During this time I went for a job with an advertising agency, even though there was something condescending about the way the ad wanted a “junior.” I entered a sterile cement shanty, shuffled along dark, joyless corridors where a large clone army slid by me, smiling with urgency. In the interview, a guy named Smithy told me I’d get four weeks off a year for cosmetic surgery. The job was data entry clerk. I started the next day. The ad didn’t lie- I entered data. My coworkers were a man who smoked cigarettes that were mysteriously lipstick-stained in the pack and an alcoholic woman who tried very hard to convince me that waking up in the revolving door of the Hyatt Hotel was something to be proud of. I loathed that job. The good days passed like decades, the so-so days like half centuries, but mostly it felt as if I were frozen in the eye of an everlasting time-storm.
The night the hut was finished, Dad and I, two lying fakers, sat on the front porch and toasted the achievement that was not our own. We saw a star fall and tear a long thin strip of white in the black sky.
“Did you see that?” Dad asked.
“Shooting star.”
“I made a wish,” he said. “Should I tell you what it was?”
“Better not.”
“You’re probably right. Did you make a wish?”
“I’ll make one later.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
“As long as I don’t blink, the power of the star is still good.”
My fingers held my eyelids wide open while I contemplated my wishing options. It was an easy choice. I wanted a woman. I wanted love. I wanted sex. Specifically, I wanted the Towering Inferno. I worked all this into one wish.
Dad must have read my mind, or made a similar wish, because he said, “You’re probably wondering why I’ve been single most all my life.”
“It’s kind of self-explanatory,” I said.
“Do you remember I told you one day about a girl I once loved?”
“Caroline Potts.”
“I still think about her.”
“Where is she now?”
“ Europe probably,” he said. “She was the love of my life.”
“And Terry was the love of hers.”
We finished our beers and listened to the gurgling of the creek.
“Make sure you fall in love, Jasper. It’s one of the greatest pleasures there is.”
“A pleasure? You mean like a hot bath in winter?”
“That’s right.”
“Anything else?”
“It makes you feel alive, really alive.”
“That sounds good. What else?”
“It confuses you so you don’t know your arse from your elbow.”
I thought about that. “Dad,” I said, “so far you’ve described love as a pleasure, a stimulant, and a distraction. Is there nothing else?”
“What more do you want?”
“I don’t know. Something higher or deeper?”
“Higher or deeper?”
“Something more meaningful?”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.”
We had reached an impasse, and turned our eyes back to the heavens. The night sky just disappoints after a falling star has fallen from sight. Show’s over, the sky says. Go home.
That night I wrote a nice little blackmail note to the Towering Inferno:
I’m considering changing my story and telling the principal it was you who orchestrated the hat incident on the train. If you would like to talk me out of it, come to my house anytime. Come alone.
You don’t think you can blackmail a woman into loving you? Well, maybe you can’t, but it was my last card and I had to play it. I perused the note. It was just the way a blackmail letter should read: concise and demanding. But…my pen wriggled in my hand. It wanted to add something. OK, I conceded, but I remembered that brevity is the soul of extortion. I wrote: P.S. If you don’t show up, then don’t think I’ll be waiting like a fool. But if you do come, I’ll be there. And then I wrote on a little; I wrote about the nature of expectation and disappointment, about lust and memories; and about people who treat use-by dates as though they were holy commandments. It was a fine note. The blackmail element was short, only three lines. The P.S. was twenty-eight pages long.
On my way to work I popped it in the mailbox outside the post office and five minutes later almost broke my hand trying to get it out. Honestly, they knew what they were doing designing those mailboxes- you really can’t get into them. I tell you, those little red fortresses, they’re impenetrable!
Two days later I was in a deep sleep, trapped in an unpleasant dream where I was at a swimming carnival and when it came my turn to swim they drained the pool. I was on the swimmer’s block and the crowd booed me because I wasn’t wearing anything and they didn’t like what they saw. Then all of a sudden I was in a bed. My bed. In my hut. Dad’s voice had dragged me into consciousness, away from the disapproving eyes. “Jasper! You have a visitor!”
I pulled the covers over me. I didn’t want to see anyone. Dad started up again. “Jasper! You in there, son?” I sat up. His voice sounded funny. I couldn’t work out what it was at first, but then I realized. He sounded polite. Something must be up. I put a towel around me and stepped outside.
I squinted in the sun. Was I still dreaming? A vision soaked my eyes with cool delight. She was here: the Towering Inferno, in my home, next to my father. I froze. I couldn’t reconcile the two figures standing side by side. It was all so out of context.
“Hi, Jasper,” she said, her voice wriggling down my spine.
“Hi,” I countered. Dad was still standing there. Why was he still standing there? Why wouldn’t he move?
“Well, here he is,” he said.
“Come on in,” I said, and by her hesitant eyes remembered I was wearing only a towel.
“Are you going to put clothes on?” the Inferno asked.
“I think I can dig up some socks.”
“There’s a bushfire up in the mountains,” Dad said.
“We’ll stay away from there. Thanks for the tip,” I said dismissively, turning my back on him. As we walked into my hut, I whipped my head around to make sure Dad wasn’t going to follow us in. He wasn’t, but he winked at me conspiratorially. It annoyed me, that wink. He had given me no choice. You can’t not accept a wink. Then I saw Dad look at her legs. He glanced up and saw me see him looking at her legs. It was a weird moment that could’ve gone either way. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but smile. He smiled too. Then the Inferno looked up and caught us smiling at each other. We both glanced at her and caught her looking at us smiling at each other. Another weird moment.
“Come in,” I said.
As she stepped into the hut, the swoosh, drag, lift of her footsteps advancing on the wooden floorboards would have driven me to drink had there been a bar in my bedroom, and had it been open. I went into the bathroom and threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and when I came out she was still standing at the doorway. She asked me if I really lived in this place.
“Why not? I built it.”
“You did?”
I showed her where I’d cut myself helping my builder put in a window. It felt good showing her my scars. They were man scars.
“Your father seems nice.”
“He’s not really.”
“So what are you doing with yourself?”
“I got a job.”
“You’re not going back to school?”
“Why should I?”
“A high school certificate is a pretty handy thing.”
“If you like paper cuts.”
She gave me a half smile. It was the other half I was worried about.
She said, “So then, how does it feel to be a working man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You might as well come up to me in a seven-story parking station and ask how it feels to be on the fourth level when before I was on the third.”
“I got your note.”
“We drove a man to suicide.”
“You don’t know that.”
She was only inches away. I couldn’t breathe. I was experiencing one of those horriblebeautifulterrifyingdisgustingwondrousinsaneunprecedentedeuphoricsensationaldisturbingthrillinghideoussublimenauseatingexceptional feelings that’s quite hard to describe unless you happen to chance upon the right word.