Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I said goodnight, closed the door, and left him alone in his nakedness, thinking of normal families who have normal problems like alcoholism and gambling and wife-beating and drug addiction. I envied them.

I woke early the next morning. My throat was unslit. The sun was hot already at six-thirty. From my window I could see mist oozing out of the jungle. We were at a high altitude, and the mist hid the mountain peaks from sight. I’d had a bad night’s sleep, thinking about everything Eddie had said. I knew he was right. Dad was planning something, even if he was doing it subconsciously. But didn’t I already know what it was? I felt as though I did, but I couldn’t quite see it. It was concealed somewhere in my mind, somewhere dark and far away. In fact, suddenly I felt I knew everything that would happen in the future but had for some reason forgotten it, and further, I thought that everybody on the planet also knew the future, only they had forgotten it too, and that fortunetellers and prognosticators weren’t people with supernatural insights after all, they were just people with good memories.

I dressed and went out the back door so as not to run into anybody.

At the back of the house, at the edge of the jungle, was a shed. I went inside. There on rickety wooden shelves were paints and paintbrushes. Leaning against the wall were a number of blank canvases. So this was where Eddie’s father had painted his disgusting artworks. It appeared to have once been a chicken coop, although there were no chickens now. There were chicken feathers, though, and a couple of ancient broken eggshells. On the floor was a half-finished painting of a pair of kidneys; Eddie’s father had obviously got it into his head to use egg yolk to get the right kind of yellow.

I picked up a paintbrush. The bristles, caked in dried paint, were stiff as wood. Outside the chicken coop there was a trough filled with muddy rainwater, as if it had fallen from the sky that way, brown and gluggy. I rinsed the brush thoroughly in the water, flicking the hairs with my fingers. As I did this, I saw Caroline walking from the house down the hill. She was walking quickly, though every few steps she’d stop and stand perfectly still before continuing on her way, as if she were late for an appointment she dreaded keeping. I watched her until she disappeared into the jungle.

I went back into the chicken coop, opened a can of paint, dipped the brush in, and started attacking a canvas. I let my brush float across it, seeing what it wanted to paint. It seemed to favor eyes. Hollow eyes, eyes like juicy plums, eyes like germs seen through a microscope, eyes within eyes, concentric eyes, overlapping eyes. The canvas was sick with them. I had to look away; these thick painted eyes were burrowing into me in a way that was more than simply unsettling: they seemed to be moving something inside me. It took me another minute to work out that they were my father’s eyes. No wonder they made me sick.

I put the canvas down and lifted another in its place. The brush started up again. This time it went for a whole face. A smug, self-satisfied face with wide, mocking eyes, a bushy mustache, a twisted brown mouth, and yellow teeth. The face of either a white slave-owner or a prison warden. I stared at the painting and felt a pang of anxiety, but I couldn’t work out why. It was as if a thread in my brain had become loose, but I was afraid to pull on it in case my whole being unraveled. Then I realized: the painting- it was the face. The face I’d dreamed about in childhood. The imperishable floating face I had seen my whole life. As I painted, I was able to recall details I didn’t know I had actually seen before: bags under the eyes, a small gap between the front teeth, wrinkles at the corners of the smiling mouth. I had a premonition that one day this face would come down from the sky to head-butt me. Suddenly the heat in the chicken coop became unbearable. I felt stifled. Being inside a humid chicken coop with that haughty face and a thousand reproductions of my father’s eyes was suffocating.

That afternoon I was lying in my bed listening to the rain. I felt groundless. Traveling on a fake passport probably meant that I could never return to Australia. That made me nationless. And, worse, the fake name on my passport was one I didn’t like, that I was actually sickened by, and unless I organized another fake passport, I might be Kasper until the end of my days.

I stayed in bed all afternoon, unable to force Eddie’s words out of my head, his supposition that I was turning into my father. If sometimes you don’t like him, it’s because you don’t like yourself. You think you’re so different from him. That’s where you don’t know yourself. That’s your blind spot, Jasper. Could that be true? Wouldn’t that coincide with Dad’s old idea that I was actually him prematurely reincarnated? And now that I was thinking of it, wasn’t there perhaps already some frightening evidence of this? Ever since Dad had started dying again, hadn’t I gotten physically stronger? Were we on a kind of seesaw- he goes down, I go up?

There was a knock on my door. It was Caroline. She had been caught in the rain and was drenched from head to toe.

“Jasper- you don’t want your father to die, do you?”

“Well, I don’t have a specific day in mind, but I don’t like the idea of him living forever. So yes, if you put it that way, I suppose I do want him to die.”

She came over and sat on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been into the village. The people around here are deeply superstitious, and maybe not for nothing. There are still ways we might be able to cure him.”

“You want to make him late for his date with destiny?”

“I want your father to rub this all over his body.” She handed me a small jar with a glutinous, milk-colored substance in it.

“What is it?”

“Oil made of fat melted from the chin of a woman who died in childbirth.”

I looked at the container. I couldn’t tell if it actually contained what she said it did, and I wasn’t thinking of the poor woman who died in childbirth, either; I was thinking of the person who melted the fat from her chin.

“Where did you get this, and, more importantly, how much did you pay for it?”

“I got it from an old woman in the village. She said it’s great for cancer.”

Great for cancer?

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Your father isn’t listening to me right now. He doesn’t want me to help him. I can’t even give him a glass of water. You need to get him to rub this oil all over himself.”

“How am I supposed to excite him into rubbing a stranger’s chin fat on his body?”

“That’s what you have to work out.”

“Why me?”

“You’re his son.”

“And you’re his wife.”

“Things are not so good between us at the moment,” she said, without elaborating. Not that she needed to- I was thoroughly familiar with the sharp-edged love triangle threatening to cut us all to shreds.

I procrastinated in the hallway for a while, but finally I went into Dad’s room. He was bent over his desk, not reading or writing anything, just bending.

“Dad,” I said.

He didn’t give any sign he knew I was there. Citronella candles were spread all around the room. He had a mosquito net above the bed, and one over the armchair in the corner too.

“Are the insects bothering you?” I asked.

“Do you think I’m welcoming them like old friends?” he said, without turning around.

“It’s just that I have some insect repellent if you want it.”

“I already have some.”

“This is a new sort. Apparently the locals use it.”

Dad turned to me. I stepped forward and put the jar of melted chin fat in his hand.