Quicksand (53 page)

That afternoon, I browbeat my senior sergeant to get a team of forensics with annoyed faces to come out and make their deliberations. They find traces of hair, urine, feces, fresh blood, black blood, old blood—Aldo's many secretions from his every orifice. Fell, drowned, washed out to sea is the verdict. (I find myself crying in front of my fellow officers. There is a hushed respect for tears in the force. They assume it's rare—it's not. In the wider culture too, it's become incredibly manly to be unafraid to look like a little girl for three to five minutes.) While the police traipse with impunity into his sour fortress of solitude, I sort through his bric-a-brac, as if Aldo himself has been mislaid there, and find his copy of Morrell's
Artist Within, Artist Without;
I cradle it, and my novel takes on additional life force; it has become like a photo album rescued from a fire-gutted house in which everybody died.

The team combs the beach and all accessible points. Did he go to shore and drag himself up that cliff? “Maybe a wave swept him off the rocks. It was bound to happen. No trace. He must've drowned.” The media come out to the rock and say he must have been booted off by the ocean's foot. With news helicopters hovering, surfers come out with little lanterns to hold a vigil, but the waves are too big and the storm clouds chase them off.

Everyone goes home; I am the last. My oldest, best, broken and heartbroken friend, the guy who wore fancy dress to an antiwar protest, who was himself the patron saint of statistical anomalies, is gone. Before I leave the island, I take one final look over these boulders heavily encrusted with sponges and algae; I peer into vertical crevices and fissures and rocky ledges and shelves, where Aldo lived among desiccated barnacles and hermit crabs and turned a blind eye to fish spawning in the hard substrate; I thought he was like the regenerating arms of the starfish; I was wrong. I thought he would never unfussily and judiciously slip into the waves without making a big song and dance about it. Psychotic with grief, I wail now.
Aldo!
Always the wrong guy with the wrong outfit saying the wrong thing in the wrong tone of voice in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong person or persons, always oozing fallibility, who is always my friend, who is gone.

The bodiless funeral service was held in the botanical gardens on a dewy morning. Aldo's anonymous returned wheelchair was there in his stead—rusted, grafittied, painted over. The mourners included people he impoverished for generations and those he enriched, all those professionals he relied upon or put aside for safekeeping: nurses, prison guards, fortune-tellers, private detectives, cardiologists, pharmacists, criminal lawyers, dentists, physiotherapists, accountants, dermatologists, bankers, lifeguards, bodyguards, magistrates, customs officers, bounty hunters, anesthetists, stockbrokers, paramedics, urologists, politicians, prostitutes, wayfarers, and stevedores. There were also offended Christians, picketers, and other people who take umbrage for a living. I picked up a smidgeon of genuine grief and mourning, but the weirdness of this funeral was that nobody was in denial. If anything, they were overprepared for this day; it had been on their calendars for months. The general consensus was his existence had been excruciating. Yet it was clear that he had touched so many lives; over the course of the day, I heard four separate people say, “He was my best friend.” I also saw business cards change hands, two separate high-fives, one down low, one too slow, three successful pickups, and more bunches of service-station flowers than I'd ever seen assembled in one place. His evangelicals (sales reps) were handing out flyers for a Special Death of Our Founder offer. The website had peaked and begun its decline. In the end it was a fad after all, a one-hit wonder. At one point, Aldo's subscribers ballooned to two million, but when I last checked they had already dwindled to three hundred thousand. That's nothing these days; cats have more followers than that.

The old child murderer Stan Maxwell read the Psalm of David. The Lord was many things to Aldo, but he sure as shit wasn't his shepherd, and Aldo was never not in want. With a conical mass of snot hanging from her nose, and face turned to the sky, Stella sang tearfully about that sorrow that was not for his death per se but for his life and their love that was like a flower shaken violently for years and on which even now a few petals remain. The song didn't finish so much as sob itself out, and Frank Rubinstein shepherded her gently off the podium. A few others got up to speak, people I had never met or heard of. They said, “Aldo's proximity to terror and to error gave my whole family nightmares,” “He was a guy
with vertigo who chose to perch on a mountaintop,” and “Aldo was the Russian formalist of all the amateur psychologists.” To be honest, I couldn't make heads nor tails of these eulogies. Doc Castle took to the podium. “Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk we could not understand him. Well, Aldo
could
talk and we could not understand him either. He was our lion.” I stopped listening after that. Frankly, I couldn't concentrate on anything. I had the dreadful idea that maybe Aldo was orchestrating a resurrection to augment his business, and I remember how when we were seventeen he told me that one member of his family per generation got into monumental debt and tried to fake his own death, and I thought this funeral was the propitious moment for his ulcerous person to pop out from behind a cabbage tree palm and surprise us with a new investment opportunity. He will either turn up any second now or be truly dead, I thought throughout the whole service. I was a wreck.

He never appeared.

At last, I had to admit that my booby-trapped and masticated friend had managed to leave his ignoble slab of a rock, this cold telluric pebble called Earth, that he had sprouted his last pustules, suffered his last spasms, endured his last internal lava spill, and that his open wound of immortality had closed over and healed, and that was a beautiful thing.

Unless.

Personally, I prefer to imagine that his old dream came true; maybe he vanished by an act of will, liquefied in his sleep and disintegrated body and soul, maybe he was uncreated and unborn—
decreated,
vanishing from the island to emerge in a distant unmapped galaxy moments later as a voiceless faceless thoughtless drifting eye, racing through the vagaries of space and time, ringing out like plucked strings, tapering off and just frankly dissolving in an orange flash as a traceless nothing, never more to wake. I hope so. Someone's dreams have to come true. Otherwise all the dreams build up on a vast garbage dump, taking up too much space in this world. You can't get from the bedroom to the bathroom without tripping over the rotting carcass of some man's dream. So I prefer to imagine that his stubborn hopes and deepest desires came to fruition, and I resolve that whenever I remember Aldo and all those days at sea, and how he disappeared just like that, I'll think: Well, at least there's one less dream cluttering up the dump.

A month later, I'm falling asleep
at my desk, taking the statement of a high-maintenance eyewitness in an ATM raid, when the phone rings.

“Constable Wilder speaking,” I say.

“Your mate is Aldo Benjamin, isn't he?”

My heart actually stops beating. I feel it stop for long enough to be consciously concerned about it restarting.

“Was. Yeah. What's this about?” I manage to say.

“A portrait of him was stolen from the Sussex Street Gallery, and it's already turned up on eBay from a US dealer.”

“Oh.”

My hands are shaking as I take down a few details and pass them on to the Computer Crimes Unit and to customs, and I marvel to think about Aldo's frustrated face floating on the black market. What is his value? That's a slippery concept. In dollar terms, not inconsiderable at present, although I suspect he will always trade slightly below estimate and will eventually trend steadily down towards zero. Aesthetically? Given he was someone not overly interested in culture himself, it's vaguely amusing to note that his ultimate claim to fame might be inadvertently propelling certain artists to a medium level of success—namely Lynne Bishop, Frank Rubinstein, and Dan Wethercot. It would not surprise me if he were one day to be a footnote to early twenty-first-century Australian art history and nothing more.

I spend the next few hours at my desk clicking through image files of Aldo Benjamin—paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, sketches, video installations, each one making me feel deeply disturbed; just as a nightmare refuses the sleeper genuine rest, his image denies any kind of peace of mind to the viewer. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that there may be no place for every random anecdote and strange story about Aldo in my book: the cat in the foldout couch debacle; Aldo being chased by the human monkey in Rajasthan; the clairvoyant's egg; the grassroots, opt-out euthanasia white paper. Not to mention the minor slipups: penises caught in zippers, pubic hair in velcro; all the misjudged timing of automatic, elevator, and revolving doors; the endless unforgivable faux pas; the romantic, candlelight-dinner, reach-for-the-salt, sleeve-on-fire scenarios. In this whole book, I've neglected to mention
that whenever Aldo tripped he felt that he was being reprimanded by a higher power, and when he got to his feet he felt it was an act of defiance.

Some afternoons I go back, I don't know why, to Leila's old ground-floor apartment. There's a single man in there now, a burned-out bummed-out middle-aged fellow who sits perpetually at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. I think: Aldo would know what was wrong with him. I can feel the suffering, but I can't name it. The last time I went he raised his sad head and slammed his fist on the table. He seemed to hate living there and looked at me as if it were all my fault.

Just as now Aldo is looking at me from Louise Bozowic's painting,
The Sadness and the Envy
. And he's no Lazarus; the more I look at these works that were created while he was alive, the more he appears already dead in them—a living death that through the artworks goes on living.

It is five o'clock on a Friday afternoon and I'm eating a falafel in my parked car outside my apartment—less sad than eating in front of the television, I figure—when I see Neil Mikula, a tall squinty neighbor in his midthirties, shoulder-bumping a skinny teenager and palming something. We were friendly in the early days but too often he's been carting stolen flat-screens or selling heroin in my line of vision; I warned him a dozen times and busted him once—he was sent down for six months. Now he's leaning against a low concrete wall in a sort of brooding languor, and a rush of customers come for his wares: tinfoil packets and plastic baggies, H and pills. This happens more than you'd think. Sometimes people assume broad daylight makes them invisible. Sure, my car's mostly obscured by the electrician's van I'm parked behind, but still. Discretion, people. I wearily put down the falafel and hit the siren. Neil turns and looks at me a moment before walking over. I don't even have to get out of the car.

“Oh man,” he says, in a weird falsetto.

“You said it.”

He takes a fistful of dollars out of his pocket, clearly his first foray into bribery.

“Put that away.”

“What are you
doing out here anyway, staking out your own apartment?”

“That's not what you need to worry about right now.”

He glances behind him at the place he's vacated, as if afraid to lose his spot. “You let me go, Liam, sorry,
Detective Wilder
, and I'll do you a solid.”

“It's Constable.”

“
Still?
”

“I'm doing
you
a solid. Take this as your early retirement plan.”

“I could give you some information, Liam.”

“You could, Neil, but I don't care what kind of information you have. I'm not ambitious. I don't have bigger fish to fry. In any case, you might not realize it, you
are
the bigger fish. The ones you throw back I already threw back. Those guys you sold to.”

His peevish stare mutates into a wait-and-see smile that catches my attention. There's something out of character about it, as if he's implying some shared destiny. He leans in intimately, and says, “Anton Benjamin.”

“You mean Aldo Benjamin?”

“Yeah. Aldo Benjamin. Sorry.”

Just the sound of the name coming out of this junkie's face makes me fear my dam of sadness might break and inundate the fucker. My evident shock is a strategic error. Neil lights a cigarette, singeing the fringe of his hair, and assumes a nonchalant manner.

“What about him?”

“He was your mate, wasn't he?”

He clears his throat that doesn't need clearing and fakes a bored yawn. In the silence, I can hear the discordant symphony of TVs from ground-floor apartments tuned to different channels. My eyes lay siege to Neil's. Predictably, he breaks first.

“OK, you might remember I recently did a little six-month stretch in Long Bay. Why? Because my unneighborly neighbor took his job a little too seriously.” I don't say anything, but close my eyes to concentrate on what Neil is saying. Now he sounds like he's clearing someone else's throat. He continues: “Halfway through my time, I moved into a cell with this insane bastard, Baz. I shat myself when I saw him but we got on anyway and for some reason he looked out for me. He was a good bloke but always getting into it with someone. Got himself bashed to death last month, crazy bastard.”

“I'm
almost but not quite sorry for your loss. So fucking what?”

“So fucking this. Before he died, he confessed something to me.”

“What was that?”

“He said he was the one who, you know, killed your mate. Aldo Benjamin.”

“That's not possible. He drowned.”