There wasn’t much to see. Eddie’s father had been an amateur painter as well as a doctor and had, unfortunately, found a way to combine his two interests. On the walls hung hauntingly realistic depictions of the bowels, heart, lungs, and kidneys and one of an aborted fetus who, despite his bad luck, appeared to be smiling wickedly. I didn’t bother pretending I liked the paintings, and Eddie didn’t expect me to. I followed him into his office, a large, immaculate room with wooden shutters. It had the kind of order and tidiness one finds in extremely finicky people and in people who have absolutely nothing to do with their time. As I knew Eddie had been waiting here for weeks on end without a single patient, it was clear which case it was.

“This was my father’s office. This is where he saw patients, did his medical research, and avoided my mother. Everything is exactly how he left it. Actually, why did I say that? That’s not true. When he died, my mother packed everything into boxes, so I have rearranged everything exactly as I remember him having it.”

It was your standard doctor’s office: an oversized desk, a comfy padded chair for the doctor, a straight-backed uncomfortable one for the patient, a raised examination table, a bookshelf with thousand-page medical manuals, and, on a side table, perfectly arranged surgical implements from not only this century but the last two as well. Unfortunately, there were more vulgar paintings of body parts on the walls, paintings that seemed to vilify the human as a reputable organism. The atmosphere in the room was heavy, because of either the lingering death of the father or the present-day frustrations of the son.

“When I took up your uncle’s offer, my parents broke off all contact with me. Now, here they are.”

“Who?”

“My parents.” Eddie motioned to two earthenware pots I thought were bookends.

“Their ashes?”

“No, their spirits.”

“Less messy.”

So the spirits of Eddie’s deceased parents were kept on a high shelf. Out of reach of children.

“I wait here every day. Not one single patient has come by. I’ve introduced myself around, but they’re totally uninterested in trying out anyone new. I’m not even sure how much business they throw around anyway. These people don’t consult doctors for minor ailments, and hardly even for major ones. But I’m determined to stick it out. After all, I went to medical school, didn’t I? So why shouldn’t I be a doctor? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write off those five years of university as a learning experience?”

Apparently Eddie was completely oblivious of the glaring contradiction in his perspective on wasted time. He had chosen to fixate on the five years of medical school rather than the more obvious twenty years of chaperoning Dad and me.

He sat on the edge of his desk and picked something from his teeth with his finger. He stared at me solemnly, as though picking food from his teeth were something he had learned at medical school.

“There’re so many things I wanted to say to you over the years, Jasper. Things I could never say because they conflicted with the requirements of my job.”

“Such as?”

“Well, as you may have figured out, I hate your father. And that the Australian people bought his bullshit even for one minute degrades them as a nation, and degrades all people everywhere.”

“I suppose.”

“Anyway, the point is, I hate your father. No, I loathe him.”

“That’s your right.”

“But what you might not know is, I don’t like you much either.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“You see? You don’t even ask me why. That’s what I don’t like about you. You’re smug and condescending. In fact, you’ve been smug and condescending ever since you were five years old.”

“And that’s my right.”

Eddie leered at me menacingly. Now that he was no longer pretending to like us, it felt as if he had become sinister overnight.

“See? Smug and condescending. I’ve observed you your entire life. I probably know you better than you know yourself. You pride yourself on knowing people and what they’re thinking. But you don’t know yourself, do you? You know what it is that you especially don’t know? That you’re an extension of your father. When he dies, you will become him. I have no doubt about that. People can inherit thoughts- they can even inherent whole minds. Do you believe that?”

“Not really.” Maybe.

“When I met your father, he was just a little older than you are now. And you know what I see in you? The same exact man. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him in your core. That’s where you don’t know yourself. I’m sure every time you hear yourself say something that’s an echo of your father, you think it’s just habit. It’s not. It’s him inside you, waiting to come out. And that’s your blind spot, Jasper.”

I gulped, despite myself. The blind spot. The fucking blind spot. Everyone has one. Even the geniuses. Even Freud and Nietzsche had mile-wide blind spots that wound up corrupting some element of their work. So was this mine? That I was sickeningly similar to my father, that I was turning into him, that I was going to inherit not just his antisocial behavior but his diseased thought processes as well? I was already worried that my depression back in Australia had had echoes of his depression.

Eddie sat on his examination table and kicked his legs in the air.

“It’s so refreshing to be speaking my mind. Keeping secrets is exhausting. I would like to tell you the truth, not just about you, but about me and what you and your father and your uncle have done to my life. So you know. It’s important that you know. Because when I finish telling you, you’ll understand why you must convince everyone to leave this house at once. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to make everyone leave. Before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Just listen. When Terry offered me the job of looking after your dad, I took it as a way to escape a future I was uncertain of. ‘Help them out when they need help, make sure they keep out of trouble, and take photos of them, as many photographs as you can,’ Terry said. That was my mission. Didn’t sound too tough. How was I supposed to know it was going to ruin my life? It’s my own fault, though, I’ll admit. I accepted a devil’s bargain. Have you noticed that in books and movies the Devil is always depicted with a sense of humor while God is deadly serious? I think in reality it would be the other way around, don’t you?”

“Probably.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit. But watching your lives was like watching an accident in slow motion. It was compelling. When I was away from Australia, away from your dad and you, I felt I was missing episodes of my favorite TV show. It was maddening. I’d be making love to my wife and thinking, ‘What are they up to now? What trouble are they in? I’m missing it, dammit!’ And I found I made excuses to return earlier and earlier. And I’d go back to listen to your father’s insipid, unending diatribes, but I couldn’t drag myself away. I was hooked. I was a junkie, plain and simple. I was hopelessly addicted to you.”

Eddie was kicking wildly now and bouncing up and down. I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to. I just had to weather this outburst.

“For twenty years I tried to get away, to wean myself off this drug of your family. But I couldn’t. When I wasn’t with you, I didn’t know who I was. I was not a person, I was a nothing. When I went back to Australia and saw you both embroiled in some ridiculous episode, I felt alive. I felt such brightness it practically came out my eyes. My wife wanted a child, but how could I when I already had two children? Yes, I love you both as much as I hate you both, more than you will ever know. I can tell you, after I deposited you two in Terry’s lap, I was devastated. Mission accomplished. I knew as soon as I moved home that I could no longer stand to be with my wife. And I was right. She couldn’t understand why I was irritable, why I was empty. I couldn’t share the emptiness with her and I didn’t love her enough for her to fill it with love, so I left her and came up here. You see? I am completely empty, and I’ve come here in order to try to fill myself. Now do you understand why you must leave? I’ve come here to find myself again, to find out who I am. I’m building myself from the ground up. Your father is always talking about projects. You were my project. And now I need another one. That’s why I need patients. I’m continuing my life where I was interrupted, and obviously I can’t do it with you two here. That’s why you have to talk your uncle into taking you all out of here.”