Dad’s: “Jasper! This is to be a hard, practical exercise! No messing about! Something that reflects my personality, no, my dilemma, my lie, which is, of course, my personality. And the color. I want it white! Blindingly white!”
Mine: “Please, can we do something simple?”
Dad’s: “I couldn’t agree with you more. We want something simple that can be eroded by the elements. We don’t want anything more durable than we are.”
Mine: “OK.”
Dad’s: “Open living space. No. That discourages human intimacy. No, hang on, I want that. I want…”
Long silence.
Mine: “Dad? You still there?”
Dad’s: “Bullfighting ring! Gothic cathedral! Mud hovel!”
Mine: “Are you taking your medicine?”
Dad’s: “And no mantelpieces! They always make me think of urns with ashes in them.”
Mine: “OK! Jesus!”
Dad’s: “Which do you prefer, a porch or a veranda? What’s the difference, anyway? Wait. I don’t care. We’ll have both. And I’ll tell you something else. Ornamental detail can go to hell. We are the ornamental detail!”
Then I’d hang up and curse myself for sending Dad down what I thought was another ruinous path. These conversations certainly did not prepare me for the abrupt change that was about to follow.
One day I visited the hospital and was shocked to see that Dad had arranged the books into a neat pile. All the pages of erratic designs had been thrown away, and when I sat down in that eerily organized room, he presented me with a single piece of paper with a shockingly normal design for a shockingly normal family home. No moats, drawbridges, igloos, or stalagmites. No bullfighting rings, indoor slides, trenches, or underwater grottos. It was just a normal house. The construction was clear and simple: a classic boxy structure with a central living space and several rooms arranged off it. I might even go so far as to say it summed up the national character, right down to the veranda on all sides.
He had finally seen his situation clearly: to build his house he must get out, and to get out he must convince the powers that be that he was once again mentally healthy and fit for society. So he faked it. It must have been a strenuous period for him, putting all his energy into pretending to be normal; he did this single-mindedly, and talked about the Great Australian Dream and interest rates and mortgage repayments and sports teams and his employment prospects; he expressed outrage at the things that outraged his countrymen: taxpayer-funded ministerial blowjobs, corporate greed, fanatical environmentalists, logical arguments, and compassionate judges. He was so convincing in his portrayal of Mr. Average that Dr. Greg swallowed every droplet of bullshit my father sweated out for him, swelling with triumph at the conclusion of each session.
And so, four months after he entered the hospital, he was released. Dad and I went to Eddie’s house and secured his loan, which really consisted of Dad saying, “So you got the money?” and Eddie saying, “Yeah.”
“I’ll pay you back,” Dad said, after an uncomfortable silence. “Double. I’ll pay you back double.”
“Martin, don’t worry about it.”
“Eddie. You know what Nietzsche said about gratitude.”
“No, Marty, I don’t.”
“He said a man in debt wants his benefactor dead.”
“OK. Pay me back.”
After we left Eddie’s, Dad tore his design for his dream house into pieces.
“What are you doing?”
“That was just a hoax. That was just to make those bastards think I was normal,” Dad said, laughing.
“But you’re better now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I feel good. This house idea has really got me back on top.”
“So if that was a hoax, where’s the real design for our house?”
“There isn’t one. Look. Why bother fucking around with building your own house? That sounds like an enormous pilgrim’s headache.”
“So we’re not getting a house?”
“Yeah. We’re just going to buy one.”
“OK. Yeah. That sounds really good, Dad. We’ll buy a house.”
“And then we’re going to hide it,” he said, smiling so proudly I finally understood why pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and such was the repellent force of his grin, I wondered why it shouldn’t be all seven.
VI
According to him, it was an idea that arrived in one piece, completely formed: we will buy a house and hide it in a maze. The idea came to him during a psychological game of word association with Dr. Greg.
“Health.”
“Sickness.”
“Ball.”
“Testicle.”
“Ideas.”
“Complexity.”
“Home.”
“House. Hidden in a labyrinth of my own design that I will build on a large property in the bush.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I have to go back to my room for a while. Can we continue this later?”
And why did he get the idea in the first place? Maybe because labyrinths have always been a facile metaphor for the soul, or the human condition, or the complexity of a process, or the pathway to God. I discounted these as being too profound, and if I know one thing, it’s that men don’t do things for profound reasons- the things they do are sometimes profound, but their reasons are not. No, I must have inspired this whole ridiculous plan by making a gift of that silly book of mazes. The failure to complete a child’s puzzle infuriated him so that it lodged in his brain, and when the idea for designing and constructing a house came in, it either merged with the idea of the maze or wrapped around it, somehow fusing so that the two ideas became one.
“Dad. Can’t we just get a house like everyone else and not hide it?”
“Nah.”
No one could talk him out of it, not me or Eddie and especially not Dr. Greg, who learned the truth when Dad went back for a checkup. He told Dad in no uncertain terms that a labyrinth wasn’t the Great Australian Dream, which is quite right, it isn’t, but in the end no one objected too strongly, because no one but me really thought he would actually build it.
We went looking at properties out of Sydney in all directions, and each time he dashed out along the property lines, exploring the bushland, nodding his head approvingly at the trees and the space and the potential for solitude. The houses themselves seemed to be unimportant to him, and he took only a cursory look through them. Colonial? Federation? Victorian? Modern? He didn’t care. He only required that the house be surrounded on all sides by dense bushland. He wanted trees and bushes and rocks fused together, bushland so dense that even without the labyrinth walls, the natural landscape would be almost impassable.
While searching for the perfect site, he accumulated dozens of mazes from everywhere from puzzle books to old manuscripts of the labyrinths of antiquity, from Egypt to medieval England, using them mainly as inspiration, not wanting merely to copy an existing design. He labored furiously in pencil to invent a complex pattern of his own imagining that he would actually reproduce on the land. This was his first major step in altering the existing universe with his own brain, so he obsessed about the structure of the house: not only did it need to be locked up in the protective custody of the maze, but it had to serve as a palace of thinking, where Dad could wander and plot without interruption- a base for his “operations,” whatever they were. He also wanted dead ends and passages where an intruder, or “guest,” would be forced into making several critical choices between paths, resulting in disorientation and/or starvation and madness. “The unpassable path!” became his new motto. “Bloody hell!” became mine. Why? Those designs stalked my nightmares. It seemed all our future disasters were prefigured in them, and depending on which he chose, we would suffer a different disaster. At night I pored over the designs myself, trying to read our impending calamities in them.