Quicksand (12 page)

“Amazing!”

Aldo turns to me. “I'm giving you something to write about.”

“I don't do obituaries.”

Maybe, in a complicated spiral of human thought, Aldo figures dying is the ultimate act of self-protection. That is, once dead, nothing further can harm him.

He digs a small hole in the sand and opens the spout of his drainage bag and releases the foggy liquid into it and the air steams with the unique odor of sand and piss. I submerge a weary disgust and am reminded that it's possible for two things to be wrong in parallel—you can be paralyzed
and
have a psychotic breakdown. Aldo stares at me with a bemused smirk. He says, “Sick of revulsion yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Tie my ankle to the board.”

That has accomplice to murder written all over it. Don't I have a duty to stop him, if not as a friend, then as an officer of the law? Of course, as a writer, I am impelled to let him try.

“Aldo,” I say, “think it over.”

I want to impress upon him the obvious fact that things can always be worse, that even though he has been jailed and paralyzed, bankrupt and heartbroken, things can always spiral into an ever darker, ever bleaker hole. In this case, he could transition from paraplegic to quadriplegic. I wouldn't put it past him.

“Now carry me in.”

“I'll get wet.”

“Don't be a pussy.”

It has been many years since anyone has called me that off-duty. The surfer helps lay him facedown on the board then we ferry him to the shore, like pallbearers transporting a coffin.

He says, “I feel like the Fussy Corpse.”

“I can see that.”

Our eyes meet and his reveal some inner explosion of pain he soundlessly bears. I realize he's crying.

“Are you OK?”

“I'm scared. I'm so scared.”

“Don't do this,” I say.

He doesn't say anything, but from his blanched and fractured face I know
he is three-dimensionally projecting every possible negative and catastrophic outcome. The air sparkles around us. The surfer and I lower Aldo and the board flat onto the sea. The water is cardiac-arrest cold. The surfer says, “Good luck,” and retreats back up the beach. I point out to Aldo that medical access will be difficult here, and if anything happens I don't know how I'll get him back up that cliff. He shrugs me off and starts paddling fearlessly to make it over the first wave and immediately slides off the board. I run in and lift him back on. Aldo hauls himself up and paddles out with a facial expression I would call arrogant distress, before sliding off again.

There's no way for him to do it. “Want to give up?”

Before he can answer, a four-footer crashes down and I hear him shout something that sounds like “Fuck me with a hadron collider!” as he vanishes into the sea. All I can see is the fin of the board poking out of a rush of white water. I sprint over literally fearing I will see viscera, and pull him up out of the surf. He is breathless and tripled over in pain. He looks like a drowning man whose one wish is to die in a fire.

When I get him back to shore I say, “At least you tried. You can still hold your head up high.”

“No, it hurts in that position.”

I laugh. He pats down his torso to confirm he is more or less unscathed. He sits up, catching his breath. Then says, “Push me back out.”

“Do you think you're being brave or something?”

His face goes hard with bitterness. “Ever step on an ant and then lift your shoe to see that flattened ant crawling away? Would you call that ant brave?”

“Aldo. You can't do it!”

The surfer bounds over and nearly, but doesn't, high-five us both. He says, “Beautiful effort,” and grabs his board and strides back into the surf, which rears up to greet him. We stare into the hazy glimmer and watch him ease past the breakers and out to the calm flat where he hooks his board 180 degrees and gives us a wave.

Aldo sighs, and asks, “What time is it now?”

“While we're waiting for whatever you're waiting for, can I interview you for the book?”

Aldo gives me his hardest stare. “Sell it to me.”

“I know he's a force of darkness, but Morrell once said—”

“I'm not fucking
kidding! Do not fucking talk to me about that man right now!”

“OK. Let me put it another way. You've let a lot of people down. Justly or not, you've been accused of some pretty horrific things. But you're a good person.”

“A sleeper angel waiting to be activated.”

“I wouldn't go that far, but you do have a strong ethical code, like when we were eating Chinese takeout in the park and you wouldn't let me feed leftover Peking duck to the ducks. Don't you want people to know about that?”

“I couldn't care less.”

“Don't you want people to know how you were such a devoted groupie to your wife that you even became a character witness for a child murderer to advance her career?”

“Meh.”

“Or back in high school, how you told me kids who become magicians to be popular only wind up exacerbating their unpopularity, and then you confiscated my wand and cape?”

“No one will give two shits.”

“Remember what you told me you said at your sister's funeral?”

“Fucking terrorists.”

“After that.”

“Oh, I said it would annoy me to be killed by someone who doesn't especially hate me as an individual, or who I didn't personally betray.”

“No, before that. You told us how, when Leila had organized the holiday in Bali for the three of you after your dad's death, you didn't go because you'd called the government's travel-warning number, learned that you needed a shot for Japanese encephalitis, and decided it would be a tedious if not fatal vacation. As you waved her off at the airport, you said to Veronica, ‘It will be one of those holidays where you'll be jailed indefinitely for insulting the king, and I can move into your bedroom on a permanent basis. Enjoy eternity!' ”

“So?”

“Enjoy eternity were your last words to your sister.”

Aldo gave me a look that was a request for privacy.

“OK,” I say, changing tack. “Remember when you borrowed money to get an exploration license in Queensland with Ron Franklin, to drill three holes in some prospect based on what, I can't remember.”

“A
ground magnetic anomaly.”

“Right. And the three holes were drilled, and no significant mineralization was discovered.”

“So?”

“And the next year, a UK company discovered uranium in that exact same location.”

“That was bad luck, but I knew what I was getting into. To be born is to be forewarned.”

I lunge for my notebook and write that down.

“Hey, stop that!”

“You know, despite your singular fate, to write about you is to troubleshoot the human spirit. I'm trying to appeal to your basic humanity here.”

“Hmm.” Aldo's mind is adrift now, his thoughts wheeling away. He's gazing sadly at the rolling blue ocean and the cloudy light like an old sea widow. He's determined not to help me.

Unless. Oh Jesus, yes. I don't know why I didn't think of it before.

“Stella's in it.”

“She is?”

“Of course. I mean, she features quite significantly, as you might expect in a book about you. In fact,” I say, “I've got the first chapter right here in my bag. It's preliminarily titled ‘Aldo Benjamin, King of Unforced Errors: The Early Years.' ”

“Aren't you even changing my name?”

“Don't you want to see your relationship from another perspective?”

“Give it here.”

I fish the manuscript out of my bag and pass it to him. He rotates his bony arse until he has molded the perfect indent in the sand, wets his thumb, and plunges in.

T
HE WEIRD TRUTH IS I'VE
often become good friends with people I originally disliked, and the more I downright loathed the person, the better friends we eventually became. This is certainly true of Aldo Benjamin, who irritated me at first, then infuriated me, then made me sick, then bored me senseless, which led to his most unforgivable crime—occasionally, when in the process of boring me, he'd become self-aware and apologize for being boring. “No no,” I'd have to say, feigning shock at the suggestion, “you're not boring me, please go on.” I sometimes had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.

Aldo had transferred to our school in the middle of the penultimate year, and about a month into our friendship, after an all-nighter on pills, Aldo dragged me on a dawn tour of the shitty neighborhood he grew up in. We had to take two buses to get there, and as the sun rose over the city skyline, we ambled past forgettable stretches of warehouses running alongside a train station that “no unarmed woman should dream about walking from, even at dusk,” past a greasy takeout shop where “one employee always kept a lookout for a health official,” until we arrived at a narrow warren of residential streets where the people coming out of their houses were “uglier than in the beachside suburbs but not as ugly as in the mountains.” The houses were all massive, all empty, and all had
FOR SALE
signs on their front lawns. The sight of his old
home territory was overexciting Aldo; as we moved through it, he bombarded me with random facts about his family that he seemed to be reciting from a census report: Only 35 percent of them were overweight, they had blue eyes, his mother's side carried the degenerative diseases, his father's side had all the madness. Mostly, he said, they were B negative. I thought: What the fuck is he talking about?

Until I met him, almost all my male friendships were based on homoerotic wrestling or the lighthearted undermining of each other's confidence, but for Aldo and me, our connection was of like minds on pointless adventures, whether that be taunting bouncers outside nightclubs, riding shopping trolleys down suicidally steep declines, or attending first-home auctions to force up the bids of nervous young couples. In those days, Aldo and I had such great conversations that every sunset seemed like the end of an era. We were young and there were no unpleasant surprises waiting for us in bathroom mirrors. We did things we wouldn't feel guilty about for literally years. Nobody was on a diet.

It was in the huffy silence of detention after the supervisor had left the room that Aldo and I first spoke. His blue eyes and copper-shaded skin made his ethnicity difficult to place. He was scrawling hairy penises on the desks; I was vandalizing an overhead projector. The other students tracked our orbit around the room as we emptied the fire extinguisher. Every now and then I'd catch him staring at me as though out the window onto a fog-drenched paddock. I said to him, “What are you looking at?” He said, “My sister Veronica was right. A teenage mustache is pathetic. I'll shave if you do.” I said, “Fuck you. What are you writing there?” and tore the notebook from his hand. Aldo was working on a project he called the Fair Price Index. Sandwiches (any kind): $3.50, haircuts: $11.50, movie tickets: $8.00, soup: $6.00. I said, “What the fuck is this?” Aldo said, “This is what I'm going to pay for goods and services in the future.” I said, “So no matter where you are, that's what you're going to pay?” He said, “That's the plan.” I said, “But that's ridiculous. You have to pay what they charge.” He said, “You can if you want. I'll pay what's right,” and I said, “What a loser,” yet several weeks later, in religious studies, he offered me a sleeping pill to see who could stay awake the longest and I accepted, and when we were sent out of the room for snoring, he said, “Drink?” I said, “A park?” He said, “Toilet block roof?” I said, “Lead on,” and we stumbled drowsily to the nearby tennis courts, on the way discovering the appalling miracle that we both had a dead sister.

We climbed the rusty drainpipe of the toilet block and sat on the hot concrete roof and spent the afternoon memorializing our big sisters, those lavender-candle-scented, introspective blabbermouths prone to selective catatonia. I told him about Molly's death by speeding cop, and he told me what happened to Veronica, how a few years earlier in Bali she was a passenger on a bus when a bomb onboard was accidentally activated; the terrorists were en route to their intended target in Kuta Beach, ironically Veronica's destination also. Aldo and I confessed in a delicious mania of grief how each of us had at one point wished his sister dead, and how this perverse magical thinking was driving us both quietly insane. We couldn't believe we had this in common too. While our grieving parents were hagiographers on the subject of their incandescent daughters, we often sat simpering in their silent bedrooms, bedrooms that were either packed away and stripped bare (Veronica's) or left unnervingly intact (Molly's). It was incredible that we had lost them at the same exact point on the relationship cycle, more or less at the same time, around their seventeenth birthdays, when they refused tickle fights and treated our smiles like swastikas, grew thorns, and mastered derision. We had both secretly idolized them and they treated us, their younger brothers, like plague carriers. Yes, it was amazing to us that we had both been abandoned and forsaken by our older sisters, both of whom wouldn't let us disturb them even as they watched the neighbors (Molly) or infomercials (Veronica)!

For months we poured out our secret grief every afternoon on the toilet block roof. We read their diaries, scoured their letters, obsessively compared and contrasted characteristics of these young women we'd lost, as if trying to decode some puzzle or classify a genus or species. In this way we kept the other's sister alive. While they had obvious differences—e.g., one had a voice like a glockenspiel (Veronica), the other a car alarm (Molly); one wept into pillows (Veronica), the other into stuffed bears (Molly); one viewed herself as a princess (Veronica), the other a high priestess (Molly)—there were so many disturbing similarities that the more we talked, the more they seemed like a two-headed creature with one narrow waist, twenty weird toes, and four double-jointed elbows;
an übersister
, made up of door slamming and mirror staring and the ability to make a bong out of anything (a Pringles can, a carrot, a golf ball) and fake tears and histrionic journal writing and shrooming breasts and crushing putdowns to parents and secret cigarette stashes and early periods and bathroom
ruckuses and iron deficiencies and improbable boyfriends and acrobatic mood swings and excessive hair-dryer usage and lame henna tattoos. They stood in doorways unsure whether to enter or exit, and sleeplessly stared out rain-streaked windows. They often pretended to not see us (Veronica) or hear us (Molly). We consoled each other that their meanness was bravado, that the girls would have grown out of torture eventually. I recall how Aldo, as he spoke, would look at his left hand for evidence of his sister's incisor marks, sadly long faded, and reminisce how she would smoke her cigarettes in his room so he'd get the blame. I told him how I still felt phantom Chinese-burn pains on my arm, and how I hated when Molly held a mirror to me, literally. Aldo admitted he often sat in Veronica's bedroom running his finger over spilled nail polish that had dried on her bedside table, or trying on her hat collection—fake tiaras, chef hats, crowns, plastic halos, Indian feathers, Stetsons—or looking at her fake ID concealed in her annotated Anaïs Nin journals, or rereading dozens of Veronica's own poems; that was her main interest: poems about madwomen recently out of attics and those remaining in rooms of their own. It was in those unrhymed stanzas he learned things no brother wanted to: about periods and handsy uncles, how she hated blow jobs but wanted to be nationally ranked, how although she did not yet have a serious boyfriend, she wanted an open marriage. Mostly, as he sat on her bed, Aldo remembered her pitying gaze, as if she knew something bad was going to befall him and didn't want to be around to see it.