Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

In between sobs he talked to himself. “Fucking apartment. Too small. Can’t breathe. It’s a tomb. Must wage war. Who am I? How can I define myself? Choices are infinite and therefore limited. Forgiveness is big in the Bible, but nowhere does it say you should forgive yourself. Terry never forgave himself, and everyone loves him. I forgive myself daily, and nobody loves me. All this dread and insomnia. I can’t teach my brain how to sleep. How’s your confusion these days? It’s put on weight.”

“Dad?”

I pushed open his door a little, and in the shadows his face was severe and his head looked like a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Jasper. Do me a favor. Pretend you’re an orphan.”

I closed the door, went into my bedroom, and pretended I was an orphan. It didn’t feel too bad.

Then, as abruptly as it started, the crying stopped. Suddenly he started going out at night. That was new. Where did he go? I followed him. He was walking the streets with a bounce in his step and waving to people as he passed. They didn’t wave back. He stopped at a small, crowded pub. I peeked through the window and saw him perched at the bar, drinking. And he wasn’t sulking alone in a corner either; he was chatting to people, laughing. That was brand spanking new. The color of his face had gone all rosy, and after he polished off a couple of beers, he stood up on the bar stool and turned off the football game and said something to the crowd while laughing and shaking his fist like a dictator telling a joke at the execution of his favorite dissident. When he finished he bowed (though nobody applauded) and went to another pub, shouting “Hello there!” as he entered, then “I’ll see what I can do!” as he left. Then he popped into a dimly lit bar and paced around in circles before leaving without ordering anything. Then a nightclub! Christ! Is this what Anouk had driven him to?

He disappeared up the escalator of the Fishbowl, a concept disco designed as an enormous glass bowl with a platform around its perimeter. I climbed up onto the platform and peered into the bowl. At first I couldn’t see him. At first I couldn’t see anything but immaculately sculpted beautiful people illuminated in brief moments under strobe lights. Then I spotted him. He was fucking dancing. He was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath, moving clumsily and making strange, drowsy arm movements, like a lumberjack chopping trees in space, but he was having fun. Or was he? His smile was twice the size of normal smiles and he was gazing lustfully at cleavage of all sizes and religions. But what was this? He wasn’t dancing alone! He was dancing with a woman! Or was he? He was dancing behind her, gyrating at her back. She was ignoring him a little too effortlessly for comfort, so he swiveled around so he was in front and tried to sweep her up in that mile-wide smile. I wondered if he was going to invite her back to our sad and filthy apartment. But no, she wasn’t taken in. So he moved on to another woman, a shorter, rounder one. He swooped down and escorted her to the bar. He bought her a drink and handed over the cash as if he were paying a ransom. As they talked, he placed his hand on her back and drew her toward him. She resisted and walked away and Dad’s smile grew even wider, making him look like a chimpanzee who’d had peanut butter smeared on his gums for a television commercial.

A flat-nosed, no-neck bouncer in a tight black T-shirt arrived. His Goliath’s hand wrapped around the back of Dad’s neck, and he forcefully escorted him out of the club. On the street, Dad told him to fuck his mother if he hadn’t already. That did it for me. I’d seen enough. It was time to go home.

At around five in the morning he banged on the door. He’d lost his key. I opened up to see him sweating and yellow and in the middle of a sentence. I went back to bed without hearing the end of it. That was the only night I followed him, and when I recounted the story to Anouk, she said it was either “quite a good sign” or a “very bad sign.” I don’t know what he did the rest of those nights out on the town. I can only assume they were variations on the same fruitless theme.

A month later he was home again, crying. But what was worse, he started watching me sleep. The first night he did it he came into the room just as I was drifting off and took a seat by the window.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing. You just go to sleep.”

“What, with you sitting there?”

“I’m going to read in here awhile,” he said, holding up a book.

He turned on the lamp and started reading. I watched him for a minute, then put my head back down and shut my eyes. I could hear him turning the pages. A few minutes later I sneaked one eyelid open and almost recoiled. He was staring at me. My face was in shadows, so he couldn’t see I was watching him watching me. Then he turned the page again. I realized he was pretending to read, as an excuse for watching me sleep. This happened night after night, Dad pretending to read in my bedroom while I stayed awake with my eyes closed, feeling his eyes on me and listening to the sound of turning pages in the quiet. I tell you, they were some eerie, sleepless nights.

Then he started shoplifting. It began well enough. Dad came home, his bag stuffed with avocados and apples and fat nobs of cauliflower. Fruit and vegetables, nothing to complain about. Then he stole combs, throat lozenges, and Band-Aids- pharmaceutical goods. Useful. Then he stole nonsense items from gift shops: an old piece of driftwood with the words “My home is my castle” etched onto a plaque, a thong-shaped flyswatter, and a mug that said “You never know how many friends you have until you own a beach house,” which might be fun to put in a beach house, if you had one. We didn’t.

Then he was in bed crying again.

Then he was watching me sleep again.

Then he was at the window. I don’t know when exactly he took up post there, or why, but he was vigilant about his new role. Half his face was looking out the window, the other half buried in the bunched-up curtains. We should have had venetian blinds, the perfect accessory for sudden outbursts of acute paranoia; there’s nothing quite as atmospheric as those slits with their thin bars of shadow falling across your face. But what was he looking at out the window anyway? Mostly the backs of people’s shitty apartments. Mostly bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms. Nothing fascinating. Man with pale skinny legs stands in underwear devouring apple, woman puts on makeup arguing with person unseen, old couple brushes teeth of uncooperative German shepherd, that kind of thing. Staring out, Dad had a dark look in his eye. It wasn’t jealousy, that much I know. For Dad, the grass was never greener on the other side of the fence. If anything, it was browner.

Everything had taken a darker turn. His mood was dark. His face was dark. His vocabulary, dark and menacing.

“Fucking bitch,” he said one day at the window. “Fucking cunt.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Bitch across the way looking at us.”

“Well, you’re looking at her.”

“Only to see if she’s looking.”

“Is she?”

“Not now.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

Here’s the problem. He used to be funny. I mean, I know I’d complained about him my whole life, but I missed the old Dad. What happened to his lighthearted godlessness? That was funny. Reclusion is hysterical. Rebellion, a thousand laughs! But crying is rarely funny, and sociopathic rage never gets a chuckle- not from me, anyway. Now he was keeping the curtains humorlessly closed all day. No light penetrated the apartment. There were no longer middays or mornings or seasonal fluctuations of any kind. The only change was in the darkness. There were things breeding in it. Whatever mushrooms existed in his psyche were thriving in that dark, damp place. Not funny.