Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I packed my bags and manuscript and put in a photograph of Astrid, my mother. She was remarkably beautiful. I have that on my side. Society hangs its tongue out at the sight of a pretty face; all I have to do is walk up the tongue into the mouth that will tell me everything I need to know. This woman touched lives, and not just my father’s. Some would be dead. Some would be too old. But somewhere were childhood friends, boyfriends, lovers. Somebody would remember her. Somewhere.

Neither Dad nor I had much love for religion, because we preferred the mystery to the miracle, but Dad didn’t really love the mystery either- it was like a pebble in his shoe. Well, I won’t ignore mysteries like he did. But I won’t try to solve them, either. I just want to see what happens when you peer into their core. I’m going to follow in my own stupid, uncertain footsteps. I’m going to wander the earth awhile and find my mother’s family and the man who belongs to the face in the sky and see where these mysterious affinities take me- closer to understanding my mother or to some unimaginable evil.

I looked out the window. It was dawn. I made myself a coffee and reread the obituary one last time. I needed a conclusion. But how do you conclude a life like his? What did he mean? What idea could finish this off? I decided I should address all those thoughtless, ignorant people who had called Dad a bastard without even knowing he actually was one.

Martin Dean was my father.

The act of writing this sentence knocked the wind out of me. All of a sudden I felt something I’d never felt before- privileged. I suddenly felt better off than a billion other sons, privileged that I had had the good fortune to be raised by an odd, uncompromising, walking stew of ideas. So what if he was a philosopher who thought himself into a corner? He was also a natural-born empathizer who would have rather been buried alive than have his imperfections ever seriously hurt anyone. He was my father. He was a fool. He was my kind of fool.

There’s no way to sum him up. How could I? If I was only a part of him, how could I possibly ever know who he was a part of?

I wrote on:

My father has been called a lot of terrible names by the people of this country. OK, he wasn’t a Gandhi or a Buddha, but honestly, he wasn’t a Hitler or a Stalin either. He was somewhere in the middle. But what I want to know is, what does your view of my father say about you?

When someone comes into the world who reaches the worst depths that humans can sink to, we will always call him a monster, or evil, or the embodiment of evil, but there is never any serious hint or suggestion that there is something actually supernatural or otherworldly about this individual. He may be an evil man, but he is just a man. But when an extraordinary person operating on the other side of the spectrum, the good, rises to the surface, like Jesus or Buddha, immediately we elevate him to God, a deity, something divine, supernatural, otherworldly. This is a reflection of how we see ourselves. We have no trouble believing that the worst creature who has done the most harm is a man, but we absolutely cannot believe that the best creature, who tries to inspire imagination, creativity, and empathy, can be one of us. We just don’t think that highly of ourselves, but we happily think that low.

That should do it. A nice confusing off-the-point conclusion. Well done, me. I popped this in the mail to Anouk at the Hobbs News Division, went to the bank to check that the money was in my account, then caught a taxi to the airport. This time I was leaving the country under my own name.

“I’d like to buy a ticket to Europe,” I said to the unsmiling woman at the counter.

“Where in Europe?”

“Good question. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Really,” she said, then leaned back in her chair and looked past me, over my shoulder. I think she was looking for a television camera.

“What’s the next flight that gets me in the Europe vicinity?”

She stared at me another couple of seconds before typing at lightning speed on the computer keyboard. “There’s a flight leaving for the Czech Republic in an hour and a half.”

The Czech Republic? For some reason I had thought she was going to say Paris, and then I’d say, “I believe Paris is lovely this time of year.”

“You want the ticket or not?”

“Sure. I believe the Czech Republic is lovely this time of year.”

After I bought my ticket and checked in my bags, I ate a $10 vegetable samosa that tasted worse than a seven-course meal of postage stamps. Then I went to the phone box and looked in the white pages to see if Strangeways Publications still existed and if Stanley was still running it, the man who had published Harry West’s The Handbook of Crime all those years ago.

It was there in black and white. I called the number.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Is that Stanley?”

“Yeah.”

“You still publishing books?”

“Men’s magazines.”

“I’ve written a book I think you might be interested in.”

“Men’s magazines, I said. You deaf? I don’t publish books.”

“It’s a biography.”

“I don’t care. Of who?”

“Martin Dean.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. It was so sharp, it almost sucked me right into the receiver.

“Who are you?”

“His son.”

Silence. Then I could hear the sound of someone moving a number of papers around a desk, and the sound of someone stapling something that didn’t sound like paper.

“Jasper, isn’t it?” Stanley said.

“That’s right.”

“You want to come into my office?”

“I’m just going to put it in the post, if that’s all right with you. I’m about to head overseas and I don’t know how long I’ll be or if I’ll ever be back. You go ahead and do whatever you want with it.”

“All right. You got my address?”

“I’ve got it.”

“I’ll look forward to reading it. Hey, I’m sorry about your dad.”

I hung up the phone without responding. To be honest, I didn’t know if he was sorry Dad died or if he was just sorry that he was my dad.

Right now I’m sitting at the airport bar, drinking an expensive Japanese beer for no good reason. Sitting at the next table is a woman with a cat in a little cat carrier. She’s talking to the cat, calling him John. People who name their pets ordinary human names depress the hell out of me. I listen to her carry on and it gets worse. The cat’s name isn’t just John. It’s John Fitzpatrick. That’s too much.

Now that I’ve told our story in all its fist-eating, gut-wrenching, seat-edging, nail-biting, lip-pulling, chain-smoking, teeth-clenching detail, I wonder: was it worth it? It’s not like I want to start a revolution or finish one that’s dragging on. I wasn’t a writer before I began, but writing a book makes a writer out of you. Anyway, I don’t know if I want to be a writer. Herman Hesse once said, “True creative power isolates one and demands something that has to be subtracted from the enjoyment of life.” That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

An announcement just told me my flight is boarding. I’ll write a few last words before I pop this in the postbox to Stanley. What could be an appropriate thought to finish on?

Maybe I should conclude with some semiprofound observation about my life.

Or about how sometimes dropped anchors hit slow-moving fish.

Or about how often the swallowing of saliva is really the suppression of a violent longing.

Or about how people mourn the recent dead but never mourn the long-term dead.

Or about how idiot savants surprise their doctors, losers blame their fathers, and failures blame their children.