Steve Toltz - Quicksand

A wave knocks me off my board and I clamber back on and have to paddle around to see his stooped posture and default scowl and his head in constant motion, as if scanning the shore for enemies, the horizon for tsunamis, the sky for a lightning bolt. Aldo shifts the pressure from his left palm to his right; he can’t get comfortable. Every now and then he takes a bite of what looks like a cold cheeseburger.

‘You know the people out there think you’re an ascetic.’

‘Detox and anorexia rendered asceticism meaningless decades ago. Don’t those idiots know that?’

‘Help me up.’

‘I hear that after death, your hair continues to grow.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But I’m bald now .’

‘Just help me up!’

I scramble up trailing tendrils of kelp and use the makeshift rope railing and natural indents in the rocks for handholds. When I get to my feet I see he has accumulated nasty grazes and lacerations and looks newly walloped — a bruise and a fresh cut under his left eye. I survey the terrain: he now has a waterproof sleeping bag, shrink-wrapped air mattress, kerosene lantern, wind chimes, garbage bags, a tarp strung over them with a thick rope and elastic orange straps; the eskies are in a shadowed nook, there’s a crater choked with campfire ash and black coals, a chaotic pile of firewood and kindling. It’s somewhere between a teenager’s bedroom and a one-man shantytown.

‘You didn’t bring me anything?’

‘Was I supposed to?’

Aldo drums his thick, gloved fingers on an esky lid, insinuating it’s the height of rudeness to visit him empty-handed. He jerks his head suddenly. Out here the mosquitoes are adult-sized and hound him gregariously. I get comfortable and observe him eyeing the surfers’ regal bearing with his quarter-squint of envy, their zipping and wheeling and cutting of serpentine pathways through the waves. He talks about the fatigue involved in watching these fuckers with your heart in your throat, about how when they’re not risking life and limb they sit for hours on end never wondering what to do with their hands. Then he points out the few in their midforties who think they’re in the best shape of their lives but whose gaunt faces and absurd musculature must terrify their spouses. ‘They’ll wind up having a cardiac arrest during a weekend triathlon,’ he says sadly.

My hapless friend lights a cigarette and this frightening phalanx of surfers — nervy men who nearly all seem to have either split lips or skin missing from their knuckles where they punched a face or wall — engage in a swearing match with him. Because Aldo can hear every word they say, he can’t help but offer unwelcome observations. He shouts, ‘Hey, Jonno, don’t you know your “tough love” of your children is merely sadism?’ Jonno shouts, ‘Go home!’ Another shouts, ‘Fuck off and die and get cremated and we’ll sprinkle you wherever you like.’ Aldo shouts back, ‘Mark, isn’t it? Stop inviting busty herbivores to steak dinners and then bitching about them!’

‘Careful, Aldo,’ I say, ‘they look like Argonauts.’

The surfers hate the strange disabled man nestled in the shadowed drippy pockets of ‘their rock’; they hate his sleep-deprived, sodden, convicted-rapist’s face every morning peering out of a garbage-bag burka with undisguised sadness; they hate his ambient noises of distress that dominate the cove — what they at first took for some warbling or dying seabird were his shrieks while under crab attack, his cursing during slips and falls, his tossing and turning on the shrink-wrapped mattress, his night terrors during afternoon siestas from which he wakes with a gruesome howl of anguish. They hate the incessant sound of his hawking gobs of spit and rib-rattling coughing fits, the groaning from his push-ups and crunches, not to mention the bodily excretions — the splashy emptying of his urine sac and his fresh turds kerplunking in the sea. They also hate spotting him perched on a ledge with his binoculars counting aloud the precancerous lesions on their faces and shoulders, and when they pass by on steep blue-grey waves, narrowly missing the rock, they loathe to hear him shout, ‘You’re not going to make it!’ or ‘Oh my God I can’t watch!’ Every now and then, to lower the temperature of his unregulatable and overheating body, Aldo does a bottom shuffle down the slippery surface of the rock to the lower ledge, drags his custom-made board by its rubber lead, holds it tensely during a low-pivot sideways transfer, keeps his right hand on the front handle so as to stop the board from shooting off into yonder, and thrashes his way out onto the waves. It is a gruelling sight. He slides off and clambers back on, often hauled out into the countervailing currents; once he was engulfed in the lip then pile-driven into a sandbank, where he sloshed around limply near the shoreline with the sets heaping on top of him. Frankly, the surfers can’t understand this troublesome invader, literally out of his depth, who needs constant supervision and is either depressing them on the plum morning waves, or mincing in the sea with evident terror, or lying prone on his board fidgeting on flat water or with heavy sighs airing his mysterious sorrow.

Now Aldo says, ‘How’s the title coming along?’

‘A Pseudosapiens’ Story.’

‘Not terrible.’

‘Not for Prophet.’

‘Terrible.’

‘A Captain of His Solitude Always Goes Down With His Shit.’

Aldo laughs. Something I haven’t seen for a long time.

‘You should forget the novel and just do a book of titles.’

‘That whole crazy thing you said in your testimony, about being immortal, you don’t still believe that, do you?’

‘I was never able to take any evasive action whatsoever. That was my first, my only real disability.’

‘Second. You’re also like an animal whose key defensive mechanism is diarrhoea.’

‘Hilarious.’

Aldo makes weird motions with his hands, like an old mime reliving his glory days. ‘There was one thing that never occurred to me. Maybe I cannot die because I’m already dead.’

‘Nope.’

‘I was not born, I was exhumed.’

‘Unlikely.’

‘And that’s why Ruby died. The dead cannot beget the living!’

Aldo radiates a steely fear; he looks out in annoyance, as if at a second-rate ocean.

‘I know what you’re thinking. Is there no end to these words of yours, to your long-winded blustering? Job 8:1.’

‘I totally wasn’t thinking that.’

‘Liam. Dangers seek out the afraid. We have to warn people. Me and Leila, our pre-traumatic stress disorders brought on our traumas. Fact.’

‘Aldo, there’s something I want to tell you.’

‘You know what’s sad? I miss the internet.’

‘You do?’

‘Watching returning soldiers surprising their children, the faces of the deaf hearing for the first time, kids biting each other’s fingers. I always liked those clips of animals being frightened. Not actual suffering, but just seeing them, cats and dogs mainly, being scared by their bored owners. What is that?’

‘A cruel streak.’

‘In one’s reluctance to confront evil one becomes evil oneself. And maybe, I’m just spitballing here, it is only by becoming evil that one can be worthy of death.’

‘You’re not evil.’

‘I’ve done things.’

‘Like what?’ I ask, sitting up eagerly, hoping for some core degrading secret to spice up the narrative.

‘I’m not sure I always gave the same courtesy to waiters as I did to barbers.’

‘Not exactly a capital offence.’

‘I used to like to scare small dogs when I saw their squat alien faces peering out of handbags.’

‘That’s fairly forgivable too.’