Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“I’m not going.”

“Why?”

“I’m just not.”

“You pussy!”

“You’ll never fuck her, you know,” Bruno said.

Terry didn’t say anything to that.

Bruno and Dave revved the car gratuitously before screeching off. We watched them disappear. I was in awe at how, after all the pain and heartache and drama and anxiety people cause, they so unceremoniously leave your life. Terry looked on the empty road without emotion.

“Who won’t you fuck?” I asked him.

“No one,” he said.

“Me neither.”

The next town hall meeting was on the Monday, and we were all dreading it. We knew the oracle had one more suggestion for Terry Dean. As we entered, we avoided the eyes of all those unfriendly faces, which looked to have experienced a fit of rage in childhood, then harnessed it for their entire lives. They cleared a space for us as we moved through. Four seats were left in the front, and my parents and I took three of them. Terry had stayed at home, sensibly boycotting the proceedings. I sat on the uncomfortable wooden chair with my eyes half closed, peering beneath my eyelids at a photograph on the wall of the Queen on her twenty-first birthday. She looked to be in a state of dread too. The Queen and I waited impatiently as we listened to the other suggestions. They held Terry’s off until last. Then it came.

I suggest Terry Dean be taken to Portland Mental Institution and be treated by a team of psychiatrists for his violent, antisocial behavior.

I hurried out of the hall into the unexpected brightness of the evening. The night sky was lit by a huge moon, not full so much as fat, hovering above deserted streets. My footsteps were the only sound in town, other than the barking of a dog that followed me for a while, excited by my panic. I didn’t stop running until I reached the house- no, I didn’t stop there. I charged through the front door and barreled down the hall into our bedroom. Terry was sitting on the bed reading.

“You have to get out of here!” I shouted. I found a sports bag and threw his clothes into it. “They’re coming! They’re going to put you in a mental institution!”

Terry looked up at me quietly. He said, “Stupid bastards. Was Caroline there tonight?”

“Yes, she was, but-”

I heard footsteps tearing down the hallway. “Hide!” I whispered. Terry didn’t move. The footsteps were almost at the door. “Too late!” I shouted uselessly. The bedroom door swung open and Caroline ran in.

“You have to get out of here!” she shouted.

Terry gazed at her with bright eyes. That threw her off balance. They stared at each other, unmoving, looking like strangely arranged mannequins. I was utterly isolated from the energy in the room. This was a shock to me. Caroline and Terry had a thing for each other? When did this happen? I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.

“I’m helping him pack,” I said, breaking the moment. My own voice was unrecognizable. Caroline liked Terry, maybe even loved him. I was furious! I felt drenched by all the world’s rain. I coughed impatiently. No one looked at me, or gave any hint that I was among them.

She sat on the edge of his bed and drummed her fingers on the blankets. “You have to leave,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

I looked to Caroline to see what her response would be. “I can’t go,” she said finally. “But I’ll visit you.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Sydney. Go to Sydney.”

“And hurry up about it!” I shouted so loudly that we didn’t hear the second round of footsteps.

Two men came in, eager early members of a lynch mob. They took on the role of a strong-arm taxi service. Terry put up a futile struggle while more people filed into our house, all with hostile, determined faces. They dragged him outside, his face bled white in the moonlight.

Caroline didn’t cry but held her hand over her mouth in a twenty-minute gasp while I was in a frenzy, screaming myself hoarse at my parents, who stood helplessly by.

“What are you doing? Don’t let them take him!”

My mother and father cowered like frightened dogs. They were afraid of going against the oracle’s command and the unstoppable will of the townspeople. Public opinion had them on the back foot.

My father said, “It’s for the best. He’s unbalanced. They know how to fix him.”

He said this as he signed the necessary paperwork and my mother looked on, resigned. Both wore obstinate grimaces you couldn’t have removed with a hammer.

“He doesn’t need fixing! I think he’s already fixed! He’s in love!”

No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves it’s unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you’d think it was burning them.

It’s not that insanity is contagious, although human history is littered with tales of mass hysteria- like the time everyone in the Western world was wearing white loafers with no socks- but as soon as Terry disappeared into the crazy house, our own house became a place of darkness as well, starting with my father, who came to his senses a week later and did everything in his power to spring Terry from the hospital, only to discover that once you put someone under forced psychiatric care, the administrators take that care as seriously as the money the government pays them to do the caring. My little brother was judged to be a danger to himself and others- the others mostly being the hospital staff he fought to break himself out. My father petitioned the courts and consulted numerous lawyers but soon realized he’d lost his son in a tangle of red tape. He was stuck. As a result, he started drinking more and more, and though my mother and I tried to slow the momentum of his downward spiral, you can’t stop someone from taking the role of alcoholic father simply by telling them it’s a cliché. Twice in the months following Terry’s internment he lost his temper and hit my mother, knocking her to the floor, but you can no more easily wean a man off the part of Wife Beater than you can convince a woman to flee her own home by assuring her she has Battered Wife Syndrome. It just doesn’t do any good.

Like my father, my mother oscillated between madness and sadness. A couple of nights after Terry was taken away, I was preparing for bed and said aloud, “Maybe I won’t brush my teeth. Why should I? Fuck teeth. I’m sick of teeth. I’m sick of my teeth. I’m sick of other people’s teeth. Teeth are a burden, and I’m sick of polishing them every night like they’re the royal jewels.” When I threw my toothbrush down in disgust, I saw a shapely shadow outside the bathroom. “Hello?” I said to the shadow. My mother came into the room and stood behind me. We looked at each other in the bathroom mirror.

“You talk to yourself,” she said, placing her hand on my forehead. “Do you have a temperature?”

“No.”

“A little warm,” she said.

“I’m a mammal,” I mumbled. “That’s how we are.”

“I’m going to the pharmacy, get you some medicine,” she said.

“But I’m not sick.”

“You won’t be if you catch it early.”

“Catch what early?” I asked, examining her sad face. My mother’s reaction to having put her son away in a mental asylum was to become a maniac for my welfare. It didn’t happen gradually but all at once, when I found I couldn’t pass her on the stairs without her crushing me in an embrace. Nor could I leave the house without her buttoning up my jacket to the top, and when that still left a little expanse of neck exposed to the elements, she sewed an extra button on so I would be always covered to the lower lip.