Steve Toltz - Quicksand

And Leila! What he had done to his poor mother didn’t bear thinking about. He’d broken every social contract when he borrowed from her and from his girlfriend. What exactly was it that made these women so blindly, so uncritically supportive?

One night Aldo was lying in bed praying to become a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye cruising through space and time before disappearing in a violent white flash. This was not the first time he’d had a version of this fantasy. Stella was asleep in shrunken leather pants she’d worn in a sauna for a music video. He pushed himself gently off the mattress and went to the kitchen, poured himself a whisky and applied for a new credit card, then tore up the application and wrote the following letter: Dear Sir/Madam, I’m honestly not sure about this alarming version of destitution whereby a veritable pauper is allowed to gad about like a respectable person and even apply for additional credit cards such as your bank sends me unsolicited in the mail. I try to reassure myself that ‘everyone’s in debt nowadays’ but the fact of it being an epidemic doesn’t help one iota, any more than the knowledge of being swept up in a fatal plague would aid in any practical way the infected individual. He tore up the letter, and dug out his mother’s bills. That very afternoon, he had dropped by Leila’s ground-floor apartment and stood on the busy street watching his mother at the sink, crushing her cigarette into the pot plant next to the wilted celery in a glass. Behind her, a man dressed in black entered and rested his hands on Leila’s shoulders. He thought: Who’s this motherfucker? The man in black smiled like a clown in a horror movie. His hair was white and his nose was so flat it looked to be embossed on a graven image of a face; he was a man with no profile whatsoever. Gah, another priest.

He went inside.

‘Father Charlie, this is my son, Aldo.’

The priest dropped his teaspoon into the cup he gripped with bony hands. ‘So this is the young man who couldn’t be satisfied making a living instead of a fortune, who has impoverished his poor mother.’

Aldo stiffened; he felt dirty just being in this priest’s line of sight and thought, not for the first time, of what Henry would have made of Aldo dropping his mother in the lurch. He said nothing but thought: What’s a man who clutches at straws for a living doing here anyway? Father Charlie stood there, one eyelid flickering. The kitchen was a mess. Leila could never close a drawer or cupboard door or replace a lid after using it. Stuck on the fridge door were overdue bills with red stamps and highlighted numbers from which Aldo averted his gaze and instead glared wildly at the priest, wondering if he was one of those men who came to God late in life, after he’d hit rock bottom and left a trail of sadness and illegitimate children. Father Charlie looked like he wanted to call on his higher power for backup. Finally he said, as if he had to unglue his mouth to speak, ‘I’ll be off, Leila.’

‘Don’t let the door hit you in the immortal soul on the way out,’ Aldo said.

Leila betrayed her groan of disapproval with a slight smile.

With the priest gone, Aldo and his mother curled up on adjoining sofas in the living room, with its chintzy fake fireplace, glass purple grapes, and her framed self-portrait in needlepoint, and Leila debriefed Aldo on her status quo. She was being sued by her lawyer for unpaid legal fees; a breast cancer screening test was clear, but she had reason to fear false negatives; the local crime rate was up and she was on the verge of a home invasion; the students at her acting school had deserted her; and physically, her life was entering a new period, its worst one yet — varicose veins, osteoporosis. ‘And — I’m just going to say it. Block your ears if you don’t want to hear it.’ Aldo blocked them, but not enough to stop the words prolapsed uterus . ‘Old age,’ Leila said, ‘it’s like walking the plank.’ She buried her face in her hands and said, ‘Thank God my parents are dead and don’t have to see their little girl in this situation.’ Aldo said, ‘That’s a strange thing for an old woman to say.’ They talked on and on, they shushed each other and berated the other for shushing (‘Don’t shush me!’ ‘You shushed me first!’) and let the room darken around them. The night was full of eyewitnesses. Aldo stared out at the stuporous pedestrians: a man bone-white in the moonlight; a group of young people, one of whom grabbed his crotch and gyrated. She had curtains. Why didn’t she close them? Some of the faces seemed close enough to touch. Only the barred windows kept the spectators from actually climbing inside. When it was time to go, the topic of conversation finally hit the target it had been ducking and weaving. Leila couldn’t meet Aldo’s eye when she confessed she had become so afraid of the bills she couldn’t even bring herself to touch them. Aldo scooped up the pile stuck to the fridge.

‘I’ll take care of these.’

‘ How will you? How ?’

‘I’ll work it out. Don’t worry so much.’

Out on the road, Aldo stood under the yellow streetlights casting their little puddles of buttery light, and with shaking hands opened all the letters and bills and overdue notices. He was stunned; she hadn’t paid her health insurance and it had expired, none of her medications were covered, and she wasn’t paying the mortgage either. He drew in deep breaths and sat right down on the footpath and calculated: nine thousand dollars just to get back to one month behind. Taking care of the woman he had personally impoverished now seemed impossible.

In his own house at three in the morning, staring at those bills, he thought: I should have died in puberty. It was a cloudy night. Out the window, the blades of grass looked black. The tiniest sliver of moon was barely visible over the serrated treetops, and his eyes angled down to the garden he was contractually obligated to maintain, to the space between the brick barbeque and the dead tree, the designated location for the music studio he’d promised to build for Stella with the landlord’s permission. Yet he couldn’t afford the materials for a basic shed. This was something Stella had begun to mention, often and snidely. In truth, he had detected a subtle shift in his girlfriend’s patience and attitude lately. She still paid uncomplainingly for their groceries with her meagre earnings gigging at various pubs and her part-time sales job at Tentworld, and greeted him at the door with loving enthusiasm as if he’d just returned from World War I, but he felt demoted in her esteem and suspected she was getting through entire sexual episodes using muscle memory. At that moment, he remembered he’d impulse-bought a hospital-quality blood-pressure kit from a medical-supply company and for the rest of the week he’d have to skip meetings in order to be sure to intercept the postman. Aldo banged his head against the glass. How was he going to get out of this?

He shut his eyes, emptied his mind, savoured the emptiness. He heard a voice, his own voice, say, ‘What about opening a B, B & B — Brothel, Bed and Breakfast?’ Maybe. ‘Why not?’ Because who wants to stay overnight in a brothel, that’s why not. He gave himself a mental thumbs-down, and spent another minute moving his lips, waiting for sound to emerge. He said, ‘What about selling extra storage space to hoarders?’ Now that had potential. Untapped customer base, unmet needs, plenty of room (heh-heh) for repeat business. Aldo slapped his hands together. His ambition was getting back up on its feet. He would not take dismal failure for an answer, and like always, his trampled spirit was set to regain its original shape. Or was it? There was something different this time; for once he didn’t feel his irrepressible optimism skyrocketing, because now he realised the truth of his relationship — what he had long thought was symbiotic was actually parasitic, and he wasn’t the host. He stood there in a sad daze, mourning every decent version of himself he’d ever imagined.