As nice as all this was, I realized I was not communicating with my father. I almost gave up and started wondering where that furious mob had gotten to when suddenly, without even trying, I conjured up Dad’s face. Then I saw his hunched body. He was in his room, bending over his desk. I looked closer. He was writing a letter to one of the Sydney newspapers. I could make out only the salutation at the beginning of the letter. “Dear cunts” was crossed out and replaced with “My dear cunts.” I was convinced this was not my imagination but a real image of Dad right now, in the present. I thought: Dad! Dad! It’s me! A riotous mob is coming to murder Eddie and everyone in the house! Get out! Get everyone out! I tried to send him an image of the rioting mob so he’d know what they looked like when they turned up. I sent him an image of the mob as one common body closing in on the house, armed with Old World farming implements. They had scythes, for God’s sake!
Without my permission, the vision faded away. I opened my eyes. It was a clouded-over black night, so dark I could have been underground. All around me the jungle was making formidable groaning sounds. How long had I been here? I had no way of knowing.
I started walking again, pushing branches out of my way, my eyes still full of visions, my nose filled with out-of-place odors (cinnamon and maple syrup), my tongue with out-of-place tastes (toothpaste and Vegemite). I had the sensation of being in the world as never before.
As I walked, I wondered, would they find the house empty? Had Dad heard my warning? Or had I just given up trying to save my family’s lives? I walked without knowing where I was going. I let my instinct guide me through the jungle, stomping on luscious plants that gave off a sweet, heady odor. I paused to drink the cold, delicious water of a small waterfall. Then I moved on again, stumbling over hills and through the dense foliage.
I felt no fear. I felt such a part of the jungle that it seemed it would have been rude of the animals to venture out to eat me. Then I moved into a clearing that ran down a long hill where I could see the moon rising. All the eyes of the flowers and the mouths of the trees and the chins of strange rock formations seemed to be telling me I was going in the right direction. That was a relief, because there were no tracks. Somehow the silent mass of vengeful people had left everything undisturbed, as if they had been floating through the jungle like some formless ancient substance.
When I finally found Eddie’s place, the lights were blazing inside. The wind was violently knocking at the windows and the doors. The sight of the house made my state of oneness vanish instantaneously. The world was hopelessly fragmented again; the absolute connectedness between me and all living things was gone. Now I felt indifferent to all living things. I couldn’t care less about them. The divisions between us were as thick as columns of bone and cartilage. There was me and there was them. Any fool could see it.
Hiding behind a tree, I felt the blood cells racing through my heart. I remembered something Dad had once promised to teach me: how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I hoped he actually knew this essential skill.
Of course I was too late. The door was wide open, and the mob was already leaving one by one, armed with scythes and hammers and pitchforks. There would be no point facing the mob or its decrystallized form, because presumably it had already done what it came to do. There was nothing to be gained in getting hacked to pieces myself.
Blood covered the hands and the faces of the mob. Their clothes were so stained, they would just have to be thrown away. I waited until the last intruder left and then waited a few moments longer. I watched the house and tried to feel no fear. Even after all Dad had taught me, I was not prepared for such a moment. Nothing had prepared me for walking into a place where my family had been butchered. I struggled to recall any nugget of wisdom from my early childhood that might offer me advice on how to proceed, but I couldn’t, so I went forward into the house, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually defenseless. Of course I had many times imagined them already dead (as soon as I feel an emotional attachment to someone, I imagine his death, so as not to be disappointed later on), but in my mind they were always relatively clean corpses, quite neat in fact, and until now it had not occurred to me to prepare myself by imagining my loved ones’ brains splattered against a wall, their bodies lying sprawled in a pool of blood/shit/guts, et cetera.
The first body I saw was Eddie’s. He looked as if he’d been run over a thousand times by a champion ice-skater. His face was so cut up I could barely make out it was him, except for his eyes, which had that frozen look of surprise characteristic of Botox and sudden death, staring up at the earthenware pots with his parents’ spirits in them, the ones who had purportedly been watching over him. It was easy to see the look of reproach in his eyes. Goodbye and good riddance, Eddie. You took your crumminess to its limit and it collapsed on top of you. Tough luck.
With superhuman effort, my legs took me to the next room. There I saw Uncle Terry on his knees, and from behind he looked like the back of a VW Beetle about to do a reverse park into a tight spot. Sweat poured off the fat folds in his neck. I could hear him crying. He spun around to look at me, then turned back and raised his chubby arm, motioning toward Dad’s bedroom.
I went in.
Dad was also on his knees, swaying gently over the mutilated body of Caroline. His eyes were as wide as they could go, as though pried open with matchsticks. The love of his life was on her back, blood seeping from a dozen slashes. Her dead eyes were fixed in an insupportable gaze. I had to look away. There was something disturbing in those eyes. She looked like someone who had said something offensive and wanted to take it back. Later I found out she had died trying to protect Eddie, of all people; she was killed inadvertently, and it was her death that had turned the mob on itself, split it into factions- those who thought that it was OK to kill a middle-aged woman and those who thought it was out of order. That had effectively ended their rampage and sent them home.
We buried Eddie and Caroline in the garden. It had started raining again, and we had no choice but to give them a wet, muddy burial, which was appropriate for Eddie maybe. But watching Caroline’s body disappear into the muck made us all sick and ashamed. Dad was having trouble breathing, as if something were blocking his airway- maybe his heart.
The three of us drove back to Bangkok in silence, lost in the kind of grief that makes every smile in your life afterward less sincere. On the way Dad sat in absolute stillness, though he made little noises to let us know that every minute left in his life would be an unendurable torture. I knew he was blaming himself for her death, and not only himself but Terry too, for employing Eddie to begin with, and not only Terry but fate, chance, God, art, science, humanity, the Milky Way. Nothing was exonerated.
When we arrived back at Terry’s house, we retired to our separate bedrooms to marvel at how quickly the human heart snaps shut and to wonder how we might ever pry it open again. It was only two days later, spurred either by Caroline’s murder or by the black dog barking in the manure of his heart, or by mourning crowding out rational thought, or maybe because even after a lifetime of reflecting on death, he still couldn’t quite comprehend the inevitability of his own, that Dad suddenly emerged from his grief-induced hypnosis and announced his final project. As Eddie had predicted, it was the looniest yet. And after a lifetime of watching Dad make improbable decision after improbable decision, and being in some way a victim of each one, what surprised me most was that I could still be surprised.