Steve Toltz - Quicksand

The waves have grown raucous and only now do I become conscious that I am sodden. Aldo is trembling but his face is uncannily still in the moon’s raw light. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘it was just an idea. Write what you want.’

Some slug creature with an orange-specked carapace stirs in the shadowed crevice near my left foot. There is nothing further to add and no way to add it. I fumble a goodbye and make a careful descent to my board. As always, no matter how open and honest we’ve been, no matter to what degree we’ve unburdened or admitted shameful secrets never before uttered aloud, we can’t seem to depart fully satisfied with the transaction, and now, even after his weirdest and darkest hypothetical confession, there is still something permanently unexpressed lingering between us.

VI

Two months go by, and I don’t go out there often. First casualties of autumn: the Lifesaving Association packs it in, the man selling cold drinks and fresh fruit goes home, the umbrellas and deckchairs and nubile bodies vanish; then weirdly, as prophesised, the beach itself disappears altogether. The sand is history, the water creeps all the way up to the cliff wall. Magic can’t go on forever, I suppose. The surfers have gone back to their old haunts, you can’t even climb down the rock face anymore. If you try, you’ll find only an angry ocean smashing up against the cliff as if to say ‘I am busy eroding sandstone, so fuck off someplace else.’ Now there’s no beach, just dark, iridescent water, some rocks, and further out in the ocean than ever before, a man alone on a rock with nothing to look at but sea and sky.

The weather isn’t a help — it’s the coldest autumn since 1965. Plus Sonja has contracted chronic fatigue syndrome, or is faking it, Tess has married a Korean air traffic controller named Eden, and I am caught up in a totally bogus corruption enquiry regarding missing quantities of impounded cannabis. I’m trying to justify why I’ve abandoned Aldo in his self-exile. The truth is, you can only be generous with your time up to a point, then you have to leave your friends on their icy rocks alone. You have other things to do.

VII

Record-breaking waves are creating havoc up and down the coastline, a cold crescendo of monsters — it’s going to be a tough visit. There’s no place from which to launch a boat, so I have to set out from another beach around the headland, just a regular beach that’s been there forever, nothing magical about it.

The sea is rough, and I can’t hear myself swear on account of the wind. I ride the choppy waves, and lashed by spray I make my approach.

‘Aldo!’ I shout.

No reply. I circle the island but can’t see him. With great difficulty, I manage to moor the boat to a bony protuberance of rock on the north side and climb onto a ledge. I look in every hollow, every crevice. I look out at the waves as if waiting for a hand or his head to surface. I crouch and stare at my own shadow on the granite as if it might tell me something. I shout his name at intervals. I tear down the tarp and trundle over every inch of the rock, sidestepping blasts of spray, and whisper, ‘Come out,’ as if he is hiding. I say, ‘Aldo. Aldo .’ I am whimpering his name now.’ Aldo. Aldo .’ I am hyperventilating it. I had never given up hope of airlifting his body to safety but it seems he has finished his pointless time on this damned place. Aldo is gone. He has left the rock standing empty, abandoned nature to nature. It surprises me how fast I start my grieving. It’s instantaneous. It rushes in. Aldo .

That afternoon, I browbeat my senior sergeant to get a team of forensics with annoyed faces to come out and make their deliberations. They find traces of hair, urine, faeces, fresh blood, black blood, old blood — Aldo’s many secretions from his every orifice. Fell, drowned, washed out to sea is the verdict. (I find myself crying in front of my fellow officers. There is a hushed respect for tears in the force. They assume it’s rare — it’s not. In the wider culture too, it’s become incredibly manly to be unafraid to look like a little girl for three to five minutes.) While the police traipse with impunity into his sour fortress of solitude, I sort through his bric-a-brac, as if Aldo himself has been mislaid there, and find his copy of Morrell’s Artist Within, Artist Without ; I cradle it, and my novel takes on additional life force; it has become like a photo album rescued from a fire-gutted house in which everybody died.

The team combs the beach and all accessible points. Did he go to shore and drag himself up that cliff? ‘Maybe a wave swept him off the rocks. It was bound to happen. No trace. He must’ve drowned.’ The media come out to the rock and say he must have been booted off by the ocean’s foot. With news helicopters hovering, surfers come out with little lanterns to hold a vigil, but the waves are too big and the storm clouds chase them off.

Everyone goes home; I am the last. My oldest, best, broken and heartbroken friend, the guy who wore fancy dress to an antiwar protest, who was himself the patron saint of statistical anomalies, is gone. Before I leave the island, I take one final look over these boulders heavily encrusted with sponges and algae; I peer into vertical crevices and fissures and rocky ledges and shelves, where Aldo lived among desiccated barnacles and hermit crabs and turned a blind eye to fish spawning in the hard substrate; I thought he was like the regenerating arms of the starfish; I was wrong. I thought he would never unfussily and judiciously slip into the waves without making a big song and dance about it. Psychotic with grief, I wail now. Aldo! Always the wrong guy with the wrong outfit saying the wrong thing in the wrong tone of voice in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong person or persons, always oozing fallibility, who is always my friend, who is gone.

VIII

The bodiless funeral service was held in the botanical gardens on a dewy morning. Aldo’s anonymous returned wheelchair was there in his stead — rusted, grafittied, painted over. The mourners included people he impoverished for generations and those he enriched, all those professionals he relied upon or put aside for safekeeping: nurses, prison guards, fortune tellers, private detectives, cardiologists, pharmacists, criminal lawyers, dentists, physiotherapists, accountants, dermatologists, bankers, lifeguards, bodyguards, magistrates, customs officers, bounty hunters, anaesthetists, stockbrokers, paramedics, urologists, politicians, prostitutes, wayfarers and stevedores. There were also offended Christians, picketers, and other people who take umbrage for a living. I picked up a smidgeon of genuine grief and mourning, but the weirdness of this funeral was that nobody was in denial. If anything they were overprepared for this day; it had been on their calendars for months. The general consensus was his existence had been excruciating. Yet it was clear that he had touched so many lives; over the course of the day, I heard four separate people say, ‘He was my best friend.’ I also saw business cards change hands, two separate high-fives, one down low, one too slow, three successful pickups, and more bunches of service-station flowers than I’d ever seen assembled in one place. His evangelicals (sales reps) were handing out flyers for a Special Death of Our Founder offer. The website had peaked and begun its decline. In the end it was a fad after all, a one-hit wonder. At one point, Aldo’s subscribers ballooned to two million, but when I last checked they had already dwindled to three hundred thousand. That’s nothing these days; cats have more followers than that.

The old child murderer Stan Maxwell read the Psalm of David. The Lord was many things to Aldo, but he sure as shit wasn’t his shepherd, and Aldo was never not in want. With a conical mass of snot hanging from her nose, and face turned to the sky, Stella sang tearfully about that sorrow that was not for his death per se but for his life and their love that was like a flower shaken violently for years and on which even now a few petals remain. The song didn’t finish so much as sob itself out, and Frank Rubinstein shepherded her gently off the podium. A few others got up to speak, people I had never met or heard of. They said, ‘Aldo’s proximity to terror and to error gave my whole family nightmares,’ ‘He was a guy with vertigo who chose to perch on a mountaintop,’ and ‘Aldo was the Russian formalist of all the amateur psychologists.’ To be honest, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of these eulogies. Doc Castle took to the podium. ‘Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk we could not understand him. Well, Aldo could talk and we could not understand him either. He was our lion.’ I stopped listening after that. Frankly, I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I had the dreadful idea that maybe Aldo was orchestrating a resurrection to augment his business, and I remembered how when we were seventeen he told me that one member of his family per generation got into monumental debt and tried to fake his own death, and I thought this funeral was the propitious moment for his ulcerous person to pop out from behind a cabbage tree palm and surprise us with a new investment opportunity. He will either turn up any second now or be truly dead, I thought throughout the whole service. I was a wreck.