Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Hey, Eddie. You have any children?” Dad asked.

Eddie shook his head.

“You sure?”

Eddie turned back to Ling and continued speaking softly.

As we checked into the hotel, careful to sign our new names and not the old ones, it struck me that the strangest thing for me was not just to be traveling, suddenly well and truly out of Australia, but to be traveling in a group. I had always imagined leaving Australia would be the ultimate symbol of my independence, and yet here I was, with everybody. I know you can never escape yourself, that you carry your past with you, but I really had. Small mercy that I wound up getting my own room, which looked down on an eviscerated dog’s carcass.

That night I paced the hotel room. All I could think of was that by now news of our escape would be all over Australia, in every last watering hole, and despite our furtive exit, someone was bound to trace us without too much difficulty. I could easily imagine Australia’s reaction on hearing that we had absconded, and at around three in the morning I felt hit by what I was sure was a hot wave of loathing that had traveled from our homeland all the way to our air-conditioned hotel rooms on Khe Sahn Road.

I went out into Bangkok wondering how to buy a gun. I didn’t think it would prove too difficult; in my head this was a sordid metropolis, a Sodom and Gomorrah that served really good food. I was in a semi-delirious state, only looking at faces, and more specifically at eyes. Most of the eyes I saw were irritatingly innocent; only a few cauterized you just by looking. Those were the ones I wanted. I thought about murder and murderers. My victim was also a criminal; who would cry for him? Well, maybe many people. Maybe he was married too! I thought with a gasp. I don’t know why I should’ve been so surprised; why shouldn’t he be married? He wasn’t notorious for being ugly and unsociable, only for being amoral. That’s attractive in some circles.

It was four in the morning and still oppressively hot and I hadn’t yet found a single gun. I walked on, thinking, “Tim Lung- should I kill you straightaway, without even offering you an aperitif?” As I walked, I lit a cigarette. Why not? It’s not the number one preventable cause of death in the world for nothing.

I was tired and leaned against a post. I felt a pair of eyes on me. There was something frightening yet strangely invigorating about these eyes. These were the eyes I’d been looking for.

I went over to the young man and we spoke at the same time.

“Do you know where I can buy a gun?”

“Do you want to see a sex show?”

“Yes, please.”

He whisked me down the street and took me to Patpong. Large groups of Western men were going into strip clubs and I thought immediately of Freud, who believed that civilization develops in an ever-increasing contrast to the needs of man. Clearly Freud had never been to Patpong. Here the needs of man were scrupulously taken care of, every need, even the needs that made him sick.

I went into the first bar and sat on a stool and ordered a beer. A young woman came and sat on my lap. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. She put her hand between my legs and I asked her, “Do you know where I could buy a gun?” At once I knew I’d made a mistake. She hopped off my lap as if it had bitten her. I saw her talk excitedly to a couple of heavy types behind the bar. I made a run for it, thinking I had slipped into one of those unrealities where you can really hurt yourself, and after a few blocks I stopped running. In effect, these Thai characters were no more criminal than people you’d find at any corner fish-and-chips shop in Sydney, and simply purchasing a gun from them was impossible. In that case, when I met Tim Lung, I’d have to improvise.

When I went down to the hotel breakfast room in the morning, I deduced from the look on Dad’s and Caroline’s faces that they hadn’t slept either. They were wretched, sleepless faces. Faces pinched with worry. Over a large nonexotic breakfast of bacon, eggs, and stale croissants, our banter was light and meaningless, to try to overpower the dark mood. Whatever was in store for us, we wanted to weather it on a full stomach.

Eddie came in without his usual benign expression.

“You ready?”

“Where’s your wife?” Dad asked.

“Shut the fuck up, Martin. I’ve had enough of you. I’ve really, really had enough.”

That silenced us all.

To get to Tim Lung’s place we had to catch a long-tail boat down a dirty, foul-smelling canal. As we passed wooden canoes laden with multicolored fruits and vegetables, I shielded my face from threatening splashes of murky water. My first impressions of Thailand were good, but I knew that my immune system wasn’t up to the challenge of its bacteria. Once beyond this ragged fleet of watercraft, we were alone in the canal, pressing forward. On either side, sitting lopsided on dusty streets, were houses that looked either semicompleted or semidilapidated. We passed women in large-brimmed straw hats washing their clothes in the brown water, evidently unfazed by the idea of encephalitis nesting in their underwear. Then there were long, deserted, dusty streets and huge trees with sprawling branches. The houses, now grand and flashy mansions, were spaced farther apart. I sensed we were getting close. I tried reading Eddie’s face. It was unreadable. Dad gave me a look, the subtext of which was “We’ve escaped, but into what?”

The boat stopped. We stepped off and walked up a small embankment to a large iron gate. Before Eddie could ring the buzzer, a sharp voice from a tinny intercom said something in Thai and Eddie answered it, looking at me, which gave me the feeling that we were on a road on which to go back was suicide and to go forward was probably suicide. I had goose bumps all over. Caroline took my hand. The gate swung open. We pressed on. Dad said something about the state of his bowels which I didn’t quite catch.

Tim Lung’s house had “drug cartel” written all over it. It was large, with huge whitewashed walls surrounded by encrusted pillars, gleaming orange and green roof tiles, and an enormous reclining Buddha nestled in a thick bamboo grove. It was reinforced that we were waltzing into a den of thieves when I spotted men hidden in the shade of trees with semiautomatic rifles, eyeing us as if we had come selling a product they knew didn’t work. The men wore short-sleeved shirts and long pants. I pointed out the armed men to Dad for his predictable response. “I know,” he said. “Long pants, in this weather!”

“This way,” Eddie said.

We walked down a set of steep stairs into a rectangular courtyard. Stuck on spikes were severed pigs’ heads with sticks of incense sprouting from their foreheads. Nice. On one wall of the courtyard was an extensive mural depicting a city razed by fire. Promising. At the end, large sliding doors were already open. I don’t know what I was expecting- snarling Dobermans, tables piled high with cocaine and bags of money, prostitutes sprawled on white leather couches, and a trail of bloodstains leading to the mutilated corpses of dead policemen. What I wasn’t expecting was the very last thing in the world I could have been expecting.

Dad saw it first. He said, “What the fuck?”

On both walls, in frames or stuck up with brown tape, were hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Dad and me.

I said it too: “What the fuck?”

“Marty! They’re photos of you!” Caroline shouted.

“I know!”

“And you too, Jasper!”

“I know!”

“Is this you as a baby? You were so cute!”

Our faces from various epochs peered out at us from all over the room. This perverse exhibition comprised all the photographs Eddie had taken over the past twenty years. There were images of a young Dad in Paris, lean and tall, with all his hair and a strange beard on his chin and neck that couldn’t or wouldn’t make its way onto his face; Dad, before he started collecting fat cells, smoking thin cigarettes in our first apartment. And there were just as many of me, as a baby and groping my way through childhood and adolescence. But it was the photos of Paris that interested me most: photographs and photographs of Dad with a young, pale, beautiful woman with a demoralizing smile.