Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

A strange threesome- Eddie & Astrid & me. At first when we ate dinner together you could see them freeze when I went to do something & it made me laugh to myself to see two grown people loath to be left in the same room. But soon quasi-friendship developed based on laughing together at my clumsiness & forgetfulness & lax attitude toward hygiene- amusement at my faults is common ground on which they both stand.

Sometimes three of us walk by the Seine. Buy cheap wine & bread & cheese & we talk about everything but I’m always impatient w/ other people’s opinions because I’m sure they’re just repeating something they heard somewhere or else regurgitating ideas fed to them in childhood. Look, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion & I’d never shut anyone down who was expressing one but can you be sure it’s really theirs? I’m not.

Catastrophe!

Tonight Astrid Eddie & me went to do laundry & to pass the time we tried to guess the origins of each other’s stains. Astrid thought every wine stain was blood & every coffee stain a splattering of tuberculosis. It was cold out & the window of the laundromat was all fogged up & we couldn’t see outside & Eddie was bent in front of the dryer lifting his clothes to his nose & sniffing each item with pleasure before folding it in a meticulous fashion as if preparing to send his underpants off to war.

– Hey, what the fuck? Eddie suddenly shouted as he sniffed his clothes his face contorting with each enormous whiff. There must have been something in the machine! These smell of shit!

He waved his garments under Astrid’s nose.

– I don’t smell anything.

– How can you not smell anything? Maybe you don’t smell what I smell but you must smell something.

– I don’t smell anything bad.

– Martin. You don’t smell shit?

I reluctantly took a sniff.

– It smells fine.

– Shit smells fine?

Eddie put his head in the clothes dryer sniffing. I was laughing & Astrid was laughing & it was a good moment. Then Astrid said I’m pregnant & Eddie hit his head on the inside of the dryer.

A baby! A fucking baby! A defecating pea-brained unformed biped! A horrible toothless homunculus! An incarnation of ego! A demanding serpent of need! A bald whining primate!

My life is over.

Help!

The topic of the moment: abortion. I am a passionate advocate. I hear myself in conversations w/ Astrid extolling virtues of abortion as if it were a new time-saving technology we can’t afford to live without. Like everything else her responses alternate between vague & fuzzy & downright mysterious. She says an abortion would be probably pointless- whatever that means.

Sex: the match that sets off human firework. In our loveless palace we’ve built a child. Suddenly being almost broke filled w/ new & daunting meaning compounded by the terrible discovery that I have not the heart/cunning/spine/amorality necessary to simply slip out of the country without a word and never return. To my horror principles have wormed their way into fabric of my being. I can’t recall a single instance of my parents showing strong moral fiber, but still it’s there inside me & I know I can’t leave Astrid. I’m stuck. Hopelessly stuck!

Much Later

Haven’t written for months. Astrid very pregnant. The fetus expands persistently. The invader draws near. My own private population explosion: spinal injury of my independence. Do I care if it dies?

The only good I can imagine from having a child: what I can learn from him, not from nauseatingly cute attempts at walking talking shitting which thrill every parent so they repeat their discoveries to you ad nauseam until you despise not only all children everywhere but even find you’re struck by sudden & irrational distaste for kittens & puppies. But it occurs to me I could learn from this child something about the nature of humanity- and if I accept Harry’s pronouncement that I am a born philosopher then this baby could be an ambitious philosophical project! What if I reared it in a cupboard without light? Or in room full of mirrors? Or Dali paintings? Apparently babies have to learnto smile so what if I never taught him or showed him laughter? No television of course no movies maybe no society either- what if he never saw another human other than me or not even me? What would happen? Would cruelty develop in that miniature universe? Would sarcasm? Would rage? Yes I could really learn something here tho why stop at one child? Could have a collective of children or “family” & alter variables in environment that will govern life of each one to see what’s natural what’s inevitable what’s environmental & what’s conditioning. Above all I will strive to raise a being that understands itself.What if I gave child head start by encouraging self-awareness at an unnaturally young age, maybe 3? Maybe earlier? Would need to create optimum conditions for flowering of self-awareness. This child will know a lot of solitude that’s for sure.

Yuck

If a girl Astrid wants to name the child Wilma for some reason- if a boy, Jasper. God knows where she got these names- all the same to me. If raised properly at a certain age he’ll/she’ll choose his/her own name to reflect who he/she thinks he/she is to feel entirely comfortable in his/her own skin- nothing worse than hearing your name called & feeling a dispassionate shudder or being left cold when you see your own name in print which is why most signatures are barely legible scrawls: the unconscious rebeling against the name, trying to smash it.

Worried about money. Astrid is too. She says she has been broke before in more countries than I can name in such poverty I cannot imagine but she’s never done it with a baby & she’s worried my inherent laziness will ensure our mutual starvation. Clearly criticism is the new fire that will not die. To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.

Christ!

Idiocy (or is it insanity?) redefined in what I saw when I came home today: Astrid fixing the fuses in the kitchen while standing in a small puddle of water. I threw her over my shoulder and tossed her on the bed.

– You trying to kill yourself? I screamed.

She looked at me as if I had put my face on inside out & said in small bored voice If I could think of a really clever way to commit suicide, I would.

Suicide?

– How can you even think about suicide when you’re pregnant? I said surprising myself w/ pro-life thoughts.

– Don’t worry. Suicides often fail, anyway. When I was a girl my uncle jumped off a cliff and then waved from the bottom, his back broken. And my cousin took an overdose of pills and just wound up vomiting for a week. My grandfather put a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and somehow managed to miss his brain.

– This is the first thing you’ve told me about your family!

– Is it?

– Did every member of your family attempt suicide at one point?

– My father never did.

– Who was your father? What was his name? What did he do? Is he still alive? What country did he come from? What country do you come from? What is your first language? Where did you grow up?

Why don’t you talk about anything? Why won’t you tell me anything?

Did something terrible happen to you? What…

A cold glaze came over her- she was receding fast. Her soul on an express train, back to nowhere.

Strange Days Indeed

Things w/ Astrid worse than ever. Icy wall dividing us. She does nothing all day, just stares out window or at own puffiness. On rare occasions she says anything her opinions are as bleak & sterile as mine were before I got sick of them. (I haven’t grown optimistic merely bored with pessimism so now I think light pretty thoughts for variety- sadly this is starting to get dull too- where next?)