“Your future!” she gasped. “I can’t stand to think of it!”
“Well, don’t.”
She ran over and hugged me. Then she pulled away and we looked into each other’s eyes and breathed into each other’s nostrils. Then she kissed me with her eyes closed- I know because mine were wide open. Then she opened her eyes too, so I shut mine quickly. The whole thing was unbelievable! My hands went for her breasts, something I’d wanted to do even before she had them. Her hands, meanwhile, went straight for my belt, and she fumbled to undo it. For a split second I thought she wanted to hit me with it. Then I got into the swing of things, and reached up her skirt and pulled off her underpants. We crashed on the bed like fallen soldiers. There we struggled together, laboring to rid ourselves of unwanted garments, until she suddenly pushed herself from me and screamed, “What are we doing!” Before I could answer, she ran out of the room crying.
I lay bewildered on her bed for half an hour, smelling her pillow with my eyes closed, engrossed in the spectacle of a lifelong dream slipping away. When she didn’t return, I got dressed and went to sit under my favorite tree to think suicidal thoughts and tear up weeds.
I avoided Caroline for the next week. Since she was the one who went hysterical, it was up to her to find me. Then on Saturday, Lionel phoned me in a panic. He couldn’t find his toothbrush, and while he might be blind, that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid of gingivitis. I went over and found it floating in the toilet bowl, specked with feces. I told him I was very sorry, he’d have to kiss that toothbrush goodbye, but not literally.
“She’s gone,” he said. “I woke up yesterday morning and there was a strange person breathing in my bedroom. I can recognize a person by their breathing patterns, you know. It gave me the fright of my life. I shouted, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Shelly was her name, a nurse Caroline had organized to look after me. I shouted at Shelly to get out, and she left, the bitch. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m afraid, Martin. Darkness is boring and surprisingly brown.”
“Where did Caroline go?”
“Damned if I know! Still, I’ll bet she’s having fun. That’s what you get when you give your child a liberal upbringing, I suppose. Liberation.”
“I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” I lied. I didn’t think she was ever coming back. I always knew Caroline would vanish one day, and finally that day had come.
Over the following months we received postcards from her from all over. The first was of a river in Bucharest, the word “ Bucharest ” stamped across it, and on the back Caroline had scrawled, “I’m in Bucharest!” The same kind came every second week from Italy, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris.
Meanwhile, I visited Terry often. It was a long journey, from our town by bus, through the city by train, then another bus to a poor outer suburb. The detention center looked like a low-rise residential block. Each time I signed in, the administrator greeted me like the patriarch of a distinguished family and took me personally to the visiting room, through a long series of corridors, where I felt physically threatened at all moments by young criminals who never stopped looking furious, as if they’d been arrested after crossing the Himalayas on foot. Terry would be waiting for me in the visitors’ room. Sometimes he had fresh purple bruises around his eyes. One day I sat down with him to see the imprint of a fist on his cheek, which was only slowly beginning to fade. He looked at me with great intensity. “Caroline visited me before she left, and she said that even though I blinded her father, she’ll always love me.” When I didn’t respond, he talked about his crime of blinding Lionel as a one-way ticket into a criminal life. “You don’t burn your bridges with normal society,” he said. “You blow your bridges up.” He spoke quickly, as if dictating in an emergency. He was eager to justify, to confide, to seek approval from me for his new plan. You see, he was picking up the pieces of that suggestion box and with it building the story of his life. He’d fit the pieces together into a pattern he could live with.
“Can’t you just keep your head down and apply yourself to studying?” I pleaded.
“I’m studying, all right. A few of us, we got big plans when we get out of here,” he said, winking. “I’ve met a couple of blokes who are teaching me a thing or two.”
I left wringing my hands, thinking about detention centers, boys’ homes, prisons; it’s through these punishments that up-and-coming criminals get to do most of their schmoozing. The state is always going about the business of introducing dangerous criminals to each other; they plug them right into the network.
If my father had an idea of how to accelerate his own deterioration, taking a job at a pest extermination business was it. For the past few years he had become the town handyman, mowing lawns, fixing fences, doing a little brickwork, but now, finally, he’d found the perfect job for himself: exterminating vermin. He breathed toxic fumes all day, handling poisonous substances such as bug powder and lethal little blue pellets, and I got the impression he was delighted by his own toxicity. He’d come home, his hands out, and say, “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! I have poison on my hands! Quick! Someone run the taps!” Sometimes if he was feeling especially mischievous, he would run at us with his poisonous hands outstretched and threaten to touch our tongues. “I’m going for your tongue! You’re done for!”
“Why don’t you wear gloves?!” my mother screamed.
“Gloves are for proctologists!” he’d say back as he chased us around the house. I deduced that this was his bizarre way of dealing with my mother’s cancer, pretending she was a sick child and he was the clown called in to cheer her up. She’d finally told my father the bad news, and while he had become compassionate enough to stop hitting her when he was drunk, her cancer, treatment, remission, and relapse cycle had made him increasingly unstable. Now, as my father threatened us with his poisonous hands, my mother would stare at me long and hard, making me feel like a mirror that reflects death back on the dying.
That’s how it was in our house; with my mother fading, my father becoming a carrier of lethal toxins, and Terry going from mental hospital to prison, what had previously been a poisonous environment only metaphorically became one literally too.
When at last Terry was released from the detention center, for no good reason I had renewed hope he’d be rehabilitated, and might even want to come home and help with our dying mother. I went to an address he’d given me over the phone. To get there I had to travel the four hours to Sydney, then change buses to ride another hour to a suburb in the south. It was a quiet and leafy neighborhood; families were out walking dogs and washing cars, and a newspaper boy pulled a yellow cart up the street, casually tossing newspapers so they landed with admirable accuracy on the doormat of every home with the front-page headline facing up. The house where Terry was residing had a beige Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. A sprinkler languidly watered an immaculately manicured lawn. A boy’s silver bicycle rested against the steps leading up to the front porch. Could this be right? Could Terry have been adopted by a lower-middle-class family by mistake?
A woman with rollers in her brown hair and a pink nightgown answered the door. “I’m Martin Dean,” I stammered with uncertainty, as though perhaps I wasn’t. Her kind smile disappeared so quickly, I wondered if I hadn’t imagined it. “They’re out the back,” she said. As the woman led me down a dark hallway, she threw off the rollers with the hair too- it was a wig. Her real hair, tied up in a tight bun and fastened with bobby pins, was flaming red. She dropped the pink nightgown too and revealed black lingerie hugging a curvy body that I wanted to take home as a pillow. When I followed her into the kitchen, I saw there were bullet holes in the walls, the cupboards, the curtains; sunlight streamed through the tiny perfect circles and stretched diagonally across the room in golden rods. A plump half-naked woman sat at the table with her head in her hands. I stepped past her and went out into the backyard. Terry was turning sausages on a barbecue. A shotgun was leaning against the wooden fence next to him. Two men with shaved heads lay on banana chairs drinking beers.