CHAPTER 7

Roaming, 1995

I didn’t really begin to consider the scope of my father’s life until I was finishing college in Seattle. One of my earliest confidants was my girlfriend. Sara had asked about the relationship between my father and mother — why they had gotten divorced — and I tried as best I could to explain it to her. I hardly understood it myself though, for it was complicated. They had loved each other, but that hadn’t been enough. The reasons for the divorce sprang in part from deep-rooted problems within my mother’s family that affected the relationship — but that is another story for another time. At this point in my life, I was still more focused on my father, and what his life said about my own.

By the time I had met Sara, my father had been retired for about a year. He had taken a buy-out and moved to Spokane, Washington, into the house that his elderly parents had bought; they evacuated upon his return. I took her to this home so that she could meet him. I told her what little I knew of my father’s life as a spy, adventure stories of derring-do and espionage and subterfuge that took place all around the world — in Mexico and India and Pakistan and Yugoslavia, many of the places of my childhood. These were the missing pieces, I thought, the most important fragments of his life.

Over time, I started to tell her the stories that had stayed with me over the years. I told her that my mother’s best friend during those years in India, a cousin named Raffy, had been married to a UPI journalist named Bob. Whenever my parents came back from India on home leave, Raffy and Bob pestered them with accusing questions. Bob thought — knew, somehow — that my father was a spy. ‘Bob just suspected it,’ my mother told me. ‘And I had to say, “No, he’s a commercial officer” again and again. I was having to lie to my best friends and my family.’

Sara thought the situation problematic because love was all about trust, and how could you ever trust someone whose life involved so much deception and fabrication? But when I thought about it, I erred on my father’s side of the equation. She was so naïve, I thought. She didn’t understand what had been at stake. How hard could it be, I said, to let go of the subterfuge? How hard could it be to become another person, shed the skein of illusion, the grip of the organisation? Easiest thing in the world, I told her. I’m not that man; I’m not my father.

I told her about what it had been like growing up with my father because that was the most important fact about me. I told her these stories of geographic transience because I thought I wanted to claim, or calm, the constant motion: the countries and schools, the reasons, true or not, for being somewhere, for staying a while, and then for suddenly leaving. Yet despite their constant flux, the years with him had felt oddly stable.

All of those adventures that bound my father and I together were the things I clung to, and not because we were so very different from everyone else — because I don’t think we were all that different. What we were, though, from the very beginning, was separate from the rest of the world. My father’s need to have me near him was inexhaustible; I was a talisman for him to keep the forces of evil away. The fierce possessiveness had always been there, this push to have me at his side, as if I was something pure and true to which he could cling, and be close. His work was frightening: trying to navigate through situations where it wasn’t clear who could be trusted, and where the consequences of not knowing could be severe. It must have been an incredibly vulnerable feeling, knowing that he was alone in a psychological battle where his own best instincts were his only weapon. In such a world, where loyalty could be bought and sold, I think I became a vassal of sorts for what he wanted to keep close, cherished, and unspoiled. Possessing me became, perhaps, something stable in an otherwise frightening and unstable world.

Sara wanted to be close to me. She took me to her family’s house every Sunday. I felt more comfortable around her grandfather’s dining-room table than my own: they had no special gloves for me, and there seemed to be nothing that couldn’t be said. Her father had been a heroin addict. Her aunt was a writer in Hollywood. They repeatedly fought and made up over the table, in front of everyone. Surrounded by the warmth of her imperfect relatives made me realise how perfectly screwed up the silence that lurked in my own home was. All of the things that hadn’t been said through my childhood, whether out of necessity or convenience, began to trouble me. I wondered why we didn’t talk to each other like this in my family. In my house, conflict had almost always been dealt with by icy silence, or by a raging of the furies that left us weakened and shaken to the core.

One day I told Sara about Irena, my father’s ‘friend’ in Barcelona, while we were sitting on a cliff somewhere, on the shores of the Pacific.

‘Scott,’ she said, when I told her. ‘Was she … ?’

I looked at her. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ Then she said what I knew she was thinking. ‘You didn’t realise?’

‘Not then.’ I grinned ruefully. ‘It took awhile.’

‘Oh, Scott,’ she said, punching me playfully on the arm as if I had made a bad joke.

Sara and I dated for three years. But that summer of 1995, when I was 22, I broke up with her. I wanted to leave her mainly because I was young and immature, and wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a serious long-term relationship. When I told her, Sara spluttered, ‘You remind me of an … an animal. A rat! Just like your father!’

But I had never thought of my father as a rat. What did a rat embody, anyway? Filth? Stealth? When I asked her, she said that a rat was always skulking around in some corner, but ran away once spotted. What surprised me was that Sara had given my father’s infidelity and behaviour toward his wives more than just a passing thought. Jesus, I thought, I must have talked about him a lot.

There was also something else that made me run away. I was scared because a few months earlier, out of the blue and apropos of what seemed to be nothing, I began to hear a voice. I thought if I ignored it, it might go away. It wasn’t a voice of the sort that schizophrenics endure — another’s giving advice, punishment, or comfort. No, it was my own voice, and I couldn’t figure out how to silence it. It was predatory, a sliver of evil I couldn’t dislodge. It said to me, over and over again, that the devil was in me.

I thought it would go away eventually, but it didn’t. Each night I fell asleep hoping, but when I woke the next morning it would still be there. It lingered for days, and then weeks. And weeks dragged into months. Every moment was laden with the same words: the devil was in me. When I eventually dug up the courage to tell Sara the words I was telling myself, she laughed, joking that I was crazy. But I was sure she was right. Finally, I went to see a psychiatrist who told me not to worry; I was symbolising an internal conflict. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what that meant, but I had neither the wherewithal nor the courage to ask.

So I decided to go away, to Alaska. I thought that if I went somewhere else, the words might leave me. I got a job on a purse-seiner, and sailed north from Seattle to Canada along the Inside Passage. We started hunting halibut as soon as we crossed into Alaskan waters. I was the least experienced man on the team, and my job was in the stern, butchering and cleaning the fish, many of them the size of a human. They rose through the sea and up to us on hooks, like white balloons. When they came up to the surface, I pulled out a hammer; and sometimes I prayed for them as I beat their heads until they lay still. I opened their gills and sliced their jugulars and let the blood seep out over my gloves.

I was seasick for days, and threw up on the fish even as I cleaned them. It rained and rained. I tied the fish to the runners with lanyards and gutted them with a spoon, and their bones tore holes in my gloves. I broke a rib when I slipped on their spilled innards. I packed whatever of them remained on the boat — their huge, white bodies and lopsided mouths, and their eyes like silvery beach stones — with ice and stuffed it in the container hold. At night, I slept in the foc’s’le with an ex-convict who yelled in his nightmares and carried buttons of methamphetamines in his arse crack. He threatened to kill more than one man that summer.

After three weeks, the boat dropped me off and paid me $1500. But nothing had changed. The voice had only gotten worse.

I got a job working the night shift at a cannery in Petersburg, on the island of Mitkof. I was on the slime line with a crew of Mexicans, gutting salmon for caviar and tossing the bodies into containers on wheels. I scooped giant blobs of pink caviar and loaded them into buckets bound for New York restaurants. Then I packed cardboard boxes full, and threw the boxes into freezers. After that I de-boned the worthless pinks, filleting them into neat rows. At the end of my shift, I hosed the blood and accumulated guts off the floors. Then I walked home, two miles to a tent city where I shared sleeping space on a wooden platform with two other guys. I hardly ever changed my clothes or brushed my teeth. In the morning I lay down dirty, covered with scales, and woke six hours later, in the haze of the afternoon, for the return walk.

The island was lush with alpine forests that glowed dully in the midnight sun. Heavy black crows often floated just overhead. But instead of being rejuvenated, all of it — the long hours of daylight, the numbing sameness of each day’s routine, and of course the words repeating in my mind — conspired to accentuate the feeling of being trapped. At the cannery I got a supervisor job and became a mini-tyrant, shouting orders at the other workers and berating them if they weren’t fast enough for me. My broken rib pained me. I had developed an infection from being so dirty. I am the devil, I kept telling myself, and with each day that passed, I became more convinced that it was true.

One morning I left the cannery as usual and began walking back to the tent city. The town was quiet; only a few fishermen and stragglers from the night before were out. Gulls floated into the harbour and back out again, as if being pulled by invisible wires. The darkness was beginning to lift, and the frost on the marshes was thawing quickly. Instead of going home, I meandered down a street, passing a diner opening its doors and a dollar store with blacked-out windows. I turned onto the highway and got a glimpse of the rising plain that led to the other side of Petersburg Sound, and from there jagged rose-coloured peaks, including one called Devil’s Peak, lifted impermeably into an egg-blue sky. I stopped. A lone payphone sat on the edge of the road, as if the city planners had thought the town would one day encompass this stretch of road, and then those plans had died. Frost dripped down the panes of glass. I stepped inside the box and called my father collect.

He accepted the call. His lonely voice mirrored my own, which was unusual. I asked how he was. I hadn’t spoken to him for several weeks.

‘Oh …’ he said, and didn’t say more. I knew he was having trouble with Janet again, although not the details. I was too pre-occupied to want to help. Something was wrong with me. All of my life my father had been able to fix me when I needed it. He buoyed me, and pulled me along toward life. I wanted him to do that now. I didn’t know how to fix myself, or even what needed fixing.

I thought my father should be able to read my mind. It was his job. He had always known when I was angry or upset before. I wanted him to look into my mind, to see what I was thinking, to hear my thoughts and purge me of them. Or to make me forget them. He had always been able to make it seem as though problems didn’t exist, and therefore didn’t need fixing. I wanted that, too. I wanted a new life, like he had always been able to give me every couple of years. I wanted a new life into which I could disappear.

I asked him what was wrong. He wasn’t forthcoming. I wanted to know about my mother, about their divorce. He couldn’t answer my litany of questions. Finally, I exploded. ‘Why do you have to be so secretive?’ I shouted. ‘Why is everything hidden?’

He sounded exhausted when he answered. ‘It’s not secret,’ he said. ‘It’s just complicated.’

The phone connection was terrible. He sounded as distant as he had when I had spoken to him as a child, when he was away on business, halfway around the world. But psychologically he was even farther than that — as far away as he had ever been. He was deep inside himself. His career was over; his marriage to Janet was in trouble. And his son was making demands about the past that he wasn’t able to satisfy.

For the first time, I started to believe that I didn’t know my father at all. All he had told me now seemed tainted by my doubt.

There was little dexterity to betrayal. It was crude and impatient. In our family, we had kept ourselves safe with plenty of lies. But they were catching up with us. First Janet, and then my father, had lied to themselves about their marriage. I had lied to others to help protect my father and his work. And we had all lied to ourselves about what this had done to us.

An eerie, palpable quiet settled between my father and me; it was scary. I didn’t know how to get around it, and neither did he. If there had been a moment in the conversation when he thought he could have spoken freely to me, it had passed.

‘I’m not doing so well,’ I said.

‘I’ve told you all I can,’ he answered.

I abandoned my line of questioning. I didn’t tell him that I had a secret: I didn’t tell him about my voices, or that I thought I was going crazy. For the first time, I didn’t tell him anything. We stayed quiet for a while, paralysed by distance and our inability to talk. All I sensed from him was a tired wish that his life had somehow turned out differently, or that the problems he was facing would just go away. He couldn’t help me, which wasn’t his fault, but it felt like the worst betrayal of all. I had kept his secrets, but now I believed he couldn’t handle mine. I had lied to my friends for him; I had watched him lie to his. What had brought us together for so many years now sat like an ocean between us.

I arrived back at his house unannounced a few weeks later. The rib was healing; the infection had dried up. I was $5000 richer and freer. I still had the voice. But for a while it was as if nothing had happened between us while I was in Alaska. I told him stories about fishing and the cannery, how the skipper had been a drunk and the first mate was a suicidal meth-head with a pending warrant. We went on long walks with his new dog, Tucker, up into the wild-grass hills behind his house.

He was still having problems with Janet. During the days they disappeared for hours into the guest bedroom, where she was staying, I heard their low, strained voices if I stopped on the stairs. On these occasions, I took off with Tucker for hours at a time. When exhausted with walking, I sat on a log, closing my eyes and praying for the voice to stop. I listened to the hum and crackle of the electric wires overhead. I let Tucker lick my face and bury his head in my chest.

One night, sitting with my father in the basement, I asked how he was, and soon enough he was telling me about his marriage problems. I listened, but what I really wanted to do was scream out my secret to him. And I couldn’t. I began to cry. Then I stood up and just bolted. I was tearing down the street when I heard the front door slam open behind me.

‘Scotty,’ he yelled. ‘Scotty, wait!’

Around the corner, at the end of the street glowing with the wet, I stopped. The Hale-Bopp comet shone in the sky, a dandelion in a field of tiny daisies, streaming upwards at a million miles an hour yet not going anywhere at all. I wanted to look up and see it gone — see it shoot out of my world like a slingshot. But it didn’t. It continued to linger, staring back at me like the gleaming eye of an Alaskan halibut.

‘I don’t want you,’ I yelled at my father from the darkness.

‘Scotty,’ he shouted back. I could hear him panting, and searching for the source of my voice. I had hid in a thicket of bushes beside an abandoned house. I tried to stay quiet. I saw him standing in the middle of the street. He had briefly emerged into the cone of a lamplight. The comet above was boundless, amorphous, hurtling over itself with the speed of its own momentum. I watched my father plunder his way back into the darkness.

‘Scotty,’ he shouted. He was shouting at the sky. We paused. The comet burned another inch further to the south. He was out of breath. I could hear him panting like an animal.

Then, ‘I need you,’ he croaked into the night. His voice was the only thing I could hear. ‘Scotty, I need you.’

After this incident, the urge to run began to well up in me very quickly. I would have gone anywhere, but I chose Morocco. I left very soon.

In the early winter of 1998 at a café in Fez, I received an email from my father. The subject line said ‘hello from your dad’. He was writing from a cousin’s house in Seattle. The next day he would board a plane for Hong Kong. He had gotten a job as a tour manager with a company called People to People, which organised trips abroad for American professionals. I hadn’t spoken to my father for months and, judging by his email, wouldn’t for another long while.

‘And so, dear Scott,’ he wrote, ‘I am off tomorrow, and won’t be back until the first week of June, so don’t try to respond to this before then. If I’m able to get to a computer somewhere en route, I’ll try to send you another note — maybe less serious but, I hope, with some stories of my adventures as an international Willy Loman.’

I sat at the little computer table for a long while, staring at the screen, as the theme song to Titanic played over and over on the stereo. The movie had come out that summer and Moroccans — at least the ones who ran this café — couldn’t get enough of it. While Celine sang about enduring love, I thought about my father.

‘I love you, Scott,’ he had written, ‘as intensely, but more complicatedly, than ever.’

I had no recollection of a Willy Loman, nor did I make an effort to find out who he was, even though I was in front of a computer. I briefly considered the possibility that he was a character from one of the spaghetti westerns my dad had been in as an extra when he was in his twenties — a roguish gunslinger, maybe, or a hired deputy run afoul of the law. That he had attached the word ‘international’ to the name suggested an American original, and I imagined Woodie Guthrie meandering his way through a Steinbeck novel, with my father picking up the trail when the story left American shores. After that I let it go, filed away the email, and returned to the afternoon heat.

I did look up Willy Loman a few days later and was reminded of who he was: the down-and-out protagonist in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. I had never thought of my father as a salesman, much less considered the possibility that he thought of himself as one. But he clearly saw traces of the familiar in Willy Loman, whose optimism has been so tarnished and withered by the meanderings of life, by weaknesses small and large and dreams gone awry, and by the failures of those around him, including his son. Yet I wondered how plausible it was for anyone, especially my father, to conceive of living a second life resounding with adventure if he saw himself as Willy Loman. Was Loman some-thing to aspire to?

I picked up Death of a Salesman in the library of the school where I was teaching English. Willy Loman tells his friend why he became a salesman:

I met a salesman ... His name was Dave Singleman. And he was eighty-four years old, and he’d drummed merchandise in thirty-one states. And old Dave, he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers — I’ll never forget — and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ’Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?

Twenty or thirty different cities, cities that could be countries — it was a life that could be measured in a daily accumulation of thank-yous and smiles of appreciation. I had never thought of my father’s life like that. But when I thought about it, he had spent his career selling ideas: of himself, of his country, of an ideology that he fiercely believed in. He sold persuasion and the ability to persuade; he sold himself and his country with aplomb. But he also sold the seductive attraction of betrayal — he trafficked in loyalty and faith. And if there is an imaginary line that divides one’s family from one’s fatherland, he crossed it frequently, and with well-intentioned ease. I adopted that life as my own, as if there were no other logical choice in the world. I could sell myself as someone new every time the opportunity presented itself — and I did.