Steve Toltz - Quicksand

This is what I learned: good times, they aren’t for everyone. And this is how you must react. You have to say, Man, that sucks. I’m really sorry. That’s terrible! That’s the first lesson. If you don’t know how to say, Boy oh boy, that’s the absolute worst, then you aren’t any kind of healer. And another thing! You can’t put people’s suffering into perspective, so don’t even try. It’s like praising the good leg of a single amputee. He knows he has one good leg. He doesn’t need you to point it out. Of course the repetition was like sulphur thrown in my eyes. Oh God, how people so shamelessly repeat themselves. Sometimes they have a dim awareness, a flash of recognition. They say, Did I tell you this before? Oh well … They soldier on anyway.

The point, Your Honour?

— Relationships are hard, I said.

Mimi still didn’t say anything. I had no choice but to resort to a cheap trick. Tell her a story of my own. That gets people talking; they feel determined to out-misery you, to make your sad story seem like light fare.

— My wife Stella left me a few years ago. When a marriage falls apart someone has to feel relieved; in our case, I discerned little diamonds of light in her eyes as she left. The truth is, she kept trying to make molehills out of all my mountains — that’s just one of those quips that someone did me the disservice of laughing at once, so now, like some obsolete machine stuck on a single setting, I can’t seem to stop saying it.

I was torturing her with hints that my story would be a long one if she didn’t interrupt with a story of her own.

— Mimi Underwood, I talk too much. That’s what they tell me, and by they I mean the psychologists I consulted about talking too much.

The deceased still made no sign that she was going to spill it. So I went ahead and told her the whole story of me and Stella, up to and including the embarrassing zolpidem overdose on her hospital bed in which I failed to end my own life and nearly murdered a baby — my bad! After my long story, she finally spoke.

— I always said to myself that I’d rather be Anne Frank than have one of those lives where I had to get into my car to be alone.

— That’s what you always said to yourself?

She nodded and fell back into silence. That was it. That was it? That’s all she was going to give? After my saddest story?

— So are you going to help me destroy these fucking posters or what?

I tried not to hesitate or linger on the malicious posters, but aimed to mirror Mimi’s manner of tearing them into shreds quickly with disgust and finality. I knew it was absolutely the wrong thing to do, but I snuck one of the folded posters into my inside pocket when she wasn’t looking. Except she was looking. Her face went slack, and with quiet deliberation she reached into her handbag and extracted a metal stick that extended.

A car antenna!

I covered my eyes but that left my entire body open to attack. Mimi cracked it against my shin. I howled and fell to the ground and she brought the antenna hard down on my back. The pain was immediate and there was a delay before the thwacks echoed sharply in my ears. I wondered if her boyfriend was watching. It was like a dream. Her unrestrained fury, my state of weird depletion in which I couldn’t lift my arms or move my legs. I wanted to exchange knowing looks with the strangers who’d gathered to bear witness, but I couldn’t lock onto a sympathetic eye. Another lonely beating.

At last, Your Honour, she breathlessly retracted the car antenna and returned it to her bag, tossed one hundred dollars at me and stormed away. I struggled to my feet, listening to the diminishing echo of her angry footsteps, and stumbled towards home with the sound of male laughter following me down the street.

No, I didn’t see her for another four months. No, we did not commence a sexual relationship until that time.

What do you mean? This is the short version.

II

As you know, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you can always find someone worse off than you, but sometimes you have to go outside your own circle of friends to do so. That’s why I’d spent the day in question frenetically googling my way through a bonanza of grotesque-luck cases: the teenager who had a stroke after her first kiss; the man whose toes were eaten by his terrier while he slept; the farmer whose X-ray showed a corkscrew in his brain; the boy who lost an arm waving to his mother out the window of a car. A stockpile of baseline comparisons for therapeutic purposes. Every story asked me, point blank, to have my say, and I obliged. Thanks for illuminating the true incoherence of cause and effect, franticangel33, you couldn’t have been unluckier if you were born in a tiger’s mouth. Hey there, functionallyilliterate007, understanding what happened to you is like trying to get a foothold in a river. The entire internet now gives off an unpleasant odour, thanks to your bitter tale, peterhotpants21, and I predict you shall never once be envied in your whole painful existence. Et cetera. Meanwhile, the phone rang constantly and I answered it to say no. I’d been doing this for weeks. No to invitations, no to creditors, no to market researchers, no to the crematorium to collect my great-aunt’s uncollected ashes — It’s been four years already, I said, let it go! — and I was still receiving calls about those absurd signs advertising my services, anything for anybody for twenty-five dollars an hour. No, I couldn’t varnish a boat, or ‘escort’ a son to an arranged marriage. Nor could I shave and tattoo an enemy’s poodle. I even said no to myself. When did you last actually leave the apartment? Yesterday. Not counting the balcony. Eight days ago. Go outside and get some fresh air. No.

To myself, Your Honour, was that not clear?

That morning, I had leapt out of bed and examined shadows that didn’t seem to correspond with the objects that cast them. A neighbour let out a fake cough designed to get attention, and I shouted at him to get a life and stormed around the apartment tearing down the notes — the one to turn off the taps (I am that tenant who repeatedly floods the bathroom), the note to shut the windows (whenever I leave a window open at home it invariably hails at a 45-degree angle) — and with a broom I tore down a spider’s web that frankly made no architectural sense. I was experiencing a severe episode of clinical frustration. It wasn’t my first.

That overdose on Stella’s hospital bed, that failed suicide attempt, had really rocked my sad world. Ending my own life wasn’t a decision I had come to lightly. I had visited a psychologist I found in the Yellow Pages. A box of Kleenex and an ability to rephrase the client’s questions seemed to be all the qualifications required. He asked why I had come. I told him it was to find courage to take the next big step in my life. Is that why you’re here? he asked. To find courage? Yes, I said. Well, Aldo, he said, that’s already very brave of you. I agreed that it was the height of bravery. Now, courage to do what, Aldo? To kill myself, I answered. One million ordinary human beings end their own lives every year, why can’t I? I don’t know, he said. Let’s puzzle it out. Well, for a long time, I said, the very idea of suicide had been my sole means of support; it had worked as hard as a single parent. Problem is, no sooner do I pick up a blade, I feel my authority challenged. He asked, Why do you think that is? I said, One merely has to google the phrase ‘failed suicide attempts’ to find the most hideous outcomes known to man or beast. He said, But surely you know that those outcomes are statistically unlikely. He wasn’t a bad therapist; his transparent strategy over the following weeks was to pretend to help me conquer my fear of suicide while in reality talking me down off the ledge. In the end he had some minor victories. He got me admitting guilt about being alive when Veronica is dead, and to realise that my self-conception of laziness and giving up easily didn’t square with my actions, that my BRFs (behaviour restricting fears) were contradictory — such as my fear of being misunderstood and my fear of being transparent — and that my chronic migraines were somehow related to the heavy responsibility and burdensome guilt for having unwittingly, through excessive teasing, goaded Leila, my mother, into unnecessary elective surgeries — gastric bypass and stomach stapling. I wept copiously about my inability to decide on my worst fear: loneliness or physical suffering, and he gleefully plied me with Kleenex, as if he were being paid by the tear. Through his window I could see exhaust-grey clouds and trees groaning on their trunks. All this talking helped, it was true, but not in the manner he intended. His ploy to pretend to help me confront my fears of suicide actually helped me confront my fears of suicide. He came with me to my lookout point over the valley of the shadow of death and showed me it was a clean jump. So I did it. Drank two entire bottles of vodka. Yet I woke in angry confusion. A month later (nobody attempts suicide twice on the same day) I sat in my out-of-town neighbour’s car in their garage with the engine running; yet again, I woke up groping the morning. The third time I binge-drank and took an overdose of pills, yet again waking with a dungeon-like hangover, exasperated and near deranged with grief but also somewhat spooked, the sensation of my beating heart causing the prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck. Each time, I had woken to find life — that inexplicable dream that overstays its welcome — restored against my will. Why couldn’t I do it? These were not lighthearted attempts or a cry for help. Why couldn’t I pull it off? I had one half-baked theory, but it was too absurd to contemplate. All I knew was I was the flea on my own back.