Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  “For what?”

  “His father, Henry, didn’t take well to stress, as you might know. They say these things are genetic, although I don’t see how. How can a choice made in adulthood be genetic?” The silence grew broody. I understood now. She was talking about suicide. Every speechless second burned a hole right through me.

  Aldo appeared in the doorway.

  “Aldo!” she yelled at him. “I almost forgot. Listen to this.”

  She ran to the answering machine and played a message. “Leila, it’s Hannah, we’ve just heard about Aldo and we’re sick about it. Please call.”

  “How did they hear about it?” Aldo asked.

  “Who the fuck knows?”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Ech. The Benjamins,” Leila said, darting glances at the window before turning to me. “They’re a sort of tribe of monumentally rude shits, the kind of people who get kicked off ashrams. Well, some of them did. They’re always mocking and urging each other to do something awful, and remember this one, Aldo?” She told a story about visiting Henry’s cousin Miguel at his Umina beach house: he’d been arrested for assault and was forced to wear a home-detention cuff on his ankle; his range ran out three meters from the ocean, and they’d spent the summer taunting the poor bastard with ice-cold splashes of sea water.

  Aldo wasn’t listening; he was back sitting with his head on his arms. Leila made a childlike pout and at that moment a brick crashed through the window with another threat scrawled across it: Your dead.

  • • •

  The next day, I did my own feeble best to explain to Natasha’s brother and his flinty mates that Aldo had an airtight alibi, but the more I defended him, the more it looked like they were going to tunnel bodily through my chest wall. For her part, Stella interrogated the girl in her place of residence; she threw pebbles at various windows until Natasha emerged, mellow eyed, and ushered her into a room with next to no furniture in it. Stella said that during the whole conversation the girl was holding what looked like a shoehorn and didn’t make the slightest physical movement. “Aldo’s a fucking virgin who doesn’t know his way around the female body, whereas would you say your rapist seemed to know exactly what he was doing?” Stella asked. Natasha said nothing. A burning cigarette lay untouched in an ashtray next to them. Stella asked Natasha why, if it was pitch-black in the room, she was so certain it was Aldo. She said, in a voice that sounded like a finger was pressing on her vocal cords, “His silhouette.” And: “His smell.” And: “His energy,” then described the same cold feeling she got whenever she was standing next to Aldo. Different strains of nausea grew inside both of them. Stella calmly demanded more details. Natasha said she had taken several bumps of the drug Special K and wanted to sit alone a moment. “He must have followed me in.”

  “Special K?!” Stella thought a moment, then in a stifled voice said, “Oh, you mean the horse tranquilizer and powerful dissociative anesthetic?”

  Natasha smiled sarcastically. “It was him. I know it was him.”

  Stella spoke now with the ferocity of a mother fighting for primary custody. “It’s not his word against yours, Tash, it’s mine against yours.”

  “It was him it was him it was him!” she screamed, the sad spooky girl, as the room filled with moonbeams and shadows. “It was him it was him it was him,” she repeated, her words seeming not just to hang in the air, but whirl like propellers.

  • • •

  After that, Aldo and Stella skedaddled together. Nobody could find either one. Feeling helpless, the only thing I could think to do was go around the school borrowing everyone’s photographs from the party so I could scour them for clues. I saw nothing useful. Around dinnertime on the fourth day, my phone rang; it was Aldo asking if I could score some pot.

  “Where are you guys?”

  “Brighton-le-Sands Motor Inn.”

  When I arrived he hurried me inside. “Did anyone follow you?”

  “Who do you think you are right now?” I asked.

  Stella was demurely tucked in under the sheets but her breasts were visible and the room stank of latex and full body sweat. Aldo confided that Stella had definitively laid waste to his virginity and his penis now enjoyed full employment. “Great,” I said, feeling crotch-level hunger pains and dropping into the red vinyl armchair against the window. As far as I could tell, they had watched movies, gotten drunk, eaten chicken-hero rolls they’d bought from the convenience store across the road and had to liquefy in the microwave on site, fucked on the stiff motel sheets like B-movie characters, and abused Leila’s financial support by renting every $12.99 VHS porn movie in the motel’s erotic video library. I felt an attack of my most chronic illness—the pain of missing out. The absurdity of these two high schoolers hiding in a motel room having the time of their lives just burned me. Aldo deflected my questions about how long they were planning to live like this.

  “Until it’s over,” Stella said, with a melodramatic lilt to her voice. She had written three goopy love songs since they’d moved in, six pop songs and one power ballad; there was something about being on the run with Aldo, she said, that had inspired the hottest burst of productivity in her whole life.

  Aldo offset my jealousy by assuring me it wasn’t all fun and games; he was simultaneously living a high-adrenaline nightmare every time a car pulled into the parking lot or a child clomped in the next room or a housekeeper knocked unexpectedly or a neighboring guest kicked either of the broken vending machines, trying to retrieve a dangling Mars bar or a stuck can of Coke. He was on edge. And going crazy. He was stumped as to why Natasha had positively identified him and he flipped obsessively through the photos of that night that I’d brought with me, scouring the faces for anyone who looked like him. Aldo’s own face was tense and he had fear-wrinkles in his forehead. He sat stewing and quivering with anger, trying to see Natasha’s side of it. There was no doubt she was raped—she wasn’t making it up—but why him? Why did she have to say it was him?

  “I’ve written a song about Aldo’s innocence,” Stella piped up from under the sheets.

  “Oh no,” I said, and it occurred to me then that love is a decision, and the intensity of that love is more closely related to stubbornness than to genuine or spontaneous feeling. For whatever reason, Stella’s heart was a nesting ground for desperate passion, and she had leaped into this union with her eyes open and her mind set on adore.

  • • •

  Walking into a nest of teachers in a staff room is like stumbling backstage at a theater: everyone half in makeup, half-costumed. Mr. Morrell was crouched down, staring into the bar fridge. He took a bite from a cold apple and returned it before sitting in an armchair with a notebook. After his wife died, I remembered, he was often called the Weird Widower, but that was years ago, and now he just seemed overly sad. He sat there like the heir to a throne in a country that had just overthrown its monarchy.

  “Excuse me sir,” I said from the doorway. I thought I saw him flinch, though I might’ve imagined it. “Come in, Liam!” he bellowed. The other educators fumbled with their soggy pink doughnuts as I approached. Mr. Morrell had been doodling on a student’s essay: a picture of a face. He saw me looking and tilted it toward me and said, “What do you think?” the subtext of which I took as: Come on, Liam, universal acclaim has to start somewhere. I praised his artwork and then explained the situation: Aldo’s girlfriend was a singer-songwriter from Beaumont Hills High who thought her protest song would win over the hearts and minds of the vengeful mob who might get to him before he could be cleared of any wrongdoing. Mr. Morrell thought it was an inspired idea. He’d fix it with the administration, put the whole scheme under his umbrella, as it were. Before I left, he asked, “Was it Valéry who called music a naked woman running mad in the pure night?” I said that I didn’t know, that I didn’t really run in those circles.

  • • •

  The students gathered to the flutter of pigeon wings and Mr. Morrell helped Stella hook up
her amp and microphone to the school’s PA system. “What did Hitler say? Without the loudspeaker we would never have conquered Germany? I play a little banjo myself,” he said, then he took to the stage. “I have an announcement regarding an important interlude. An outside musician, someone who is not a student at this school—don’t feed the pigeons, McKenzie!—has written a song about one of our students.” He closed his eyes as if inhaling a pungent bouquet. “Her name is Stella Winter and without further ado”—he turned—“come on out, girl.” The students erupted in jeers and boos as Stella strutted the stage triumphantly, as if the concert were already over and she had played a legendary set, like Janis at Monterey.

  “Rapist’s bitch!” someone yelled.

  Stella throttled the microphone and bewilderedly glanced up at the biology-classroom window where Aldo cowered wearing an umpire’s mask, before she shouted, “This is called ‘The Aldo Benjamin Blues’ and it is written in defense of an innocent boy,” and as if deciding the treeless Zetland High quadrangle would be her musical birthplace, she did not sing so much as screech at the belligerent crowd, who leaned forward to discern the lyrics so they could hate them with more clarity and force—He wouldn’t harm a fly / Persecuted without knowing why / The girl she’d taken ketamine / And fingered Aldo Benjamin—and aside from the bemusing miracle that the accuser had been blitzed on the only illicit substance that rhymed with the family name of the accused, the song seemed to be an ordeal for the singer as much as for the audience. It went from sounding like seagulls cawing inside a rainstorm to a muffled drawl, like when someone talking on the phone has let the receiver drop to their chin. For that reason, perhaps, the students were transfixed, and after it ended there was a deep silence that seemed to envelop the entire school, which now looked less like a crowd and more like a still photograph of a crowd scene. Then came the boos. Stella responded with a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” that she dedicated, in something of a non sequitur, I thought, to “Palestinian women shackled during childbirth in Israeli prisons,” a cantankerous finale that won her a vaguely fearful smattering of applause. After switching off the microphone and watching her pack away her guitar, Mr. Morrell congratulated her on her robust performance, the volume and intensity of which had canceled out any extraneous thoughts in his head; Stella said she had imagined she was in CBGB in ’73 but “We live in an age where you can’t be transgressive anymore. To make any kind of lasting impression I’d have to literally get up there and fuck a dog in the eye,” and Morrell, seemingly unperturbed by the concept, said brightly, “You’d be surprised, Stella. Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo—” He was cut off by the unexpected launching of missiles—pencils, textbooks, shoes, school diaries—and escorted Stella out of the line of fire. It was overall, I thought, a pointless debacle.

  Two weeks later, the DNA tests came back from the lab exonerating Aldo. It was, coincidentally, the day Sydneysiders were protesting the government sending two frigates and a supply ship to the Gulf at the beginning of the first Iraq war. The news had not yet spread that he was forensically in the clear, so Aldo met me on George Street wrapped in bandages with dark sunglasses and a black hat. He’d come as the Invisible Man. I said, “Whoever told you an antiwar protest was fancy dress?” He seemed confused, to not entirely know where he was. He unraveled the bandages, and not a minute later let out a strangled gasp. I turned to see Natasha in the throng waving a SHAME placard in his direction and Natasha’s brother running at us at full speed. Aldo shouted, “Wait!” as the brother lunged and Aldo fell down hard, face-first onto a broken beer bottle in the gutter that left a two-centimeter scar on his left cheek, still visible today.

  The day after the DNA news made its way to her, with no leads to her actual attacker, Natasha wandered the school grounds with a haunted look that pressed into us—she was doubted, and doubted herself nonstop about who had come upon her drugged in the dark. The next day she dropped out of school, and later we heard she’d attempted suicide, and that seemed to deprive us all of the last slivers of childhood, as if her confusing and violent misfortune was a harbinger of uncertain and terrible futures for us all. We remembered back to when she had climbed out of the history-classroom window to chase the Mr. Whippy van, her perfect swan dive at the Year 10 swimming carnival, her rendition of “A Bushel and a Peck” from the year before’s production of Guys and Dolls, yet we were powerless to restore her to that state, and because we had the idea that suicide was private and we shouldn’t be talking about it, we didn’t.

  As for Aldo, even after the news circulated that he was officially cleared, neither Natasha’s brother nor the police nor the vigilantes were especially apologetic about the ordeal he’d been through, and the police acted in tone and gesture like they might charge him anyway, as though by appearing incorrectly in the victim’s memory he was guilty of tampering with evidence.

  • • •

  After this episode, Aldo still said everything with ziplock certainty, mooched around school barefoot, slipped easily between groups, boasted that he never ate breakfast (why hate breakfast? why boast about it?), was still careless with cigarette butts, silly when drunk, serious when stoned, hilarious on cocaine, jittery on coffee, and dizzy on glue, but he moved lizardly between classes, flinched at odd moments, stood at the edge of the quadrangle trying to look harmless, one hand half-raised in a permanent gesture of amiable hello or good-natured good-bye: the ongoing negotiation of a peace accord. He’d stand on his toes as if leaning against a stiff wind, his eyes on all the exits, now often talking to Mr. Morrell, who’d be wearing a white windbreaker or some other jacket with a vaguely nautical aspect. He spoke more intensely and something had woken up in his eyes: He was always wary, on alert, at complete attention, at DEFCON 1, and that’s where he’d live his life from now on, as if a simple act of daydreaming were a perilous cognitive drift he couldn’t afford. Always democratic in his alliances, now he became friends with everybody, even the most broken or strange or unfriendly or unwanted or violent kids, those with elongated foreheads and developmental disorders and those with criminal records and tattoos on the backs of their shaved heads. It was as if by surrounding himself with people, he was building airtight alibis for every minute he passed on earth. And maybe this all contributed to his bizarre behavior at the graduation ceremony months later, in the ugly quadrangle where our families were hopelessly locked in a crazy purgatorial session of never-ending applause, when our fellow graduates—those future real estate ingenues and up-and-coming heroin overdosers—filed up to collect their flimsy piece of kindling, and Aldo sat still as a stone. He was not afraid of being on stage in front of his prior accusers, as I suggested, but was actually contemplating, he later said, something jarring that Morrell had whispered to him in a conspiratorial voice just as he was leaving his classroom—“This is the last time you’ll be able to sleep with sixteen-year-olds without everyone looking down their noses at you,” he’d said—and so when the headmaster repeatedly bleated Aldo’s name, and Leila nudged him with her elbow, and the unexpected stall in the proceedings resulted in an almost complete absence of sound, the silence amplified through the microphone and loudspeaker, Aldo didn’t budge.

  The following morning, it didn’t matter how vigorously me and the guys who were traveling up to Surfer’s Paradise for schoolies week rubbed the notion of unsheathed orgies in Aldo’s face, and how much Stella begged him to accompany her to Melbourne for the Battle of the Bands, Aldo said that it was only in complete solitude and far from civilization that he could conceive of a life plan he wouldn’t kick himself for six decades down the track. He packed a sleeping bag and a few provisions and took himself into the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, where he felt genuine envy for this or that bird, and aggressively bush-bashed through twisted paths all the way to a freshwater creek where he set up camp. A cold drizzle fell the whole long night,
making his mission twofold: to keep his cigarettes dry and ascertain his destiny. What was he going to do? What should he become? Around eight p.m., he realized that having a boss, or some kind of superior, would be for him like being forced to wear clothes was for those people with extra-sensitive skin. Therefore, he must be self-employed. Other than that, and the certainty that he wanted to spend every waking second with Stella, he had no ideas. None. It was about this time that he bitterly lamented the decision not to join us up north, and feeling sorry for himself cried for hours into his inflatable pillow.

  At three a.m., cranky and sodden and with some strange insect frothing in his inner ear, it hit him, the cardinal epiphany he’d been waiting for: that while money can’t buy happiness, it can buy lawyers, it can allow you to litigate endlessly and buy off witnesses, and it can purchase expensive medications not covered by the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, and go to countries where experimental stem-cell treatments are better than nothing. If one needs to eschew authority, to hover even one inch above the law, to circumnavigate certain bureaucracies, to pay for detectives to investigate your case, to pay your own legal fees or, when ordered, to pay the legal fees of your opponents, not to mention bribes to keep yourself alive in prison, or to move you up on an organ-donation queue, the answer is always money. Tell the World Health Organization that money can’t buy you actual years of life on earth and they’ll laugh in your fucking face! So that was his big epiphany: He would knock the doors of prosperity off its hinges, provide himself and Leila and Stella with a gargantuan emergency fund, and with the excess—as a vague afterthought, a subfantasy—hack a philanthropic path through a jungle of poverty. That was the plan, and with no tangible skills or obvious enthusiasms, his only obstacle was how to achieve it.

  II

  I remember when Aldo stopped pretending to reach for the bill. It was the year his ringtone was the hum of crickets and he turned his sights on that vast potential field of golden poppies—the internet. His two big startups were a matchmaking service to hook up all the left-over single women in New York and London with all the one-child-policy single men in Shanghai and Beijing—he’d either overestimated the desperation of the women or underestimated their racism—and a porn website called Fruit ’n’ Vag that specialized in links to repugnant and unthinkable niches like “Biblical” that way misjudged even sex-toy advertisers’ willingness to be associated with videos of Mary Magdalene with the Good Samaritan’s donkey. But no, he couldn’t even make money in the oughts! Just like during the previous years of failed ventures, his crashed food truck, the shut-down warehouse dance parties, vandalized health-snacks vending machines, malfunctioning peanut-allergy divining wand, aborted tanning-salon taxi service, etc., he once again fell almost stealthily into arrears; he stopped even intending to pay bills, threw his mobile phone into the sea. As he had after all the other nosedives, he convinced himself he’d finally arrived at the terminus of entrepreneurial life, and his disconsolate figure could be seen trundling here and there, sitting in the sunshine smoking cigarettes, taking up a whole bench with his long body and overhanging feet, his head resting on corrosive bird shit, hardened gum, dried saliva. You would find him, in those days, in a crowded food court trying to saw through the burnt underside of a baked potato with a plastic knife, looking quasi-homeless, with shaggy hair and old jeans and moving with a strange lethargy, because, according to him, “Debt has its own pulse, central nervous system and physical weight.” When Aldo heard his name hissed and bellowed from car windows and street corners, he’d give a discreet wave or shrug. When accosted in shops and pubs by various creditors who accused him of responsibility shirking or downright thievery, sometimes he ran, sometimes he accepted their insults, threats, and the occasional physical blow. Then there were those who came to his door, not just creditors, but their wives and daughters, pleading for money. He desperately wanted to repay them, but short of harvesting his organs, there was nothing he could do. To be ignominiously saddled with incalculable debts is to be permanently demeaned, and even though he borrowed from men who rubbed cocaine on their dicks and told relative strangers about it, he lived in a state of inferiority and constant mortification; he felt subordinate to everyone in any given room. In bathrooms he avoided his mirror image, from every angle a man in defeat. Even watching movies where the characters spent money on restaurants or clothes made him sick with jealousy. No wonder perpetual debt servitude is the most irrefutable factor in the male suicide rate, though just as often Aldo imagined an unlucky detective investigating his murder, sifting through photos of hundreds of enervated suspects.