Steve Toltz - Quicksand

The only thing that helped me slightly was seeing myself represented, decontextualised, recontextualised, bent over, in pain, and solidified in that chair by Morrell’s artistic movement — that he personally seemed to want nothing to do with — called (clumsily, in my opinion) Aldoism, which at least transitioned me through the denial phase relatively quickly, even though only two artists had signed up so far (Dee Franklin who did ink-wash drawings of me slumped in my chair and Lynne Bishop whose mixed-media installation of me in hospital, laughing under the influence of morphine, hung in the living room of the residence). Despite my vociferous protestations, and my offering up alternate subjects — Stella (for her beauty) and Frank Rubinstein (for his ugliness) — they pestered me endlessly to pose for their craptastic artworks.

Regardless, furious resentment was my default setting. When the manic are shackled, expect problems. I had been out of the residence once or twice, wheeled down the road to the shops before getting caught in a sudden downpour, felt the agony of unexpected jolts — not until you are confined to a wheelchair do you realise there is practically no purely flat or even or obstructionless surface anywhere in the city, no pavement without dips or cracks or breaks or holes or raised edges. Your Honour, some people like to be the centre of attention. They’re the ones nobody notices. Other people can’t abide a single eyeball trained in their direction. They’re invariably centrestage — the overly fat, the impossibly ugly, the horribly scarred. For us, it seems the maximum level of open glaring is permitted. I had to endure the cretinous stares of bewildered citizens, as if I were the Big Pineapple on wheels. Or bear those who had the temerity to ask, Shit. What happened to you? Or the crushing laughter of children. Or the sight of a woman’s hourglass figure. Or a human running, or traversing a flight of stairs. Or the easy spotting of a hundred people glad they’re not you. Then I would return home only to be castigated for wheeling mud into the house, or to be ignored, or scrutinised, or laughed at when arose unpredictable and unwanted reflex erections that I was totally unaware of and that were triggered by the folds of my baggy jeans, or by a book in my lap. I became utterly unable to make small talk, or worse, any conversation that did not deal directly with my own precipitous decline and suffering. Or with the declines and sufferings of others: the parents of birth defectees; children with psychiatric conditions; people with chromosomal or metabolic disorders; alien limb syndromees; the battered and raped; the cutting and self-harmed; the deaf and the blind; the burnt and the disfigured; babies with foetal alcohol syndrome. Any other conversation seemed so beside the point as to be heinously offensive. Nobody was talking about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or fibromyalgia — but why should they? And who was I, the patron worrywart of degenerative disease? And I had only just begun to appreciate the significance of statistics. Even if the likelihood of contracting some rare ailment is so numerically insignificant as to be classified negligible, it isn’t actually zero, and even 0.1 percent equates to millions of people suffering the torments of hell. This, according to doctors, is negligible . Why did that infuriate me so? And why did I wake each morning fretting about parents who accidentally flattened their own toddlers in driveways? And about co-sleeping mothers who suffocated their babies? And the secret lovers of recently deceased adulterers? Or the unacknowledged love children of adulterers in permanent vegetative states? Or those people who get no sex because of unkissable mouths? Or family members who die in improper sequence? Or what the neighbours hear the morning of cot death discoveries? Who cries for these lives? It was overwhelming and I felt fragile and anxious every moment of the day.

One evening, Stella was telling everyone about the time we were swimming in a rockpool and I was sucked into a pipe, sucked right out to sea. I didn’t like hearing these stories about the old me. I was jealous of that guy, how easy he’d had it. Liam had come by and brought Sonja, apparently so we could see the top of her head while she texted. At dinner, my wheelchair was a few centimetres shorter than the dining chairs, so I felt back at the kiddies’ table at a grown-up party. Liam was getting into it with his old mentor. Following a boisterous argument about fiction, about whether or not being tarred and feathered is a poetic act — they both seemed to be gesturing towards me when they said it — Morrell said, Damn it, Liam, a writer is not merely a man who sits in a room trying to use the word pusillanimous in a sentence, obviously referring to something Liam had sent him. Afterwards, Liam confessed that he’d really come by to give me bad news. The kid in the hospital had died, and the charge was being upped from reckless driving resulting in bodily injury to manslaughter. A guilty verdict would necessitate significant jail time.

I rolled out to the balcony, and thought about the dead boy, his family’s pain. The silhouette of the battered cliffs looked like ruins of an old castle. Down at the ocean, the white foam was still bright under the slip of moon, and I began thinking about that old impossible yet irresistible idea of my immortality, and I wrung my hands at the idea of no exit ever. The sea wind set the weathervane spinning and I was thinking that life is basic training for an even more brutal heaven, when I overheard through the open window Stella and Mimi fighting over who would turn me at three in the morning. I thought: That’s sweet, my two women are fighting over me, until I realised that neither wanted to. I had to get out. I needed a single night off from this perpetual nightmare. Where could I go? I only knew one place.

If it pleases the court, I will now recount a sexual experience so shocking it turned my pubic hair white overnight.

XXIX

As a strengthening of appetite coincides with a diminishing ability to satiate it, and just as sexual problems require sexual solutions, and as I was horny as a train conductor — that’s an amusing reference to Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality regarding mechanical agitation and sexual excitation — never mind. Let me try again. As being burdened with a sexual longing that neither peaks nor dissipates needs treating like any other physical ailment, and as it is every faulty carcass’s right to seek at least a simulacrum of relief lest they go insane, I steeled myself for what I imagined would be one of the more humiliating Saturdays in memory. In any case, one prostitute per month for medicinal purposes is hardly excessive.

The taxi ramp lowered with agonising slowness outside The Enigma Variations; at those rude motherfuckers on the street watching me disembark I arched my eyebrows as if we had just made a supernatural transaction and they were next. As I paid the driver, he gave me a look that contained profound apology for my plight, a gesture I appreciated and resented in equal measure. I didn’t tip him.

A gentle rain fell. I wheeled over a cracked, slanted pavement to the open front door, and immediately ran up against an insurmountable obstacle — the interior frame of the doorway was too narrow. This brothel wasn’t wheelchair-accessible. I banged my chair against the frame. The women inside on couches turned their heads to look yet didn’t move to assist me. I felt facial flushing and a spreading headache.

— Hello! Some help?

The women were immobile, as if they were under orders to remain seated. Before it had even begun, I’d managed to find myself at misadventure’s end. On second thoughts, best reverse, and fast. The last thing I needed was some local with a camera phone sending my mortification viral. The Korean madam came running out waving her hands.