Steve Toltz - Quicksand

— Oh Jesus, Mimi. You really know how to break my heart.

The strange thing was, though, I didn’t feel anything when I said that. It was only afterwards, when I stepped out onto the balcony into the wet night and stormed down the slippery wooden staircase to the damp cold sand, that I found I was genuinely devastated. Elliot, I realised, was background noise to her every movement on earth. She could only excrete love and I could only suck up those excretions; ours was an insect love. The silence became thick and hurt my ears. Black waves folded into black sand. I collapsed and remained on the beach until the dissipating morning mist unveiled the horizon and, as always when you’re sitting on a shoreline feeling suicidal, the tsunamis don’t come. They don’t come and they don’t come.

XVI

Two days later, Mimi was switching outfits before the mirror.

— Where are you going?

— Nowhere.

— How do you normally get there?

— By bus.

— I’ll drive you.

Endless rows of telegraph poles against wide grey skies en route to the prison. We drove in Lynne Bishop’s Hyundai in untenable silence through nondescript suburbs down a tree-lined highway divided by pointless grassy parkland. The tension was a storm to be weathered. We began lane-swapping skirmishes with clusters of silver sedans and trucks the lengths of city blocks, passed houses with blue tarps flapping in southerly gusts, redbrick churches with white crosses, pensioners in knee-high socks standing forlornly at mailboxes. I was faking calm in a tropical sweat. Why had I driven her here? It was an avuncular move on my part. As we approached the prison, I felt a loud pounding in my ears. Here it was. Prison! The place where brute realities look you in the face.

Prohibited items were everything except the clothes on one’s back. Mimi left her bag and walked inside, leaving me to stare at the oppressive, sprawling mass of Silverwater prison and the people going in and out: guards long past peak fitness; teary, terrified visitors with sleeplessness gouged into their faces, perhaps burdened by guilt — in contrast, I thought, you’d scarcely find one hospital visitor even indirectly implicated in a patient’s kidney failure. Outside the walls and barbed-wired gates, cars flowed obliviously; it never occurred to me you could be lying in your cell listening to traffic! The colourless afternoon sky was beginning to darken. Birds circled in maddening patterns. I felt dizzy, migrainous. I closed my eyes and thought of shiv-wielding sodomites in a tobacco economy where the death of an old man’s pet mouse precipitates his suicide. It teemed down, lending plausibility to the mawkish scene I imagined taking place inside: Mimi sobbing through plexiglass or on the telephone, or hand-holding on a wooden table. Maybe he would take her face in his hands and kiss her tear-stained lips.

An hour later, Mimi staggered back to the car and collapsed in convulsive sobs.

— He’s been badly beaten. His eyes were swollen shut!

— We should go overseas together, to one of those countries where men dye their hair black but leave their moustaches white.

— He’s lost teeth.

— South America maybe. You know, and you go into a restaurant and the waiter’s older than your great-grandfather but he can still beat you in a fight.

Mimi’s eyes were clotted with tears. Her cheeks at risk of moisture damage.

— Or to France or Germany, I said, where a sexual darkness in one’s soul is a given.

By the time her sleeping pills knocked her unconscious that night, she hadn’t said another word. I sat on a wicker chair and gazed at the dark purple storm clouds drifting over the inexhaustible tides until morning. Mimi awoke with cold clear eyes.

— I think I need to be alone today. Do you mind going home?

Your Honour, for the next two days I sat in my grim apartment with its warmth of a parking garage, waiting for the sound of a rattling engine, the sight of her fuzzy head craning out a car window, but I knew she wouldn’t come. The law of unintended consequences applies to confidences. Now that she had divulged her secret to me, she could no longer hide her misery from me. Her jovial façade was reserved for strangers, acquaintances, one-night stands. I left message after message at the residence to no avail.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if only I’d left it there. Here was my clean exit. Why didn’t I take the sense memory of oral sex as a parting gift and get on with my own private predicament? Why didn’t I leave her alone? Why couldn’t I be alone? I was incapable, that’s why. I was love-dependent and desperate. And I was selfish. Without Stella, I needed Mimi, and while I knew I was unable to supplant her love for Elliot, I wanted her to need me too. But how? How to make someone need what they don’t need? How to reverse the polarity of dwindling physical attraction?

My friend Liam swung by and we both sat on the damp cement balcony and dangled our legs through the iron gratings and passed a bottle between us and made an inventory of my positive traits — we only got as far as ‘never had a filling’. Nothing useful. Dark clouds threatened the brisk walkers on the street below. Liam had been to the residence and seen Mimi with his own bare eyes, and understood my desperation to win back this voluptuous greying saddult of the female persuasion. He himself had recently separated from his wife Tess, and exuded disturbing levels of desperation on my behalf. He said he’d been dating and a person should do anything they can to avoid having to mate with the forlorn masses. He thrust his finger in my face with unexpected vehemence, and said that second-time-around love is rare and an exceptional stroke of luck. I said, How am I going to get Mimi back? He said, Men win women over with kindness, with cruelty, with flowers, with cold hard cash. I said, They also attract them by radiating confidence. He said, None of that’s going to work for you. He took out a notebook and scribbled in it. That made me fear he was going to turn my love affair into one of his failed novels. I said, What are you writing? He read, That Mimi, the object of Aldo’s desire, has two working eyes and free will counts against him . I said, Fuck you. At three in the morning, Liam passed out and I dragged him to the couch and it was then it hit me, the ruinous idea that doomed us all. Not to say Mimi would still be alive— because I didn’t fucking kill her —but I wouldn’t be soiling myself in my greens manacled to this lousy wheelchair. In fact, I wouldn’t even be in a wheelchair. There are no greater regrets than the poor decisions you agonised over to make.

XVII

Mimi was lying in the hammock, in the sun and the cold sea air.

— When the sky is bright and clear I suspect God of an ulterior motive, don’t you?

— I’m glad you came.

She led me into her bedroom and undressed quickly, less with desire for me, I suspected, and more with a blind desire to lose herself, but when she pressed her naked body hard against mine I pushed her away. Penetrate her heart in one clean thrust was my plan, and as I sat fully dressed on the bed and she stood naked with uncertainty, shivering, I felt cruel and ridiculous. Nevertheless.

— Elliot, I said.

— What about him.

— I’ve made some arrangements, I said casually, examining my thumbnail.

— What the fuck are you talking about?

— I can have him protected.

Her eyes lingered on mine; she was trying to catch me out in a lie. If she was afraid of the power I had just taken for myself, she didn’t show it.

— Protected? Are you fucking with me? Explain yourself!

Problem was, my plan was really only three-quarters of a plan; I thought the rest would come together of its own accord. I told her that I knew people who could protect her husband. I knew the people to be paid, palms to be greased, guards to be bribed, gangs to be placated, etc. As I said this I was afraid I’d shown her my secret face, my evil face, and she could detect pleasure on it, but she didn’t seem to notice. I explained that I knew a shocking number of people in prison, just as I knew a shocking number in hospitals with fatal diseases; I knew a fair number of prison guards just as I knew a fair number of nurses and hospital administrators. I got lost on this thread a while. Just as I am familiar with the inner workings of hospitals, I explained, I am familiar with the inner workings of prisons.