Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Stanley

I shook the manila envelope until something nice fell out. The check. There it was: $15,000. Not a huge amount of money, but by the standards of a man who was in the habit of recycling old cigarettes, it was considerable.

So that was that. I was leaving. The hell with my unbreakable bond- I was breaking it. I didn’t think I’d be doing my mother any good rotting in jail next to her other rotting son. Besides, jail was Terry’s thing. I wouldn’t last one shower.

I hadn’t even been up to see him since he’d been in. That may sound strange, after all the fretting and running around I did after him, but to tell you the truth, I was sick to death of everything to do with Terry Dean. The public accolades had got to me in the end. And now there wasn’t anything more I could do for him. I needed a breather. I had, however, received a note, and I remember thinking it was the first time I’d seen his handwriting.

Dear Marty,

What’s this shit about a book? No one will shut up about it. If you get a sec, straighten that out, will you? I don’t want to be known as a writer. I want to be known as a vigilante who liberated sport from the dirty hands of corruption. Not for scribbling some stupid book.

Prison- blah. Still, I can see our house from up here. The warden treats me well on account of me being a kind of celebrity and he lent me his binoculars the other day, and guess what I saw? Dad looking at me through a pair of binoculars! Weird!

Anyway, don’t forget to get the hell out of town and do something with your life. Politics, mate. I reckon that’s for you. You’re the only one with brains in this whole silly circus.

Love,

Terry

P.S. Come up and see me sometime.

I started packing immediately. I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. Fuck that. I didn’t want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were too heavy.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked. I spun around, shamefaced, as if she’d caught me masturbating.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Paris,” I said, surprising myself. “I’m going to track down Caroline Potts and ask her to marry me.”

She didn’t say anything to that, just swayed back and forth on her feet.

“Lunch in half an hour.”

“OK,” I said, and when she was gone, the gaping mouth of my open suitcase looked up at me accusingly.

After a silent lunch, I made my final journey up the hill to say goodbye to Terry. It was the hottest day of summer, so hot you could fry bacon on a leaf. The wind was hot too, and it felt like I was walking into a hair dryer. Sweat ran into my eyes. As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you’re really missing is just time itself.

The guard wouldn’t let me in.

“No visitors. Terry’s in solitary confinement,” he said.

“Why?”

“Fighting.”

“Well, how long is he going to be in there for?”

“I dunno. A month?”

“A month! In solitary confinement! Is that legal?”

“I dunno.”

Christ! I couldn’t wait a month just to say goodbye. I was terrified of putting the brakes on my momentum.

“Well, can you tell him his brother came to say goodbye?”

“But his brother hasn’t been here.”

“I’m his brother.”

“Oh. And what’s the message?”

“Tell him I’ve gone overseas.”

“But now you’re back, eh. How long have you been away?”

“I don’t know. A couple of years maybe. But when you tell him, put it in the future tense, OK?”

“Why?”

“Private joke.”

“All right. I’ll say his brother is going overseas for a couple of years,” he said, winking at me.

“Perfect,” I said, and turning away from the prison, I made the steep descent down the treeless hill and took in a full, unobscured view of our town. Nice town. Nice little town.

Fuck you, nice little town.

I hope you burn.

I walked through the streets, entertaining various revenge fantasies of returning one day rich and successful, but I quickly got over that idea. In truth, all I ever wanted was for everyone to like me, and coming back to a place rich and successful never won anyone any hearts.

As I was thinking these pointless thoughts, I noticed a queer sensation in my interior, and an odd noise that sounded like a little man was gargling mouthwash in my abdomen. The sensation quickly developed into an awful pain. I doubled over and rested my hand against a streetlamp. What was this? It felt as if all the glands in my body had started secreting battery acid.

Just as suddenly the pain subsided, and feeling light-headed, I groped my way back home.

When I got into my bedroom, the pain returned worse than before. I lay down and shut my eyes with the thought that a twenty-minute nap was all I needed to get over this.

But it was just the beginning.

By the morning I was still unwell. Some crazy sickness had struck me down suddenly, with debilitating stomach cramps, vomiting, then fever. At first I was diagnosed as having the flu, but my mother and I were worried; these were the symptoms I’d had as a child that had led me into the black arms of the terrifying coma. Once again I was confined to bed, and I feared that my brief flicker of light was growing prematurely dim, and every time I shat my pants from the stomach cramps, I shat my pants from fear. There’s no two ways about it. Sickness and fear were making me incontinent. It was while lying in bed that I realized that illness is our natural state of being. We’re always sick and we just don’t know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.

Now I want you to know, I do not agree with the theory that all illness is made in the mind. Whenever someone says that to me, and blames all sickness on “negative thoughts,” I think one of the ugliest, most uncharitable, angriest thoughts in my ugly, uncharitable, angry thought repertoire. I think: I hope to see you at your child’s funeral so you can explain to me how your six-year-old daughter fabricated her own leukemia. Like I said, not nice, but that’s how furious that particular theory makes me. Old age means nothing to those theorists. They think matter decays because it’s down in the mouth.

The problem with people is that they are so in love with their beliefs that their epiphanies have to be absolute and comprehensive or nothing. They can’t accept the possibility that their truths may have only an element of truth in them. It follows, therefore, that it’s possible that some illnesses are born in the mind, and since desperation makes a man still more desperate, I was even willing to consider a supernatural cause for my deteriorating state.

When you’re lying in agony, it gives you some relief to diagnose yourself; you get some of the illusion of power back. But if you know as much about the intricacies of the human body as you do about jet engines, you have to get creative. First, I meditated on plain old simple anxiety. But other than a exhausted concern for my mother and an unease about the possibility of being charged in a police investigation, I really wasn’t that anxious. In truth, the slamming of the cell door in Terry’s face was an enormous relief to me. That cell door signified the end of my days of fretting. I was relieved he was shut away.

The second tier of investigation brought me to the spiritual world. My thinking was this: I had sought to break the bond I had made with my mother, and if this was the cause of my illness, I had psychological and supernatural roots to choose from. Perhaps unconsciously I had made myself sick about it. Maybe my body revolted at the act of betrayal. Or, supernaturally, possibly the link with my mother was so strong, our bond had doomed me to keeping my word. Perhaps I had been suckered into a Polish mother’s curse, and I didn’t know it.