Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Elliot put his frightless eyes near mine and gave an equine snort. I thought: If only I could pull off a classic thrust behind the collarbone to the ascending aorta or smash his ribs causing fractured bone fragments to lacerate the bladder and intestines so digestive juices and faeces will pour like the Ganges into his peritoneal cavity, but I had no weapons; I was overpowered. A second rapist joined in. I wanted to vaporise or disintegrate, like in my old fantasy, and liquefy in my sleep or be a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye cruising through space and time before disappearing in a violent white flash. I was a well filled with blood. I was all chasm. I was broken in two, in four, in eight. I was torn asunder. I was wolfed down. I was dividing into an embryo and being born again. Again! This time into who? Who knows? This was a psychiatric emergency. I sank and didn’t resurface. Goodbye, self, we’ll meet back and reintegrate later. An inmate, I noticed, was filming this on a camera phone. So that’s out there somewhere. A stream of my blood soaked the mattress where my head lay. I thought of Natasha Hunt. Of Jin. Of the Red Army sweeping into Germany in ’45. I thought: Violated is the absolutely right synonym for rape. And: If I could get my hands on those husbands and fathers in certain cultures (Is- cough -lamic) who stone the raped for promiscuity. Or maybe I thought these things after. At the time I was swept away in the countervailing horrors and geysers of rage as, I imagined, blood-borne pathogens moved through my mucous membranes. Let’s face it. From year dot to right this minute the mindblowing rate of forced intercourse is the biggest thorn in the side of every single floated theory of basic human goodness.

— Shut your mouth, bitch.

— Consider this a warning.

A warning? Jesus.

It was over. Elliot declared with a smile that reporting the attacks would result in castration involving boltcutters, then he winched me up and put a glass shiv to my eyeball and — I’m just giving you the facts, these are the facts — made me perform oral sex on both rapists, at the end of which one of them urinated into my mouth.

Earthlings. Blech.

It would be fine with me, Your Honour, if the ladies and gentlemen of the jury would like a moment to call their loved ones.

In that case, I will continue.

Some weeks, or perhaps months later, I woke with my stomach horribly distended and stabbing abdominal pains. I was drenched in sweat with a pounding headache, my face burning and a tingling on my tongue.

— As my daddy always says, looks like your shit just became manure, son, said Patrick.

Guards came in pairs like feuding siblings.

— What’s wrong with you?

— I’m fine. Please just nip down to the apothecary and fetch me some milk of the poppy.

The guards ferried me out to the nearest hospital, where I was diagnosed as having had a transient ischaemic attack — a mini-stroke — precipitated by, the doctor said in an annoyed voice, as if I were the only one who’d turned up to his seminar, a high-blood-pressure spike symptomatic of autonomic dysreflexia that was in turn brought on by faecal impactions.

And that’s not all! The distension of the abdominal area was unrelated to the stroke, and so they forced me to have barium studies of the upper gastrointestinal tract which revealed a relatively rare spinal complication called superior mesenteric artery syndrome, a compression of the duodenum. This they treated immediately with nasogastric intubation, and when that failed, I was rushed into surgery for a fucking duodenojejunostomy, performed laparoscopically. You know the drill. Unfortunately recovery time was quick, so I was to be back in prison in four days, except that results from my MRI showed a small neurofibroma tumour near the spine.

— What’s amazing, said the doctor with naked excitement, is that had you not had your car accident, this tumour might have remained undetected and grown to a size that would have compressed your spinal cord.

— Amazing, I said.

I was wheeled through metal doors with yellow radiation-warning signs, the kind fastened to the top and sides of nuclear-warhead carrying cases in espionage thrillers, into a cavernous room where I was laid sideways on a table and my head moulded to a blue semi-inflatable pillow where I had a constant view of the worried-looking cartoon foetus with the uneducated or oblivious mother in an If you’re pregnant tell the radiologist sign , who I heavily identified with (the foetus, not the mother). There was a lot of fiddling, lowering and raising of the platform, signifying ample room for human error; a rotating computer screen’s red eye that looked to have achieved intelligence but was keeping mum about it made a sluggish orbit around my body while emitting a low-resolution horror-movie hum. It was called a Gamma Knife. The aim was to fuck up my DNA to make the cancer cells unable to divide while avoiding collateral damage of healthy tissue. Basically, it was six million concentrated volts as invisible as God himself.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, during the months that followed I was transferred from prison to hospital and hospital to prison on a seemingly continuous loop. From the suffocation of solitary confinement to the suffocation of the MRI machine. Inedible prison food to inedible hospital food. Fear of the shiv to fear of the scalpel. I was in prison to be wrecked, in hospital to be salvaged. I often found myself in a hospital elevator with another prisoner who was handcuffed and couldn’t cover his mouth when he coughed, or in waiting areas with poor suckers who sat with the placidity of cows or tottered and staggered along the corridors clutching those big white CT-scan envelopes, or in radiotherapy which carried the fear of impending nausea (emetophobia) that was followed by actual nausea from the radiation (no doubt exacerbated by the nurse — doctor treacly chitchat), after which I would then be taken back to prison for the malevolent zeal of sexual violence. No, I will never understand the allure of raping me, other than to fill personal quotas, yet at least once every couple of months, Elliot or one of his men with their nautical faces and neck tattoos lurched out of shadows to drag me into designated nooks and supervision blindspots for protracted attacks, with their all too human casual brutality and zero incidence of erectile dysfunction, impeccably choreographed with the movements of the guards. Or else coming into my cell at all hours. My whole dumb life I always hated being woken, but to be jerked from a horrific nightmare to an even more horrific reality was categorically hellish. My single consoling thought was maybe radiation was transmitted, maybe I was literally radioactive and toxic. I’d think: My superpower is that I AM POISON .

Here’s where it gets strange.

One night, the silence thickening around me, I lay on the floor of my tiny cell, regretting the past, hating the present, dreading the future, thinking that since I suffered the hell of anticipating a rapist unbuttoning his pants or a doctor tapping a syringe, and since it was invariably followed by an IV hookup or an actual rape, this meant I had pre-traumatic stress disorder, then trauma, then post-traumatic stress disorder, often simultaneously. Then I thought: If thinking is only a poor form of dreaming, and dreaming a poor form of pure being, and pure being a poor form of nonexistence, then nonexistence is a poor form of never-having-existed-at-all. Frankly, I was pissed off that to vanish and dissolve by an act of will, to liquefy in my sleep and disintegrate body and soul, to be uncreated and unborn— decreated —like Simone Weil writes about, was beyond my ability. All the time, inmates’ voices from adjoining cells filled my own: