Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  A thousand possible subjects and none quite right. Mimi peered at me with sly eyes. She said her photos didn’t feel unique, inspired, organic or revelatory in any way; rather, they felt parodic, vulgar, flat, self-conscious, trite. Clearly more preoccupied with what she was about to say than what she was saying, it was at that moment she dragged her finger languorously across my thigh, climbed on top of me, and pressed her sharp hip bones against mine.

  —Aldo. You might be just the subject I’ve been looking for.

  XI

  At Mimi’s insistence, I took her on what she called a tour of my Sydney, and let her photograph me in front of the two-story homestead at the Benjamin compound I grew up in, presently occupied by an unwelcoming Chinese family not averse to shooing away former tenants; beside the ugly redbrick building where Henry had kept a secret apartment; at the leafy marketplace where I paid a fortune-teller double to read her own palms; in the empty swimming pool where I once almost drowned; at the police station where I was held for wasting police time; on the rooftop where Stella was married and I drank myself into a coma; in the hospital where I had my first three kidney stones removed; at Luna Park where I’d been stabbed; in the lobby of the Railway Hotel where I’d found a man hanging; outside Liam’s house where I was accused of raping Natasha Hunt; in the motel room where Stella and I hid from vigilantes; in the park where I was beaten with a tennis ball in a sock; in the bushland where I’d shot a zombie film; at the bar where Stella played her first gig; leaning against my abandoned car that had no registration and a dozen tickets and which I still planned to reclaim—basically, she photographed me at the locations of my catastrophes, where none of my gambles had paid off. Wherever we went, I was recognized by furious creditors with long memories, who forced us to make detours through cold streets and alleyways. Mimi photographed these confrontations, capturing the shiver of horror running through me as my enemies with their stockpiled grievances greeted me with humorless shouts: “Your phone’s cut off! You don’t answer your emails!” The deceased didn’t mind making me look foolish. And neither did I, that was the truth.

  —You’ve had a bad go of it, Mimi sympathized, one day after we’d stopped for lunch and I had tried unsuccessfully to order off the kids’ menu—the waitress wasn’t having it—and the angriest son of my angriest creditor sitting at the next table marched over and punched me hard in the breastbone. It was true. I had had a bad go of it. The sorrows knew when to waken, like vampires in their coffins. Mimi said she understood that the women in my life—Leila and Veronica and Stella and little baby Ruby—were the inextinguishable cold-fires in the black hole of my sadness, but that Stella was roaring the loudest. She asked me when I knew it was over. I used to believe it was the moment I realized I was no longer Stella’s muse, but another time occurred to me: One night, a few months after Ruby’s death, we could both feel the relationship slipping away irrevocably; around bedtime she gave me a rare open-mouthed kiss and asked if there was a sexual fantasy I’d never fulfilled. Off the top of my head, I said I’d always wanted to tear clothes violently from a female body. She put on her favorite dress, a black full-length evening gown, and said, “Go ahead.” I tore it with both hands, almost surgically down the middle, and we fucked on a chest of drawers. Afterward Stella gave me two options: take the dress to a professional or stitch it myself—she needed it by the weekend. The following morning I went to the dressmaker. End of week, eighty dollars, the dressmaker said. I thought: Eighty dollars! The price of passion. The only problem was I had to borrow the money from Stella to retrieve the dress. She was in the kitchen baking banana bread when I asked her for it, and the face she made was so repulsed and repulsive, I felt some core piece of myself leave my body—my immortal soul wanted no part of that scene—and I knew it was over. I have not felt the same since that day; I’ve had some fundamental instability I can only relate to that morning in the kitchen.

  At the end of my story Mimi said she had the impression she was watching a famine through a television commercial.

  —I’d like to do a series of portraits of you out in the desert where you lost your child, she said.

  The deceased wasn’t exactly sensitive, Your Honor. But here’s the thing. My story finally triggered the secret story of her own the following day, so despite her initial reticence, in the end she revealed her innate volubility; and that old familiar disregard for the listener’s limitations set in, and the intimacy that had blossomed between us held, like a successful transplant.

  XII

  We strolled together, all the artists, along the coastal highway, past the beach club, the holiday houses—eight- or twelve-bedroom monoliths with palm trees and circular automated driveways and high security gates and all-year-round gardeners—in which one never saw a single resident, then we cut a path through the bush and wound down a steep descent to a small, hidden beach.

  —Magic Beach, Dan Wethercot said.

  It was a crazy place. A forbidding piece of rock jutted out of the sea with a seagull perched atop it like a sentry on a watchtower; surfers maneuvered around it with abandon, high-risk-tolerant individuals, half-demented, in fact. They were taut gymnasts with wild gestures and an excess of testosterone; in zigzags or clean arcs they slipped down walls of water into gardens of froth among boulders of sea-slicked granite. I feared they would be cleaved in two, or mashed or impaled and skewered; seemingly limitless harm could be done to a body in this place. The ocean was deafening; I felt I had seashells clamped to both ears. Beside me, Mimi in her tortoiseshell sunglasses was very still, gaping at the surfers with escalating dread and tension, and sighing with relief when they emerged whole out of the spume.

  —What are you thinking about? Mimi asked, taking my hand.

  I was thinking that oceans are hotbeds of extraterrestrial activity while we look dumbly at the skies. I was thinking: An immortal is a man whose body has gone insane. But mainly I was thinking about the previous night.

  We’d played a few mildly dangerous sexual games until Mimi screamed—I forgot our safe word—and we collapsed together, then around midnight, perched on the edge of the bed, overwhelmed by a new nightly panic—I just couldn’t get over how, while I was experiencing the mystery of being alive, I was expected to just lie there for eight hours—I shouted at her, We’re alive! So why are we going to bed? Mimi quieted me with a look that seemed to say that all the answers could be heard in the silence, if only I’d learn how to listen. And I listened. And I heard it. I mean, really heard it. When she finally fell unconscious, I covered her tawny body with a sheet and kissed her dark eyebrows and fragile throat and her meaty scarlet lips, and stared at her amazing frizzy hair that required its own pillow. I watched goose bumps form on her arms and nightmares make lines in her forehead. I thought: What a woman. I thought: It’s cute how she enjoys crushing cigarettes into ashtrays more than smoking. The windows rattled in the wind and a dog yelped; Mimi sat upright, her razor-wire hair silhouetted against the moon like pubic hair on a plate. I took her in my arms and gently lowered her in the bed; I felt like I had taken receipt of her due to a clerical error. Thanks to Mimi, I was acting like my old self again; the keyword, though, is acting—think Charlie Chaplin entering a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest and coming in third. Or was that Elvis? Either way, even if I did a fairly solid impression of myself, was it really me? I took a deep breath and thought: Holy crap. I think I love Mimi!

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! Consider the horrific complexity of my situation. For a suicidal case, love is inconvenient; for an immortal, it is a cause for despair. I climbed out of bed and went out onto the balcony so I could think of Mimi in peace without Mimi herself interrupting me. Cold night air in my face, I felt shame that I loved Mimi in a similar way to how I loved Stella, but relief that I could forget about my terror at having lost Stella and could enjoy the terror of losing Mimi.

  Now, on Magic Beach, with all the artists wrestling lazily in their usual aura of benign lawlessness, consuming b
reakfast beers and joints, wrangling children, enjoying a faint tension among the egos while the songwriter Cash Caswill wrote a song in response to the tsunami, I dared ask myself the abominable question: Did Mimi love me back? If she did, she seemed to be asymptomatic. No blushing, no gazing into my face, no evident butterflies. In any case, could anyone love an immortal with no job prospects? I resolved to be on the lookout for clues.

  Around two in the afternoon, the artists started playing a drinking game that involved writing haikus, and mine took out round one . . .

  I lived by myself

  as brother and sister,

  the hermaphrodite said.

  . . . . although nobody seemed sure it was a genuine haiku. My second one wasn’t quite as good as the first one, or it was better. You decide:

  My spirit animal—

  A dog with its head

  in a bucket.

  The sun grew hot. I removed my shirt. The artists were stunned into silence, as if a curtain had been lifted at a sideshow.

  —How the hell did you get those scars? Frank Rubinstein asked.

  I ran through the list: motorcycle, skinheads, wrong turn, stray billiard ball, ambush by a party of thorns, Molotov cocktail, car antenna, gravel rash, cigars, etc. The painter Dee Franklin asked if she could draw me.

  —Sure.

  I noticed Mimi was quiet and turned the other way, facing the arc of gulls and the routine waves collapsing on the shore.

  —We have to get going, Aldo, she said.

  Was she jealous? Was this the required proof?

  —Where are we going?

  —You said you’d show me where Leila is buried.

  —Now?

  I could have played this out forever, though I couldn’t deduce precisely what she was jealous about, since Dee Franklin was in a committed lesbian relationship with Lynne Bishop.

  —Yes, Aldo, right now.

  Your patience is about to be rewarded, members of the press, because it is from here we may be approaching the answer to our most pressing question: Who probably killed Mimi Underwood? And yes, yes, Your Honor, I promise on my own eyeballs to only, in the briefest manner, stick to the salient points.

  XIII

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, someone had draped seaweed over the statues of angels in Waverley Cemetery, that beautiful hillside resting place overlooking the sea; they must have come up from the beach, barefoot and laughing, and now the violent aroma of sun-fried kelp rotting on graves made Mimi and me wince as we strolled through the grounds and I detailed how my mother’s people were bog-standard Christians in the way that their idea of God was a frowning octogenarian in a toga and heaven a glass-bottomed palace through which the angels observe and report. When we reached a large elegant cross I placed three purple orchids on the headstone.

  —Leila Benjamin, meet Mimi Underwood. Like you, dear mother, she isn’t fond of her upper arms and has a temper that could scorch a field of sunflowers.

  —It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Benjamin.

  —A few of Mimi’s people are buried nearby. Not far, just over there.

  —My grandparents. A couple of aunts and uncles. Isn’t that a nice coincidence?

  We gazed at the headstone, fingers intertwined. The world was quiet; it had gone into a coma. The heat peeled clouds from the sky, and along the edge of the cliff suicidal joggers made their way to the next beach. Gradually the uneasy smile disappeared from Mimi’s face; I supposed she realized how ridiculous this all was.

  —It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Benjamin, she said dispassionately and moved to her grandparents’ resting place where she began her own ritual, which entailed removing her socks and shoes and sitting bralessly on a granite step, rolling a cigarette and staring at the oil tanker on the horizon. She looked slightly disappointed with herself; it seemed to me there was a failure taking place: the failure to get sad or to achieve violent regret, or perhaps it was the failure to remember—maybe she couldn’t picture the faces of her grandparents, or she had forgotten to forgive them for something, or she had overforgiven them; either way, she suddenly looked like someone fed up with self-disgust. I turned to my mother and the fear of public opinion rotting with her, then back to Mimi. I had an overwhelming craving for a quick fuck and a long nap. Nothing new about that, Your Honor, I’ve been horny and tired my whole life.

  All right, all right. May I just say, in my own defense, I have the right to my own defense, so fingers poised, madam court stenographer, while we meet yet another suspect in this awful case.

  Shoes in hand, Mimi came back over.

  —Let’s go to the military graves and name all the unnamed soldiers.

  —That sounds different.

  We walked like a couple of old assassins down the unsteady path to the military section, through the rows of simple white crosses until we were at the edge of the cliff; the wind was stronger and the tall grass danced at the edges of the graves. Mimi stopped at the first white cross.

  —Name him.

  —What about T-Bone McNally?

  Mimi removed a permanent black marker from her purple leather handbag and wrote T-Bone McNally on the white cross. Christ, I thought. When this girl names an unnamed soldier, she doesn’t fuck about.

  —Next, she commanded.

  —Simon Simonson.

  Scrupulously she wrote that too. I watched her perfect calligraphy take form on the white cross and looked around to see if anyone was watching us.

  —Now I have one. Elliot Grass.

  I wrote it.

  —You’ve spelled it wrong!

  She tore the marker from my hand, correcting the name with agonizing slowness, saying it aloud in a reedy voice filled with tears. The silence that followed felt sacred, apocalyptic. Elliot Grass. The name was familiar.

  —Who’s Elliot Grass?

  She didn’t respond. I thought back to all the stories she’d told me late at night in bed.

  —The guy who gave you an eye infection when he came in your eye?

  —No.

  —The guy with the misspelled tattoo?

  —No.

  —The guy who kept making postcoital ta-da gestures?

  —No.

  —Wait. Is this the guy who shaved his mustache into a bowl and then smoked it?

  —Yes, she said.

  —And Elliot Grass wrote The Fussy Corpse!

  —That’s him, she said, then added, almost as an afterthought, my husband.

  XIV

  Husband! The deceased’s face was crypt-like and refused expression. We stood in a thunderous silence; I felt perilously lost, cotton-mouthed, threatened. I do not like to love in anyone’s shadow, but at the same time I felt an encroaching sense of relief at the onset of complications, the restored order of unleashed monsters. Here’s where they’ve been hiding.

  —What happened to you guys?

  —He had this golden retriever named Honey, and when it died he bought another golden retriever and called it Honey II.

  —No, come on. That wasn’t it.

  —Men only pretend to give up the sex obsessions of adolescence but they never do.

  —And so?

  —So what was the quote, that Churchill one about democracy?

  —The worst system except for all the others that have been tried?

  —Yeah, well, that’s how he felt about monogamy.

  —Let’s start again. Can we start again? What happened to your husband?

  —He lost me, then outright refused to win me back.

  —Can you be more specific?

  —At nightclubs he and his friends did something called rape dancing, which I think speaks for itself.

  —And that’s why you split up?

  —He didn’t have good people skills. Isn’t that a weird idea? I mean, you can imagine a horse or a wild dog needing people skills, but that actual people need people skills points to some fucked-up fundamental error in our makeup, don’t you think?

  —So that’s why you spl
it up?

  —God, Aldo, you make it sound so weird. Everyone has three or four relationships they’re ashamed of.

  —Three or four? That sounds like a lot.

  —He was a generous guy, but really lazy. He would give you the shirt off his back, then ask you to wash it.

  —Where is he now?

  —In prison.

  Prison! Your Honor! I felt like a moth pinned to a wall in a serial killer’s basement. Something you should know: I have always perceived our society as a narrow bridge, either side of which lie two other societies—the prison, the hospital. To finally fall into the horror of the prison or the horror of the hospital was my greatest fear. Mimi’s revelation deeply rattled me and we stood a while longer as the sun beat down like profound hatred, and her dark, sensual eyes gave off sparks—you all know the psychosexual allure of emotional distress—and I gazed at a long row of black trees flexing in the strong wind and became more acutely aware that we were standing on ground filled with clean bones without their lumps of meat, now just instruments in a caveman’s symphony. When Mimi began the trek back to the car, I walked beside her in deliberate silence. In the case of the revelation of a person’s deepest sadness, you can’t ruin it by making small talk or asking anything other than the one question the person wants you to ask, but I hadn’t figured out what that was yet.

  —Are you OK? I asked when we were in the car.

  —No time for self-pity, she answered, as if feeling sorry for oneself was only a matter of scheduling.

  XV

  Back in the bedroom, Mimi stretched out on the bed.

  —What are you looking at?

  —You.

  —How do I look?

  —Svelte.

  —Do you want to see what Elliot looks like?

  —Not especially.

  She pulled out a photo of a beautiful man in a top hat and jeans and black eye makeup and sandals: four decades in one outfit. He was an athletic acrobat/dancer type, skinny yet muscular; he looked like he could do a backflip from a first-floor balcony onto the saddle of a horse.