by Steve Toltz
“Are you going to write that my facial scars gleamed in the soft daylight, you know, for verisimilitude?”
“Big word for a hermit on a rock.”
“Why are you getting so annoyed?”
“Because you’re being annoying.”
“Why did you even want to become a writer?”
“You know why.”
“Tell me again.”
“Because when I was twelve years old I was waiting at a bus stop next to this woman who yelled, ‘You think I’m dumb because I put my cat on antidepressants!’ to an obese man who shouted back, ‘No, bitch, it’s ’cause you went to a rock-paper-scissors seminar.’ I mean, Jesus Christ, Aldo. I absolutely had to write down that snatch of dialogue, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but you don’t ever acknowledge your debts as debts. You’re taking my life, Liam.”
“Good artists borrow.”
“Better artists don’t.”
“Great artists steal.”
“That’s like saying great jazz pianists beat their wives. Maybe they do. But that’s not what makes them great jazz pianists.”
“I don’t understand why—”
“An artist’s theory of art is always founded on his shortcomings as an artist, his passion for that theory in direct proportion to the severity of his failures.”
“Morrell? You’re quoting Morrell now?”
“Why not? I’ve been reading his book.”
“Why are we having a proxy argument about art when you’re talking about murder?”
“I thought we were talking about character and plot.”
“Did the character Aldo Benjamin or the character based on Aldo Benjamin or my real friend Aldo Benjamin kill Mimi Underwood?!”
“When you masturbate with ironic distance, you still ejaculate, but it’s not the same.”
“What?”
“I had it wrong all this time. Suicide is not saying ‘I quit,’ but rather ‘You’re fired.’ ”
“What possible reason in all of fucking Christendom would the character Aldo Benjamin or the character based on Aldo Benjamin or my real friend Aldo Benjamin kill Mimi Underwood?!”
“Reason? Reason? Maybe because I’m always Typhoid Mary’s first port of call and I always get tetanus from Cupid’s arrow and my own hardtokillability combined with my susceptibility to airborne, bloodborne, lipborne, godborne pathogens means that the phrase ‘I’m fine’ amounts to wild hyperbole and I’m therefore in need of constant emergency assistance and possibly centuries of palliative care. Maybe because Mimi was a born nurse, an involuntary nurturer, and a pathological carer our destinies dangerously overlapped, and maybe because on that night of my release and welcome-home party, beside me on that balcony gazing at constellations that looked like track marks in the night sky, Mimi maybe said to me, with a sickening air of predestination, ‘I will take care of you,’ before she wheeled me through the party to her bedroom where her photography equipment made distended shadows and we settled on the bed and took sleeping pills and she repeated, ‘Don’t worry, I will take care of you,’ just as she was taking care of Elliot and Morrell. Maybe it was the proximity of the ocean’s madness and the effluvia of my own unceasing flatulence and the opulent chandelier of stars and the moon’s worm-eaten smile and the sinewy palm tree branches flailing like drowning limbs in the violent wind, but her body suddenly seemed an omnibus of corpses; what I mean to say is maybe death was already plying her trade on Mimi’s silvered shoulders and on her marble hips and on the wide circumference of her saucered nipples. And maybe I watched moonbeams claw at her careworn face and her mouth ulcers and her stress rashes and her chewed fingernails and her thigh bruises and the thicket of hickeys on her neck and her eyes gouged with worry and shadows, and maybe I saw clearly her monomania of caring and pathological sacrificing that had her holed up in this subtropical hell with madman Morrell, and maybe her lying there endomorphic, martyred, and turbaned in her own hair, while in my mouth the taste or the sense memory of the taste of contrast agents injected for CT scans was making me feel a nuclear blast of compassion, a scalding of pity without consolation, an injection of energizing empathy; what I mean to say is that maybe her suffering was so intense and so complete it’s possible that I did not dehumanize her, but overhumanized her, and interiorized her pain and became her so convincingly that I could commit suicide as her in a case of mistaken identity, maybe there was what I imagine to be a dolly zoom of my own face as I had the unwelcome realization that the gift of non-being is the only gift that keeps on giving, and maybe I was surprised to find myself weaponized, that this was germ warfare and I was the germ, and maybe I released my inner child-soldier, and maybe I couldn’t let her achieve one more attosecond of consciousness so I disentangled my arm from hers and in a single fraction of an instant that was less than a second yet an experience of infinity my hand became a prosthesis with a knife, and myself an alien-hand syndromee, and maybe she died succinctly, her blinkless eyes cold in their craters, her creases in her forehead flatlined, and maybe in the profound disquiet that followed I lay awake until the sunlight broke through the fogged dawn and illuminated the bespatted bedsheets, and only then did I scream until a handful of artists ran in and lingered at the door like the four horsemen between apocalypses and simultaneously announced their citizen’s arrest.”
The waves have grown raucous and only now do I become conscious that I am sodden. Aldo is trembling but his face is uncannily still in the moon’s raw light. “Anyway,” he says, “it was just an idea. Write what you want.”
Some slug creature with an orange-specked carapace stirs in the shadowed crevice near my left foot. There is nothing further to add and no way to add it. I fumble a good-bye and make a careful descent to my board. As always, no matter how open and honest we’ve been, no matter to what degree we’ve unburdened or admitted shameful secrets never before uttered aloud, we can’t seem to depart fully satisfied with the transaction, and now, even after his weirdest and darkest hypothetical confession, there is still something permanently unexpressed lingering between us.
VI
Two months go by, and I don’t go out there often. First casualties of autumn: the Lifesaving Association packs it in, the man selling cold drinks and fresh fruit goes home, the umbrellas and deck chairs and nubile bodies vanish; then weirdly, as prophesised, the beach itself disappears altogether. The sand is history, the water creeps all the way up to the cliff wall. Magic can’t go on forever, I suppose. The surfers have gone back to their old haunts, you can’t even climb down the rock face anymore. If you try, you’ll find only an angry ocean smashing up against the cliff as if to say “I am busy eroding sandstone, so fuck off someplace else.” Now there’s no beach, just dark, iridescent water, some rocks, and further out in the ocean than ever before, a man alone on a rock with nothing to look at but sea and sky.
The weather isn’t a help—it’s the coldest autumn since 1965. Plus Sonja has contracted chronic fatigue syndrome, or is faking it, Tess has married a Korean air traffic controller named Eden, and I am caught up in a totally bogus corruption inquiry regarding missing quantities of impounded cannabis. I’m trying to justify why I’ve abandoned Aldo in his self-exile. The truth is, you can only be generous with your time up to a point, then you have to leave your friends on their icy rocks alone. You have other things to do.
VII
Record-breaking waves are creating havoc up and down the coastline, a cold crescendo of monsters—it’s going to be a tough visit. There’s no place from which to launch a boat, so I have to set out from another beach around the headland, just a regular beach that’s been there forever, nothing magical about it.
The sea is rough, and I can’t hear myself swear on account of the wind. I ride the choppy waves, and lashed by spray I make my approach.
“Aldo!” I shout.
No reply. I circle the island but can’t see him. With great difficulty, I manage to moor the boat to a bony protuberance of rock on the north
side and climb onto a ledge. I look in every hollow, every crevice. I look out at the waves as if waiting for a hand or his head to surface. I crouch and stare at my own shadow on the granite as if it might tell me something. I shout his name at intervals. I tear down the tarp and trundle over every inch of the rock, sidestepping blasts of spray, and whisper, “Come out,” as if he is hiding. I say, “Aldo. Aldo.” I am whimpering his name now. “Aldo. Aldo.” I am hyperventilating it. I had never given up hope of airlifting his body to safety but it seems he has finished his pointless time on this damned place. Aldo is gone. He has left the rock standing empty, abandoned nature to nature. It surprises me how fast I start my grieving. It’s instantaneous. It rushes in. Aldo.
That afternoon, I browbeat my senior sergeant to get a team of forensics with annoyed faces to come out and make their deliberations. They find traces of hair, urine, feces, fresh blood, black blood, old blood—Aldo’s many secretions from his every orifice. Fell, drowned, washed out to sea is the verdict. (I find myself crying in front of my fellow officers. There is a hushed respect for tears in the force. They assume it’s rare—it’s not. In the wider culture too, it’s become incredibly manly to be unafraid to look like a little girl for three to five minutes.) While the police traipse with impunity into his sour fortress of solitude, I sort through his bric-a-brac, as if Aldo himself has been mislaid there, and find his copy of Morrell’s Artist Within, Artist Without; I cradle it, and my novel takes on additional life force; it has become like a photo album rescued from a fire-gutted house in which everybody died.
The team combs the beach and all accessible points. Did he go to shore and drag himself up that cliff? “Maybe a wave swept him off the rocks. It was bound to happen. No trace. He must’ve drowned.” The media come out to the rock and say he must have been booted off by the ocean’s foot. With news helicopters hovering, surfers come out with little lanterns to hold a vigil, but the waves are too big and the storm clouds chase them off.
Everyone goes home; I am the last. My oldest, best, broken and heartbroken friend, the guy who wore fancy dress to an antiwar protest, who was himself the patron saint of statistical anomalies, is gone. Before I leave the island, I take one final look over these boulders heavily encrusted with sponges and algae; I peer into vertical crevices and fissures and rocky ledges and shelves, where Aldo lived among desiccated barnacles and hermit crabs and turned a blind eye to fish spawning in the hard substrate; I thought he was like the regenerating arms of the starfish; I was wrong. I thought he would never unfussily and judiciously slip into the waves without making a big song and dance about it. Psychotic with grief, I wail now. Aldo! Always the wrong guy with the wrong outfit saying the wrong thing in the wrong tone of voice in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong person or persons, always oozing fallibility, who is always my friend, who is gone.
VIII
The bodiless funeral service was held in the botanical gardens on a dewy morning. Aldo’s anonymous returned wheelchair was there in his stead—rusted, grafittied, painted over. The mourners included people he impoverished for generations and those he enriched, all those professionals he relied upon or put aside for safekeeping: nurses, prison guards, fortune-tellers, private detectives, cardiologists, pharmacists, criminal lawyers, dentists, physiotherapists, accountants, dermatologists, bankers, lifeguards, bodyguards, magistrates, customs officers, bounty hunters, anesthetists, stockbrokers, paramedics, urologists, politicians, prostitutes, wayfarers, and stevedores. There were also offended Christians, picketers, and other people who take umbrage for a living. I picked up a smidgeon of genuine grief and mourning, but the weirdness of this funeral was that nobody was in denial. If anything, they were overprepared for this day; it had been on their calendars for months. The general consensus was his existence had been excruciating. Yet it was clear that he had touched so many lives; over the course of the day, I heard four separate people say, “He was my best friend.” I also saw business cards change hands, two separate high-fives, one down low, one too slow, three successful pickups, and more bunches of service-station flowers than I’d ever seen assembled in one place. His evangelicals (sales reps) were handing out flyers for a Special Death of Our Founder offer. The website had peaked and begun its decline. In the end it was a fad after all, a one-hit wonder. At one point, Aldo’s subscribers ballooned to two million, but when I last checked they had already dwindled to three hundred thousand. That’s nothing these days; cats have more followers than that.
The old child murderer Stan Maxwell read the Psalm of David. The Lord was many things to Aldo, but he sure as shit wasn’t his shepherd, and Aldo was never not in want. With a conical mass of snot hanging from her nose, and face turned to the sky, Stella sang tearfully about that sorrow that was not for his death per se but for his life and their love that was like a flower shaken violently for years and on which even now a few petals remain. The song didn’t finish so much as sob itself out, and Frank Rubinstein shepherded her gently off the podium. A few others got up to speak, people I had never met or heard of. They said, “Aldo’s proximity to terror and to error gave my whole family nightmares,” “He was a guy with vertigo who chose to perch on a mountaintop,” and “Aldo was the Russian formalist of all the amateur psychologists.” To be honest, I couldn’t make heads nor tails of these eulogies. Doc Castle took to the podium. “Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk we could not understand him. Well, Aldo could talk and we could not understand him either. He was our lion.” I stopped listening after that. Frankly, I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I had the dreadful idea that maybe Aldo was orchestrating a resurrection to augment his business, and I remember how when we were seventeen he told me that one member of his family per generation got into monumental debt and tried to fake his own death, and I thought this funeral was the propitious moment for his ulcerous person to pop out from behind a cabbage tree palm and surprise us with a new investment opportunity. He will either turn up any second now or be truly dead, I thought throughout the whole service. I was a wreck.
He never appeared.
At last, I had to admit that my booby-trapped and masticated friend had managed to leave his ignoble slab of a rock, this cold telluric pebble called Earth, that he had sprouted his last pustules, suffered his last spasms, endured his last internal lava spill, and that his open wound of immortality had closed over and healed, and that was a beautiful thing.
Unless.
Personally, I prefer to imagine that his old dream came true; maybe he vanished by an act of will, liquefied in his sleep and disintegrated body and soul, maybe he was uncreated and unborn—decreated, vanishing from the island to emerge in a distant unmapped galaxy moments later as a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye, racing through the vagaries of space and time, ringing out like plucked strings, tapering off and just frankly dissolving in an orange flash as a traceless nothing, never more to wake. I hope so. Someone’s dreams have to come true. Otherwise all the dreams build up on a vast garbage dump, taking up too much space in this world. You can’t get from the bedroom to the bathroom without tripping over the rotting carcass of some man’s dream. So I prefer to imagine that his stubborn hopes and deepest desires came to fruition, and I resolve that whenever I remember Aldo and all those days at sea, and how he disappeared just like that, I’ll think: Well, at least there’s one less dream cluttering up the dump.
IX
A month later, I’m falling asleep at my desk, taking the statement of a high-maintenance eyewitness in an ATM raid, when the phone rings.
“Constable Wilder speaking,” I say.
“Your mate is Aldo Benjamin, isn’t he?”
My heart actually stops beating. I feel it stop for long enough to be consciously concerned about it restarting.
“Was. Yeah. What’s this about?” I manage to say.
“A portrait of him was stolen from the Sussex Street Gallery, and it’s already turned up on eBay from a US dealer.”
“Oh.”
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br /> My hands are shaking as I take down a few details and pass them on to the Computer Crimes Unit and to customs, and I marvel to think about Aldo’s frustrated face floating on the black market. What is his value? That’s a slippery concept. In dollar terms, not inconsiderable at present, although I suspect he will always trade slightly below estimate and will eventually trend steadily down towards zero. Aesthetically? Given he was someone not overly interested in culture himself, it’s vaguely amusing to note that his ultimate claim to fame might be inadvertently propelling certain artists to a medium level of success—namely Lynne Bishop, Frank Rubinstein, and Dan Wethercot. It would not surprise me if he were one day to be a footnote to early twenty-first-century Australian art history and nothing more.
I spend the next few hours at my desk clicking through image files of Aldo Benjamin—paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, sketches, video installations, each one making me feel deeply disturbed; just as a nightmare refuses the sleeper genuine rest, his image denies any kind of peace of mind to the viewer. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that there may be no place for every random anecdote and strange story about Aldo in my book: the cat in the foldout couch debacle; Aldo being chased by the human monkey in Rajasthan; the clairvoyant’s egg; the grassroots, opt-out euthanasia white paper. Not to mention the minor slipups: penises caught in zippers, pubic hair in velcro; all the misjudged timing of automatic, elevator, and revolving doors; the endless unforgivable faux pas; the romantic, candlelight-dinner, reach-for-the-salt, sleeve-on-fire scenarios. In this whole book, I’ve neglected to mention that whenever Aldo tripped he felt that he was being reprimanded by a higher power, and when he got to his feet he felt it was an act of defiance.
Some afternoons I go back, I don’t know why, to Leila’s old ground-floor apartment. There’s a single man in there now, a burned-out bummed-out middle-aged fellow who sits perpetually at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. I think: Aldo would know what was wrong with him. I can feel the suffering, but I can’t name it. The last time I went he raised his sad head and slammed his fist on the table. He seemed to hate living there and looked at me as if it were all my fault.
