Back in the apartment her smell everywhere. I told Eddie to go home then went to the baby in bedroom asleep, unaware that his mother’s head & her arms & her face were all in separate locations.
Just me & this grimacing baby.
He woke up screaming from hunger or existential angst. What am I going to do? It’s not like there are any breasts in the refrigerator. I opened up a carton of milk & poured him a cup & then took the cup back to Jasper & poured a little milk into his mouth thinking I’m a widow of sorts. We weren’t married but a baby is a fleshier contract than a flimsy piece of paper.
Found note taped to the bathroom mirror:
I know you will worry how to be a father. You only have to love him. Don’t try to keep him safe from harm. Love him, that’s all you have to do.
Rather simplistic, I thought folding the note. Now I see it was her plan all along even if she herself didn’t know it. To have this child & then dispose of herself.
Astrid dead. Never really knew her. Wonder if she knew I loved her.
Went upstairs & threw some clothes into a bag & then went back into the room & looked at the baby. That’s what I’m doing now. Looking at this baby. My baby. Poor baby. Jasper. Poor Jasper.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry what terrible tomorrows we’ll have together what shabby luck your soul fell into the body of my son my son your father is love’s lonely cripple. I’ll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words “your generation.” I will teach you how not to demonize your enemies & how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I’ll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I’ll teach you how to know what’s missing.
We’ll go.
We’ll go home, to Australia.
amp; I’ll teach you that if ever you’re surprised you’re still alive to check again. You can never be too sure about a thing like that.
That was it. The last entry.
I closed the notebook, sick to my stomach. The story of my birth shattered into rubble in my brain. Each broken piece of debris reflected an image from the journal’s story. So, then- out of loneliness, insanity, and suicide, I was laboriously born. Nothing surprising about that.
The following year, on the morning of my mother’s birthday, Dad came into my bedroom while I was dressing.
“Well, mate, it’s the seventeenth of May again.”
“So?”
“You be ready to go after lunch?”
“I have other plans.”
“It’s your mother’s birthday.”
“I know.”
“You’re not coming to the grave?”
“It’s not a grave. It’s a hole. I don’t mourn holes.”
Dad stood there, and I noticed there was a present in his hand. “I got her something,” he said.
“That’s nice.”
“Don’t you want to unwrap it?”
“I’m late,” I said, leaving him alone in my bedroom with his sad and pointless gift.
Instead I took myself to the harbor to look at the boats. During the year that had passed, I thought against my will of all that was in my father’s journal. No piece of writing before or since has burned so permanently into my memory. Despite the clever tricks in the art of forgetting my mind knows, they have no impact here. I remember every frightening word.
I sat all day, watching the boats. Or else I looked down at the rocks and the slick, shiny coat of oil floating on top of the water. I stayed there a long time. I stayed until the moon rose and a curtain of stars was drawn across the sky and the lights on the harbor bridge shone out of the darkness. All the boats nodded gently in the dark.
My soul is ambitious and mercenary in its desire to know itself. Dad’s journal left this aim unsatisfied, and my mother’s story was more of a mystery than when I knew nothing at all. I had ascertained that my mother was probably insane and of unknown origins. Other than that, my investigation had led only to more questions. About my father, it didn’t surprise me that I had been violently unwanted. The only concrete thing I learned about her was that my birth was the final item on her to-do list, and once she’d checked it off, it allowed her to die. I was born to clear the obstacles on her pathway to death.
It got cold. I shivered a little.
The rhythms of the universe were perceptible in the way the boats were nodding at me.
A few years later I went back to the cemetery. My mother’s grave was gone. There was someone new there, wedged in between old Martha Blackman and little Joshua Wolf. Her name was Frances Pearlman. She’d been forty-seven years old. She left behind two sons, a daughter, and a husband.
Since finding the journal I had read it over several more times.
The most disturbing element in that unpleasant little book was his assertion that I was possibly a premature reincarnation of his still living self, that I was my father: what did it all mean? That somewhere inside him, the man feared my autonomy would be the death of him?
I thought this staring at the grave of Frances Pearlman.
There were fresh flowers spread out over her grave. This was no misshapen love or empty coffin. I thought about my father, and how one of us was the host, the other the parasite, and I did not know who was who. It seemed to me we could not both survive. It seemed to me that one day, inevitably, one of us had to go. It seemed to me we were going to fight each other for supremacy of the soul. It seemed to me I’d be willing to kill him to survive.
They were creepy thoughts, but I was in a cemetery, after all.
THREE
I
In the newspaper and television reports made immediately after my father’s death, much was made of the years of the early to mid-1990s, the period covering the worst excesses of his so-called insanity. Not only was this epoch notable for the arrival of Anouk Furlong (as she was known then)- a woman who played no small part in provoking his mental collapse- but this was the eventful slab of years that included strip clubs, mental asylums, plastic surgery, arrests, and what occurred when my father tried to hide our house.
Here’s how it all happened:
One day without warning Dad struck a resounding blow to our peaceful squalor: he got a job. He did it for my sake and never stopped reminding me. “I could milk the social welfare system dry if it was just me, but it’s insufficient for two. You’ve driven me into the workforce, Jasper. I’ll never forgive you!”
It was Eddie again who found him work. A year after Dad’s return from Paris, Eddie turned up at our apartment door, which surprised Dad, who’d never had an enduring friendship in all his life, certainly not one that spanned continents. Eddie had left Paris just after we did and had returned to Thailand before moving to Sydney.
Now, eleven years later, he had found Dad employment for the second time. I had no idea if this new gig was with equally murky characters and just as dangerous. Frankly, I didn’t care. I was twelve years old, and for the first time in my life, Dad was out of the apartment. His heavy presence was suddenly lifted from my life, and I felt free to eat my cornflakes without hearing over and over again why man was the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity.
Dad worked all the time, and it wasn’t that his long hours away from me were making me lonely (I was lonely already), but there was something to it that didn’t feel right. Of course, it’s not unusual for fathers to work all the time because they are bringing home the bacon, and it can’t be helped that the bacon lurks in offices and coal mines and building sites, but in our home there was a mystery regarding the location of our bacon. I started thinking about it every day. Where the hell’s our bacon? I thought this because my friends lived in houses, not apartments, and their fridges were always full of food while ours was full of space. Dad worked all day every day, even on weekends, but we didn’t seem to have any more money than when he was unemployed. Not a cent. One day I asked him, “Where’s all the money go?”