Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

These were the strange, turbulent days; Dad married his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Anouk married the son of a billionaire, Dad was betrayed by his best friend, I was betrayed by my true love, and he was despised by an entire nation. In the media, the descriptions of him varied: a businessman, a swindler, a Jew. I remember he was often obsessed with his inability to define himself. Hearing himself compartmentalized in this way only served to remind him who he wasn’t.

Everything was going wrong. I was getting death threats from strangers. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was lonely. I wandered the streets endlessly and tried to pretend I saw the Inferno everywhere, but there just weren’t enough six-foot redheads in Sydney, and I wound up mistaking her for some laughable substitutes. Retreating to my apartment, I became so depressed that when it came time for eating, I thought: What’s in it for me? At night I kept dreaming of a single face, the same face I used to dream about in childhood, the ugly face contorted in a silent scream, the face that I sometimes see even when I’m awake. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where to, and, worse, I couldn’t be bothered doing up my shoes. That’s when I started chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana, eating cereal out of the box, drinking vodka out of the bottle, vomiting myself to sleep, crying for no reason, talking to myself in a stern voice, and pacing the streets, which were crammed with people who, unlike me, were conspicuously not screaming inside and not paralyzed by indecision and not hated by every person on this vile island continent.

I took up my post in bed, under the covers, and stayed there, only shaken out of a drunken sleep one afternoon to see Anouk’s green eyes peering at me.

“I’ve been trying to call you for days.”

She was dressed in an old undershirt and tracksuit pants. The shock of marrying money was obviously forcing her to dress down.

“This is very strange, Jasper. I have the exact same feeling as when I first walked into your dad’s apartment after we met. Remember? Look at this place! It’s disgusting. Trust me on this- beer-can ashtrays are a sign you can’t ignore!”

She ran around the apartment, cleaning up energetically, undaunted by the moldy food and general debris of my day-to-day existence. “You’ll need to repaint these walls to get the smell out,” she said. I fell asleep listening to the rising and falling of her voice. The last thing I heard her say were the words “Just like your father.”

I woke a few hours later to find the whole apartment clean and smelling of incense. Anouk sat with her long legs crossed on the floor, her shoes kicked off, a sunbeam reflecting off her ankle bracelet. “Too much has happened. You’re overstimulated. Come down here,” she said.

“No thanks.”

“I taught you how to meditate, didn’t I?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Your dad could never turn off his mind- that’s why he was always breaking down. Unless you want to suffer the same mental deterioration, you’re going to have to achieve a stillness of the mind through meditation.”

“Leave me alone, Anouk.”

“Jasper. I’m just trying to help you. The only way you’re going to survive all this hatred is if you have inner peace. And to find inner peace, you first have to reach the higher self. And to find the higher self, you have to find the inner light. Then you join the light.”

“Join the light. To what?”

“No- you and the light become one.”

“What’s that going to feel like?”

“Bliss.”

“So it’s good, then.”

“Very.”

Anouk went on in this way, about inner peace, about meditation and the power of the mind not to bend spoons but to thwart hatred. She wasn’t fooling me. She was only a wannabe guru- hearing rumors of enlightenment was as far as she’d got. Still, we tried to find peace, light, our higher and lower selves, and all those in between. Anouk thought I might be a natural at meditation, since I’d confided in her that I suspected I could read my father’s thoughts and often saw faces where there should be none. She seized these revelations zealously, and her frenzied voice became more insistent. Just as in the old days, I was defenseless against her fanatical compassion. I let her buy flowers and wind chimes. I let her buy me books on different approaches to meditation. I even let her drag me to a rebirthing experience. “Don’t you want to remember your own birth?” she snapped, as if she were noting forgetfulness as another of my character traits. She took me to a center that had walls the color of an old woman’s gums, and we lay in a dimly lit room in a semicircle, chanting and regressing and struggling to recall the moment of birth as if we were trying to remember someone’s phone number. I felt like a fool. But I loved being around Anouk again, so I went along with it, and every day afterward, as we sat cross-legged in parks and on beaches, repeating our mantras over and over again like obsessive-compulsives. For those couple of weeks I did nothing but watch my breathing and attempt to empty my mind, but my mind was like a boat with a leak; every time I got rid of a bucket of thoughts, new ones poured in. And when I thought I might have achieved the slightest emptiness, I got scared. My emptiness was not blissful but felt malignant. The sound of my own breathing was faintly sinister. My posture seemed theatrical. Sometimes I’d shut my eyes only to see that strange and terrible face, or else I’d see nothing but I would hear, faint and muffled, my father’s voice, as if he were talking to me from inside a box. Clearly meditation couldn’t help me. Nothing could help me. I was beyond help, and not even a sudden sun shower could lift me up. In fact, I started wondering what I had seen in nature all that time I lived in the labyrinth. It suddenly seemed to be horrible and ostentatious, and I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

So that was my state of mind when Dad, Eddie, and Caroline turned up at my apartment building and honked the horn until I went down onto the street. The car just sat there, engine idling. I went over to the window. They were all wearing dark sunglasses, as though they shared a collective hangover.

“They’re coming to arrest me tomorrow,” Dad said. “We’re making a run for it.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, we just came to say goodbye,” Dad said.

Eddie was shaking his head. “You should come with us.”

That seemed a good reason to shake my head, so I did, and asked, “What are you crazy fugitives going to do in Thailand?”

“Tim Lung has offered to put us up for a while.”

“Tim Lung?” I shouted, then whispered softly, “Christ.”

That’s when an absurd and dangerous idea entered my head with an almost audible pop. Just as I loved the Inferno with clenched fists, I hated Tim Lung with open arms.

I thought: I will kill him. Kill him with an impersonal bullet to the head.

“Are you all right?” Dad asked.

In that instant I knew I was not above the fulfillment of a bloodthirsty fantasy. For months I’d been harboring vile ideas about people (I dreamed of filling their mouths with haggis), and now I knew actual violence was the next logical step. After years of witnessing my father’s seasonal dissolutions, I had eons ago resolved to avoid a lifetime of intense contemplation; an abrupt departure into murder seemed the way to go about this. Yes, suddenly I was no longer in the darkness, groping along the endless corridors of days. For the first time in a long time, the path ahead was well lit and clearly defined.

So when Dad said his dried-eyed goodbye for the last time, I said, “I’m coming with you.”