Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Terry has made it easy for me, far easier than most of my patients, not necessarily with his own self-awareness, which, to be honest, is nothing special, but with his candor and total willingness to answer without pause or detour any question I put to him. Actually, he may be the most straightforward patient I’ve ever had in my life. I would like to say at this point, you have done a tremendous job in raising a truly honest and open person.”

“So he’s not insane?” my father asked.

“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. He’s crazy as a coconut. But open!”

“We’re not violent people,” my father said. “This whole thing is a mystery to us.”

“No man’s life is a mystery. Believe me, there is order and structure in the most ostensibly chaotic skull. There seem to be two major events in Terry’s life that have shaped him more than any others. The first I would not have believed had I not unwavering faith in his honesty.” The doctor leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “Did he really spend the first four years of his life sharing a bedroom with a comatose boy?”

My parents looked at each other with a start.

“Was that wrong?” my mother asked.

“We didn’t have any room,” my father said, annoyed. “Where were we supposed to put Martin? In the shed?”

“Terry described the scene so vividly it actually gave me shivers. I know shivers aren’t a professional reaction, but there you have it. He talked about eyes rolled back that would spontaneously roll forward and stare. Sudden jerks and spasms, incessant drooling…” The psychiatrist turned to me and asked, “You would be the boy who was in the coma?”

“That’s me.”

He pointed a finger at me and said, “My professional opinion is that this faintly breathing corpse gave young Terry Dean what I can only diagnose as the permanent willies. This more than anything made him retreat into his own private fantasy life, in which he is the protagonist. You see, there are traumas that affect people, traumas that are sudden, but there are also prolonged, lingering traumas, and often they are the most insidious, because their effects grow alongside everything else and are as much a part of the sufferer as his own teeth.”

“And the second thing?”

“His injury, his inability to play sport. Deep down, although he was very young, Terry was convinced that excelling at sport was the reason he was here on earth. And when he was robbed of that, he turned from a creator to a destroyer.”

Nobody spoke- we all just soaked it up.

“I think at first, when Terry found he could no longer play football or cricket or swim, he embraced violence as a perversion of what he knew- to display skill. He wasn’t out to do anything other than show off, pure and simple. You see, his useless limping leg was an insult to his self-image, and he couldn’t accept the powerlessness without restoring his ability to act. So he acted, violently, the violence of the man who is denied positive expression,” the psychiatrist said with a pride that felt inappropriate for the occasion.

“What the hell are you talking about?” my father said.

“So how does he cease to be crippled?” I asked.

“Well, now you’re talking about transcendence.”

“Transcendence that could be, for instance, found in the expression of love?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

This conversation was really puzzling for my parents, as they had never seen my brain before. They’d seen the shell, but not the goods inside. The answer to all this was obvious to me: a doctor couldn’t turn Terry around, nor a priest nor a rabbi nor any god nor my parents nor a fright nor a suggestion box nor even me. No, the only hope for Terry’s reform was Caroline. His hope was love.

I hadn’t noticed it going up. You couldn’t see it from the town, owing to the high wall of thick leafy trees at the summit of Farmer’s Hill, but on Saturday night everyone wound up the track toward it for its opening. You should’ve seen us, all filing out of town as if in a fire drill no one believed in. No one was carrying on with the usual banter; there was something different in the air. We all felt it- anticipation. Some didn’t even know what an observatory was, and those who did were rightly excited. The most exotic thing in bush towns is the dim sum in those ubiquitous Chinese restaurants. This was something else.

Then we saw it, a large dome.

All trees had been removed from directly in front of it, because where telescopes are concerned, even a single leaf of an overhanging branch can obscure the galaxy. The observatory was painted white; the building walls were framed with two-by-fours and covered with roofing metal. The telescope itself I knew little of, other than it was thick, long, and white, had a simple spherically curved mirror, stood on an isolated pier for a stable platform to prevent the transmission of vibrations, was designed to include expansion capabilities, weighed in excess of 250 pounds, was 10 degrees from the southern horizon, could not be pointed down into the girls’ bathroom in the school gymnasium, was encased in a fiberglass dome, and had a glass roof that lifted on a hinge. To move the telescope, if you wanted to peek at another corner of the galaxy or follow the transit of celestial objects across the sky, the idea for rotation motors was dropped in favor of “putting your back into it.”

We all stepped up, one by one, to the big eye.

You had to climb up to it on a little stepladder. Each person pressed against the eyepiece, and when their time was up, they stepped down in a sort of trance, as though lobotomized by the vastness of the universe. It was one of the strangest nights I ever had in that town.

I had my turn at the telescope. It exceeded my expectations. I saw huge numbers of stars: faint and old and yellow. I saw brilliant hot stars, clusters of young blue stars. I saw streaks of globules and dust, sinuous dark lanes winding through luminous gas and scattered starlight, reminding me of all the visions I had seen in the coma. I thought: The stars are dots. Then I thought of every human being as a dot too, but realized sadly that most of us could barely light up a room. We’re too small to be dots.

Still, I returned to the telescope night after night, familiarizing myself with the southern sky, and after a while I understood that watching the universe expand is like watching grass grow, so I watched the townspeople instead. After they stepped up silently, poked around in the farthest reaches of our galaxy, let out a whistle, and stepped down, they came outside and smoked cigarettes and talked. Probably their ignorance of astronomy helped move the conversations onto other things; this is one of those areas where lack of trivial, useless knowledge- the names of the stars in this instance- is a huge benefit. The important thing is not what the stars are called but what they imply.

People began with some marvelous understatements of the universe, such as “Pretty big, isn’t it?” But I think they were purposefully laconic. They were filled with awe and wonder, and like a dreamer who has woken but lies unmoving in bed trying to return to the dream, they didn’t want inadvertently to shake themselves awake. But then, slowly, they began to talk, and it wasn’t about the stars or their place in the universe. I listened with astonishment as they said things like

“I should spend more time with my son.”

“When I was young, I used to look up at the stars too.”

“I don’t feel loved. I feel liked.”

“I wonder why I don’t go to church anymore.”

“My children turned out differently than I expected. Taller, maybe.”

“I’d like to take a holiday with Carol, like we did when we were first married.”