Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Dad, is that…?”

“Astrid,” he confirmed.

“Is this your mother, Jasper? She’s beautiful!” Caroline cooed.

“What’s this about?” Dad shouted, his voice echoing through the house. Dad was a bona fide paranoiac who had finally discovered, after all these years, that there really was a conspiracy against him.

“Come on,” Eddie said, leading us deeper into the house.

Dad and I were frozen. Had this something to do with Astrid’s suicide? With my mother dying on one of Tim Lung’s boats? We were thrust into the role of detectives, forced to investigate our own lives, but our mental journeys into the past were futile. We just didn’t get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac’s nightmare! A narcissist’s dream! We didn’t know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed. Obviously Eddie had infused this criminal overlord with an obsession for Dad and me, but what had he said? What could he have said? I imagined him in late-night drinking sessions with his boss: “You wouldn’t believe these characters. They’re insane. They shouldn’t be allowed to live!”

“Mr. Lung is waiting for you in there,” Eddie said, pointing to double wooden doors at the end of the hallway. He had the colossal nerve to be smirking.

Dad suddenly grabbed him violently by the shirt collar; it looked as if he were planning to pull the shirt over his head- Dad’s first official act of physical violence. Caroline pried his fingers loose. “What have you got us into, you bastard?” he shouted, though it wasn’t as threatening as he intended. Fury mingled with genuine curiosity just comes out strange.

An armed guard emerged from a doorway to investigate the commotion. Eddie disarmed him with a nod. Disappointed, the guard retreated into the shadows. Apparently Eddie had a nod that was irrefutable. That was news to us. We continued down the hallway toward the double wooden doors in a daze, examining more photos on the way. Until now, I’d never realized how much Dad resembled a dog being pushed unwillingly into a swimming pool. And me- suddenly my identity felt like a less solid thing. I found it almost impossible to connect with the pictorial history of ourselves. We looked like damaged relics of a failed civilization. We didn’t look comprehensible at all.

And my mother! My heart nearly burst open looking at her. In all the photos she looked silent and motionless; all the action went on behind the eyes, the kind of eyes that look as if they have come back from the farthest corners of the earth just to tell you not to bother going there. Her smile was like a staircase leading nowhere. Half obscured in the corners of frames, there was her sad beauty, she was resting her head in her hands, her tired eyes clouding over. Perhaps it was coincidence, but in each photo she seemed to be farther and farther away from the camera lens, as if she were shrinking. These images gave me a newfound respect for Dad- she looked like a distant and imposing woman whom no sensible person would enter into a relationship with. I took one photograph of her off the wall and broke it out of the frame. It was black-and-white, taken in a laundromat. My mother was sitting on a washing machine, legs dangling, looking directly into the camera lens with her strikingly large eyes. Suddenly I knew this mystery had something to do with her- here I would receive the first clue as to who she was, where she came from. One thing was clear to me: the riddle of my mother’s existence would be answered behind that door.

Dad opened it, and I followed close behind.

We entered a large square room with so many pillows on the floor that part of me just wanted to lie down and be fed grapes. Large indoor ferns made me feel we were outside again. The walls didn’t quite reach the ceiling and sunlight poured through the space above them, except for the far wall, which was made of glass and looked out on the overgrown Buddha in the garden. There, at the wall of glass, was a man, his back to us, staring out at that Buddha. They were the same build. In the bright light that came through the window, we could see only the man’s giant silhouette. At least, I think it was a man. It looked more or less like one, only bigger.

“Mr. Lung,” Eddie said, “may I present Martin and Jasper Dean. And Caroline Potts.”

The man turned. He was not Thai, Chinese, or Asian at all. He had blond scraggly hair and a bushy beard covering pulpy, blemished skin, and he was wearing shorts and a cut-off flannelette shirt. He looked like an explorer recently returned from the wilds, enjoying his first taste of civilization. That’s an off-the-point description, though, one ignoring the elephant in the room, because most of all he was the elephant in the room, the fattest man I’d ever seen or was ever going to see, an astounding freak of nature. Either he had a hormone disorder or the man must have eaten fiendishly for decades with the express ambition of becoming the biggest man alive. His body shape was unreal to me- his hideousness was suffocating. I could no more kill this monstrosity with a bullet than I could dent a mountain by slapping it.

He stared at us without blinking an eye, even while he put out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. Clearly he was planning to stare us into submission. It was working. I felt exceedingly meek, as well as fantastically thin. I looked at Dad to see if he was feeling meek too. He wasn’t. He was squinting at the enormous man as if he were one of those magic puzzles that reveal a hidden image.

Dad spoke first, as though talking in his sleep. “Bloody hell,” he said, and at once I knew.

Caroline said it before anyone. “Terry,” she said.

Terry Dean, my uncle, looked from one of us to the other and broke into the widest smile I had ever seen.

“Surprised? Of course you are,” he said, laughing. His echoey, powerful voice sounded like it came from deep within a cave. He limped toward us. “You should see the look on your faces. You really should. Do you want me to get a mirror? No? What’s the matter, Marty? You’re in shock? Understandable, very understandable. We’ll all just wait here until the shock dies down and makes way for anger and resentment. I don’t expect any of you to take this lying down. This isn’t one of those things you laugh about straightaway, right up front, but later, when it’s all sunk in. Don’t worry- it’ll sink. In a few days you’ll be hard-pressed to recall a single day I wasn’t alive. But tell me, did you suspect it? Even a little? What am I thinking? Here you are, seeing your long-dead brother after all these years, and not only does he have the effrontery to be living and breathing, he hasn’t even offered you a beer! Eddie, get us some beers, will you, mate? And Jasper! I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. Do you know who I am?”

I nodded.

“My nephew! You have your grandmother’s nose, did your dad ever tell you that? I’m so happy to see you. Eddie’s told me all about you. You must be some kind of rock, living with your dad without shattering into a million little pieces. But you look like you’ve turned out all right. You look so normal and healthy and adjusted. How is it that you’re not crazy? It’s crazy that you’re not crazy! Though maybe you are. That’s what I’m looking forward to finding out. And Caroline! Seeing you comes as a bit of a shock, I’ll admit. Of course Eddie told me you’d married…”

Terry stared at her for a long moment before snapping himself out of it.

“I know, you’re all caught off guard. Drink your beers, you’ll feel better. I’ll wait until you calm down. There’s time. Christ, if there’s one thing we all have, it’s time. Marty, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies with that look. You too, Caroline. But not you, Jasper, eh? Maybe because you’re still young. When you’re older, it’s a surprise that you can still be surprised. I wonder, what’s the bigger surprise, that I’m so wonderfully alive or that I’m so wonderfully fat? You can say it- I don’t mind. I like being fat. I’m Henry the Eighth fat. Buddha fat. Let’s get it out of the way so we’re not bogged down in it. I’m a fat fuck. I’ll just take off my shirt so you can see the extent of it. See? OK? I’m a whale. My belly is unrelenting! Invincible!”