Quicksand (2 page)

“What's the point of it?” he asks, gesturing to my notebook.

“For the reader, reading pleasure. For myself, financial reward. For you, catharsis. This will be easier than confession. I'll do it for you.”

The man in the ponytail slides a stool closer. Aldo blots sweat from his cheeks with his sleeve. “So what'll you write about exactly? And I mean,
exactly.
”

“Your murder trial and astonishing testimony, of course. Your trillion failed businesses. Your dire luck. Your grim health.” I could go on. So I do. “Your luminous desperation. Your impressive resilience. Your humiliating bankruptcies. Your dead child.” I pause. I won't go further. Maybe just a little. “That tractor-beam personality of yours. How you're always womanizing, only with the same woman. Your thwarted suicide attempts—”

“I never really tried to kill myself.”

“Get the fuck.”

This is such an absurd lie—his suicide attempts were so numerous, so unambiguous, so well documented—I'm forced to try a different tack. “All right. What about those late-night prank calls you used to make?” I say. “First to old schoolteachers, then to people in the phone book with the same names as celebrities, and finally to the suicide hotline.” On his face, a look of embarrassed surprise, like a janitor caught shouting lines of dialogue in an empty theater. I parrot, “Hello. What kind of noose knot would you suggest? A triple bowline? An angler's loop? A zeppelin bend? Which is better, suicide by cop or suicide by fatwa? Ideally, I'd like to liquefy in my sleep, or be taken by the hand and led to my coffin. I certainly don't want to go through the whole hire-a-hitman-to-kill-me-then-change-my-mind-when-it's-too-late
rigmarole
.”

He almost smiles. “That was for laughs.”

“Once I saw you draw a finger across your throat while looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror.”

“I don't remember that!”

“Remember what Morrell told me?”

“Today of all days I don't want to think about that man.”

Aldo bites his lower lip. I should probably pursue another topic altogether. “That nobody more snidely dismisses originality than the terminally unoriginal,” I
quote nevertheless, pulling up my stool. “He meant it as a putdown. And I hate to admit he's right about anything anymore, especially in light of,
you know,
but it still sounds right, and for the life of me I can't think of anything new either. That's why I've decided to write about not what I know, but who. If I could deploy you as my fictional attaché, so to speak . . .”

Aldo says nothing, his eyes trained on the window, at the slender cabbage-tree palms swaying in random gusts of wind. We both let out sighs and I think how over the years we've sat in bars long enough for them to gentrify around us. The bartender calls to someone in the back who I suspect is not actually in the building. Aldo reaches into his cup holder and pulls out a plastic bag crammed with medications and counts out two egg-shaped, five elliptical, three oblong, three six-sided, four barrel-shaped, and two diamond-shaped pills of every hue, and gulps them, three at a time, with his beer. More customers file in wearing same-colored walking shorts with socks pulled to the shin or old jeans I suspect never fitted even when they were new. Aldo greets each newcomer with a prison-haunted stare. They sit at the long bar, breathing like stampeding animals at a wallow, pretending to ignore Aldo's joggling foot, his alarming leg spasms, the incremental rocking back and forth. He has never been sedentary, although these days most of the motion and turmoil take place under the skin, at the level of his nerves: beads of sweat form irrespective of air-conditioning and without exertion; his hand perceptibly trembles when he holds something; he has constant goose bumps on his arms and legs, unrelated to external stimuli, and an overproduction of saliva that he slurps from his lip back into his mouth. He's stunted and subtracted, his central nervous system has gone feral, his bowels are on the back foot. He has a lifetime of sitting ovations, cloudy urine, and skullaches ahead of him. He's musculoskeletally fucked. I write:
Aldo's experience of time. His version of “past,” “present,” and “future” is “the memory of pain,” “pain,” or “the anticipation of pain.”
Poor Aldo. The first half of his hair fell out in hospital, the rest fled his cranium in prison. Why couldn't God let him at least keep his hair?

I say, “I'm sick of looking at you and perceiving a smaller, meaner universe.”

He laughs and says, “Tough,” then starts telling me about the guys he met in hospital, a quadriplegic who risked breaking a rib if he sneezed and had to be on constant vigilance against pollen and pepper and sunshine, another with a malignant melanoma on his spinal cord, and yet another who'd dived into an
unseen sandbar and whose fusion of broken vertebrae was now a centimeter off, and how it was both unbearable and heartbreaking to be stuck in the smoking area with these unfortunate bastards who were already doing one-handed wheelies by the time Aldo had only learned to transfer to a toilet seat. I turn my gaze downward, stifle a groan, and write:
I can't imagine a sadder thing in the whole world than putting socks and shoes on those useless feet.

“What are you writing
now
?”

I show him. Anger is not one of Aldo's usual go-to emotions, so I am taken aback when he bangs his fist on his chair's tubular armrest and shouts, “I'll make your publisher pulp it while your daughter watches!”

The bartender leans forward and says, “I
said
, keep it down,” then turns up Van Morrison disagreeably loud.

Aldo holds a stiffened finger in the air. I think: Here we go again. He says, “You know how if we had time travel people would use it to go back short temporal distances to make premonitions and look like big shots?”

“Yeah. And?”

“Never mind. Fuck it,” he says and puts on his aviator sunglasses. “I'm going for a ciggie.” He wheels himself out onto the balcony, to the sea-rusted railings where gulls are perched and where he goes through half a box of matches lighting his cigarette in the infuriating wind. From a distance, he has the worn yet sleazy handsomeness of a cruise-ship magician. He flicks the half-smoked cigarette at a seagull, narrowly missing it, and shouts back to me, “AS PATRICK'S DADDY ONCE TOLD HIM: IT AIN'T A PROJECTILE IF IT AIN'T AIRBORNE!”

I shout, “WHO'S PATRICK?”

He shouts, “MY CELLMATE!”

The bartender shouts, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Aldo gives him the finger, then moves like a storm front inside, toward the handicapped toilets. He rattles the door handle.

The bartender yells, “That one's out of order. Use the downstairs one.”

Aldo swivels his chair and gazes down the steep metal staircase.

“You're supposed to have a handicapped toilet.”

“It's out of order.”

“It's the law!”

“It's out of order.”

Aldo takes a slow, deep breath and beckons me over. He turns around and rigidly faces the big window. I stand beside him, looking out at houses nestled in bushland with imbricated terra-cotta roofs and manicured lawns, at gnarled limestone cliffs, surfers carving up the lips of rising waves. He says, “With medical science improving at roughly the same rate as our environmental situation worsens, the most likely scenario is that the world will become uninhabitable at the precise moment the human race becomes immortal.”

“So true!” I write that down and say, “This is going to sound gay . . .”

“Say it.”

“You
are
my muse.”

“Will you carry me to the toilet?”

“Of course.”

He is not light in my arms. I carry him down the stairs and turn on my side to get him into the narrow cubicle. As I bend to gently lower him I can feel my back give out and—I have no choice, it's a split-second decision, pure reflex—I drop Aldo onto the seat. He hits his head on the stainless-steel toilet paper dispenser. In a small, hoarse voice: “My kingdom for an intrathecal morphine pump.”

“You've outlived yourself.”

“I never wanted anyone to say of me, ‘He's breathing on his own now.' ”

“Now do you understand why—”

“You do not have my permission!”

“Do I need it?”

Even back in high school he'd burden me with some unbelievable secret and beseech me to promise I wouldn't tell anyone, then when I betrayed his confidence to a mutual friend, I'd discover he'd already told them the exact same thing. In any case, the fact is I am not the only one intrigued enough about his existence to document it. I have copious rivals who've already depicted his protracted wince on canvas, daubed his dead-eyed, petulant expression in earthworm pink and Day-Glo yellow, drawn his convulsions like folds in fabric, sketched his legs to illustrate their significant loss of bone density, summoned his hunched form in glazed ceramic, in pastels and oils, in plaster and clay. I've viewed tidy little works in which can be seen the digitally animated collapse of his whole craniofacial complex, and murals of him face-planting into a quiver of arrows. My best friend has been cropped, doctored, photoshopped, bubble
wrapped, and shipped. I've glimpsed his tired grimace on glossy variable contrast paper so many times I've felt sorry for my own naked eye.

“You going to stand there and watch?”

I go back upstairs to the bar and sit down. Clouds swim in a watery blue sky. It is loose, warm weather. I feel drowsy. The music is loud and I'm not sure I'll be able to hear Aldo calling me from inside the toilet. I look over my notes and think: I'll be annoyed if after writing a whole book, a photograph of his screaming face would have done just as well.

The bartender says, “You want something else?”

I sigh. “In 1929 Georges Simenon wrote forty-one novels.”

“What?”

“A bourbon and Coke.”

As the bartender pours, I light a cigarette.

“Go outside,” he says.

I keep the cigarette going, sucking deeply.

“I'm calling the police.”

I laugh and open my jacket just enough to show my gun.

The bartender leans forward. “So even writers carry guns these days?”

I go, “You have no idea.”

W
E MAKE ART BECAUSE BEING
alive is a hostage situation in which our abductors are silent and we cannot even intuit their demands,” Morrell said in one of his bewildering conversational pivots, stabbing with his crooked finger the court documents I'd brought to school. This was my final year, a midwinter afternoon in the portable after all my classmates had left. On the muted yellow wall, Blake Carney's painting of a golliwog wearing a swastika had caught Morrell's eye and he froze in front of it and said something I'm almost positive was: “Unused talent exerts downward pressure on the spirit.” My uncertainty was due to the grating transportation soundscape—the school being situated by a train station on the intersection of a busy highway underneath a flight path—which meant I had to use all my concentration just to hear him. And I wanted to hear him. While traditionally our Zetland High art teacher was depicted in toilet-stall graffiti as a talking anus, I liked the guy; other than the burst capillaries on his nose, and the creases ironed into his clothes at random angles, he was a relatively well-preserved and mostly calm man, keyed up only by absenteeism, pigeon feeding, obtrusive yawning, his own sinus infections, and the creative spirit. Morrell paced the classroom like he wanted to give me a guided tour of it. He said, “We create for the same reason we do anything: fear of the alternative,” then pirouetted on the threadbare
carpet and scooped from his desk his own book—
Artist Within, Artist Without
(that he'd snuck onto the syllabus to the chagrin of Mr. Hennelly, our weedy, terse headmaster)—and copied onto the blackboard, in perfect yet minuscule handwriting I had to squint to decipher, the following lengthy passage:

Shamefully, doctors neglect to tell new parents that an increasingly common postnatal complication is that a small percentage of babies will grow into anthropologists in their own homes, as if they'd been conceived in order to study and then record the dreadful failings of their mothers and fathers, who've no idea they've invited this cold-hearted observer into their lives. All these parents wanted was to produce cuter versions of themselves, poor bastards; instead they're saddled with an unsympathetic informer who won't hesitate to report them to the lowest authority—the general public. In other words, it is as the poet Czeslaw Milosz once said: When a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed! (Exclamation mark mine.)

To give the paragraph time to sink in, he nudged a discarded Vicks inhaler with his boot and flipped on a single-setting exhaust fan that blew his own musty odor around the room. I sat impassively in the plastic orange chair, trying to remember how I act when genuinely fascinated. Amber dusklight fell across the ordered row of desks. Outside, the parking lot was emptying. Drafts were coming up through a rough join in the floor. Morrell stared out the window and yelled, “Don't feed the pigeons, Henderson!” then swiftly moved back to the blackboard and wrote:
It's important to always take sides. Both sides,
before he turned to check my face for rapt attention. “You OK?” he asked. I looked down at the kind of carpet you wouldn't want to bring into contact with exposed skin. He stepped closer, and for a second I thought he was going to reach for my hand or pat my shoulder. “I know what it is to lose someone,” he said. My jaw tightened. I was close to tears, sniffling prematurely. There was nothing I could do, apparently, to hide the hairy goiter of loss and acute sadness emanating from my person.