“Is that it? Is that the boat? Is that the fucking boat? Is it watertight? It looks pretty loose to me.”
“That’s her, all right.”
“It looks like it couldn’t float in space.”
“I agree. It’s not too late to chuck this whole idea.”
“No, no. We’ll carry on.”
“Right.” Fuck.
The sun was rising. It was almost morning. The captain came over and urged us on board again. Terry put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it like a lemon.
“All right. Remember what I told you: if these two men do not reach Australia in tip-top condition, I will kill you.”
“And if he doesn’t,” Dad said, “my ghost will come back and kick you in the balls.”
“That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You got it?”
The captain nodded wearily. He seemed used to threats.
Terry and Dad stood facing each other like two men about to wrestle. Dad tried to smile, but his face couldn’t support the sudden strain. Terry puffed a little, as if he were climbing stairs, and slapped Dad lightly on the arm.
“Well. This was a hell of a reunion, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry dying’s made me such a shit,” Dad said. He looked awkward with this goodbye, and put his hand on his head as if he were worried it would blow away. Then they gave each other a smile. You could see their whole lives in that smile: their childhood, their adventures. The smile said, “Didn’t we turn out to be two different and amusing creatures?”
“Just have a nice peaceful death,” Terry said, “and try not to take Jasper with you.”
“He’ll be OK,” Dad said, and turning away from his brother, he boarded the boat, which knocked gently against the pier.
Terry grabbed me by the shoulders and smiled. He leaned forward, smelling of coriander and lemongrass, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “You take care of yourself.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I think I’ll get out of Thailand. Maybe move to Kurdistan or Uzbekistan, one of those places I can’t spell. I’ll try setting up a cooperative there. This whole thing with your dad and Caroline has shaken me up a little. I think I need to go on a long, rough journey. See what’s up. I have a funny feeling the world’s about to go up in smoke. The war has started, Jasper. Take my word for it. The have-nots are getting their act together. And the haves are in for a rough trot.”
I agreed it seemed to be developing that way.
“Will you ever come out of the shadows and return to Australia?”
“One day I’ll come back and give them all the fright of their lives.”
“Come on, let’s go home,” Dad shouted from the deck.
Terry looked at Dad and held up a finger to say he needed one minute. “Jasper, before you go, I’d like to give you a word or two of advice.”
“All right.”
“From watching you these past months, I’ve worked out that there’s something you want above all things. You want not to be like your father.”
That wasn’t something I kept hidden, even from Dad.
“You’ve probably worked out by now that if you think courageous thoughts, you will cross busy streets without looking, and if you think sadistic, venal thoughts, you will find yourself pulling out the chair every time someone is about to sit down. You are what you think. So if you don’t want to turn into your father, you don’t want to think yourself into a corner like he did- you need to think yourself into the open, and the only way to do that is to enjoy not knowing whether you’re right or wrong, play the game of life without trying to work out the rules. Stop judging the living, enjoy futility, don’t be disillusioned with murder, remember that fasting men survive while starving men die, laugh as your illusions collapse, and above all, always bless every single minute of this silly season in hell.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I thanked him, hugged him one last time, and boarded the boat.
As we set off, through a heavy curtain of black engine smoke, I waved goodbye to Terry until he disappeared from sight. I looked at Dad to see if he was sad to never see his brother again, and I noticed that he was turned in the opposite direction, gazing out at the horizon and smiling an inappropriately optimistic smile.
IV
The terrible ocean! Weeks and weeks of it!
It seemed impossible for the captain to get the boat under control. Large waves threatened us on all sides. The trawler was tossed appallingly. It felt like she wasn’t just rocking back and forth but wheeling and spiraling and looping, doing mad circles in space.
Below deck, the portholes were welded shut and painted over with black tar. The floors were lined with soiled cardboard, and the passengers slept on mattresses as thin as sheets. I remembered how when I first arrived in Thailand everyone told me not to point my feet at anyone’s head. Now, in this cramped space, people were crowded together so closely that you ended up putting your feet not just at the heads of strangers but right into their faces too, day in, day out. Dad and I were jammed into a tight corner, sandwiched between bulky sacks of rice and a chain-smoking family from southern China.
In that hot and sweaty cage, the only oxygen we inhaled had been exhaled by other passengers. To be below deck was to be submerged in a nightmare. The crush of limbs and skeletal torsos was oppressive, especially in the suffocating darkness, where voices- peculiar, chilling, guttural sounds- made up conversations from which we were estranged. If you had to go outside for air, you didn’t so much move among them as were pushed remorselessly from one end of the hull to the other.
Sometimes, Dad and I slept up on the hard, ridged deck, using as pillows coils of wet, heavy rope caked in mud from one sea floor or another. It wasn’t much better up there; the days were stinking hot, it rained steadily, and who’d have imagined mosquitos could make it this far out to sea? They gnawed us incessantly. We could hardly hear ourselves swear at God against the loud, throbbing engine, which was belching out clouds of black smoke relentlessly.
At night we lay staring up at the sky, where the stars swam in shapes somehow made menacing by sobs, screams, and howls of delirium, mostly from Dad.
There’s nothing pleasant about the final stages of cancer. He was confused, delirious, convulsing; he had severe throbbing headaches, giddiness, slurred speech, dizzy spells, nausea, vomiting, trembling, sweating, unbearable muscle pain, extreme weakness, and sleeps as heavy as comas. He made me feed him from a pill bottle with an unreadable label. They were opiates, he said. So Dad’s various immortality projects had given way to the more important mortality project: to die with the least pain.
No one liked having the sick man on board. They knew the journey required strength and stamina, and besides, no matter what religion you followed, a dying man was a bad omen in every one. Perhaps because of this, the Runaways were reluctant to share their provisions with us. And it wasn’t just Dad’s health that bothered them- we emanated the smell of the alien. They knew we were Australians who had paid enormous sums of money to enter our own country illegally. They couldn’t wrap their minds around it.
One night on deck I was awoken by a voice shouting, “Why you here?” I opened my eyes to see the ship’s captain standing above us, smoking a cigarette. His face was a pulp novel I didn’t have the energy to read. “I don’t think he make it,” the captain’s voice persisted as his foot nudged Dad in the stomach. “Maybe we throw him off.”
“Maybe I throw you off,” I said.
One of the Runaways stood up behind me and shouted something to the captain in a language I didn’t recognize. The captain backed off. I turned around. The Runaway was around the same age as me, with large, beautiful eyes that were much too big for his drawn face. He had long curly hair and long curly eyelashes. Everything about him was long and curly.