Steve Toltz - Quicksand

He didn’t seem surprised to see me. ‘I run in different circles. You know that.’

I did know that. Aldo lived in a way that often got me reevaluating my own modus operandi — lie low and keep out of people’s way. Aldo had weed friends, binge-drinking friends, Spanish-class friends, indoor-soccer friends, science-geek friends, hipster friends, vaguely criminal friends, business friends, school friends, old friends, new friends — now sick friends — he was an indiscriminate friendmaker, often caught in a freak friendstorm. Aldo had a thousand confidants, a thousand allies who frequently, depending on their level of financial investment, became a thousand enemies.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Come into my bedroom,’ he said, leading me into his monastic yet untidy room at the end of the hall. One lamp, broken. One double bed, unmade. One apple core on bedside table atop a stack of psychology textbooks. One chair covered in an avalanche of underpants and T-shirts. One couple dry-humping on the bed.

‘Let’s try the balcony.’

Out there the air was brittle and cold. Over the Navy Yard, where three gargantuan vessels were anchored, storm clouds formed. To the south, fireworks and a shifting curtain of smoke.

‘Where is it?’ I asked, at the same time as he exclaimed, ‘Stella’s pregnant!’

It took me a moment to register. ‘With her husband’s baby?’

‘Jesus. Why do you have to say it like that?’

Inside someone switched tracks from Radiohead to Stevie Wonder. Aldo tightened his frown and leaned into me.

‘Where’s what?’ he asked.

‘I heard you bought Nembutal from a vet.’

He flashed a smile as if from inside a raincoat. ‘So?’

‘Nembutal, Aldo. The suicide drug.’

‘So? So? So?’

I got annoyed now. ‘So why don’t you just put a pistol in your mouth? Why are you sneaking around buying vet medicine? You do know that Nembutal is horse poison, right?’

Aldo stubbed his cigarette out on the frosted glass of the circular table and said, ‘Of course I know. You think I want human poison? You’d have to pour yourself literally buckets of human poison just so you can reach the point where you can say: this is enough to kill a horse. So why not go straight for the actual horse poison and consume less?’

All of a sudden I wished this were some artificial reality from which I would eventually be unplugged.

A throat cleared theatrically. Doc Castle came out onto the balcony lighting a spliff, followed by three other men who moved in a confident, guileless manner that suggested divorced fathers with new girlfriends, or content homeowners who had just paid off their mortgages that very morning. Aldo made the introductions. Jeremy Samuels, lawyer. Evan Pascall, dentist. Graeme Frost, accountant. I stood there letting my face go slack. Aldo Benjamin, snake! He’d built personal connections with the full suite of professional services for his stupid human life where emergencies came with bizarre regularity. He was at home on the edge of hysteria, where he lived his open secret: that he was a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster that had just happened, or a disaster that was currently happening. This methodical gathering of human fire hoses was shameless. I felt used and was overwhelmed with disgust to find myself face to face with these friendships that were all ugly mirrors of my own. I thought: Enough’s enough. I would no longer offer myself as parachute, chaperone or soft landing for this guy; I didn’t care how far back our friendship went, how much history we shared. I was sick of being obliging. Aldo had now spent all his friendship tokens and unless he had some ingenious scheme to get a fresh supply, we were fucking done.

I snatched the joint out of Doc Castle’s hand and tossed it over the balcony. ‘You know what I’ve just realised, Aldo? I’ve had enough of you.’

Aldo blinked, and Doc Castle and the rest of the professionals awkwardly edged backwards as I went on a verbal rampage about how Aldo and I might have been genuine friends in the past but he had been using me for years. I even repeated Tess’s fear that Aldo’s most toxic, corrupting influence was not on my behaviour, but on my destiny, and now I feared she was right; there was something contagious about his shit luck, and in his orbit one had a tendency to give oneself bad advice. It started to drizzle, affording the spectators the perfect excuse to return inside. Aldo hadn’t moved; his head was cocked and he wore a strange sad smile, a practised smile, as if he’d heard this speech before from others. Maybe he had.

‘I know I’m a pain,’ he said. We stared silently at each other. A pulsing light from the nearby telecommunications tower went off. That seemed to be my cue. I stormed inside.

‘Liam, wait,’ Aldo said as I tramped through the party into his bedroom, where I ejected the copulating couple and turned over magazines, tossed self-actualisation tomes and dry psychology textbooks to the floor, methodically ransacked his cupboards, swung my arm in a loose arc underneath his bed, gathering socks and T-shirts and shoes I’ll bet Aldo assumed he’d lost. His guests gathered at the doorway to make snarky asides and take photographs on their phones, but I doubted they could perceive the tendrils of Aldo’s psyche twined around mine. They certainly couldn’t have caught all the nuances of intimacy I felt while touching his things, nor seen the angry tears in my eyes. This was a friendship of nearly twenty years I was throwing away here. I rifled through his drawers, charged by the spasms of rage I’d ceded control to, and aware of the frightening effect an armed uniformed maniac must be having on spectators. It was in a white Nike sport sock that I found it: an opaque bottle with a stopper and an acrid odour rising out of it. I went into the kitchen, waved it in the air in prosecutorial triumph at Aldo, who didn’t respond in any visible way. My plan was to pour it down the sink, but Aldo’s non-reaction forced a melodramatic act; I smashed it on the kitchen tiles, and almost immediately the cat went to lick it up. I removed the cat, found a mop, and cleaned up the Nembutal before the animal could get to it and die violently in front of the whole party. Aldo watched all this with a compelling look of genuine, haunted sadness. I had robbed him of his last resort, seized his suicide from his actual hands. I thought: One man’s tragedy averted is another man’s fantasy deferred. I wrapped the broken glass in newspaper and stepped into the cold hallway without a word.

VI

For several months I took a well-deserved hiatus from my old friend, stopped returning his messages, resisted the temptation to call, slid the idea of him into a compartment with a hidden bottom. On Sonja’s eighth birthday he sent a musical-ballerina jewellery box; that it was his first gift since her christening only exacerbated my annoyance and strengthened my resolve. At the same time I stopped writing. Outnumbered by bad ideas, I tossed it in, and this new commitment to personal and artistic failure somehow felt in concert with my sad abandonment of my hopeless friend. Once I almost weakened: his histrionic voice on my answering machine sounded like it came from the inside of a metal pipe, whispering harshly and cryptically about deep trouble. Sonja was playing on the floor next to me, a formidable punk princess sporting a pink tiara, her eyes smeared with her mother’s mascara; she looked scared at the sound of Aldo’s voice. It was a tough decision, but I deleted that message. Another afternoon, Stella telephoned to tell me she wanted to try to force Aldo to get an ordinary job to pay her back the money he owed, and couldn’t I talk sense into him?

‘Trying to make it rich after all these years is frankly stupid,’ she said.