A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  ***

  Dad spent the first few months in Thailand remote and surly. On the rare occasions we risked outings and sat in restaurants frequented by Australian tourists, his name would pop up in their conversations, and hearing himself disparaged in the third person nauseated him. He often bought the Australian papers and read them while grinding his teeth, and afterward he wrote long letters to the editors, letters I begged him not to send. As for me, I stayed a mile away from the papers and swore to do so for all time. I’ve come to the conclusion that reading the newspaper is sort of like drinking your own piss. Some people say it’s good for you, but I don’t believe it.

  Maybe the hate waves from Australia finally took their toll, because Dad started dying again. It was clear that the cancer had reemerged in his lungs and was spreading. Over a period of a few months, his body became the centerpiece in a theater of horror. It looked as if he were being eaten from the inside out. He moved gruesomely from flesh to bone. He became pale and looked as though his essence had been suffused with methane. Eventually he avoided mirrors altogether. He stopped shaving and wandered around Terry’s place like a castaway, so thin he was swimming in his clothes. Then, just as suddenly, his trajectory toward death plateaued. He didn’t get any better, but he stopped getting worse. It was clear to me that he was waiting for something, waiting to do something, and he wasn’t going to die until he did it. There’s a lot to be said for the power of obstinacy. People often will themselves to stay alive; cripples walk and dead men get erections. Look around. It happens.

  At first Terry and Caroline did nothing but plead with him to see doctors and begin another course of chemotherapy, but Dad refused. I knew it was doubtful that I could persuade him to do anything, but I couldn’t help thinking of Anouk and her obsessive belief in the powers of meditation. I tried to convince him that the possibility remained that by extreme efforts of concentration he might vanquish the cancer on his own. To humor me, he tried one afternoon. We sat together at the foot of the Buddha. I instructed him that superhuman efforts of the most intense form of mind control were required, but Dad was never able to clear his mind of skeptical thoughts. In the middle of meditation, he opened one eyelid and said, “You know what Mencken said about the human body? He said this: ‘All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient machine. He has the worst kidneys known to comparative zoology, and the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it is called upon to do, is less efficient than the eye of the earthworm; an optical instrument maker, who made an instrument so clumsy would be mobbed by his customers.’ ”

  “That sounds true,” I said.

  “Well, then- what makes you think meditation can override my body’s congenital frailty?”

  “I don’t know. It was just an idea.”

  “It’s a useless idea. Remember how Heraclitus said a man’s character is his fate? That’s not true. It’s his body that is his fate.”

  Dad pulled himself up, using the Buddha’s toes as leverage, and staggered back toward the house. Caroline was standing at the door, watching us.

  “How did it go?” I heard her ask.

  “It was great. I’m healed. I’ll live for another several billion years. I don’t know why I never tried it before.”

  Caroline nodded wearily, then accompanied Dad back inside.

  Poor Caroline. On top of her role as primary caregiver, she had her own problems. She surprised herself by succumbing to emotional outbursts and crying fits. She’d been profoundly shaken by the events in Australia. She had always seen herself as somewhat of a thick-skinned, carefree, unself-conscious woman who loved life and never took any aspect of it seriously, least of all public opinion. But the outpouring of hatred focused on her had a serious and permanent destabilizing effect. She had become cautious and introverted; she saw this difference and no longer liked herself. On top of that, the reappearance of Terry, her childhood love, had called her marriage to Dad into question. I wasn’t sleeping well, so I was often witness to their midnight soap operas. Caroline would go bleary-eyed into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Dad would sneak down the hallway after her and peer around the doorway. His soupy breathing always gave him away.

  “What are you doing?” she’d ask.

  “Nothing. Stretching my legs.”

  “Are you spying on me?”

  “I’m not spying. I missed you, that’s all. Isn’t it romantic?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do? Do you think I wait until you’re asleep and then…what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean!”

  I tell you, you’ve never heard so much subtext in your life!

  Caroline and Dad shared the bedroom next to mine. Often I’d hear the three a.m. opening of sliding doors. I’d sit up in bed and look out my window at the slim figure of Caroline crossing the lawn to the reclining Buddha. In the moonlight I could see everything. Sometimes she’d rest her head on Buddha’s shoulder, and if the night was still and the birds asleep, I could make out the soft sound of her voice drifting into my room. “He’s fat and disgusting. And a criminal. He’s a fat, disgusting criminal. And he’s dead. He’s fat and he’s dead and he likes whores.” Once I heard her say, “And who am I? Look at my body. I’m no prize.”

  The most painful moments came when it was time for bed. We’d be sprawled on cushions on the floor, bloated and drunk from the evening meal. Suddenly conversations would become stillborn dialogues.

  Dad: “I’m tired.”

  Caroline: “Go to bed, then.”

  Dad would stare at Terry in a faintly sinister way.

  Dad: “In a little while.”

  Caroline: “Well, I’m going to bed.”

  Terry: “Me too.”

  Dad: “Me too.”

  Dad did everything he could not to leave Caroline and Terry alone together. It was awkward, although I suspected he secretly loved the idea of being betrayed by his brother. To be betrayed by his brother was cheap melodrama of Biblical proportions, and it would be a gift to the dying man- a gift that showed life had not forgotten to include him in her grubby comedies. Then one night I saw Caroline sneaking out of Terry’s room, her hair messed up, shirt half unbuttoned. She froze at the sight of me. I gave her a weary look- what was I supposed to do, wink? Still, I couldn’t bring myself to blame her for her treachery. It was an untenable situation all around. I just wished she could have waited; it wouldn’t be long before Dad was out of the way. Cancer thrives on broken hearts; it is a vulture waiting for you to give up on human warmth. Dad often talked about the shame of the unlived life, but it was the shame of his unloved life that was really killing him.

  I wasn’t sure if Terry was aware of his role in this triangle, and I don’t think that in general he knew he had succeeded in doing what Dad had only dreamed about, and that by doing so he had irrevocably cut Dad off from himself. Otherwise, he maybe wouldn’t have harassed Dad as much as he did.

  Some months after our arrival, Terry got it into his head that it was within his powers to make Dad’s final days a constant wonder and joy, and he recruited me to help. He dragged the three of us to bathe naked in the river, then to look at cloud formations, then to bet at a dogfight, then to wallow in flesh and booze at a drunken orgy. Dad seethed about all these interruptions to his dying in peace and threw Terry nothing but odious, hate-filled looks. As for me, I was relieved to be doing something. Maybe it was the sudden freedom of having someone else to worry about Dad, but ever since arriving in Thailand, I’d had an enormous amount of energy. I felt stronger too, as if I could wrestle an animal to the ground. I woke early each morning, spent the day walking from one side of Bangkok to the other, and went to bed late each night. I seemed to need very little sleep. I thrived on the activities Terry meant for Dad to thrive on.

  One obsc
enely hot afternoon, after I had been on my feet for several hours, I lay down in the hammock, stared at that humongous Buddha, and made a sort of mental inventory of my life experiences to see if they in fact wove together seamlessly without my having noticed at the time. I thought if I could decode the order of the past, I could deduce what was coming next.

  I couldn’t. A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Terry’s naked torso. It was always impressive to see him with his shirt off. It made me wonder if he hadn’t reversed the usual order of enlightenment and achieved his Buddha-like serenity from the outside in.

  “You ready?” Terry said.

  “For what?”

  “We’re going to try kick-starting your father’s motor again.”

  I swung my legs over the hammock and followed Terry into Dad’s room. He was lying on the bed stomach down. He didn’t acknowledge our presence in any way.

  “Look, Marty, don’t you find yourself a heavy weight, pinning you down?”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “Don’t you want instead to be a leaf blown in the air, or a drop of rain, or a wispy cloud?”

  “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

  “You need to be reborn. You need to die and be reborn.”

  “I’m too old for rebirth. And who do you think you are, anyway? You’re a murderer a hundred times over, you’re a drug pusher, a pimp, a gunrunner, yet you take yourself for a visionary and a sage! Why is it your hypocrisy doesn’t make you sick?”

  “Good question. It’s an amiable contradiction, that’s all.”

  God, how these unedifying discussions went on and on.

  Terry hauled Dad out of bed and dragged us to a shooting range where you could use pump-action shotguns to hit the targets. Neither Dad nor I had much love for guns, and the force of the action sent Dad keeling over onto his back. Terry bent over him, and Dad looked up, his mouth open, trembling all over.

  “Marty, tell me something- where has all this meditating on death got you?”

  “Fucked if I know.”

  “Jasper says you’re a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner.”

  “Does he?”

  “Tell me about the corner. What does it look like? How did you get there? And what do you think would get you out?”

  “Help me up,” Dad said. When he was on his feet again, he said, “In brief, here it is. Because humans deny their own mortality to such an extent they become meaning machines, I can never be sure when something supernatural or religious in nature occurs that I did not manufacture my connection to it out of desperation to believe in my own specialness and my desire for continuance.”

  “Maybe because you’ve never had mystical experiences.”

  “But he has,” I said. “Once he saw everything in the universe simultaneously. But he never followed up on it.”

  “So you understand the nature of the corner now? If men are constantly manufacturing meaning in order to deny death, then how can I know I didn’t manufacture that experience myself? I can’t know for sure, so I must assume I did.”

  “But then your whole life you haven’t ever really taken your own soul seriously.”

  “Stop talking about the soul. I don’t believe in it, and neither does Jasper.”

  Terry turned to me. I shrugged. In truth, I simply could not make up my mind about its existence. Dad was right- the immortal soul didn’t wash with me. Its shelf life felt overestimated. I believed instead in the mortal soul, one that from the moment of birth is ceaselessly worn away and that will die when I die. Whatever its shortcomings, a mortal soul still seemed perfectly sublime to me, no matter what anyone said.

  “Look, Marty. Let it go- the mind that wants to solve the mysteries of the universe. It’s over. You lost.”

  “No, you look, Terry,” Dad said wearily. “If I did live wrongly, if I made blunders and still have blunders coming up, I think maintaining the status quo of my deficient personality would be a lot less tragic than changing at the eleventh hour. I don’t want to be the dying man who learns how to live five seconds before his death. I’m happy to be ridiculous, but I don’t want my life to assume the characteristics of a tragedy, thanks.”

  I reloaded my shotgun and aimed at the target and, for the first time that day, hit the bull’s-eye. I turned back to Dad and Terry, but neither had seen it. They were both unmoving, two brothers standing together but alive in very different worlds.

  ***

  That night I buried myself deep under the covers. The shots Terry was firing at Dad seemed to be missing the target and hitting me instead. It occurred to me that the uncompromising position Dad held in the face of death was likely to be my own someday. Despite my desire to be his mirror opposite, I had to admit there were disturbing similarities between us. I also had a restless inquiring mind that aimed to solve the mysteries of creation, and like him, I didn’t know how to find respite from this fruitless, unending investigation. I wasn’t so sure Terry wasn’t rocking my boat on purpose. He must have known Dad wasn’t going to change one atom of his personality, and that’s why he was intent on dragging me along for these outings. He was aiming at me and getting me square on. I knew that somewhere within me was a spiritual inclination that Dad lacked, but it was still faint and unresolved. It wouldn’t take much to wake up one day and find I’d drifted away from my own center and was now tracing my father’s footsteps like a zombie.

  There was a knock on the door. I didn’t say anything, but the door opened anyway. Terry waddled into the bedroom sideways.

  “Damn these narrow doorways. Hey, Jasper, I need to pick your brain. What can we do to make your father’s final days wonderful?”

  “Fuck, Terry. We can’t. Just leave him be.”

  “I know! Maybe we should go on a trip.”

  “All of us? Together?”

  “Yes! In the country! We could go visit Eddie, see how he’s getting on.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”

  “Your father’s not doing so good. I think to be in the company of his oldest friend might be just what he needs. And besides, the countryside could freshen him up.”

  “You can’t freshen him up. He’s putrefying.”

  “I’m going to tell everyone.”

  “Wait- what about the cooperative? Don’t you have prostitutes to pimp, opium to grow, guns to trade?”

  “The others can take care of things until I get back.”

  “Look, Terry. Dad doesn’t get lost in the beauty of nature. Natural phenomena make him sink into the worst kind of introspection. What he needs is distraction, not a journey into his interior. Besides, you’re sleeping with his wife and he knows it.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Come on, Terry. I saw her coming out of your room.”

  “Look. Caroline’s frustrated. Your father doesn’t know how to cuddle, that’s all. He only uses one arm!”

  It was pointless talking to Terry. His mind was made up. We would all of us go to a remote mountain village and stay with Eddie for a couple of weeks. I tore at my hair and overheard him break the news ungently to Dad and Caroline, and though it was a unanimously detested idea, the following morning he herded us all into the Jeep.

  IX

  During the drive I ruminated on what Terry had told me about Eddie’s history. His father had been the only doctor in the remote mountain village where they lived, and as a young man Eddie was expected to follow in his footsteps. It was his parents’ dream that Eddie would take over once his father retired, and such was the force of their will, it became Eddie’s dream too. Over the years they scraped and sacrificed to send their son to medical school, and he went along, filled with gratitude and enthusiasm.

  Unfortunately, things went sour from the first day Eddie opened his medical textbooks. As much as he wanted to pursue “his” dream and please his parents, he found that he was offended by the slop inside the human body. So Eddie spent most of his internship dry-retching. There was really no part o
f human anatomy he could stomach: the lungs, the heart, the blood, the intestines were not simply repellent symbols of man’s animality, but so delicate and prone to disease and disintegration that he scarcely knew how people survived from one minute to the next.

  In his second year of medical school he married a beautiful journalism student whom he had won over dishonestly by boasting about his future as a doctor and predicting a prosperous life together. What should have been a happy event was for Eddie a secret torture. He had serious doubts about entering the medical profession but didn’t trust that he was inherently lovable enough “as is.” Now he had something else to be confused and guilty over: he had begun a marriage based on a lie.

  Then he met the man who would change his life. It was two a.m. when Terry Dean stumbled into the emergency room with a penknife stuck in the small of his back at such an awkward angle he couldn’t remove it himself. As Eddie pulled out the knife, Terry’s open and candid manner, combined with the late-night silence of the graveyard shift, made Eddie confide to his patient his confused feelings- how it felt to be torn between disgust and duty, between obligation and the fear of failure. Basically, Eddie moaned: did he want to be a fucking doctor or didn’t he? He admitted that he loathed the idea and it would in all probability drive him to suicide, but how could he get out of it now? How else could he make money? Terry listened sympathetically, and on the spot offered him a high-paying though unusual job: traveling the world and watching over his brother with the aim of helping him out when he needed it. In short, to be Martin Dean’s friend and protector.