Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  Me:

  You’re right! But . . .

  Voice:

  But what?

  Me:

  This is a big project. Where do I even begin?

  Voice:

  Whether the gates of heaven open inward or outward is up to you.

  Me:

  Meaning . . . ?

  Voice:

  Let me start you off. How about a process of taking back regretted prayers—a forty-eight-hour cooling-off period, if you like.

  Me:

  I see where you’re going with this. Less punitive, more contrite, more inclusive, less withholding. A God who clearly understands clinical frustration, obviously; with thunder, lightning, earthquakes, tsunamis being outward displays of His thwarting His own desires. And we don’t have to let that Peeping Yahweh creep us out!

  Voice:

  Nice idea. You can opt out of omniscience by simply adjusting God’s privacy settings!

  Me:

  Online confessional booths. Home baptism kits. I’ll need a Thou Shalt Not Kill, a break-out commandment. One that crosses over demographics. Maybe for that we’ll engage the female brainiacs currently hard at work on exegeses of male text messages and set them the task of creating a multistoried celestial realm people can believe in. But hang on. Will people believe in what they know is created? Isn’t that the flaw in this idea?

  Voice:

  People believe in aliens, astrology, reincarnation, ghosts, homeopathy, cold fusion, karma, fate. They believe you shouldn’t wake sleepwalkers, that chewing gum takes seven years to digest, that romance and passion will outlive a decade! People are nuts! Cognitive dissonance is a fundamental part of consciousness, the seed just has to be planted. It doesn’t even matter if people know you’ve planted the seed yourself. Confirmation bias will do the rest. You don’t need to worry about that part.

  Me:

  OK. So we will not persecute the nonbeliever, but make him feel bad about his life choices.

  Voice:

  Just don’t make your God like the reproduction-obsessed irascible legislator of the Old Testament.

  Me:

  How about when you die, God does it personally . . . ? The midnight knock at the door and He looks you in the eye. He should be a good communicator. He won’t send eerie blind seers talking out of slits in their throats, or speak through the mangled intentions of a summer storm.

  Voice:

  You should market a creator that speaks to people’s actual day-to-day experiences.

  Me:

  The hilarious deity who gave me a big head that won’t accommodate most hats. A god who loves it when someone diets their whole lives. A god who longs for the day a man finds that he’s inferior in the precise area he thought he was superior.

  Voice:

  That’s right. You don’t have to avoid making explicit references to His indiscriminate and no-nonsense cruelty with this wised-up street-smart generation.

  Me:

  Our God clearly enjoys sprinkling over the earth the half-dozen megasuccesses needed to mentally torture the billions who are not.

  Voice:

  Now you’re talking.

  Me:

  And those arriving in heaven will have post-traumatic stress disorder from the unbearable nightmare of dying and thereafter will live among a bunch of shell-shocked layabouts who all know each other and thus bore you senseless with their abominable private jokes for all eternity. And the only people who will be rewarded with the highest honors the afterlife has to offer are the pedophiles who never touched a child, for they are the real unsung heroes of our world.

  Voice:

  You might want to rethink that one.

  Me:

  It’s just an example.

  Voice:

  The main thing is you can put God back in circulation.

  Me:

  But how exactly?

  Voice:

  You’ve heard of Moore’s law.

  Me:

  The rate at which we cannot live without the things that didn’t exist before yesterday?

  Voice:

  Not exactly. We’ll call that Aldo’s law. But . . . close enough. My point is. Forget the old bible. God is dead on the page there. He can stand a little remodeling, a little imaginative effort, and it could be interactive. You don’t have to do it alone.

  Me:

  Meaning?

  Voice:

  Groupthink. The wisdom of crowds. Your market is a bunch of people who have fallen head over heels in love with the inorganic—their phones, of all things, for heaven’s sake! The most embarrassing turn of events in human history. Get them, the subscribers, to be the contributors and they will become the believers.

  Me:

  And in the process, make him go viral.

  Voice:

  And eventually, with the singularity and Artificial Intelligence technology, who do you think will come online just when we need Him?

  Me:

  I see! God too has to evolve, and we ourselves will be the agency of that evolution.

  Voice:

  Now you understand the second purpose of consciousness.

  Me:

  The creator has given us the means to create his own prototype. That will evolve and become a better God.

  Voice:

  And so?

  Me:

  So there will be no divine will until we will the divine. God can be regifted. He will be the fruit of our labors and dwell where we tell him to dwell! We’ll stumble across Him by using His greatest gift—the imagination. This both makes no sense and is the exact idea I’ve waited for my whole life.

  Voice:

  You’re welcome. If I may offer one last observation and one last piece of advice . . .

  Me:

  What? What?

  Voice:

  You only call God perfect vis-a-vis your congenitally low standards of perfection. You’re always searching for the perfect romantic getaway, the perfect cup of coffee. What is that?

  Me:

  And the advice?

  Voice:

  You people.

  Me:

  Yes?

  Voice:

  The human race.

  Me:

  Yes? What? What about us?

  Voice:

  You really took a wrong turn at monotheism.

  Then the voice was gone. That was it.

  Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, members of the press, madam court stenographer, random citizens who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning, Uncle Howard, bailiffs, live-streaming folks of the internet—by reshaping the way people pray, and empowering worshippers, we’ll provide online solutions to crises of faith. With user-generated content, self-publishing, and uploading of commandments, our omniscient God will also be bite-sized and high-speed and available 24/7 in real time. He’ll be personalized and Everlasting, meaning He can be duplicated with zero generation loss. With a high demand and low overheads, we’ll be cashflow positive almost from day one. We’ll be taking our God to market within a year. He will be the gold standard of new gods, but also a gateway god to other gods. Every year we will increase server-access bandwidth to allow maximum web traffic and uninterrupted streaming of the Lord’s vlogs, both sacred and profane; our new bible will be mixed media—video, audio files of eternal silence, text. We have gone from the infinite being written on scrolls to the ability to infinitely scroll through content feeds. You, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, worshippers and content creators, whom God has created to create Him, YOU are the first cause. Congratulations! Time immemorial begins NOW! Praise the Lord! Compliment Him! Just tell Him you approve! Be an intelligent designer today. Narcissistic gratification guaranteed or your money back. Yes, I realize a murder trial is a strange place to pitch this once-in-a-lifetime offer but Yahweh, Himself once merely one of a dozen ancient desert gods, knows the meaning of the word aspirational. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, live-streaming people of the internet, you w
ho ask for a cigarette then tuck it away behind your ear for later, you men and women who say “welcome to the real world” whenever something shit happens to a friend, you who do taxes in public libraries or conduct job interviews in chain coffee houses, you people so depressed and solipsistic you take the big bang as a personal slight, you Pseuodosapiens, Businessapiens, Thinklings, Saddults, and the Clinically Frustrated, who seem weirdly super-keen to hurry up and get to the postapocalypse recovery effort, you who cry “Dehumanized” when treated like cattle but say “I’m only human!” when you act like gorillas, you who sidestep history and only bear witness in your peripheral vision, for whom human progress means putting genocide on the backburner, you who think taking your last breath with someone else in the house eases the loneliness of dying, who in bars feel women’s pulses erotically like sleazy doctors, who are sad that whoring is no longer part of the contemporary vernacular, who are either wafer thin or terribly fat and accused your parents of child abuse if they said no to you and who are living under the specter of the greatest fear in a liberal democracy—fear of your own body weight, you IVF nations with your plague of twins, you who are truly longing for salvation yet have settled for makeovers, you who for some strange reason have decided that it is some kind of human right to do better than the previous generation even if the previous generation did just fine, you who don’t realize that being busy is incontrovertible evidence that you’ve taken life too seriously, and who wonder what’s the use of life if you don’t get to keep it when you die, you who want to travel to the sexual ends of the earth but don’t even know where your next embrace is coming from, you who feel overtaxed and late to the party, and for whom self-fulfilment is your goal thus dissatisfaction your destiny! Before you go back to your low-protein high-carbohydrate lives and watch your buttered toast land butter-side down on your grubby carpets, call 800-222-222 or go to my website, thenewpantheonishere.com, for your no-risk trial and you’ll get ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE a Touched By An Angel hand sanitizer (retail value of $19.99). ACT NOW. And please find me not guilty of all charges.

  III

  draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story

  —Hamlet

  A Plague of Isolated Cases

  IT IS SUMMER IN SYDNEY. Cherries, pawpaw, mangoes, and watermelon render apples, bananas, and oranges the most banal-tasting objects ever to set foot in a human mouth; waves foreclose on children’s sandcastles; shopping-center Christmas decorations hang tackily over swarthy Santas with heat exhaustion; bushfires rage out of control and everywhere is ash, and a burning red moon of a bushfire night hangs over the city, over the ocean, over Aldo ripening like garbage on his dreary rock.

  Magic Beach is overrun, blighted with onlookers who stumble down the hazardous descent to gawk at the muse, the paraplegic, the poet, the rapist, the murderer, the religious entrepreneur and false prophet sequestered on the rock; his congregation is made up of girls tanning their fake tans, hirsute men so incurious they don’t know what their own tattoos mean, flaxen Scandinavian backpackers with actual snouts, Chinese tourists, nudists splayed limply on the sand as if they’ve been blown out of a whale’s spout, members of the Association of Sex Workers, spliff-smoking truants who have biked unhelmeted down the near-vertical slope, occupational therapists and their clients, tween sexual autodidacts, bloggers, reality-TV stars, septuagenarian snorkelers, the unemployed and underemployed, white and off-white supremacists, PR companymen attempting to persuade Aldo to endorse this or that brand of energy drink, stoners, locals, local politicians hoping for photo opportunities, and parents scrambling to reclaim children who dared each other to swim out and touch the hermit in an increasingly popular game called Escape from Pedophile Island.

  They all huddle on the shoreline, squinting out over the seasick-green sea, shielding their eyes in his direction, as if he were a precious jewel heavily guarded by three-foot waves on endless patrol. The surfers don’t know what to think. Breasts are flashed, penises fetched from inside speedos, stereo speakers blare discordantly. People sneak onto the rock with offerings: flowers, a cat afraid of water, pornography, cakes, Kentucky Fried Chicken, gas lanterns, throw cushions, dripping gelatos, cases of beer, an issue of Waves magazine delivered by the local newsagent himself. An Indian man has set up a kiosk on the beach hawking binoculars. At night, torches probe the quiet darkness. Aldo is beset from the ocean side too; dinghies are launched from God knows where, the clatter of outboard engines throttling near the rocks; wooden yachts with blaring neon lights drift by nightly. All these people are wondering, perhaps, what goes through the mind of this swarthy guru given legitimacy through suffering as he moves occasionally naked around that tiny, desolate, gull-sick island. Who knows what he thinks of the world, weakened by distance and seen through a sheen of salty air; who knows if the endless sea looks to him like a desert or a long, flowing oasis when he wakes up drooling on a pillow of moss, frozen and covered in dew, back aching, neck and shoulders hurting in newfound ways; who knows what runs through his mind when he is beset by a plague of winds, a militia of waves, a cancer of sunbeams, looking dumbly at his wheelchair from the rock as people sit on it, birds shit on it, rain falls on it; who knows what the hell he’s thinking when he swivels to gaze at the stringybarks canted at 45-degree angles, or at the sandstone ridges, or the steep ascent back to civilization, or at the back of a ragged line of white water rolling to the shore, and when he gives the sky his rapt attention before a little housekeeping—sweeping seagull feathers and tangled masses of seaweed and rockweed into the sea—and then sits there like Father Time in an old Claymation movie. I know he often imagines he is back in his cell, or in his hospital bed, because he’s told me so. Otherwise, it is a mystery, even to me.

  In the first few weeks, Stella visited many times. The wind carried their voices straight to shore and you could hear whole chunks of their near-intolerable nonsense: You could hear them fighting about old fights, arguing about whether to call her music label Fossil Records or Dental Records; Aldo swearing at her about some vital promise she had repeatedly broken, begging forgiveness, the two of them forcing forgiveness down one another’s throats. One day, Saffron came with a small bag and stood on the shore with her thumb out. A guy on a longboard ferried her out to the island and she stayed a few hours, but she hasn’t come back since. And because if you’re single and above the age of consent in this world, people will try to fix you up with someone until your dying day, I put his profile on romance.com and perfectmatch.com and described him as “a nice quiet paralyzed gentleman living on a rock just off the eastern seaboard, who abounds in dealbreakers yet has a great sense of humor and lying down is 183 centimeters tall,” and the women that came out, wow. Those were some crazy bitches, it has to be said. Afterward, Aldo forbid me to bring any more women. The main point I needed to understand, he said, is that he no longer felt the need for intimacy, or to imitate the triumphant, or to try to come across as primal in business meetings and sophisticated in women’s bedrooms; he no longer felt constantly on the point of departure, no longer offered advice of any kind, nor did he solicit it. Across the waves, far away from his island, people swaggered from wake to sleep, wondering if their lives were going to change, if they were going to meet that special someone, if their ship was going to come in. Aldo was free of all that. Free of hope. Hope, the imperishable courtesan, said Baudelaire according to Morrell, helps people bury the present in dreams. “I really feel like I’ve finally exhausted fear,” Aldo said. “I’ve used up my whole lifetime’s supply and I’m not sure I’m able to be afraid anymore. This is the opposite of bravery. It’s the end of fear.”

  Aldo believes this when he says it, but the truth is, he is so riveting to watch not only because he has made surviving a new kind of depravity, but because his brain still drip-feeds him immobilizing panic at every turn, especially at night; he doesn’t know I often smoke a gram of impounded cannabis before descending the track down to the tiny, shrinking beach. I don’t light a fire or ev
en a cigarette, and from the shoreline I gaze out at Aldo in the semidarkness, watch him leap in fright at the racket of wave against rock, the wind snarling through the trees, the cicadas and jumping fish, crabs scampering, possum-on-possum violence. When the sea is quiet, all you can hear is the distant grinding of his teeth or choking sobs or God-directed invectives. Aldo has a good fire going some nights, and in spite of everything I find myself jealous of him. Maybe it’s just the usual city dweller’s hermit envy: Aldo huddling in the open with a pleasant salty breeze and a front-row seat to intense electrical storms, golden hours that go on for hours, end-to-end rainbows, winds that traffic in delectable smells, pristine mornings and beguiling dusks and the uninterrupted fire of the evening sky. So I sit on the shore in the dark, and backlit as he often is by the moon and scattered stars, I often think Aldo is there to inaugurate the apocalypse. I often think: He has marooned himself on this piece of earth not worth having dominion over. I often think: He went mad with a proviso; he was mad when he got there.

  On my previous visit, hipsters had gathered on the beach, haunch-squatting or in lotus, awaiting the word. I was sitting beside Aldo who was positioned on a sort of sandstone dais, looking gnomic and frenzied; he raised his speargun aloft in exhortation, then lowered it meaninglessly. “Well, Liam, it seems we’ve lived long enough for muttonchops to come back into fashion,” he said, then fell silent. When I went back to the beach they asked me what he’d said. I didn’t have the heart to tell them.