by Steve Toltz
Now I want you to know, I do not agree with the theory that all illness is made in the mind. Whenever someone says that to me, and blames all sickness on “negative thoughts,” I think one of the ugliest, most uncharitable, angriest thoughts in my ugly, uncharitable, angry thought repertoire. I think: I hope to see you at your child’s funeral so you can explain to me how your six-year-old daughter fabricated her own leukemia. Like I said, not nice, but that’s how furious that particular theory makes me. Old age means nothing to those theorists. They think matter decays because it’s down in the mouth.
The problem with people is that they are so in love with their beliefs that their epiphanies have to be absolute and comprehensive or nothing. They can’t accept the possibility that their truths may have only an element of truth in them. It follows, therefore, that it’s possible that some illnesses are born in the mind, and since desperation makes a man still more desperate, I was even willing to consider a supernatural cause for my deteriorating state.
When you’re lying in agony, it gives you some relief to diagnose yourself; you get some of the illusion of power back. But if you know as much about the intricacies of the human body as you do about jet engines, you have to get creative. First, I meditated on plain old simple anxiety. But other than a exhausted concern for my mother and an unease about the possibility of being charged in a police investigation, I really wasn’t that anxious. In truth, the slamming of the cell door in Terry’s face was an enormous relief to me. That cell door signified the end of my days of fretting. I was relieved he was shut away.
The second tier of investigation brought me to the spiritual world. My thinking was this: I had sought to break the bond I had made with my mother, and if this was the cause of my illness, I had psychological and supernatural roots to choose from. Perhaps unconsciously I had made myself sick about it. Maybe my body revolted at the act of betrayal. Or, supernaturally, possibly the link with my mother was so strong, our bond had doomed me to keeping my word. Perhaps I had been suckered into a Polish mother’s curse, and I didn’t know it.
Either way, I was really sick. Name a symptom, I had it: vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever, dizziness, shortness of breath, blurry vision, aching joints, groaning muscles, sore toes, chattering teeth, white tongue. I had everything short of bleeding from the eyeballs, and I didn’t doubt that was next. I was so weak, I couldn’t stand up to go to the bathroom. Beside my bed were two white bowls, one for vomit, one for piss and shit. I lay in a stupor, eyeing my half-packed suitcase and watching through a blurry haze a parade of noxious childhood memories pass before my eyes. I was right back where I started! That was the most painful part of being ill again, realizing that I had come full circle, and all I could think about was how I’d squandered my years of good health by just moping around and not climbing Everest.
My mother came into my room with an armful of books and began reading to me again, just like in the old days. Barely alive herself, she sat in the thin light of the lamp and read to me, beginning with an ominous choice, The Man in the Iron Mask. Lying in that dazed state, I had little trouble imagining a similar metallic apparatus constricting my own poor head. She read from morning to night, and after a while began sleeping in Terry’s old bed next to mine, so there was hardly a time that we weren’t together.
Her conversation often drifted to her early life in Shanghai, before she was pregnant with me, when she was still pregnant with possibility. She spoke often of Father Number One and remembered moments of intimacy between them when he stroked her hair while saying her name as if it were a sacred thing. It was the only time she liked the sound of her own name. She told me I had a similar-sounding voice, and one night she asked me to call her by her first name. It made me very uncomfortable, as I was already familiar with the works of Freud, but I did it to make her happy. Then she began unburdening herself by my bedside with lots of awful confessions like this one:
“I feel like I took a wrong turn but went so far down the road I didn’t have the energy to turn back. Please, Martin, you must remember this. It’s never too late to turn back if you make a wrong turn. Even if it takes you a decade to backtrack, you must do it. Don’t get stuck because the road back seems too long or too dark. Don’t be afraid to have nothing.”
And this one:
“I have stayed faithful to your father all these years, even though I don’t love him. Now I see I should’ve fucked around. Don’t let morality get in the way of living your life. Terry killed those men because that’s what he wanted to do with his life. If you need to cheat, cheat. If you need to kill, kill.”
And this:
“I married your father because of fear. I stayed because of fear. Fear has ruled my life. I am not a brave woman. It’s a bad thing to come to the end of your life and discover you are not brave.”
I never knew what to say when my mother unloaded herself in this way. I only smiled into her face that was once a well-tended garden, and patted her bony hands not without some embarrassment, because it is embarrassing to watch a life that scrutinizes itself at the end and realizes all it has to take into death is the shame of not having fully lived.
One day I imagined I was at my execution after a long and costly trial. I thought: On a clear day you can see me dying. I was thinking of Caroline too, that I might never see her again, that she would never understand the width and depth of my feelings. I thought about how I was dying a virgin. Damn. I took a deep breath. There was a repulsive, sickening smell in the air. It was me.
Was I dreaming? I didn’t hear them come in. Standing over me were two men in brown suits, jackets off, sleeves rolled up, sweat dripping into their eyes. One had a jutting-out jaw so extreme I didn’t know whether to shake his hand or his chin. The other one had small eyes set in a small head, and a small nose sitting above a small mouth with lips so thin they looked drawn on by a pencil, a 2B.
“We want to talk to you, Mr. Dean,” the chin said, and that sentence was notable for being the first time in my life I was called Mr. Dean. I didn’t like it. “Can you hear me? What’s wrong with you?”
“Childhood illness,” my mother said.
“Isn’t he a bit old for that?”
“Listen, Mr. Dean. We’d like a statement from you concerning the exact nature of your editing of the book.”
“What book?” I groaned obtusely.
The small one wiped sweat from his face and smeared it on his pants. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Dean. You did considerable work editing The Handbook of Crime for Terry Dean.”
“Harry West,” I said.
“What?”
“The Handbook of Crime was written by Harry West, not Terry Dean.”
“The guy who took a dive off the harbor bridge,” the chin said to the thin lips.
“Blaming it on a dead man because he can’t corroborate your story is a little too convenient. I don’t like it.”
“Do you have to like something before it becomes fact?” I asked, and before they could respond, I said, “Excuse me a minute.” I could feel my lunch coming up for air. I grabbed a bowl and threw up into it. A long silver thread of saliva connected my lower lip to the edge of the bowl.
“Listen, Dean. Are you going to make a statement or not?”
I motioned to the bowl and said, “I just made it.”
“Look. There’s no need to be hostile. We’re not charging you with anything, we’re just making some preliminary inquiries. Could you tell us how exactly you edited the book? Where did you and Terry meet?”
“Your brother isn’t the most educated man in the world, Mr. Dean. There must have been a lot of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and the like.”
I looked over to my mother, who was staring out the window in a sort of trance.
“We’ve looked into it. Editors work closely with their authors.”
“Did your brother have any accomplices? We’re investigating some new crimes.”
I said nothing, but I too had read the sm
all print in the newspapers. Just like artists, murderers are seduced by the dazzling, unexpected fusion of originality and success, and one or two would-be criminals had taken to plagiaristic copycat killings in the months after Terry’s arrest, but they lacked spark and innovation. When the Australian chess champion was found with the bishop and two pawns lodged in his throat, the nation gave it scant attention, not least because the wannabe vigilante hadn’t realized that chess is a game, not a sport.
Observing that I was in no state to answer their questions, one of the detectives said, “We’ll come back when you’re feeling a little better, Mr. Dean.”
After they left, my father shuffled down the hallway in his pajamas and paused at the door, looking from me to my mother and back at me, with a look on his face that I couldn’t quite read, before shuffling off again. For the record, I did not see the look as something sinister, and for all his bitterness and resentment toward me, I was still his son in a way. I never gave too much weight to his infamous list, nor to the possibility that his madness had taken him to a place where he could actually, willingly do me harm.
The following morning I heard my mother’s voice calling me in a half whisper, half gurgle, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that my suitcase was now fully packed and sitting by the door with my brown boots beside it, toes pointing into the corridor. My mother, with her paper-white face, was peering down at me. “Quick. You should go now,” she said, staring at me fixedly, but not at my eyes—at some other point on my face, perhaps my nose. “What’s happening?” I croaked, but she just pulled the sheets off the bed and tugged at my arm with surprising force. “Time to go, Marty. You go catch the bus now.” She kissed my sweaty forehead. “I love you very much, but don’t come back here,” she said. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. “We came a long way together, Marty. I carried you, remember? But I can’t carry you this time. You have to go on your own. Come on, get a move on. You’re going to miss the bus.” She cupped her hand around the back of my head and gently eased me upright.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
We heard footsteps in the hallway, the floorboards creaking. My mother threw the sheets over me again and leapt into Terry’s bed. My father’s face appeared at the door, and he saw me still half propped up in bed.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
I shook my head, and when he left, I swiveled my head to see my mother’s eyes closed; she was pretending to be asleep.
Later I had only a vague, fleeting memory of all this, but the residual feeling remained, a feeling like walking into the middle of a Harold Pinter play and being asked immediately by a tribunal to explain it or be executed. My mother, for her part, seemed to remember none of it, and when I brought it up she told me I had been laid up all night in a crazy fever, babbling like a lunatic. I didn’t know what to believe.
Then things went from worse to cataclysmic.
It was hot, 104 degrees. A blazing southerly wind blew through the open window. I tried to eat some vegetable soup my father had made. My mother brought it in. I drank only two spoonfuls, but I couldn’t hold it down. I reached for the bowl and threw it all up. My head hung over the bowl and I left it there, staring stupidly into the kaleidoscopic face of my own vomit. There, in the spew, I saw perhaps the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and since then I’ve seen dogs sawn in half.
This is what I saw:
Two. Blue. Pellets.
That’s right, rat poison.
That’s right, rat poison.
I struggled for a while to figure out how I may have inadvertently swallowed them myself. But having not put one foot out of bed since my illness began, I just had to rule it out. That left only one answer. My stomach tightened like a vise. I’m being poisoned, I thought. He, my father, is poisoning me.
Let’s not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. That’s right. That this man who I’d lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!
I dropped the bowl so the vomit spilled onto the carpet and dribbled down the cracks in the floorboards. I looked and looked again, each time confirming that I was not hallucinating, as my mother had assured me the previous night.
My mother! What was her part in all this? She obviously knew—that was why she wanted me to escape, a desire that ended abruptly when she feared that if the murderer knew I was fleeing, he would abandon his languid plan on the spot and just take a knife to my guts or a pillow to my face.
Christ! What a pickle!
Keeping your calm while your stepfather tries to kill you is quite impossible. Watching your murderer scrunch up his face in disgust as he silently cleans up your vomit may have its darkly comic elements, but it’s also just so damn chilling, you want to curl into a fetal position and remain there until the next ice age.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was consumed by a perverse curiosity to see what he’d do. I should say something, I thought, but what? Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you don’t want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest.
“Next time, try to get it into the bowl,” he said blandly.
I said nothing, just stared at him as if he’d broken my heart.
When he was gone, my rational mind came home. What the fuck was I going to do? It seemed sensible, as the intended victim, to remove myself from the scene of the crime, so as to avoid the crime. Yes, it was time to test the theory of superhuman strength being bestowed on people in life-threatening situations. Because my body was no use, I was counting on my will to live to get me out of this Shakespearean family drama. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got to my feet, using the side table for balance. I winced through the pain as my stomach contracted and twisted horribly. I went for my suitcase and noted it was still packed from the episode the night before. My feet struggled into my boots, and with great effort I began to walk: when you haven’t worn footwear in a while, even sandals feel as heavy as cement blocks. Trying to sneak out without a sound, I crept down the hallway. I could hear arguing from the living room. They were both screaming, my mother crying. There was the sound of breaking glass. They were fighting, physically. Maybe my mother had confronted him about his plot! At the door, I put down the suitcase and headed for the kitchen. What else could I do? I couldn’t leave my mother in my father’s psychotic hands. My course was clear. I had to kill my father (by marriage).
I tell you, I’ve taken more time choosing an item on a menu than I took making the decision to end my father’s life. And as someone who has always battled the pernicious vice of indecision—beginning the moment my mother dangled the raw nipples of two milk-filled tits in my face and said, “Choose one”—I found that having suddenly made a quick choice, however dreadful, gave me a supremely satisfying sense of empowerment.
In the kitchen I grabbed the carving knife. It smelled of onions. Through a crack in the door, I could see my parents struggling. They were really going for it. He’d hit my mother before many times, always late at night, in the privacy of their bedroom, but not since she’d told him she had cancer. My mother was clawing at him as best as she could in her half-dead state, and in return he gave her such a backhander, she fell to the floor in a crumpled heap.
My strength flowing, I burst through the door unsteadily but kept a clean, tight grip on the knife handle. They saw me—first my mother, then my father—but paid no attention to the knife in my hands. I might just as well have been holding a feather, they simply were so deep in their own private nightmare.
“Martin! Get out of here!” my mother wailed.
At the sight of me, my father’s face did something I’ve never seen a face do before. It contracted to half its normal siz
e. He looked back at my mother, picked up a chair, and smashed it to pieces on the ground so the fragments shattered around her.
“Get away from her!” I yelled, my voice cracking and wobbling at the same time.
“Martin…” he said in a strange voice.
My mother was sobbing hysterically.
“I said get away!” I repeated.
Then he said, in a voice like a grenade, “Your fucking crazy mother has been putting rat poison in your food!”
I stood there like a wall.
“It was you,” I said.
He just shook his head sadly.
I turned, confused, to my mother, whose face was partially covered by her hand. Her eyes streamed with tears; her body heaved with sobs. Immediately I knew it was true.
“Why?” my father yelled, punching the wall next to her. She screamed. He looked at me with tenderness and confusion and sobbed, “Martin, why?”
My mother was shivering. Her free hand clutched a copy of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. That was the next book she’d planned on reading to me. “So she could look after me,” I said, almost inaudibly.
He looked at me blankly. He didn’t get it. He didn’t get it at all.
“I’m sorry, son,” he said, in the first display of love he’d ever shown me.
It was all too much. I stumbled through the kitchen and down the hall and, grabbing my suitcase, burst through the front door.
If I’d been in any kind of reasonable state at all, I would’ve immediately noticed something wrong in the world around me. I walked in a daze, feeling the heat of the day on my face. I walked and walked, fast, as if carried by a strong current. My thoughts broke in half, then replicated—anger dividing into horror and rage, then again into pity and disgust, and so on. All the time I kept walking, feeling stronger and stronger with every step. I walked to the top of Farmer’s Hill.
