Peter Carey - The Fat Man in History aka Exotic Pleasures

“Yes,” I said, “I get what you mean.”

“But do you?” My father insisted. “But do you really, I wonder.” He examined me seriously, musing on the possibilities of my understanding him. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” I said.

“I knew, of course,” he said. “Do you understand the significance of the nether regions?”

I sighed, a little too loudly and my father narrowed his eyes. Quickly I said: “They are like everything else. They’re like the cities. The cities are deserts where people are alone and lonely. They don’t love one another.”

“Don’t love one another,” intoned my father, also sighing. “We no longer love one another. When we realize that we need one another we will stop disappearing. This is a lesson to us. A hard lesson, but, I hope, an effective one.”

My father continued to speak, but I watched him without listening. After a few minutes he stopped abruptly: “Are you listening to me?” he said. I was surprised to detect real concern in his voice. He looked at me questioningly. “I’ve always looked after you,” he said, “ever since you were little.”

12. The Cartographers’ Fall

I don’t know when it was that I noticed that my father had become depressed. It probably happened quite gradually without either my mother or me noticing it.

Even when I did become aware of it I attributed it to a woman. My father had a number of lovers and his moods usually reflected the success or failure of these relationships.

But I know now that he had heard already of Hurst and Jamov, the first two Cartographers to disappear. The news was suppressed for several weeks and then, somehow or other, leaked to the press. Certainly the Cartographers had enemies amongst the civil servants who regarded them as over-proud and overpaid, and it was probably from one of these civil servants that the press heard the news.

When the news finally broke I understood my father’s depression and felt sorry for him.

I didn’t know how to help him. I wanted, badly, to make him happy. I had never ever been able to give him anything or do anything for him that he couldn’t do better himself. Now I wanted to help him, to show him I understood.

I found him sitting in front of the television one night when I returned from my office and I sat quietly beside him. He seemed more kindly now and he placed his hand on my knee and patted it.

I sat there for a while, overcome with the new warmth of this relationship and then, unable to contain my emotion any more, I blurted out: “You could change your job.”

My father stiffened and sat bolt upright. The pressure of his hand on my knee increased until I yelped with pain, and still he held on, hurting me terribly.

“You are a fool,” he said, “you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.”

Through the pain in my leg, I felt the intensity of my father’s fear.

13. Why the World Needs Cartographers

My father woke me at 3 a.m. to tell me why the world needed Cartographers. He smelled of whisky and seemed, once again, to be very gentle.

“The world needs Cartographers,” he said softly, “because if they didn’t have Cartographers the fools wouldn’t know where they were. They wouldn’t know if they were up themselves if they didn’t have a Cartographer to tell them what’s happening. The world needs Cartographers,” my father said, “it fucking well needs Cartographers.”

14. One Final Scene

Let me describe a final scene to you: I am sitting on the sofa my father brought home when I was five years old. I am watching television. My father is sitting in a leather armchair that once belonged to his father and which has always been exclusively his. My mother is sitting in the dining alcove with her cards spread across the table, playing one more interminable game of patience.

I glance casually across at my father to see if he is doing anything more than stare into space, and notice, with a terrible shock, that he is showing the first signs of dematerializing.

“What are you staring at?” My father, in fact, has been staring at me.

“Nothing.”

“Well, don’t.”

Nervously I return my eyes to the inanity of the television. I don’t know what to do. Should I tell my father that he is dematerializing? If I don’t tell him will he notice? I feel I should do something but I can feel, already, the anger in his voice. His anger is nothing new. But this is possibly the beginning of a tide of uncontrollable rage. If he knows he is dematerializing, he will think I don’t love him. He will blame me. He will attack me. Old as he is, he is still considerably stronger than I am and he could hurt me badly. I stare determinedly at the television and feel my father’s eyes on me.

I try to feel love for my father, I try very, very hard.

I attempt to remember how I felt about him when I was little, in the days when he was still occasionally tender towards me.

But it’s no good.

Because I can only remember how he has hit me, hurt me, humiliated me and flirted with my girlfriends. I realize, with a flush of panic and guilt, that I don’t love him. In spite of which I say: “I love you.”

My mother looks up sharply from her cards and lets out a surprised cry.

I turn to my father. He has almost disappeared. I can see the leather of the chair through his stomach.

I don’t know whether it is my unconvincing declaration of love or my mother’s exclamation that makes my father laugh. For whatever reason, he begins to laugh uncontrollably: “You bloody fools,” he gasps, “I wish you could see the looks on your bloody silly faces.”

And then he is gone.

My mother looks across at me nervously, a card still in her hand. “Do you love me?” she asks.

It was three summers since the Fastalogians had arrived to set up the Genetic Lottery, but it had got so no one gave a damn about what season it was. It was hot. It was steamy. I spent my days in furies and tempers, half-drunk. A six-pack of beer got me to sleep. I didn’t have the money for more fanciful drugs and I should have been saving for a Chance. But to save the dollars for a Chance meant six months without grog or any other solace.

There were nights, bitter and lonely, when I felt beyond the Fastalogian alternative, and ready for the other one, to join the Leapers in their suicidal drops from the roofs of buildings and the girders of bridges. I had witnessed a dozen or more. They fell like over-ripe fruit from the rotten trees of a forgotten orchard.

I was overwhelmed by a feeling of great loss. I yearned for lost time, lost childhoods, seasons for Chrissake, the time when peaches are ripe, the time when the river drops after the snow has all melted and it’s just low enough to wade and the water freezes your balls and you can walk for miles with little pale crayfish scuttling backwards away from your black-booted feet. Also you can use the dragonfly larva as live bait, casting it out gently and letting it drift downstream to where big old brown trout, their lower jaws grown long and hooked upwards, lie waiting.

The days get hot and clear then and the land is like a tinder box. Old men lighting cigarettes are careful to put the burnt matches back into the matchbox, a habit one sometimes sees carried on into the city by younger people who don’t know why they’re doing it, messengers carrying notes written in a foreign language.

But all this was once common knowledge, in the days when things were always the same and newness was something as delightful and strange as the little boiled sweets we would be given on Sunday morning.

Those were the days before the Americans came, and before the Fastalogians who succeeded them, descending in their space ships from god knows what unimaginable worlds. And at first we thought them preferable to the Americans. But what the Americans did to us with their yearly car models and two-weekly cigarette lighters was nothing compared to the Fastalogians who introduced concepts so dazzling that we fell prey to them wholesale like South Sea Islanders exposed to the common cold.