Steve Toltz - Quicksand

* *

In the morning, my two free-floating women glisten at the foot of my bed, a

bovine nurse beside them. I know you’re upset, she coos, but there’s

still a remote chance he’s going to pull through. He’s here? Upstairs, in the palaeontology ward, the nurse says, or something like it. Stella and Mimi are

swelling hypnotically. The nurse transports out. The air spreads shadows across the room. I hold tight to nothing. I think you should go see the kid, Mimi

says. It’ll drive you crazy otherwise, Stella adds.

They crouch down sorting their hooks and baits trying grimly to start a hive

mind — I bare my teeth. I say, I’m sick of buying a bulletproof

vest only to be stabbed by the vest salesman. Mimi says, Are you coming

or not? I say, Fuck! Oil my wheel so I can equivalently

tiptoe — and help me up.

Stella and Mimi lower me into my wheelchair, and with my head dizzy

at high altitude, we prowl the hospital followed by the eerie hum of vending

machines, the nurse at her desk ignoring the buzzings

and their sad subtexts. Some patients want water or fatal morphine drips.

We charge through the hospital’s obvious lack of cartwheels,

headquarters of Population Control, we pass the burns ward where oilfields, haystacks & the

disproportionately caramelised are shucked from their clothes, pass visitors who

look like hitchhikers dropped unexpectedly at a

turnpike, pass the torn-asunder, the tactical errors, the system bugs,

the design faults, the triple in size, the prised open, the

unresponsive to vocal commands, pass the operating theatre, a room haunted by the memory of entrails, the smell of gloved hands, a man

in a mask with a high wrinkled forehead who leans over me smiling as if his smile is for the good of mankind, and a voice — I’m your anaesthetist,

here to make sure you don’t let out a scream and give away our position — before his features became fuzzy and indistinct

like the face on Mars.

We share an elevator with a pregnant woman about to hack up an infant to

the sixth floor where a few whole-bodied visitors make way for me I must have looked that bad.

At the door of 608 (of all the turnstiles I’d been caught in, all the revolving

doors that pushed back, the automatic doors mistimed, the stage doors mistaken for back doors,

this was the worst) my women nudge me ruthlessly into

a small dimly lit room oppressively filled with murmuring

bodies, crowding the bed. There is only one light on, above the sink.

At first no one seems to notice us. Then a voice

in the green darkness: Aldo.

My blood goes into a holding pattern. My mysterious visitor! The old woman with the bright

orange hair. (His grandmother?) Thank you for coming, she says, keeping her eyes low. My impulse is to return at magic hour. How is he? I ask. Roll credits, she answers, gesturing to the vivarium.

The visitors turn on like runway lights and clear a path to the centrepiece, the capsized boy. I

have never seen so puzzling a configuration of puzzle pieces. Such an imperfect likeness of a human

shape. His wrung-out pale body spread ceaseless on the bed, a tree split by lightning. Through the cold rail his hand falls down like dangled

bait. The visitors don’t take their eyes off, engraving upon me their malice aforethought. Fear is deafening with gusto. I lurch closer.

So that’s what a larynx looks like. So this is the failure to reconcile a brain to its stem. So this is the syrupy ruckus that intubated lungs make.

His sink is clogged — I don’t know the medical term — his dark streams have frozen over. This greeny backlit mode of sinking makes me sicker, my nausea nauseating me.

If death is peace then sleep is terror. His mother cries (almost) headlessly. Their little boy is all jugular. He will never again look into the

lens and not smile.

Stella is making vague sounds. Mimi hardens. The old woman sizzles at

me with quiet eyes. I am a source of fascination. Behind us, visitors from other rooms have heard the murderer has come to

visit his victim. Nurses, burly orderlies, men and women trailing fluids and held together with tape crowd the door. This is

an event in their hospital lives. Other than the tired human drama of living and dying, not much happens. This is something

different.

His parents peck and claw. Their pupils are like glowworms in a foetal position. They say, The hospital asked us if we want to pull the plug. And: We won’t. And: He’s brain-damaged. And: A vegetable. And: At best. This isn’t news. Doctors rate survival highly, never how many resuscitated patients go on to dance in the rain. The human respiratory system gets pride of place.

Falling through gusts of hate, hauling their violence down from their attics,

In the thrall of their tragedy, they had struck oil:

a face of evil to pin the blame on. Poor kid. He was paying for

being in a family, for being locked in a binding contract with a bunch of people whose set of beliefs had demagnetised their moral

compass. Fucker, someone says. Leave him alone. He’s come here asking forgiveness, after all. Actually, I’m here

simply to survey the damage and get an estimate of the accident

I’ve only an anti-memory of. Maybe it wasn’t me, maybe he came in here

for a hygiene check and the surgeon cut the red wire instead of the green.

To think that this kid might suffer in an indefinite vegetative state because

his tribe couldn’t put two and two together is intolerable. His endless suffering is on my head. They prefer their son to be a slug. They

believe in a God who prefers living slugs to dead sons. Poor kid. Now that you’re a slug, they’ll keep you on a tight budget.

I say, Take him to a farm so he can run around in the sunshine. For

those slow on the uptake, I say, Have his organs authenticated and certificated ready for transfer. Pull the proverbial plug. Survival isn’t

everything!

The family plot my windpipe in their crosshairs. Their shadows arch over me.

Stella squeezes my hand. Having finally arrived at the horrible apex of my

horrible life, and sharing this grotesque scene, once again Stella and I are bonded

for life. I love her

for standing smack bang in the middle of my catastrophe.

Their indignity steps ashore. Murder signals me to go. No one can be bored at

their own

execution, but what if you were standing on the gallows for months, waiting for the executioner to return from his vacation?

Shall we? I say as if suggesting a moonlight stroll. With a tremble and grimace Stella wheels me out, Mimi stays inside to see if there’s anything

she can do.

Stella takes the reins and loses

balance several times, knocked off her feet by the contaminated energy of disease, the ruthless force of sorrow and

desperation. We are heading towards the children’s ward where ingénues of agony play in quicksand pits & yellow-tinctured babies

bask in sunbeds. Without speaking, Stella does a 180-degree turn and pushes me the other way. Cutting paths through ethereal ick, a scrimmage of organs. I feel not removed from life so much as injected into it for the first time. Hospital corridors are the authentic streets of man.

¾ of a guy named Dan’s bed is empty. Sheets stained clean. He died,

Chelsea says. They took him for an autopsy and deboning.

Stella says, Let’s get some air. We share the elevator with four doctors

with penlights, their voices trombone-deep and galactic. They say, I know him laparoscopically. And: When I thrust my thumb into that

fontanelle … And: Abdominal retractors are a dime a dozen. Not worth going back in for it. And: It was the fifth case of friendly fire I diagnosed this week. We escape at reception. The automatic doors open. We aren’t ghosts, after all. This old technology proves we exist.