He had unbelievable habits. He liked to roam the streets to see if someone would try to rip him off. Often he’d let them pick his pockets, then laugh about what was taken. Sometimes he’d stop the pickpockets and tell them what they did wrong. Sometimes he checked into backpacker hostels and partied in a German accent. And he never missed a single sunrise or sunset. One afternoon we watched a dark orange sun bleed into the horizon. “This is one of those sunsets made glorious by the pollution of a congested city. Someone has to say it and it might as well be me- Nature’s own work pales in comparison. The same goes for mass destruction. One day we’ll all be basking in the glow of a nuclear winter and God, won’t it be heaven on the eyes!”
In addition to heroin smuggling and prostitution, the democratic cooperative of crime’s main trade was gambling on Thai boxing matches, the national sport. Terry would take me along when he bribed the boxers to take a dive. I remember thinking about his legacy in Australia, how he had been obsessed with fighting corruption in sport, and I was impressed with the way he now shat all over it like this. Often, on the way to the matches, Terry tried to get a tuk-tuk to give the drivers a scare- none would take my mammoth uncle, so we would be forced to walk. He never once got angry; he’d be happy to have the opportunity to stop at a vegetable market and buy a fresh bunch of coriander to wear around his neck (“Better smell than any flower!”). During the boxing match he would ask me all about myself: what I liked, what I didn’t, what were my hopes, my fears, my aspirations. Despite prostitutes, gambling, and drugs being his bread-and-butter, Terry was the sort of man who inspired you to be honest. I revealed myself to him as I never had to anyone else. He listened to my confessions seriously, and when I recounted the horror/love story of the Towering Inferno, he said he thought that I had “loved her sincerely, though not really.” I couldn’t argue with that.
But what thrilled me most about my uncle was that he spoke of the real world- of prisons and bloodbaths and sweatshops and famines and slaughterhouses and civil wars and kings and modern-day pirates. It was a wonderful relief to be out of the philosophical realm for a change, the oppressive, suffocating universe of Dad’s thought culs-de-sac and thought outdoor toilets. Terry talked of his experiences in China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, and India, his forays into remote and dangerous territories, the murderers he’d met in dingy gambling joints, how he picked them to join the democratic cooperative of crime. He talked of his reading and how he started with all of Dad’s favorite books, how he’d struggled through them at first, how he’d fallen in love with the printed word, and how he read voraciously in deserts and jungles, on trains and on the backs of camels. He told me of the moment he decided to begin his prodigious eating (it was in the Czech Republic, a cold potato dumpling soup). He saw food as his link to humanity, and while traveling, he was invited to family dinners wherever he went; he ate ritualistically with all races, tasting every culture and custom across the globe. “To be fat is to love life,” he said, and I realized that his belly wasn’t an impenetrable fortification against the world but a reaching out to embrace it.
Most nights whores entered the house, sometimes two or three together. Their professionalism melted away at the sight of Terry’s enormous body, their famous Thai smiles morphing into grimaces on their young, fresh faces. The rest of us couldn’t help but feel sorry for these prostitutes as they led Terry to the bedroom like zookeepers conspiring to tranquilize an agitated gorilla. By the time they emerged though, he was vindicated; the girls were happy, exalted. They came out looking strengthened by the experience- rejuvenated, even. And he had his favorite whores too, ones who came back night after night. They often ate with us, and they never stopped smiling and laughing. You couldn’t deny that he loved them passionately. He showered them with affection and attention, and I really believed he didn’t feel icky that they went off to fuck and suck other men. His love really was uncomplicated. It was love without possessiveness. It was real love. And I couldn’t help comparing his love for the prostitutes with my love for the Towering Inferno, which was so bogged down in the issue of ownership, it could easily be argued that what I’d felt for her didn’t even resemble love at all.
Dad spent the first few months in Thailand remote and surly. On the rare occasions we risked outings and sat in restaurants frequented by Australian tourists, his name would pop up in their conversations, and hearing himself disparaged in the third person nauseated him. He often bought the Australian papers and read them while grinding his teeth, and afterward he wrote long letters to the editors, letters I begged him not to send. As for me, I stayed a mile away from the papers and swore to do so for all time. I’ve come to the conclusion that reading the newspaper is sort of like drinking your own piss. Some people say it’s good for you, but I don’t believe it.
Maybe the hate waves from Australia finally took their toll, because Dad started dying again. It was clear that the cancer had reemerged in his lungs and was spreading. Over a period of a few months, his body became the centerpiece in a theater of horror. It looked as if he were being eaten from the inside out. He moved gruesomely from flesh to bone. He became pale and looked as though his essence had been suffused with methane. Eventually he avoided mirrors altogether. He stopped shaving and wandered around Terry’s place like a castaway, so thin he was swimming in his clothes. Then, just as suddenly, his trajectory toward death plateaued. He didn’t get any better, but he stopped getting worse. It was clear to me that he was waiting for something, waiting to do something, and he wasn’t going to die until he did it. There’s a lot to be said for the power of obstinacy. People often will themselves to stay alive; cripples walk and dead men get erections. Look around. It happens.
At first Terry and Caroline did nothing but plead with him to see doctors and begin another course of chemotherapy, but Dad refused. I knew it was doubtful that I could persuade him to do anything, but I couldn’t help thinking of Anouk and her obsessive belief in the powers of meditation. I tried to convince him that the possibility remained that by extreme efforts of concentration he might vanquish the cancer on his own. To humor me, he tried one afternoon. We sat together at the foot of the Buddha. I instructed him that superhuman efforts of the most intense form of mind control were required, but Dad was never able to clear his mind of skeptical thoughts. In the middle of meditation, he opened one eyelid and said, “You know what Mencken said about the human body? He said this: ‘All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient machine. He has the worst kidneys known to comparative zoology, and the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it is called upon to do, is less efficient than the eye of the earthworm; an optical instrument maker, who made an instrument so clumsy would be mobbed by his customers.’ ”
“That sounds true,” I said.
“Well, then- what makes you think meditation can override my body’s congenital frailty?”
“I don’t know. It was just an idea.”
“It’s a useless idea. Remember how Heraclitus said a man’s character is his fate? That’s not true. It’s his body that is his fate.”