Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I felt the promise of catastrophe weaken, even break, and I dared to think optimistically again about our softly stirring futures.

During a long walk around the grounds the idea hit me like a mud slide: the most striking difference between my father and me was that I preferred simplicity and he preferred complexity. Not to say I often, or ever, succeeded in achieving simplicity, only to say that I preferred it, just as he enjoyed muddying everything when he could, complicating everything until he couldn’t see straight.

One evening he was standing in the back garden staring out. It was a liquid night and the moon was just a smudge out of focus.

I said, “What are you thinking about?”

He said, “It’s a surprise.”

I said, “I don’t like surprises. Not anymore.”

He said, “You’re too young to-”

I said, “I’m not kidding. No more surprises.”

He said, “I’m not going to get another job.”

I said, “How will we live?”

He said, “We’ll live fine.”

I said, “What about food and shelter?”

He said, “We have shelter. Eddie said he’s not in a hurry for me to pay back the loan, and thanks to him, we own this property.”

I said, “And what about Anouk? How will you pay her?”

He said, “I’m giving her the back room to use as a studio. She wants somewhere to sculpt.”

I said, “And food? What about food?”

He said, “We’ll grow food.”

I said, “Steaks? We’ll grow steaks?”

Then he said, “I’m thinking about cleaning up the pond.”

In the back garden, there was a pond in the shape of a figure eight with small white stones around its perimeter. “And I might put some fish in it,” he added.

“Shit, Dad, I don’t know.”

“But this time I’ll take care of them, OK?”

I agreed.

As promised, he cleaned up the pond and put in three rare Japanese fish. They were not goldfish; they were so big and colorful they must have been the most advanced form of fish before great white sharks, and Dad fed them once a day, sprinkling the flakes in a semicircle across the pond as if in a simple, dignified ceremony.

A month or two later, I was in the kitchen with Anouk and I could see Dad in the back garden with a tub full of a white substance that he was dishing into the pond in large spoonfuls. He was whistling contentedly.

Anouk pressed her face against the window, then turned to me with a stunned look. “That’s chlorine,” she said.

“Well, that can’t be good for the fish,” I said.

“MARTIN!” Anouk screamed through the window. Dad turned swiftly, with an air of perplexity. You could see in his face, even from that distance, that the man had tasted the collapse of his own mind, a taste that hadn’t yet left his mouth. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU GREAT BIG IDIOT?” Anouk shouted. Dad continued to stare at her as if she were a puppet he had made out of wood that had startled him by speaking.

We ran outside. It was too late. The three of us stood over the dead fish, which lay on their sides, eyes bulging with disbelief.

“You know what your problem is?” Anouk asked.

“Yes,” Dad said in a soft voice. “I think I do.”

That night I was numb with cold. The fire was dying out, so I went upstairs to bed fully clothed and piled blankets on top of me. From my bed I could see a soft glow emanating from the back garden. I went to the window and looked out. Below, Dad stood in his pajamas holding a kerosene lamp that bobbed in the dark.

He was mourning those fish. He went so far as to stare at his hands in a dramatic show of guilt, looking like he was in a student production of Macbeth. For a while I watched him standing down there in the back garden, the thin sliver of moon casting a pale light on his minikingdom. The wind cut through the trees. The cicadas sang a monotonous song. Dad threw stones in the pond. I felt disgusted, but it was compelling, the sight of him.

I heard a noise behind me.

There was something in my room: a bat, a possum, or a rat. I knew I’d never sleep until it was dead or removed; I knew I’d be lying in bed in the dark awaiting the sensation of sharp, jagged teeth on my toes. That was our new house for you. Our house, where from every little crack and orifice, every hole and slit, a living thing crawled out.

I went downstairs and made myself comfortable on the couch just as Dad came in from the garden.

“I’m going to sleep down here tonight,” I said.

He nodded. I watched him browsing along his bookshelves for something to read. I turned over on my side and thought the completion of his project had introduced a new danger- he might once again render himself susceptible to a lethal twiddling of thumbs. What was he going to do now? With all that activity in his head? The house and the labyrinth had sustained him for a time and would continue to sustain him for a while longer, but they would not do so forever. Sooner or later he’d need a new project, and if one considered the progressive scale of the projects he’d already embarked on- the suggestion box, The Book of Crime, the construction of the labyrinth- it was clear that the next one would have to be enormous. Something that would, ironically, sustain him to his death and probably be the thing that killed him.

Dad settled into the reclining chair and pretended to read. I knew exactly what he was doing; he was watching me sleep. It used to bother me, that creepy habit of his. Now I found it strangely comforting- the sound of turning pages in the quiet, his wheezy breathing and heavy presence filling the corners of the room.

He turned the pages quickly. Now he was not only pretending to read, he was pretending to skim-read. I felt his eyes like a sandbag on my head, and I stretched out on the couch, let out a little moan, and after a believable period of time, pretended to dream.

It must have been that the maze outside infected everything within. Why else would Dad leave scraps of paper around the house with nonsensical messages written on them, such as “Can’t love ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”? These messages were easily decoded by using the most basic system of cryptology, the first letter of each word in the text spelling out the real message.

“ Can’t love ear and not your open ugly raw room onto old maps!”

becomes

“Clean your room!”

Then he started with transposition, where the letters were jumbled and their normal order rearranged.

“Egon ot het sposh. Kabc ralet.”

becomes

“Gone to the shops. Back later.”

Then one night, a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I found the following message stuck to the bathroom mirror:

rezizsl ta ta ixs em teme

It took me a while to decode it, because he’d rearranged the words as well as the letters. After a few minutes of scrutiny, I cracked it:

“Meet me at Sizzler at six.”

Sizzler was where we preferred to eat to celebrate good news- that is to say, we’d been there once before, five years earlier, after Dad won $46 on lotto. I rode my bike through the labyrinth to the main road and took the bus into the city to the Hotel Carlos. This particular Sizzler was located on the top floor, although you didn’t need to stay in the hotel to eat there. You could if you wanted to, of course, but truth be told, once you’d finished eating and paid your bill, they didn’t really care where you slept.

When I got there, he was already sitting at a table by the window, I suppose so we could gaze out across the cityscape during the inevitable lulls in conversation.

“So how’s school?” he asked as I sat down.