Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Aldo, in the coming years, when I ask why I’m passed over for promotion time and time again, my superiors will simply play me a recording of this interview.

That’s why you’re having so many problems as a writer. You’ve always been a stickler for reality. Anyway, there was a yeasty, antiseptic, faecal smell in Stella’s room that mingled with the pitiful bunches of service-station flowers, and the stink wafted unpleasantly towards me as I cautiously entered, removing my shoes. A shaft of brassy sunlight inclined through the narrow window. Stella was fast asleep emitting the softest snore you ever heard. On the windowsill, plastic plates and serrated white knives and sporks. The baby was asleep in a clear plastic bassinet on wheels in the curtained alcove on the far side of the bed. There he was, in the cold yellow light, tiny and shrunken, pointy-headed, blotchy-faced, with a wispy fuzz of fine black hair. Asleep, no different from my own baby when dead. I was afraid he was dead, he was so still — until I clocked the rise and fall of his little chest. Alive then. Time to put up or shut up.

You took out the pills.

Looking at the sign about mandatory handwashing affixed above the basin, I washed the pills down and stood for a moment staring at Stella, her sleeping body an almost panoramic vista, her long limbs half sheeted, and her gown blood-yellow where her bandages had soaked through; all this in a low steady light reminiscent of the Railway Hotel, that was, it only occurred to me now, nowhere near a train station. That would be my dying epiphany — oh well! The sleeping pills hit fast. It was not darkness that came, but fog. I was dying. A glimpse of death I felt secretly proud of, as if I were an amateur astronomer who gets to name a star. Now that free will was behind me, I might finally relax. It was time to go to the morgue, but my feet wouldn’t move. Maybe for some their whole life flashes, but I only got a single jolting memory from childhood of someone hitting me repeatedly on the back of the head with a tennis ball in a sock. Who wielded the weapon? I couldn’t remember. Maybe the same person who told me to ‘take a sleeping pill, wait half an hour, then smoke in bed’. Now I have a hazy recollection of picking up the little baby and nestling him next to Stella on the bed, under her arm. Miraculously he made no sound. I silently moved the cushioned chair closer and put my head on the mattress edge. I wanted to christen this baby without parental consent, but I couldn’t think of any good names. I remember wondering what teething felt like. A hush threaded its way through my bloodstream, through the arteries, and I felt the slow quiet of my heart, and the woolly darkness descend. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness was the baby opening his eyes and grabbing my finger and me weeping and thinking this was going to be the best death ever.

You don’t know how you wound up lying on the bed next to Stella and on top of the baby?

I must have climbed up onto the bed to snuggle. I just don’t remember.

Zolpidem causes memory loss.

That’s what I used to like about it.

Aldo, you cock, that baby could have died.

I know.

If Stella hadn’t woken up at that very moment —

I KNOW! I KNOW! Jesus, Liam. You don’t think I know that? If I wanted to die before, how do you think I feel now?

Interview concluded at four-thirty p.m. EST.

II

Stella walked gingerly into the station a few hours later, heels clicking on the hardwood floor, her new-mother’s face gleaming darkly in the spectral light she always carried with her. Everyone in the station turned to look. She hugged me hello with a tepid formality, like we were ambassadors of warring nations who had once shared a roll of toilet paper in the UN restroom.

‘This incident must have been very frightening, but Aldo didn’t try to kill your baby,’ I said plainly. She stared fiercely at me. ‘This was not a murder or attempted murder, it was just a clumsy suicide attempt and a total fuckup and you know it, Stella, you fucking know it.’

‘Constable!’

Senior Detective Doyle glared at me with all the sullen power of his rank. Stella seemed shocked at my vehemence and locked me in a straightforward gaze.

‘I guess.’

‘You guess ?’

There was, now that I come to think of it, always an uncertainty to her; as if she wasn’t sure of a single one of her life choices and was always on the lookout for a second opinion.

‘Come with me,’ I said, and grabbing a file led her outside where Stella held her body as if she feared I was going to reach out and touch it.

‘This is what you’re going to do,’ I said. ‘You’re going to say you’re not pressing charges and then you’re going to write a statement saying that this incident was entirely accidental, and you’re even going to say you were so out of it on painkillers it might actually have been you on top of your baby, and not Aldo.’

A suspicious frown gave way to a wan curiosity. She let out a full-body exhale and slid her hands into her pockets.

‘All right, Liam. But he needs to stay away from us for good.’

‘Absolutely.’

We stood awkwardly beside a row of police cars, and I don’t know why but I suddenly thought about her career, how music had been her life and she’d completely abandoned it. I felt an almost dizzying wave of empathy. The times I had given up writing had been a devastating exercise in soul-shrinking. I didn’t have an inkling how she disconnected the reflex to pick up a guitar, how a lifelong marriage to music could be so abruptly annulled. And as a songwriter, how did she withstand the pull of a melody or lyric that came to her in the night? I reflected how she’d given up not after but exactly in the middle of the death of their baby. ‘All right,’ she said again, sighed, snatched the paper and clipboard out of my hand and wrote a brief statement to the effect that Aldo hadn’t intended to harm her child, that she had picked up Clive herself and taken him into the bed without realising that Aldo was already passed out beside her. Her statement made no sense, but almost nobody was going to read it.

She handed me the clipboard. ‘Did he have to have his stomach pumped again?’

‘Sure.’

‘How is he?’ Before I could answer she asked, in a sort of breezy despair, ‘Why hasn’t he moved on?’

A brightness in her eyes betrayed that this was some kind of triumph. Who wouldn’t want to be a man’s greatest regret? I torpedoed her with my silence and dead eyes and turned away. Across the street, a muscular individual with close-cropped hair wearing a white singlet and tight jeans was staring directly at us, and whenever a passer-by blocked his view, he’d crane his neck or go up on tiptoes to keep us in his field of vision.

‘Craig, I presume?’

‘He’s waiting for Aldo to come out so he can beat the shit out of him. He’s furious at him for trying to die by my side.’

‘It was a bit cheeky.’

We had relaxed now, though we had nothing further to say to each other, and I became itchy to leave. A few sombre seconds passed, and I said I had to get back; I kissed her on the cheek, taking in her soft spring-rain scent, and wished her and her baby well. The fact is, I didn’t really understand why Aldo’s love for Stella was so robust. It was a nuisance for everybody. When I reached the station doors, I turned back to see her unmoved under the streetlight, still watching me. From that angle, I got a glimpse of Aldo’s recurring dream. I saw what he saw: the artist, the singer/songwriter, the frantic mother, the highly intelligent, no-nonsense, no-bullshit and weirdly increasingly youthful incarnation of some dangerous, angry beauty. For a brief moment I got to feel what he felt, and the contrast to my own tepid emotional tumult with Tess made me realise that in the world of love I was a straggler, a craven magpie, a lousy poet who, like Aldo said, was a stickler for reality and all the poorer for it.