So you see? How could I tell her about these things when I wasn’t sure whether I’d just put one over on myself? Neither could I tell her that sometimes I was certain I could read my father’s thoughts and other times I suspected he could read mine. Sometimes, I tried to tell him something just by thinking it, and I’d feel I could hear him respond in the negative; I sensed a “Fuck you” traveling through the ether. Nor could I tell the Inferno that more than once I’d had visions of a disembodied face. I first dreamed of the face in my childhood, a tanned, mustached, thick-lipped, wide-nosed face floating out of a dark void, his piercing eyes giving off an aura of sexual violence, his mouth contorted into a silent scream. I’m sure this has happened to everyone. Then one day you see the face even when you’re awake. You see it in the sun. You see it in the clouds. You see it in the mirror. You see it clearly, even though it’s not there. Then you feel it too. And you stand up and say, “Who’s there?” And when you receive no answer, you say, “I’m calling the police.” And what is this presence anyway if in fact it’s not a ghost? The most likely explanation: a fully exteriorized and manifested idea. There were things crawling inside my brain itching to get out, and, worse, they were getting out and I had no control over where and when.
No, why air every ugly, negative, loopy, idiotic thought that floats through the head? That’s why when you’re standing by the harbor and your lover says, in a tender embrace, “What are you thinking about?” you don’t respond, “That I hate people and I wish they’d fall down and never get up.” I’m telling you. You just can’t say it. I don’t know much about women, but I do know that.
I fell asleep, and at four in the morning I woke with a shocking realization: I’d never told the Towering Inferno that Terry Dean was my uncle.
I stared at the clock until eight a.m. without looking away once, then called Brian.
“Who is it?”
“How did you know I was Terry Dean’s nephew?”
“Jasper?”
“How did you know?”
“Your girlfriend told me.”
“Yeah, I know, I was just checking. So, um…you and her, then…”
“What about us?”
“She said you went out with her for just a little while.”
He didn’t say anything. In the silence I heard him breathing like someone who knows he has the upper hand, and I wound up breathing like someone stuck with the lower hand, and then he began telling me not just about him and her but things about her she had kept secret- her whole life, it seemed: how she ran away from home at fifteen and stayed two months with a drug dealer in Chippendale named Freddy Luxembourg and how she went back home one abortion later and changed schools and how when she was sixteen she started going out by herself to bars and that’s where they met and she ran away from home again and lived with him for one year until she caught him with another woman and totally freaked out and ran back home again and her parents sent her to a psychologist who declared her a human time bomb and how she’d been calling him and leaving strange messages on his answering machine about her new boyfriend who was going to kill him if he ever showed his face in her life again. It surprised me to learn that the killer boyfriend was me.
I took all this with pretend calm, saying things like “Uh-huh” and trying not to show alarm at the unsettling conclusions I was drawing. That she had been calling her old boyfriend and leaving surly messages on his phone meant that she was probably still hung up on him, and that he in return was talking to her about getting his old job back meant that he was probably still hung up on her.
I couldn’t get my head around it. She’d lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!
I hung up and threw my legs over the side of the bed like two anchors. I didn’t get up. I sat on that bed for hours, breaking the spell only to call in sick to work. At around five I finally got out of bed and sat on the back veranda emptying tobacco out of my cigarette and into a pipe. I stared at the sunset because I thought I saw a face in it, a face in the sun, that old familiar face I hadn’t seen in a long time. All around me cicadas were making a racket. It sounded like they were closing in. I thought about catching one and fixing it into the pipe and smoking it. I was wondering if it would get me high when I saw a red flare shoot into the sky. I put down the pipe and set off in the direction of the trail of vapor that hung in the air. It was her. I had given her a flare gun because she often got lost in the maze.
I found her near a large boulder and took her back to the hut. When we got inside, I told her everything Brian had told me. She looked at me, her eyes death-empty.
“Why didn’t you tell me you lived with him for a year?” I yelled.
“Well, you haven’t been honest with me either. You didn’t tell me that your uncle is Terry Dean!”
“Why would I? I never met him! It was a long time ago. I was minus two years old when he died. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me that you knew about my uncle?”
“Look. Let’s be honest with each other from now on,” she said.
“Yes, let’s.”
“Scrupulously honest.”
“We’ll tell each other everything.”
The door was wide open. Neither of us stepped through it. It was the time to ask questions and answer them, like two informants who’d just discovered that each had made separate immunity deals with the public prosecutor.
“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.
I watched her walk across the room, and when she bent over to pick up a towel from the floor, I noticed how the back of her jeans curved away from her body, like an evil grin.
VI
After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge right before he sentences you, but in a relationship they signify discomfort. And I was uncomfortable because she still hadn’t gotten over Brian. This was not baseless paranoia, either. She had started comparing me to him, unfavorably. For instance, she said I wasn’t as romantic as Brian, just because I’d once said in an intimate moment, “I love you with all of my brain.” Is it my fault she didn’t understand how the heart has stolen credit from the head, that wild passionate feelings actually come from the ancient limbic system in the brain, and that I was just trying to avoid referring to the heart as the actual storehouse of all my feelings when it is, after all, only a soggy, bloody pump and filter system? Is it my fault people can’t enjoy a symbol without turning it into a literal fact? Which is why, by the way, you should never waste your time giving the human race an allegorical tale- in less than one generation they’ll turn it into historical data, complete with eyewitnesses.
Oh, and then there was the jar.
I was at her place, in her bedroom. We’d just had sex very quietly because her mother was in the next room. I enjoyed doing it quietly because when you can make all the noise you like you sort of go faster. Silent sex makes you slow down.