Steve Toltz - Quicksand

— Who took my lucky shiv?

— She was raped and murdered? That’s mission creep.

— Guard! I shouted. Ever consider soundproofing these walls? You can do it with egg cartons!

I worked out in the exercise room at every available opportunity. Free weights. Dumbbells. Focused on my upper body. In the showers I avoided victim-precipitated homicide as best I could. At mealtimes I feigned uncorked aggression. When asked, I gave friendly psychological consultations to my fellow inmates. Listen, there’s a time to plant a seed of evil and a time to harvest! That sounds fine, just keep your revenge fantasies modest! Why not shit into your hands and throw it at the guards? Et cetera.

The hospital. The violence. The painful gastroesophageal reflux. It was piling in from all sides, like a peak-hour crush. In one multifariously horrific month, the manslaughter conviction for killing the boy with the brick wall added six months to my sentence, I had my last dose of radiotherapy, was forced to swallow punitive mouthfuls of brackish-tasting semen, endured the use of my anus as a purse in which to hide drugs during a cell search, and contracted a pressure sore on my coccyx. I was in and out of the visiting room in a blur. When I informed Mimi how truly psychotic and evil Elliot really was, that only triggered a spiky exchange during which in a cold, implacable voice she accused me of smearing his good character out of jealousy. Help me, I cried to Liam. Some penises are like silos! Others barely a phallus! How superior Liam felt in his uniform and how inferior he appeared. No touching! the guard shouted when I reached for Stella’s hand. OK, but can we spoon? I asked. It was hard not to touch her in her low-cut blouse — she smelled like soap from our old house. Then I was visited by Morrell, his face slack and tired. Mimi did it, he said. Did what? I asked. Morrell’s exhibition had been deliberately burnt down an hour before opening night. Classic Mimi, I thought. After losing his paintings he’d tried to return to his old job at Zetland High, but the substitute who’d replaced him had already been replaced by a full-time teacher, he whined.

Then that afternoon, or perhaps it was another, I was assaulted by a man eating a sandwich — this was a working lunch! — and I said aloud, Oh Lord, they know not what they do, but they sure as shit enjoy doing it!

— I forgive you, I said to my assailant. (My theory was any old fool could forgive after a period of contemplation and a wound-healing passage of time, but instantaneous forgiveness would Blow. Their. Minds.)

In response he came in with a tea kettle — and not to make me a cuppa. That’s why lying there burnt and blistering on the floor of my cell, patting down the actual bottom of the abyss, facedown in a pool of tears and succumbing to the kind of fit of irresistible laughter that can take one to the ER, I prayed.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is not just that whenever I pray I feel like I’m waving to someone across the street with the sun in my eyes, or feel the same way as when I can’t catch a bartender’s eye on a Friday night, but I fear that praying risks interrupting God when He’s fine-tuning a tsunami or manually conjoining twins. What makes it weirder is the fact that I’m agnostic. Of course I wasn’t born that way. In my pre-teen years I worshipped Apollo, but was later shamed into dropping him because everyone else was into Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed or Krishna, and Apollo was simply not contemporary enough. Imagine my disappointment to learn that Apollo was deity non grata! But still I had a hunger for God that developed into a steady appetite; I nibbled the edges of His magnificent being, I found Him bitter, I spat Him out. There was a part of me that missed Him, of course, that missed the God who loves each of us like a carnival barker loves his most hideous attraction, but I couldn’t find my way back, and what’s more, whenever I told someone I was an atheist they’d say, Don’t you believe in anything ? As if any nonsense would do. As if faith itself is the virtue, and what you believe is inconsequential. So I moved from atheism to agnosticism. As I matured, I came to the conclusion that believing in God was a mostly harmless foible, like when you know someone who is meaner than necessary to his pets — not exactly a reason to end a friendship, but a clear warning sign of hazardous character faults. Anyhow, there I was on the cold concrete floor, praying with the fervour of a man masturbating on the eve of his castration.

I said:

God grant me the serenity to de-escalate my fears before they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, the courage to downgrade my premonitions to fears, and the wisdom to know the difference. God, I went on, other than racial persecution, hunger and slut-shaming, there is no torment that I am unaccustomed to. Why did paralysis and rape have to be my sentimental education? I know we often forget that ‘human rights’ is a thing we totally made up, but it still burns when your own are violated. Kudos for levelling the killing field, God, but have You too forgotten our safe word? Did You hear me when I withdrew consent? Exactly whose revenge fantasy am I living? Why has Life always seemed like a pre-trial hearing? Why were my rock bottoms so near the top? For a while — I’ll admit — I was secretly flattered by my absurd dilemmas, as if being bested by You meant there was something inside me worth annihilating, but do You know what paralysis does to a person’s inferiority complex?

I am asking You directly in my sick voice: Did I not honour my mother and father? All children play dead! Boys especially like to feign death to scare their mothers. Is it because I practised the black magic of withholding love? Did I not visit Leila enough in her ridiculous see-through apartment all lit up like Gatsby’s, where I’d have to endure watching her eating partially de-fatted pork fatty tissue right out of a can of potted meat? Was I wrong to laugh when her liposuction sutures caught on the zipper of her velvet trackpants? Was it bad to get annoyed when she checked out labels on the back of strangers’ shirts? Was it dishonourable to tell her that complaining about rising crime levels was a pleasure she wouldn’t have forgone in exchange for a safer community? I know she sacrificed a lot for me — but did she? Wasn’t her sacrifice really for her , so she could experience motherhood?

Why was I red-flagged? Were You annoyed I’d been God-proofed by Leila’s piety and therefore never really believed in You? Is it my fault I found Your expectation for us to buy You sight unseen unreasonable and in Your ‘holy’ book I hated the prodigal son with a passion?

Or was it a sexual transgression? Are You that kind of God after all? Is it because when I was a teenager all I wanted was to move to a town so sleazy that when you walked down the street every man would be stepping out of a shadowed doorway, doing up his fly; because I wanted to be a sex addict, even though I might as well have been addicted to gold ingots? Is it my treatment of women? Who did I personally subjugate? The men that women are afraid of — I am too! I’d stand up to the abusers, but frankly, they’re in women’s homes and they won’t let me in. Was it because I found the battle of the sexes utterly tiresome? ( They make a pregnancy pact. We make a vasectomy pact. They make virginity pledges. We order porn.) So what if I want to consummate everyone’s marriage? What man doesn’t? I was OK that nobody ever considered me forbidden fruit, yet it’s true when I smiled at a woman in a bar I often felt like Goebbels putting ampoules of cyanide in his children’s mouths. I get it: women are punished for their bodies (men are punished for being a dime a dozen), but did I personally silence, or oppress? I realise being too shy for catcalling does not let me off the hook. And true, until too recently I thought teenage runaways were hot: like everyone of my gender, I’ve been deep-pornofried — but I swear eroticised violence was never my thing. And I admit it’s been over a decade since my last age-appropriate sexual fantasy. And one night in Dubai, when I was as poor as a dust-bowl farmer and schmoozing potential investors, a group of venture capitalists came into my hotel room with a young woman and said, I hope you don’t have a fear of flying; we chartered a vagina, a six-seater. And I didn’t get up and leave. I stayed, oh God, I stayed. If Kant was right and history is the narrative of men’s moral progress, then my personal history has not yet begun — granted — but let me stress: no to harassment, no to battery, no to subordination (I have consensually bound but not gagged), no to drugging (but yes to hypnotising) and no to rape . Because while clinical frustration makes tyrants rageful and tantrums violent, my record is clean.