Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘I’m not a mantis, Stella. And besides, self-improvement is so twentieth century. People don’t want to improve anymore. They want to enhance. They want to augment.’

‘You drum up some bullshit cosmology. You fake some visitation from God. You offer suckers water-glimpses of salvation for monthly credit card payments.’

‘What the fuck, Stella,’ Aldo says, annoyed. ‘I’m not a huckster.’

‘You’re good at finding people’s weaknesses.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Well, it’s a terrible thing to notice.’

‘People want what they’ve always wanted, salvation, and salvation costs what the market can bear.’

‘Hey, I have principles, despite what you obviously think of me.’

‘OK, don’t get so annoyed,’ she says, and takes his hand.

Now Stella and Aldo are promising to love each other forever. They turn and look back; the concert seems so small in the bemusing immensity of the desert where there’s nothing to see your reflection in, and that’s just fine. This is the first quiet moment they’ve had in a week. The quiet is insane. Stella’s hand is flat against her stomach.

‘Wait.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You can’t remember what?’

‘We’ve been going over these songs, and the playlist, and I’ve been nervous, I mean obsessed, I mean my mind’s been distracted.’

‘You can’t remember what?’

‘Wait. Just wait.’

She turns and starts walking fast. He has a bad feeling, the worst. Aldo catches up and strides beside her in the accusing silence of a desert in its prime. Stella whimpers with fear. They reach the edge of the main tent in the reddish light of dusk. Stella tries lying on her side, then on her back. ‘I can’t remember the last time it moved.’

‘It was this morning.’

‘Maybe. No. Not today. Was it today?’

This is the beginning of an ordeal. There is still a long way to go and they are not yet clear if the ordeal is real. Now she goes down on one knee. She is kneeling in the dirt, her yellow dress billowing around her. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Wait a minute.’ She seems afraid to move in the unrelenting heat.

She says, ‘Maybe it wasn’t yesterday either.’ Aldo doesn’t budge or breathe. She screams, ‘HE’S NOT MOVING!’

What happens next comes to Aldo afterwards as a blur. He shouts for an ambulance, for a doctor, and a man with a neck beard comes striding out of the wilderness with sweat patches under his arms, and a voice that seems to suggest homes with blinds permanently drawn. ‘Let’s get you to my office,’ he says, and helps Stella to her feet, manoeuvring her to the medical centre, a small fibreglass building with a broken fence. Inside he takes a Doppler foetal monitor and searches breathlessly for the baby’s heartbeat.

There isn’t one.

‘No heartbeat,’ the doctor says.

A voice in Aldo’s head says miscarriage .

The doctor calls it something else.

A stillbirth.

Aldo demands simple answers to complex questions. The doctor puts the lightest of emphasis on possibilities too early to know: A spontaneous rupture of the placenta? A blood clot in the cord? Too much fluid in her brain? Cord wrapped around her throat? That’s when they catch the word for the first time. Her.

It’s a girl.

Was it their fault?

No, the doctor says. These things happen.

These things? Things like this?

The doctor calls ahead to a hospital in Perth, four hours away, but they are on skeleton staff and won’t be able to remove the dead child until the following day. ‘There’s no point going now,’ the doctor says. ‘We’ll wait until first light.’

They step outside. The sun has gone down and the temperature with it. A still night, starry and enormous; a cold wind carries dust to their faces. The people dancing are on hallucinogenics or just look that way. Aldo and Stella walk wordlessly in a daze. Their silence is a third voice talking intrusively over them.

She is not walking so much as being borne along solemnly by limbs on autopilot. It is clear to Aldo that for Stella this is the split event, the moment that will divide her life in two. Was it also his?

Her name is called over the loudspeaker. At the same time, Aldo’s phone rings. It is his mother. He lets it ring. Aldo says, ‘This is not the end of us, we will live to love another day.’ The irritated male voice on the loudspeaker calls for Stella a second time.

‘Just tell them to stop calling my fucking name.’ In order to take her mind off their tragedy, Aldo says the seven words he’ll regret his whole life: ‘Why not get out there and sing?’

The agonising silence and this is how he fills it. Stella gazes at him in astonishment that quickly dissolves into a horrible blankness, a new kind of nothingness that settles and defines her. She says quietly, ‘Sing?’

Aldo stands his ground. ‘Sing! Sure, yes. That’s why we came here, after all. You should.’ As he is saying it, he thinks: Unless you shouldn’t. Unless it’s a terrible, possibly fatal idea. Without a word, she waddles onto the shadowed stage, and Aldo, like the Sherpa of old, carries her guitar and amplifier with trembling hands. She settles on a stool as he sets the amplifier up, glancing at her belly; they had hoped her womb was some kind of Xanadu, now it’s a crypt where their heartache is coordinated.

The wind blows sand and red dust against the stage. With moonlight splashing her skin, Stella steps up to the microphone. Aldo thinks about the things women have had to do throughout history with dead babies inside them. Plough fields, fight off hard Viking penises, bake. The doctor stands beside Aldo backstage, now just another tattooed, neck-bearded groupie. In a soft voice Stella begins to sing, so tentatively at first, Aldo has to call out and ask her to turn it up. Is she even touching those strings? He calls out, ‘Louder, baby!’

Staring across the plains, she takes a deep breath and violently expels the song, cracking the desert silence with a voice so unnervingly beautiful, Aldo becomes lost in the wonder of it. An optimistic mood envelops him, an expansive glee, a thought that this magical moment would kickstart the child and people would talk about it for years, the baby pronounced dead and resurrected through song.

His commiserating gaze gives way to a smile of pleasure, of pride, of love. Stella meets this smile with an unfeeling mask and he thinks maybe she can’t see it, so he smiles even more broadly, then adds two thumbs-up to the picture.

This evokes from Stella the most resentment a human face can carry. Later he will say that even though he then gave frantic glances, and miserable looks of solicitude after the show, it was too late, and what killed his marriage was that unforgivable smile and those dopey thumbs.

At the end of the song, the audience gives an uncertain spattering of applause. It is not havoc out there. The song barely registered. Stepping off the stage she is handed a joint which she smokes in one long jaw-dropping drag.

During the drive back to Perth the next morning, she has phantom kicks that give them new hope. Then Stella and Aldo huddle in the waiting room, and are told she has to be induced to deliver their dead child. Foetal demise, he hears the doctor say on the phone.

‘You’ll have to deliver the baby vaginally.’

‘No, no,’ Stella cries.

‘Can’t you just cut it out? Like a C-section?’

‘You don’t want your wife to go through unnecessary abdominal surgery on top of all this, do you?’

‘So this will be …?’

‘Just like a normal delivery.’

So Stella would get her natural birth after all.