Maybe the hate waves from Australia finally took their toll, because Dad started dying again. It was clear that the cancer had reemerged in his lungs and was spreading. Over a period of a few months, his body became the centerpiece in a theater of horror. It looked as if he were being eaten from the inside out. He moved gruesomely from flesh to bone. He became pale and looked as though his essence had been suffused with methane. Eventually he avoided mirrors altogether. He stopped shaving and wandered around Terry’s place like a castaway, so thin he was swimming in his clothes. Then, just as suddenly, his trajectory toward death plateaued. He didn’t get any better, but he stopped getting worse. It was clear to me that he was waiting for something, waiting to do something, and he wasn’t going to die until he did it. There’s a lot to be said for the power of obstinacy. People often will themselves to stay alive; cripples walk and dead men get erections. Look around. It happens.

At first Terry and Caroline did nothing but plead with him to see doctors and begin another course of chemotherapy, but Dad refused. I knew it was doubtful that I could persuade him to do anything, but I couldn’t help thinking of Anouk and her obsessive belief in the powers of meditation. I tried to convince him that the possibility remained that by extreme efforts of concentration he might vanquish the cancer on his own. To humor me, he tried one afternoon. We sat together at the foot of the Buddha. I instructed him that superhuman efforts of the most intense form of mind control were required, but Dad was never able to clear his mind of skeptical thoughts. In the middle of meditation, he opened one eyelid and said, “You know what Mencken said about the human body? He said this: ‘All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient machine. He has the worst kidneys known to comparative zoology, and the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it is called upon to do, is less efficient than the eye of the earthworm; an optical instrument maker, who made an instrument so clumsy would be mobbed by his customers.’ ”

“That sounds true,” I said.

“Well, then- what makes you think meditation can override my body’s congenital frailty?”

“I don’t know. It was just an idea.”

“It’s a useless idea. Remember how Heraclitus said a man’s character is his fate? That’s not true. It’s his body that is his fate.”

Dad pulled himself up, using the Buddha’s toes as leverage, and staggered back toward the house. Caroline was standing at the door, watching us.

“How did it go?” I heard her ask.

“It was great. I’m healed. I’ll live for another several billion years. I don’t know why I never tried it before.”

Caroline nodded wearily, then accompanied Dad back inside.

Poor Caroline. On top of her role as primary caregiver, she had her own problems. She surprised herself by succumbing to emotional outbursts and crying fits. She’d been profoundly shaken by the events in Australia. She had always seen herself as somewhat of a thick-skinned, carefree, unself-conscious woman who loved life and never took any aspect of it seriously, least of all public opinion. But the outpouring of hatred focused on her had a serious and permanent destabilizing effect. She had become cautious and introverted; she saw this difference and no longer liked herself. On top of that, the reappearance of Terry, her childhood love, had called her marriage to Dad into question. I wasn’t sleeping well, so I was often witness to their midnight soap operas. Caroline would go bleary-eyed into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Dad would sneak down the hallway after her and peer around the doorway. His soupy breathing always gave him away.

“What are you doing?” she’d ask.

“Nothing. Stretching my legs.”

“Are you spying on me?”

“I’m not spying. I missed you, that’s all. Isn’t it romantic?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I wait until you’re asleep and then…what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean!”

I tell you, you’ve never heard so much subtext in your life!

Caroline and Dad shared the bedroom next to mine. Often I’d hear the three a.m. opening of sliding doors. I’d sit up in bed and look out my window at the slim figure of Caroline crossing the lawn to the reclining Buddha. In the moonlight I could see everything. Sometimes she’d rest her head on Buddha’s shoulder, and if the night was still and the birds asleep, I could make out the soft sound of her voice drifting into my room. “He’s fat and disgusting. And a criminal. He’s a fat, disgusting criminal. And he’s dead. He’s fat and he’s dead and he likes whores.” Once I heard her say, “And who am I? Look at my body. I’m no prize.”

The most painful moments came when it was time for bed. We’d be sprawled on cushions on the floor, bloated and drunk from the evening meal. Suddenly conversations would become stillborn dialogues.

Dad: “I’m tired.”

Caroline: “Go to bed, then.”

Dad would stare at Terry in a faintly sinister way.

Dad: “In a little while.”

Caroline: “Well, I’m going to bed.”

Terry: “Me too.”

Dad: “Me too.”

Dad did everything he could not to leave Caroline and Terry alone together. It was awkward, although I suspected he secretly loved the idea of being betrayed by his brother. To be betrayed by his brother was cheap melodrama of Biblical proportions, and it would be a gift to the dying man- a gift that showed life had not forgotten to include him in her grubby comedies. Then one night I saw Caroline sneaking out of Terry’s room, her hair messed up, shirt half unbuttoned. She froze at the sight of me. I gave her a weary look- what was I supposed to do, wink? Still, I couldn’t bring myself to blame her for her treachery. It was an untenable situation all around. I just wished she could have waited; it wouldn’t be long before Dad was out of the way. Cancer thrives on broken hearts; it is a vulture waiting for you to give up on human warmth. Dad often talked about the shame of the unlived life, but it was the shame of his unloved life that was really killing him.

I wasn’t sure if Terry was aware of his role in this triangle, and I don’t think that in general he knew he had succeeded in doing what Dad had only dreamed about, and that by doing so he had irrevocably cut Dad off from himself. Otherwise, he maybe wouldn’t have harassed Dad as much as he did.

Some months after our arrival, Terry got it into his head that it was within his powers to make Dad’s final days a constant wonder and joy, and he recruited me to help. He dragged the three of us to bathe naked in the river, then to look at cloud formations, then to bet at a dogfight, then to wallow in flesh and booze at a drunken orgy. Dad seethed about all these interruptions to his dying in peace and threw Terry nothing but odious, hate-filled looks. As for me, I was relieved to be doing something. Maybe it was the sudden freedom of having someone else to worry about Dad, but ever since arriving in Thailand, I’d had an enormous amount of energy. I felt stronger too, as if I could wrestle an animal to the ground. I woke early each morning, spent the day walking from one side of Bangkok to the other, and went to bed late each night. I seemed to need very little sleep. I thrived on the activities Terry meant for Dad to thrive on.

One obscenely hot afternoon, after I had been on my feet for several hours, I lay down in the hammock, stared at that humongous Buddha, and made a sort of mental inventory of my life experiences to see if they in fact wove together seamlessly without my having noticed at the time. I thought if I could decode the order of the past, I could deduce what was coming next.