Narcopolis

Chapter Four His Father, the Insect

One afternoon, Lee came home to find his parents sharing a bed for the first time in years. It was not because they had made up their differences but because the bed was the only item of furniture left in the house, other than the shrine and his father’s pipes. Money was short and his father had been selling things, small and not small, family heirlooms and clothes and furniture. In the newly spacious room his parents seemed to be strangers to each other and to him, damaged strangers with no claim to make and nothing to say. His father had placed a pipe on the bed. There was a tray with a lamp that tilted precariously on the lumpy mattress. When he took a drag his cheeks appeared to cave in. He had become very thin and it seemed to Lee that his father no longer resembled a human being. He was a pipe attached to a head with stick arms and legs. Or he was an inanimate object, a piece of knobbed wood, a walking stick or polished figurine. He was an insect, possibly a dangerous insect, a succubus with vertical eyes and internal antennae. Even the sounds he made were insect sounds, clicks and sucking noises. It was very interesting that the transformation which had overtaken his father had occurred so gradually that his family hadn’t noticed. When exactly had his father stopped being human? Was it a permanent transformation or would he return one day to his natural state? While his father smoked, his mother lay on her back with her eyes open, pinching the fingers of her left hand with her right. Though she said nothing she managed to convey a sense of immense dissatisfaction with her surroundings and with the man who lay beside her. Lee climbed into the bed and turned his back on his parents and went to sleep. He dreamed he was an orphan who lived on a mountain inhabited by dragons. There was no food or water and for his survival he depended on one of the dragons to bring him bits of meat and fruit. The years passed and he grew tall, but the bigger he grew the more his dragon protector seemed to diminish, until one day he realized that his friend, the dragon, had become a living skeleton, an intricate network of interlocked bones without flesh or blood or breath. He woke one morning and found a pile of broken bones beside him, and then he felt a rumble under his feet and he realized that the mountain was heating up from below, that there was smoke emanating from its crevices and the trees had dissolved into ash and the sun had disappeared. He resolved to walk off the mountain and keep walking until he found food or he died, but no sooner had he started to walk than a rain of cinders began to fall around him. He ran faster and faster until, exhausted, he lay down to mourn and die. He woke to the sound of drums. There was a fog so thick it was difficult to breathe. When his eyes adjusted he was in his parents’ house. He might as well have been outdoors because the weather had come inside. He heard someone knocking and he stumbled across the room, unable to see through the fog. His eyes were streaming and when he took a breath he coughed. He walked slowly in the direction of the knock and then he saw a shape coming towards him, a shape that pushed him back on the bed. His terror vanished when he recognized his mother and he wrestled her to the ground and opened the door. The fog thinned and many people rushed in. His uncle and another man poured pails of water on the smoking mattress. They took his father outside, where, sick with fever, he shivered uncontrollably in the warm sunshine. His uncle was overcome by a rush of emotion and he took off the silk jacket he was wearing and cut off the sleeves with a pair of scissors. He slipped the sleeves over Lee’s father’s legs. They took his father to a hospital, where he died the next day, not of asphyxiation but from malnutrition. Rich Uncle Lee came to the funeral with a two-storey house made of paper. As the house burned, Uncle said, Brother, I give you a big house. Lee laughed at his uncle. He said, Rich Uncle, you should have given my father a house when he was alive.