by Steve Toltz
Around midnight, the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it. The journalists wouldn’t leave me alone. The phone stopped ringing and I heaved a sigh of relief. My sigh was short-lived. A minute later the phone started up again. This was going to go on all night. I picked it up.
“Mr. Dean?” a male voice said.
I supposed I’d better get used to that. “Listen,” I said, “I’m not giving interviews, quotes, comments, or sound bites, so why don’t you go hound a gang-raping footballer.”
“I’m not a journalist.”
“Who are you, then?”
“I was wondering if we could meet.”
“And I was wondering who you are.”
“I can’t say. Your phone is probably bugged.”
“Why would my phone be bugged?” I asked, looking suspiciously at the phone. I couldn’t tell whether it was bugged or not.
“Could you be outside Central Railway Station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“If the phone’s bugged, won’t whoever is listening be there too?”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m not. I thought you might be.”
“So will you be there?”
“All right, then. I’ll be there.”
He hung up. I stared at the phone awhile, hoping it might start speaking on its own, explaining to me all the things I didn’t understand. It didn’t.
At nine o’clock the next morning I was at Central Station, waiting for God knows who. I sat on a bench and observed the people who hurried into the station to catch the trains and the people who hurried out of the station to get away from the trains. They seemed to be the same people.
A car honked its horn. I turned to see a black Mercedes with tinted windows. The driver was leaning out of his window, beckoning me with his finger. I didn’t recognize him. When I didn’t move, he stopped with his finger and started beckoning me with his whole hand. I went over. Even standing right up against the car, I couldn’t see who was in the backseat.
“Mr. Dean, would you get in the back, please?”
“Why should I?”
“Jasper! Get in!” a voice called out from the back. I smiled instantly, which felt strange because I hadn’t smiled for a long time. I opened the back door and dived in, and as the car moved off, Anouk and I hugged for ten minutes without speaking and without letting go.
When we pulled away, we stared at each other with our mouths half open. There was simply too much to say to know how to go about saying it. Anouk didn’t look like a rich widow. She was wearing a silk sari of deep red and had shaved her head again. Her enormous green eyes peered crazily out of her skull like symbols of an ancient catastrophe. Her face looked both old and young, foreign and familiar.
“You must think I’ve become paranoid with all this mystery stuff,” she said. “But it’s awful, Jasper. Everyone wants me to put on a brave face, but I don’t have one of those. I only have a distraught face. After Oscar and now your father it’s the only one I’ve got left.”
I sat trying to think of a way to start speaking. I squeezed her hand instead.
“I own it all, Jasper. I don’t know how this happened. I’m the richest woman in Australia.”
“The richest woman in the world,” the driver said.
“Stop listening!”
“Sorry, Anouk.”
“I won’t let anyone call me Mrs. Hobbs. Well, that’s another story. But isn’t it funny that I’m so rich?” It was more than funny. It was more than ironic too. I hadn’t forgotten how we’d met—she’d been running a key along Dad’s sports car because she outright hated the rich. “But you’re so thin!” she exclaimed. “What’s happened to you? I’ve only heard bits and pieces.”
I asked the driver to stop and he pulled the car over in a dead-end alley. Anouk and I climbed out, and standing in the alleyway next to a sleeping drunk clutching a broken television set, I told her everything about Eddie and Terry and the democratic cooperative and Thailand and poison and the murdering mob and Caroline and the people-smugglers. By the time I got to the boat trip she was biting her lower lip, and at my description of Dad’s death she sucked it into her mouth. For the rest of the story she kept her eyes closed and left a sad, bittersweet smile on her face. I didn’t mention my mother’s paintings, because I needed to keep something just for myself.
“As for me,” she said, “I’m in hiding. Everyone wants me to make a decision as to what to do. Am I going to take on running this megabusiness or aren’t I?”
“Do you want to?”
“Some of it might be kind of cool. It might be fun to run a movie studio. I produced a short film once, do you remember?”
I remembered. It was a dreadful, pretentious mesh of abstract images and obvious symbolism about a rich man who convinces a poor woman to sell him her breast, and once he’s bought it, he sits with the breast in his favorite armchair, stroking it, kissing it, trying to make the nipple erect, but when the nipple doesn’t rise, in frustration and despair he throws the breast on the barbecue and eats it with tomato sauce.
“What do you think, Jasper? You think I could run a movie studio?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m giving a lot away to friends—the music companies, the bookstores, the restaurants, the hotel chains, the cruisers—and my dad always wanted an island, but I’m going to wait for his birthday.”
“Aren’t you keeping anything?”
“Of course. I’m not a bloody fool. I’m keeping the newspapers, the magazines, the radio stations, the cable and free-to-air TV stations, and the movie studio for myself. Can you believe it, Jasper? The most powerful propaganda machines in the history of civilization, and they’ve fallen into our hands!”
“What do you mean, our?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. What are you going to do now?”
“I want to go to Europe and search for my mother’s family. But I need money. Anouk, can I have some money? I won’t pay you back.”
Anouk suddenly peered up and down the alley, and I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a celebrity or a wanted criminal, excess attention makes you paranoid. She leaned forward and solemnly uttered, “Of course, Jasper. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
“Really?”
“On one condition.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You have to help me out.”
“No.”
“You’ll have lots of power.”
“Power? Yuck.”
“Please.”
“Look. I really just want to leave the country and live the rest of my days floating in an anonymous fog. I don’t want to help you with—what is it you want help with?”
“With the media.”
“What media?”
“All of it.”
“I’m going to Europe. I don’t want to be stuck in some office.”
“This is the twenty-first century, so if you want—”
“I know what century it is. Why do people always tell me what century it is?”
“—so if you want to keep moving, you can. You’ll have a laptop, an assistant, a mobile. You can do it all on the road. Please, Jasper. I don’t trust anyone else. You’ve never seen so many people who want so much so openly. They all have their hands out, all my old friends included. And no one will give me an honest opinion. You’re the only one I can count on. And besides, I think your father was preparing you your whole life for something like this. Maybe for this exact thing. Maybe he knew all along. This feels like fate, don’t you think? You and me, we’re completely the wrong people to be in this position—that’s what’s so great about it.”
“Anouk, this is crazy. I don’t know anything about newspapers or television!”
“And I don’t know anything about being a media mogul, but here I am! How is it possible that I’m in this position? And why? I didn’t claw my way to get here. I fell into it. I feel I’m supposed to do something.”
“Like what?”
She made a very hard and serious face, the kind that makes your own face hard and serious just from looking at it.
“Jasper, I believe that life is based on love. And that orderly love is the fundamental law of the universe.”
“Which universe is that and where is it? I’d love to pop by and say hello.”
Anouk sat on the edge of an empty beer keg. She was radiating pure joy and enthusiasm. Yes, she might have been pretending to hate this strange turn of events which had transformed her into a rich and powerful woman, but I wasn’t buying it.
“I believe that a person’s thoughts often manifest into actual events—that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, twenty-four-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?”
“I get it. Go on.”
“In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people’s addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there’re no developments is disappointed. They’re checking the news two or three times a day—they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secret parts of himself, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don’t you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.”
The homeless man in the gutter had woken up and was moving his half-open eyes furtively from Anouk to me, a bored smile on his face, as if to say in response to Anouk’s theory that he’d heard it all before. Maybe he had.
“So what do you intend to do?”
“We have to wean people off their addiction, or else there’ll be hell to pay.”
“We.”
“Yes, Jasper.”
I looked at the drunk in the alley to make sure I wasn’t imagining all this. Did I want to help Anouk in her plan? Sure, I could take control of the newspapers and put in fun headlines like “This Newspaper Makes Independent Thinking Impossible” and pursue Anouk’s aim of combating this addiction to “news” by making news dry and boring—limiting broadcasts and reporting banal and positive events (grandmothers planting new gardens, football stars eating dinner with their families) and not allowing mass murderers their turn on the celebrity wonder wheel.
However, the last thing I wanted was to take on a public role doing anything. The general public was still apt to turn apoplectic with rage at the mention of my father, and thus people would hate me for whatever I did. All I wanted was to melt into vast crowds of non-English-speaking people and taste the many flavors of women filling tight-fitting T-shirts in all the cities of the globe. And Anouk wanted the news division to be under my control?
“Anouk, I’ll tell you what. You start without me. I’ll give you a call in six months, see how you’re getting along, and then maybe I’ll come and help you out. But it’s a big maybe.”
She made a weird sound in her throat and started breathing hard. Her eyes somehow got rounder. I almost weakened. It’s hard enough to go through life disappointing yourself every second day, but disappointing others takes it out of you too. That’s why you should never answer the phone or the door. So you don’t have to say no to whoever’s on the other side.
“OK, Jasper. But I want you to do one thing before you leave.”
“What’s that?”
“Write an obituary for your dad that I can print in the paper.”
“What for? People don’t care.”
“I care. And so do you. And I know you—you probably haven’t let yourself grieve in any way for your father. I know he was a pain in the arse, but he did love you and he made you what you are and you owe it to him and to yourself to write something about him. Doesn’t matter if what you write is flattering or insulting. As long as it’s true and it comes from the heart and not from the brain.”
“OK.”
We climbed back into the car, and the homeless man watched us with smiling eyes that said in no uncertain terms that he had just overheard a conversation between two people who took themselves too seriously.
The car pulled up outside my building and we sat in the backseat facing each other, with barely a blink between us, barely the slightest movement.
“Sure I can’t convince you to stay in Australia for a few months?”
It was obvious that what she needed more than anything was to have a friendly face around, and I felt bad because I was taking mine to Europe.
“Sorry, Anouk. This is something I have to do.”
She nodded, then wrote me a check for $25,000. I was eternally grateful, but not so grateful I didn’t wish it were more.
We kissed goodbye, and I almost fell to pieces watching the black Mercedes disappear from sight, but I pulled myself together, out of habit. I walked to the bank and put the check in my account. I would have to wait three days before I could access the money to buy myself a one-way ticket to somewhere else. Three days seemed too long.
When I got home, I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about the fact that there were cat hairs on the couch that weren’t there yesterday. Not having a cat, I had no explanation for it. Just another of life’s inscrutable and pointless mysteries.
I tried to go to sleep, and when I couldn’t go there, I tried to get sleep to come to me. That didn’t work either. I got up and drank two beers and lay down on the couch again. My mind took over and dug up a few fragile images that seemed ready to crack if I thought about them hard enough. I decided to think about the future instead. In three days I would be on a plane to Europe, just as my father had once been, at roughly the same age, when almost everyone he knew was dead. Well, you have to follow in people’s footsteps sometimes. You can’t expect every cough, scratch, and sneeze to be your own.
Around midnight I started working on the obituary for my father that Anouk could print in the paper. After staring at a blank page for two days, I began.
Martin Dean, 1956–2001
Who was my father?
The offal of the universe.
The fatty rind.
An ulcer on the mouth of time.
He was sorry he never had a great historical name like Pope Innocent VIII or Lorenzo the Magnificent.
He was the man who first told me that no one would buy life insurance if it was called death insurance.
He thought the best definition of thoroughness is having your ashes buried.
He thought that people who don’t read books don’t know that any number of dead geniuses are waiting for their call.
He thought that there seems to be no passion for life, only for lifestyle.
About God—he thought that if you live in a house, it’s of only nominal interest to know the name of the architect who designed it.
About evolution—he thought it was unfair that man is at the top of the food chain when he still believes the newspaper headlines.
About pain and suffering—he thought that you can bear it all. It’s only the fear of pain and suffering that is unbearable.
I took a break and read over what I’d written. All true. Not bad. This was coming along nicely. But I should be more personal. After all, he wasn’t just a brain in a jar spitting out ideas, he was also a human being with emotions that made him sick.
He never achieved unlonely aloneness. His aloneness was terrible for him.
He could not hear a mother calling for her child in the park without c
alling out too, sick with the ominous feeling that something awful had happened to little Hugo (or whoever).
He was always proud of things that shamed others.
He had a fairly complex Christ complex.
His worldview seemed to be something like “This place sucks. Let’s refurbish.”
He was impossibly energetic but lacked the kind of hobbies that actually required energy, which is why he often read books while walking and watched TV while pacing back and forth between rooms.
He could empathize with anyone, and if he found out someone in the world was suffering, Dad had to go home and lie down.
OK. What else?
I looked over what I had written and decided it was time to get to the heart of the man.
The concept of Dad’s death ruined his whole life. The very thought of it struck him down like some toxic jungle fever.
My God. This topic made my whole body feel heavy. Just as Terry had realized that the terror of death had almost killed him, Dad had often repeated his conviction that it was the base cause of all human beliefs. I saw now that I had developed a nasty mutation of this disease, namely, the terror of the terror of death. Yes, unlike Dad and unlike Terry, I don’t fear death so much as I fear the fear of it. The fear that makes people believe, and kill each other, and kill themselves; I am afraid of this fear that could make me unconsciously manufacture a comforting or confusing lie that I might base my life on.
Wasn’t I going off to chase the face from my nightmares?
Wasn’t I going on a journey to learn more about the face? And about my mother? And about myself?
Or was I?
Dad always maintained that people don’t go on journeys at all but spend a lifetime searching for and gathering evidence to rationalize the beliefs they’ve held in their hearts since day one. They have new revelations, certainly, but these rarely shatter their core belief structure—they just build on it. He believed that if the base remains intact, it doesn’t matter what you build on it, it is not a journey at all. It is just layering. He didn’t believe that anyone ever started from scratch. “People aren’t looking for answers,” he often said. “They’re looking for facts to prove their case.”
