A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

by Steve Toltz

  Dad stiffened, and his tempestuous face sent me torrents of inexhaustible anxiety while waiting for me to say something complimentary and obedient. I stayed mute. Sometimes there’s nothing as snide as silence.

  “So, what do you think?”

  “I have no idea what you just said.”

  His breathing got loud, as if he’d just run a couple of marathons with me on his back. In truth, his speech made an impression on my mind so deep, a surgeon could probably still make out the grooves. And not just because it planted a seed that would eventually make me distrust any feelings or ideas of my own that might be viewed as spiritual, but because there’s nothing more distressing or uncomfortable to look at than a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner. And that was the night I first got a good, clear look at his corner, his terrible corner, his sad dead end, where Dad had inoculated himself against having anything mystical or religious ever happen to him, so that if God came down and boogied right in his face, he’d never allow himself to believe it. That was the night I understood he was not just a skeptic who doesn’t believe in a sixth sense, but he was the über-skeptic, who wouldn’t trust or believe in the other five either.

  Suddenly he threw his napkin in my face and growled, “You know what? I wash my hands of you.”

  “Don’t forget to use soap,” I said back.

  I guess there’s nothing unusual about it—a father and son, two generations of men, growing apart. Still, I thought back to how it used to be when I was a kid, when he carried me on his shoulders to school, sometimes right into the classroom. He’d sit on the teacher’s desk with me balancing on his shoulders and ask the shocked kids, “Has anyone seen my son?” If you compare times like that with times like this, it just makes you sad.

  The waiter came by. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked. Dad stabbed him with his eyes. The waiter backed away.

  “Let’s go,” Dad snapped.

  “Suits me.”

  We pulled our coats off the chairs. A crowd of haunted eyes followed us to the door. We walked out into the cold night air. The eyes stayed in the restaurant, where it was warm.

  I knew why he was upset. In his own paradoxically neglectful way, he’d always made a significant effort to try to mold me. This was the first night he saw clearly that I wanted nothing to do with his mold. He saw me spit inside it, and he took offense. The thing is, education was the first great battle of our relationship, our continuous duel, which is why he always vacillated between threatening the public school system with arson and abandoning me to it. By leaving school of my own volition, I had made a decision that he couldn’t. That’s why he gave me that speech: after all the confused and contradictory lectures Dad had bombarded me with over the years, on topics ranging from creation to gravy to purgatory to nipple rings, wherein he tried on ideas as if he were in a dressing room trying on shirts, he had finally let me hear the core idea on which his life was based.

  What neither of us knew then, of course, was that we were on the verge of another scarcely credible sequence of disasters that could be traced back to single events. They say endings can be read in beginnings. Well, the beginning of this ending was my quitting school.

  So why did I really quit? Because I always wound up sitting next to the kid with the baffling rash? Or because whenever I walked into class late, the teacher made a face as if he were defecating? Or was it simply the way every authority figure was so scandalized by my behavior all the time? No, on second thought, I quite liked that; one teacher’s veins throbbed in his neck: the height of comedy. Another one turned purple with rage: a zinger! Back then nothing was funnier to me than outrage, nothing got me feeling lighter or bouncier.

  No, if I’m to be honest, all those irritations only stuck me in a grinding hell of dissatisfaction; no reason to walk away from that, that’s just regular unhappiness a person is lucky to have. My true motivation for quitting school began with all those pesky suicides.

  Our school was pushed as far up against the eastern seaboard as possible without actually being in the water. We had to keep the classroom windows shut to avoid the distraction of the roaring sea below, but on summer days the stifling heat left us no choice but to open them, and the teacher’s voice could hardly compete with the crashing of the waves. The school buildings, a series of connected red brick blocks, were positioned high above the water, on the edge of the Cliffs of Despondency (“Cliffs of Despair” was already taken by a bleak cliff-face a few beaches around the headland). From the end of the school oval, treacherous paths led down to the beach. If you were disinclined to take the paths, if you were impatient or you didn’t want to brave the steep descent, or if you despised yourself and your life and saw no hope for a brighter future, you could always jump. Many did. Our school averaged one suicide every nine or ten months. Of course, youth suicide isn’t uncommon; young men and women have always been sneezing to their deaths from various influenzas of the soul. But there must have been some mythical hypnotic call drifting through those half-open classroom windows, because we really had more than our share of kids propelling themselves through the celestial gateway. Not that there’s anything unusual about teenagers calling it quits, as I said, but it’s the funerals that wear you down. Christ, I should know. Even now I still dream about one particular open casket, one that might not have happened if I hadn’t had to write an essay on Hamlet for my English class.

  Hamlet’s Paralysis

  by Jasper Dean

  The story of Hamlet is an unambiguous warning of the dangers of indecision. Hamlet is a Danish prince who can’t decide whether he should avenge his father’s death, kill himself, not kill himself, etc., etc. You wouldn’t believe the way he goes on about it. Inevitably, this tedious behavior sends Hamlet mad, and by the end of the play everyone is dead, too bad for Shakespeare if he decided later he wanted to write a sequel. The brutal lesson of Hamlet’s indecision is one for all humanity, although if your uncle has murdered your father and married your mother, you might feel it is especially relevant.

  Hamlet’s name is the same as his father who is also called Hamlet and who died unpleasantly when his brother poured poison in his ear. In his ear! Not nice. Clearly, sibling rivalry was what was rotten in the state of Denmark.

  Later, when his dad’s ghost beckons Hamlet to follow him, Horatio advises against it in case the ghost tries driving Hamlet insane, which he does, and Horatio also notes that everybody looking down from an unprotected large height thinks about jumping to their death which made me think, Good, it’s not just me then.

  In conclusion, Hamlet is about indecision. The truth is, indecisiveness affects us all, even if we are one of those people who have no trouble making decisions. In other words, impatient shits. We suffer too. Waiting for someone else to make a decision, for example, in a restaurant when the waiter is standing right there is among life’s greatest horrors, but we must learn patience. Tearing the menu out of your date’s hand and shouting “She’ll have the chicken” is no way to combat this affliction, and it certainly won’t get you sex.

  That was it. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when my English teacher, Mr. White, failed me. What more could I have expected from him, or from any other of the sluggish educators who haunted that school? I can see them even now. One teacher looks like all his vital organs not only have been removed but are being held for a ransom he can’t afford to pay. Another looks like he entered a party two minutes after everyone left and can still hear their laughter tormenting him from down the street. One sits there defiantly, like a sole ant who refuses to carry a bread crumb. Some are as cheerful as despots, others as giddy as idiots.

  Then there was Mr. White: he was the teacher with the small patch of gray hair that sat on his head like the ash of a cigarette, the one who often looked like he’d just glimpsed his future in a single-sex nursing home. But worse, he was the teacher with the son in our class. OK, you can’t plan for happiness in life, but you can take certain precautions agains
t unhappiness, can’t you? At the beginning of every class, Mr. White had to do roll call. He had to call out his own son’s name. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? A father knows whether his own son is in the room or not, surely.

  “White,” he’d say.

  “Here,” Brett would answer. What a farce.

  Poor Brett!

  Poor Mr. White!

  How could either of them stand it, to have to suppress their intimacy to the extent where one pretends daily not even to recognize the face of his own kin? And when Mr. White growled at the students for their stupidity, how did Brett feel to be mauled by his own father like that? Was it a game to them? Was it real? During Mr. White’s tirades, Brett’s face was too emotionless, too frozen—I’d say he knew as well as we did that his father was a petty tyrant who treated us students as though we had deprived him of his vital years and, as revenge, predicted our future failings, then failed us to prove himself prophetic. Yes, Mr. White, you were unquestionably my favorite teacher. Your awfulness was the most comprehensible to me. You were the one visibly raging in pain, and shamelessly you did it in front of your own child.

  He handed me back my Hamlet essay with a livid face. He actually gave me a mighty zero. With my essay, I’d made a joke of something that was sacred to him: William Shakespeare. Deep down, I knew that Hamlet was an extraordinary work, but when I’m ordered to complete a task, I find myself straining dumbly at the leash. Writing garbage was the form of my petty rebellion.

  That night I made the mistake of showing the essay to my father. He read it squinting, grunting, nodding—basically, as if he were lifting heavy timber. I stood beside him, waiting for approval, I suppose. I didn’t get it. He handed it back to me and said, “I read something interesting today in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Did you know before the Egyptians embalmed their pharaoh, they took his brain out? Yet they expected him to reemerge later on down the centuries. What do you think they imagined he’d do there, without his brain?”

  It had been a long time since my father had tried to educate me himself. To make up for abandoning me to a system he had nothing but contempt for, Dad routinely dumped piles of books in my room with little Post-it notes (“Read this!” or “This man is a motherfucking god!”) pasted onto the covers: Plato, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Epictetus, Berkeley, Kant, Popper, Sartre, Rousseau, and so on. He seemed especially to favor any writer who was a pessimist, a nihilist, or a cynic, including Céline, Bernhard, and the ultimate pessimist-poet, James Thomson, with his darkly frightening “The City of Dreadful Night.”

  “Where are the women?” I asked Dad. “Didn’t they think anything worth writing down?”

  The next night I found Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag waiting on my pillow.

  In this way I was not self-educated so much as I was forcefed, and in truth I liked them all well enough. The Greeks, for example, had fine ideas about how to run a society that are still valid today, especially if you think slavery is wonderful. As for the rest of them, all unquestionable geniuses, I have to admit that their enthusiasm for and celebration of one kind of human being (themselves) and their fear and revulsion of the other kind (everyone else) grated on my nerves. It’s not just that they petitioned for the halting of universal education lest it “ruin thinking,” or that they did everything they could to make their art unintelligible to most people, but they always said unfriendly things like “Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas!” (D. H. Lawrence) and “If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it” (G. B. Shaw) and “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats) and “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men” (Nietzsche). Everyone else or, in other words, everyone I knew was nothing more than a corpse rotting upright mainly because of his preference for watching football over reading Virgil. “Mass entertainment is the death of civilization,” those highbrows spat, but I say, if a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by a profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched? Honestly, who cares? That man just had a wonderful inner moment, and what’s more, he got it cheap. Good for him, you ponderous fuck! Basically they thought it would be lovely if the dehumanized masses, who made them literally sick, would please either pass into history or become slaves and be quick about it. They wanted to create a race of superbeings based on their own snobby, syphilitic selves, men who sit on mountaintops all day licking their inner god into a frenzy. Personally I think it wasn’t the “plebeian desire for happiness” of the masses they hated so much, but the secret, sour acknowledgment that the plebes sometimes found it.

  That’s why, just as my father had abandoned me, I’d abandoned his learned friends, all those wonderful, bitter geniuses, and at school I’d settled in comfortably doing the bare minimum. Often I’d give myself the day off and walk around the throbbing city to watch it throb or to the racetrack to watch the horses eke out their unfortunate existence under the arses of small men. Occasionally the administration would send grave, unintentionally humorous letters to my father about my attendance.

  “Got another letter,” Dad would say, waving it in the air like a $10 note he’d found in an old pair of pants.

  “And?”

  “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “Five days a week is too much. It’s draining.”

  “You don’t have to be the first in the state, you know. Just scrape by. That’s what you should be aiming for.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m scraping.”

  “Great. Just make sure you turn up enough to get the little sliver of paper with your name on it.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I told you a thousand times. You need society to think you’re playing along. You do what you like later, but you need to make them think you’re one of them.”

  “Maybe I am one of them.”

  “Yeah, and I’m going to the office tomorrow morning at seven.”

  But he wasn’t always able to leave it alone. In fact, I had achieved a certain notoriety among the faculty because of the universally dreaded and personally mortifying visits of my father, whose face would appear suddenly pressed against the frosted glass of the classroom door.

  The day after I showed my father my Hamlet essay, he came into my English class and took a seat in the back, squeezing himself into a wooden chair. Mr. White had been writing the word “intertextualization” on the blackboard when Dad came in, so when he turned back to us and saw a middle-aged man among all of us fresh-faced dopes, he was confused. He glowered at my father disapprovingly, as if getting ready to chastise one of his students for spontaneously aging in the middle of a lesson.

  “Bit sluggish in here, isn’t it?” Dad said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said, it’s a bit difficult to think in here, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, you are…”

  “A concerned parent.”

  “You are a parent of a student in this class?”

  “Maybe the word ‘concerned’ is an understatement. When I think of him under your tutelage, I start bleeding from the eyes.”

  “Which child is yours?”

  “I’m not ashamed to admit it. My son is the creature labeled ‘Jasper.’”

  Mr. White shot me a stern glance just as I was trying to merge with my chair. “Jasper? Is this your father?”

  I nodded. What choice did I have?

  “If you would like to speak with me about your son, we could make an appointment,” he said to Dad.

  “I don’t need to talk to you about my son. I know my son. Do you?”