A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  While it broke his parents’ hearts and put an unbelievable strain on his relationship with his young bride, Eddie took the job and set off to Paris to wait near Caroline for Dad to turn up. The most astounding fact of all that was revealed to us was that in all those years, from the moment Eddie met Dad in Paris onward, he couldn’t tolerate him. All those years he hated my father, and this hatred never once let up. It was beyond belief. The more I thought about Eddie’s deception, pretending to like a man for twenty years, the more I thought it verged on virtuosity. Then I decided that people probably pretend to like their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for their entire lives, and twenty years is no great trick.

  The traffic had been heavy leaving Bangkok, but now we were out of the city, it eased up. We were on an open road flanked by rice fields. Terry drove fast. We passed tiny mopeds with several generations of whole families on them and buses that looked to be veering dangerously out of control. For a while we were stuck behind a slow-moving tractor driven by a farmer who was languidly rolling a cigarette with both hands. Then we began winding up the mountains. As if to finish the story swilling around in my head, Terry gave us an update on what had happened to Eddie since he returned to Thailand.

  Eddie’s jubilation at having completed a twenty-year mission dissipated as things went almost immediately pear-shaped. After a separation of two hundred and forty months because of Eddie’s work, it took just six weeks of togetherness to destroy his marriage. Eddie moved out of his wife’s apartment in Bangkok and into a house in the remote village where he grew up. It was a terrible mistake- the ghosts of his parents were everywhere, berating him for breaking their hearts. So what did the fool do? He picked up the thread of his old dream. Dreams can be as dangerous as anything else. If you go through the years, changing with age and experience, and you forget to overhaul your dreams as well, you might find yourself in Eddie’s unenviable position: a forty-seven-year-old pursuing the dreams of a twenty-year-old. In Eddie’s case it was worse. He’d forgotten that they weren’t even his dreams to begin with; he’d got them secondhand. And now he had returned to this outrageously isolated community with the intention of setting up shop, only to find that his father’s replacement, now sixty-five years old, had the job well and truly sewn up.

  We arrived around sunset at Eddie’s place, a dilapidated house set in a small clearing. The hills surrounding it were covered by thick jungle. When Terry turned off the engine, I could hear a river running. We were really in the middle of nowhere. The isolation of the place made me vaguely ill. Having lived in a hut in the northwest corner of a labyrinth, I was no stranger to austerity or solitude, but this was something else. The house made me shudder. Maybe I’d read too much or seen too many films, but when you consider your life in terms of its dramatic attributes, as I did, everything becomes instantly loaded with meaning. A house is not just a house- it is a location where an episode of your life is staged, and I thought this remote house was an absolutely perfect setting for a menacing low point and possibly, if we stayed long enough, a tragic climax.

  Terry honked the horn, and Eddie came out waving his arms in a truly berserk manner.

  “What’s this? What do you want?”

  “Didn’t you tell him we were coming?” I asked Terry.

  “What for? Anyway, he knows now. Eddie! We’ve come to see how you’re getting on. Make up the spare rooms, will you? You have guests.”

  “I don’t work for you anymore, Terry. You can’t tell me…you can’t just come here and expect…Look, I’m a doctor now. I don’t want any funny business up here.”

  “My spies tell me you haven’t had one patient.”

  “How did you…They’re a little suspicious of outsiders. And I haven’t lived here for many, many years. It takes time to build a reputation, that’s all. Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? You can’t stay. My position here is precarious enough. The last thing I need is you giving me a bad name.”

  “My God, Eddie, we’re not going to run around the village in our underwear, we just want some peace and quiet, see a little scenery, and anyway, is it so strange for a doctor to take in a dying man and his family for a few weeks?”

  “Weeks? You intend to stay for weeks?”

  Terry laughed loudly and slapped Eddie on the back.

  “Him too?” Eddie asked quietly, looking in Dad’s direction. Dad shot a look back that was lifeless and cold. Then Eddie looked at me with a half smile that approximated warmth but was not quite warm. I had recently experienced from the Australian people the concept of hate by association and so recognized the size and smell of it. Terry grabbed his bag and headed into the house. The rest of us followed cautiously. I paused at the door and turned back to Eddie. He hadn’t moved. He was standing next to the Jeep, perfectly still. He looked as if he couldn’t endure any of us. And who could blame him? Individually we were all quite pleasant people, but together we were unendurable.

  I am not aware of what it is about my body that attracts mosquitos of all races and religions, I can only say that I doused my body in insect repellent and lit a thousand citronella candles, but for some reason they just kept coming. I removed the mosquito net from the bed and wrapped it like a shroud around my body. Through the diaphanous netting, I took in my surroundings. To say the furnishings were minimal was an understatement: four white walls, a creaky chair with a broken leg, a wobbly table, and a wafer-thin mattress. A window looked out on the thick vegetation of the jungle. I had insisted on the bedroom farthest away from everybody. There was a back door- good for entering and exiting without having to see anyone, I’d thought.

  I felt a mosquito on my arm. They were tunneling through the net. I tore it off in disgust and thought: What am I going to do here? In Bangkok, between the sex shows and the Buddhist temples, there was plenty to keep me occupied. Here, Dad’s dying was likely to make all non-Dad-dying thoughts virtually impossible. What was there to do other than watch the man deteriorate?

  ***

  After a silent dinner during which we all eyed each other suspiciously, where the air was thick with secret desires and no one said the unsayable so there was nothing much to be said, Eddie gave me a tour of the place.

  There wasn’t much to see. Eddie’s father had been an amateur painter as well as a doctor and had, unfortunately, found a way to combine his two interests. On the walls hung hauntingly realistic depictions of the bowels, heart, lungs, and kidneys and one of an aborted fetus who, despite his bad luck, appeared to be smiling wickedly. I didn’t bother pretending I liked the paintings, and Eddie didn’t expect me to. I followed him into his office, a large, immaculate room with wooden shutters. It had the kind of order and tidiness one finds in extremely finicky people and in people who have absolutely nothing to do with their time. As I knew Eddie had been waiting here for weeks on end without a single patient, it was clear which case it was.

  “This was my father’s office. This is where he saw patients, did his medical research, and avoided my mother. Everything is exactly how he left it. Actually, why did I say that? That’s not true. When he died, my mother packed everything into boxes, so I have rearranged everything exactly as I remember him having it.”

  It was your standard doctor’s office: an oversized desk, a comfy padded chair for the doctor, a straight-backed uncomfortable one for the patient, a raised examination table, a bookshelf with thousand-page medical manuals, and, on a side table, perfectly arranged surgical implements from not only this century but the last two as well. Unfortunately, there were more vulgar paintings of body parts on the walls, paintings that seemed to vilify the human as a reputable organism. The atmosphere in the room was heavy, because of either the lingering death of the father or the present-day frustrations of the son.

  “When I took up your uncle’s offer, my parents broke off all contact with me. Now, here they are.”

  “Who?”

  “My parents.” Eddie motioned to two earthenware pots I thought were bookends.r />
  “Their ashes?”

  “No, their spirits.”

  “Less messy.”

  So the spirits of Eddie’s deceased parents were kept on a high shelf. Out of reach of children.

  “I wait here every day. Not one single patient has come by. I’ve introduced myself around, but they’re totally uninterested in trying out anyone new. I’m not even sure how much business they throw around anyway. These people don’t consult doctors for minor ailments, and hardly even for major ones. But I’m determined to stick it out. After all, I went to medical school, didn’t I? So why shouldn’t I be a doctor? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write off those five years of university as a learning experience?”

  Apparently Eddie was completely oblivious of the glaring contradiction in his perspective on wasted time. He had chosen to fixate on the five years of medical school rather than the more obvious twenty years of chaperoning Dad and me.

  He sat on the edge of his desk and picked something from his teeth with his finger. He stared at me solemnly, as though picking food from his teeth were something he had learned at medical school.

  “There’re so many things I wanted to say to you over the years, Jasper. Things I could never say because they conflicted with the requirements of my job.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, as you may have figured out, I hate your father. And that the Australian people bought his bullshit even for one minute degrades them as a nation, and degrades all people everywhere.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Anyway, the point is, I hate your father. No, I loathe him.”

  “That’s your right.”

  “But what you might not know is, I don’t like you much either.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “You see? You don’t even ask me why. That’s what I don’t like about you. You’re smug and condescending. In fact, you’ve been smug and condescending ever since you were five years old.”

  “And that’s my right.”

  Eddie leered at me menacingly. Now that he was no longer pretending to like us, it felt as if he had become sinister overnight.

  “See? Smug and condescending. I’ve observed you your entire life. I probably know you better than you know yourself. You pride yourself on knowing people and what they’re thinking. But you don’t know yourself, do you? You know what it is that you especially don’t know? That you’re an extension of your father. When he dies, you will become him. I have no doubt about that. People can inherit thoughts- they can even inherent whole minds. Do you believe that?”

  “Not really.” Maybe.

  “When I met your father, he was just a little older than you are now. And you know what I see in you? The same exact man. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him in your core. That’s where you don’t know yourself. I’m sure every time you hear yourself say something that’s an echo of your father, you think it’s just habit. It’s not. It’s him inside you, waiting to come out. And that’s your blind spot, Jasper.”

  I gulped, despite myself. The blind spot. The fucking blind spot. Everyone has one. Even the geniuses. Even Freud and Nietzsche had mile-wide blind spots that wound up corrupting some element of their work. So was this mine? That I was sickeningly similar to my father, that I was turning into him, that I was going to inherit not just his antisocial behavior but his diseased thought processes as well? I was already worried that my depression back in Australia had had echoes of his depression.

  Eddie sat on his examination table and kicked his legs in the air.

  “It’s so refreshing to be speaking my mind. Keeping secrets is exhausting. I would like to tell you the truth, not just about you, but about me and what you and your father and your uncle have done to my life. So you know. It’s important that you know. Because when I finish telling you, you’ll understand why you must convince everyone to leave this house at once. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to make everyone leave. Before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Just listen. When Terry offered me the job of looking after your dad, I took it as a way to escape a future I was uncertain of. ‘Help them out when they need help, make sure they keep out of trouble, and take photos of them, as many photographs as you can,’ Terry said. That was my mission. Didn’t sound too tough. How was I supposed to know it was going to ruin my life? It’s my own fault, though, I’ll admit. I accepted a devil’s bargain. Have you noticed that in books and movies the Devil is always depicted with a sense of humor while God is deadly serious? I think in reality it would be the other way around, don’t you?”

  “Probably.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to quit. But watching your lives was like watching an accident in slow motion. It was compelling. When I was away from Australia, away from your dad and you, I felt I was missing episodes of my favorite TV show. It was maddening. I’d be making love to my wife and thinking, ‘What are they up to now? What trouble are they in? I’m missing it, dammit!’ And I found I made excuses to return earlier and earlier. And I’d go back to listen to your father’s insipid, unending diatribes, but I couldn’t drag myself away. I was hooked. I was a junkie, plain and simple. I was hopelessly addicted to you.”

  Eddie was kicking wildly now and bouncing up and down. I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to. I just had to weather this outburst.

  “For twenty years I tried to get away, to wean myself off this drug of your family. But I couldn’t. When I wasn’t with you, I didn’t know who I was. I was not a person, I was a nothing. When I went back to Australia and saw you both embroiled in some ridiculous episode, I felt alive. I felt such brightness it practically came out my eyes. My wife wanted a child, but how could I when I already had two children? Yes, I love you both as much as I hate you both, more than you will ever know. I can tell you, after I deposited you two in Terry’s lap, I was devastated. Mission accomplished. I knew as soon as I moved home that I could no longer stand to be with my wife. And I was right. She couldn’t understand why I was irritable, why I was empty. I couldn’t share the emptiness with her and I didn’t love her enough for her to fill it with love, so I left her and came up here. You see? I am completely empty, and I’ve come here in order to try to fill myself. Now do you understand why you must leave? I’ve come here to find myself again, to find out who I am. I’m building myself from the ground up. Your father is always talking about projects. You were my project. And now I need another one. That’s why I need patients. I’m continuing my life where I was interrupted, and obviously I can’t do it with you two here. That’s why you have to talk your uncle into taking you all out of here.”

  “Why don’t you just throw us out?”

  “Well, Mr. Smug, Mr. Condescension, I can’t. You might think your uncle’s all fun and games, but I’ve seen the violence he’s capable of.”

  “Terry’s pretty stubborn. I don’t think I’d have much luck convincing him of anything.”

  “Please, Jasper. Please. Your father’s dying. And he is going to do one more crazy thing, and it’s going to be a big one. You must know that too. You can feel it coming, can’t you? It’s like an approaching storm. It’s going to be something wild and unexpected and dangerous and stupid. I stay up nights thinking about it. What is he going to do? Do you know? What is it? I must know. But I can’t. You see? You must leave!”

  “I’ll try to speak to Terry.”

  “You don’t try, you do. What do you think will happen when your father dies? It’s you that will take up his heritage of doing crazy, unbelievable things. And you will turn out to be an even bigger spectacle than your dad. And that’s why I promise you, if you don’t leave now, I will follow you doggedly for your whole life until you have a son, and then I will have a son just so my son can follow your son. Don’t you see? This is an addiction that can go on for generations! For centuries! We’re at a crucial point here, Jasp
er. If I don’t get off you now, I will be attached to you forever.”

  That was an unpleasant thought.

  “Anyway. That’s it. Go speak to your uncle. If you stay, I don’t know what I’ll do. Slit your throats in your sleep, probably.” With that thought he let out a laugh, the kind where you don’t see any teeth. “Leave me alone now. I must pray to my parents.”

  Eddie laid some brightly colored flowers on the floor and knelt in front of them and started muttering. He prayed daily for success, which was bad news- when a doctor in your neighborhood prays for business, you’d better hope his gods aren’t listening.

  ***

  I poked my head into Terry’s room on the way to bed. Even though I’d knocked and he’d said come in, he hadn’t bothered to throw clothes on. He was standing naked in the center of the room.

  “Hey, Jasper! What’s going on?”

  “Never mind. Goodnight.”

  I closed the door. I wasn’t in the mood for chatting to a fat naked man at the moment. Then again, I wasn’t in the mood for having my throat slit in my sleep either. I reopened the door. Terry hadn’t moved.

  “Jesus, can’t you knock?”

  “Eddie’s gone crazy. He’s threatening to slit our throats in our sleep.”

  “That’s not especially hospitable, is it?”

  “I don’t think he wants to kill us, I just think that by being here, Dad and I are likely to push him over the edge.”

  “So?”

  “So shouldn’t we get out of here?”

  “Probably.”

  “Good.”

  “But we’re not going to.”

  “Why not?”

  His eyebrows were all bunched up, and his mouth was open as if any second he were going to speak. Any second now.