Quicksand (25 page)

Shouldn't what?

Live in glass houses. Clearly, I didn't know what the fuck I was saying!

Do you want to take a minute?

I have something in my eye.

They're called tears, Aldo.

Liam, it's just me now.

You still have a ton of relatives, don't you?

No.

On your father's side.

Fuck those cunts.

So you're an orphan. Welcome to the club. You're almost forty.

No parents, no brothers or sisters, no children. Imagine, to never be able to have another incestuous thought!

Aldo, you realize you could easily fall into homelessness? You've the three magical ingredients: mental problems, terrible financial debt, and zero support network. Add alcohol to this mix and you might vanish in the blink of an eye. Well, I want you to know you still have me. Remember what Aristotle said? Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Yes, but that was in an epoch when all other goods meant a clay pot and some terra-cotta roof tiles.

Let's get back to the reason you're here.

Did I mention who I saw, as I was up there on the podium, in the back row sandwiched between manicurists of the deceased?

Stella was there?

And
so
pregnant, standing in a way that was sexy but I knew was bad for her hip. On catching her sympathetic look my heart went out to myself in the worst way. I thought: If only we could fuck shyly again! I hurried through my eulogy and practically trampled the secondhand coffin to make it over to her. She seemed to be aging at half-speed and was a tumult of familiar odors—jasmine and freshly spilled vanilla milk shake and wax bendy straws. “I'm so
sorry; I loved your mother. Let's go outside and I'll watch you have a cigarette in memoriam,” she said, reminiscing on Leila's two-pack-a-day habit, and about how an hour after her last cigarette she would burp up smoke trapped in her lungs. We went outside where the traffic moved in fits and starts as if grazing on the dull surface of the road, and as my mind stumbled over thoughts, Stella placed her hand on my shoulder. It is tiresome to find even compassion erotic. I said, “I guess I should wish you luck for your caesar.” Now we plunged into the vast unspoken reservoir of old pain. The number of people we were mourning doubled, and to prevent the descent of another curtain of awkward silence, she suddenly snapped, “What the fuck happened at the Railway Hotel? My uncle said you just stopped turning up.”

She was annoyed at you.

She was annoyed at my having squandered the opportunity she'd laid out for me. Like most people, Stella wanted lavish praise for tiny gestures of ordinary kindness, just as she expected to be rewarded daily for possessing common sense. I thought: She'd accept a kiss if I forced her, then wipe it off on the way home, so what would be the point? As if reading my mind, she gave me a look of pained uncertainty and I told her Leila was to be buried between Henry and Veronica, a little family reunion in a space I'd gotten her at Waverley Cemetery. It was her favorite. “Waverley's everyone's favorite,” Stella said, which is true. It's a hell of a cemetery. With nothing left for us to say to each other, she swiveled on her heels and waddled away.

So this was the last time you saw Stella before you tried to kill her baby?

I can't believe you just said that to me.

Aldo, we need to get there. How did you know she was having a caesarean?

I assumed that no doctor, in light of her past history, would allow a let's-just-see-what-happens birth plan. I called a certified pediatric emergency nurse I knew, who had friends at the Royal Hospital for Women, who found out on the sly that Stella had a C-section booked for April twentieth.

Why was it so important for you to see the child that is not yours?

Because I love her. Because the world is round. Because of the wonderful things she does. Because, because, because, because, because.

Because?

If she loses this second child then perhaps having lost the first was
her
fate and not mine.

So on the morning of April twentieth you—

Wait up. Where's the fire? A person can't take his own life without tying up loose ends, can he? My original intention was to take revenge, make amends, confront ghosts, and settle scores, but I couldn't be bothered with all that so I focused on one thing: apologies. I wanted to say sorry. So for a whole week I entered the houses of old friends and associates and colleagues and acquaintances in tears and left in tears and admittedly didn't utter a comprehensible word in between.

I'm glad I didn't answer the door.

My farewell was always “see you later.” To say “see you soon” felt like I was sentencing that person to death.

What did you apologize for?

Everything, everything.

What everything?

Everything! I said sorry for ruining your experience of high school; sorry for threatening to fuck you with a monkey's thighbone; sorry for pretending not to see that rainbow that time; sorry for making fun of your grandfather's war record; sorry for asking if your new girlfriend had bird-headed dwarfism; sorry for saying you died in childbirth; sorry for boring you into the arms of death with Stella-related issues; sorry for saying “I've a thought,” then waiting for you to ask me what it was; sorry for not getting to know your children; sorry for summarizing your problems back to you with a smirk; sorry for telling everybody your mantra; sorry for purposefully speaking slowly to prolong the conversation because I was afraid to go home alone; sorry for feigning nonjudgment when I was judging you like crazy; sorry that I accepted your compliment about being a good listener when I was leveraging the severity of your many gag-inducing deficits to persuade you to partake in my schemes; sorry for abusing my knowledge of your weaknesses and habits and sad interpersonal relationships to get you to lend me money; sorry for making informal psychological assessments in brief psychodynamic therapy sessions you weren't aware of having; sorry for looking into your bereaved or incest-surviving or recovering-alcoholic or histrionically emoting or chronically fatigued or prescription-medication-abusing faces and comprehending you for my own ends; sorry for using you instead of helping you understand your true value, for not pointing out you were sixes stalking eights, or sevens
who were once eights while your partners had ascended to nines; sorry I never really helped all you uneducated adults who somehow managed to partner up, procreate, and sustain full work lives with no apparent native language whatsoever and who for the most part test nothing you say against reality and boast that “what you see is what you get,” mistaking it for a positive trait; sorry for stifling raucous laughter and sending you back to your abused families with your firm belief in your own virtue and human goodness intact; I'm sorry for my fluency in bullshit; I'm sorry for you well-thumbed open books who have
no idea whatsoever
that you've had acute depression for thirty years; I'm sorry for flattering you even when it was not in your long-term interest; I'm sorry for allowing myself to be treated like a human security blanket, for forcing confessions through the sinister use of awkward silences, for purposefully not shedding light on your perceptual biases that even blind Freddy could see, for using your personality disorders to my advantage; I'm sorry for sitting back and letting you demonize yourself while I reaped your gratitude and ministered to your agonized souls with a prospectus or bank account number.

How did that go down?

My most resonating indiscretions had all been financial. I came offering love and asking forgiveness, but in the end they just wanted their money back.

So then it was April twentieth and you went to the hosp—

NOT YET. First I had to write the perfect good-bye to pin to my body and take to the final curtain. I remember the night of the nineteenth sitting at the window in my shitty apartment like a fixed idea, thinking how what I could have been I never was, and what I used to be I wasn't really anyway. It was dark outside; there was only a small and puny moon, just an overblown star really, that gave no light to speak of. I could just make out the silent trees moving in the night and the empty kindergarten below, which had gotten me arrested one summer morning for standing naked in my own kitchen. I opened the sliding doors and stepped onto the balcony. At one end of the street a young man was breaking into a car. At the other, a kid throwing a brick through a phone booth. What an unfriendly society, I thought, even our criminals—

Are too antisocial to form gangs.

Are we finishing each other's confessions now?

Is that what this is? A confession?

The moon looked mean now, full of cold rage. I went back inside and opened the fridge and stared at the food rotting in shopping bags before returning to the desk, to the note. Dear World, I wrote, I am not one of those people whose greatest fear in life is being chased down a long corridor by their unrealized potential; rather, mine is of an intruder breaking into the apartment while I am in the shower.

That's the dumbest suicide note I ever heard.

No shit. I was way off point. I tried again and wrote, To all of you who stand poised halfway up the so-called back stairs to liberty but cannot move up nor retreat, I dedicate this suicide note, which, if you are reading it, means I have been murdered—if I have any self-respect—by my own hand.

Pretentious.

Agreed. I couldn't get it right. The neighbors above were doing their nightly dragging of furniture across the floor while twisting a cat's ears, or something like that, making noises so sudden and random you couldn't brace yourself against them, but so regular you anticipated them at all the wrong moments. I switched off all the lights, turned off the clocks, the TV, the stereo, unplugged the microwave and the fridge—anything with an electric hum or a blinking red light. Still, true darkness and total silence were impossible to achieve. The sound of moaning came through the walls. I rubbed my bruised chin that still ached from the previous week when I'd discovered firsthand the perils of asking the neighbors to keep their porn down. I wrote, There's nothing I would do again the same, and if given the opportunity, I would decline the opportunity.

Not great.

But not terrible.

So THEN you went to the hospital and—

Not quite. Before my final breath, there was one essential task I had to attend to.

Jesus Christ. What was that?

Liam, I don't know about you, but I am just plain furious that I
never ever
grew out of the adolescent male mind-set. You know, that if your only tool is a penis, every problem looks like a vagina.

Desire that feels like starvation, I know.

And even when getting it, I was fed up by the act itself: irritated by the unfalsifiable nature of women's orgasms, sick of the logistical nightmare of
craving personal space during intercourse, frustrated at needing fellatio to be silent but too timid to ask the girl to keep the sucking noises down.

So you went out to get lucky?

The Bat & Ball & Chain.

Where's that?

Near Central. It's just your standard carcass of an old hotel. A dozen poker machines, a squalid chamber of doorless toilets, an undersized pool table beside a dance floor, dozens of small tables and chairs filled by men watching women watching men watching television. Normally I go an hour before closing, as prey. Timing is crucial: too early and the predators still have plenty of time to find someone better-looking than you; too late, they aren't in the mood anymore. I drank the first beer quickly, contemplating the unusual paradox. How do you sell yourself when you're the salesman
and
the product?

Tricky.

For medicinal purposes I try to sleep with one woman a fortnight. This never feels excessive when one takes into consideration the other thirteen nights alone in bed—that's three hundred and thirty-nine lonely nights a year—but frankly, it adds up, and in the years since Stella left me I've found, to my own surprise, that I've slept with nearly ninety-eight women, at least a third of whom are furious at me for not having been “The One.”

On the night in question, did you find someone?

Usually I fear that my character flaws are diagnosable at first sight. From the way I cut up the dance floor, I sometimes wonder, can you tell that I'm resistant to change? This time maybe the stench of death was mingled in with my usual odor of desperation and violent sorrow.

So no luck.

Just one last measly fuck before gravetime! That's all I wanted. Is it too much to ask? But I failed to excrete irresistibility. I swaggered unbuttoned from one sweaty drunken lady to another but none sustained eye contact. I felt myself without a human face. I kicked the speaker for its general lack of magic. Then I spotted on the dance floor a large-bottomed woman, pale as a cow's stomach lining, shaky on her feet. I lingered on her periphery until we locked eyes and I gyrated toward her and we kissed, but when she pulled away I suddenly thought that I'd rather die painfully than have another verbal exchange that did not cut a straight path to the heart of human truth, so when she asked
my name I said, “No names,” and she said, “I'm Tracy,” and so I said, “Oh, forget it then,” and stormed outside into the cold quiet and stamped my feet on the empty street. Nobody was around. The moon looked so low and close you could reach out and stick your finger in its eye. Then it hit me: Who gives a shit about her name? I went back inside. She was in the arms of someone swifter who knew well enough to eat what was on his plate. I'd blown it, and I was tired, tired of moving, tired of the body's needs. It was late. I was hungry. Almost everything would be shut. That's what counts for a last meal in the valley of the shadow of death. A fucking kebab.