SEVEN
I
I don’t want to die here,” Dad said.
“What’s the matter?” Terry asked. “Don’t you like your room?”
“The room’s fine. It’s this country.”
The three of us were eating chicken laksas and watching the sun set over the polluted metropolis. As usual, Dad was nauseated and managed to make it seem as though his vomiting were a gut reaction not to the food but to the company.
“Well, we don’t want you to die either, do we, Jasper?”
“No,” I said, and waited a full thirty seconds before adding, “not at the moment.”
Dad wiped the corners of his mouth with my sleeve and said, “I want to die at home.”
“When you say home, you mean…”
“ Australia.”
Terry and I looked at each other with dread.
“Well, mate,” Terry said slowly, “that’s just not practical.”
“I know. Nevertheless, I’m going home.”
Terry took a deep breath and spoke to Dad calmly and deliberately, as though gently chastising his grown-up mentally disturbed son for smothering the family pet by overhugging.
“Marty. Do you know what would happen the minute the plane landed on Aussie soil? You’d be arrested at the airport.” Dad didn’t say anything. He knew this was true. Terry pushed on: “Do you want to die in jail? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you fly back home.”
“No, I don’t want to die in jail.”
“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You’ll die here.”
“I have another idea,” Dad said, and at once any glimmer of hope died and I knew that a nice, quiet, peaceful death followed by an intimate funeral and a respectable period of restrained mourning was now out of the question. Whatever was coming was going to be dangerous, messy, and frantic and would drive me to the edge of insanity.
“So, Marty, what are you suggesting?”
“We sneak back into Australia.”
“What?”
“By boat,” he clarified. “Terry, I know you know who the people-smugglers are.”
“This is nuts!” I said. “You can’t want to risk your life just to die in Australia! You hate Australia!”
“Look, I know this is world-class hypocrisy. But I don’t fucking care. I’m homesick! I miss the landscape and the smell of it. I even miss my countrymen and the smell of them!”
“Be careful now,” I said. “Your final act will be a direct contradiction of everything you’ve ever thought, said, and believed.”
“I know,” he said almost cheerfully, not minding at all. In fact, he seemed enlivened by it. He was up on his feet now, swaying a little, daring us with his eyes to raise objections so he could shoot them down.
“Didn’t you tell me nationalism is a disease?” I asked.
“And I stand by it. But it’s a disease that, as it turns out, I have contracted, along with everything else. And I don’t see the point of trying to cure myself of a minor ailment when I’m about to die of a major one.”
I didn’t say anything to that. What could I say?
I had to get out the big guns to help me. Luckily, Dad had packed a suitcase full of books, and I found the very quote I needed in his well-thumbed copy of Fromm’s The Sane Society. I went into his room but he was on the toilet, so I read it to him through the bathroom door: “Hey, Dad. ‘The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their and his own human reality.’ ”
“It doesn’t matter. When I die, my failures and weaknesses die with me. You see? My failures are dying too.”
I continued: “ ‘Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism”…is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.’ ”
“So?”
“So you don’t love humanity, do you?”
“No. Not really.”
“Well, there you are!”
Dad flushed the toilet and came out without washing his hands. “You can’t change my mind, Jasper. This is what I want. Dying men get dying wishes even if it irritates the living. And this is mine- I want to expire in my country, with my people.”
Caroline, I thought. It was obvious that Dad was in the grip of a pain that would arrive forever. He had made himself perpetually vigilant against his own comfort, and this mission to Australia was a directive from a sadness that must be obeyed.
But not only that. By tiptoeing back into Australia as human cargo in a risky smuggling operation, Dad had found one last stupid project, one that was sure to expedite his death.
II
The people-smugglers orchestrated their nasty enterprise out of an ordinary restaurant on a congested street that looked like seventy other congested streets I saw as we drove in. Terry gave Dad and me a warning at the door: “We’ve got to be careful with these guys. They’re absolutely brutal. They’ll cut your head off first, ask questions later, mostly about where to send your head.” With that in mind, we took a table and ordered jungle curries and beef salad. I had always imagined that fronts for criminal activity were merely façades, but here they actually served food, and it wasn’t bad.
We ate without speaking. Dad coughed in between spoonfuls and in between coughs called repeatedly to a waiter for bottled water. Terry was shoveling down prawns and breathing through his nose. The King was glaring at me disapprovingly from a portrait on the far wall. A couple of English backpackers at the next table were discussing the physical and psychological differences between Thai prostitutes and a girl named Rita from East Sussex.
“So, Terry,” I asked, “what happens now? We just sit here until closing time?”
“Leave it to me.”
We left it to him. All the communication happened wordlessly, according to a preestablished set of rules: Terry gave a conspiratorial nod to a waiter, who in turn gave it to the chef through an open window into the kitchen. The chef then passed the nod on to a man out of our line of vision, who for all we knew passed it on to twenty more men who lined a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine of hell. After a few anxious minutes, a man with a slightly malformed bald head came out and sat down, biting his lip and staring at us threateningly. Terry produced an envelope brimming with money and pushed it across the table. That softened the smuggler up a little. Grabbing the envelope, he rose from the table. We followed him, our footsteps sounding prolonged echoes as we walked down a hallway that eventually led to a small windowless room where two armed men greeted us with cold stares. One of them molested us, searching for weapons, and when none were found a flabby middle-aged man in an expensive suit entered and gazed at us quietly. His impressive stillness made me feel I was in a story by Conrad, as if I were looking into the heart of darkness. Of course he was just a businessman, with the same love of profit and indifference to human suffering as his Western corporate counterparts. I thought that this man could be a midlevel executive at IBM or a legal adviser to the tobacco industry.
Without warning, one of the bodyguards cracked the butt of a rifle over Terry’s head. His massive body crashed to the floor. He was unconscious but alive, his torso heaving with slow, deep breaths. When they aimed the guns at me, I thought how this was exactly the type of room I had always imagined I’d die in: small, airless, and crammed with strangers looking on indifferently.
“You are police,” the boss said in English.
“No. Not police,” Dad protested. “We are wanted criminals. Like you. Well, not like you. We don’t know if you’re wanted or not. Perhaps nobody wants you.”
“You are police.”
“No. Christ, listen. I have cancer. Cancer, you know. The big C. Death.” Dad then proceeded to tell them the whole absurd story of his fall from grace and escape from Australia.