Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I tried calling Anouk, the only person left on the planet I had any connection with, but this proved far more difficult than I’d anticipated. It’s not easy getting in touch with the richest woman in the country, even if she once cleaned your toilet. Her home number was unsurprisingly unlisted, and it was only after calling the Hobbs Media Group and speaking to several secretaries, that it finally occurred to me to ask for Oscar instead. I received a few noes before one young woman said, “Is this a prank call?”

“No, it’s not a prank call. Why shouldn’t I speak to him?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Where’ve you been living the last six months, in a cave?”

“No, a prison in the middle of the desert.”

That got me a long silence. “He’s dead,” she said finally. “They both are.”

“Who?” I asked, my heart freezing block-solid.

“Oscar and Reynold Hobbs. Their private jet crashed.”

“And Mrs. Hobbs?” I asked, shaking. Please don’t let her be dead. Please don’t let her be dead. In that moment I realized that of all the people I had ever known in my whole life, Anouk deserved to die the least.

“I’m afraid so.”

I felt everything pour out of me. Love. Hope. Spirit. There was nothing left.

“Are you still there?” the woman asked.

I nodded. No words to speak. No thought to think. No air to breathe.

“Are you OK?”

This time I shook my head. How could I ever be OK now?

“Hang on,” she said. “Which Mrs. Hobbs do you mean?”

I gulped.

“Reynold’s wife, Courtney, was on the plane, not the other one.”

“So Anouk?” I gasped.

“No, she wasn’t with them.”

I sucked all that love, hope, and spirit back into my lungs with one deep breath. Thank you!

“When was this?”

“About five months ago.”

“I have to speak to her. Tell her Jasper Dean is trying to call her.”

“Jasper Dean? Son of Martin Dean?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you skip the country? When did you get back? Is your father with you?”

“JUST LET ME SPEAK TO ANOUK!”

“I’m sorry, Jasper. She’s uncontactable.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s traveling at the moment.”

“Where is she?”

“We think she’s in India.”

“You think?”

“To be honest, nobody knows where she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“After the plane crash, she just vanished. There’re a lot of people who want to talk to her, as you can imagine.”

“Well, if she calls in, can you tell her I’m home and I need to speak to her?”

I left my telephone number and hung up. Why was Anouk in India? I supposed she was mourning out of the spotlight. Understandable. The spotlight is the last place anyone wants to mourn. Anouk would be well aware that as a widow, if you’re not a mascara-running hysteric, the public will just assume you’re a murderer.

I felt desolate, unreal. Dad was dead, Eddie was dead, now even the indestructible Oscar and Reynold were dead, and none of it made me feel especially alive. In truth, I didn’t feel much of anything. It was as if I had been anesthetized head to toe, so I didn’t feel the contrast between life and death anymore. Later, in the shower, I wasn’t even certain I knew the difference between hot and cold.

A day into my new life and I already hated it. There was no way I could become anything other than permanently disgusting in this disgusting apartment. I resolved to get out of there. And go where? Well, overseas. I remembered my original plan- to drift aimlessly through time and space. For that, I needed money. Problem was, I didn’t have any money and didn’t know how to go about making it fast. All I had to sell was the same as everybody else who hasn’t an asset to his name: I could sell my time or I could sell my story. Having no marketable skills, I knew my time wouldn’t fetch me one dollar over minimum wage, but with not one but two infamous men in my immediate family, my story might get me a higher price than most. Of course I could’ve gone the easy route, agreeing to a television interview, but I’d never squeeze the whole story into the twenty minutes of a television half hour. No, I had to keep writing it down to be sure the story got told right, without leaving anything out. My only chance was to finish the book I’d started, find a publisher, and set sail with a hefty advance. That was my plan. I took out the pages my interrogators had read and dismissed as fiction. Where was I up to? I hadn’t gotten very far at all- I had a lot of writing to do.

I went out to the shops to buy a couple of reams of A4 paper. I like white pages- they shame me into filling them. Outside, the sun was a hand of light slapping me in the face. Looking at all the people, I thought: What a strenuous life. Now that I had nobody I was close to, I’d have to make do with some of these strangers, turn a couple of them into either friends or lovers. What a lot of work life is when you’re always starting from scratch.

The streets of my city felt like a foreign country. The toxic effects of being in a detention center were still with me, because I found out that while I needed individuals, I was terrified of crowds, with an intense physical anxiety that left me hugging streetlamps. What was I afraid of? They didn’t mean me any harm. I suppose I was afraid of their indifference. Believe me, you don’t want to fall over in front of man. He won’t pick you up.

I passed a newsstand and my heart sank- everything had gone public. Dad was officially declared dead. I decided not to read any of the tabloid eulogies. “Bastard Dies!” “Woo-Hoo! He’s Dead!” and “The End of a Scumbag!” didn’t seem worthy of my $1.20. Anyway, I’d heard it all before. As I walked away, it occurred to me that there was a certain unreal quality to those headlines, like a prolonged déjà vu. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt as if I was either at the end of something I’d thought endless or at the beginning of something I could have sworn had started long ago.

The next few days I sat by the barred window and wrote day and night, and as I did, I remembered Dad’s ugly, pontificating head and laughed hysterically until the neighbors banged on the walls. The phone rang nonstop- journalists. I ignored it and I wrote ceaselessly for three weeks, each page a fresh unloading of nightmares that it was a great relief to be rid of.

One night I was lying on the couch, feeling displaced, like an eyelid trapped inside an eye, when I heard the neighbors arguing through the walls. A woman shouted, “What did you do that for?” and a man shouted back, “I saw it on TV! Can’t you take a joke?” I was using up what felt like my last remaining brain cell trying to work out what he’d done when there was a knock at the door. I answered it.

Standing there with enviable posture was a young, prematurely balding man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit. He said his name was Gavin Love, and I accepted that at face value: I couldn’t think of any reason someone would call himself Gavin Love if that wasn’t his name. He said he was a lawyer too, which lent his Gavin Love story all the more weight. He said he had some papers for me to sign.

“What kind of papers?”

“Your father’s things are being held in a storage room. They’re all yours. You just have to sign for them.”

“And if I don’t want them?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I don’t want them, I guess there’s no point signing.”

“Well…” His face was blank. “I just need your signature,” he said hesitatingly.

“I understand that. I’m not sure I want to give it to you.”

Right away his confidence evaporated. I could tell he was going to get into trouble for this.