Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  “That was generous of you. Making a speech.”

  “Here.”

  Aldo handed me his phone. Someone had been kind enough to video it and send him a copy. On screen, the shaky image of Aldo stumbling up to the bridal table and snatching a champagne flute out of the groom’s hand. “So, a Buddhist wedding! How unintentionally hilarious, considering the Buddha was a guy who abandoned his wife and child to do his own thing. Actually, don’t tell anyone but I think they think the central tenet of Buddhist philosophy is that a lack of ambition is a shortcut to enlightenment. And if, according to the orthodoxy, the goal of life is nonexistence, then isn’t it an act of mind-blowing hypocrisy and unnecessary cruelty, at the least, for Buddhists to have children? It seems Stella and Craig have misunderstood the idea of the god within to mean that they themselves are God-like. Not that they need draw on this inner power or expect miracles from their own core. It’s just a nice feeling to be God, that’s all. So let us all toast this infuriating couple by raising our glasses to this tired brand of cheap, self-aggrandizing pseudospiritualism! To Craig and Stella! If they ever live long enough to see their souls reborn into nonexistence, they’d shit themselves for never and never. Amen.”

  At which point, the obviously shattered Aldo tumbles off the podium. I handed him back his phone. “A mean-spirited, anti-Buddhist wedding toast, then.”

  “It was,” the small man in the corner said, still without raising his eyes from his texting. “At the culmination of which, Aldo kissed several bare shoulders, accidentally hit the bride in the face, and collapsed under the drinks table, whereupon he drank his arse into a state so near death that he was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped.”

  “Doc Castle’s my personal physician.”

  “The hell I am. I’m a doctor. Just not his. I’m more of a friend. Gary.” Doc Castle extended his hand.

  “Liam Wilder,” I said.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Officer,” he said suggestively, as if he’d browsed a glossy catalog of my core life errors that very morning.

  “Doc was my plus-one,” Aldo said. “I would’ve asked you, but you were on the list of definitely-nots.”

  “Hell of an event,” Doc Castle said. “She’ll not forget that day too soon.”

  I looked hard at Aldo. “Did you try to kill yourself?”

  “Why is he talking about suicide?” Doc Castle asked. “Just drank too much, didn’t you?”

  Aldo fell back into silence, thinking his memories into a fine dust, before he blithely threw off the bedcovers, exposing his pale body.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting the fuck out of here.”

  He climbed out of bed and wobbled on his feet and began to dress in his befouled wedding attire. While he looked under the bed for a shoe I had a premonition of déjà vu, not that we’d done this before, but that we’d do it again in the future.

  “Should I go over and apologize to Stella?”

  I had to break it to him. “She’s taking out a restraining order against you.”

  Aldo bit his lip and sighed. “You can’t ruin someone’s wedding without paying for it the rest of your life. I get that.”

  “And this might not be the time to mention it, but she rang me about an hour ago,” Doc Castle said. “You better pay her the thirty-five thousand dollars you owe her.”

  Aldo’s body grew slightly hunched; he stood for almost an entire ghastly minute, during which I couldn’t come up with a single consoling thought. Half in, half out of his clothes, he’d been drained of the will to dress.

  I asked, “Aldo, want to stay with me a few days?”

  “No. Just drop me home.”

  “Can I have a lift too?” Doc Castle asked, finally looking me in the face. His bored eyes were an arresting blue. “My wife took my car home.”

  “No problem.”

  Aldo wore a fogged expression as we moved down the silent corridor. Passing the nurses’ station, its desk strewn with files, Aldo suddenly seized my arm for leverage and jumped the counter. Oh crap, I thought. He flipped through the files until he came across his own. “Hey, don’t go there!” An irate nurse at the end of the corridor was striding over. Doc Castle snickered. Aldo said, “Stall her,” and I said, “Nothing doing.” She yelled, “Officer! Officer!” as she barreled toward us, and when she reached Aldo he dummied right, a move she anticipated; she grabbed his shirt, he held the file beyond her reach. The bizarre choreography of their battle went on for another torturous minute.

  “This is against hospital policy!”

  “It’s my file!”

  Two men in gowns and slippers looked on. The nurse at last grabbed hold of the corner of the file, but Aldo wouldn’t let go.

  “You can have it,” she said, struggling, “but you need to put in a request . . . in . . . writing.”

  “That . . . makes . . . no . . . sense.”

  The doctor and I watched on—it wasn’t an unamusing spectacle—but the problem with being an officer of the law is that everyone expects you to intervene. A gathering crowd of onlookers now nudged me with their elbows.

  “Aldo, cut it out,” I said.

  He let go all at once and the nurse tumbled back against the desk, file clutched to her colossal breasts. Condescension looked like it had been built into her face at conception.

  “I’ll get you that request,” Aldo said calmly as we left, and the three of us slid into a mercifully awaiting elevator just before the doors shut.

  In the car, Aldo asked Doc Castle a barrage of questions about his marital problems. Did his wife forgive him? Had he forgiven himself? How much had their daughter seen and did he think she would remember it? Aldo listened to the answers with his usual peculiar intensity. I tuned out. I didn’t feel like hearing my friend’s analysis of this doctor’s creepy marital strife and I felt, in fact, a weak sort of outrage that grew in intensity until we arrived outside Aldo’s apartment complex, Phoenix Court, a five-story redbrick horror with cement balconies that all had underpants drying on metal railings.

  Aldo had moved into this building three years before, the year friends could not stop telling him he had reached the age of Christ’s death. (‘Fucking odd thing to say to someone,” he said to me at the time. “What are they implying?”) His apartment was on the first floor, right above a butcher shop, and the knowledge that only floorboards and a couple of meters of putrid air lay between him and all those red-veined carcasses swinging on hooks made him fearful that he’d be visited by the ghosts of cows and lambs and chickens, and be woken intermittently in the night by an eerie moo. That, and the bad ventilation, and an undefeatable cockroach army, and surprise visits from the overbearing landlord, and the more or less constant sounds of wife beating drifting in from any number of adjacent apartments seemed to guarantee him, night after night, a steady stream of gruesome nightmares. One thing I knew about Aldo: He always despised dreams, even pleasant ones, for what he considered their tedious impenetrability and their shocking waste of creativity. He hated how every morning he had no option other than to open his eyes and remember. What was it this time? A faceless man? His dead sister, Veronica, scratching at an enormous red door? Regular dreams featured his cadaverous grandmother leaning against a tree with her oxygen tank, or his mother’s island slipping into the sea, or else he was marching into a river with a broken piano on his back. “God, how the human brain goes on,” he said once. “It’s nearly impossible to not wake up embarrassed by the trite symbolism you’ve subjected yourself to during the night.”

  Aldo climbed out of the car and pushed his head through the open window and said, “Every time I return home I’ve forgotten how shit this area is. Do you think the people who live in this neighborhood have moved up in the world? I mean, Jesus, where were they before?”

  “In hell,” I said.

  He laughed, and we watched him disappear into the building. What now? I could feel Doc Castle looking intently at me. “I don’t suppose you�
�re hungry, Constable?”

  We drove to Woolloomooloo, to Harry’s Café de Wheels, and sat on the wharf eating chunky beef pies with buttered mash and staring out at the impossibly blue sky and dark water, a doctor and a policeman, two urban professionals with apparently not a single thing to say to each other. Eventually we found the area where our working lives intersected: the overprescription of drugs that was hiking up the crime rate, with most break-and-enters being done specifically to ransack medicine cabinets—oxycodone, Vicodin, and Xanax were the most common prizes. And when that topic ran its course, the conversation turned quickly to where it was always destined to go.

  “Quite a character, that Aldo,” Doc Castle said.

  His understatement was tinged with amazement; he genuinely didn’t get exactly why he dropped everything to help our annoying, unfortunate mutual friend. “It’s rare to get so attached to another human being in adulthood,” the doctor mused. They’d met at a game of touch football about eight years ago, he explained, and they’d been friends ever since.

  “Just don’t lend him any money,” I said.

  “Too late for that, I’m afraid.” It turned out the doctor had invested heavily in High Steaks, Aldo’s defunct restaurant. “There is another level to our friendship, of course,” Doc Castle said darkly. “At first he’d ask for advice or assistance, and then if I wouldn’t mind scribbling a little prescription . . .”

  Indeed, that confirmed my suspicions about their relationship; it was a mirror of my own. Just as often as Aldo needed my legal assistance, he called the doctor for medical assistance; when he required bailing out he called me; when he needed patching up he called Doc Castle. What I confirmed that day: I wasn’t the only one on his speed dial, and Aldo’s obsession with his body rivaled his fear of the law. He called Doc Castle for back spasms and sudden immobility, when he’d cut himself with a Stanley knife, for emergency tetanus shots, for burns, when he’d splashed boiling water on his hand or picked up metal pots by the handles, for concussions, for a deafness-inducing buildup of wax in the ear, when he was beaten up by disgruntled investors, to remove a piece of glass from his face (after a pub fight, or slamming the car brakes so that skis went through the front windshield, or falling drunkenly through a glass shower screen); he called him for a vast array of STD fears—warts, lumps, rashes, burning with urination—for fainting in other doctors’ offices, for lacerations and broken bones and bruises and sprains after falling off ladders and down staircases, for cysts that needed to be removed, and for food poisoning and suspected food poisoning. Aldo called on Doc Castle to prove or disprove his own self-diagnoses, and to get emergency appointments with dermatologists, gastroenterologists, radiologists, podiatrists, and to book him in or bump him up on waiting lists for CT scans, MRIs, and the like. “Ever since he was a child,” Doc Castle said, “he’s been afraid of internal bleeding.”

  “I know!”

  “He can’t recall the exact TV show he saw it on, but from his childhood onward, whenever he’s fallen, he’s been convinced he has internal bleeding. That’s the first thing he asks. ‘Doc, do I have internal bleeding? Do I? Am I bleeding internally?’ Or else it’s stitches. He always fears he needs stitches. ‘Do I need stitches? Does it need stitches?’ Doc Castle seemed particularly amused that we were both almost constantly on call, bailing out, rescuing, bandaging, advising, stitching, extricating, inoculating, disentangling. The tone of the conversation was jovial—we laughed about the absurdity of being conscripted as unwitting members of this fool’s entourage—but still, my mood began to darken. This idea that there was something special about Aldo carried within it the implication that there was nothing special about us.

  To break out of the conversation, I said I needed to make a quick call, and dialed my own number and heard my own voice asking me to leave a message. I whispered, “You’re no good,” and when I hung up and turned back Doc Castle was still laughing about Aldo. I laughed too, but I didn’t feel it. I genuinely loved and pitied my old friend but there was no reason at all why his suffering should eclipse my own, I thought somewhat bitterly, or that, quite frankly, he was a special case in any way.

  V

  Not two weeks later, around five p.m., my mobile rang. It was one of those days: Every driver I random breath-tested exhibited suspicious behavior, smiling ferociously or flicking cigarette ash into their laps or making lewd eye contact as they wrapped their cracked lips on the tube and blew, or twitching with restrained violence or staring fixedly ahead or talking gibberish and acting disoriented, surprised to even find themselves driving, as if they were certain they’d left the house on foot.

  “Constable Wilder?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Detective Garnick, drug squad. We met at the trial of Norman Lester. I don’t know if you remember.”

  “Of course. How’s your eye?”

  “I look like a fucking Chinaman.”

  “Can I do something for you, Detective?”

  “This is just a courtesy call to let you know I’ve arrested a vet for selling Nembutal at the Montefiore, the Jewish retirement home down Gladesville way.”

  “Well done, you.”

  “It’s a euthanasia drug. Also used to kill horses.”

  “And that’s relevant to me because . . . ?”

  “Aldo Benjamin’s your mate, isn’t he?”

  My heart tightened, a palpable dread. What now?

  “We got a list of clients. It seems your boy bought himself two bottles last week.”

  Nembutal?

  Was Aldo finally going to do it? Ever obsessed with taking his own life, something that could be traced back to his father’s suicide, had he succumbed to the cumulative effects of his long string of professional failures and the permanent loss of Stella? Was this his ultimate dramatic suspension of judgment? Had he decided to listen to the voices in his head, always with the bad advice?

  I thanked the detective and hung up. The cars came in an endless stream, the whoosh and screech of traffic in my ears grew louder, and everyone was over the limit—everyone!—and for hours I booked citizen after citizen after citizen, feeling like the last sober man in a crazed nation that ran on booze. In every remorseful driver I saw Aldo’s suicide, the agony of him second-guessing himself too late, and I was afraid I wouldn’t catch him in time, that I’d walk in to see him flapping like a fish on the deck of a boat. These thoughts made me whimper, tear up, knowing Aldo’s abject terror of physical pain. Yet for some reason I can’t account for, I waited until nine p.m., after my shift, to drive over to Phoenix Court. There was a proliferation of abandoned mattresses on the rain-slicked footpath and every parked car seemed to have its own gang of youths perched on its hood.

  Even from the elevator, thumping music could be heard that, as it turned out, was coming from Aldo’s apartment. A party was in progress and I felt the vague sting of the uninvited as I made my way inside to see guests drinking, upper-torso dancing, and loud-talking over the music. Thin traces of cocaine were on the glass coffee table, next to bowls of guacamole brown at the edges. The heavy smell of hydroponic pot. There was something perfectly ordinary and yet unaccountably strange about this party, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Aldo was standing by the flat-screen television with glitter on his face, chatting to a pale, scarfed woman with a theatrical voice that carried across the smoky room. “And I wasn’t thinking,” I heard her say, “so I accidentally signed my porn name.” He hadn’t seen me, so I started surreptitiously checking in cupboards for the Nembutal while reassuring guests either visibly spooked at the sight of my uniform or overly excited, mistaking me for a male stripper. As I mingled, it dawned on me, the source of the weirdness: about every third guest I encountered was sick in some way. I spoke to a double amputee, a woman with an incurable liver disease, a recent testicular cancer survivor, gaseous men and women who smelled like the slick coating on vitamins, people who had wasted legs or moony faces or who seemed to have been born into their dotag
e. Something implausible was going on. People who needed emergency mollycoddling skittered around the party discussing various treatments, the efficacy of this drug over that, superbacteria horror stories. They were all prototypes of a human being in God’s workshop—strictly first drafts.

  I marched over to Aldo, interrupting him mid conversation.

  “Hey, I know this is going to sound fantastically insensitive,” I said, “but seriously, Aldo, what kind of bullshit friends are these? They’re all sick. How can they all be sick? I mean, two is a coincidence. Three’s a pattern, but still within the realm of probability. But four? Five? Ten terminally ill pals? What gives?”

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “I run in different circles. You know that.”

  I did know that. Aldo lived in a way that often got me reevaluating my own modus operandi—lie low and keep out of people’s way. Aldo had weed friends, binge-drinking friends, Spanish-class friends, indoor-soccer friends, science-geek friends, hipster friends, vaguely criminal friends, business friends, school friends, old friends, new friends—now sick friends—he was an indiscriminate friendmaker, often caught in a freak friendstorm. Aldo had a thousand confidants, a thousand allies who frequently, depending on their level of financial investment, became a thousand enemies.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Come into my bedroom,” he said, leading me into his monastic yet untidy room at the end of the hall. One lamp, broken. One double bed, unmade. One apple core on bedside table atop a stack of psychology textbooks. One chair covered in an avalanche of underpants and T-shirts. One couple dry-humping on the bed.

  “Let’s try the balcony.”

  Out there the air was brittle and cold. Over the Navy Yard, where three gargantuan vessels were anchored, storm clouds formed. To the south, fireworks and a shifting curtain of smoke.

  “Where is it?” I asked, at the same time as he exclaimed, “Stella’s pregnant!”