Quicksand

by Steve Toltz

  He confessed!

  It wasn’t easy to understand, but it seems that he killed her in a fit of rage for setting fire to his exhibition, and in fear of her reporting their underage liaison to the police. His admission was followed by an inert yet volatile silence before order pivoted to chaos: The court erupted into a theatrical level of gasping and stock incomprehensible murmuring; Stella rushed to Aldo’s side; supporters stormed a stiffened Aldo with backslaps and handshakes; the judge gavel-thrashed; Mimi’s father, who had spat on Aldo as he entered the courtroom, collapsed in tears; armed bailiffs snapped into a state of excited vigilance while the prosecutor looked personally aggrieved, as if Morrell’s confession had been glommed inadmissibly onto the defense last-minute; and in the midst of this mayhem, Aldo sat expressionless and silent. A month after this irksome near-miscarriage of justice, Morrell was sentenced to a non-parole period of seventeen years, and Aldo was acquitted of Mimi’s murder.

  Now Aldo haggardly peruses the cheap zine and manages a smile. I can tell that despite the somber collection of depressing poems, confessional stories, and inmates apparently soiling themselves on canvas, it’s satisfying to him that Morrell has been exercising his teaching superpower, his one genuine talent.

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Yesterday morning Morrell was found in his cell with so many stab wounds in his chest and throat, at ninety-seven the coroner gave up counting.

  “Had to be Elliot,” Aldo says, wincing. “Poor Morrell.”

  “Poor Mimi.” That hers weren’t the first blue lips or empty eyes or gored breast I’d ever seen didn’t lesson the frequency of the nightmares.

  “What did Tolstoy say? All living people are alike; every dead person is dead in their own way.”

  “He never said that.”

  We sit quietly, thinking about Morrell until the lambent light of the sun burns out and a jumble of stars appear. Aldo and I each crack open a beer with the hissing sea all around us. Froth seeps up through the fissures.

  I say, “It’s a weird thing to watch a man on a decline from so low a starting point.”

  He exhales a slender jet of smoke in my face and in response, or retaliation, tells me his last night’s dream: a seven-foot man made of bees was opening Aldo’s belly with some kind of scimitar, his intestines unspooling under a wedge of yellow moon.

  I say, “It’s cold. Your balls must be two peas in pods by now.”

  He removes his teeth and shows me the horrendous thing that had been done to his mouth.

  “They got knocked out in prison,” he says.

  Aldo’s fetal pallor is enriched by the moon’s luminescence; we don’t speak. I look at my old bald, toothless friend and I think: This man will have difficulty getting a new credit card.

  I bark in frustration, “Do you actually want to be dragged back to safety? I understand you’ve been humbled by a thousand cuts and numerous incisions, and I know there’s no improving an unimprovable life, but you’ve never felt any special kinship with the ocean, as far as I know, so what’s this about? You just can’t cut it on land? You can’t be bothered to move? Is this for self-protection, making yourself accessible only to a vengeful God from above?”

  It seems Aldo has selectively suspended his senses so he can no longer see, smell, or hear me. Gulls circle in confusion and let out cryptic shrieks. I want to implore him to make a fresh start, but I don’t have the acting chops to sound like I mean it.

  Finally he speaks. “Stare at the horizon long enough, sometimes it relaxes, shows some slack,” he says, and downs two sleeping pills, my cue to leave.

  When I’m halfway to shore I turn back and can hardly make him out; the rock holds Aldo in some hardened sheltered corner of total darkness. I find I’m still talking to him. “Or because you can’t drag a trail of disasters in your wake if you don’t go anywhere? Or maybe you just need a place to contemplate your arduous life? Or to ascertain what exactly made you low-lying fruit . . . ?”

  III

  Along supersaturated blue skies white clouds seem strategically arranged, like spaceships before an invasion. My plan is to paddle out to the island to deliver Aldo’s mail (it’s been building up), sit next to him while he goes through it and gives instructions on how to reply, but when I approach I’m greeted by the stink of turpentine and solvents intermingled in the briny air. Aldo is sitting for yet another portrait. I’d take the preening surfers over the conceited and garrulous artists any day.

  As I clamber up I recognize the abstract painter Frank Rubinstein, hunched over an easel squinting at his model, who looks glandular and is limply dangling off a sea-slicked boulder in a position that could not possibly be painless.

  “I’m using fast-drying oils because the ocean spray keeps smearing the paint on the canvas,” Frank Rubinstein says.

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  “Aldo,” Frank Rubinstein says, “are you comfortable in that position?”

  I laugh. “Aldo hasn’t been comfortable in fifteen years.”

  Emerging from behind a rock, terrified and gripping the rope railing with enough concentration to perform keyhole surgery, is Doc Castle. I haven’t seen him since the trial.

  “Afternoon, Constable.”

  “Afternoon, Doctor.”

  “Have you heard about our hero here?”

  I shake my head.

  “You’re writing a novel about this little guy, aren’t you? Well, put this in your book and smoke it.” The doctor told the following story: The day before, Aldo had woken late, stumbled to the ledge in the cold morning sunshine, and gimped onto his board, tried to catch one of the dismaying waves on offer and demonstrated accidental magic, carving and hooking up the lip of the wave then riding a hollow tunnel to shore where he lay in the shallows, his arms around the surfboard as if clinging to a log during a flood. It was then he spied a small hand reaching out of the bulging water—a child caught in a strong rip drifting close to the rocks. He paddled over, pulled the drowning child by the arm onto his board, catching a face full of threshing limbs in the process, and gave a ferocious, bearded kiss of life that terrified the resuscitated child before ferrying him to the shoreline to his fretful parents. “One minute longer in the water and I would have let him drown for sure,” Aldo said to them. “You won’t see me returning a brain-damaged child to its parents.” The mother and father gaped at Aldo with mild horror. “And raise him right! I don’t want to have saved someone who turns out to be a wife-beater, or who twenty years down the track is involved in a hit-and-run. I sure as shit don’t want to be the one telling some poor mother that it was me who put this bastard back on the streets.”

  Frank Rubinstein and Doc Castle were laughing.

  Aldo says, “Can we change the subject? Liam, what do you think between a Ouija board with spellcheck, a chastity belt with biometric iris-recognition technology, and updating the handkerchief?”

  “Neither. None. What?”

  “OK. What about interconnected coffins? One big coffin shaped like a cross. All we do is wait for a family of four to die in a car crash.”

  “That’s your market?”

  “Would you bury them head to head,” Doc Castle asked, “or feet to feet?”

  “Aldo,” I say irritably, “you don’t even care about your one successful business. After all these years you finally crack it—and you don’t give a shit. Why the fuck would you want to start another?”

  Aldo looks at me, stricken. This is just the fleshless nub of his old dream talking; he’s spent his whole life striving for a profitable idea, and habit has kept it on life support. Here I am, pulling the plug.

  He turns his face to the shore and says, “Wheelchair’s gone”—it was indeed stolen weeks ago—and then shouts, “all right, can everybody please just get the FUCK out of here?!”

  We scramble for our boards and kayaks and canoes and head back to shore, leaving Aldo babyish and alone on his shadeless rock. Without path
ological entrepreneurialism, what else is he going to do, other than stare out of shit-colored glasses at that drek of an ocean, at the sky he perceives as an uninhabitable waste of space, a desolate and stupid emptiness.

  Three weeks later, I have my answer.

  IV

  It is a hot night in his sea garden. Huge, glittering stars humiliate the barren earth, in my opinion. Mosquitoes pester us while Aldo shampoos his armpits. He bathes at night, when he can’t be seen. The rock has a natural protuberance he uses as a towel rack. He scampers down to the water’s edge and jumps into the dark surging water and pulls himself back up; when he’s dry, he sits as still as the rock, as if to take on its color and posture. The last surfer on the beach gives Aldo a kind of salute. We listen to the sea and tarpaulin flapping in the wind with an incessant series of thwacks. The ocean is black and fast moving and Aldo tells me there are scratches on the moon’s face that were not there the night before.

  He says, “I’ve got the traversing of a minute down to an art form.”

  “Well done. What?”

  He smiles horribly, now that he leaves his teeth out, save for occasions of chewing meat.

  “You know how in Morrell’s book he writes that Wittgenstein says a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inward as long as it doesn’t occur to him to pull rather than to push?”

  “Yes but—”

  “I’m finally pulling.”

  “What does that mean?”

  When you ask him a question he pauses now, as if sending it up the chain of command.

  “My hair roots, my neck nape, my elbow joint, my fat cells, my flesh, my cartilage, my bones, my tissue, my glands, my acids, my marrow, my bile, my whole musculoskeletal system—”

  “What about them?”

  “The attainment of infinity thus unfolds in an instant. That’s what she said.”

  “Who said?”

  “I was hoping to combine astral traveling and levitation and teleportation and spontaneous combustion—but these experiments of mind, time, and matter are not progressing well. Maybe I don’t have the discipline. I honestly thought my circumstances would be ideal for promoting self-harm through mental telepathy, or at least close the morphological space between me and that black-browed albatross.”

  “What black-browed albatross?”

  “What retards ascent?”

  “What?”

  “I am held down by superficial forces. To do away with weight or do away with gravity. That is the question.”

  “You can’t try out a new approach to life at your age. Your nose hairs are turning gray.”

  “I want my hands to be putty in my hands.”

  “See, I don’t know what that means.”

  “The Cambrian explosion was yesterday to me.”

  “Not any clearer.”

  “I’m talking about being aerodynamically borne aloft on my own beak or claw. I’m talking about adaptability, variability, discontinuity, divergence, diversification, allopatric speciation, flexibility where it counts. I’m talking about forceful invocation of will, about harnessing my clinical frustration for antagonism-based modification. I’m talking about evolvability, Liam. I’m not making this shit up. Ask any evolutionary biologist. Sudden mutations are a thing.”

  Last week, he explains, he thought he’d made progress when the stars above him vibrated, and he experienced an oceanic, ecstatic feeling as if his endorphins and adrenaline and dopamine levels were going haywire, but when it was over, there was a bloody pool at the back of his head and he realized he’d likely had some kind of seizure, probably from low blood sugar or high fever or a tapeworm or encephalitis.

  Now he is squinting and sweating, his head juddering and his cheeks red; I assume he is, like always, simply experiencing pain in alien quantities.

  The cold arc of a falling star seems to be a cue for Aldo to spritz lighter fluid on his surfboard and start lighting matches.

  I say, “Really?”

  One match hits the surfboard and it goes up, just like that, and sends our way noxious fumes of flaming polyurethane, fiberglass, and epoxy resin.

  Aldo says, “You know who is beset by personal demons? The devil.” He laughs feverishly. I’m not sure what kind of joke that is supposed to be and I don’t want to know.

  V

  The last time I see him, it is like a dream of a recurring nightmare. He sits as if he is some aquatic scarecrow, blinking on the world’s worst refuge, wrapped in a blanket and staring out at the waves that roam his streets like wolves. He looks extraterrestrially thin and gray-skinned, hairless, inert. His skin is leathery, his callused hands torn to shit; eyes spidered with blood, yellow discharge at the corners. He’s twisting his beard in his fingers, has agonizing facial contortions; he spits and he lunges violently at insects or phantoms. Repeated heatstroke and UV exposure have taken their toll. His spasming is near constant; his hands shake all the time. His hectoring body won’t leave him alone, like some persistent bully. There’s a new pain in his back—his kidneys giving up on him, perhaps. He can feel fluid on his lungs, and persistently clears his throat, producing a russety scum. His voice is worn and sedate. A clammy sweat is a near-permanent fixture on his skin. His sutures and burns, the whip and claw marks, the tooth- and car-antenna scars, all faded and weirdly pigmented in his deep tan. He greets me with seismic laughter that I recognize as the frenzy of anxious grief.

  He asks, “How’s your book?”

  He has not asked me about my book for some time. He has not asked me about Sonja or about my health or my work or my own chaotic love life. He is looking at me with an aggressive curiosity that should prepare me for the worst.

  “It’s been hard, Aldo. Really hard. I mean, I’ve been working around the clock to get down an accurate cross section of your traumas, but it’s difficult to make an underdeveloped person into a well-developed character. I think I’ve accurately depicted how you’re critical of others yet despairing of your own unceasing self-regard, and how you don’t think so much as secrete thought. But it’s not working. The thing is, I want to make you real. Tangible.”

  “That would be so great.”

  “For others, I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I haven’t captured you yet. Your sprightly depression, for instance. It’s hard to get it right.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Let me ask you a question. What’s your best-case scenario?”

  “I meet God. We open each other’s throats.”

  “See? Who says that?”

  “Maybe you should throw in a twist.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, say, you write that I killed Mimi after all.”

  I do a loud inhale that sounds melodramatic and rehearsed. “Why would I write that?”

  “I don’t know. Just an idea.”

  “A fucking stupid idea.”

  Aldo turns and glares flatly as if at a painting of the sea.

  “Morrell confessed,” I say.

  “So? How airtight is a confession? People make false confessions all the time. They do in movies. Why not in books? You could write that he was innocent.”

  “Why would he confess if he’s innocent?”

  “Oh God, Liam. For a writer you have such little imagination. You were never good at imagining, at making something up or creating something from nothing. Why is that?”

  “This is a plot twist.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m not interested in plots.”

  “That’s convenient. You’re not good at coming up with them.”

  “No, I find myself totally bored by them.”

  “Yeah—that boredom might have developed during the twenty years you were killing yourself to make them work.”

  “Why would I write that you and not Morrell killed Mimi?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s puzzle it out. Maybe before the trial I convinced him that he’d ruined Mimi’s entire
life and sanity by fucking her as a student, that it was the worst kind of abuse, that he was a young-adult molester and he should have been punished and he had no right to live his life a free man when Mimi was dead. Maybe I convinced him that he was a terrible artist and deluding himself and had turned his back on his true calling, that the only good he’d ever done in his life was teach, that it is in prison where human beings are most in need of a teacher to help them discover their artistic selves, and that to benefit these individuals and by consequence the whole of society, so as to balance the scales, restore equilibrium to the moral universe, repay his debt, make amends, use his bestowed gifts where they were best suited, he should take the rap.”

  I’m breathing heavily, trying to manage my fear. Cloudlight has turned his crumpled-banknote face battleship gray. I feel the silence against me like a naked flame.

  I go, “You should write fiction.”

  “I’d probably do a better job.”

  “I couldn’t write that you killed Mimi. You had no reason. You couldn’t have done it. You loved her. It’s not in your character.”

  “Does my character in your book need to be more consistent than my character in my actual life?”

  “No.”