That night I celebrated by myself in Caroline’s apartment. She was there but wouldn’t inhale so much as a champagne bubble in the name of victory.

“Well, that was childish,” she said, standing at the fridge eating ice cream from the carton. Of course she was right. Nevertheless, I felt sublime. As it turned out, hateful revenge was the only pure aspiration from my youth that had survived intact, and its satisfaction, however puerile, deserved at least one glass of Moët et Chandon. But the awful inevitability of the situation had dawned on me: they’d be coming for me soon with redoubled strength. I must right now choose between the reality of prison and the reality of suicide. I thought I really would have to kill myself this time. I couldn’t do prison. I have a horror of all forms of uniform and most forms of sodomy. So suicide it was. According to the conventions of this society, I’d seen my son reach adulthood, so my death would be sad but not tragic. Dying parents are allowed to moan about not seeing their children grow up, but not about not seeing them grow old. Well, fuck- maybe I wanted to see my son graying and shrinking, even if I had to witness it through the foggy frosted glass of a cryogenic deep freeze.

What’s that? I hear a car. Shit. I hear footsteps. The haunting percussive beat of footsteps! They stop. Now I hear knocking! Someone’s knocking at the door! Suicide? Prison?

Well, what do you know: a third option!

I have to finish this off quick. There isn’t much time.

I came out of the bedroom to see Caroline curled up on the couch like a long skinny dog. “Don’t answer it,” she said, not speaking these words out loud but mouthing them noiselessly. I took off my shoes and crept up to the door. The floorboards complained under me. I gritted my teeth, took a few more creaky steps, and peeped through the peephole.

Anouk, Oscar Hobbs, and Eddie were standing there with big convex heads. I opened the door. They all hurried inside.

“OK. I’ve spoken to a friend in the federal police,” Oscar said. “I had a tip-off. They’re coming to arrest you tomorrow.”

“Morning or afternoon?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe a little. I can get a lot done in five or six hours.” That was just bravado. The truth was, I’ve never been able to get anything done in five or six hours. I need eight.

“And what’s he doing here?” I asked, pointing at Eddie.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Eddie said.

“You mean- run?”

Eddie nodded with such energy he lifted up onto his toes.

“Well, if I decide to run, what makes you think I’d run with you? And where could we go anyway? The whole of Australia knows my face now, and it’s not something they cherish.”

“ Thailand,” Eddie said. “Tim Lung has offered to hide you.”

“That crook! What makes you think-”

“You’ll die here in jail, Marty.”

That settled things. Not even I would go to jail simply to be able to tell Eddie to fuck off. “But we’ll get stopped at the airport. They’ll never let me leave the country.”

“Here,” Eddie said, handing me a brown envelope. I looked inside and pulled out the contents. Australian passports. Four of them. One for me, one for him, one for Caroline, and one for Jasper. Our photos were there but the names were different. Jasper and I were Kasper and Horace Flint, Caroline was Lydia Walsh, and Eddie was Aroon Jaidee.

“How did you get these?” I asked.

“Courtesy of Tim Lung.”

Yielding to an impulse, I picked up an ashtray and hurled it against the wall. It didn’t change anything substantial.

“But it’s still my face on the passport!” I shouted.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Eddie said. “I have it all worked out.”

Caroline put her arms around me and we assaulted each other with whispered questions, each terrified to acknowledge the desires of the other lest they contradict.

“Would you like me to come with you?” Caroline asked.

“What do you want to do?”

“Will I make life hard for you on the run? Will I be in the way?”

“Do you want to stay?” I asked wearily.

“Dammit, Martin, just tell me one way or the other. Do you want me to work on your case from here?” Caroline offered, the idea having arrived at her lips at the same time it struck her brain. I understood that her questions were thinly veiled answers.

“Caroline,” Anouk said, “if Martin goes missing, the police are going to give you a pretty hard time.”

“So will the public,” Oscar added.

Caroline was suffering. The shape of her face seemed to lengthen like a shadow. I watched conflicting thoughts play out in her eyes.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“So am I.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“I don’t want to be left.”

“I do love you.”

“I was beginning to think…”

She put her finger on my lips. Normally I hate it when people shut me up, but I love it when women put their fingers on my lips.

“We’ll go together,” she said breathlessly.

“OK, we’re coming,” I said to Eddie “But why did you get a passport for Jasper? He doesn’t need to go on the run.”

“I think he should,” Eddie said.

“He wouldn’t.”

“The family that sticks together…” he said, without finishing. Maybe he thought I’d finish it for him. How could I? I have no idea what happens to the family that sticks together.

It was perhaps the saddest moment of my life, saying goodbye to Anouk. It was awful not to be able to say I would see her soon, or even later. There would be no soon. Nor a later. This was it. It was growing dark. The sun was setting with urgency. Everything had sped up. The air was charged. Oscar never forgot that he was taking a risk coming here; he tapped his finger on his leg with increasingly rapid intensity. The sand was racing through the hourglass. Anouk was desolate. We didn’t hug so much as we grasped each other. It’s only at the moment of goodbye that you understand the function of a person: Anouk had been there to save my life and she had done it, many times over.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

I didn’t even know how to say “I don’t know what to say.” I just hugged her tighter while Oscar cleared his throat a dozen times. Then they left.

Now I am packed and waiting. The plane leaves in about four hours. Caroline is calling me. Though for some reason she is calling me Eddie. Eddie answers. They aren’t talking to me.

I think I’ll leave this manuscript here in a box in the apartment, and maybe one day it’ll be found and someone will have the smarts to publish it posthumously. Maybe it can act as a makeover from beyond the grave. Certainly the media and public will take our escape as concrete evidence of our guilt- they don’t have enough insight into human psychology to know that escape is evidence only of fear.

And now, on our way to the airport, we have to stop by Jasper’s apartment and say goodbye to him too. How am I going to say goodbye to my son? It was hard enough when he moved out of home, but what words will form the goodbye that says I’m going to live the rest of my days as Horace Flint in Thailand in a nest of seedy criminals? I suppose I’ll warm him with the consolation that his father, Martin Dean, will never be eradicated after all, but it will be Horace Flint who will earn himself a grave in some swampy Thai cemetery. That should cheer him up. OK. Now Caroline is really calling me. We have to go. The sentence I am now writing is the last sentence I will write.