Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

There was a knock on the door. I didn’t say anything, but the door opened anyway. Terry waddled into the bedroom sideways.

“Damn these narrow doorways. Hey, Jasper, I need to pick your brain. What can we do to make your father’s final days wonderful?”

“Fuck, Terry. We can’t. Just leave him be.”

“I know! Maybe we should go on a trip.”

“All of us? Together?”

“Yes! In the country! We could go visit Eddie, see how he’s getting on.”

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.”

“Your father’s not doing so good. I think to be in the company of his oldest friend might be just what he needs. And besides, the countryside could freshen him up.”

“You can’t freshen him up. He’s putrefying.”

“I’m going to tell everyone.”

“Wait- what about the cooperative? Don’t you have prostitutes to pimp, opium to grow, guns to trade?”

“The others can take care of things until I get back.”

“Look, Terry. Dad doesn’t get lost in the beauty of nature. Natural phenomena make him sink into the worst kind of introspection. What he needs is distraction, not a journey into his interior. Besides, you’re sleeping with his wife and he knows it.”

“I’m not!”

“Come on, Terry. I saw her coming out of your room.”

“Look. Caroline’s frustrated. Your father doesn’t know how to cuddle, that’s all. He only uses one arm!”

It was pointless talking to Terry. His mind was made up. We would all of us go to a remote mountain village and stay with Eddie for a couple of weeks. I tore at my hair and overheard him break the news ungently to Dad and Caroline, and though it was a unanimously detested idea, the following morning he herded us all into the Jeep.

During the drive I ruminated on what Terry had told me about Eddie’s history. His father had been the only doctor in the remote mountain village where they lived, and as a young man Eddie was expected to follow in his footsteps. It was his parents’ dream that Eddie would take over once his father retired, and such was the force of their will, it became Eddie’s dream too. Over the years they scraped and sacrificed to send their son to medical school, and he went along, filled with gratitude and enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, things went sour from the first day Eddie opened his medical textbooks. As much as he wanted to pursue “his” dream and please his parents, he found that he was offended by the slop inside the human body. So Eddie spent most of his internship dry-retching. There was really no part of human anatomy he could stomach: the lungs, the heart, the blood, the intestines were not simply repellent symbols of man’s animality, but so delicate and prone to disease and disintegration that he scarcely knew how people survived from one minute to the next.

In his second year of medical school he married a beautiful journalism student whom he had won over dishonestly by boasting about his future as a doctor and predicting a prosperous life together. What should have been a happy event was for Eddie a secret torture. He had serious doubts about entering the medical profession but didn’t trust that he was inherently lovable enough “as is.” Now he had something else to be confused and guilty over: he had begun a marriage based on a lie.

Then he met the man who would change his life. It was two a.m. when Terry Dean stumbled into the emergency room with a penknife stuck in the small of his back at such an awkward angle he couldn’t remove it himself. As Eddie pulled out the knife, Terry’s open and candid manner, combined with the late-night silence of the graveyard shift, made Eddie confide to his patient his confused feelings- how it felt to be torn between disgust and duty, between obligation and the fear of failure. Basically, Eddie moaned: did he want to be a fucking doctor or didn’t he? He admitted that he loathed the idea and it would in all probability drive him to suicide, but how could he get out of it now? How else could he make money? Terry listened sympathetically, and on the spot offered him a high-paying though unusual job: traveling the world and watching over his brother with the aim of helping him out when he needed it. In short, to be Martin Dean’s friend and protector.

While it broke his parents’ hearts and put an unbelievable strain on his relationship with his young bride, Eddie took the job and set off to Paris to wait near Caroline for Dad to turn up. The most astounding fact of all that was revealed to us was that in all those years, from the moment Eddie met Dad in Paris onward, he couldn’t tolerate him. All those years he hated my father, and this hatred never once let up. It was beyond belief. The more I thought about Eddie’s deception, pretending to like a man for twenty years, the more I thought it verged on virtuosity. Then I decided that people probably pretend to like their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues for their entire lives, and twenty years is no great trick.

The traffic had been heavy leaving Bangkok, but now we were out of the city, it eased up. We were on an open road flanked by rice fields. Terry drove fast. We passed tiny mopeds with several generations of whole families on them and buses that looked to be veering dangerously out of control. For a while we were stuck behind a slow-moving tractor driven by a farmer who was languidly rolling a cigarette with both hands. Then we began winding up the mountains. As if to finish the story swilling around in my head, Terry gave us an update on what had happened to Eddie since he returned to Thailand.

Eddie’s jubilation at having completed a twenty-year mission dissipated as things went almost immediately pear-shaped. After a separation of two hundred and forty months because of Eddie’s work, it took just six weeks of togetherness to destroy his marriage. Eddie moved out of his wife’s apartment in Bangkok and into a house in the remote village where he grew up. It was a terrible mistake- the ghosts of his parents were everywhere, berating him for breaking their hearts. So what did the fool do? He picked up the thread of his old dream. Dreams can be as dangerous as anything else. If you go through the years, changing with age and experience, and you forget to overhaul your dreams as well, you might find yourself in Eddie’s unenviable position: a forty-seven-year-old pursuing the dreams of a twenty-year-old. In Eddie’s case it was worse. He’d forgotten that they weren’t even his dreams to begin with; he’d got them secondhand. And now he had returned to this outrageously isolated community with the intention of setting up shop, only to find that his father’s replacement, now sixty-five years old, had the job well and truly sewn up.

We arrived around sunset at Eddie’s place, a dilapidated house set in a small clearing. The hills surrounding it were covered by thick jungle. When Terry turned off the engine, I could hear a river running. We were really in the middle of nowhere. The isolation of the place made me vaguely ill. Having lived in a hut in the northwest corner of a labyrinth, I was no stranger to austerity or solitude, but this was something else. The house made me shudder. Maybe I’d read too much or seen too many films, but when you consider your life in terms of its dramatic attributes, as I did, everything becomes instantly loaded with meaning. A house is not just a house- it is a location where an episode of your life is staged, and I thought this remote house was an absolutely perfect setting for a menacing low point and possibly, if we stayed long enough, a tragic climax.

Terry honked the horn, and Eddie came out waving his arms in a truly berserk manner.

“What’s this? What do you want?”

“Didn’t you tell him we were coming?” I asked Terry.