A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

by Steve Toltz

  Gradually, though, the tall stone walls and oversized hedges were erected, and the house was hidden from sight. A synthesis of house and shell. Psychologically complex. Virtually inaccessible. We moved inside, willing victims of Dad’s vast and hazardous imagination.

  When Anouk came back from Bali, she wasn’t surprised so much as absolutely furious that she’d missed everything: the collapse, the home for children, the mental hospital, and the building of this outrageous place. But, incredibly, she came back to work as if none of it had happened. She made Dad install an intercom system so that when she or any wanted visitors arrived, we could go and lead them through the maze to our fortified homestead. I’ll never understand that woman, I thought, but if she wants to cook and clean in a place of endless wanderings, that’s her choice.

  So this is where we lived.

  We were cut off and had only the natural sounds of the bush to placate, stimulate, and terrify us. The air here was different, and I surprised myself: I loved the quiet (as opposed to Dad, who developed the habit of leaving the radio on all the time). For the first time I felt the truth that the sky begins a quarter of an inch from the ground. In the mornings the bush smelled like the best underarm deodorant you ever smelled, and I quickly got used to the mysterious movements of the trees, which heaved rhythmically like a man chloroformed. From time to time the night sky seemed uneven, closer in points, then smoothed out, like a tablecloth bunched up, then suddenly pulled taut. I’d wake up to see lowlying clouds balanced precariously on the tops of trees. Sometimes the wind was so gentle it seemed to come from a child’s nostril, while other times it was so strong all the trees seemed held tenuously to the earth by roots as weak as doubled-over sticky tape.

  I felt the promise of catastrophe weaken, even break, and I dared to think optimistically again about our softly stirring futures.

  During a long walk around the grounds the idea hit me like a mud slide: the most striking difference between my father and me was that I preferred simplicity and he preferred complexity. Not to say I often, or ever, succeeded in achieving simplicity, only to say that I preferred it, just as he enjoyed muddying everything when he could, complicating everything until he couldn’t see straight.

  One evening he was standing in the back garden staring out. It was a liquid night and the moon was just a smudge out of focus.

  I said, “What are you thinking about?”

  He said, “It’s a surprise.”

  I said, “I don’t like surprises. Not anymore.”

  He said, “You’re too young to—”

  I said, “I’m not kidding. No more surprises.”

  He said, “I’m not going to get another job.”

  I said, “How will we live?”

  He said, “We’ll live fine.”

  I said, “What about food and shelter?”

  He said, “We have shelter. Eddie said he’s not in a hurry for me to pay back the loan, and thanks to him, we own this property.”

  I said, “And what about Anouk? How will you pay her?”

  He said, “I’m giving her the back room to use as a studio. She wants somewhere to sculpt.”

  I said, “And food? What about food?”

  He said, “We’ll grow food.”

  I said, “Steaks? We’ll grow steaks?”

  Then he said, “I’m thinking about cleaning up the pond.”

  In the back garden, there was a pond in the shape of a figure eight with small white stones around its perimeter. “And I might put some fish in it,” he added.

  “Shit, Dad, I don’t know.”

  “But this time I’ll take care of them, OK?”

  I agreed.

  As promised, he cleaned up the pond and put in three rare Japanese fish. They were not goldfish; they were so big and colorful they must have been the most advanced form of fish before great white sharks, and Dad fed them once a day, sprinkling the flakes in a semicircle across the pond as if in a simple, dignified ceremony.

  A month or two later, I was in the kitchen with Anouk and I could see Dad in the back garden with a tub full of a white substance that he was dishing into the pond in large spoonfuls. He was whistling contentedly.

  Anouk pressed her face against the window, then turned to me with a stunned look. “That’s chlorine,” she said.

  “Well, that can’t be good for the fish,” I said.

  “MARTIN!” Anouk screamed through the window. Dad turned swiftly, with an air of perplexity. You could see in his face, even from that distance, that the man had tasted the collapse of his own mind, a taste that hadn’t yet left his mouth. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU GREAT BIG IDIOT?” Anouk shouted. Dad continued to stare at her as if she were a puppet he had made out of wood that had startled him by speaking.

  We ran outside. It was too late. The three of us stood over the dead fish, which lay on their sides, eyes bulging with disbelief.

  “You know what your problem is?” Anouk asked.

  “Yes,” Dad said in a soft voice. “I think I do.”

  That night I was numb with cold. The fire was dying out, so I went upstairs to bed fully clothed and piled blankets on top of me. From my bed I could see a soft glow emanating from the back garden. I went to the window and looked out. Below, Dad stood in his pajamas holding a kerosene lamp that bobbed in the dark.

  He was mourning those fish. He went so far as to stare at his hands in a dramatic show of guilt, looking like he was in a student production of Macbeth. For a while I watched him standing down there in the back garden, the thin sliver of moon casting a pale light on his minikingdom. The wind cut through the trees. The cicadas sang a monotonous song. Dad threw stones in the pond. I felt disgusted, but it was compelling, the sight of him.

  I heard a noise behind me.

  There was something in my room: a bat, a possum, or a rat. I knew I’d never sleep until it was dead or removed; I knew I’d be lying in bed in the dark awaiting the sensation of sharp, jagged teeth on my toes. That was our new house for you. Our house, where from every little crack and orifice, every hole and slit, a living thing crawled out.

  I went downstairs and made myself comfortable on the couch just as Dad came in from the garden.

  “I’m going to sleep down here tonight,” I said.

  He nodded. I watched him browsing along his bookshelves for something to read. I turned over on my side and thought the completion of his project had introduced a new danger—he might once again render himself susceptible to a lethal twiddling of thumbs. What was he going to do now? With all that activity in his head? The house and the labyrinth had sustained him for a time and would continue to sustain him for a while longer, but they would not do so forever. Sooner or later he’d need a new project, and if one considered the progressive scale of the projects he’d already embarked on—the suggestion box, The Book of Crime, the construction of the labyrinth—it was clear that the next one would have to be enormous. Something that would, ironically, sustain him to his death and probably be the thing that killed him.

  Dad settled into the reclining chair and pretended to read. I knew exactly what he was doing; he was watching me sleep. It used to bother me, that creepy habit of his. Now I found it strangely comforting—the sound of turning pages in the quiet, his wheezy breathing and heavy presence filling the corners of the room.

  He turned the pages quickly. Now he was not only pretending to read, he was pretending to skim-read. I felt his eyes like a sandbag on my head, and I stretched out on the couch, let out a little moan, and after a believable period of time, pretended to dream.

  FOUR

  It must have been that the maze outside infected everything within. Why else would Dad leave scraps of paper around the house with nonsensical messages written on them, such as “Can’t love ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”? These messages were easily decoded by using the most basic system of cryptology, the first letter of each word in the text spelling out the real message.

  “Can’t love
ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”

  becomes

  “Clean your room!”

  Then he started with transposition, where the letters were jumbled and their normal order rearranged.

  “Egon ot het sposh. Kabc ralet.”

  becomes

  “Gone to the shops. Back later.”

  Then one night, a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I found the following message stuck to the bathroom mirror:

  rezizsl ta ta ixs em teme

  It took me a while to decode it, because he’d rearranged the words as well as the letters. After a few minutes of scrutiny, I cracked it:

  “Meet me at Sizzler at six.”

  Sizzler was where we preferred to eat to celebrate good news—that is to say, we’d been there once before, five years earlier, after Dad won $46 on lotto. I rode my bike through the labyrinth to the main road and took the bus into the city to the Hotel Carlos. This particular Sizzler was located on the top floor, although you didn’t need to stay in the hotel to eat there. You could if you wanted to, of course, but truth be told, once you’d finished eating and paid your bill, they didn’t really care where you slept.

  When I got there, he was already sitting at a table by the window, I suppose so we could gaze out across the cityscape during the inevitable lulls in conversation.

  “So how’s school?” he asked as I sat down.

  “Not bad.”

  “Learn anything today?”

  “The usual stuff.”

  “Such as?”

  “You know,” I said, and became nervous when I realized that he wasn’t looking at me. Maybe he’d heard someone say you’re not supposed to look directly into the sun and took it the wrong way.

  “I have something to show you,” he said. He laid an envelope on the table and drummed his fingers on it.

  I picked up the already torn-open envelope and removed the note inside. The letterhead was from my high school. As I read it, I feigned confusion, but I think it came across as a confession.

  Dear Mr. Dean,

  This is to officially inform you that your son, Jasper Dean, has been involved in an assault that took place on a train in the afternoon of the twentieth of April, after school. We have indisputable evidence that your son, while wearing school uniform, assaulted a man without provocation. In addition, we are writing to inform you that your son has chosen of his own volition to leave school.

  Yours sincerely,

  Mr. Michael Silver

  Principal

  “Why did they write that you were wearing your school uniform? Why is that important?”

  “That’s how they are.”

  Dad clicked his tongue.

  “I’m not going back,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve already said my goodbyes.”

  “And you attacked someone? Is that true?”

  “You had to be there.”

  “Were you defending yourself?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Look, everything I need to know I can teach myself. I can read books on my own. Those fools need someone to turn the pages for them. I don’t.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said. How could I tell him that I now wanted what he had once wanted—to travel on trains and fall in love with girls with dark eyes and extravagant lips? It didn’t matter to me if at the end of it I had nothing to show but sore thighs. It wasn’t my fault that the life of the wanderer, the wayfarer, had fallen out of favor with the world. So what if it was no longer acceptable to drift with the wind, asking for bread and a roof, sleeping on bales of hay and enjoying dalliances with barefooted farmgirls, then running away before the harvest? This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites.

  But unfortunately Dad didn’t like the concept of his only son floating aimlessly through space and time, as he came to describe my life plan. He leaned back in his chair and said, “You have to finish school.”

  “You didn’t finish school.”

  “I know. You don’t want to follow in my footsteps, do you?”

  “I’m not following in your footsteps. You don’t own the rights to quitting school.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to put my soul on the open road. See what happens.”

  “I’ll tell you what happens. Road rage.”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  “Look, Jasper. All I know is the exact pathway to frozen dinners and unwashed laundry. I left school. I wandered aimlessly over the whole earth. I gave myself no choice but to remain exiled from society. But I put you back in school for a reason: so you could have a foot in both worlds, ours and theirs. There’s no reason to leave now as if from the scene of a crime. Stay. Finish. Then do what you want. You want to go to university? You want to get a job and settle down? You want to travel to some of the world’s most exciting dictatorships? You want to drown in a foreign river during a monsoon? Whatever. Just give yourself the option. Stay within the system for now, OK?”

  “You didn’t. How many times have I heard you say, ‘Fuck the system’? Well, that’s all I’m doing. Fucking it.”

  Pity us, the children of rebels. Just like you, we have the right to rebel against our father’s ways, we too have anarchies and revolutions exploding in our hearts. But how do you rebel against rebellion? Does that mean turning back to conformity? That’s no good. If I did that, then one day my own son, in rebellion against me, would turn out to be my father.

  Dad leaned forward as though about to confess a murder he was particularly proud of.

  “Well, if you’re going out to put your soul on the open road, I’d like to give you a warning,” he said, his eyebrows arching unattractively. “Call it a road warning. I’m just not sure how to word it.”

  Dad put his thinking face on. His breathing became shallow. He spun around and shushed the couple at the table behind us. Suddenly he proceeded with his warning.

  “People always complain about having no shoes until they see a man with no feet, then they complain about not having an electric wheelchair. Why? What makes them automatically transfer themselves from one dull system to another, and why is free will utilized only on details and not on the broad outlines—not ‘Should I work?’ but ‘Where should I work?’ and not ‘Should I start a family?’ but ‘When should I start a family?’ Why is it we don’t suddenly swap countries so that everyone in France moves to Ethiopia and everyone in Ethiopia moves to Britain and everyone in Britain moves to the Caribbean and so on until we have finally shared the earth like we were supposed to and shed ourselves of our shameful, selfish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical loyalty to dirt? Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?

  “Listen. People are like knees that are hit with tiny rubber hammers. Nietzsche was a hammer. Schopenhauer was a hammer. Darwin was a hammer. I don’t want to be a hammer, because I know how the knees will react. It’s boring to know. I know because I know that people believe. People are proud of their beliefs. Their pride gives them away. It’s the pride of ownership. I’ve had mystical visions and found they were all so much noise. I saw visions I heard voices I smelled smells but I ignored them just as I will always ignore them. I ignore these mysteries because I saw them. I have seen more than most people, yet they believe and I do not. And why don’t I believe? Because there’s a process going on and I can see it.

  “It happens when people see Death, which is all the time. They see Death but they perceive Light. They feel their own death and they call it God. This happens to me too. When I feel deep in my guts that there’s meaning in the world, or God, I know it is really Death, but because I don’t want to see Death in the daylight, the mind plots and says Listen up you won’t die don’t worry you are special you have meaning the world has meaning can’t you feel it? And I still see Death and feel him too. And my mind says Don’t think about death
lalalala you will always be beautiful and special and you will never die nevernevernever haven’t you heard of the immortal soul well you have a really nice one. And I say Maybe and my mind says Look at that fucking sunset look at those fucking mountains look at that goddamn magnificent tree where else could that have come from but the hand of God that will cradle you forever and ever. And I start to believe in Profound Puddles. Who wouldn’t? That’s how it begins. But I doubt. And my mind says Don’t worry. You won’t die. Not in the long term. The essence of you will not perish, not the stuff worth keeping. One time I saw all the world from my bed, but I rejected it. Another time I saw a fire and in that fire I heard a voice telling me I would be spared. I rejected that too, because I know that all voices come from within. Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death. It is during the fiery Process that belief is produced, and if the fires are really hot they produce Certainty—Belief’s ugly son. To feel you know with all your heart Who made the universe, Who manages it, Who pays for it, et cetera, is in effect to disengage from it. The so-called religious, the so-called spiritualists, the groups that are quick to renounce the Western tradition of ‘soul-deadening consumerism’ and point out that comfort is death think it applies only to material possessions. But if comfort is death, then that should apply most profoundly to the mother of all comforts, certainty of belief—far cushier than a soft leather couch or an indoor Jacuzzi, and sure to kill an active spirit faster than an electric garage door opener. But the lure of certainty is difficult to resist, so you need one eye on the Process like me so that when I see the mystical visions of all the world and hear the half-whispered voices, I can reject them out of hand and resist the temptation to feel special and trust in my immortality, as I know it is only the handiwork of Death. So you see? God is the beautiful propaganda made in the fires of Man. And it’s OK to love God because you appreciate the artistry of his creation, but you don’t have to believe in a character because you’re impressed by the author. Death and Man, God’s coauthors, are the most prolific writers on the planet. Their output is prodigious. Man’s Unconscious and Inevitable Death have co-penned Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, to name but a few. And that’s just the characters. They created heaven, hell, paradise, limbo, and purgatory. And that’s just the settings. And what more? Everything, maybe. This successful partnership has created everything in the world but the world itself, everything that exists except for what was originally here when we found it. You get it? Do you understand the Process? Read Becker! Read Rank! Read Fromm! They’ll tell you! Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful byproduct: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from a very early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. The meaning they feel becomes channeled into their immortality projects—such as their children, or their gods, or their artistic works, or their businesses, or their nations—that they believe will outlive them. And here’s the problem: people feel they need these beliefs in order to live but are unconsciously suicidal because of their beliefs. That’s why when a person sacrifices his life for a religious cause, he has chosen to die not for a god but in the service of an unconscious primal fear. So it is this fear that causes him to die of the very thing he is afraid of. You see? The irony of their immortality projects is that while they have been designed by the unconscious to fool the person into a sense of specialness and into a bid for everlasting life, the manner in which they fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them. This is where you have to be careful. This is my warning to you. My road warning. The denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and if you are not careful, they will take you with them.”