Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I kept an eye on Eddie but he’d made himself look harmless and sincere, which was no small trick considering the vile thoughts going on in his head. The village doctor was gone- now it was between Eddie and the young doctor. I could see Eddie thinking, He shouldn’t be too hard to discredit. Eddie straightened himself up, ready to seduce the mourners. It was his first pronouncement as a doctor.

They all spoke to Eddie in quiet tones, and afterward he turned to me and I saw a flicker of derangement, ruthlessness, obstinacy, and deviousness. It’s astonishing the complexity that can be perceived in a face at the right time of day. Eddie took me aside and explained that the apprentice had been here when the doctor had died and had already proclaimed him dead.

“He didn’t waste any time, the little bastard,” Eddie whispered.

“Where’s the young doctor now?”

“He went home to bed. Apparently he’s sick too.”

This time Eddie couldn’t contain his glee. He asked directions to the young doctor’s house and went off, I was certain, to treat him in as negligent and slipshod a manner as possible.

He drove fast. I caught him practicing his sweetest possible smile in the rearview mirror, which meant he was gearing up to play the tyrant.

The young doctor lived by himself in a hut high up in the mountains. Eddie raced inside. It was a struggle to keep up with him. The young doctor was lying on the bed with his clothes on. By the time I entered, Eddie was leaning over him.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

Eddie walked around the bed as if he were doing a victory dance.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“What’s he got?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a virus, but an uncommon one. I don’t know how to treat it.”

“Well, if the old doctor had it and now the young doctor has it, it must be contagious. I’m getting out of here,” I said, covering my mouth as I left.

“It’s probably not contagious.”

“How do you know? You don’t know what it is.”

“Could be that something crawled inside them and laid eggs in their intestines.”

“That’s just disgusting.”

“Or else it’s something they ate together. I don’t think you have to worry.”

“I’ll decide when and where I worry,” I said, heading outside.

The young doctor died two days later. Eddie didn’t leave his bedside the whole time. Despite Eddie’s insistence that the virus wasn’t contagious, I refused to set foot inside the death chamber. I knew the very moment the young doctor died, though, because the same hideous gut-wrenching wails as before echoed through the village. Frankly, I was suspicious of all this showy mourning and finally decided it was just a cultural tic, like those smiles. It’s not actually uncontrollable grief, I thought, it’s a show of uncontrollable grief. Quite a different thing.

That’s how Eddie became the doctor of the village. He’d gotten what he wanted, but this didn’t soften him up. It was an error of judgment on my part to imagine it would. And it was an error on Eddie’s part to imagine that becoming the village doctor by default would warm the villagers to him. We went door-knocking. Some slammed the door in Eddie’s face; they thought he’d put a hex on the two doctors, a pox on both their houses. Eddie came out looking like a grave robber. We did the rounds anyway. There were no bites. And it was in no small part because the people didn’t seem ever to get sick.

I’d scarcely thought it was possible, but Eddie was becoming even more unpleasant. All this healthiness was getting to him. “Not one patient! All I want is for someone to get ill! Violently ill! What are these people, immortal? They could do with a little motor neuron disease. Show them what life’s really about.” Eddie meant badly. His heart was in the wrong place.

Thank God for farming accidents! After a few inadvertent amputations and the like, he eventually managed to scrounge up a couple of patients. The people were afraid of hospitals, so Eddie had to do things in the rice fields that I personally wouldn’t want done to me in anything other than the most sterile environment. But they didn’t seem to mind.

As Eddie began his official career as a doctor, all these years after finishing medical school, I went back to the house to confront the dramas that I was sure would have progressed in my absence to a nice, steamy boiling point.

“I’m in love with my husband’s brother,” Caroline said, as if she were on an American talk show and I didn’t know the names of the people involved. She straightened the chair I had unsuccessfully used to barricade the door.

“I know it’s hard, Caroline. But can you hold out a little longer?”

“Until your father’s dead? I’m so guilty. I’m counting the days. I want him to die.”

This explained her feverish efforts to prolong his life: guilt. I had a feeling that when Dad did finally die, she would mourn him more than all of us. In fact, my father’s death was likely to ruin this woman. I thought I should speak to him about it, cautiously of course, and entreat him to give her to Terry while he was still alive. The death of her husband could send her over the edge for wishing it. I knew this would be a sore point with him, but for Caroline’s sake, for the image of her sad crazy eyes, I had to broach the subject.

Dad was in bed with the lights out. The darkness helped me find the courage to go about my unenviable task. I launched right into it. I pretended that Caroline had said nothing to me and I had just deduced this all on my own. “Look,” I said, “I know this must be painful, and I know how you are- the last thing you want to do on the eve of your death is something noble- but the fact of the matter is, Caroline will be destroyed by your death if, as you die, she secretly wishes it. If you really love her, you must make a present of her to your brother. You must bequeath her, while you’re still alive.”

Dad didn’t say a word. As I made this appalling speech, I thought that if someone said this to me, I would probably stick a butter knife through his tongue.

“Leave me alone,” he said finally, in the dark.

The next day Terry decided Dad must look at a dead bird he had seen on an early morning walk, and he dragged me along. He thought Dad would look at the still bird and be glad to be moving. It was a childish idea. My father had already seen many dead things, and they’d never made him glad to be alive. They wordlessly invited him to join them in death. This I knew. I wondered why Terry didn’t.

“I think you should take Caroline off my hands,” Dad said, crouched over the unmoving bird.

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think she can maintain this farce any longer than I can,” Dad said wearily. “We might have gotten away with it had you remained dead, like a good boy, but you had to resurrect yourself, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what I have to do with it.”

“Don’t be obtuse. You take her, OK?”

Terry’s body made an unexpected jolt, as if he’d rested his hand upon a high-voltage fence.

“For argument’s sake, let’s say I agree to this bit of nonsense. What makes you think she’ll go along with it?”

“Cut it out, Terry. You’ve always been a self-serving bastard, so why not just continue the tradition and serve yourself again - a helping of the woman you love, who, incomprehensibly, loves you back. You know, I always put my failure with women down to the lack of symmetry in my facial features, and yet here you are, the fattest man alive, and you get her again!”

“So what do you want?”

“Just take care of her, OK?”