Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

That was only the adults, of course; the kids of the town couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me. That taught me something worth noting: the healthy and the sick are not peers, whatever else they might have in common.

Apparently everyone hassled the old woman too. I heard they crowded around her bed looking at their watches. I couldn’t understand why they’d taken such an interest. Later I learned bets had been laid. The old woman was the favorite. I was the long shot. I ran at over 100 to 1. Hardly anyone bet on me. I guess no one, not even in a morbid game of Guess Who’ll Die First, liked contemplating the death of a child. It just didn’t sit well with anyone.

“He’s dead! He’s dead!” a voice shouted one afternoon. I checked my pulse. Still ticking. I pulled myself up and called through the window at old George Buckley, our nearest neighbor.

“Who? Who’s dead?”

“Frank Williams! He fell off the roof!”

Frank Williams. He lived four houses down on the same street. From my window I could see the whole town running to his house to look. I wanted to look too. I dragged myself out of bed and moved like a greasy slug along the floor of my bedroom, into the hallway, out the front door into dazzling sunlight. Keeping my pajama pants on was an issue, but then it always is. Wiggling across the patchy grass lawn, I thought about Frank Williams, the late entry and surprise winner of our little contest. Father of four. Or was it five? All boys. He was always trying to teach his sons to ride a bike. When it wasn’t one son wobbling past my window with a hysterically tense grimace, it was another. I always hated the Williams boys for being slow learners. Now I felt sorry for them. No one should lose a parent through clumsiness. Their whole lives, those boys are going to have to say, “Yeah. My father fell off a roof. Lost his balance. What? What does it matter what he was doing up there?” Poor kids. Clearing gutters is no reason for a man to die. There’s just no honor in it.

The curious horde crouching around the dead man took no notice of the sick little worm crawling toward them. I made it through the legs of Bruce Davies, the town butcher. He peered down just as I peered up. Our eyes locked. I thought someone should tell him to get far away from the lifeless carcass of our neighbor. I didn’t like the glint in that butcher’s eye.

I looked closer. Frank’s neck was broken. His head had rolled back in a pool of dark blood and hung limp across the shoulders. When a neck breaks, it really breaks. I looked closer still. His eyes were wide open but there was nothing behind them, just a stupefying cavern. I thought: That will be me soon. Nothingness will envelop me just as it has enveloped him. Because of the contest and my own part in it, I saw this death not just as a preview of my own, but as an echo. Frank and I were in this together, chained to one another in some macabre marriage for all eternity- deadlock, I now call it, the affinity the living have with the dead. It’s not for everyone. You either feel it or you don’t. I did then and I do now. I feel it profoundly: this sacred, insidious bond. I feel they are waiting for me to join them in holy deadlock.

I rested my head on Frank’s lap and closed my eyes and let the voices of the townspeople soothe me to sleep.

“Poor Frank,” someone said.

“He’d had a good innings.”

“What was he doing up on that roof?”

“He was forty-two.”

“Is that my ladder?”

“Forty-two is young. He didn’t have a good innings. He had a shit innings.”

“I’m forty-four next week.”

“What are you doing?”

“Let go of that!”

“This is my ladder. I lent it to him last year, but when I asked about it he swore he’d returned it.”

“What about the boys?”

“Oh geez…the boys.”

“What’s going to happen to them?”

“They’ll be OK. They still have their mother.”

“But they won’t have this ladder. It’s mine.”

Then I fell asleep.

I awoke back in bed, sicker than ever. The doctor said that by crawling half a kilometer to see my first dead body, I had set my health back, as if it were a clock I had adjusted for daylight saving. After he left, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, her unstrung face an inch from mine, and she told me in an almost guilty voice that she was pregnant. I was too weak to say congratulations, and I just lay there as she stroked my forehead, which I really liked and still do, although there’s nothing soothing in stroking your own forehead.

Over the following months, as my condition gradually worsened, my pregnant mother sat down beside me and let me touch her belly, which was swelling horribly. Occasionally I felt the kick or perhaps head butt of the fetus inside. Once, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her whisper, “It’s a shame you won’t get to meet him.”

Then, just when I was at my weakest and death was licking her lips, something unexpected happened.

I didn’t die.

But I didn’t live either.

Quite by accident, I took the third option: I slipped into a coma. Bye-bye world, bye-bye consciousness, bye-bye light, too bad death, hello ether. It was a hell of a thing. I was hiding right in between death’s open arms and life’s folded ones. I was nowhere, absolutely nowhere at all. Honestly, you can’t even get to limbo from a coma.

My coma was nothing like those I’ve read about since: I’ve heard of people who fell into a coma in the middle of telling a joke and forty-two years later woke up and told the punch line. For them, those decades of oblivion were an instant of nothingness, as if they had passed through one of Sagan’s wormholes, time had curled around on itself, and they had flown through it in a sixteenth of a second.

Describing the thoughts, visions, and sensations I had inside that coma is near impossible. It wasn’t the nothingness, because there was quite a bit of somethingness (when you’re in a coma, even anyness is good), but I was too young to make sense of the experience. I can say, though, that I had as many dreams and visions as if I’d consumed a canyonful of peyote.

No, I won’t try to describe the indescribable, only so much as to say there were sounds I heard that I could not have heard and things I saw that I could not have seen. What I’m about to say is going to sound insane- or, worse, mystical, and you know I’m not that way inclined- but here it is: if you look at the unconscious mind as a big barrel, in the normal run of things the lid is open and sights, sounds, experiences, bad vibes, and sensations pour in during the waking hours, but when there aren’t any waking hours, none at all, for months or even years, and the lid is sealed, it’s possible that the restless mind, desperate for activity, might reach deep into the barrel, right down to the bottom of the unconscious, dredging up stores of things that were left there by previous generations. This is a Jungian explanation and I don’t even know if I like Jung, but there’s very little else out there on the shelves that could go any way to explain the things I saw that I could not have seen, to justify the things I heard that I could not have heard.

Let me try to put it another way. There is a short story by Borges called “The Aleph.” In the story, the Aleph, hidden under the nineteenth step of a cellar staircase, is an ancient mysterious portal to every point in the universe- I’m not kidding, every single point- and if you look into it, you see, well, absolutely everything. I’m hypothesizing that somewhere in the ancient parts of ourselves there could exist a similar porthole, resting quietly in a crack or a crevice or within the folds of the memory of your own birth, only the thing is, normally we never get to reach it or see it because the usual business of living piles mountains of crap on top of it. I’m not saying I believe this, I’m only giving you the best explanation I’ve come up with so far for the root of the extraordinarily dizzying hodgepodge of sights and sounds that flashed and whirled before my mind’s eye and ear. If the mind can have eyes, why not ears? You probably think there’s no such thing as the mind’s nose, either. Well, there is. And like Borges in his story, I can’t accurately describe it because my visions were simultaneous, and language, being successive, means I have to record it that way. So use your imagination, Jasper, when I tell you one gazillionth of what I saw: