Quicksand (42 page)

He turned the siren on for me. An incompetent policeman and artistic failure, a failed-businessman paraplegic, two divorcés, two old friends, set off. I wanted him to drive us back to our youths.

—1990 and step on it, I said.

As we threaded through the city, my eyes could not compute. Everything was hyperreal. The unpalsied populace smug in their pace. Bored faces in stuck cars. Buildings under construction, as if a freeze-frame of collapse. I did not open my mouth for fear of whimpering. Neither did Liam, though at traffic lights he took my hand and squeezed it, as if in an attempt to transfer power from his body to mine. When we hit the meandering coastal road, the horrific number of wreaths and service-station flowers on what seemed like every third telephone pole spoke of split-second tragedies and ghastly second acts. Liam told me he'd been out to the residence a couple more times to see Morrell. The thought that they were still entangled in some sort of protégé/mentor tango was patently absurd.

Morrell, a bearded stranger to shampoo, was standing at the door as we arrived.

—When you have a serious medical problem, depending on the prognosis, you either quit smoking or take it up, he said, dropping a carton of cigarettes in my lap.

The residence was overflowing with artists who seemed even more like sulky adolescents than I'd remembered. I felt the sting of Darwinism, an innately inferior specimen with no evolutionary purpose.

—And I have a nice surprise for you, Morrell added. Let me introduce our newest artist.

Standing with her beautiful smile and wind-chime earrings was Stella!

—I live here now, she said, beaming.

—Then you'll be breaking
your own restraining order on a 24/7 basis, Liam said.

Her sweet laughter wafted over like perfume. I used to see the light side of everything too.

—Where's Clive? I asked.

—With Craig, she said, her smile tightening.

—Would you like to see how my exhibition is shaping up? Morrell asked, crouching down in front of me as if before a child. I'll give you a tour of my latest works.

—Not before he eats something, Mimi interrupted, whisking me into the kitchen where we ate cold meats and bread and cheese and Liam and Stella and Mimi and Morrell all spoke as if divided by soundproof partitions they couldn't see; there was a hush at least as loud as the conversations. I experienced such hostility toward everybody; I didn't quite know how to orient myself. I felt like a grown-up ward of the state facing his old abusers.

Mimi and Stella helped me into my north-facing room—I was frankly relieved not to have to stare at that ocean—where someone had made the en suite accessible by taking a mallet to the doorframe, leaving jagged edges, exposed wire, and sediments of plaster. Ten minutes of swallowing medications later, I undressed and Mimi and Stella helped me onto the most incredibly depressing piece of plastic furniture invented, the shower chair, where I sat under a stream of water that was in turns scalding and freezing, without being able to move quickly out of the way, while the women were silent and solemn and even seemed a tad annoyed, and it made me imagine disciples come to wash the feet of Christ who have to settle for Judas in a wig. This I thought mainly to distract myself from the two loves of my life pretending not to stare at the suprapubic catheter entering an actual hole in my actual stomach and at what is now accurately called “my junk.” They were thinking the same sad thing: Could he ever again? And would he ever again? I had spent many months wondering the same thing.

Later, Morrell carried me in his arms downstairs into his bright studio to see his oil paintings, all vaguely sexualized interiors of domestic spaces: erotic chairs, curvaceous couches, labial curtains with picture-window views of period-red skies with the nippled sun and moon as interlocking spheres. They seemed perfectly fine if not exceptional works—or maybe they were
masterpieces. What do I know? Morrell was haunted by the specter of no red dots—of an utterly dotless opening night. He was trying to decide if, due to his age and experience, he should refer to himself as a promising beginner or a midcareer artist, a late starter or a late bloomer. I predicted I'd be forced to accept invitations to Morrell's studio, meaning I'd have to regularly acquiesce to being carried in the bastard's arms to this den of frustration. He had, at last count, fourteen pieces in total. The room could bear twenty but he feared he had too many already.

—In the art world, less is not only more, it's much
much
more.

—They're good.

—The enemy of the great, he responded bitterly, and threw the closest painting over the balcony to the beach below.

Around midnight, the artists had moved from boisterous dinner into a combat-zone level of debauchery and it occurred to me I'd made a terrible mistake moving back into the residence, what with the conversations that played on a loop and the sexual hijinks and the attendant miseries and jealousies. I wheeled myself out onto the balcony and stared at the pointless magnificence of the ocean and the derelict moon orbiting nothing of value.

—Would you mind if I draw you? Dee Franklin asked.

She wanted me naked, covered in gold and silver body paint. I declined. More artists gathered around me with cheery, fascinated faces. Though I'd recently lost a vast array of abilities I'd previously considered indispensable to a basic human existence and felt ghastly about it every picosecond of every day, nobody seemed to notice my despair. Everybody weighed in. Everyone looks on the bright side for you. They're really positive about your situation. Nobody feels underqualified to offer medical advice. The preposterous suggestions they're not ashamed to make! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to torture someone with an incurable illness or a permanent disability is easy. Name the most ludicrous and disreputable remedy imaginable—e.g. bamboo under the fingernail therapy—and
swear
it fixed a friend of yours. The dying or disabled patient, sick in heart and soul with the desperate feeling that he hasn't tried everything to restore himself, will quicksmart reach for the bamboo.

They will also tell you about exceptional individuals who did exceptional things even with exceptional limitations. This in no way felt relevant to my case.

That night, I sat in bed more frightened that I'd ever been in my life. I had developed, through the wonders of neuropathic pain, an extreme sensitivity to fabrics, so that I couldn't bear the sheets upon my skin, and this was coupled with the intolerable sensation that my toes were squashed painfully together as if into a child's shoe. After an abortive attempt to wiggle them, I wanted to hit the call button, I wanted to go where other grotesques congregated, I wanted out. In the distance I heard a beeping sound that I assumed was existence backing over me.

Stella was at the door, loitering with intent.

—Zip up my dress?

Her failsafe beauty, the way she moved like windblown leaves, still managed to take the air out of whatever room I was in. I soon understood that she was colliding with herself, fretting that her new songs were self-plagiarism, the first sign of irreversible artistic decline (some were about the cumulative toxic energy of the competing artists in the residence and how she was working so much she often “forgot to eat,” something I never fathomed because I hadn't missed a meal since 1993, but most were about her separation from Craig, who had taken temporary custody of Clive so she could concentrate on her music, an agreement she now experienced as guilt-ridden torture). Listening to her with familiar fascination made me think, Christ will I
ever
stop falling in love with the same woman over and over again? I thought how Stella had been sewn into the fabric of my existence, followed by the realization I didn't have the legs to run away with her, that I couldn't carry her once more across a threshold. All of a sudden something heavy and dull hit me in the face, a vague pain spread over my cheek. Frown lines crowded Stella's forehead. Don't do that, she said, kissing me on the head. It was my own fist. I had hit myself.

Stella lay next to me tickling and scratching her left arm—my old job!—then we reminisced for hours, huddling close, admitting that nobody else would ever know either of us in the same way. That's why couples stick together, Stella said, neither wants to be rendered unknown. Her face was turned to mine, a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

—I'm proud of how you're dealing with everything, she whispered. You're a survivor.

That annoyed me.

—I am
not
a survivor, I
said. That is not even a human character trait I admire. I like it when a person says, “Blech,” then rolls over and literally dies.

As soon as I said that her sullen face brightened and she leaped up and sprinted out of the room and reentered with her guitar. For two hours I delighted in the nourishing vision of the moonlight trembling on her gleaming, dark-honey limbs as she wrote pages of nonsense lyrics and plucked a cute little melody out of thin air that she first whistled, then sang—a lovely, silly song that drifted over me, and sailed through me, and I felt the fleeting contentment of reliving old times.

—I will always love you unconditionally, I said, on two conditions.

—Go ahead, she said.

—One. That you never give up the guitar ever again.

A smile, a sigh. Gratitude and relief at feeling deeply understood.

—What's the second?

—That you hire someone to kill me.

—Get the fuck.

—Please.

—Aldo!

She buried her head in her hands and cried. They were tears of despair, for the abominable reality that reinserted itself into our moment, and tears of anger, for the grave crime of abusing our mutual devotion. Stella seized her guitar by the neck and stormed out.

In the morning, I woke to find Mimi cleansing an unremembered bowel movement, moisturizing the skin, then expertly turning me. Her knowledge of a paraplegic's arcana seemed innate.

—Are you still sleeping with Mr. Morrell?

—Call him Angus, for Christ's sake.

—So, are you?

Mimi swiveled her head and stared catatonically out the window at the brushed-steel sky. She turned back with a compact smile, airtight.

—Once a week. Wednesday afternoons. Three o'clock.

I bit my lip. That was the time we used to have detention.

—There's something else wrong, I said. What is it?

—It's Elliot.

She explained. About a month ago she went to Silverwater to visit him but he
refused to see her. Then he started leaving messages that made no sense at all, antagonistic and incoherent messages about Jesus Christ not being Yahweh's only betrayed child.

—It was Elliot, I said, who stuck those posters of you around the city, wasn't it?

She nodded and told me how over the past weeks her phone would ring at night, like it used to, but there was just silence on the other end. The disturbing part was, she had the oddest feeling that Elliot was actually talking, but had become inaudible. That he was standing there on the phone with his mouth moving and nothing coming out. The calls came every night for a week until five nights ago. Now Elliot had ceased all communication, she said, running tearfully to her room.

Between the fretful Morrell, the restless Stella, the anxious Mimi, all clear-cut cases of clinical frustration, the environment in the residence was downright toxic—I was thinking this when Morrell entered my room and sat beside me and clutched my shoulder, a supremely unwelcome gesture I hadn't the energy to shrug off.

—Aldo, the average person has an intrinsic value, but you have, in addition, a symbolic value, and one day I predict you will make a great work of art.

I didn't understand his use of the word “make.” Did he mean, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that I would produce a great work of art, or that I would become one?

Time slowed down again to childhood-summer pace. The days were long. Sleeping pills got me through the night. Soon they got me through the day too. And I was adjusting to life wheelchair bound. I was learning to separate the worst-case scenarios that resulted in deep humiliation, such as shitting or pissing my pants, from the worst-case scenarios that resulted in life-threatening damage, such as bedsores or a fatal blood-pressure spike. I hated transferring, feared falling out of the chair, or falling out of the chair and it tipping on top of me. I hated being estranged from my own body, trapped in enemy territory. I hated needing help to get into the fetal position. I wanted to teleport daily into oblivion.

The only thing that helped me slightly was seeing myself represented, decontextualized, recontextualized, bent over, in pain, and solidified in that chair by Morrell's artistic movement—that he personally seemed to want nothing to do with—called (clumsily, in my opinion) Aldoism, which at least transitioned me through the denial phase relatively quickly, even though only two artists had signed up so far (Dee Franklin who did ink-wash drawings of me slumped in my chair and Lynne Bishop, whose mixed-media installation of me in hospital, laughing under the influence of morphine, hung in the living room of the residence). Despite my vociferous protestations, and my offering up alternate subjects—Stella (for her beauty) and Frank Rubinstein (for his ugliness)—they pestered me endlessly to pose for their craptastic artworks.

Regardless, furious resentment was my default setting. When the manic are shackled, expect problems. I had been out of the residence once or twice, wheeled down the road to the shops before getting caught in a sudden downpour, felt the agony of unexpected jolts—not until you are confined to a wheelchair do you realize there is practically no purely flat or even or obstructionless surface anywhere in the city, no pavement without dips or cracks or breaks or holes or raised edges. Your Honor, some people like to be the center of attention. They're the ones nobody notices. Other people can't abide a single eyeball trained in their direction. They're invariably center stage—the overly fat, the impossibly ugly, the horribly scarred. For us, it seems the maximum level of open glaring is permitted. I had to endure the cretinous stares of bewildered citizens, as if I were The Big Pineapple on wheels. Or bear those who had the temerity to ask,
Shit. What happened to you?
Or the crushing laughter of children. Or the sight of a woman's hourglass figure. Or a human running, or traversing a flight of stairs. Or the easy spotting of a hundred people glad they're not you. Then I would return home only to be castigated for wheeling mud into the house, or to be ignored, or scrutinized, or laughed at when arose unpredictable and unwanted reflex erections that I was totally unaware of and that were triggered by the folds of my baggy jeans, or by a book in my lap. I became utterly unable to make small talk, or worse, any conversation that did not deal directly with my own precipitous decline and suffering. Or with the declines and sufferings of others: the parents of birth defectees; children with psychiatric conditions; people with chromosomal or metabolic disorders; alien limb syndromees; the battered
and raped; the cutting and self-harmed; the deaf and the blind; the burnt and the disfigured; babies with fetal alcohol syndrome. Any other conversation seemed so beside the point as to be heinously offensive. Nobody was talking about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or fibromyalgia—but why should they? And who was I, the patron worrywart of degenerative disease? And I had only just begun to appreciate the significance of statistics. Even if the likelihood of contracting some rare ailment is so numerically insignificant as to be classified negligible, it isn't actually zero, and even 0.1 percent equates to millions of people suffering the torments of hell. This, according to doctors, is
negligible
. Why did that infuriate me so? And why did I wake each morning fretting about parents who accidentally flattened their own toddlers in driveways? And about cosleeping mothers who suffocated their babies? And the secret lovers of recently deceased adulterers? Or the unacknowledged love children of adulterers in permanent vegetative states? Or those people who get no sex because of unkissable mouths? Or family members who die in improper sequence? Or what the neighbors hear the morning of crib death discoveries? Who cries for these lives? It was overwhelming and I felt fragile and anxious every moment of the day.