Dad settled into the reclining chair and pretended to read. I knew exactly what he was doing; he was watching me sleep. It used to bother me, that creepy habit of his. Now I found it strangely comforting- the sound of turning pages in the quiet, his wheezy breathing and heavy presence filling the corners of the room.
He turned the pages quickly. Now he was not only pretending to read, he was pretending to skim-read. I felt his eyes like a sandbag on my head, and I stretched out on the couch, let out a little moan, and after a believable period of time, pretended to dream.
FOUR
I
It must have been that the maze outside infected everything within. Why else would Dad leave scraps of paper around the house with nonsensical messages written on them, such as “Can’t love ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”? These messages were easily decoded by using the most basic system of cryptology, the first letter of each word in the text spelling out the real message.
“
becomes
“Clean your room!”
Then he started with transposition, where the letters were jumbled and their normal order rearranged.
“Egon ot het sposh. Kabc ralet.”
becomes
“Gone to the shops. Back later.”
Then one night, a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I found the following message stuck to the bathroom mirror:
rezizsl ta ta ixs em teme
It took me a while to decode it, because he’d rearranged the words as well as the letters. After a few minutes of scrutiny, I cracked it:
“Meet me at Sizzler at six.”
Sizzler was where we preferred to eat to celebrate good news- that is to say, we’d been there once before, five years earlier, after Dad won $46 on lotto. I rode my bike through the labyrinth to the main road and took the bus into the city to the Hotel Carlos. This particular Sizzler was located on the top floor, although you didn’t need to stay in the hotel to eat there. You could if you wanted to, of course, but truth be told, once you’d finished eating and paid your bill, they didn’t really care where you slept.
When I got there, he was already sitting at a table by the window, I suppose so we could gaze out across the cityscape during the inevitable lulls in conversation.
“So how’s school?” he asked as I sat down.
“Not bad.”
“Learn anything today?”
“The usual stuff.”
“Such as?”
“You know,” I said, and became nervous when I realized that he wasn’t looking at me. Maybe he’d heard someone say you’re not supposed to look directly into the sun and took it the wrong way.
“I have something to show you,” he said. He laid an envelope on the table and drummed his fingers on it.
I picked up the already torn-open envelope and removed the note inside. The letterhead was from my high school. As I read it, I feigned confusion, but I think it came across as a confession.
Dear Mr. Dean,
This is to officially inform you that your son, Jasper Dean, has been involved in an assault that took place on a train in the afternoon of the twentieth of April, after school. We have indisputable evidence that your son, while wearing school uniform, assaulted a man without provocation. In addition, we are writing to inform you that your son has chosen of his own volition to leave school.
Yours sincerely,
Mr. Michael Silver
Principal
“Why did they write that you were wearing your school uniform? Why is that important?”
“That’s how they are.”
Dad clicked his tongue.
“I’m not going back,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I’ve already said my goodbyes.”
“And you attacked someone? Is that true?”
“You had to be there.”
“Were you defending yourself?”
“It’s more complicated than that. Look, everything I need to know I can teach myself. I can read books on my own. Those fools need someone to turn the pages for them. I don’t.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said. How could I tell him that I now wanted what he had once wanted- to travel on trains and fall in love with girls with dark eyes and extravagant lips? It didn’t matter to me if at the end of it I had nothing to show but sore thighs. It wasn’t my fault that the life of the wanderer, the wayfarer, had fallen out of favor with the world. So what if it was no longer acceptable to drift with the wind, asking for bread and a roof, sleeping on bales of hay and enjoying dalliances with barefooted farmgirls, then running away before the harvest? This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites.
But unfortunately Dad didn’t like the concept of his only son floating aimlessly through space and time, as he came to describe my life plan. He leaned back in his chair and said, “You have to finish school.”
“You didn’t finish school.”
“I know. You don’t want to follow in my footsteps, do you?”
“I’m not following in your footsteps. You don’t own the rights to quitting school.”
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to put my soul on the open road. See what happens.”
“I’ll tell you what happens. Road rage.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Look, Jasper. All I know is the exact pathway to frozen dinners and unwashed laundry. I left school. I wandered aimlessly over the whole earth. I gave myself no choice but to remain exiled from society. But I put you back in school for a reason: so you could have a foot in both worlds, ours and theirs. There’s no reason to leave now as if from the scene of a crime. Stay. Finish. Then do what you want. You want to go to university? You want to get a job and settle down? You want to travel to some of the world’s most exciting dictatorships? You want to drown in a foreign river during a monsoon? Whatever. Just give yourself the option. Stay within the system for now, OK?”
“You didn’t. How many times have I heard you say, ‘Fuck the system’? Well, that’s all I’m doing. Fucking it.”
Pity us, the children of rebels. Just like you, we have the right to rebel against our father’s ways, we too have anarchies and revolutions exploding in our hearts. But how do you rebel against rebellion? Does that mean turning back to conformity? That’s no good. If I did that, then one day my own son, in rebellion against me, would turn out to be my father.
Dad leaned forward as though about to confess a murder he was particularly proud of.
“Well, if you’re going out to put your soul on the open road, I’d like to give you a warning,” he said, his eyebrows arching unattractively. “Call it a road warning. I’m just not sure how to word it.”
Dad put his thinking face on. His breathing became shallow. He spun around and shushed the couple at the table behind us. Suddenly he proceeded with his warning.
“People always complain about having no shoes until they see a man with no feet, then they complain about not having an electric wheelchair. Why? What makes them automatically transfer themselves from one dull system to another, and why is free will utilized only on details and not on the broad outlines- not ‘Should I work?’ but ‘Where should I work?’ and not ‘Should I start a family?’ but ‘When should I start a family?’ Why is it we don’t suddenly swap countries so that everyone in France moves to Ethiopia and everyone in Ethiopia moves to Britain and everyone in Britain moves to the Caribbean and so on until we have finally shared the earth like we were supposed to and shed ourselves of our shameful, selfish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical loyalty to dirt? Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?