Quicksand (10 page)

On the way into Surry Hills station, a shirtless man with a bloodied face tried headbutting me. Everyone has potential for uncontrollable rages. I'd seen Aldo's customary impotent explosions against corporations, injustice, God, banks, government, greed, and ineptitude, but was I to believe that all his liberated demons had mobilized and marched on Stella's newborn? No, it was some absurd misunderstanding. Unless. Unless.

The desk sergeant eating a kebab nodded hello.

“I've come to see Aldo Benjamin,” I announced.

Behind him, a senior detective with a harangued face and mirrored sunglasses pushed up on his head waved me over.

“Constable Liam Wilder?”

“Yes.”

“Name's Doyle. Your mate's charged with attempted infanticide.”

“It's a mistake.”

Doyle made his eyes sigh—I'd never seen that before. “He had a note in his pocket.”

“A confession?”

“Not exactly. Here.”

He handed me a note in a plastic envelope. It read:

Dear Lord, when Fate jiggles her wet finger in my ear like a little sister, and I knock over jars of girlfriends' grandmothers' ashes and tip over scaffolding I am attempting to scale, when bicyclists clip me in passing and friends' pets die on my watch, what the fuck, you old Dog? I mean, it's hard not to take the spontaneous tumbling of shop displays the wrong way!

P.T.O.

On the other side was written:

Why, O Lord, is it my role in this life to be not just the falling clown, but the falling clown who other falling clowns fall on? In other words, how the fuck is an old lady grabbing onto my arm as she trips in a supermarket characteristic of ME?

(Amen)

Aldo Benjamin

I thought: Aldo, my poor, sad-lucked, kind-hearted fucked-up friend, this desperate and pitiful plea to a God he didn't believe in must really be the end of
the line. I fought back angry tears and berated myself: What kind of friend had I been? I never helped him avert a single disaster. My desire to protect him had always come to nothing.

This train of thought was suddenly derailed by an unexpected event. That absurd prayer set it off: Nabokov's throb, Nietzsche's rapture of tremendous tension, Shelley's inconstant wind, Jarrell's lightning strike, Hazlitt's mighty ferment, Lorca's duende, Dickinson's soul at the white heat, Morrell's deadbeat dad (
who comes through when you least expect it, then disappears when you begin to count on him
), i.e., Inspiration. The idea that compels you to create with the urgency of flushing drugs down the toilet as the police are breaking down your door, or with the adrenaline that comes with stuffing a body into the boot of a car before the CCTV swivels back in your direction. I stood there immobile. The idea was spreading through my body like whiskey. A hodgepodge of passages from
Artist Within, Artist Without
swam in my head:
. . . you are in the business of immensities . . . precision is the next best thing to silence . . . only when you have lassoed multiplicity will there be nothing to add . . . write what knows you . . . to discover the point of your uselessness . . . above all, find your natural subject.

And I had! The last cigarette shaken out of the soft pack of ideas: My sad old friend, who I'd met in 1990—a two-decade gestation period. Other people were mere vapor to me, but I knew
his
inadequacies by heart. No facile invention necessary; I'd give readers the realest person I knew. Of course, his life was anything other than “the way we live now.” Nobody lives like him and lives to tell the tale. I'd tell his tale! I'd curate an exhibition of his foibles and follies. I felt luminous, intrepid, like a correspondent embedded in hell. I was going to make my report. Finally! My natural subject.

“You OK?”

I stood blinking at Aldo's note, trying to memorize it, eyeing the photocopier under the bulletin board in the adjoining alcove.

“Constable? What do you make of it?”

I'll tell you what I'll make of it! Insomuch as a friend is an exploitable resource, and since I can't, it seems, help him anyway, I'll mine Aldo for everything he is, and write about all the terrible things that have happened to him, a small, inoffensive human being who can't catch a break, and how he is somehow complicit in the worldly and supernatural crimes perpetrated against him.
Preliminary title:
Woe is He
. Or
Jokers of the Fall
. Or
Between the Water and the Clay.

“Do you mind giving me a moment?”

I went to the men's room; the reflection of my rapacious face was jarring. My inner voice's faint excited whisper:
This is it. This is it.
Was this it? Was I sure? Morrell says:
Muses lay traps and conjure mirages.
On the other hand:
Some women you have to bed before you can reject them.
OK, I know Aldo told me untold things in absolute confidence but this was
minimal
compensation, the
least
I could recoup for my efforts. Besides, his life could
benefit
from close reading. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, so I would examine it for him. Who else but a best friend could do that?

I opened my notebook and with hardly a moment's thought or hesitation, I wrote:
The weird truth is I've often become good friends with people I originally disliked, and the more I downright loathed the person, the better friends we eventually became. This is certainly true of Aldo Benjamin, who irritated me at first, then infuriated me, then made me sick, then bored me senseless, which led to his most unforgivable crime—occasionally, when in the process of boring me, he'd become self-aware and apologize for being boring. “No no,” I'd have to say, feigning shock at the suggestion, “you're not boring me, please go on.” I sometimes had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.

I stared at that paragraph, and allowed myself a brief shiver of admiration for having expressed something true. The pen was still wriggling in my hand. I had more to say, much more. I closed my eyes and contemplated the daunting task ahead. To write this story would automatically throw me into a head-on collision with the meaning of fate, humanity's, sure, but Aldo's strange specific one too, for I could finally admit what I always knew to be true: He
is
unique, he who seems hell-bent on falling into the same river not twice but innumerable times.

And I could unravel, permeate, explain him.

Senior Detective Doyle gazed at me with a cool, suspicious eye when I came to his desk and asked to personally conduct the interview. Everything about me had become sinister, and he spotted that. “Your mate's having a manic episode,” he drawled, as if being manic was evidence of his guilt.

“I will get him to speak,” I said, and Doyle looked baffled and annoyed.

“You're not hearing me. He's
already
speaking, Constable.” Doyle again
made references to a manic episode; Aldo was either coked up or on methamphetamines or simply out of his mind. Yes, he
was
talking, he repeated, but not about the crime per se, this wasn't a confession, and he wasn't saying anything incriminating, though what he was saying was certainly very disturbing, and Doyle had left Sergeant Oakes in there to keep an eye on him. “In any case, Mr. Benjamin has been specifically asking for you to be present for the interview,” he said with a light snarl.

“Thanks for mentioning it,” I responded, then moved briskly to the interview room, as if all the nation's novelists were hurrying to beat me to it.

I entered to see Aldo, greyhound-thin, gripping the undersides of his chair as if he and the chair were hurtling through space. His hair was wet and combed back and looked like a kind of mold, and he was emitting an uneasy vigor and chattering like a small mob, explaining how he was ashamed of his long-held desire to see a mounted policeman thrown by his own horse. He turned away from Sergeant Oakes to give me a furtive hand gesture that looked like an aborted thumbs-up, but his eyes only lingered on my face long enough to convey vague disappointment, as if for a split second he thought I was coming in to tell him his bath was ready. Though the room was ice cold, and Aldo was in short sleeves, his face was sheened with sweat. Now he was saying he was tired of thoughts so self-pitying he believed he could hear God throw up in His mouth.

Sergeant Oakes busted out a nervous laugh. Talk about your captive audience; Aldo knew we
had
to listen to everything he said in case it could be held against him in a court of law. He was disgusted at all the horrible pretend laughing he'd done in his life, he said now, and was upset that he could derive pleasure only from the sight of the dogs of two introverts attacking each other in the street. Whether he
was
in the grip of a methamphetamine high still in its ascendance or having some kind of manic episode, he was shifting in the chair and shaking violently and picking at the skin on his forearm as if ants were strutting on it, seemingly set upon the herculean task of emptying his head, like in some mental stock-clearance sale where everything must go. He said he was depressed that if we ever advanced to a one-world government it would only mean that national wars became civil wars, and he was enraged how nobody admitted that the single most irritating thing in our whole society was being the captured person in a citizen's arrest.

He tilted his chair backward and said it was a further annoyance that a life strategy of minimizing regrets only winds up guaranteeing you suffer the maximum. I wanted to carry him out of there and put him to bed, and I wondered how far I'd get if I picked him up in my arms and made for the exit. Now, as he tilted back so far the chair looked like it would topple over, he said he was sick of watching so much porn it was affecting his genome. He brought the chair slamming down on the cement floor. He was revolted, he said, at how he was so impatient for the population to drop below replacement level he could barely contain himself. And he was grossed out that our only evidence of moral evolution was how we'd learned to forgive ourselves
during
the sins we committed, and not wait until after.

It was at this moment I noticed that he'd fixed his eye on some point in the room. What was he looking at? He was saying that it was very telling that the only time people looked serious was when they were counting money or watching their child vanish around a corner. Sergeant Oakes nodded at me morosely and I had the impression he'd developed a stoop since I'd first entered. I thought: It is us, not Aldo, who will crack under interrogation. Aldo swiped vaguely at his own face. I traced his focal point to either a tiny crack in the plaster on the wall or the fly beside it. He said there was a reason that “the kindness of nature” isn't a saying in any language. That people mistreat dogs because they can't handle that type of devotion. That we're not the worst civilization ever to blight the earth, but we're the most sensitive.

It struck me that every time he slammed the floor after titling backward, he edged the chair a few millimeters forward. He was saying that history isn't a litany of peoples and civilizations, it's a series of clinical trials. That the first sign of madness is inattention to Don't Walk signals. That the most significant impact of the digital world on our lives is we no longer wait for people to take their photographs when we want to pass in front of their cameras. “We just fucking go.” Aldo rocked back and forth with metronomic rhythm and slammed the chair again, inching forward. Now I understood. He was in all probability aiming to lunge for the gun in Sergeant Oakes's holster in order to turn it on himself. Would he know how to take the safety off? If we intercepted him in time, would it be misinterpreted as an attempt on
our
lives? He said it was downright inscrutable that most people he met were as self-defeating as child pornographers who put their incriminating hard drives in for service.
Now he seemed about to make a move. He said we are always exaggerating when we praise someone's integrity, and that when you have poor intuition,
everything
is counterintuitive. Aldo's chair was less than a half-meter from Sergeant Oakes, who hadn't noticed, busy as he was kneading his own left shoulder. Aldo said he was sickened that he only fell into lockstep with his fellow man during earthquakes and when the Olympics were held in his home city, he was sad that a return to naiveté would require substantial damage to his prefrontal cortex, and thought it plainly weird that nobody but him realized that Islamophobia is merely repressed harem envy. His voice, I thought, was now communicating nausea and transmitting it directly to the listeners. He was sorry he couldn't articulate if pressed why he was so sure his life was superior to the life of a cow, and loathed the phrase “a serious, but stable condition,” which implied a generally positive outcome while in reality meant someone's life was probably ruined, that they were to be a paraplegic, or a quadraplegic. “Take it from me. Serious but stable is nothing to cheer about.”

Aldo's incremental inching had now put him in arm's reach of Oakes's holster, and when he made his move I intercepted him with a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back into his seat. Oakes wasn't sure what had just happened, and stood up at high alert with one hand balled into a fist and the other on his weapon, signaling me with urgent eyes his readiness to lend a hand in physically subduing this bona-fide danger to society.

I sat opposite Aldo and said I was going to conduct the interview, and that while the recording device was active he should remain still.

A long, distressing moment followed where his lips were sucked into his mouth and he trembled with intense concentration, as if he were trying to hold in his own odor. Aldo toasted me with his Styrofoam cup of water and spilled most of it down his chin, and in one long breath explained that what was worse than being treated like a statistic was being treated like a statistical anomaly. He insisted he had always felt, on any given day, that his worst fears would be realized, not the grave, but an automated bed or a cell. Not a shroud, but bandages or a uniform. Not death, but physical suffering or imprisonment. Nothingness was nothing to get excited about, but agony and incarceration were. That is to say, he had always felt extravulnerable to the whimsy of the microbe, or to damning circumstantial evidence, as in, he said, the results are in, the jury is back, the tests are positive, you've been found guilty, I recommend a course of
chemotherapy, I sentence you to seven years' maximum security; because for him, he said, there had always been two totally separate and more or less autonomous civilizations existing parallel to regular society—the prison society and the hospital society—and he perceived regular society as a narrow bridge with the other two lying on either side, and he'd always been terrified of losing his footing and falling into one or the other, into a world of solitary confinement or of burn wards, of laundry-room rapes or skin grafts, and where he would finally fall—into the horror of the prison, or into the horror of the hospital—was his greatest fear.