A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  As nice as all this was, I realized I was not communicating with my father. I almost gave up and started wondering where that furious mob had gotten to when suddenly, without even trying, I conjured up Dad’s face. Then I saw his hunched body. He was in his room, bending over his desk. I looked closer. He was writing a letter to one of the Sydney newspapers. I could make out only the salutation at the beginning of the letter. “Dear cunts” was crossed out and replaced with “My dear cunts.” I was convinced this was not my imagination but a real image of Dad right now, in the present. I thought: Dad! Dad! It’s me! A riotous mob is coming to murder Eddie and everyone in the house! Get out! Get everyone out! I tried to send him an image of the rioting mob so he’d know what they looked like when they turned up. I sent him an image of the mob as one common body closing in on the house, armed with Old World farming implements. They had scythes, for God’s sake!

  Without my permission, the vision faded away. I opened my eyes. It was a clouded-over black night, so dark I could have been underground. All around me the jungle was making formidable groaning sounds. How long had I been here? I had no way of knowing.

  I started walking again, pushing branches out of my way, my eyes still full of visions, my nose filled with out-of-place odors (cinnamon and maple syrup), my tongue with out-of-place tastes (toothpaste and Vegemite). I had the sensation of being in the world as never before.

  As I walked, I wondered, would they find the house empty? Had Dad heard my warning? Or had I just given up trying to save my family’s lives? I walked without knowing where I was going. I let my instinct guide me through the jungle, stomping on luscious plants that gave off a sweet, heady odor. I paused to drink the cold, delicious water of a small waterfall. Then I moved on again, stumbling over hills and through the dense foliage.

  I felt no fear. I felt such a part of the jungle that it seemed it would have been rude of the animals to venture out to eat me. Then I moved into a clearing that ran down a long hill where I could see the moon rising. All the eyes of the flowers and the mouths of the trees and the chins of strange rock formations seemed to be telling me I was going in the right direction. That was a relief, because there were no tracks. Somehow the silent mass of vengeful people had left everything undisturbed, as if they had been floating through the jungle like some formless ancient substance.

  When I finally found Eddie’s place, the lights were blazing inside. The wind was violently knocking at the windows and the doors. The sight of the house made my state of oneness vanish instantaneously. The world was hopelessly fragmented again; the absolute connectedness between me and all living things was gone. Now I felt indifferent to all living things. I couldn’t care less about them. The divisions between us were as thick as columns of bone and cartilage. There was me and there was them. Any fool could see it.

  Hiding behind a tree, I felt the blood cells racing through my heart. I remembered something Dad had once promised to teach me: how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I hoped he actually knew this essential skill.

  Of course I was too late. The door was wide open, and the mob was already leaving one by one, armed with scythes and hammers and pitchforks. There would be no point facing the mob or its decrystallized form, because presumably it had already done what it came to do. There was nothing to be gained in getting hacked to pieces myself.

  Blood covered the hands and the faces of the mob. Their clothes were so stained, they would just have to be thrown away. I waited until the last intruder left and then waited a few moments longer. I watched the house and tried to feel no fear. Even after all Dad had taught me, I was not prepared for such a moment. Nothing had prepared me for walking into a place where my family had been butchered. I struggled to recall any nugget of wisdom from my early childhood that might offer me advice on how to proceed, but I couldn’t, so I went forward into the house, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually defenseless. Of course I had many times imagined them already dead (as soon as I feel an emotional attachment to someone, I imagine his death, so as not to be disappointed later on), but in my mind they were always relatively clean corpses, quite neat in fact, and until now it had not occurred to me to prepare myself by imagining my loved ones’ brains splattered against a wall, their bodies lying sprawled in a pool of blood/shit/guts, et cetera.

  The first body I saw was Eddie’s. He looked as if he’d been run over a thousand times by a champion ice-skater. His face was so cut up I could barely make out it was him, except for his eyes, which had that frozen look of surprise characteristic of Botox and sudden death, staring up at the earthenware pots with his parents’ spirits in them, the ones who had purportedly been watching over him. It was easy to see the look of reproach in his eyes. Goodbye and good riddance, Eddie. You took your crumminess to its limit and it collapsed on top of you. Tough luck.

  With superhuman effort, my legs took me to the next room. There I saw Uncle Terry on his knees, and from behind he looked like the back of a VW Beetle about to do a reverse park into a tight spot. Sweat poured off the fat folds in his neck. I could hear him crying. He spun around to look at me, then turned back and raised his chubby arm, motioning toward Dad’s bedroom.

  I went in.

  Dad was also on his knees, swaying gently over the mutilated body of Caroline. His eyes were as wide as they could go, as though pried open with matchsticks. The love of his life was on her back, blood seeping from a dozen slashes. Her dead eyes were fixed in an insupportable gaze. I had to look away. There was something disturbing in those eyes. She looked like someone who had said something offensive and wanted to take it back. Later I found out she had died trying to protect Eddie, of all people; she was killed inadvertently, and it was her death that had turned the mob on itself, split it into factions- those who thought that it was OK to kill a middle-aged woman and those who thought it was out of order. That had effectively ended their rampage and sent them home.

  We buried Eddie and Caroline in the garden. It had started raining again, and we had no choice but to give them a wet, muddy burial, which was appropriate for Eddie maybe. But watching Caroline’s body disappear into the muck made us all sick and ashamed. Dad was having trouble breathing, as if something were blocking his airway- maybe his heart.

  ***

  The three of us drove back to Bangkok in silence, lost in the kind of grief that makes every smile in your life afterward less sincere. On the way Dad sat in absolute stillness, though he made little noises to let us know that every minute left in his life would be an unendurable torture. I knew he was blaming himself for her death, and not only himself but Terry too, for employing Eddie to begin with, and not only Terry but fate, chance, God, art, science, humanity, the Milky Way. Nothing was exonerated.

  When we arrived back at Terry’s house, we retired to our separate bedrooms to marvel at how quickly the human heart snaps shut and to wonder how we might ever pry it open again. It was only two days later, spurred either by Caroline’s murder or by the black dog barking in the manure of his heart, or by mourning crowding out rational thought, or maybe because even after a lifetime of reflecting on death, he still couldn’t quite comprehend the inevitability of his own, that Dad suddenly emerged from his grief-induced hypnosis and announced his final project. As Eddie had predicted, it was the looniest yet. And after a lifetime of watching Dad make improbable decision after improbable decision, and being in some way a victim of each one, what surprised me most was that I could still be surprised.

  SEVEN

  I

  I don’t want to die here,” Dad said.

  “What’s the matter?” Terry asked. “Don’t you like your room?”

  “The room’s fine. It’s this country.”

  The three of us were eating chicken laksas and watching the sun set over the polluted metropolis. As usual, Dad was nauseated and managed to make it seem as though his vomiting were a gut reaction not to the food but to the company.

  “Well, we don’t want
you to die either, do we, Jasper?”

  “No,” I said, and waited a full thirty seconds before adding, “not at the moment.”

  Dad wiped the corners of his mouth with my sleeve and said, “I want to die at home.”

  “When you say home, you mean…”

  “ Australia.”

  Terry and I looked at each other with dread.

  “Well, mate,” Terry said slowly, “that’s just not practical.”

  “I know. Nevertheless, I’m going home.”

  Terry took a deep breath and spoke to Dad calmly and deliberately, as though gently chastising his grown-up mentally disturbed son for smothering the family pet by overhugging.

  “Marty. Do you know what would happen the minute the plane landed on Aussie soil? You’d be arrested at the airport.” Dad didn’t say anything. He knew this was true. Terry pushed on: “Do you want to die in jail? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you fly back home.”

  “No, I don’t want to die in jail.”

  “That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You’ll die here.”

  “I have another idea,” Dad said, and at once any glimmer of hope died and I knew that a nice, quiet, peaceful death followed by an intimate funeral and a respectable period of restrained mourning was now out of the question. Whatever was coming was going to be dangerous, messy, and frantic and would drive me to the edge of insanity.

  “So, Marty, what are you suggesting?”

  “We sneak back into Australia.”

  “What?”

  “By boat,” he clarified. “Terry, I know you know who the people-smugglers are.”

  “This is nuts!” I said. “You can’t want to risk your life just to die in Australia! You hate Australia!”

  “Look, I know this is world-class hypocrisy. But I don’t fucking care. I’m homesick! I miss the landscape and the smell of it. I even miss my countrymen and the smell of them!”

  “Be careful now,” I said. “Your final act will be a direct contradiction of everything you’ve ever thought, said, and believed.”

  “I know,” he said almost cheerfully, not minding at all. In fact, he seemed enlivened by it. He was up on his feet now, swaying a little, daring us with his eyes to raise objections so he could shoot them down.

  “Didn’t you tell me nationalism is a disease?” I asked.

  “And I stand by it. But it’s a disease that, as it turns out, I have contracted, along with everything else. And I don’t see the point of trying to cure myself of a minor ailment when I’m about to die of a major one.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. What could I say?

  I had to get out the big guns to help me. Luckily, Dad had packed a suitcase full of books, and I found the very quote I needed in his well-thumbed copy of Fromm’s The Sane Society. I went into his room but he was on the toilet, so I read it to him through the bathroom door: “Hey, Dad. ‘The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their and his own human reality.’ ”

  “It doesn’t matter. When I die, my failures and weaknesses die with me. You see? My failures are dying too.”

  I continued: “ ‘Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism”…is its cult…Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.’ ”

  “So?”

  “So you don’t love humanity, do you?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Well, there you are!”

  Dad flushed the toilet and came out without washing his hands. “You can’t change my mind, Jasper. This is what I want. Dying men get dying wishes even if it irritates the living. And this is mine- I want to expire in my country, with my people.”

  Caroline, I thought. It was obvious that Dad was in the grip of a pain that would arrive forever. He had made himself perpetually vigilant against his own comfort, and this mission to Australia was a directive from a sadness that must be obeyed.

  But not only that. By tiptoeing back into Australia as human cargo in a risky smuggling operation, Dad had found one last stupid project, one that was sure to expedite his death.

  II

  The people-smugglers orchestrated their nasty enterprise out of an ordinary restaurant on a congested street that looked like seventy other congested streets I saw as we drove in. Terry gave Dad and me a warning at the door: “We’ve got to be careful with these guys. They’re absolutely brutal. They’ll cut your head off first, ask questions later, mostly about where to send your head.” With that in mind, we took a table and ordered jungle curries and beef salad. I had always imagined that fronts for criminal activity were merely façades, but here they actually served food, and it wasn’t bad.

  We ate without speaking. Dad coughed in between spoonfuls and in between coughs called repeatedly to a waiter for bottled water. Terry was shoveling down prawns and breathing through his nose. The King was glaring at me disapprovingly from a portrait on the far wall. A couple of English backpackers at the next table were discussing the physical and psychological differences between Thai prostitutes and a girl named Rita from East Sussex.

  “So, Terry,” I asked, “what happens now? We just sit here until closing time?”

  “Leave it to me.”

  We left it to him. All the communication happened wordlessly, according to a preestablished set of rules: Terry gave a conspiratorial nod to a waiter, who in turn gave it to the chef through an open window into the kitchen. The chef then passed the nod on to a man out of our line of vision, who for all we knew passed it on to twenty more men who lined a spiral staircase leading to the mezzanine of hell. After a few anxious minutes, a man with a slightly malformed bald head came out and sat down, biting his lip and staring at us threateningly. Terry produced an envelope brimming with money and pushed it across the table. That softened the smuggler up a little. Grabbing the envelope, he rose from the table. We followed him, our footsteps sounding prolonged echoes as we walked down a hallway that eventually led to a small windowless room where two armed men greeted us with cold stares. One of them molested us, searching for weapons, and when none were found a flabby middle-aged man in an expensive suit entered and gazed at us quietly. His impressive stillness made me feel I was in a story by Conrad, as if I were looking into the heart of darkness. Of course he was just a businessman, with the same love of profit and indifference to human suffering as his Western corporate counterparts. I thought that this man could be a midlevel executive at IBM or a legal adviser to the tobacco industry.

  Without warning, one of the bodyguards cracked the butt of a rifle over Terry’s head. His massive body crashed to the floor. He was unconscious but alive, his torso heaving with slow, deep breaths. When they aimed the guns at me, I thought how this was exactly the type of room I had always imagined I’d die in: small, airless, and crammed with strangers looking on indifferently.

  “You are police,” the boss said in English.

  “No. Not police,” Dad protested. “We are wanted criminals. Like you. Well, not like you. We don’t know if you’re wanted or not. Perhaps nobody wants you.”

  “You are police.”

  “No. Christ, listen. I have cancer. Cancer, you know. The big C. Death.” Dad then proceeded to tell them the whole absurd story of his fall from grace and escape from Australia.

  I thought it was commonly accepted that stories this ridiculous had to be true, but the smugglers seemed skeptical. As they deliberated our fate, I remembered how Orwell described the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever, and I thought that all around me were boots, people so terrible that the whole human race should be punished for doing nothing to curb their existence. The job of these people-smugglers was to recruit desperate people, strip them of every penny, lie to the
m before shoving them onto boats that routinely sank. Each year they sent hundreds to their terror-stricken deaths. These pure exploiters were the irritable bowel syndrome of the cosmos, I thought, and looking at these men as if they were examples of all men, I decided I’d be happy to disappear if it meant they also could not exist.

  The boss spoke quietly in Thai just as Terry regained consciousness. We helped him up off the floor, which was no easy task. Rubbing his head, he said, “They said it’ll cost you twenty-five thousand.”

  “Fifty thousand,” I said.

  “Jasper,” Dad whispered, “don’t you know anything about bargaining?”