Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“What for? Anyway, he knows now. Eddie! We’ve come to see how you’re getting on. Make up the spare rooms, will you? You have guests.”

“I don’t work for you anymore, Terry. You can’t tell me…you can’t just come here and expect…Look, I’m a doctor now. I don’t want any funny business up here.”

“My spies tell me you haven’t had one patient.”

“How did you…They’re a little suspicious of outsiders. And I haven’t lived here for many, many years. It takes time to build a reputation, that’s all. Anyway, what’s it got to do with you? You can’t stay. My position here is precarious enough. The last thing I need is you giving me a bad name.”

“My God, Eddie, we’re not going to run around the village in our underwear, we just want some peace and quiet, see a little scenery, and anyway, is it so strange for a doctor to take in a dying man and his family for a few weeks?”

“Weeks? You intend to stay for weeks?”

Terry laughed loudly and slapped Eddie on the back.

“Him too?” Eddie asked quietly, looking in Dad’s direction. Dad shot a look back that was lifeless and cold. Then Eddie looked at me with a half smile that approximated warmth but was not quite warm. I had recently experienced from the Australian people the concept of hate by association and so recognized the size and smell of it. Terry grabbed his bag and headed into the house. The rest of us followed cautiously. I paused at the door and turned back to Eddie. He hadn’t moved. He was standing next to the Jeep, perfectly still. He looked as if he couldn’t endure any of us. And who could blame him? Individually we were all quite pleasant people, but together we were unendurable.

I am not aware of what it is about my body that attracts mosquitos of all races and religions, I can only say that I doused my body in insect repellent and lit a thousand citronella candles, but for some reason they just kept coming. I removed the mosquito net from the bed and wrapped it like a shroud around my body. Through the diaphanous netting, I took in my surroundings. To say the furnishings were minimal was an understatement: four white walls, a creaky chair with a broken leg, a wobbly table, and a wafer-thin mattress. A window looked out on the thick vegetation of the jungle. I had insisted on the bedroom farthest away from everybody. There was a back door- good for entering and exiting without having to see anyone, I’d thought.

I felt a mosquito on my arm. They were tunneling through the net. I tore it off in disgust and thought: What am I going to do here? In Bangkok, between the sex shows and the Buddhist temples, there was plenty to keep me occupied. Here, Dad’s dying was likely to make all non-Dad-dying thoughts virtually impossible. What was there to do other than watch the man deteriorate?

After a silent dinner during which we all eyed each other suspiciously, where the air was thick with secret desires and no one said the unsayable so there was nothing much to be said, Eddie gave me a tour of the place.

There wasn’t much to see. Eddie’s father had been an amateur painter as well as a doctor and had, unfortunately, found a way to combine his two interests. On the walls hung hauntingly realistic depictions of the bowels, heart, lungs, and kidneys and one of an aborted fetus who, despite his bad luck, appeared to be smiling wickedly. I didn’t bother pretending I liked the paintings, and Eddie didn’t expect me to. I followed him into his office, a large, immaculate room with wooden shutters. It had the kind of order and tidiness one finds in extremely finicky people and in people who have absolutely nothing to do with their time. As I knew Eddie had been waiting here for weeks on end without a single patient, it was clear which case it was.

“This was my father’s office. This is where he saw patients, did his medical research, and avoided my mother. Everything is exactly how he left it. Actually, why did I say that? That’s not true. When he died, my mother packed everything into boxes, so I have rearranged everything exactly as I remember him having it.”

It was your standard doctor’s office: an oversized desk, a comfy padded chair for the doctor, a straight-backed uncomfortable one for the patient, a raised examination table, a bookshelf with thousand-page medical manuals, and, on a side table, perfectly arranged surgical implements from not only this century but the last two as well. Unfortunately, there were more vulgar paintings of body parts on the walls, paintings that seemed to vilify the human as a reputable organism. The atmosphere in the room was heavy, because of either the lingering death of the father or the present-day frustrations of the son.

“When I took up your uncle’s offer, my parents broke off all contact with me. Now, here they are.”

“Who?”

“My parents.” Eddie motioned to two earthenware pots I thought were bookends.

“Their ashes?”

“No, their spirits.”

“Less messy.”

So the spirits of Eddie’s deceased parents were kept on a high shelf. Out of reach of children.

“I wait here every day. Not one single patient has come by. I’ve introduced myself around, but they’re totally uninterested in trying out anyone new. I’m not even sure how much business they throw around anyway. These people don’t consult doctors for minor ailments, and hardly even for major ones. But I’m determined to stick it out. After all, I went to medical school, didn’t I? So why shouldn’t I be a doctor? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Write off those five years of university as a learning experience?”

Apparently Eddie was completely oblivious of the glaring contradiction in his perspective on wasted time. He had chosen to fixate on the five years of medical school rather than the more obvious twenty years of chaperoning Dad and me.

He sat on the edge of his desk and picked something from his teeth with his finger. He stared at me solemnly, as though picking food from his teeth were something he had learned at medical school.

“There’re so many things I wanted to say to you over the years, Jasper. Things I could never say because they conflicted with the requirements of my job.”

“Such as?”

“Well, as you may have figured out, I hate your father. And that the Australian people bought his bullshit even for one minute degrades them as a nation, and degrades all people everywhere.”

“I suppose.”

“Anyway, the point is, I hate your father. No, I loathe him.”

“That’s your right.”

“But what you might not know is, I don’t like you much either.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“You see? You don’t even ask me why. That’s what I don’t like about you. You’re smug and condescending. In fact, you’ve been smug and condescending ever since you were five years old.”

“And that’s my right.”

Eddie leered at me menacingly. Now that he was no longer pretending to like us, it felt as if he had become sinister overnight.

“See? Smug and condescending. I’ve observed you your entire life. I probably know you better than you know yourself. You pride yourself on knowing people and what they’re thinking. But you don’t know yourself, do you? You know what it is that you especially don’t know? That you’re an extension of your father. When he dies, you will become him. I have no doubt about that. People can inherit thoughts- they can even inherent whole minds. Do you believe that?”

“Not really.” Maybe.

“When I met your father, he was just a little older than you are now. And you know what I see in you? The same exact man. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him in your core. That’s where you don’t know yourself. I’m sure every time you hear yourself say something that’s an echo of your father, you think it’s just habit. It’s not. It’s him inside you, waiting to come out. And that’s your blind spot, Jasper.”