Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I had since devoured many philosophy books from the library, and it seemed that most philosophy was petty argument about things you just couldn’t know. I thought: Why waste time on insoluble problems? What does it matter whether the soul is made up of smooth, round soul atoms or of Leggo, it’s unknowable, so let’s just drop it. I also found that, geniuses or not, most of the philosophers undermined their own philosophies, from Plato onward, because almost no one seemed willing to start with a blank slate or endure uncertainty. You could read the prejudices, the self-interest, and desires of every single one. And God! God! God! The most brilliant minds coming up with all these complicated theories and then they say, “But let’s just assume there’s a God and let’s assume he’s good.” Why assume anything? To me, it was obvious man created God in his own image. Man hasn’t the imagination to come up with a God totally unlike him, which is why in Renaissance paintings God looks like a skinny version of Santa Claus. Hume says that man only cuts and pastes, he doesn’t invent. Angels, for instance, are men with wings. In the same way, Bigfoot is man with big foot. This is why I could see in most of the “objective” philosophical systems man’s fears, drives, prejudices, and aspirations written all over them.

The only thing of value I did was read books to Lionel, whose eyes were irrevocably damaged, and one rainy afternoon I almost lost my virginity to Caroline, an event that precipitated her leaving town in the middle of the night. Here’s how it happened:

We were trying to read a book together to her father, but he kept interrupting to convince himself that his life had changed for the better. Lionel was doing his best to take blindness in his stride. “Judgmental faces! Condescending eyes I’ve felt on me since the day I moved into this rotten town! I’ll never have to see them again! Thank God- I was sick of the sight of them!” Lionel was finally letting loose on the people’s automatic antipathy to him as though his personality were an extension of his bank balance. They didn’t want to know him or his story. They didn’t care that two years before moving to our town, Caroline’s mother was discovered to be hoarding a basketful of inoperable tumors growing like plums in her insides. They didn’t care that she had been something of a cold, neurotic woman, and the process of dying had not turned her into a sweetie. They didn’t believe that a man with so much money could have human qualities worth sympathizing with. He was up against the smelliest prejudice in existence: wealth-haters. At least a racist, a man who hates black people, for instance- at least he isn’t harboring a secret desire to be black. His prejudice, while ugly and stupid, is at least thorough and honest. Hatred of the well-off, from those who would jump at the chance to swap places, is a textbook case of sour grapes.

“Hey- I’ll never have to see another disappointed face either! Now when I let someone down, if they don’t say, ‘Awwwww,’ I’ll never be burdened with it! Fuck disapproving eyes! I’ve escaped!”

Eventually he talked himself to sleep. While Lionel snored as if he were all nose, we crept silently into Caroline’s bedroom. She had decided to forget all about Terry, but she talked about forgetting him so much, it was the only thing on her mind. She rambled on, and as much as I loved the sound of her spongy voice, I just had to switch off. I lit a half-smoked cigarette I’d found in a puddle and dried in the sun. As I sucked on it I felt her eyes on me, and when I looked up, I saw her lower lip curl a little, like a leaf when hit with a single drop of rain.

Suddenly she lowered her voice. “What’s going to happen to you, Martin?”

“To me? I don’t know. Nothing bad, I hope.”

“Your future!” she gasped. “I can’t stand to think of it!”

“Well, don’t.”

She ran over and hugged me. Then she pulled away and we looked into each other’s eyes and breathed into each other’s nostrils. Then she kissed me with her eyes closed- I know because mine were wide open. Then she opened her eyes too, so I shut mine quickly. The whole thing was unbelievable! My hands went for her breasts, something I’d wanted to do even before she had them. Her hands, meanwhile, went straight for my belt, and she fumbled to undo it. For a split second I thought she wanted to hit me with it. Then I got into the swing of things, and reached up her skirt and pulled off her underpants. We crashed on the bed like fallen soldiers. There we struggled together, laboring to rid ourselves of unwanted garments, until she suddenly pushed herself from me and screamed, “What are we doing!” Before I could answer, she ran out of the room crying.

I lay bewildered on her bed for half an hour, smelling her pillow with my eyes closed, engrossed in the spectacle of a lifelong dream slipping away. When she didn’t return, I got dressed and went to sit under my favorite tree to think suicidal thoughts and tear up weeds.

I avoided Caroline for the next week. Since she was the one who went hysterical, it was up to her to find me. Then on Saturday, Lionel phoned me in a panic. He couldn’t find his toothbrush, and while he might be blind, that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid of gingivitis. I went over and found it floating in the toilet bowl, specked with feces. I told him I was very sorry, he’d have to kiss that toothbrush goodbye, but not literally.

“She’s gone,” he said. “I woke up yesterday morning and there was a strange person breathing in my bedroom. I can recognize a person by their breathing patterns, you know. It gave me the fright of my life. I shouted, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Shelly was her name, a nurse Caroline had organized to look after me. I shouted at Shelly to get out, and she left, the bitch. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m afraid, Martin. Darkness is boring and surprisingly brown.”

“Where did Caroline go?”

“Damned if I know! Still, I’ll bet she’s having fun. That’s what you get when you give your child a liberal upbringing, I suppose. Liberation.”

“I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” I lied. I didn’t think she was ever coming back. I always knew Caroline would vanish one day, and finally that day had come.

Over the following months we received postcards from her from all over. The first was of a river in Bucharest, the word “ Bucharest ” stamped across it, and on the back Caroline had scrawled, “I’m in Bucharest!” The same kind came every second week from Italy, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris.

Meanwhile, I visited Terry often. It was a long journey, from our town by bus, through the city by train, then another bus to a poor outer suburb. The detention center looked like a low-rise residential block. Each time I signed in, the administrator greeted me like the patriarch of a distinguished family and took me personally to the visiting room, through a long series of corridors, where I felt physically threatened at all moments by young criminals who never stopped looking furious, as if they’d been arrested after crossing the Himalayas on foot. Terry would be waiting for me in the visitors’ room. Sometimes he had fresh purple bruises around his eyes. One day I sat down with him to see the imprint of a fist on his cheek, which was only slowly beginning to fade. He looked at me with great intensity. “Caroline visited me before she left, and she said that even though I blinded her father, she’ll always love me.” When I didn’t respond, he talked about his crime of blinding Lionel as a one-way ticket into a criminal life. “You don’t burn your bridges with normal society,” he said. “You blow your bridges up.” He spoke quickly, as if dictating in an emergency. He was eager to justify, to confide, to seek approval from me for his new plan. You see, he was picking up the pieces of that suggestion box and with it building the story of his life. He’d fit the pieces together into a pattern he could live with.