Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

The light was on in his living room. I peered through the window. Dad was reading the newspaper and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, opening the sliding doors.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Stealing milk.”

“Well, steal your own milk!” he said.

I walked in and tore the newspaper out of his hands. It was one of the daily tabloids. Dad got up and went into the next room. I looked closer at the newspaper. The story Dad had been reading was about Frankie Hollow, the recently murdered rock star who, coming home from a tour, had been confronted by a crazed fan who shot him twice in the chest, once in the head, and once “for good luck.” Every single day since then the story had managed to make the front page, despite there being no additional facts after day one. Some days the papers included interviews with people who didn’t know anything and who in the course of the interview revealed nothing. Then they squeezed every last drop of blood out of the story by digging up the dead star’s past, and when there was absolutely, positively nothing left to report, they reported some more. I thought: Who prints this toe jam? And then I thought: Why is Dad crying over this celebrity death? I stood there with a thousand belittling phrases swimming in my head, trying to decide if I should lay the boot in. I decided against it; death is death, and mourning is mourning, and even if people choose to shed tears over the loss of a popular stranger, you can’t mock a sad heart.

I closed the paper, more clueless than before. From the next room I could hear the television; it sounded like Dad was testing the volume to see how high it could go. I went in. He was watching a late-night soft porn series about a female detective who solves crimes by showing her clean-shaven legs. He wasn’t looking at the screen, though; he was staring into the tiny oval mouth of a can of beer. I sat next to him, and we didn’t talk for a while. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked.

“Thanks, Dad,” Dad said.

I sat there trying to think of something sarcastic to say in retort, but when you put two sarcastic comments side by side, they just sound nasty. I went back into the labyrinth and to the Inferno in my bed.

“Where’s the milk?” she asked as I crawled in beside her.

“It had lumps in it,” I said, thinking of Dad and the lumps within. Anouk and Eddie were right- he had slipped back into a depressed state. Why this time? Why was he grieving over this rock star he’d never heard of? Was he going to start mourning every death on the planet Earth? Could there be a more time-consuming hobby?

In the morning when I woke up, the Inferno was gone. That was new. We had obviously fallen to a new low- in the old days we would’ve shaken each other out of a diabetic coma to announce our departure. Now she sneaked out, probably to avoid the question “What are you doing later?” My hut had never felt so empty. I buried my head in my pillow and shouted, “She’s falling out of love with me!”

To distract myself from this sour-smelling reality, I picked up the newspaper and browsed through it, cringing. I’ve always hated our newspapers, mostly for their insulting geography. For example, on page 18 your eyes fall on the story of a terrible earthquake in some place like Peru with an insult hidden between the lines; twenty thousand human beings buried under broken rubble, then buried again, this time under seventeen pages of local blabber. I thought: Who prints this gum disease?

Then I heard a voice. “Knock knock,” the voice said.

That put me instantly on edge. I shouted back. “Don’t stand at the door and say ‘Knock knock’! If I had a doorbell, would you stand there saying, ‘Brrrring’?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Anouk asked, entering.

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me.”

Should I confide in her? I knew Anouk was having troubles in her own love life. She was in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always in the middle of a messy breakup. In fact, she was always breaking up with people I never knew she’d even been seeing. If anyone had an eye for the beginning of the end, it would be Anouk. But I decided against asking for her advice. Some people sense when you’re drowning, and when they step forward to get a clear view, they can’t help putting their foot on your head.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I want to talk to you about your dad’s depression.”

“I’m not really in the mood.”

“I know how to fill his emptiness. His notebooks!”

“I’ve snooped enough in his notebooks to last a lifetime! His writings are the stains of dripping juices from all the tangled meat in his head. I won’t do it!”

“You don’t have to. I already did.”

“You did?”

Anouk pulled one of Dad’s little black notebooks from her pocket and waved it in the air as if it were a winning lottery ticket. The sight of the notebook produced in me the same effect as the sight of my father’s face: an overwhelming weariness.

“OK,” Anouk said, “listen to this. Are you sitting down?”

“You’re looking right at me, Anouk!”

“OK! OK! Jesus, you’re in a bad mood.”

She cleared her throat and read: “ ‘In life, everyone’s doing exactly what they’re supposed to. I mean, look closely when you meet an accountant- he looks exactly like an accountant! Never did there exist an accountant who looked like he should have been a fireman, a clerk in a clothing store who looked like a judge, or a vet who looked like he belonged behind the counter at McDonald’s. One time at a party I met this guy and I said, “So then, what do you do for a crust?” and he said loudly, so everyone could hear, “I’m a tree surgeon,” just like that, and I took a step back and gave him the once-over and I’ll be damned if he didn’t fit the image precisely- he looked like a tree surgeon, even though I’d never met one before. This is what I’m saying- absolutely everyone is as they should be, and this is also the problem. You never find a media mogul with the soul of an artist or a multibillionaire with the raving, fiery compassion of a social worker. But what if you could whisper in a billionaire’s ear and reach the raving, fiery compassion that’s lying dormant and unused, where empathy is stored, and you could whisper in his ear and fuel that empathy until it catches alight, and then you douse that empathy with ideas until it’s transformed into action. I mean, excite him. Really excite him. That’s what I’ve been dreaming about. To be the man who excites rich and powerful men with his ideas. That’s what I want- to be the man who whispers thrilling ideas into an enormous golden ear.’ ”

Anouk closed the notebook and looked at me as though expecting a standing ovation. Was this what she was excited about? His megalomania was old news to me. I’d learned the same when I’d helped him out of the asylum. Of course, it was just a lucky break that time- taking the contents of those insane notebooks literally and using them on its owner was a very hazardous business- as we were about to find out.

“So what?” I said.

“So what?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t get it?”

“Stop repeating everything I say.”

“It’s the answer, Jasper.”

“It is? I’ve forgotten the question.”

“How to fill your dad’s emptiness. It’s simple. We go out and find one.”

“Find what?”

“A golden ear,” she said, smiling.

That night, on my way over to Anouk’s house, I thought about her plan. The golden ear she had decided on belonged to the head of Reynold Hobbs, who, in case you live in a cave that doesn’t get cable television, was the richest man in Australia. He owned newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, movie studios, and television stations that recorded sporting events that he broadcast through his cable networks. He owned football clubs, nightclubs, hotel chains, restaurants, a fleet of taxis, and a chain of record companies that produced music that he sold in his music stores. He owned resorts, politicians, apartment buildings, mansions, racehorses, and a yacht the size of the Pacific island of Nauru. Half the time Reynold lived in New York, but he was so secretive, you never knew which half. He was the rare sort of celebrity who didn’t have to worry about the paparazzi because he owned them. I tell you, Reynold Hobbs could take a shit off the Harbor Bridge and you’d never see a picture of it in the paper.