Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  It was ten p.m. by the time Aldo was warned and released with a court date for violating the AVO, and we were in my car on the way back to his apartment. Aldo looked tenderized and depleted; he gripped the armrest and stared out the window with a smile of fear at the mundane streets of the cold city, appearing increasingly tiny and alone, and in between shallow breaths, to my eternal chagrin, continued his pre-interview rant, his wholesale dumping of thought, his tour de force of complaint. He was afraid, he said, that he’d failed himself in ways he’d never understand, hated the unbearable sight of nobody in love, loathed people who prayed so hard they thought they were making God come, was depressed that the only people in society who commanded his respect were those he saw on trains reading manuscripts of sheet music, was sick of wondering whether to assign meaning to his misfortunes or not, irritated at how people would quick-smart find tragic a suicide rather than the preceding decades of unbearable psychological torment leading up to it, which was just seen as normal life—

  I slammed on the brakes and glared at him. His face looked like it had been melted down and recast.

  “Are you going to be OK?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to try this again?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “In the tropics, do coffins at open-casket funerals have mosquito nets?”

  “Do what?”

  “There’s a market there.”

  “What?”

  “Mosquito nets for open-casket funerals in tropical climes!”

  I gaped dumbly. This was typical Aldo. He was preparing for death, but at the same time doubling up on life. Suicidal and ambitious. Furiously tying nooses while intermittently doing abdominal exercises. It was absurd.

  “Let’s have a drink,” I said. “We have some brainstorming to do.”

  “Holster your cock, Officer.”

  “Shut up until we get there. I need a drink to listen to you.”

  I drove us to the Hollywood Hotel and while chain-smoking in the beer garden I told him that he was already well proven to be phenomenally unlucky; his next suicide would likely have him lapse into a coma, or leave him with internal organ damage, brain damage, paralysis, or horrific disfigurement, and he’d live the rest of his life in a state-run, underfunded care facility, or worse. As I said this it occurred to me there was something different in his eyes; they were like cartoon asterisks or pinwheels, maybe from him having gone halfway up and back the tunnel of light so many times he’d left a greasy trail. I feared a permanent psychotic break, and worried that this intense accelerated state would be his new normal. I gave him an ultimatum: cobble together a will to live and settle upon a short-term life plan by the end of this drink or I would shoot him in the face. I said I’d be shirking my duty as a friend if I didn’t help him build a tenuous link to life. Besides, I had my pen and notebook ready.

  Aldo agreed to no more businesses, no more borrowing, no more investments, no more restaurants, no more get-rich-quick schemes, and since having a boss was impossible for someone with his temperament, he decided he would freelance, but as what? I reminded him that after high school he had been a cold-calling, pet-sitting, house-cleaning, garden-clearing, leaflet-distributing-aholic. He needed to go back to basics. I convinced him to put himself in the service of others. Helping people in whatever way they needed help. I wrote down where Aldo’s strengths and skill sets lay, and made a sign for him that he agreed to affix to walls and telephone poles all over the city.

  This was the sign:

  HANDYMAN. CAN DO ALMOST ANYTHING—WITHIN REASON. HOUSE PAINTER. WINDOW WASHING. LANGUAGE TEACHER (ENGLISH ONLY). MOW LAWNS. PUNISH YOUR CHILDREN. WHATEVER. $25 AN HOUR. ALDO BENJAMIN. 063 621 4137. NO JOB TOO DISTASTEFUL.

  That was literally the best we could do.

  The night sky was weirdly pale. We drove home through silent streets, past inner-city terraces with young people carousing on wrought-iron balconies and burlesque-outfitted women shadowed by males swaggering with sexual violence. Aldo’s skin seemed made of cheesecloth and he was squished down in the passenger’s seat once again throwing off scalding thoughts and stamping on them, my internal organs speakers through which his voice was amplified. The air in the car was fusty, almost unbreathable. I gripped the wheel until my palms began to ache, experiencing a fatigue that started to feel like pain, trying to shut down my peripheral vision so as to avoid his face turned toward me. Aldo was, he said, fed up with foraging for silver linings, irritated by how a lifelong use of humor as a defense mechanism had perverted his sense of humor and weakened his defenses, sick of needing assurances that others were not enjoying their lives either, bored by hostile looks in bathroom mirrors that could descend any moment into violence, weary of the dread of insomnia, of floating down a silent river of hours toward dawn weighing up the worst of human cruelty, e.g., bayoneting babies in utero (the Rape of Nanking) vs. forcing sons to rape their mothers (Kosovo).

  I accelerated down the three-lane highway. I wanted him out of the car; I’d had more than I could take.

  Once out of the harbor tunnel, we passed a rattling semitrailer spilling dirt on the road, and a manure smell poured in through the windows. We drove down the deserted somber streets, my police radio calling for backup—a brawl in the Cross—and I was thinking a complicated warren of thoughts, such as how Morrell writes, Just as in quantum physics the observer alters the behavior of the observed, so in art does the artist modify the subject, and wondering how whatever I came up with would transform Aldo, but I was also trying to memorize what he was saying. He had landed, once more, on his defining theme, his fear of prisons and hospitals, the medical-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, antibiotic resistance levels, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, protective custody, quarantine, secondary infections, trumped-up charges, the general population, visitation rights, visiting hours, tainted blood transfusions, wrongful convictions, misdiagnoses, lockdown, pathogens, handcuffs, vital-signs monitors, pneumatic sliding doors. He recounted a dream (“As you know, doctors have long personified death in my dreamscape, and I keep dreaming about a sign in a hospital men’s room that says SURGEONS MUST WASH THEIR HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK”) and finally he linked his two obsessions: “When you think about it,” he said, “preexisting conditions and prior convictions amount to the same thing: Once you’re fucked, you’re fucked again for having once been fucked.” I pulled up to Phoenix Court with a violent screech and we both jerked forward. My brain felt parched, starved of oxygen. Just before he got out of the car, Aldo asked, in a furious voice, “Why the fuck does depression get to be a disease when frustration does not?”

  He shut the door. Sharp air gusted in through the open window, and without noticing the tears of exhaustion in my eyes, Aldo spoke of two decades of thwarted impulses, backed-up energy, the toll taken by gratification forever denied, by keeping his aggression in check, by love rejected if not outright flung back in his face, and of how it was not elusive goals that had worn him down, but the accreted obstacles that needed to be removed to obtain them, and just before he turned and faced the barely traversable puddles of vomit and then disappeared through his building’s shattered glass door, he gave me his final self-diagnosis: He was convinced he was suffering from clinical frustration, a humanwide phenomenon that as yet no pharmaceutical companies were “getting into.”

  A Gulag of One’s Own

  I AM WOKEN BY A momentous wave, as if the first to crash on the shore this calendar year, and I hallucinate the sound of a crying baby, rasping and raked in the foam. I sit up, damp and cold, feeling only minimally alive. A terrifying swell is rolling, coming in rows every few minutes. A gray light spreads thinly over the dawn sky and the horizon is veiled in a light mist. Overnight the glassy waves have grown big and stormy, six-footers breaking over the tiny island, waves so big they seem to generate their own weather system. I can see the figure of Aldo propped up on a rock, a dance of white w
ater spiraling up behind him. He’s shouting something, and making some kind of hand signal.

  I think he is just waving hello. I say, “What a cock.”

  Behind me, a laugh. I turn around. Her face swarming with hair, a toddler on her lap playing with his mother’s skirt. Christ. Stella.

  “You snore,” she says.

  There’s black eyeliner framing her gigantic eyes, and she looks padded out; the weight has aged her.

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Not long.”

  She gives me that intense stare of hers that feels like a part of her is also watching me from another vantage point with binoculars. She digs her nails into the copper sand. Clive, the puffy-cheeked toddler, shovels fingers of it into his mouth.

  “Do you have water?”

  She passes me a bottle; it tastes like melted refrigerator ice. Wedged into the sand beside her is a small Esky cooler.

  “He called me. Asked me to get supplies.”

  “What did he ask you to get?”

  “The usual.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She opens the cooler to reveal gardener’s gloves, a coffee-filled thermos, a heavy rope, yogurt, sandwiches, tins of tuna and pineapple slices, jars of pickles, bananas, beer, fruit, a first-aid kit, a carton of Marlboro Reds, a lighter, and an old photograph, framed—when was the last time anybody framed a photograph?—of the two of them together.

  I say, “Jesus, is that—?”

  A barefoot dark-haired woman emerges from the path and heads toward us. She’s thin and pleasant looking but with a hook nose that you don’t see so much in the twenty-first century.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Saffron.”

  “Liam. We met at Aldo’s trial.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’m Stella. What’ve you got there?”

  Saffron too has an Esky in her hand.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “Aldo asked me to bring supplies.”

  I laugh, “What a cock.”

  “I guess he was covering his bets.”

  “Wow, so that’s where he is? On that?”

  There is abrupt silence as the three of us contemplate the rock: No longer a piece of sea-worn granite off the eastern seaboard, it is a solid abyss on which our broken mutual friend is miserably camped in the open air alone. We all stand absurdly, like pod people.

  “So, Liam,” says Stella. “What are you waiting for?”

  “No time like the present,” Saffron says.

  I turn and make my plea to the large waves collapsing on the shore. “Just dash out, make a whirlwind visit to the rock, and whip back? Is that what you mean?”

  “We’ll hold your spot for you,” Stella says.

  The waves, the waves. The kind that frequently swallow rock anglers and their children. Even if I was a regular surfer, I wouldn’t voluntarily go out in surf this big, but with Stella frowning and Saffron jubilant behind me, I feel an indispensable part of an ongoing drama.

  A flash of lightning; the sky’s in a mood.

  I strap both Eskies to the nose of my surfboard and push out, battling the frightening waves. A gray bank of cloud hangs ominously above and it feels as if a storm is raging on the sea floor. It’s slow-going, and I’m sloshed around like a shrunken head in a barrel. I get over the peaks and consider my approach. The ocean swells up over the island, leaving a short interval to swim onto the rocky base before the water rushes back out, creating a dangerous vacuum effect. This is going to be tricky.

  “Careful, Liam!” Aldo shouts.

  There he is, looking wolfish, atavistic, perched on a ledge without a wetsuit and propped up on the rock, belly spilling over tight black board shorts. I spot his surfboard wedged up between a couple of dark boulders. “Did you sleep?” I ask, trying to stay afloat.

  “Got an hour here or there. The place is crawling with crabs!”

  “What?”

  “Crabs! One of the bastards nipped my toes.”

  “Come back in!”

  “Just leave the Eskies.”

  “Fuck that. Those women are killers. I’m coming up.”

  “Not there!”

  Relentless waves make access unsafe, and the rocks are too steep to climb on to. He gestures to a spot on the northern point of the island, so I paddle around. Here the waves are downright barbarous, but there is a jagged ledge that seems plausible. Aldo laboriously shuffles down to the water’s edge and grabs the nose of the board.

  “Untie your ankle.”

  I take the leash off my ankle and toss it to him. He wraps it around a crag and it goes immediately taut. Whatever the ocean is doing to me, it is nonconsensual. Aldo asks if I know any sea shanties.

  “Just help me up!”

  Between thrashing breakers, he pulls the Eskies onto the rock, then takes my hand and steadies me as I cautiously slide onto the ledge and scramble up. The water is billowing dangerously. Aldo drags my board up after me.

  Happy to be safe from the clamor of the waves, I make a quick perusal of the terrain. It’s craggy and uneven and mossy with unexpected shelves and rock pools; water foams in the crevices, sick with seagulls and their feathers. Vistas front and back. The waves are deafening here. I can see a couple of crabs with reddish-brown bodies and bright, red-tipped claws, no better than spiders in my estimation, and also Aldo’s handiwork: a jellyfish with a stick through it. The island is treacherously rugged, even for the sure-footed and nimble. It’s like some new planet you’d take a quick look around—then fuck off out of.

  He tongues a cavity and gives me a look, as if he’ll turn a blind eye to trespassing just this once, and sifts through Saffron’s Esky, tossing aside a bottle of Stolichnaya, grapes, cigarettes, ibuprofen, soap, sterile gauze bandages, disposable medical gloves, sunscreen, toilet paper, raincoat, vinegar, lemon juice, antiseptic cream, hydrogen peroxide, and burn ointment. He drags out the binoculars and gazes at the women on the shore and nods a thank-you that they couldn’t possibly see, and throws a wild wave to Clive. Then he slips on the medical gloves and holds up a pair of tweezers.

  “I have a tick.”

  “Out here?”

  “Must have picked it up yesterday when we came through the bush. You get one?”

  “Nope.”

  We both thought: Typical.

  He burrows into his skin and yanks the sucker out.

  “Fuck!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I left the head inside.”

  He tosses the tick’s body angrily into the sea and washes the wound with bottled water from Stella’s bounty. With a sulky expression he rubs the antiseptic cream on his hands and dons the gardener’s gloves. He slips on the shades and pockets a sheathed knife and lifts himself up on his arms and strenuously crisscrosses the rock face, reminding me of those quadrupeds in Turkey. He is going after crabs and other living things that hiss and roil in their shells.

  “This guy’s been bugging me all night.”

  He presses his face to the wet, scaly rock. This position seems to cause him agony, but it’s like he’s come to realize his capacity to endure pain is elastic and he still hasn’t seen how far it’ll stretch. He returns from his hunt without success, bringing his portable carnage to a rest beside me. Blood trickles out from under his eye. When did that happen? He must’ve fallen soundlessly when I wasn’t looking. He looks like a fish unhooked too late.

  Rain falls meekly now. Aldo throws on the raincoat, then grabs the binoculars again and stares out through the vapory haze at the women on the shore. We sit in silence for maybe an hour with the glare of cloud-filtered sun on our faces. Aldo resembles a well-preserved corpse in some grand open-air tomb. Gulls hang as if suspended midair. A layer of moisture, either ocean spray or cold sweat, slicks his face.

  I say, “So this is where the industrious robbed of industry go.”

  I realize he is dead asleep. T
he drizzle continues and I can’t tell the rain from the ocean spray. I think: What is this incoherent camping trip about anyway? Is he enacting a dream he had in prison? On his unfeeling legs, I notice what looks like a bluebottle sting. I think: I would totally cast him to play the wretched of the earth in a movie. An hour later, he wakes with a clouded expression.

  I say, “It’s an atrocity.”

  “What is?”

  “Your life.”

  “Not as bad as some, which in a way makes it worse, because I have to feel guilty for not being grateful for my atrocity.”

  The thing is, he’s right. He grows sullen and unreachable, and in an audible whimper he says, “Tell me more about this book.”

  “A whole chapter will be your testimony in court at Mimi’s murder trial.”

  “But that’s in the public domain.”

  “That’s what’s so good about it. It’s a cut-and-paste job.”

  “Jesus, Liam. You’re as corrupt a novelist as you are a policeman!”

  I sneer but I know he’s right. My arm slides around his shoulder. “Let’s go back.”

  “You go.”

  “Oh fuck it.”

  Let him rot. I trudge down to where my surfboard is and pretend I’m not daunted in the least as I slide back into the undulating sea. The waves are monstrous but it’s warmer in the water than out of it. I paddle quickly to distance my body from the rock. I think: I’d like to see Jesus walk on this water. Aldo maneuvers down to see me off.