A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

by Steve Toltz

  “You’re hired.”

  “Fine.”

  I looked at Dad who had a strange look on his face, as if we had trekked all night to arrive at a secret waterfall and this was it. We kept on with the envelopes as the dawn became morning.

  The first night Anouk came in to cook and clean, her confusion was hilarious; she was expecting a wealthy man’s spacious house, only to step into our small and disgusting apartment, which was rotting like the bottom of an old boat. After she cooked us dinner she asked, “How can you live like this? You’re pigs. I’m working for pigs,” and Dad said, “Is that why you cooked us this slop?” She was furious, but for reasons that I’ve never completely understood (there are other jobs), she came back week after week, returning to us always with tireless and aggressive disapproval and a face that looked like it had just sucked a basket of lemons. She came in, opening curtains and dumping light into our hole in the wall, and as she stepped over Dad’s overdue library books, which carpeted the floor, she looked searchingly at me, as if I were a captive she was considering freeing.

  At first Anouk came in for a few hours on Mondays and Fridays, though gradually the routine fell apart and she just started turning up whenever she felt like it, not only to cook and clean but often to eat and make a mess. She ate with us regularly, argued with us constantly, and introduced me to a breed I’d never encountered before: a left-wing, art-loving, self-proclaimed “spiritual person” who chose to convey her gentle ideas about peace and love and nature by screaming at you.

  “You know what your problem is, Martin?” she asked Dad one night after dinner. “You’re choosing books over life. I don’t think books are supposed to be a substitute for life, you know. They’re more of a complement.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know when I see someone who doesn’t know how to live.”

  “And you do?”

  “I’ve got some ideas.”

  In her view, Dad and I were problems waiting to be solved, and she began by trying to turn us into vegetarians, parading pictures of howling mutilated animals in front of us while we were in the middle of tucking into a juicy steak. When that failed, she sneaked meat substitutes onto our plates. And it wasn’t just food; Anouk dished out all forms of spirituality like a Hun: art therapy, rebirthing, therapeutic massage, strange-smelling oils. She recommended we go and get our auras massaged. She dragged us to criminally obscure plays, including one where the actors performed with their backs to the audience during the entire production. It was as if a lunatic were holding the key to our brains, stuffing things inside like crystals and wind chimes and pamphlets advertising lectures by one mystical left-wing levitating Gucci guru after another. That’s when she started with escalating urgency to critically assess our way of life.

  Every week she inspected a new corner of our airless lives and gave us a review. It was never a rave. We never got a thumbs-up. The thumbs were always pointing to the sewer. After she discovered that Dad was managing a strip club, the reviews became savage, starting on the outside and working in. She critiqued our habit of impersonating each other on the phone, and the way, whenever there was a knock on the door, we both froze in terror as if we lived in a totalitarian regime and were running an underground newspaper. She pointed out that living like art students while Dad had an expensive sports car was borderline insane; she shot down Dad’s habit of kissing books and not me, as well as the way he’d go weeks without acknowledging my existence, then weeks when he wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace. She picked apart everything, from the way Dad slouched in his chair, to how he’d spend an hour weighing the advantages and disadvantages of having a shower, to his sociopathic manner of dressing (it was Anouk who first spotted that Dad was wearing his pajamas underneath his suit), to his lazy way of shaving, so he left tufts of hair sprouting in random patches on his face.

  Maybe it was her arctic, belittling tone of voice, but he’d just stare sullenly into his coffee as she unveiled her latest damning report from the front lines. Her most unsettling and damaging form of reproach, though, was when she critiqued Dad’s criticism; that sent him reeling. You see, he’d spent nearly his whole life honing his contempt for others and had nearly perfected his “guilty” verdict on the world when Anouk came in and leveled it. “You know what your problem is?” she’d say (that’s how she always began). “You hate yourself and so you hate others. It’s just sour grapes. You’re too busy reading and thinking about big things. You don’t care about the little things in your own life, and that means you’re contemptuous of anyone who does. You’ve never struggled like they have, because you’ve never cared like they do. You don’t really know what people go through.” Often as she dished it out Dad would be strangely quiet, and he rarely rose to his own defense.

  “You know what your problem is?” she asked after Dad told her his life story one afternoon. “You’re rehashing your old thoughts. Do you realize that? You’re quoting yourself, your only friend is a sleazy sycophant”—Eddie—“who agrees with everything you say, and you never air your ideas in a forum where they might be challenged, you just say them to yourself and then congratulate yourself when you agree with what you said.”

  She went on and on like this, and over the following months, as I squeezed uncomfortably into adolescence and my relationship with Dad weakened daily, as if it had osteoporosis, Anouk didn’t just pour acid all over his ideas, hopes, and self-esteem, she took aim at me too. She was the one who told me I was only good-looking enough to attract about 22 percent of the female population. I thought that was a dismal figure, really abominable. It wasn’t until I was able to spot the loneliness in the faces of men that I realized that being attractive to 22 percent of women is a whopping success story. There are legions of ugly, wretchedly lonely, hopelessly inept sociopaths out there who fall in the 0–2 percent category—armies of them—and every one would kill for my 22 percent.

  Oh, and she also berated me for neglecting the second batch of fish.

  You see, Dad’s bank balance was swelling again, and undaunted by the previous episode of fish homicide (suicide?), he bought three more fish, this time simple goldfish, as if he thought that the ownership of fish went through degrees of difficulty depending on the species and the previous disaster had been caused by the fact that he had bought me fish that were simply too hard for my level. To him, goldfish were fish with training wheels: immortal, impossible to kill.

  He was wrong. In the end I disposed of those fish quite easily too, though this time from underfeeding. They starved to death. But we argued right up to and including the day Dad died on the issue of whose fault it was. I went away for a week to stay at my friend Charlie’s house, and I swear to God, as I was leaving the apartment I said to Dad, “Don’t forget to feed the fish.” Dad remembers it very differently, and in his version, when leaving the apartment I had actually said, “OK, bye.” Whatever the case, sometime during my weeklong absence the fish came down with a bad case of starvation and, unlike humans in the same fix, did not think to resort to cannibalism. They just let themselves waste away.

  Anouk took Dad’s side on this one, and I noticed that the only time Dad enjoyed the benefits of a ceasefire was when he could team up with Anouk against me. I have to admit, their relationship perplexed me. They were an improbable pairing, as if a rabbi and a man who raised pit bulls were marooned together on a desert island; incompatible strangers thrown together during a time of crisis, only Dad and Anouk’s was a nameless crisis without beginning or end.

  A year into her employment with us, Dad received an unexpected phone call.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “Jesus Christ, no. Absolutely not. Not if you raped and tortured me. How much is a lot? Well, all right, then. Yes, yes, I said yes, didn’t I? When do I start?”

  It was good news! An American film production company had heard of the Terry Dean story and wanted to make it into a Hollywood blockbuster. They wanted Dad’s help to make sure they got it ri
ght, even though they were setting it in America as the story of a dead baseball player who comes back from hell to take revenge on his teammates who battered him to death.

  So it seemed Dad could make good money off his memories, but why now? There had already been a couple of wildly inaccurate Australian movies based on the story, and Dad had refused to cooperate with any of them. Why this surrender, this sudden willingness to exploit his private dead? It was another in an alarming series of abrupt about-faces, allowing a writer to come with a nice check in exchange for picking the scabs off Dad’s brain to see what was underneath. Anouk, with her uncanny gift for identifying the worm in the apple, said, “You know what your problem is? You’re living in your brother’s shadow,” and when the twenty-three-year-old gum-chewing writer bounded cheerily into the apartment the following week, he only had to say, “So, tell me what Terry Dean was like as a child,” for Dad to grab him by the shirtsleeves and throw him exuberantly out the door with his laptop after him. One court appearance later, his new “job” cost him $4,000 and some unwanted press. “You know what your problem is?” Anouk said that night. “You’re a fanatic, but you’re fanatical about everything. Don’t you see? You’re spreading your fanaticism too thin.”

  But you want to know what our real problem was? You can’t drift blissfully along in a blind haze when someone’s standing beside you shouting: That’s lust! That’s pride! That’s sloth! That’s habit! That’s pessimism! That’s jealousy! That’s sour grapes! Anouk was stuffing up our deeply entrenched custom of scraping and wheezing our way unenthusiastically around our claustrophobic apartment. The only way we knew how to get ahead was to plod toward our paltry desires and pant loudly to get attention. And the endlessly optimistic Anouk wanted to turn creatures like us into superbeings! She desired us to be considerate, helpful, conscientious, moral, strong, compassionate, loving, selfless, and brave, and she never let up, until gradually we fell into the regrettable habit of watching what we did and what we said.

  After months of her boring us and boring into us, we no longer used plastic bags, and rarely ate anything that bled; we signed petitions, joined fruitless protests, inhaled incense, bent ourselves into difficult yoga positions—all worthy ascents up the mountain of self-improvement. But there were crap changes too, deep plummets into the gorge. Because of Anouk, we lived in fear of ourselves. Whoever first equated self-knowledge with change has no respect for human weakness and should be found and bitten to death. I’ll tell you why: Anouk highlighted our problems but didn’t have the resources or the know-how to help us fix them. We certainly didn’t know. So thanks to Anouk, not only were we stuck with the slippery menagerie of problems we already had, we were now imbued with an appalling awareness of them. This, of course, led to new problems.

  III

  There was something really wrong with my father. He was crying; he was in his bedroom, crying. I could hear him sobbing through the walls. I could hear him pacing back and forth over the same small space. Why was he crying? I’d never heard him cry before; I thought he couldn’t. Now it was every night after work and every morning before work. I took it as a bad omen. I felt that he was crying prophetically—not for what had happened but for what was about to take place.

  In between sobs he talked to himself. “Fucking apartment. Too small. Can’t breathe. It’s a tomb. Must wage war. Who am I? How can I define myself? Choices are infinite and therefore limited. Forgiveness is big in the Bible, but nowhere does it say you should forgive yourself. Terry never forgave himself, and everyone loves him. I forgive myself daily, and nobody loves me. All this dread and insomnia. I can’t teach my brain how to sleep. How’s your confusion these days? It’s put on weight.”

  “Dad?”

  I pushed open his door a little, and in the shadows his face was severe and his head looked like a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

  “Jasper. Do me a favor. Pretend you’re an orphan.”

  I closed the door, went into my bedroom, and pretended I was an orphan. It didn’t feel too bad.

  Then, as abruptly as it started, the crying stopped. Suddenly he started going out at night. That was new. Where did he go? I followed him. He was walking the streets with a bounce in his step and waving to people as he passed. They didn’t wave back. He stopped at a small, crowded pub. I peeked through the window and saw him perched at the bar, drinking. And he wasn’t sulking alone in a corner either; he was chatting to people, laughing. That was brand spanking new. The color of his face had gone all rosy, and after he polished off a couple of beers, he stood up on the bar stool and turned off the football game and said something to the crowd while laughing and shaking his fist like a dictator telling a joke at the execution of his favorite dissident. When he finished he bowed (though nobody applauded) and went to another pub, shouting “Hello there!” as he entered, then “I’ll see what I can do!” as he left. Then he popped into a dimly lit bar and paced around in circles before leaving without ordering anything. Then a nightclub! Christ! Is this what Anouk had driven him to?

  He disappeared up the escalator of the Fishbowl, a concept disco designed as an enormous glass bowl with a platform around its perimeter. I climbed up onto the platform and peered into the bowl. At first I couldn’t see him. At first I couldn’t see anything but immaculately sculpted beautiful people illuminated in brief moments under strobe lights. Then I spotted him. He was fucking dancing. He was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath, moving clumsily and making strange, drowsy arm movements, like a lumberjack chopping trees in space, but he was having fun. Or was he? His smile was twice the size of normal smiles and he was gazing lustfully at cleavage of all sizes and religions. But what was this? He wasn’t dancing alone! He was dancing with a woman! Or was he? He was dancing behind her, gyrating at her back. She was ignoring him a little too effortlessly for comfort, so he swiveled around so he was in front and tried to sweep her up in that mile-wide smile. I wondered if he was going to invite her back to our sad and filthy apartment. But no, she wasn’t taken in. So he moved on to another woman, a shorter, rounder one. He swooped down and escorted her to the bar. He bought her a drink and handed over the cash as if he were paying a ransom. As they talked, he placed his hand on her back and drew her toward him. She resisted and walked away and Dad’s smile grew even wider, making him look like a chimpanzee who’d had peanut butter smeared on his gums for a television commercial.

  A flat-nosed, no-neck bouncer in a tight black T-shirt arrived. His Goliath’s hand wrapped around the back of Dad’s neck, and he forcefully escorted him out of the club. On the street, Dad told him to fuck his mother if he hadn’t already. That did it for me. I’d seen enough. It was time to go home.

  At around five in the morning he banged on the door. He’d lost his key. I opened up to see him sweating and yellow and in the middle of a sentence. I went back to bed without hearing the end of it. That was the only night I followed him, and when I recounted the story to Anouk, she said it was either “quite a good sign” or a “very bad sign.” I don’t know what he did the rest of those nights out on the town. I can only assume they were variations on the same fruitless theme.

  A month later he was home again, crying. But what was worse, he started watching me sleep. The first night he did it he came into the room just as I was drifting off and took a seat by the window.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing. You just go to sleep.”

  “What, with you sitting there?”

  “I’m going to read in here awhile,” he said, holding up a book.

  He turned on the lamp and started reading. I watched him for a minute, then put my head back down and shut my eyes. I could hear him turning the pages. A few minutes later I sneaked one eyelid open and almost recoiled. He was staring at me. My face was in shadows, so he couldn’t see I was watching him watching me. Then he turned the page again. I realized he was pretending to read, as an excuse for watching me sleep. This happened night after night, Dad pretendi
ng to read in my bedroom while I stayed awake with my eyes closed, feeling his eyes on me and listening to the sound of turning pages in the quiet. I tell you, they were some eerie, sleepless nights.

  Then he started shoplifting. It began well enough. Dad came home, his bag stuffed with avocados and apples and fat nobs of cauliflower. Fruit and vegetables, nothing to complain about. Then he stole combs, throat lozenges, and Band-Aids—pharmaceutical goods. Useful. Then he stole nonsense items from gift shops: an old piece of driftwood with the words “My home is my castle” etched onto a plaque, a thong-shaped flyswatter, and a mug that said “You never know how many friends you have until you own a beach house,” which might be fun to put in a beach house, if you had one. We didn’t.

  Then he was in bed crying again.

  Then he was watching me sleep again.

  Then he was at the window. I don’t know when exactly he took up post there, or why, but he was vigilant about his new role. Half his face was looking out the window, the other half buried in the bunched-up curtains. We should have had venetian blinds, the perfect accessory for sudden outbursts of acute paranoia; there’s nothing quite as atmospheric as those slits with their thin bars of shadow falling across your face. But what was he looking at out the window anyway? Mostly the backs of people’s shitty apartments. Mostly bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms. Nothing fascinating. Man with pale skinny legs stands in underwear devouring apple, woman puts on makeup arguing with person unseen, old couple brushes teeth of uncooperative German shepherd, that kind of thing. Staring out, Dad had a dark look in his eye. It wasn’t jealousy, that much I know. For Dad, the grass was never greener on the other side of the fence. If anything, it was browner.

  Everything had taken a darker turn. His mood was dark. His face was dark. His vocabulary, dark and menacing.

  “Fucking bitch,” he said one day at the window. “Fucking cunt.”

  “Who?” I asked.