“Give him some air!” a voice cried.
“He’s having a fit!” exclaimed another.
I felt bewildered and nauseated. Tears rolled down my face. Then all of a sudden I remembered I was only playing around. My body relaxed, and the nausea was replaced by a fear of discovery. The eyes had moved a couple of feet back, but the force of their gaze was undiminished. Anouk was holding me in her arms. I felt ridiculous.
“Get off me!” I screamed, pushing her away. I returned to the cattle. They were being judged by a panel of leathery-looking folk in Akubra hats. I leaned over the fence. I heard Anouk whispering frantically behind me, but I refused to look. After a minute she joined me.
“You OK now?” she asked.
My answer wasn’t audible. We stood side by side, in silence. A minute later a brown cow with a white stain on his back won first prize for being the juiciest-looking steak in the paddock. We all applauded as if there were nothing absurd about applauding cows.
“You and your father are quite a pair,” Anouk said. “I’m ready to go as soon as you are.”
I felt terrible. What was I doing? So what if his head was an empty seashell in which you could hear the torment of the sea? What did that have to do with my mental well-being? His gestures had become crazy birds banging into windows. Did that mean mine needed to be too?
A couple of weeks later, Dad and I drove Anouk to the airport. She was going for a few months to be massaged on a beach in Bali. Just before she went through the departure gate, she took me aside and said, “I feel a little guilty leaving you at the moment. Your dad’s about to fall off the edge.”
I think she wanted me to say, “No, we’ll be fine. You go enjoy yourself.”
“Please don’t go,” I said.
Then she went anyway, and a week later he fell off the edge.
Dad went through his monthlong cycle of crying, pacing, screaming, watching me sleep, and shoplifting, though suddenly all within a week. Then it was compressed further and he ran through the whole cycle in a day, each stage taking about an hour. Then he went through the cycle in an hour, sighing and groaning and muttering and stealing (from the corner newsstand) in a blaze of tears, running home and tearing off his clothes and pacing naked in the apartment, his body looking like spare parts assembled in a hurry.
Eddie came banging on the door. “Why hasn’t your dad been coming into work? Is he sick?”
“You might say that.”
“Can I see him?”
Eddie went into the bedroom and closed the door. After half an hour, he came out scratching his neck as though Dad had given him a rash and said, “Jesus. When did this all start?”
I don’t know. A month ago? A year?
“How do we fix him?” Eddie asked himself. “We’ve really got to brainstorm. Let’s see. Let me think.”
We stood in a swampy silence for a full twenty minutes. Eddie was brainstorming. I was sick at the way he was breathing through his nostrils, which were partially blocked by something I could see. After another ten minutes Eddie said, “I’m going to think some more about this at home.” And then he left. I didn’t hear from him after that. If he had any brilliant ideas, they just didn’t come fast enough.
A week later there was a knock on the door. I went into the kitchen and made some toast and started shaking. I don’t know how I knew the universe had vomited up something special for me; I just knew. The banging on the door persisted. I didn’t want to overtax my imagination, so against my better judgment I answered it. A woman with a sagging face and big brown teeth was at the door, wearing a look of pity on her face. There was a policeman with her too. I guessed it wasn’t the policeman she felt sorry for.
“Are you Kasper Dean?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“Can we come in?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this. Your father is in the hospital.”
“Is he all right? What happened?”
“He’s not well. He’s going to stay awhile. I want you to come with us.”
“What are you talking about? What happened to him?”
“We’ll tell you about it in the car.”
“I don’t know who you are and what you want to do with me, but you can go fuck yourselves.”
“Come on, son,” the policeman said, clearly not in any mood to follow my suggestion.
“Where?”
“There’s a home you can stay in for a couple of days.”
“This is my home.”
“We can’t leave you alone here. Not until you’re sixteen.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been taking care of myself forever.”
“Come on, Kasper,” the policeman barked.
I didn’t tell him my name was Jasper. I didn’t tell him that Kasper was a fictional character of my dad’s invention and that Kasper had been killed off many years ago. I decided to play along until I worked out just what the situation was. I knew this much: I wasn’t sixteen, and that meant I had no rights. People are always talking about the rights of the child, but it’s never the rights you need when you need them.
I went with them in the police car.
On the way they explained that Dad had driven his car through the window of the Fleshpot. It was an act that might have been taken as an unfortunate accident, only when he got through the window, he locked the steering wheel in a tight circle and spun the car around the dance floor, into tables and chairs, smashing up the place, destroying the bar. The police had to drag him out of the car. Clearly he’d gone mad. And now he was in the madhouse. I wasn’t surprised. Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it. It’s OK from a mountaintop, but Dad was smack bang in the middle, and his berserk contradictions had finally butted each other insensible.
“Can I see him?”
“Not today,” the woman said. We pulled up to a house in the suburbs. “You’ll stay here a couple of days, until we see if any of your relatives can come and get you.”
Relatives? I didn’t know anyone like that.
The house was a one-story brick number and looked just like a regular family home. From the outside you couldn’t tell this was where they warehoused the broken-off pieces of shattered families. The policeman honked the horn when we pulled up. A woman with one enormous bosom came out with a smile that I predicted I would see again and again in a thousand awful nightmares. The smile said, “Your tragedy is my ticket to heaven, so come here and give me a hug.”
“You must be Kasper,” she said, and she was joined by a bald man who kept nodding as if he were Kasper.
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m Mrs. French,” the single-bosomed woman said, as if boasting, as if to be Mrs. French were a hard-earned achievement in itself.
When I didn’t respond, they walked me through the house. They showed me a bunch of kids watching television in the living room. Out of habit, I surveyed the female faces in the room. I do this even among the fragmented. I do this to see if there is any physical beauty I can dream about or lust over; I do this on buses, in hospitals, at the funerals of dear friends; I do this to lighten the load a little; I will do this as I lie dying. As it happened, everyone in the place was ugly, at least on the outside. All the kids peered at me as though I were up for sale. Half of them looked resigned to whatever it was their fate was dishing up to them; the other half snarled defiantly. For once I wasn’t interested in their stories. I’m sure they all had perfectly awful tragedies that I could weep over for centuries, but I was too busy aging ten years with every passing minute in this limbo for children.
The couple continued with their tour. They showed me the kitchen. They showed me the backyard. They showed me my room, a glorified closet. The people may have been nice and kind and soft-spoken, but I preferred to save some time and just assume they were perverts awaiting nightfall.