Steve Toltz - Quicksand

I was relieved when Elliot stopped speaking. Not only did he make me uncomfortable, I felt downright spooked by him. His voice was a huge eraser and every time he spoke a part of me was wiped clean.

— How did you know about Morrell?

— How? How? Let me ask you something. Have you noticed? That you’re not perceptible? You know. By all the senses at the same time? That some people — they can’t smell you? And to others you emit no sound? None whatsoever?

That was it. Elliot had drifted off on some incomprehensible tangent and confirmed for me what I already suspected: he was not a narcissist or antisocial but a plain old meat-and-potatoes psychopath.

By dawn Mimi still hadn’t returned to her bedroom and I went down to the beach and saw Morrell emerge from the surf and pick up his towel where the retreating waves left crescents of foam in the wet sand. The bastard was inexcusably fit for his age and as he bounded over towards me, I found evidence of his intention to make love to Mimi in his gait. While I’ll admit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not unusual for a man to feel a modicum of grudging respect for the cheeky bugger who has bedded his intended, this was way out of order.

— Listen, Mr Morrell.

— The less you think, the more you talk, Montesquieu said, but go on, what were you saying?

— Why don’t you leave us alone?

— Mimi told me that you’re suicidal.

— So?

— Mimi also said you’re having trouble dying.

— So?

— Mimi also said that it was due to some kind of condition of immortality?

Morrell turned his head upward as if to appraise the azure, featureless sky and nodded, apparently approving of God’s use of negative space.

— The infinite is synonymous with the perfection of form. Do you feel like someone who is slowly perfecting?

I had to admit that I didn’t.

— You think your will is more stubborn than anybody else’s? You, Aldo Francis Benjamin, who has no unusual passion for living?

Again, I shook my head. He stroked an imaginary beard. There was nothing indecisive about his gestures.

— You have horror infiniti . Or perhaps, as Leopardi suggested, you have confused the infinite with the indefinite. You are perishable, Aldo. Like I always used to tell my more hopeless students, you just need to follow your heart, get out of your comfort zone. Your problem is that you lack inspiration and the passion to achieve your goal. That’s what all your nonsensical justifications and frankly incredible rationalisations are about. Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art — Camus. Empty your mind, be yourself, Aldo. This immortality thing. That’s just suicide’s block.

With his back to the shrieking blast of sea Morrell spoke to me as neither teacher nor artist, but as Mimi’s lover.

— I can’t persuade you to live but I can persuade you, however, to leave.

When I got back inside, Mimi’s face gave me the news that I was a fast depreciating currency.

— You should go, Aldo, right now, and don’t come back.

— I’m a realist with a background in evolutionary psychology! I know my market worth and I demand to be left for someone better. Stella’s new man is handsomer, richer, more virile and physically robust. Evolutionarily beyond reproach. But Morrell !

Mimi didn’t respond. She took some tightly framed photos of me gathering my things into green garbage bags, close-ups of the look in my rejected eyes as she was rejecting me, a panoramic in the bathroom as I shovelled her clutter of sleeping pills into my pockets. Then I kissed her moist, downcast eyes goodbye.

— I’ll miss your cold sort of love and your breast-wielding sashays to the bathroom framed by the sea.

— Please, Aldo. Just go.

There was no point arguing — I’d been beaten. Out in the main room nobody gathered to watch me pathetically drag the plastic garbage bags behind me. The same no one offered me comfort. I shouted goodbye to the few who were lying on the sofas. They had their mental fly swatters out. Not being an artist myself, I didn’t warrant a grand adieu. I was merely another artist’s fuckthing. A recreation, like the ping-pong table.

— Bye-bye, I said, soberly, to no one.

Morrell emerged from downstairs dressed in black jeans, black T-shirt, black duffel coat, like the ferryman in Hades, and patted me on the back with the embarrassment of the victor. I couldn’t loiter with exaggerated sadness a moment longer. Not a key to relinquish, no locks would need to be changed. I waved vaguely at all the artists whose names I had learned but whose arrogance made them mostly indistinguishable from one another, and allowed myself to be exorcised, like a demon from the body of a frightened child.

XXII

Unable to face my apartment, its smell of meat and loneliness, the terrifying biodiversity in the fridge, the banality of weevils, I set out on a long, purposeless ramble, cutting an oblique path through the city, committing thought crimes, thought genocides, thought human-rights abuses. That was easy; the city was clogged with businesssapiens all living one single idea of a human life, men and women who looked so buttoned-up and restrained I imagined they could each hold in an epileptic seizure for up to an hour apiece. Sydney was awash in a grey rain and I walked in no specific direction, along with the prevailing herd, the other saddults like me, cheering as a car went the wrong way down a one-way street, laughing at the doomed monorail that sped overhead. When night fell crisply, I collapsed on a bench in Hyde Park. It was cold and wet and around two a.m. I woke to find a young junkie rummaging through my pockets. Let him. I’d simply left Mimi in Morrell’s hands without a fight. Was I evil? What kind of a man was I? All I knew was that if legal slavery had persisted into the twenty-first century I’d be on eBay buying a person right now . Dawn couldn’t come fast enough.

The next morning, I found my old fake limp was acting up again. I hobbled north to Circular Quay where I used to applaud Stella busking, and I sat at the harbour’s edge and watched the ferries coming in and out all day and into the night, through a splashy sunset and a cold bath of stars blinking in code. I decided Morrell was right: I wasn’t slowly perfecting. I’d confused the infinite with the indefinite. Everybody is perishable and I would be the dying proof of it. I was on the road to eternity after all, and like Kafka said, coasting along it downhill. I sat there in my own hinterland and did the heavy lifting of mourning myself. I tipped my hat at everything I’d failed to understand. Well played, sir.

Stella’s verandah light burnt pointlessly. On the overgrown lawn our old red couch was black with mould. I crept around the side and peered through the open slats of the shuttered windows; in the living room was enough paraphernalia for a dozen babies: change table, yellow plastic tractors, prams, a white wooden bassinet. The same house that once felt like a hospital for the insane now exuded warmth and love. Good for her. I left a note— Dear Stella, love Aldo —and pinned it to the door. Despite my feelings for Mimi, I had never let go of Stella and I wanted to do something ceremonial to allow my love for her dissipate once and for all, but I couldn’t think of anything. I stood frozen in the breezy night, half wanting to run in and pledge to become a born-again Christian if we could do it together as Siamese twins, when The Smiths ’ lyric about the joy of dying beside the beloved sung in the sweetness of Stella’s voice played in my brain as if from an old radio, but I’d already tried that once on her hospital bed, and now, standing there, conjuring her scent and imagining it was wafting over from the rotting verandah, I realised I had never asked her if, like me, she’d had ghastly encounters with parents of children who’d died at the age of eight or ten and was made to feel ridiculous for mourning a daughter who never even saw the sky or took a breath, for having a comparatively trivial tragedy to be defined by. My guess was she had, but now I recalled her immunity to self-pity and her ability to subtract herself from any equation, as a method of self-defence, and this reflection triggered more memories — her hard gaze, her ferocious loyalty, her sleek thighs, her cold intelligence, her almost genius ability to be in on every joke, her bewildering dance moves, her electric smile, her kissable throat, her heavy sighs … It was the sound of a motorcycle raging down a nearby street that brought me back into the present. I noticed a hazy moon in the sky above the treetops, and I feared Stella and Craig would be returning soon, so I turned and hurried away, the spreading shame on my face and upper body telling me where I was going.