What can you mean? I asked, still grinning.
Well, it's creepy.
Ah. Yes. Creepy.
There was yet a hint of laughter in our voices but I was unnerved by the exchange. Years later, when it shouldn't have mattered anymore, I made the mistake of returning to this conversation as I dropped the girls home one Sunday afternoon. There'd been a photo of an actress naked and pregnant on the cover of a glamour magazine, which sparked a surprising furore. To my mind it was a rather brave and beautiful image, but I was curious about what Grace might think. She seemed annoyed that I'd even bring it up.
Grotesque, she said, as the girls hauled their bags up the steps to her door. Now they're mainstreaming porn.
Okay, I murmured.
I leant against the car, conscious of the potential for things to go unhelpfully sour. Perhaps it was stupid of me to mention it. I was no great success as a man but I had been, I thought, a faithful, gentle husband. Never sexually insistent, I steered clear of oddness. I took no interest in pornography. I made myself quite safe and ordinary — a lab bloke, a threat to nobody. And yet.
I gave a wave and got back in the car.
Nobody wants to be creepy. I was careful, always backing off. And somehow, somewhere along the track, I went numb. I couldn't say what it was and didn't dare try. How do you explain the sense of being made to feel improper? I withdrew into a watchful rectitude, anxious to please, risking nothing. I followed the outline of my life, carefully rehearsing form without conviction, like a bishop who can't see that his faith has become an act.
I started, despite myself, to fool with electricity. A couple of times I came to on the tile floor at work, down beneath the sinks and benches where the odours of agar and disinfectant and formaldehyde brewed like some obscene secret, and the return of consciousness brought with it a sad blankness like the lingering melancholy after sex.
I didn't understand this behaviour. I had no special interest in electricity. Granted, it's a potent, tangible presence in a world that's cast off presences. It was just a moment of righteous sensation, like a blow to the head. It knocked me down. It hurt like hell. But it was something I could feel.
,n a dentist's waiting room, during a year I can barely recall, I came upon a photo of Bill Sanderson in a travel magazine. It seems he'd come to preside over quite an empire. Snowboards, alpine apparel — all dripping rebel chic. The interview mentioned his wife Eva and their son Joseph — a good Mormon name. There was much talk of risk in die financial sense. Sando was a kind of investment guru, a motivational speaker of some note. Out on the Aspen slopes he looked like a grizzly, sunbleached Kris Kristofferson, a man arrived.
It was my mother who sent the news clipping about Eva Sanderson. I still don't know why she did. Until that moment I never gave her sufficient credit to imagine she might take some little pleasure in passing it on. But the chances are she simply thought I'd like to know.
Without the slightly lurid details and the connection to Utah wealth, Eva's death might have gone unreported. In any event it earned only two inches of a Reuters column. Eva was found hanging naked from the back of a bathroom door in Portland, Oregon. A Salvadorean hotel employee discovered her with a belt around her neck. The deceased had been the sole occupant of her five-star room, the cause of death cardiac arrest as a result of asphyxiation.
There was no one I could talk to, least of all my mother. Grace found the clipping and wanted, with good cause, to know what it signified. But I couldn't say. I wouldn't risk setting off the rolling mass of trouble inside me. I choked it down. At quite some cost.
You couldn't blame Grace for how things went. She just wanted to be happy. She had her career to look to, and she was anxious for the girls. And in the end I wasn't fit. No question about that.
Afterwards I had myself put away for a spell. I only signed myself out to go to my mother's funeral, a day of hard and vivid feeling. I took the burial as a sacrament of my own failure as much as a tribute to my gentle mother's life. My girls were there. They seemed happy to see me and I couldn't hold their wariness against them. Grace left her new bloke at home though she needn't have. I would have behaved. She seemed wistful but determined and it clearly upset her to see me looking the way I did. I had a few scars by then and I was woozy with pills. I felt the hopeless tug of love as she led the girls towards the car. The mourners around me were careful but not afraid. I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems.
I didn't go back to the hospital. I broke an undertaking. Got in a car and drove east, as far away from the sea and the city as possible.
When I was on the ward there was a tall, reedy bloke who carried a bible with him all day. He had a habit of fixing on things you said during group work and hitting you later with a few pithy verses to be going on with. He had me down as some kind of compulsive — not miles off die mark — but I wanted to pull his ears off when he told me that a man who even thinks about having his neighbour's wife is already an adulterer.
No, Desmond, I told him. Bullshit.
Can't deny it!
You get ideas. We all get ideas. Thoughts. And most of them come and go without causing anybody grief.
Desmond shook his head and I wanted to get him by the hair, squeeze the poison from his head. Wanted to, but didn't. I told him he was sad and dangerous, that he shouldn't say such things, especially not to vulnerable people like us. I was well and truly wigged out at the time, but still sane enough to know there's a world of difference between thinking things and doing them.
You lack morality, he said mildly enough.
You call that morality? I said, trying not to shout. Robbing people of the distinction between thoughts and actions?
Sport, said Desmond, I tell you this out of love. You are a captive of evil.
Talk like that frightened me because in an unsteady moment you could believe it. I was tired and sad and fucked up but I wasn't going to give in to bullshit. I'd been prey to false convictions aplenty and I'd had enough. It is possible to believe that as an idea comes into your mind, an act has been born and there's nothing you can do about it. It's as if thinking something causes it to happen, makes an action inevitable, even necessary. Sometimes it's good to remind yourself it isn't so.
A captive of evil, said Desmond.
No, I said. I'm a voluntary patient.
What I didn't say, because I didn't trust myself not to clock him one, is that nobody should be a slave to their thoughts — this was captivity, this was evil.
All about there were others watching Desmond and me, waiting for a blow-up. There were people in our midst who believed that babies had died and cities burnt because of thoughts they'd had.
Do you lust after your neighbour's wife? asked the girl with the slashed arms. Really, she said drolly, you can tell us.
My wife, I said. My wife is now my neighbour's wife. And my old neighbour's wife is dead.
Man, that's fucked up, said someone.
No lust?
Not much, I said. Not now.
Loonie died in Mexico, shot in a bar in Rosarito, not far from Tijuana. Some kind of drug deal gone bad. Maybe he did business with the wrong cops. For years stories had made their way back to me, sightings on the northern beaches of Sydney or in Peru or the Mentawais. His reputation for fearlessness endured. He surfed hard and lived hard and seemed to finance it all with drug scams and smuggling. It was said he bought his way out of Indonesia several times, that he had contacts in the TNI. I wonder about his apprenticeship to Sando, how much more than just surfing it might have involved — all those side-trips to Thailand, the long, unexplained absences, surfboards arriving from all over the globe — and whether Sandos family money had been augmented by his darker business interests.