A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  “That’s not Australia.”

  “Who cares? It’s land! Dry land! We won’t drown there!”

  We pushed on, cutting a foamy trail through an ocean bubbling with hostile intentions.

  It’s surprising just how placid the dying human animal can be in such a circus. I never would’ve believed it. I thought we’d be tearing each other’s flesh off, drinking the blood of our brothers, but it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone was too tired. Sure, there was crying and a fair amount of bitter frustration, but it was sad and quiet bitter frustration. We were tiny, shrunken creatures, too frail for any kind of serious protest.

  Most of the time Dad lay motionless on deck, looking like a scary stuffed toy you give to a child on Halloween.

  I stroked his forehead gently, but he summoned up just enough energy to shrug me off.

  “I’m dying,” he said bitterly.

  “Another couple of days and I’ll be dying too,” I said, to cheer him up.

  “I’m sorry about that. I told you not to come,” he said, knowing full well he hadn’t.

  Dad was trying to act remorseful for having selfishly aligned my fate to his. But I knew better. I knew something he would never admit- that he had never fully shaken off his old, sick delusion that I was the premature reincarnation of his still living self- and now he thought that if I died, he might live on.

  “Jasper, I’m dying,” he said again.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad! Look around! Everyone here is dying! We’re all going to die!”

  That burned him up. He was furious that his death was not being regarded as a tragic isolated spectacle. To die among the dying, as a number, was really a thorn in his side. Mostly, though, it was the constant praying to God that was getting under his skin. “I wish these idiots would shut up,” he said.

  “These are good people, Dad. We should be proud to drown among them.”

  Nonsense. I was talking pure nonsense. But Dad was determined to leave the earth in a belligerent state, and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. Even with his life packed and its passport stamped, he rejected the religious world for the umpteenth time.

  We were the only ones not praying, and the Runaways’ positivism really put Dad and me to shame. They still had the feeling that lovely things were stirring in the air. They were giddy in their ecstatic flight, blissful because their gods were not the inner kind, who can’t really help you out in a tangible, nonephemeral crisis like a sinking boat; their gods were old-fashioned, the kind who direct the whole of nature to the desires of the individual. What a lucky break! Their gods actually listened to people, and sometimes intervened. Their gods dealt out personal favors! It’s Who you know! That’s why their private experience had none of the cold terror of ours: we envisaged no big thumb and forefinger descending from the heavens to pluck us out of harm’s way.

  I tended to Dad in a sort of trance. In the dark he laid out countless ideas about life and how to live it. They were slightly more confused and puerile than his usual diatribes, though, and I realized that when you’re falling, the only thing you have to hold on to is yourself. When he talked, I pretended to listen. If he wanted to sleep, I slept too. When Dad moaned, I gave him painkillers. There wasn’t anything else to do. He was suffering, his far-off eyes farther off than ever before. I knew he was thinking of Caroline. “Martin Dean- what a fool he was!” he said. It gave him some comfort to talk about himself in the third-person past tense.

  Ned sometimes gave me a break. He took my place and gave Dad water and took over pretending to listen to his ceaseless droning. On those occasions I crawled over the half-conscious bodies of my companions to get to the deck for a breath of air. Above me the sky opened up like a cracked skull. The stars were glistening like beads of sweat. I was awake, but my senses were dreaming. My own sweat tasted of mango, then chocolate, then avocado. This was a disaster! Dad was dying too slowly and in too much pain. Why didn’t he just kill himself? Why do staunch atheists put up with so much futile agony? What was he waiting for?

  Suddenly I remembered. The poison!

  I ran down and climbed over the human mattress and whispered feverishly in his ear. “Do you want the poison?”

  Dad sat up and looked at me with glowing eyes. Death can be controlled, the eyes sang. Our vital powers were somewhat recharged, contemplating the poison.

  “Tomorrow morning at dawn,” he said. “We’ll do it together.”

  “Dad- I’m not taking the poison.”

  “No, of course not. I didn’t mean that you would take it. I just meant that I’d take it and you’d watch.”

  Poor Dad. He always hated loneliness, and now he was faced with the deepest, most concentrated form of loneliness in existence.

  But at dawn it was raining, and he didn’t want to commit suicide in the rain.

  When the rain cleared, it was too hot to end it all.

  At night he wanted to let out his final breath in the warm glare of the sun.

  In short, he was never ready. He vacillated interminably. He always found a new excuse not to do it: too rainy, too cloudy, too sunny, too choppy, too early, too late.

  Two or three days of agony passed in that way.

  ***

  It finally happened just after sunset around two or three weeks at sea. A wave of foam crashed below deck. We were half drowned. The shrieking didn’t help anything. When the ocean settled, Dad sat up in the dark. He suddenly had trouble breathing. I gave him some more water.

  “Jasper, I think this is it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. I was always suspicious of the way in movies people knew when their time was coming, but it’s true. Death knocks. He actually knocks.”

  “Can I do anything?”

  “Take me up top, wait until I’m dead, and push me off the boat.”

  “I thought you didn’t want a watery grave.”

  “I don’t. But these bastards have been eyeing me like I’m just one big lamb chop.”

  “Cancer hasn’t exactly made you appetizing.”

  “Don’t argue with me. Once I’m dead, I don’t want to spend another minute on this boat.”

  “Understood.”

  The Runaways didn’t take their eyes off us. They spoke to each other in quiet, conspiratorial tones as Ned helped me get Dad out of there.

  Up on deck his breathing grew easier. The Pacific air seemed to do him some good. The vast movement of the ocean pacified him. Well, at least I’d like to think so. These were his final moments, and I’d like to think that at the end he ceased to find his cosmic insignificance insulting, that finally he felt something whimsical in meaning nothing, that it was even somewhat amusing to be an accident in the appalling wasteland of space-time. This was my hope- that, staring out at the ocean’s majestical performance in surging blue and facing the mad sea wind, he might have cottoned on to the idea that the universal stage show was a bigger drama than he could ever have dreamed to land a key role in. But no, he didn’t put his existence into perspective at all- he was humorless about it right to the end. He went to his death a martyr to his own secret cause, unwilling to denounce himself.

  I record his last minutes in the sad spirit of a biographer too close to his subject.

  The night was silent, save for the creaking of the boat and the gentle lapping of the water. The moon hung brightly above the horizon. We were heading straight for it. The captain was steering us into the moon. I imagined a hatch door opening. I imagined us drifting inside. I imagined the door slamming shut behind us and the sound of crazy laughter. I imagined these things to distract me from the reality of my father’s death.

  “Look, Martin, look at the moon,” Ned said. “Look at how it has been painted on the sky. God is truly an artist.”

  That gave Dad a burst of energy. “I hope not, for all our sakes,” he said. “Honestly, Ned, have you ever actually met an artist? These are not nice people. They’re selfish, narcissistic, and vicious types who spend thei
r good days in a suicidal depression. Tell him, Jasper.”

  I sighed, knowing this speech by heart. “Artists are the kind of people who cheat on their mistresses, abandon their legitimate children, and make those who are underprivileged enough to know them suffer terribly for their efforts to show them kindness,” I said.

  Dad raised his head to add, “And you proudly label God an artist and expect him to take care of you? Good luck!”

  “You lack faith.”

  “Have you ever wondered why your God requires faith? Is it that heaven has a limited seating capacity and the necessity of faith is God’s way of keeping the numbers down?”

  Ned looked at him with pity, shook his head, and said nothing.

  “Dad, give it a rest.”

  I gave him another couple of painkillers. After swallowing, he gasped and fell unconscious. Ten minutes later he began ranting deliriously.

  “Hundreds…millions…Christians salivating…heaven a fancy hotel where…won’t be bumping into Muslims and Jews at the ice machine…Muslims and the Jews…no better…no budging…modern man…good teeth…short attention span…supposed to be…turmoil of alienation…no religious worldview…neurosis…insanity…not true…always religion among creatures…who…die.”

  “Save your energy,” Ned said. He could have said “Shut up” and I wouldn’t have held it against him.

  Dad’s head fell back into my lap. He couldn’t have had more than a couple of minutes left and he still couldn’t believe it.

  “This is really incredible,” he said, and took a deep breath. I could tell by his face that the painkillers were kicking in.

  “I know.”

  “But really! Death! My death!”

  He slipped into sleep for a few minutes, then his eyes sprang open with a blank expression behind them, as bland as a bureaucrat’s. I think he was trying to convince himself that the day he died was not the worst day of his life but just an average so-so day. He couldn’t keep it up, though, and groaned once more through clenched teeth.

  “Jasper.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Chekhov believed that man will become better when you show him what he is like. I don’t think that’s turned out to be true. It’s just made him sadder and lonelier.”

  “Look, Dad- don’t feel pressured to be profound with your dying words. Just take it easy.”

  “I’ve said a lot of drivel in my life, haven’t I?”

  “It wasn’t all drivel.”

  Dad took a few wheezing breaths while his eyes rolled around in his head as if they were searching for something in the corner of his skull.

  “Jasper,” he croaked, “I have to admit something.”

  “What?”

  “I heard you,” he said.

  “You heard what?”

  “In the jungle. When they came. I heard your voice warning me.”

  “You heard me?” I shouted. I couldn’t believe it. “You heard that? Why didn’t you do anything? You could have saved Caroline’s life!”

  “I didn’t believe it was real.”

  We didn’t say anything for a long while. We both gazed silently into the moving waters of the sea.

  Then the pain started up again. He howled in agony. I felt afraid. Then fear grew into panic. I thought: Don’t die. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. You’re breaking up a partnership. Can’t you see it? Please, Dad. I’m absolutely dependent on you, even as your opposite, especially as your opposite- because if you’re dead, what does that make me? Is the opposite of nothing everything? Or is it nothing?

  And I don’t want to be mad at a ghost, either. That’ll never end.

  “Dad, I forgive you.”

  “What for?”

  “For everything.”

  “What everything? What did I ever do to you?”

  Who is this irritating man? “It doesn’t matter.”

  “OK.”

  “Dad, I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  There. We said it. Good.

  Or not so good- strangely unsatisfying. We’d just said “I love you.” Father and son, at the deathbed of the former, saying we love each other. Why didn’t that feel good? This is why: because I knew something that nobody knew or would ever know- what a strange and wonderful man he was. And that’s what I really wanted to say.

  “Dad.”

  “I should have killed myself,” he said between clenched teeth; then he repeated it, as if it were his private mantra. He would never forgive himself for not committing suicide. In my mind, that was appropriate. I think all people on their deathbeds should not forgive themselves for not committing suicide, even one day earlier. To let yourself be murdered by Nature’s hand is the only real apathy there is.

  His actual death was quick- sudden, even. His body trembled a little, then spasmed in fear, he gasped, his teeth snapped shut as if trying to bite death, the lights of his eyes flickered and went out.

  That was it.

  Dad was dead.

  Dad was dead!

  Unbelievable!

  And I never said I liked him. Why hadn’t I said it? I love you- blah. How hard is it to say “I love you”? It’s a fucking song lyric. Dad knew I loved him. He never knew I liked him. Even respected him.

  Saliva was left unswallowed on his lips. His eyes, devoid of soul or consciousness, still managed to look dissatisfied. His face, deformed by death, damned the rest of humanity with a twist of his mouth. It was impossible to believe that the long, inglorious tumult in his head was over.

  A couple of the Runaways came forward to help me throw him off the side.

  “Don’t touch him!” I screamed.

  I was determined to perform the burial at sea by myself, without assistance. It was a worthless idea, but I was stubborn about it. I knelt down beside his body, cupped my arms underneath him. He went all sinewy in my hands. His long, loose limbs dangled over my shoulders. The waves swelled up, as if licking their lips. All the passive, sunken faces of the Runaways looked respectfully on. The wordless ceremony roused them from their own languid dying.

  I put my shoulder into it, flung his body over the edge and buried him in the roar of waves. He floated momentarily on the surface, bobbing up and down a little like a carrot thrown whole into a boiling stew. Then he went under, as if taken by invisible hands, and went off hurrying to greet himself in strange corners of the sea.

  That was it.

  Goodbye, Dad. I hope you knew how I felt.

  Ned put his hand on my shoulder. “He’s with God now.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “Your father never understood what it’s like to be part of something bigger than himself.”

  That shit me. People always say, “It’s good to be a part of a something bigger than yourself,” but you already are. You’re part of a huge thing. The whole of humanity. That’s enormous. But you couldn’t see it, so you pick, what? An organization? A culture? A religion? That’s not bigger than you. It’s much, much smaller!

  ***

  The moon and the sun had just begun to share the sky when the boat approached the shoreline. I made eye contact with Ned and waved my arms around majestically, motioning to the bushland that surrounded the cove. Ned stared blankly at me, not understanding that I was suddenly overcome with the irrational feeling that I was his host and, almost bursting with pride, wanted to show him around.

  The captain stepped out of the darkness and urged everyone to return below deck. Before I disappeared, I paused at the top of the steps. There were silhouettes on the shoreline. They stood frozen in clusters along the beach, dark figures wedged like poles in the wet sand. Ned joined me at the railing and clutched my arm.

  “They might be fishermen,” I said.

  We watched silently. The human statues grew in size. There were too many of them to be fishermen. They had spotlights too, and were shining them right in our faces. The boat had made it to land, but we were sunk.

  V
r />   The federal police and coast guard were all over the beach. They took no time in rounding us up. The coast guards strutted and shouted to one another like trout fishermen who had unexpectedly landed a sperm whale. The spectacle of them sickened me, and I knew my fellow travelers were in for a nightmare of bureaucracy they might never awaken from. To be poor and foreign and illegal and at the mercy of the generosity of an affluent Western people is to be on very shaky ground.

  Now that Dad was absolutely gone, no longer there to make my life a living hell, I automatically took on that role myself. Just as I had always feared and Eddie had predicted, with Dad dead, it was up to me now to be indecent with my future. That’s why it seemed perfectly natural on that beach at dawn not to do what I didn’t do.

  I had plenty of opportunities to speak up, to explain that I was an Australian and had every right to walk free. I should have separated myself from the Runaways. I mean, there’s no law prohibiting an Australian from returning to Australia on a leaky boat. Theoretically, I should be able to return from Asia propelled by a giant slingshot if it works, but for some reason I chose to say nothing. I simply kept my mouth shut and allowed myself to be rounded up with the others.

  But how was it that they mistook me for a Runaway? My father’s genetic hand-me-down black hair and olive skin worked marvelously with the inability of my own countrymen to shake the idea that we are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. Everyone assumed I was from Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq, and no one thought to question whether I was. So away we went.