A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

by Steve Toltz

  Dr. Greg came in and noted the piles of architectural literature. “What’s going on here, then?”

  Proudly, Dad told him the idea.

  “The Great Australian Dream, huh?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, you’re going to pursue the Great Australian Dream. I think that’s a very good idea.”

  “What do you mean? There’s a collective dream? How come nobody told me? What is it again?”

  “Owning your own home.”

  “Owning your own home? That’s the Great Australian Dream?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Wait a minute. Haven’t we merely appropriated the Great American Dream and just substituted the name of our country?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dr. Greg said, looking worried.

  “Whatever you say,” Dad said, rolling his eyes so we both could see it.

  A week later I went back. The books were open and pages torn up and scattered all over the room. When I entered, Dad held up his head like a hoisted sail. “Glad you’re here. What do you think of manifesting the symbolic paradise of the womb, a house huge and glistening, and we’ll bury ourselves inside where we can really rot in privacy?”

  “Sounds good,” I said, moving a pile of books off the chair so I could sit down.

  “Tell me if any of these say anything to you: French chateau, English cottage, Italian villa, German castle, peasant simplicity.”

  “Not really.”

  “But geometric simplicity, OK? Fundamentally simple, uncluttered, loud, pretentious, and gaudy, without being dispiritingly tasteless.”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “Above all, I don’t want anything angular, so maybe it should be round.”

  “Good idea.”

  “You think so? Do you feel like living in an orb?”

  “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

  “What we want is to blend into the natural surroundings. An organic synthesis, that’s what we’re after. And inside I think two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a dark room, not to develop photos, just so we can sit in the dark. Now, what else? Let’s talk about the threshold.”

  “The what?”

  “The portal into the home.”

  “You mean the front door?”

  “How many times do I have to say it?”

  “Just once would be good.”

  Dad’s eyes narrowed into thin slits and the edges of his mouth curled downward. “If you’re going to be that way about it, we’ll just scrap the whole design. What about living in a cave?”

  “A cave?”

  “I thought we agreed we’d live in a uterine symbol.”

  “Dad.”

  “Well, what if we live in the trunk of an old tree, like Merlin? Or wait. I know. We could construct platforms in the trees. What do you say, Jasper—are we tree-dwellers?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Since when don’t you want to live in leafy sensuality?”

  Dr. Greg had come into the room. He was ogling us like a Supreme Court judge watching a couple of neo-Nazis wash his car at traffic lights.

  “Dad, let’s just have an ordinary house. Just a nice, normal, ordinary house.”

  “You’re right. We don’t need to go over the top. OK. Which do you prefer? A cubical ordinary house or a cylindrical ordinary house?”

  I sighed. “Cubical.”

  “Have you ever seen the Tower of Samara in Iraq?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “OK. Here’s a structural dilemma we have to overcome. I want to hear the echo of my own footsteps, but I don’t want to hear yours. What can we do about that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right, then. Let’s talk ceilings. Do you want high ceilings?”

  “Of course. Why would anyone want a low ceiling?”

  “To hang yourself. OK? Hang on a sec. Let’s see…” Dad rummaged through his books. “Tepee?”

  “Come on, Dad, what’s happened to your brain? You’re all over the place.”

  “You’re right. You’re right. We need to focus. We need to be sensible. We need to be logical. So let’s be logical. What are the objectives inherent in the design of a house? To meet your physical needs. Eating, sleeping, shitting, and fucking. That translates to comfort, utility, efficiency. But our psychological needs? The same, really. In fact, I don’t see why we should separate ourselves from primitive man in this. Our goal should be to exist in a consistent climate and to keep out predators.”

  “Great.”

  “Just remember that the form of our habitat will inflict undue influence on our behavior. We have to be smart about this. What about an igloo?”

  “No.”

  “A house on wheels! A drawbridge! A moat!”

  “No! Dad! You’re out of control here!”

  “OK! OK! Have it your way. We’ll do something simple. The only thing I insist on, though, is that the ideology behind the design of our house should be the old Italian proverb.”

  “What proverb?”

  “That the best armor is to keep out of range.”

  This idea was clearly backfiring. Dr. Greg looked on quietly through these brainstorming sessions with half-closed, judgmental eyes. Dad had become luminous with ideas, but he’d made the undesirable leap from manic-depressive to obsessive-compulsive.

  Meanwhile I decided to play along and be a good provisional orphan, so I returned to the house for lost children. It made sense, because if I played truant they’d be lying in wait for me every time I visited Dad in hospital, and breaking into an insane asylum is just as difficult as breaking out. I also had to return to school. Mrs. French drove me in the mornings, and throughout the school day I scrupulously avoided telling anyone about Dad’s meltdown or about how my father and I were now living in separate homes for cracked eggs—talking about it would have meant surrendering myself to reality. I just went on as if it were business as usual. Of course, returning from school every afternoon was a nightmare, though as it happened, absolutely everyone at the house neglected to sexually abuse me in any way, and nothing of interest occurred there except I eventually gave in to my gnawing curiosity and listened to everyone’s stories, which were far worse than mine. In this way all the abandoned children robbed me of self-pity. That’s when I really bottomed out. Without being able to feel sorry for myself, I had nothing left.

  And worse, every now and then the fools at the hospital granted Dad access to a telephone. I’d answer it and suffer through a conversation like this:

  My voice: “Hello?”

  Dad’s voice: “Here’s a spatial dilemma: how to arrange the house so that at the same time it is comfortable for us but discourages guests from staying more than forty-five minutes.”

  Mine: “Not sure.”

  Dad’s: “Jasper! This is to be a hard, practical exercise! No messing about! Something that reflects my personality, no, my dilemma, my lie, which is, of course, my personality. And the color. I want it white! Blindingly white!”

  Mine: “Please, can we do something simple?”

  Dad’s: “I couldn’t agree with you more. We want something simple that can be eroded by the elements. We don’t want anything more durable than we are.”

  Mine: “OK.”

  Dad’s: “Open living space. No. That discourages human intimacy. No, hang on, I want that. I want…”

  Long silence.

  Mine: “Dad? You still there?”

  Dad’s: “Bullfighting ring! Gothic cathedral! Mud hovel!”

  Mine: “Are you taking your medicine?”

  Dad’s: “And no mantelpieces! They always make me think of urns with ashes in them.”

  Mine: “OK! Jesus!”

  Dad’s: “Which do you prefer, a porch or a veranda? What’s the difference, anyway? Wait. I don’t care. We’ll have both. And I’ll tell you something else. Ornamental detail can go to hell. We are the ornamental detail!”

  Then I’d hang up and curse
myself for sending Dad down what I thought was another ruinous path. These conversations certainly did not prepare me for the abrupt change that was about to follow.

  One day I visited the hospital and was shocked to see that Dad had arranged the books into a neat pile. All the pages of erratic designs had been thrown away, and when I sat down in that eerily organized room, he presented me with a single piece of paper with a shockingly normal design for a shockingly normal family home. No moats, drawbridges, igloos, or stalagmites. No bullfighting rings, indoor slides, trenches, or underwater grottos. It was just a normal house. The construction was clear and simple: a classic boxy structure with a central living space and several rooms arranged off it. I might even go so far as to say it summed up the national character, right down to the veranda on all sides.

  He had finally seen his situation clearly: to build his house he must get out, and to get out he must convince the powers that be that he was once again mentally healthy and fit for society. So he faked it. It must have been a strenuous period for him, putting all his energy into pretending to be normal; he did this single-mindedly, and talked about the Great Australian Dream and interest rates and mortgage repayments and sports teams and his employment prospects; he expressed outrage at the things that outraged his countrymen: taxpayer-funded ministerial blowjobs, corporate greed, fanatical environmentalists, logical arguments, and compassionate judges. He was so convincing in his portrayal of Mr. Average that Dr. Greg swallowed every droplet of bullshit my father sweated out for him, swelling with triumph at the conclusion of each session.

  And so, four months after he entered the hospital, he was released. Dad and I went to Eddie’s house and secured his loan, which really consisted of Dad saying, “So you got the money?” and Eddie saying, “Yeah.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” Dad said, after an uncomfortable silence. “Double. I’ll pay you back double.”

  “Martin, don’t worry about it.”

  “Eddie. You know what Nietzsche said about gratitude.”

  “No, Marty, I don’t.”

  “He said a man in debt wants his benefactor dead.”

  “OK. Pay me back.”

  After we left Eddie’s, Dad tore his design for his dream house into pieces.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That was just a hoax. That was just to make those bastards think I was normal,” Dad said, laughing.

  “But you’re better now, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I feel good. This house idea has really got me back on top.”

  “So if that was a hoax, where’s the real design for our house?”

  “There isn’t one. Look. Why bother fucking around with building your own house? That sounds like an enormous pilgrim’s headache.”

  “So we’re not getting a house?”

  “Yeah. We’re just going to buy one.”

  “OK. Yeah. That sounds really good, Dad. We’ll buy a house.”

  “And then we’re going to hide it,” he said, smiling so proudly I finally understood why pride is one of the seven deadly sins, and such was the repellent force of his grin, I wondered why it shouldn’t be all seven.

  VI

  According to him, it was an idea that arrived in one piece, completely formed: we will buy a house and hide it in a maze. The idea came to him during a psychological game of word association with Dr. Greg.

  “Health.”

  “Sickness.”

  “Ball.”

  “Testicle.”

  “Ideas.”

  “Complexity.”

  “Home.”

  “House. Hidden in a labyrinth of my own design that I will build on a large property in the bush.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I have to go back to my room for a while. Can we continue this later?”

  And why did he get the idea in the first place? Maybe because labyrinths have always been a facile metaphor for the soul, or the human condition, or the complexity of a process, or the pathway to God. I discounted these as being too profound, and if I know one thing, it’s that men don’t do things for profound reasons—the things they do are sometimes profound, but their reasons are not. No, I must have inspired this whole ridiculous plan by making a gift of that silly book of mazes. The failure to complete a child’s puzzle infuriated him so that it lodged in his brain, and when the idea for designing and constructing a house came in, it either merged with the idea of the maze or wrapped around it, somehow fusing so that the two ideas became one.

  “Dad. Can’t we just get a house like everyone else and not hide it?”

  “Nah.”

  No one could talk him out of it, not me or Eddie and especially not Dr. Greg, who learned the truth when Dad went back for a checkup. He told Dad in no uncertain terms that a labyrinth wasn’t the Great Australian Dream, which is quite right, it isn’t, but in the end no one objected too strongly, because no one but me really thought he would actually build it.

  We went looking at properties out of Sydney in all directions, and each time he dashed out along the property lines, exploring the bushland, nodding his head approvingly at the trees and the space and the potential for solitude. The houses themselves seemed to be unimportant to him, and he took only a cursory look through them. Colonial? Federation? Victorian? Modern? He didn’t care. He only required that the house be surrounded on all sides by dense bushland. He wanted trees and bushes and rocks fused together, bushland so dense that even without the labyrinth walls, the natural landscape would be almost impassable.

  While searching for the perfect site, he accumulated dozens of mazes from everywhere from puzzle books to old manuscripts of the labyrinths of antiquity, from Egypt to medieval England, using them mainly as inspiration, not wanting merely to copy an existing design. He labored furiously in pencil to invent a complex pattern of his own imagining that he would actually reproduce on the land. This was his first major step in altering the existing universe with his own brain, so he obsessed about the structure of the house: not only did it need to be locked up in the protective custody of the maze, but it had to serve as a palace of thinking, where Dad could wander and plot without interruption—a base for his “operations,” whatever they were. He also wanted dead ends and passages where an intruder, or “guest,” would be forced into making several critical choices between paths, resulting in disorientation and/or starvation and madness. “The unpassable path!” became his new motto. “Bloody hell!” became mine. Why? Those designs stalked my nightmares. It seemed all our future disasters were prefigured in them, and depending on which he chose, we would suffer a different disaster. At night I pored over the designs myself, trying to read our impending calamities in them.

  One afternoon we went to inspect some land half an hour northwest of the city. To reach the property you had to take a private road that was a long wiggling dirt track, over which you had to bounce unevenly through burned-out forests, their charred tree trunks a warning: by living in the bush, you are living in a war zone during an unreliable ceasefire.

  The property seemed custom-built for his purpose: it was dense, dense, dense. Hills with steep climbs and sudden descents, twisting gullies, large rocky outcrops, winding creeks you had to wade across, a foliage of thick scrub and waist-high grass that would require special footwear. As we surveyed the property we got lost straightaway, which Dad took as a good sign. Standing on ground that sloped gently downward, he looked at the dirt, the trees, the sky. Yes, he even examined the sun. He looked right into it. He turned to me and gave me the thumbs-up. This was the one!

  Unfortunately, the house wasn’t subjected to examination at all. Me, I would’ve failed it mercilessly. It was a drafty, dilapidated old thing—no more than your classic two-story shoebox. The shag carpet was thick and ugly, and crossing the living room floor felt like walking on a hairy chest. The kitchen stank like a toilet. The toilet, covered in moss, looked like a garden. The garden was a cemetery for weeds and dead grass. The staircase creaked like drying
bones. The ceiling paint had dried midbubble. Each room I encountered was smaller and darker than the room before. The upstairs hallway narrowed as you moved down it, so much that the very end of it was almost a point.

  Worst of all, to get to school I would need to trek a half a kilometer through the maze, then down our long private road to the nearest bus stop so I could travel twenty minutes to the train, then ride a further forty-five minutes to the coast, where my school was located, but the bus came only three times a day, only once in the morning, and if I missed it, I missed it. I rejected Dad’s suggestion that I move to a new school in the area, because I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of making a whole new set of enemies. Better the bully you know, I reasoned.

  Dad signed the papers that afternoon, and I had to accept that this insane folly was going to happen. I knew I wouldn’t last long in exile on this property, and it was only a matter of time before I’d have to move out and leave him alone, an uncomfortable thought that made me feel wretchedly guilty. I wondered if he realized it too.

  He wasted no time hiring the builders, and the fact that he was not the kind of man who had any business at a building site (even if it was his own) did not stop Dad from aggravating them. They gritted their teeth as he passed on his gigantic compositions. Dad had adjusted his maze designs to fit into the natural configurations of the landscape and insisted that few trees were to be harmed. He had narrowed down his mazes to four, and instead of reducing the choices to one, he incorporated them all in one section of the property or another, so that four equally confounding conundrums were to be forced onto the land: mazes within mazes, and in the center our rather ordinary house.

  I won’t go into all the dull details—the zoning ordinances, the building codes, the delineation of boundaries, the delays, the unforeseen problems like hailstorms and the unrelated disappearance of the builder’s wife, but I will say the labyrinth walls were constructed from hedges and countless rocks and massive stones and boulders and sandstone slabs and granite and thousands and thousands of bricks. Because Dad mistrusted the workmen intensely, he broke up the design and gave each section to a different team to construct. The men themselves frequently got lost among the thousand alleys and paths that emerged, and Eddie often joined us on our search parties. He would always photograph their irritated faces when we found them.