With superhuman effort, my legs took me to the next room. There I saw Uncle Terry on his knees, and from behind he looked like the back of a VW Beetle about to do a reverse park into a tight spot. Sweat poured off the fat folds in his neck. I could hear him crying. He spun around to look at me, then turned back and raised his chubby arm, motioning toward Dad’s bedroom.

I went in.

Dad was also on his knees, swaying gently over the mutilated body of Caroline. His eyes were as wide as they could go, as though pried open with matchsticks. The love of his life was on her back, blood seeping from a dozen slashes. Her dead eyes were fixed in an insupportable gaze. I had to look away. There was something disturbing in those eyes. She looked like someone who had said something offensive and wanted to take it back. Later I found out she had died trying to protect Eddie, of all people; she was killed inadvertently, and it was her death that had turned the mob on itself, split it into factions- those who thought that it was OK to kill a middle-aged woman and those who thought it was out of order. That had effectively ended their rampage and sent them home.

We buried Eddie and Caroline in the garden. It had started raining again, and we had no choice but to give them a wet, muddy burial, which was appropriate for Eddie maybe. But watching Caroline’s body disappear into the muck made us all sick and ashamed. Dad was having trouble breathing, as if something were blocking his airway- maybe his heart.

The three of us drove back to Bangkok in silence, lost in the kind of grief that makes every smile in your life afterward less sincere. On the way Dad sat in absolute stillness, though he made little noises to let us know that every minute left in his life would be an unendurable torture. I knew he was blaming himself for her death, and not only himself but Terry too, for employing Eddie to begin with, and not only Terry but fate, chance, God, art, science, humanity, the Milky Way. Nothing was exonerated.

When we arrived back at Terry’s house, we retired to our separate bedrooms to marvel at how quickly the human heart snaps shut and to wonder how we might ever pry it open again. It was only two days later, spurred either by Caroline’s murder or by the black dog barking in the manure of his heart, or by mourning crowding out rational thought, or maybe because even after a lifetime of reflecting on death, he still couldn’t quite comprehend the inevitability of his own, that Dad suddenly emerged from his grief-induced hypnosis and announced his final project. As Eddie had predicted, it was the looniest yet. And after a lifetime of watching Dad make improbable decision after improbable decision, and being in some way a victim of each one, what surprised me most was that I could still be surprised.

SEVEN

I

I don’t want to die here,” Dad said.

“What’s the matter?” Terry asked. “Don’t you like your room?”

“The room’s fine. It’s this country.”

The three of us were eating chicken laksas and watching the sun set over the polluted metropolis. As usual, Dad was nauseated and managed to make it seem as though his vomiting were a gut reaction not to the food but to the company.

“Well, we don’t want you to die either, do we, Jasper?”

“No,” I said, and waited a full thirty seconds before adding, “not at the moment.”

Dad wiped the corners of his mouth with my sleeve and said, “I want to die at home.”

“When you say home, you mean…”

“ Australia.”

Terry and I looked at each other with dread.

“Well, mate,” Terry said slowly, “that’s just not practical.”

“I know. Nevertheless, I’m going home.”

Terry took a deep breath and spoke to Dad calmly and deliberately, as though gently chastising his grown-up mentally disturbed son for smothering the family pet by overhugging.

“Marty. Do you know what would happen the minute the plane landed on Aussie soil? You’d be arrested at the airport.” Dad didn’t say anything. He knew this was true. Terry pushed on: “Do you want to die in jail? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you fly back home.”

“No, I don’t want to die in jail.”

“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You’ll die here.”

“I have another idea,” Dad said, and at once any glimmer of hope died and I knew that a nice, quiet, peaceful death followed by an intimate funeral and a respectable period of restrained mourning was now out of the question. Whatever was coming was going to be dangerous, messy, and frantic and would drive me to the edge of insanity.

“So, Marty, what are you suggesting?”

“We sneak back into Australia.”

“What?”

“By boat,” he clarified. “Terry, I know you know who the people-smugglers are.”

“This is nuts!” I said. “You can’t want to risk your life just to die in Australia! You hate Australia!”

“Look, I know this is world-class hypocrisy. But I don’t fucking care. I’m homesick! I miss the landscape and the smell of it. I even miss my countrymen and the smell of them!”

“Be careful now,” I said. “Your final act will be a direct contradiction of everything you’ve ever thought, said, and believed.”

“I know,” he said almost cheerfully, not minding at all. In fact, he seemed enlivened by it. He was up on his feet now, swaying a little, daring us with his eyes to raise objections so he could shoot them down.

“Didn’t you tell me nationalism is a disease?” I asked.

“And I stand by it. But it’s a disease that, as it turns out, I have contracted, along with everything else. And I don’t see the point of trying to cure myself of a minor ailment when I’m about to die of a major one.”

I didn’t say anything to that. What could I say?

I had to get out the big guns to help me. Luckily, Dad had packed a suitcase full of books, and I found the very quote I needed in his well-thumbed copy of Fromm’s The Sane Society. I went into his room but he was on the toilet, so I read it to him through the bathroom door: “Hey, Dad. ‘The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their and his own human reality.’ ”

“It doesn’t matter. When I die, my failures and weaknesses die with me. You see? My failures are dying too.”

I continued: “ ‘Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism”…is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.’ ”

“So?”

“So you don’t love humanity, do you?”

“No. Not really.”

“Well, there you are!”

Dad flushed the toilet and came out without washing his hands. “You can’t change my mind, Jasper. This is what I want. Dying men get dying wishes even if it irritates the living. And this is mine- I want to expire in my country, with my people.”

Caroline, I thought. It was obvious that Dad was in the grip of a pain that would arrive forever. He had made himself perpetually vigilant against his own comfort, and this mission to Australia was a directive from a sadness that must be obeyed.

But not only that. By tiptoeing back into Australia as human cargo in a risky smuggling operation, Dad had found one last stupid project, one that was sure to expedite his death.