Of course I made her swear not to tell anyone the secret I’d told her. And of course she told the man she loved, because without thinking, I had given her a breaking news story to salvage his flagging journalistic career.
So is that why I joined Eddie, Dad, and Caroline on the run? I went along seeking forgiveness? Maybe, though why should I have stayed? I’d just had the worst year of my life. When the Towering Inferno dumped me, I had moved from the spaciousness of Dad’s labyrinth into a long thin apartment that was not much more than a glorified corridor with a bathroom and an L-shaped space at the end where you could stick a single bed and anything L-shaped you happened to have lying around. The move from the bush to the city had an unexpected and serious destabilizing effect on me. In my hut, I had been close to the voice of the earth and never had to strive to feel at ease. Now, in the city, I found that I was cut off from all my favorite hallucinations. I’d left myself behind. Banished from the source, I felt entirely at sea.
Then, when Dad became a public figure adored by the nation, I’ll admit it- his fame hit me hard. How could twenty million people like that irritating man? I mean, six months before he couldn’t get ten friends in a room for a dinner! The world was yet to fall off its hinges, though; one mild afternoon Dad visited me at work, in his suit, stiff as if unable to bend his knees. He stood awkwardly in my cubicle, looking like a house boarded up, and our sad, silent confrontation climaxed with him telling me the awful news. He hardly had to say it. I don’t know how, but I already knew. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Couldn’t he see I knew as soon as he approached? I practically had to shield my eyes from the glare of death.
These were the strange, turbulent days; Dad married his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Anouk married the son of a billionaire, Dad was betrayed by his best friend, I was betrayed by my true love, and he was despised by an entire nation. In the media, the descriptions of him varied: a businessman, a swindler, a Jew. I remember he was often obsessed with his inability to define himself. Hearing himself compartmentalized in this way only served to remind him who he wasn’t.
Everything was going wrong. I was getting death threats from strangers. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was lonely. I wandered the streets endlessly and tried to pretend I saw the Inferno everywhere, but there just weren’t enough six-foot redheads in Sydney, and I wound up mistaking her for some laughable substitutes. Retreating to my apartment, I became so depressed that when it came time for eating, I thought: What’s in it for me? At night I kept dreaming of a single face, the same face I used to dream about in childhood, the ugly face contorted in a silent scream, the face that I sometimes see even when I’m awake. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to, and, worse, I couldn’t be bothered doing up my shoes. That’s when I started chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana, eating cereal out of the box, drinking vodka out of the bottle, vomiting myself to sleep, crying for no reason, talking to myself in a stern voice, and pacing the streets, which were crammed with people who, unlike me, were conspicuously not screaming inside and not paralyzed by indecision and not hated by every person on this vile island continent.
I took up my post in bed, under the covers, and stayed there, only shaken out of a drunken sleep one afternoon to see Anouk’s green eyes peering at me.
“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”
She was dressed in an old undershirt and tracksuit pants. The shock of marrying money was obviously forcing her to dress down.
“This is very strange, Jasper. I have the exact same feeling as when I first walked into your dad’s apartment after we met. Remember? Look at this place! It’s disgusting. Trust me on this- beer-can ashtrays are a sign you can’t ignore!”
She ran around the apartment, cleaning up energetically, undaunted by the moldy food and general debris of my day-to-day existence. “You’ll need to repaint these walls to get the smell out,” she said. I fell asleep listening to the rising and falling of her voice. The last thing I heard her say were the words “Just like your father.”
I woke a few hours later to find the whole apartment clean and smelling of incense. Anouk sat with her long legs crossed on the floor, her shoes kicked off, a sunbeam reflecting off her ankle bracelet. “Too much has happened. You’re overstimulated. Come down here,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“I taught you how to meditate, didn’t I?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Your dad could never turn off his mind- that’s why he was always breaking down. Unless you want to suffer the same mental deterioration, you’re going to have to achieve a stillness of the mind through meditation.”
“Leave me alone, Anouk.”
“Jasper. I’m just trying to help you. The only way you’re going to survive all this hatred is if you have inner peace. And to find inner peace, you first have to reach the higher self. And to find the higher self, you have to find the inner light. Then you join the light.”
“Join the light. To what?”
“No- you and the light become one.”
“What’s that going to feel like?”
“Bliss.”
“So it’s good, then.”
“Very.”
Anouk went on in this way, about inner peace, about meditation and the power of the mind not to bend spoons but to thwart hatred. She wasn’t fooling me. She was only a wannabe guru- hearing rumors of enlightenment was as far as she’d got. Still, we tried to find peace, light, our higher and lower selves, and all those in between. Anouk thought I might be a natural at meditation, since I’d confided in her that I suspected I could read my father’s thoughts and often saw faces where there should be none. She seized these revelations zealously, and her frenzied voice became more insistent. Just as in the old days, I was defenseless against her fanatical compassion. I let her buy flowers and wind chimes. I let her buy me books on different approaches to meditation. I even let her drag me to a rebirthing experience. “Don’t you want to remember your own birth?” she snapped, as if she were noting forgetfulness as another of my character traits. She took me to a center that had walls the color of an old woman’s gums, and we lay in a dimly lit room in a semicircle, chanting and regressing and struggling to recall the moment of birth as if we were trying to remember someone’s phone number. I felt like a fool. But I loved being around Anouk again, so I went along with it, and every day afterward, as we sat cross-legged in parks and on beaches, repeating our mantras over and over again like obsessive-compulsives. For those couple of weeks I did nothing but watch my breathing and attempt to empty my mind, but my mind was like a boat with a leak; every time I got rid of a bucket of thoughts, new ones poured in. And when I thought I might have achieved the slightest emptiness, I got scared. My emptiness was not blissful but felt malignant. The sound of my own breathing was faintly sinister. My posture seemed theatrical. Sometimes I’d shut my eyes only to see that strange and terrible face, or else I’d see nothing but I would hear, faint and muffled, my father’s voice, as if he were talking to me from inside a box. Clearly meditation couldn’t help me. Nothing could help me. I was beyond help, and not even a sudden sun shower could lift me up. In fact, I started wondering what I had seen in nature all that time I lived in the labyrinth. It suddenly seemed to be horrible and ostentatious, and I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.