So it seemed Dad could make good money off his memories, but why now? There had already been a couple of wildly inaccurate Australian movies based on the story, and Dad had refused to cooperate with any of them. Why this surrender, this sudden willingness to exploit his private dead? It was another in an alarming series of abrupt about-faces, allowing a writer to come with a nice check in exchange for picking the scabs off Dad’s brain to see what was underneath. Anouk, with her uncanny gift for identifying the worm in the apple, said, “You know what your problem is? You’re living in your brother’s shadow,” and when the twenty-three-year-old gum-chewing writer bounded cheerily into the apartment the following week, he only had to say, “So, tell me what Terry Dean was like as a child,” for Dad to grab him by the shirtsleeves and throw him exuberantly out the door with his laptop after him. One court appearance later, his new “job” cost him $4,000 and some unwanted press. “You know what your problem is?” Anouk said that night. “You’re a fanatic, but you’re fanatical about everything. Don’t you see? You’re spreading your fanaticism too thin.”
But you want to know what our real problem was? You can’t drift blissfully along in a blind haze when someone’s standing beside you shouting: That’s lust! That’s pride! That’s sloth! That’s habit! That’s pessimism! That’s jealousy! That’s sour grapes! Anouk was stuffing up our deeply entrenched custom of scraping and wheezing our way unenthusiastically around our claustrophobic apartment. The only way we knew how to get ahead was to plod toward our paltry desires and pant loudly to get attention. And the endlessly optimistic Anouk wanted to turn creatures like us into superbeings! She desired us to be considerate, helpful, conscientious, moral, strong, compassionate, loving, selfless, and brave, and she never let up, until gradually we fell into the regrettable habit of watching what we did and what we said.
After months of her boring us and boring into us, we no longer used plastic bags, and rarely ate anything that bled; we signed petitions, joined fruitless protests, inhaled incense, bent ourselves into difficult yoga positions- all worthy ascents up the mountain of self-improvement. But there were crap changes too, deep plummets into the gorge. Because of Anouk, we lived in fear of ourselves. Whoever first equated self-knowledge with change has no respect for human weakness and should be found and bitten to death. I’ll tell you why: Anouk highlighted our problems but didn’t have the resources or the know-how to help us fix them. We certainly didn’t know. So thanks to Anouk, not only were we stuck with the slippery menagerie of problems we already had, we were now imbued with an appalling awareness of them. This, of course, led to new problems.
III
There was something really wrong with my father. He was crying; he was in his bedroom, crying. I could hear him sobbing through the walls. I could hear him pacing back and forth over the same small space. Why was he crying? I’d never heard him cry before; I thought he couldn’t. Now it was every night after work and every morning before work. I took it as a bad omen. I felt that he was crying prophetically- not for what had happened but for what was about to take place.
In between sobs he talked to himself. “Fucking apartment. Too small. Can’t breathe. It’s a tomb. Must wage war. Who am I? How can I define myself? Choices are infinite and therefore limited. Forgiveness is big in the Bible, but nowhere does it say you should forgive yourself. Terry never forgave himself, and everyone loves him. I forgive myself daily, and nobody loves me. All this dread and insomnia. I can’t teach my brain how to sleep. How’s your confusion these days? It’s put on weight.”
“Dad?”
I pushed open his door a little, and in the shadows his face was severe and his head looked like a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.
“Jasper. Do me a favor. Pretend you’re an orphan.”
I closed the door, went into my bedroom, and pretended I was an orphan. It didn’t feel too bad.
Then, as abruptly as it started, the crying stopped. Suddenly he started going out at night. That was new. Where did he go? I followed him. He was walking the streets with a bounce in his step and waving to people as he passed. They didn’t wave back. He stopped at a small, crowded pub. I peeked through the window and saw him perched at the bar, drinking. And he wasn’t sulking alone in a corner either; he was chatting to people, laughing. That was brand spanking new. The color of his face had gone all rosy, and after he polished off a couple of beers, he stood up on the bar stool and turned off the football game and said something to the crowd while laughing and shaking his fist like a dictator telling a joke at the execution of his favorite dissident. When he finished he bowed (though nobody applauded) and went to another pub, shouting “Hello there!” as he entered, then “I’ll see what I can do!” as he left. Then he popped into a dimly lit bar and paced around in circles before leaving without ordering anything. Then a nightclub! Christ! Is this what Anouk had driven him to?
He disappeared up the escalator of the Fishbowl, a concept disco designed as an enormous glass bowl with a platform around its perimeter. I climbed up onto the platform and peered into the bowl. At first I couldn’t see him. At first I couldn’t see anything but immaculately sculpted beautiful people illuminated in brief moments under strobe lights. Then I spotted him. He was fucking dancing. He was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath, moving clumsily and making strange, drowsy arm movements, like a lumberjack chopping trees in space, but he was having fun. Or was he? His smile was twice the size of normal smiles and he was gazing lustfully at cleavage of all sizes and religions. But what was this? He wasn’t dancing alone! He was dancing with a woman! Or was he? He was dancing behind her, gyrating at her back. She was ignoring him a little too effortlessly for comfort, so he swiveled around so he was in front and tried to sweep her up in that mile-wide smile. I wondered if he was going to invite her back to our sad and filthy apartment. But no, she wasn’t taken in. So he moved on to another woman, a shorter, rounder one. He swooped down and escorted her to the bar. He bought her a drink and handed over the cash as if he were paying a ransom. As they talked, he placed his hand on her back and drew her toward him. She resisted and walked away and Dad’s smile grew even wider, making him look like a chimpanzee who’d had peanut butter smeared on his gums for a television commercial.
A flat-nosed, no-neck bouncer in a tight black T-shirt arrived. His Goliath’s hand wrapped around the back of Dad’s neck, and he forcefully escorted him out of the club. On the street, Dad told him to fuck his mother if he hadn’t already. That did it for me. I’d seen enough. It was time to go home.
At around five in the morning he banged on the door. He’d lost his key. I opened up to see him sweating and yellow and in the middle of a sentence. I went back to bed without hearing the end of it. That was the only night I followed him, and when I recounted the story to Anouk, she said it was either “quite a good sign” or a “very bad sign.” I don’t know what he did the rest of those nights out on the town. I can only assume they were variations on the same fruitless theme.
A month later he was home again, crying. But what was worse, he started watching me sleep. The first night he did it he came into the room just as I was drifting off and took a seat by the window.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing. You just go to sleep.”
“What, with you sitting there?”
“I’m going to read in here awhile,” he said, holding up a book.