Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I stepped right out to the edge of the precipice. I thought that when Caroline saw me afterward she’d cry, “I loved that mashed-up piece of human wreckage.” I looked over at the terrifying drop and my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.

I stepped away from the cliff and ran in the opposite direction, stopping only to trip over a large stone.

I went back to see Harry West to give him a piece of my mind. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

“So you didn’t do it, eh? You think you will wait until you hit rock bottom before taking your own life? Well, let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. You’ll never get there, and that’s why I know you’ll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he’ll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don’t think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they’re the ones who can’t do it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldn’t dare. Look, Marty, you’re in an untenable situation. You don’t have the resources to live a full life, yet you can’t bring yourself to die. So what do you do?”

“I don’t know! I’m fourteen!”

“You and me, we’re in the same boat. Here in this prison a man cannot live properly. He can’t meet girls or cook his own meals or make friends or go out dancing or do any of the skimming-the-surface-of-life things that gather leaves and lovely memories. So I, like you, can’t live. And like you, I can’t die. I ask you again, what’s a man to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You create!”

“Oh.”

“Can you draw or paint?”

“Not at all.”

“Can you make up stories and write them down?”

“No.”

“Can you act?”

“No.”

“Can you write poetry?”

“Nope.”

“Can you play music?”

“Not a note.”

“Can you design buildings?”

“Afraid not.”

“Well, something will come to you. In fact, I think you already know.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

“Really, I don’t.”

“You know you do. Now hurry up. Get out of here. I’m sure you’re in a hurry to get started.”

“No, I’m not because I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I left the prison all dazed and emptied out, on the verge of either a shocking fit or a wonderful discovery. Create, the man said.

Create what?

I needed to think. I needed an idea. Feeling heavy, I trudged into town and walked up and down our five measly streets. When I reached the end of one and almost continued into the bush, I spun around and walked the streets again. Why wouldn’t I venture into the bush that surrounded our town on all sides? Well, I wished I could draw my inspiration from Mother Nature’s well, but to tell you the truth, the bitch leaves me dry. Always has, always will. I just don’t get any great ideas looking at trees or at possums fucking. Sure, the sleeping angel in my breast stirs just like everyone else’s when confronted by a breathtaking sunset or a bubbling brook, but it doesn’t lead me anywhere. A shivering blade of grass is lovely, but it leaves me with a big mental blank. Socrates must have thought the same when he said, “The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing.” Instinctively I knew that I could draw inspiration only from man and manmade things. It’s unromantic, but that’s just how I’m built.

I stood at the crossroads and watched the people drag themselves about their business. I looked at the cinema. I looked at the general store. I looked at the barbershop. I looked at the Chinese restaurant. That all of this had sprouted from the primordial soup was a profound and impossible mystery. There’s nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that a post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.

Then I had it.

They call it inspiration: sudden ideas that explode into your brain just when you are convinced you’re a moron.

I had my idea, and it was a biggie. I ran home thinking Harry was instructing both of us, Terry and me, in different lessons, but to be honest, I don’t think Terry got anything out of Harry at all. Oh, a few practical pointers, sure, but none of the philosophy, none of the juice!

I’m not a handyman by nature. The objects constructed by me that exist in the world are few; scattered in garbage pits across the country lie a misshapen ashtray, an unfinished scarf, a crooked crucifix just big enough for a cat to sacrifice his life for all the future sins of unborn kittens, a deformed vase, and the object I made the night after visiting Harry in his stinking prison: a suggestion box.

I built it optimistically; it was a real cavern, 50 centimeters across, 30 centimeters in depth, enough space inside to fit literally thousands of suggestions. The box looked like an enormous square head, and after I gave it a varnish I took the handsaw and widened the mouth farther, opening up the corners a couple of centimeters on either side so the mouth was smiling. First thing I considered was attaching it to a stick and pounding it into the earth somewhere in the town, but when you’re building something for public access, you have to take vandals into account; every place on earth has them, and beyond too.

Consider the layout of our town: one wide, tree-lined main street with four smaller streets running off in the middle. At this crossroads was the epicenter- the town hall. No one could go about his business without passing it. Yes, it had to be the town hall to give the suggestion box an official air. But to achieve permanence, so no one could remove it easily, it had to become part of the structure, part of the town hall itself. It had to be welded, that was obvious, but just try welding wood to concrete! Or to brick!

I scavenged around the backyard for scraps of corrugated iron that hadn’t made it onto the roof of my father’s shed. With his grinder I cut them into four pieces and with his welding torch I entombed the top, back, and sides of the box. I put a padlock on it, and at three in the morning, when every last person in the town was sleeping and the lights in the houses were off, I welded it to the bottom of the handrail that ran up the steps to the door of the town hall.

I placed the key to the padlock in an envelope and laid it on the front-door step of Patrick Ackerman, our lackluster town councilman. On the outside of the envelope I wrote his name and inside the following words:

I am entrusting you with the key to unlocking the potential of our town. You are the key master. Do not abuse your privilege. Do not be slow or lazy or neglectful. Your town is counting on you.

I thought it was an elegant little note. As dawn rose over the hills and the prison was backlit by a sinister orange glow, I sat on the steps and composed the inaugural suggestions. They needed to be beauties; they needed to inspire, to excite, and they needed to be within reason. So I refrained from putting in some of my more outlandish and unworkable suggestions, such as that we should move the whole town out of this dismal valley and closer to some water- a good idea, but beyond the jurisdiction of our three-man council, one of whom no one had seen since the last big rain. No, the first suggestions needed to set the tone and encourage the populace to follow suit. They were: