Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Anyway, I am the amateur. You the pro. You disciplined my sister, and good. (Hey, remember when Henry died, I said, God, You just lost a customer. And since then I haven’t prayed — I preferred to communicate through solicitors — but after Leila’s death I shouted to the sky, I’m not afraid to die but I’m afraid of dying. And a voice shouted back, It’s a routine procedure — I perform 150000 of them every single day. Was that You, or was that in my head?)

Or wait — am I being disproportionately punished for the night of Liam’s out-of-control party, upstairs in that bedroom in that empty house, after Stella mocked me because I could not define the word labia and I said, Some are born me, some become me, and some have me thrust upon them, then I prematurely ejaculated, and was so spent that when I saw Natasha out the window running down the street screaming for help I did nothing, and never told anyone?

Or is it because later, Stella and I crossed every smutty frontier? Or because I made her mad by giving her a shoddy ceremony and then quoting Lacan in our wedding vows: Love is giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist ? Or because at Wave Rock I told her to sing with a dead baby in her womb? (About love, I was on the fence — until You electrified it. In any case, the map of the human heart does not match the terrain.) Is it because after the divorce, I was bummed I would never be able to write a suicide note that started Dear Widow Benjamin ?

Or because I took total advantage of my friends? I thought all you needed to be a good friend in this life was to know a little cognitive therapy and pharmapsychology — was I wrong? Is it because of my business ambitions, that it’s unseemly to reach the age of forty and not lower your expectations? Is it because I’ve pitied people who remind me of me? Is it because of the palpable sense of relief I feel passing children’s hospitals — because I’ve outgrown them? Is it because I’ve been the tenant in a landlord — tenant biting dispute and the romantic who stole flowers from roadside memorials? Is it because I’ve pre-emptively apologised so I could treat someone like shit, told insulting punchlines without set-ups, used repugnance as my moral compass, veiled my barefaced lies, interrupted, shushed, monologued, cut in line? Is it because I’ve found racial biases to be as stubborn to remove as red wine from a carpet and wondered if two ugly people should adopt to give a child a better life? Is it because having ridden bicycles into clotheslines, had doggy doors slammed in my face and laughed stitches open, I’ve looked at the sky and wished geocruisers would slam into us — that I half prayed for mass extinction so I’d know I wouldn’t be missing anything upon my death?

Tell me once and for all: is bad luck self-harm by another name? Is it? Is it? Is it? Lord, You made me perceptive. You gave me the power to know things. I know you shouldn’t listen when someone tells you to be true to yourself — instead of to other, kinder people. I know that the proper behaviour when one meets a celebrity is to mistake them for another celebrity. I know the great surprise of life is that the inevitable and the inconceivable always turn out to be the same thing. I know that unconditional love is impossible without unconditional fear; that congested housing leads to incest; that the only thing that can save us from our more unsavoury desires is observing those same desires in the faces of others, but Lord, why did You make me one of the few people who forget how to ride a bike? And why wouldn’t You just deactivate me like I asked? The future is some kind of newfangled yesterday I want no part of, that’s why I’ve always envied insects and flowers who live for a single day, and I only never wanted to die on public transport or during a vasectomy reversal. Now I see! I should’ve just married a black widow!

Didn’t Freud suggest that the aim of the organism is to die in its own way? Why can’t I die in mine? Why are You holding me up to impossible standards? It’s somehow my own fault. I won’t say ‘self-sabotage’—that’s a phrase you use to flatter yourself while admitting blame. Freud again: The psychical significance of a drive rises in proportion to its frustration. Lord, I don’t have to tell You. I have not enough agency to wiggle a toe. Frustration is where I live. Is this punishment? For what? Did my mother spawn a monster? I know whenever a beggar asked me for money on the street I often said, No thanks, as if he had offered me money, but that was an involuntary response. Similarly, in relation to seeing deformed people, a gag reflex is not inherently judgemental. Be fair.

Or wait — there’s one more possibility. Was it because I was not a good brother to my sister? When she turned on me, was it really only the storm of female adolescence? How is it possible a girl can go from laughing till she almost tears her stomach lining to crouching on the bottom of a drained swimming pool with her head in her hands? When Veronica was fifteen and refused to go to our cousin Devin’s wedding (for fear of bumping into him), Henry took us aside and bellowed his personal maxim, one I’ve never forgotten: Friends don’t care whether you live or die. It’s only family that counts. Was this true? Personally, I found his reverence for blood ties psychologically suspect. After Veronica’s death, Leila dragged me away from the compound — why did we move away? I thought it was because the Benjamins were gossips and petty thieves and cat-torturers, because they were only a facial feature away from being total strangers to us. But was there another reason? I see nothing in the old home movies to give me pause. (I love super 8. Our home movies are nearly indistinguishable from Hitler’s.) There’s us chasing huntsmen and Bogong moths and herding ants with rivulets of hose water, and there’s Uncle Brett, whose nose hairs were as thick and twangy as harp strings, and Great-Uncle Gary with his long ink-black hair who adored out of all proportion his Chinese snuff bottles, and there’s cousin Paul who put his cigarette out on the back of his hand at a party. There they all are, the Benjamin men, waving their wet, anonymous eyes and ergodynamic heads around. Was it one of them? Or none of them? Veronica bathed with the lights out, it occurs to me now — is that something I should have asked about? I peered in as the funeral parlour readied her repatriated body for the service and I was shocked to see her head shaved and a tattoo of a flock of seagulls between her shoulderblades. What happened in Indonesia, exactly? Why didn’t I ask Leila when I had the chance?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

I don’t know anything other than that the greatest misconception about the apocalypse is that it is a sudden, brief event. It is not. It is slow. Grindingly slow. It goes for generations.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, Lord, can I borrow Yours? The log-sized one from the Sistine Chapel? Am I insane? Has the pain rewired my brain? Human endurance is absurd. It can take ANYTHING. You know this. Can’t there please be a point where once a person has reached a maximum of suffering they just explode ?

Lord, give me a doll and I’ll show You where You touched me.

Amen.

Silence. Just silence. Maybe my prayer went to His spam file. In any case, then it was morning and one of the least pleasant guards turned up at my door. He said, S’pose you’re excited, Legless. I said, What about, Bitch-Tits? He said, You’re out, Cunt. I laughed and said, Don’t you mean in about eighteen months, you Horror of a Human Being? He squinted with all the toxicity he could drain from his unbearable existence. You’ve been here two and a half years, Fuckface. Time’s up. I sat up with a surprised expression one usually sees on a head rolling into a basket. An ungraspable turn of events — had I been praying that long? In the showers, I broke my third commandment and looked in the mirror. My legs had grown thinner, my knees knobblier, my eyes googlier, my hair sparser, but all those crunches, squats, rows and presses had made my chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps and quads weirdly yet impressively inflated. Then I dressed in my civilian clothes and made my way out the gates where absolutely no one asked me to sign the guestbook. But who cared? I was in remission. And free!