by Steve Toltz
I sit down beside him, light us both cigarettes, and say, “Share it with the rest of the class.”
“Did I tell you about the guy I met in hospital?”
“Which one?”
“Nontraumatic myelopathy.”
“Was he Greek?”
“He became paralyzed after a two-hour surfing lesson, not from an accident, but from overprolonged spine hyperextension, you know, while lying on the surfboard.”
“I wish you would stop telling me these stories.”
Aldo buries his cigarette in the sand, and with wounded eyes contemplates the healthy bodies carried in on green waves.
He says, “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He gives me an annoyed look, as if I should be able to hear the noises in his head too.
We continue to watch the surfers risking then saving their lives in a single gesture, but even daredevilry grows monotonous after a while. And maybe I’m wrong, but I catch a flash of disappointment in Aldo’s face when one narrowly misses the rock—he is wearing his heart of darkness on his sleeve. He’s even breathing aggressively.
Aldo consults my watch again.
I ask, “Somewhere you have to be?”
“It was Mimi who first brought me here.”
“I know.”
He turns his head to look at the incongruity of his cumbersome mechanized chair nestled at the base of the rugged cliffs that tower over this isolated cove. Getting his chair back up that steep pathway now seems unfeasible. My eyes survey the top of the cliff face, the incredible glassy houses with their endless vistas and wraparound balconies.
“They’re not coming.”
“Who’s not?”
“I can’t wait any longer,” he says.
“For what?”
Aldo seems to be bursting out of himself. I am picking up frustration, sexual and existential, maybe at the idea of spending another couple of decades with the debris of himself, or maybe it’s just the leggy, bikinied women sprawled in broad daylight ten meters from where we’re sitting. In this twenty-first-century context, where we increasingly become, as McLuhan forecasted, the sex organs of the machine world, where does that put Aldo?
“See that fucknugget over there?”
Aldo is pointing to a dark-toned guy with bleached-blond dreads in Mambo board shorts walking out of the surf like he has left it for dead.
“Yes.”
“Call him over.”
“What for?”
“Just do it, will you?”
I feel an uneasy social transaction coming up. I wave at the surfer and he comes over warily, as if in fear we might remove the genetic stamp from his body.
He says, “What’s up?”
Aldo says, “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you’ll lend me your surfboard for an hour.”
“You serious?”
“Totally.”
“Wait. Aren’t you that guy —?”
“Yep.”
The surfer’s thinking face comes on; he tightens his mouth and flares his nostrils that, to me, seem larger than the diameter of his whole nose. He turns back to the surf as if to calculate the exact latitude and longitude where Aldo will perish.
“You gotta know what you’re doing.”
“I do.”
The guy frowns, perhaps having noticed that Aldo is panting and sweating even though he’s inert.
“There are only a billion safer places to surf. A mate of mine broke his hand here last month. Another guy I know cracked his skull. I’ve had a few stitches myself. And a punctured cheek. See?” He shows us a puffy pink scar underneath his right eye.
“I’ll be right,” Aldo says, and turns his face to the wind and scrutinizes the waves, then slides down a powerful wall of water—in his imagination—and is already toweled off and back among us.
It was 1990—we spent one hateful summer learning to surf in order to impress Suzanne Douglas and Kelly Stevens, but both of us quickly had enough of the indecision, fear, and impatience necessary to be truly bad surfers; we hated it equally, and soon wound up back on dry land attracting a whole other genre of girls with secondhand metal detectors.
The surfer is silent a moment. Then he says, “My cousin’s got Parkinson’s,” as if that were some kind of synchronicity, and worth applauding. When we don’t say anything, he says, “Well, shit. You can just borrow it for free.”
“Deal!”
Aldo rolls onto his back and with lightning speed whips off his tracksuit pants to reveal tight black board shorts underneath. His eyes, cast in my direction, say, Ta-da! My uneasiness makes way for confusion. He had his swimmers on all this time?
“What about your thingy there,” the surfer says, pointing brazenly to Aldo’s suprapubic catheter inserted in the abdominal wall. The guy is now acting as if he’s partaking in some long-scheduled Make-A-Wish event.
“I have to be careful the bag isn’t torn from my body.”
“Oh Jesus,” I say.
“If this comes out, you’d be shocked how quick that hole closes over.”
“Shock me,” the surfer says, hand on his hip.
“Five minutes. Ten at the outside.”
“Amazing!”
Aldo turns to me. “I’m giving you something to write about.”
“I don’t do obituaries.”
Maybe, in a complicated spiral of human thought, Aldo figures dying is the ultimate act of self-protection. That is, once dead, nothing further can harm him.
He digs a small hole in the sand and opens the spout of his drainage bag and releases the foggy liquid into it and the air steams with the unique odor of sand and piss. I submerge a weary disgust and am reminded that it’s possible for two things to be wrong in parallel—you can be paralyzed and have a psychotic breakdown. Aldo stares at me with a bemused smirk. He says, “Sick of revulsion yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Tie my ankle to the board.”
That has accomplice to murder written all over it. Don’t I have a duty to stop him, if not as a friend, then as an officer of the law? Of course, as a writer, I am impelled to let him try.
“Aldo,” I say, “think it over.”
I want to impress upon him the obvious fact that things can always be worse, that even though he has been jailed and paralyzed, bankrupt and heartbroken, things can always spiral into an ever darker, ever bleaker hole. In this case, he could transition from paraplegic to quadriplegic. I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Now carry me in.”
“I’ll get wet.”
“Don’t be a pussy.”
It has been many years since anyone has called me that off-duty. The surfer helps lay him facedown on the board then we ferry him to the shore, like pallbearers transporting a coffin.
He says, “I feel like the Fussy Corpse.”
“I can see that.”
Our eyes meet and his reveal some inner explosion of pain he soundlessly bears. I realize he’s crying.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m scared. I’m so scared.”
“Don’t do this,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything, but from his blanched and fractured face I know he is three-dimensionally projecting every possible negative and catastrophic outcome. The air sparkles around us. The surfer and I lower Aldo and the board flat onto the sea. The water is cardiac-arrest cold. The surfer says, “Good luck,” and retreats back up the beach. I point out to Aldo that medical access will be difficult here, and if anything happens I don’t know how I’ll get him back up that cliff. He shrugs me off and starts paddling fearlessly to make it over the first wave and immediately slides off the board. I run in and lift him back on. Aldo hauls himself up and paddles out with a facial expression I would call arrogant distress, before sliding off again.
There’s no way for him to do it. “Want to give up?”
Before he can answer, a four-footer crashes down and I hear him shout something that
sounds like “Fuck me with a hadron collider!” as he vanishes into the sea. All I can see is the fin of the board poking out of a rush of white water. I sprint over literally fearing I will see viscera, and pull him up out of the surf. He is breathless and tripled over in pain. He looks like a drowning man whose one wish is to die in a fire.
When I get him back to shore I say, “At least you tried. You can still hold your head up high.”
“No, it hurts in that position.”
I laugh. He pats down his torso to confirm he is more or less unscathed. He sits up, catching his breath. Then says, “Push me back out.”
“Do you think you’re being brave or something?”
His face goes hard with bitterness. “Ever step on an ant and then lift your shoe to see that flattened ant crawling away? Would you call that ant brave?”
“Aldo. You can’t do it!”
The surfer bounds over and nearly, but doesn’t, high-five us both. He says, “Beautiful effort,” and grabs his board and strides back into the surf, which rears up to greet him. We stare into the hazy glimmer and watch him ease past the breakers and out to the calm flat where he hooks his board 180 degrees and gives us a wave.
Aldo sighs, and asks, “What time is it now?”
“While we’re waiting for whatever you’re waiting for, can I interview you for the book?”
Aldo gives me his hardest stare. “Sell it to me.”
“I know he’s a force of darkness, but Morrell once said—”
“I’m not fucking kidding! Do not fucking talk to me about that man right now!”
“OK. Let me put it another way. You’ve let a lot of people down. Justly or not, you’ve been accused of some pretty horrific things. But you’re a good person.”
“A sleeper angel waiting to be activated.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but you do have a strong ethical code, like when we were eating Chinese takeout in the park and you wouldn’t let me feed leftover Peking duck to the ducks. Don’t you want people to know about that?”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“Don’t you want people to know how you were such a devoted groupie to your wife that you even became a character witness for a child murderer to advance her career?”
“Meh.”
“Or back in high school, how you told me kids who become magicians to be popular only wind up exacerbating their unpopularity, and then you confiscated my wand and cape?”
“No one will give two shits.”
“Remember what you told me you said at your sister’s funeral?”
“Fucking terrorists.”
“After that.”
“Oh, I said it would annoy me to be killed by someone who doesn’t especially hate me as an individual, or who I didn’t personally betray.”
“No, before that. You told us how, when Leila had organized the holiday in Bali for the three of you after your dad’s death, you didn’t go because you’d called the government’s travel-warning number, learned that you needed a shot for Japanese encephalitis, and decided it would be a tedious if not fatal vacation. As you waved her off at the airport, you said to Veronica, ‘It will be one of those holidays where you’ll be jailed indefinitely for insulting the king, and I can move into your bedroom on a permanent basis. Enjoy eternity!’ ”
“So?”
“Enjoy eternity were your last words to your sister.”
Aldo gave me a look that was a request for privacy.
“OK,” I say, changing tack. “Remember when you borrowed money to get an exploration license in Queensland with Ron Franklin, to drill three holes in some prospect based on what, I can’t remember.”
“A ground magnetic anomaly.”
“Right. And the three holes were drilled, and no significant mineralization was discovered.”
“So?”
“And the next year, a UK company discovered uranium in that exact same location.”
“That was bad luck, but I knew what I was getting into. To be born is to be forewarned.”
I lunge for my notebook and write that down.
“Hey, stop that!”
“You know, despite your singular fate, to write about you is to troubleshoot the human spirit. I’m trying to appeal to your basic humanity here.”
“Hmm.” Aldo’s mind is adrift now, his thoughts wheeling away. He’s gazing sadly at the rolling blue ocean and the cloudy light like an old sea widow. He’s determined not to help me.
Unless. Oh Jesus, yes. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.
“Stella’s in it.”
“She is?”
“Of course. I mean, she features quite significantly, as you might expect in a book about you. In fact,” I say, “I’ve got the first chapter right here in my bag. It’s preliminarily titled ‘Aldo Benjamin, King of Unforced Errors: The Early Years.’ ”
“Aren’t you even changing my name?”
“Don’t you want to see your relationship from another perspective?”
“Give it here.”
I fish the manuscript out of my bag and pass it to him. He rotates his bony arse until he has molded the perfect indent in the sand, wets his thumb, and plunges in.
Aldo Benjamin, King of Unforced Errors: The Early Years
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.
Aldo had transferred to our school in the middle of the penultimate year, and about a month into our friendship, after an all-nighter on pills, Aldo dragged me on a dawn tour of the shitty neighborhood he grew up in. We had to take two buses to get there, and as the sun rose over the city skyline, we ambled past forgettable stretches of warehouses running alongside a train station that “no unarmed woman should dream about walking from, even at dusk,” past a greasy takeout shop where “one employee always kept a lookout for a health official,” until we arrived at a narrow warren of residential streets where the people coming out of their houses were “uglier than in the beachside suburbs but not as ugly as in the mountains.” The houses were all massive, all empty, and all had FOR SALE signs on their front lawns. The sight of his old home territory was overexciting Aldo; as we moved through it, he bombarded me with random facts about his family that he seemed to be reciting from a census report: Only 35 percent of them were overweight, they had blue eyes, his mother’s side carried the degenerative diseases, his father’s side had all the madness. Mostly, he said, they were B negative. I thought: What the fuck is he talking about?
Until I met him, almost all my male friendships were based on homoerotic wrestling or the lighthearted undermining of each other’s confidence, but for Aldo and me, our connection was of like minds on pointless adventures, whether that be taunting bouncers outside nightclubs, riding shopping trolleys down suicidally steep declines, or attending first-home auctions to force up the bids of nervous young couples. In those days, Aldo and I had such great conversations that every sunset seemed like the end of an era. We were young and there were no unpleasant surprises waiting for us in bathroom mirrors. We did things we wouldn’t feel guilty about for literally years. Nobody was on a diet.
It was in the huffy silence of detention after the supervisor had left the room that Aldo and I first spoke. His blue eyes and copper-shaded skin made his ethnicity difficult to place. He was scrawling hairy penises on the desks; I was vandalizing an overhead projector. The other students tracked our orbit around the room as we emptied the fire extinguisher. Every now and then I’d catch him staring at me as
though out the window onto a fog-drenched paddock. I said to him, “What are you looking at?” He said, “My sister Veronica was right. A teenage mustache is pathetic. I’ll shave if you do.” I said, “Fuck you. What are you writing there?” and tore the notebook from his hand. Aldo was working on a project he called the Fair Price Index. Sandwiches (any kind): $3.50, haircuts: $11.50, movie tickets: $8.00, soup: $6.00. I said, “What the fuck is this?” Aldo said, “This is what I’m going to pay for goods and services in the future.” I said, “So no matter where you are, that’s what you’re going to pay?” He said, “That’s the plan.” I said, “But that’s ridiculous. You have to pay what they charge.” He said, “You can if you want. I’ll pay what’s right,” and I said, “What a loser,” yet several weeks later, in religious studies, he offered me a sleeping pill to see who could stay awake the longest and I accepted, and when we were sent out of the room for snoring, he said, “Drink?” I said, “A park?” He said, “Toilet block roof?” I said, “Lead on,” and we stumbled drowsily to the nearby tennis courts, on the way discovering the appalling miracle that we both had a dead sister.
We climbed the rusty drainpipe of the toilet block and sat on the hot concrete roof and spent the afternoon memorializing our big sisters, those lavender-candle-scented, introspective blabbermouths prone to selective catatonia. I told him about Molly’s death by speeding cop, and he told me what happened to Veronica, how a few years earlier in Bali she was a passenger on a bus when a bomb onboard was accidentally activated; the terrorists were en route to their intended target in Kuta Beach, ironically Veronica’s destination also. Aldo and I confessed in a delicious mania of grief how each of us had at one point wished his sister dead, and how this perverse magical thinking was driving us both quietly insane. We couldn’t believe we had this in common too. While our grieving parents were hagiographers on the subject of their incandescent daughters, we often sat simpering in their silent bedrooms, bedrooms that were either packed away and stripped bare (Veronica’s) or left unnervingly intact (Molly’s). It was incredible that we had lost them at the same exact point on the relationship cycle, more or less at the same time, around their seventeenth birthdays, when they refused tickle fights and treated our smiles like swastikas, grew thorns, and mastered derision. We had both secretly idolized them and they treated us, their younger brothers, like plague carriers. Yes, it was amazing to us that we had both been abandoned and forsaken by our older sisters, both of whom wouldn’t let us disturb them even as they watched the neighbors (Molly) or infomercials (Veronica)!