Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“No, you’re not wasting your time,” he said. “I swear on my son’s life.”

“Dad,” I said.

“Just give me a minute to get my notes together. Um, Anouk, can you come in here for a sec?”

Dad and Anouk went into Dad’s bedroom and closed the door. I wanted to follow them inside, but I didn’t want Reynold and Oscar to think I was afraid to be alone with them, even though I was afraid to be alone with them. We all kind of nodded at each other, but nodding gets old after a few seconds. So I said, “I wonder what’s keeping them?” and I went into the bedroom, where Anouk sat on Dad’s bed while he knelt on the floor, bent over a collection of old black notebooks, frantically turning pages. It was a disturbing sight. I could hear him hiss: he was leaking anxiety. Anouk made a face at me, a face overloaded with dread.

“What are you standing there for?” Dad snapped at me without looking up.

“Are you ready?”

“He hasn’t picked an idea yet,” Anouk said.

“They’re waiting.”

“I know!”

“You swore on my life, remember?”

“All right,” Anouk said, “let’s everybody calm down.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Turn off the light!” Dad whispered to me urgently.

“Dad, they saw us go in.”

“Why do I care anyway? This is foolishness.”

Dad picked up a handful of notebooks and went out into the living room. Anouk and I followed. Dad sat on the armchair, leafing through one of his notebooks slowly, making clicking noises with his tongue. “So…yes…the idea…I have a couple that I thought you’d be interested in…”

He shuffled through to the last page and snapped it shut- seems the idea wasn’t there after all, because he pulled out another black notebook, identical to the first. And again, flying through the pages, clicking his tongue, eyeballs sweating. That notebook also failed to produce. Another pocket held a third small black notebook. “I just…oh yeah, this is something you’ll- no, probably not…Hang on…just one more second…one more second…I swear…five seconds- five, four, three, two, one, and the winner is…um, just one more second.” A tiny worm of a smile slid onto Reynold’s face. I wanted to stamp it out with the foot of an elephant. At the best of times I hated watching my father squirm in a hell of his own construct, but in the face of derision from outsiders, it was unbearable. Dad was in a frenzy trying to break out of this paralysis of indecision, when Reynold snapped his fingers. Twice. That must be how rich people get things done, I thought. It worked. Dad stopped and immediately read what was written on the page he happened to have open at that exact moment.

“Idea for a cannibal-themed restaurant- every piece of food is shaped like a part of the human anatomy.”

The idea hung in the air. It was idiotic. No one responded, because there was no reason to. Dad’s eyes dove back to his notebook and continued to search. Reynold didn’t snap his fingers again. He didn’t have to. Dad started anticipating the fingers and would stop randomly at an idea and read it out loud.

“Drug education- have schoolchildren spend a week living with a junkie in a falling-down squat. Child will watch junkie shoot up, vomit, steal from his own family, break out in sores, and finally overdose. Child will write a report of five hundred words and read it at junkie’s funeral, which will be part of the daily school excursion. Every time a junkie dies, the class has to bury him, until association of heroin with death is embedded in the unconscious minds of the children.”

He wasn’t thinking. He was just spewing out ideas. And none of the good ones.

“Introduce conscription for community service where we let the homeless live in the homes of bankers and take the mentally ill off the streets and let them shit in the bathrooms of those in the advertising industry.”

“Next,” Reynold said quietly.

“Electronically tag celebrities like cattle, so when they’re walking down the street-”

“Next.”

“Based on car emissions and usage of water, sprays, and nonrecyclable materials, calculate how much damage each individual is doing to the environment and record it against that person’s name and sentence him or her to spend an equivalent in hours or money in doing something to repair the environment.”

Reynold’s eyes flickered just enough to let you know he was thinking. “How do you make money on that?”

“You can’t.”

“Next.”

“Make every man, woman, and child in this country a millionaire.”

Reynold didn’t say anything, and he said it with his eyes. His disdain became another entity in the room. “Even if you could do that,” he said, “why would you want to?”

It was a fair question. Dad was about to answer when Reynold said, “OK, Martin. We’ve heard you out. Now I want you to hear us out- is that fair?”

“All right.”

“We want to do a television special on Terry Dean. The real story, you know? Stuff we haven’t heard. Maybe a miniseries. Over two big nights. The story as you’ve never heard it before.”

The name of his brother made Dad stiffen up so he looked packed in ice. “So who’s stopping you?” he said, distressed.

“You are. We have the police and media reports from the time, but everyone else who was there died in the fire. You’re the ultimate insider. We can’t do it without your contribution. There’s so much we don’t know.”

“Is that why you came?”

“Yes.”

So this was how Anouk had convinced these two media giants to come home and listen to my father’s inane ideas. What a miscalculation! We all sat for the longest time in the most dreadful, ominous silence, during which I was afraid Dad might try to strangle every neck in the room. He shut his eyes, then opened them again. After several more minutes passed and it became obvious Dad wasn’t going to say another word, Oscar said, “Well, we’ll be off.”

Once they were gone, Dad rose from his chair as if levitating, walked out of the house, and disappeared into the labyrinth. Anouk ran after him. I didn’t move for an hour, struck immobile by visions of my father killing himself or doing some fucked-up thing that would get him interned for another round in a mental hospital, and I’m ashamed to say the thought of these appalling things didn’t frighten or sadden me as much as they bored me to tears. That’s how sick of him I was.

I hadn’t seen or heard from the Inferno in almost a week. I played a waiting game with the telephone and lost. It had become, in my mind, a weird surrogate for her, a plastic representation. The telephone was silent because she was silent. I began to hate the telephone, as if she had sent it to me as her delegate because she was too important to come herself.

Shuffling around the labyrinth, I decided to bother Anouk. Shortly after we moved into the house, Dad had given her a spare room to use as a studio. Apart from being both sexy and annoying, Anouk was an artist of sorts, a sculptress. She was really into depicting the subjugation of women, the emasculation of men, and the subsequent ascension of women to a higher plane of consciousness. That is to say, the room was full of vaginas and dissected penises. It was an unsettling potpourri of genitalia; there were thin limping penises dressed in rags, bloody lifeless penises made to look like dead soldiers on a gloomy battlefield, penises with nooses tied around the shaft, charcoal drawings of terrified penises, melancholy penises, penises weeping at the funerals of dead penises…but they were nothing next to the victorious vaginas! Vaginas with wings, great ascending vaginas, twinkling vaginas flecked with golden light, vaginas on green stems with yellow petals protruding in place of pubic hair, vaginas with wide grinning mouths; there were dancing clay vaginas, exultant plaster-of-Paris vaginas, blissful candle vaginas with a wick like a tampon string. The most terrifying words you could hear in our house came out of Anouk’s mouth when you had a birthday coming up. “I’m making you something,” she’d say, and no smile was wide enough to conceal the oceans of dread bubbling underneath.