by Steve Toltz
The last time I was conscripted into action to assist him, he phoned me when I was at my desk gazing at a basket of pens, waiting for a transformation of the spirit. “I’m being chased!” Aldo hollered in a panicked tone, puffing theatrically as if to prove he was running. Agonizing quagmires and near-fatal setbacks were Aldo’s specialty, so I had no reason to doubt the urgency of his situation. “Keep moving,” I told him and he gave me his cross streets. I stuck my head in the senior sergeant’s office and told him my best friend was yet again in mortal danger.
“Need backup?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
A violet night sky was darkening with storm clouds. I schlepped out east to a fancy suburb full of up-market pubs with sophisticated bouncers and clothing boutiques so expensive they needed only one customer every seventy-two hours to stay afloat. I had to be careful; during a similar “situation” I’d phoned him only to give away his position to his pursuer, so this time I opted to scour the low-lit streets without fanfare. A white sedan was circling and when I approached, it U-turned and disappeared down a side street. I cut the lights, idled a moment outside a councilman’s office, and stared at the poster of his bilious face, which I doubt had ever begotten a single sexual fantasy. A light rain fell soundlessly on the windscreen; on the streets, late joggers and contemplative men walked minuscule dogs. I moved off again, took a sharp turn down a residential street, and shined my spotlight on the discreetly lit sandstone houses. It was on my fourth tour of the block that I heard a shout; bright halogen house lights flicked on, and sprinting out from behind a flower bed was Aldo, moving like a projectile in the damp glow of orange streetlamps, a solid brick of a man charging after him.
I hit the siren. It startled me, as usual.
The assailant tackled Aldo and they rolled, looking like two men sharing a seizure. I hit the brakes and leaped out. Then they were on their feet and it happened fast: They were taking swings like old hillbillies settling their great-granddaddies’ squabbles. Aldo went down while his attacker kept going, throwing wild punches in the rain. You could hear the thwacks of skull against pavement. I made straight for the aggressor and pulled him off.
“Taser him!” Aldo yelled.
I pinned the man facedown on the pavement and kept my knee pressed between his shoulderblades while I cuffed him.
“Taser him! Taser him!”
Residents staggered stiffly out of their houses, as if off their couches for the first time in a week. One of Aldo’s eyes was beaten shut and there was gravel rash on his upper cheek; blood trickled down his neck over his older scars. He clutched a bruised or broken rib. He wasn’t wearing shoes.
“Now,” I said, assessing Aldo’s attacker. Gelled hair. Thick, dark mustache. Colonel Mustard in his youth. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“Officer, this fucking cunt owes me fifty thousand dollars.”
“What for?” I asked.
“I invested in his horror movie.”
“I never said it would win awards!” Aldo said.
“It never even got finished!”
“I’m sorry, Kaplan. But you accepted the risk. Did I put a gun to your head?”
“You said I’d quadruple my investment!”
I let this fruitless discussion go on for a few minutes before sending the unhappy investor on his way, injustice clinging to him tightly as he trudged somberly down the street. Aldo made me stop at a McDonald’s drive-thru for ice. The rain came down hard now and hit the dark streets. Aldo pulled out a pocket-sized first-aid kit he kept on his person at all times, and sprayed antiseptic on his face.
I said, “You’re a fucking movie producer now?”
“Let me tell you something. The people who invest in films hate films. They wouldn’t be caught dead at a cinema.”
After reading about two young men who had produced a horror movie for $25,000 that went on to make over 248 million worldwide, Aldo had penned a screenplay, a period zombie movie called Van Demon’s Land, set in 1788 and featuring four principal groups: colonialists, convicts, Aborigines, and a couple of French explorers. They’d spent six months trying to secure financing and distribution, had the thing cast, shot twenty minutes of raw footage (using Kaplan’s investment), then attempted to use that footage to raise completion funds—to no avail.
“Seems that guy’s got every right to beat you senseless. Fifty thousand dollars! Where does that fit on your Fair Price Index?”
“It was impossible,” Aldo said, rubbing his jaw. “Every time I went into meetings with production companies, or with the government film-financing bodies, I hit a snag. The last meeting I went into they said there was too much dialogue. Film’s a visual medium, they said. Well, that just got my nerves up. I said film was a visual medium, you’re absolutely correct, but only until 1927 when it became a visual and sound medium, because that was the year Al Jolson did The Jazz Singer. Yes, but film is a visual medium, they repeated like robots. Unbelievable! So, I said, you haven’t heard of this thing called the talkies? They said, ‘But we don’t understand why the convict William Henry Groom has all these long speeches.’ Then I said, ‘And I don’t understand why all the film and literature of this country has to have as its main character a silent or laconic type. That’s not like real life. My experience of people is they never shut up!’ ”
Aldo tapped his fingers on the window, maybe at the woman standing at the bus stop. “Anyway,” he went on, “that was only one issue. Next they said, ‘You can’t have the zombies eating the Indigenous brains. It’s OK if they eat the brains of the British soldiers, it’s OK if they eat the brains of the British convicts, and we love when they eat the brains of the French explorers, but you can’t have them eating the brains of the Aboriginals.’ I asked why not, and you know what they said? Cultural sensitivities.”
That was two months ago, and now, as I drove along the shadowed city streets in the convulsing afternoon traffic, it occurred to me that the only person genuinely pleased with the absurd non sequitur of my becoming a police officer was Aldo, who had perhaps foreseen how frequently he would require my assistance. This was without question the most inconvenient alliance of my life, yet at the same time there was nobody else with whom I felt the most real and relaxed version of myself. To be honest, my most relaxed version grated on Tess, and I had begun to fear there was potential for divorce in my future. And Sonja, my sweet little monster: She still worshipped me as little girls do their fathers, but that would draw to an end once puberty got its messy hands on her. And though I could always make friends, I could never again make an old friend—that time had passed for me forever.
And yet I didn’t flash the light or put on the siren as guys on the force all sometimes did to slip through heavy traffic, because, I realized, I was reluctant to come to my old friend’s rescue yet again, or put in a good word for him, or bail him out, or plead for special consideration. Instead of hurrying, I took alternative routes, slowed down at yellow lights, let civilians overtake, felt plain relief when a tunnel under construction forced all the cars into a single lane; and when at the lights I allowed a bare-chested methadone addict to clear my windshield with a quizzical pout, I finally understood how tired I was of being immured in a friendship that was taking such a personal and professional toll. If Aldo perceived himself to be a burden, or thought he had overshot the boundaries of our friendship, he had never given any indication. In fact, he had unwavering confidence that I’d always step up for him at a moment’s notice and zero qualms about pestering me with the consequences of his unintentional yet frequent clusterfucks. Although it made me his enabler (Tess’s words) I never hesitated or refused him, but even after saving his life or extricating him from whatever jam he was in, he’d only give me the bare minimum of thanks before trotting out incongruous snark, or lighthearted ribbing. Lately his troubles had increased in frequency and seriousness; I felt apprehension at seeing his name on my caller ID, and began to feel taken for granted. The cumulative effect of the
se favors was to tip the balance of our friendship—as failed writer and destitute entrepreneur we were in the same boat and I could laugh at his one mishap after another, but as a policeman I seemed to serve only one purpose for him and I was beginning to resent it.
At the station, I walked past the CAUTION WET FLOOR sign that had been there for months and into the restrained chaos of three men in wifebeaters, panting, with two sweaty constables standing over them. The men sat as if tight spaces had been drawn around them, afraid to interact. I’d clearly just missed a fight. The desk sergeant stared impassively at me.
“Your idiot mate’s in there.”
“What’s the charge?”
“Wasting police time.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
He buzzed me through the side door. Aldo was standing beside the Wanted posters in the unpleasantly hot and glary sun-blasted corridor. He was wearing a bloodstained T-shirt underneath his old denim jacket, his slight frame bent into a posture of slothful defeat. He was quite a sight. Prematurely balding, prematurely graying, even though, if I remember correctly, he was excruciatingly late to puberty. What a sad and narrow prime he’d had.
“Here he is,” he said. “Why do you still look like a bus driver in that uniform?” Aldo gave me something I can only describe as a knowing wink of despair. “How’s things? How’s Sonja?”
“She’s starting to save her tantrums for the most public places with the fewest exits. Tess suspects she’s using our mortification as her secret weapon.”
Aldo laughed. “Everyone always says, until you have children you can’t ever understand what it’s like. That’s just because they have no empathy, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” I said, stepping back. Aldo waved his hands when he talked; he was always knocking people in the side of the head and not apologizing. His existence needed room.
“Be honest, Liam, isn’t fatherhood exactly what you thought it would be?”
“No, it’s totally different.”
“Liar!”
“Just take him home!” the sergeant barked.
The truth is, fatherhood was exactly what the culture had prepared me for: near-fatal fatigue, geysers of love, the cornered feeling that comes from being The Provider. But whenever Aldo asked about Sonja, I always detected substrates of old grief and even a smidgeon of unacknowledged jealousy that fatherhood had worked out for only one of us. There was also an imperative to change the subject before Aldo threw some awful fact in my face. (Last time, it was the epidemic of precocious puberty in seven-year-old girls.) By the time we stepped outside into an ambush of sunlight, Aldo already had a cigarette lit and was furiously inhaling, as if non-smoking laws were an inalienable human-rights violation. We leaned against my car and Aldo promised to email me a video of a blonde who had trained her pug to breastfeed. I noted with relief that in the ten minutes we had been together he had not mentioned Stella once. That was progress. I thought: Maybe his heart is finally out of quarantine.
“So you’ll never fucking guess who’s getting remarried,” Aldo said.
“You’re kidding.” This was bad news, the worst. “To who?”
“Something called Craig, one of those sub-lawyer thingies.”
“You mean like a legal secretary?”
“A paralegal something or other, yeah, one of those law careers where you’re kitty litter for other lawyers.”
“Remarried! What’s he like?”
“I don’t know much. I only met him once. He’s lived in Italy and so went on and on about how lateness is culturally superior to being on time.”
“What a cock.”
He pinched the cigarette butt so tight it became a flat wedge he had to suck hard on to get any smoke through. The air grew heavy with the smell of impending thunderstorms and Aldo told me how, the week before, he’d followed them to Bronte, down to the beach where he saw Craig take his shirt off to reveal swimmer’s abs lodged in a soldier’s torso, and how Aldo had stood there behind some family’s beach umbrella feeling a slow liquidation of his emotional assets. He let out a dry, glum laugh, bent down to pick up a fifty-cent coin and winced; I could see through the open shirt that his torso was wrapped in white gauze.
“And guess what else? She’s asked me to be part of the wedding.”
“No she didn’t.”
“She still considers me her best friend.”
“Ex-husbands aren’t best friends!”
“No shit.”
We slid into the car. Aldo shifted the sideview mirror to steer clear of his reflection. We moved off into the three-lane highway and were quickly embroiled in heavy traffic.
“Part of the wedding,” I said. “As what?”
“An usher.”
“An usher?”
“That’s how I said it. An usher? An usher? So I tear the tickets in half and with a flashlight show the patrons to their seats? Something like that, Stella said, laughing, thinking that my being lighthearted was proof of her good decision. But I begged her to reconsider. I mean, first of all, I almost choked when she told me the wedding is on a rooftop. I said, It’s outside? Her whole life she’s dreamed of getting married the traditional way that we never did, with the dress and the cake and the whole extended family, and then she goes and organizes an outside wedding? I mean, thirty-six years in the planning and it can’t rain?”
He was breathing heavily and staring into the copper light that glinted off the skyscrapers from the setting sun.
“If I’m to be entirely honest,” I said, just to stir the pot, “I never understood what you saw in her.”
Aldo snapped to attention. “For one, she’s naturally beautiful. I don’t know if you realize this, but the whole time we were together, she never once wore makeup.”
“That’s like describing me by saying—He doesn’t wear a hat. So fucking what?”
“So shut up and put on the siren.”
“Grow up.”
A long stretch of gridlocked traffic, and I had to actively resist the homicidal urge to plow through it or open the door as motorcycles weaved past. As usual, civilians who pulled up beside me looked straight ahead with fixed postures, or slouched down in order to hide their texting, or rolled up their windows gradually, or all of a sudden, to contain the smell of pot. Ten minutes later, we’d only moved two blocks. Aldo eased back into the seat and put his bare feet on the dashboard. I knocked them off.
If you wait long enough in life, your jealousies will eventually make no sense. Stella’s devotion to Aldo had always nested a special envy in my heart. She adored him, beyond all bearable limits. She wrote songs about him, for Christ’s sake, songs that she performed in public spaces in front of strangers. In that era, I had a few times made the tactical error of going out as a foursome; they behaved as if their love took place at a cellular level and whatever Tess and I had going on seemed—was—paltry in comparison. And now—poof!—that love was gone.
“How’s your novel?” he asked.
“I’m taking a hiatus.”
“You shouldn’t let failure go to your head.”
“You don’t understand. When I write about a character, it’s like getting a tattoo of them on my arm, and when it doesn’t work out I carry the failure of the relationship around with me forever, like some celebrity—”
“Loser.”
“The man just arrested for wasting police time is not calling me a loser.”
“That’s not how it went down.”
“What happened?”
As we stuttered along in the peak-hour nightmare, Aldo told me the whole story.
Earlier in the day, he’d convinced Stella to return to Luna Park with him in the hope of rekindling their romance, a dud idea that misfired almost as soon as they got through the turnstiles. He had blurted out the whole spiel about them giving it one more shot. “She said, ‘Face it, Aldo, the marriage was a failure.’ I said, ‘The relationship isn’t a failure merely becau
se one of us didn’t die, and despite it being the gold standard for our whole stupid civilization, my death or your death is actually a ghoulish barometer for marital success.’ Then we talked about the state of our union in those final months. She said it was rusted, leprous, and there was no wind left to harness. She said, ‘A love drawn taut snaps eventually.’ She said, ‘Maybe our youths ended at different times, did you ever think of that?’ I said, ‘Let’s lay all our cards on the table,’ and I proceeded to tell her that somewhere affairs were had, by me, just two minor indiscretions that any competent marriage counselor would have recommended to couples staring down a commitment that stretches interminably into the future. Get it out of your system, I imagined the marriage counselor advising.”
“The imagined marriage counselor?”
“Hey, my conscience is clean: I change it every week.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
Aldo laughed loudly, then bit his lip as if he’d revealed something he had set out to conceal. “Anyway, I told her how deeply and permanently and profoundly hurt I was by the way she left me.”