”
I felt everything pour out of me. Love. Hope. Spirit. There was nothing left.
“Are you still there?” the woman asked.
I nodded. No words to speak. No thought to think. No air to breathe.
“Are you OK?”
This time I shook my head. How could I ever be OK now?
“Hang on,” she said. “Which Mrs. Hobbs do you mean?”
I gulped.
“Reynold’s wife, Courtney, was on the plane, not the other one.”
“So Anouk?” I gasped.
“No, she wasn’t with them.”
I sucked all that love, hope, and spirit back into my lungs with one deep breath. Thank you!
“When was this?”
“About five months ago.”
“I have to speak to her. Tell her Jasper Dean is trying to call her.”
“Jasper Dean? Son of Martin Dean?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you skip the country? When did you get back? Is your father with you?”
“JUST LET ME SPEAK TO ANOUK!”
“I’m sorry, Jasper. She’s uncontactable.”
“How’s that?”
“She’s traveling at the moment.”
“Where is she?”
“We think she’s in India.”
“You think?”
“To be honest, nobody knows where she is.”
“What do you mean?”
“After the plane crash, she just vanished. There’re a lot of people who want to talk to her, as you can imagine.”
“Well, if she calls in, can you tell her I’m home and I need to speak to her?”
I left my telephone number and hung up. Why was Anouk in India? I supposed she was mourning out of the spotlight. Understandable. The spotlight is the last place anyone wants to mourn. Anouk would be well aware that as a widow, if you’re not a mascara-running hysteric, the public will just assume you’re a murderer.
I felt desolate, unreal. Dad was dead, Eddie was dead, now even the indestructible Oscar and Reynold were dead, and none of it made me feel especially alive. In truth, I didn’t feel much of anything. It was as if I had been anesthetized head to toe, so I didn’t feel the contrast between life and death anymore. Later, in the shower, I wasn’t even certain I knew the difference between hot and cold.
A day into my new life and I already hated it. There was no way I could become anything other than permanently disgusting in this disgusting apartment. I resolved to get out of there. And go where? Well, overseas. I remembered my original plan—to drift aimlessly through time and space. For that, I needed money. Problem was, I didn’t have any money and didn’t know how to go about making it fast. All I had to sell was the same as everybody else who hasn’t an asset to his name: I could sell my time or I could sell my story. Having no marketable skills, I knew my time wouldn’t fetch me one dollar over minimum wage, but with not one but two infamous men in my immediate family, my story might get me a higher price than most. Of course I could’ve gone the easy route, agreeing to a television interview, but I’d never squeeze the whole story into the twenty minutes of a television half hour. No, I had to keep writing it down to be sure the story got told right, without leaving anything out. My only chance was to finish the book I’d started, find a publisher, and set sail with a hefty advance. That was my plan. I took out the pages my interrogators had read and dismissed as fiction. Where was I up to? I hadn’t gotten very far at all—I had a lot of writing to do.
I went out to the shops to buy a couple of reams of A4 paper. I like white pages—they shame me into filling them. Outside, the sun was a hand of light slapping me in the face. Looking at all the people, I thought: What a strenuous life. Now that I had nobody I was close to, I’d have to make do with some of these strangers, turn a couple of them into either friends or lovers. What a lot of work life is when you’re always starting from scratch.
The streets of my city felt like a foreign country. The toxic effects of being in a detention center were still with me, because I found out that while I needed individuals, I was terrified of crowds, with an intense physical anxiety that left me hugging streetlamps. What was I afraid of? They didn’t mean me any harm. I suppose I was afraid of their indifference. Believe me, you don’t want to fall over in front of man. He won’t pick you up.
I passed a newsstand and my heart sank—everything had gone public. Dad was officially declared dead. I decided not to read any of the tabloid eulogies. “Bastard Dies!” “Woo-Hoo! He’s Dead!” and “The End of a Scumbag!” didn’t seem worthy of my $1.20. Anyway, I’d heard it all before. As I walked away, it occurred to me that there was a certain unreal quality to those headlines, like a prolonged déjà vu. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt as if I was either at the end of something I’d thought endless or at the beginning of something I could have sworn had started long ago.
The next few days I sat by the barred window and wrote day and night, and as I did, I remembered Dad’s ugly, pontificating head and laughed hysterically until the neighbors banged on the walls. The phone rang nonstop—journalists. I ignored it and I wrote ceaselessly for three weeks, each page a fresh unloading of nightmares that it was a great relief to be rid of.
One night I was lying on the couch, feeling displaced, like an eyelid trapped inside an eye, when I heard the neighbors arguing through the walls. A woman shouted, “What did you do that for?” and a man shouted back, “I saw it on TV! Can’t you take a joke?” I was using up what felt like my last remaining brain cell trying to work out what he’d done when there was a knock at the door. I answered it.
Standing there with enviable posture was a young, prematurely balding man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit. He said his name was Gavin Love, and I accepted that at face value: I couldn’t think of any reason someone would call himself Gavin Love if that wasn’t his name. He said he was a lawyer too, which lent his Gavin Love story all the more weight. He said he had some papers for me to sign.
“What kind of papers?”
“Your father’s things are being held in a storage room. They’re all yours. You just have to sign for them.”
“And if I don’t want them?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I don’t want them, I guess there’s no point signing.”
“Well…” His face was blank. “I just need your signature,” he said hesitatingly.
“I understand that. I’m not sure I want to give it to you.”
Right away his confidence evaporated. I could tell he was going to get into trouble for this.
“Mr. Dean, don’t you want your inheritance?”
“Did he have any money? That’s what I really need.”
“No, I’m afraid not. His bank account is empty. And everything of value would have been sold. What remains of his possessions is probably, well…”
“Worthless.”
“But worth a look, though,” he said, trying to sound positive.
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. Anyway, I didn’t know why I was torturing this poor dope. I went ahead and signed my name. It was only later I realized I’d signed “Kasper.” He didn’t seem to notice.
“So where is this storage room?”
; “Here’s the address,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “If you’d like to go now, I could give you a lift.”
We drove to a lonely-looking government building stuck out near furniture warehouses and packaged food wholesalers. A guard in a little painted white cubbyhole had carte blanche on the raising and lowering of a wooden beam at the entrance to the parking lot. Gavin Love rolled the window down.
“This is Jasper Dean. He’s here to claim his father’s estate.”
“I’m not here to claim anything,” I said. “Only to give it the once-over.”
“ID,” the guard said.
I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. The guard examined it and tried to equate the face on the license with the face attached to my head. They weren’t a clear match, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt.
We drove to the front of the building.
“You’ll probably be awhile,” Gavin Love said.
“Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to wait.”
I got out of the car, and Gavin Love wished me luck, which he seemed to think was pretty decent of him. A small, pudgy man in a gray uniform opened the door. His pants were pulled up higher than what I deem standard practice.
“Can I help you?”
“My name’s Jasper Dean. My father’s possessions are stuffed in one of your airless rooms. I’ve come for a poke around.”
“His name?”
“Martin Dean.”
The man’s eyes widened a little, then contracted. He went into the office and came out with a large blue ledger.
“Dean, Dean…here it is, Room—”
“One-oh-one?” I asked, thinking of Orwell.
“Ninety-three,” he said. “This way.”
I followed him to an elevator. He got in with me. We didn’t have much to say to each other, so we both watched the lift numbers illuminate in turn and I saw that he mouthed each number silently. On the fourth floor we got out and walked down a long, brightly lit corridor. About halfway down he said, “Here we are,” and stopped at a door.
“There’re no numbers on these doors. How do you know this is ninety-three?”
“It’s my job to know,” he said.
That was no kind of job. He took out a set of keys and unlocked the door and pushed it ajar.
“You can close the door behind you if you want.”
“That’s OK,” I said. It didn’t look like the kind of place you want to be closed into.
The room was dark and cluttered and I couldn’t see the end of it—I imagined it stretched endlessly to the brink of existence. I couldn’t think how they’d managed to get everything in here: books, lamps, maps, photographs, furniture, empty picture frames, a portable X-ray machine, life jackets, telescopes, old cameras, bookshelves, pipes, and potato sacks filled with clothes. The space was entirely occupied by Dad’s possessions, everything jumbled up together and in complete disarray—papers on the floor, cupboard drawers emptied and turned over. Obviously the authorities had searched for clues of Dad’s whereabouts and where he had left the money. Every dusty cubic meter was occupied by Dad’s worthless junk. I felt a kind of diluted heartache navigating through the maze of bric-a-brac. None of the anxiety that he had infused each item with had ebbed away. I could smell his intense frustration everywhere. I was taken over by the delusion that I was walking around in my father’s head.
It really was a no-man’s-land. I felt I had stumbled upon undiscovered continents—for example, a large blue sketchbook had me captivated for hours. Inside there were designs and sketches for unbelievable contraptions: a homemade guillotine, a large plastic collapsible bubble worn on the head so you could smoke in airplane toilets, a question-mark-shaped coffin. I also found a box filled with thirty or forty teen romance novels as well as his unfinished autobiography, and underneath a manuscript in his handwriting entitled “Love at Lunchtime,” a nauseating story of unrequited love written for thirteen-year-old girls. I felt completely lost. I felt I was meeting a few more of his well-hidden selves for the first time. Even before the idea of writing a book about him had occurred to me, even before I had set down one line, I had seen myself as his unwilling chronicler. The only thing I was an expert on was my father. Now it seemed there was a life to him I hadn’t known. In this way he mocked me from beyond the grave.
The guard appeared in the doorway and asked, “How are you getting on in here?” I didn’t know quite how to answer the particular phrasing of that question, though I said I was getting on fine.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, and left me to it.
What was I supposed to do with all this rubbish? The journals were worth keeping, certainly. Without them, I might never prove to anyone that my life with him had been as manic as I remembered it. And not only for outsiders—for myself too. I took them and his autobiography, placed them by the door, and continued scavenging.
Underneath a moth-eaten duffel coat I found a large wooden crate, rotted away at the corners. It looked damaged by water and time. A padlock was hanging off it, and a crowbar lay on the floor. The authorities, looking for missing millions, had cracked open this crate and rummaged through it. I looked closer. On the side was some yellowing paperwork written in French, with Dad’s name and, underneath, an address in Australia.
I opened it up.
On the top was a painting. In the dim light, I couldn’t make it out at first, but when I did, I was so shocked I may even have said something like “What the—?”
It was the painting I’d painted in the chicken coop in Thailand. The painting of the disembodied face that had haunted me my whole life. The painting that had been destroyed.
My head was spinning. I looked again. It was definitely my painting. How could this be?
I lifted it up to see what was underneath. There were more paintings of the same face. That was strange. I had painted only one. Then I understood.
They weren’t my paintings. They were my mother’s!
I took a deep breath and thought it out. I remembered Dad’s green notebook, his Paris journal. Dad had bought Astrid paints, brushes, and canvases and she had become obsessed with painting. The words of his journal were etched in my mind. I recalled that he had written: Each painting a rendition of hell—she had many hells & she painted them all. But hell was just a face—and it was just the face she painted. One face. One terrible face. Painted many times.
A moment of terror stretched into a solid minute of terror and kept going. I looked again at the face; it was like a big bruise, purple and splotchy. Then I studied all the paintings carefully. It was undeniable. The lashes on the lower eyelid, curled like fingers; the nose hairs like nerve fibers; its eyes in a trancelike state; the oppressive closeness of its flattened nose; its uncomfortable gaze. It looked as if the face threatened to break out of the painting and actually come into the room. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that I could smell it—its odor poured off the canvas in waves.
My mother and I had painted the same face, that same ghoulish face! What did it mean? Had I seen these paintings in my youth? No. The journal said she had given up painting after my birth, and since Dad and I left Paris just after her death, I definitely hadn’t seen them. So Astrid had seen a face and painted that face. And I had seen the same face and also painted it. I examined the paintings again. With sharp edges and horizontal lines broken up to make its geometrically off-putting head, done in a vile green and thick, wavy lines of black and red and brown, it wasn’t a passive face she’d painted, it was face as function—the function being to scare you.
I turned away from the paintings and tried to work it out. It was totally reasonable to assume that (a) my mother was haunted by the face in the same manner I was or (b) my mother hadn’t seen it floating in the clouds but had actually known the person it belonged to.
Pacing the warehouse, I forced my way through the junk and came across an old broken cabinet. In the bottom drawer I found half a packet of Marlboros and a lighter in the
shape of a woman’s torso. I lit a cigarette but was too preoccupied to inhale. I stood there in that place totally immobilized by thought until the cigarette burned my fingers.
My eyes sprang open. I hadn’t realized they’d been closed. An idea had been inserted into my brain. But what an idea! What an idea! Why didn’t I think of it straightaway? I circled the room shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God,” like a contestant on a game show. I examined the paintings again. This had never happened to me—a lightning-bolt moment! It was incredible! “Why assume I’m turning into my father,” I shouted, “when there’s an equal chance I’m turning into my mother?” I stomped my feet to shake up the whole building. The thought was absolutely liberating. What had I been worried about all this time? And even if I was turning into my father, it wouldn’t ever have been the whole of me but only a section or a subsection—maybe a quarter of me would turn into him, another quarter into my mother, one eighth into Terry, or into the face, or into all the other me’s I hadn’t met yet. The existence of these paintings suggested a scope to my being I had not previously imagined. I think you can appreciate my indescribable joy. The period when my father threatened to dominate my personality—the Occupation—was a mirage. It had never been just me and him. I was a goddamn paradise of personalities! I sat down on a couch and closed my eyes and pictured myself. I couldn’t see anything clearly. Wonderful! That’s how it should be! I am a blurry image constantly trying to come into focus, and just when, for an instant, I have myself in perfect clarity, I appear as a figure in my own background, fuzzy as hair on a peach.
I suddenly knew what it meant. My mission was clear: fly to Europe and find my mother’s family. The face was the starting point. This was the first clue. Find the face, I thought, and I’ll find my mother’s family.
In a daze, I grabbed as many of the canvases as I could handle and called a taxi and took them home. I stared at them all night. I felt a mixture of feelings so conflicting in nature I was threatened with being torn apart by them: a deep grief for the loss of my mother, a snug feeling of comfort that we were close in mind, spirit, and psychosis, an abhorrence of and revulsion for the face, a pride that I’d uncovered a secret, and a furious frustration that I didn’t understand the secret I’d uncovered.
