Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘Remember when we used to sit on that toilet block roof and think up morally repugnant ad campaigns for dodgy products?’

I say, in a mock deep advertorial voice, ‘Rohypnol: the path of least resistance.’

‘And we did one for Ethnic Cleansing Products, that gas that the Nazis used. What was that?’

‘The ad campaign was a can of Zyklon B with a picture of a Hasidic Jew on it, and underneath it said, You missed a spot. ’

‘We were horrible people!’

Were we? Are we?

‘I snuck into the school staffroom and stuck a live pigeon into Mr Morrell’s pigeonhole.’

‘That was you?’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Oedipus had literally no idea he had fucked his mother and murdered his father but he found out eventually, just as I too hope to soon learn of my crime.’

‘This is exhausting. This is so exhausting. I have to tell you something.’

‘You know, the bullshit thing about the temporary insanity defence is that six months to a year is not regarded as temporary in legal circles.’

‘Something’s happened.’

‘Maybe at the end of the day I’m like everybody else, just another arsehole whose endless fascination with himself has blossomed into a worldview.’

‘I saw Morrell last week.’

‘Yeah? How is he?’

‘There’s good news and bad news.’

He squints at me as if through a keyhole. ‘Good news, please.’

‘Look.’ I pull out the first edition of Artist Inside, Artist Outside . It’s a handmade colour-photocopied zine. Paintings, drawings, sketches, short stories and poems by prisoners. ‘He’s been teaching again, convincing the other inmates they aren’t criminals so much as marginalised poets and artists. Inspiring them to express themselves.’

I should mention: after Aldo’s insane and epic defence testimonial/sales pitch, and two seconds after he was pronounced incredibly guilty by a jury of his so-called peers, Morrell tapped me on the shoulder, his strange and fanatical eyes raw and spittle dangling from his lip, his face sopping wet, his mouth twisted. At first I thought he might be having a stroke; I eyed the exits. ‘It goes without saying,’ he whispered. I said, ‘What does?’ Morrell’s half-open mouth obliged me to keep looking at him. Was this a form of grief? Morrell had been devastated and torn apart by Mimi’s death, and it was true that Aldo’s testimony had exhausted us all to the point of madness, but something else was happening here. I leaned closer. On his face I watched one thought intrude on another. He begged, then threatened himself, hesitated and continued. He said, ‘Come into the garden, my roses would like to see you.’ I said, ‘What?’ His jaw clicked and there was an acrid smell, as if his synapses were rotting in his brain. It seemed he was looking for the spare key to a room in his head. Now where did I leave it? During the mammoth testimony Morrell had looked on somewhat proudly, I noted, as Aldo read his poem to the jury, but now all I could see was creeping dismay. ‘You’re a good friend to Aldo,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t make up for what you lack, but it’s not nothing.’ His lids were like hardened scabs over his eyes. ‘In a strange way you are almost to Aldo what Plato was to Socrates, or what Paul was to Jesus.’ He was breathing heavily, his teeth actually rattled. I was stumped. What was I looking at? What was I bearing witness to? Morrell opened his eyes and whispered, ‘I want to turn myself into you.’ I squinted; that phrase could be taken one of two ways. He gave me his signature dark scowl for slow comprehension. ‘Can’t you understand, Wilder? It was me ,’ he hissed. ‘ I did it.’ And with that Morrell rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen!’ he yelled, and there it happened.

He confessed!

It wasn’t easy to understand, but it seems that he killed her in a fit of rage for setting fire to his exhibition, and in fear of her reporting their under-age liaison to the police. His admission was followed by an inert yet volatile silence before order pivoted to chaos: the court erupted into a theatrical level of gasping and stock incomprehensible murmuring; Stella rushed to Aldo’s side; supporters stormed a stiffened Aldo with backslaps and handshakes; the judge gavel-thrashed; Mimi’s father, who had spat on Aldo as he entered the courtroom, collapsed in tears; armed bailiffs snapped into a state of excited vigilance while the prosecutor looked personally aggrieved, as if Morrell’s confession had been glommed inadmissibly onto the defence last-minute; and in the midst of this mayhem, Aldo sat expressionless and silent. A month after this irksome near-miscarriage of justice, Morrell was sentenced to a non-parole period of seventeen years, and Aldo was acquitted of Mimi’s murder.

Now Aldo haggardly peruses the cheap zine and manages a smile. I can tell that despite the sombre collection of depressing poems, confessional stories, and inmates apparently soiling themselves on canvas, it’s satisfying to him that Morrell has been exercising his teaching superpower, his one genuine talent.

‘What’s the bad news?’

‘He’s dead.’

Yesterday morning Morrell was found in his cell with so many stab wounds in his chest and throat, at ninety-seven the coroner gave up counting.

‘Had to be Elliot,’ Aldo says, wincing. ‘Poor Morrell.’

‘Poor Mimi .’ That hers weren’t the first blue lips or empty eyes or gored breast I’d ever seen didn’t lessen the frequency of the nightmares.

‘What did Tolstoy say? All living people are alike; every dead person is dead in their own way.’

‘He never said that.’

We sit quietly, thinking about Morrell until the lambent light of the sun burns out and a jumble of stars appear. Aldo and I each crack open a beer with the hissing sea all around us. Froth seeps up through the fissures.

I say, ‘It’s a weird thing to watch a man on a decline from so low a starting point.’

He exhales a slender jet of smoke in my face and in response, or retaliation, tells me his last night’s dream: a seven-foot man made of bees was opening Aldo’s belly with some kind of scimitar, his intestines unspooling under a wedge of yellow moon.

I say, ‘It’s cold. Your balls must be two peas in pods by now.’

He removes his teeth and shows me the horrendous thing that had been done to his mouth.

‘They got knocked out in prison,’ he says.

Aldo’s foetal pallor is enriched by the moon’s luminescence; we don’t speak. I look at my old bald, toothless friend and I think: This man will have difficulty getting a new credit card.

I bark in frustration, ‘Do you actually want to be dragged back to safety? I understand you’ve been humbled by a thousand cuts and numerous incisions, and I know there’s no improving an unimprovable life, but you’ve never felt any special kinship with the ocean, as far as I know, so what’s this about? You just can’t cut it on land? You can’t be bothered to move? Is this for self-protection, making yourself accessible only to a vengeful God from above?’

It seems Aldo has selectively suspended his senses so he can no longer see, smell or hear me. Gulls circle in confusion and let out cryptic shrieks. I want to implore him to make a fresh start, but I don’t have the acting chops to sound like I mean it.

Finally he speaks. ‘Stare at the horizon long enough, sometimes it relaxes, shows some slack,’ he says, and downs two sleeping pills, my cue to leave.

When I’m halfway to shore I turn back and can hardly make him out; the rock holds Aldo in some hardened sheltered corner of total darkness. I find I’m still talking to him. ‘Or because you can’t drag a trail of disasters in your wake if you don’t go anywhere? Or maybe you just need a place to contemplate your arduous life? Or to ascertain what exactly made you low-lying fruit …?’