A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  “Go on,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

  “Of course I’m not. What am I, a saint? Do you think of me as an especially unselfish person? Do I love my enemies? Do I volunteer in soup kitchens?”

  “Shut up, Jasper, and let me think.”

  “First you want to talk. Now you want to think. Haven’t you thought this out? Didn’t you at least compose a speech in your head prior to coming out tonight? Don’t tell me you’re improvising! Don’t tell me this is something you’re just winging on the spot!”

  “Jesus Christ! Just be silent for one minute!”

  When I sense someone is about to hurt me emotionally, it’s very difficult to resist the temptation to act like a five-year-old. Right then, for example, it was everything I could do to stop myself counting down the sixty seconds out loud.

  “I think we need a break,” she said.

  “A break meaning a lengthy pause, or a break meaning a severing?”

  “I think we need to stop seeing each other.”

  “Has this got something to do with my father?”

  “Your father?”

  “I saw you talking to him this morning after you left the hut. What did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He didn’t say nothing. The man has never said nothing in his life. Besides, you were talking to him for, like, ten minutes. Did he say something against me?”

  “No- nothing. Honest.”

  “Then what’s this about? Is it because I drank your tears?”

  “Jasper- I’m still in love with Brian.”

  I didn’t say anything. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to work that out. Or a rocket scientist. Or an Einstein. Then I thought: I don’t think brain surgeons, rocket scientists, or even Einstein are that brilliant when it comes to charting the map of human emotions. And why always brain surgeons, rocket scientists, and Einstein anyway? Why not architects or criminal lawyers? And why not, instead of Einstein, Darwin or Heinrich Böll?

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “You’re in love with your ex-boyfriend. I don’t have to be Heinrich Böll to work that out.”

  “Who?”

  I shook my head, stood up, and walked out of the pub. I heard her calling my name, but I didn’t turn around.

  Outside, I broke into tears. What a hassle! Now I’d have to become rich and successful just so she could regret dumping me. That’s another thing to do in this short, busy life. Christ. They’re adding up.

  I couldn’t believe the relationship was over. And the sex! That fortuitous conjunction of our bodies, finished! I supposed it was better this way. I really never wanted anyone to shout at me, “I gave you the best years of my life!” This way, the best years of her life were still ahead of her.

  And why? Maybe she was pissed off that I had drunk her tears and was in love with her ex-boyfriend, but I knew Dad had said something that had pushed her over the edge. What had he said? What the fuck had he said? That’s it, I thought. I don’t care what he does- he can write a handbook of crime, put in a suggestion box, set a town on fire, smash up a nightclub, be interned in a mental hospital, build a labyrinth, but he absolutely cannot touch one hair on the head of my love life.

  He was a stinky concentrated form of pandemonium and I would no longer let him ruin my life. If the Inferno could break up with me, I could break up with him. I don’t care what anybody says, you absolutely can break up with family.

  I went home planning to gather up all the particles of energy I could muster and release them right in his fucking face!

  I marched straight into his house. The lights were off. I unlocked the door and sneaked in. I heard a strange sound from his bedroom. He must be crying again. But it didn’t sound like mere crying. It sounded like sobbing. Well, so what? I hardened myself against the lure of sympathy. I went and opened the door, and what I saw was so shocking, I didn’t have the common decency to close the door. Dad was in bed with Anouk.

  “Get out!” he screamed.

  I just couldn’t get my head around it. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “Jasper, get the fuck out of here!” Dad yelled again.

  I know I should have, but my feet seemed to be as dumbfounded as my head. “What a joke!”

  “Why is this a joke?” Dad asked.

  “What’s she getting out of it?”

  “Jasper, leave us alone!” Anouk shouted.

  I stepped back out of the room and slammed the door. This was really insulting. Anouk hadn’t wanted to sleep with me and yet she had jumped into bed with my father. And ewww- with my condoms! And what was she doing with Dad when Oscar Hobbs had been trying to get into her bed? Was some pitiful soap opera going on? Dad was a man who had spent the majority of his life absent from human relationships, who finally embarked on one with his only confidant, merely to find himself as the dullest point of a love triangle where, if logic prevailed, he would lose her.

  Well, this was no longer my problem.

  ***

  The next morning I woke early. I decided the practical thing would be to find a room in a share house with junkies, something cheap and affordable so I wouldn’t drain my meager savings just on shelter. I answered a bunch of ads in the newspaper. There weren’t many that didn’t specifically ask for, in capital letters, a FEMALE. It seemed to be common knowledge that men hadn’t made the right kind of evolutionary leap, the one that allowed them to tidy up after themselves. The apartments and houses that did permit males to exist there weren’t so bad, but they all had people living in them. Of course I knew this beforehand, but it wasn’t until I was face-to-face with the other humans that I realized I needed to be alone. We were expected to be civil to each other, not just once in a while, but every day. And what if I wanted to sit in my underwear and stare out the kitchen window for six hours? No, the solitude of living in a hut in the center of a labyrinth had ruined me for cohabitation.

  In the end I decided on a studio apartment and took the first one I saw. One room and a bathroom and a partition between the main area and the little kitchen, which ran alongside a wall. It was nothing to get excited about. There was not one feature of it about which you could say, “But look at this! It has a ____________________!” It had nothing. It was just a room. I signed the lease, paid the rent and the security deposit, and took the keys. I went inside and sat in the empty room on the floor and smoked one cigarette after another. I rented a van and drove home to my hut and threw all my possessions worth keeping into it.

  Then I went up to the house. Dad was standing in the kitchen wearing his dressing gown that still had the price tag on. He was whistling atonally while cooking pasta.

  “Where’s Anouk?” I asked.

  “Not sure.”

  Maybe with Oscar Hobbs, I thought.

  The pasta sauce was spluttering, and in another pan he seemed to be overboiling vegetables so as to bleed every last nuance of flavor out of them. He gazed at me with a rare look of affection and said, “I understand you were a bit shocked. We should’ve told you. But anyway, you know now. Hey- maybe the four of us can go out sometime?”

  “The four of who?”

  “Anouk and me and you and your plaything.”

  “Dad, I’m leaving.”

  “I didn’t mean tonight.”

  “No. I’m leaving leaving.”

  “Leaving leaving? You mean…leaving?”

  “I’ve found an apartment in the city. A studio.”

  “You already found a place?”

  “Yeah- put down a security deposit and the first two weeks’ rent.”

  There was a shiver running through him, a shiver I could see.

  “And you’re moving out when?”

  “Now.”

  “Right now?”

  “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  “What about your stuff?”

  “I hired a van. I packed everything I
need.”

  Dad stretched his limbs strangely, and in a dull, artificial voice he said, “You’re not giving me much say in the matter.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “What about your hut?”

  “I’m not taking it with me.”

  “No, I mean…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he meant. Dad started breathing heavily through his nostrils. He was trying not to look wretched. I was trying not to feel guilty. I knew that by losing me he was losing the only person who understood him. But I was guilty for other reasons too; I wondered what was going to happen to his mind. And how could I leave him with that face? That sad and lonely and terrified face?

  “You need help moving?”

  “No, it’s OK.”

  It was as if we had been playing a game all our lives and the game was ending, and we were going to take off our masks and our uniforms and shake hands and say, “Great game.”

  But we didn’t.

  Suddenly all my bitterness and hatred for him evaporated. I felt enormously sorry for him. I saw him as a spider who woke up thinking he was a fly and didn’t understand he was caught in his own web.

  “Well, I’d better get going,” I said.

  “Do you have a phone number?”

  “Not yet. I’ll call you when I get the phone on.”

  “Right. Well, bye.”

  “See ya.”

  As I turned and walked out, Dad let out a little rumbling grunt, like the sound of troubled bowels.

  FIVE

  A uthor’s note: My original version of this chapter went hurtling into the shredder as soon as I discovered among my father’s papers the first five chapters of his unfinished autobiography. I’d just finished pouring out my entire story and I was frankly annoyed- mostly because his account covered this period better than my version of the events. Not only was his version more concise, because it did not contain my long digression on the recent glut of calendars featuring sexy priests, but I was irritated that Dad’s version of events contradicted much of my own, and even some of the previous chapter (four), which I’d really labored over. Nevertheless, under the influence of my two guiding stars, impatience and laziness, I’ve not amended any part of Chapter Four, and decided to print Dad’s unfinished autobiography here, slightly edited, as Chapter Five. My version of Chapter Five is still around somewhere- I didn’t really throw it in the shredder. Hopefully, in years to come it will be of curiosity value- to the highest bidder.

  My Life by Martin Dean

  A Loner’s Story by Martin Dean

  A Loser’s Story by Martin Dean

  Born to Be Snide by Martin Dean

  Untitled Autobiography of Martin Dean by Martin Dean

  Chapter One

  Why write this autobiography? Because it’s the privilege of my class. Now before you start screaming, I’m not talking about working, middle-, or upper-middle class. I’m talking about the real class struggle: the celebrity vs. the ordinary schmo. Like it or not, I am a celebrity, and that means that you are interested in how many sheets of toilet paper I use to wipe my arse, whereas I have no interest in whether you wipe your arse at all or just leave it as is. You know how the relationship works. Let’s not pretend it’s any different.

  All celebrities who write their biographies play the same trick on readers: they tell you some terrible degrading truth about themselves, putting you in a position where you think they must be honest chaps, then they turn on the lies. I won’t do that. I’ll tell you only the truth, even if I come off smelling like lawn fertilizer. And, just so you know, I understand that an autobiography should cover the early years of my life (e.g., Martin Dean was born on such-and-such a date, went to such-and-such a school, accidentally got such-and-such a woman pregnant, and so on), but I won’t be doing that either. My life up until one year ago is none of your business. Instead, I’ll start from where my life was at the moment when the great change occurred.

  ***

  I was forty-one at the time, unemployed and living off child support even though I was the parent. Admittedly, this is not the spirit that has made our country great, but it is the spirit that has made it so you can go to the beach on a weekday and see it full of people. Once a week I would make myself busy at the dole office showing them a list of jobs I hadn’t gone for, and this was taking increasing amounts of energy and imagination. I tell you, the jobs out there are getting harder and harder not to get. Some bosses will hire anyone!

  On top of this, I was going through the humiliating process of aging. Everywhere I went I met my memories, and I had that old sinking feeling of betrayal, of having betrayed my destiny. I wasted many months thinking about my death, until it began to feel like the death of a great-uncle I didn’t know I had. It was at this time I became addicted to talk-back radio, listening to mostly elderly people who stepped out of their houses one day and just didn’t recognize anything, and the more I listened to their interminable griping, the more I realized they were, in their way, doing the same thing I was: protesting the present as if it were a future one still has the option of voting against.

  There were no two ways about it: I was in a crisis. But recent shifts in behavioral patterns of different age groups had made it difficult for me to determine what type of crisis I was in. How could it be a midlife crisis when the forties were the new twenties, the fifties were the new thirties, and the sixties were the new forties? Where the fuck was I? I had to read the lifestyle supplement in the Sunday papers to make sure I wasn’t actually going through puberty.

  If only that was the worst of it!

  I suddenly was mortified by how ridiculous I was to live in a labyrinth of my own design. I was scared I would one day be remembered for it, and equally terrified I would not be remembered at all, unlike my fucking brother, who was still being talked about, still the focus of my countrymen’s affections, still popping up in semischolarly books about the characters that typify Australia, in paintings, novels, comic books, documentaries, telemovies, and the occasional student thesis. In fact, my brother had become an industry. I went to the library and found no fewer than seventeen books that chronicled (incorrectly) the Terry Dean story, as well as countless references to him in books on Australian sport, Australian crime, and those that tackled the tedious, narcissistic topic of pinning down our cultural identity. And the pinnacle of my creative life was to build a stupid labyrinth!

  I wondered why nobody had stopped me. I wondered why my friend Eddie loaned me the money so willingly, knowing full well that a man who lives in a labyrinth of his own design must necessarily go mad. On top of which, I had not paid him back, and since then he had continued to support me. In fact, when I thought about it, he had mercilessly loaned me money ever since I’d met him in Paris, and worse than that, he had brutally, without conscience, never asked for it back. Never! I became convinced that he had an ulterior motive. I worked myself up into a paranoid frenzy about it, and I realized that I hated my closest friend. When I thought about his gestures and expressions in my company, it occurred to me that he hated me too, and I thought friends must hate each other the world over and I shouldn’t be bothered by it, but I was bothered by this sudden conviction that Eddie actually loathed me. I was bothered by the question of why the hell I’d never noticed it before.

  To top this off, I found to my shame that I had all but lost interest in my son as a person. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe the novelty of seeing what my eyes and nose looked like on someone else’s face had finally worn off. Or maybe because I felt there was something sleazy, gutless, restless, and horny about my son, something that I recognized in myself. Or maybe because despite a lifetime of my trying to wield my personality as an influence on him, he’d managed to turn out utterly different from me. He somehow became dreamy and positive and took sunsets dead seriously, as though the outcome of the event might not always be that the sun sets but that it might freeze just above the horizon and start going up again. He seem
ed to be amused by walking in the outdoors, listening to the earth, and fondling plants. Imagine! A son of mine! Isn’t that a reason to turn away? Maybe, but to be honest, the reason I lost interest in him is that he’d lost interest in me.

  I was increasingly unable to talk to him, or even at him, and more and more regularly the intervals of silence between us lengthened, and then I couldn’t utter a single word without disgusting him, or make even a single sound, not even “Oh” or “Hmm.” In every look and gesture, I could feel he was accusing me of every possible parenting crime there is short of infanticide. He absolutely refused to talk to me about his love life, sex life, work life, social life, or inner life. In fact, there were now so many subjects he forbade me to discuss, I was waiting for him to outlaw “Good morning.” I thought: It’s not my conversation he finds distasteful, it’s my very existence. If I greeted him smiling, he’d frown. If I frowned, he’d smile. He was fervently working to become my mirror opposite. What ingratitude! After all I’d tried to teach him: that there are four kinds of people in this world, those who are obsessed by love, those who have it, those who laugh at retarded people when they are children, and those who laugh at them right into adulthood and old age. A veritable wisdom bonanza, right? But this ungrateful son of mine had chosen to reject everything, totally. Of course, I knew he couldn’t help but be confused by the contradictory directives I’d boomed at him his whole life: Don’t follow the herd, I’d preached, but don’t be as miserably apart as I’ve been. Where could he go? Neither of us knew. But look- even if you’re a total shit of a parent, you are still burdened by your children, still vulnerable to the pain of their suffering. Believe me, even if you suffer from your chair in front of the television, you still suffer.