Steve Toltz - Quicksand

And we’re back. Thank God. So in response, you come to the decision to once and for all kill yourself.

I know I mocked the happy couple at their wedding, but at least the Buddhists know what a bummer being born is. And the future! I mean, do I want to be an entrepreneur in a world with an ageing population in which the biggest growth market will be human kidneys? Do I want to strain my lifespan just to witness the intergenerational conflicts or water wars of the mid-21st century? In any case, I was sick to death of cognitive function. I thought: You can only cure a fear of dying by dying. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt relief — early onset oblivion, I suppose — and took in the inexhaustible hum of the relentless hallway air-con, the smell of the chicken fettuccine blended with the stench of our dead hero’s final evacuations. I looked out the south-facing windows as though in a narcotic stupor and gazed at the squashed rectangle of empty blue and remembered how, when our little dead girl was born, I stupidly tried to console Stella by swearing we’d saved her a lifetime of heartache and pain. Now I turned back to the swinging body and strained to see the rising coils of his human soul — there were none — and I had an epiphany. Two things needed to happen before I could end my own life: one, I could not allow my mother to outlive me, and two, I needed to see that Stella and her new child were OK. Therefore I needed Leila to die, and I needed Stella to give birth.

You needed to see the baby and the corpse.

I even knew how I’d do it, the exact method.

Not hanging!

Please. I’d break into a hospital morgue and lay myself inside one of those terrifying metal drawers and take an overdose of sleeping pills and then slide myself into the wall.

Not bad.

Not bad? An irreproachably considerate death, you fuck.

So that explains why you were at the hospital once Stella gave birth. But you said you needed your mother to die before you did it.

That’s right.

So you changed your mind about that.

No I didn’t.

Wait a minute.

Yes.

Aldo.

So that happened.

I think I’m going to cry.

Why not? I did.

Leila died?

A month ago.

YOU DIDN’T CALL ME!

I seem to remember a certain somebody who’d had a gutful of a certain somebody else’s toxic influence.

I would’ve helped you.

Do what?

I don’t know. Organise the funeral?

Eh. Took me all of twenty minutes. Because I couldn’t bear sitting in some office with the inevitable funereal muzak and the consoling tone of the funeral director, I did the whole thing online with a few clicks; picked the day, the coffin, the flowers, the music, entered the address to pick up the body, another to send the death certificate, and after I’d completed the satisfaction survey, it was all organised. It was held in a building on Cleveland Street; the casket I’d chosen, a highly polished rosewood with full trim, had enough nicks and chips to suggest it was a showroom model, and above it was a blown-up headshot of Leila in her late twenties or early thirties — in any case, taken way before her gizzard-smelling later years. I stood inside the door misremembering several old family friends, citing ‘face blindness’, while every one of them shook my hand in condolence, but since I associate handshakes with congratulations, I had to resist the impulse to lop off each proffered hand at the wrist. In addition, most were people I owed money to or who downright blamed me for precipitating my mother’s death. Not that there was an abundance of mourners. I’d rejected the idea of a standard obituary notice. I mean, why alert graverobbers?

I can’t believe Leila’s gone. She was so full of life.

Never short on gratitude. Thank you, Aldo, she’d say, for ruining Christmas, thank you for ruining my birthday, thank you for ruining a perfectly nice Sunday lunch.

She had a great sense of humour.

Whenever there was thunder, she’d look at the sky and say, ‘Great minds think alike.’

She adored you.

As a mother who wanted photogenic children adores a moderately handsome son.

You were always embarrassed by her.

On public transport she spoke like loudspeakers! I remember when I was a child and she asked me to sing a little number for dinner guests, then turned to them and said I had a voice like the castrato Farinelli. And God, the nose she had for magazines hidden under mattresses. In those pre-internet days, her intuition had compass-needle accuracy, always pointing due porn.

I remember her being a very together lady.

That was a front, for visitors. In truth, she hardwired me for panic attacks, by example. Regarding suffering, she really set the tone.

You mean her death? Was it bad?

That depends. Are impacted bowels bad? Where do you come down on septicaemia and gangrene?

Jesus Christ.

She had to grapple with her complex reactions to the realisation of her worst fears, poor thing. The triumph of having predicted the worst-case scenario vs. the horror of experiencing it. She had her fucking legs amputated, Liam.

Oh Jesus! Where did she die?

Hospice. With a violent lemon odour and obligatory death-cat. That final visit the nurse said to me, ‘The body knows how to die, let the body do its thing,’ which I thought made sense, and when I went in she was lying peacefully, dying on her left side. She always had the outward appearance of indifference, which I suspect is the real secret to longevity. That or a genuine desire to die. I made a timid effort to wake her. How was I going to talk to her about the gangrene? She opened her eyes. I said, ‘What have you got there, soldier — trenchfoot?’ She turned her head, not because she couldn’t look me in the eye, but so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye.

Considerate. Did you say everything you wanted to say?

What could I say? What could I ask? What did I want to know about her, anyway? Why exactly she and I seemed to be more afraid than other people? It was always difficult to talk casually to her because her anxiety prevented it, her judgemental heart prevented it, and now her pain prevented it. ‘Aldo. We’re the last ones left,’ she said, looking genuinely heartbroken. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘The very idea almost makes me want to murder us both on the spot.’ She managed a laugh — she knew I was merely parodying my old heartlessness. ‘Besides, I always suspected you were secretly pleased to have outlived your family. In fact,’ I said, ‘I’m the only thing standing in the way of a complete sweep, and we both know it.’ She waved her hand at me. Every family has a private language. Ours was mainly gestural. Questions bubbled up, mainly about Veronica, but I couldn’t articulate them. The next twenty hours were atrocious. Leila never stopped talking about how she never got to do that European tour of death camps; she’d hallucinate old friends; I moved her from lying to sitting to lying. Even the morphine drip seemed insufficient to diminish her agony. In the end, she died when I was out getting drive-thru McDonald’s. I missed the moment, but you know who didn’t? That fucking white-haired priest, remember him, Liam?

Father Charlie?

He also showed up uninvited and unscheduled at her mostly secular funeral service, and spoke about the waves of bad luck that had broken against her. Henry’s death. Veronica’s death. And the final insult of losing her house due to her son’s financial misdeeds. Then the old cunt read a psalm, called her ‘a deep believer now resting in heaven’. That shit me. I took to the lectern to rebut. Thanked him for so deftly explaining how she had been confiscated by God into His kingdom, where I imagined her talking all throughout orientation and lurking creepily around the apostles’ dressing rooms. I said, ‘We are here today to honour a woman who once took up a whole two-seater couch but will soon fit in an overhead compartment on any domestic commercial flight. Leila Benjamin, a voice-over actress who after my father’s death never lost her unbecoming face of perpetual sorrow, and basically spent the rest of her life leaning on God and searching for codependents and working on her résumé and striking up curious friendships with predators of the cloth — an especially qualified congregant, having lost a husband and child, she had the smell of Job on her, poor dear.’