A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

by Steve Toltz

  “I’ll decide when and where I worry,” I said, heading outside.

  The young doctor died two days later. Eddie didn’t leave his bedside the whole time. Despite Eddie’s insistence that the virus wasn’t contagious, I refused to set foot inside the death chamber. I knew the very moment the young doctor died, though, because the same hideous gut-wrenching wails as before echoed through the village. Frankly, I was suspicious of all this showy mourning and finally decided it was just a cultural tic, like those smiles. It’s not actually uncontrollable grief, I thought, it’s a show of uncontrollable grief. Quite a different thing.

  That’s how Eddie became the doctor of the village. He’d gotten what he wanted, but this didn’t soften him up. It was an error of judgment on my part to imagine it would. And it was an error on Eddie’s part to imagine that becoming the village doctor by default would warm the villagers to him. We went door-knocking. Some slammed the door in Eddie’s face; they thought he’d put a hex on the two doctors, a pox on both their houses. Eddie came out looking like a grave robber. We did the rounds anyway. There were no bites. And it was in no small part because the people didn’t seem ever to get sick.

  I’d scarcely thought it was possible, but Eddie was becoming even more unpleasant. All this healthiness was getting to him. “Not one patient! All I want is for someone to get ill! Violently ill! What are these people, immortal? They could do with a little motor neuron disease. Show them what life’s really about.” Eddie meant badly. His heart was in the wrong place.

  Thank God for farming accidents! After a few inadvertent amputations and the like, he eventually managed to scrounge up a couple of patients. The people were afraid of hospitals, so Eddie had to do things in the rice fields that I personally wouldn’t want done to me in anything other than the most sterile environment. But they didn’t seem to mind.

  As Eddie began his official career as a doctor, all these years after finishing medical school, I went back to the house to confront the dramas that I was sure would have progressed in my absence to a nice, steamy boiling point.

  “I’m in love with my husband’s brother,” Caroline said, as if she were on an American talk show and I didn’t know the names of the people involved. She straightened the chair I had unsuccessfully used to barricade the door.

  “I know it’s hard, Caroline. But can you hold out a little longer?”

  “Until your father’s dead? I’m so guilty. I’m counting the days. I want him to die.”

  This explained her feverish efforts to prolong his life: guilt. I had a feeling that when Dad did finally die, she would mourn him more than all of us. In fact, my father’s death was likely to ruin this woman. I thought I should speak to him about it, cautiously of course, and entreat him to give her to Terry while he was still alive. The death of her husband could send her over the edge for wishing it. I knew this would be a sore point with him, but for Caroline’s sake, for the image of her sad crazy eyes, I had to broach the subject.

  Dad was in bed with the lights out. The darkness helped me find the courage to go about my unenviable task. I launched right into it. I pretended that Caroline had said nothing to me and I had just deduced this all on my own. “Look,” I said, “I know this must be painful, and I know how you are—the last thing you want to do on the eve of your death is something noble—but the fact of the matter is, Caroline will be destroyed by your death if, as you die, she secretly wishes it. If you really love her, you must make a present of her to your brother. You must bequeath her, while you’re still alive.”

  Dad didn’t say a word. As I made this appalling speech, I thought that if someone said this to me, I would probably stick a butter knife through his tongue.

  “Leave me alone,” he said finally, in the dark.

  The next day Terry decided Dad must look at a dead bird he had seen on an early morning walk, and he dragged me along. He thought Dad would look at the still bird and be glad to be moving. It was a childish idea. My father had already seen many dead things, and they’d never made him glad to be alive. They wordlessly invited him to join them in death. This I knew. I wondered why Terry didn’t.

  “I think you should take Caroline off my hands,” Dad said, crouched over the unmoving bird.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think she can maintain this farce any longer than I can,” Dad said wearily. “We might have gotten away with it had you remained dead, like a good boy, but you had to resurrect yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I have to do with it.”

  “Don’t be obtuse. You take her, OK?”

  Terry’s body made an unexpected jolt, as if he’d rested his hand upon a high-voltage fence.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s say I agree to this bit of nonsense. What makes you think she’ll go along with it?”

  “Cut it out, Terry. You’ve always been a self-serving bastard, so why not just continue the tradition and serve yourself again—a helping of the woman you love, who, incomprehensibly, loves you back. You know, I always put my failure with women down to the lack of symmetry in my facial features, and yet here you are, the fattest man alive, and you get her again!”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Just take care of her, OK?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terry said, and his mouth made several odd shapes, though no sound came out. He looked as if he were trying to commit a long and difficult equation to memory.

  Caroline was sitting under a tree in the rain when Dad and I approached. I knew she was quietly tormenting herself. I thought I could hear her thoughts, fully articulated in my head. She was thinking of evil, whether she possessed evil herself or was possessed by it. She wanted to be good. She didn’t think she was good. She thought she was a victim of circumstance and that maybe all people who do evil are also victims of circumstance. She thought not only that Dad had cancer but that he was cancer. She wished he would fall in love with someone else and then die peacefully in his sleep. She felt Dad had taken over the story of her life and was rewriting it with messy handwriting so it became illegible. She thought her life had become illegible and incoherent.

  This is what I was certain I heard her thinking. I felt so sympathetic, I wished the ground would open up and swallow her.

  Dad strode up and laid it on the line. I should have guessed his first foray into noble deeds would blow up in his face. The truth is, his generosity of spirit extended only so far, and while magnanimously sacrificing himself on the altar of their love, he was unable to wipe the hurt look off his face, which killed the point of the whole exercise. It was this hurt look that made her explode.

  “No! How can you say that? I love you! You! I love YOU!”

  Dad pushed on. “Look. Terry was your first love, and I know you’ve never stopped loving him. It’s nobody’s fault. When you agreed to marry me, you thought he’d been dead for twenty years. We all did. So why pretend?”

  Dad put forth a convincing case and got all worked up as he laid it out. He was so convincing that what seemed inconceivable suddenly became conceivable—and that threw Caroline into confusion.

  “I don’t know. What do you want me to do? Is it that you don’t love me anymore? Yes, maybe it’s that.” And before Dad could answer, she said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I love you, and whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.”

  Dad’s resolve was tested here. Why did she keep tormenting him like this? How could he keep it up?

  “I want you to admit it,” he said.

  “Admit what?”

  “That you’re in love with him.”

  “Martin, it’s—”

  “Admit it!”

  “OK! I admit it! First I started thinking, why does he have to be alive? Why couldn’t he have just stayed dead? And the more time I spent with Terry, the more I realized I was still in love with him. Then I started thinking, why do you have to be alive? Why are you dying so slowly? How unjust that s
omeone who loved life, like my son, had to die so suddenly when someone who wants to die, like you, gets to live unendingly. Every time you talk about suicide my hopes jump up. But you never do it. You’re all talk! Why do you keep promising suicide if you won’t do it? You’re driving me crazy with all these promises of killing yourself! Do it or shut up about it, but stop getting my hopes up like that!” Suddenly Caroline stopped and covered her mouth with her hand, doubled over, and vomited. The vomit came through her fingers. When she straightened up, her face was twisted in shame. Every part of her face was magnified by it—her eyes were too round, her mouth too wide, her nostrils the same size as her mouth had been. Before anyone could say anything, she ran off into the jungle.

  Dad swayed on his thin legs, and his complexion became what I can only describe as grainy. My life has been an unfair and humiliating series of losing propositions, his face lamented. Love was my noble suicide bid.

  Just then Terry came out of the house. “Did I hear shouting?” he asked.

  “She’s all yours,” Dad said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Caroline—she’s all yours. We’re finished.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. You can be together now. I don’t mind.”

  All the blood drained from Terry’s face, and he looked as if he’d just been told the plane he was on was making an emergency landing nose first in a volcano.

  “Well…but…I can’t give up my prostitutes. I told you, love doesn’t work without possessiveness. No. No way. I can’t turn my back on my life now, after so long. No, I can’t be with Caroline.”

  “Don’t you love her?”

  “Leave me alone! What are you trying to do to me?” he said, and walked off into the jungle, but in the opposite direction to Caroline.

  So the triangle had effectively broken up. Nobody was with anybody. The three points were single lines again, parallel, not touching.

  Oops. My fault.

  I didn’t witness the scene later that day between Terry and Caroline, but I saw Caroline afterward, walking as if tranquilized. “Are you OK?” I called out. Every now and then she’d stop and pound her head with her fists. “Caroline!” I called out again. She looked up at me with desperate eyes. Then Terry wandered past my window, looking bulldozed. He informed me that we were going back to Bangkok in the morning. At last, good news. I wondered if Terry’s curiosity about the terrible event to take place in Eddie’s house had been satisfied by the explosion of the triangle. Either way, I couldn’t wait to leave, nor could I spend the rest of the day in that house. I had to get out.

  With no other option, I went with Eddie in his car as he went on his rounds. He seemed glad of the company and eagerly delivered a creepy monologue that compared doctors with gods. We visited a few farmers he’d finally discovered had chronic illnesses. After his consultations, to my disgust, he hit on their daughters right in front of the parents, girls who couldn’t be older than sixteen. Not knowing enough about the culture, I wasn’t sure of the perils of Eddie carrying on in this fashion, but it was hair-raising the way he went about trying to seduce, intimidate, and buy these poor girls. I couldn’t find his redeeming features anymore. The man I had grown up with was gone. As we left, he made up words about these girls, “fuckalicious” and “fuck-worthy” being the most common. Every word and gesture of his seemed saturated in frustration and fury. Back on the road, I thought: This man is a grenade waiting to detonate, and I hope I’m not around to see it.

  Then he detonated.

  I was around to see it.

  My forehead was pressed against the car window, and I was wishing that the jungle around us was in fact the interior of a lavish, jungle-themed hotel and any time I liked I could go upstairs to my room and crawl between clean sheets and order room service and take an overdose of sleeping pills. I would have liked nothing better.

  “What’s this?” Eddie said, breaking my reverie.

  It was a girl of about fifteen running down the road waving her arms, signaling us to stop. Here’s trouble, I thought.

  Eddie pulled over and we both got out of the car. She was motioning for Eddie to follow her. From what I could gather, her father was sick. Very sick. She was in a panic. She wanted Eddie to come right away. Eddie summoned his most professional posture. He translated for me, repeated the symptoms as she described them: fever, vomiting, powerful abdominal cramps, delirium, and lack of feeling in the legs and arms. Eddie grunted and sighed at the same time. Then he shook his head obstinately. The girl started shouting in a pleading voice.

  What was he up to?

  She turned and grabbed my arm. “Please, please.”

  “Eddie, what’s going on?”

  “I really don’t think I can make it today. Maybe tomorrow, if I have a minute.”

  “No you understand?” she said in English. “My father. He is dying!”

  “Eddie,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  “Jasper, can you go for a little walk?”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was about to be an accomplice in the dirtiest piece of blackmail possible.

  “I’m not leaving,” I said.

  Eddie looked at me with crushing, concentrated hatred. It was a showdown. “Jasper,” he said behind clenched teeth, “I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here.”

  “No way.”

  Eddie went ballistic, ranting at me with the full extent of his lung capacity. He tried everything to get me to shove off and leave him alone to rape and pillage. I wouldn’t budge. This is it, I thought. My first physical confrontation with evil. I was eager to triumph.

  I didn’t.

  He pushed me. I pushed back. He pushed me again. It was getting tedious. I took a swing. Eddie ducked it. Then he took a swing at me. I tried ducking too, but instead of socking me in the jaw, his fist connected with my forehead. I staggered backward a little, and taking advantage of my wobbling, he let fly an unexpected kick that got me in the throat. I fell back and hit my head on the dirt. I heard the car door slam, and by the time I got to my feet, I couldn’t do anything but watch the car drive off.

  Eddie, that disgusting bastard! That oily, rancid, horny bandit! I felt guilty for my failure to protect that poor girl, but if someone you’ve known since childhood is so determined to commit a crime he’s willing to kick you in the throat, what can you do? Anyway, it was too late now. That fiend had made away with the girl and left me stranded in the middle of nowhere. And where the hell was I, anyway, other than the exact place where all the heat in Thailand gathered for a meeting?

  I walked for several hours. Swarms of overexcited mosquitos pursued me assiduously. There was no one in sight, no sign of human life. It was easy to imagine that I was the only one in existence, and it didn’t make me feel lonely at all. It’s exhilarating to imagine every human dead, to have it in your power to start a new civilization or not. I thought I’d choose not. Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race? Not me. I could see myself as the ant king, or the figurehead of a crab society—but Eddie had seriously turned me off humans altogether. One person can do that.

  I walked on, oozing from the humidity but more or less content in my last-man-on-earth fantasy. I didn’t even mind so much that I was utterly lost in the jungle. How many times would this happen in my life? A lot, I predicted. This time it’s the jungle, next time it will be the ocean, then a department store parking lot, until finally I will be irretrievably lost in outer space. Mark my words.

  But my solitude was short-lived. I heard the chattering of voices coming from the bottom of a hill. I went over the slope and could see a group of maybe twenty people, farmers mostly, in a circle next to a police van. There was nothing in this scene to suggest it had anything to do with me, but something told me not to go down there. I suppose this is what happens when you feel guilty all the time for no reason.

  I stood up on my tiptoes to get a better view. As I did, I saw a shadow creeping up on me
. I spun around. A middle-aged woman holding a basket of apples was staring at me. No, she wasn’t. She was stealing dark glances at the amulet around my neck.

  “Stay down. Don’t let them see you,” she said in an accent as thick as the jungle around us.

  She pushed me to the ground with her long, muscular arms. We lay side by side on the grassy slope.

  “I know you.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re the doctor’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He’s in trouble,” she said.

  So they knew he’d blackmailed the poor girl into sleeping with him. Well, good. I couldn’t care less if they threw him in jail so that he could be sodomized for the rest of his life. He deserved it.

  “They dug up the bodies,” she said.

  What bodies was she talking about?

  “What bodies are you talking about?”

  “The old doctor, and the young one too.”

  “They dug them up? What made them do a creepy thing like that?”

  “They thought it might be a plague of some new virus. A couple of years ago, we had an outbreak of chicken flu. Now there is much vigilance when it comes to multiple deaths of uncertain causes.”

  Interesting, but what has this got to do with blackmail and rape? I wondered.

  “And?”

  “They did an autopsy. And I suppose you know what they found.”

  “A hideous mess of decomposing organs?”

  “Poison,” she said, looking at me carefully for my reaction.

  “Poison?” Poison? “And so they think…” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. It was obvious what they thought. And moreover, it was obvious they were right. Eddie had done it, the despicable bastard. To realize his dead parents’ dream of his becoming a doctor, he had killed the old doctor and the young apprentice to get them out of the way.

  “So the police are going to arrest him?”

  “No. You see those people down there?” Did she want me to answer that one? They were right there.

  “What about them?”