by Steve Toltz
This made me think of his journey. What was it all about? He may have traveled the globe, but he didn’t seem to go very far. He may have dipped himself in different pools of experience, but his spirit stayed the same flavor. All his plans, plots, and schemes centered on man in relation to society, or larger—to civilization, or smaller—to community. He aspired to change the world around him, but he saw his being as solid and unchangeable. He wasn’t interested in testing the limits within himself. How far can someone expand? Can his essence be found and enlarged? Can the heart get an erection? Can your soul pour out your mouth? Can a thought drive a car? It hardly seems to have occurred to him.
Finally I knew how to revolt against my father’s ways! The nature of my anarchy was clear. Like Terry, I would live as though on the edge of death, as the world sank or swam. Civilization? Society? Who cares. I would turn my back on progress, and unlike my father, I would concentrate my attention not on the outside but on the inside.
To get to the bottom of myself. To get to the bottom of thought. To get beyond time. Like everyone, I’m saturated in time, I’m soaking in it, I’m drowning in it. To annihilate this profound, all-encompassing, psychological trick would really be an ace up my sleeve.
I had communicated my thoughts successfully to Dad from the jungle in Thailand, though he chose not to believe it. That means the manipulation of thought exists. That’s why you have to be careful what you think. That’s why most doctors quietly admit that depression, stress, and grief affect our immune systems, as does loneliness. In fact, loneliness is linked to higher death rates through heart disease, cancer, and suicide, and even to accidental death, meaning that feeling lonely may lead to fatal clumsiness. See your doctor if loneliness persists.
We ignorantly indulge in negative thoughts, unaware that thinking over and over again “I suck” is probably as carcinogenic as sucking down a carton of unfiltered Camels. So then, should I rig up a device where I can give myself little electric shocks every time I have a negative thought? Would that work? What about self-hypnosis? Even in my fantasies, beliefs, ideas, and hallucinations, can I stop my mind from running in old grooves? Can I emancipate myself? Renew myself? Replace myself like old skin cells? Is that too ambitious? Does self-awareness have an off switch? I have no idea. Novalis said that atheism is when you don’t believe in yourself. OK, in this respect I am probably an agnostic, but either way, is this my project? To test the limit of the power of thought and see what the material world really looks like? What then? Can I be of the world and in the world even when I have crashed through time and space? Or do I have to live on a mountaintop? I really don’t want to. I want to stay at the bottom and bribe seven-year-olds to buy me half-price tickets for the movies. How do I deal with such incompatible desires? And I know that to achieve enlightenment I’m supposed to witness the dissolution of my wants, but I like my wants, so what’s a guy to do?
I packed my bags and manuscript and put in a photograph of Astrid, my mother. She was remarkably beautiful. I have that on my side. Society hangs its tongue out at the sight of a pretty face; all I have to do is walk up the tongue into the mouth that will tell me everything I need to know. This woman touched lives, and not just my father’s. Some would be dead. Some would be too old. But somewhere were childhood friends, boyfriends, lovers. Somebody would remember her. Somewhere.
Neither Dad nor I had much love for religion, because we preferred the mystery to the miracle, but Dad didn’t really love the mystery either—it was like a pebble in his shoe. Well, I won’t ignore mysteries like he did. But I won’t try to solve them, either. I just want to see what happens when you peer into their core. I’m going to follow in my own stupid, uncertain footsteps. I’m going to wander the earth awhile and find my mother’s family and the man who belongs to the face in the sky and see where these mysterious affinities take me—closer to understanding my mother or to some unimaginable evil.
I looked out the window. It was dawn. I made myself a coffee and reread the obituary one last time. I needed a conclusion. But how do you conclude a life like his? What did he mean? What idea could finish this off? I decided I should address all those thoughtless, ignorant people who had called Dad a bastard without even knowing he actually was one.
Martin Dean was my father.
The act of writing this sentence knocked the wind out of me. All of a sudden I felt something I’d never felt before—privileged. I suddenly felt better off than a billion other sons, privileged that I had had the good fortune to be raised by an odd, uncompromising, walking stew of ideas. So what if he was a philosopher who thought himself into a corner? He was also a natural-born empathizer who would have rather been buried alive than have his imperfections ever seriously hurt anyone. He was my father. He was a fool. He was my kind of fool.
There’s no way to sum him up. How could I? If I was only a part of him, how could I possibly ever know who he was a part of?
I wrote on:
My father has been called a lot of terrible names by the people of this country. OK, he wasn’t a Gandhi or a Buddha, but honestly, he wasn’t a Hitler or a Stalin either. He was somewhere in the middle. But what I want to know is, what does your view of my father say about you?
When someone comes into the world who reaches the worst depths that humans can sink to, we will always call him a monster, or evil, or the embodiment of evil, but there is never any serious hint or suggestion that there is something actually supernatural or otherworldly about this individual. He may be an evil man, but he is just a man. But when an extraordinary person operating on the other side of the spectrum, the good, rises to the surface, like Jesus or Buddha, immediately we elevate him to God, a deity, something divine, supernatural, otherworldly. This is a reflection of how we see ourselves. We have no trouble believing that the worst creature who has done the most harm is a man, but we absolutely cannot believe that the best creature, who tries to inspire imagination, creativity, and empathy, can be one of us. We just don’t think that highly of ourselves, but we happily think that low.
That should do it. A nice confusing off-the-point conclusion. Well done, me. I popped this in the mail to Anouk at the Hobbs News Division, went to the bank to check that the money was in my account, then caught a taxi to the airport. This time I was leaving the country under my own name.
“I’d like to buy a ticket to Europe,” I said to the unsmiling woman at the counter.
“Where in Europe?”
“Good question. I haven’t thought about it.”
“Really,” she said, then leaned back in her chair and looked past me, over my shoulder. I think she was looking for a television camera.
“What’s the next flight that gets me in the Europe vicinity?”
She stared at me another couple of seconds before typing at lightning speed on the computer keyboard. “There’s a flight leaving for the Czech Republic in an hour and a half.”
The Czech Republic? For some reason I had thought she was going to say Paris, and then I’d say, “I believe Paris is lovely this time of year.”
“You want the ticket or not?”
“Sure. I believe the Czech Republic is lovely this time of year.”
After I bought my ticket and checked in my bags, I ate a $10 vegetable samosa that tasted worse than a seven-course meal of postage stamps. Then I went to the phone box and looked in the white pages to see if Strangeways Publications still existed and if Stanley was still running it, the man who had published Harry West’s The Handbook of Crime all those years ago.
It was there in black and white. I called the number.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is that Stanley?”
“Yeah.”
“You still publishing books?”
“Men’s magazines.”
“I’ve written a book I think you might be interested in.”
“Men’s magazines, I said. You deaf? I don’t publish books.”
“It’s a biography.”
“I d
on’t care. Of who?”
“Martin Dean.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. It was so sharp, it almost sucked me right into the receiver.
“Who are you?”
“His son.”
Silence. Then I could hear the sound of someone moving a number of papers around a desk, and the sound of someone stapling something that didn’t sound like paper.
“Jasper, isn’t it?” Stanley said.
“That’s right.”
“You want to come into my office?”
“I’m just going to put it in the post, if that’s all right with you. I’m about to head overseas and I don’t know how long I’ll be or if I’ll ever be back. You go ahead and do whatever you want with it.”
“All right. You got my address?”
“I’ve got it.”
“I’ll look forward to reading it. Hey, I’m sorry about your dad.”
I hung up the phone without responding. To be honest, I didn’t know if he was sorry Dad died or if he was just sorry that he was my dad.
Right now I’m sitting at the airport bar, drinking an expensive Japanese beer for no good reason. Sitting at the next table is a woman with a cat in a little cat carrier. She’s talking to the cat, calling him John. People who name their pets ordinary human names depress the hell out of me. I listen to her carry on and it gets worse. The cat’s name isn’t just John. It’s John Fitzpatrick. That’s too much.
Now that I’ve told our story in all its fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail, I wonder: was it worth it? It’s not like I want to start a revolution or finish one that’s dragging on. I wasn’t a writer before I began, but writing a book makes a writer out of you. Anyway, I don’t know if I want to be a writer. Herman Hesse once said, “True creative power isolates one and demands something that has to be subtracted from the enjoyment of life.” That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.
An announcement just told me my flight is boarding. I’ll write a few last words before I pop this in the postbox to Stanley. What could be an appropriate thought to finish on?
Maybe I should conclude with some semiprofound observation about my life.
Or about how sometimes dropped anchors hit slow-moving fish.
Or about how often the swallowing of saliva is really the suppression of a violent longing.
Or about how people mourn the recent dead but never mourn the long-term dead.
Or about how idiot savants surprise their doctors, losers blame their fathers, and failures blame their children.
Or about how if you listen closely, you discover that people aren’t really ever for something but instead are just opposed to its opposite.
Or about how when you’re a child, to stop you from following the crowd you’re assaulted with the line “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?” but when you’re an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, “Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren’t you?”
Or about how when women who’ve had extensive plastic surgery die, God greets them with puzzlement, saying, “I’ve never seen that woman before in my life.”
Or should I finish on a positive note and say that even if you find yourself with no loved ones left to bury, it’s good to be optimistic and carry a shovel with you, just in case?
No, none of that seems right. I’ve run out of time anyway. My plane’s boarding in ten minutes. This paragraph will have to be the end of it. Sorry, whoever you are. Hey—that’s a question: who might actually read this if Stanley actually publishes it? Anyone? Surely there’s got to be one measly person out of six billion who has a couple of days to spare. One bored soul out of the shocking number of humans cluttering up this little blue-green ball of ours. You know, I read somewhere that by the year 2050 there will be another couple of billion. What a conceited outburst of humanity! I tell you, you don’t have to be a misanthrope to be chilled at the idea of that many people bumping into each other on the street, but it helps.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Toltz resides in Sydney, Australia. This is his first novel.
PUBLISHED BY SPIEGEL & GRAU
Copyright © 2008 by Steve Toltz
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.spiegelandgrau.com
SPIEGEL & GRAU is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Permission for H. L. Mencken quote on Chapter Six granted by the Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Estate of H. L. Mencken in accordance with the terms of Mr. Mencken’s bequest.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Toltz, Steve, 1972–
A fraction of the whole/Steve Toltz.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.4.T65F73 2008
823’.92—dc22
2007038240
eISBN: 978-0-385-52569-5
v1.0
Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
