In his second year of medical school he married a beautiful journalism student whom he had won over dishonestly by boasting about his future as a doctor and predicting a prosperous life together. What should have been a happy event was for Eddie a secret torture. He had serious doubts about entering the medical profession but didn’t trust that he was inherently lovable enough “as is.” Now he had something else to be confused and guilty over: he had begun a marriage based on a lie.
Then he met the man who would change his life. It was two a.m. when Terry Dean stumbled into the emergency room with a penknife stuck in the small of his back at such an awkward angle he couldn’t remove it himself. As Eddie pulled out the knife, Terry’s open and candid manner, combined with the late-night silence of the graveyard shift, made Eddie confide to his patient his confused feelings- how it felt to be torn between disgust and duty, between obligation and the fear of failure. Basically, Eddie moaned: did he want to be a fucking doctor or didn’t he? He admitted that he loathed the idea and it would in all probability drive him to suicide, but how could he get out of it now? How else could he make money? Terry listened sympathetically, and on the spot offered him a high-paying though unusual job: traveling the world and watching over his brother with the aim of helping him out when he needed it. In short, to be Martin Dean’s friend and protector.
While it broke his parents’ hearts and put an unbelievable strain on his relationship with his young bride, Eddie took the job and set off to Paris to wait near Caroline for Dad to turn up. The most astounding fact of all that was revealed to us was that in all those years, from the moment Eddie met Dad in Paris onward, he couldn’t tolerate him. All those years he hated my father, and this hatred never once let up. It was beyond belief. The more I thought about Eddie’s deception, pretending to like a man for twenty years, the more I thought it verged on virtuosity. Then I decided that people probably pretend to like their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for their entire lives, and twenty years is no great trick.
The traffic had been heavy leaving Bangkok, but now we were out of the city, it eased up. We were on an open road flanked by rice fields. Terry drove fast. We passed tiny mopeds with several generations of whole families on them and buses that looked to be veering dangerously out of control. For a while we were stuck behind a slow-moving tractor driven by a farmer who was languidly rolling a cigarette with both hands. Then we began winding up the mountains. As if to finish the story swilling around in my head, Terry gave us an update on what had happened to Eddie since he returned to Thailand.
Eddie’s jubilation at having completed a twenty-year mission dissipated as things went almost immediately pear-shaped. After a separation of two hundred and forty months because of Eddie’s work, it took just six weeks of togetherness to destroy his marriage. Eddie moved out of his wife’s apartment in Bangkok and into a house in the remote village where he grew up. It was a terrible mistake- the ghosts of his parents were everywhere, berating him for breaking their hearts. So what did the fool do? He picked up the thread of his old dream. Dreams can be as dangerous as anything else. If you go through the years, changing with age and experience, and you forget to overhaul your dreams as well, you might find yourself in Eddie’s unenviable position: a forty-seven-year-old pursuing the dreams of a twenty-year-old. In Eddie’s case it was worse. He’d forgotten that they weren’t even his dreams to begin with; he’d got them secondhand. And now he had returned to this outrageously isolated community with the intention of setting up shop, only to find that his father’s replacement, now sixty-five years old, had the job well and truly sewn up.
We arrived around sunset at Eddie’s place, a dilapidated house set in a small clearing. The hills surrounding it were covered by thick jungle. When Terry turned off the engine, I could hear a river running. We were really in the middle of nowhere. The isolation of the place made me vaguely ill. Having lived in a hut in the northwest corner of a labyrinth, I was no stranger to austerity or solitude, but this was something else. The house made me shudder. Maybe I’d read too much or seen too many films, but when you consider your life in terms of its dramatic attributes, as I did, everything becomes instantly loaded with meaning. A house is not just a house- it is a location where an episode of your life is staged, and I thought this remote house was an absolutely perfect setting for a menacing low point and possibly, if we stayed long enough, a tragic climax.
Terry honked the horn, and Eddie came out waving his arms in a truly berserk manner.
“What’s this? What do you want?”
“Didn’t you tell him we were coming?” I asked Terry.
“What for? Anyway, he knows now. Eddie! We’ve come to see how you’re getting on. Make up the spare rooms, will you? You have guests.”
“I don’t work for you anymore, Terry. You can’t tell me…you can’t just come here and expect…Look, I’m a doctor now. I don’t want any funny business up here.”
“My spies tell me you haven’t had one patient.”
“How did you…They’re a little suspicious of outsiders. And I haven’t lived here for many, many years. It takes time to build a reputation, that’s all. Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? You can’t stay. My position here is precarious enough. The last thing I need is you giving me a bad name.”
“My God, Eddie, we’re not going to run around the village in our underwear, we just want some peace and quiet, see a little scenery, and anyway, is it so strange for a doctor to take in a dying man and his family for a few weeks?”
“Weeks? You intend to stay for weeks?”
Terry laughed loudly and slapped Eddie on the back.
“Him too?” Eddie asked quietly, looking in Dad’s direction. Dad shot a look back that was lifeless and cold. Then Eddie looked at me with a half smile that approximated warmth but was not quite warm. I had recently experienced from the Australian people the concept of hate by association and so recognized the size and smell of it. Terry grabbed his bag and headed into the house. The rest of us followed cautiously. I paused at the door and turned back to Eddie. He hadn’t moved. He was standing next to the Jeep, perfectly still. He looked as if he couldn’t endure any of us. And who could blame him? Individually we were all quite pleasant people, but together we were unendurable.
I am not aware of what it is about my body that attracts mosquitos of all races and religions, I can only say that I doused my body in insect repellent and lit a thousand citronella candles, but for some reason they just kept coming. I removed the mosquito net from the bed and wrapped it like a shroud around my body. Through the diaphanous netting, I took in my surroundings. To say the furnishings were minimal was an understatement: four white walls, a creaky chair with a broken leg, a wobbly table, and a wafer-thin mattress. A window looked out on the thick vegetation of the jungle. I had insisted on the bedroom farthest away from everybody. There was a back door- good for entering and exiting without having to see anyone, I’d thought.
I felt a mosquito on my arm. They were tunneling through the net. I tore it off in disgust and thought: What am I going to do here? In Bangkok, between the sex shows and the Buddhist temples, there was plenty to keep me occupied. Here, Dad’s dying was likely to make all non-Dad-dying thoughts virtually impossible. What was there to do other than watch the man deteriorate?
After a silent dinner during which we all eyed each other suspiciously, where the air was thick with secret desires and no one said the unsayable so there was nothing much to be said, Eddie gave me a tour of the place.