Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

As Dad absorbed his brother’s story, his whole being looked to me like a Hollywood façade, as if I were to take a step around him, I’d see he was only one inch wide.

“When I was in that cell,” Terry said, “and thought my death was seconds away, I saw clearly that everything I had tried to do, to tidy up the ethics in sport, was fucking meaningless. I realized that, barring accident, I could have lived for eighty or ninety years, and I had blown it. I was furious with myself! Furious! I tried to reason why I had done it, what I was thinking, and I realized that I’d been trying to leave a trace of myself so that after I was gone, I would still kind of be here. Everything is summed up in that idiotic ‘kind of.’ And you know what I realized on the very edge of death? That I couldn’t give a fuck. I didn’t want to build a statue of myself. I had an epiphany. Have you ever had one? They’re great! This was mine: I found out that I had killed myself because I wanted to live forever. I had tossed my life away in the name of some daft I don’t know what-”

“Project,” I said. Dad and I looked at each other.

“Project. Yeah. Anyway, I swore if I got out of there I’d live in the moment, fuck everyone, let my fellow man do whatever he wants, and I swore that I’d follow Harry’s advice and stay anonymous for the rest of my days.”

Terry suddenly turned to Caroline with clear, serious eyes.

“I wanted to call you, but every time I was about to, I remembered that cell, that death chamber, and I understood that the way I loved you was sort of possessive, and like my sporting rampage, it was a way of barricading myself against, I don’t know…death. That’s why I’ve chosen to love only prostitutes. There’s no chance of getting into that old routine of jealousy and possessiveness. I took myself out of the competition, like Harry said. I’m free, and I’ve been free since that day. And you know what I do now? When I wake up every day, I say to myself ten times, ‘I am a soulless dying animal with an embarrassingly short lifespan.’ Then I go out, as the world sinks or swims, and make myself a little more comfortable. In the cooperative our profits aren’t outstanding, but we make a fairly decent living, and we can afford to live like kings because Thailand’s cheap as chips!”

A long silence followed, in which no one knew where to look.

“Australia loves you,” Dad said finally.

“And they hate you,” Terry said back.

Despite their divergent paths in life- two diametrically opposed roads less traveled- the brothers had come to the same conclusion, Terry, naturally, through epiphany and the cathartic afterbirth of his near-death trauma, and Dad through reflection and thought and intellectually obsessing about death. Uneducated Terry, the man Dad had once described as being unable to write his name in the snow with his piss, had somehow intuited the traps of the fear of death and with ease sidestepped them, as if they were dog turds on a brightly lit street. Dad, on the other hand, had intellectually recognized the traps but still managed to fall into every one of them. Yes, I could see it in his face straightaway. Dad was crushed! Terry had lived the truth of Dad’s life, and Dad never had, even though it was his truth.

“So what happens now?” Dad asked.

“You stay with me. All of you.”

We looked at each other, knowing that it was a bad idea but that we had no other choice. Nobody moved. We were like a tribe of cave dwellers whose cave had just caved in. As my eyes shifted from my father to his brother, I thought: These sick characters are my family. Then I thought: Career criminals and philosophers have a surprising amount in common- they are both at odds with society, they both live uncompromisingly by their own rules, and they both make really lousy parent figures. A few minutes passed, and even though nobody budged in any direction, I felt like the two brothers were already tearing me apart.

Life in Thailand was easygoing. They call it the land of smiles. That’s not an empty tag: Thais never stop grinning, so much so that at first I thought we’d landed in a vast land of simpletons. Generally, though, the chaos of Bangkok was in harmony with my state of mind. There was only one thing I had to watch out for other than the tap water and those suspicious smiles: Thais have such a deep regard for heads and such a low opinion of feet that everyone kept telling me I should not point my tootsies at people’s noggins. They must have thought I was planning to.

A travel guide told me that foreigners can be ordained as Buddhist monks and I thought that sounded like an impressive addition to my résumé, but I found out that monks must abstain from murdering bugs (even if they invade your pajamas), stealing, lying, sex, luxuries, and intoxicants, including beer and double espressos, and I didn’t think that left anything except meditating and the ritual burning of incense. Their philosophy is based on the understanding that all life is suffering, and all life is, especially when you abstain from stealing, lying, sex, luxuries, beer, and double espressos. Anyway, I was too full of hate to be a Buddhist monk; in my thoughts I composed letters to the Towering Inferno that had compound words in them like “cunt-bitch” and “whore-nose” and curses such as “I hope you cough your uterus out your mouth.” Buddhists generally don’t think like that.

I told Terry of my plan to murder Tim Lung and we laughed until our sides ached. It was a great icebreaker. After that, we spent many days and nights together, and I would go to bed with my ears exhausted but buzzing. Like his brother, Terry was prone to unrelenting talking jags, crazy monologues on every conceivable subject. Sometimes they’d be broken by moments of introspection, when he’d hold up one finger as if to put the universe on mute; he’d sway on his fat stumpy legs in openmouthed silence, his pupils would narrow as though I’d shone a torch on his face, and minutes would pass like this before his finger would come down and he’d continue talking. He did this wherever we went: in restaurants and at vegetable markets, at the poppy fields and in the sex shows. The more time I spent with Terry, the more I saw behind his mischievous smile an inner strength and something ageless. Even the breaded-fish crumbs on his beard looked timeless, as if they had always been there.

He had unbelievable habits. He liked to roam the streets to see if someone would try to rip him off. Often he’d let them pick his pockets, then laugh about what was taken. Sometimes he’d stop the pickpockets and tell them what they did wrong. Sometimes he checked into backpacker hostels and partied in a German accent. And he never missed a single sunrise or sunset. One afternoon we watched a dark orange sun bleed into the horizon. “This is one of those sunsets made glorious by the pollution of a congested city. Someone has to say it and it might as well be me- Nature’s own work pales in comparison. The same goes for mass destruction. One day we’ll all be basking in the glow of a nuclear winter and God, won’t it be heaven on the eyes!”

In addition to heroin smuggling and prostitution, the democratic cooperative of crime’s main trade was gambling on Thai boxing matches, the national sport. Terry would take me along when he bribed the boxers to take a dive. I remember thinking about his legacy in Australia, how he had been obsessed with fighting corruption in sport, and I was impressed with the way he now shat all over it like this. Often, on the way to the matches, Terry tried to get a tuk-tuk to give the drivers a scare- none would take my mammoth uncle, so we would be forced to walk. He never once got angry; he’d be happy to have the opportunity to stop at a vegetable market and buy a fresh bunch of coriander to wear around his neck (“Better smell than any flower!”). During the boxing match he would ask me all about myself: what I liked, what I didn’t, what were my hopes, my fears, my aspirations. Despite prostitutes, gambling, and drugs being his bread-and-butter, Terry was the sort of man who inspired you to be honest. I revealed myself to him as I never had to anyone else. He listened to my confessions seriously, and when I recounted the horror/love story of the Towering Inferno, he said he thought that I had “loved her sincerely, though not really.” I couldn’t argue with that.