Steve Toltz - Quicksand

I am incongruous in a wetsuit, Aldo is incongruous on the seafloor …

What did Aldo say? ‘Oceans are hotbeds of extraterrestrial activity while we look dumbly at the skies.’ Maybe he’s right.

I should give up this fool’s errand but I feel the ocean currents like a tractor beam, pulling me in. With the hope that his blood no longer circulates, that his respiration has stopped, that he no longer excretes, that over forty years of death throes are enough, I move through the water in an angry fear, ploughing deeper, deeper into the awful splendour of the unknown. And I go down where, if the Leviathan will rise from the sea, I hope it’s the Atlantic.

Tonight, under the white-breasted moon, I am preparing to go down the deepest yet. I’ll be accompanied by Senior Detective Dan Westbury, an amphibious swashbuckler, it turns out, who’s coming with me because where I need to go ‘shit starts getting technical’. It’s an irrational thought, but I find myself hoping the Rapture does not happen tonight. I am going to a place from where anyone ascending to heaven would get the bends.

It’s almost time to go. I’m sitting at my kitchen table where I spend my waking hours (I haven’t spent more than a minute in my living room for months). Sonja stands at the fridge, draped in swimming medals and athletic regalia, parading back and forth with a beer in hand, stamping her feet, trying to get my attention but not knowing what to do with it when she has it. I clamp my eyes shut. When I open them Sonja is gone, and my eyes fall to the cabinet, to Aldo’s copy of Artist Within, Artist Without that I retrieved from the rock. I fetch it, and at the kitchen table absently flick through the pages. To my surprise, Aldo has underlined three sentences, two of which I remember well.

We make art because being alive is a hostage situation in which our abductors are silent and we cannot even intuit their demands.

And:

There but for the grace of God goes God.

And then there is the one I didn’t remember. I had only once, many years ago, read carefully through Morrell’s copious footnotes. Aldo had triple-underlined and asterisked one at the bottom of page 112, halfway through the chapter ‘Tribulations and Creativity’. It’s a short, simple sentence but for some unaccountable reason it makes me cry so hard Sonja comes back in and hands me her half-empty beer. I drink it and read again:

Each day you wake up alive, you are the victor; go claim your spoils.