Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Oscar wasn’t keen on the idea of Eddie running the administrative side of the enterprise, but he was inhumanly busy running two television stations, an Internet service, and three newspapers. I couldn’t help but be impressed. If you knew how hard these bastards worked, you’d never say anything negative about privilege again, and you wouldn’t even want it for yourself. So he okayed Eddie and gave us a large office each in the Hobbs News Building. We were able to pick our own staff, and though we only hired females with great cleavage (a habit from our strip-club days) we weren’t just clowning around in there. Eddie got right to it. He really took charge. With Oscar’s influence, he obtained the electoral rolls for every state, made a database, and rigged up some system where the names would be jumbled around in the computer much like balls in a lottery bubble. Then, quite at random, the computer would somehow pick the first twenty names. Actually, even though I can’t be precise in my explanation of how it worked, it wasn’t that complicated. Nothing surprising about that. There’s plenty of uncomplicated things I don’t understand.

That was it, really. The newspapers publicized the details of the scheme, and by the end of the week the dollar coins came streaming in. Our poor staff was snowed under opening envelopes and counting millions of those round cold dollars. We were also all gearing up for the opening-night party, when the names of the first millionaires would be read out on national television. It was going to be one of those A-list parties where the guests either make a fool out of you or pretend you don’t exist. I wasn’t looking forward to it. And there was my public role as mastermind behind the unsophisticated scheme; standing next to Oscar Hobbs, I was to read out the list of names, then the new millionaires, rounded up earlier that day by Eddie’s crew, would come up onstage and shriek appropriately. That was the plan. Today was Thursday. The party was next Friday. Oscar had organized a deal with all the TV stations. It would be like the moon landing. For one night there was going to be peace between the warring networks. Oscar was incredible- all this he did in between managing everything else.

I was revitalized, but my energy was still easily exhaustible, and I collapsed in bed each night, with Anouk often waiting for me. We quickly wore each other out.

“Are you happy, Martin? Are you happy?” she’d ask.

What an odd question to ask me, of all people. I shook my head. “Happy? No. But my life has become a curious shape that interests me for the first time.”

That made her smile with relief.

On the Tuesday before the party, I was sitting motionless behind my desk as if I were some extraneous piece of office furniture when the phone rang. I picked it up.

“Hello?”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t give interviews.”

“Dad- it’s me.”

“Oh, Jasper. Hi.”

“What are you planning?”

“Planning?”

“There’s no way you’re just making people millionaires for no reason.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I know you better than you know yourself.”

“You think so, do you?”

“It’s your opening gambit, isn’t it?”

“I don’t like talking on the phone. Am I going to see you soon?”

“Yeah- soon,” he said.

He hung up and I stared wistfully at the telephone until someone saw me, then I pretended to clean it. The truth is, I missed Jasper: he was the only one who understood that making people millionaires was an entirely calculated bit of shenanigans, simply a means to an end- the end being to get people on my side, then follow that with something that would surprise even Death. Yes, all along this was a conscious strategy for winning their approval, which would be pitted against their unconscious strategy for destroying me. What Jasper guessed was that I had a simple plan:

1. Make everyone in Australia a millionaire, thus winning everyone’s support, trust, and perhaps adoration, also having

2. The media barons on my side, while simultaneously

3. Becoming a politician and winning a seat in Parliament at the upcoming federal election and then

4. Commence wholesale reformation of Australian society based on my ideas and thus

5. Impress Jasper, who would apologize, weeping, while I

6. Had sex as often as possible with Anouk and

7. Died painlessly, content that a week after my death construction would begin on

8. Statues erected in public squares to the peculiar specifications of my head and body.

That was it: a plan to put an exclamation mark at the end of my life. Before I died, I would expel all my ideas from my head- every idea, no matter how silly- so that my process of dying would be a process of emptying. When I was feeling optimistic about the success of my plan, the image of my death intertwined with an image of Lenin in his tomb. In pessimistic moments, the image of my death mingled with an image of Mussolini hung from an Esso gas station in Milan.

While waiting for the big night, I hung around the office, slightly annoyed that I had nothing to do. I’d delegated everything. All I could do was work on my look of conscientious deliberation, ask at various junctures “How’s it going?” and pretend to care about the answers.

Eddie, on the other hand, was working himself into the ground preparing for the party. I watched him scribbling industriously and I was wondering if he ever felt like I did, like a few misplaced molecules cobbled together to form an implausible person, when I suddenly had a great idea.

“Eddie,” I said. “That list of will-be millionaires- are there any in Sydney?”

“Three,” he said. “Why?”

“Give me their files, will you?”

The first millionaire was in Camperdown. His name was Deng Agee. He was from Indonesia. He was twenty-eight years old and had a wife and a three-month-old baby. The house looked completely deserted. There was no answer when I knocked, but ten minutes later I saw him coming home with heavy shopping bags. Ten meters from the house, the plastic bag in his left hand broke and his groceries went crashing onto the pavement. He looked down at his dented tins of tuna like one heartbroken, as if the tins of tuna just wanted to be friends.

I smiled warmly so he wouldn’t recognize me from the newspapers.

“How’s life, Deng?” I sang.

“Do I know you?” he said, looking up.

“You doing OK, then? Got everything you need?”

“Fuck off.”

He had no idea that in a week’s time he’d be a millionaire. It was hilarious.

“Are you happy in this place, Deng? It’s kind of a dump, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“What do you want? I’ll call the police.”

I walked over, stooped down, and pretended to pick up $10 from the ground. “Did you drop this?”

“That’s not mine,” he said, and went inside and slammed the door in my face. He’s going to make a terrific millionaire, I thought, as if it were necessary for me that my millionaires (as I thought of them) be incorruptible.

The second Sydney millionaire was a biology teacher. She had maybe the ugliest face I’d ever seen. I almost cried at the sight of it. I could feel the wind of a thousand doors closing in that ugly face. She didn’t see me come into her classroom. I took a desk in the back row and grinned madly.

“Who are you?”

“How long have you been teaching here, Mrs. Gravy?”

“Sixteen years.”

“And in that time have you ever forced a child to swallow chalk?”

“No, never!”

“Really. That’s not what they’re saying down at the Board of Education.”