A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz

  “Jasper, I believe that life is based on love. And that orderly love is the fundamental law of the universe.”

  “Which universe is that and where is it? I’d love to pop by and say hello.”

  Anouk sat on the edge of an empty beer keg. She was radiating pure joy and enthusiasm. Yes, she might have been pretending to hate this strange turn of events which had transformed her into a rich and powerful woman, but I wasn’t buying it.

  “I believe that a person’s thoughts often manifest into actual events- that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, twenty-four-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?”

  “I get it. Go on.”

  “In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people’s addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there’re no developments is disappointed. They’re checking the news two or three times a day- they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secret parts of himself, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don’t you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.”

  The homeless man in the gutter had woken up and was moving his half-open eyes furtively from Anouk to me, a bored smile on his face, as if to say in response to Anouk’s theory that he’d heard it all before. Maybe he had.

  “So what do you intend to do?”

  “We have to wean people off their addiction, or else there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “We.”

  “Yes, Jasper.”

  I looked at the drunk in the alley to make sure I wasn’t imagining all this. Did I want to help Anouk in her plan? Sure, I could take control of the newspapers and put in fun headlines like “This Newspaper Makes Independent Thinking Impossible” and pursue Anouk’s aim of combating this addiction to “news” by making news dry and boring- limiting broadcasts and reporting banal and positive events (grandmothers planting new gardens, football stars eating dinner with their families) and not allowing mass murderers their turn on the celebrity wonder wheel.

  However, the last thing I wanted was to take on a public role doing anything. The general public was still apt to turn apoplectic with rage at the mention of my father, and thus people would hate me for whatever I did. All I wanted was to melt into vast crowds of non-English-speaking people and taste the many flavors of women filling tight-fitting T-shirts in all the cities of the globe. And Anouk wanted the news division to be under my control?

  “Anouk, I’ll tell you what. You start without me. I’ll give you a call in six months, see how you’re getting along, and then maybe I’ll come and help you out. But it’s a big maybe.”

  She made a weird sound in her throat and started breathing hard. Her eyes somehow got rounder. I almost weakened. It’s hard enough to go through life disappointing yourself every second day, but disappointing others takes it out of you too. That’s why you should never answer the phone or the door. So you don’t have to say no to whoever’s on the other side.

  “OK, Jasper. But I want you to do one thing before you leave.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Write an obituary for your dad that I can print in the paper.”

  “What for? People don’t care.”

  “I care. And so do you. And I know you- you probably haven’t let yourself grieve in any way for your father. I know he was a pain in the arse, but he did love you and he made you what you are and you owe it to him and to yourself to write something about him. Doesn’t matter if what you write is flattering or insulting. As long as it’s true and it comes from the heart and not from the brain.”

  “OK.”

  We climbed back into the car, and the homeless man watched us with smiling eyes that said in no uncertain terms that he had just overheard a conversation between two people who took themselves too seriously.

  ***

  The car pulled up outside my building and we sat in the backseat facing each other, with barely a blink between us, barely the slightest movement.

  “Sure I can’t convince you to stay in Australia for a few months?”

  It was obvious that what she needed more than anything was to have a friendly face around, and I felt bad because I was taking mine to Europe.

  “Sorry, Anouk. This is something I have to do.”

  She nodded, then wrote me a check for $25,000. I was eternally grateful, but not so grateful I didn’t wish it were more.

  We kissed goodbye, and I almost fell to pieces watching the black Mercedes disappear from sight, but I pulled myself together, out of habit. I walked to the bank and put the check in my account. I would have to wait three days before I could access the money to buy myself a one-way ticket to somewhere else. Three days seemed too long.

  When I got home, I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about the fact that there were cat hairs on the couch that weren’t there yesterday. Not having a cat, I had no explanation for it. Just another of life’s inscrutable and pointless mysteries.

  I tried to go to sleep, and when I couldn’t go there, I tried to get sleep to come to me. That didn’t work either. I got up and drank two beers and lay down on the couch again. My mind took over and dug up a few fragile images that seemed ready to crack if I thought about them hard enough. I decided to think about the future instead. In three days I would be on a plane to Europe, just as my father had once been, at roughly the same age, when almost everyone he knew was dead. Well, you have to follow in people’s footsteps sometimes. You can’t expect every cough, scratch, and sneeze to be your own.

  Around midnight I started working on the obituary for my father that Anouk could print in the paper. After staring at a blank page for two days, I began.

  Martin Dean, 1956-2001

  Who was my father?

  The offal of the universe.

  The fatty rind.

  An ulcer on the mouth of time.

  He was sorry he never had a great historical name like Pope Innocent VIII or Lorenzo the Magnificent.

  He was the man who first told me that no one would buy life insurance if it was called death insurance.

  He thought the best definition of thoroughness is having your ashes buried.

  He thought that people who don’t read books don’t know that any number of dead geniuses are waiting for their call.

  He thought that there seems to be no passion for life, only for lifestyle.

  About God- he thought that if you live in a house, it’s of only nominal interest to know the name of the architect who designed it.

  About evolution- he thought it was unfair that man is at the top of the food chain when he still believes the newspaper headlines.

  About pain and suffering- he thought that you can bear it all. It’s only the fear of pain and suffering that is unbearable.

  I took a break and read over what I’d written. All true. Not bad. This was coming along nicely. But I should be more personal. After all, he wasn’t just a brain in a jar spitting out ideas, he was also a human being with emotions that made him sick.

  He never achieved unlonely aloneness. His aloneness was terrible for him.

  He could not hear a mother calling for her child in the park without calling out too, sick with the ominous feeling that something awful had happened to little Hugo (or whoever).

  He was always proud of
things that shamed others.

  He had a fairly complex Christ complex.

  His worldview seemed to be something like “This place sucks. Let’s refurbish.”

  He was impossibly energetic but lacked the kind of hobbies that actually required energy, which is why he often read books while walking and watched TV while pacing back and forth between rooms.

  He could empathize with anyone, and if he found out someone in the world was suffering, Dad had to go home and lie down.

  OK. What else?

  I looked over what I had written and decided it was time to get to the heart of the man.

  The concept of Dad’s death ruined his whole life. The very thought of it struck him down like some toxic jungle fever.

  My God. This topic made my whole body feel heavy. Just as Terry had realized that the terror of death had almost killed him, Dad had often repeated his conviction that it was the base cause of all human beliefs. I saw now that I had developed a nasty mutation of this disease, namely, the terror of the terror of death. Yes, unlike Dad and unlike Terry, I don’t fear death so much as I fear the fear of it. The fear that makes people believe, and kill each other, and kill themselves; I am afraid of this fear that could make me unconsciously manufacture a comforting or confusing lie that I might base my life on.

  Wasn’t I going off to chase the face from my nightmares?

  Wasn’t I going on a journey to learn more about the face? And about my mother? And about myself?

  Or was I?

  Dad always maintained that people don’t go on journeys at all but spend a lifetime searching for and gathering evidence to rationalize the beliefs they’ve held in their hearts since day one. They have new revelations, certainly, but these rarely shatter their core belief structure- they just build on it. He believed that if the base remains intact, it doesn’t matter what you build on it, it is not a journey at all. It is just layering. He didn’t believe that anyone ever started from scratch. “People aren’t looking for answers,” he often said. “They’re looking for facts to prove their case.”

  This made me think of his journey. What was it all about? He may have traveled the globe, but he didn’t seem to go very far. He may have dipped himself in different pools of experience, but his spirit stayed the same flavor. All his plans, plots, and schemes centered on man in relation to society, or larger- to civilization, or smaller- to community. He aspired to change the world around him, but he saw his being as solid and unchangeable. He wasn’t interested in testing the limits within himself. How far can someone expand? Can his essence be found and enlarged? Can the heart get an erection? Can your soul pour out your mouth? Can a thought drive a car? It hardly seems to have occurred to him.

  Finally I knew how to revolt against my father’s ways! The nature of my anarchy was clear. Like Terry, I would live as though on the edge of death, as the world sank or swam. Civilization? Society? Who cares. I would turn my back on progress, and unlike my father, I would concentrate my attention not on the outside but on the inside.

  To get to the bottom of myself. To get to the bottom of thought. To get beyond time. Like everyone, I’m saturated in time, I’m soaking in it, I’m drowning in it. To annihilate this profound, all-encompassing, psychological trick would really be an ace up my sleeve.

  I had communicated my thoughts successfully to Dad from the jungle in Thailand, though he chose not to believe it. That means the manipulation of thought exists. That’s why you have to be careful what you think. That’s why most doctors quietly admit that depression, stress, and grief affect our immune systems, as does loneliness. In fact, loneliness is linked to higher death rates through heart disease, cancer, and suicide, and even to accidental death, meaning that feeling lonely may lead to fatal clumsiness. See your doctor if loneliness persists.

  We ignorantly indulge in negative thoughts, unaware that thinking over and over again “I suck” is probably as carcinogenic as sucking down a carton of unfiltered Camels. So then, should I rig up a device where I can give myself little electric shocks every time I have a negative thought? Would that work? What about self-hypnosis? Even in my fantasies, beliefs, ideas, and hallucinations, can I stop my mind from running in old grooves? Can I emancipate myself? Renew myself? Replace myself like old skin cells? Is that too ambitious? Does self-awareness have an off switch? I have no idea. Novalis said that atheism is when you don’t believe in yourself. OK, in this respect I am probably an agnostic, but either way, is this my project? To test the limit of the power of thought and see what the material world really looks like? What then? Can I be of the world and in the world even when I have crashed through time and space? Or do I have to live on a mountaintop? I really don’t want to. I want to stay at the bottom and bribe seven-year-olds to buy me half-price tickets for the movies. How do I deal with such incompatible desires? And I know that to achieve enlightenment I’m supposed to witness the dissolution of my wants, but I like my wants, so what’s a guy to do?

  ***

  I packed my bags and manuscript and put in a photograph of Astrid, my mother. She was remarkably beautiful. I have that on my side. Society hangs its tongue out at the sight of a pretty face; all I have to do is walk up the tongue into the mouth that will tell me everything I need to know. This woman touched lives, and not just my father’s. Some would be dead. Some would be too old. But somewhere were childhood friends, boyfriends, lovers. Somebody would remember her. Somewhere.

  Neither Dad nor I had much love for religion, because we preferred the mystery to the miracle, but Dad didn’t really love the mystery either- it was like a pebble in his shoe. Well, I won’t ignore mysteries like he did. But I won’t try to solve them, either. I just want to see what happens when you peer into their core. I’m going to follow in my own stupid, uncertain footsteps. I’m going to wander the earth awhile and find my mother’s family and the man who belongs to the face in the sky and see where these mysterious affinities take me- closer to understanding my mother or to some unimaginable evil.

  I looked out the window. It was dawn. I made myself a coffee and reread the obituary one last time. I needed a conclusion. But how do you conclude a life like his? What did he mean? What idea could finish this off? I decided I should address all those thoughtless, ignorant people who had called Dad a bastard without even knowing he actually was one.

  Martin Dean was my father.

  The act of writing this sentence knocked the wind out of me. All of a sudden I felt something I’d never felt before- privileged. I suddenly felt better off than a billion other sons, privileged that I had had the good fortune to be raised by an odd, uncompromising, walking stew of ideas. So what if he was a philosopher who thought himself into a corner? He was also a natural-born empathizer who would have rather been buried alive than have his imperfections ever seriously hurt anyone. He was my father. He was a fool. He was my kind of fool.

  There’s no way to sum him up. How could I? If I was only a part of him, how could I possibly ever know who he was a part of?

  I wrote on:

  My father has been called a lot of terrible names by the people of this country. OK, he wasn’t a Gandhi or a Buddha, but honestly, he wasn’t a Hitler or a Stalin either. He was somewhere in the middle. But what I want to know is, what does your view of my father say about you?

  When someone comes into the world who reaches the worst depths that humans can sink to, we will always call him a monster, or evil, or the embodiment of evil, but there is never any serious hint or suggestion that there is something actually supernatural or otherworldly about this individual. He may be an evil man, but he is just a man. But when an extraordinary person operating on the other side of the spectrum, the good, rises to the surface, like Jesus or Buddha, immediately we elevate him to God, a deity, something divine, supernatural, otherworldly. This is a reflection of how we see ourselves. We have no trouble believing that the worst creature who has done the most harm is a man, but we absolutely cannot believe that the best creature, who trie
s to inspire imagination, creativity, and empathy, can be one of us. We just don’t think that highly of ourselves, but we happily think that low.

  That should do it. A nice confusing off-the-point conclusion. Well done, me. I popped this in the mail to Anouk at the Hobbs News Division, went to the bank to check that the money was in my account, then caught a taxi to the airport. This time I was leaving the country under my own name.

  “I’d like to buy a ticket to Europe,” I said to the unsmiling woman at the counter.

  “Where in Europe?”

  “Good question. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Really,” she said, then leaned back in her chair and looked past me, over my shoulder. I think she was looking for a television camera.

  “What’s the next flight that gets me in the Europe vicinity?”

  She stared at me another couple of seconds before typing at lightning speed on the computer keyboard. “There’s a flight leaving for the Czech Republic in an hour and a half.”

  The Czech Republic? For some reason I had thought she was going to say Paris, and then I’d say, “I believe Paris is lovely this time of year.”

  “You want the ticket or not?”

  “Sure. I believe the Czech Republic is lovely this time of year.”

  After I bought my ticket and checked in my bags, I ate a $10 vegetable samosa that tasted worse than a seven-course meal of postage stamps. Then I went to the phone box and looked in the white pages to see if Strangeways Publications still existed and if Stanley was still running it, the man who had published Harry West’s The Handbook of Crime all those years ago.

  It was there in black and white. I called the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Is that Stanley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still publishing books?”

  “Men’s magazines.”

  “I’ve written a book I think you might be interested in.”

  “Men’s magazines, I said. You deaf? I don’t publish books.”

  “It’s a biography.”