Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Jasper,” I said.

He spun around and looked at me disapprovingly. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got the big C.”

“The what?”

“The big cliché.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got cancer,” I said. “It’s found a crawl space in my lungs. I’m fucked.” I tried to sound blasé, as if I had had cancer once a month for my entire life and now- what a hassle- I had it again.

Jasper opened his mouth, but no sound came out. We did not move. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The wind rustled papers on his desk. Jasper swallowed. I could hear saliva slide down his esophagus. We remained motionless. We were like humans before language, Paleolithic men in an office cubicle.

Finally he spoke. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jasper understood what most people don’t: that the dying still have important decisions to make. I knew he was asking me if I was going to ride it out to the end or beat death to the punch. And then he gave me his view. I was touched.

“Dad, please don’t die slowly and painfully. Please commit suicide,” he said.

“I’m thinking about it,” I snapped, both relieved and irritated he’d said the unsayable.

That night Jasper and Caroline and I sat down to dinner as a family. There was so much we had to say, we couldn’t say any of it. Jasper eyed me the whole time. He was looking to catch a glimpse of Death red-handed. I am almost certain now that Jasper and I can read each other’s minds, and it is far worse than speaking.

I suggested that he and I go for a drive, even though I had never gone for a drive in my whole life. It was a black night, the stars buried in the clouds. We drove without purpose or destination, and all the while I blabbered an inane monologue about how traffic is nothing but a rioting mob, each member with his own mobile weapon in which he dreams of perpetual motion.

“Hey! Stop the car!” Jasper shouted.

Without thinking, I had driven us to our first apartment, a place where my mental engine had conked out countless times. We knocked on the door, and Jasper told a man in stained boxer shorts that we wanted to look around for the same reason that a person looks through a photo album. The bloke let us in. As we wandered through the rooms, I thought that we had ruined the place by living there, that it had our gloomy residue in every airless corner. I thought we had exuded the essence of our core problems into the air, and our lightly wafting disease of the spirit had probably infected every poor bastard who had lived there since.

Back in the car we drove on, pinballing from one old haunt to another- squats, parks, supermarkets, bookstores, barbers, grocers, psychiatric hospitals, newsagents, chemists, banks, every place that had once housed our confusions. I can’t tell you the purpose of this compelling, nonmetaphorical journey down memory lane, but I can tell you that in each place I could see our past selves clear as day; it was as though we were retracing our steps and finding in every vanished footprint our actual feet. There’s nothing like a nostalgia trip to make you feel alien from both your past and your present. You also see what’s static in you, what you hadn’t the courage or strength to change, and all your old fears, the ones you still carry. The disappointment of your failure is palpable. It’s terrible to go around bumping into yourself like that.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” Jasper said.

“Weird isn’t the word.”

We looked at each other and laughed. The only upside of the drive was that it turned out our mutual antagonism wasn’t as inexhaustible as we thought. In the car we were talking, reminiscing, laughing. It was the only night that I felt in my son I had a friend.

Around three in the morning we were getting tired and losing enthusiasm. We decided to finish up with a beer at the Fleshpot, the strip club I had managed and nearly destroyed with my red sports car some years earlier.

A doorman standing outside said, “Come in! Beautiful dancers, boys! Come in!”

We went in, down the familiar black corridor with the red flashing bulbs, into the club. The room was full of smoke, mostly from cigars, but there was a little curling out of a machine onstage. The strippers were doing their usual sexless thing around poles and in businessmen’s faces. You’d never have thought some crazy idiot had once driven a red MG onto the dance floor. I looked around- the bouncer was different. Same bulk, same bozo expression, different face. The girls were different too. They seemed younger than the girls I used to hire. Me! Hiring strippers! With eyes popping out of my head! Me! Unleashed! On a conga line of scantily dressed females barely teetering over the age of consent! Although the truth was, in my two years of auditioning, hiring, firing, and managing girls I had not slept with any of the strippers, except three. In this business, that’s nothing.

We took a seat in front of the stage and ordered drinks and sipped them slowly.

“I don’t like it here,” Jasper said.

“Me neither,” I answered. “Why don’t you like it?”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t understand the logic of strip clubs. Brothels make sense. Brothels I understand. You want to fuck, you go there and you fuck, you orgasm, you leave. Sexual satisfaction. Easy. Understandable. But strip clubs- at best, if you don’t find them disgusting, you get sexually excited, then because you can’t actually fuck these women, you leave sexually frustrated. Where’s the thrill in that?”

“Maybe we’re not as different as you think,” I said, and he smiled. Honestly, with all the noise a father makes about demanding respect and obedience, I don’t think there can be a father in the world who doesn’t, at the bottom of his heart, want a simple thing: for his son to like him.

“Oh my God,” Jasper said. “Look at that bartender.”

“What bartender?”

“That one. Isn’t he one of the millionaires?”

I took a good look at the thin Asian man behind the bar. Was he or wasn’t he? I wasn’t sure. I don’t want to say anything racist like “They all look alike,” but you can’t deny the similarities.

“Look at him,” Jasper said. “He’s working his arse off. Why would a millionaire be doing that?”

“Maybe he spent all the money already.”

“On what?”

“How should I know?”

“I know. Maybe he’s one of those people who have worked so hard their whole lives they don’t know how to do anything else.”

We sat there for a while thinking of people who need hard work to give them self-esteem, and we felt lucky we weren’t one of them. Then Jasper said, “Wait. There’s another fucking one.”

“Another fucking what?”

“Another fucking millionaire! And this one’s taking out the garbage!”

This one I recognized, as he was in the first batch of winners. It was Deng Agee! I’d been to his house! I’d personally tormented him!

“What are the odds that…” My voice trailed off. It wasn’t worth saying. We knew what the odds were. Like a horse race with one horse in it.

“Bastard,” I said.

“Who?”

“Eddie. He’s fucked us.”

We drove straight to the Hobbs building and grabbed the files of the millionaires. We read them and reread them, but there was no way of knowing how many friends Eddie had made rich through my scheme. He’d screwed me. He’d really screwed me. There was no way that eventually someone wasn’t going to find out about this. That snake! That’s friendship for you! It was a truly annihilating betrayal. I wanted to pull down the night with my bare hands.

As we hurried over to Eddie’s house, I assumed that Eddie, my so-called friend, had dropped me unceremoniously into the shit on a whim. What I didn’t know then, of course, was that it was so much worse than that.