Quicksand (16 page)

•  •  •

The students gathered to the flutter of pigeon wings and Mr. Morrell helped Stella
hook up her amp and microphone to the school's PA system. “What did Hitler say? Without the loudspeaker we would never have conquered Germany? I play a little banjo myself,” he said, then he took to the stage. “I have an announcement regarding an important interlude. An outside musician, someone who is not a student at this school—don't feed the pigeons, McKenzie!—has written a song about one of our students.” He closed his eyes as if inhaling a pungent bouquet. “Her name is Stella Winter and without further ado”—he turned—“come on out, girl.”
The students erupted in jeers and boos as Stella strutted the stage triumphantly, as if the concert were already over and she had played a legendary set, like Janis at Monterey.

“Rapist's bitch!” someone yelled.

Stella throttled the microphone and bewilderedly glanced up at the biology-classroom window where Aldo cowered wearing an umpire's mask, before she shouted, “This is called ‘The Aldo Benjamin Blues' and it is written in defense of an innocent boy,” and as if deciding the treeless Zetland High quadrangle would be her musical birthplace, she did not sing so much as screech at the belligerent crowd, who leaned forward to discern the lyrics so they could hate them with more clarity and force—
He wouldn't harm a fly / Persecuted without knowing why / The girl she'd taken ketamine
/
And fingered Aldo Benjamin
—and aside from the bemusing miracle that the accuser had been blitzed on the only illicit substance that rhymed with the family name of the accused, the song seemed to be an ordeal for the singer as much as for the audience. It went from sounding like seagulls cawing inside a rainstorm to a muffled drawl, like when someone talking on the phone has let the receiver drop to their chin. For that reason, perhaps, the students were transfixed, and after it ended there was a deep silence that seemed to envelop the entire school, which now looked less like a crowd and more like a still photograph of a crowd scene. Then came the boos. Stella responded with a cover of Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit” that she dedicated, in something of a non sequitur, I thought, to “Palestinian women shackled during childbirth in Israeli prisons,” a cantankerous finale that won her a vaguely fearful smattering of applause. After switching off the microphone and watching her pack away her guitar, Mr. Morrell congratulated her on her robust performance, the volume and intensity of which had canceled out any extraneous thoughts in his head; Stella said she had imagined she was in CBGB in '73 but “We live in an age where you can't be transgressive anymore. To make any kind of lasting impression I'd have to literally get up there and fuck a dog in the eye,” and Morrell, seemingly unperturbed by the concept, said brightly, “You'd be surprised, Stella. Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo—” He was cut off by the unexpected launching of missiles—pencils, textbooks, shoes, school diaries—and escorted Stella out of the line of fire. It was overall, I thought, a pointless debacle.

Two weeks later, the DNA tests came back from the lab exonerating Aldo. It was, coincidentally, the day Sydneysiders were protesting the government sending two frigates and a supply ship to the Gulf at the beginning of the first Iraq war. The news had not yet spread that he was forensically in the clear, so Aldo met me on George Street wrapped in bandages with dark sunglasses and a black hat. He'd come as the Invisible Man. I said, “Whoever told you an antiwar protest was fancy dress?” He seemed confused, to not entirely know where he was. He unraveled the bandages, and not a minute later let out a strangled gasp. I turned to see Natasha in the throng waving a
SHAME
placard in his direction and Natasha's brother running at us at full speed. Aldo shouted, “Wait!” as the brother lunged and Aldo fell down hard, face-first onto a broken beer bottle in the gutter that left a two-centimeter scar on his left cheek, still visible today.

The day after the DNA news made its way to her, with no leads to her actual attacker, Natasha wandered the school grounds with a haunted look that pressed into us—she was doubted, and doubted herself nonstop about who had come upon her drugged in the dark. The next day she dropped out of school, and later we heard she'd attempted suicide, and that seemed to deprive us all of the last slivers of childhood, as if her confusing and violent misfortune was a harbinger of uncertain and terrible futures for us all. We remembered back to when she had climbed out of the history-classroom window to chase the Mr. Whippy van, her perfect swan dive at the Year 10 swimming carnival, her rendition of “A Bushel and a Peck” from the year before's production of
Guys and Dolls
, yet we were powerless to restore her to that state, and because we had the idea that suicide was private and we shouldn't be talking about it, we didn't.

As for Aldo, even after the news circulated that he was officially cleared, neither Natasha's brother nor the police nor the vigilantes were especially apologetic about the ordeal he'd been through, and the police acted in tone and gesture like they might charge him anyway, as though by appearing incorrectly in the victim's memory he was guilty of tampering with evidence.

•  •  •

After this episode, Aldo still said everything with ziplock certainty, mooched
around school barefoot, slipped easily between groups, boasted that he never ate breakfast (why hate breakfast? why boast about it?), was still careless with
cigarette butts, silly when drunk, serious when stoned, hilarious on cocaine, jittery on coffee, and dizzy on glue, but he moved lizardly between classes, flinched at odd moments, stood at the edge of the quadrangle trying to look harmless, one hand half-raised in a permanent gesture of amiable hello or good-natured good-bye: the ongoing negotiation of a peace accord. He'd stand on his toes as if leaning against a stiff wind, his eyes on all the exits, now often talking to Mr. Morrell, who'd be wearing a white windbreaker or some other jacket with a vaguely nautical aspect. He spoke more intensely and something had woken up in his eyes: He was always wary, on alert, at complete attention, at DEFCON 1, and that's where he'd live his life from now on, as if a simple act of daydreaming were a perilous cognitive drift he couldn't afford. Always democratic in his alliances, now he became friends with
everybody
, even the most broken or strange or unfriendly or unwanted or violent kids, those with elongated foreheads and developmental disorders and those with criminal records and tattoos on the backs of their shaved heads. It was as if by surrounding himself with people, he was building airtight alibis for every minute he passed on earth. And maybe this all contributed to his bizarre behavior at the graduation ceremony months later, in the ugly quadrangle where our families were hopelessly locked in a crazy purgatorial session of never-ending applause, when our fellow graduates—those future real estate ingenues and up-and-coming heroin overdosers—filed up to collect their flimsy piece of kindling, and Aldo sat still as a stone. He was not afraid of being on stage in front of his prior accusers, as I suggested, but was actually contemplating, he later said, something jarring that Morrell had whispered to him in a conspiratorial voice just as he was leaving his classroom—“This is the last time you'll be able to sleep with sixteen-year-olds without everyone looking down their noses at you,” he'd said—and so when the headmaster repeatedly bleated Aldo's name, and Leila nudged him with her elbow, and the unexpected stall in the proceedings resulted in an almost complete absence of sound, the silence amplified through the microphone and loudspeaker, Aldo didn't budge.

The following morning, it didn't matter how vigorously me and the guys who were traveling up to Surfer's Paradise for schoolies week rubbed the notion of unsheathed orgies in Aldo's face, and how much Stella begged him to accompany her to Melbourne for the Battle of the Bands, Aldo said that it was only in complete solitude and far from civilization that he could conceive of a
life plan he wouldn't kick himself for six decades down the track. He packed a sleeping bag and a few provisions and took himself into the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, where he felt genuine envy for this or that bird, and aggressively bush-bashed through twisted paths all the way to a freshwater creek where he set up camp. A cold drizzle fell the whole long night, making his mission twofold: to keep his cigarettes dry and ascertain his destiny.
What was he going to do? What should he become?
Around eight p.m., he realized that having a boss, or some kind of superior, would be for him like being forced to wear clothes was for those people with extra-sensitive skin. Therefore, he must be self-employed. Other than that, and the certainty that he wanted to spend every waking second with Stella, he had no ideas. None. It was about this time that he bitterly lamented the decision not to join us up north, and feeling sorry for himself cried for hours into his inflatable pillow.

At three a.m., cranky and sodden and with some strange insect frothing in his inner ear, it hit him, the cardinal epiphany he'd been waiting for: that while money can't buy happiness, it
can
buy lawyers, it
can
allow you to litigate endlessly and buy off witnesses, and it
can
purchase expensive medications not covered by the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, and go to countries where experimental stem-cell treatments are better than nothing. If one needs to eschew authority, to hover even one inch above the law, to circumnavigate certain bureaucracies, to pay for detectives to investigate your case, to pay your own legal fees or, when ordered, to pay the legal fees of your opponents, not to mention bribes to keep yourself alive in prison, or to move you up on an organ-donation queue, the answer is always money. Tell the World Health Organization that money can't buy you actual years of life on earth and
they'll laugh in your fucking face!
So that was his big epiphany: He would knock the doors of prosperity off its hinges, provide himself and Leila and Stella with a gargantuan emergency fund, and with the excess—as a vague afterthought, a subfantasy—hack a philanthropic path through a jungle of poverty. That was the plan, and with no tangible skills or obvious enthusiasms, his only obstacle was how to achieve it.

I remember when Aldo stopped pretending to reach for the bill. It was the year his ringtone was the hum of crickets and he turned his sights on that vast
potential field of golden poppies—the internet. His two big startups were a matchmaking service to hook up all the left-over single women in New York and London with all the one-child-policy single men in Shanghai and Beijing—he'd either overestimated the desperation of the women or underestimated their racism—and a porn website called Fruit 'n' Vag that specialized in links to repugnant and unthinkable niches like “Biblical” that
way
misjudged even sex-toy advertisers' willingness to be associated with videos of Mary Magdalene with the Good Samaritan's donkey. But no, he couldn't even make money in the oughts! Just like during the previous years of failed ventures, his crashed food truck, the shut-down warehouse dance parties, vandalized health-snacks vending machines, malfunctioning peanut-allergy divining wand, aborted tanning-salon taxi service, etc., he once again fell almost stealthily into arrears; he stopped even intending to pay bills, threw his mobile phone into the sea. As he had after all the other nosedives, he convinced himself he'd finally arrived at the terminus of entrepreneurial life, and his disconsolate figure could be seen trundling here and there, sitting in the sunshine smoking cigarettes, taking up a whole bench with his long body and overhanging feet, his head resting on corrosive bird shit, hardened gum, dried saliva. You would find him, in those days, in a crowded food court trying to saw through the burnt underside of a baked potato with a plastic knife, looking quasi-homeless, with shaggy hair and old jeans and moving with a strange lethargy, because, according to him, “Debt has its own pulse, central nervous system and physical weight.” When Aldo heard his name hissed and bellowed from car windows and street corners, he'd give a discreet wave or shrug. When accosted in shops and pubs by various creditors who accused him of responsibility shirking or downright thievery, sometimes he ran, sometimes he accepted their insults, threats, and the occasional physical blow. Then there were those who came to his door, not just creditors, but their wives and daughters, pleading for money. He desperately wanted to repay them, but short of harvesting his organs, there was nothing he could do. To be ignominiously saddled with incalculable debts is to be permanently demeaned, and even though he borrowed from men who rubbed cocaine on their dicks and told relative strangers about it, he lived in a state of inferiority and constant mortification; he felt subordinate to everyone in any given room. In bathrooms he avoided his mirror image, from every angle a man in defeat. Even watching movies where the characters spent money on restaurants or clothes made him sick with jealousy. No
wonder perpetual debt servitude is the most irrefutable factor in the male suicide rate, though just as often Aldo imagined an unlucky detective investigating his murder, sifting through photos of hundreds of enervated suspects.

And Leila! What he had done to his poor mother didn't bear thinking about. He'd broken every social contract when he borrowed from her and from his girlfriend. What exactly was it that made these women so blindly, so uncritically supportive?

One night Aldo was lying in bed praying to become a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye cruising through space and time before disappearing in a violent white flash. This was not the first time he'd had a version of this fantasy. Stella was asleep in shrunken leather pants she'd worn in a sauna for a music video. He pushed himself gently off the mattress and went to the kitchen, poured himself a whiskey, and applied for a new credit card, then tore up the application and wrote the following letter:
Dear Sir/Madam, I'm honestly not sure about this alarming version of destitution whereby a veritable pauper is allowed to gad about like a respectable person and even apply for additional credit cards such as your bank sends me unsolicited in the mail. I try to reassure myself that “everyone's in debt nowadays” but the fact of it being an epidemic doesn't help one iota, any more than the knowledge of being swept up in a fatal plague would aid in any practical way the infected individual.
He tore up the letter, and dug out his mother's bills. That very afternoon, he had dropped by Leila's ground-floor apartment and stood on the busy street watching his mother at the sink, crushing her cigarette into the potted plant next to the wilted celery in a glass. Behind her, a man dressed in black entered and rested his hands on Leila's shoulders. He thought: Who's this motherfucker? The man in black smiled like a clown in a horror movie. His hair was white and his nose was so flat it looked to be embossed on a graven image of a face; he was a man with no profile whatsoever. Gah, another priest.