Quicksand (32 page)

I'm out! I got nothing else! You know the bad luck it takes to get a big toe caught in a mousetrap, but I've done it, I've done it!

You sound stressed.

I
am
stressed. And I know that stress destroys dendrites and neural pathways in the hippocampus, and that stresses me even more. Christ. I need to stand up.

What was that sound?

I stepped on some walnuts.

Was that your knees?

Mimi, I remember your hair. And your lips. And your eyes.

Aldo, I remember your wife had left you.

I think it was for the best. I mean, for my own safety.

What do you mean?

Well, when you think about it, the phrase “until death do us part” inevitably serves to foster murderous fantasies in one or both parties. That clause is a clear inducement to murder! Am I the only one who can see it?

So you're still single, then.

The materialistic, sex-withholding, cynical women of this superficial town routinely sense my low expectations and then lower themselves to fit under them. And not only that, but I've completely run out of sexual fantasies. The actresses are too stupid, the models too thin, the waitresses too mean, the shop girls too bitter, the nurses too depressed, and the regular civilians look like they haven't had a good night's sleep in years. How is one expected to masturbate in this society?

Is this an exaggeration of the real you or a toned-down version of the real you? Or is this the real you?

That's a good question.

They say if you want to be loved, be lovable.

They also say practice what you preach; that's why I'm preaching threesomes.

You're a fucking riot, you are.

I need hosing down, it's true. Do you have kids?

No.

Are you in a relationship?

I overheard my last boyfriend refer to my vagina as any port in a storm.

Shit. I suppose the vertical decline of your fertility is an issue. Do you
want
kids?

It's so late in the game.

I guess at our age the decision to have children is an expression of the fear of not having children.

You know what I think?

Yes, I do. You think living in such a fast-moving civilization means your dreams are obsolete before you have a chance to give up on them.

I think you called to ask me out and you haven't gotten around to it yet.

Why do you think it's such a taboo to conclude that life isn't worth living?

I don't know. It just is.

Ten thousand women raped, six thousand children molested, twenty-five thousand men beaten to death. Is there one earth day that isn't like that?

I suppose not.

Then how can you tell me life is worth living? Besides, the question isn't “is life worth living” but “is
my
life worth living.” You compare your best day to your worst, and find it balances out quite nicely. You don't compare your best day with the worst day of a victim of sex slavery!

Don't fucking yell at me!

If you told people with absolute authority that in ten years every child will be boiled in hot lava, I'm absolutely positive that people would still churn out babies. That's the human race for you!

You sound like someone who got woken up at the wrong time. Are you sure you meant to ring me specifically?

Tell me what you think of this equation: Having already reached my potential five years ago, plus eternity,
plus
a human mind that cannot fathom the infinite, equals madness, right?

Are you saying you believe you—

Feel every picosecond and will continue to do so ad infinitum.

You think you're actually—

If I was destined to die, shouldn't Jeremy's mother, the fortune-teller, have prognosticated some species of void?

What are you saying?

What if from birth I had come down with, that is to say had contracted, an exceedingly rare case of—I can't believe I'm saying this out loud—
immortality
?

That's crazy.

Yet what is the inability to cause the irreversible cessation of one's core physiological function if not
immortality
? And what is the time value coexisting with that inability if not
eternity
? What if the end of consciousness is our common disease, and what if someone was immune, or had built up resistance to the disease? And what if that someone was me?

I'm hanging up now.

In the face of forever, the contours of one's life slacken and become not just poorly defined, but permanently resistant to definition. I feel sick. I cannot meet the basic prerequisites for death! How embarrassing! I've stolen fire from the gods, without meaning to!

You think you're invincible—

I'm not saying I can't be hurt. I can. That's the problem. There's no freedom in
my
immortality, it just makes me
more
vulnerable to pain and suffering. Imagine the setbacks and dangers that I'll be susceptible to! I might get a thousand-year migraine, or be a few hundred years bedridden, or contract dementia and be combing over precarious memories every morning forever. Or what if I were to be decapitated? Or sentenced to life imprisonment? Death is our wedding with the abyss and I'm the only bachelor in town. This is a sickness. I'm sick. I'm incurable! I'm a candle that can never sputter out! I can break but I can't erode! I can crumble but not disappear! As time expands, space shrinks. The world is suddenly infinitesimal, every minute a tyrant. I could do anything! Get into any amount of trouble! Or I could do nothing! Make no sound or movement! It makes not the slightest difference!

I can't understand a single thing you're saying.

And I can't understand why masturbation is called self-abuse. It's the only nice thing I've done for myself all week!

Traditionally, who likes hearing this kind of crap?

Traditionally, you should know, I've gone for girls with page-boy haircuts and a high-lesbian intelligence. Actually, wait. That used to be true. Now when I see a woman I think, if I had paid a thousand dollars for a high-class escort and
she
turned up at my door, would I feel like a satisfied customer or would I feel short-changed?

You actually think that?

Let me put it this way. I'm way too old for the raging hormones of adolescence, and yet, and yet, I can't pass a woman on the street without imagining bending her over a bar fridge, a plinth, or a reception desk—it's an incredible drag.

You're a monster.

Are you looking at the moon?

I've just worked out why you called.

I thought I'd be the first to know.

You want someone to like you for who you were before you became who you are now. You want someone to like you retrospectively.

I think I called at the right time.

Do you now?

Sometimes all you need in life is good timing. I almost never have it. I think I'm actually proud of myself.

Don't be so sure.

True. I'm always misjudging circumstances. Like the time I went for a job interview and the manager asked what would I say is my greatest asset and I answered: I can sleep anywhere!

Aldo.

Yes, Mimi?

Let's meet.

Your Honor, it was three in the morning when we met outside the often violent Coogee Bay Hotel. The night was cold and the moon thin and transparent, just barely in the sky. I spotted her moving as if she hoped to kill something underneath her heel with every step, wearing jeans tight enough to stop circulation, and that, I gruesomely thought, would need to be cut off in an emergency. I felt like a gravedigger resting on his spade.

—Hi, she said.

—There's nothing worse than lonely people who find each other and fail to connect, but no pressure.

With the salty wind like shadows of ghosts advancing from the sea, and
the palms swaying, I took her in: The deceased was leggy and nearly as nearly beautiful as I remembered, with high, pushed-up breasts, her signature wild hair, and cannibal eyes glowing in the dark. We seemed overawed by each other and were both suffering the embarrassment of mutual attraction. Our faces were close together now, lips almost touching, but we had not yet kissed. A group of skinny men ran along the beach, the echo of their conspiratorial voices drawing us even closer together. Mimi wrapped her arms around my neck and I tasted cigarettes in her hair; we stood, cheeks together, almost-kissing in the unbroken silence for uncountable minutes. I tell you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is eerie and unbelievably erotic almost-kissing a stranger in the dark.

—What are you thinking about? the deceased asked.

—Our retirement years, how it might be lovely to pool our superannuation, move to Byron Bay, and then die within twenty-four hours of each other—one from heart failure, the other from grief.

What's that? OK, Mr. Impatient, I'll get to the point. And why shouldn't I? The point is fantastic.

Rain may or may not have been falling. The deceased pressed her body heavily against mine and I could feel her silken lashes against my cheek and our faces did what faces do before we hurried back to her place to begin—as you're so fond of saying—
a sexual relationship
. Is that concise enough for you? May I at least describe her residence, or would the prosecutor like the jury to have no sense of place or setting?

Along a dull stretch of highway, Your Honor, north through hills and scrubland, off a desolate coastal road that winds along the cliff's edge, there's a narrow lane, and at the end of the lane, obscured by wild garden, stands a house hidden in the shadow of an enormous camphor tree. I stepped out of Mimi's van into the wet morning; the earth was soft and everything shiftless and breezy. I followed the deceased through the front door of this ramshackle house into a large open room with ocean views, filled with pandemonium: There was a lanky man with shriveled arms furiously turning over couch cushions while a girl in overalls said, “Warm, warmer, now cold, colder.” A Japanese girl drawing a guy with white dreadlocks cutting his toenails; bodies strewn on mildewed furniture,
heads in laps, resting on groins, the shape of multiple carcasses twisting in a single hammock; carpets stained with paint and cigarette ash; candles melted down onto wine-stained tablecloths; guitars strewn on the Ping-Pong table; street signs and broken chairs, dried paint tubes, stiff unwashed brushes, and a piano on which you knew that some son of a bitch would soon be playing “Chopsticks” or “Piano Man.” The atmosphere was vaguely thoughtless and erotic. It smelled of cats and kebabs and turpentine. I tripped over a ukulele. A laughing woman was giving a haircut to a dog with stitches in his coat, while sugared-up children ran wild around them, eating paint that most certainly contained lead. I asked, What the hell is this place? A squat? A commune? Mimi said, It's an artists' residency. The Hobbs Foundation. One of seventy now across Australia. Here we have mainly painters and sculptors, a couple of poets.

The children were running in circles and throwing shriveled apples from a still life.

—Is there an actual parent around here? I asked.

—Plenty of societies, like the Spartans, got by just fine raising children as a society.

—Sure, I replied tersely, if you count their decline and eventual extinction as “getting on fine.”

Each room was crammed tight with easels and canvases and paints, and smelled of human sweat. I had the impression I couldn't brush against a curtain without contracting hepatitis C. I heard dogs barking, but that turned out to be on the stereo.

Sidebar, Your Honor: What do I know about art? I was never an artist myself, even though as a child I knew that to ask someone why they were in a bad mood when they weren't in a bad mood would put them in a bad mood—sometimes I did that just to change the energy in a room. And then, when I was older, it was a reliable pleasure to tell a newly formed couple they looked like brother and sister, and watch the spark of sexual chemistry flare out. Of course I knew the basic archetypes: bald vigorous Spaniard type vs. tormented Dutch ear-slicing type; the rejectionphobes vs. the rejection fetishists; those who put anything they daub or scribble up for sale vs. perfectionists who warm themselves on painting bonfires. Otherwise, it was Mr. Morrell who'd taught me everything I knew to this point about art as a profession: The best artists are disillusioned by eight thirty in the morning; the only perfection possible
is to never begin; without context, a high-priced and much-feted conceptual masterpiece turns back into the embalmed shark or garbage pail that it is; artistic genius is often linked with insanity only because free time is the key factor in exacerbating mental illness; most artists are easily offended, save empathy for their work, but parcel it out sparingly in their lives; they cultivate animosity toward their audience and vehement contempt for their patrons. In short, as Mr. Morrell elucidated, they are a beloved, magnificent, obstinate race of snake oil salesmen. Now that I think about it, Mr. Morrell is the reason why I'm suspicious and even fearful of artists as a species, so when Mimi made brief introductions—Everyone, this is Aldo. Aldo, this is everyone—I braced myself. Good thing I did. Hi, they said. I'm Frank Rubinstein. I'm Nick Whiticker. I'm Eve Fairbanks. I'm Dan Wethercot.

—Why is everyone telling me their full names? I asked Mimi.

—They want to see if you've heard of them.

The onslaught continued: I'm Maria Hamilton. I'm Tristan Conrad. I'm Louise Bozowic. I nodded with a rigid smile and eyed the males in the group. Who had fucked Mimi? Who wanted to? Who would after I left? Was the coward who plastered pornographic posters huddled among them? Now I wonder, was there a murderer among these artists? Shall we add them all, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to the list of possible suspects?

Mimi led me into her bedroom; it was like the inside of a shantytown. We kissed again, and the deceased unbuttoned my shirt and registered shock at the sight of my scarred torso.