Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

Shortly after my eighth birthday, I woke up. Just like that. Four years and four months after I slipped into a coma, I slipped out again. Not only could my eyes see, but I used the lids to blink. I opened my mouth and asked for cordial- I wanted to taste something sweet. Only people regaining consciousness in movies ask for water. In real life you think of cocktails with pineapple chunks and little umbrellas.

There were a lot of joyous faces in my bedroom the week I returned to the land of the living. People seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and they all said “Welcome back,” as if I’d been away on a long voyage and any moment I was going to pull out the presents. My mother hugged me and covered my hands in wet kisses that I could now wipe on my pajamas. Even my father was jubilant, no longer the unfortunate man with the freak-show stepson, the Amazing Sleeping Kid. But little four-year-old Terry: he was in hiding. My sudden rebirth was too much of a shock. My mother breathlessly called for him to come and meet his brother, but Terry was a no-show. I was still too tired and weak to be offended. Later, when everything went into the toilet, I was forced to consider what it must have been like for Terry’s developing mind to grow up next to a corpse and then to be told “That creepy mummy over there is your brother.” It must have been spooky, especially at night when the moonlight hit my frozen face and my unmoving eyeballs fixed on the poor kid, as if they had solidified that way on purpose, just to stare.

On the third day after my resurrection, my father thundered in and said, “Let’s get you up and about.” He and my mother grabbed my arms and helped me out of bed. My legs were sad, dead things, so they dragged me around the room as if I were a drunk friend they were escorting out of a bar. Then my father got an idea. “Hey! You’ve probably forgotten what you look like!” It was true. I had. A vague image of a little boy’s face drifted somewhere in my mind, but I couldn’t be sure if it was me or someone who had once hated me. With my bare feet trailing behind, my father dragged me into the bathroom to look at myself in a mirror. It was a crushing spectacle. Even ugly people know beauty when they don’t see it.

Terry couldn’t avoid me forever. It was about time we were properly introduced. Soon after everyone had lost interest in congratulating me on waking up, he came into the room and sat on his bed, bouncing rhythmically, hands pressed down on his knees as if to keep them from flying away.

I lay back in bed gazing at the ceiling and pulled the covers over me. I could hear my brother breathing. I could hear myself breathing too- so could anyone; the air whistled noisily through my throat. I felt awkward and ridiculous. I thought: He’ll speak when he’s ready. My eyelids weighed a ton, but I wouldn’t allow them the satisfaction of closing. I was afraid the coma was waiting.

It took an hour for Terry to bridge the distance between us.

“You had a good sleep,” he said.

I nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. The sight of my brother was overpowering. I felt impossibly tender and wanted a hug, but decided it was better to remain aloof. More than anything, I just couldn’t get over how unrelated we looked. I know we had different fathers, but it was as if our mother hadn’t a single dominant gene in her whole body. While I had an oily yellow complexion, a pointed chin, brown hair, slightly protruding teeth, and ears pressed flat against my head like they were waiting for someone to pass, Terry had thick blond hair and blue eyes and a smile like a dental postcard and fair skin dotted with adorable orange freckles; his features had a perfect symmetry to them, like a child mannequin’s.

“Do you want to see my hole?” he said suddenly. “I dug a hole in the backyard.”

“Later on, mate. I’m a bit tired.”

“Go on,” my father said, scowling. He was standing at the door glaring at me. “You need fresh air.”

“I can’t now,” I said. “I feel too weak.”

Disappointed, Terry slapped my atrophied leg and ran outside to play. I watched him from the window, a little ball of energy trampling on flower beds, a little streak of fire jumping in and out of the hole he’d dug. While I watched him, my father remained hovering at the bedroom door, with burning eyes and fatherly sneers.

Here’s the thing: I had peered over the abyss, stared into the yellow eyes of death, and now that I was back in the land of the living, did I want sunshine? Did I want to kiss flowers? Did I want to run and play and shout, “To be alive! To be alive!” Actually, no. I wanted to stay in bed. It’s difficult to explain why. All I know is a powerful laziness seeped into me during my coma, a laziness that ran through my blood and solidified into my core.

It was only six weeks after my groggy reawakening when- even though the pain it caused me to walk was reshaping my body to resemble a eucalypt twisted by fire- my parents and doctors decided it was time for me to return to school. The boy who had slept through a sizable chunk of his childhood was expected to slip unnoticed into society. At first the children greeted me with curiosity: “Did you dream?” “Could you hear people talking to you?” “Show us your bedsores! Show us your bedsores!” But the one thing a coma doesn’t teach you is how to blend into your surroundings (unless everyone around you is sleeping). I had only a few days to work it out. Obviously, I failed miserably, because it wasn’t two weeks later when the attacks started. The pushing, the beating, the intimidation, the insults, the jeers, the wedgies, the tongue poking, and, worst of all, the agonizing silence: there were almost two hundred students at our school, and they gave me four hundred cold shoulders. It was the kind of cold that burned like fire.

I longed for school to be over so I could go to bed. I wanted to spend all my time there. I loved lying down, the reading lamp shining, just a sheet over me, the blankets bunched up at the bottom of the bed like fat rolls. My father was unemployed then (the prison was completed and had its grand opening while I was in the coma), and he burst into my room at all hours and screamed, “GET OUT OF BED! CHRIST! IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE!” His fury multiplied tenfold when directed at Terry, who would lie in bed too. You see, it might be difficult for anyone to believe now, but somehow, juvenile invalid though I was, I still managed to be a hero to Terry. He adored me. He idolized me. When I lay all day in bed, Terry lay all day in bed. When I threw up, Terry plunged his fingers down his own throat. I’d be under the sheets curled up into a ball, shivering uncontrollably with fever, and Terry would be curled and shivering too. It was sweet.

My father was scared stiff for him, for his actual son, and he concentrated all his mental forces into predicting terrible futures, all because of me.

One day he had an idea, and for a parent, it wasn’t a bad one. If your child has an unhealthy obsession, the only way to wean him off it is to replace it with a healthy one. The obsession my father chose to lure Terry away from wanting to be an invalid was as Australian as a funnel-web spider bite on the kneecap.

Sport.

It was Christmas. Terry was given a football. My father said to him, “Well, let’s you and me go throw the ball around, eh?” Terry didn’t want to go because he knew I would stay inside. My father put his foot down and dragged him kicking and screaming out into the sunshine. I watched them through the window. Terry put on a fake limp. Whenever my father threw the ball, Terry hobbled miserably across the field to catch it.