One afternoon we went to inspect some land half an hour northwest of the city. To reach the property you had to take a private road that was a long wiggling dirt track, over which you had to bounce unevenly through burned-out forests, their charred tree trunks a warning: by living in the bush, you are living in a war zone during an unreliable ceasefire.
The property seemed custom-built for his purpose: it was dense, dense, dense. Hills with steep climbs and sudden descents, twisting gullies, large rocky outcrops, winding creeks you had to wade across, a foliage of thick scrub and waist-high grass that would require special footwear. As we surveyed the property we got lost straightaway, which Dad took as a good sign. Standing on ground that sloped gently downward, he looked at the dirt, the trees, the sky. Yes, he even examined the sun. He looked right into it. He turned to me and gave me the thumbs-up. This was the one!
Unfortunately, the house wasn’t subjected to examination at all. Me, I would’ve failed it mercilessly. It was a drafty, dilapidated old thing- no more than your classic two-story shoebox. The shag carpet was thick and ugly, and crossing the living room floor felt like walking on a hairy chest. The kitchen stank like a toilet. The toilet, covered in moss, looked like a garden. The garden was a cemetery for weeds and dead grass. The staircase creaked like drying bones. The ceiling paint had dried midbubble. Each room I encountered was smaller and darker than the room before. The upstairs hallway narrowed as you moved down it, so much that the very end of it was almost a point.
Worst of all, to get to school I would need to trek a half a kilometer through the maze, then down our long private road to the nearest bus stop so I could travel twenty minutes to the train, then ride a further forty-five minutes to the coast, where my school was located, but the bus came only three times a day, only once in the morning, and if I missed it, I missed it. I rejected Dad’s suggestion that I move to a new school in the area, because I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of making a whole new set of enemies. Better the bully you know, I reasoned.
Dad signed the papers that afternoon, and I had to accept that this insane folly was going to happen. I knew I wouldn’t last long in exile on this property, and it was only a matter of time before I’d have to move out and leave him alone, an uncomfortable thought that made me feel wretchedly guilty. I wondered if he realized it too.
He wasted no time hiring the builders, and the fact that he was not the kind of man who had any business at a building site (even if it was his own) did not stop Dad from aggravating them. They gritted their teeth as he passed on his gigantic compositions. Dad had adjusted his maze designs to fit into the natural configurations of the landscape and insisted that few trees were to be harmed. He had narrowed down his mazes to four, and instead of reducing the choices to one, he incorporated them all in one section of the property or another, so that four equally confounding conundrums were to be forced onto the land: mazes within mazes, and in the center our rather ordinary house.
I won’t go into all the dull details- the zoning ordinances, the building codes, the delineation of boundaries, the delays, the unforeseen problems like hailstorms and the unrelated disappearance of the builder’s wife, but I will say the labyrinth walls were constructed from hedges and countless rocks and massive stones and boulders and sandstone slabs and granite and thousands and thousands of bricks. Because Dad mistrusted the workmen intensely, he broke up the design and gave each section to a different team to construct. The men themselves frequently got lost among the thousand alleys and paths that emerged, and Eddie often joined us on our search parties. He would always photograph their irritated faces when we found them.
Gradually, though, the tall stone walls and oversized hedges were erected, and the house was hidden from sight. A synthesis of house and shell. Psychologically complex. Virtually inaccessible. We moved inside, willing victims of Dad’s vast and hazardous imagination.
When Anouk came back from Bali, she wasn’t surprised so much as absolutely furious that she’d missed everything: the collapse, the home for children, the mental hospital, and the building of this outrageous place. But, incredibly, she came back to work as if none of it had happened. She made Dad install an intercom system so that when she or any wanted visitors arrived, we could go and lead them through the maze to our fortified homestead. I’ll never understand that woman, I thought, but if she wants to cook and clean in a place of endless wanderings, that’s her choice.
So this is where we lived.
We were cut off and had only the natural sounds of the bush to placate, stimulate, and terrify us. The air here was different, and I surprised myself: I loved the quiet (as opposed to Dad, who developed the habit of leaving the radio on all the time). For the first time I felt the truth that the sky begins a quarter of an inch from the ground. In the mornings the bush smelled like the best underarm deodorant you ever smelled, and I quickly got used to the mysterious movements of the trees, which heaved rhythmically like a man chloroformed. From time to time the night sky seemed uneven, closer in points, then smoothed out, like a tablecloth bunched up, then suddenly pulled taut. I’d wake up to see low-lying clouds balanced precariously on the tops of trees. Sometimes the wind was so gentle it seemed to come from a child’s nostril, while other times it was so strong all the trees seemed held tenuously to the earth by roots as weak as doubled-over sticky tape.
I felt the promise of catastrophe weaken, even break, and I dared to think optimistically again about our softly stirring futures.
During a long walk around the grounds the idea hit me like a mud slide: the most striking difference between my father and me was that I preferred simplicity and he preferred complexity. Not to say I often, or ever, succeeded in achieving simplicity, only to say that I preferred it, just as he enjoyed muddying everything when he could, complicating everything until he couldn’t see straight.
One evening he was standing in the back garden staring out. It was a liquid night and the moon was just a smudge out of focus.
I said, “What are you thinking about?”
He said, “It’s a surprise.”
I said, “I don’t like surprises. Not anymore.”
He said, “You’re too young to-”
I said, “I’m not kidding. No more surprises.”
He said, “I’m not going to get another job.”
I said, “How will we live?”
He said, “We’ll live fine.”
I said, “What about food and shelter?”
He said, “We have shelter. Eddie said he’s not in a hurry for me to pay back the loan, and thanks to him, we own this property.”
I said, “And what about Anouk? How will you pay her?”
He said, “I’m giving her the back room to use as a studio. She wants somewhere to sculpt.”
I said, “And food? What about food?”
He said, “We’ll grow food.”
I said, “Steaks? We’ll grow steaks?”
Then he said, “I’m thinking about cleaning up the pond.”
In the back garden, there was a pond in the shape of a figure eight with small white stones around its perimeter. “And I might put some fish in it,” he added.
“Shit, Dad, I don’t know.”
“But this time I’ll take care of them, OK?”
I agreed.
As promised, he cleaned up the pond and put in three rare Japanese fish. They were not goldfish; they were so big and colorful they must have been the most advanced form of fish before great white sharks, and Dad fed them once a day, sprinkling the flakes in a semicircle across the pond as if in a simple, dignified ceremony.