by Steve Toltz
Then there are the Aldoists who come out like old fur traders, a curious procession trudging down the path or from a beach around the headlands, absurdly rowing eight-foot dinghies or kayaks that they moor or rope to a stubby spire, scrambling up wringing wet and overloaded with art supplies to gather around him like a coven of witches and squat and eye him with acute, scrutinizing gazes as if they wish he were taller or a different hue, and while they sculpt, paint, sketch, draw, peel prawns, neck beers, and raid his trash for “found objects” and “ready-mades” they make their backhanded compliments to one another and rehearse their prolix artistic statements and carefully tailored nonsense for grant applications that don’t hold up to human comprehension, and they make their works: photos or photorealistic drawings; abstract oil paintings; plaster, clay, Plasticine, polyurethane and iron-mesh sculptures; video art unlikely to pass the test of time into the following week; sound installations such as of a human voice screaming over a crashing wave; conceptual pieces like amputated Ken dolls squashed into cracked snow globes; oversized banknotes with the denomination of zero featuring his anguished visage, etc. Despite the wildly divergent stylistic flourishes, they are all representations of Aldo himself: his scarred, aggrieved, seething face; his oppressive direct gaze; downturned mouth; unglued smile; fine wrinkles; graying, dandruffed eyebrows; puckered lips midepiphany or denoting sudden neuropathic pain or memory of unbearable regret; his familiar grimace of creeping dismay; equally familiar dumbfounded or resigned expression or vague glint of evil; occasionally, he’s portrayed as horned or antlered, as serene or beatific, or hunched, wracked, contorted, with veined and purplish wasted legs, incongruously muscular arms, looking tensile or excessively angular or warty or in need of urgent hospitalisation, or pierced by cold wind, or veiled in fine mist, or engulfed in white water, and mostly on his rocky habitat that itself is often depicted as a desolate planet or an asteroid cruising through space. The most recurrent iconic and quintessential images: Rodin’s Thinker in a rusted wheelchair, or a cobwebby wheelchair with a lone seagull perched on its arm. The various titles: “The Sexual Stakes Are Low,” “Mattress Without Stuffing,” “God Protecting His Investment,” “The Self-defeated Champion,” “Still Life with Beating Heart,” “Unceasing Torment With a View,” “The Accursed One Eating a Pine-lime Splice,” “Sex Offender on a Rock,” “A Petulant Sulk of Biblical Proportions,” “Nonvital Statistics,” “Man Returned to the Lump of Clay From Whence He Came,” “Shoah for One,” “Hominid in Yellow,” “Less Than Meets the Eye,” “A Gulag of One’s Own,” etc.
At first I wondered why he bothered secreting himself in so bizarre and inaccessible a location, only to allow himself to be overrun by the kind of people who wouldn’t hesitate to ask on your wedding night if they could crash on the floor of your honeymoon suite, then I realized: Aldo owed much of the success of his new religion to these people. It was the artworks that made the connection with the general public—he was known less for himself than as a common denominator between artists. It was the poems and the paintings and the photographs and the sculptures, it was aging enfant-terrible Frank Rubinstein’s Archibald Prize People’s Choice Award–winning portrait, the painting of Maria Hamilton’s that was used for the Weekend Australian magazine cover, Stella’s fan base from her moderately successful album “I Love You: It Isn’t Personal,” and the wildly popular exhibition after her murder of Mimi’s photographs that Aldo had to thank for increasing traffic to his website, which linked to his YouTube channel, and for sending edited clips of his murder-trial testimony/business pitch viral, for throwing his voice into the echo chamber and making him a cultural commodity, and, in his words, “as popular as antibacterial handwash,” a popularity that would have been unfeasible without the artists. Their ambition to sell and be known and his ambition to be sold was a happy coincidence. “My first,” he said. Some people saw his “religion” as an extension of their artworks, like branching hypertexts or interconnected nodes of expression, and everyone who subscribed felt in on the joke. It was Aldo’s touch of genius to add The Congregation, a social-networking feature that allowed his “believers” to hook up for sex.
Thus was it art and artists that finally achieved for him his lifelong goal: He was making money, but he didn’t yield to his success, he ignored it. He wouldn’t even get involved enough to mismanage it into the ground! He put Graeme Frost, his accountant “friend,” in charge and instructed him to divert his earnings into two accounts: one for Stella and one for her son, Clive. The earnings doubled, tripled, quadrupled. He didn’t care, and he didn’t even want to know the figures; he took zero pleasure in counting his money or visiting his website. It’s an infallible rule that one achieves one’s dreams too late.
Tonight, the temperature drops way down, and I’m mourning in my kitchen. A silent moon grieves at the window and my reflection floats in the glass doors. Sonja laughs exuberantly at something and because I’m feeling sad and mean-spirited, I don’t ask what she is laughing at. Stella and I drink beer and she asks me, not for the first time, to go out and bring him home. The sky is fouled with dark clouds; southerly gusts skid the outdoor chairs across the courtyard. What is he doing right now in his midnight gloom? I imagine him unsheltered and frisked by the wind, holding tight to the peak of a slippery rock in that hidden cove that won’t return an echo to its master . . .
II
The sun burns dimly behind a bank of clouds. I scramble down the pathway in a panic, as I can’t see him though the haze—wait, there he is, like some half-human, half-crustacean, something you might find in a cabinet of curiosities, his special surfboard levered up behind him. I get comfortable and watch him through binoculars from the shore; the wind’s fierce and Aldo’s washed in endless spray and cool air, his hair plastered to his head. He sits like an old man in a bedsit—motionless, hands in his lap, glaring through the briny sheen at the oiled women on the shoreline. I go out on the board. I paddle around and he watches me mutely.
I say, “It’s just not like you, ostentatiously commandeering a tiny island like this.”
He says, “You’re interrupting my intercourse with the sea.”
I say, “That’s disgusting.”
A wave breaks violently between us and I have to squint through a misty wall of white spray to keep him in sight.
He says, “Imagine. Two and a half years in prison, two months on this rock and I can still hear my ringtone.”
“At least put some suntan lotion on.”
“Just take a biopsy and get back to me.”
“What are you still doing out here?”
“This is no more radical than living on the streets.”
“I wanted to ferry a psychiatrist out but he wanted to charge traveling time.”
“My hearse will be a water taxi.”
“He told me to ask you what it is that you want.”
“Ask yourself instead.”
“I want to be a writer so prolific I’ll wind up dedicating my books to women I see on the street the morning of printing. What about you?”
“To travel back in time and sterilize my grandfather.”
“You’ll die out here.”
“Promise?”
“I predict drowning or pneumonia.”
“Kidney failure or blood clots more likely.”
“What about sharks?”
“Hand-to-fin combat? Mano a sharko? Bring it on.”
A wave knocks me off my board and I clamber back on and have to paddle around to see his stooped posture and default scowl and his head in constant motion, as if scanning the shore for enemies, the horizon for tsunamis, the sky for a lightning bolt. Aldo shifts the pressure from his left palm to his right; he can’t get comfortable. Every now and then he takes a bite of what looks like a cold cheeseburger.
“You know the people out there think you’re an ascetic.”
“Detox and anorexia rendered asceticism meaningless decades ago. Don’t those idiots know that?”
“I hear that after death, your hair continues to grow.”
“That’s right.”
“But I’m bald now.”
“Just help me up!”
I scramble up trailing tendrils of kelp and use the makeshift rope railing and natural indents in the rocks for handholds. When I get to my feet I see he has accumulated nasty grazes and lacerations and looks newly walloped—a bruise and a fresh cut under his left eye. I survey the terrain; he now has a waterproof sleeping bag, shrink-wrapped air mattress, kerosene lantern, wind chimes, garbage bags, a tarp strung over them with a thick rope and elastic orange straps; the Eskys are in a shadowed nook, there’s a crater choked with campfire ash and black coals, a chaotic pile of firewood and kindling. It’s somewhere between a teenager’s bedroom and a one-man shantytown.
“You didn’t bring me anything?”
“Was I supposed to?”
Aldo drums his thick, gloved fingers on an Esky lid, insinuating it’s the height of rudeness to visit him empty-handed. He jerks his head suddenly. Out here the mosquitoes are adult-sized and hound him gregariously. I get comfortable and observe him eyeing the surfers’ regal bearing with his quarter-squint of envy, their zipping and wheeling and cutting of serpentine pathways through the waves. He talks about the fatigue involved in watching these fuckers with your heart in your throat, about how when they’re not risking life and limb they sit for hours on end never wondering what to do with their hands. Then he points out the few in their midforties who think they’re in the best shape of their lives but whose gaunt faces and absurd musculature must terrify their spouses. “They’ll wind up having a cardiac arrest during a weekend triathlon,” he says sadly.
My hapless friend lights a cigarette and this frightening phalanx of surfers—nervy men who nearly all seem to have either split lips or skin missing from their knuckles where they punched a face or wall—engage in a swearing match with him. Because Aldo can hear every word they say, he can’t help but offer unwelcome observations. He shouts, “Hey, Jonno, don’t you know your ‘tough love’ of your children is merely sadism?” Jonno shouts, “Go home!” Another shouts, “Fuck off and die and get cremated and we’ll sprinkle you wherever you like.” Aldo shouts back, “Mark, isn’t it? Stop inviting busty herbivores to steak dinners and then bitching about them!”
“Careful, Aldo,” I say, “they look like Argonauts.”
The surfers hate the strange disabled man nestled in the shadowed drippy pockets of “their rock”; they hate his sleep-deprived, sodden, convicted-rapist’s face every morning peering out of a garbage-bag burka with undisguised sadness; they hate his ambient noises of distress that dominate the cove—what they at first took for some warbling or dying seabird were his shrieks while under crab attack, his cursing during slips and falls, his tossing and turning on the shrink-wrapped mattress, his night terrors during afternoon siestas from which he wakes with a gruesome howl of anguish. They hate the incessant sound of his hawking gobs of spit and rib-rattling coughing fits, the groaning from his push-ups and crunches, not to mention the bodily excretions—the splashy emptying of his urine sac, and his fresh turds kerplunking in the sea. They also hate spotting him perched on a ledge with his binoculars counting aloud the precancerous lesions on their faces and shoulders, and when they pass by on steep blue-gray waves, narrowly missing the rock, they loathe to hear him shout, “You’re not going to make it!” or “Oh my god I can’t watch!” Every now and then, to lower the temperature of his unregulatable and overheating body, Aldo does a bottom shuffle down the slippery surface of the rock to the lower ledge, drags his custom-made board by its rubber lead, holds it tensely during a low-pivot sideways transfer, keeps his right hand on the front handle so as to stop the board from shooting off into yonder, and thrashes his way out onto the waves. It is a gruelling sight. He slides off and clambers back on, often hauled out into the countervailing currents; once he was engulfed in the lip then pile-driven into a sandbank, where he sloshed around limply near the shoreline with the sets heaping on top of him. Frankly, the surfers can’t understand this troublesome invader, literally out of his depth, who needs constant supervision and is either depressing them on the plum morning waves, or mincing in the sea with evident terror, or lying prone on his board fidgeting on flat water or with heavy sighs airing his mysterious sorrow.
Now Aldo says, “How’s the title coming along?”
“A Pseudosapiens’ Story.”
“Not terrible.”
“Not for Prophet.”
“Terrible.”
“A Captain of His Solitude Always Goes Down With His Shit.”
Aldo laughs. Something I haven’t seen for a long time.
“You should forget the novel and just do a book of titles.”
“That whole crazy thing you said in your testimony, about being immortal, you don’t still believe that, do you?”
“I was never able to take any evasive action whatsoever. That was my first, my only real disability.”
“Second. You’re also like an animal whose key defensive mechanism is diarrhea.”
“Hilarious.”
Aldo makes weird motions with his hands, like an old mime reliving his glory days. “There was one thing that never occurred to me. Maybe I cannot die because I’m already dead.”
“Nope.”
“I was not born, I was exhumed.”
“Unlikely.”
“And that’s why Ruby died. The dead cannot beget the living!”
Aldo radiates a steely fear; he looks out in annoyance, as if at a second-rate ocean.
“I know what you’re thinking. Is there no end to these words of yours, to your long-winded blustering? Job 8:1.”
“I totally wasn’t thinking that.”
“Liam. Dangers seek out the afraid. We have to warn people. Me and Leila, our pre-traumatic stress disorders brought on our traumas. Fact.”
“Aldo, there’s something I want to tell you.”
“You know what’s sad? I miss the internet.”
“You do?”
“Watching returning soldiers surprising their children, the faces of the deaf hearing for the first time, kids biting each other’s fingers. I always liked those clips of animals being frightened. Not actual suffering, but just seeing them, cats and dogs mainly, being scared by their bored owners. What is that?”
“A cruel streak.”
“In one’s reluctance to confront evil one becomes evil oneself. And maybe, I’m just spitballing here, it is only by becoming evil that one can be worthy of death.”
“You’re not evil.”
“I’ve done things.”
“Like what?” I ask, sitting up eagerly, hoping for some core-degrading secret to spice up the narrative.
“I’m not sure I always gave the same courtesy to waiters as I did to barbers.”
“Not exactly a capital offense.”
“I used to like to scare small dogs when I saw their squat alien faces peering out of handbags.”
“That’s fairly forgivable too.”
“Remember when we used to sit on that toilet block roof and think up morally repugnant ad campaigns for dodgy products?”
I say, in a mock deep advertorial voice, “Rohypnol: the path of least resistance.”
“And we did one for Ethnic Cleansing Products, that gas that the Nazis used. What was that?”
“The ad campaign was a can of Zyklon B with a picture of a Hasidic Jew on it, and underneath it said, You missed a spot.”
“We were horrible people!”
Were we? Are we?
“I snuck into the school staffroom and stuck a live pigeon into Mr. Morrell’s pigeonhole.”
“That was you?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“How should I know?”
“Oedipus had literally no idea he had fucked his mother and murdered his father but he found out eventually, just as I too hope to soon learn of my crime.”
“You know, the bullshit thing about the temporary insanity defense is that six months to a year is not regarded as temporary in legal circles.”
“Something’s happened.”
“Maybe at the end of the day I’m like everybody else, just another arsehole whose endless fascination with himself has blossomed into a worldview.”
“I saw Morrell last week.”
“Yeah? How is he?”
“There’s good news and bad news.”
He squints at me as if through a keyhole. “Good news, please.”
“Look.” I pull out the first edition of Artist Inside, Artist Outside. It’s a handmade color-in-photocopied zine. Paintings, drawings, sketches, short stories and poems by prisoners. “He’s been teaching again, convincing the other inmates they aren’t criminals so much as marginalized poets and artists. Inspiring them to express themselves.”
I should mention: After Aldo’s insane and epic defense testimonial/sales pitch, and two seconds after he was pronounced incredibly guilty by a jury of his so-called peers, Morrell tapped me on the shoulder, his strange and fanatical eyes raw and spittle dangling from his lip, his face sopping wet, his mouth twisted. At first I thought he might be having a stroke; I eyed the exits. “It goes without saying,” he whispered. I said, “What does?” Morrell’s half-open mouth obliged me to keep looking at him. Was this a form of grief? Morrell had been devastated and torn apart by Mimi’s death, and it was true that Aldo’s testimony had exhausted us all to the point of madness, but something else was happening here. I leaned closer. On his face I watched one thought intrude on another. He begged, then threatened himself, hesitated, and continued. He said, “Come into the garden, my roses would like to see you.” I said, “What?” His jaw clicked and there was an acrid smell, as if his synapses were rotting in his brain. It seemed he was looking for the spare key to a room in his head. Now where did I leave it? During the mammoth testimony Morrell had looked on somewhat proudly, I noted, as Aldo read his poem to the jury, but now all I could see was creeping dismay. “You’re a good friend to Aldo,” he said. “That doesn’t make up for what you lack, but it’s not nothing.” His lids were like hardened scabs over his eyes. “In a strange way you are almost to Aldo what Plato was to Socrates, or what Paul was to Jesus.” He was breathing heavily, his teeth actually rattled. I was stumped. What was I looking at? What was I bearing witness to? Morrell opened his eyes and whispered, “I want to turn myself in to you.” I squinted; that phrase could be taken one of two ways. He gave me his signature dark scowl for slow comprehension. “Can’t you understand, Wilder? It was me,” he hissed. “I did it.” And with that Morrell rose unsteadily to his feet. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen!” he yelled, and there it happened.
