Quicksand (21 page)

“What? It's what? What is that?”

“Illness resulting from or influenced by medical examination or treatment.” I looked at him a moment. “That's what happened to Henry,” he said, in a quiet voice. “Poor Henry. Poor Daddy.”

I was startled to see Aldo had tears in his eyes. He didn't wipe them, but rather tried to cram them back into his eyes with the heels of his palms.

“What about me?”

“On the cusp of major depressive episode brought on by intense dread of high school reunion.”

“What about you, then?” I asked. “What's your problem?”

“Jinxed, Liam. I'm fucking jinxed.”

It seemed strange and pitiful to be so coldly clinical about the afflicted around him while saving the balm of magical thinking for himself.

It was then Aldo asked me if I wanted to see the photograph of his baby girl. Oh, heaven knows, now I'm a police officer and I've seen my share of dead babies, but I wasn't then, and anyway, I sure didn't want to see his. But I was also his friend and I had the feeling that he really needed to show it to me.

He held the picture out, for me to take. My best friend's tragedy and it wasn't more than five centimeters from my face. I tried to stop my eyes from working. I couldn't. The baby girl's cheeks were unexpectedly rosy and puffed. She looked like a healthy dead baby. I remarked as much.

The photo slipped out of his fingers and fell through the sewer grating.

“Shit!” We bent down, pressed our faces to the grate, but it was out of reach. “I'll have to ask Stella for a copy. That'll be a fun moment.”

Aldo sighed deeply; I had nothing to add except a sigh of my own. “I think I'll slip away,” he said, but he didn't move. Instead he declared that only a lesion on the brain of God could explain why He so consistently overestimates the resilience of His creation. I said, “I don't believe in a tumorous Yahweh.” He said, “If only I had an explanation.” I quoted Byron: “Who then will explain the explanation?” His head wobbled on his neck as if the tendons were spring-loaded. He asked, “Can an unintended victim of a drive-by shooting be complicit in attracting ricocheted bullets?” I thought: These are the sorts of impossible questions Aldo's bad luck and narrow escapes pose to the lifelong observer of his misfortunes. He then launched on a talking jag, about the grinding suckiness of a capricious universe and the tactical error of being born and feeling like an unexploded ordnance. He talked about how Stella looked at him as if she thought she was going to be raptured at any minute and the rest of us would just be standing there gazing up at her ascension with an idiotic look on our damned faces. He admitted that sometimes, late at night, he googled the name Veronica Benjamin, in the desperate hope that she might have an online presence in the afterlife. He said his heart felt the craziness of animals before a major meteorological event. He talked about how Leila had three personalities, two of which kept the third on as a common enemy. He said, “Last time I checked, there are fifty-one languages on earth spoken by only one person—imagine those poor suckers, that's a lot of pressure.” I felt lanced to the point of mutilation by his voice and glanced at the half-open door leading back into the reunion. He asked, “Hey, am I boring you?” There it was again! His most common, most unforgivable crime—when in the process of boring me, he became self-aware and apologized for being boring. “No, no,” I said, feigning shock at the suggestion, “you're not boring me, please go on.” It was crazy. Even now, after all these years, I still had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.

G
O FUCK YOURSELF,” HE SAYS,
flinging the manuscript in my lap. His expression, however, is neutral. It is as if we are both waiting for his smile to download.

Wind blows sand in Aldo's eyes and I remember he also has a face that attracts campfire smoke. The airy space between us widens and the silence grows unwieldy. Had I actually managed to offend him?

A voice shouts, “Hey! Aldo!”

We turn to see that two young men with weak chins, wearing blue T-shirts and khaki shorts, surfboards and black sports bags under their arms, have emerged from the path. Aldo waves them over.

“I didn't think you guys were going to turn up!”

“Bit of trouble finding the place,” the tall one says. I note he's recently undergone tattoo-removal surgery on his right forearm. “What is this, a secret beach?”

“Magic beach, actually,” I say.

Their faces light up. “Magic beach! Awesome!”

“Mr. Benjamin, feast your eyes on this. Voilà!”

They place one of the boards on the sand. It is like none I have ever seen; it has soft polyurethane handles at the front and an indentation scooped out for his belly, and straps to hold both legs.

“This is perfect.”

“We made it just for you.”

“No charge, Aldo Benjamin. No charge.”

“We were happy to do it.”

This is madness.

“Wait,” I say. “What if you roll?”

“If he rolls,” the tall one says, “the straps will snap with the force of it.”

Aldo holds himself erect while they help him squeeze into an oversized wetsuit. He is so weirdly proportioned, with his bulky arms and withered legs, his Tarzan upper torso and round, hard gut, it's an uncomfortable, awkward procedure. I think: How will he keep his head above water? How will he not drown? How will he manage on his own? The tall one says, “So I understand you're going in too?”

“Me?”

Handing me a wet suit and a surfboard, he says, “You're his friend, aren't you?”

He has me there.

Aldo's all zipped up and aiming his pleading eyes in my direction. This preplanned excursion clearly hinges on me going along with it. I turn to the clean, endless ocean, the blue air sparkling above it, and I'm reunited with old childhood terrors of dumpings, the taste of seawater and my own bile. I suddenly remember that anger is the sea's default setting. Aldo exhales my name as miserably as possible.

Oh, what choice do I have? I say, “I guess it's like Morrell writes:
If not working on your art, time should only be spent on sensual pleasure or charity work.
”

“There you go.”

Once again, thinking of Angus Morrell saddens and oppresses us.

I change into the wet suit.

The short one says, “Know much about surfing?”

I say, “We aim the pointy end at the horizon, right?”

I hadn't been surfing, as I said, for over twenty years. My memories are: falling prey to a bad rip; being grievously assaulted by a wave and dragged from the surf by a hungover lifeguard with faintly diarrheic breath. I don't want to do this, I think, as Aldo lies prone on the board and the two men carry him like a battle-weary king, just like the goddamn Fussy Corpse, to the shoreline.

“Come on!” he shouts.

I shuffle to the water's edge and wedge the long board in the wet sand and stare at the pitiless waves pounding the shore.

“God,” Aldo says, to no one. It suddenly dawns on me that surfing with someone who hasn't been on a board for twenty-five years—and who has paralysis in both lower extremities—might just be unbearable.

A stiff wind is tearing up the sea. Each wave has a face of angry grief. In contrast, the mammoth backlit rock is nightmarishly faceless, solid and anonymous as death. I look over at Aldo, prone on his specialized surfboard, wincing as the waves curl. Why he wants to go out there is unclear, but I can see the creeping onset of stupefying fear and realize he might just flap about on the shoreline until sunset and then hate himself as we head for home.

“Come on,” I say, “let's go in.”

The tall one says, “We'll wait here a bit to see if the board needs any adjustments.”

It's up to me to propel him out into the cold, fast-rising swell. I push him into the shallows and get ready to help him duck-dive under the first wave, but he shrugs me off.

“I'll get through the breakers myself, thanks.”

“He wants to do it himself,” the short one says.

“Let him try,” the tall one says.

“Whatever, bitches,” I say and slam my board on the ocean and lie down on it; it flips over immediately. I stand and turn quickly to see if anyone's watching. They all are.

Aldo shouts, “Incoming!”

A wave breaks on my back and I fall facefirst onto the wet sand. This time when I gather myself, I don't look; I turn and go through the shoals and a repulsive dense bed of seaweed, dive in under the breakers, and make my way out to the flat behind the first peak. I swing the board around and see I'm alongside the rock, which juts up steeply, menacingly, casting rigid, dislocated shadows on the water. I paddle as far from the intimidating, windswept monolith as possible while scanning the shore. There he is, waves crashing into his face; Aldo can turn away slightly, but can't duck their force. He is knocked off. The khaki men hoist him back onto the board. He tries again, this time paddling twice as hard, clawing for his life against the lines of white water, yet is inevitably
spewed up onto the shore. The waves deny him access to their peaks. He's still in the shallows. Even from here I can see his eyes burn from the salt water. This is ridiculous.

“Want some help?” I yell.

“I'll get there!”

I straddle my board in what feels like all seven-tenths of the earth's surface, longing for terrestrial existence. I'd forgotten how much I hate floating on the endless drama of the sea, hate drifting aimlessly as a little door swings open and self-loathing thoughts come out. I'd forgotten how much I hate the ocean spray in my face, the sun like syringes in my eyes, and the prospect of sharks, or shark lookalikes—dolphins—and bluebottle stingers and the odds of wallowing in underwater silence until death. I'd forgotten the total boredom that comingles with continuous terror to make surfing as unpleasant a pastime as there ever was. I pray for long flat spells.

Aldo, who has lost all access to his “brave face,” is still having trouble getting past the breakers. He's trying to duck-dive under the crashing foam, and is so enraged, he begins intense, vein-popping, hate-paddling with his Popeye arms until he finally makes it through the aggressive wall of water and splats down next to me, heaving violently.

Letting his arms hang in the water, he rests awhile, lying limply on the board, waiting to catch his breath. We silently watch the loudmouthed, heavy-jawed, rancorous, and unfriendly surfers beside us who, in my professional opinion, you should never leave an unguarded drink next to; i.e., ladies, these are hunters who medicate their prey. These men with the abs of galley slaves are staring us down. Now that I think about it, Aldo has always made a point of hating subcultures; the whole idea of mobs celebrating their differences from other mobs, of being different
together
, never worked for him conceptually. He even hates the paraphernalia of subcultures: “the tight undershirts of homosexuals, the black hats of Orthodox Jews, the polished boots of skinheads.” So what are we doing here?

“So?” I say.

“So maybe evolution was a backward step. So maybe I want my gills back.”

Full, steep waves march toward the shore every couple of minutes. Aldo is floating beside me, with his lumbering, insensate body's whiff of septic tank. He is equally horrified by the looming rock yet seemingly unperturbed
by the absurdity of us being out here. He looks like he could keep floating for some time.

“Go on then,” I say. “You want to fucking surf, fucking surf.”

“As predicted in the Book of Revelation: And the sideshow shall become the main event.”

“Just move.”

Flat on the board, Aldo starts paddling. A wave lifts him up and he rises with it, but he puts too much weight on the front and the nose of his board goes straight to the bottom, like it's drilling for oil, then catapults out of the fattened waves. I scan churning water for a downturned torso or the international symbol for drowning. Minutes later, through curtains of spray, I see him, back on the crescent of copper sand, readjusting his catheter, conferring with his specialists, conferring with his heart that, even from a distance, is almost visibly throbbing through his chest.

My turn, but I can't seem to swing the board around; I am facing out to sea. When I do manage to turn and paddle to catch a wave, it comes time to get to my feet but I can't do it. I get as far as my knees and stay there; I must look like I'm about to take the holy sacrament. I tumble into the sea and a second later I'm underwater in coffin silence. I think: I only hate golfing more, and I come up in time to see Aldo vanish into the seething white water.

I paddle over and fish him out. “We done?”

He gazes at me as if reading a map that doesn't correspond with the terrain. “Let's get back out there.”

We return ourselves to the snarling waves. Miraculously our boards both make it over. We hyperventilate in tandem.

“Your turn,” he says. “I need a minute.”

For the next wave I crouch and try to imagine little Sonja on my back; no way would I want to fall. But my foot isn't far enough forward. I tumble off, and a cave mouth closes around me, the surge of water sucking me along a secret curve.

The rest of the afternoon continues like this. Feeling both weightless and rooted to every spot at once, with our terrible timing and the sun a holy riot in the sky, blazing onto our shoulders and our backs, each wave arrives tediously, another depressing milestone to be confronted and overcome. Worst of all, any wave we catch seems to angle toward the obstacle, the island, that big bulge
of rock that threatens fractured wrists and snapped necks, punctured lungs and severed spines, and when it is not the waves, the rip is like a tractor beam dragging us toward it. A couple of times I come too close to the rocky island and leap off the board so I won't hit it. In the lulls between carnage, we regroup on shore and I swear at Aldo in a dozen languages. I'm not the only one. While Aldo was fighting the good fight in the liquid trenches, the surfers, aggressively protective of their breaks, were growling and having fun cutting him off. I wade out and tell them to lay off, pointing to the wheelchair at the sand's edge: a seagull is perched on one of the arms. By three p.m. his skin is an angry rash, like he's been rubbed with a steel brush, and in the hours of horizontal surfing he has had multiple mouthfuls of sand and foamy scum. One time he snags himself on a rock and self-diagnoses coral poisoning. This is no good. No fun to watch either. I think: Surfing is primal in the way that human flight is primal, in that it's not.