One night I heard Dad screaming. I came out of my bedroom to see Terry chasing him around the living room with a pillow.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s trying to kill me!”

“I don’t want you to die. You want you to die. I’m just trying to help you out.”

“Stay away from me, you fucker! I said I wanted to commit suicide. I didn’t say I wanted to be murdered.”

Poor Dad. It’s not that he didn’t have clear ideas, it’s just that he had too many, and they contradicted, effectively canceling each other out. Dad didn’t want to be smothered by his brother, but he couldn’t bring himself to do his own smothering.

“Let me do this,” Terry said. “I was always there for you, and I always will be.”

“You weren’t there for me when our mother tried to kill me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dad stared at Terry a long time. “Nothing,” he said finally.

“You know what? You don’t know how to die because you don’t know who you are.”

“Well, who am I?”

“You tell me.”

After some hesitation, Dad described himself as a “seer of limited epiphanies.” I thought that was pretty good, but Terry thought he was something else entirely: a Christ figure who couldn’t summon the courage to sacrifice himself, a Napoleon who didn’t have the stomach for battle, and a Shakespeare who didn’t have a gift with words. It was clear we were getting closer to defining who Dad was.

Dad let out a low moan and stared at the floor. Terry put his wide, thick hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“I want you to admit that despite having lived for so long on this earth, you don’t know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, how can you be what you are?”

Dad didn’t respond in words but let out another moan, like an animal who had just visited his parents in a butcher shop window.

I went to bed wondering, Do I know who I am? Yes, I do: I’m Kasper. No, I mean Jasper. Above all, I am not my father. I am not turning into my father. I am not a premature reincarnation of my father. I’m me, that’s all. No one more, no one less.

This thinking nauseated me, and it felt like the nausea was changing the shape of my face. I climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror. I wasn’t looking better or worse, simply different. Soon I might not be able to recognize myself at all, I thought. Something strange was happening to my face, something that was not simply the process of aging. I was turning into someone not myself.

There was a loud noise outside. Someone or something was in the chicken coop. I looked out but couldn’t see anything from the window, only the reflection of my own slightly unfamiliar face. I turned off the light but even with the moonlight it was too black. The noises continued. I certainly wasn’t going to go out there to investigate. Who knew what creatures existed in the jungles of Thailand, and who knew how hungry they were? All I could do was shut my eyes tight and try to go to sleep.

In the morning I sat up and looked out my window. The coop was still standing- I half expected it to be hanging from a giant slobbering mouth. I headed out the back door.

The grass under my feet was cold and wet. The air had a funny taste to it, like an old mint that had lost most of its flavor. I walked cautiously, readying myself to run back to the house if an animal should leap out at me. Inside, the coop was in chaos. The paint cans had been opened and their contents emptied onto the floor and onto my painting of the floating face, which had been torn into little pieces. Who had destroyed my painting? And why? There was nothing to do but go back to bed.

I wasn’t in bed five minutes when I heard someone breathing. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It didn’t do any good. The breathing came closer and closer, until I felt it on my neck. I hoped it wasn’t Eddie. It was. I turned over to see him leaning down over me. I jumped up.

“What do you want?”

“Jasper, what are you doing today?”

“Sleeping, hopefully.”

“I’m going out driving to see if I can drum up some business.”

“OK, then- have a good day.”

“Yeah. You too.”

And still Eddie didn’t move. Even though it was exhausting to do so, I felt sorry for him. There’s no other way to say it. He looked lovesick. It was a bad look.

“I don’t suppose you want to come along. Keep me company?” Eddie asked.

It was a daunting proposition. Spending the day alone with Eddie didn’t particularly appeal to me, and visiting sick people even less, but it turned out there was nothing I could imagine as disagreeable as staying in the house with Dad’s clanking death.

We went traipsing up and down the countryside in the pitiless sun. I thought Australia was hot! The humidity in the mountains was out of control- I could feel beads of sweat forming on my gallbladder. We rode along, not saying much. When Eddie was silent, I felt as if I were the only person alive in the world- although I had that feeling when he was talking too. Wherever we went, people watched us. They couldn’t understand a man in his mid-forties wanting to become a doctor- it was a violation of the natural order. Eddie tried to take it in his stride, but it was obviously wearing him down. He had only vicious, unfriendly words to say about the healthy, peaceful inhabitants of this tranquil village. He couldn’t stand their contentment. He even resisted the cutesy Thai custom of smiling like a cretin in every conceivable situation, although he had to if he wanted to lure patients. But his smile took up only one side of his divided face. I saw the real one, with the furious down-turned lips and restrained homicidal rage in his blinking eye.

We ate lunch by the side of the road. I could feel no wind, but the branches of the trees moved every so often. After lunch Eddie said, “Did you speak to Terry about taking you all out of here?”

“He wants us to stay. He thinks something bad is going to happen in your house and he wants to see what it is.”

“He thinks that, does he? That’s bad news for us.”

Before Eddie could add any more, we heard the roar of a motorcycle charging at full speed.

“Look who it is,” Eddie said.

“Who?”

“That antique doctor. Look how smug he is.”

The motorcycle screamed toward us, stirring up dust. It was hard to believe anyone antique could ride a bike so fast. As the doctor came to a shuddering stop, Eddie corrected his posture. It’s difficult to look like a winner when you’re clearly the loser, but posture plays a part.

The doctor may have been in his sixties, but he had the physique of an Olympic swimmer. I couldn’t detect anything smug about him. He and Eddie exchanged a few words. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I saw Eddie’s eyes widen in a way that darkened his face and made me somehow relieved I couldn’t understand the language. When the doctor had sped off, I asked Eddie, “What did he say? Will he retire soon?”

“There’s bad news. Fuck! Terrible news! The doctor already has a young apprentice, ready to fill his shoes.”

Well, that was the end of that. There was absolutely no use for Eddie in this community, and he knew it.

All I wanted to do was sleep, but the moment I returned to my room, I knew it would be impossible, mostly because Caroline was sitting on the edge of my bed.

“I went into the village today,” she said.

“Please, no more chin fat.”

She handed me a small leather pouch tied with a string. I took it and pulled out a necklace with three strange objects hanging off it.

“A piece of elephant tusk and some kind of tooth,” I guessed.

“Tiger’s tooth.”

“Sure. And what’s that third one?”