by Steve Toltz
Just as now Aldo is looking at me from Louise Bozowic’s painting, The Sadness and the Envy. And he’s no Lazarus; the more I look at these works that were created while he was alive, the more he appears already dead in them—a living death that through the artworks goes on living.
X
It is five o’clock on a Friday afternoon and I’m eating a falafel in my parked car outside my apartment—less sad than eating in front of the television, I figure—when I see Neil Mikula, a tall squinty neighbor in his midthirties, shoulder-bumping a skinny teenager and palming something. We were friendly in the early days but too often he’s been carting stolen flat-screens or selling heroin in my line of vision; I warned him a dozen times and busted him once—he was sent down for six months. Now he’s leaning against a low concrete wall in a sort of brooding languor, and a rush of customers come for his wares: tinfoil packets and plastic baggies, H and pills. This happens more than you’d think. Sometimes people assume broad daylight makes them invisible. Sure, my car’s mostly obscured by the electrician’s van I’m parked behind, but still. Discretion, people. I wearily put down the falafel and hit the siren. Neil turns and looks at me a moment before walking over. I don’t even have to get out of the car.
“Oh man,” he says, in a weird falsetto.
“You said it.”
He takes a fistful of dollars out of his pocket, clearly his first foray into bribery.
“Put that away.”
“What are you doing out here anyway, staking out your own apartment?”
“That’s not what you need to worry about right now.”
He glances behind him at the place he’s vacated, as if afraid to lose his spot. “You let me go, Liam, sorry, Detective Wilder, and I’ll do you a solid.”
“It’s Constable.”
“Still?”
“I’m doing you a solid. Take this as your early retirement plan.”
“I could give you some information, Liam.”
“You could, Neil, but I don’t care what kind of information you have. I’m not ambitious. I don’t have bigger fish to fry. In any case, you might not realize it, you are the bigger fish. The ones you throw back I already threw back. Those guys you sold to.”
His peevish stare mutates into a wait-and-see smile that catches my attention. There’s something out of character about it, as if he’s implying some shared destiny. He leans in intimately, and says, “Anton Benjamin.”
“You mean Aldo Benjamin?”
“Yeah. Aldo Benjamin. Sorry.”
Just the sound of the name coming out of this junkie’s face makes me fear my dam of sadness might break and inundate the fucker. My evident shock is a strategic error. Neil lights a cigarette, singeing the fringe of his hair, and assumes a nonchalant manner.
“What about him?”
“He was your mate, wasn’t he?”
He clears his throat that doesn’t need clearing and fakes a bored yawn. In the silence, I can hear the discordant symphony of TVs from ground-floor apartments tuned to different channels. My eyes lay siege to Neil’s. Predictably, he breaks first.
“OK, you might remember I recently did a little six-month stretch in Long Bay. Why? Because my unneighborly neighbor took his job a little too seriously.” I don’t say anything, but close my eyes to concentrate on what Neil is saying. Now he sounds like he’s clearing someone else’s throat. He continues: “Halfway through my time, I moved into a cell with this insane bastard, Baz. I shat myself when I saw him but we got on anyway and for some reason he looked out for me. He was a good bloke but always getting into it with someone. Got himself bashed to death last month, crazy bastard.”
“I’m almost but not quite sorry for your loss. So fucking what?”
“So fucking this. Before he died, he confessed something to me.”
“What was that?”
“He said he was the one who, you know, killed your mate. Aldo Benjamin.”
“That’s not possible. He drowned.”
“Nup. He was done.”
“How?”
“Baz went out there.”
“Out where?”
“Where do you think? To that rock.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Contract.”
“Come on.”
“Swear.”
“Who contracted him?”
Here Neil studies his fingernails. I remove my Taser and place it on the dashboard.
“A woman,” Neil says.
“What woman?”
“Middle-aged bird, a real stunner, wouldn’t stop crying, though. But the thing that struck Baz about her, he said, was how she wore denim and leather and suede all at once with tassels hanging off everything.”
Stella.
“There was one other unusual thing. She told him to ‘make sure he doesn’t suffer, make it quick and painless,’ which is pretty typical. Baz said people always want to make sure their hit doesn’t suffer, or else to make sure they do suffer, a lot, and people also say ‘make it look like an accident’ like in the movies, or to ‘look like a suicide’ or to ‘look like a robbery gone wrong.’ But what she said, he said, people never say.”
“What did she say?”
“After you kill him, she said, make sure, a hundred percent sure, a thousand percent sure, a million percent sure, that he’s actually dead. Don’t leave him alive and suffering. Verify. Verify. Verify. She kept saying the word verify. It freaked him out.”
“And so he . . .”
“So Baz took the rubber boat out and climbed onto that rock one night and stabbed old Anton in the heart.”
“Aldo.”
“Right. He said he must have been out of it on something because he hardly put up a fight.”
I thought how Aldo feared stabbings among all violent deaths, how he’d feared the sensation of a punctured lung.
“And then he dragged the body onto the boat and took him far out and tied an anchor onto his legs and arms and dropped him.”
“How far out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think. Very fucking specifically. How many minutes going how many knots per hour did Baz go before dropping Aldo onto the sea floor?”
“Jesus, how the fuck should I know? He didn’t say. He just said he went out far.” Neil scrunched up his face, worried his arrest was unavoidable. “So we good? I can go? Thanks, Liam. See you next time.”
“And did he?”
“What?”
“Verify?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Baz said he was a million percent sure Aldo was dead?”
“Yes.”
“You’re certain. You’re certain that he was certain.”
“Well, of course he was bloody certain. It’s not as if he’d be there alive chained to the bottom of the sea.”
XI
I’m taking scuba-diving courses now. I got my PADI Open Water certification. I borrowed a suit from Senior Detective Dan Westbury, the only weekend diver I know in the force. It’s a quarter-size too small and smells like pee, but I get in it and go out there once or twice a week. As it turns out, I hate being under the sea as much as being on top of it. Scuba diving has fast become the most hateful of all pastimes, aquatic, landlocked, or lunar. The regulator vibrates on the inhale, the weight belt’s too tight, the mask foggy, the tank heavy, and each time I sourly don my fins and head down sloping sandstone or through seagrass or hotfoot it over oyster beds or wade through a swaying clump of plastic bags, milk containers, chip wrappers, and the occasional mosaic of sewerage discharge that is like moving through a vile concoction of womb and bowel, or I plunge into freezing waters from Doc Castle’s boat while he sits on deck, reminiscing about Aldo. (“He wanted a blank check; he wanted a blank prescription pad; he wanted blanket assurances that he would be OK, and he wasn’t OK, he never was.”) I escape him in the dark rush of water, with baited hooks swinging at my head. I surface and splash around like a drowning man attracting the chilling sig
ht of dorsal fins until in a shriek of air bubbles I make my descent, down to where the water feels thicker than water, with larger vectors of darkness to navigate and where one thinks only of Coleridge’s lines: Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea. Of course there are the beautiful rainbow-hued fish, but there are also—seen magnified through the mask—sea gargoyles that belong on the roofs of flooded cathedrals; bloated slow-moving scum-trailing creatures that seem to be all nucleus, with dull aureoles; barbs and stingers wearing their burst guts on the outside; acephalous creatures; beings with small eyes or, worse, eyeless, and who look so alien as to have no archetype, or so rock-like as to be impossible to anthropomorphize. Frankly, there’s too much biodiversity for my liking, everything in plague proportions: rat kings, tailor, salmon, great squid, snapper, flathead, sea dragons, cuttlefish streaking past like comet tails, slothful swarms of hybrids, lumbering catlike fish, fish with overbites and suckers and pincers and gaping jaws. I am frazzled by the vastness and infinite murk of this underwater ghost town.
I feel the claustrophobia of the mask and exhale bubbles into my line of sight. I’m deafened by the all-encompassing sound of my own breathing. Surges come out of nowhere—there are waves underwater! Who knew? And who knew how regularly I would wash out bloody nasal mucus swilling around the bottom of my mask, or bite down on my regulator mouthpiece so hard I dislodged a crown, or be shunned by gropers, bested by angry triggerfish defending their nests on sandstone reefs, terrified by a turtle springing out from a ledge, or misinterpret the body language of wobbegong sharks, wedge a foot between rocks, see fish eat my vomit. I’ve taken on Aldo’s fear of fears: in this case the pulmonary barotrauma of a quick ascent. I try to put it out of my mind.
In my dreams the ground that opens beneath my feet is the seabed.
Each week I go down into the delirium of lower depths, with my perpetual motion sickness and the weight of the ocean on my head and thinning gradations of light, where things get primordial and I hope to find a corpse of no fixed address.
I think of Stella’s shock decision to grant Aldo’s most unreasonable wish and hire a hitman. Well, murder is only a question of consent. Or implied consent. She had preauthorization. I can’t think too badly of her. As long as I will soon be able to put my head to his chest and hear the stillness of his unbeating heart and fulfill Aldo’s lifelong desire to be pronounced dead at the scene.
It is this prickly, preposterous, impossible nightmare of an idea that won’t desert me and keeps me awake nights. I think about Aldo’s old adolescent obsession with the Greek gods: gods who don’t think twice about impelling eagles to gnaw on your perpetually regenerated entrails, or getting you torn to pieces by dogs, or turning you into a deer, or into a spider, or into a cow, or into stone, or making you roll a giant boulder up a hill for eternity, or positioning food and water just out of reach, or fastening you to a burning wheel forever. I think: Maybe he locked eyes with the wrong god out that plane window over Leila’s island, one of those shipwrecking, maiden-raping, virility-obsessed, black-ram-slaying, meddling, intemperate, vindictive, rampaging, oversensitive, humorless gods, with their discuses and thunderbolts, their sickles and cooking spits, their rites and ancestral hangups, initiations and vendettas, who wouldn’t lose sleep over coupling with a bull or their own mothers, who never saw a lamb they didn’t sacrifice and who still, for all we know, think virginity is the coin of the realm. Who can say for sure this god didn’t mete out a punishment so severe, chaining a human man to the bottom of the sea, simply because maybe he dared to fear it. This is the absurd nightmare scenario that keeps me going out there, expecting around every murky corner to see Aldo bloated or eyeless, looking strange or fishborn, marooned without death’s hospitality, dwelling unbravely and in total terror like a shipwreck on the seafloor, or Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus in an underwater Valley of the Kings. I cannot help but imagine a shrieking mouth of bubbles, the horror of a windpipe crammed with seawater, inundated with starfish, Aldo crankily passing the time by decoding the arabesques of sea urchins. But how could I find his tears in all that water? With the intolerable sound of my own breathing, how could I also hear a human heartbeat? This is insanity, these oppressive fantasies in the overcrowded sea.
I am incongruous in a wet suit, Aldo is incongruous on the seafloor . . .
What did Aldo say? “Oceans are hotbeds of extraterrestrial activity while we look dumbly at the skies.” Maybe he’s right.
I should give up this fool’s errand but I feel the ocean currents like a tractor beam, pulling me in. With the hope that his blood no longer circulates, that his respiration has stopped, that he no longer excretes, that over forty years of death throes are enough, I move through the water in an angry fear, plowing deeper, deeper into the awful splendor of the unknown. And I go down where, if the Leviathan will rise from the sea, I hope it’s the Atlantic.
Tonight, under the white-breasted moon, I am preparing to go down the deepest yet. I’ll be accompanied by Senior Detective Dan Westbury, an amphibious swashbuckler, it turns out, who’s coming with me because where I need to go “shit starts getting technical.” It’s an irrational thought, but I find myself hoping the Rapture does not happen tonight. I am going to a place from where anyone ascending to heaven would get the bends.
It’s almost time to go. I’m sitting at my kitchen table where I spend my waking hours (I haven’t spent more than a minute in my living room for months). Sonja stands at the fridge, draped in swimming medals and athletic regalia, parading back and forth with a beer in hand, stamping her feet, trying to get my attention but not knowing what to do with it when she has it. I clamp my eyes shut. When I open them Sonja is gone, and my eyes fall to the cabinet, to Aldo’s copy of Artist Within, Artist Without that I retrieved from the rock. I fetch it, and at the kitchen table absently flick through the pages. To my surprise, Aldo has underlined three sentences, two of which I remember well.
We make art because being alive is a hostage situation in which our abductors are silent and we cannot even intuit their demands.
And:
There but for the grace of God goes God.
And then there is the one I didn’t remember. I had only once, many years ago, read carefully through Morrell’s copious footnotes. Aldo had triple-underlined and asterisked one at the bottom of page 112, halfway through the chapter “Tribulations and Creativity.” It’s a short, simple sentence but for some unaccountable reason it makes me cry so hard Sonja comes back in and hands me her half-empty beer. I drink it and read again:
Each day you wake up alive, you are the victor; go claim your spoils.
About the Author
© PRUDENCE UPTON
Steve Toltz was born in Sydney, Australia. Quicksand is his second novel.
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ALSO BY STEVE TOLTZ
A Fraction of the Whole
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Steve Toltz
Originally published in 2015 by Penguin Group (Australia)
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Jacket design and illustration by Jonathan Bush
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Toltz, Steve, 1972–
Quicksand : a novel / Steve Toltz.
pages ; cm
I. Title.
PR9619.4.T65Q85 2015
823'.92—dc23
2015010363
ISBN 978-1-4767-9782-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-9784-7 (ebook)
