“Where did you get this, and, more importantly, how much did you pay for it?”
“I got it from an old woman in the village. She said it’s great for cancer.”
Great for cancer?
“Why don’t you do it?”
“Your father isn’t listening to me right now. He doesn’t want me to help him. I can’t even give him a glass of water. You need to get him to rub this oil all over himself.”
“How am I supposed to excite him into rubbing a stranger’s chin fat on his body?”
“That’s what you have to work out.”
“Why me?”
“You’re his son.”
“And you’re his wife.”
“Things are not so good between us at the moment,” she said, without elaborating. Not that she needed to- I was thoroughly familiar with the sharp-edged love triangle threatening to cut us all to shreds.
I procrastinated in the hallway for a while, but finally I went into Dad’s room. He was bent over his desk, not reading or writing anything, just bending.
“Dad,” I said.
He didn’t give any sign he knew I was there. Citronella candles were spread all around the room. He had a mosquito net above the bed, and one over the armchair in the corner too.
“Are the insects bothering you?” I asked.
“Do you think I’m welcoming them like old friends?” he said, without turning around.
“It’s just that I have some insect repellent if you want it.”
“I already have some.”
“This is a new sort. Apparently the locals use it.”
Dad turned to me. I stepped forward and put the jar of melted chin fat in his hand.
“You have to smear it over your whole body.”
Dad unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents. “It smells funny.”
“Dad- do you think we’re similar?”
“In what way- physically?”
“No, I don’t know. As people.”
“That would be your worst nightmare, wouldn’t it?”
“I have one or two worse ones.”
We heard a buzzing. We both looked around but couldn’t see where it was coming from. Dad took off his shirt and scooped a handful of the melted chin fat from the jar and started smearing it over his chest and belly.
“You want some?”
“No, I’m good.”
I started to feel queasy, now thinking of the woman who had died in childbirth. I wondered if her baby had lived, and if one day he might not be annoyed that he hadn’t been the one to inherit the fat of his mother’s chin.
“Eddie’s turned out to be a different sort of bloke than we thought, hasn’t he?” Dad said, coating his underarms.
I was tempted to recount Eddie’s sick monologue and menacing threats, but I didn’t want to add any further stress to his stressed-out body.
“It was still good for you to have a good friend, even if it was all a lie.”
“I know.”
“Eddie was the first person to tell me anything useful about Astrid.”
“Was he?”
“He led me to your Paris journal.”
“You read it?”
“Cover to cover.”
“Made you sick?”
“Extremely.”
“Well, that’s what you get for snooping.”
As he said this he removed his sandals and rubbed the chin fat between his toes. It made a squishy sound.
“In it you said you thought I might be the premature reincarnation of yourself.”
Dad cocked his head to one side, closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again. He looked at me as though he had just performed a magic trick in which I vanish and he was annoyed that it hadn’t worked. “What’s your point?”
“Do you still believe that?”
“I think it’s highly possible, even when you consider that I don’t believe in reincarnation.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Exactly.”
I felt an old fury welling up inside me. Who is this irritating man? I walked out and slammed the door. Then I opened it again.
“That’s not insect repellent,” I said.
“I know. You don’t think I recognize melted chin fat when I see it?”
I stood there, my mind a complete blank.
“I was eavesdropping, you little idiot,” he admitted.
“So what’s wrong with you? Why would you put that crap on your body?”
“I’m dying, Jasper! Don’t you get it? What do I care what I put on my body? Chin fat, stomach fat, goat feces. So what? When you’re dying, even disgust loses its meaning.”
Dad was hurrying to his doom, there was no denying that. He looked more ravaged each day. Ravaged mentally too- he couldn’t shake the fear that Caroline wanted to go back to Uncle Terry, or that we were all discussing this possibility behind his back. He was paranoid that we were constantly talking about him. This fear soon became a hot topic of conversation between the rest of us. That was how he breathed life into his own delusions and set them free.
Our dinners continued to be as silent as the first; the only noise was Dad sighing loudly in between spoonfuls of spicy soup. Reading between the sighs, I knew that he was growing increasingly furious because he wasn’t getting enough pity from anyone. He didn’t want a lot. Just the minimum would do. Terry was no help there- he was still stuck on the idea of giving Dad pleasure and stimulation; and Caroline was even less help- she pretended she’d stopped believing in his death altogether. She applied herself to the unenviable task of trying to reverse the course of his cancer; she was dragging in every sort of witchcraft- psychospiritual healing, visualization, karma repair. All around him was a loathsome form of positivism, anathema to a dying man. And probably because Caroline was obsessed with trying to save Dad’s life and Terry his soul, Dad became obsessed with suicide, saying that to die of natural causes was just plain lazy. The more they tried to save him with outlandish methods, the more he insisted on taking the matter of dying into his own hands.
One night I heard Dad screaming. I came out of my bedroom to see Terry chasing him around the living room with a pillow.
“What’s going on?”
“He’s trying to kill me!”
“I don’t want you to die. You want you to die. I’m just trying to help you out.”
“Stay away from me, you fucker! I said I wanted to commit suicide. I didn’t say I wanted to be murdered.”
Poor Dad. It’s not that he didn’t have clear ideas, it’s just that he had too many, and they contradicted, effectively canceling each other out. Dad didn’t want to be smothered by his brother, but he couldn’t bring himself to do his own smothering.
“Let me do this,” Terry said. “I was always there for you, and I always will be.”
“You weren’t there for me when our mother tried to kill me.”
“What are you talking about?”
Dad stared at Terry a long time. “Nothing,” he said finally.
“You know what? You don’t know how to die because you don’t know who you are.”
“Well, who am I?”
“You tell me.”
After some hesitation, Dad described himself as a “seer of limited epiphanies.” I thought that was pretty good, but Terry thought he was something else entirely: a Christ figure who couldn’t summon the courage to sacrifice himself, a Napoleon who didn’t have the stomach for battle, and a Shakespeare who didn’t have a gift with words. It was clear we were getting closer to defining who Dad was.
Dad let out a low moan and stared at the floor. Terry put his wide, thick hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“I want you to admit that despite having lived for so long on this earth, you don’t know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, how can you be what you are?”
Dad didn’t respond in words but let out another moan, like an animal who had just visited his parents in a butcher shop window.
I went to bed wondering, Do I know who I am? Yes, I do: I’m Kasper. No, I mean Jasper. Above all, I am not my father. I am not turning into my father. I am not a premature reincarnation of my father. I’m me, that’s all. No one more, no one less.
This thinking nauseated me, and it felt like the nausea was changing the shape of my face. I climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror. I wasn’t looking better or worse, simply different. Soon I might not be able to recognize myself at all, I thought. Something strange was happening to my face, something that was not simply the process of aging. I was turning into someone not myself.