by Steve Toltz
I opened my notebook and with hardly a moment’s thought or hesitation, I wrote: The weird truth is I’ve often become good friends with people I originally disliked, and the more I downright loathed the person, the better friends we eventually became. This is certainly true of Aldo Benjamin, who irritated me at first, then infuriated me, then made me sick, then bored me senseless, which led to his most unforgivable crime—occasionally, when in the process of boring me, he’d become self-aware and apologize for being boring. “No no,” I’d have to say, feigning shock at the suggestion, “you’re not boring me, please go on.” I sometimes had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.
I stared at that paragraph, and allowed myself a brief shiver of admiration for having expressed something true. The pen was still wriggling in my hand. I had more to say, much more. I closed my eyes and contemplated the daunting task ahead. To write this story would automatically throw me into a head-on collision with the meaning of fate, humanity’s, sure, but Aldo’s strange specific one too, for I could finally admit what I always knew to be true: He is unique, he who seems hell-bent on falling into the same river not twice but innumerable times.
And I could unravel, permeate, explain him.
Senior Detective Doyle gazed at me with a cool, suspicious eye when I came to his desk and asked to personally conduct the interview. Everything about me had become sinister, and he spotted that. “Your mate’s having a manic episode,” he drawled, as if being manic was evidence of his guilt.
“I will get him to speak,” I said, and Doyle looked baffled and annoyed.
“You’re not hearing me. He’s already speaking, Constable.” Doyle again made references to a manic episode; Aldo was either coked up or on methamphetamines or simply out of his mind. Yes, he was talking, he repeated, but not about the crime per se, this wasn’t a confession, and he wasn’t saying anything incriminating, though what he was saying was certainly very disturbing, and Doyle had left Sergeant Oakes in there to keep an eye on him. “In any case, Mr. Benjamin has been specifically asking for you to be present for the interview,” he said with a light snarl.
“Thanks for mentioning it,” I responded, then moved briskly to the interview room, as if all the nation’s novelists were hurrying to beat me to it.
I entered to see Aldo, greyhound-thin, gripping the undersides of his chair as if he and the chair were hurtling through space. His hair was wet and combed back and looked like a kind of mold, and he was emitting an uneasy vigor and chattering like a small mob, explaining how he was ashamed of his long-held desire to see a mounted policeman thrown by his own horse. He turned away from Sergeant Oakes to give me a furtive hand gesture that looked like an aborted thumbs-up, but his eyes only lingered on my face long enough to convey vague disappointment, as if for a split second he thought I was coming in to tell him his bath was ready. Though the room was ice cold, and Aldo was in short sleeves, his face was sheened with sweat. Now he was saying he was tired of thoughts so self-pitying he believed he could hear God throw up in His mouth.
Sergeant Oakes busted out a nervous laugh. Talk about your captive audience; Aldo knew we had to listen to everything he said in case it could be held against him in a court of law. He was disgusted at all the horrible pretend laughing he’d done in his life, he said now, and was upset that he could derive pleasure only from the sight of the dogs of two introverts attacking each other in the street. Whether he was in the grip of a methamphetamine high still in its ascendance or having some kind of manic episode, he was shifting in the chair and shaking violently and picking at the skin on his forearm as if ants were strutting on it, seemingly set upon the herculean task of emptying his head, like in some mental stock-clearance sale where everything must go. He said he was depressed that if we ever advanced to a one-world government it would only mean that national wars became civil wars, and he was enraged how nobody admitted that the single most irritating thing in our whole society was being the captured person in a citizen’s arrest.
He tilted his chair backward and said it was a further annoyance that a life strategy of minimizing regrets only winds up guaranteeing you suffer the maximum. I wanted to carry him out of there and put him to bed, and I wondered how far I’d get if I picked him up in my arms and made for the exit. Now, as he tilted back so far the chair looked like it would topple over, he said he was sick of watching so much porn it was affecting his genome. He brought the chair slamming down on the cement floor. He was revolted, he said, at how he was so impatient for the population to drop below replacement level he could barely contain himself. And he was grossed out that our only evidence of moral evolution was how we’d learned to forgive ourselves during the sins we committed, and not wait until after.
It was at this moment I noticed that he’d fixed his eye on some point in the room. What was he looking at? He was saying that it was very telling that the only time people looked serious was when they were counting money or watching their child vanish around a corner. Sergeant Oakes nodded at me morosely and I had the impression he’d developed a stoop since I’d first entered. I thought: It is us, not Aldo, who will crack under interrogation. Aldo swiped vaguely at his own face. I traced his focal point to either a tiny crack in the plaster on the wall or the fly beside it. He said there was a reason that “the kindness of nature” isn’t a saying in any language. That people mistreat dogs because they can’t handle that type of devotion. That we’re not the worst civilization ever to blight the earth, but we’re the most sensitive.
It struck me that every time he slammed the floor after titling backward, he edged the chair a few millimeters forward. He was saying that history isn’t a litany of peoples and civilizations, it’s a series of clinical trials. That the first sign of madness is inattention to Don’t Walk signals. That the most significant impact of the digital world on our lives is we no longer wait for people to take their photographs when we want to pass in front of their cameras. “We just fucking go.” Aldo rocked back and forth with metronomic rhythm and slammed the chair again, inching forward. Now I understood. He was in all probability aiming to lunge for the gun in Sergeant Oakes’s holster in order to turn it on himself. Would he know how to take the safety off? If we intercepted him in time, would it be misinterpreted as an attempt on our lives? He said it was downright inscrutable that most people he met were as self-defeating as child pornographers who put their incriminating hard drives in for service. Now he seemed about to make a move. He said we are always exaggerating when we praise someone’s integrity, and that when you have poor intuition, everything is counterintuitive. Aldo’s chair was less than a half-meter from Sergeant Oakes, who hadn’t noticed, busy as he was kneading his own left shoulder. Aldo said he was sickened that he only fell into lockstep with his fellow man during earthquakes and when the Olympics were held in his home city, he was sad that a return to naiveté would require substantial damage to his prefrontal cortex, and thought it plainly weird that nobody but him realized that Islamophobia is merely repressed harem envy. His voice, I thought, was now communicating nausea and transmitting it directly to the listeners. He was sorry he couldn’t articulate if pressed why he was so sure his life was superior to the life of a cow, and loathed the phrase “a serious, but stable condition,” which implied a generally positive outcome while in reality meant someone’s life was probably ruined, that they were to be a paraplegic, or a quadraplegic. “Take it from me. Serious but stable is nothing to cheer about.”
Aldo’s incremental inching had now put him in arm’s reach of Oakes’s holster, and when he made his move I intercepted him with a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back into his seat. Oakes wasn’t sure what had just happened, and stood up at high alert with one hand balled into a fist and the other on his weapon, signaling me with urgent eyes his readiness to lend a hand in physically subduing this bona-fide danger to society.
I sat opposite Aldo and said I was going to conduct the interview, and that while the recording device was active he should rem
ain still.
A long, distressing moment followed where his lips were sucked into his mouth and he trembled with intense concentration, as if he were trying to hold in his own odor. Aldo toasted me with his Styrofoam cup of water and spilled most of it down his chin, and in one long breath explained that what was worse than being treated like a statistic was being treated like a statistical anomaly. He insisted he had always felt, on any given day, that his worst fears would be realized, not the grave, but an automated bed or a cell. Not a shroud, but bandages or a uniform. Not death, but physical suffering or imprisonment. Nothingness was nothing to get excited about, but agony and incarceration were. That is to say, he had always felt extravulnerable to the whimsy of the microbe, or to damning circumstantial evidence, as in, he said, the results are in, the jury is back, the tests are positive, you’ve been found guilty, I recommend a course of chemotherapy, I sentence you to seven years’ maximum security; because for him, he said, there had always been two totally separate and more or less autonomous civilizations existing parallel to regular society—the prison society and the hospital society—and he perceived regular society as a narrow bridge with the other two lying on either side, and he’d always been terrified of losing his footing and falling into one or the other, into a world of solitary confinement or of burn wards, of laundry-room rapes or skin grafts, and where he would finally fall—into the horror of the prison, or into the horror of the hospital—was his greatest fear.
“Wait,” I said, “let me turn on the recorder.”
An Unexpected Journey
ALDO’S MUFFLED VOICE HOLLERS FOR me through the bathroom door. The patrons in the beach club bar strike troubled smiles, their conversations silenced as they listen to his call of deep humiliation, or distress. I put down my bourbon and descend the stairs and rescue him from the narrow cubicle where he is perched upright with a feigned expression of boredom, as if a ride in my arms, to kill the time, might be just the thing. He drapes his arms around my neck and I ferry him, as if we are honeymooners, back up the steep staircase to his awaiting chariot. Once settled, he holds himself erect with perhaps his last remaining possession of value, his abdominal muscles, his face sharp and tightening in the sun’s hard glare. “Let’s go down there,” he says, gesturing to the beach below. “I want to feel the sand.”
“On your hands?”
“Why not?”
I can’t think of a single reason.
It is a hot, blindingly bright morning near spring’s end, the sky a luminous sea of pale blue swirls. Birds have made nests in the telephone poles. From the get-go, Aldo is angered by the broken footpath, its cracks and bumps. Brown leaves and sluggish lizards are crushed under his wheels as he rolls in and out of the thick shadows of overhanging trees. I walk beside him. When we reach the path that slopes down to the beach, Aldo keeps going.
“We’re not stopping here,” he says, without turning.
“Then where are we going?” I ask, catching up. His uneasy smile tells me nothing.
Through the sleepy green of the beachside suburb, we meander along the uneven footpath that lines the narrow road. Parakeets squawk unseen in the tops of large trees, and the air is thick with the damp odor of the sea. When the paved footpath ends, Aldo moves onto the road itself and keeps close to the guardrail that hugs the coastline, but his colossal chair forces cars to cross into the oncoming lane, lest they misjudge the overtake and knock him into the sea. En route, I’m thinking how he can never sneak up on a person again. Or trap any kind of animal.
“What’s the title of your book?” he asks.
“The King of Unforced Errors.”
“Hate it.”
“I’ll change it.”
“To what?”
“Sour Grapes: A Memoir.”
“No.”
“The Slowest Death on Record.”
“Better, but not great.”
“And the tagline is He was afraid of life. And he was right to be afraid.”
“Go suck a bag of dicks.”
To our left, homes built on near-vertical inclines; on our right, between the pine-shaded houses, we glimpse a ribbon of blue, or sometimes through front windows and out back ones, a whole slab of sea. We say nothing as we pass steep staircases that wind out of sight, landscape gardeners on cigarette breaks, the sporadic estranged husband asleep in his car, mailboxes in the shape of whales, and bright blue houses with weather vanes swearing on rusted hinges. Without warning, he turns off the road into a trackless expanse of waist-high grass. Aldo, a man captaining his own vessel, is radiating fear and determination, and I follow into unexpectedly dense bushland where the sky is all but obscured by interlocking canopies. The chair hums ahead of me as I trudge along behind, watching twigs churned up in his wheels that, from time to time, falter on the uneven ground. The sea air comes in strong wafts, and I feel a mishap is imminent; Aldo is sort of crouched now, tightly gripping the left armrest, and I catch up to him on a sloping dirt pathway that forces his chair on a dangerous tilt to the side. “Careful,” I say, but then all at once we’re on a forbiddingly steep descent; as Aldo heads down he shouts for help, and I grab the back of his chair to prevent it flipping over on top of him. “Don’t let go!” he commands in a panic. With me swearing and protesting, we teeter precariously on this scrubby path that twists down onto a small cove. We make it to the bottom, to the shadowless edge where the sand begins and the ocean roars and a breeze shifts the treetops and a raucous cloud of birds burst into the soft light. The beach is walled in by steep limestone cliffs on either side, and rising out of the sea is a rocky island, like an outpost. Four-foot sets are rolling in from the horizon, and in the anarchy of waves surfers are ducking and weaving and dodging around the huge monolith of rock as if they have impunity against bodily harm. It’s spectacularly dangerous.
“A secret beach!” I say.
Over the crashing waves, Aldo explains that the ocean recedes far enough to make it a beach only periodically, the last time being some years ago, when he came here with the artists. “So not a secret beach,” he says, “a magic beach.”
Of course. Aldo had mentioned it during his toxic murder-trial testimony, which had warped the courtroom furniture and the jurors’ minds. Those of us who heard it never stopped hearing it afterward, and despite an overload of sympathy for Aldo, we kind of hated ourselves, as though it were our own ears that had let us down.
“So this is Magic Beach.”
I stare at the sand and the water and the small clusters of sunbathers and think: People will label anything magical at the drop of a hat. Aldo pushes his wheelchair forward until his wheels spin in the soft sand; he looks out, and for a moment he appears to me as faceless as an old coin, as he gazes at the kamikaze water circus manuevering deftly around the island. It seems you could fall from a wave and be thrashed to death on that big rock, or wipe out early and be pinned against the sheer face of it. Or smash into the rounded boulders that fringe its perimeter. Or tumble onto the smaller, wave-polished stones that line the shore. Either way, these waves leave very little room for error, and there seems to be plenty of opportunity to narrowly escape death or, alternatively, not escape it at all.
“Look at these fuckers,” Aldo says.
“The type of risk takers that smuggle heroin in their stomachs.”
“People have to stop saying that adults have lost their sense of wonder. Maybe the fuzziness of a caterpillar’s legs no longer impresses me like it used to, but people always do.”
His face is bright for the first time that morning. A slip of fugitive cloud drifts by. The sun on its errand up the sky.
“What’s the time?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Midday?”
Aldo removes his T-shirt, and a silence forms around us. Here is his lifetime of scars, his sickly pale skin a mess of them, and a small drainage bag half filled with urine strapped to his belly with a suprapubic catheter, a permanent silicone tube that goes into a stoma in his lower abdomen, doi
ng nobody’s eyes any favors. He catches me reeling and with a gaze locks our sad faces together. I am trapped in an old crate without a single airhole.
“People always talk about wanting to die with dignity,” he says.
“They never shut up about it,” I agree.
“And when they use the word dignity in that sense, nine times out of ten they’re thinking of losing autonomy over urine and defecation, piss and shit, but for those of us who’ve already lost control of all that, what does dignity even mean?”
I genuinely have no idea. Our conversation cycles down to mere sighs. He spins his wheels once more but the chair doesn’t move anywhere. “Liam,” he says, “I want to go down by the water.”
“Should I carry you?”
“No, I’ll crawl.”
Aldo shifts to the edge of the chair and performs a flustered though painstakingly precise choreography: He gathers his legs, moves in front of the footplate, puts his fist on the ground, and with his chest on his knees and his weight on his fist, uses his arm as a pivot to land on the sand, where he drags himself onto his side so that the sack of urine doesn’t catch and burst open.
“Sure I can’t carry you?”
He shakes his head. This seems to be part of some outburst he’s been incubating all year, but if he thinks me carrying him is a worse spectacle than him crawling on the sand, spoiling people’s appetites, he is grossly mistaken.
I kick off my shoes and socks and realize the sand’s too hot for bare skin, yet Aldo’s crawling across it, oblivious—one of those dangers his deadened nerves keeps secret from his brain—so I rush down and scoop him up and he lets out a furious shriek that gets people’s attention, people who don’t mind gaping open-mouthed and scrunching their disgusted faces right at you. I get him to the water’s edge and, carefully this time, lower him onto the wet sand where he’s immediately ambushed by a wave; he spits and sullenly drags himself back a few meters, his legs looking like ramen noodles inside his sodden pants. He moves his lips silently, crunching sand between his teeth; his eyes hold a darkish glare.