Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

At five minutes to five we were ushered into the publisher’s office. Everything about it made you feel small and unimportant. It was spacious and quiet and air-conditioned and newly carpeted, and instead of a window there was a wall of glass you couldn’t open and jump out of, even if you wanted to; at best you could press your face against it and dream of falling. The publisher looked as if someone had told him if he smiled he’d lose everything he had ever worked for.

“You’ve written a book. I publish books. You think that means we’re a match made in heaven. It doesn’t. I have to be bowled over by whatever you’ve got, and I don’t fall easily,” he said.

Harry demanded that the publisher take a quick look while we waited. The publisher laughed without smiling. Harry tossed in the line about missing golden opportunities that went straight to the man’s heart, the one in his back pocket. He picked up the manuscript and browsed through it, clicking his tongue as if he were calling his dog. He stood and walked to the glass wall and read it while leaning against it. I worried the glass would crack and send him tumbling into the street. After a minute he threw the manuscript at us as if it were making his hands dirty.

“Is this a joke?”

“I assure you it’s not.”

“To publish this would be suicide. You’re instructing people how to break the law.”

“Why is he telling me what my book is about?” Harry asked me.

I shrugged.

“Get out of here before I call the police!” the publisher screamed at us.

In the elevator on the way down, Harry shook with fury. “That cunt,” he muttered.

I felt similarly dented, and I didn’t know much about the publishing world, but I tried to explain to him that we had to expect some rejections. “This is normal. It would have been too much to expect that the first place fell all over it.”

At the second floor the elevator stopped. “What are we stopping for?” Harry yelled at me.

The doors slid open and a man stepped in. “You can’t walk down one fucking floor?” Harry shouted, and the man leapt out again just before the doors closed.

On the street it was impossible to get a cab. It was really not advisable to be lingering on the street like this with a known fugitive, but neither of us seemed able to make a taxi materialize just by wishing it.

“We’ve been made!” he whispered.

“What?”

“They’re onto me!”

“Who?”

“All of them!”

He was out of control. He was trying to hide behind me, but the crowd was on all sides. He circled my body like a shark. He was drawing too much attention to himself in his panicked attempt to remain inconspicuous.

“There!” he screamed, and pushed me into a stream of traffic, into a taxi. Cars halted and honked their horns as we jumped in.

I really put my foot down after that. Harry was to stay at home. I simply refused to help him anymore if he insisted on coming along. He put up a struggle, but it was a weak one. The last incident had added seventeen years to his face. Even he could see it.

The following weeks were a nightmare. I tripped from office to office in a blur. They were all the same. I couldn’t get over how quiet they were. Everyone spoke in a whisper, and the way they tiptoed around, you’d think you’d wandered into a sacred temple if it weren’t for the telephones. The receptionists all wore the same condescending sneers. Often I sat in waiting rooms with other authors. They were the same too. They all emanated fear and desperation and looked so hungry they would have signed away the rights to their children for a lozenge, poor bastards.

In one of the publishing houses, where I waited all day for two days in a row and still wasn’t granted an audience with the king, a writer and I swapped manuscripts to pass the time. His was set in a small country town and was about a doctor and a pregnant schoolteacher who passed each other on the street every day but were too inward to say hello. It was unreadable. It was almost all description. My spirits lifted when, on page 85, he’d deigned to put in a smattering of dialogue between the characters. His novel was a real struggle to wade through, but he was sitting right beside me so I had to persist, out of politeness. Every now and then we glanced at each other to see how we were getting on. Finally, around lunchtime, he turned to me and said, “This is a peculiar book. Is it a satire?”

“Not at all. Yours is interesting too. Are the characters mute?”

“Not at all.”

We each handed back the other’s manuscript and looked at our watches.

Every morning I endured the four-hour bus ride into Sydney, where I spent the day going from publisher to publisher. Most laughed right in my face. One guy had to come out from behind his desk to do it because my face was too far away. It was discouraging. Also, the publishers didn’t like the idea of my hiding the author’s name from them right up to the day of printing. It made them suspicious. Many thought it was some kind of plot to drop them in the shit. You never met a greasier bunch of paranoid, unimaginative, dull-witted merchants in your life. The ones who took the manuscript seriously, who didn’t think it was a hoax or a prank or a plot, called me the worst possible names. They thought the work was an abomination and I was a dangerous, irresponsible anarchist for trying to peddle it. Before they threw me out on the street, they all said the same thing: this book would never be published, not in their lifetimes. I guess that meant that once they were dead, the world could fall into the toilet for all they cared about it.

Harry took it badly. He flew into fits, accused me of being lazy or sabotaging the meetings with ineptitude. That burned. I was slaving my guts out peddling that book of his, but it was the book they didn’t like, not me. Then, and after the tenth rejection, he started cursing the Australian publishing industry instead of me. “Maybe we need to take this to America. Freedom of expression is big over there right now. They have a thing called the right to free press. They have amendments enforcing it. Ideas are encouraged to flourish. Here the industry’s as stale as week-old bread crusts. This country’s so fucking conservative it makes you want to puke. It’s a wonder anyone gets anything published at all.” He might have had a point. Maybe the local publishers were just scared. He started talking about buying me a plane ticket to New York, but I shot that idea down the best I could. I didn’t want to go to New York. I couldn’t leave my sick mother or Terry, wherever he was. I was convinced that someday, soon, Terry was going to need me, maybe to save his life. I had to be on hand.

Caroline felt no such duty. She and Lionel arrived at my front door in the near-darkness of twilight to say goodbye. They had sold the house and were moving off. Lionel gave me a hug while Caroline stood shaking her head. “I’m not going to hang around and see Terry killed,” she said. “No one’s asking you to,” I said back, although I did think about it. It began to rain softly. She gave me a hug too, though it wasn’t the squeeze I needed, and as I watched her guiding her blind father out into the night, I felt as though I had renounced my humanity. I called out “Bye!” as she disappeared into the darkness, but it was as though I meant, You go ahead, I’m not a man anyway. There’s nothing human about me, so you be off.

A week later I was at Harry’s watching television when Terry called. After giving him an earful, Harry threw me the phone.

“How are you holding up?” I asked frantically. “They’re saying you got shot.”

“In the ankle! Who shoots ankles? Look, don’t worry about me, mate. I got a bird who does wonders with iodine. I’m tired, that’s about it. Otherwise I’m OK.”