Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

The doctors walked briskly on the way to strip the patients of their crazy laughter. I studied the faces of the nurses: how could they work here? They must be either sadists or saints. They couldn’t be anything else, but could they be both? They and the doctors looked tired: draining heads of wrong ideas is obviously an exhausting business.

I thought: What human thing could emerge out of this edifice of violent nightmares and say, “OK, now back to work!”?

The nurse at reception sat eerily still with a pained expression, as if bracing herself for a punch in the face.

“Jasper Dean to see Martin Dean,” I said.

“Are you family?”

When I didn’t say anything for a while, she said, “I’ll call Dr. Greg.”

“I hope that’s his last name.”

She picked up a phone and paged Dr. Greg. I searched Mrs. French’s face for some acknowledgment that I hadn’t referred to myself as Kasper. If she had heard me, she wasn’t giving anything away.

A couple of minutes later, Dr. Greg arrived, looking sharp, smiling like someone who thinks he is always well liked, especially at first sight.

“I’m glad you’re here. Your father won’t talk to us,” he announced.

“And?”

“And I was wondering if you could come into the room and help us out.”

“If he doesn’t want to talk to you, it means he doesn’t care what you think. My presence won’t change that.”

“Why doesn’t he care what I think?”

“Well, you probably said things to him like ‘We’re on your side, Mr. Dean,’ and ‘We’re here to help you.’ ”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Look. You’re a psychiatrist, right?”

“And?”

“He’s read books written by your predecessors: Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Fromm, and Becker. Those guys. You need to convince him that you’re cut from the same cloth.”

“Well, I’m not Freud.”

“And there’s your problem right there.”

Mrs. French waited in the reception area while I followed the doctor through the gloomy corridors and the opening and closing of countless locked doors. We got to Dad’s room and he unlocked it with a key. Inside was a single bed, a desk, a chair, and half-chewed morsels of indefinable food mangled on a plate. Dad stood with his back to us, staring out the window. Watching him was like looking at a naked tree in winter.

“Look, Martin. Your son’s here to see you,” Dr. Greg said.

When he turned, I let out a little gasp. It looked as if all the bones and muscles in his face had been taken out.

“How are you?” I asked, as if we were meeting for the first time. He stepped forward with the dazed look of a mother after childbirth.

Any vow of silence Dad had taken he abandoned at the sight of me. “Jasper. Listen. You can never really kill your old selves. They lie there in a mass grave, buried alive, one on top of the other, waiting for the opportunity for resurrection, and then, because they’ve once been dead, they drive you like a zombie, as they themselves are zombies. Do you see what I’m getting at? All your old failures squirming to life!”

I looked over at Dr. Greg and said, “You wanted him talking. Well, he’s talking.”

Dad sucked in his lip as a sign of defiance. I went over to him and whispered, “Dad, you have to get out of here. They’ve got me in a state-run home. It’s horrible.”

He didn’t say anything. Dr. Greg didn’t say anything either. I looked around the room and thought it was the worst possible environment for a collapsed mind, as it would give him more time to reflect, and if his disease had a cause, it was excessive reflection; too much thinking had broken his brain. I looked back at Dr. Greg: he was leaning against the desk, as if watching a play where none of the actors knew whose turn it was to speak.

“Here. I brought you something,” I said, handing Dad the book of puzzles. He gave me a sad glance as he took it and then began studying the book and making little “hmm” sounds.

“A pencil,” he said in a scratchy whisper, holding out his hand without looking up.

I stared at Dr. Greg until he reluctantly fished in his shirt pocket and handed me a pencil as delicately as if it were a machete. I gave it to Dad. He opened the book and started going through the first maze. I tried to think of something to say, but I didn’t come up with anything other than “You’re welcome,” even though he hadn’t said thank you.

“Done,” he said to himself when he finished.

“Martin,” Dr. Greg said. Dad flinched, turned the page, and started on the second maze. From where I sat the book was upside down, and I got dizzy watching him.

After a minute he said, “Too easy,” turned the page, and began to tackle the third maze. “They get progressively harder as you go through the book,” he said to no one.

He was now attacking the puzzles compulsively. Dr. Greg gave me a look as if to say, “What made you give a mentally confused man a compendium of conundrums?” and I had to agree I would’ve done much better with my first instinct, to buy porn.

“Eddie says you can come back to work when you’re ready,” I said.

Without looking up, Dad said, “Son of a bitch.”

“He’s being pretty good to you, I think, considering you smashed up his club.”

“The first day I met him in Paris he offered me money, then he offered me a job. Then he found me a job. Then later he followed me here to Australia and gave me money to feed you. Not much, a hundred here, a hundred there, but he keeps helping me out.”

“Sounds like you have a very good friend,” Dr. Greg said.

“What do you know about it?” Dad snapped.

Enough of this small talk, I thought. I walked close to Dad and tried whispering in his ear again. “Dad, I need you to get out of here. They’ve put me in a home.” He didn’t say anything, and turned to the last maze in the book and started working through it. “It’s dangerous. Some guy made a pass at me,” I lied.

He still didn’t say anything, only scrunched up his face in annoyance, not at my distasteful lie but at the puzzle he was failing to solve.

“Martin,” Dr. Greg chimed in, “don’t you want to look at your son?”

“I know what he looks like,” Dad said.

It was clear that Dr. Greg’s lacerating mediocrity was suffocating Dad. The doctor was treading the unlit terrain of Dad’s mind with muddy boots, trampling over everything, understanding nothing. As I said, Dad wanted to be prodded by a Freud or a Jung, and if there was no further evidence of his unhinged mind, expecting that an undiscovered genius would be languishing here in this state-run hovel was proof enough.

He was still having trouble with the last maze. His pencil worked through it, but he kept hitting dead ends. “What the fuck?” he said. He was grinding his teeth so loudly we could hear it.

“Martin, why don’t you put the book away and talk to your son?”

“Shut up!”

Suddenly Dad jumped up and stamped his foot. He grabbed a chair and held it above his head, breathing so deeply his whole body heaved. “Get me out of here now!” he screamed, waving the chair in the air.

“Put it down!” Dr. Greg shouted. “Jasper, don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said, although I was a little afraid. “Dad,” I said, “don’t be a dickhead.”

Then the reinforcements arrived, like they do in the movies. An orderly ran in and grabbed Dad and pushed him onto the table. Another grabbed me and pushed me out of the room. I could still see Dad through the little window in the door. The orderlies had him pinned to the table and were sticking a needle in his arm. He was kicking and screaming; whatever was in that needle was taking its time. Dad’s stubborn hyped-up metabolism was slow to react, his agitation far too electric. Then I couldn’t see his face because one of the orderlies was in the way, and I thought how when the apocalypse comes there’s bound to be someone with big hair standing in front of me. Finally the orderly moved to the side, and I saw that Dad was all slobbery and drowsy and medicated into ambivalence. When, a couple of spasms later, he was blissfully at peace, Dr. Greg came out to talk to me. His face was red and sweaty, and I detected a subtle look of exhilaration behind his eyes, as if he were saying to himself, “This is what it’s all about!”