by Steve Toltz
—Aldo, the average person has an intrinsic value, but you have, in addition, a symbolic value, and one day I predict you will make a great work of art.
I didn’t understand his use of the word “make.” Did he mean, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that I would produce a great work of art, or that I would become one?
XXVIII
Time slowed down again to childhood-summer pace. The days were long. Sleeping pills got me through the night. Soon they got me through the day too. And I was adjusting to life wheelchair bound. I was learning to separate the worst-case scenarios that resulted in deep humiliation, such as shitting or pissing my pants, from the worst-case scenarios that resulted in life-threatening damage, such as bedsores or a fatal blood-pressure spike. I hated transferring, feared falling out of the chair, or falling out of the chair and it tipping on top of me. I hated being estranged from my own body, trapped in enemy territory. I hated needing help to get into the fetal position. I wanted to teleport daily into oblivion.
The only thing that helped me slightly was seeing myself represented, decontextualized, recontextualized, bent over, in pain, and solidified in that chair by Morrell’s artistic movement—that he personally seemed to want nothing to do with—called (clumsily, in my opinion) Aldoism, which at least transitioned me through the denial phase relatively quickly, even though only two artists had signed up so far (Dee Franklin who did ink-wash drawings of me slumped in my chair and Lynne Bishop, whose mixed-media installation of me in hospital, laughing under the influence of morphine, hung in the living room of the residence). Despite my vociferous protestations, and my offering up alternate subjects—Stella (for her beauty) and Frank Rubinstein (for his ugliness)—they pestered me endlessly to pose for their craptastic artworks.
Regardless, furious resentment was my default setting. When the manic are shackled, expect problems. I had been out of the residence once or twice, wheeled down the road to the shops before getting caught in a sudden downpour, felt the agony of unexpected jolts—not until you are confined to a wheelchair do you realize there is practically no purely flat or even or obstructionless surface anywhere in the city, no pavement without dips or cracks or breaks or holes or raised edges. Your Honor, some people like to be the center of attention. They’re the ones nobody notices. Other people can’t abide a single eyeball trained in their direction. They’re invariably center stage—the overly fat, the impossibly ugly, the horribly scarred. For us, it seems the maximum level of open glaring is permitted. I had to endure the cretinous stares of bewildered citizens, as if I were The Big Pineapple on wheels. Or bear those who had the temerity to ask, Shit. What happened to you? Or the crushing laughter of children. Or the sight of a woman’s hourglass figure. Or a human running, or traversing a flight of stairs. Or the easy spotting of a hundred people glad they’re not you. Then I would return home only to be castigated for wheeling mud into the house, or to be ignored, or scrutinized, or laughed at when arose unpredictable and unwanted reflex erections that I was totally unaware of and that were triggered by the folds of my baggy jeans, or by a book in my lap. I became utterly unable to make small talk, or worse, any conversation that did not deal directly with my own precipitous decline and suffering. Or with the declines and sufferings of others: the parents of birth defectees; children with psychiatric conditions; people with chromosomal or metabolic disorders; alien limb syndromees; the battered and raped; the cutting and self-harmed; the deaf and the blind; the burnt and the disfigured; babies with fetal alcohol syndrome. Any other conversation seemed so beside the point as to be heinously offensive. Nobody was talking about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or fibromyalgia—but why should they? And who was I, the patron worrywart of degenerative disease? And I had only just begun to appreciate the significance of statistics. Even if the likelihood of contracting some rare ailment is so numerically insignificant as to be classified negligible, it isn’t actually zero, and even 0.1 percent equates to millions of people suffering the torments of hell. This, according to doctors, is negligible. Why did that infuriate me so? And why did I wake each morning fretting about parents who accidentally flattened their own toddlers in driveways? And about cosleeping mothers who suffocated their babies? And the secret lovers of recently deceased adulterers? Or the unacknowledged love children of adulterers in permanent vegetative states? Or those people who get no sex because of unkissable mouths? Or family members who die in improper sequence? Or what the neighbors hear the morning of crib death discoveries? Who cries for these lives? It was overwhelming and I felt fragile and anxious every moment of the day.
One evening, Stella was telling everyone about the time we were swimming in a rock pool and I was sucked into a pipe, sucked right out to sea. I didn’t like hearing these stories about the old me. I was jealous of that guy, how easy he’d had it. Liam had come by and brought Sonja, apparently so we could see the top of her head while she texted. At dinner, my wheelchair was a few centimeters shorter than the dining chairs, so I felt back at the kiddies’ table at a grown-up party. Liam was getting into it with his old mentor. Following a boisterous argument about fiction, about whether or not being tarred and feathered is a poetic act—they both seemed to be gesturing toward me when they said it—Morrell said, Damn it, Liam, a writer is not merely a man who sits in a room trying to use the word pusillanimous in a sentence, obviously referring to something Liam had sent him. Afterward, Liam confessed that he’d really come by to give me bad news. The kid in the hospital had died, and the charge was being upped from reckless driving resulting in bodily injury to manslaughter. A guilty verdict would necessitate significant jail time.
I rolled out to the balcony, and thought about the dead boy, his family’s pain. The silhouette of the battered cliffs looked like ruins of an old castle. Down at the ocean, the white foam was still bright under the slip of moon, and I began thinking about that old impossible yet irresistible idea of my immortality, and I wrung my hands at the idea of no exit ever. The sea wind set the weather vane spinning and I was thinking that life is basic training for an even more brutal heaven, when I overheard through the open window Stella and Mimi fighting over who would turn me at three in the morning. I thought: That’s sweet, my two women are fighting over me, until I realized that neither wanted to. I had to get out. I needed a single night off from this perpetual nightmare. Where could I go? I only knew one place.
If it pleases the court, I will now recount a sexual experience so shocking it turned my pubic hair white overnight.
XXIX
As a strengthening of appetite coincides with a diminishing ability to satiate it, and just as sexual problems require sexual solutions, and as I was horny as a train conductor—that’s an amusing reference to Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality regarding mechanical agitation and sexual excitation—never mind. Let me try again. As being burdened with a sexual longing that neither peaks nor dissipates needs treating like any other physical ailment, and as it is every faulty carcass’s right to seek at least a simulacrum of relief lest they go insane, I steeled myself for what I imagined would be one of the more humiliating Saturdays in memory. In any case, one prostitute per month for medicinal purposes is hardly excessive.
The taxi ramp lowered with agonizing slowness outside Enigma Variations; at those rude motherfuckers on the street watching me disembark I arched my eyebrows as if we had just made a supernatural transaction and they were next. As I paid the driver, he gave me a look that contained profound apology for my plight, a gesture I appreciated and resented in equal measure. I didn’t tip him.
A gentle rain fell. I wheeled over a cracked, slanted pavement to the open front door, and immediately ran up against an insurmountable obstacle—the interior frame of the doorway was too narrow. This brothel wasn’t wheelchair accessible. I banged my chair against the frame. The women inside on couches turned their heads to look yet didn’t move to assist me. I felt facial flushing and a spreading headache.
—Hello! Some help?
The women were immobile, as if they were under orders to remain seated. Before it had even begun, I’d managed to find myself at misadventure’s end. On second thoughts, best reverse, and fast. The last thing I needed was some local with a camera phone sending my mortification viral. The Korean madam came running out waving her hands.
—Are you going to make a complain?
I said that I wouldn’t make a complain.
—Come inside. We’ll carry you! Girls! Girls!
—Please no, don’t call—
It was too late. A half-dozen negligeed prostitutes surrounded me, the brothel bulb casting their faces in a smoldering red glow.
—Ferry gentleman into salon, the madam commanded.
—No, really, I protested.
The laughing women scooped me up.
—Wait! My wheelchair! It’ll get stolen!
—We put bike chain on it. Tiffany! Get bike chain from office.
Now I was being held aloft by eight prostitutes in the rain, their cleavages pressed tight against me. To keep myself upright I grasped onto one’s bony track-marked arms with egg-blue veins.
—Is Gretel here?
—Who?
—Gretel. Saffron.
—No, she doesn’t work here anymore.
My disappointment was intense.
—I’m here, though, the woman holding my head said. I grimaced. The inside of her mouth looked carcinogenic.
A prostitute with lopsided breasts chained the chair up to a telephone pole against which, a moment later, an oblivious drunk man began to urinate. I gazed at the madam with genuine loathing and demanded to be let go as they carried me inside that old wet cheek of a room and gently set me down on a pink settee.
—What’s that?
My shirt had risen up and one of the prostitutes was pointing to my suprapubic catheter and its attached bag of urine.
—Oh my God, that’s gross!
They turned their gazes anywhere other than at my face. I was losing novelty value fast. They couldn’t understand how sex with me was supposed to work. Frankly, who could blame the poor girls, with their rotten job whoring and their children, at least two, at home to support and their understanding or abusive husbands waiting for them at the end of the day, four a.m. probably, in their vans or motorcycles. The eight prostitutes told me their noms de coitus (Helena, Selena, Tiffany, etc.) and now looked gently upon my face but avoided my eyes.
—Choose girl, the madam said.
They shrank into themselves. The disintegrating penis of an old mummy would rate higher. Nobody wanted to be the chosen one. I assumed a steely determination to seem impervious to humiliation yet I could not bear the thought of dragging my body down the corridor of the brothel to the exit. I pointed at each prostitute one by one and made my vengeful evaluation.
—Too old. Too masculine. Too upholstered in tattoos. Bad wig day. Bad heroin day. Bad face day. Stilts for legs. Hasn’t kept down solids this decade.
That was my only ploy to get myself thrown out, but they could see through my proud swagger—the hot tears in my eyes gave me away. The women refused to be offended, no matter what I said. The bouncer became alert though insultingly made no move to silence me, finding me harmless and unthreatening. When I had run through them all, I demanded they take me to my chair. After an agonizing silence the women came upon me with their powerful smells and lifted me in their arms and carried me back outside.
—There are other places you can go, that cater specifically for people in your situation.
—Get me the fuck out of here.
—I can’t remember the code for the bicycle lock, said the madam.
Her plot was immediately apparent. She was going to charge me for the code. Meanwhile, the prostitutes’ arms were getting tired.
—Can we put him down?
—No! Not yet!
—Give me the code! I shouted.
They were piling up, these worst moments. The madam put her hand on her chin.
—Two hundred dollars.
—Go fuck yourself.
—Put him back inside.
—Fuck!
The prostitutes staggered back inside and down the hallway, this time dropping me ungently on the couch. As they consulted amongst themselves I used the opportunity to call Liam.
—I need some fucking help ASAP please.
—Chair broken down?
I explained that I was being held hostage in a brothel on Sussex Street, the Enigma Variations.
—That sounds like some pickle. Only thing is, I’m on a boat on the harbor. I’ll tell you what. I’ll send over some of the boys.
At that moment the prostitutes hurled themselves on my helpless body for the third time, lifting me up, and I thought of The Fussy Corpse as they carried me upstairs and down the hallway and left me alone on the bed in Gretel’s old room. There it was, the little desk with the wobbly leg. Out the broken window, the drainpipe. It was going to be OK. The madam stuck her hand in my face.
—Two hundred dollars. Up front.
Even though I had lost 99.9 percent of my sexual desire, I paid up and the odious madam took her leave. Two minutes later a negligeed willowy Thai woman entered as if shouldering an invisible coffin and approached the bed in a wide arc, and sat wordlessly on the edge of the mattress, stock-still and staring with large pitch-dark eyes. She seemed to be timidly waiting for some gesture from me, but isn’t initiative what one ultimately pays for in a brothel, freedom from that dreadful first move, the anticipation of rejection? In truth, I felt like telling her not to bother, but thought she would feel rejected.
—What’s your name?
—Jin. What do you want to do?
—Nothing unusual.
Let the court know that I was never perverse—at least, not in behavior; I was perverse by appearance, but that couldn’t be helped. Her jaw was clenched, her left eye twitching. The bedroom’s shadows were not doing either of us any favors. She reached out and touched my hair as one tests fabric you fear will itch. She removed her stockings, the kind women were frequently strangled with in the old days, and took off my shirt, revealing the bag. My embarrassment was now total, almost fatal. She tackled the belt, as if all the trouble resided in the belt. I was now inarticulate and self-conscious, hoping for some kind of conspiratorial wink, like we were in this together, or at least a gesture of consummate professionalism. I felt irritated that I couldn’t endear myself to her. It was an ordeal, her terrible silence and kind smile. I wanted my mental activity to cease. I wondered what her interior monologue was like. I thought: I’ll just fuck you and be on my way (Though this wasn’t a fait accompli—that sustainable erections might occur indiscriminately and at the most unwanted of times, not when needed, was frankly my greatest fear. That and the failure of sex altogether). I kissed her breasts hurriedly, fiendishly, with evident stress. Her nasally inhalations were distracting and did nothing to mollify my anxiety. She still hadn’t spoken by the time my pants were on the floor. Manually, what I managed was not exactly a periscope but respectable and lifelike, and she climbed onto the bed as if onto a scaffold and nimbly mounted me. Penetration. I was in—I think. Yes. Relief was the overwhelming emotion. This was just like sex! An unambiguous success! Yet why I fucked her with a heavy heart I could not say. This was my rechristening ceremony; it should have been a joyous occasion. It wasn’t. Maybe because Jin was making weird off-putting mouth motions as if trying to make her ears pop during an airplane’s descent.
—Are you all right?
At that moment, angry hollering came from the hallway. Doors fist-battered and kicked open. A commotion, just like the last time I was here. A voice: Police!
This time, I’d called them. I’d almost forgotten. Oh well, fine. Rescued at last! Jin remained frozen on top of me.
—Maybe you’d best get off, I said.
She heaved a sharp sigh and the door burst open. A bearded policeman’s head loitered in the greasy light. Jin’s stupefaction dissol
ved into fear. Another entered and yanked Jin off me then led her by the wrist out of the room. My jeans were within reach so I dressed myself, but otherwise couldn’t make a move to go.
—Get up, grub, he said.
I said that I couldn’t. He grabbed me by the hand. I fell to the floor.
—I’m technically a paraplegic, I said. My chair’s outside chained to a pole.
Now I, the perennial fussy corpse, was being carried in the arms of a junior detective down the stairs where the girls were showing their identification and being arrested.
—Aren’t brothels totally legal in this country? Everyone is over eighteen. Too over, if you ask me.
—Shut up, grub, the junior detective said.
—I called this in! I called you! I’m Liam’s friend. Constable Liam Wilder. Did Liam send you?
The police couldn’t fit me and the wheelchair in their squad car but the station was only six blocks away so they navigated the chair through the Saturday-night streets, running me over Styrofoam takeout containers and shattered beer bottles while groups of drunk men gawked and even the city’s sprawled and king-hit sat up to witness our passing. The policemen were expertly whispering and I couldn’t make out a single coherent syllable. They wheeled me through the reception area of the station into the same small airless room where I’d been interrogated by Liam nearly two years before. They searched my chair, taking my little medical kit with them, and left me alone with my branching headache and berserk spasms. Half an hour passed. This was no ticking-bomb scenario. Around the hour mark I had difficulty swallowing. Several of my medications caused the most hideous dry mouth, but the police had confiscated my saliva-replacement gels. This was intolerable. Not to mention I was completely confused; I didn’t mind getting caught in a whorehouse—in fact it was quite a manly place to get caught—but what law had I broken?