Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  “Soooo, I was thinking,” he said, tossing me a cigarette I hadn’t asked for. “You should have a party so I can invite her and, you know.”

  “Why my place?”

  “Didn’t you say your folks were away? And you have no neighbors.”

  It was true. We had just moved into an overlandscaped estate in a newly created suburb with identical streetscapes and pink concrete driveways and paved patios and brick-plinth letterboxes. Most houses had been sold off the plan but we were the first in, and there would be no further residents for four weeks. “What if nobody comes?” I said in a near whisper, and then, thinking of the epic party hurricanes that had legendarily decimated teenagers’ homes, added, “Or too many?”

  “Jesus, Liam, no one’s asking you to go swimming with sharks during your menstrual cycle,” Aldo said. “A little get-together. That’s all.”

  • • •

  The sight of my ruined house was compelling. The skylight smashed from below. The broken banister, suspended. Downstairs, every window shattered. A human-shaped hole in the plasterboard. The floor a minefield of glass and shredded Gyproc. My uncle’s urn on its side, emptied of its contents. Graffitied walls. Tiled kitchen floor sticky with beer, red wine collected in the grout. Cat wearing my old McDonald’s hairnet. Whatever carpet or curtains or couches remained carried the stench of cigarettes woven into the fabric. The front gate was all hinges and no gate, the pink driveway had been torn up, the Hills Hoist wrestled to the ground, the lemon tree set on fire, the letterbox kicked over, flower beds trampled flat. There was nothing left to protect. I remember promising my mother I would do the dishes.

  It had started poorly enough. Aldo and Ben Stack were sitting on the bottom step of the veranda pretending not to notice that the street around us was abnormally quiet, as if even the cicadas had gone to a different party. “Who wants a cup of tea?” Aldo asked. “Your grandmother,” I answered. He rose and moved toward the kitchen and I said, “Fuck, Aldo, if anyone comes in here and sees you making tea . . .”

  Two hours later, the living room was too crowded to move in; chairs, coffee tables, and bookshelves had been repositioned and stacked carelessly to make room for dancing; people were stamping like horses trapped in a burning barn. Etiquette seemed to dictate putting cigarettes out directly on the coffee table rather than into the burgundy Persian rug. There were guys and girls piggyback jousting, kicking in sideboards, mowing the carpet, trampolining face first into the wrought-iron chandelier, pouring turpentine into the fish tank, pulling insulation out of the walls, and generally taking out their own puberties on the physical structures around them. Outside, teenagers jumping on cars, pulling the back door off its hinges, ripping up artificial turf, cannonballing off the pitched roof into our above-ground pool. It seemed that high-functioning sociopaths were flocking from all over Sydney. It got worse. Silhouettes of gangly marauders on the lopsided roofs of the neighbors’ empty McMansions; plummeting rooftiles; the doors in the street piled up in flames; jeering boys launching beer bottles at the street lamps and porch lights; every last gravel stone in the driveway hurled through every window. I remember crossing our lawn where unconscious ladies were lit by the moon to sit weeping at the gutter’s edge, and being worried about Aldo, who was lost in this somewhere, and furious that my best friend had deserted me in what was unmistakably my hour of need.

  • • •

  It was cold, sooty clouds in the sky. Students drifted in their early morning way, lightly dusted with a fine grimy car exhaust. Mr. Hanson, who looked like the historical Jesus, was getting out of his car. A plane flew overhead. I headed directly to the narrow space between the library wall and the canteen where I was greeted with an unwanted round of applause and unreturned high-fives and everyone fought over themselves to inform me that Natasha’s brother and her friends were readying themselves to kill Aldo, to castrate Aldo, to knock Aldo’s teeth out, all vying to posit the sick motives behind what my best friend had done—and what he did last night at my party, they said, was rape Natasha Hunt in one of the empty houses. “Tash identified him,” Tina Carter said, sucking in her cheeks.

  • • •

  If the rumors were true, I’d have expected Aldo to look as if his conscience was eroding him like an excruciating illness, but when I found him amid blue clouds of smoke in the boys’ toilets, he was deep in conversation with Jay Turnbull, discussing what I first thought was either the party or the plot of a movie, but I soon realized that Aldo was comparing Kristallnacht with the Cambodian Killing Fields—a senseless comparison if you ask me—in any case it was one of those conversations it does you no benefit to overhear. A kind of white noise roared in my head and I burst out with it: “You’re being accused of rape!” He lifted a fearful face that looked like it had never known a smile. He was shaking, looking more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. Of course he knew, he said, why did I think he was hiding in the toilet stall?

  This news had triggered in him an adult level of sweat. Aldo lowered his tone. “When they told you, did they say rape or sexual assault?”

  “I’m pretty sure they said rape.”

  “Because sometimes they’ll say sexual assault and you’ll assume rape,” he said, as if he couldn’t catch his breath, “but when you read the details you see the assailant maybe only groped or at the most digitally penetrated his victim, which is horrible and equally uncalled for, granted, but a different ball of wax!”

  “I don’t think it really matters at this point. I mean, did you do either?”

  “Of course not! Jesus!” Delirious tears began to fall. “I just want to be absolutely fucking clear about what I’m being wrongfully accused of!” Aldo said this rape accusation was the worst kind of prank, and that the police were most likely on their way to the school to arrest him, and he didn’t know what to do. I said that to correct the error would be simple, surely, and he accused me of being “so fucking naive.” Jay leaned against the wall and seemed to hang there, as if stuck on a coat hook. In the silence that followed, I recalled the time we were waiting with Ben Stack outside the Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in order to ask the next released prisoner if she would accompany one or all of us to the school formal. As we waited, Aldo and Ben argued over whether rape was about sex or power. Ben said it was about power. Aldo said sex. It was a heated argument even though neither seemed overly committed to his position. Aldo turned away from us as the electronic gates were sliding open to reveal the sinewy, cruciform figure of a woman with her arms outstretched. “Explain this, then: Everything else in the world is about sex,” Aldo said. “Evolution. Reproduction. Cinema. Advertising. Nation building. Bridge building. Moon exploring. Art creating. Everything is about sex. Why not rape?”

  Now Aldo stepped out of the cubicle and in a thin voice that echoed off the concrete walls said that around the time the party had almost hit its chaotic zenith, he had been sitting beside Stella on the divan making jokes about them sleeping together, jokes she unfortunately took as jokes. When he put his hand on her knee she laughed, and he thought: It’s fucking galling that people take me as harmless even as I’m literally pawing at them, so he slid his hand higher, to her thigh. There was an excruciating pause as Stella leaned back and looked at his body as if she could use it to store paper clips, old currency, and bobby pins, then she took his hand and led him out of the house, onto the street, into the still, airless night and into one of the empty houses, to an apricot upstairs bedroom where the whole thing took place in near silence. She seemed to want clothed sex but he was determined to at least get her bra off, telling her, “If you think I’m going to lose my virginity without catching sight of a tit, you have another thing coming.” Stella obliged; her breasts felt hard and cold, like packed snow, and his hands looked tiny and blue against her chilled white body in the moonlight. “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” he said, suddenly becoming shy. “But I can tell you one thing: It was one thousand percent consensual, that’s for fucking sure, and
we stayed in that bedroom talking until dawn.”

  “Will Stella corroborate that?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  Who knew anything about anybody? I trusted my friend, but it was beyond baffling why Natasha had identified him as her assailant.

  • • •

  Waiting for Aldo in the police station, seated on a sticky patch of dried Coke near the vending machines, I dug out of my bag Artist Within, Artist Without and turned to the section “Tribulations and Creativity.” Morrell writes: It is up to you to make every death of a parent a mixed blessing. Don’t waste time rebuking God or cursing injustice. Rather, transmit your lived pain as solace or amusement . . . If they are also artists, the truly unfortunate have a wealth of material. If they are not artists, their transformative materials remain lodged in their souls . . . The neurotic civilian is an incredibly sad, tormented person while the neurotic artist can use his sadness and torment as a sculptor uses clay. Purpose, or the illusion of purpose, are both better than none. I remember thinking, as I waited for my friend to emerge from his interrogation, that I was an artist and Aldo was not; I could write stories and poems, and Stella could write songs, while Aldo was not going to benefit from his problems in any way, was just going to suffer with no net gain.

  • • •

  Stella stood with her back arched, as if her breasts might take off if they weren’t strapped in.

  “I told them the truth. It’s really unjust. We didn’t even actually.”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  “But he never even, which means he never has. So the question about whether he would is just so. You know.”

  “Stella, what are you saying?”

  “What do you think I’m saying?”

  “You didn’t have sex?”

  “We didn’t fuck. We fooled around. We almost did. But he, you know. Ejaculated. Prior to. Oh God, I can’t believe I’m about to say this word. Penetration. Then again, I also said ejaculated.” She gave an awkward laugh.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. So that means, you know, technically he’s still a . . .”

  It was late; the setting sun reflected its reddish light in the street. Pedestrians seemed to move at the pace of gridlocked cars. I felt sick. Had Aldo neglected that detail of their rendezvous out of embarrassment? Poor Aldo! How sexually confusing can a single evening be? Rushed from a humiliating episode of premature ejaculation to a horrific accusation of sexual assault. Stella sat on the stone steps of the police station rolling a cigarette, her one bare shoulder emitting an odor of sunscreen. I thought: If this is true, a virgin accused of rape seemed the very definition of injustice.

  • • •

  Since moving away from the Benjamin compound, Aldo had lived with his mother, Leila, in their street-level apartment where all manner of pedestrians could see right inside the kitchen and watch them eating, sometimes in their underwear. They were more of an exhibit than a family, appearing to have no sense of being watched and always forgetting to draw the curtains at night.

  Sometimes I’d swing by hoping to catch sight of Leila. She was an elegant, voluptuous woman, usually to be found smoking a cigarette and drinking from a bottle of beer, her skin silvered in the moonlight, and even from a distance I could feel her hot nakedness under that dress, this lady from the vanished Pacific island Aldo wouldn’t name. My fascination was not entirely sexual. She valued my opinions, often told me I thought for myself, and was just as delighted that I hated the sound of Nina Simone’s voice as she was by my pronouncement that The Sun Also Rises is a stupid name for a book.

  Now, in the wake of the rape accusation, this exposed apartment was the worst possible place to live; car engines revved at late hours and misspelled death threats tied to stones were pelted through windows. When I arrived one afternoon they were sitting in the kitchen; his head was buried in his arms on the table and Leila sat leggily on a stool with a legal pad, pen poised. “What do you think, Liam? Should I speak to the girl’s mother?”

  What an idea.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Poor girl. Still. We’re in a tough spot; we must be careful not to be too aggressive.” She put down the pen and said, “I’ll ask Father Andrew. He knows some lawyers.”

  Aldo lifted his head. “I’ll bet he does.”

  Leila ignored him and said, “Liam, did your parents ever tell you that part of being a grown-up is having the ability to assess risk?”

  “Not that I recall.” The idea of my parents saying anything remotely resembling that was laughable. Leila swiveled around to zap me with a disapproving gaze. “What made you throw a party like that?!”

  Aldo hit his head on the table repeatedly. I looked away to the bunches of lilies by the sink, bulbs and dirt still attached, maybe pulled from a neighbor’s flower bed, and to a pile of books we were force read in English class—Catch-22, Pride and Prejudice, The Caretaker—and a thick blue faux-leather edition of Bulfinch’s Mythology, Aldo’s old obsession.

  “Darling,” Leila said, stroking Aldo’s hair, “this whole disaster makes me think of ‘The Black Riders.’ By César Vallejo.”

  “Mum, don’t even start.”

  Leila cleared her throat. “There are blows in life so violent—don’t ask me! / Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them, / the deep waters of everything lived through / were backed up in the soul . . . Don’t ask me!”

  “Nobody’s asking you.”

  “Well, I’m asking you. How could they think you could do such a thing? Why did you have to leave the house that night at all?”

  Aldo raised his head again. “Maybe we should move far away. Into the country.”

  “The country can be summed up in one image,” Leila said. “A horse’s eyes covered in flies. God has thoroughly let that animal down. It can’t swat away shit.” She reached across and tugged Aldo’s earlobe, a gesture that had no evident purpose or effect. “No, I love this apartment,” she said. “I fully intend to die here.” She glanced at Aldo and added, “Don’t look so excited. That won’t be for a very, very long time.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Matricide’s making a comeback.”

  They both giggled.

  I couldn’t figure out what they meant by talking to each other like that. It used to stump me—my parents and I were painfully cordial and seemed to have based our relationship on a model that served families well in the Habsburg Empire, while Aldo and Leila layered theirs with a constant casual cruelty. A few months earlier he had given her a birthday card in which he’d drawn a picture of God in heaven sodomized by the hillbilly dead, with the words I love you incrementally less each day, and for his birthday she gave him one that said Happy Birthday, you son of a bitch. I might have envied their relationship, but I never understood it.

  “I’m going to the loo, then let’s go,” Aldo said to me.

  As soon as he left, she said, “You need to look out for him.”

  “I’ll do my best, Leila.”

  Her eyes went to the window, where neighborhood girls hopscotched by. Maybe closed blinds made her feel claustrophobic (though I couldn’t see how being hemmed in by foot traffic was any great improvement). Then Leila launched into a monologue about the inexplicable shambles Aldo’s life had suddenly become, lamenting that this could be the ruination of her harmless, unimpeachable little boy. As she spoke, I was reminded of her voice-over work (her smoky tones narrated a commercial that pitted margarine against something called Buttersoft). Leila stubbed out her cigarette after four drags, and interrupted herself with questions to me—would you like cake or cheese? Do you want to stay in the kitchen or should we adjourn to the living room?—then snapped her fingers. “Find the real rapist—to prove his innocence we must unmask the real culprit. If this is not nipped in the bud . . .” This was fear talking, and fear can be verbose. She wanted constant reassurance while being totally resistant to any emotional comfort. “I thought th
e something bad that would happen to Aldo would be leukemia, but I was off, way off.”

  Clearing my throat was all I could think to do. An awkward silence descended. Leila had miraculously run out of things to say. My eyes explored the wall behind her head where, partially obscured by the long fronds of a spider plant, there was an old framed photograph of Henry, Veronica, Leila, and Aldo. They were standing in a yard with arms draped over each other’s shoulders, tight little smiles and unbearably sad eyes—the kind of photo that rouses a memory even if you’re not in it. Veronica’s skin was marginally darker than Aldo’s, more like her mother’s, while Leila and Aldo, the last two surviving soldiers of a unit that had taken heavy artillery, looked vaguely restless, it seemed to me, as if they wanted to wander off into another photo altogether. Directly above that on the wall was a framed quote: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

  “What’s your favorite biblical passage?” asked Leila, catching my interest in the quote.

  Did she really think I would have one?

  “The Ten Commandments?”

  “Oh dear, Liam. Really? Moses did his best I’m sure,” she said, “but at least Matthew didn’t try to get the Sermon on the Mount down in point form.” I wondered if she was a little drunk. “And this is certainly the right time to point it out to you—the Ten Commandments is a horrendous document made horrendous by the sin of omission. Where the fucking hell is Thou Shalt Not Rape?”

  Her long fingers with their mauve nail polish seized my wrist. “Please keep an eye out.”