A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  “Terry. Are you all right?”

  “Of course I am. I’m a little agitated, that’s all. I’m not used to being agitated. You know, I’ve been away from my family for so long, it’s having a funny effect on me having you two here. I don’t feel quite myself. I don’t feel quite as…free. I’ve started fretting about you two, if you want to know the truth. And I haven’t fretted about anything or anyone in a long time.”

  “And Caroline? Are you fretting about her too?”

  Terry’s face turned purple in a split second. Then his eyes went all funny. I felt I was standing outside a house watching someone flick the lights on and off.

  “You’re a pretty intuitive guy, Jasper. What is your intuition telling you? Mine is telling me that something is going to happen in this house. I’m not sure what. It could be a good thing, though I doubt it. It’ll probably be a bad thing. It could even be a very bad thing. And maybe we should get out of here, but I’m insanely curious. Aren’t you? Curiosity is one of my favorite things. Intense curiosity is like one of those tantric orgasms, a long, maddening, delayed pleasure. That’s what it is.”

  I said goodnight, closed the door, and left him alone in his nakedness, thinking of normal families who have normal problems like alcoholism and gambling and wife-beating and drug addiction. I envied them.

  ***

  I woke early the next morning. My throat was unslit. The sun was hot already at six-thirty. From my window I could see mist oozing out of the jungle. We were at a high altitude, and the mist hid the mountain peaks from sight. I’d had a bad night’s sleep, thinking about everything Eddie had said. I knew he was right. Dad was planning something, even if he was doing it subconsciously. But didn’t I already know what it was? I felt as though I did, but I couldn’t quite see it. It was concealed somewhere in my mind, somewhere dark and far away. In fact, suddenly I felt I knew everything that would happen in the future but had for some reason forgotten it, and further, I thought that everybody on the planet also knew the future, only they had forgotten it too, and that fortunetellers and prognosticators weren’t people with supernatural insights after all, they were just people with good memories.

  I dressed and went out the back door so as not to run into anybody.

  At the back of the house, at the edge of the jungle, was a shed. I went inside. There on rickety wooden shelves were paints and paintbrushes. Leaning against the wall were a number of blank canvases. So this was where Eddie’s father had painted his disgusting artworks. It appeared to have once been a chicken coop, although there were no chickens now. There were chicken feathers, though, and a couple of ancient broken eggshells. On the floor was a half-finished painting of a pair of kidneys; Eddie’s father had obviously got it into his head to use egg yolk to get the right kind of yellow.

  I picked up a paintbrush. The bristles, caked in dried paint, were stiff as wood. Outside the chicken coop there was a trough filled with muddy rainwater, as if it had fallen from the sky that way, brown and gluggy. I rinsed the brush thoroughly in the water, flicking the hairs with my fingers. As I did this, I saw Caroline walking from the house down the hill. She was walking quickly, though every few steps she’d stop and stand perfectly still before continuing on her way, as if she were late for an appointment she dreaded keeping. I watched her until she disappeared into the jungle.

  I went back into the chicken coop, opened a can of paint, dipped the brush in, and started attacking a canvas. I let my brush float across it, seeing what it wanted to paint. It seemed to favor eyes. Hollow eyes, eyes like juicy plums, eyes like germs seen through a microscope, eyes within eyes, concentric eyes, overlapping eyes. The canvas was sick with them. I had to look away; these thick painted eyes were burrowing into me in a way that was more than simply unsettling: they seemed to be moving something inside me. It took me another minute to work out that they were my father’s eyes. No wonder they made me sick.

  I put the canvas down and lifted another in its place. The brush started up again. This time it went for a whole face. A smug, self-satisfied face with wide, mocking eyes, a bushy mustache, a twisted brown mouth, and yellow teeth. The face of either a white slave-owner or a prison warden. I stared at the painting and felt a pang of anxiety, but I couldn’t work out why. It was as if a thread in my brain had become loose, but I was afraid to pull on it in case my whole being unraveled. Then I realized: the painting- it was the face. The face I’d dreamed about in childhood. The imperishable floating face I had seen my whole life. As I painted, I was able to recall details I didn’t know I had actually seen before: bags under the eyes, a small gap between the front teeth, wrinkles at the corners of the smiling mouth. I had a premonition that one day this face would come down from the sky to head-butt me. Suddenly the heat in the chicken coop became unbearable. I felt stifled. Being inside a humid chicken coop with that haughty face and a thousand reproductions of my father’s eyes was suffocating.

  ***

  That afternoon I was lying in my bed listening to the rain. I felt groundless. Traveling on a fake passport probably meant that I could never return to Australia. That made me nationless. And, worse, the fake name on my passport was one I didn’t like, that I was actually sickened by, and unless I organized another fake passport, I might be Kasper until the end of my days.

  I stayed in bed all afternoon, unable to force Eddie’s words out of my head, his supposition that I was turning into my father. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him. That’s where you don’t know yourself. That’s your blind spot, Jasper. Could that be true? Wouldn’t that coincide with Dad’s old idea that I was actually him prematurely reincarnated? And now that I was thinking of it, wasn’t there perhaps already some frightening evidence of this? Ever since Dad had started dying again, hadn’t I gotten physically stronger? Were we on a kind of seesaw- he goes down, I go up?

  There was a knock on my door. It was Caroline. She had been caught in the rain and was drenched from head to toe.

  “Jasper- you don’t want your father to die, do you?”

  “Well, I don’t have a specific day in mind, but I don’t like the idea of him living forever. So yes, if you put it that way, I suppose I do want him to die.”

  She came over and sat on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been into the village. The people around here are deeply superstitious, and maybe not for nothing. There are still ways we might be able to cure him.”

  “You want to make him late for his date with destiny?”

  “I want your father to rub this all over his body.” She handed me a small jar with a glutinous, milk-colored substance in it.

  “What is it?”

  “Oil made of fat melted from the chin of a woman who died in childbirth.”

  I looked at the container. I couldn’t tell if it actually contained what she said it did, and I wasn’t thinking of the poor woman who died in childbirth, either; I was thinking of the person who melted the fat from her chin.

  “Where did you get this, and, more importantly, how much did you pay for it?”

  “I got it from an old woman in the village. She said it’s great for cancer.”

  Great for cancer?

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “Your father isn’t listening to me right now. He doesn’t want me to help him. I can’t even give him a glass of water. You need to get him to rub this oil all over himself.”

  “How am I supposed to excite him into rubbing a stranger’s chin fat on his body?”

  “That’s what you have to work out.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re his son.”

  “And you’re his wife.”

  “Things are not so good between us at the moment,” she said, without elaborating. Not that she needed to- I was thoroughly familiar with the sharp-edged love triangle threatening to cut us all to shreds.

  I procrastinated in the hallway for a while, but finally I went into Dad’s room. He
was bent over his desk, not reading or writing anything, just bending.

  “Dad,” I said.

  He didn’t give any sign he knew I was there. Citronella candles were spread all around the room. He had a mosquito net above the bed, and one over the armchair in the corner too.

  “Are the insects bothering you?” I asked.

  “Do you think I’m welcoming them like old friends?” he said, without turning around.

  “It’s just that I have some insect repellent if you want it.”

  “I already have some.”

  “This is a new sort. Apparently the locals use it.”

  Dad turned to me. I stepped forward and put the jar of melted chin fat in his hand.

  “You have to smear it over your whole body.”

  Dad unscrewed the lid and sniffed the contents. “It smells funny.”

  “Dad- do you think we’re similar?”

  “In what way- physically?”

  “No, I don’t know. As people.”

  “That would be your worst nightmare, wouldn’t it?”

  “I have one or two worse ones.”

  We heard a buzzing. We both looked around but couldn’t see where it was coming from. Dad took off his shirt and scooped a handful of the melted chin fat from the jar and started smearing it over his chest and belly.

  “You want some?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  I started to feel queasy, now thinking of the woman who had died in childbirth. I wondered if her baby had lived, and if one day he might not be annoyed that he hadn’t been the one to inherit the fat of his mother’s chin.

  “Eddie’s turned out to be a different sort of bloke than we thought, hasn’t he?” Dad said, coating his underarms.

  I was tempted to recount Eddie’s sick monologue and menacing threats, but I didn’t want to add any further stress to his stressed-out body.

  “It was still good for you to have a good friend, even if it was all a lie.”

  “I know.”

  “Eddie was the first person to tell me anything useful about Astrid.”

  “Was he?”

  “He led me to your Paris journal.”

  “You read it?”

  “Cover to cover.”

  “Made you sick?”

  “Extremely.”

  “Well, that’s what you get for snooping.”

  As he said this he removed his sandals and rubbed the chin fat between his toes. It made a squishy sound.

  “In it you said you thought I might be the premature reincarnation of yourself.”

  Dad cocked his head to one side, closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again. He looked at me as though he had just performed a magic trick in which I vanish and he was annoyed that it hadn’t worked. “What’s your point?”

  “Do you still believe that?”

  “I think it’s highly possible, even when you consider that I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Exactly.”

  I felt an old fury welling up inside me. Who is this irritating man? I walked out and slammed the door. Then I opened it again.

  “That’s not insect repellent,” I said.

  “I know. You don’t think I recognize melted chin fat when I see it?”

  I stood there, my mind a complete blank.

  “I was eavesdropping, you little idiot,” he admitted.

  “So what’s wrong with you? Why would you put that crap on your body?”

  “I’m dying, Jasper! Don’t you get it? What do I care what I put on my body? Chin fat, stomach fat, goat feces. So what? When you’re dying, even disgust loses its meaning.”

  ***

  Dad was hurrying to his doom, there was no denying that. He looked more ravaged each day. Ravaged mentally too- he couldn’t shake the fear that Caroline wanted to go back to Uncle Terry, or that we were all discussing this possibility behind his back. He was paranoid that we were constantly talking about him. This fear soon became a hot topic of conversation between the rest of us. That was how he breathed life into his own delusions and set them free.

  Our dinners continued to be as silent as the first; the only noise was Dad sighing loudly in between spoonfuls of spicy soup. Reading between the sighs, I knew that he was growing increasingly furious because he wasn’t getting enough pity from anyone. He didn’t want a lot. Just the minimum would do. Terry was no help there- he was still stuck on the idea of giving Dad pleasure and stimulation; and Caroline was even less help- she pretended she’d stopped believing in his death altogether. She applied herself to the unenviable task of trying to reverse the course of his cancer; she was dragging in every sort of witchcraft- psychospiritual healing, visualization, karma repair. All around him was a loathsome form of positivism, anathema to a dying man. And probably because Caroline was obsessed with trying to save Dad’s life and Terry his soul, Dad became obsessed with suicide, saying that to die of natural causes was just plain lazy. The more they tried to save him with outlandish methods, the more he insisted on taking the matter of dying into his own hands.

  One night I heard Dad screaming. I came out of my bedroom to see Terry chasing him around the living room with a pillow.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He’s trying to kill me!”

  “I don’t want you to die. You want you to die. I’m just trying to help you out.”

  “Stay away from me, you fucker! I said I wanted to commit suicide. I didn’t say I wanted to be murdered.”

  Poor Dad. It’s not that he didn’t have clear ideas, it’s just that he had too many, and they contradicted, effectively canceling each other out. Dad didn’t want to be smothered by his brother, but he couldn’t bring himself to do his own smothering.

  “Let me do this,” Terry said. “I was always there for you, and I always will be.”

  “You weren’t there for me when our mother tried to kill me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Dad stared at Terry a long time. “Nothing,” he said finally.

  “You know what? You don’t know how to die because you don’t know who you are.”

  “Well, who am I?”

  “You tell me.”

  After some hesitation, Dad described himself as a “seer of limited epiphanies.” I thought that was pretty good, but Terry thought he was something else entirely: a Christ figure who couldn’t summon the courage to sacrifice himself, a Napoleon who didn’t have the stomach for battle, and a Shakespeare who didn’t have a gift with words. It was clear we were getting closer to defining who Dad was.

  Dad let out a low moan and stared at the floor. Terry put his wide, thick hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  “I want you to admit that despite having lived for so long on this earth, you don’t know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, how can you be what you are?”

  Dad didn’t respond in words but let out another moan, like an animal who had just visited his parents in a butcher shop window.

  I went to bed wondering, Do I know who I am? Yes, I do: I’m Kasper. No, I mean Jasper. Above all, I am not my father. I am not turning into my father. I am not a premature reincarnation of my father. I’m me, that’s all. No one more, no one less.

  This thinking nauseated me, and it felt like the nausea was changing the shape of my face. I climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror. I wasn’t looking better or worse, simply different. Soon I might not be able to recognize myself at all, I thought. Something strange was happening to my face, something that was not simply the process of aging. I was turning into someone not myself.

  There was a loud noise outside. Someone or something was in the chicken coop. I looked out but couldn’t see anything from the window, only the reflection of my own slightly unfamiliar face. I turned off the light but even with the moonlight it was too black. The noises continued. I certainly wasn’t going to go out there to investigate. Who knew what creatures existed in the jungles of Thailand, and
who knew how hungry they were? All I could do was shut my eyes tight and try to go to sleep.

  In the morning I sat up and looked out my window. The coop was still standing- I half expected it to be hanging from a giant slobbering mouth. I headed out the back door.

  The grass under my feet was cold and wet. The air had a funny taste to it, like an old mint that had lost most of its flavor. I walked cautiously, readying myself to run back to the house if an animal should leap out at me. Inside, the coop was in chaos. The paint cans had been opened and their contents emptied onto the floor and onto my painting of the floating face, which had been torn into little pieces. Who had destroyed my painting? And why? There was nothing to do but go back to bed.

  I wasn’t in bed five minutes when I heard someone breathing. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It didn’t do any good. The breathing came closer and closer, until I felt it on my neck. I hoped it wasn’t Eddie. It was. I turned over to see him leaning down over me. I jumped up.

  “What do you want?”

  “Jasper, what are you doing today?”

  “Sleeping, hopefully.”

  “I’m going out driving to see if I can drum up some business.”

  “OK, then- have a good day.”

  “Yeah. You too.”

  And still Eddie didn’t move. Even though it was exhausting to do so, I felt sorry for him. There’s no other way to say it. He looked lovesick. It was a bad look.

  “I don’t suppose you want to come along. Keep me company?” Eddie asked.

  It was a daunting proposition. Spending the day alone with Eddie didn’t particularly appeal to me, and visiting sick people even less, but it turned out there was nothing I could imagine as disagreeable as staying in the house with Dad’s clanking death.

  ***

  We went traipsing up and down the countryside in the pitiless sun. I thought Australia was hot! The humidity in the mountains was out of control- I could feel beads of sweat forming on my gallbladder. We rode along, not saying much. When Eddie was silent, I felt as if I were the only person alive in the world- although I had that feeling when he was talking too. Wherever we went, people watched us. They couldn’t understand a man in his mid-forties wanting to become a doctor- it was a violation of the natural order. Eddie tried to take it in his stride, but it was obviously wearing him down. He had only vicious, unfriendly words to say about the healthy, peaceful inhabitants of this tranquil village. He couldn’t stand their contentment. He even resisted the cutesy Thai custom of smiling like a cretin in every conceivable situation, although he had to if he wanted to lure patients. But his smile took up only one side of his divided face. I saw the real one, with the furious down-turned lips and restrained homicidal rage in his blinking eye.