A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

by Steve Toltz

  “I said time’s up!” the guard shouted. Now he was standing at the door, blinking irritably.

  “OK, boys, you heard the man. Get out of here. Come back, though, I’ve got lots more stuff. And you never know, maybe we can work together one day. Just because I’m in here for life doesn’t mean I won’t be out one day. Life doesn’t really mean life. It’s just a figure of speech. It means an eternity which is actually shorter than life, if you know what I mean.”

  Harry was still talking when we were escorted out of the room.

  Bruno and Dave thought Harry’s advice was rubbish. An anonymous underworld figure? A democratic cooperative of crime? What was that shit? Of course their names were going to echo through eternity! Infamy was high on their to-do lists. No, the only part of Harry’s monologue appealing to Bruno and Dave was his reference to the accumulation and hiding of guns. “We’re nothing without guns. We need to move up to the next level,” Bruno sang. I shook at the thought of what that level involved, and I didn’t know how to reason with them, particularly because I was the one who had suggested they see Harry. I couldn’t get my brother out of a life of violence either. It was like trying to persuade a short man to be taller. I knew Terry wasn’t cruel, however, only reckless. He wasn’t concerned for his own physical well-being, and he extended that indifference to the bodies of others.

  He visited Harry once a month, always alone. As much as he wanted me to, and as much as the inmate’s rants often seemed to make sense, I refused to return to the prison. I thought Harry was a dangerous maniac and/or an unendurable idiot. I could do without listening to him ever again.

  That said, about six months after the original visit I went back up to the prison, this time without Terry. Why? Harry had requested my attendance. I reluctantly agreed because Terry had pleaded with me to go, and when Harry limped into the visiting room, I noticed he had fresh cuts and bruises on his face.

  “You should see the other guy. He looks pretty good, actually,” Harry said, lowering himself into a chair. He stared at me curiously. I stared back at him impatiently. Our stares were totally different in character.

  “Well, Martin, do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a kid who wants to remain hidden. Look. You’ve covered part of your hand with your sleeve. You’re slouching down. Here, I think, is a kid who wishes to be invisible.”

  “Is this why you wanted to see me?”

  “Terry talks about you a lot. He’s told me everything about you. You’ve started to intrigue me.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “He told me how you don’t have any friends.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Look at the way you’re scrunching up your face! It’s very slight. Almost nothing. Just in the eyes. You’re judging me, aren’t you? Well, go ahead, my little misanthrope. Fairly obviously I’ve been judged before, judged and tried and sentenced! God, I’ve never met such a disturbed thing in its infancy before. Quite premature, aren’t you?”

  “What do you want?” I said. “I already told you I’m not interested in crime.”

  “But I’m interested in you. I want to see how you’re managing out there in the big bad world. Certainly not like your brother. He’s a chameleon, remarkably adaptable, and a dog, very loyal, happy as a lark. Wonderful disposition your brother’s got, even though…” Harry leaned forward and said, “There’s something unstable about him. You’ve noticed it, of course.”

  I had.

  “Not much gets past you, I’ll bet. No, I won’t use that hackneyed phrase that you remind me of myself when I was a boy, because, frankly, you don’t. You remind me of myself now, as a man, in jail, and it’s pretty frightening for me to be able to make that comparison, Martin, don’t you think? Considering, well, you’re just a kid.”

  I could see his point, but I pretended I didn’t.

  “You and your brother are unique. You are not, either of you, influenced in any significant way by those around you. You don’t try to imitate them. You stand apart, even from each other. That kind of fierce individualistic streak is rare. You are both born leaders, you know.”

  “Terry might be.”

  “You too, Marty! Problem is, mate, you’re in the fucking sticks! The type of followers you might have had just don’t grow here. Tell me something—you don’t like people very much, do you?”

  “They’re OK.”

  “Do you think you’re superior to them?”

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you like them?”

  I wondered if I should open up to this lunatic. It occurred to me that nobody had ever taken an interest in what I thought or felt before. Nobody had ever taken an interest in me.

  “Well, for one,” I said, “I’m jealous of their happiness. And second, it infuriates me that they seem to have made up their minds without thinking first.”

  “Go on.”

  “It seems that they’re just keeping themselves busy at any and every task that distracts them from the impulse of thinking about their own existence. Why else would they smash the heads of their neighbors together over different football teams, if it didn’t serve the purpose of helping them avoid the thought of their own impending deaths?”

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  “No.”

  “You’re philosophizing.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are. You’re a philosopher.”

  “No I’m not!” I shouted. I didn’t want to be a philosopher. All they do is sit around and think. They grow fat. They don’t know how to do anything practical like weed their own gardens.

  “Yes, Martin, you are. I’m not saying you’re a good one, just that you’re a natural one. It’s not an insult, Marty. Listen. I’ve been labeled many times a criminal—an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that’s what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that—I don’t even know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?” Harry leaned forward and I could smell his stale cigarette breath. “You’ve felt it too, Marty. As you say, you don’t know why people act without thinking. You ask why. That’s an important question for you. Now I ask you—why the why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do. It’s all right, Martin. Tell me—why the why?”

  “Well, as long as I can remember, in the afternoons, my mother served me up cold glasses of milk. Why not warm? Why milk? Why not coconut juice or mango lassis? I asked her once. She said that this was what children at my age drank. And another time, during dinner, she chastised me for placing my elbows on the table while eating. I asked why. She said, ‘It’s rude.’ I said, ‘Rude to who? To you? In what way?’ Again she was stumped, and as I went to bed ‘because seven p.m. is bedtime for children under seven,’ I realized that I was blindly following the orders of a woman who herself was blindly following rumors. I thought: Maybe things don’t have to be this way. They could be done another way. Any other way.”

  “So you feel people have accepted things that may not be true?”

  “But they have to accept things, otherwise they can’t live their daily lives. They have to feed their family, and put a roof over their heads. They don’t have the luxury of sitting around thinking and asking why.”

  Harry clapped his hands in delight. “And now you take the opposite view in order to hear the counterargument! You’re arguing with yourself! That also is the sign of a philosopher!”

  “I’m not a fucking philosopher!”

  Harry came and sat down beside me, his frighteningly pummeled face close to mine.

  “Look, Marty, let me tell you something. Your life isn’t going to get any better. In fact, think of your worst moment. Are you thinking of it? Well, let me tell you. It’s al
l downhill from there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know you haven’t a chance in hell of happiness.”

  That was upsetting news to hear, and I took it badly, maybe because I had the uncomfortable feeling that Harry understood me. Tears came to my eyes, but I fought them. Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? Is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can’t hide our melancholy? Why? What’s the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak? After a big cry, you always feel drained and exhausted and sometimes embarrassed, especially if the tears come after watching a television commercial for tea bags. Is it evolution’s design to humble us? To humiliate us?

  Fuck.

  “You know what I think you should do?” Harry asked.

  “What?”

  “Kill yourself.”

  “Time!” the guard called.

  “Two more minutes!” Harry shouted back.

  We sat glaring at each other.

  “Yep, I advise you to commit suicide. It’s the best thing for you. There is no doubt a cliff or something you can jump from around here.”

  My head moved slightly, though it wasn’t a nod or a shake. It was a slight reverberation.

  “Go alone. When no one is with you. Don’t write a note. Many potential suiciders spend so much time composing their final words they wind up dying of old age! Don’t let this be your mistake. When it comes to taking your own life, preparation is procrastination. Don’t say goodbye. Don’t pack a bag. Just walk to the cliff alone one late afternoon—afternoon is best because it sits solidly at the end of a day when nothing in your life has changed for the better, so you aren’t suffering the tender illusion of potential and possibility that morning often brings. So then, you’re at the edge of the cliff now, and you’re alone, and you don’t count down from ten or a hundred, and you don’t make a big thing of it, you just go, don’t jump, this isn’t the Olympics, this is a suicide, so just step off the edge of the cliff like you’re climbing the steps of a bus. Have you ever been on a bus? Fine. Then you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I said time’s up!” the guard shouted, this time from the door.

  Harry gave me a look that set off an intestinal chain reaction. “Well,” he said, “I suppose this is goodbye, then.”

  There’s no shortage of potential suicide jump points when you live in a valley. Our town was surrounded by cliff walls. I made my way up the steepest I could find, an exhausting, almost vertical climb to a ridge flanked by tall trees. After leaving the prison, I had conceded that Harry was right: I probably was a philosopher, or at least some kind of perennial outsider, and life wasn’t going to get any easier for me. I’d separated myself from the flow, ejected my pod from the mother ship. Now I was hurtling through space that loomed endlessly ahead.

  The mood of the brightening morning was incongruous to suicide, but maybe that’s just what it wanted me to think. I took a last look around. I saw, in the hazy distance, the jagged ridge of the surrounding hills, and above, the sky, which seemed to be a high, unattainable plate-glass window. A light breeze carried the warm fragrance of flowers in waves, and I thought: Flowers really are lovely but not lovely enough to excuse the suffocating volume of paintings and poems inspired by them while there are still next to no paintings and poems of children throwing themselves off cliffs.

  I took a step closer to the edge. High in the trees I could hear the sounds of birds. They weren’t chirping, they were just moving around making everything rustle. Down near the earth brown beetles were rummaging in the dirt, not thinking of death. It didn’t seem to me I’d be missing out on much. Existence is humiliating anyway. If Someone was watching us build, decay, create, degenerate, believe, and wither as we do, he’d never stop laughing. So why not? What do I know about suicide? Only that it is a melodramatic act, as well as an admission that the heat is too hot so I’m getting out of this crazy kitchen. And why shouldn’t a fourteen-year-old commit suicide? Sixteen-year-olds do it all the time. Maybe I’m just ahead of my time. Why shouldn’t I end it all?

  I stepped right out to the edge of the precipice. I thought that when Caroline saw me afterward she’d cry, “I loved that mashed-up piece of human wreckage.” I looked over at the terrifying drop and my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.

  I stepped away from the cliff and ran in the opposite direction, stopping only to trip over a large stone.

  I went back to see Harry West to give him a piece of my mind. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

  “So you didn’t do it, eh? You think you will wait until you hit rock bottom before taking your own life? Well, let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. You’ll never get there, and that’s why I know you’ll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he’ll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don’t think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they’re the ones who can’t do it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldn’t dare. Look, Marty, you’re in an untenable situation. You don’t have the resources to live a full life, yet you can’t bring yourself to die. So what do you do?”

  “I don’t know! I’m fourteen!”

  “You and me, we’re in the same boat. Here in this prison a man cannot live properly. He can’t meet girls or cook his own meals or make friends or go out dancing or do any of the skimming-the-surface-of-life things that gather leaves and lovely memories. So I, like you, can’t live. And like you, I can’t die. I ask you again, what’s a man to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You create!”

  “Oh.”

  “Can you draw or paint?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Can you make up stories and write them down?”

  “No.”

  “Can you act?”

  “No.”

  “Can you write poetry?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you play music?”

  “Not a note.”

  “Can you design buildings?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Well, something will come to you. In fact, I think you already know.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Really, I don’t.”

  “You know you do. Now hurry up. Get out of here. I’m sure you’re in a hurry to get started.”

  “No, I’m not because I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  I left the prison all dazed and emptied out, on the verge of either a shocking fit or a wonderful discovery. Create, the man said.

  Create what?

  I needed to think. I needed an idea. Feeling heavy, I trudged into town and walked up and down our five measly streets. When I reached the end of one and almost continued into the bush, I spun around and walked the streets again. Why wouldn’t I venture into the bush that surrounded our town on all sides? Well, I wished I could draw my inspiration from Mother Nature’s well, but to tell you the truth, the bitch leaves me dry. Always has, always will. I just don’t get any great ideas looking at trees or at possums fucking.
Sure, the sleeping angel in my breast stirs just like everyone else’s when confronted by a breathtaking sunset or a bubbling brook, but it doesn’t lead me anywhere. A shivering blade of grass is lovely, but it leaves me with a big mental blank. Socrates must have thought the same when he said, “The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing.” Instinctively I knew that I could draw inspiration only from man and manmade things. It’s unromantic, but that’s just how I’m built.

  I stood at the crossroads and watched the people drag themselves about their business. I looked at the cinema. I looked at the general store. I looked at the barbershop. I looked at the Chinese restaurant. That all of this had sprouted from the primordial soup was a profound and impossible mystery. There’s nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that a post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.

  Then I had it.

  They call it inspiration: sudden ideas that explode into your brain just when you are convinced you’re a moron.

  I had my idea, and it was a biggie. I ran home thinking Harry was instructing both of us, Terry and me, in different lessons, but to be honest, I don’t think Terry got anything out of Harry at all. Oh, a few practical pointers, sure, but none of the philosophy, none of the juice!

  First Project

  I’m not a handyman by nature. The objects constructed by me that exist in the world are few; scattered in garbage pits across the country lie a misshapen ashtray, an unfinished scarf, a crooked crucifix just big enough for a cat to sacrifice his life for all the future sins of unborn kittens, a deformed vase, and the object I made the night after visiting Harry in his stinking prison: a suggestion box.

  I built it optimistically; it was a real cavern, 50 centimeters across, 30 centimeters in depth, enough space inside to fit literally thousands of suggestions. The box looked like an enormous square head, and after I gave it a varnish I took the handsaw and widened the mouth farther, opening up the corners a couple of centimeters on either side so the mouth was smiling. First thing I considered was attaching it to a stick and pounding it into the earth somewhere in the town, but when you’re building something for public access, you have to take vandals into account; every place on earth has them, and beyond too.