Quicksand (3 page)

The previous year, my big sister Molly had been crossing the street when she was struck and killed by a junior police officer during a high-speed chase on the Shortland Esplanade in Newcastle's East End. The judge asked if we wished to prepare a victim impact statement, but my mother had difficulties
expressing herself without plagiarizing another mother's grief. Since we all wanted Probationary Constable John Green to suffer the way we had—or at least receive the harshest possible sentence—I agreed to try my hand at writing the statement. Over a long, queasy night I wrote how Molly's death constituted
an anti-miracle
and that we had become
axes and wood, chopping ourselves to death
and since the hit-and-run, we felt
ashen, hexed, skewed
,
exploded
and
downsized in heart and soul,
and feared
roads, cars, telephones, rain, birds
and had
full-blown panic attacks in the presence of sirens and police strobes and fading taillights
and dreaded the sight of
braids, orthodontics, low-set ears,
anything that reminded us of Molly:
halter tops, out-of-date perms, women,
and those
men she would never marry
—
that is to say, all men . . .
It occurs to me now that Probationary Constable John Green's eight months' minimum security sentence—my earliest taste of success—solidified me on the path of the artist (or, as Morrell often writes it, the
a
rtist, with a very small—8 point—lower case
a
). It was in a naked bid to prolong the limelight that I'd shown Morrell my statement with the proclamation that I was thinking of turning it into a short story for the
Sydney Morning Herald
Young Writer of the Year competition—that's what had excited him into this impromptu unsolicited after-class master class. (My statement also, incidentally, won me my parents' grudging approval. Prior to the constable's conviction, they had been less than encouraging of my early teenage creative efforts: short stories on my father's same-sex infidelities, then on Molly's body dysmorphia, and finally a one-act play in which I portrayed them as rapists and made them play themselves in the production.)

Morrell continued. He wrote:
Forget the pram in the hallway—the only enemy of art is unrelenting sexual thoughts.
And:
The first step is admitting all your novel-writing fantasies begin with you typing the words “The End.”
And:
The good thing about being a beginner is you know precisely the value of your work (zero cents).
He suddenly lurched and fondled the louvered shutters that hung by a thread, in order to intercept Aldo, who was peering in through the smeared window, doing a masturbation pantomime. Morrell waved at him as if from a parade float, and wedged the window open slightly to allow his voice to carry outside. Aldo leaned his elbows on the sill and made a disdainful face I studiously ignored. In truth, I felt grateful and flattered to be the focus of Morrell's attention in the semester before he quit teaching to pursue his painting career, as he always threatened to do, even when I had to endure an advice spree
taken verbatim from his own 211-page, single-paragraph hectoring screed, that Aldo thought impenetrable and hypnotically dull but I appreciated and not just because the word “masturbatory” occurred twenty-seven times, and that he now copied from onto the blackboard, writing to
not freak out when your one-trick pony dies
, and that a writer, if that's what I was to become, needs
a sniper's awareness of landscape + a sinister impulse to show reality its own face + a hunter's sense of hearing + a bedridden personality type + a consumptive's reading habits + an interior life like an iron lung + an open mind in regards to lumbar support + a visceral connection to the written word + a keen interest in capitalizing on the tragedies of your time + a capacity to live without exterior validation + an irresistible curiosity that gives you the moral right to eavesdrop or stalk almost anyone on the planet earth.
Each phrase he aggressively underlined until the blackboard made the classroom look like the situation room in a madman's HQ.

All this time I was inert, with an increasingly befuddled grin. From the window Aldo said loudly, “Jesus Christ Almighty,” and walked away. Morrell now began to write aphorisms I didn't understand.
You can be wounded by applause but some standing ovations are lethal.
And:
There but for the grace of God goes God
, as well as explicit warnings that seemed to prod and twang my entire nervous system:
As soon as you've found yourself a fallback career, you will fall back on it. Whatever you do, don't gain an unrelated skill or gather specialized knowledge or master any kind of profession—once you're “qualified” you're on the hook for life.
His gluey eyes seemed to hold melancholy secrets when he said, “Most importantly, Liam, you have to find your natural subject.” “What's that?” I asked. He smirked, slapped a nicotine patch on his arm, and said, “That's for God to know and you to find out.” This was the last thing he said that afternoon. I remember Morrell stepping on his polarized sunglasses, which had tumbled from his top pocket when he'd bent down, and then doing what looked like calf stretches as he examined the blue bucket brimming with old rainwater that had leaked through the black mold in the cork ceiling, that the Parent Teacher Association was up in arms about. The most dominant aspect of this memory, however, was how strangely at ease I felt alone with Mr. Morrell that afternoon, so devoid of my usual acute paranoia of authority figures I didn't once hallucinate the sound of a zipper when my back was turned.

In the decade after high school, on the hunt for my elusive natural subject, I wrote copiously about my childhood fascination with spontaneous combustion, quicksand, piranhas, the bubonic plague, time capsules, the equator, stowaways, giant squid, narcolepsy, and a mission I undertook when I was seventeen to seek out our city's hunchbacks (we have two). I also wrote about my several love affairs with bisexuals of both genders, and how I wound up doing the kinds of jobs usually taken by illegal immigrants or prisoners on day release—that is, how I started at the bottom and worked my way sideways, from dishwasher in an Italian restaurant to dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant, from cashier in a sporting goods store to cashier in a pet store, and on and on, manning hotlines, donning fast-food uniforms, turning back people who'd wandered in to use the restroom, waiting for customers to ask directions to our competitors, barely tolerating my coworkers' we're-all-in-the-same-boat faces, and following the orders of bosses who seemed to have no stomach for nooses or razor blades so were trying to kill themselves by their general attitude. The problem was twofold: Nothing I wrote was any good, and living my own life vicariously had a cool, distancing effect. Instead of relationships I had exploits; instead of affairs I had escapades. I began to suspect that in my soul, something sinister and carnivorous had replaced curiosity, and I had purposely sought out an itinerant work life and found inappropriate men and women to fuck and nuzzle in cheaply decorated bedrooms just for the material. The unexpected exclamation point to this era came the morning after a one-night stand with a pale-skinned waitress with a barcode tattoo who called me a star fucker as I tried to sneak out the door. I turned and said, “What does
that
mean? Who's a star, you?” Apparently she'd been on a TV soap for a season and assumed my interest was based on her “celebrity.” When she realized I didn't know who she was she cracked up laughing, which I thought was pretty irresistible. Her name was Tess, and eleven months later I found myself a married man in a delivery room tensely gripping her hand in a too-late-for-an-epidural situation as she was upstaged by the real star's grand, urgent entrance. As Tess wept, holding our brand-new raging red baby, Sonja, I remember detecting underneath my love, shock, and awe a well of pressure in my chest and the certainty that if I didn't succeed in my writing now, it would forever remain a hobby.

My signed copy of
Artist Within, Artist Without
had become my veritable bible and gave me plenty of conflicting advice, such as:
Muses inspire but also violate—innocently, like the kissing bandit; or horrifyingly, like the granny rapist
, and:
“Inspiration of the muses” is the “only following orders” of the creative act
, and:
When you're looking for Ideas just remember: People often die straining on the toilet.
It was in this confusion that I decided to take as my subject this three-pronged family of mine, that moved to an industrial suburb and into a small apartment with a rusting two-door Celica in the grassy yard and flying cockroaches in the living room and a Juliet balcony haunted by wet crows. Yet as the years passed and I wrote about the sour, stubborn screams of early childhood or the dripping tap of marriage or anything else for that matter—my nation's catastrophes and blood-orange sunsets; its old-timey genocides and Salvation Army bin fires; the New Australia, how there hadn't been a stoic among us for fifty years—I knew I still hadn't found the holy grail, my natural subject.

Moreover, whenever I was in mid-creation, a phrase from
Artist Within, Artist Without
would eviscerate me; I had repeatedly failed to structure an invented story in a convincing or original manner, and I could not, no matter how I tried, come up with engaging plots, write realistic dialogue or convincing characters, therefore when I decided that the traditional, conventional novel was a contrived and predictable anachronism and I should no longer waste my time with it, Morrell's work snidely castigated me:
An artist's theory of art is always founded on his shortcomings as an artist, his passion for that theory in direct proportion to the severity of his failures.
When I tried my hand at disrupting expectations of linear narrative and wrote one hundred pages of fragmentary scraps, random paragraphs that could be arranged in any order, I came across this quote:
Only when one is disappointed with the quality of one's content does one develop an exaggerated interest in form.
I had told myself I was being extraordinarily daring, but Morrell's book said:
Most times people talk of artistic risk, they are referring to commercial risk. Not “Will this succeed?” but “Will this be purchased?”
When out of pathetic desperation I attempted a pastiche of my favorite writings, often drifting into outright plagiarism, I found the putdown
Only those with no personal stamp do not believe in copyright.

My future lay behind me. I was thirty years old and had been unspooling for more than a decade and was in the perpetual doldrums about my not-for-profit
days and nights, envious of Tess's actor friends who had already abandoned their dreams and “grown” and “changed” while I watched myself metamorphose annually into the same thing I was the year before. To make matters worse, the relentlessness of parenthood—the unending string of sunrises, interminable housework, and separate schedules—seemed to be getting the better of us. Maybe that was why, when our paths did cross, and not just when I came home to find I'd been tried in absentia for some domestic crime or another, it was my impression that Tess had started luxuriating a smidgeon in my failures. Maybe I was just hypersensitively overinterpreting clues, but everything suddenly became deeply significant: the night she coerced me to plug my nostrils with Snore Less Nasal Cones; the day I asked her to scratch my back, and she left scars. And I'm pretty sure, though I can't prove it, that she stole my wedding ring in order to accuse me of losing it. At the same time, Tess's aura of self-sufficiency strengthened. Her Pilates classes, intended to rid herself of her pillowy post-baby body, turned her into a certified-organic fitness junkie; she weaned herself off shoplifting, made new friends, returned to university. It was like we'd boarded the same train but I'd wound up on an uncoupled carriage, stationary on the tracks. My grip on her was loosening and the more she slipped away, the more I realized I loved her; and the more I loved her, the more she seemed to lose interest in me. On the night of my thirty-first birthday I got so drunk I couldn't find my own mouth, and tiptoeing into a household of light sleepers, I slipped into the guest bathroom where I often went during dinner for a minute of mute howling. Through the window, a piebald moon cruised the sky. I fished
Artist Within, Artist Without
from the wastebasket where Tess had thrown it, accusing me of being unnaturally attached to this old teacher “with no pedagogical value” who lectured about art but had never produced a body of artistic work. I could see her point; Google told me that Morrell had still not followed up on his threat to quit teaching in order to paint, but I was reluctant to relinquish this textbook that I used as a kind of alternative I Ching. I desperately flicked through, looking for a lit path through the darkness. And on page 86 I found this:
When you begin a work, keep expectations low. Anticipate that you will be like the new groom who unexpectedly returns home from his honeymoon a widower.
That advice was a windfall; as always the book seemed to speak directly to my particular psychological impediments, this time my
debilitating perfectionism. It inspired me to begin again. One last shot. But what would I write about?

Then, on page 99, this:
If stuck, descend to the floor of the abyss and exhume the idiosyncratic horror that made you.

That was it. I would write about Molly's death—turn my victim impact statement not into a short story, but a novel! But rather than the point of view of the grieving brother, I would get into the head of the murderer, the young cop. And for that I would do research. I'd interview policemen. Or better: I'd fuck policemen. Or better still: I'd join the Police Academy!