I could see that Dad’s inward rage had almost made its way out. An evil storm was churning in him, and it had everything to do with Caroline. He noticed that she was demonstrating none of the rage; she was quiet, still literally gaping at Terry in horror and wonder. Terry, meanwhile, aimed his smiling eyes back at me.

“Hey, nephew. Why don’t you say something?”

“How did you get out of solitary confinement?”

Terry’s face looked empty of thought for a moment, before he said, “The fire! Of course! And Marty, you told him the whole story. Good for you! Good question, Jasper, right at the beginning.”

“Were you even in solitary?” Dad asked.

We all leaned forward with utter absorption as Terry began.

“I sure was! That was a close one. I almost did get baked- in solitary there are no windows, of course, but I heard a lot of screaming, guards shouting orders to each other, and when the smoke came under the door I knew I was cooked. It was pitch-black in that cement cage, hotter than hell and full of smoke. I was terrified. I started shouting, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ But no one came. I banged on the door and nearly burned my arm right off. There wasn’t anything I could do, and it took all the psychological effort I could muster to calm myself down enough to settle in for an unpleasant death. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor. It was one of the guards, Franklin. I recognized his voice: ‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted. ‘Terry Dean!’ I answered. Good old Franklin. He was a good man who loved cricket and he was a big fan of my rampage. He opened the door and said, ‘Come on!’ and in his panic to save me, he let down his guard. I knocked him unconscious, took his clothes, threw him in the cell, and locked the door.”

“You murdered the man who came to save you.”

Terry paused a moment and gave Dad a strange look, like a man deciding whether or not to explain a complex natural phenomenon to a child, then continued. “After that it was easy. The whole prison was on fire, and I didn’t even have to use the keys I’d stolen- all the doors were open. Somehow I made my way through the smoke-filled corridors and out of the prison, I saw the town up in flames and disappeared into the smoke. That was it.”

“So it was Franklin who burned in your cell.”

“Yeah, I guess it was his ashes you scooped up.”

“What happened next?”

“Oh yeah- I saw you in the fire. I called out to you, but you didn’t see me. Then I saw that you were running into a trap. I shouted, ‘Left, turn left!’ and you turned and disappeared.”

“I heard you! I thought it was your bloody ghost, you mongrel!”

“Spent a couple of days in Sydney lying very low. Caught a freighter to Indonesia. Worked my way around the globe checking out the other continents to see what they had to offer, and wound up here in Thailand. That’s when I started the democratic cooperative of crime.”

“What about Eddie?”

“Eddie started working for me at the beginning. I tried to track you down, Marty, but you’d already left Australia. So the best I could do was get Eddie to go and wait near Caroline. I had her address from a letter she’d sent me in jail, and Eddie took a room next to hers and waited for you to show up.”

“How could you be so sure I’d go see Caroline?”

“I wasn’t sure. But I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Why didn’t you just get Eddie to tell me you were alive?”

“By then I felt like I’d caused you enough trouble. You were really looking out for me back then, Marty, and you probably thought I didn’t notice, but I knew you’d worried yourself sick about me. I figured you’d had enough.”

“You told Eddie to make Caroline a millionaire!”

“Of course!” Turning to Caroline, he said, “When I heard about your son, I was so sorry.”

“Go on, Terry,” Dad said.

“That’s it. I had Eddie keep tabs on you. When he told me you were with some nutty lady who you got pregnant and you didn’t have any money, I told him to give you some. But you wouldn’t take it. I didn’t know how to help, so I gave you a job working for me. Unfortunately, it was a bad time- you waltzed right into the middle of a little gang warfare. I didn’t know your lunatic girlfriend was going to jump on the boat and blow herself up. It was a nutty way to do yourself in, wasn’t it? Sorry, Jasper.”

“What else?”

“Anyway. When you took Jasper to Australia, I got Eddie to follow. He came back with some crazy reports. I gave you a job again, running one of my strip clubs, and you smashed the place and wound up in hospital. Then I gave you some dosh so you could build your maze, and that’s that. Then you warped the whole of Australia with your strange ideas and here we are. That pretty much brings us up to date.”

As Dad absorbed his brother’s story, his whole being looked to me like a Hollywood façade, as if I were to take a step around him, I’d see he was only one inch wide.

“When I was in that cell,” Terry said, “and thought my death was seconds away, I saw clearly that everything I had tried to do, to tidy up the ethics in sport, was fucking meaningless. I realized that, barring accident, I could have lived for eighty or ninety years, and I had blown it. I was furious with myself! Furious! I tried to reason why I had done it, what I was thinking, and I realized that I’d been trying to leave a trace of myself so that after I was gone, I would still kind of be here. Everything is summed up in that idiotic ‘kind of.’ And you know what I realized on the very edge of death? That I couldn’t give a fuck. I didn’t want to build a statue of myself. I had an epiphany. Have you ever had one? They’re great! This was mine: I found out that I had killed myself because I wanted to live forever. I had tossed my life away in the name of some daft I don’t know what-”

“Project,” I said. Dad and I looked at each other.

“Project. Yeah. Anyway, I swore if I got out of there I’d live in the moment, fuck everyone, let my fellow man do whatever he wants, and I swore that I’d follow Harry’s advice and stay anonymous for the rest of my days.”

Terry suddenly turned to Caroline with clear, serious eyes.

“I wanted to call you, but every time I was about to, I remembered that cell, that death chamber, and I understood that the way I loved you was sort of possessive, and like my sporting rampage, it was a way of barricading myself against, I don’t know…death. That’s why I’ve chosen to love only prostitutes. There’s no chance of getting into that old routine of jealousy and possessiveness. I took myself out of the competition, like Harry said. I’m free, and I’ve been free since that day. And you know what I do now? When I wake up every day, I say to myself ten times, ‘I am a soulless dying animal with an embarrassingly short lifespan.’ Then I go out, as the world sinks or swims, and make myself a little more comfortable. In the cooperative our profits aren’t outstanding, but we make a fairly decent living, and we can afford to live like kings because Thailand’s cheap as chips!”

A long silence followed, in which no one knew where to look.

“Australia loves you,” Dad said finally.

“And they hate you,” Terry said back.

Despite their divergent paths in life- two diametrically opposed roads less traveled- the brothers had come to the same conclusion, Terry, naturally, through epiphany and the cathartic afterbirth of his near-death trauma, and Dad through reflection and thought and intellectually obsessing about death. Uneducated Terry, the man Dad had once described as being unable to write his name in the snow with his piss, had somehow intuited the traps of the fear of death and with ease sidestepped them, as if they were dog turds on a brightly lit street. Dad, on the other hand, had intellectually recognized the traps but still managed to fall into every one of them. Yes, I could see it in his face straightaway. Dad was crushed! Terry had lived the truth of Dad’s life, and Dad never had, even though it was his truth.