SIX

I

Why, oh why did I go on the run too? Why did I throw in my lot with Dad, after all that had happened between us? Because I’m the dutiful son? You never know. I loved my father, no matter how imperfectly. Is that any reason? I mean, loyalty is one thing, but the man had destroyed my life, after all. That should’ve reserved me the right to let him tear off into the wilderness without me. He had meddled unforgivably in my relationship. OK, it wasn’t his fault I was in love with a girl who was not a girl but a building on fire. And it wasn’t his fault either that she chose a man who was not me. I had no case; I was me, and embarrassingly so. It wasn’t Dad’s fault I couldn’t strong-arm her affections, that I couldn’t think of an offer she couldn’t refuse. So she refused me, that’s all. Was it my father’s fault that this flaming edifice loved her failed ex-boyfriend and sacrificed us on the altar of that love? No, it wasn’t. But I blamed him anyway. That’s the great thing about blame; she goes where you send her, no questions asked.

That Eddie had rigged the millionaires and dropped Dad in the shit was such a juicy stab in the back that I was dying to tell my girlfriend about it before the news broke, even if, strictly speaking, she wasn’t my girlfriend. Maybe it was just a good excuse to see her- the spilling of family secrets. And I needed an excuse. The Inferno had left me, and establishing contact with someone who has left you is a tricky business; it’s very, very hard not to come off looking pathetic. I’d already made two attempts at seeing her, and both times I’d come off looking pathetic. The first time I returned a bra that belonged to her that she’d left in my hut, and the second time I returned a bra belonging to her that I’d actually bought that morning in a department store. Neither time was she happy to see me- she looked at me as if I had no business in her line of vision.

The third time I went to her house and left my finger on the buzzer. I remember it was a beautiful day, with shreds of sinewy cloud twisting in fresh wind, the air smelling of a thick, heavy fragrance like the expensive perfume rich women put on their cats.

“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.

“Nothing. I just want to talk.”

“I can’t talk about us anymore because there is no more us. Well, there is an us, but it’s not you and me. It’s me and Brian.”

“Can’t we just be friends?” I asked (already pathetic).

“Friends,” she answered slowly, with a puzzled look on her face, as if I’d actually asked her if we could just be fish.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Just around the block?”

She relented, and on the walk I told her everything that had happened regarding the millionaires, how Eddie had scammed Dad badly by rigging the winners to include most of his friends, and how if anyone found out, he’d be crucified.

I remember at the time I simply wanted to be close to her again, if only for a moment, and spilling our potentially life-destroying secret seemed to be the way to achieve this. It achieved nothing of the kind. In actuality, as a cathartic unburdening of secrets goes, it was intensely unsatisfying. “Your father’s crazy anyway,” she said, as though that were somehow relevant. When we arrived back at her building, she got serious. I knew this because she took my hand. “I still have feelings for you,” she said. I was about to say something. I know this because I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “But I have stronger feelings for him.” So then I was to understand it was a competition for the relative strength of her feelings. Brian was getting all the potent ones; I was getting the leftovers, the tepid, hardly breathing, barely conscious affections. No wonder I couldn’t feel them.

Of course I made her swear not to tell anyone the secret I’d told her. And of course she told the man she loved, because without thinking, I had given her a breaking news story to salvage his flagging journalistic career.

So is that why I joined Eddie, Dad, and Caroline on the run? I went along seeking forgiveness? Maybe, though why should I have stayed? I’d just had the worst year of my life. When the Towering Inferno dumped me, I had moved from the spaciousness of Dad’s labyrinth into a long thin apartment that was not much more than a glorified corridor with a bathroom and an L-shaped space at the end where you could stick a single bed and anything L-shaped you happened to have lying around. The move from the bush to the city had an unexpected and serious destabilizing effect on me. In my hut, I had been close to the voice of the earth and never had to strive to feel at ease. Now, in the city, I found that I was cut off from all my favorite hallucinations. I’d left myself behind. Banished from the source, I felt entirely at sea.

Then, when Dad became a public figure adored by the nation, I’ll admit it- his fame hit me hard. How could twenty million people like that irritating man? I mean, six months before he couldn’t get ten friends in a room for a dinner! The world was yet to fall off its hinges, though; one mild afternoon Dad visited me at work, in his suit, stiff as if unable to bend his knees. He stood awkwardly in my cubicle, looking like a house boarded up, and our sad, silent confrontation climaxed with him telling me the awful news. He hardly had to say it. I don’t know how, but I already knew. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Couldn’t he see I knew as soon as he approached? I practically had to shield my eyes from the glare of death.

These were the strange, turbulent days; Dad married his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Anouk married the son of a billionaire, Dad was betrayed by his best friend, I was betrayed by my true love, and he was despised by an entire nation. In the media, the descriptions of him varied: a businessman, a swindler, a Jew. I remember he was often obsessed with his inability to define himself. Hearing himself compartmentalized in this way only served to remind him who he wasn’t.

Everything was going wrong. I was getting death threats from strangers. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was lonely. I wandered the streets endlessly and tried to pretend I saw the Inferno everywhere, but there just weren’t enough six-foot redheads in Sydney, and I wound up mistaking her for some laughable substitutes. Retreating to my apartment, I became so depressed that when it came time for eating, I thought: What’s in it for me? At night I kept dreaming of a single face, the same face I used to dream about in childhood, the ugly face contorted in a silent scream, the face that I sometimes see even when I’m awake. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to, and, worse, I couldn’t be bothered doing up my shoes. That’s when I started chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana, eating cereal out of the box, drinking vodka out of the bottle, vomiting myself to sleep, crying for no reason, talking to myself in a stern voice, and pacing the streets, which were crammed with people who, unlike me, were conspicuously not screaming inside and not paralyzed by indecision and not hated by every person on this vile island continent.

I took up my post in bed, under the covers, and stayed there, only shaken out of a drunken sleep one afternoon to see Anouk’s green eyes peering at me.

“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”

She was dressed in an old undershirt and tracksuit pants. The shock of marrying money was obviously forcing her to dress down.

“This is very strange, Jasper. I have the exact same feeling as when I first walked into your dad’s apartment after we met. Remember? Look at this place! It’s disgusting. Trust me on this- beer-can ashtrays are a sign you can’t ignore!”

She ran around the apartment, cleaning up energetically, undaunted by the moldy food and general debris of my day-to-day existence. “You’ll need to repaint these walls to get the smell out,” she said. I fell asleep listening to the rising and falling of her voice. The last thing I heard her say were the words “Just like your father.”