Steve Toltz - Quicksand

xylophone or bringing bones home for the family dog or even the terrible green glaze of a parachute soldier whirling gyroscopically to the earth.

With morning light years away I think: The worst thing in the world isn’t suffering or loneliness at all. It’s a combination: suffering alone.

All I want is the old waking daydream, to kiss the patron saint of brain death, rise up into the star-strewn skies, be a voiceless

faceless thoughtless drifting eye ringing out like plucked strings and taper off or just frankly dissolve in an orange flash and be a traceless nothing, never more to

wake startled wishing I could sleep the sleep of a child, when all my nightmares were merely instinctual and my monsters standard-issue.

* *

Dining-room electric chairs that beep like

Smoke detectors with dying batteries,

A strange hum and squeak of foot tray to back wheel,

Queue of the paralysed, the cerebrovascularly

Down on their luck, amputees wearing last season’s

Prosthetics, those with hip disarticulation and

Hemipelvectomies, neurodegeneratives with

Claymation faces, stroke victims whose speech

Is all ellipses and who wouldn’t last two minutes

In Hitler’s Germany. This is where the falling stones

Fell and stay fallen. The feet you see! The legs!

Nurse, fumigate the patient! Nurse, pulp that man!

Twisted torsos, veritable cubes, 18- to 24-year-old

Gregarious debacles screeching around corridors

At four in the morning. (Masculinity was their disease.

They’d still put you in a headlock if they could.

They’re already pimping their rides and zipping

Through corridors like cannonballs.)

Or moving spiderlike or crabwise in the sob of night,

These wearying all-or-nothing personalities, clientele

Who are bad for business, for whom there was

Never enough plenitude, mostly football and motorcycle

Accidents (in less-developed countries falling from

Trees is aetiologically more common.) One begins

To believe a man with children who gets on a motorbike

Is not a loving father.

The patients complain about larcenous

Nurses or sticky-fingered visitors; froth about peakless

Futures, the inaccessibility of tree houses and being

Wheelbound wallflowers waiting for fetishists to

Rustle our dark foliage. These are not our bodies but

Our scorched-earth policies. We are obscene gestures

Raving into bedpans. I’d prefer back-to-back awkward

Silence marathons. We’ve gone headfirst into our heads.

We weren’t without our faults, OK; still, we didn’t deserve

To be pulled up by the roots like that. If you believe that

Determination allows a man to walk again, and anyone who

Doesn’t get to their feet simply hasn’t the willpower to do it,

And that your God miracles so indiscriminately, then you

Are frankly a cunt. That other people are likewise suffering

Is the coldest comfort there is.

This you understand is pure economics: the redistribution

Of health. Hands changing hands. We had plans.

Places to go, fertility rites to wrong, but you can’t

Go home again. You can’t even get back into

Plato’s cave. Let’s face it. We are separated from the

Truly sick, we are not diseased, not even ill! Just broken.

The luck of the cancerous is, they have options:

Get better or die. We just keep on keeping on,

Symbolising injustice, and FYI:

Atheists are everywhere . Clearly we don’t

Frequent the same foxholes.

* *

¾ of a guy named Dan has suppurating blisters and bedsores. His hips gurgle. He looks

like a vase left too long in a kiln.

His avocado-green crater forever opening on his bone. Premonitions of septicaemia come true.

He is dying. His death won’t be cathartic for anyone.

¾ of a guy named Dan says, Promise me something. Turn over a new leaf,

escape yourself, start again, redraw the map, go to a time-management consultant, keep proper documentation, find pleasure in a ray of sunlight or die trying, get in touch with the ocean, live every day like it’s your last.

I say, I’ve never understood that. If this was my last earth day I’d shoot

heroin and have unprotected sex with multiple strangers. He says, Stop, it hurts to laugh. I say, It hurts to do a lot of things. It hurts.

It’s my turn is all, he says. It’s like jury duty. I say, Don’t worry. Your

doctor is so famous he can drop his own name. He dedicates each operation to a different lover.

We were not quite right, like we’d been homeschooled in a cave with Wiccans.

Before they take him for surgery he says, When I get back let’s break

quarantine and prowl the halls with kerosene lanterns like caretakers in a storm.

I kiss his hand. It wasn’t just my complete turnaround that was shocking to me,

given the frenetic heat of fear and anxiety in that sickbed, the poisonous atmosphere of the spinal ward where camaraderie is scarce and each injured man jealous of his brother’s recovery. It is madness that a friendship blossomed at all.

* *

Heart operation interrupted by a mobile phone. The surgeon waits until the embarrassed intern can silence it. He is too slow, the patient bleeds out. ‘We’re sorry for your loss.’ (A nightmare)

Just when I’d almost forgotten about them the police enter like spies whose codenames

are the same as their actual names.

I sit up, preparing to help with their enquiries, obliging though enigmatic. You know how it is. We are forever in our trailer, waiting to be called to set.

Witnesses say you drove straight into the wall without turning and without trying to stop.

I did? Christ. How embarrassing. Wait. I wasn’t even driving!

Or was I?

You weren’t on the phone, were you? Sending a text message? Eating a sandwich? Smoking a cigarette? Or did you — he stops midspeech

and puts his finger to his forehead as if marking a place — fall asleep? My feet are cold. I reach for the blanket,

it falls on the floor. The other detective picks it up, drapes it over me. Under the sheets I clench my fists. Tucked in by

my interrogators. The indignities never end. So, were you depressed or something? the detective pressed. You didn’t swerve.

Officer, Mimi says, surely half the human race has been killed in a car accident by now. What do you care if my client

drove into a brick wall? The policeman says, Because there was a kid on the other side of it. I am an iceberg

breaking free from the mainland. The policeman continues, He was writing graffiti. And you dropped a brick wall

on his head. I ask, Is he …? Mimi asks, Is he …? Stella asks, Is he …? The policeman leans over me

and shakes his head. It’s not looking good. He is a crumpled mess yet to surface. The doctors

are dragging his lakes, separating the flesh from the bones. He’s tangled as headphones.

Now the police keep me under surveillance, the doctors keep me under observation. I spend the remainder of my time in hospital

under the threat of prison.

* *

Mimi’s three photographs: ‘An Intriguing New Entry in God’s Bestiary’, ‘An Incident at the Assembly Line Where He Was Made’, and ‘Something That Once Existed But Has Since Disappeared From Fossil Records’. All feature in this month’s edition of Australian Photography magazine. Mimi’s new exhibition: Waiting for an Accident Waiting to Happen. Morrell tells me to leave my body, not to science, but to art — why have a funeral when you could have an exhibition? — and campaigns for himself to encourage the artists in the residency to start a new movement, not on form, not on representation, not on process, not on aesthetics, not on theoretical concepts or ideas, but the first art movement in history to focus on the subject, a single subject, so as to free the form. Creativity is at its most unleashed with limitations — and what could be more limiting than having to depict the same sad sack. He calls it Aldoism. While Morrell is blowing hard about it, Mimi asks if she can include my CT scans in her portfolio. Stella has her guitar and plays a new song based on something I asked the hospital psychologist: Is it still necrophilia/if the corpse fucks you ? Neither woman you want around for locked-in syndrome.