Steve Toltz - Quicksand

It might have been the overwhelming reality, or the overpowering morphine, but there was a distinct fade-out, an ebbing and subsiding of awareness, and hours later I was jerkily reinserted into consciousness, squinting through harsh light. The room was a chaotic thoroughfare; someone two beds over was being noisily defibrillated, and by my curtained bedside Morrell was nursing a coffee and wielding an ungodly frown of pity.

— Adorno said it’s barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz. What can one say to that man, except for Don’t be so sensitive!

— What?

— Axe, meet frozen sea, he said, and dropped a black spiral notebook on my lap. I opened it up. On the first page was a poem written in Morrell’s unmistakable cursive:

Dear Aldo,

Put pen to paper and mind to air.

Let it shape you, let down your hair.

Be a poet, be not afraid to just go,

Go it alone and wade in waters deep

And keep your calm, you might as well

You are in hell and cannot keep yourself from harm.

Love, Angus

He had seen my framed haikus in Mimi’s bedroom; they’d triggered his astonishing memory that I had in class (thanks to Leila) demonstrated knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Spanish poets — how the hell did he remember that? He then quoted extensively from his own book, the chapter ‘Tribulations and Creativity’.

— Don’t waste time rebuking God or cursing injustice. Rather, transmit your lived pain as solace or amusement … If they are also artists, the truly unfortunate have a wealth of material. And you know what else? Plato said there is no invention in a poet until he is inspired and out of his senses, and here you are, on morphine.

When I protested that I wasn’t a poet he assured me it didn’t matter, that the muses were themselves artists, and besides, he said, like a true poet, my most redeeming shortcoming was my ability to commit one hundred percent to a bad idea.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the rest of my stay in hospital is a five-month nightmarish blur of chaos and panic and wretchedness and agony that comes to me in indistinct fragments; it turns out that poetry is the most accurate and concise method to summarise this period so resistant to summation. A few days after Morrell’s suggestion, I had several hallucinations of Veronica’s bleary ghost hovering above my hospital bed or on the outer side of the far window. These visitations were short-lived but served to remind me of my sister’s own passion for free verse, and inspired me to do as she would have herself. Of course, I am relatively ashamed of the long poem I scribbled but I don’t repudiate it. I’m not disloyal. What the hell, I wrote poetry and I’m glad I did. And here I enter my lived truths as exhibit D, conceived during months of in extremis and therefore resistant to falsification. Please excuse the pervading sadness of my dredged soul as I beg the court’s open mind to allow me to read a little testimonial segue here, this work that might for all we know shed further light on Mimi’s murder:

XXVI

Good news, Buddha, I’m finally in the now!

(Absolutely. Worst. Now. Ever.)

I’m only forty and already on

my backup generator. My backpacking days are over

unless I’m the one in the pack.

The best compliment I can hope to hear:

his vital signs are good.

Everything bad in life will be worse from now on: insomnia, diarrhoea, hangovers. Every problem

is the least of my problems.

I used to work as an ensemble, now I live

like Trotsky died.

God seized all my assets.

The door that was always open

is now a wall.

Even fight or flight will take time.

I would totally wish this

on my worst enemy.

Now would be a great time

to get raptured.

One Daisy Duke nurse in this sea of manhands wipes me with a towel

you wouldn’t dry a dog with.

You’re scheduled for an MRI, urodynamic study and crop-rotation,

she says, before rushing off to deal with the oil spill in bed seven, Lot’s daughter in bed five, the squiggly thing in bed eight, the axolotl in bed nine.

I catch her eye and make a ‘cheque please’ sign in the air.

She says, Your stool sample has been sent to a psychic who helps police with missing persons.

It feels like I’ve swallowed cacti, electric eels are going to the toilet over my major organs, and I’m experiencing meteor showers.

Wielding a large-bore needle: Doctors like priests expect you

to renounce your pain, she says.

I vow to sit out rehabilitation. If I want to promote neuroplasticity,

I’ll hire a publicist.

She says, A man who lives his life in pain will end up a torturer.

And if you feel agony for too long a period you are treated

like one who hears voices.

Late-night, I wake in floodwaters, therapeutic time windows shutting. The spinal cord is not a ripcord, God,

but I hope you landed safely.

She says, The medical establishment will as a matter of policy and without consultation prolong your days until everything you are you’ll owe to human ingenuity.

I ask, Did the malediction mention me by name?

She says, While psychiatric wards are patrolled by small fistfuls of Christs, the spinal ward is all Jobs.

I say, Listen. Hear that silence? That’s the sound of my forebears wondering why they bothered.

She says, Look around. You haven’t been singled out for persecution after all.

That burned.

Who the fuck are these people, these nurses? I can’t fathom where they could have gotten this cavalier attitude towards the human body: in their upbringing?

She holds my hand. Knows how to make me feel better.

She says, You can’t imagine

the home catalogues you’ll be receiving!

* *

Transferred out of ICU into a vulcanised-smelling green-lit thrumming chamber of competing soap operas

— certain trains of thoughts are a death sentence and watching television is like holding pressure on a wound—

My roommate, ¾ of a guy named Dan, is being executed piecemeal. He lies on his bed folded like shirts. We have our differences:

he oozes, I clot.

His wife presents him with memorabilia from home.

(Tins of biscuits. Mug. Photos. A football banner. Surfing posters.)

Who knows how deep those saliva threads go? He says to the doctor, Just when you finally have time to stop and smell the flowers, your nose is bandaged. He says, What did you come across in my trenches and ravines? And: Keep it to yourself if you’ve found larvae! And: Don’t tell me the surgeon left his keys in the bladder with the engine running?

It is well known in the medical profession that some patients desire nothing but a jocular relationship with their doctors and if during the course of the session they share one good quip that patient is satisfied with his care.

The doctor enters: Presto! We had to remove your

whirligig.

On the upside: We’ve cured your

sleepwalking.

And you’re safe from bodysnatchers.

I say, Don’t name a disease after me. Name one before me and see

if I run into it. I say, I’ve racked my narrative

for signs of hubris.

And I realise this is not a period of convalescence. I took my death drive

on a death drive and now my legs can’t wait to wither

and my IV arm is thinner. Why they don’t alternate I have no idea.

I think they prefer the one that’s closer to the door, says ¾ of a guy

named Dan, pupating there on hospital sheets.

He doesn’t understand that medicine makes you sick like psychiatry makes you crazy, that one should not be afraid of your persecutors but be terrified of saviours with butter fingers, of grave, life-threatening miscommunication blunders between departments or the inexperience of trainee nurses learning on the job , often between English classes — don’t hate me for not understanding in my haste to be afraid!