Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

The party was held in a cavernous ballroom with chandeliers and seventies floral wallpaper and a stage where I would make my historic speech. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the Harbor Bridge and a big yellow moon hanging over it. It was one of those parties I’d never dreamed of going to, where the partygoers were talking themselves up big, and when they ran out of ways to aggrandize themselves directly, they did it indirectly, by making everyone else small. Reynold Hobbs was there with his young confused bride. People cruelly called her a trophy wife, as if he’d won her in a contest. That just wasn’t fair or true. He hadn’t won her at all; he’d earned her through hard work and enterprise.

My attention was mostly focused on studying the erratic behavior of my ego in unstable conditions; under the stress of compliments and smiles and repeated blasts of direct eye contact, its propensity was to become engorged. I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.

It was too crowded to pace nervously. I was thinking that my speech would more than likely backfire, and also that I had to tell Anouk about Caroline. Of course I knew it was almost unthinkable that a man like me could reject anyone, let alone a woman like Anouk. How could I tell her I would never taste her again, especially when she gave me the kind of supreme gratification one can get only from freeing slaves or sleeping with a really sexy woman a decade younger than yourself? Luckily, I remembered I was in love with Caroline, so I was able to walk over to Anouk and point her out. Caroline was standing in the corner of the room in a red chiffon dress, pretending not to look at me. Anouk remembered who she was from one of our postcoital confession sessions, and I explained that we were going to get married in a couple of weeks. She said nothing, a loud unpleasant nothing which made my monologue grow louder and incoherent.

“After all,” I said, “we don’t want to jeopardize our friendship.”

Her face became a stone veiled in a smile. She laughed suddenly, a hideously exaggerated laughter that made me take a half step back. Before I had the chance to say anything, to dig myself deeper into a hole, everyone in the room was calling me to make a speech.

This was it. Time to put my plan into action. I stepped up onstage. After all, you’ve made them rich. My head weighed somewhere between a droplet of water and a gallon of air. Who doesn’t love a man who’s made you rich? You can’t lose. I stood there, looking dumbly at the eager crowd, stuck in a dizzying immobility.

I searched the crowd for Caroline, who gave me an encouraging nod. That made me feel really low. And then I saw Jasper. I didn’t know he was coming and hadn’t seen him arrive. Fortunately for me, he had the same expression a dog has when you pretend to throw the ball but still have it in your hand. That gave me the boost I needed.

I cleared my throat, though it did not need it, and began.

“Thank you. I accept your applause and adoration. You’re greedy to escape your prisons, and you think that by making you rich, I set you free. I haven’t; I have only let you out of your cell, into the corridor. The prison still exists, your prison that you don’t know you love so much. All right. Let’s talk about me in relation to the tall-poppy syndrome. It’s best to address this tricky issue right off the bat. Look, don’t cut my head off, you shits. You love me now, but you’ll hate me tomorrow. You know how you are- actually, you don’t. That’s why I’d like to suggest an unusual exercise for the nation, and the exercise is to love me in perpetuity. OK? In this spirit, I have an announcement to make. My God, my entire life has led up to this moment. Of course five minutes ago I went to the toilet and my entire life led up to that moment too. But here it is. I am running for Senate. That’s right, Australia, I give you my wasted gifts! My squandered potential! I’ve always led a degraded existence, and now I offer it to you. I would like to be a part of our horrendous Parliament, our collective hoax! I want to put myself among the swine, and why shouldn’t I? I am unemployed, after all, and senator is a job as good or bad as any other, isn’t it? Just so you know, I’m not tied to any party. I will be running as an independent. And I’ll be honest with you. I think politicians are weeping sores. And when I look at our politicians in our country, I can’t believe that all of these unendurable people were actually chosen. So what can we say about democracy, except that it’s not a good enough system to hold people accountable for their lies? Supporters of this inadequate system say, well, punish them at the polls, then! But how can we when most likely the single opponent at the polls is another in a long line of unelectable gormless bandits, and so we wind up voting the liars in again, voting with our teeth clenched? Of course, the most disagreeable thing about being an atheist is that according to my nonbeliefs, I know that all these sons of bitches have no retribution coming to them in the hereafter- that everyone gets away with everything. It’s very distressing; what goes around doesn’t come around but stays where it went when it first went around.

“Are you all following me? We puzzlingly overestimate our elected representatives. Don’t overestimate me! I’ll make blunder after stupid blunder! But it is necessary for you to know where I stand on certain contentious issues so you’ll know what kind of blunders I’ll be making. Well, I am certainly not on the right. I don’t care if gays get married or get divorced. Not that I’m not for gay rights specifically, I’m just against the phrase ‘family values.’ In fact, when someone says the phrase ‘family values,’ I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face with a condom from 1953. Well, then, am I on the left? Sure, they’re the first to sign petitions and in international affairs will always support the perceived underdog, even if the underdog is a bunch of cannibals- as long as they have less money and fewer resources- and these deeply caring individuals on the left will do anything for the betterment of the disenfranchised except make a personal sacrifice. So you see? I’m neither left nor right. I’m just an ordinary person who goes to sleep feeling guilty every night. Why shouldn’t I? Eight hundred million people went to bed hungry today. All right, I’ll admit for a while our roles as massively wasteful consumers seemed to be doing us a world of good- we were slimming down, a good half of us had breast implants; frankly, we were looking good- but now we’re all fatter and more cancerous than ever, so what’s the point of it? The world is getting hotter, the ice caps are melting, because man keeps saying to nature, Hey, our whole idea of a cozy future is to have jobs. That’s all we’ve got planned. What’s more, we will pursue this aim at any cost, even, paradoxically, if it means the eventual destruction of our workplace. Man says, Sacrifice industry and economy and jobs? For what? Future generations? I don’t even know those guys! I’ll tell you something for free- it makes me ashamed that our species, which is so finely ennobled by its sacrifices, winds up sacrificing it all for the wrong things and comes off just looking like a race of people who like to use the hair dryer while taking a bath. I’m only sorry I was born three-quarters through this self-inflicted tragedy and not at the very beginning or at the very end. I’m fucking sick of watching this tragedy in slow motion. The other planets aren’t, though- they’re on the edge of their suns. The reason we’ve never had visitors from outer space isn’t that they don’t exist but that they don’t want to know us. We’re the village idiots of all the teeming galaxies. On a quiet night you can hear their crackled laughter. And what are they laughing at? Let me put it this way: humanity is the guy who shits in his own pants and then walks around saying, ‘So, do you like my new shirt?’ What’s my point? To let you know I am an environmentalist insofar as I wouldn’t like to live in a caldron of boiling piss. Believe me, there’s no politics in staying alive. That’s why I’m an apolitical person entering the world of politics. But I’m not perfect. Tell me, why have we been infected by that American disease of wanting our politicians to be pure as monks? Society went through the sexual revolution decades ago, but for some reason we judge the people who manage our economy by Victorian standards, and this doesn’t seem strange to us. Let me get this out of the way- if I see a chance of having an illicit affair with an intern or a colleague’s wife, I will jump at it with both feet. As far as I’m concerned, ‘getting away with it’ has nothing to do with no one finding out and everything to do with no one falling pregnant. OK? I deny nothing. I admit everything. And let me say this to you too: I will not pretend that I’m not attracted to certain high school girls. Some of them are seventeen, for Chrissakes. They’re not children! They’re sexy, blossoming young women, most of whom lost their virginity at fourteen! There’s a difference between inappropriate sex with a minor and pedophilia. It’s stupid and dangerous to bundle them up in the same sack.