There was an old photograph in my dad’s notebook. It was a picture of a young man standing in front of a house on wooden stilts. A sepia-coloured rooster pecked at the cobblestones near his feet. A muddy creek, flanked by mangroves, ran behind the house and through a coffee-ring stain.
‘Who is this?’ I asked Mum.
She squinted at the photo. ‘I don’t have my glasses.’
We had made our way through Dad’s study this way. Me, picking up anything that provoked my curiosity, asking questions. Her, with clipped replies, scooping objects into a sagging garbage bag. I told her I could finish down here if she had other things to do.
‘This mess needs to be cleaned up before he gets back,’ she said.
‘What should I do with it all?’
She left the bag by the door as she left the room. ‘No idea. Throw it away.’
I opened the window to let in some air and light and the view of Alexandria. The old industrial neighbourhood of freight yards and wool warehouses giving way to luxury apartments, scaffolding and the tower cranes that rose up in mutiny against the sky. I spent the rest of that afternoon cleaning. I vacuumed the carpet. I dusted furniture. I peeled topographical maps off the walls and scrubbed the glyptic patterns of mould growing beneath. I swept eraser crumbs and crimped lozenge wrappers off the oak writing desk. I lined old surveying equipment—a fibre optic camera, a seismometer, a couple of aerial drones—stored in Kennards boxes, up against the far wall. I collected the A4 notebooks scattered around the room, each one fat with his crabbed draftsman’s print, and stacked them on the tattered sofa. He’d been writing about the history of the Philippines during the Second World War.
When I finished, I took a notebook from the heap and read through it. It opened with a fairly dry account of the 1941 Japanese invasion. My dad wrote at length about the different factions’ aerial and maritime power. Army composition, uniforms, key battles and so on, in laborious detail. (These things always start off innocuous. Even banal. Here’s another middle-aged man who’s lost it over military history.) I skimmed through all that and then picked up another notebook. This one appeared to be an index of war crimes: the massacres in Bataan and Manila, death marches, looting. He was especially prolific on the last subject. I read about the gold and jewels and antiques that the Imperial Army had systematically stolen, at the tip of a bayonet, as it cut its way through the Asian mainland. There were frequent references to burials, labyrinths and something called the ‘Golden Lily’.
Mum called me downstairs for dinner. I felt the late-day wind come in like an exhalation. The smell of summer: clipped grass and bushfire smoke. We ate quickly, mostly in silence, and I took a canvas bag full of old notebooks home with me, along with some leftovers.
*
Dad’s always been keen on history. He travelled a lot for work, which gave him time to read and write. We thought it was a book. Non-fiction, most likely, or a really severe screenplay. He threw himself into it—whatever it was—with a zeal I always found enviable. (I was barely getting through my university readings. I was considering dropping out of law school.) A redundancy in 2014 quickened his pen and took the whole project past mere scholarship. He started travelling. He burned through his pay-out (which was just shy of $26,000, plus an extra stack for all the leave he’d never taken), and spent it on trips to the Philippines three or four times a year. It was research, he’d say. And while this reticence gave Mum the shits, she still sometimes went along, softened up with the promise of a tropical holiday. They took the night train through Bicol, saw the Taal caldera, sailed a sloop around the Hundred Islands, and visited another dozen places I’d never been to. Things were good between them then, and it would’ve stayed that way had the money lasted.
Of course, it didn’t. Dad was indifferent to their finances. He fell back into the old grooves. He became preoccupied, distant and inconsiderate. They visited Southern Leyte once. He left Mum at the resort for three days, and when he returned he told her that he’d gone and run a salvage operation on a dreadnought wreck. Further probing revealed that he’d also bankrolled it all. Leyte was their last trip together. Within a year, Mum had to go back to part-time work. They argued about selling the house. (I tried to be diplomatic. He’s overqualified for a lot of jobs, I said. He can’t just hustle with the rest of us in the gig economy. Plus, he’s old now. There are worse hobbies. It kept him occupied, focused, so…?) But she was reaching her rope’s frayed end.
These days, if my father was in Sydney, he’d be confined to his study, poring over old books. Mum would brood in the yard, gloved hands deep in the earth, tearing weeds out by the root. Family dinners were interminable, full of sniping and venom. Things have been said I’d rather not put in writing. Then, last winter, he announced that he’d be taking another trip.
‘You can fucking stay there this time,’ my mum shot out. She was unshakeable. Regal.
That was six months ago. He hasn’t been back since.
*
He had worked as a geological engineer, mostly on offshore gas and subsea pipeline projects. The work took him across the country and beyond: Queensland, the Northern Territory, sometimes as far as Indonesia. It was a hard job—and a lonely one, too—but nobody complained because it kept us comfortable. I was six when we first moved to the red-brick house in the industrial scrub of Sydney’s south-east. I used to love that old place. Its warmth and size (palatial compared to our old apartment), the yard, the familiar smell of food floating down the hallway. I know all the gutters and culverts of the Alexandria Canal. I know the narrow alleys where a wayward P-plater might smoke cones in his parents’ Camry. How the flight paths of passenger planes were like meridians of acupuncture, intersecting at a point just above us. I would know that Dad had returned from a trip by seeing his unpacked suitcase sitting beside his shoes at the front door. By Mum’s fussing, by the nice cutlery being out. And I’d know when he was gone again. Back out there to sit on a lonely rig. That’s how I always imagined him. Alone like a lighthouse keeper or an old captain, enclosed by gathering cumulus and the unsparing sea. It’s the kind of setting that might send a person’s mind sailing to far-off places.
*
I read about the Golden Lily in my father’s notebooks. A secret ultranationalist organisation formed in Tokyo in the 1930s. Its goal was to take all the treasure the Japanese had looted since the invasion of Manchuria and deliver it to the royal family. It answered directly to the Chrysanthemum Throne (and arguably exerted some shadowy influence over it too), and it had provisional command of the military stationed in the Philippines. My father claimed that by the end of conflict the Lily had gathered ‘between twenty and fifty thousand tonnes of gold and jewels (valued at $2.3 trillion)’. He described hollow Buddhas filled with diamonds, cabochons of imperial jade and South Sea pearls the size of human eyes. He wrote about the gold—coins, pendants, icons of bodhisattva—that had been melted and recast into bricks, inscribed with stars to denote weight.
The Lily’s agents transported all of this to occupied ports in Burma, Sumatra and Singapore so that it could then be shipped to Tokyo, with one stop in Manila to refuel. This went on for two years, between 1942 and 1944. By mid 1944, the sea routes were compromised. Mindanao was being bombarded. The Allied counterforce had conquered garrisons across Micronesia and the Marianas chain. The naval bigshots could no longer justify a loss in manpower to defend something most of them were forbidden to even know existed. The Golden Lily anticipated a Japanese defeat, however, and had already begun to hitch together another web. They’d always been interested in the vast cave systems of the Philippine archipelago. Labyrinths that twisted around ancient mountain folds, beneath volcanogenic lakes and endless reef. They believed that they could exploit these places as natural vaults. Stash the payload until the heat died down, essentially.
They needed to work quickly. Their field units dug mazes deep within the karst, a vasculature of treacherous tunnels across the seven thousand islands. Special chambers were built, where portions of the treasure could be interred. Cruel traps would thwart any trespassers. ‘Ceilings were rigged to collapse and rooms set to flood,’ my father wrote in the notebooks. ‘Landmines and capsules of cyanide’ would shatter with a misstep. The Lily demanded secrecy. The labourers were executed along with the engineers. ‘Schematics were burned. Translators’ tongues were cut out, etc.’ They kept no written records and killed their witnesses and thereby frustrated any attempt at (academic, conventional) historical reconstruction. My father had to make conjectures based on whatever source material he could get his hands on: manifests, vessel schedules, coded letters he couldn’t quite break, deathbed confessions from remorseful collaborators. He studied the movements and supply lines of the Japanese forces, and from the data triangulated potential treasure sites (172 in total: 138 land-based, 34 underwater). He charted the Lily’s command structure, pulled together a conspiracy that involved not just military men and politicians, but industrialists, aristocrats, the scions of once-noble clans…
As I read, scraps of paper would float out and onto my lap. A receipt, a loyalty card, medical scripts for the high blood pressure I’m fated to inherit. The barest artefacts of a lived life. He wrote about boats crossing seas that might’ve shone if there were moonlight—a faded Travel Ten—and freight trucks that lurched up quiet roads—a Times quick crossword, a $5 scratchie—and an army that shambled to the edges of a battered country, the edges of history.
*
I woke to possums fighting in the ceiling and couldn’t get back to sleep. I plucked a plastic bottle of water off the carpet and sucked down the last dregs. I’d been chewing nicotine gum again and I felt the familiar throb of withdrawal behind my eyelids and on my tongue. In the distance, the rhythmic thud of a waning house party. The wail of a stray cat. It was four in the morning. I stepped out onto the balcony and sat on the old foldout chair. There was some strange graffiti someone had just tagged on the brick wall opposite our building. It was still too dark, but I tried to decipher the words. Then at some point, I must’ve dozed off again because the next thing I remember is the yolky dawn rising over the Marrickville roofline. It was one of those days where the heat telegraphs itself for hours before the sun comes out. I watched a man push a Coles trolley full of refuse he’d scavenged from back-alley bins and the council verge: empty wooden picture frames, glass bottles, bone-white ceramics.
*
I’d been staying home a lot, reading through Dad’s notebooks. I read abstracts for a journal articles he’d planned to publish, then abandoned. I read about heated exchanges he’d had with foreign academics. I read his meditations on cryptography, the symbols on cave walls based on hexagrams of the I Ching. One notebook began as a guide to subterranean construction. It was full of practicalities—the importance of mixing fine sand with clay, proper ventilation—written in the kind of genial tone you’d use to teach someone how to jump-start a battery or apply bathroom sealant. All of a sudden: a turbulent passage on the visions he saw before he fell asleep.
I found even the smallest things compelling. His style, for example. How the prose was unpretentious, at times even plain. How he had a preference for short, declarative sentences, and shunned metaphor. There were occasional references to things he’d seen in Europe—a bombed-out church in Dresden, a biplane in Bracciano—where, decades ago, my parents spent their honeymoon. He alluded to characters and scenarios from the pulpy novels he read while he was growing up. War novels, as you’d expect, but he enjoyed other genres back then too. Detective stories, stories about the Wild West, adventure books that featured pith-helmeted adventurers (and their little Oriental sidekicks) searching for El Dorado, Shambala and Atlantis. I wondered if his fixation on the Lily had grown out of some childhood nostalgia. A tito could’ve pulled him aside at a family barbecue and told him about a clandestine society and a treasure that lay just past the horizon’s seam. The flushed tito’s face a little too close, the cerveza stink on his breath. The other adults watching on, slightly amused. A rambling yarn that picked up the kid by the scruff of his neck and carried him away.
It would’ve been easy to dismiss it all as a well-crafted fabrication, a hoax. Or worse. But I think that my initial fascination with the notebooks’ contents always disguised a deeper concern for the man who’d written in them. The hard-arse and disciplinarian that I’d always known. I could certainly see him hunched over and working all through the night by the solitary light of his desk lamp. That was easy enough. What was much more difficult for me to imagine—at least back then—was the look on his face. The intensity, the forehead’s skin furrowed like a walnut’s, the spellbound joy. But I get it now.
*
In the lead up to this final trip my father had hired:
a draftsman;
two Japanese-Tagalog translators;
a disgraced former university professor;
a chemist;
a ‘crooked’ numismatist; and
a four-man scuba team.
*
An unfinished primer on ‘the central figures of the Pacific Ocean theatre from 1939’ contains one entry, dated a few days before he left. It’s about Hiroo Onoda, surprisingly. The last Japanese soldier in the Philippines. You may know how the story goes.
Lieutenant Onoda was the man for whom the Second World War never ended. He didn’t believe, couldn’t believe, that the Emperor had surrendered. The newspaper headlines—Axis defeat! Hiroshima wiped out!—were craven lies, or illusions sent by God to test him. He went bush. Thirty years he spent on Lubang Island, fighting a guerrilla war against his nightmares, evading the local constabulary, shooting at farmers, at water buffalo, ready at any moment to give his life in the service of his nation. He knew what he was. It was the world that was distorted. It was the world that had become a parody.
He was captured in 1974 when his commanding officer, who now owned a bookstore in Osaka, was flown to the Philippines and ordered him to stand down. Come home, soldier, the old man told him. It’s over now, this whole painful business, and maybe he even believed it.
*
Extracted from various entries between 2016 and 2018:
Look for public works built in ‘65+.
[Ferdinand] Marcos knew about the gold and the ‘construction sites’ for his various projects were often a cover…
Look for bridges and water storage facilities and crossroads.
Especially if the structures were located near former Japanese assets (e.g., shell factories, field hospitals, camps).
Corregiedor, Fort Bonifacio, Nueva Ecija (the Good Samaritan Hospital), Batangas City (site of old Cine Astor).
Shallow graves.
Entrances close to a body of water.
¥555 billion or ¥777 billion contained in each chamber. Auspicious sums.
Look for stones shaped like toads or frogs.
Bamboo was planted on top of these burial sites b/c of its fast growth. Snakes.
Look for papaya, mango, camachile.
Ducat and acacia.
Look for signs carved in rock.
Some tunnels have false walls. They extend much further than they initially appear. Look for the symbols.
*
I called him. I sent him emails. It had been weeks since I first read his work. No one answered.
*
Where did it all begin? When does a fantasy turn into an obsession?
I thought often about my how my parents came to this country. How they traded their homeland for the panic and bureaucracy of Australia. For the thankless work, the cipher of a language. They slept on mattresses in other peoples’ living rooms with their thoughts always fixed on a big, unknown X. Wealth, security, ease. The delusions some of us need to sustain in order to get through our days. My mother grew up associating money with safety, and treating all extravagance (financial or otherwise) as an object of guilt. She tried to instil that guilt in me—don’t buy what you can get for free, repair don’t replace, finish everything on the plate, ask only for tap water—because life is easier when you learn to forego luxury. How did my father cope? I wondered. Perhaps the story about the Golden Lily was just another one of those delusions, a daydream he had nursed for too long. A way to divert himself from the daily toil and the debt. Did he suddenly imagine, one morning, a squadron of Nakajima bombers flying over the Timor? Were there generals in dark coats sitting in every airless room, behind panes of mirrored glass? There are no confessions in the notebooks. These aren’t the kinds of things he wrote about.
*
Instead, he told stories about prisoners of war, about torture and forced labour. ‘American and Filipino soldiers worked on the tunnels,’ one entry read. ‘All day and night, stopping only when the rain made the tracks muddy and impassable.’ They dragged timber scaffolding and corrugated iron, and pushed around wheelbarrows of slurry. They unloaded cargo from the trucks and replaced them with the bodies. They worked through the pneumatic wheeze of old machinery, the shriek of macaques in the dense canopy above. Rain on the foliage and the litterfall. A rot-sweet fragrance blooming in the air, whipped up by the wind and floating away, past the mangroves and desolate rice fields and villages that lay empty.
When the final chamber was completed, all two hundred workers were ordered inside and the entrances were demolished, trapping them. Their commanders were left behind with their transgression and shame—to hold it close and unseen, like an abominable talisman—for the rest of their lives. Which wouldn’t be long: when the war was lost the Lily took their silence too, on a scaffold at Los Baños.
*
But c.f. an entry entitled ‘Two Versions of Yamashita’ in which the author suggests that Tomoyuki Yamashita, the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ and Military Governor of the Philippines, did not in fact meet his death on 23 February 1946. General Yamashita, sixty years old, ailing with tropical maladies, was no longer as devoted as he once was to the empire that he suspected had given him up as a propitiatory sacrifice. He confessed to the Americans on the eve of his execution. The Golden Lily’s existence, the locations of the treasure—he gave it all up. In exchange, he was allowed to live. They squirrelled him off to Argentina where he practiced horticulture and calligraphy until his actual death in 1956. A ruptured aneurysm claimed him in his Buenos Aires apartment while he listened to the Melbourne Olympics on the radio (‘a wrestling match—Mitsuo Ikeda won the gold over the American, Ernie Fischer’).
If this were fiction, I remember thinking as I read all this, you’d call it a masterpiece.
That night I worked through an entire foil blister pack of Nicorette and gave myself over to insomnia and a churning in my gut.
*
A period of mania followed.
*
I’d amassed my own archive of violence. Thousand-page books with gold and black spines and titles like Battle Plans of the Pacific Theatre Vol. I and The Red Sun Over Manila Bay. I read about a lawsuit in the nineties against the exiled Ferdinand Marcos in the Hawaiian Supreme Court. The former president was accused of sending hired goons to rob the plaintiff of a golden buddha statue that he’d found in a cave on the outskirts of Baguio City. I familiarised myself with the Cultural Properties Preservation and Protection Act. I visited old BBCode forums, Usenet archives and unhinged blogs. I corresponded with other Lily enthusiasts: a scattered group of recluses that included detectorists, amateur historians and a couple of LARPers. I read medical articles on conspiratorial ideation, monomania and idée fixe. I tracked flight prices from Kingsford Smith to Ninoy Aquino Airport ($586.52 one way, just under a quarter of my life’s savings). My housemates expressed concern. Friends’ texts piled up on my phone, and the Deliveroo guy started to recognise me. I skipped classes and I needed two shifts at the café covered. The late hours and empty-carb diet took their toll. My reflection in the wardrobe mirror (gaunt, anaemic, bluely lit by my Mac’s screen) was barely recognisable.
*
There’s a story my dad used to tell about my lolo, my grandpa. This one isn’t in the notebooks. When my lolo was a boy, he worked in the sweet potato fields that his family leased. One day, he felt tired and hungry and he wandered over to the river to see if he could find any wild quail eggs or, even better, freshwater crabs. It was one of those slow-moving afternoons at the end of the dry season, where the sun was high and dramatic and vivid red like a pomegranate seed. When my lolo got to the river he suddenly felt very sleepy and he lay down in the shade of a balete tree. He awoke a few hours later, lying in the cool grass under a starry night sky, some distance away from the tree he’d originally stopped beneath. It’s a strange detail that Dad always included in his retelling. As if some crucial part of the story had been left out, or as if my lolo had been sleepwalking and hadn’t realised. Whatever happened, there wasn’t much time for him to reflect. The sound of gunfire broke the evening’s silence. He ran and hid.
*
I went to visit my mum. She’d been working in the garden again and she came to greet me in a wide-brimmed hat and a threadbare shirt. We sat on the verandah and drank tea despite the heat.
‘Are you sick?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing serious at least.’
‘You don’t eat enough,’ she said, not giving the slightest indication that she’d heard me. She waved a maternal wand and summoned a plate of sliced peaches, some mandarins. ‘Eat, eat.’
She told me about the tomatoes she’d espaliered to some bamboo sticks; the bitter limes covered in fine mesh to protect them from birds; her failed experiments with taro and papaya. I said I’d been thinking about Dad.
‘He’ll be back soon,’ she said and popped a wedge of mandarin in her mouth. She always peeled all the pith off before eating the fruit.
‘What do you think about going to see him? To check if he’s okay, I mean. Whether he’s found anything—’
‘He hasn’t found anything.’
‘You don’t even know what he’s looking for.’
She didn’t respond. I could see one of her neighbours standing by his window, watching us out in the garden. I stared back at him and he must’ve noticed because he suddenly recoiled. Then he disappeared behind the curtains.
‘You aren’t worried,’ I said.
She looked up at the sky, as if for divine guidance. ‘Have I raised an idiot?’
‘Mum.’
‘You want to do something stupid, that’s your business.’ A declaration of fact. She shook her head and began to clear the table.
‘Come on. I’ll get that.’
I took everything inside and washed up. Mum stood beside me, drying cups with a cloth and setting them on the rack. When we were finished, I walked over to get my backpack, which I’d left slumped on a chair by the dining table. I’d taken a few of the notebooks along with me, intending to return them. I took them out, one by one, and formed a small pile. Mum watched as I did this, her expression unreadable.
‘What are those?’ she asked.
‘Just some of Dad’s things.’
‘I thought I said to get rid of it all.’
‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry.’
For a while neither of us spoke. I could hear a radio in the distance. Errant strains of opera and AM news. The magpies and windchimes sang their suburban refrain. I heard a child’s squeal, followed by a great, giddy splash into a backyard pool. Marco, Polo. Marco, Polo.
‘I have a feeling that something terrible will happen, Bryant,’ my mother said eventually.
I turned around to look at her. I put a hand on her skinny arm. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’ Then I went back out into the yard to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything before I left.
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