A Fraction of the Whole

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A Fraction of the Whole Page 46

by Steve Toltz


  This was where I was placed psychologically when the great change occurred.

  ***

  I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. I didn’t feel nauseous and I wasn’t in any pain. I didn’t have any buildup of phlegm or odd-colored feces. It was completely different from both my childhood illness and the time my mother slipped rat poison into my food. I just felt a little off-kilter, a similar feeling to the one I had when I realized four months late that I’d forgotten my own birthday. But was there really nothing physically wrong with me? Well, there was one thing, though it was more odd than anything else. I detected a faint, strange odor rising out of my skin. Very faint. Hardly an odor at all, really. Sometimes I couldn’t smell it. But other times I caught a whiff and yelled out, “There it is again!”

  One morning I worked out what it was.

  Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they’re warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing? This is just what my imagination did that morning. It saw all the possible tomorrows, then narrowed them down in a short instant to only one. That one I spoke aloud: “Fuck me! I’ve got a terminal disease!”

  I guessed further- cancer. It had to be cancer; it couldn’t be anything other than cancer, because it was always cancer that haunted my waking nightmares, ever since I saw my mother devoured by that king of diseases. Even if you fear death on a daily basis, there are certain deaths that you dismiss- scurvy, giant squid, falling piano- but no one with a brain cell left rattling in his head can ever dismiss cancer.

  So! This was it! Death! I always knew that one day my body would kick the shit out of me! My whole life I’d felt like a lone soldier trapped in hostile territory. Everywhere were enemies to my cause- back, legs, kidneys, lungs, heart- and they would eventually conclude that the only way to kill me was a kamikaze mission. All of us were going down.

  I rushed out of the house and drove fast out of the labyrinth. Speeding through the green suburbs, I was horrified to see that everything was bathed in gorgeous summer sunlight. Of course it was- nothing brings out sunshine faster than cancer. I took myself straight to the doctor’s. I hadn’t been for years and I went to the one closest to my house. I needed any doctor, just as long as he wasn’t too fat (one must be as suspicious of obese doctors as of bald hairdressers). I didn’t need him to be a genius either; I just needed him to confirm what I already knew. DR. P. SWEENY the brass plaque said on the door. I sprinted into his office. It was dark inside, the dark of a room in which everything is brown: the furniture, the carpet, the doctor’s mood. Brown. He was there drumming his fingers on his desk, a middle-aged man with a placid expression and a full head of thick brown hair. He was one of those men who never go bald, who go to the grave needing a haircut.

  “I’m Dr. Peter Sweeny,” he said.

  “I know you’re a doctor. You don’t have to wave it in my face. Don’t you know the title is only useful for directing mail, to distinguish you from all the unpretentious Mr. Peter Sweenys of the world?”

  The doctor reclined his head a couple of millimeters, as if I had been spitting.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I guess I’m a little stressed out. So what if you call yourself doctor? You worked hard for the right to plunge your hand inside the human body! Elbow deep in viscera all day, maybe you want to let everyone know you’re a doctor so they won’t offer you offal or a plate of haggis. What right have I to cast judgment on a man’s prefix?”

  “You seem pretty wound up, there. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m pretty sure I have cancer,” I said. “And I just want you to do whatever you have to do to confirm or deny it.”

  “What kind of cancer do you think you have?”

  “What kind? I don’t know. What’s the worst sort?”

  “Well, prostate cancer’s the most common for men in your age bracket.”

  “You’re the same age as me!”

  “OK-our age bracket.”

  “Well, my cancer won’t be the most common, that much I can tell you. What’s the worst one? And I mean the absolute worst.”

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “If I smoked, the cancer I wouldn’t want for myself, for fear of kicking myself all the way to the grave, is lung cancer.”

  “Lung cancer. I knew it! That’s the one. That’s what I’ve got.”

  “You seem pretty certain.”

  “I am certain.”

  Even though he was obscured behind his desk, he made a shift as though he’d put his hand on his hip. “All right,” he said finally, “I’ll order the tests. They aren’t pleasant.”

  “Neither is lung cancer.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  ***

  I won’t detail the weeks that followed- the intrusive tests, the cruel waiting periods, the stomach-pummeling anxiety. Of course Jasper didn’t notice anything, but Anouk sensed something was wrong. She kept hounding me to tell her what it was, but I was tight-lipped about it. I wanted to be 100 percent sure before I told anyone. I didn’t want to get their hopes up.

  It was a month later when I went back to Dr. Sweeny’s office to hear the results. In the waiting period I had been plagued with hope, and nothing I could do could put those pesky optimistic feelings to rest.

  “Come in, Mr. Dean. How are you feeling?”

  “Let’s not waste time. It’s cancer, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is.”

  In the old days the medical profession didn’t tell you that you were dying. It was considered a breach of ethics. Now the reverse is true. Now they can’t wait to tell you.

  “Lung cancer?”

  “I’m afraid so. How did you know?”

  Christ! It was true! I was being murdered by my own body! I burst out laughing.

  Then I stopped laughing- I remembered why I had started.

  ***

  I left the doctor’s office in a daze. So! It turned out my lifelong pessimistic stance was entirely justified. Imagine if I had been optimistic all this time! Wouldn’t I be feeling ripped off right about now? Yes, I was in for a slow, violent death. And I don’t sleep peacefully, so dying peacefully in my sleep was out of the question. The best I could hope for was that maybe I’d die fitfully in my sleep. Oh my God- suddenly all the other possible deaths had slipped into the unlikely. How often does a man dying of cancer suddenly choke to death on a chicken bone? Or get decapitated by jumping up and down on his bed, forgetful of the ceiling fan? Or die from asbestos poisoning or obesity? No, there just wasn’t enough time to get really, fatally fat. If anything, my illness was probably going to make me thinner.

  Over the following weeks I was an emotional wreck. The slightest thing sent me into tears. I cried at television ads, at the autumn leaves turning brown. One night Jasper came in and caught me sobbing over the death of some idiotic pop star I’d never even heard of. He’d been shot in the head and died instantly, lucky bastard!

  What made me cry was the fear that I’d be unable to kill myself when my quality of life dropped below par, when my daily task became choosing between pain and painkillers, between the ravages of the disease and the destruction of the treatment. Even with my lifelong meditation on death, my existence had still seemed something permanent and stable on the planet Earth- something dependable, like igneous rock. Now that cancers were metastasizing to their heart’s content, atheism seemed like a pretty cruel thing to do to myself. I begged my brain to reconsider. I thought: Won’t I survive somewhere, in some form? Can I believe it? Please? Pretty please can I believe in the everlasting soul? In heaven or angels or paradise with sixteen beautiful virgins waiting for me? Pretty please can I believe that? Look, I don’t even need the sixteen beautiful virgins. There could be just one woman, old and u
gly, and she doesn’t even have to be a virgin, she could be the town bike of the ever-after. In fact, there could be no women at all, and it doesn’t have to be paradise, it could be a wasteland- hell, it could even be hell, because while suffering the torments of a lake of fire, at least I’d be around to yell “Ouch!” Could I believe in that, please?

  All the other afterlife scenarios are just not comforting. Reincarnation without continuance of this consciousness- I just don’t see the point in getting excited about it. And the least comforting eternity scenario of all time, one that is growing daily in popularity, one that people never stop telling me about, is that I will die but my energy will live on.

  My energy, ladies and gentlemen.

  Is my energy going to read books and see movies? Is my energy going to sink languidly into a hot bath or laugh until its sides ache? Let’s be clear: I die, my energy scatters and dissolves into Mother Earth. And I’m supposed to be thrilled by this idea? That’s as good to me as if you told me my brain and body die but my body odor lives on to stink up future generations. I mean, really. My energy.

  But can’t I prolong my existence anywhere? My actual existence, not some positively charged shadow? No, I just can’t convince myself that the soul is anything other than the romantic name we have given to consciousness so we can believe it doesn’t tear or stain.

  So, then, the rest of my life was going to be an accumulation of physical pain, mental anguish, and suffering. Normally I could handle it. But the problem was, until I died I’d be thinking only about my death. I decided that if I couldn’t spend one single day without thinking, I’d kill myself. Why not? Why should I struggle against my death? I couldn’t possibly win. And even if by some miracle I did beat this round with cancer, what about the next? And the next? I have no talent for futility. What’s the point of fighting a losing battle? To give a man dignity? I have no talent for dignity either. Never saw the point in it, and when I hear someone say, “At least I have my dignity,” I think, “You just lost it by saying that.”

  The next day I woke and resolved not to think about anything the whole day. Then I thought: I’m thinking now, aren’t I? Then I thought: My death my death my death my death my gruesome painful sobbing death!

  Fuck!

  I had to do it. I would kill myself.

  And I had an idea: maybe I should kill myself publicly. Why not fob off my suicide on one cause or another, pretending to die in protest over, I don’t know, the WTO’s wasteful agricultural policies, or third world debt, anything. Remember the photograph of that self-immolating monk? Now there’s an enduring image! Even if you’re killing yourself so your family will be sorry, pick a worthy cause, call the media, find a public spot, and kill yourself. Then even if your life has been a totally meaningless affair, your death doesn’t have to be.

  The following morning by chance the radio told me that there was a protest on in the city around lunchtime. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a protest against the WTO’s wasteful agricultural policies or about erasing third world debt, it was about primary school teachers wanting a pay raise and more vacation. I tried to see the bright side. That was as worth dying for as anything, wasn’t it? I didn’t suppose any of the teachers themselves were passionate enough to self-immolate, but I imagined they’d welcome my contribution to their cause. I found an old canvas bag and threw in a can of petrol, a lighter in the shape of a woman’s torso, and some painkillers. I wasn’t trying to cheat death; I was hoping to cheat pain.

  Sydney is one of the most beautiful modern cities in the world, but I always manage to find myself at the corner of Drab and Bleak Streets, and always in the section of the city where there’s nowhere to sit down, so I spent the morning walking and staring into people’s faces as I passed by them, thinking, “See you soon!” I was going to die now, but by the look of those triple chins, I knew they wouldn’t be far behind.

  I arrived at the protest around twelve. It was a poor turnout. Forty or so people were holding up signs demanding respect. I didn’t think anybody who had to demand respect ever got it. There were a couple of television cameramen too. They looked young, probably cadets in their first year on the job. Since I didn’t require a seasoned journalist who’d ducked sniper bullets in Vietnam to film me, I took a place in the protest next to a couple of angry-looking women I wouldn’t want teaching my kid and psyched myself into the state I needed to be in to do myself in. All I had to do was think relentlessly negative thoughts about the inhabitants of the planet Earth. When I felt almost ready, I took out the painkillers but discovered I’d forgotten to bring a bottle of water. I walked to a nearby café and asked for a glass. “You have to eat something,” a waitress said, so I ordered a late breakfast: bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, baked beans, toast, and coffee. I ate too much; the food in my belly made me sleepy. I had just ordered a second espresso when I saw someone famous coming out of a restaurant on the other side of the street: an old television journalist. I vaguely remembered that this journalist had been disgraced owing to one scandal or another. What had happened? It was nagging me. Did he wet his pants on TV? Did he lie about the state of the world and say on national television that everything would work out well for everyone? No, that wasn’t it.

  I paid the bill and walked toward him and was just about to ask him to clarify the details of his public humiliation when a girl came out of the restaurant, flung her arms around his neck, and kissed him passionately. I thought: Sure, I’ve been kissed, but no one has ever flung her arms around my neck. Women have placed them there gently or lowered them over my head as if they were putting on a jumper, but never flung them. Then the girl pulled away and I recognized her too. Christ, I thought. What do these celebrities do, join forces to double their fame?

  Then it hit me. She’s not famous! She’s my son’s girlfriend!

  Well, so what? Why should I care? This wasn’t very big on the tragedy scale. It was just a teen drama, the type you might see on a nightly soap opera. But by being an eyewitness, I had become a character in the cheap melodrama; I had to play out my part to the end, to the dénouement. How irritating! I just wanted to peacefully self-immolate. And now I had to “get involved.”

  I dropped the matches and the petrol in disgust and went home, enormously relieved that an excuse for staying alive had dropped in my lap.

  ***

  When I arrived home, Anouk was in her studio, stretched out on the daybed she’d made for herself, propped up on a mountain of pillows. I could always count on Anouk for good conversation. We each had our favorite topics, our default topics. Mine was the gnawing fear of dropping so low in my own estimation that I would no longer acknowledge myself in mirrors, but would pass on by, pretending I hadn’t seen me. For Anouk it was always a new horror story from the chronicles of modern relationship hell. She often had me in stitches recounting recent love affairs, and I felt a strange pity for those men, even though they were the ones who left her. She was always creating complications for herself- putting the wrong people together, sleeping with her girlfriends’ ex-boyfriends, sleeping with her ex-boyfriend’s friends, always just on the line of fair play, teetering on the line, sometimes falling.

  “What do you think of this girl Jasper’s seeing?” I asked.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Is that the best we can say about her?”

  “I’ve hardly had two words with her. Jasper keeps her hidden from us.”

  “That’s natural. I embarrass him,” I said.

  “What’s natural about that?”

  “I embarrass myself.”

  “Why are you interested?”

  “I saw her today- with another man.”

  Anouk sat up and looked at me with bright eyes. Sometimes I think the human animal doesn’t really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t.”

  �
��I think I have to, don’t I? I can’t sit back and watch my son be made a fool of by someone other than me.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t talk to him. Talk to her. Tell her you saw her. Tell her she has to tell him or you will.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Telling him yourself will be disastrous. If nothing else, he won’t believe it. He’ll think you’re jealous and competing with him.”

  “Do you think fathers and sons compete for sex?”

  “Yes, though not in the Oedipal way. Just in the ordinary way.”

  Anouk brought her knees up and rested her chin on them and stared at me as if debating whether to tell me I had something stuck between my teeth.

  “I’ve had enough of relationships,” she said. “I want to take some time out. I think I’ve become a serial monogamist. It’s embarrassing. What I’d really like is a lover.”

  “Yes, I think that would suit you.”

  “A friendly fuck with someone I know.”

  “Good idea. Do you have anyone in mind?”

  “Not sure. Maybe someone like you.”

  She really said this. And I really didn’t get it. Slow, slow, slow. “Someone like me,” I mused. “Do you know anyone like me?”

  “One person.”

  “Like me? I wouldn’t want to meet him.” Jasper? It couldn’t be Jasper, could it? “Who do you know like me?”

  “You!”

  “I’ll admit there’s a similarity,” I said slowly, starting to get the hint. It was coming to me now, as if through a dense cloud. I sat forward in my chair. “You don’t mean…”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  “No, really?”

  That’s how it began between Anouk and me.

  It became a regular thing. Lying in bed with this young, beautiful woman, I felt a pathetic, adolescent form of pride- this is me kissing this neck! These breasts! These are my worn-out hands groping their way along the length of this sublime body! This liaison really saved me. I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.

 

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