Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“How do we fix him?” Eddie asked himself. “We’ve really got to brainstorm. Let’s see. Let me think.”

We stood in a swampy silence for a full twenty minutes. Eddie was brainstorming. I was sick at the way he was breathing through his nostrils, which were partially blocked by something I could see. After another ten minutes Eddie said, “I’m going to think some more about this at home.” And then he left. I didn’t hear from him after that. If he had any brilliant ideas, they just didn’t come fast enough.

A week later there was a knock on the door. I went into the kitchen and made some toast and started shaking. I don’t know how I knew the universe had vomited up something special for me; I just knew. The banging on the door persisted. I didn’t want to overtax my imagination, so against my better judgment I answered it. A woman with a sagging face and big brown teeth was at the door, wearing a look of pity on her face. There was a policeman with her too. I guessed it wasn’t the policeman she felt sorry for.

“Are you Kasper Dean?” she asked.

“What is it?”

“Can we come in?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this. Your father is in the hospital.”

“Is he all right? What happened?”

“He’s not well. He’s going to stay awhile. I want you to come with us.”

“What are you talking about? What happened to him?”

“We’ll tell you about it in the car.”

“I don’t know who you are and what you want to do with me, but you can go fuck yourselves.”

“Come on, son,” the policeman said, clearly not in any mood to follow my suggestion.

“Where?”

“There’s a home you can stay in for a couple of days.”

“This is my home.”

“We can’t leave you alone here. Not until you’re sixteen.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been taking care of myself forever.”

“Come on, Kasper,” the policeman barked.

I didn’t tell him my name was Jasper. I didn’t tell him that Kasper was a fictional character of my dad’s invention and that Kasper had been killed off many years ago. I decided to play along until I worked out just what the situation was. I knew this much: I wasn’t sixteen, and that meant I had no rights. People are always talking about the rights of the child, but it’s never the rights you need when you need them.

I went with them in the police car.

On the way they explained that Dad had driven his car through the window of the Fleshpot. It was an act that might have been taken as an unfortunate accident, only when he got through the window, he locked the steering wheel in a tight circle and spun the car around the dance floor, into tables and chairs, smashing up the place, destroying the bar. The police had to drag him out of the car. Clearly he’d gone mad. And now he was in the madhouse. I wasn’t surprised. Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it. It’s OK from a mountaintop, but Dad was smack bang in the middle, and his berserk contradictions had finally butted each other insensible.

“Can I see him?”

“Not today,” the woman said. We pulled up to a house in the suburbs. “You’ll stay here a couple of days, until we see if any of your relatives can come and get you.”

Relatives? I didn’t know anyone like that.

The house was a one-story brick number and looked just like a regular family home. From the outside you couldn’t tell this was where they warehoused the broken-off pieces of shattered families. The policeman honked the horn when we pulled up. A woman with one enormous bosom came out with a smile that I predicted I would see again and again in a thousand awful nightmares. The smile said, “Your tragedy is my ticket to heaven, so come here and give me a hug.”

“You must be Kasper,” she said, and she was joined by a bald man who kept nodding as if he were Kasper.

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m Mrs. French,” the single-bosomed woman said, as if boasting, as if to be Mrs. French were a hard-earned achievement in itself.

When I didn’t respond, they walked me through the house. They showed me a bunch of kids watching television in the living room. Out of habit, I surveyed the female faces in the room. I do this even among the fragmented. I do this to see if there is any physical beauty I can dream about or lust over; I do this on buses, in hospitals, at the funerals of dear friends; I do this to lighten the load a little; I will do this as I lie dying. As it happened, everyone in the place was ugly, at least on the outside. All the kids peered at me as though I were up for sale. Half of them looked resigned to whatever it was their fate was dishing up to them; the other half snarled defiantly. For once I wasn’t interested in their stories. I’m sure they all had perfectly awful tragedies that I could weep over for centuries, but I was too busy aging ten years with every passing minute in this limbo for children.

The couple continued with their tour. They showed me the kitchen. They showed me the backyard. They showed me my room, a glorified closet. The people may have been nice and kind and soft-spoken, but I preferred to save some time and just assume they were perverts awaiting nightfall.

As I dropped my bag on the single bed, Mrs. French said, “You’ll be happy here.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said back. I don’t like people telling me when and where I am to be happy. That’s not even for me to decide.

“So what now? Do I get my one phone call?” I asked.

“This isn’t prison, Kasper.”

“We’ll see.”

I telephoned Eddie to see if I could stay with him. He admitted that he had overstayed his visa and was illegal and therefore unable to make any application to be my legal guardian. I called Anouk’s house to hear her flatmate tell me what I already knew- she was still sunning herself in a Buddhist meditation center in Bali and wasn’t due home until her money ran out. I was stuck. I hung up the phone and went back to my little slab of darkness and cried. I’d never thought negatively about my future until that moment. I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.

There wasn’t a lock on the door, but I managed to wedge the chair under the handle. I sat awake all night, waiting for that ominous rattle. At about three in the morning I fell asleep, so I can only assume they came to sexually abuse me when I was far gone, dreaming of oceans and the horizons I would never reach.

The next day, accompanied by Mrs. French, I went to see Dad. I admit, shamefully, that when we hopped in the car I was excited. I’d never been inside a mental hospital- was it like in the movies, with a symphony of high-pitched inhuman screams? I even went as far as to hope the patients were not too heavily sedated to bang wooden spoons against the back of saucepans.

In the car on the way, I didn’t say anything. Mrs. French kept glancing at me impatiently, irritated that I wasn’t pouring out my heart to her. Silence dogged us all the way to the hospital. She pulled over at the newsagent’s and said, “Why don’t you pick up your father some magazines to read?” and she gave me $10. I went inside and thought: What does a man who’s fallen off the brink want to read? Pornography? Entertainment news? I picked up an equestrian magazine but put it down again. That wasn’t right. In the end I settled for a book of puzzles, mazes, anagrams, and teasers to give his brain a workout.

Inside the hospital we heard the kind of frenzied screams you generally associate with boiling rivers of blood. Stepping out of the elevator, I could see patients walking aimlessly through the corridors, legs twitching, tongues hanging out, mouths open wide as if at the dentist’s. I could see something yellow in their eyes. I could smell a smell unlike any smell I’ve ever smelled. These were people who had been tossed in the darkness, human leftovers starring in their own nightmares, covered in flimsy white gowns, their psyches poking through like ribs. They were the embers of a fire dying out. Where in the world could they go where they made sense?