Quicksand (24 page)

I'll say it quicker. For the record, Aldo's mother, Leila, and her family came from a small Pacific island, the name of which Aldo refuses to utter aloud because he promised himself that once it had been totally submerged he'd forget it for all time. When Aldo was thirteen years old, the highest peak of its tallest mountain was swallowed by the sea; Aldo's father Henry chartered a private twelve-seater and flew him and his mother and his sister over Leila's homeland for the last time. There. That's it.

No, that's not it. The plane schlepping us across the gleaming Pacific was terrifyingly small, the main cabin had patterned curtains on the oval windows and smelled of new carpet and salted peanuts. There was dog hair on the seat. I asked to see the pilot's license and was upset he couldn't produce it. To everyone's laughter, I pulled out of my Adidas sports bag an unused World War II parachute and my nana's spare oxygen tank, and thirty minutes into the flight, the plane begun to shudder, and they laughed even harder when I put the mask over my face, as if they didn't notice the building rhythm of the sudden drops. Both Veronica and Henry were frozen upright in their seats, and I remember wishing I was in the plane alone. I imagined the crash and resented the presence of Veronica—who I had fallen out with permanently the day she hit puberty. Ever since, we'd argued constantly, slapped nicotine patches on each other while we slept, etcetera, and I decided it would be irksome to die with her. There was a moment when the plane cruised as if on a current of air. “That's it! That's it!” Leila screamed. I closed my eyes, not from fear, but because Henry's gift to Leila of witnessing the vanishing of her homeland as it vanishes seemed such an outlandish privilege that I was determined not to experience it. Leila cried out, “Aldo, please look out the window.” I looked. The sun had dipped behind low moist clouds and there, veiled in a light rain, was the land that sprang out of my mother's dreams—a barely visible, pitiful, water-bound peak surrounded by a colossal turquoise sea. The tip of an island so minuscule it seemed impossible that any human civilization once resided there. This was the image she would brood on until her final breath. “It's sad, but nothing more,” I said, as the early moon floated above the vast calm that enveloped the doomed island. I wasn't saying that it wasn't sad.
The pilot had turned the plane to make a second pass when there was an eerie, discomforting quiet, a faint acrid smell and a haze of flickering smoke, and the dim luminosity of silver sparks hitting the windscreen; the plane labored and reverberated and then dropped, and we went into a steep descent. It was as if I were levitating in my seat; there was enormous pressure in my eardrums and everyone screamed and, a moment later, lost consciousness, their heads slumped on their chests. All except me, sucking on my nana's oxygen, my face crushed against the window. The pilot managed to get the plane under control but was flying radically low, and I saw through that oval window an image that penetrated my subconscious with such force I can still feel its moment of entry: the water rising up like blue flames and utterly submerging the drenched peak. That was it: the whole nation slipped away in broad daylight. I was a spectator with no real business seeing what I was seeing. How many generations had lived and died here! I was a solitary pair of eyes, and maybe the ghosts of that nation, unfortunate spirits with nobody to haunt for miles around, attached themselves to me, a diffident eyewitness unwittingly administering a nation's last rites, because it was just after this incident that life turned to shit. Veronica in the bus explosion, and, the year before that, Henry breaking his shoulder in a fall down a flight of stairs. In hospital he contracted an infection at the surgical site, necrotizing fasciitis that led to septic shock and forced him into and out of surgery, and into the chronic pain that, I believe, led to his suicide. The one he orchestrated for a stranger to find, just as I had been conscripted to do in the Railway Hotel.

And we're back. Thank God. So in response, you come to the decision to once and for all kill yourself.

I know I mocked the happy couple at their wedding, but at least the Buddhists know what a bummer being born is. And the future! I mean, do I
want
to be an entrepreneur in a world with an aging population in which the biggest growth market will be human kidneys? Do I
want
to strain my lifespan just to witness the intergenerational conflicts and water wars of the mid-twenty-first century? In any case, I was sick to death of cognitive function. I thought: You can only cure a fear of dying by dying. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt relief—early onset oblivion, I suppose—and took in the inexhaustible hum of the relentless hallway air-con, the smell of the chicken fettuccine blended with the stench of our dead hero's final evacuations. I looked out the south-facing
windows as though in a narcotic stupor and gazed at the squashed rectangle of empty blue and remembered how, when our little dead girl was born, I stupidly tried to console Stella by swearing we'd saved her a lifetime of heartache and pain. Now I turned back to the swinging body and strained to see the rising coils of his human soul—there were none—and I had an epiphany. Two things needed to happen before I could end my own life: One, I could not allow my mother to outlive me, and two, I needed to see that Stella and her new child were OK. Therefore I needed Leila to die, and I needed Stella to give birth.

You needed to see the baby and the corpse.

I even knew how I'd do it, the exact method.

Not hanging!

Please. I'd break into a hospital morgue and lay myself inside one of those terrifying metal drawers and take an overdose of sleeping pills and then slide myself into the wall.

Not bad.

Not bad? An irreproachably considerate death, you fuck.

So that explains why you were at the hospital once Stella gave birth. But you said you needed your mother to die before you did it.

That's right.

So you changed your mind about that.

No, I didn't.

Wait a minute.

Yes.

Aldo.

So that happened.

I think I'm going to cry.

Why not? I did.

Leila died?

A month ago.

YOU DIDN'T CALL ME!

I seem to remember a certain somebody who'd had a gutful of a certain somebody else's toxic influence.

I would've helped you.

Do what?

I don't know. Organize the funeral?

Eh. Took me all of twenty minutes. Because I couldn't bear sitting in some office with the inevitable funereal muzak and the consoling tone of the funeral director, I did the whole thing online with a few clicks; picked the day, the coffin, the flowers, the music, entered the address to pick up the body, another to send the death certificate, and after I'd completed the satisfaction survey, it was all organized. It was held in a building on Cleveland Street; the casket I'd chosen, a highly polished rosewood with full trim, had enough nicks and chips to suggest it was a showroom model, and above it was a blown-up headshot of Leila in her late twenties or early thirties—in any case, taken way before her gizzard-smelling later years. I stood inside the door misremembering several old family friends, citing “face blindness,” while every one of them shook my hand in condolence, but since I associate handshakes with congratulations, I had to resist the impulse to lop off each proffered hand at the wrist. In addition, most were people I owed money to or who downright blamed me for precipitating my mother's death. Not that there was an abundance of mourners. I'd rejected the idea of a standard obituary notice. I mean, why alert grave robbers?

I can't believe Leila's gone. She was so full of life.

Never short on gratitude. Thank you, Aldo, she'd say, for ruining Christmas, thank you for ruining my birthday, thank you for ruining a perfectly nice Sunday lunch.

She had a great sense of humor.

Whenever there was thunder, she'd look at the sky and say, “Great minds think alike.”

She adored you.

As a mother who wanted photogenic children adores a moderately handsome son.

You were always embarrassed by her.

On public transport she spoke like loudspeakers! I remember when I was a child and she asked me to sing a little number for dinner guests, then turned to them and said I had a voice like the castrato Farinelli. And God, the nose she had for magazines hidden under mattresses. In those pre-internet days, her intuition had compass-needle accuracy, always pointing due porn.

I remember her being a very together lady.

That was a front, for visitors. In truth, she hardwired me for panic attacks, by example. Regarding suffering, she really set the tone.

You mean her death? Was it bad?

That depends. Are impacted bowels bad? Where do you come down on septicemia and gangrene?

Jesus Christ.

She had to grapple with her complex reactions to the realization of her worst fears, poor thing. The triumph of having predicted the worst-case scenario vs. the horror of experiencing it. She had her fucking legs amputated, Liam.

Oh Jesus! Where did she die?

Hospice. With a violent lemon odor and obligatory death cat. That final visit the nurse said to me, “The body knows how to die, let the body do its thing,” which I thought made sense, and when I went in she was lying peacefully, dying on her left side. She always had the outward appearance of indifference, which I suspect is the real secret to longevity. That or a genuine desire to die. I made a timid effort to wake her. How was I going to talk to her about the gangrene? She opened her eyes. I said, “What have you got there, soldier—trenchfoot?” She turned her head, not because she couldn't look me in the eye, but so
I
wouldn't have to look
her
in the eye.

Considerate. Did you say everything you wanted to say?

What could I say? What could I ask? What did I want to know about her, anyway? Why exactly she and I seemed to be more afraid than other people? It was always difficult to talk casually to her because her anxiety prevented it, her judgmental heart prevented it, and now her pain prevented it. “Aldo. We're the last ones left,” she said, looking genuinely heartbroken. “So what?” I said. “The very idea almost makes me want to murder us both on the spot.” She managed a laugh—she knew I was merely parodying my old heartlessness. “Besides, I always suspected you were secretly pleased to have outlived your family. In fact,” I said, “I'm the only thing standing in the way of a complete sweep, and we both know it.” She waved her hand at me. Every family has a private language. Ours was mainly gestural. Questions bubbled up, mainly about Veronica, but I couldn't articulate them. The next twenty hours were atrocious. Leila never stopped talking about how she never got to do that European tour of death camps; she'd hallucinate old friends; I moved her from lying to sitting to lying. Even the morphine drip seemed insufficient to diminish her agony. In the end, she died when I was out getting drive-thru McDonald's. I missed the
moment, but you know who didn't? That fucking white-haired priest, remember him, Liam?

Father Charlie?

He also showed up uninvited and unscheduled at her mostly secular funeral service, and spoke about the waves of bad luck that had broken against her. Henry's death. Veronica's death. And the final insult of losing her house due to her son's financial misdeeds. Then the old cunt read a psalm, called her “a deep believer now resting in heaven.” That shit me. I took to the lectern to rebut. Thanked him for so deftly explaining how she had been confiscated by God into his kingdom, where I imagined her talking all throughout orientation and lurking creepily around the apostles' dressing rooms. I said, “We are here today to honor a woman who once took up a whole two-seater couch but will soon fit in an overhead compartment on any domestic commercial flight. Leila Benjamin, a voice-over actress who after my father's death never lost her unbecoming face of perpetual sorrow, and basically spent the rest of her life leaning on God and searching for codependents and working on her résumé and striking up curious friendships with predators of the cloth—an especially qualified congregant, having lost a husband and child, she had the smell of Job on her, poor dear.”

It would have been better to watch you without sound.

“Some of you think I killed her with my demoralizing business snafus. Rest assured, I will avenge her death by dying myself one day, maybe sooner than you think.” Blah blah blah. Then I said something about how she never stopped moisturizing her hands and loved salad bars and kept Kleenex in a shoulder holster and had a hug Veronica and I used to call “the third rail,” and how when she was fifty-five she went out and bought black dye for her hair. I asked her why and she said, I think I'm going prematurely gray. Premature, at fifty-five! She was a woman in denial. Then I improvised the poem I promised myself I would write as a tribute to her love of poetry.

I remember. Leila read poems to you after every dinner.

And before every bedtime right into late adolescence! Though it was more Veronica's thing; she was the poet of the family. Leila always force-fed us French and Spanish poets. Apollinaire. Valéry. Reverdy. Breton. Cernuda. Lorca. Éluard. Jiménez. Hernández.

Let's hear yours.

“Mother. My mother. A monument that stood / for seventy-two winters
before sliding / into the sea. Her face reflected / in her three-sided bathroom mirror, like a Bacon / triptych. She disapproved by stealth. Mouthed / her silences. Captained a family that went / down. Could fashion a crown of thorns out of any / topic. Attentive grudge holder. Bestial temper. Own worst / frenemy. Shut-ins who live in glass houses / shouldn't.” That was it.