Quicksand (27 page)

“Come with me,” I said, and grabbing a file led her outside where Stella held her body as if she feared I was going to reach out and touch it.

“This is what you're going to do,” I said. “You're going to say you're not pressing charges and then you're going to write a statement saying that this incident was entirely accidental, and you're even going to say you were so out of it on painkillers it might actually have been
you
on top of your baby, and not Aldo.”

A suspicious frown gave way to a wan curiosity. She let out a full-body exhale and slid her hands into her pockets.

“All right, Liam. But he needs to stay away from us for good.”

“Absolutely.”

We stood awkwardly beside a row of police cars, and I don't know why but I suddenly thought about her career, how music had been her life and she'd completely abandoned it. I felt an almost dizzying wave of empathy. The times I had given up writing had been a devastating exercise in soul shrinking. I didn't have an inkling how she disconnected the reflex to pick up a guitar, how a lifelong marriage to music could be so abruptly annulled. And as a songwriter, how did she withstand the pull of a melody or lyric that came to her in the night? I reflected how she'd given up not after but exactly in the middle of the death of their baby. “All right,” she said again, sighed, snatched the paper and clipboard out of my hand, and wrote a brief statement to the effect that Aldo hadn't intended to harm her child, that she had picked up Clive herself and taken him into the bed without realizing that Aldo was already passed out beside her. Her statement made no sense, but almost nobody was going to read it.

She handed me the clipboard. “Did he have to have his stomach pumped again?”

“Sure.”

“How is he?” Before I could answer she asked, in a sort of breezy despair, “Why hasn't he moved on?”

A brightness in her eyes betrayed that this was some kind of triumph. Who wouldn't want to be a man's greatest regret? I torpedoed her with my silence
and dead eyes and turned away. Across the street, a muscular individual with close-cropped hair wearing a white undershirt and tight jeans was staring directly at us, and whenever a passer-by blocked his view, he'd crane his neck or go up on tiptoes to keep us in his field of vision.

“Craig, I presume?”

“He's waiting for Aldo to come out so he can beat the shit out of him. He's furious at him for trying to die by my side.”

“It was a bit cheeky.”

We had relaxed now, though we had nothing further to say to each other, and I became itchy to leave. A few somber seconds passed, and I said I had to get back; I kissed her on the cheek, taking in her soft spring-rain scent, and wished her and her baby well. The fact is, I didn't really understand why Aldo's love for Stella was so robust. It was a nuisance for everybody. When I reached the station doors, I turned back to see her unmoved under the streetlight, still watching me. From that angle, I got a glimpse of Aldo's recurring dream. I saw what he saw: the artist, the singer/songwriter, the frantic mother, the highly intelligent, no-nonsense, no-bullshit, and weirdly increasingly youthful incarnation of some dangerous, angry beauty. For a brief moment I got to feel what he felt, and the contrast to my own tepid emotional tumult with Tess made me realize that in the world of love I was a straggler, a craven magpie, a lousy poet who, like Aldo said, was a stickler for reality and all the poorer for it.

It was ten p.m. by the time Aldo was warned and released with a court date for violating the AVO, and we were in my car on the way back to his apartment. Aldo looked tenderized and depleted; he gripped the armrest and stared out the window with a smile of fear at the mundane streets of the cold city, appearing increasingly tiny and alone, and in between shallow breaths, to my eternal chagrin, continued his pre-interview rant, his wholesale dumping of thought, his tour de force of complaint. He was afraid, he said, that he'd failed himself in ways he'd never understand, hated the unbearable sight of nobody in love, loathed people who prayed so hard they thought they were making God come, was depressed that the only people in society who commanded his respect were those he saw on trains reading manuscripts of sheet music, was sick of wondering whether to assign meaning to his misfortunes or not, irritated at how people would quick-smart find tragic a suicide rather than the preceding
decades of unbearable psychological torment leading up to it, which was just seen as normal life—

I slammed on the brakes and glared at him. His face looked like it had been melted down and recast.

“Are you going to be OK?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you going to try this again?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“In the tropics, do coffins at open-casket funerals have mosquito nets?”

“Do what?”

“There's a market there.”

“What?”

“Mosquito nets for open-casket funerals in tropical climes!”

I gaped dumbly. This was typical Aldo. He was preparing for death, but at the same time doubling up on life. Suicidal
and
ambitious. Furiously tying nooses while intermittently doing abdominal exercises. It was absurd.

“Let's have a drink,” I said. “We have some brainstorming to do.”

“Holster your cock, Officer.”

“Shut up until we get there. I need a drink to listen to you.”

I drove us to the Hollywood Hotel and while chain-smoking in the beer garden I told him that he was already well proven to be phenomenally unlucky; his next suicide would likely have him lapse into a coma, or leave him with internal organ damage, brain damage, paralysis, or horrific disfigurement, and he'd live the rest of his life in a state-run, underfunded care facility, or worse. As I said this it occurred to me there was something different in his eyes; they were like cartoon asterisks or pinwheels, maybe from him having gone halfway up and back the tunnel of light so many times he'd left a greasy trail. I feared a permanent psychotic break, and worried that this intense accelerated state would be his new normal. I gave him an ultimatum: cobble together a will to live and settle upon a short-term life plan by the end of this drink or I would shoot him in the face. I said I'd be shirking my duty as a friend if I didn't help him build a tenuous link to life. Besides, I had my pen and notebook ready.

Aldo agreed to no more businesses, no more borrowing, no more investments, no more restaurants, no more get-rich-quick schemes, and since having
a boss was impossible for someone with his temperament, he decided he would freelance, but as what? I reminded him that after high school he had been a cold-calling, pet-sitting, house-cleaning, garden-clearing, leaflet-distributing-aholic. He needed to go back to basics. I convinced him to put himself in the service of others. Helping people in whatever way they needed help. I wrote down where Aldo's strengths and skill sets lay, and made a sign for him that he agreed to affix to walls and telephone poles all over the city.

This was the sign:

H
ANDYMAN
. C
AN DO ALMOST ANYTHING
—W
ITHIN REASON
. H
OUSE PAINTER
. W
INDOW WASHING
. L
ANGUAGE TEACHER
(E
NGLISH ONLY
). M
OW LAWNS
. P
UNISH YOUR CHILDREN
. W
HATEVER
. $25
AN HOUR
. A
LDO
B
ENJAMIN
. 063 621 4137. N
O JOB TOO DISTASTEFUL
.

That was literally the best we could do.

The night sky was weirdly pale. We drove home through silent streets, past inner-city terraces with young people carousing on wrought-iron balconies and burlesque-outfitted women shadowed by males swaggering with sexual violence. Aldo's skin seemed made of cheesecloth and he was squished down in the passenger's seat once again throwing off scalding thoughts and stamping on them, my internal organs speakers through which his voice was amplified. The air in the car was fusty, almost unbreathable. I gripped the wheel until my palms began to ache, experiencing a fatigue that started to feel like pain, trying to shut down my peripheral vision so as to avoid his face turned toward me. Aldo was, he said, fed up with foraging for silver linings, irritated by how a lifelong use of humor as a defense mechanism had perverted his sense of humor and weakened his defenses, sick of needing assurances that others were not enjoying their lives either, bored by hostile looks in bathroom mirrors that could descend any moment into violence, weary of the dread of insomnia, of floating down a silent river of hours toward dawn weighing up the worst of human cruelty, e.g., bayoneting babies
in utero
(the Rape of Nanking) vs. forcing sons to rape their mothers (Kosovo).

I accelerated down the three-lane highway. I wanted him out of the car; I'd had more than I could take.

Once out of the harbor tunnel, we passed a rattling semitrailer spilling dirt
on the road, and a manure smell poured in through the windows. We drove down the deserted somber streets, my police radio calling for backup—a brawl in the Cross—and I was thinking a complicated warren of thoughts, such as how Morrell writes,
Just as in quantum physics the observer alters the behavior of the observed, so in art does the artist modify the subject,
and wondering how whatever I came up with would transform Aldo, but I was also trying to memorize what he was saying. He had landed, once more, on his defining theme, his fear of prisons and hospitals, the medical-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, antibiotic resistance levels, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, protective custody, quarantine, secondary infections, trumped-up charges, the general population, visitation rights, visiting hours, tainted blood transfusions, wrongful convictions, misdiagnoses, lockdown, pathogens, handcuffs, vital-signs monitors, pneumatic sliding doors. He recounted a dream (“As you know, doctors have long personified death in my dreamscape, and I keep dreaming about a sign in a hospital men's room that says
SURGEONS MUST WASH THEIR HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK
”) and finally he linked his two obsessions: “When you think about it,” he said, “
preexisting conditions
and
prior convictions
amount to the same thing: Once you're fucked, you're fucked again for having once been fucked.” I pulled up to Phoenix Court with a violent screech and we both jerked forward. My brain felt parched, starved of oxygen. Just before he got out of the car, Aldo asked, in a furious voice, “Why the fuck does depression get to be a disease when frustration does not?”

He shut the door. Sharp air gusted in through the open window, and without noticing the tears of exhaustion in my eyes, Aldo spoke of two decades of thwarted impulses, backed-up energy, the toll taken by gratification forever denied, by keeping his aggression in check, by love rejected if not outright flung back in his face, and of how it was not elusive goals that had worn him down, but the accreted obstacles that needed to be removed to obtain them, and just before he turned and faced the barely traversable puddles of vomit and then disappeared through his building's shattered glass door, he gave me his final self-diagnosis: He was convinced he was suffering from
clinical frustration
, a humanwide phenomenon that as yet no pharmaceutical companies were “getting into.”

I
AM WOKEN BY A
momentous wave, as if the first to crash on the shore this calendar year, and I hallucinate the sound of a crying baby, rasping and raked in the foam. I sit up, damp and cold, feeling only minimally alive. A terrifying swell is rolling, coming in rows every few minutes. A gray light spreads thinly over the dawn sky and the horizon is veiled in a light mist. Overnight the glassy waves have grown big and stormy, six-footers breaking over the tiny island, waves so big they seem to generate their own weather system. I can see the figure of Aldo propped up on a rock, a dance of white water spiraling up behind him. He's shouting something, and making some kind of hand signal.

I think he is just waving hello. I say, “What a cock.”

Behind me, a laugh. I turn around. Her face swarming with hair, a toddler on her lap playing with his mother's skirt. Christ. Stella.

“You snore,” she says.

There's black eyeliner framing her gigantic eyes, and she looks padded out; the weight has aged her.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“Not long.”

She gives me that intense stare of hers that feels like a part of her is also watching me from another vantage point with binoculars. She digs her nails
into the copper sand. Clive, the puffy-cheeked toddler, shovels fingers of it into his mouth.

“Do you have water?”

She passes me a bottle; it tastes like melted refrigerator ice. Wedged into the sand beside her is a small Esky cooler.

“He called me. Asked me to get supplies.”

“What did he ask you to get?”

“The usual.”

“What does that mean?”

She opens the cooler to reveal gardener's gloves, a coffee-filled thermos, a heavy rope, yogurt, sandwiches, tins of tuna and pineapple slices, jars of pickles, bananas, beer, fruit, a first-aid kit, a carton of Marlboro Reds, a lighter, and an old photograph, framed—when was the last time anybody framed a photograph?—of the two of them together.

I say, “Jesus, is that—?”

A barefoot dark-haired woman emerges from the path and heads toward us. She's thin and pleasant looking but with a hook nose that you don't see so much in the twenty-first century.