Steve Toltz - Quicksand

The rest of the afternoon continues like this. Feeling both weightless and rooted to every spot at once, with our terrible timing and the sun a holy riot in the sky, blazing onto our shoulders and our backs, each wave arrives tediously, another depressing milestone to be confronted and overcome. Worst of all, any wave we catch seems to angle towards the obstacle, the island, that big bulge of rock that threatens fractured wrists and snapped necks, punctured lungs and severed spines, and when it is not the waves, the rip is like a tractor beam dragging us towards it. A couple of times I come too close to the rocky island and leap off the board so I won’t hit it. In the lulls between carnage, we regroup onshore and I swear at Aldo in a dozen languages. I’m not the only one. While Aldo was fighting the good fight in the liquid trenches, the surfers, aggressively protective of their breaks, were growling and having fun cutting him off. I wade out and tell them to lay off, pointing to the wheelchair at the sand’s edge: a seagull is perched on one of the arms. By three p.m. his skin is an angry rash, like he’s been rubbed with a steel brush, and in the hours of horizontal surfing he has had multiple mouthfuls of sand and foamy scum. One time he snags himself on a rock and self-diagnoses coral poisoning. This is no good. No fun to watch either. I think: Surfing is primal in the way that human flight is primal, in that it’s not.

A single personal highlight: in the late afternoon I coast on a small clean wave close to shore. Though I feel like a child riding a paedophile’s back, and the ride lasts all of four seconds, I’m still mildly pleased and ready to quit while I’m only behind. When I go back out, Aldo’s sea-shaken, slackened body is sprawled on the board.

‘We done?’

‘Not quite.’

For some reason I allow this farce to continue, and when Aldo catches a wave to shore himself and I shout bravo, he admonishes me. ‘There’s nothing more depressing than a triumph of the human spirit.’

Frankly, his whole peevish demeanour is pissing me off.

‘So really, why are we doing this?’

He wants to share a destiny with a starfish, or be swept away? Has this something to do with Mimi, a way to remember the dead? One thing is clear. He’s making his own rites of passage on the fly.

‘Hey, tell me something,’ I say.

‘I miss starjumps.’

‘That wasn’t my question.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Your religion.’

‘What about it?’

‘Before prison, you sort of represented a vociferous brand of God-hating that pretty much called for a violent overthrow of the human need for spiritual comfort.’

‘You were in the courtroom. You heard my testimony. I know it’s hard for an atheist to accept, but even though He is nonexistent, God is irreplaceable,’ Aldo says. ‘In lieu of accepting the stale knockoffs on offer, one must reinvent Him or remain forever unfit for active duty.’

‘Man, I really wish I had my pen.’

‘Anyway, don’t you remember when we first met? I was a deep believer.’

‘Oh wait, you mean in Apollo?’

‘People not only want you to believe, they’ve already got the God all picked out for you.’

‘That’s not religion, that’s mythology.’

‘ Now it’s mythology. It was religion at some point. Sometimes I think about those old gods who came down and meddled in human affairs. Maybe they crashed my car.’

‘Way to take responsibility.’

Aldo makes a gastroenteritis face. ‘And maybe they descended to earth and took my form at your party.’

‘What party — Oh. That party.’

‘Have you ever felt so large you can’t be expanded yet so small you can’t be compressed?’

‘Nope.’

For another hour we lie on the strange symmetry of the waves, not talking, watching the setting sun reflected on the wet sand. At one point I go to get our phones and cigarettes from the beach, carrying them back out in one of Aldo’s ziplock medicine bags. On the flat we lie on our boards smoking and taking photos of each other. Occasionally Aldo catches a wave but he seems content to just lie there. It’s the end of the day and even my ears are sunburnt.

At sunset I say, ‘Let’s go in.’

‘A few more waves,’ he says.

My feet are growing numb. The wind has died down and there are no waves of consequence, just the general meander of the sea. The darkness that comes with the vanishing sun seems thick and slippery, and our boards slosh in the quiet sea that slobbers at the shore, regurgitating brown sand.

‘Now?’

‘Not yet,’ he says, with a look in his eye.

A crescent moon ascends majestically like a silky white eyebrow raised in surprise. The sky darkens completely as the sun disappears behind the cliffs.

‘Last drinks, gentlemen,’ I say.

‘Five more minutes,’ he says.

The night pours down and we float on the water with moonlight dancing on the foam. Baby waves keep us moving.

Lulled by the hypnotic currents, we keep parallel to each other. The ocean is black now, pitiless, cold, and Aldo is up on his elbows, water creeping across his board. The last two remaining surfers head for shore then stand together on the beach, half out of their wetsuits, looking semihuman, facing out to sea.

‘Let’s go in,’ I say.

‘You only have to take one look at the moon to know man will never walk on her ever again.’

‘Two minutes,’ I say.

My skin is tingling from the cool breath of night. We let our boards drift in circles, giving us a tour of our surroundings. Steep cliffs twist up to the stars that burn like sparks against the sky. At one point I’m turned away from the shore, towards the horizon, with the moon cutting a straight path across the sea. I make a mental note of the air, that new-planet smell, the sound of thrashing water against rock. When his board swings my way, Aldo’s face looks laminated in the moonlight. He grips the handles tight, lies rigid and gazes unpleasantly at that desolate island, breathing heavily. The sea is as flat as a lake now. It seems as if we’re in a bottle with the cork in. For a moment Aldo mumbles incoherently, then he falls silent and listens for something, like a child hoping to hear a mother’s footstep on a staircase. Every ten minutes I suggest going in, but Aldo resists.

‘Humanity’s common goal is to die with dignity and dignified in that context is defined as dying in our own beds, but what if you have a waterbed or Spider-Man bedsheets? What’s dignified about that?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing.’

‘Right up until his death,’ he says, ‘Henry thought people of good character were those who took cold baths. Until hers Leila was always presenting me with fruit as if she were Marco Polo bringing back pasta from the Orient. And Veronica — she was the first person who had a visceral reaction to my face, but she wasn’t the last.’

In the dark, you could almost hear his memories crackle like bacon.

He says, ‘The coccyx is the last bone to decay in the grave.’

‘Are you all right?’

He shook his head. ‘I feel so physically bad all the time I’ve gotten to the point of not knowing when I’m sick.’

‘What’s wrong now?’

‘Head pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, upper back pain, lower back pain, arm pain, elbow pain, wrist pain, hand pain, chest pain, hip pain, pelvic pain. I’ve got thermal hyperalgesia and tactile allodynia. Christ, forget it. I’m lashed to the first day of the rest of forever. Get Amnesty International in here. SMS the RSPCA. Reconvene the Nuremberg Trials.’

‘I’m sorry for what happened to you.’ I realise I hadn’t said this before now.

‘I know.’

‘I mean in prison.’

‘Even in a hundred years from now that will be the cause of death.’