Without looking up, Dad said, “Son of a bitch.”
“He’s being pretty good to you, I think, considering you smashed up his club.”
“The first day I met him in Paris he offered me money, then he offered me a job. Then he found me a job. Then later he followed me here to Australia and gave me money to feed you. Not much, a hundred here, a hundred there, but he keeps helping me out.”
“Sounds like you have a very good friend,” Dr. Greg said.
“What do you know about it?” Dad snapped.
Enough of this small talk, I thought. I walked close to Dad and tried whispering in his ear again. “Dad, I need you to get out of here. They’ve put me in a home.” He didn’t say anything, and turned to the last maze in the book and started working through it. “It’s dangerous. Some guy made a pass at me,” I lied.
He still didn’t say anything, only scrunched up his face in annoyance, not at my distasteful lie but at the puzzle he was failing to solve.
“Martin,” Dr. Greg chimed in, “don’t you want to look at your son?”
“I know what he looks like,” Dad said.
It was clear that Dr. Greg’s lacerating mediocrity was suffocating Dad. The doctor was treading the unlit terrain of Dad’s mind with muddy boots, trampling over everything, understanding nothing. As I said, Dad wanted to be prodded by a Freud or a Jung, and if there was no further evidence of his unhinged mind, expecting that an undiscovered genius would be languishing here in this state-run hovel was proof enough.
He was still having trouble with the last maze. His pencil worked through it, but he kept hitting dead ends. “What the fuck?” he said. He was grinding his teeth so loudly we could hear it.
“Martin, why don’t you put the book away and talk to your son?”
“Shut up!”
Suddenly Dad jumped up and stamped his foot. He grabbed a chair and held it above his head, breathing so deeply his whole body heaved. “Get me out of here now!” he screamed, waving the chair in the air.
“Put it down!” Dr. Greg shouted. “Jasper, don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said, although I was a little afraid. “Dad,” I said, “don’t be a dickhead.”
Then the reinforcements arrived, like they do in the movies. An orderly ran in and grabbed Dad and pushed him onto the table. Another grabbed me and pushed me out of the room. I could still see Dad through the little window in the door. The orderlies had him pinned to the table and were sticking a needle in his arm. He was kicking and screaming; whatever was in that needle was taking its time. Dad’s stubborn hyped-up metabolism was slow to react, his agitation far too electric. Then I couldn’t see his face because one of the orderlies was in the way, and I thought how when the apocalypse comes there’s bound to be someone with big hair standing in front of me. Finally the orderly moved to the side, and I saw that Dad was all slobbery and drowsy and medicated into ambivalence. When, a couple of spasms later, he was blissfully at peace, Dr. Greg came out to talk to me. His face was red and sweaty, and I detected a subtle look of exhilaration behind his eyes, as if he were saying to himself, “This is what it’s all about!”
“You can’t keep him here!” I shouted.
“Actually, we can.”
He showed me some paperwork. There was plenty of technical mumbo jumbo. I couldn’t understand it. It was all pretty dull. Even the font was boring.
“Listen. What will it take to get him out of here?”
“He needs to be better than he is now.”
“Well, fuck, can you be more specific?”
“More balanced. We need to be confident he’s not going to do any harm to himself, or to you, or to others.”
“And how do you intend to do that? Be specific, now.”
“By getting him to talk to me. And by medicating him to maintain his stability.”
“This all sounds time-consuming.”
“It isn’t going to happen overnight.”
“Well, how long? An estimate.”
“I don’t know, Jasper. Six months? A year? Two years? Look at him- your father’s pretty far gone.”
“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Live in a fucking state-run home?”
“Don’t you have any relatives who can look after you?”
“No.”
“Uncles or aunts?”
“Dead.”
“Grandparents?”
“Dead! Dead! Everyone’s fucking dead!”
“I’m sorry, Jasper. This is just not something that can be moved along quickly.”
“It has to.”
“I don’t see how.”
“That’s because you’re an idiot,” I said, and stormed down the corridors, not stopping to contemplate the loud groaning on either side. At the reception area, Mrs. French was studiously examining her fingernails like someone who doesn’t like to be left alone with her thoughts. Those fingernails were a way out. I left her with them and crept silently to the elevator. On the way down, I thought of all the people I’d heard pompously call themselves crazy and I wished them lots and lots and lots of bad luck.
I caught a bus home. The other passengers looked as tired and worn-out as I felt. I thought about my problem: this hospital, rather than being a road to wellness, would only accelerate the decay of his body, mind, and spirit, and if Dad was going to get well, he had to get out of there, but to get out of there, he needed to be well. To get him well, I needed to discover exactly what had made him sick, the means by which he had rendered himself useless.
Back in the apartment I searched for Dad’s more recent notebooks. I needed an idea, and no textbook could better aid me than one he wrote himself. But I couldn’t find them. They weren’t in his wardrobe, or under his bed, or wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in the top of the toilet- none of his usual hiding places. After an hour of general ransacking, I had to admit they weren’t in the apartment at all. What had he done with them? I turned the bedroom upside-down again, which only transformed it from one state of chaos to another. Exhausted, I lay on his bed. The atmosphere reeked of Dad’s collapse, and I did my best to avoid the sticky notion that this was not the beginning of the end but the actual definitive conclusive end, the end of the end.
On Dad’s bedside table was a postcard from Anouk. It had “ Bali ” printed in bold red letters over a picture of rice workers in a field. On the other side she had written “You guys need a holiday,” and that was all. We sure did.
I rolled over. Something in his pillowcase dug into my skull. I shook the pillow- out fell a black notebook! There were 140 pages, all numbered. Okay, I was the only one who could free Dad, and this book was going to tell me how. The problem was, entering my father’s mental state implied a certain danger, because his was the kind of thinking that closed around you, not slowly or surreptitiously but quick like the snap of a rusty bear trap. My defense, then, was to read ironically, and with this in mind, I braced myself and began.
Not surprisingly, it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience, as all journeys into dissolution and madness must be. I read it through twice. There were general frustrations, as on page 88:
I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That’s why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain.
and disturbing observations pertaining to me, as on page 21:
Poor Jasper. Watching him sleep while I’m pretending to read, I don’t think he realizes yet that every day his pile of minutes lightens. Maybe he should die when I die?
and observations about himself:
My problem is I can’t sum myself up in one sentence. All I know is who I’m not. And I’ve noticed there is a tacit agreement among most people that they’ll at least try to adjust to their environment. I’ve always felt the urge to rebel against it. That’s why when I’m in the movies and the screen goes dark I get an irresistible impulse to read a book. Luckily, I carry a pocket torch.