Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  Falling through gusts of hate, hauling their violence down from their attics,

  In the thrall of their tragedy, they had struck oil:

  a face of evil to pin the blame on. Poor kid. He was paying for

  being in a family, for being locked in a binding contract with a bunch of people whose set of beliefs had demagnetized their moral

  compass. Fucker, someone says. Leave him alone. He’s come here asking forgiveness, after all. Actually, I’m here

  simply to survey the damage and get an estimate of the accident

  I’ve only an antimemory of. Maybe it wasn’t me, maybe he came in here

  for a hygiene check and the surgeon cut the red wire instead of the green.

  To think that this kid might suffer in an indefinite vegetative state because

  his tribe couldn’t put two and two together is intolerable. His endless suffering is on my head. They prefer their son to be a slug. They

  believe in a God who prefers living slugs to dead sons. Poor kid. Now that you’re a slug, they’ll keep you on a tight budget.

  I say, Take him to a farm so he can run around in the sunshine. For

  those slow on the uptake, I say, Have his organs authenticated and certificated ready for transfer. Pull the proverbial plug. Survival isn’t

  everything!

  The family plot my windpipe in their crosshairs. Their shadows arch over me.

  Stella squeezes my hand. Having finally arrived at the horrible apex of my

  horrible life, and sharing this grotesque scene, once again Stella and I are bonded

  for life. I love her

  for standing smack bang in the middle of my catastrophe.

  Their indignity steps ashore. Murder signals me to go. No one can be bored at

  their own

  execution, but what if you were standing on the gallows for months, waiting for the executioner to return from his vacation?

  Shall we? I say as if suggesting a moonlight stroll. With a tremble and grimace Stella wheels me out, Mimi stays inside to see if there’s anything

  she can do.

  Stella takes the reins and loses

  balance several times, knocked off her feet by the contaminated energy of disease, the ruthless force of sorrow and

  desperation. We are heading towards the children’s ward where ingenues of agony play in quicksand pits & yellow-tinctured babies

  bask in sunbeds. Without speaking, Stella does a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and pushes me the other way. Cutting paths through ethereal ick, a scrimmage of organs. I feel not removed from life so much as injected into it for the first time. Hospital corridors are the authentic streets of man.

  3/4 of a guy named Dan’s bed is empty. Sheets stained clean. He died,

  Chelsea says. They took him for an autopsy and deboning.

  Stella says, Let’s get some air. We share the elevator with four doctors

  with penlights, their voices trombone-deep and galactic. They say, I know him laparoscopically. And: When I thrust my thumb into that

  fontanelle . . . And: Abdominal retractors are a dime a dozen. Not worth going back in for it. And: It was the fifth case of friendly fire I diagnosed this week. We escape at reception. The automatic doors open. We aren’t ghosts, after all. This old technology proves we exist.

  Outside, the air is surprisingly warm. We’d been kept

  on ice. Under the awning stubborn smokers defiantly suck their cigarettes next to cans full of butts. The sky seems

  fresh, feverish. We loiter next to a man with a kebab obstructing his airway, down near the hospital garbage cans containing

  bloody smocks, foreskins, and a flock of breasts. Neither of us stop trembling.

  Stella walks over to the smokers

  and comes back with two cigarettes and a lighter. It’s been a decade. The mutiny an emphatic

  success. We suction nicotine and release trapped anecdotes into the wild, forage for old feelings. Ex-husband and wife, two

  old lovers, two old friends. The nucleus is intact. The problem with having a new lease on life is it is a nonbinding

  contract. Neither of us changed

  by our life-changing experiences—our lost baby, my lost mobility.

  The stubbornness of personality will win out as it always does and

  whoever we were before we would always remain, yet

  I still have the feeling that at last, at last,

  at last my formative years have

  finally begun.

  XXVII

  As you know, it’s a classic ploy to wait until three days after you’ve been profoundly institutionalized before depriving you of the institution, Your Honor. When the hospital administrator strode in beside one of my doctors and congratulated me on being stable enough to leave, I delayed. I was not eager. In my prior life I’d grown comfortable with my fears: of death, of sexually transmitted diseases, of public speaking, of train derailments. But now my terrors included being left alone in the street. A puncture in my tire. Not to mention fear of my own body—I distrusted each organ equally. I feared spasms, blood clots, embolisms, bedsores, autonomic dysreflexia. One gets used to having experts on call in case of emergencies. An allergic reaction, hemorrhaging, unexpected drug contraindication. I wondered: Who will interpret my feces? Reduce the swelling? Stop the bleeding? Who will resuscitate me? I was already dreading Sundays and public holidays when emergencies invariably arise. I thought: if my doctor plans a vacation I will know the universe is scheduling a life-threatening episode during that exact period, from which without urgent medical attention I will emerge further crippled. In truth, I felt a monumental timidity, terrified of taking this flimsy version of myself anywhere outside the most sterile and well staffed of environments. Problem was, I had to make room for the constant stream of incoming paraplegics and quadriplegics, but where would I go? My old apartment, with its narrow hallways and standing-room-only kitchen was out of the question, so social workers had found me an acceptable one-bedroom with the requisite ramps and handles, yet it was at the moment of my departure, having hyperventilated adios to the ghost of my truncated roommate, and being unable to bid the nurses a special farewell as they were all busy with ambulance-loads of unpleasant arrivals, that the thought of suffering alone, my new bugbear, became overwhelming. This led me to accept last minute, against my better judgement, Mimi and Morrell’s invitation to live in the residence, at least until my reckless-driving-resulting-in-bodily-injury trial. I wheeled myself outside and into Liam’s squad car. The only upside I could think of: Anyone fucks with me now, it’s a hate crime.

  He turned the siren on for me. An incompetent policeman and artistic failure, a failed-businessman paraplegic, two divorcés, two old friends, set off. I wanted him to drive us back to our youths.

  —1990 and step on it, I said.

  As we threaded through the city, my eyes could not compute. Everything was hyperreal. The unpalsied populace smug in their pace. Bored faces in stuck cars. Buildings under construction, as if a freeze-frame of collapse. I did not open my mouth for fear of whimpering. Neither did Liam, though at traffic lights he took my hand and squeezed it, as if in an attempt to transfer power from his body to mine. When we hit the meandering coastal road, the horrific number of wreaths and service-station flowers on what seemed like every third telephone pole spoke of split-second tragedies and ghastly second acts. Liam told me he’d been out to the residence a couple more times to see Morrell. The thought that they were still entangled in some sort of protégé/mentor tango was patently absurd.

  Morrell, a bearded stranger to shampoo, was standing at the door as we arrived.

  —When you have a serious medical problem, depending on the prognosis, you either quit smoking or take it up, he said, dropping a carton of cigarettes in my lap.

  The residence was overflowing with artists who seemed even more like sulky adolescents than I’d remembered. I felt the sting of Darwinism, an innately inferior specimen wi
th no evolutionary purpose.

  —And I have a nice surprise for you, Morrell added. Let me introduce our newest artist.

  Standing with her beautiful smile and wind-chime earrings was Stella!

  —I live here now, she said, beaming.

  —Then you’ll be breaking your own restraining order on a 24/7 basis, Liam said.

  Her sweet laughter wafted over like perfume. I used to see the light side of everything too.

  —Where’s Clive? I asked.

  —With Craig, she said, her smile tightening.

  —Would you like to see how my exhibition is shaping up? Morrell asked, crouching down in front of me as if before a child. I’ll give you a tour of my latest works.

  —Not before he eats something, Mimi interrupted, whisking me into the kitchen where we ate cold meats and bread and cheese and Liam and Stella and Mimi and Morrell all spoke as if divided by soundproof partitions they couldn’t see; there was a hush at least as loud as the conversations. I experienced such hostility toward everybody; I didn’t quite know how to orient myself. I felt like a grown-up ward of the state facing his old abusers.

  Mimi and Stella helped me into my north-facing room—I was frankly relieved not to have to stare at that ocean—where someone had made the en suite accessible by taking a mallet to the doorframe, leaving jagged edges, exposed wire, and sediments of plaster. Ten minutes of swallowing medications later, I undressed and Mimi and Stella helped me onto the most incredibly depressing piece of plastic furniture invented, the shower chair, where I sat under a stream of water that was in turns scalding and freezing, without being able to move quickly out of the way, while the women were silent and solemn and even seemed a tad annoyed, and it made me imagine disciples come to wash the feet of Christ who have to settle for Judas in a wig. This I thought mainly to distract myself from the two loves of my life pretending not to stare at the suprapubic catheter entering an actual hole in my actual stomach and at what is now accurately called “my junk.” They were thinking the same sad thing: Could he ever again? And would he ever again? I had spent many months wondering the same thing.

  Later, Morrell carried me in his arms downstairs into his bright studio to see his oil paintings, all vaguely sexualized interiors of domestic spaces: erotic chairs, curvaceous couches, labial curtains with picture-window views of period-red skies with the nippled sun and moon as interlocking spheres. They seemed perfectly fine if not exceptional works—or maybe they were masterpieces. What do I know? Morrell was haunted by the specter of no red dots—of an utterly dotless opening night. He was trying to decide if, due to his age and experience, he should refer to himself as a promising beginner or a midcareer artist, a late starter or a late bloomer. I predicted I’d be forced to accept invitations to Morrell’s studio, meaning I’d have to regularly acquiesce to being carried in the bastard’s arms to this den of frustration. He had, at last count, fourteen pieces in total. The room could bear twenty but he feared he had too many already.

  —In the art world, less is not only more, it’s much much more.

  —They’re good.

  —The enemy of the great, he responded bitterly, and threw the closest painting over the balcony to the beach below.

  Around midnight, the artists had moved from boisterous dinner into a combat-zone level of debauchery and it occurred to me I’d made a terrible mistake moving back into the residence, what with the conversations that played on a loop and the sexual hijinks and the attendant miseries and jealousies. I wheeled myself out onto the balcony and stared at the pointless magnificence of the ocean and the derelict moon orbiting nothing of value.

  —Would you mind if I draw you? Dee Franklin asked.

  She wanted me naked, covered in gold and silver body paint. I declined. More artists gathered around me with cheery, fascinated faces. Though I’d recently lost a vast array of abilities I’d previously considered indispensable to a basic human existence and felt ghastly about it every picosecond of every day, nobody seemed to notice my despair. Everybody weighed in. Everyone looks on the bright side for you. They’re really positive about your situation. Nobody feels underqualified to offer medical advice. The preposterous suggestions they’re not ashamed to make! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to torture someone with an incurable illness or a permanent disability is easy. Name the most ludicrous and disreputable remedy imaginable—e.g. bamboo under the fingernail therapy—and swear it fixed a friend of yours. The dying or disabled patient, sick in heart and soul with the desperate feeling that he hasn’t tried everything to restore himself, will quicksmart reach for the bamboo.

  They will also tell you about exceptional individuals who did exceptional things even with exceptional limitations. This in no way felt relevant to my case.

  That night, I sat in bed more frightened that I’d ever been in my life. I had developed, through the wonders of neuropathic pain, an extreme sensitivity to fabrics, so that I couldn’t bear the sheets upon my skin, and this was coupled with the intolerable sensation that my toes were squashed painfully together as if into a child’s shoe. After an abortive attempt to wiggle them, I wanted to hit the call button, I wanted to go where other grotesques congregated, I wanted out. In the distance I heard a beeping sound that I assumed was existence backing over me.

  Stella was at the door, loitering with intent.

  —Zip up my dress?

  Her failsafe beauty, the way she moved like windblown leaves, still managed to take the air out of whatever room I was in. I soon understood that she was colliding with herself, fretting that her new songs were self-plagiarism, the first sign of irreversible artistic decline (some were about the cumulative toxic energy of the competing artists in the residence and how she was working so much she often “forgot to eat,” something I never fathomed because I hadn’t missed a meal since 1993, but most were about her separation from Craig, who had taken temporary custody of Clive so she could concentrate on her music, an agreement she now experienced as guilt-ridden torture). Listening to her with familiar fascination made me think, Christ will I ever stop falling in love with the same woman over and over again? I thought how Stella had been sewn into the fabric of my existence, followed by the realization I didn’t have the legs to run away with her, that I couldn’t carry her once more across a threshold. All of a sudden something heavy and dull hit me in the face, a vague pain spread over my cheek. Frown lines crowded Stella’s forehead. Don’t do that, she said, kissing me on the head. It was my own fist. I had hit myself.

  Stella lay next to me tickling and scratching her left arm—my old job!—then we reminisced for hours, huddling close, admitting that nobody else would ever know either of us in the same way. That’s why couples stick together, Stella said, neither wants to be rendered unknown. Her face was turned to mine, a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

  —I’m proud of how you’re dealing with everything, she whispered. You’re a survivor.

  That annoyed me.

  —I am not a survivor, I said. That is not even a human character trait I admire. I like it when a person says, “Blech,” then rolls over and literally dies.

  As soon as I said that her sullen face brightened and she leaped up and sprinted out of the room and reentered with her guitar. For two hours I delighted in the nourishing vision of the moonlight trembling on her gleaming, dark-honey limbs as she wrote pages of nonsense lyrics and plucked a cute little melody out of thin air that she first whistled, then sang—a lovely, silly song that drifted over me, and sailed through me, and I felt the fleeting contentment of reliving old times.

  —I will always love you unconditionally, I said, on two conditions.

  —Go ahead, she said.

  —One. That you never give up the guitar ever again.

  A smile, a sigh. Gratitude and relief at feeling deeply understood.

  —What’s the second?

  —That you hire someone to kill me.

  —Get the fuck.

  —Please.

  —Aldo!<
br />
  She buried her head in her hands and cried. They were tears of despair, for the abominable reality that reinserted itself into our moment, and tears of anger, for the grave crime of abusing our mutual devotion. Stella seized her guitar by the neck and stormed out.

  In the morning, I woke to find Mimi cleansing an unremembered bowel movement, moisturizing the skin, then expertly turning me. Her knowledge of a paraplegic’s arcana seemed innate.

  —Are you still sleeping with Mr. Morrell?

  —Call him Angus, for Christ’s sake.

  —So, are you?

  Mimi swiveled her head and stared catatonically out the window at the brushed-steel sky. She turned back with a compact smile, airtight.

  —Once a week. Wednesday afternoons. Three o’clock.

  I bit my lip. That was the time we used to have detention.

  —There’s something else wrong, I said. What is it?

  —It’s Elliot.

  She explained. About a month ago she went to Silverwater to visit him but he refused to see her. Then he started leaving messages that made no sense at all, antagonistic and incoherent messages about Jesus Christ not being Yahweh’s only betrayed child.

  —It was Elliot, I said, who stuck those posters of you around the city, wasn’t it?

  She nodded and told me how over the past weeks her phone would ring at night, like it used to, but there was just silence on the other end. The disturbing part was, she had the oddest feeling that Elliot was actually talking, but had become inaudible. That he was standing there on the phone with his mouth moving and nothing coming out. The calls came every night for a week until five nights ago. Now Elliot had ceased all communication, she said, running tearfully to her room.

  Between the fretful Morrell, the restless Stella, the anxious Mimi, all clear-cut cases of clinical frustration, the environment in the residence was downright toxic—I was thinking this when Morrell entered my room and sat beside me and clutched my shoulder, a supremely unwelcome gesture I hadn’t the energy to shrug off.