Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  • • •

  Zetland High’s ten-year reunion was held in the same beer garden of an old hotel we used to be denied access to when we were underaged. Everybody laughed about their lives as if they were simulations; those who were successful seemed visibly so, and those who were undermined for a living displayed that too. Some people were so bald and so fat your eyes felt callous just looking at them, or were so sick and so thin you started the grieving process as you bought them a drink. Well, that’s a high school reunion for you. Divorce, dead kids; even a ten-year reunion has some points of interest. Yet there was an unexpected feeling of genuine warmth; these were the people who’d known you when you were still callow and the fault of your parents, before you were the product of your own missteps.

  Together, the group regressed, like a cast reunion of a long-running soap where it’s unseemly to break character. An orgy of reminiscences, pasts that needed verifying. It was a socially weird and artificial environment. Unhappily married men trying to fuck the same girls they once rejected for reasons they couldn’t remember now, and which suddenly seemed their greatest regret. Every now and then you made a fatal error. You didn’t recognize someone, and to cover, you pretended they’d changed, when actually you couldn’t remember their names back then either. The faux pas added up. Aldo confused one of the Norton twins for another set of twins altogether, the Goldsbros. It was a colossal mistake. Yet not the worst of the night. The ultimate insult was when Jeremy, the fortune-teller’s son, projected photographs of my out-of-control party while Natasha Hunt stood frozen in the back of the room, displaying no outward signs of life.

  It had never occurred to me until that night that people in general think I’m a ridiculous human being; almost everybody laughed mean-spiritedly about the school play I’d written, The Vagina of Ill Repute; after a few laps in that pool of memory I was ready to run, but I hung around for Aldo’s sake. A good number of people there had invested in some of his schemes and so he was forced to apologize, make excuses, impossible promises. He leaned heavily on whoever he talked to, and I overheard him say at one point, “I even miss the sound of Stella smoking on the other end of the telephone.” He was greeted with amusement, old Aldo, but there was something so sad about him it no longer seemed funny.

  Around ten p.m., there was a moment of old-fashioned hubbub when Stan Maxwell sauntered in and was greeted like a scallywag coming from the headmaster’s office (his conviction had been quashed on appeal). He made a beeline for Aldo. “I hear we both lost a child,” he said. For the first time in his life, Aldo was speechless.

  Stan said, “I’m living by myself now; we should get a drink sometime.”

  It seemed Stan’s post-grief self was something he was just now unveiling to the public, and he was giving us a sneak preview. Aldo, who had never instigated violence in all his life, tightened his fist.

  “We could do that.”

  “How’s that musician wife of yours?”

  “We split up.”

  “Yeah, me and Vicki did too. Losing a kid, a couple can’t survive that. And the ones who can, they must be psychopaths.”

  Aldo looked like he was having trouble breathing.

  “How’s Lola?”

  “Leila. She’s good. She moved to a . . . she’s in a home, settling in well. She’s . . . not far. Edgecliff. I get out there as often as I can. I try to.”

  Maybe the chill in the conversation had lasted long enough for Stan to begin to see himself from our vantage point; that might account for the sudden drop in civility on his face. His look turned steel cold and if eyes could gnash their teeth, then that is what his were doing. I said, “Nice to see you, Stan,” and shepherded Aldo outside.

  We sat on a bench and watched people through the window; women’s heads that clashed with their bodies; men who had been styled by their uncles. Aldo said, “You know how people neurotically fear their imperfections are the most visible thing about them?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, in the case of this room, they’re one hundred percent right.”

  He examined the group carefully. “Bipolar,” he said. “OCD. Intimacy issues. Super depressed. Compulsive liar. Mythomaniac, really. Morbid dependency on his two-year-old. Abandonment issues. Cold turkey from something. Passive-aggressive crisis of masculinity. Battered other woman syndrome. Narcissistic personality disorder. Grandiosity, hypervigilance. He’s coked up. Stuck in a grim cycle of abuse that’s just warming up. Serial adulterer. Sex addict. Cannabis-induced psychosis.”

  “Oh come on, how could you possibly know that?”

  Aldo shrugged.

  “You’re a judgmental son of a bitch.”

  “You don’t call a doctor judgmental for diagnosing a cancer.”

  “You bet I do.”

  We watched a little longer the unhappy parade of old friends and foes, this lengthy queue for the grave. Aldo was transfixed.

  I asked, “Hey, did you speak to Brad?”

  “Yeah. He’s got cardiac neurosis. It’s iatrogenic.”

  “What? It’s what? What is that?”

  “Illness resulting from or influenced by medical examination or treatment.” I looked at him a moment. “That’s what happened to Henry,” he said, in a quiet voice. “Poor Henry. Poor Daddy.”

  I was startled to see Aldo had tears in his eyes. He didn’t wipe them, but rather tried to cram them back into his eyes with the heels of his palms.

  “What about me?”

  “On the cusp of major depressive episode brought on by intense dread of high school reunion.”

  “What about you, then?” I asked. “What’s your problem?”

  “Jinxed, Liam. I’m fucking jinxed.”

  It seemed strange and pitiful to be so coldly clinical about the afflicted around him while saving the balm of magical thinking for himself.

  It was then Aldo asked me if I wanted to see the photograph of his baby girl. Oh, heaven knows, now I’m a police officer and I’ve seen my share of dead babies, but I wasn’t then, and anyway, I sure didn’t want to see his. But I was also his friend and I had the feeling that he really needed to show it to me.

  He held the picture out, for me to take. My best friend’s tragedy and it wasn’t more than five centimeters from my face. I tried to stop my eyes from working. I couldn’t. The baby girl’s cheeks were unexpectedly rosy and puffed. She looked like a healthy dead baby. I remarked as much.

  The photo slipped out of his fingers and fell through the sewer grating.

  “Shit!” We bent down, pressed our faces to the grate, but it was out of reach. “I’ll have to ask Stella for a copy. That’ll be a fun moment.”

  Aldo sighed deeply; I had nothing to add except a sigh of my own. “I think I’ll slip away,” he said, but he didn’t move. Instead he declared that only a lesion on the brain of God could explain why He so consistently overestimates the resilience of His creation. I said, “I don’t believe in a tumorous Yahweh.” He said, “If only I had an explanation.” I quoted Byron: “Who then will explain the explanation?” His head wobbled on his neck as if the tendons were spring-loaded. He asked, “Can an unintended victim of a drive-by shooting be complicit in attracting ricocheted bullets?” I thought: These are the sorts of impossible questions Aldo’s bad luck and narrow escapes pose to the lifelong observer of his misfortunes. He then launched on a talking jag, about the grinding suckiness of a capricious universe and the tactical error of being born and feeling like an unexploded ordnance. He talked about how Stella looked at him as if she thought she was going to be raptured at any minute and the rest of us would just be standing there gazing up at her ascension with an idiotic look on our damned faces. He admitted that sometimes, late at night, he googled the name Veronica Benjamin, in the desperate hope that she might have an online presence in the afterlife. He said his heart felt the craziness of animals before a major meteorological event. He talked about how Leila had three personalities, two of which kept the third on as a common enem
y. He said, “Last time I checked, there are fifty-one languages on earth spoken by only one person—imagine those poor suckers, that’s a lot of pressure.” I felt lanced to the point of mutilation by his voice and glanced at the half-open door leading back into the reunion. He asked, “Hey, am I boring you?” There it was again! His most common, most unforgivable crime—when in the process of boring me, he became self-aware and apologized for being boring. “No, no,” I said, feigning shock at the suggestion, “you’re not boring me, please go on.” It was crazy. Even now, after all these years, I still had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.

  Albeit a Persistent One

  GO FUCK YOURSELF,” HE SAYS, flinging the manuscript in my lap. His expression, however, is neutral. It is as if we are both waiting for his smile to download.

  Wind blows sand in Aldo’s eyes and I remember he also has a face that attracts campfire smoke. The airy space between us widens and the silence grows unwieldy. Had I actually managed to offend him?

  A voice shouts, “Hey! Aldo!”

  We turn to see that two young men with weak chins, wearing blue T-shirts and khaki shorts, surfboards and black sports bags under their arms, have emerged from the path. Aldo waves them over.

  “I didn’t think you guys were going to turn up!”

  “Bit of trouble finding the place,” the tall one says. I note he’s recently undergone tattoo-removal surgery on his right forearm. “What is this, a secret beach?”

  “Magic beach, actually,” I say.

  Their faces light up. “Magic beach! Awesome!”

  “Mr. Benjamin, feast your eyes on this. Voilà!”

  They place one of the boards on the sand. It is like none I have ever seen; it has soft polyurethane handles at the front and an indentation scooped out for his belly, and straps to hold both legs.

  “This is perfect.”

  “We made it just for you.”

  “No charge, Aldo Benjamin. No charge.”

  “We were happy to do it.”

  This is madness.

  “Wait,” I say. “What if you roll?”

  “If he rolls,” the tall one says, “the straps will snap with the force of it.”

  Aldo holds himself erect while they help him squeeze into an oversized wetsuit. He is so weirdly proportioned, with his bulky arms and withered legs, his Tarzan upper torso and round, hard gut, it’s an uncomfortable, awkward procedure. I think: How will he keep his head above water? How will he not drown? How will he manage on his own? The tall one says, “So I understand you’re going in too?”

  “Me?”

  Handing me a wet suit and a surfboard, he says, “You’re his friend, aren’t you?”

  He has me there.

  Aldo’s all zipped up and aiming his pleading eyes in my direction. This preplanned excursion clearly hinges on me going along with it. I turn to the clean, endless ocean, the blue air sparkling above it, and I’m reunited with old childhood terrors of dumpings, the taste of seawater and my own bile. I suddenly remember that anger is the sea’s default setting. Aldo exhales my name as miserably as possible.

  Oh, what choice do I have? I say, “I guess it’s like Morrell writes: If not working on your art, time should only be spent on sensual pleasure or charity work.”

  “There you go.”

  Once again, thinking of Angus Morrell saddens and oppresses us.

  I change into the wet suit.

  The short one says, “Know much about surfing?”

  I say, “We aim the pointy end at the horizon, right?”

  I hadn’t been surfing, as I said, for over twenty years. My memories are: falling prey to a bad rip; being grievously assaulted by a wave and dragged from the surf by a hungover lifeguard with faintly diarrheic breath. I don’t want to do this, I think, as Aldo lies prone on the board and the two men carry him like a battle-weary king, just like the goddamn Fussy Corpse, to the shoreline.

  “Come on!” he shouts.

  I shuffle to the water’s edge and wedge the long board in the wet sand and stare at the pitiless waves pounding the shore.

  “God,” Aldo says, to no one. It suddenly dawns on me that surfing with someone who hasn’t been on a board for twenty-five years—and who has paralysis in both lower extremities—might just be unbearable.

  A stiff wind is tearing up the sea. Each wave has a face of angry grief. In contrast, the mammoth backlit rock is nightmarishly faceless, solid and anonymous as death. I look over at Aldo, prone on his specialized surfboard, wincing as the waves curl. Why he wants to go out there is unclear, but I can see the creeping onset of stupefying fear and realize he might just flap about on the shoreline until sunset and then hate himself as we head for home.

  “Come on,” I say, “let’s go in.”

  The tall one says, “We’ll wait here a bit to see if the board needs any adjustments.”

  It’s up to me to propel him out into the cold, fast-rising swell. I push him into the shallows and get ready to help him duck-dive under the first wave, but he shrugs me off.

  “I’ll get through the breakers myself, thanks.”

  “He wants to do it himself,” the short one says.

  “Let him try,” the tall one says.

  “Whatever, bitches,” I say and slam my board on the ocean and lie down on it; it flips over immediately. I stand and turn quickly to see if anyone’s watching. They all are.

  Aldo shouts, “Incoming!”

  A wave breaks on my back and I fall facefirst onto the wet sand. This time when I gather myself, I don’t look; I turn and go through the shoals and a repulsive dense bed of seaweed, dive in under the breakers, and make my way out to the flat behind the first peak. I swing the board around and see I’m alongside the rock, which juts up steeply, menacingly, casting rigid, dislocated shadows on the water. I paddle as far from the intimidating, windswept monolith as possible while scanning the shore. There he is, waves crashing into his face; Aldo can turn away slightly, but can’t duck their force. He is knocked off. The khaki men hoist him back onto the board. He tries again, this time paddling twice as hard, clawing for his life against the lines of white water, yet is inevitably spewed up onto the shore. The waves deny him access to their peaks. He’s still in the shallows. Even from here I can see his eyes burn from the salt water. This is ridiculous.

  “Want some help?” I yell.

  “I’ll get there!”

  I straddle my board in what feels like all seven-tenths of the earth’s surface, longing for terrestrial existence. I’d forgotten how much I hate floating on the endless drama of the sea, hate drifting aimlessly as a little door swings open and self-loathing thoughts come out. I’d forgotten how much I hate the ocean spray in my face, the sun like syringes in my eyes, and the prospect of sharks, or shark lookalikes—dolphins—and bluebottle stingers and the odds of wallowing in underwater silence until death. I’d forgotten the total boredom that comingles with continuous terror to make surfing as unpleasant a pastime as there ever was. I pray for long flat spells.

  Aldo, who has lost all access to his “brave face,” is still having trouble getting past the breakers. He’s trying to duck-dive under the crashing foam, and is so enraged, he begins intense, vein-popping, hate-paddling with his Popeye arms until he finally makes it through the aggressive wall of water and splats down next to me, heaving violently.

  Letting his arms hang in the water, he rests awhile, lying limply on the board, waiting to catch his breath. We silently watch the loudmouthed, heavy-jawed, rancorous, and unfriendly surfers beside us who, in my professional opinion, you should never leave an unguarded drink next to; i.e., ladies, these are hunters who medicate their prey. These men with the abs of galley slaves are staring us down. Now that I think about it, Aldo has always made a point of hating subcultures; the whole idea of mobs celebrating their differences from other mobs, of being different together, never worked for him conceptually. He even hates the paraphernalia of subcultures: “the tight undershirts of homosexuals, t
he black hats of Orthodox Jews, the polished boots of skinheads.” So what are we doing here?

  “So?” I say.

  “So maybe evolution was a backward step. So maybe I want my gills back.”

  Full, steep waves march toward the shore every couple of minutes. Aldo is floating beside me, with his lumbering, insensate body’s whiff of septic tank. He is equally horrified by the looming rock yet seemingly unperturbed by the absurdity of us being out here. He looks like he could keep floating for some time.

  “Go on then,” I say. “You want to fucking surf, fucking surf.”

  “As predicted in the Book of Revelation: And the sideshow shall become the main event.”

  “Just move.”

  Flat on the board, Aldo starts paddling. A wave lifts him up and he rises with it, but he puts too much weight on the front and the nose of his board goes straight to the bottom, like it’s drilling for oil, then catapults out of the fattened waves. I scan churning water for a downturned torso or the international symbol for drowning. Minutes later, through curtains of spray, I see him, back on the crescent of copper sand, readjusting his catheter, conferring with his specialists, conferring with his heart that, even from a distance, is almost visibly throbbing through his chest.

  My turn, but I can’t seem to swing the board around; I am facing out to sea. When I do manage to turn and paddle to catch a wave, it comes time to get to my feet but I can’t do it. I get as far as my knees and stay there; I must look like I’m about to take the holy sacrament. I tumble into the sea and a second later I’m underwater in coffin silence. I think: I only hate golfing more, and I come up in time to see Aldo vanish into the seething white water.