I couldn’t. A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Terry’s naked torso. It was always impressive to see him with his shirt off. It made me wonder if he hadn’t reversed the usual order of enlightenment and achieved his Buddha-like serenity from the outside in.

“You ready?” Terry said.

“For what?”

“We’re going to try kick-starting your father’s motor again.”

I swung my legs over the hammock and followed Terry into Dad’s room. He was lying on the bed stomach down. He didn’t acknowledge our presence in any way.

“Look, Marty, don’t you find yourself a heavy weight, pinning you down?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Don’t you want instead to be a leaf blown in the air, or a drop of rain, or a wispy cloud?”

“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

“You need to be reborn. You need to die and be reborn.”

“I’m too old for rebirth. And who do you think you are, anyway? You’re a murderer a hundred times over, you’re a drug pusher, a pimp, a gunrunner, yet you take yourself for a visionary and a sage! Why is it your hypocrisy doesn’t make you sick?”

“Good question. It’s an amiable contradiction, that’s all.”

God, how these unedifying discussions went on and on.

Terry hauled Dad out of bed and dragged us to a shooting range where you could use pump-action shotguns to hit the targets. Neither Dad nor I had much love for guns, and the force of the action sent Dad keeling over onto his back. Terry bent over him, and Dad looked up, his mouth open, trembling all over.

“Marty, tell me something- where has all this meditating on death got you?”

“Fucked if I know.”

“Jasper says you’re a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner.”

“Does he?”

“Tell me about the corner. What does it look like? How did you get there? And what do you think would get you out?”

“Help me up,” Dad said. When he was on his feet again, he said, “In brief, here it is. Because humans deny their own mortality to such an extent they become meaning machines, I can never be sure when something supernatural or religious in nature occurs that I did not manufacture my connection to it out of desperation to believe in my own specialness and my desire for continuance.”

“Maybe because you’ve never had mystical experiences.”

“But he has,” I said. “Once he saw everything in the universe simultaneously. But he never followed up on it.”

“So you understand the nature of the corner now? If men are constantly manufacturing meaning in order to deny death, then how can I know I didn’t manufacture that experience myself? I can’t know for sure, so I must assume I did.”

“But then your whole life you haven’t ever really taken your own soul seriously.”

“Stop talking about the soul. I don’t believe in it, and neither does Jasper.”

Terry turned to me. I shrugged. In truth, I simply could not make up my mind about its existence. Dad was right- the immortal soul didn’t wash with me. Its shelf life felt overestimated. I believed instead in the mortal soul, one that from the moment of birth is ceaselessly worn away and that will die when I die. Whatever its shortcomings, a mortal soul still seemed perfectly sublime to me, no matter what anyone said.

“Look, Marty. Let it go- the mind that wants to solve the mysteries of the universe. It’s over. You lost.”

“No, you look, Terry,” Dad said wearily. “If I did live wrongly, if I made blunders and still have blunders coming up, I think maintaining the status quo of my deficient personality would be a lot less tragic than changing at the eleventh hour. I don’t want to be the dying man who learns how to live five seconds before his death. I’m happy to be ridiculous, but I don’t want my life to assume the characteristics of a tragedy, thanks.”

I reloaded my shotgun and aimed at the target and, for the first time that day, hit the bull’s-eye. I turned back to Dad and Terry, but neither had seen it. They were both unmoving, two brothers standing together but alive in very different worlds.

That night I buried myself deep under the covers. The shots Terry was firing at Dad seemed to be missing the target and hitting me instead. It occurred to me that the uncompromising position Dad held in the face of death was likely to be my own someday. Despite my desire to be his mirror opposite, I had to admit there were disturbing similarities between us. I also had a restless inquiring mind that aimed to solve the mysteries of creation, and like him, I didn’t know how to find respite from this fruitless, unending investigation. I wasn’t so sure Terry wasn’t rocking my boat on purpose. He must have known Dad wasn’t going to change one atom of his personality, and that’s why he was intent on dragging me along for these outings. He was aiming at me and getting me square on. I knew that somewhere within me was a spiritual inclination that Dad lacked, but it was still faint and unresolved. It wouldn’t take much to wake up one day and find I’d drifted away from my own center and was now tracing my father’s footsteps like a zombie.

There was a knock on the door. I didn’t say anything, but the door opened anyway. Terry waddled into the bedroom sideways.

“Damn these narrow doorways. Hey, Jasper, I need to pick your brain. What can we do to make your father’s final days wonderful?”

“Fuck, Terry. We can’t. Just leave him be.”

“I know! Maybe we should go on a trip.”

“All of us? Together?”

“Yes! In the country! We could go visit Eddie, see how he’s getting on.”

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”

“Your father’s not doing so good. I think to be in the company of his oldest friend might be just what he needs. And besides, the countryside could freshen him up.”

“You can’t freshen him up. He’s putrefying.”

“I’m going to tell everyone.”

“Wait- what about the cooperative? Don’t you have prostitutes to pimp, opium to grow, guns to trade?”

“The others can take care of things until I get back.”

“Look, Terry. Dad doesn’t get lost in the beauty of nature. Natural phenomena make him sink into the worst kind of introspection. What he needs is distraction, not a journey into his interior. Besides, you’re sleeping with his wife and he knows it.”

“I’m not!”

“Come on, Terry. I saw her coming out of your room.”

“Look. Caroline’s frustrated. Your father doesn’t know how to cuddle, that’s all. He only uses one arm!”

It was pointless talking to Terry. His mind was made up. We would all of us go to a remote mountain village and stay with Eddie for a couple of weeks. I tore at my hair and overheard him break the news ungently to Dad and Caroline, and though it was a unanimously detested idea, the following morning he herded us all into the Jeep.

IX

During the drive I ruminated on what Terry had told me about Eddie’s history. His father had been the only doctor in the remote mountain village where they lived, and as a young man Eddie was expected to follow in his footsteps. It was his parents’ dream that Eddie would take over once his father retired, and such was the force of their will, it became Eddie’s dream too. Over the years they scraped and sacrificed to send their son to medical school, and he went along, filled with gratitude and enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, things went sour from the first day Eddie opened his medical textbooks. As much as he wanted to pursue “his” dream and please his parents, he found that he was offended by the slop inside the human body. So Eddie spent most of his internship dry-retching. There was really no part of human anatomy he could stomach: the lungs, the heart, the blood, the intestines were not simply repellent symbols of man’s animality, but so delicate and prone to disease and disintegration that he scarcely knew how people survived from one minute to the next.