A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  It was true. He was so enormous he gave the impression he was indestructible, that he could survive any cataclysm. The zoo of animal tattoos Dad had described to me many years ago had stretched into shapeless swirls of color.

  Dad had stiffened. He looked like he wanted to say something but his tongue wasn’t cooperating. “Alive…fat,” was all he could manage.

  It dawned on me that Terry was sort of confused himself. He didn’t know who to look at. Every now and then he turned and gazed searchingly at me, perhaps his best chance of immediate love and acceptance. He wasn’t getting it, because despite the incredible news that a family member so thoroughly mythologized was alive and well, more than anything I felt a bitter disappointment that this had nothing to do with my mother after all.

  “Isn’t anybody going to give me a hug?”

  No one moved.

  “So who is Tim Lung?” Dad said finally.

  “Tim Lung doesn’t exist. Neither did Pradit Banthadthan or Tanakorn Krirkkiat, for that matter.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m doing it, Marty. I’m finally doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “The democratic cooperative of crime.”

  Dad spasmed as though he’d been jump-started with cables. “You’re what?!” he screamed. This was the first emotive response he had given.

  “Well, mate, the first time I stuffed it up good and proper. Harry was onto something, though. This thing works like a charm.”

  “I can’t believe it! I can’t fucking believe it!”

  This apparently was a bigger shock to Dad than the news that Terry had been alive all this time.

  Caroline said, “What’s the democratic-”

  “Don’t ask,” Dad interjected. “Oh my God.”

  Terry clapped his chubby hands with delight and hopped up and down on his stumpy legs. I was thinking how utterly different he was from the young renegade who had so often appeared in my mind’s eye. This fat man was the same sporting hero, the same fugitive, the same vigilante worshipped by the nation?

  Suddenly his knees locked up and he looked embarrassed.

  “Eddie tells me you’ve been ill,” Terry said.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Dad said, his voice turbulent with emotion. “I scattered your ashes, you know.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “I put them in bottles of cayenne pepper in a small supermarket. The rest I dumped in a puddle on the side of the road.”

  “Well, I can’t say I deserved any better!” Terry laughed loudly and put his hand on Dad’s shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me, you fat ghost!”

  “Mate. Don’t be like that. Are you pissed off about the millionaires thing? Don’t be. I just couldn’t resist. As soon as I heard about what you were doing in Australia, Marty, I knew what I had to do. I’ve been rescuing you from one drama or another your entire life. And helping you has made me who I am. I don’t regret it. I love who I am, and just taking those millions in such an obvious scheme was the easiest way for me to rescue you one last time. You see, mate, I wanted you to come here. I thought it was high time we saw each other again, and I was long overdue to meet Jasper.”

  I could see that Dad’s inward rage had almost made its way out. An evil storm was churning in him, and it had everything to do with Caroline. He noticed that she was demonstrating none of the rage; she was quiet, still literally gaping at Terry in horror and wonder. Terry, meanwhile, aimed his smiling eyes back at me.

  “Hey, nephew. Why don’t you say something?”

  “How did you get out of solitary confinement?”

  Terry’s face looked empty of thought for a moment, before he said, “The fire! Of course! And Marty, you told him the whole story. Good for you! Good question, Jasper, right at the beginning.”

  “Were you even in solitary?” Dad asked.

  We all leaned forward with utter absorption as Terry began.

  “I sure was! That was a close one. I almost did get baked- in solitary there are no windows, of course, but I heard a lot of screaming, guards shouting orders to each other, and when the smoke came under the door I knew I was cooked. It was pitch-black in that cement cage, hotter than hell and full of smoke. I was terrified. I started shouting, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ But no one came. I banged on the door and nearly burned my arm right off. There wasn’t anything I could do, and it took all the psychological effort I could muster to calm myself down enough to settle in for an unpleasant death. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor. It was one of the guards, Franklin. I recognized his voice: ‘Who’s in there?’ he shouted. ‘Terry Dean!’ I answered. Good old Franklin. He was a good man who loved cricket and he was a big fan of my rampage. He opened the door and said, ‘Come on!’ and in his panic to save me, he let down his guard. I knocked him unconscious, took his clothes, threw him in the cell, and locked the door.”

  “You murdered the man who came to save you.”

  Terry paused a moment and gave Dad a strange look, like a man deciding whether or not to explain a complex natural phenomenon to a child, then continued. “After that it was easy. The whole prison was on fire, and I didn’t even have to use the keys I’d stolen- all the doors were open. Somehow I made my way through the smoke-filled corridors and out of the prison, I saw the town up in flames and disappeared into the smoke. That was it.”

  “So it was Franklin who burned in your cell.”

  “Yeah, I guess it was his ashes you scooped up.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Oh yeah- I saw you in the fire. I called out to you, but you didn’t see me. Then I saw that you were running into a trap. I shouted, ‘Left, turn left!’ and you turned and disappeared.”

  “I heard you! I thought it was your bloody ghost, you mongrel!”

  “Spent a couple of days in Sydney lying very low. Caught a freighter to Indonesia. Worked my way around the globe checking out the other continents to see what they had to offer, and wound up here in Thailand. That’s when I started the democratic cooperative of crime.”

  “What about Eddie?”

  “Eddie started working for me at the beginning. I tried to track you down, Marty, but you’d already left Australia. So the best I could do was get Eddie to go and wait near Caroline. I had her address from a letter she’d sent me in jail, and Eddie took a room next to hers and waited for you to show up.”

  “How could you be so sure I’d go see Caroline?”

  “I wasn’t sure. But I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Why didn’t you just get Eddie to tell me you were alive?”

  “By then I felt like I’d caused you enough trouble. You were really looking out for me back then, Marty, and you probably thought I didn’t notice, but I knew you’d worried yourself sick about me. I figured you’d had enough.”

  “You told Eddie to make Caroline a millionaire!”

  “Of course!” Turning to Caroline, he said, “When I heard about your son, I was so sorry.”

  “Go on, Terry,” Dad said.

  “That’s it. I had Eddie keep tabs on you. When he told me you were with some nutty lady who you got pregnant and you didn’t have any money, I told him to give you some. But you wouldn’t take it. I didn’t know how to help, so I gave you a job working for me. Unfortunately, it was a bad time- you waltzed right into the middle of a little gang warfare. I didn’t know your lunatic girlfriend was going to jump on the boat and blow herself up. It was a nutty way to do yourself in, wasn’t it? Sorry, Jasper.”

  “What else?”

  “Anyway. When you took Jasper to Australia, I got Eddie to follow. He came back with some crazy reports. I gave you a job again, running one of my strip clubs, and you smashed the place and wound up in hospital. Then I gave you some dosh so you could build your maze, and that’s that. Then you warped the whole of Australia with your strange ideas and here we are. That pretty much brings us up to date.”

  As Dad absorbed his brother’s
story, his whole being looked to me like a Hollywood façade, as if I were to take a step around him, I’d see he was only one inch wide.

  “When I was in that cell,” Terry said, “and thought my death was seconds away, I saw clearly that everything I had tried to do, to tidy up the ethics in sport, was fucking meaningless. I realized that, barring accident, I could have lived for eighty or ninety years, and I had blown it. I was furious with myself! Furious! I tried to reason why I had done it, what I was thinking, and I realized that I’d been trying to leave a trace of myself so that after I was gone, I would still kind of be here. Everything is summed up in that idiotic ‘kind of.’ And you know what I realized on the very edge of death? That I couldn’t give a fuck. I didn’t want to build a statue of myself. I had an epiphany. Have you ever had one? They’re great! This was mine: I found out that I had killed myself because I wanted to live forever. I had tossed my life away in the name of some daft I don’t know what-”

  “Project,” I said. Dad and I looked at each other.

  “Project. Yeah. Anyway, I swore if I got out of there I’d live in the moment, fuck everyone, let my fellow man do whatever he wants, and I swore that I’d follow Harry’s advice and stay anonymous for the rest of my days.”

  Terry suddenly turned to Caroline with clear, serious eyes.

  “I wanted to call you, but every time I was about to, I remembered that cell, that death chamber, and I understood that the way I loved you was sort of possessive, and like my sporting rampage, it was a way of barricading myself against, I don’t know…death. That’s why I’ve chosen to love only prostitutes. There’s no chance of getting into that old routine of jealousy and possessiveness. I took myself out of the competition, like Harry said. I’m free, and I’ve been free since that day. And you know what I do now? When I wake up every day, I say to myself ten times, ‘I am a soulless dying animal with an embarrassingly short lifespan.’ Then I go out, as the world sinks or swims, and make myself a little more comfortable. In the cooperative our profits aren’t outstanding, but we make a fairly decent living, and we can afford to live like kings because Thailand’s cheap as chips!”

  A long silence followed, in which no one knew where to look.

  “Australia loves you,” Dad said finally.

  “And they hate you,” Terry said back.

  Despite their divergent paths in life- two diametrically opposed roads less traveled- the brothers had come to the same conclusion, Terry, naturally, through epiphany and the cathartic afterbirth of his near-death trauma, and Dad through reflection and thought and intellectually obsessing about death. Uneducated Terry, the man Dad had once described as being unable to write his name in the snow with his piss, had somehow intuited the traps of the fear of death and with ease sidestepped them, as if they were dog turds on a brightly lit street. Dad, on the other hand, had intellectually recognized the traps but still managed to fall into every one of them. Yes, I could see it in his face straightaway. Dad was crushed! Terry had lived the truth of Dad’s life, and Dad never had, even though it was his truth.

  “So what happens now?” Dad asked.

  “You stay with me. All of you.”

  We looked at each other, knowing that it was a bad idea but that we had no other choice. Nobody moved. We were like a tribe of cave dwellers whose cave had just caved in. As my eyes shifted from my father to his brother, I thought: These sick characters are my family. Then I thought: Career criminals and philosophers have a surprising amount in common- they are both at odds with society, they both live uncompromisingly by their own rules, and they both make really lousy parent figures. A few minutes passed, and even though nobody budged in any direction, I felt like the two brothers were already tearing me apart.

  VIII

  Life in Thailand was easygoing. They call it the land of smiles. That’s not an empty tag: Thais never stop grinning, so much so that at first I thought we’d landed in a vast land of simpletons. Generally, though, the chaos of Bangkok was in harmony with my state of mind. There was only one thing I had to watch out for other than the tap water and those suspicious smiles: Thais have such a deep regard for heads and such a low opinion of feet that everyone kept telling me I should not point my tootsies at people’s noggins. They must have thought I was planning to.

  A travel guide told me that foreigners can be ordained as Buddhist monks and I thought that sounded like an impressive addition to my résumé, but I found out that monks must abstain from murdering bugs (even if they invade your pajamas), stealing, lying, sex, luxuries, and intoxicants, including beer and double espressos, and I didn’t think that left anything except meditating and the ritual burning of incense. Their philosophy is based on the understanding that all life is suffering, and all life is, especially when you abstain from stealing, lying, sex, luxuries, beer, and double espressos. Anyway, I was too full of hate to be a Buddhist monk; in my thoughts I composed letters to the Towering Inferno that had compound words in them like “cunt-bitch” and “whore-nose” and curses such as “I hope you cough your uterus out your mouth.” Buddhists generally don’t think like that.

  I told Terry of my plan to murder Tim Lung and we laughed until our sides ached. It was a great icebreaker. After that, we spent many days and nights together, and I would go to bed with my ears exhausted but buzzing. Like his brother, Terry was prone to unrelenting talking jags, crazy monologues on every conceivable subject. Sometimes they’d be broken by moments of introspection, when he’d hold up one finger as if to put the universe on mute; he’d sway on his fat stumpy legs in openmouthed silence, his pupils would narrow as though I’d shone a torch on his face, and minutes would pass like this before his finger would come down and he’d continue talking. He did this wherever we went: in restaurants and at vegetable markets, at the poppy fields and in the sex shows. The more time I spent with Terry, the more I saw behind his mischievous smile an inner strength and something ageless. Even the breaded-fish crumbs on his beard looked timeless, as if they had always been there.

  He had unbelievable habits. He liked to roam the streets to see if someone would try to rip him off. Often he’d let them pick his pockets, then laugh about what was taken. Sometimes he’d stop the pickpockets and tell them what they did wrong. Sometimes he checked into backpacker hostels and partied in a German accent. And he never missed a single sunrise or sunset. One afternoon we watched a dark orange sun bleed into the horizon. “This is one of those sunsets made glorious by the pollution of a congested city. Someone has to say it and it might as well be me- Nature’s own work pales in comparison. The same goes for mass destruction. One day we’ll all be basking in the glow of a nuclear winter and God, won’t it be heaven on the eyes!”

  In addition to heroin smuggling and prostitution, the democratic cooperative of crime’s main trade was gambling on Thai boxing matches, the national sport. Terry would take me along when he bribed the boxers to take a dive. I remember thinking about his legacy in Australia, how he had been obsessed with fighting corruption in sport, and I was impressed with the way he now shat all over it like this. Often, on the way to the matches, Terry tried to get a tuk-tuk to give the drivers a scare- none would take my mammoth uncle, so we would be forced to walk. He never once got angry; he’d be happy to have the opportunity to stop at a vegetable market and buy a fresh bunch of coriander to wear around his neck (“Better smell than any flower!”). During the boxing match he would ask me all about myself: what I liked, what I didn’t, what were my hopes, my fears, my aspirations. Despite prostitutes, gambling, and drugs being his bread-and-butter, Terry was the sort of man who inspired you to be honest. I revealed myself to him as I never had to anyone else. He listened to my confessions seriously, and when I recounted the horror/love story of the Towering Inferno, he said he thought that I had “loved her sincerely, though not really.” I couldn’t argue with that.

  But what thrilled me most about my uncle was that he spoke of the real world- of prisons and bloodbaths and sweatshops and famines a
nd slaughterhouses and civil wars and kings and modern-day pirates. It was a wonderful relief to be out of the philosophical realm for a change, the oppressive, suffocating universe of Dad’s thought culs-de-sac and thought outdoor toilets. Terry talked of his experiences in China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, and India, his forays into remote and dangerous territories, the murderers he’d met in dingy gambling joints, how he picked them to join the democratic cooperative of crime. He talked of his reading and how he started with all of Dad’s favorite books, how he’d struggled through them at first, how he’d fallen in love with the printed word, and how he read voraciously in deserts and jungles, on trains and on the backs of camels. He told me of the moment he decided to begin his prodigious eating (it was in the Czech Republic, a cold potato dumpling soup). He saw food as his link to humanity, and while traveling, he was invited to family dinners wherever he went; he ate ritualistically with all races, tasting every culture and custom across the globe. “To be fat is to love life,” he said, and I realized that his belly wasn’t an impenetrable fortification against the world but a reaching out to embrace it.

  Most nights whores entered the house, sometimes two or three together. Their professionalism melted away at the sight of Terry’s enormous body, their famous Thai smiles morphing into grimaces on their young, fresh faces. The rest of us couldn’t help but feel sorry for these prostitutes as they led Terry to the bedroom like zookeepers conspiring to tranquilize an agitated gorilla. By the time they emerged though, he was vindicated; the girls were happy, exalted. They came out looking strengthened by the experience- rejuvenated, even. And he had his favorite whores too, ones who came back night after night. They often ate with us, and they never stopped smiling and laughing. You couldn’t deny that he loved them passionately. He showered them with affection and attention, and I really believed he didn’t feel icky that they went off to fuck and suck other men. His love really was uncomplicated. It was love without possessiveness. It was real love. And I couldn’t help comparing his love for the prostitutes with my love for the Towering Inferno, which was so bogged down in the issue of ownership, it could easily be argued that what I’d felt for her didn’t even resemble love at all.