Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“You can’t keep him here!” I shouted.

“Actually, we can.”

He showed me some paperwork. There was plenty of technical mumbo jumbo. I couldn’t understand it. It was all pretty dull. Even the font was boring.

“Listen. What will it take to get him out of here?”

“He needs to be better than he is now.”

“Well, fuck, can you be more specific?”

“More balanced. We need to be confident he’s not going to do any harm to himself, or to you, or to others.”

“And how do you intend to do that? Be specific, now.”

“By getting him to talk to me. And by medicating him to maintain his stability.”

“This all sounds time-consuming.”

“It isn’t going to happen overnight.”

“Well, how long? An estimate.”

“I don’t know, Jasper. Six months? A year? Two years? Look at him- your father’s pretty far gone.”

“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Live in a fucking state-run home?”

“Don’t you have any relatives who can look after you?”

“No.”

“Uncles or aunts?”

“Dead.”

“Grandparents?”

“Dead! Dead! Everyone’s fucking dead!”

“I’m sorry, Jasper. This is just not something that can be moved along quickly.”

“It has to.”

“I don’t see how.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot,” I said, and stormed down the corridors, not stopping to contemplate the loud groaning on either side. At the reception area, Mrs. French was studiously examining her fingernails like someone who doesn’t like to be left alone with her thoughts. Those fingernails were a way out. I left her with them and crept silently to the elevator. On the way down, I thought of all the people I’d heard pompously call themselves crazy and I wished them lots and lots and lots of bad luck.

I caught a bus home. The other passengers looked as tired and worn-out as I felt. I thought about my problem: this hospital, rather than being a road to wellness, would only accelerate the decay of his body, mind, and spirit, and if Dad was going to get well, he had to get out of there, but to get out of there, he needed to be well. To get him well, I needed to discover exactly what had made him sick, the means by which he had rendered himself useless.

Back in the apartment I searched for Dad’s more recent notebooks. I needed an idea, and no textbook could better aid me than one he wrote himself. But I couldn’t find them. They weren’t in his wardrobe, or under his bed, or wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in the top of the toilet- none of his usual hiding places. After an hour of general ransacking, I had to admit they weren’t in the apartment at all. What had he done with them? I turned the bedroom upside-down again, which only transformed it from one state of chaos to another. Exhausted, I lay on his bed. The atmosphere reeked of Dad’s collapse, and I did my best to avoid the sticky notion that this was not the beginning of the end but the actual definitive conclusive end, the end of the end.

On Dad’s bedside table was a postcard from Anouk. It had “ Bali ” printed in bold red letters over a picture of rice workers in a field. On the other side she had written “You guys need a holiday,” and that was all. We sure did.

I rolled over. Something in his pillowcase dug into my skull. I shook the pillow- out fell a black notebook! There were 140 pages, all numbered. Okay, I was the only one who could free Dad, and this book was going to tell me how. The problem was, entering my father’s mental state implied a certain danger, because his was the kind of thinking that closed around you, not slowly or surreptitiously but quick like the snap of a rusty bear trap. My defense, then, was to read ironically, and with this in mind, I braced myself and began.

Not surprisingly, it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience, as all journeys into dissolution and madness must be. I read it through twice. There were general frustrations, as on page 88:

I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That’s why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain.

and disturbing observations pertaining to me, as on page 21:

Poor Jasper. Watching him sleep while I’m pretending to read, I don’t think he realizes yet that every day his pile of minutes lightens. Maybe he should die when I die?

and observations about himself:

My problem is I can’t sum myself up in one sentence. All I know is who I’m not. And I’ve noticed there is a tacit agreement among most people that they’ll at least try to adjust to their environment. I’ve always felt the urge to rebel against it. That’s why when I’m in the movies and the screen goes dark I get an irresistible impulse to read a book. Luckily, I carry a pocket torch.

The most recurrent thoughts were Dad’s desire to hide, to be alone, to be isolated, not to be bothered by noise and people. The usual Dad rant. But surprisingly, there were also hints at a megalomania I hadn’t heard him articulate before, passages in his notebook that alluded to a longing to dominate and change the world- this appeared to be an evolution of his obsessive thoughts- which shed new light on his usual longing to be alone. I understood it now as a desire to have an isolated headquarters where he could plan his attack. There was, for instance, this:

No symbolic journey can take place in an apartment. There’s nothing metaphorical about a trip to the kitchen. There’s nothing to ascend! Nothing to descend! No space! No verticality! No cosmicity! We need a roomy, airy house. We need nooks and crannies and corners and hollows and garrets and staircases and cellars and attics. We need a second toilet. The essential important idea that will shift me from Thinking Man to Doing Man is impossible to apply here. The walls are too close to my head, and the distractions too many- the noise of the street, the doorbell, the telephone. Jasper and I need to move to the bush so I can lay the plans for my major task which I have lying in egg form. I am also lying in egg form. I am a halfway man, and I need a place of intense concentration if I am to whisper into a golden ear and change the face of this country.

and this:

Emerson understood! “The moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction,” he said. That’s my problem. I’m ¼ of who I should be! Maybe even 1/8th. Then he said, “The voices which we hear in solitude grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.” This is my problem exactly: I can’t hear myself! He also said, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” I can’t do this!

And then, on my second reading, I found a quote that was so frighteningly to the point, I actually shouted “Ah-ha!” which is something I’d never said before and have never said since. It was this, on page 101:

Pascal notes that during the French Revolution, all the nuthouses were emptied. The inmates suddenly had meaning in their lives.

I closed the notebook and walked to the window and looked down at the twisted roofs and roads and the city skyline, then moved my eyes to the sky, to the clouds dancing on it. I felt as though I had drawn a new and fresh source of strength into my body. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I had to do.

I caught the bus to Eddie’s and trod a narrow path winding between expensive jungles of fern to the front of his sandstone house. I rang the bell. You couldn’t hear its call from the outside. Eddie must have made a lot of money himself from strip clubs- only rich people can afford to mute like that; the silence is due to the thickness of the door, and the more money you have, the chunkier your door is. It’s the way of the world. The poor get thinner and the rich get chunkier.