Steve Toltz - Quicksand

He never appeared.

At last, I had to admit that my booby-trapped and masticated friend had managed to leave his ignoble slab of a rock, this cold telluric pebble called Earth, that he had sprouted his last pustules, suffered his last spasms, endured his last internal lava spill and that his open wound of immortality had closed over and healed, and that was a beautiful thing.

Unless.

Personally, I prefer to imagine that his old dream came true; maybe he vanished by an act of will, liquefied in his sleep and disintegrated body and soul, maybe he was uncreated and unborn— decreated , vanishing from the island to emerge in a distant unmapped galaxy moments later as a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye, racing through the vagaries of space and time, ringing out like plucked strings, tapering off and just frankly dissolving in an orange flash as a traceless nothing, never more to wake. I hope so. Someone’s dreams have to come true. Otherwise all the dreams build up on a vast garbage dump, taking up too much space in this world. You can’t get from the bedroom to the bathroom without tripping over the rotting carcass of some man’s dream. So I prefer to imagine that his stubborn hopes and deepest desires came to fruition, and I resolve that whenever I remember Aldo and all those days at sea, and how he disappeared just like that, I’ll think: Well, at least there’s one less dream cluttering up the dump.

IX

A month later, I’m falling asleep at my desk, taking the statement of a high-maintenance eyewitness in an ATM raid, when the phone rings.

‘Constable Wilder speaking,’ I say.

‘Your mate is Aldo Benjamin, isn’t he?’

My heart actually stops beating. I feel it stop for long enough to be consciously concerned about it restarting.

‘Was. Yeah. What’s this about?’ I manage to say.

‘A portrait of him was stolen from the Sussex Street Gallery, and it’s already turned up on eBay from a US dealer.’

‘Oh.’

My hands are shaking as I take down a few details and pass them on to the Computer Crimes Unit and to Customs, and I marvel to think about Aldo’s frustrated face floating on the black market. What is his value? That’s a slippery concept. In dollar terms, not inconsiderable at present, although I suspect he will always trade slightly below estimate and will eventually trend steadily down towards zero. Aesthetically? Given he was someone not overly interested in culture himself, it’s vaguely amusing to note that his ultimate claim to fame might be inadvertently propelling certain artists to a medium level of success — namely Lynne Bishop, Frank Rubinstein and Dan Wethercot. It would not surprise me if he were one day to be a footnote to early 21st-century Australian art history and nothing more.

I spend the next few hours at my desk clicking through image files of Aldo Benjamin — paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, sketches, video installations — each one making me feel deeply disturbed; just as a nightmare refuses the sleeper genuine rest, his image denies any kind of peace of mind to the viewer. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that there may be no place for every random anecdote and strange story about Aldo in my book: the cat in the foldout couch debacle; Aldo being chased by the human monkey in Rajasthan; the clairvoyant’s egg; the grassroots, opt-out euthanasia white paper. Not to mention the minor slip-ups: penises caught in zippers, pubic hair in velcro; all the misjudged timing of automatic, elevator and revolving doors; the endless unforgivable faux pas; the romantic, candlelight-dinner, reach-for-the-salt, sleeve-on-fire scenarios. In this whole book, I’ve neglected to mention that whenever Aldo tripped he felt that he was being reprimanded by a higher power, and when he got to his feet he felt it was an act of defiance.

Some afternoons I go back, I don’t know why, to Leila’s old ground-floor apartment. There’s a single man in there now, a burned-out bummed-out middle-aged fellow who sits perpetually at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. I think: Aldo would know what was wrong with him. I can feel the suffering, but I can’t name it. The last time I went he raised his sad head and slammed his fist on the table. He seemed to hate living there and looked at me as if it were all my fault.

Just as now Aldo is looking at me from Louise Bozowic’s painting, ‘The Sadness and the Envy’. And he’s no Lazarus; the more I look at these works that were created while he was alive, the more he appears already dead in them — a living death that through the artworks goes on living.

X

It is five o’clock on a Friday afternoon and I’m eating a falafel in my parked car outside my apartment — less sad than eating in front of the television, I figure — when I see Neil Mikula, a tall squinty neighbour in his mid-thirties, shoulder-bumping a skinny teenager and palming something. We were friendly in the early days but too often he’s been carting stolen flat-screens or selling heroin in my line of vision; I warned him a dozen times and busted him once — he was sent down for six months. Now he’s leaning against a low concrete wall in a sort of brooding languor, and a rush of customers come for his wares: tinfoil packets and plastic baggies, H and pills. This happens more than you’d think. Sometimes people assume broad daylight makes them invisible. Sure, my car’s mostly obscured by the electrician’s van I’m parked behind, but still. Discretion, people. I wearily put down the falafel and hit the siren. Neil turns and looks at me a moment before walking over. I don’t even have to get out of the car.

‘Oh man,’ he says, in a weird falsetto.

‘You said it.’

He takes a fistful of dollars out of his pocket, clearly his first foray into bribery.

‘Put that away.’

‘What are you doing out here anyway, staking out your own apartment?’

‘That’s not what you need to worry about right now.’

He glances behind him at the place he’s vacated, as if afraid to lose his spot. ‘You let me go, Liam, sorry, Detective Wilder , and I’ll do you a solid.’

‘It’s Constable.’

‘Still?’

‘I’m doing you a solid. Take this as your early retirement plan.’

‘I could give you some information, Liam.’

‘You could, Neil, but I don’t care what kind of information you have. I’m not ambitious. I don’t have bigger fish to fry. In any case, you might not realise it, you are the bigger fish. The ones you throw back I already threw back. Those guys you sold to.’

His peevish stare mutates into a wait-and-see smile that catches my attention. There’s something out of character about it, as if he’s implying some shared destiny. He leans in intimately, and says, ‘Anton Benjamin.’

‘You mean Aldo Benjamin?’

‘Yeah. Aldo Benjamin. Sorry.’

Just the sound of the name coming out of this junkie’s face makes me fear my dam of sadness might break and inundate the fucker. My evident shock is a strategic error. Neil lights a cigarette, singeing the fringe of his hair, and assumes a nonchalant manner.

‘What about him?’

‘He was your mate, wasn’t he?’

He clears his throat that doesn’t need clearing and fakes a bored yawn. In the silence, I can hear the discordant symphony of TVs from ground-floor apartments tuned to different channels. My eyes lay siege to Neil’s. Predictably, he breaks first.

‘OK, you might remember I recently did a little six-month stretch in Long Bay. Why? Because my unneighbourly neighbour took his job a little too seriously.’ I don’t say anything, but close my eyes to concentrate on what Neil is saying. Now he sounds like he’s clearing someone else’s throat. He continues: ‘Halfway through my time, I moved into a cell with this insane bastard, Baz. I shat myself when I saw him but we got on anyway and for some reason he looked out for me. He was a good bloke but always getting into it with someone. Got himself bashed to death last month, crazy bastard.’