by Steve Toltz
The bus to the festival arrives very late in the afternoon, just as the damp glow of a desert sun is setting over that incredible rock, and they are greeted by an old man with a gray goatee and two gaunt dogs who leads them to a converted bus where they will sleep on a mattress under a mosquito net. That night, a sky of sharp silvery stars, the kind of night that, as Aldo puts it, “stirs extraterrestrial desires that no earthling can satisfy.” Stella writes this in her notebook and Aldo feels the faintest throb of irritation. For the rest of the night he does not share any further thoughts; he doesn’t tell her that he feels like the whole world is an enormous aquarium before you pour the water in, nor that he feels they are as long dead as the stars themselves and the act of God remembering us is what gives us the illusion of life. Instead he stays silent and they fall asleep.
The next morning they wake late and eat vegetarian nachos in a tent with the members of Acquired Brain Injury, and Aldo gets into an argument with the lead singer over the composition of nondairy cheese. After lunch, Aldo and Stella walk around the two main stages checking out the early afternoon acts. The smell of marijuana is sweet and constant. There is an aura of debauched lethargy. Stella’s pregnant body draws curious stares. This is the biggest crowd she has ever played. She is going through her set list when Aldo’s phone rings.
“Aldo! It’s horrible!”
It is Leila. The smell of the retirement home is both musty and antiseptic, and she describes the people the same way: musty and antiseptic souls, she says; the inmates here won’t stop complaining, she complains. Then there is the noise, the dueling televisions, the smell of pine cleaner and urine; twice she has been sexually harassed by male inmates, someone slipped her wedding ring off her finger while she was asleep, but the worst was being stuck living with all these overentitled baby boomers. “It’s intolerable,” she cries.
“Don’t call them inmates. They’re residents, like you.”
“Inmates is what we are!”
“Then come live with Stella and me.”
“No! I don’t want to intrude.”
There is no way out, no consolation; it is the grimmest kind of horror story—one with guilt and regret. She had thought her future was an enigma, when it never was. It was waiting smack-bang in her field of vision all along. Leila is suffering and it’s Aldo who feels wronged. He hates himself for that feeling. He feels dwarfed by it.
“And my blanket was stolen—you know, the red cashmere one.”
“Are you sure you took it there?”
“Of course I’m sure . . .”
Her voice recedes, and that’s his fault too, because he is no longer listening. This life she’s depicting—the wily nurses, the missing items, the lascivious male residents—is it paranoia or not? It is hard to hear the details now because she is speaking with her hand over her mouth. Now she’s bemoaning her Henry, her Veronica, her house, her youth, her health, her island, everything she has lost. Her tight voice is so alive with hurt, with loneliness and longing and outrage, and its every utterance discredits him totally.
“Father Charlie is coming to visit, he’s the only one I can count on.”
“Don’t let him in!” Aldo says. He still can’t get over this dried-up priest going about in public in this day and age, daring to counsel vulnerable widows with terrible sons. “Listen, tell Father Charlie that you can no longer see him because being a Catholic today is like remaining in the Nazi Party because you like the autobahns.”
Stella slaps Aldo on the arm. “I have an idea,” she says.
Aldo wraps up the call. “I can’t do anything right now. But as soon as I get back to Sydney I’ll sort this out. I promise. I love you. I’ll sort it out. I love you. Bye.” Two I-love-yous to counteract hanging up on his abandoned mother.
It is two hours from showtime. Stella says, “Let’s go for a walk.” They wander silently for two kilometers until they are afraid to go further. Not a shadow of a tree and nothing but edgeless sky, an unblinking hell of a sun, the heat mitigated by a breeze that stirs the dust. Aldo gazes around him at the old rocks and the oversized silences and the expanding desolation and negligible wind and the suffocation of all that space and dust pouring off the empty plains.
“I’ve been thinking about Uncle Howard,” Stella says.
“What about him?”
“I’m not supposed to know this, but he’s spent a shitload working his way through the spiritual ranks of that religion. Four million new clients a year.”
“I think they’re called believers.”
“Subscribers. You’ve spent your whole life on dumb businesses. You should start a religion, like Hubbard. Like Joseph Smith.”
“Who’s that?”
“He started Mormonism. They got rich too. You’re always preying on people’s need for self-improvement.”
“I’m not a mantis, Stella. And besides, self-improvement is so twentieth century. People don’t want to improve anymore. They want to enhance. They want to augment.”
“You drum up some bullshit cosmology. You fake some visitation from God. You offer suckers water-glimpses of salvation for monthly credit card payments.”
“What the fuck, Stella,” Aldo says, annoyed. “I’m not a huckster.”
“You’re good at finding people’s weaknesses.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“It’s true.”
“Well, it’s a terrible thing to notice.”
“People want what they’ve always wanted, salvation, and salvation costs what the market can bear.”
“Hey, I have principles, despite what you obviously think of me.”
“OK, don’t get so annoyed,” she says, and takes his hand.
Now Stella and Aldo are promising to love each other forever. They turn and look back; the concert seems so small in the bemusing immensity of the desert where there’s nothing to see your reflection in, and that’s just fine. This is the first quiet moment they’ve had in a week. The quiet is insane. Stella’s hand is flat against her stomach.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember what?”
“We’ve been going over these songs, and the playlist, and I’ve been nervous, I mean obsessed, I mean my mind’s been distracted.”
“You can’t remember what?”
“Wait. Just wait.”
She turns and starts walking fast. He has a bad feeling, the worst. Aldo catches up and strides beside her in the accusing silence of a desert in its prime. Stella whimpers with fear. They reach the edge of the main tent in the reddish light of dusk. Stella tries lying on her side, then on her back. “I can’t remember the last time it moved.”
“It was this morning.”
“Maybe. No. Not today. Was it today?”
This is the beginning of an ordeal. There is still a long way to go and they are not yet clear if the ordeal is real. Now she goes down on one knee. She is kneeling in the dirt, her yellow dress billowing around her. “Wait,” she says. “Wait a minute.” She seems afraid to move in the unrelenting heat.
She says, “Maybe it wasn’t yesterday either.” Aldo doesn’t budge or breathe. She screams, “HE’S NOT MOVING!”
What happens next comes to Aldo afterward as a blur. He shouts for an ambulance, for a doctor, and a man with a neck beard comes striding out of the wilderness with sweat patches under his arms, and a voice that seems to suggest homes with blinds permanently drawn. “Let’s get you to my office,” he says, and helps Stella to her feet, maneuvering her to the medical center, a small fiberglass building with a broken fence. Inside he takes a Doppler fetal monitor and searches breathlessly for the baby’s heartbeat.
There isn’t one.
“No heartbeat,” the doctor says.
A voice in Aldo’s head says miscarriage.
The doctor calls it something else.
A stillbirth.
Aldo demands simple answers to compl
ex questions. The doctor puts the lightest of emphasis on possibilities too early to know: A spontaneous rupture of the placenta? A blood clot in the cord? Too much fluid in her brain? Cord wrapped around her throat? That’s when they catch the word for the first time. Her.
It’s a girl.
Was it their fault?
No, the doctor says. These things happen.
These things? Things like this?
The doctor calls ahead to a hospital in Perth, four hours away, but they are on skeleton staff and won’t be able to remove the dead child until the following day. “There’s no point going now,” the doctor says. “We’ll wait until first light.”
They step outside. The sun has gone down and the temperature with it. A still night, starry and enormous; a cold wind carries dust to their faces. The people dancing are on hallucinogenics or just look that way. Aldo and Stella walk wordlessly in a daze. Their silence is a third voice talking intrusively over them.
She is not walking so much as being borne along solemnly by limbs on autopilot. It is clear to Aldo that for Stella this is the split event, the moment that will divide her life in two. Was it also his?
Her name is called over the loudspeaker. At the same time, Aldo’s phone rings. It is his mother. He lets it ring. Aldo says, “This is not the end of us, we will live to love another day.” The irritated male voice on the loudspeaker calls for Stella a second time.
“Just tell them to stop calling my fucking name.” In order to take her mind off their tragedy, Aldo says the seven words he’ll regret his whole life: “Why not get out there and sing?”
The agonizing silence and this is how he fills it. Stella gazes at him in astonishment that quickly dissolves into a horrible blankness, a new kind of nothingness that settles and defines her. She says quietly, “Sing?”
Aldo stands his ground. “Sing! Sure, yes. That’s why we came here, after all. You should.” As he is saying it, he thinks: Unless you shouldn’t. Unless it’s a terrible, possibly fatal idea. Without a word, she waddles onto the shadowed stage, and Aldo, like the Sherpa of old, carries her guitar and amplifier with trembling hands. She settles on a stool as he sets the amplifier up, glancing at her belly; they had hoped her womb was some kind of Xanadu, now it’s a crypt where their heartache is coordinated.
The wind blows sand and red dust against the stage. With moonlight splashing her skin, Stella steps up to the microphone. Aldo thinks about the things women have had to do throughout history with dead babies inside them. Plow fields, fight off hard Viking penises, bake. The doctor stands beside Aldo backstage, now just another tattooed, neck-bearded groupie. In a soft voice Stella begins to sing, so tentatively at first, Aldo has to call out and ask her to turn it up. Is she even touching those strings? He calls out, “Louder, baby!”
Staring across the plains, she takes a deep breath and violently expels the song, cracking the desert silence with a voice so unnervingly beautiful, Aldo becomes lost in the wonder of it. An optimistic mood envelops him, an expansive glee, a thought that this magical moment would kickstart the child and people would talk about it for years, the baby pronounced dead and resurrected through song.
His commiserating gaze gives way to a smile of pleasure, of pride, of love. Stella meets this smile with an unfeeling mask and he thinks maybe she can’t see it, so he smiles even more broadly, then adds two thumbs-up to the picture.
This evokes from Stella the most resentment a human face can carry. Later he will say that even though he then gave frantic glances, and miserable looks of solicitude after the show, it was too late, and what killed his marriage was that unforgivable smile and those dopey thumbs.
At the end of the song, the audience gives an uncertain spattering of applause. It is not havoc out there. The song barely registered. Stepping off the stage she is handed a joint that she smokes in one long jaw-dropping drag.
During the drive back to Perth the next morning, she has phantom kicks that give them new hope. Then Stella and Aldo huddle in the waiting room, and are told she has to be induced to deliver their dead child. Fetal demise, he hears the doctor say on the phone.
“You’ll have to deliver the baby vaginally.”
“No, no,” Stella cries.
“Can’t you just cut it out? Like a C-section?”
“You don’t want your wife to go through unnecessary abdominal surgery on top of all this, do you?”
“So this will be . . . ?”
“Just like a normal delivery.”
So Stella would get her natural birth after all.
She is wheeled into an echoey delivery room. The unused heart monitor sits there, incidental, accusatory. The nurse is saying, “We can give you all the pain medication you need because there’s no risk to the baby,” as if that bright side were actually bright. Aldo finds himself unable to stop his old worries, and speaks out against an epidural—she doesn’t want a spinal injury on top of this, he says—and then it all happens quickly, and despite himself Aldo thinks of the seventies- and early-eighties comedy trope of the surprise black baby and how that would play in a stillbirth situation.
Everything they’d read and heard about in the classes is happening; Stella is induced and has painful contractions and Aldo is beside her saying things like push and breathe and everything’s a nightmare, everything, expelling the placenta, the episiotomy, the icepacks, but when the baby comes out, no one says “It’s a girl,” and there’s no monitoring of the heartbeat, there’s no cry. There is only silence, an incredible silence, like the silence of the desert, or the silence of a plane gliding without engines over a menacing seascape, or of a body submerged in bathwater, or of a mute television showing an exploded bus, or soundless like a Portuguese housekeeper seen sobbing through a picture window. As Aldo looks at his child, he remembers his very first memory on earth: the detestable quiet of a summer’s day, the hottest day on record, and the Benjamins sunburned as a family, him and Veronica and Henry and Leila, all four lying naked on the floor like underfed animals in a zoo during a heatwave unable to move for food or water; everyone ordering everyone else to empty the kitty litter. He wants to tell Stella this memory, but doesn’t. There’s something else on her mind. They haven’t yet named their child—it was Aldo’s idea to wait until they saw her and now, on Stella’s insistence, they struggle to name this dead girl. He buys a book of baby names from the hospital gift shop. They settle on Ruby.
The doctor asks Stella if she wants to hold the baby. Oh Christ no, Aldo thinks. Say no. She says yes. She holds onto her as if the baby were a souvenir, something brought back from a holiday in a war zone. Her translucent skin and stillness make her look like some bloodless Cupid. Stella also wants to be photographed with the baby. They do a series of gruesome family portraits: Ruby wrapped tight in a blanket, distraught mother and father holding onto her, onto each other.
Stella is holding her fingers and her fingernails and kissing the palm of her hand. She gets plaster casts of her feet and hands, imprints of her footprints. They dress and bathe the baby, and say the final good-bye as Ruby is taken away for an autopsy. Aldo organizes the funeral and Stella overhears him ask if they give a discount for stillborns.
They do.
• • •
They went back into their lives like fellow commuters on a train stuck in a tunnel due to a body on the tracks. Stella put her guitars in the storage cupboard and shut the door and never went in and never sang or played guitar again. She also stopped sharing her thoughts, or her thoughts became unshareable, and threw herself into her depressing sales job as though she enjoyed it. They were too young to assimilate this kind of tragedy, so they partied, and they partied separately, and their own vitality and lack of gloom was horrifying to them. They had sex but only occasionally, and as unobtrusively as possible, got it down to the brevity of a haiku, or else she gave him furious hand jobs that were best avoided; who dreaded the ritual of bedtime more, it was hard to say. Aldo spent his weekends at the retirement village consoli
ng Leila for the death of her granddaughter, and set about on a new real estate venture to buy up all the state’s murder houses for a song. That was principally to disguise his grief, but there was no real sympathy for him anyway. He hadn’t carried the child; people treated him as if she had not been his to lose, and he resented Stella for that. And now that she was no longer deeply in love with him, his financial failures, crippling debts and overall bad pecuniary fate came to define him. Money and Aldo’s irresponsible loss of it became a contentious issue in their relationship, the default issue. He owed her money, and she wanted him to pay up.
The night he knew it was over, they’d just eaten Chinese food; he cracked open the fortune cookie and pretended to read a made-up fortune. “May all your enemies be beautiful so you might one day hate-fuck them with pleasure,” he said, and glanced up at Stella to see if she would write it down or make a mental note. Nothing. Hands trembling, he opened another cookie and fake-read, “Only schoolchildren masturbate to mermaids. Outside of the face, those sea-hotties have not a single workable orifice.” Stella sat stone-faced, and Aldo felt swept away in a current. He smashed opened another cookie: “Be satisfied with your looks. The almost-but-not-quite beautiful people don’t have the burden of being gawked at 24/7, and can go about their lives without looking in the mirror and seeing a plate of dog’s balls.” Nothing. He could no longer affect, influence, or help her. Now he was going over a waterfall in a barrel. He was her muse no longer.