Steve Toltz - Quicksand

III

Along supersaturated blue skies white clouds seem strategically arranged, like spaceships before an invasion. My plan is to paddle out to the island to deliver Aldo’s mail (it’s been building up), sit next to him while he goes through it and gives instructions on how to reply, but when I approach I’m greeted by the stink of turpentine and solvents intermingled in the briny air. Aldo is sitting for yet another portrait. I’d take the preening surfers over the conceited and garrulous artists any day.

As I clamber up I recognise the abstract painter Frank Rubinstein, hunched over an easel squinting at his model, who looks glandular and is limply dangling off a sea-slicked boulder in a position that could not possibly be painless.

‘I’m using fast-drying oils because the ocean spray keeps smearing the paint on the canvas,’ Frank Rubinstein says.

‘I don’t care,’ I say.

‘Aldo,’ Frank Rubinstein says, ‘are you comfortable in that position?’

I laugh. ‘Aldo hasn’t been comfortable in fifteen years.’

Emerging from behind a rock, terrified and gripping the rope railing with enough concentration to perform keyhole surgery, is Doc Castle. I haven’t seen him since the trial.

‘Afternoon, Constable.’

‘Afternoon, Doctor.’

‘Have you heard about our hero here?’

I shake my head.

‘You’re writing a novel about this little guy, aren’t you? Well, put this in your book and smoke it.’ The doctor told the following story: the day before, Aldo had woken late, stumbled to the ledge in the cold morning sunshine and gimped onto his board, tried to catch one of the dismaying waves on offer and demonstrated accidental magic, carving and hooking up the lip of the wave then riding a hollow tunnel to shore where he lay in the shallows, his arms around the surfboard as if clinging to a log during a flood. It was then he spied a small hand reaching out of the bulging water — a child caught in a strong rip drifting close to the rocks. He paddled over, pulled the drowning child by the arm onto his board, catching a face full of threshing limbs in the process, and gave a ferocious, bearded kiss of life that terrified the resuscitated child before ferrying him to the shoreline to his fretful parents. ‘One minute longer in the water and I would have let him drown for sure,’ Aldo said to them. ‘You won’t see me returning a brain-damaged child to its parents.’ The mother and father gaped at Aldo with mild horror. ‘And raise him right! I don’t want to have saved someone who turns out to be a wife-beater, or who twenty years down the track is involved in a hit-and-run. I sure as shit don’t want to be the one telling some poor mother that it was me who put this bastard back on the streets.’

Frank Rubinstein and Doc Castle were laughing.

Aldo says, ‘Can we change the subject? Liam, what do you think between a ouija board with spellcheck, a chastity belt with biometric iris-recognition technology, and updating the handkerchief?’

‘Neither. None. What?’

‘OK. What about interconnected coffins? One big coffin shaped like a cross. All we do is wait for a family of four to die in a car crash.’

‘That’s your market?’

‘Would you bury them head to head,’ Doc Castle asked, ‘or feet to feet?’

‘Aldo,’ I say irritably, ‘you don’t even care about your one successful business. After all these years you finally crack it — and you don’t give a shit. Why the fuck would you want to start another?’

Aldo looks at me, stricken. This is just the fleshless nub of his old dream talking; he’s spent his whole life striving for a profitable idea, and habit has kept it on life support. Here I am, pulling the plug.

He turns his face to the shore and says, ‘Wheelchair’s gone’—it was indeed stolen weeks ago — and then shouts, ‘all right, can everybody please just get the FUCK out of here?!’

We scramble for our boards and kayaks and canoes and head back to shore, leaving Aldo babyish and alone on his shadeless rock. Without pathological entrepreneurialism, what else is he going to do, other than stare out of shit-coloured glasses at that drek of an ocean, at the sky he perceives as an uninhabitable waste of space, a desolate and stupid emptiness.

Three weeks later, I have my answer.

IV

It is a hot night in his sea garden. Huge, glittering stars humiliate the barren earth, in my opinion. Mosquitoes pester us while Aldo shampoos his armpits. He bathes at night, when he can’t be seen. The rock has a natural protuberance he uses as a towel rack. He scampers down to the water’s edge and jumps into the dark surging water and pulls himself back up; when he’s dry, he sits as still as the rock, as if to take on its colour and posture. The last surfer on the beach gives Aldo a kind of salute. We listen to the sea and tarpaulin flapping in the wind with an incessant series of thwacks. The ocean is black and fast-moving and Aldo tells me there are scratches on the moon’s face that were not there the night before.

He says, ‘I’ve got the traversing of a minute down to an art form.’

‘Well done. What?’

He smiles horribly, now that he leaves his teeth out, save for occasions of chewing meat.

‘You know how in Morrell’s book he writes that Wittgenstein says a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards as long as it doesn’t occur to him to pull rather than to push?’

‘Yes but —’

‘I’m finally pulling.’

‘What does that mean?’

When you ask him a question he pauses now, as if sending it up the chain of command.

‘My hair roots, my neck nape, my elbow joint, my fat cells, my flesh, my cartilage, my bones, my tissue, my glands, my acids, my marrow, my bile, my whole musculoskeletal system —’

‘What about them?’

‘The attainment of infinity thus unfolds in an instant. That’s what she said.’

‘Who said?’

‘I was hoping to combine astral travelling and levitation and teleportation and spontaneous combustion — but these experiments of mind, time and matter are not progressing well. Maybe I don’t have the discipline. I honestly thought my circumstances would be ideal for promoting self-harm through mental telepathy, or at least close the morphological space between me and that black-browed albatross.’

‘What black-browed albatross?’

‘What retards ascent?’

‘What?’

‘I am held down by superficial forces. To do away with weight or do away with gravity. That is the question.’

‘You can’t try out a new approach to life at your age. Your nose hairs are turning grey.’

‘I want my hands to be putty in my hands.’

‘See, I don’t know what that means.’

‘The Cambrian explosion was yesterday to me.’

‘Not any clearer.’

‘I’m talking about being aerodynamically borne aloft on my own beak or claw. I’m talking about adaptability, variability, discontinuity, divergence, diversification, allopatric speciation, flexibility where it counts. I’m talking about forceful invocation of will, about harnessing my clinical frustration for antagonism-based modification. I’m talking about evolvability , Liam. I’m not making this shit up. Ask any evolutionary biologist. Sudden mutations are a thing.’

Last week, he explains, he thought he’d made progress when the stars above him vibrated, and he experienced an oceanic, ecstatic feeling as if his endorphins and adrenaline and dopamine levels were going haywire, but when it was over, there was a bloody pool at the back of his head and he realised he’d likely had some kind of seizure, probably from low blood sugar or high fever or a tapeworm or encephalitis.