I went into the first bar and sat on a stool and ordered a beer. A young woman came and sat on my lap. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. She put her hand between my legs and I asked her, “Do you know where I could buy a gun?” At once I knew I’d made a mistake. She hopped off my lap as if it had bitten her. I saw her talk excitedly to a couple of heavy types behind the bar. I made a run for it, thinking I had slipped into one of those unrealities where you can really hurt yourself, and after a few blocks I stopped running. In effect, these Thai characters were no more criminal than people you’d find at any corner fish-and-chips shop in Sydney, and simply purchasing a gun from them was impossible. In that case, when I met Tim Lung, I’d have to improvise.

When I went down to the hotel breakfast room in the morning, I deduced from the look on Dad’s and Caroline’s faces that they hadn’t slept either. They were wretched, sleepless faces. Faces pinched with worry. Over a large nonexotic breakfast of bacon, eggs, and stale croissants, our banter was light and meaningless, to try to overpower the dark mood. Whatever was in store for us, we wanted to weather it on a full stomach.

Eddie came in without his usual benign expression.

“You ready?”

“Where’s your wife?” Dad asked.

“Shut the fuck up, Martin. I’ve had enough of you. I’ve really, really had enough.”

That silenced us all.

IV

To get to Tim Lung’s place we had to catch a long-tail boat down a dirty, foul-smelling canal. As we passed wooden canoes laden with multicolored fruits and vegetables, I shielded my face from threatening splashes of murky water. My first impressions of Thailand were good, but I knew that my immune system wasn’t up to the challenge of its bacteria. Once beyond this ragged fleet of watercraft, we were alone in the canal, pressing forward. On either side, sitting lopsided on dusty streets, were houses that looked either semicompleted or semidilapidated. We passed women in large-brimmed straw hats washing their clothes in the brown water, evidently unfazed by the idea of encephalitis nesting in their underwear. Then there were long, deserted, dusty streets and huge trees with sprawling branches. The houses, now grand and flashy mansions, were spaced farther apart. I sensed we were getting close. I tried reading Eddie’s face. It was unreadable. Dad gave me a look, the subtext of which was “We’ve escaped, but into what?”

The boat stopped. We stepped off and walked up a small embankment to a large iron gate. Before Eddie could ring the buzzer, a sharp voice from a tinny intercom said something in Thai and Eddie answered it, looking at me, which gave me the feeling that we were on a road on which to go back was suicide and to go forward was probably suicide. I had goose bumps all over. Caroline took my hand. The gate swung open. We pressed on. Dad said something about the state of his bowels which I didn’t quite catch.

Tim Lung’s house had “drug cartel” written all over it. It was large, with huge whitewashed walls surrounded by encrusted pillars, gleaming orange and green roof tiles, and an enormous reclining Buddha nestled in a thick bamboo grove. It was reinforced that we were waltzing into a den of thieves when I spotted men hidden in the shade of trees with semiautomatic rifles, eyeing us as if we had come selling a product they knew didn’t work. The men wore short-sleeved shirts and long pants. I pointed out the armed men to Dad for his predictable response. “I know,” he said. “Long pants, in this weather!”

“This way,” Eddie said.

We walked down a set of steep stairs into a rectangular courtyard. Stuck on spikes were severed pigs’ heads with sticks of incense sprouting from their foreheads. Nice. On one wall of the courtyard was an extensive mural depicting a city razed by fire. Promising. At the end, large sliding doors were already open. I don’t know what I was expecting- snarling Dobermans, tables piled high with cocaine and bags of money, prostitutes sprawled on white leather couches, and a trail of bloodstains leading to the mutilated corpses of dead policemen. What I wasn’t expecting was the very last thing in the world I could have been expecting.

Dad saw it first. He said, “What the fuck?”

On both walls, in frames or stuck up with brown tape, were hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Dad and me.

I said it too: “What the fuck?”

V

“Marty! They’re photos of you!” Caroline shouted.

“I know!”

“And you too, Jasper!”

“I know!”

“Is this you as a baby? You were so cute!”

Our faces from various epochs peered out at us from all over the room. This perverse exhibition comprised all the photographs Eddie had taken over the past twenty years. There were images of a young Dad in Paris, lean and tall, with all his hair and a strange beard on his chin and neck that couldn’t or wouldn’t make its way onto his face; Dad, before he started collecting fat cells, smoking thin cigarettes in our first apartment. And there were just as many of me, as a baby and groping my way through childhood and adolescence. But it was the photos of Paris that interested me most: photographs and photographs of Dad with a young, pale, beautiful woman with a demoralizing smile.

“Dad, is that…?”

“Astrid,” he confirmed.

“Is this your mother, Jasper? She’s beautiful!” Caroline cooed.

“What’s this about?” Dad shouted, his voice echoing through the house. Dad was a bona fide paranoiac who had finally discovered, after all these years, that there really was a conspiracy against him.

“Come on,” Eddie said, leading us deeper into the house.

Dad and I were frozen. Had this something to do with Astrid’s suicide? With my mother dying on one of Tim Lung’s boats? We were thrust into the role of detectives, forced to investigate our own lives, but our mental journeys into the past were futile. We just didn’t get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac’s nightmare! A narcissist’s dream! We didn’t know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed. Obviously Eddie had infused this criminal overlord with an obsession for Dad and me, but what had he said? What could he have said? I imagined him in late-night drinking sessions with his boss: “You wouldn’t believe these characters. They’re insane. They shouldn’t be allowed to live!”

“Mr. Lung is waiting for you in there,” Eddie said, pointing to double wooden doors at the end of the hallway. He had the colossal nerve to be smirking.

Dad suddenly grabbed him violently by the shirt collar; it looked as if he were planning to pull the shirt over his head- Dad’s first official act of physical violence. Caroline pried his fingers loose. “What have you got us into, you bastard?” he shouted, though it wasn’t as threatening as he intended. Fury mingled with genuine curiosity just comes out strange.

An armed guard emerged from a doorway to investigate the commotion. Eddie disarmed him with a nod. Disappointed, the guard retreated into the shadows. Apparently Eddie had a nod that was irrefutable. That was news to us. We continued down the hallway toward the double wooden doors in a daze, examining more photos on the way. Until now, I’d never realized how much Dad resembled a dog being pushed unwillingly into a swimming pool. And me- suddenly my identity felt like a less solid thing. I found it almost impossible to connect with the pictorial history of ourselves. We looked like damaged relics of a failed civilization. We didn’t look comprehensible at all.

And my mother! My heart nearly burst open looking at her. In all the photos she looked silent and motionless; all the action went on behind the eyes, the kind of eyes that look as if they have come back from the farthest corners of the earth just to tell you not to bother going there. Her smile was like a staircase leading nowhere. Half obscured in the corners of frames, there was her sad beauty, she was resting her head in her hands, her tired eyes clouding over. Perhaps it was coincidence, but in each photo she seemed to be farther and farther away from the camera lens, as if she were shrinking. These images gave me a newfound respect for Dad- she looked like a distant and imposing woman whom no sensible person would enter into a relationship with. I took one photograph of her off the wall and broke it out of the frame. It was black-and-white, taken in a laundromat. My mother was sitting on a washing machine, legs dangling, looking directly into the camera lens with her strikingly large eyes. Suddenly I knew this mystery had something to do with her- here I would receive the first clue as to who she was, where she came from. One thing was clear to me: the riddle of my mother’s existence would be answered behind that door.