Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Behind him, a senior detective with a harangued face and mirrored sunglasses pushed up on his head waved me over.

‘Constable Liam Wilder?’

‘Yes.’

‘Name’s Doyle. Your mate’s charged with attempted infanticide.’

‘It’s a mistake.’

Doyle made his eyes sigh — I’d never seen that before. ‘He had a note in his pocket.’

‘A confession?’

‘Not exactly. Here.’

He handed me a note in a plastic envelope. It read:

Dear Lord, when Fate jiggles her wet finger in my ear like a little sister, and I knock over jars of girlfriends’ grandmothers’ ashes and tip over scaffolding I am attempting to scale, when bicyclists clip me in passing and friends’ pets die on my watch, what the fuck, you old Dog? I mean, it’s hard not to take the spontaneous tumbling of shop displays the wrong way!

P.T.O.

On the other side was written:

Why, O Lord, is it my role in this life to be not just the falling clown, but the falling clown who other falling clowns fall on? In other words, how the fuck is an old lady grabbing onto my arm as she trips in a supermarket characteristic of ME?

(Amen)

Aldo Benjamin

I thought: Aldo, my poor, sad-lucked, kind-hearted fucked-up friend, this desperate and pitiful plea to a God he didn’t believe in must really be the end of the line. I fought back angry tears and berated myself: what kind of friend had I been? I never helped him avert a single disaster. My desire to protect him had always come to nothing.

This train of thought was suddenly derailed by an unexpected event. That absurd prayer set it off: Nabokov’s throb, Nietzsche’s rapture of tremendous tension, Shelley’s inconstant wind, Jarrell’s lightning strike, Hazlitt’s mighty ferment, Lorca’s duende, Dickinson’s soul at the white heat, Morrell’s deadbeat dad (who comes through when you least expect it, then disappears when you begin to count on him), i.e. Inspiration. The idea that compels you to create with the urgency of flushing drugs down the toilet as the police are breaking down your door, or with the adrenaline that comes with stuffing a body into the boot of a car before the CCTV swivels back in your direction. I stood there immobile. The idea was spreading through my body like whisky. A hodgepodge of passages from Artist Within, Artist Without swam in my head: … you are in the business of immensities … precision is the next best thing to silence … only when you have lassoed multiplicity will there be nothing to add … write what knows you … to discover the point of your uselessness … above all, find your natural subject.

And I had! The last cigarette shaken out of the soft pack of ideas: my sad old friend, who I’d met in 1990—a two-decade gestation period. Other people were mere vapour to me, but I knew his inadequacies by heart. No facile invention necessary; I’d give readers the realest person I knew. Of course, his life was anything other than ‘the way we live now’. Nobody lives like him and lives to tell the tale. I’d tell his tale! I’d curate an exhibition of his foibles and follies. I felt luminous, intrepid, like a correspondent embedded in hell. I was going to make my report. Finally! My natural subject.

‘You OK?’

I stood blinking at Aldo’s note, trying to memorise it, eyeing the photocopier under the bulletin board in the adjoining alcove.

‘Constable? What do you make of it?’

I’ll tell you what I’ll make of it! Insomuch as a friend is an exploitable resource, and since I can’t, it seems, help him anyway, I’ll mine Aldo for everything he is, and write about all the terrible things that have happened to him, this small, inoffensive human being who can’t catch a break, and how he is somehow complicit in the worldly and supernatural crimes perpetrated against him. Preliminary title: Woe is He . Or Jokers of the Fall . Or Between the Water and the Clay .

‘Do you mind giving me a moment?’

I went to the men’s room; the reflection of my rapacious face was jarring. My inner voice’s faint excited whisper: This is it. This is it. Was this it? Was I sure? Morrell says: Muses lay traps and conjure mirages. On the other hand: Some women you have to bed before you can reject them. OK, I know Aldo told me untold things in absolute confidence but this was minimal compensation, the least I could recoup for my efforts. Besides, his life could benefit from close reading. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, so I would examine it for him. Who else but a best friend could do that?

I opened my notebook and with hardly a moment’s thought or hesitation, I wrote: The weird truth is I’ve often become good friends with people I originally disliked, and the more I downright loathed the person, the better friends we eventually became. This is certainly true of Aldo Benjamin, who irritated me at first, then infuriated me, then made me sick, then bored me senseless, which led to his most unforgivable crime — occasionally, when in the process of boring me, he’d become self-aware and apologise for being boring. ‘No no,’ I’d have to say, feigning shock at the suggestion, ‘you’re not boring me, please go on.’ I sometimes had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.

I stared at that paragraph, and allowed myself a brief shiver of admiration for having expressed something true. The pen was still wriggling in my hand. I had more to say, much more. I closed my eyes and contemplated the daunting task ahead. To write this story would automatically throw me into a head-on collision with the meaning of fate, humanity’s, sure, but Aldo’s strange specific one too, for I could finally admit what I always knew to be true: he is unique, he who seems hell-bent on falling into the same river not twice but innumerable times.

And I could unravel, permeate, explain him.

Senior Detective Doyle gazed at me with a cool, suspicious eye when I came to his desk and asked to personally conduct the interview. Everything about me had become sinister, and he spotted that. ‘Your mate’s having a manic episode,’ he drawled, as if being manic was evidence of his guilt.

‘I will get him to speak,’ I said, and Doyle looked baffled and annoyed.

‘You’re not hearing me. He’s already speaking, Constable.’ Doyle again made references to a manic episode; Aldo was either coked up or on methamphetamines or simply out of his mind. Yes, he was talking, he repeated, but not about the crime per se, this wasn’t a confession, and he wasn’t saying anything incriminating, though what he was saying was certainly very disturbing, and Doyle had left Sergeant Oakes in there to keep an eye on him.

‘In any case, Mr Benjamin has been specifically asking for you to be present for the interview,’ he said with a light snarl.

‘Thanks for mentioning it,’ I responded, then moved briskly to the interview room, as if all the nation’s novelists were hurrying to beat me to it.

I entered to see Aldo, greyhound-thin, gripping the undersides of his chair as if he and the chair were hurtling through space. His hair was wet and combed back and looked like a kind of mould, and he was emitting an uneasy vigour and chattering like a small mob, explaining how he was ashamed of his long-held desire to see a mounted policeman thrown by his own horse. He turned away from Sergeant Oakes to give me a furtive hand gesture that looked like an aborted thumbs-up, but his eyes only lingered on my face long enough to convey vague disappointment, as if for a split second he thought I was coming in to tell him his bath was ready. Though the room was ice-cold, and Aldo was in short sleeves, his face was sheened with sweat. Now he was saying he was tired of thoughts so self-pitying he believed he could hear God throw up in His mouth.