Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Either way, I was really sick. Name a symptom, I had it: vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever, dizziness, shortness of breath, blurry vision, aching joints, groaning muscles, sore toes, chattering teeth, white tongue. I had everything short of bleeding from the eyeballs, and I didn’t doubt that was next. I was so weak, I couldn’t stand up to go to the bathroom. Beside my bed were two white bowls, one for vomit, one for piss and shit. I lay in a stupor, eyeing my half-packed suitcase and watching through a blurry haze a parade of noxious childhood memories pass before my eyes. I was right back where I started! That was the most painful part of being ill again, realizing that I had come full circle, and all I could think about was how I’d squandered my years of good health by just moping around and not climbing Everest.

My mother came into my room with an armful of books and began reading to me again, just like in the old days. Barely alive herself, she sat in the thin light of the lamp and read to me, beginning with an ominous choice, The Man in the Iron Mask. Lying in that dazed state, I had little trouble imagining a similar metallic apparatus constricting my own poor head. She read from morning to night, and after a while began sleeping in Terry’s old bed next to mine, so there was hardly a time that we weren’t together.

Her conversation often drifted to her early life in Shanghai, before she was pregnant with me, when she was still pregnant with possibility. She spoke often of Father Number One and remembered moments of intimacy between them when he stroked her hair while saying her name as if it were a sacred thing. It was the only time she liked the sound of her own name. She told me I had a similar-sounding voice, and one night she asked me to call her by her first name. It made me very uncomfortable, as I was already familiar with the works of Freud, but I did it to make her happy. Then she began unburdening herself by my bedside with lots of awful confessions like this one:

“I feel like I took a wrong turn but went so far down the road I didn’t have the energy to turn back. Please, Martin, you must remember this. It’s never too late to turn back if you make a wrong turn. Even if it takes you a decade to backtrack, you must do it. Don’t get stuck because the road back seems too long or too dark. Don’t be afraid to have nothing.”

And this one:

“I have stayed faithful to your father all these years, even though I don’t love him. Now I see I should’ve fucked around. Don’t let morality get in the way of living your life. Terry killed those men because that’s what he wanted to do with his life. If you need to cheat, cheat. If you need to kill, kill.”

And this:

“I married your father because of fear. I stayed because of fear. Fear has ruled my life. I am not a brave woman. It’s a bad thing to come to the end of your life and discover you are not brave.”

I never knew what to say when my mother unloaded herself in this way. I only smiled into her face that was once a well-tended garden, and patted her bony hands not without some embarrassment, because it is embarrassing to watch a life that scrutinizes itself at the end and realizes all it has to take into death is the shame of not having fully lived.

One day I imagined I was at my execution after a long and costly trial. I thought: On a clear day you can see me dying. I was thinking of Caroline too, that I might never see her again, that she would never understand the width and depth of my feelings. I thought about how I was dying a virgin. Damn. I took a deep breath. There was a repulsive, sickening smell in the air. It was me.

Was I dreaming? I didn’t hear them come in. Standing over me were two men in brown suits, jackets off, sleeves rolled up, sweat dripping into their eyes. One had a jutting-out jaw so extreme I didn’t know whether to shake his hand or his chin. The other one had small eyes set in a small head, and a small nose sitting above a small mouth with lips so thin they looked drawn on by a pencil, a 2B.

“We want to talk to you, Mr. Dean,” the chin said, and that sentence was notable for being the first time in my life I was called Mr. Dean. I didn’t like it. “Can you hear me? What’s wrong with you?”

“Childhood illness,” my mother said.

“Isn’t he a bit old for that?”

“Listen, Mr. Dean. We’d like a statement from you concerning the exact nature of your editing of the book.”

“What book?” I groaned obtusely.

The small one wiped sweat from his face and smeared it on his pants. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Dean. You did considerable work editing The Handbook of Crime for Terry Dean.”

“Harry West,” I said.

“What?”

“The Handbook of Crime was written by Harry West, not Terry Dean.”

“The guy who took a dive off the harbor bridge,” the chin said to the thin lips.

“Blaming it on a dead man because he can’t corroborate your story is a little too convenient. I don’t like it.”

“Do you have to like something before it becomes fact?” I asked, and before they could respond, I said, “Excuse me a minute.” I could feel my lunch coming up for air. I grabbed a bowl and threw up into it. A long silver thread of saliva connected my lower lip to the edge of the bowl.

“Listen, Dean. Are you going to make a statement or not?”

I motioned to the bowl and said, “I just made it.”

“Look. There’s no need to be hostile. We’re not charging you with anything, we’re just making some preliminary inquiries. Could you tell us how exactly you edited the book? Where did you and Terry meet?”

“Your brother isn’t the most educated man in the world, Mr. Dean. There must have been a lot of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and the like.”

I looked over to my mother, who was staring out the window in a sort of trance.

“We’ve looked into it. Editors work closely with their authors.”

“Did your brother have any accomplices? We’re investigating some new crimes.”

I said nothing, but I too had read the small print in the newspapers. Just like artists, murderers are seduced by the dazzling, unexpected fusion of originality and success, and one or two would-be criminals had taken to plagiaristic copycat killings in the months after Terry’s arrest, but they lacked spark and innovation. When the Australian chess champion was found with the bishop and two pawns lodged in his throat, the nation gave it scant attention, not least because the wannabe vigilante hadn’t realized that chess is a game, not a sport.

Observing that I was in no state to answer their questions, one of the detectives said, “We’ll come back when you’re feeling a little better, Mr. Dean.”

After they left, my father shuffled down the hallway in his pajamas and paused at the door, looking from me to my mother and back at me, with a look on his face that I couldn’t quite read, before shuffling off again. For the record, I did not see the look as something sinister, and for all his bitterness and resentment toward me, I was still his son in a way. I never gave too much weight to his infamous list, nor to the possibility that his madness had taken him to a place where he could actually, willingly do me harm.

The following morning I heard my mother’s voice calling me in a half whisper, half gurgle, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that my suitcase was now fully packed and sitting by the door with my brown boots beside it, toes pointing into the corridor. My mother, with her paper-white face, was peering down at me. “Quick. You should go now,” she said, staring at me fixedly, but not at my eyes- at some other point on my face, perhaps my nose. “What’s happening?” I croaked, but she just pulled the sheets off the bed and tugged at my arm with surprising force. “Time to go, Marty. You go catch the bus now.” She kissed my sweaty forehead. “I love you very much, but don’t come back here,” she said. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. “We came a long way together, Marty. I carried you, remember? But I can’t carry you this time. You have to go on your own. Come on, get a move on. You’re going to miss the bus.” She cupped her hand around the back of my head and gently eased me upright.