Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I wasn’t in bed five minutes when I heard someone breathing. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It didn’t do any good. The breathing came closer and closer, until I felt it on my neck. I hoped it wasn’t Eddie. It was. I turned over to see him leaning down over me. I jumped up.

“What do you want?”

“Jasper, what are you doing today?”

“Sleeping, hopefully.”

“I’m going out driving to see if I can drum up some business.”

“OK, then- have a good day.”

“Yeah. You too.”

And still Eddie didn’t move. Even though it was exhausting to do so, I felt sorry for him. There’s no other way to say it. He looked lovesick. It was a bad look.

“I don’t suppose you want to come along. Keep me company?” Eddie asked.

It was a daunting proposition. Spending the day alone with Eddie didn’t particularly appeal to me, and visiting sick people even less, but it turned out there was nothing I could imagine as disagreeable as staying in the house with Dad’s clanking death.

We went traipsing up and down the countryside in the pitiless sun. I thought Australia was hot! The humidity in the mountains was out of control- I could feel beads of sweat forming on my gallbladder. We rode along, not saying much. When Eddie was silent, I felt as if I were the only person alive in the world- although I had that feeling when he was talking too. Wherever we went, people watched us. They couldn’t understand a man in his mid-forties wanting to become a doctor- it was a violation of the natural order. Eddie tried to take it in his stride, but it was obviously wearing him down. He had only vicious, unfriendly words to say about the healthy, peaceful inhabitants of this tranquil village. He couldn’t stand their contentment. He even resisted the cutesy Thai custom of smiling like a cretin in every conceivable situation, although he had to if he wanted to lure patients. But his smile took up only one side of his divided face. I saw the real one, with the furious down-turned lips and restrained homicidal rage in his blinking eye.

We ate lunch by the side of the road. I could feel no wind, but the branches of the trees moved every so often. After lunch Eddie said, “Did you speak to Terry about taking you all out of here?”

“He wants us to stay. He thinks something bad is going to happen in your house and he wants to see what it is.”

“He thinks that, does he? That’s bad news for us.”

Before Eddie could add any more, we heard the roar of a motorcycle charging at full speed.

“Look who it is,” Eddie said.

“Who?”

“That antique doctor. Look how smug he is.”

The motorcycle screamed toward us, stirring up dust. It was hard to believe anyone antique could ride a bike so fast. As the doctor came to a shuddering stop, Eddie corrected his posture. It’s difficult to look like a winner when you’re clearly the loser, but posture plays a part.

The doctor may have been in his sixties, but he had the physique of an Olympic swimmer. I couldn’t detect anything smug about him. He and Eddie exchanged a few words. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I saw Eddie’s eyes widen in a way that darkened his face and made me somehow relieved I couldn’t understand the language. When the doctor had sped off, I asked Eddie, “What did he say? Will he retire soon?”

“There’s bad news. Fuck! Terrible news! The doctor already has a young apprentice, ready to fill his shoes.”

Well, that was the end of that. There was absolutely no use for Eddie in this community, and he knew it.

All I wanted to do was sleep, but the moment I returned to my room, I knew it would be impossible, mostly because Caroline was sitting on the edge of my bed.

“I went into the village today,” she said.

“Please, no more chin fat.”

She handed me a small leather pouch tied with a string. I took it and pulled out a necklace with three strange objects hanging off it.

“A piece of elephant tusk and some kind of tooth,” I guessed.

“Tiger’s tooth.”

“Sure. And what’s that third one?”

“A dried-out cat’s eye.”

“Nice. And I’m to get Dad to wear this, I suppose.”

“No, it’s for you.”

“For me?”

“It’s an amulet,” she said, and placed it around my neck and leaned back and gazed at me as if I were a sad-eyed puppy in a pet store window.

“What’s it for?”

“To protect you.”

“From what?”

“How do you feel?”

“Me? OK, I guess. A little tired.”

“I wish you could have met my son,” she said.

“I wish so too.”

Poor Caroline. It seemed she wanted to conduct several conversations but didn’t know which to pick.

She stood suddenly. “OK, then,” she said, and went out by the back door. I almost took the amulet off but for some reason was overcome with fear of being without it. I thought: The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all- it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.

The next few days I spent at the mirror, confirming my features with the touch of my hand. Nose? Here! Chin? Here! Mouth? Teeth? Forehead? Here! Here! Here! This inane facial roll call was the only valuable way I could think of to pass the time. Somewhere else in the house Caroline, Dad, and Terry were circling each other like rabid dogs. I stayed well away.

I spent many hours sitting with Eddie in his office. It seemed to me it was he, and not I, who had taken on the qualities of an accident in slow motion, and I didn’t want to miss the show. Besides, Caroline’s gift had put doubts about my health into my mind, and I thought it best if I let Eddie examine me. He gave me a thorough going-over. He tested the dull thumping of my heart, my sluggish reflexes; I even let him take my blood. Not that there was a pathology lab in the area where he could send it. He just filled a vial and gave it to me afterward as a keepsake. He said there was nothing wrong with me.

We were in the office listening to the radio through the stethoscope when something extraordinary and unexpected happened- a patient! A woman came in visibly upset and agitated. Eddie put on a solemn face that for all I know might’ve been genuine. I sat there on the edge of my seat while the woman gibbered on. “The doctor’s very sick,” Eddie translated to me. “Maybe dying,” he added, and stared at me for a long time, just to show me he wasn’t smiling.

The three of us piled into Eddie’s car and drove at breakneck speed to the doctor’s house. When we arrived, we heard the most awful screeching imaginable.

“It’s too late. He’s dead,” Eddie said.

“How do you know?”

“That wailing.”

Eddie was right. There was nothing ambiguous about that wailing.

He turned off the engine, grabbed his doctor’s bag, and combed his hair down with his hands.

“But he’s dead- what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to pronounce him dead.”

“Don’t you think that nightmarish howling has pretty much got that covered?”

“Even in a village as remote as this, there are rules. The dead must be officially declared dead,” he said. I took a deep breath and followed Eddie and the woman inside.

A dozen or so people were crowded around the dead doctor’s bed; either they had come to mourn him or had arrived earlier to watch him die. The doctor that I’d seen a few days earlier tearing around the countryside on his motorbike was now perfectly motionless. The man whose statuesque physique I had envied had caved in. His body looked as if someone had gone in with a powerful vacuum cleaner and just sucked everything out: heart, ribcage, spine, everything. Frankly, he didn’t even look like skin and bones, just skin.