Quicksand (22 page)

A single personal highlight: In the late afternoon I coast on a small clean wave close to shore. Though I feel like a child riding a pedophile's back, and the ride lasts all of four seconds, I'm still mildly pleased and ready to quit while I'm only behind. When I go back out, Aldo's sea-shaken, slackened body is sprawled on the board.

“We done?”

“Not quite.”

For some reason I allow this farce to continue, and when Aldo catches a wave to shore himself and I shout bravo, he admonishes me. “There's nothing more depressing than a triumph of the human spirit.”

Frankly, his whole peevish demeanor is pissing me off.

“So really, why are we doing this?”

He wants to share a destiny with a starfish, or be swept away? Has this something to do with Mimi, a way to remember the dead? One thing is clear. He's making his own rites of passage on the fly.

“Hey, tell me something,” I say.

“I miss star jumps.”

“That wasn't my question.”

“Shoot.”

“Your religion.”

“What about it?”

“Before
prison, you sort of represented a vociferous brand of God-hating that pretty much called for a violent overthrow of the human need for spiritual comfort.”

“You were in the courtroom. You heard my testimony. I know it's hard for an atheist to accept, but even though He is nonexistent, God is irreplaceable,” Aldo says. “In lieu of accepting the stale knockoffs on offer, one must reinvent Him or remain forever unfit for active duty.”

“Man, I really wish I had my pen.”

“Anyway, don't you remember when we first met? I was a deep believer.”

“Oh wait, you mean in Apollo?”

“People not only want you to believe, they've already got the God all picked out for you.”

“That's not religion, that's mythology.”

“
Now
it's mythology. It was religion at some point. Sometimes I think about those old gods who came down and meddled in human affairs. Maybe
they
crashed my car.”

“Way to take responsibility.”

Aldo makes a gastroenteritis face. “And maybe they descended to earth and took my form at your party.”

“What part— Oh. That party.”

“Have you ever felt so large you can't be expanded yet so small you can't be compressed?”

“Nope.”

For another hour we lie on the strange symmetry of the waves, not talking, watching the setting sun reflected on the wet sand. At one point I go to get our phones and cigarettes from the beach, carrying them back out in one of Aldo's ziplock medicine bags. On the flat we lie on our boards smoking and taking photos of each other. Occasionally Aldo catches a wave but he seems content to just lie there. It's the end of the day and even my ears are sunburned.

At sunset I say, “Let's go in.”

“A few more waves,” he says.

My feet are growing numb. The wind has died down and there are no waves of consequence, just the general meander of the sea. The darkness that comes with the vanishing sun seems thick and slippery, and our boards slosh in the quiet sea that slobbers at the shore, regurgitating brown sand.

“Now?”

“Not yet,” he says, with a look in his eye.

A crescent moon ascends majestically like a silky white eyebrow raised in surprise. The sky darkens completely as the sun disappears behind the cliffs.

“Last drinks, gentlemen,” I say.

“Five more minutes,” he says.

The night pours down and we float on the water with moonlight dancing on the foam. Baby waves keep us moving.

Lulled by the hypnotic currents, we keep parallel to each other. The ocean is black now, pitiless, cold, and Aldo is up on his elbows, water creeping across his board. The last two remaining surfers head for shore, then stand together on the beach, half out of their wet suits, looking semihuman, facing out to sea.

“Let's go in,” I say.

“You only have to take one look at the moon to know man will never walk on her ever again.”

“Two minutes,” I say.

My skin is tingling from the cool breath of night. We let our boards drift in circles, giving us a tour of our surroundings. Steep cliffs twist up to the stars that burn like sparks against the sky. At one point I'm turned away from the shore, toward the horizon, with the moon cutting a straight path across the sea. I make a mental note of the air, that new-planet smell, the sound of thrashing water against rock. When his board swings my way, Aldo's face looks laminated in the moonlight. He grips the handles tight, lies rigid, and gazes unpleasantly at that desolate island, breathing heavily. The sea is as flat as a lake now. It seems as if we're in a bottle with the cork in. For a moment Aldo mumbles incoherently, then he falls silent and listens for something, like a child hoping to hear a mother's footstep on a staircase. Every ten minutes I suggest going in, but Aldo resists.

“Humanity's common goal is to die with dignity, and ‘dignified' in that context is defined as dying in our own beds, but what if you have a water bed or Spider-Man bedsheets? What's dignified about that?”

“I don't know. Nothing.”

“Right up until his death,” he says, “Henry thought people of good character were those who took cold baths. Until hers, Leila was always presenting me
with fruit as if she were Marco Polo bringing back pasta from the Orient. And Veronica—she was the first person who had a visceral reaction to my face, but she wasn't the last.”

In the dark, you could almost hear his memories crackle like bacon.

He says, “The coccyx is the last bone to decay in the grave.”

“Are you all right?”

He shook his head. “I feel so physically bad all the time I've gotten to the point of not knowing when I'm sick.”

“What's wrong now?”

“Head pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, upper back pain, lower back pain, arm pain, elbow pain, wrist pain, hand pain, chest pain, hip pain, pelvic pain. I've got thermal hyperalgesia and tactile allodynia. Christ, forget it. I'm lashed to the first day of the rest of forever. Get Amnesty International in here. SMS the RSPCA. Reconvene the Nuremberg Trials.”

“I'm sorry for what happened to you.” I realize I hadn't said this before now.

“I know.”

“I mean in prison.”

“Even in a hundred years from now that will be the cause of death.”

“I know.”

“I'm not sadistic, but—”

“That's like that thing racists say. I'm not racist, but . . .”

“Yeah. Like, I'm not racist, but to die and find God in blackface would be hilarious.”

“Exactly. What were you saying?”

“I'm not sadistic but sometimes I think about chemical castration, though only if I get to choose the chemical. Hydrochloric acid.”

Poor Aldo. In the right light you could see his organs fail.

“Hang on,” he says in a cracked voice, “I've got an idea.”

He paddles over to the rocky island and collides with it. He paddles backward and then takes another lunge at the rock.

“Careful! What are you doing?”

He guides the nose of the board and manages to wedge it in a crevice between two egg-shaped boulders. Great curtains of spray cover him as he maneuvers alongside and slides himself across onto the narrow ledge, the rope from the board sluicing the sea. He pulls himself upright and sits on the island's
edge, his emaciated legs dangling in the water. You can't even call him a biped without fiddling with the definition.

With the rope he drags the board onto the ledge and secures it. He slides himself over an inch, stops, then another inch, as if in slow pursuit of something. I can't understand what he is doing.

I paddle over. “What are you doing?”

“I'm staying here the night.”

“The whole night?”

Aldo shakes his head, which doesn't answer my question. The dark is chilling. Using his forearms, he makes a painfully slow, furtive tour of duty around the island, grimacing as he gropes his way along the uneven plateau.

The waves start up again. I struggle to remain on my board. Aldo pushes himself into a hollow under an overhanging ledge and shouts, “Off you go!”

He settles in as if he'd programmed this destination into his GPS at birth. He sits stiffly, as remote and inhuman as the character in one of my earliest short stories from adolescence, “The Elephant Man in the Iron Mask of Zorro.” I say, “You know who you look like?”

He doesn't say anything.

I say, “Are you serious?”

“Go home, Liam.”

It's unsafe for him there. All afternoon I've been watching that island. I swear birds flew in that didn't fly out.

“I can't leave you stranded on a rock.”

“You've got better things to do than worry about me.”

“Yeah, but I'm not going to be doing them.”

“Think of this as like being supportive when your girlfriend confesses she wants to get a breast reduction.”

“What?”

Aldo retreats further still, until his face is consumed by shadow. The waves grow bigger now, tossing me about, and start crashing over the island. Aldo is soaked in his little alcove and he shuffles back out, looking for a better position.

“It's getting rough,” he says.

I stare at him for a couple of minutes then swivel around. For some reason I remember that during high school Aldo had a dog that barked itself to death.

“Hey, remember Sooty?”

“Of course I do. She was
my
dog.”

“What the fuck was up with that bitch?”

He scowls at me, then slithers and drags himself toward what I imagine is the dry center of the rock. He slips and falls into a crevice and pulls himself out. It's tough going. It would be easier if he were a double amputee. What use are those legs to him now? They just get in the way, I think, watching him gimping around the rock in the starlight, peering into crevices, a look of surprise on his face.

“What is it? What are you looking at?” I ask.

“Shit!”

“What? What happened?”

He holds up the palm of his hand—blood streams from it. He laughs.

“What's so funny?”

“Not long ago I was worried about bedsores. Now I'm worried about barnacles.”

“What?”

“Go home, Liam.”

Aldo waves me away one last time. What choice do I have? Other than physically dragging him back to shore, I'm out of ideas. I float on the dark and oily water.

Aldo says, “Coo-eee,” but there's no echo. He's disappointed. “We're too far out, I guess,” he says.

“Seriously,” I say, “I'm heading back to shore.”

“Ta-ta.”

I wait, but he doesn't move.

“OK,” I say. “Nighty night. Sleep tight. Don't let the box jellyfish bite.”

“
Adiós, muchacho.”

I paddle in, the island sliding into darkness at my back, and I make it to shore on jelly legs with the taste of salty foam in my mouth. On the wet sand I sit bewildered and gape at the somber outline of the jutting rock, at the steep waves rising and falling, the white peaks staring out of the dark. I can't see Aldo but for a brief moment I spot the flare of a lighter and the glow of a cigarette.

As the hours pass, the night grows darker still; the headlands dissolve into
it. The whites of the breakers gleam faintly, then they don't. The waves disappear, the rock can't be seen, nothing. It's easy to mistake wind for outright hatred in the night.

I strain to hear if Aldo's calling me but I can't separate land noises from sea noises. I'm shaking from the chilly air as I take a couple more of Aldo's painkillers from his wheelchair bag, lay my head on the cold sand, and close my eyes. The blissful monotony of sleep. I dream we are on our boards, drifting along a dark, wet corridor in crystal-clear waters, looking down at a valley of wet bones buried beneath us. At four in the morning I wake to see the clouds have cleared and the sky is jam-packed with stars and the rock looks huge. Everything seems out of place—as if it has been shuffled, or put through some kind of filter. I can see the shape of Aldo sitting up. He's not moving, and I remember his physical immobility back in that interrogation room, once I had forced him down in his chair, with the charge of infanticide hanging over his head, and the eyes of the gravelly, mute Sergeant Oakes and Senior Detective Doyle gazing at this friend of mine whom they saw as a lost and evil cause . . .

T
HIS IS A TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW
by Constable Liam Wilder of Aldo Francis Benjamin. Also present to corroborate is Senior Detective Jason Doyle and Sergeant David Oakes. The time is three p.m. Please state your full name and address.

Aldo Francis Benjamin. 242 Botany Road, Sydney.

You don't have to lean into the microphone. Age and date of birth?

Sixth of May 1973 was the benighted moment. I'm nearly thirty-nine.

Are you an Australian citizen?

Yes.

Are you a permanent resident of Australia?

Of course.

Are you an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander?

Jesus Christ. For the record, the constable and I are old high school friends. He knows very well what I am and what I am not.

Tell me what happened, Aldo. Why are we here? From the beginning.

OK. Stella had been bugging me to stop starting startups, to drop my dreams of sudden and undeserved wealth, to forget the whole notion of total financial security and just settle down to some steady, gainful employment and repay my debts even if by the tiniest of installments.

I've been saying the same thing since forever, but go on.

Sometime in late January or early February, I acquiesced and found myself in a job interview in the low-lit, empty lobby of the Railway Hotel, trying to look vital, eager, and responsible. I felt none of those things, obviously, opposite her uncle Howard. You've met him.