Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

The most painful moments came when it was time for bed. We’d be sprawled on cushions on the floor, bloated and drunk from the evening meal. Suddenly conversations would become stillborn dialogues.

Dad: “I’m tired.”

Caroline: “Go to bed, then.”

Dad would stare at Terry in a faintly sinister way.

Dad: “In a little while.”

Caroline: “Well, I’m going to bed.”

Terry: “Me too.”

Dad: “Me too.”

Dad did everything he could not to leave Caroline and Terry alone together. It was awkward, although I suspected he secretly loved the idea of being betrayed by his brother. To be betrayed by his brother was cheap melodrama of Biblical proportions, and it would be a gift to the dying man- a gift that showed life had not forgotten to include him in her grubby comedies. Then one night I saw Caroline sneaking out of Terry’s room, her hair messed up, shirt half unbuttoned. She froze at the sight of me. I gave her a weary look- what was I supposed to do, wink? Still, I couldn’t bring myself to blame her for her treachery. It was an untenable situation all around. I just wished she could have waited; it wouldn’t be long before Dad was out of the way. Cancer thrives on broken hearts; it is a vulture waiting for you to give up on human warmth. Dad often talked about the shame of the unlived life, but it was the shame of his unloved life that was really killing him.

I wasn’t sure if Terry was aware of his role in this triangle, and I don’t think that in general he knew he had succeeded in doing what Dad had only dreamed about, and that by doing so he had irrevocably cut Dad off from himself. Otherwise, he maybe wouldn’t have harassed Dad as much as he did.

Some months after our arrival, Terry got it into his head that it was within his powers to make Dad’s final days a constant wonder and joy, and he recruited me to help. He dragged the three of us to bathe naked in the river, then to look at cloud formations, then to bet at a dogfight, then to wallow in flesh and booze at a drunken orgy. Dad seethed about all these interruptions to his dying in peace and threw Terry nothing but odious, hate-filled looks. As for me, I was relieved to be doing something. Maybe it was the sudden freedom of having someone else to worry about Dad, but ever since arriving in Thailand, I’d had an enormous amount of energy. I felt stronger too, as if I could wrestle an animal to the ground. I woke early each morning, spent the day walking from one side of Bangkok to the other, and went to bed late each night. I seemed to need very little sleep. I thrived on the activities Terry meant for Dad to thrive on.

One obscenely hot afternoon, after I had been on my feet for several hours, I lay down in the hammock, stared at that humongous Buddha, and made a sort of mental inventory of my life experiences to see if they in fact wove together seamlessly without my having noticed at the time. I thought if I could decode the order of the past, I could deduce what was coming next.

I couldn’t. A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Terry’s naked torso. It was always impressive to see him with his shirt off. It made me wonder if he hadn’t reversed the usual order of enlightenment and achieved his Buddha-like serenity from the outside in.

“You ready?” Terry said.

“For what?”

“We’re going to try kick-starting your father’s motor again.”

I swung my legs over the hammock and followed Terry into Dad’s room. He was lying on the bed stomach down. He didn’t acknowledge our presence in any way.

“Look, Marty, don’t you find yourself a heavy weight, pinning you down?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Don’t you want instead to be a leaf blown in the air, or a drop of rain, or a wispy cloud?”

“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

“You need to be reborn. You need to die and be reborn.”

“I’m too old for rebirth. And who do you think you are, anyway? You’re a murderer a hundred times over, you’re a drug pusher, a pimp, a gunrunner, yet you take yourself for a visionary and a sage! Why is it your hypocrisy doesn’t make you sick?”

“Good question. It’s an amiable contradiction, that’s all.”

God, how these unedifying discussions went on and on.

Terry hauled Dad out of bed and dragged us to a shooting range where you could use pump-action shotguns to hit the targets. Neither Dad nor I had much love for guns, and the force of the action sent Dad keeling over onto his back. Terry bent over him, and Dad looked up, his mouth open, trembling all over.

“Marty, tell me something- where has all this meditating on death got you?”

“Fucked if I know.”

“Jasper says you’re a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner.”

“Does he?”

“Tell me about the corner. What does it look like? How did you get there? And what do you think would get you out?”

“Help me up,” Dad said. When he was on his feet again, he said, “In brief, here it is. Because humans deny their own mortality to such an extent they become meaning machines, I can never be sure when something supernatural or religious in nature occurs that I did not manufacture my connection to it out of desperation to believe in my own specialness and my desire for continuance.”

“Maybe because you’ve never had mystical experiences.”

“But he has,” I said. “Once he saw everything in the universe simultaneously. But he never followed up on it.”

“So you understand the nature of the corner now? If men are constantly manufacturing meaning in order to deny death, then how can I know I didn’t manufacture that experience myself? I can’t know for sure, so I must assume I did.”

“But then your whole life you haven’t ever really taken your own soul seriously.”

“Stop talking about the soul. I don’t believe in it, and neither does Jasper.”

Terry turned to me. I shrugged. In truth, I simply could not make up my mind about its existence. Dad was right- the immortal soul didn’t wash with me. Its shelf life felt overestimated. I believed instead in the mortal soul, one that from the moment of birth is ceaselessly worn away and that will die when I die. Whatever its shortcomings, a mortal soul still seemed perfectly sublime to me, no matter what anyone said.

“Look, Marty. Let it go- the mind that wants to solve the mysteries of the universe. It’s over. You lost.”

“No, you look, Terry,” Dad said wearily. “If I did live wrongly, if I made blunders and still have blunders coming up, I think maintaining the status quo of my deficient personality would be a lot less tragic than changing at the eleventh hour. I don’t want to be the dying man who learns how to live five seconds before his death. I’m happy to be ridiculous, but I don’t want my life to assume the characteristics of a tragedy, thanks.”

I reloaded my shotgun and aimed at the target and, for the first time that day, hit the bull’s-eye. I turned back to Dad and Terry, but neither had seen it. They were both unmoving, two brothers standing together but alive in very different worlds.

That night I buried myself deep under the covers. The shots Terry was firing at Dad seemed to be missing the target and hitting me instead. It occurred to me that the uncompromising position Dad held in the face of death was likely to be my own someday. Despite my desire to be his mirror opposite, I had to admit there were disturbing similarities between us. I also had a restless inquiring mind that aimed to solve the mysteries of creation, and like him, I didn’t know how to find respite from this fruitless, unending investigation. I wasn’t so sure Terry wasn’t rocking my boat on purpose. He must have known Dad wasn’t going to change one atom of his personality, and that’s why he was intent on dragging me along for these outings. He was aiming at me and getting me square on. I knew that somewhere within me was a spiritual inclination that Dad lacked, but it was still faint and unresolved. It wouldn’t take much to wake up one day and find I’d drifted away from my own center and was now tracing my father’s footsteps like a zombie.