Steve Toltz - Quicksand

I sit down beside him, light us both cigarettes and say, ‘Share it with the rest of the class.’

‘Did I tell you about the guy I met in hospital?’

‘Which one?’

‘Non-traumatic myelopathy.’

‘Was he Greek?’

‘He became paralysed after a two-hour surfing lesson, not from an accident, but from over-prolonged spine hyperextension, you know, while lying on the surfboard.’

‘I wish you would stop telling me these stories.’

Aldo buries his cigarette in the sand, and with wounded eyes contemplates the healthy bodies carried in on green waves.

He says, ‘Did you hear that?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

He gives me an annoyed look, as if I should be able to hear the noises in his head too.

We continue to watch the surfers risking then saving their lives in a single gesture, but even daredevilry grows monotonous after a while. And maybe I’m wrong, but I catch a flash of disappointment in Aldo’s face when one narrowly misses the rock — he is wearing his heart of darkness on his sleeve. He’s even breathing aggressively.

Aldo consults my watch again.

I ask, ‘Somewhere you have to be?’

‘It was Mimi who first brought me here.’

‘I know.’

He turns his head to look at the incongruity of his cumbersome mechanised chair nestled at the base of the rugged cliffs that tower over this isolated cove. Getting his chair back up that steep pathway now seems unfeasible. My eyes survey the top of the cliff-face, the incredible glassy houses with their endless vistas and wraparound balconies.

‘They’re not coming.’

‘Who’s not?’

‘I can’t wait any longer,’ he says.

‘For what?’

Aldo seems to be bursting out of himself. I am picking up frustration, sexual and existential, maybe at the idea of spending another couple of decades with the debris of himself, or maybe it’s just the leggy, bikinied women sprawled ten metres from where we’re sitting. In this 21st-century context, where we increasingly become, as McLuhan forecasted, the sex organs of the machine world, where does that put Aldo?

‘See that fucknugget over there?’

Aldo is pointing to a dark-toned guy with bleached-blond dreads in Mambo board shorts walking out of the surf like he has left it for dead.

‘Yes.’

‘Call him over.’

‘What for?’

‘Just do it, will you?’

I feel an uneasy social transaction coming up. I wave at the surfer and he comes over warily, as if in fear we might remove the genetic stamp from his body.

He says, ‘What’s up?’

Aldo says, ‘I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you’ll lend me your surfboard for an hour.’

‘You serious?’

‘Totally.’

‘Wait. Aren’t you that guy —’

‘Yep.’

The surfer’s thinking face comes on; he tightens his mouth and flares his nostrils that, to me, seem larger than the diameter of his whole nose. He turns back to the surf as if to calculate the exact latitude and longitude where Aldo will perish.

‘You gotta know what you’re doing.’

‘I do.’

The guy frowns, perhaps having noticed that Aldo is panting and sweating even though he’s inert.

‘There are only a billion safer places to surf. A mate of mine broke his hand here last month. Another guy I know cracked his skull. I’ve had a few stitches myself. And a punctured cheek. See?’ He shows us a puffy pink scar underneath his right eye.

‘I’ll be right,’ Aldo says, and turns his face to the wind and scrutinises the waves, then slides down a powerful wall of water — in his imagination — and is already towelled off and back among us.

It was 1990—we spent one hateful summer learning to surf in order to impress Suzanne Douglas and Kelly Stevens, but both of us quickly had enough of the indecision, fear and impatience necessary to be truly bad surfers; we hated it equally, and soon wound up back on dry land attracting a whole other genre of girls with secondhand metal detectors.

The surfer is silent a moment. Then he says, ‘My cousin’s got Parkinson’s,’ as if that were some kind of synchronicity, and worth applauding. When we don’t say anything, he says, ‘Well, shit. You can just borrow it for free.’

‘Deal!’

Aldo rolls onto his back and with lightning speed whips off his tracksuit pants to reveal tight black board shorts underneath. His eyes, cast in my direction, say Ta-da! My uneasiness makes way for confusion. He had his swimmers on all this time?

‘What about your thingy there,’ the surfer says, pointing brazenly to Aldo’s suprapubic catheter inserted in the abdominal wall. The guy is now acting as if he’s partaking in some long-scheduled Make-A-Wish event.

‘I have to be careful the bag isn’t torn from my body.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ I say.

‘If this comes out, you’d be shocked how quick that hole closes over.’

‘Shock me,’ the surfer says, hand on his hip.

‘Five minutes. Ten at the outside.’

‘Amazing!’

Aldo turns to me. ‘I’m giving you something to write about.’

‘I don’t do obituaries.’

Maybe, in a complicated spiral of human thought, Aldo figures dying is the ultimate act of self-protection. That is, once dead, nothing further can harm him.

He digs a small hole in the sand and opens the spout of his drainage bag and releases the foggy liquid into it and the air steams with the unique odour of sand and piss. I submerge a weary disgust and am reminded that it’s possible for two things to be wrong in parallel — you can be paralysed and have a psychotic breakdown. Aldo stares at me with a bemused smirk. He says, ‘Sick of revulsion yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Tie my ankle to the board.’

That has accomplice to murder written all over it. Don’t I have a duty to stop him, if not as a friend, then as an officer of the law? Of course, as a writer, I am impelled to let him try.

‘Aldo,’ I say, ‘think it over.’

I want to impress upon him the obvious fact that things can always be worse, that even though he has been jailed and paralysed, bankrupt and heartbroken, things can always spiral into an ever darker, ever bleaker hole. In this case, he could transition from paraplegic to quadriplegic. I wouldn’t put it past him.

‘Now carry me in.’

‘I’ll get wet.’

‘Don’t be a pussy.’

It has been many years since anyone has called me that off-duty. The surfer helps lay him facedown on the board then we ferry him to the shore, like pallbearers transporting a coffin.

He says, ‘I feel like the Fussy Corpse.’

‘I can see that.’

Our eyes meet and his reveal some inner explosion of pain he soundlessly bears. I realise he’s crying.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m scared. I’m so scared.’

‘Don’t do this,’ I say.

He doesn’t say anything, but from his blanched and fractured face I know he is three-dimensionally projecting every possible negative and catastrophic outcome. The air sparkles around us. The surfer and I lower Aldo and the board flat onto the sea. The water is cardiac-arrest cold. The surfer says, ‘Good luck,’ and retreats back up the beach. I point out to Aldo that medical access will be difficult here, and if anything happens I don’t know how I’ll get him back up that cliff. He shrugs me off and starts paddling fearlessly to make it over the first wave and immediately slides off the board. I run in and lift him back on. Aldo hauls himself up and paddles out with a facial expression I would call arrogant distress, before sliding off again.

There’s no way for him to do it. ‘Want to give up?’

Before he can answer, a four-footer crashes down and I hear him shout something that sounds like ‘Fuck me with a hadron collider!’ as he vanishes into the sea. All I can see is the fin of the board poking out of a rush of white water. I sprint over literally fearing I will see viscera, and pull him up out of the surf. He is breathless and tripled over in pain. He looks like a drowning man whose one wish is to die in a fire.