Steve Toltz - Quicksand

— Get up, grub, he said.

I said that I couldn’t. He grabbed me by the hand. I fell to the floor.

— I’m technically a paraplegic, I said. My chair’s outside chained to a pole.

Now I, the perennial fussy corpse, was being carried in the arms of a junior detective down the stairs where the girls were showing their identification and being arrested.

— Aren’t brothels totally legal in this country? Everyone is over eighteen. Too over, if you ask me.

— Shut up, grub, the junior detective said.

— I called this in! I called you! I’m Liam’s friend. Constable Liam Wilder. Did Liam send you?

The police couldn’t fit me and the wheelchair in their squad car but the station was only six blocks away so they navigated the chair through the Saturday-night streets, running me over styrofoam takeaway containers and shattered beer bottles while groups of drunk men gawked and even the city’s sprawled and king-hit sat up to witness our passing. The policemen were expertly whispering and I couldn’t make out a single coherent syllable. They wheeled me through the reception area of the station into the same small airless room where I’d been interrogated by Liam nearly two years before. They searched my chair, taking my little medical kit with them, and left me alone with my branching headache and berserk spasms. Half an hour passed. This was no ticking-bomb scenario. Around the hour mark I had difficulty swallowing. Several of my medications caused the most hideous dry mouth, but the police had confiscated my saliva-replacement gels. This was intolerable. Not to mention I was completely confused; I didn’t mind getting caught in a whorehouse — in fact it was quite a manly place to get caught — but what law had I broken?

Eventually three detectives sidled in. One was nearly bald, his remaining hair slicked back with gel. He gave me a glass of water. I washed my face with it. One with shaggy eyebrows took a seat opposite me while the third man leaned against the wall. I angled myself to keep all three in view. They made sidelong glances at my emergency survival kit which they’d brought back with them into the room, at the preposterous number of pills, the enema kits, etc. Their faces were calm, even apologetic. I felt their sympathy and waited as it crossed the border into pity. This new interrogation technique — good cop, better cop, best cop — thoroughly confounded me and I was reminded of my time in the garment business in India, of the genuine hospitality of con artists. Yet when they spoke, it was clear they were all blazing against me.

— Why do you go to brothels?

— For non-reproductive sex.

— Can’t you get a woman without paying for it?

— Not on short notice.

At that moment my phone beeped. I took it out of my pocket and saw two text messages from Liam. One said: Deny . The other: This could only happen to you. That familiar phrase friends and family had been amusedly plying me with for years now carried with it a force of intense dread; already surfeited with bad luck, I found myself bracing for an additional slice.

The balding detective slid across the table a photo of Jin, not an old photo but one taken earlier that evening. I recognised the negligee. Well, who wouldn’t look sad and fragile in that lighting?

— You probably can’t even have sex.

— Is that a question? I asked.

— No, said the detective with shaggy eyebrows. This is: You got a limp dick?

— Could you have fucked this woman? asked the third man. Or any woman?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have to admit I’ve never understood the whole idea of masculinity. OK, guys competing and tackling and one-upping each other when vying for a particular woman or women is evolutionarily understandable, but men trying to outdo each other in pubs or street fights or locker rooms with nary a breast in sight is something I’ve always found weird and somewhat suspicious — admit it, it’s super -gay — yet here I was, these fuckers clearly trying to goad me, and maybe because the neurosurgeon’s warning that sexual intercourse might not be possible had made me disproportionately proud of my tenuous boudoir success, the overly macho posturing by the pantomime squad got the better of me. I thrust my finger at the photo of Jin, forgetting that a gentleman never tells.

— Yes, actually. I did fuck her. Twice.

— Are you sure?

— Yes I’m sure.

There was now a long pause and a frightening businesslike demeanour settled on all three faces at once.

— Aldo Benjamin, the detective said, you are under arrest on the charge of rape.

Wait, what? Rape?

Your Honour, I know what you’re thinking. Who in the history of rape has paid two hundred dollars for it? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know what you’re thinking: Aldo, you went to a legal establishment and procured the professional services of a sex worker, so how in the hell was this rape? Here’s how. Jin had been trafficked.

Yes, trafficked!

The madam was charged with one count of possessing a slave and of using the slave. Jin had been kept in debt bondage in the room at the end of the corridor, the padlocked and windowless room, where she lived out the horrors of sexual servitude. That sinister padlocked room!

Due to the ballooning sex industry in the Asia-Pacific region, the burgeoning sex market in Australia, and the increasing incidence of sex slavery, a human rights group had lobbied for a new law, enacted just thirty days previous; it was modelled after a Swedish law in which clients are liable to criminal prosecution. It was just my fucking luck to be saddled with the ignominy of being the very first case.

— Haven’t you heard about this law? Liam asked me afterwards. It was in all the papers.

— It’s two thousand and something! I shouted, weeping. Who reads the papers?

XXX

The manslaughter trial’s start date was still pending, but the rape trial was fast-tracked. They wouldn’t combine them to reduce travel time. The judge (for the rape trial) looked like one of those old Eastern Bloc corrupt officials who used to commit suicide during press conferences. On Liam’s advice, I used a manual wheelchair so as not to let them see me ‘coast in on that electric number as if on a golden hovercraft while their own seats just sit there’. It was sage advice. Unlike the nice folks of my present jury, that jury already seemed alert for any scrap of evidence in my demeanour that showed me as a bad person; a mean-hearted cripple was almost as good to them as a black racist.

Liam chaperoned me through the process.

— Try not to look post-coital.

— What are these cameras?

— All criminal trials are live-streamed now.

— Who’s watching?

— Depends on the level of public interest. This one being a test case, a lot of eyes are on it.

And eyes there were. An open courtroom is the best place for a reunion. Anybody who knows you shows up, anybody you owe thousands of dollars to, or who wants to show their support, but the kind of support that will spice up their own anecdoteless lives, that will give them some kind of majestic travesty of justice to talk about on the way home.

The prosecutor told the court that Jin — her real name, incidentally; she didn’t even get a fantasy hooker one — was promised work as a nanny, then when she arrived in Australia, her passport was taken and she was told she had a 45-thousand-dollar debt that she would need to repay by sleeping with seven hundred men, often unprotected, sometimes fifteen to twenty a day, sixteen hours a day before being taken back to a locked room to sleep. I bit my lip, thinking of my own role in this horror story. It was easy to find the Korean madam and her husband disgusting, but after the prosecutor gave a general overview — twenty million slaves in the world now, sixty percent of them in the Asia-Pacific region, a 32-billion-dollar industry — he said, Aldo Benjamin is a human rights abuser. He wondered aloud what made me evil. I wondered the same thing. This is a test case, he said, and it is up to you to send a message to others. As in all rape cases, the prosecutor went on to say, a rape kit was used that scraped the vagina for semen, and while the defence will assert that of the four traces of semen found, either inside Jin or in the discarded condoms discovered at the scene, none were the defendant’s, it was common, the prosecutor took great pains to point out, for men with spinal cord injuries to experience a retrograde ejaculation whereupon the semen returns into the bladder. That didn’t seem worth objecting to.