Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“I don’t understand,” I said.

We heard footsteps in the hallway, the floorboards creaking. My mother threw the sheets over me again and leapt into Terry’s bed. My father’s face appeared at the door, and he saw me still half propped up in bed.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

I shook my head, and when he left, I swiveled my head to see my mother’s eyes closed; she was pretending to be asleep.

Later I had only a vague, fleeting memory of all this, but the residual feeling remained, a feeling like walking into the middle of a Harold Pinter play and being asked immediately by a tribunal to explain it or be executed. My mother, for her part, seemed to remember none of it, and when I brought it up she told me I had been laid up all night in a crazy fever, babbling like a lunatic. I didn’t know what to believe.

Then things went from worse to cataclysmic.

It was hot, 104 degrees. A blazing southerly wind blew through the open window. I tried to eat some vegetable soup my father had made. My mother brought it in. I drank only two spoonfuls, but I couldn’t hold it down. I reached for the bowl and threw it all up. My head hung over the bowl and I left it there, staring stupidly into the kaleidoscopic face of my own vomit. There, in the spew, I saw perhaps the most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and since then I’ve seen dogs sawn in half.

This is what I saw:

Two. Blue. Pellets.

That’s right, rat poison.

That’s right, rat poison.

I struggled for a while to figure out how I may have inadvertently swallowed them myself. But having not put one foot out of bed since my illness began, I just had to rule it out. That left only one answer. My stomach tightened like a vise. I’m being poisoned, I thought. He, my father, is poisoning me.

Let’s not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. That’s right. That this man who I’d lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!

I dropped the bowl so the vomit spilled onto the carpet and dribbled down the cracks in the floorboards. I looked and looked again, each time confirming that I was not hallucinating, as my mother had assured me the previous night.

My mother! What was her part in all this? She obviously knew- that was why she wanted me to escape, a desire that ended abruptly when she feared that if the murderer knew I was fleeing, he would abandon his languid plan on the spot and just take a knife to my guts or a pillow to my face.

Christ! What a pickle!

Keeping your calm while your stepfather tries to kill you is quite impossible. Watching your murderer scrunch up his face in disgust as he silently cleans up your vomit may have its darkly comic elements, but it’s also just so damn chilling, you want to curl into a fetal position and remain there until the next ice age.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was consumed by a perverse curiosity to see what he’d do. I should say something, I thought, but what? Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you don’t want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest.

“Next time, try to get it into the bowl,” he said blandly.

I said nothing, just stared at him as if he’d broken my heart.

When he was gone, my rational mind came home. What the fuck was I going to do? It seemed sensible, as the intended victim, to remove myself from the scene of the crime, so as to avoid the crime. Yes, it was time to test the theory of superhuman strength being bestowed on people in life-threatening situations. Because my body was no use, I was counting on my will to live to get me out of this Shakespearean family drama. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got to my feet, using the side table for balance. I winced through the pain as my stomach contracted and twisted horribly. I went for my suitcase and noted it was still packed from the episode the night before. My feet struggled into my boots, and with great effort I began to walk: when you haven’t worn footwear in a while, even sandals feel as heavy as cement blocks. Trying to sneak out without a sound, I crept down the hallway. I could hear arguing from the living room. They were both screaming, my mother crying. There was the sound of breaking glass. They were fighting, physically. Maybe my mother had confronted him about his plot! At the door, I put down the suitcase and headed for the kitchen. What else could I do? I couldn’t leave my mother in my father’s psychotic hands. My course was clear. I had to kill my father (by marriage).

I tell you, I’ve taken more time choosing an item on a menu than I took making the decision to end my father’s life. And as someone who has always battled the pernicious vice of indecision- beginning the moment my mother dangled the raw nipples of two milk-filled tits in my face and said, “Choose one”- I found that having suddenly made a quick choice, however dreadful, gave me a supremely satisfying sense of empowerment.

In the kitchen I grabbed the carving knife. It smelled of onions. Through a crack in the door, I could see my parents struggling. They were really going for it. He’d hit my mother before many times, always late at night, in the privacy of their bedroom, but not since she’d told him she had cancer. My mother was clawing at him as best as she could in her half-dead state, and in return he gave her such a backhander, she fell to the floor in a crumpled heap.

My strength flowing, I burst through the door unsteadily but kept a clean, tight grip on the knife handle. They saw me- first my mother, then my father- but paid no attention to the knife in my hands. I might just as well have been holding a feather, they simply were so deep in their own private nightmare.

“Martin! Get out of here!” my mother wailed.

At the sight of me, my father’s face did something I’ve never seen a face do before. It contracted to half its normal size. He looked back at my mother, picked up a chair, and smashed it to pieces on the ground so the fragments shattered around her.

“Get away from her!” I yelled, my voice cracking and wobbling at the same time.

“Martin…” he said in a strange voice.

My mother was sobbing hysterically.

“I said get away!” I repeated.

Then he said, in a voice like a grenade, “Your fucking crazy mother has been putting rat poison in your food!”

I stood there like a wall.

“It was you, ” I said.

He just shook his head sadly.

I turned, confused, to my mother, whose face was partially covered by her hand. Her eyes streamed with tears; her body heaved with sobs. Immediately I knew it was true.

“Why?” my father yelled, punching the wall next to her. She screamed. He looked at me with tenderness and confusion and sobbed, “Martin, why?”

My mother was shivering. Her free hand clutched a copy of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. That was the next book she’d planned on reading to me. “So she could look after me,” I said, almost inaudibly.

He looked at me blankly. He didn’t get it. He didn’t get it at all.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said, in the first display of love he’d ever shown me.

It was all too much. I stumbled through the kitchen and down the hall and, grabbing my suitcase, burst through the front door.

If I’d been in any kind of reasonable state at all, I would’ve immediately noticed something wrong in the world around me. I walked in a daze, feeling the heat of the day on my face. I walked and walked, fast, as if carried by a strong current. My thoughts broke in half, then replicated- anger dividing into horror and rage, then again into pity and disgust, and so on. All the time I kept walking, feeling stronger and stronger with every step. I walked to the top of Farmer’s Hill.