Steve Toltz - Quicksand

The crowd thinned and the pub closed and we stood outside as a three a.m. wind nearly took our heads off, like some curfew-enforcing act of God. Beside us, a handful of stragglers were trying to hail taxis that had just ended their shifts, the drivers refusing passengers who didn’t live on their own exact street.

‘OK then, I guess I’ll see you later,’ Aldo said.

‘OK then,’ I said.

We loved each other but goodbyes were stubbornly awkward; I never really understood why, perhaps they were an expression of the disappointment of something left unsaid. No matter how open and honest we were, no matter how much we unburdened ourselves and admitted shameful secrets never before uttered aloud, we couldn’t seem to depart fully satisfied with the transaction. We stood another long moment. I thought about Aldo’s chronic fear of being alone. A frail half-smile sat weirdly in his otherwise frowning face. He looked like he could break into laughter or tears.

‘Do you remember when Stella couldn’t go a full sixty seconds without touching me in some way?’

‘It was annoying.’

‘She loved my smell.’

‘That makes one of us.’

The wind abated and we shivered in the cold night’s stillness, as Aldo launched into an unwelcome rambling monologue that it was much too late in the evening for, about how Stella’s kisses had felt one minute like she was violently cauterising a wound, and the next like a feather-light brush of the lips that drove him crazy, and how she’d never once belittled him, except of course with her own merits and abilities, and now he had this horrible feeling that something bad was going to happen to him and he wouldn’t be able to even get her on the phone. And did he mention that she was going to have a Buddhist wedding, though neither she nor Craig were strictly Buddhists? I smiled silently but it wasn’t my real smile and he knew it.

‘Anyway,’ he said, with a tinge of self-disgust, ‘I’m off!’ We gave each other a sad hug and an extra squeeze as our mutual expression of regret. Aldo’s keys jingled in his pocket, but I knew he never drunk-drove because of his fear of committing vehicular manslaughter. He set off at a dawdle and when he disappeared around the corner, leaving me in the empty street, I was struck with an overwhelming dread. Truth was, ever since high school, Stella had been the magnet that drew Aldo back to earth after he flew off onto dangerous tangents. In my case, when I’m feeling murderous and unhinged, it’s anchoring to come home and see Tess and Sonja in a standoff or a cuddlefest or painting the toenails of our claw-footed bathtub. Aldo was going home every night as if he was a contaminated sample, to an apartment empty but for ferocious silences and his own pot-bellied shadow, with no one to refill the liquid soap dispenser or quiet his alarmist tendencies or take minutes or second motions or bounce ideas off or egg him on or talk him down — and until he was ready for bed he would often sit in his Poäng birch-veneer Ikea armchair for hours, feeling like an unaccompanied minor on a long-haul flight.

IV

Six months after that, my phone rang just as a young shoplifter, in an attempt to extricate himself from my handcuffs, had gotten in a tangle in my backseat while a proliferation of nosy citizens had risen in a unified spasm and were circling me with their phone cameras and mortal hatred. It was Stella on the line, her voice dripping with the old dislike, as if she were gazing ruefully at a photograph of me as she spoke. Aldo had assaulted her at the wedding, she said, before drinking himself into a coma.

I was speechless. It was entirely plausible that Aldo might try drinking himself to death at her ceremony simply to cast a black omen over her marriage, but would he have physically assaulted her? True, Aldo was already a well-known parasite and failure, had declared multiple bankruptcies, and was the kind of man you might come across sharing cigarettes in an alleyway with a masturbating hobo, but he certainly wasn’t violent.

‘Craig thinks I should take out an AVO,’ she said, as if Aldo were one of those acid-throwing jealous exes who seek to disfigure what they cannot have.

‘You really think that’s necessary?’ I asked.

‘Listen to me very carefully, Liam,’ she said, in a flat, unfocused voice — I suspected she was browsing the internet while talking to me—‘ You’re his friend. You deal with him,’ and hung up. So what could I do but ride grudgingly to the rescue once more? I opened the car door and liberated the shoplifter from the handcuffs and took a stance that gave the crowd just the slightest hint of imminent arrests. In return, they gave me mock salutes and heil Hitlers. It was infuriating, but I couldn’t give them the finger if I didn’t want to see it on YouTube.

In the hospital room, Aldo lay flat on his back in perfect stillness, sheets firmly tucked to his chin as if the person who’d made the bed was unaware he was still in it. He looked full of oversized fears, like a ship in a bottle, in that you wondered how he squeezed them all in there. The room was suffused with a buttery light. Leaning against the window alcove, transfixed by his phone, was a short, middle-aged man with a boyish face, and on his head the answer to the age-old question of what happens to curly hair when it thins.

‘This isn’t it,’ Aldo said with fragility, as if the words were on a string he could pull back into his mouth at will.

‘Good to hear,’ I said.

He meant this wasn’t the thing he wouldn’t recover from, the dividing, before-and-after event that transforms lives. I weathered the uncomfortable angle required to embrace him and noticed he was insufficiently bandaged around the neck, so that the edges of nasty lacerations were visible.

‘I fell on a fork,’ he said.

‘Cake fork nicked his jugular,’ the small man in the corner said, laughing, without looking up. ‘There was a lot of blood, which didn’t make the wedding cake any more appetising.’

‘Who has a carrot cake for their wedding anyway?’ Aldo asked.

The image of blood-soaked carrot cake floated before my eyes. ‘Give me the highlights.’

Aldo made a grunting show of sitting upright. ‘The special day,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you. Her celebrant looked tolerant. Too tolerant. In fact, he exuded an exasperating degree of tolerance, as if, in addition to Buddhist and Hindu weddings, he performed KKK and Taliban weddings.’ The man in the corner guffawed. Aldo described the whole event: rooftop ceremony amid a shitload of tropical plants, him wedged between burly female cousins as the passive-aggressive groom and kite-strung bride lit candles and incense at the foot of a shrine to Buddha and shat something out of their mouths about the fastidious discharging of marital responsibilities. A couple of incoherent blessings later, Craig got up to say that he was compelled by the inadequacy of language to understate his feelings, then Stella’s uncle Howard made a speech that began as a nod to his hero L. Ron Hubbard but ended as a single long perverse sentence that made obscure references to a camping trip which had as its dénouement an exploding toilet, while Aldo got progressively shit-faced and kissed an aunt with a face like aged pork, and at some point made an uninvited wedding toast.

‘That was generous of you. Making a speech.’

‘Here.’

Aldo handed me his phone. Someone had been kind enough to video it and send him a copy. On screen, the shaky image of Aldo stumbling up to the bridal table and snatching a champagne flute out of the groom’s hand. ‘So, a Buddhist wedding! How unintentionally hilarious, considering the Buddha was a guy who abandoned his wife and child to do his own thing. Actually, don’t tell anyone but I think they think the central tenet of Buddhist philosophy is that a lack of ambition is a shortcut to enlightenment. And if , according to the orthodoxy, the goal of life is non-existence, then isn’t it an act of mind-blowing hypocrisy and unnecessary cruelty, at the least, for Buddhists to have children? It seems Stella and Craig have misunderstood the idea of the god within to mean that they themselves are God-like. Not that they need draw on this inner power or expect miracles from their own core. It’s just a nice feeling to be God, that’s all. So let us all toast this infuriating couple by raising our glasses to this tired brand of cheap, self-aggrandising pseudospiritualism! To Craig and Stella! If they ever live long enough to see their souls reborn into nonexistence, they’ll shit themselves for never and never. Amen.’