Steve Toltz - Quicksand

XXXII

From the passenger’s window of the wheelchair-accessible taxi, the outside world looked digitally colourised. Ochre sky; faraway, tepid sun. The office buildings buffeted the frenzied winds that tore in from the east. On the streets, people who looked like they wanted to interbreed with their screens; women with yoga backs pushing strollers while berating husbands or personal assistants on phones; war veterans living stump to mouth, and I could perceive their suffering — their sore balls and sinus headaches, I could hear their brief pleas for hard currency and tight bodies and loving hearts. Then into the suburbs, past houses where once I could sense the death of a family pet or an impending divorce but could never pinpoint the exact location — now I could. The taxi took me to the coast, a glimpse of the breathless sea, and clouds that looked like sopping bathtowels. Then we arrived. That rambling freestanding house, that sun-dappled wild garden on all sides, that camphor tree: the residence, on what would be the deceased’s last night on earth.

It’s hard to describe the disorientation of that chaos. A WELCOME BACK ALDO banner hung over the portico, and I was inundated with handshakes, nods, cheek kisses, back slaps, hair ruffles, shoulder rubs, from both familiar and unfamiliar drunk artists — imagine if Goya painted the faces found inside a casino at dawn — who moved as if on conveyor belts to show me sculptures, drawings, still-wet paintings of yours truly: caged and beady-eyed, oddly thin and bleeding in magentas and crimsons and indigos, in cadmium yellows and lava reds. The artists were either proud of their ingenuity or apologised for misrepresenting their intentions. The packs of new dogs and fresh rubble and sleep-deprived children and the muted hysteria and combined beards and near nakedness of both genders made me feel harried and confused, being neither in the hospital nor the prison universe, and I could barely talk to anybody — their twisted, crunchy smiles terrified me — and navigated my way around poorly, rolling over feet. I was hurried into inebriation, a joint and a beer thrust in my hand, cocaine pushed up my nostrils, as I scanned the room for Elliot’s inside man, but to me everyone looked like a ‘person of interest’ you might see ‘helping police with their enquiries’. In addition, I felt embarrassed at seeing everybody, as if in this interim period I ought to have found a replacement body.

Mimi herself looked bad, her hair like seaweed and her eyes dried-out puddles, while Stella tucked and retucked her breasts into her leather corset and kissed Frank Rubinstein — they were a couple! The unexpectedness of this completely destabilised me. I wheeled over to Morrell, who was naked under his polyester poncho and groping everybody, apparently adjusting to his burnt-out exhibition by going insane. Where was I exactly? Freedom had never seemed so turbulent or repulsive, never so chaotic and formless a thing. I made a mad dash out to the balcony and I remained there until the rusted sunset sky went dark and stars sweated in the glassy moonlight. Down in the beach parking lot, headlights tunnelled through the mist. Mimi came out and stood beside my chair and stared with slumberous eyes at the sea as if through a windscreen at an endless desert road. For a long time she didn’t blink or budge. Then without asking she wheeled me back inside, through the party and into her bedroom where we both took sleeping pills and held each other. I lay there listening to her chest rise and fall, and to the wind that grew intense, to sand-swept seagulls that flew onto the windowsill for a breather. Mimi slept erect, strangely rigid in the bed. Finally I passed out and dreamed, I think, of the herped mouths of New York mohels.

I woke up and heard the sea on its permanent war footing. There was a sickening smell, like burnt heroin. I turned to Mimi: rivulets of blood from her mouth down her chin, glazed eyes bulging in their sockets. Except for the blood and the eyes, she was untrammelled and peaceful, but her face was no longer her face, her body not her body.

Mimi was dead.

No trace elements of her anguish. Just an empty slate. I suddenly felt ashamed that I didn’t really love her because I knew her, I loved her because I needed to.

I called for help. The artists rushed in and crowded the bed and yelled, Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!

Ech. The worst.

The police were called. My insistence that I should be treated as an eyewitness, not a suspect, and that the police should be interrogating the artists to deduce who placed a knife into my unconscious hand was ignored; the attending detective seemed bored and distracted, as if he’d been listening to a story in which his favourite character inexplicably disappeared from the narrative. Liam arrived just in time to stand helplessly as the detective arrested me on the spot. I was taken back into custody because, I was told, murder was a violation of my parole.

Hauled back to prison. After only eleven hours of freedom.

It was that very night, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in my cell, downwind to myself, covered in blue-tinted shadows, at my lowest moment, lower than the floor of the abyss, listening to the irregular breathing of my new cellmate, Gary (convicted of witness tampering and whose head had all the hallmarks of a forceps birth), when I heard it.

A voice.

No, not just a voice.

A cold trumpet blast of wonder that dwelled in my inner ear! A sonar beam of divine wattage that had the UV-brightness of unveiled truth! A sound that left me feeling lighter, less creaturely. This was no wordless experience of the divine. In truth, it was quite verbose. I didn’t just hear it. I inhaled, imbibed, suckled at it. Now I understand those mystics who talk about loving God physically , like they want to straddle him right there on his throne. Of course you might say, What lesion spoke to you thus? Or are you sure this wasn’t a psychotic episode or that your primary auditory cortex wasn’t on the blink? Are you sure it wasn’t just a part of you speaking that had been removed, like a phantom consciousness or a surplus soul? Either way, I could hear it plain as day in my fucking cochlea, a cattle prod of a voice. It was delicious, stupefying! I was traumatised by its beauty. I yielded totally. Whether it was divine or extraterrestrial or from this or that side of the human — angel divide does not matter. It came from on high, in any case. Sometimes the voice was like a poet reading me a work-in-progress. Other times it was businesslike and hesitant, like a doctor who gives you just two weeks to live but is also going through a personal crisis. It was a voice that wore a ponytail. It was sea air blown through a bong. The cell filled with light, and I was whistling ‘Hallelujah’. Only now is the measureless joy beginning to wear off. Quite the comedown, I assure you.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: this verdict is overripe. Pronounce it already. The defence rests; the defence, frankly, is exhausted. The defence has been beaten, raped, paralysed, bankrupted, saddened and enslaved. Just say I’m innocent, will you? Let it be known that Aldo Benjamin has only butchered and decapitated people in photoshop. My charm wears off like a local anaesthetic, I know — and that was hours ago. I sincerely thank you for your attention, your patience, your impressive lack of toilet breaks. Just remember: you can’t convict simply because a custodial sentence will reduce the risk of running into me at the supermarket.

Unless — just before I go, do you want to know the substance of my conversation with the divine? Would you like me to reveal the amazing truths I heard?

I certainly don’t want to take much more of the court’s valuable time.