I thought it was commonly accepted that stories this ridiculous had to be true, but the smugglers seemed skeptical. As they deliberated our fate, I remembered how Orwell described the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever, and I thought that all around me were boots, people so terrible that the whole human race should be punished for doing nothing to curb their existence. The job of these people-smugglers was to recruit desperate people, strip them of every penny, lie to them before shoving them onto boats that routinely sank. Each year they sent hundreds to their terror-stricken deaths. These pure exploiters were the irritable bowel syndrome of the cosmos, I thought, and looking at these men as if they were examples of all men, I decided I’d be happy to disappear if it meant they also could not exist.
The boss spoke quietly in Thai just as Terry regained consciousness. We helped him up off the floor, which was no easy task. Rubbing his head, he said, “They said it’ll cost you twenty-five thousand.”
“Fifty thousand,” I said.
“Jasper,” Dad whispered, “don’t you know anything about bargaining?”
“I’m going too,” I said.
Dad and Terry exchanged looks. Dad’s was dark and silent while his brother’s was wide and mystified.
“Plenty of these boats sink long before they get to Australia,” Terry said anxiously. “Marty! I absolutely forbid this! You can’t let Jasper go with you.”
“I can’t stop him,” Dad said, and I detected in his voice an enthusiasm to be reckless with my life now that his was over.
“Jasper, you’re a fool. Don’t do this,” Terry protested.
“I have to.”
Terry sighed, and muttered that I was more like my father every day. The deal was sealed with a handshake and fifty grand in cold, hard cash, and once the transaction was made, the smugglers seemed to relax and even offered us beers “on the house.” Watching these villains, I imagined that I had branched off the evolutionary line at an earlier age and evolved in secret, parallel to man but always apart.
“Tell me one thing, Jasper,” Terry said after we left the restaurant. “Why are you going?”
I shrugged. It was complicated. I didn’t want the people-smugglers, those fucking ghouls, to double-cross Dad and throw his body into the water half an hour out to sea. But this was not just an altruistic outburst; it was a form of preemptive strike. I didn’t want Dad’s resentment haunting me from beyond the grave, or little waves of guilt lapping at my future serenity. But above all, it was to be a sentimental journey: if he was to die, either at sea or among “his people” (whoever the fuck they were), I wanted to see it for myself, eyeball to vacant eyeball. My whole life I’d been pushed beyond rational limits by this man, and I was offended by the notion that I could be so implicated in his lifelong drama and not be present for the grand finale. He might have been his own worst enemy, but he was my worst enemy too, and I’d be damned if I was going to wait patiently by the riverbank, as in the Chinese proverb, for his corpse to float by. I wanted to see him die and bury him and pat the earth with my bare hands.
I say this as a loving son.
III
Our last night in Thailand, Terry prepared a feast, but the night was ruined early by Dad’s failure to show up. We searched the house thoroughly, especially the bathrooms and toilets, any hole he might have fallen into, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, on his desk, we found a short note: “Dear Jasper and Terry. Gone to a brothel. Back later.”
Terry took it personally that his brother was avoiding him on their last night together, and I couldn’t quite convince him that each dying man must perform his own archaic ritual. Some hold hands with loved ones; others prefer unprotected and exploitative third world sex.
Before bed, I packed a few things for the trip. We had taken very little to Thailand, and I put together even less for the return trip- one change of clothes each, two toothbrushes, one tube of toothpaste, and two vials of poison, procured by Terry, who had presented them to me with shaky hands over dinner. “Here you are, nephew,” he said, handing me little plastic tubes filled with a cloudy liquid. “In case the voyage drifts on without end or winds up on the bottom of the sea floor and you can look forward only to starvation or drowning, voilà! A third option!” He assured me it was a quick and relatively painless poison, though I pondered the word “relatively” for some time, unconsoled that we’d be howling in agony for a briefer period than offered by the other poisons in the shop. I hid the plastic tubes in a zipped pocket on the side of my bag.
I didn’t close my eyes all night. I thought about Caroline and my inability to save her. What a disappointment my brain turned out to be. After everything I had witnessed in my life, I had almost convinced myself that the wheel of personal history spins on thought, and therefore my history was muddy because my thinking had been muddy. I imagined that everything I’d experienced to date was likely to be a materialization of my fears (especially my fear of Dad’s fears). In short, I had briefly believed that if man’s character is his fate, and if his character is the sum of his actions, and his actions are a result of his thoughts, then man’s character, actions, and fate are dependent on what he thinks. Now I wasn’t so sure.
An hour before dawn, when it was time to leave to catch the boat, Dad still hadn’t returned. I imagined he was either lost in Bangkok, weary at having spent the night bargaining down prostitutes, or else soaking in a bubble bath in a fancy hotel, having changed his mind about the voyage without telling us.
“What do we do?” Terry asked.
“Let’s get down to the dock. Maybe he’ll turn up there.”
It was a half-hour drive to the dock through the stacked-up city and then through ramshackle suburbs that looked like an enormous house of cards that had fallen down. We parked next to a long pier. The sun, emerging over the horizon, glowed through the fog. Above us we could just make out clouds the shape of lopped-off heads.
“There she is,” Terry said.
When I saw the fishing trawler, our dilapidated would-be coffin, all the joints in my body stiffened. It was a crappy wooden boat that looked like an ancient relic restored in a hurry just for show. I thought: This is where we’re to be stored like the cod livers we are.
It wasn’t long before the asylum-seekers, the Runaways, began appearing in fearful, suspicious groups of two and three. There were men, women, and children. I did my own head count as they crowded the dock- eight…twelve…seventeen…twenty-five…thirty…They kept coming. There seemed no way this little boat could accommodate us all. Mothers hugged their sons and daughters tightly. I felt like crying. You can’t overlook the poignancy of a family risking its children’s existence to give them a better life.
But here they were! The Runaways! Here they were, demonstrating twin expressions of human desperation and human hope, huddling together furtively, examining the trawler with profound mistrust. They weren’t fools. They knew they were riding on a coin toss. They were deeply suspicious that this rusty vessel could possibly be their deliverance. I checked them out, wondering: Will we resort to cannibalism before the journey’s done? Will I be eating that man’s thigh and drinking that woman’s spinal fluid with a bile chaser?
I waited with Terry on the pier. The smugglers appeared as if from nowhere, all wearing khaki. The captain stepped off the boat. He was a slim man with a tired face who stood rubbing the back of his neck over and over as if it were a genie’s bottle. He ordered us all on board.
“I’m not going if Dad’s not going,” I said with enormous relief.
“Wait! There he is.”
Dammit, yes, there he was, coming down the dock, staggering toward us.
Someone once said that at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. Well, I’m sorry, but no one at any age deserves the face my father had as he walked toward us. It was as though the force of gravity had gone haywire and was pulling his face down to the earth and up to the moon at the same time.