He turned on the lamp and started reading. I watched him for a minute, then put my head back down and shut my eyes. I could hear him turning the pages. A few minutes later I sneaked one eyelid open and almost recoiled. He was staring at me. My face was in shadows, so he couldn’t see I was watching him watching me. Then he turned the page again. I realized he was pretending to read, as an excuse for watching me sleep. This happened night after night, Dad pretending to read in my bedroom while I stayed awake with my eyes closed, feeling his eyes on me and listening to the sound of turning pages in the quiet. I tell you, they were some eerie, sleepless nights.
Then he started shoplifting. It began well enough. Dad came home, his bag stuffed with avocados and apples and fat nobs of cauliflower. Fruit and vegetables, nothing to complain about. Then he stole combs, throat lozenges, and Band-Aids- pharmaceutical goods. Useful. Then he stole nonsense items from gift shops: an old piece of driftwood with the words “My home is my castle” etched onto a plaque, a thong-shaped flyswatter, and a mug that said “You never know how many friends you have until you own a beach house,” which might be fun to put in a beach house, if you had one. We didn’t.
Then he was in bed crying again.
Then he was watching me sleep again.
Then he was at the window. I don’t know when exactly he took up post there, or why, but he was vigilant about his new role. Half his face was looking out the window, the other half buried in the bunched-up curtains. We should have had venetian blinds, the perfect accessory for sudden outbursts of acute paranoia; there’s nothing quite as atmospheric as those slits with their thin bars of shadow falling across your face. But what was he looking at out the window anyway? Mostly the backs of people’s shitty apartments. Mostly bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms. Nothing fascinating. Man with pale skinny legs stands in underwear devouring apple, woman puts on makeup arguing with person unseen, old couple brushes teeth of uncooperative German shepherd, that kind of thing. Staring out, Dad had a dark look in his eye. It wasn’t jealousy, that much I know. For Dad, the grass was never greener on the other side of the fence. If anything, it was browner.
Everything had taken a darker turn. His mood was dark. His face was dark. His vocabulary, dark and menacing.
“Fucking bitch,” he said one day at the window. “Fucking cunt.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Bitch across the way looking at us.”
“Well, you’re looking at her.”
“Only to see if she’s looking.”
“Is she?”
“Not now.”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
Here’s the problem. He used to be funny. I mean, I know I’d complained about him my whole life, but I missed the old Dad. What happened to his lighthearted godlessness? That was funny. Reclusion is hysterical. Rebellion, a thousand laughs! But crying is rarely funny, and sociopathic rage never gets a chuckle- not from me, anyway. Now he was keeping the curtains humorlessly closed all day. No light penetrated the apartment. There were no longer middays or mornings or seasonal fluctuations of any kind. The only change was in the darkness. There were things breeding in it. Whatever mushrooms existed in his psyche were thriving in that dark, damp place. Not funny.
One night I spilled coffee on my bed. It was coffee, I swear, that soaked through the sheets and seeped into the mattress, but it looked like urine. I thought: Anouk will think it is urine. I tore the sheets off my bed and hid them. I went to the cupboard for clean sheets. There were none there.
Where did all the sheets go?
I asked Dad.
“Outside,” he said.
We didn’t have an outside. We lived in an apartment. I puzzled over this mystery awhile before arriving at a frightening conclusion. I went to check. I opened the curtains. There was no outside world. What I saw was sheets; he had hung them over the windows from the outside, maybe as a white flapping shield to hide us from prying eyes. But no, they weren’t white. They weren’t a shield either. They were a sign. There was something written on the other side of the sheets, in red. The words “Fucking Bitch.”
This was bad. I knew this was bad.
I took down the sheets and hid them with the others, the ones with urine on them. Shit, I wrote that, didn’t I? OK. I admit it. It was urine (it is not attention-seeking that makes children wet their beds, but fear of their parents).
Just so you know, you don’t have to be religious to pray. Prayer is not so much an article of faith anymore as it is something that is culturally inherited from film and television, like kissing in the rain. I prayed for my father’s recovery as a child actor might pray: on my knees, palms locked, head bowed, eyes closed. I went so far as to light a candle for him, not in a church- you can take hypocrisy only so far- but in the kitchen late one night, when his nocturnal rumblings had reached a fever pitch. I hoped the candle would unwrap whatever it was that bound him so tight.
Anouk was in the kitchen with me, cleaning it from top to bottom, muttering that she wanted to be not only paid but praised, and, citing mouse poo and cockroach nests as evidence, she implied that by cleaning the kitchen she was saving our lives.
Dad was stretched out on the couch with his hands covering his face.
She stopped cleaning and stood in the doorway. Dad could feel her staring at him and pressed the palms of his hands harder into his eyes.
“What the fuck is going on with you, Martin?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
“God, no.”
“You’re wallowing in self-pity, that’s what I think. You’re frustrated, OK. Your aspirations are unfulfilled. You think you’re this special person who deserves special treatment, only you’re just starting to see that no one in the whole wide world agrees with you. And to make matters worse, your brother is celebrated like the god you think you are, and that’s finally dropped you in this kind of bottomless pit of depression where all these dark thoughts are gnawing at you, feeding on each other. Paranoia, persecution complex, probably impotence too, I don’t know. But let me tell you. You have to do something about this before you do something you’ll regret.”
It was as excruciating as watching someone light a firecracker, then peer over it thinking it’s a dud. Only Dad wasn’t a dud.
“Stop bad-mouthing my soul, you meddlesome bitch!”
“Listen to me, Martin. Anyone else would get the hell out of here. But someone has to talk some sense into you. And besides, you’re scaring the kid.”
“He’s OK.”
“He’s not OK. He’s pissing his bed!”
Dad lifted his head over the top of the couch so all I could see was his receding hairline.
“Jasper, come here.”
I went over to the hairline.
“Haven’t you ever been depressed?” Dad asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re always so calm. It’s a façade, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me, what gnaws at you, Jasper?”
“You do!” I shouted, and ran to my room. What I didn’t yet understand was that Dad’s unhinged state had the potential to send me down the same precarious path.
Soon after that evening, Anouk took me to the Royal Easter Show to cheer me up. After the rides and the fairy floss and the show bags, we wandered over to see the judging of livestock. While staring at cattle, I suddenly pretended to be suffering from a bout of chronic disequilibrium, a new pastime of mine that involved bumping into people, stumbling, falling into shop displays, that kind of thing.
“What’s wrong?” she shrieked, grabbing me by the shoulders.
“I don’t know.”
Her hands clasped mine. “You’re shaking!”
It’s true, I was. The world was reeling, my legs bending like straw. My whole body was vibrating out of control. I’d worked myself into such a lather, the fabricated illness had taken over, and for a minute I forgot there was nothing wrong with me.
“Help me!” I screamed. A crowd of spectators rushed over, including some officials from the show. They hovered over me, gawking (in a real emergency, a thousand eyes pressing against your skull isn’t actually that helpful).