by Steve Toltz
It took me a moment to register. “With her husband’s baby?”
“Jesus. Why do you have to say it like that?”
Inside someone switched tracks from Radiohead to Stevie Wonder. Aldo tightened his frown and leaned into me.
“Where’s what?” he asked.
“I heard you bought Nembutal from a vet.”
He flashed a smile as if from inside a raincoat. “So?”
“Nembutal, Aldo. The suicide drug.”
“So? So? So?”
I got annoyed now. “So why don’t you just put a pistol in your mouth? Why are you sneaking around buying vet medicine? You do know that Nembutal is horse poison, right?”
Aldo stubbed his cigarette out on the frosted glass of the circular table and said, “Of course I know. You think I want human poison? You’d have to pour yourself literally buckets of human poison just so you can reach the point where you can say: This is enough to kill a horse. So why not go straight for the actual horse poison and consume less?”
All of a sudden I wished this were some artificial reality from which I would eventually be unplugged.
A throat cleared theatrically. Doc Castle came out onto the balcony lighting a spliff, followed by three other men who moved in a confident, guileless manner that suggested divorced fathers with new girlfriends, or content homeowners who had just paid off their mortgages that very morning. Aldo made the introductions. Jeremy Samuels, lawyer. Evan Pascall, dentist. Graeme Frost, accountant. I stood there letting my face go slack. Aldo Benjamin, snake! He’d built personal connections with the full suite of professional services for his stupid human life where emergencies came with bizarre regularity. He was at home on the edge of hysteria, where he lived his open secret: that he was a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster that had just happened, or a disaster that was currently happening. This methodical gathering of human fire hoses was shameless. I felt used and was overwhelmed with disgust to find myself face-to-face with these friendships that were all ugly mirrors of my own. I thought: Enough’s enough. I would no longer offer myself as parachute, chaperone, or soft landing for this guy; I didn’t care how far back our friendship went, how much history we shared. I was sick of being obliging. Aldo had now spent all his friendship tokens, and unless he had some ingenious scheme to get a fresh supply, we were fucking done.
I snatched the joint out of Doc Castle’s hand and tossed it over the balcony. “You know what I’ve just realized, Aldo? I’ve had enough of you.”
Aldo blinked, and Doc Castle and the rest of the professionals awkwardly edged backward as I went on a verbal rampage about how Aldo and I might have been genuine friends in the past but he had been using me for years. I even repeated Tess’s fear that Aldo’s most toxic, corrupting influence was not on my behavior, but on my destiny, and now I feared she was right; there was something contagious about his shit luck, and in his orbit one had a tendency to give oneself bad advice. It started to drizzle, affording the spectators the perfect excuse to return inside. Aldo hadn’t moved; his head was cocked and he wore a strange sad smile, a practiced smile, as if he’d heard this speech before from others. Maybe he had.
“I know I’m a pain,” he said. We stared silently at each other. A pulsing light from the nearby telecommunications tower went off. That seemed to be my cue. I stormed inside.
“Liam, wait,” Aldo said as I tramped through the party into his bedroom, where I ejected the copulating couple and turned over magazines, tossed self-actualization tomes and dry psychology textbooks to the floor, methodically ransacked his cupboards, swung my arm in a loose arc underneath his bed, gathering socks and T-shirts and shoes I’ll bet Aldo assumed he’d lost. His guests gathered at the doorway to make snarky asides and take photographs on their phones, but I doubted they could perceive the tendrils of Aldo’s psyche twined around mine. They certainly couldn’t have caught all the nuances of intimacy I felt while touching his things, nor seen the angry tears in my eyes. This was a friendship of nearly twenty years I was throwing away here. I rifled through his drawers, charged by the spasms of rage I’d ceded control to, and aware of the frightening effect an armed uniformed maniac must be having on spectators. It was in a white Nike sport sock that I found it: an opaque bottle with a stopper and an acrid odor rising out of it. I went into the kitchen, waved it in the air in prosecutorial triumph at Aldo, who didn’t respond in any visible way. My plan was to pour it down the sink, but Aldo’s non-reaction forced a melodramatic act; I smashed it on the kitchen tiles, and almost immediately the cat went to lick it up. I removed the cat, found a mop, and cleaned up the Nembutal before the animal could get to it and die violently in front of the whole party. Aldo watched all this with a compelling look of genuine, haunted sadness. I had robbed him of his last resort, seized his suicide from his actual hands. I thought: One man’s tragedy averted is another man’s fantasy deferred. I wrapped the broken glass in newspaper and stepped into the cold hallway without a word.
VI
For several months I took a well-deserved hiatus from my old friend, stopped returning his messages, resisted the temptation to call, slid the idea of him into a compartment with a hidden bottom. On Sonja’s eighth birthday he sent a musical-ballerina jewelry box; that it was his first gift since her christening only exacerbated my annoyance and strengthened my resolve. At the same time I stopped writing. Outnumbered by bad ideas, I tossed it in, and this new commitment to personal and artistic failure somehow felt in concert with my sad abandonment of my hopeless friend. Once I almost weakened: his histrionic voice on my answering machine sounded like it came from the inside of a metal pipe, whispering harshly and cryptically about deep trouble. Sonja was playing on the floor next to me, a formidable punk princess sporting a pink tiara, her eyes smeared with her mother’s mascara; she looked scared at the sound of Aldo’s voice. It was a tough decision, but I deleted that message. Another afternoon, Stella telephoned to tell me she wanted to try to force Aldo to get an ordinary job to pay her back the money he owed, and couldn’t I talk sense into him?
“Trying to make it rich after all these years is frankly stupid,” she said.
It was an inoffensive request, but I didn’t feel obliging. I said, “You’re his ex-wife. You deal with him.”
As the months of radio silence went by, I felt the gravitational pull of our friendship waning. The break started to feel irrevocable. Occasionally I’d wake with an ineffable sadness; there was no one in whom I could confide in the same way. I even missed Aldo’s irritating habit of not understanding me on the phone (“Are you chewing?” he’d say. “What’s that over your mouth, an oven mitt?”), and the times he’d call to ask my opinion on some random question (e.g., “Hey, do animals rape interspecies? I mean, a giraffe isn’t going to try and fuck a swan, is he?”). Sometimes I’d be reminded of him by a simple object—guitar picks (he used to carry them for Stella) or black gloves (which reminded him of strangulation)—and of course I’d think of him whenever I drove by hospitals or medical centers or saw a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign, or when I had to fish an insolvent entrepreneur out of his own swimming pool. The strange thing was that in all that time we never even bumped into each other. As I drove past the Hollywood Hotel, or was arresting a hash dealer within a few blocks’ radius of Phoenix Court, I’d keep one eye on the pedestrians in my periphery, but they were never him. Maybe he’d gone back to China or India or Dubai, to pursue some doomed idea to its dismal conclusion.
In any case, life without Aldo was OK. People shed friends all the time—why couldn’t I? Besides, with his arduous existence excised, I could focus solely on my own demoralizing problems: I was under investigation for misplacing my gun; haunting my daymares were the mangled faces of an eight-year-old boy and his mother, crushed in the backseat in a car accident I had responded to; my marital discord had plateaued at a constant fever pitch; and Sonja had started displaying increasingly aggressive behavior. Always quick to hysterical anger, she’d sometimes sucker punch me w
hen I kissed her; now, to our horror, she had started biting people, and other than muzzling her, we didn’t know what to do. These were dark days that seemed meaningless and unending, and I could barely manage to get up in the morning.
Turned out, I was wrong about one thing: Tess and I hadn’t plateaued at all. Our marriage evaporated almost instantaneously when I called home during a night shift to say good night to Sonja. She answered the phone with a delightful, high-pitched “Daddy!” and I told her a brief, sanitized version of my day’s misadventures, after which she reciprocated with her own and then suddenly broke into a horrible adult laugh. It was Tess, pretending. “You can’t even tell your wife from your eight-year-old daughter. Pathetic!” she laughed. This so humiliated and destabilized me, every ounce of love for her rushed out of me in one slick whoosh, and not until later that night, in the bleak surroundings of the Marco Polo Motor Inn on Parramatta Road, did a sort of bright side occur to me. That was a pretty juicy scene, I realized, and sat up writing until two in the morning. Unfortunately my brain made its usual pilgrimage to the mysterious land where language dies. My imagination was impenetrably dark, boarded up. The ideas remained inexpressible, penumbral. I had linguistic thrombosis, my textual flow impeded by the narrowing of some creative vessel. I sat simpering at the desk, and thought: You fucker, you failed to cannibalize drug deals, corruption, murdered nurses, domestic disputes, drowned children, hit-and-runs, and now you can’t even fashion a decent story out of your wife’s sadism. You’re done. I poured 330 milliliters of Heineken on the keyboard until the screen went green. I had been dodging success with drone-like precision for nearly two decades. That’s it, I concluded. It’s finished. Seems persistence wasn’t the key after all.
Two months or so later, I had kept to my word. Although at times I felt a fraud, I had settled into a life I’d always feared yet secretly desired, a life uninterpreted and unencumbered by art. To that end, I had got on with the job of being a competent officer of the law. I moved out of the motel and into a warehouse apartment on Kippax Street where Sonja stayed every second weekend. I read teenage vampire romances that would not inspire me to pick up a pen. I acted on sexual impulses with the kind of menopausal, unhappily married, horny strangers our pornography culture had turned me on to. In other words, I was doing OK.
Until the afternoon Senior Constable Ronnie Grant came over with a tired uncertainty and sat on my desk reeking of every disliked great-uncle from childhood. He picked up the picture of Sonja and contemplated it in a lurid fashion. I snatched the photograph back off him.
“You’re wanted down at Surry Hills,” he said.
“What for?”
“Your boy Benjamin.”
I couldn’t even muster a sigh. To my surprise, I experienced no deeper concern than the interruption of my workflow. I felt pleasantly anesthetized, or as if a wound had been expertly cauterized. Not even a feeling of déjà vu, nothing. Whatever Aldo had done didn’t pertain to me in any way. “Leave me out of it.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
He gave me a bleary shrug and shuffled back to his desk. For ten minutes, I got on with finishing an evidence seizure report: four knives, each with titanium 4 centimeter blades; two transparent bags with traces of brown powder, possibly heroin; one mobile phone, Nokia. On the radio, the prime minister campaigned for re-election saying, “I’m just an ordinary bloke, and I want to do things for ordinary working-class families,” and the opposition leader responded by saying he was just “an ordinary Australian who represented other ordinary Australians.” I sighed, felt the cold snout of duty pushing the back of my neck. Five minutes later I was agitated beyond belief. What had Aldo done now? I fast-walked over to Senior Constable Ronnie Grant’s desk, where he was the monosyllabic half of a telephone conversation; I stood for an agonizing twelve minutes until he finished his call.
“What’s the charge?”
“Attempted murder.”
A jet stream of ice entered my body.
“Was it Stella?”
“No,” he said, glancing at the Post-it note on his desk. “Clive Gibson.”
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Dunno. Clive Warren Gibson. Aged three days.”
Three days? It couldn’t be. “Stella’s baby?”
“I don’t know these people you’re talking about.”
I slunk furtively to the stairs, took two at a time until I reached the roof and almost leaped into the clear blue air. It was incomprehensible that he’d ever harm anyone, let alone a baby. I’d seen him knock the cigarette out of a pregnant woman’s hand on the street. Unless.
From the rooftop I looked out with disdain at an exhausted city masking its exhaustion in a display of vitality: the backed-up traffic, businesssapiens (Aldo’s word) hastening in the shadowed streets. On the building opposite, an Australian flag flapped in the wind. Why bother with flags? We know what country this is: It’s the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary.
On the way into Surry Hills station, a shirtless man with a bloodied face tried headbutting me. Everyone has potential for uncontrollable rages. I’d seen Aldo’s customary impotent explosions against corporations, injustice, God, banks, government, greed, and ineptitude, but was I to believe that all his liberated demons had mobilized and marched on Stella’s newborn? No, it was some absurd misunderstanding. Unless. Unless.
The desk sergeant eating a kebab nodded hello.
“I’ve come to see Aldo Benjamin,” I announced.
Behind him, a senior detective with a harangued face and mirrored sunglasses pushed up on his head waved me over.
“Constable Liam Wilder?”
“Yes.”
“Name’s Doyle. Your mate’s charged with attempted infanticide.”
“It’s a mistake.”
Doyle made his eyes sigh—I’d never seen that before. “He had a note in his pocket.”
“A confession?”
“Not exactly. Here.”
He handed me a note in a plastic envelope. It read:
Dear Lord, when Fate jiggles her wet finger in my ear like a little sister, and I knock over jars of girlfriends’ grandmothers’ ashes and tip over scaffolding I am attempting to scale, when bicyclists clip me in passing and friends’ pets die on my watch, what the fuck, you old Dog? I mean, it’s hard not to take the spontaneous tumbling of shop displays the wrong way!
P.T.O.
On the other side was written:
Why, O Lord, is it my role in this life to be not just the falling clown, but the falling clown who other falling clowns fall on? In other words, how the fuck is an old lady grabbing onto my arm as she trips in a supermarket characteristic of ME?
(Amen)
Aldo Benjamin
I thought: Aldo, my poor, sad-lucked, kind-hearted fucked-up friend, this desperate and pitiful plea to a God he didn’t believe in must really be the end of the line. I fought back angry tears and berated myself: What kind of friend had I been? I never helped him avert a single disaster. My desire to protect him had always come to nothing.
This train of thought was suddenly derailed by an unexpected event. That absurd prayer set it off: Nabokov’s throb, Nietzsche’s rapture of tremendous tension, Shelley’s inconstant wind, Jarrell’s lightning strike, Hazlitt’s mighty ferment, Lorca’s duende, Dickinson’s soul at the white heat, Morrell’s deadbeat dad (who comes through when you least expect it, then disappears when you begin to count on him), i.e., Inspiration. The idea that compels you to create with the urgency of flushing drugs down the toilet as the police are breaking down your door, or with the adrenaline that comes with stuffing a body into the boot of a car before the CCTV swivels back in your direction. I stood there immobile. The idea was spreading through my body like whiskey. A hodgepodge of passages from Artist Within, Artist Without swam in my head: . . . you are in the business of immensities . . . precision is the next best thing to silence . . . only when you have la
ssoed multiplicity will there be nothing to add . . . write what knows you . . . to discover the point of your uselessness . . . above all, find your natural subject.
And I had! The last cigarette shaken out of the soft pack of ideas: My sad old friend, who I’d met in 1990—a two-decade gestation period. Other people were mere vapor to me, but I knew his inadequacies by heart. No facile invention necessary; I’d give readers the realest person I knew. Of course, his life was anything other than “the way we live now.” Nobody lives like him and lives to tell the tale. I’d tell his tale! I’d curate an exhibition of his foibles and follies. I felt luminous, intrepid, like a correspondent embedded in hell. I was going to make my report. Finally! My natural subject.
“You OK?”
I stood blinking at Aldo’s note, trying to memorize it, eyeing the photocopier under the bulletin board in the adjoining alcove.
“Constable? What do you make of it?”
I’ll tell you what I’ll make of it! Insomuch as a friend is an exploitable resource, and since I can’t, it seems, help him anyway, I’ll mine Aldo for everything he is, and write about all the terrible things that have happened to him, a small, inoffensive human being who can’t catch a break, and how he is somehow complicit in the worldly and supernatural crimes perpetrated against him. Preliminary title: Woe is He. Or Jokers of the Fall. Or Between the Water and the Clay.
“Do you mind giving me a moment?”
I went to the men’s room; the reflection of my rapacious face was jarring. My inner voice’s faint excited whisper: This is it. This is it. Was this it? Was I sure? Morrell says: Muses lay traps and conjure mirages. On the other hand: Some women you have to bed before you can reject them. OK, I know Aldo told me untold things in absolute confidence but this was minimal compensation, the least I could recoup for my efforts. Besides, his life could benefit from close reading. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, so I would examine it for him. Who else but a best friend could do that?