Steve Toltz - Quicksand

— In the art world, less is not only more, it’s much much more.

— They’re good.

— The enemy of the great, he responded bitterly, and threw the closest painting over the balcony to the beach below.

Around midnight, the artists had moved from boisterous dinner into a combat-zone level of debauchery and it occurred to me I’d made a terrible mistake moving back into the residence, what with the conversations that played on a loop and the sexual hijinks and the attendant miseries and jealousies. I wheeled myself out onto the balcony and stared at the pointless magnificence of the ocean and the derelict moon orbiting nothing of value.

— Would you mind if I draw you? Dee Franklin asked.

She wanted me naked, covered in gold and silver body paint. I declined. More artists gathered around me with cheery, fascinated faces. Though I’d recently lost a vast array of abilities I’d previously considered indispensable to a basic human existence and felt ghastly about it every picosecond of every day, nobody seemed to notice my despair. Everybody weighed in. Everyone looks on the bright side for you. They’re really positive about your situation. Nobody feels underqualified to offer medical advice. The preposterous suggestions they’re not ashamed to make! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to torture someone with an incurable illness or a permanent disability is easy. Name the most ludicrous and disreputable remedy imaginable — e.g. bamboo under the fingernail therapy — and swear it fixed a friend of yours. The dying or disabled patient, sick in heart and soul with the desperate feeling that he hasn’t tried everything to restore himself, will quicksmart reach for the bamboo.

They will also tell you about exceptional individuals who did exceptional things even with exceptional limitations. This in no way felt relevant to my case.

That night, I sat in bed more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. I had developed, through the wonders of neuropathic pain, an extreme sensitivity to fabrics, so that I couldn’t bear the sheets upon my skin, and this was coupled with the intolerable sensation that my toes were squashed painfully together as if into a child’s shoe. After an abortive attempt to wiggle them, I wanted to hit the call button, I wanted to go where other grotesques congregated, I wanted out. In the distance I heard a beeping sound that I assumed was existence backing over me.

Stella was at the door, loitering with intent.

— Zip up my dress?

Her failsafe beauty, the way she moved like windblown leaves, still managed to take the air out of whatever room I was in. I soon understood that she was colliding with herself, fretting that her new songs were self-plagiarism, the first sign of irreversible artistic decline (some were about the cumulative toxic energy of the competing artists in the residence and how she was working so much she often ‘forgot to eat’, something I never fathomed because I hadn’t missed a meal since 1993, but most were about her separation from Craig, who had taken temporary custody of Clive so she could concentrate on her music, an agreement she now experienced as guilt-ridden torture). Listening to her with familiar fascination made me think: Christ, will I ever stop falling in love with the same woman over and over again? I thought how Stella had been sewn into the fabric of my existence, followed by the realisation I didn’t have the legs to run away with her, that I couldn’t carry her once more across a threshold. All of a sudden something heavy and dull hit me in the face, a vague pain spread over my cheek. Frown lines crowded Stella’s forehead. Don’t do that, she said, kissing me on the head. It was my own fist. I had hit myself.

Stella lay next to me tickling and scratching her left arm — my old job! — then we reminisced for hours, huddling close, admitting that nobody else would ever know either of us in the same way. That’s why couples stick together, Stella said, neither wants to be rendered unknown. Her face was turned to mine, a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

— I’m proud of how you’re dealing with everything, she whispered. You’re a survivor.

That annoyed me.

— I am not a survivor, I said. That is not even a human character trait I admire. I like it when a person says, ‘Blech,’ then rolls over and literally dies.

As soon as I said that her sullen face brightened and she leaped up and sprinted out of the room and re-entered with her guitar. For two hours I delighted in the nourishing vision of the moonlight trembling on her gleaming, dark-honey limbs as she wrote pages of nonsense lyrics and plucked a cute little melody out of thin air that she first whistled, then sang — a lovely, silly song that drifted over me, and sailed through me, and I felt the fleeting contentment of reliving old times.

— I will always love you unconditionally, I said, on two conditions.

— Go ahead, she said.

— One. That you never give up the guitar ever again.

A smile, a sigh. Gratitude and relief at feeling deeply understood.

— What’s the second?

— That you hire someone to kill me.

— Get the fuck.

— Please.

— Aldo!

She buried her head in her hands and cried. They were tears of despair, for the abominable reality that reinserted itself into our moment, and tears of anger, for the grave crime of abusing our mutual devotion. Stella seized her guitar by the neck and stormed out.

In the morning, I woke to find Mimi cleansing an unremembered bowel movement, moisturising the skin, then expertly turning me. Her knowledge of a paraplegic’s arcana seemed innate.

— Are you still sleeping with Mr Morrell?

— Call him Angus, for Christ’s sake.

— So, are you?

Mimi swivelled her head and stared catatonically out the window at the brushed-steel sky. She turned back with a compact smile, airtight.

— Once a week. Wednesday afternoons. Three o’clock.

I bit my lip. That was the time we used to have detention.

— There’s something else wrong, I said. What is it?

— It’s Elliot.

She explained. About a month ago she went to Silverwater to visit him but he refused to see her. Then he started leaving messages that made no sense at all, antagonistic and incoherent messages about Jesus Christ not being Yahweh’s only betrayed child.

— It was Elliot, I said, who stuck those posters of you around the city, wasn’t it?

She nodded and told me how over the past weeks her phone would ring at night, like it used to, but there was just silence on the other end. The disturbing part was, she had the oddest feeling that Elliot was actually talking, but had become inaudible. That he was standing there on the phone with his mouth moving and nothing coming out. The calls came every night for a week until five nights ago. Now Elliot had ceased all communication, she said, running tearfully to her room.

Between the fretful Morrell, the restless Stella, the anxious Mimi, all clear-cut cases of clinical frustration, the environment in the residence was downright toxic — I was thinking this when Morrell entered my room and sat beside me and clutched my shoulder, a supremely unwelcome gesture I hadn’t the energy to shrug off.

— Aldo, the average person has an intrinsic value, but you have, in addition, a symbolic value, and one day I predict you will make a great work of art.

I didn’t understand his use of the word ‘make’. Did he mean, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that I would produce a great work of art, or that I would become one?

XXVIII

Time slowed down again to childhood-summer pace. The days were long. Sleeping pills got me through the night. Soon they got me through the day too. And I was adjusting to life wheelchair-bound. I was learning to separate the worst-case scenarios that resulted in deep humiliation, such as shitting or pissing my pants, from the worst-case scenarios that resulted in life-threatening damage, such as bedsores or a fatal blood-pressure spike. I hated transferring, feared falling out of the chair, or falling out of the chair and it tipping on top of me. I hated being estranged from my own body, trapped in enemy territory. I hated needing help to get into the foetal position. I wanted to teleport daily into oblivion.