A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  We ate lunch by the side of the road. I could feel no wind, but the branches of the trees moved every so often. After lunch Eddie said, “Did you speak to Terry about taking you all out of here?”

  “He wants us to stay. He thinks something bad is going to happen in your house and he wants to see what it is.”

  “He thinks that, does he? That’s bad news for us.”

  Before Eddie could add any more, we heard the roar of a motorcycle charging at full speed.

  “Look who it is,” Eddie said.

  “Who?”

  “That antique doctor. Look how smug he is.”

  The motorcycle screamed toward us, stirring up dust. It was hard to believe anyone antique could ride a bike so fast. As the doctor came to a shuddering stop, Eddie corrected his posture. It’s difficult to look like a winner when you’re clearly the loser, but posture plays a part.

  The doctor may have been in his sixties, but he had the physique of an Olympic swimmer. I couldn’t detect anything smug about him. He and Eddie exchanged a few words. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I saw Eddie’s eyes widen in a way that darkened his face and made me somehow relieved I couldn’t understand the language. When the doctor had sped off, I asked Eddie, “What did he say? Will he retire soon?”

  “There’s bad news. Fuck! Terrible news! The doctor already has a young apprentice, ready to fill his shoes.”

  Well, that was the end of that. There was absolutely no use for Eddie in this community, and he knew it.

  ***

  All I wanted to do was sleep, but the moment I returned to my room, I knew it would be impossible, mostly because Caroline was sitting on the edge of my bed.

  “I went into the village today,” she said.

  “Please, no more chin fat.”

  She handed me a small leather pouch tied with a string. I took it and pulled out a necklace with three strange objects hanging off it.

  “A piece of elephant tusk and some kind of tooth,” I guessed.

  “Tiger’s tooth.”

  “Sure. And what’s that third one?”

  “A dried-out cat’s eye.”

  “Nice. And I’m to get Dad to wear this, I suppose.”

  “No, it’s for you.”

  “For me?”

  “It’s an amulet,” she said, and placed it around my neck and leaned back and gazed at me as if I were a sad-eyed puppy in a pet store window.

  “What’s it for?”

  “To protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Me? OK, I guess. A little tired.”

  “I wish you could have met my son,” she said.

  “I wish so too.”

  Poor Caroline. It seemed she wanted to conduct several conversations but didn’t know which to pick.

  She stood suddenly. “OK, then,” she said, and went out by the back door. I almost took the amulet off but for some reason was overcome with fear of being without it. I thought: The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all- it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.

  ***

  The next few days I spent at the mirror, confirming my features with the touch of my hand. Nose? Here! Chin? Here! Mouth? Teeth? Forehead? Here! Here! Here! This inane facial roll call was the only valuable way I could think of to pass the time. Somewhere else in the house Caroline, Dad, and Terry were circling each other like rabid dogs. I stayed well away.

  I spent many hours sitting with Eddie in his office. It seemed to me it was he, and not I, who had taken on the qualities of an accident in slow motion, and I didn’t want to miss the show. Besides, Caroline’s gift had put doubts about my health into my mind, and I thought it best if I let Eddie examine me. He gave me a thorough going-over. He tested the dull thumping of my heart, my sluggish reflexes; I even let him take my blood. Not that there was a pathology lab in the area where he could send it. He just filled a vial and gave it to me afterward as a keepsake. He said there was nothing wrong with me.

  We were in the office listening to the radio through the stethoscope when something extraordinary and unexpected happened- a patient! A woman came in visibly upset and agitated. Eddie put on a solemn face that for all I know might’ve been genuine. I sat there on the edge of my seat while the woman gibbered on. “The doctor’s very sick,” Eddie translated to me. “Maybe dying,” he added, and stared at me for a long time, just to show me he wasn’t smiling.

  The three of us piled into Eddie’s car and drove at breakneck speed to the doctor’s house. When we arrived, we heard the most awful screeching imaginable.

  “It’s too late. He’s dead,” Eddie said.

  “How do you know?”

  “That wailing.”

  Eddie was right. There was nothing ambiguous about that wailing.

  He turned off the engine, grabbed his doctor’s bag, and combed his hair down with his hands.

  “But he’s dead- what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to pronounce him dead.”

  “Don’t you think that nightmarish howling has pretty much got that covered?”

  “Even in a village as remote as this, there are rules. The dead must be officially declared dead,” he said. I took a deep breath and followed Eddie and the woman inside.

  A dozen or so people were crowded around the dead doctor’s bed; either they had come to mourn him or had arrived earlier to watch him die. The doctor that I’d seen a few days earlier tearing around the countryside on his motorbike was now perfectly motionless. The man whose statuesque physique I had envied had caved in. His body looked as if someone had gone in with a powerful vacuum cleaner and just sucked everything out: heart, ribcage, spine, everything. Frankly, he didn’t even look like skin and bones, just skin.

  I kept an eye on Eddie but he’d made himself look harmless and sincere, which was no small trick considering the vile thoughts going on in his head. The village doctor was gone- now it was between Eddie and the young doctor. I could see Eddie thinking, He shouldn’t be too hard to discredit. Eddie straightened himself up, ready to seduce the mourners. It was his first pronouncement as a doctor.

  They all spoke to Eddie in quiet tones, and afterward he turned to me and I saw a flicker of derangement, ruthlessness, obstinacy, and deviousness. It’s astonishing the complexity that can be perceived in a face at the right time of day. Eddie took me aside and explained that the apprentice had been here when the doctor had died and had already proclaimed him dead.

  “He didn’t waste any time, the little bastard,” Eddie whispered.

  “Where’s the young doctor now?”

  “He went home to bed. Apparently he’s sick too.”

  This time Eddie couldn’t contain his glee. He asked directions to the young doctor’s house and went off, I was certain, to treat him in as negligent and slipshod a manner as possible.

  He drove fast. I caught him practicing his sweetest possible smile in the rearview mirror, which meant he was gearing up to play the tyrant.

  The young doctor lived by himself in a hut high up in the mountains. Eddie raced inside. It was a struggle to keep up with him. The young doctor was lying on the bed with his clothes on. By the time I entered, Eddie was leaning over him.

  “Is he all right?” I asked.

  Eddie walked around the bed as if he were doing a victory dance.

  “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s a virus, but an uncommon one. I don’t know how to treat it.”

  “Well, if the old doctor had it and now the young doctor has it, it must be contagious. I’m getting out of here,” I said, covering my mouth as I left.

  “It’s probably not contagious.”

  “How do you know? You don’t know what it is.”

  “Could be that something crawled inside them and laid eggs in their intestines.”

  “That’s just disgusting.”
<
br />   “Or else it’s something they ate together. I don’t think you have to worry.”

  “I’ll decide when and where I worry,” I said, heading outside.

  The young doctor died two days later. Eddie didn’t leave his bedside the whole time. Despite Eddie’s insistence that the virus wasn’t contagious, I refused to set foot inside the death chamber. I knew the very moment the young doctor died, though, because the same hideous gut-wrenching wails as before echoed through the village. Frankly, I was suspicious of all this showy mourning and finally decided it was just a cultural tic, like those smiles. It’s not actually uncontrollable grief, I thought, it’s a show of uncontrollable grief. Quite a different thing.

  ***

  That’s how Eddie became the doctor of the village. He’d gotten what he wanted, but this didn’t soften him up. It was an error of judgment on my part to imagine it would. And it was an error on Eddie’s part to imagine that becoming the village doctor by default would warm the villagers to him. We went door-knocking. Some slammed the door in Eddie’s face; they thought he’d put a hex on the two doctors, a pox on both their houses. Eddie came out looking like a grave robber. We did the rounds anyway. There were no bites. And it was in no small part because the people didn’t seem ever to get sick.

  I’d scarcely thought it was possible, but Eddie was becoming even more unpleasant. All this healthiness was getting to him. “Not one patient! All I want is for someone to get ill! Violently ill! What are these people, immortal? They could do with a little motor neuron disease. Show them what life’s really about.” Eddie meant badly. His heart was in the wrong place.

  Thank God for farming accidents! After a few inadvertent amputations and the like, he eventually managed to scrounge up a couple of patients. The people were afraid of hospitals, so Eddie had to do things in the rice fields that I personally wouldn’t want done to me in anything other than the most sterile environment. But they didn’t seem to mind.

  As Eddie began his official career as a doctor, all these years after finishing medical school, I went back to the house to confront the dramas that I was sure would have progressed in my absence to a nice, steamy boiling point.

  ***

  “I’m in love with my husband’s brother,” Caroline said, as if she were on an American talk show and I didn’t know the names of the people involved. She straightened the chair I had unsuccessfully used to barricade the door.

  “I know it’s hard, Caroline. But can you hold out a little longer?”

  “Until your father’s dead? I’m so guilty. I’m counting the days. I want him to die.”

  This explained her feverish efforts to prolong his life: guilt. I had a feeling that when Dad did finally die, she would mourn him more than all of us. In fact, my father’s death was likely to ruin this woman. I thought I should speak to him about it, cautiously of course, and entreat him to give her to Terry while he was still alive. The death of her husband could send her over the edge for wishing it. I knew this would be a sore point with him, but for Caroline’s sake, for the image of her sad crazy eyes, I had to broach the subject.

  Dad was in bed with the lights out. The darkness helped me find the courage to go about my unenviable task. I launched right into it. I pretended that Caroline had said nothing to me and I had just deduced this all on my own. “Look,” I said, “I know this must be painful, and I know how you are- the last thing you want to do on the eve of your death is something noble- but the fact of the matter is, Caroline will be destroyed by your death if, as you die, she secretly wishes it. If you really love her, you must make a present of her to your brother. You must bequeath her, while you’re still alive.”

  Dad didn’t say a word. As I made this appalling speech, I thought that if someone said this to me, I would probably stick a butter knife through his tongue.

  “Leave me alone,” he said finally, in the dark.

  The next day Terry decided Dad must look at a dead bird he had seen on an early morning walk, and he dragged me along. He thought Dad would look at the still bird and be glad to be moving. It was a childish idea. My father had already seen many dead things, and they’d never made him glad to be alive. They wordlessly invited him to join them in death. This I knew. I wondered why Terry didn’t.

  “I think you should take Caroline off my hands,” Dad said, crouched over the unmoving bird.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think she can maintain this farce any longer than I can,” Dad said wearily. “We might have gotten away with it had you remained dead, like a good boy, but you had to resurrect yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I have to do with it.”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You take her, OK?”

  Terry’s body made an unexpected jolt, as if he’d rested his hand upon a high-voltage fence.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s say I agree to this bit of nonsense. What makes you think she’ll go along with it?”

  “Cut it out, Terry. You’ve always been a self-serving bastard, so why not just continue the tradition and serve yourself again- a helping of the woman you love, who, incomprehensibly, loves you back. You know, I always put my failure with women down to the lack of symmetry in my facial features, and yet here you are, the fattest man alive, and you get her again!”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Just take care of her, OK?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terry said, and his mouth made several odd shapes, though no sound came out. He looked as if he were trying to commit a long and difficult equation to memory.

  ***

  Caroline was sitting under a tree in the rain when Dad and I approached. I knew she was quietly tormenting herself. I thought I could hear her thoughts, fully articulated in my head. She was thinking of evil, whether she possessed evil herself or was possessed by it. She wanted to be good. She didn’t think she was good. She thought she was a victim of circumstance and that maybe all people who do evil are also victims of circumstance. She thought not only that Dad had cancer but that he was cancer. She wished he would fall in love with someone else and then die peacefully in his sleep. She felt Dad had taken over the story of her life and was rewriting it with messy handwriting so it became illegible. She thought her life had become illegible and incoherent.

  This is what I was certain I heard her thinking. I felt so sympathetic, I wished the ground would open up and swallow her.

  Dad strode up and laid it on the line. I should have guessed his first foray into noble deeds would blow up in his face. The truth is, his generosity of spirit extended only so far, and while magnanimously sacrificing himself on the altar of their love, he was unable to wipe the hurt look off his face, which killed the point of the whole exercise. It was this hurt look that made her explode.

  “No! How can you say that? I love you! You! I love YOU!”

  Dad pushed on. “Look. Terry was your first love, and I know you’ve never stopped loving him. It’s nobody’s fault. When you agreed to marry me, you thought he’d been dead for twenty years. We all did. So why pretend?”

  Dad put forth a convincing case and got all worked up as he laid it out. He was so convincing that what seemed inconceivable suddenly became conceivable- and that threw Caroline into confusion.

  “I don’t know. What do you want me to do? Is it that you don’t love me anymore? Yes, maybe it’s that.” And before Dad could answer, she said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I love you, and whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.”

  Dad’s resolve was tested here. Why did she keep tormenting him like this? How could he keep it up?

  “I want you to admit it,” he said.

  “Admit what?”

  “That you’re in love with him.”

  “Martin, it’s-”

  “Admit it!”

  “OK! I admit it! First I started thinking, why does he have to be alive? Why couldn’t he have just stayed dead? And the more time I spent wi
th Terry, the more I realized I was still in love with him. Then I started thinking, why do you have to be alive? Why are you dying so slowly? How unjust that someone who loved life, like my son, had to die so suddenly when someone who wants to die, like you, gets to live unendingly. Every time you talk about suicide my hopes jump up. But you never do it. You’re all talk! Why do you keep promising suicide if you won’t do it? You’re driving me crazy with all these promises of killing yourself! Do it or shut up about it, but stop getting my hopes up like that!” Suddenly Caroline stopped and covered her mouth with her hand, doubled over, and vomited. The vomit came through her fingers. When she straightened up, her face was twisted in shame. Every part of her face was magnified by it- her eyes were too round, her mouth too wide, her nostrils the same size as her mouth had been. Before anyone could say anything, she ran off into the jungle.

  Dad swayed on his thin legs, and his complexion became what I can only describe as grainy. My life has been an unfair and humiliating series of losing propositions, his face lamented. Love was my noble suicide bid.

  Just then Terry came out of the house. “Did I hear shouting?” he asked.

  “She’s all yours,” Dad said.