Quicksand (51 page)

“I saw Morrell last week.”

“Yeah? How is he?”

“There's good news and bad news.”

He squints at me as if through a keyhole. “Good news, please.”

“Look.” I pull out the first edition of
Artist Inside, Artist Outside.
It's a handmade color-in-photocopied zine.
Paintings, drawings, sketches, short stories and poems by prisoners. “He's been teaching again, convincing the other inmates they aren't criminals so much as marginalized poets and artists. Inspiring them to express themselves.”

I should mention: After Aldo's insane and epic defense testimonial/sales pitch, and two seconds after he was pronounced incredibly guilty by a jury of his so-called peers, Morrell tapped me on the shoulder, his strange and fanatical eyes raw and spittle dangling from his lip, his face sopping wet, his mouth twisted. At first I thought he might be having a stroke; I eyed the exits. “It goes without saying,” he whispered. I said, “What does?” Morrell's half-open mouth obliged me to keep looking at him. Was this a form of grief? Morrell had been devastated and torn apart by Mimi's death, and it was true that Aldo's testimony had exhausted us all to the point of madness, but something else was happening here. I leaned closer. On his face I watched one thought intrude on another. He begged, then threatened himself, hesitated, and continued. He said, “Come into the garden, my roses would like to see you.” I said, “What?” His jaw clicked and there was an acrid smell, as if his synapses were rotting in his brain. It seemed he was looking for the spare key to a room in his head. Now where did I leave it? During the mammoth testimony Morrell had looked on somewhat proudly, I noted, as Aldo read his poem to the jury, but now all I could see was creeping dismay. “You're a good friend to Aldo,” he said. “That doesn't make up for what you lack, but it's not nothing.” His lids were like hardened scabs over his eyes. “In a strange way you are almost to Aldo what Plato was to Socrates, or what Paul was to Jesus.” He was breathing heavily, his teeth actually rattled. I was stumped. What was I looking at? What was I bearing witness to? Morrell opened his eyes and whispered, “I want to turn myself in to you.” I squinted; that phrase could be taken one of two ways. He gave me his signature dark scowl for slow comprehension. “Can't you understand, Wilder? It was
me
,” he hissed. “
I
did it.” And with that Morrell rose unsteadily to his feet. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen!” he yelled, and there it happened.

He confessed!

It wasn't easy to understand, but it seems that he killed her in a fit of rage for setting fire to his exhibition, and in fear of her reporting their underage
liaison to the police. His admission was followed by an inert yet volatile silence before order pivoted to chaos: The court erupted into a theatrical level of gasping and stock incomprehensible murmuring; Stella rushed to Aldo's side; supporters stormed a stiffened Aldo with backslaps and handshakes; the judge gavel-thrashed; Mimi's father, who had spat on Aldo as he entered the courtroom, collapsed in tears; armed bailiffs snapped into a state of excited vigilance while the prosecutor looked personally aggrieved, as if Morrell's confession had been glommed inadmissibly onto the defense last-minute; and in the midst of this mayhem, Aldo sat expressionless and silent. A month after this irksome near-miscarriage of justice, Morrell was sentenced to a non-parole period of seventeen years, and Aldo was acquitted of Mimi's murder.

Now Aldo haggardly peruses the cheap zine and manages a smile. I can tell that despite the somber collection of depressing poems, confessional stories, and inmates apparently soiling themselves on canvas, it's satisfying to him that Morrell has been exercising his teaching superpower, his one genuine talent.

“What's the bad news?”

“He's dead.”

Yesterday morning Morrell was found in his cell with so many stab wounds in his chest and throat, at ninety-seven the coroner gave up counting.

“Had to be Elliot,” Aldo says, wincing. “Poor Morrell.”

“Poor
Mimi
.” That hers weren't the first blue lips or empty eyes or gored breast I'd ever seen didn't lesson the frequency of the nightmares.

“What did Tolstoy say? All living people are alike; every dead person is dead in their own way.”

“He never said that.”

We sit quietly, thinking about Morrell until the lambent light of the sun burns out and a jumble of stars appear. Aldo and I each crack open a beer with the hissing sea all around us. Froth seeps up through the fissures.

I say, “It's a weird thing to watch a man on a decline from so low a starting point.”

He exhales a slender jet of smoke in my face and in response, or retaliation, tells me his last night's dream: a seven-foot man made of bees was opening Aldo's belly with some kind of scimitar, his intestines unspooling under a wedge of yellow moon.

I say, “It's cold. Your balls must be two peas in pods by now.”

He removes his teeth and shows me the horrendous thing that had been done to his mouth.

“They got knocked out in prison,” he says.

Aldo's fetal pallor is enriched by the moon's luminescence; we don't speak. I look at my old bald, toothless friend and I think: This man will have difficulty getting a new credit card.

I bark in frustration, “Do you actually want to be dragged back to safety? I understand you've been humbled by a thousand cuts and numerous incisions, and I know there's no improving an unimprovable life, but you've never felt any special kinship with the ocean, as far as I know, so what's this about? You just can't cut it on land? You can't be bothered to move? Is this for self-protection, making yourself accessible only to a vengeful God from above?”

It seems Aldo has selectively suspended his senses so he can no longer see, smell, or hear me. Gulls circle in confusion and let out cryptic shrieks. I want to implore him to make a fresh start, but I don't have the acting chops to sound like I mean it.

Finally he speaks. “Stare at the horizon long enough, sometimes it relaxes, shows some slack,” he says, and downs two sleeping pills, my cue to leave.

When I'm halfway to shore I turn back and can hardly make him out; the rock holds Aldo in some hardened sheltered corner of total darkness. I find I'm still talking to him. “Or because you can't drag a trail of disasters in your wake if you don't go anywhere? Or maybe you just need a place to contemplate your arduous life? Or to ascertain what exactly made you low-lying fruit . . . ?”

Along supersaturated blue skies white clouds seem strategically arranged, like spaceships before an invasion. My plan is to paddle out to the island to deliver Aldo's mail (it's been building up), sit next to him while he goes through it and gives instructions on how to reply, but when I approach I'm greeted by the stink of turpentine and solvents intermingled in the briny air. Aldo is sitting for yet another portrait. I'd take the preening surfers over the conceited and garrulous artists any day.

As I clamber up I recognize the abstract painter Frank Rubinstein, hunched over an easel squinting at his model, who looks glandular and is
limply dangling off a sea-slicked boulder in a position that could not possibly be painless.

“I'm using fast-drying oils because the ocean spray keeps smearing the paint on the canvas,” Frank Rubinstein says.

“I don't care,” I say.

“Aldo,” Frank Rubinstein says, “are you comfortable in that position?”

I laugh. “Aldo hasn't been comfortable in fifteen years.”

Emerging from behind a rock, terrified and gripping the rope railing with enough concentration to perform keyhole surgery, is Doc Castle. I haven't seen him since the trial.

“Afternoon, Constable.”

“Afternoon, Doctor.”

“Have you heard about our hero here?”

I shake my head.

“You're writing a novel about this little guy, aren't you? Well, put this in your book and smoke it.” The doctor told the following story: The day before, Aldo had woken late, stumbled to the ledge in the cold morning sunshine, and gimped onto his board, tried to catch one of the dismaying waves on offer and demonstrated accidental magic, carving and hooking up the lip of the wave then riding a hollow tunnel to shore where he lay in the shallows, his arms around the surfboard as if clinging to a log during a flood. It was then he spied a small hand reaching out of the bulging water—a child caught in a strong rip drifting close to the rocks. He paddled over, pulled the drowning child by the arm onto his board, catching a face full of threshing limbs in the process, and gave a ferocious, bearded kiss of life that terrified the resuscitated child before ferrying him to the shoreline to his fretful parents. “One minute longer in the water and I would have let him drown for sure,” Aldo said to them. “You won't see me returning a brain-damaged child to its parents.” The mother and father gaped at Aldo with mild horror. “And raise him right! I don't want to have saved someone who turns out to be a wife-beater, or who twenty years down the track is involved in a hit-and-run. I sure as shit don't want to be the one telling some poor mother that it was me who put this bastard back on the streets.”

Frank Rubinstein and Doc Castle were laughing.

Aldo says, “Can we change the subject? Liam, what do you think between
a Ouija board with spellcheck, a chastity belt with biometric iris-recognition technology, and updating the handkerchief?”

“Neither. None. What?”

“OK. What about interconnected coffins? One big coffin shaped like a cross. All we do is wait for a family of four to die in a car crash.”

“That's your market?”

“Would you bury them head to head,” Doc Castle asked, “or feet to feet?”

“Aldo,” I say irritably, “you don't even care about your one
successful
business. After all these years you finally crack it—and you don't give a shit. Why the fuck would you want to start another?”

Aldo looks at me, stricken. This is just the fleshless nub of his old dream talking; he's spent his whole life striving for a profitable idea, and habit has kept it on life support. Here I am, pulling the plug.

He turns his face to the shore and says, “Wheelchair's gone”—it was indeed stolen weeks ago—and then shouts, “all right, can everybody please just get the FUCK out of here?!”

We scramble for our boards and kayaks and canoes and head back to shore, leaving Aldo babyish and alone on his shadeless rock. Without pathological entrepreneurialism, what else is he going to do, other than stare out of shit-colored glasses at that drek of an ocean, at the sky he perceives as an uninhabitable waste of space, a desolate and stupid emptiness.

Three weeks later, I have my answer.

It is a hot night in his sea garden. Huge, glittering stars humiliate the barren earth, in my opinion. Mosquitoes pester us while Aldo shampoos his armpits. He bathes at night, when he can't be seen. The rock has a natural protuberance he uses as a towel rack. He scampers down to the water's edge and jumps into the dark surging water and pulls himself back up; when he's dry, he sits as still as the rock, as if to take on its color and posture. The last surfer on the beach gives Aldo a kind of salute. We listen to the sea and tarpaulin flapping in the wind with an incessant series of thwacks. The ocean is black and fast moving and Aldo tells me there are scratches on the moon's face that were not there the night before.

He says, “I've got the
traversing of a minute down to an art form.”

“Well done. What?”

He smiles horribly, now that he leaves his teeth out, save for occasions of chewing meat.

“You know how in Morrell's book he writes that Wittgenstein says a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inward as long as it doesn't occur to him to pull rather than to push?”

“Yes but—”

“I'm finally pulling.”

“What does that mean?”

When you ask him a question he pauses now, as if sending it up the chain of command.

“My hair roots, my neck nape, my elbow joint, my fat cells, my flesh, my cartilage, my bones, my tissue, my glands, my acids, my marrow, my bile, my whole musculoskeletal system—”

“What about them?”

“The attainment of infinity thus unfolds in an instant. That's what she said.”

“Who said?”

“I was hoping to combine astral traveling and levitation and teleportation and spontaneous combustion—but these experiments of mind, time, and matter are not progressing well. Maybe I don't have the discipline. I honestly thought my circumstances would be ideal for promoting self-harm through mental telepathy, or at least close the morphological space between me and that black-browed albatross.”

“What black-browed albatross?”

“What retards ascent?”

“What?”

“I am held down by superficial forces. To do away with weight or do away with gravity. That is the question.”

“You can't try out a new approach to life at your age. Your nose hairs are turning gray.”

“I want my hands to be putty in my hands.”

“See, I don't know what that means.”

“The Cambrian explosion was yesterday to me.”

“Not any clearer.”

“I'm talking about
being aerodynamically borne aloft on my own beak or claw. I'm talking about adaptability, variability, discontinuity, divergence, diversification, allopatric speciation, flexibility where it counts. I'm talking about forceful invocation of will, about harnessing my clinical frustration for antagonism-based modification. I'm talking about
evolvability
, Liam. I'm not making this shit up. Ask any evolutionary biologist. Sudden mutations are a thing.”

Last week, he explains, he thought he'd made progress when the stars above him vibrated, and he experienced an oceanic, ecstatic feeling as if his endorphins and adrenaline and dopamine levels were going haywire, but when it was over, there was a bloody pool at the back of his head and he realized he'd likely had some kind of seizure, probably from low blood sugar or high fever or a tapeworm or encephalitis.