Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Now he is squinting and sweating, his head juddering and his cheeks red; I assume he is, like always, simply experiencing pain in alien quantities.

The cold arc of a falling star seems to be a cue for Aldo to spritz lighter fluid on his surfboard and start lighting matches.

I say, ‘Really?’

One match hits the surfboard and it goes up, just like that, and sends our way noxious fumes of flaming polyurethane, fibreglass and epoxy resin.

Aldo says, ‘You know who is beset by personal demons? The devil.’ He laughs feverishly. I’m not sure what kind of joke that is supposed to be and I don’t want to know.

V

The last time I see him, it is like a dream of a recurring nightmare. He sits as if he is some aquatic scarecrow, blinking on the world’s worst refuge, wrapped in a blanket and staring out at the waves that roam his streets like wolves. He looks extraterrestrially thin and grey-skinned, hairless, inert. His skin is leathery, his calloused hands torn to shit; eyes spidered with blood, yellow discharge at the corners. He’s twisting his beard in his fingers, has agonising facial contortions; he spits and he lunges violently at insects or phantoms. Repeated heat stroke and UV exposure have taken their toll. His spasming is near constant; his hands shake all the time. His hectoring body won’t leave him alone, like some persistent bully. There’s a new pain in his back — his kidneys giving up on him perhaps. He can feel fluid on his lungs, and persistently clears his throat, producing a russety scum. His voice is worn and sedate. A clammy sweat is a near-permanent fixture on his skin. His sutures and old burns, the whip and claw marks, the tooth and car-antenna scars, all faded and weirdly pigmented in his deep tan. He greets me with seismic laughter that I recognise as the frenzy of anxious grief.

He asks, ‘How’s your book?’

He has not asked me about my book for some time. He has not asked me about Sonja or about my health or my work or my own chaotic love life. He is looking at me with an aggressive curiosity that should prepare me for the worst.

‘It’s been hard, Aldo. Really hard. I mean, I’ve been working around the clock to get down an accurate cross-section of your traumas, but it’s difficult to make an underdeveloped person into a well-developed character. I think I’ve accurately depicted how you’re critical of others yet despairing of your own unceasing self-regard, and how you don’t think so much as secrete thought . But it’s not working. The thing is, I want to make you real. Tangible.’

‘That would be so great.’

‘For others, I mean.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I haven’t captured you yet. Your sprightly depression, for instance. It’s hard to get it right.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Let me ask you a question. What’s your best-case scenario?’

‘I meet God. We open each other’s throats.’

‘See? Who says that?’

‘Maybe you should throw in a twist.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, say, you write that I killed Mimi after all.’

I do a loud inhale that sounds melodramatic and rehearsed. ‘Why would I write that?’

‘I don’t know. Just an idea.’

‘A fucking stupid idea.’

Aldo turns and glares flatly as if at a painting of the sea.

‘Morrell confessed,’ I say.

‘So? How airtight is a confession? People make false confessions all the time. They do in movies. Why not in books? You could write that he was innocent.’

‘Why would he confess if he’s innocent?’

‘Oh God, Liam. For a writer you have such little imagination. You were never good at imagining, at making something up or creating something from nothing. Why is that?’

‘This is a plot twist.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m not interested in plots.’

‘That’s convenient. You’re not good at coming up with them.’

‘No, I find myself totally bored by them.’

‘Yeah — that boredom might have developed during the twenty years you were killing yourself to make them work.’

‘Why would I write that you and not Morrell killed Mimi?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s puzzle it out. Maybe before the trial I convinced him that he’d ruined Mimi’s entire life and sanity by fucking her as a student, that it was the worst kind of abuse, that he was a young-adult molester and he should have been punished and he had no right to live his life a free man when Mimi was dead. Maybe I convinced him that he was a terrible artist and deluding himself and had turned his back on his true calling, that the only good he’d ever done in his life was teach, that it is in prison where human beings are most in need of a teacher to help them discover their artistic selves, and that to benefit these individuals and by consequence the whole of society, so as to balance the scales, restore equilibrium to the moral universe, repay his debt, make amends, use his bestowed gifts where they were best suited, he should take the rap.’

I’m breathing heavily, trying to manage my fear. Cloudlight has turned his crumpled-banknote face battleship grey. I feel the silence against me like a naked flame.

I go, ‘You should write fiction.’

‘I’d probably do a better job.’

‘I couldn’t write that you killed Mimi. You had no reason. You couldn’t have done it. You loved her. It’s not in your character.’

‘Does my character in your book need to be more consistent than my character in my actual life?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to write that my facial scars gleamed in the soft daylight, you know, for verisimilitude?’

‘Big word for a hermit on a rock.’

‘Why are you getting so annoyed?’

‘Because you’re being annoying.’

‘Why did you even want to become a writer?’

‘You know why.’

‘Tell me again.’

‘Because when I was twelve years old I was waiting at a bus stop next to this woman who yelled, “You think I’m dumb because I put my cat on antidepressants!” to an obese man who shouted back, “No bitch, it’s ’cause you went to a rock-paper-scissors seminar.” I mean, Jesus Christ, Aldo. I absolutely had to write down that snatch of dialogue, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, but you don’t ever acknowledge your debts as debts. You’re taking my life, Liam.’

‘Good artists borrow.’

‘Better artists don’t.’

‘Great artists steal.’

‘That’s like saying great jazz pianists beat their wives. Maybe they do. But that’s not what makes them great jazz pianists.’

‘I don’t understand why —’

‘An artist’s theory of art is always founded on his shortcomings as an artist, his passion for that theory in direct proportion to the severity of his failures.’

‘Morrell? You’re quoting Morrell now?’

‘Why not? I’ve been reading his book.’

‘Why are we having a proxy argument about art when you’re talking about murder?’

‘I thought we were talking about character and plot.’

‘Did the character Aldo Benjamin or the character based on Aldo Benjamin or my real friend Aldo Benjamin kill Mimi Underwood?!’

‘When you masturbate with ironic distance, you still ejaculate, but it’s not the same.’

‘What?’

‘I had it wrong all this time. Suicide is not saying “I quit”, but rather “You’re fired.”’

‘What possible reason in all of fucking Christendom would the character Aldo Benjamin or the character based on Aldo Benjamin or my real friend Aldo Benjamin kill Mimi Underwood?!’

‘Reason? Reason? Maybe because I’m always Typhoid Mary’s first port of call and I always get tetanus from Cupid’s arrow and my own hardtokillability combined with my susceptibility to airborne, bloodborne, lipborne, godborne pathogens means that the phrase “I’m fine” amounts to wild hyperbole and I’m therefore in need of constant emergency assistance and possibly centuries of palliative care. Maybe because Mimi was a born nurse, an involuntary nurturer and a pathological carer our destinies dangerously overlapped, and maybe because on that night of my release and welcome-home party, beside me on that balcony gazing at constellations that looked like track marks in the night sky, Mimi maybe said to me, with a sickening air of predestination, “I will take care of you,” before she wheeled me through the party to her bedroom where her photography equipment made distended shadows and we settled on the bed and took sleeping pills and she repeated, “Don’t worry, I will take care of you,” just as she was taking care of Elliot and Morrell. Maybe it was the proximity of the ocean’s madness and the effluvia of my own unceasing flatulence and the opulent chandelier of stars and the moon’s worm-eaten smile and the sinewy palm tree branches flailing like drowning limbs in the violent wind, but her body suddenly seemed an omnibus of corpses; what I mean to say is maybe death was already plying her trade on Mimi’s silvered shoulders and on her marble hips and on the wide circumference of her saucered nipples. And maybe I watched moonbeams claw at her careworn face and her mouth ulcers and her stress rashes and her chewed fingernails and her thigh bruises and the thicket of hickeys on her neck and her eyes gouged with worry and shadows, and maybe I saw clearly her monomania of caring and pathological sacrificing that had her holed up in this subtropical hell with madman Morrell, and maybe her lying there endomorphic, martyred and turbaned in her own hair, while in my mouth the taste or the sense memory of the taste of contrast agents injected for CT scans was making me feel a nuclear blast of compassion, a scalding of pity without consolation, an injection of energising empathy; what I mean to say is that maybe her suffering was so intense and so complete it’s possible that I did not dehumanise her, but over humanised her, and interiorised her pain and became her so convincingly that I could commit suicide as her in a case of mistaken identity, maybe there was what I imagine to be a dolly zoom of my own face as I had the unwelcome realisation that the gift of non-being is the only gift that keeps on giving, and maybe I was surprised to find myself weaponised, that this was germ warfare and I was the germ, and maybe I released my inner child-soldier, and maybe I couldn’t let her achieve one more attosecond of consciousness so I disentangled my arm from hers and in a single fraction of an instant that was less than a second yet an experience of infinity my hand became a prosthesis with a knife, and myself an alien-hand syndromee, and maybe she died succinctly, her blinkless eyes cold in their craters, her creases in her forehead flatlined, and maybe in the profound disquiet that followed I lay awake until the sunlight broke through the fogged dawn and illuminated the bespatted bedsheets, and only then did I scream until a handful of artists ran in and lingered at the door like the four horsemen between apocalypses and simultaneously announced their citizen’s arrest.’