A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  “I’m going too,” I said.

  Dad and Terry exchanged looks. Dad’s was dark and silent while his brother’s was wide and mystified.

  “Plenty of these boats sink long before they get to Australia,” Terry said anxiously. “Marty! I absolutely forbid this! You can’t let Jasper go with you.”

  “I can’t stop him,” Dad said, and I detected in his voice an enthusiasm to be reckless with my life now that his was over.

  “Jasper, you’re a fool. Don’t do this,” Terry protested.

  “I have to.”

  Terry sighed, and muttered that I was more like my father every day. The deal was sealed with a handshake and fifty grand in cold, hard cash, and once the transaction was made, the smugglers seemed to relax and even offered us beers “on the house.” Watching these villains, I imagined that I had branched off the evolutionary line at an earlier age and evolved in secret, parallel to man but always apart.

  “Tell me one thing, Jasper,” Terry said after we left the restaurant. “Why are you going?”

  I shrugged. It was complicated. I didn’t want the people-smugglers, those fucking ghouls, to double-cross Dad and throw his body into the water half an hour out to sea. But this was not just an altruistic outburst; it was a form of preemptive strike. I didn’t want Dad’s resentment haunting me from beyond the grave, or little waves of guilt lapping at my future serenity. But above all, it was to be a sentimental journey: if he was to die, either at sea or among “his people” (whoever the fuck they were), I wanted to see it for myself, eyeball to vacant eyeball. My whole life I’d been pushed beyond rational limits by this man, and I was offended by the notion that I could be so implicated in his lifelong drama and not be present for the grand finale. He might have been his own worst enemy, but he was my worst enemy too, and I’d be damned if I was going to wait patiently by the riverbank, as in the Chinese proverb, for his corpse to float by. I wanted to see him die and bury him and pat the earth with my bare hands.

  I say this as a loving son.

  III

  Our last night in Thailand, Terry prepared a feast, but the night was ruined early by Dad’s failure to show up. We searched the house thoroughly, especially the bathrooms and toilets, any hole he might have fallen into, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, on his desk, we found a short note: “Dear Jasper and Terry. Gone to a brothel. Back later.”

  Terry took it personally that his brother was avoiding him on their last night together, and I couldn’t quite convince him that each dying man must perform his own archaic ritual. Some hold hands with loved ones; others prefer unprotected and exploitative third world sex.

  Before bed, I packed a few things for the trip. We had taken very little to Thailand, and I put together even less for the return trip- one change of clothes each, two toothbrushes, one tube of toothpaste, and two vials of poison, procured by Terry, who had presented them to me with shaky hands over dinner. “Here you are, nephew,” he said, handing me little plastic tubes filled with a cloudy liquid. “In case the voyage drifts on without end or winds up on the bottom of the sea floor and you can look forward only to starvation or drowning, voilà! A third option!” He assured me it was a quick and relatively painless poison, though I pondered the word “relatively” for some time, unconsoled that we’d be howling in agony for a briefer period than offered by the other poisons in the shop. I hid the plastic tubes in a zipped pocket on the side of my bag.

  I didn’t close my eyes all night. I thought about Caroline and my inability to save her. What a disappointment my brain turned out to be. After everything I had witnessed in my life, I had almost convinced myself that the wheel of personal history spins on thought, and therefore my history was muddy because my thinking had been muddy. I imagined that everything I’d experienced to date was likely to be a materialization of my fears (especially my fear of Dad’s fears). In short, I had briefly believed that if man’s character is his fate, and if his character is the sum of his actions, and his actions are a result of his thoughts, then man’s character, actions, and fate are dependent on what he thinks. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  An hour before dawn, when it was time to leave to catch the boat, Dad still hadn’t returned. I imagined he was either lost in Bangkok, weary at having spent the night bargaining down prostitutes, or else soaking in a bubble bath in a fancy hotel, having changed his mind about the voyage without telling us.

  “What do we do?” Terry asked.

  “Let’s get down to the dock. Maybe he’ll turn up there.”

  It was a half-hour drive to the dock through the stacked-up city and then through ramshackle suburbs that looked like an enormous house of cards that had fallen down. We parked next to a long pier. The sun, emerging over the horizon, glowed through the fog. Above us we could just make out clouds the shape of lopped-off heads.

  “There she is,” Terry said.

  When I saw the fishing trawler, our dilapidated would-be coffin, all the joints in my body stiffened. It was a crappy wooden boat that looked like an ancient relic restored in a hurry just for show. I thought: This is where we’re to be stored like the cod livers we are.

  It wasn’t long before the asylum-seekers, the Runaways, began appearing in fearful, suspicious groups of two and three. There were men, women, and children. I did my own head count as they crowded the dock- eight…twelve…seventeen…twenty-five…thirty…They kept coming. There seemed no way this little boat could accommodate us all. Mothers hugged their sons and daughters tightly. I felt like crying. You can’t overlook the poignancy of a family risking its children’s existence to give them a better life.

  But here they were! The Runaways! Here they were, demonstrating twin expressions of human desperation and human hope, huddling together furtively, examining the trawler with profound mistrust. They weren’t fools. They knew they were riding on a coin toss. They were deeply suspicious that this rusty vessel could possibly be their deliverance. I checked them out, wondering: Will we resort to cannibalism before the journey’s done? Will I be eating that man’s thigh and drinking that woman’s spinal fluid with a bile chaser?

  I waited with Terry on the pier. The smugglers appeared as if from nowhere, all wearing khaki. The captain stepped off the boat. He was a slim man with a tired face who stood rubbing the back of his neck over and over as if it were a genie’s bottle. He ordered us all on board.

  “I’m not going if Dad’s not going,” I said with enormous relief.

  “Wait! There he is.”

  Dammit, yes, there he was, coming down the dock, staggering toward us.

  Someone once said that at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. Well, I’m sorry, but no one at any age deserves the face my father had as he walked toward us. It was as though the force of gravity had gone haywire and was pulling his face down to the earth and up to the moon at the same time.

  “Is that it? Is that the boat? Is that the fucking boat? Is it watertight? It looks pretty loose to me.”

  “That’s her, all right.”

  “It looks like it couldn’t float in space.”

  “I agree. It’s not too late to chuck this whole idea.”

  “No, no. We’ll carry on.”

  “Right.” Fuck.

  The sun was rising. It was almost morning. The captain came over and urged us on board again. Terry put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it like a lemon.

  “All right. Remember what I told you: if these two men do not reach Australia in tip-top condition, I will kill you.”

  “And if he doesn’t,” Dad said, “my ghost will come back and kick you in the balls.”

  “That’s settled, then,” Terry said. “You got it?”

  The captain nodded wearily. He seemed used to threats.

  Terry and Dad stood facing each other like two men about to wrestle. Dad tried to smile, but his face couldn’t support the sudden strain. Terry puffed a little, as if he were climbing stairs, and slapped Dad lightly on the arm.

  “Well.
This was a hell of a reunion, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry dying’s made me such a shit,” Dad said. He looked awkward with this goodbye, and put his hand on his head as if he were worried it would blow away. Then they gave each other a smile. You could see their whole lives in that smile: their childhood, their adventures. The smile said, “Didn’t we turn out to be two different and amusing creatures?”

  “Just have a nice peaceful death,” Terry said, “and try not to take Jasper with you.”

  “He’ll be OK,” Dad said, and turning away from his brother, he boarded the boat, which knocked gently against the pier.

  Terry grabbed me by the shoulders and smiled. He leaned forward, smelling of coriander and lemongrass, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “You take care of yourself.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I think I’ll get out of Thailand. Maybe move to Kurdistan or Uzbekistan, one of those places I can’t spell. I’ll try setting up a cooperative there. This whole thing with your dad and Caroline has shaken me up a little. I think I need to go on a long, rough journey. See what’s up. I have a funny feeling the world’s about to go up in smoke. The war has started, Jasper. Take my word for it. The have-nots are getting their act together. And the haves are in for a rough trot.”

  I agreed it seemed to be developing that way.

  “Will you ever come out of the shadows and return to Australia?”

  “One day I’ll come back and give them all the fright of their lives.”

  “Come on, let’s go home,” Dad shouted from the deck.

  Terry looked at Dad and held up a finger to say he needed one minute. “Jasper, before you go, I’d like to give you a word or two of advice.”

  “All right.”

  “From watching you these past months, I’ve worked out that there’s something you want above all things. You want not to be like your father.”

  That wasn’t something I kept hidden, even from Dad.

  “You’ve probably worked out by now that if you think courageous thoughts, you will cross busy streets without looking, and if you think sadistic, venal thoughts, you will find yourself pulling out the chair every time someone is about to sit down. You are what you think. So if you don’t want to turn into your father, you don’t want to think yourself into a corner like he did- you need to think yourself into the open, and the only way to do that is to enjoy not knowing whether you’re right or wrong, play the game of life without trying to work out the rules. Stop judging the living, enjoy futility, don’t be disillusioned with murder, remember that fasting men survive while starving men die, laugh as your illusions collapse, and above all, always bless every single minute of this silly season in hell.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I thanked him, hugged him one last time, and boarded the boat.

  As we set off, through a heavy curtain of black engine smoke, I waved goodbye to Terry until he disappeared from sight. I looked at Dad to see if he was sad to never see his brother again, and I noticed that he was turned in the opposite direction, gazing out at the horizon and smiling an inappropriately optimistic smile.

  IV

  The terrible ocean! Weeks and weeks of it!

  It seemed impossible for the captain to get the boat under control. Large waves threatened us on all sides. The trawler was tossed appallingly. It felt like she wasn’t just rocking back and forth but wheeling and spiraling and looping, doing mad circles in space.

  Below deck, the portholes were welded shut and painted over with black tar. The floors were lined with soiled cardboard, and the passengers slept on mattresses as thin as sheets. I remembered how when I first arrived in Thailand everyone told me not to point my feet at anyone’s head. Now, in this cramped space, people were crowded together so closely that you ended up putting your feet not just at the heads of strangers but right into their faces too, day in, day out. Dad and I were jammed into a tight corner, sandwiched between bulky sacks of rice and a chain-smoking family from southern China.

  In that hot and sweaty cage, the only oxygen we inhaled had been exhaled by other passengers. To be below deck was to be submerged in a nightmare. The crush of limbs and skeletal torsos was oppressive, especially in the suffocating darkness, where voices- peculiar, chilling, guttural sounds- made up conversations from which we were estranged. If you had to go outside for air, you didn’t so much move among them as were pushed remorselessly from one end of the hull to the other.

  Sometimes, Dad and I slept up on the hard, ridged deck, using as pillows coils of wet, heavy rope caked in mud from one sea floor or another. It wasn’t much better up there; the days were stinking hot, it rained steadily, and who’d have imagined mosquitos could make it this far out to sea? They gnawed us incessantly. We could hardly hear ourselves swear at God against the loud, throbbing engine, which was belching out clouds of black smoke relentlessly.

  At night we lay staring up at the sky, where the stars swam in shapes somehow made menacing by sobs, screams, and howls of delirium, mostly from Dad.

  There’s nothing pleasant about the final stages of cancer. He was confused, delirious, convulsing; he had severe throbbing headaches, giddiness, slurred speech, dizzy spells, nausea, vomiting, trembling, sweating, unbearable muscle pain, extreme weakness, and sleeps as heavy as comas. He made me feed him from a pill bottle with an unreadable label. They were opiates, he said. So Dad’s various immortality projects had given way to the more important mortality project: to die with the least pain.

  No one liked having the sick man on board. They knew the journey required strength and stamina, and besides, no matter what religion you followed, a dying man was a bad omen in every one. Perhaps because of this, the Runaways were reluctant to share their provisions with us. And it wasn’t just Dad’s health that bothered them- we emanated the smell of the alien. They knew we were Australians who had paid enormous sums of money to enter our own country illegally. They couldn’t wrap their minds around it.

  One night on deck I was awoken by a voice shouting, “Why you here?” I opened my eyes to see the ship’s captain standing above us, smoking a cigarette. His face was a pulp novel I didn’t have the energy to read. “I don’t think he make it,” the captain’s voice persisted as his foot nudged Dad in the stomach. “Maybe we throw him off.”

  “Maybe I throw you off,” I said.

  One of the Runaways stood up behind me and shouted something to the captain in a language I didn’t recognize. The captain backed off. I turned around. The Runaway was around the same age as me, with large, beautiful eyes that were much too big for his drawn face. He had long curly hair and long curly eyelashes. Everything about him was long and curly.

  “They say you’re Australian,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I would like to take an Australian name. Can you think of one for me?”

  “OK. Sure. How about…Ned.”

  “Ned?”

  “Ned.”

  “All right. I am now Ned. Will you please call me by my new name and see if I turn around?”

  “OK.”

  Ned faced away from me and I called out “Shane!” as a test. He didn’t fall for it. After that I tried calling him Bob, Henry, Frederick, and Hot-pants21, but he didn’t even flinch. Then I called out “Ned!” and he spun around, grinning madly.

  “Thank you,” he said politely. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why are you here? We would all like to know.”

  I looked behind me. Others had emerged from the cabin below to wash their filthy lungs in the night air. Dad was sweating and feverish, and Ned held out a wet rag for my inspection.

  “May I?” he asked me.

  “Go ahead.”

  Ned pressed the wet rag against Dad’s forehead. Dad let out a long sigh. Our fellow passengers yelled out questions to Ned, and he yelled back before waving them over. They shuffled closer, crowded around us, and wet our ears with a spatterin
g of broken English. These strange ancillary characters, called in at the last minute to make a guest appearance in the epilogue of a man’s life, wanted to understand.

  “What’s your name?” Ned asked Dad.

  “I’m Martin. This is Jasper.”

  “So, Martin, why do you go into Australia like this?” Ned asked.

  “They don’t want me there,” Dad said weakly.

  “What did you do?”

  “I made some bad mistakes.”

  “You kill someone?”

  “No.”

  “You rape someone?”

  “No. It was nothing like that. It was a…financial indiscretion.” He winced. If only Dad had raped and killed. Those crimes would at least have been worth his life, and possibly mine.

  Ned translated the phrase “financial indiscretion” to the others, and as if on cue a thick curtain of cloud parted, allowing the moon to illuminate their blank confusion. Watching them watching us, I wondered if they had the slightest clue what to expect in Australia. I supposed they knew they’d be living an underground existence, exploited in brothels, factories, building sites, restaurant kitchens, and by the fashion industry, who would get them sewing their fingers to the bone. But I doubted they were aware of the adolescent competition among political leaders to see who had the toughest immigration policies, the kind you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley. Or that public opinion was already set against them, because even if you’re running for your life you still have to wait in line, or that Australia, like everywhere, excelled in making arbitrary distinctions between people seem important.

  If they knew this, there was no time to dwell on it. Surviving the journey was the only priority, and that was no easy trick. Things were getting steadily worse. Supplies were dwindling. Wind and rain battered the boat. Enormous swollen waves threatened to capsize us at every moment. There were times we could not let go of the rail or we would have been thrown overboard. We felt no closer to Australia than when we started, and it became hard to believe that our country even existed anymore, or any other country, for that matter. The ocean was growing bigger. It covered the whole earth. The sky got bigger too- it was raised even higher, stretched to breaking point. Our boat was the smallest thing in creation, and we were infinitesimal. Hunger and thirst shrank us further. The heat was a full-body fat suit we all wore together. Many were trembling with fever. We spotted land once or twice, and I screamed in the captain’s eardrum, “Let’s pull in there, for Chrissakes!”