II
The people-smugglers orchestrated their nasty enterprise out of an ordinary restaurant on a congested street that looked like seventy other congested streets I saw as we drove in. Terry gave Dad and me a warning at the door: “We’ve got to be careful with these guys. They’re absolutely brutal. They’ll cut your head off first, ask questions later, mostly about where to send your head.” With that in mind, we took a table and ordered jungle curries and beef salad. I had always imagined that fronts for criminal activity were merely façades, but here they actually served food, and it wasn’t bad.
We ate without speaking. Dad coughed in between spoonfuls and in between coughs called repeatedly to a waiter for bottled water. Terry was shoveling down prawns and breathing through his nose. The King was glaring at me disapprovingly from a portrait on the far wall. A couple of English backpackers at the next table were discussing the physical and psychological differences between Thai prostitutes and a girl named Rita from East Sussex.
“So, Terry,” I asked, “what happens now? We just sit here until closing time?”
“Leave it to me.”
We left it to him. All the communication happened wordlessly, according to a preestablished set of rules: Terry gave a conspiratorial nod to a waiter, who in turn gave it to the chef through an open window into the kitchen. The chef then passed the nod on to a man out of our line of vision, who for all we knew passed it on to twenty more men who lined a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine of hell. After a few anxious minutes, a man with a slightly malformed bald head came out and sat down, biting his lip and staring at us threateningly. Terry produced an envelope brimming with money and pushed it across the table. That softened the smuggler up a little. Grabbing the envelope, he rose from the table. We followed him, our footsteps sounding prolonged echoes as we walked down a hallway that eventually led to a small windowless room where two armed men greeted us with cold stares. One of them molested us, searching for weapons, and when none were found a flabby middle-aged man in an expensive suit entered and gazed at us quietly. His impressive stillness made me feel I was in a story by Conrad, as if I were looking into the heart of darkness. Of course he was just a businessman, with the same love of profit and indifference to human suffering as his Western corporate counterparts. I thought that this man could be a midlevel executive at IBM or a legal adviser to the tobacco industry.
Without warning, one of the bodyguards cracked the butt of a rifle over Terry’s head. His massive body crashed to the floor. He was unconscious but alive, his torso heaving with slow, deep breaths. When they aimed the guns at me, I thought how this was exactly the type of room I had always imagined I’d die in: small, airless, and crammed with strangers looking on indifferently.
“You are police,” the boss said in English.
“No. Not police,” Dad protested. “We are wanted criminals. Like you. Well, not like you. We don’t know if you’re wanted or not. Perhaps nobody wants you.”
“You are police.”
“No. Christ, listen. I have cancer. Cancer, you know. The big C. Death.” Dad then proceeded to tell them the whole absurd story of his fall from grace and escape from Australia.
I thought it was commonly accepted that stories this ridiculous had to be true, but the smugglers seemed skeptical. As they deliberated our fate, I remembered how Orwell described the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever, and I thought that all around me were boots, people so terrible that the whole human race should be punished for doing nothing to curb their existence. The job of these people-smugglers was to recruit desperate people, strip them of every penny, lie to them before shoving them onto boats that routinely sank. Each year they sent hundreds to their terror-stricken deaths. These pure exploiters were the irritable bowel syndrome of the cosmos, I thought, and looking at these men as if they were examples of all men, I decided I’d be happy to disappear if it meant they also could not exist.
The boss spoke quietly in Thai just as Terry regained consciousness. We helped him up off the floor, which was no easy task. Rubbing his head, he said, “They said it’ll cost you twenty-five thousand.”
“Fifty thousand,” I said.
“Jasper,” Dad whispered, “don’t you know anything about bargaining?”
“I’m going too,” I said.
Dad and Terry exchanged looks. Dad’s was dark and silent while his brother’s was wide and mystified.
“Plenty of these boats sink long before they get to Australia,” Terry said anxiously. “Marty! I absolutely forbid this! You can’t let Jasper go with you.”
“I can’t stop him,” Dad said, and I detected in his voice an enthusiasm to be reckless with my life now that his was over.
“Jasper, you’re a fool. Don’t do this,” Terry protested.
“I have to.”
Terry sighed, and muttered that I was more like my father every day. The deal was sealed with a handshake and fifty grand in cold, hard cash, and once the transaction was made, the smugglers seemed to relax and even offered us beers “on the house.” Watching these villains, I imagined that I had branched off the evolutionary line at an earlier age and evolved in secret, parallel to man but always apart.
“Tell me one thing, Jasper,” Terry said after we left the restaurant. “Why are you going?”
I shrugged. It was complicated. I didn’t want the people-smugglers, those fucking ghouls, to double-cross Dad and throw his body into the water half an hour out to sea. But this was not just an altruistic outburst; it was a form of preemptive strike. I didn’t want Dad’s resentment haunting me from beyond the grave, or little waves of guilt lapping at my future serenity. But above all, it was to be a sentimental journey: if he was to die, either at sea or among “his people” (whoever the fuck they were), I wanted to see it for myself, eyeball to vacant eyeball. My whole life I’d been pushed beyond rational limits by this man, and I was offended by the notion that I could be so implicated in his lifelong drama and not be present for the grand finale. He might have been his own worst enemy, but he was my worst enemy too, and I’d be damned if I was going to wait patiently by the riverbank, as in the Chinese proverb, for his corpse to float by. I wanted to see him die and bury him and pat the earth with my bare hands.
I say this as a loving son.
III
Our last night in Thailand, Terry prepared a feast, but the night was ruined early by Dad’s failure to show up. We searched the house thoroughly, especially the bathrooms and toilets, any hole he might have fallen into, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, on his desk, we found a short note: “Dear Jasper and Terry. Gone to a brothel. Back later.”
Terry took it personally that his brother was avoiding him on their last night together, and I couldn’t quite convince him that each dying man must perform his own archaic ritual. Some hold hands with loved ones; others prefer unprotected and exploitative third world sex.
Before bed, I packed a few things for the trip. We had taken very little to Thailand, and I put together even less for the return trip- one change of clothes each, two toothbrushes, one tube of toothpaste, and two vials of poison, procured by Terry, who had presented them to me with shaky hands over dinner. “Here you are, nephew,” he said, handing me little plastic tubes filled with a cloudy liquid. “In case the voyage drifts on without end or winds up on the bottom of the sea floor and you can look forward only to starvation or drowning, voilà! A third option!” He assured me it was a quick and relatively painless poison, though I pondered the word “relatively” for some time, unconsoled that we’d be howling in agony for a briefer period than offered by the other poisons in the shop. I hid the plastic tubes in a zipped pocket on the side of my bag.