Quicksand Read online

  Aldo holds a stiffened finger in the air. I think: Here we go again. He says, “You know how if we had time travel people would use it to go back short temporal distances to make premonitions and look like big shots?”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “Never mind. Fuck it,” he says and puts on his aviator sunglasses. “I’m going for a ciggie.” He wheels himself out onto the balcony, to the sea-rusted railings where gulls are perched and where he goes through half a box of matches lighting his cigarette in the infuriating wind. From a distance, he has the worn yet sleazy handsomeness of a cruise-ship magician. He flicks the half-smoked cigarette at a seagull, narrowly missing it, and shouts back to me, “AS PATRICK’S DADDY ONCE TOLD HIM: IT AIN’T A PROJECTILE IF IT AIN’T AIRBORNE!”

  I shout, “WHO’S PATRICK?”

  He shouts, “MY CELLMATE!”

  The bartender shouts, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  Aldo gives him the finger, then moves like a storm front inside, toward the handicapped toilets. He rattles the door handle.

  The bartender yells, “That one’s out of order. Use the downstairs one.”

  Aldo swivels his chair and gazes down the steep metal staircase.

  “You’re supposed to have a handicapped toilet.”

  “It’s out of order.”

  “It’s the law!”

  “It’s out of order.”

  Aldo takes a slow, deep breath and beckons me over. He turns around and rigidly faces the big window. I stand beside him, looking out at houses nestled in bushland with imbricated terra-cotta roofs and manicured lawns, at gnarled limestone cliffs, surfers carving up the lips of rising waves. He says, “With medical science improving at roughly the same rate as our environmental situation worsens, the most likely scenario is that the world will become uninhabitable at the precise moment the human race becomes immortal.”

  “So true!” I write that down and say, “This is going to sound gay . . .”

  “Say it.”

  “You are my muse.”

  “Will you carry me to the toilet?”

  “Of course.”

  He is not light in my arms. I carry him down the stairs and turn on my side to get him into the narrow cubicle. As I bend to gently lower him I can feel my back give out and—I have no choice, it’s a split-second decision, pure reflex—I drop Aldo onto the seat. He hits his head on the stainless-steel toilet paper dispenser. In a small, hoarse voice: “My kingdom for an intrathecal morphine pump.”

  “You’ve outlived yourself.”

  “I never wanted anyone to say of me, ‘He’s breathing on his own now.’ ”

  “Now do you understand why—”

  “You do not have my permission!”

  “Do I need it?”

  Even back in high school he’d burden me with some unbelievable secret and beseech me to promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, then when I betrayed his confidence to a mutual friend, I’d discover he’d already told them the exact same thing. In any case, the fact is I am not the only one intrigued enough about his existence to document it. I have copious rivals who’ve already depicted his protracted wince on canvas, daubed his dead-eyed, petulant expression in earthworm pink and Day-Glo yellow, drawn his convulsions like folds in fabric, sketched his legs to illustrate their significant loss of bone density, summoned his hunched form in glazed ceramic, in pastels and oils, in plaster and clay. I’ve viewed tidy little works in which can be seen the digitally animated collapse of his whole craniofacial complex, and murals of him face-planting into a quiver of arrows. My best friend has been cropped, doctored, photoshopped, bubble wrapped, and shipped. I’ve glimpsed his tired grimace on glossy variable contrast paper so many times I’ve felt sorry for my own naked eye.

  “You going to stand there and watch?”

  I go back upstairs to the bar and sit down. Clouds swim in a watery blue sky. It is loose, warm weather. I feel drowsy. The music is loud and I’m not sure I’ll be able to hear Aldo calling me from inside the toilet. I look over my notes and think: I’ll be annoyed if after writing a whole book, a photograph of his screaming face would have done just as well.

  The bartender says, “You want something else?”

  I sigh. “In 1929 Georges Simenon wrote forty-one novels.”

  “What?”

  “A bourbon and Coke.”

  As the bartender pours, I light a cigarette.

  “Go outside,” he says.

  I keep the cigarette going, sucking deeply.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  I laugh and open my jacket just enough to show my gun.

  The bartender leans forward. “So even writers carry guns these days?”

  I go, “You have no idea.”

  The Long Gestation of an Idea

  WE MAKE ART BECAUSE BEING alive is a hostage situation in which our abductors are silent and we cannot even intuit their demands,” Morrell said in one of his bewildering conversational pivots, stabbing with his crooked finger the court documents I’d brought to school. This was my final year, a midwinter afternoon in the portable after all my classmates had left. On the muted yellow wall, Blake Carney’s painting of a golliwog wearing a swastika had caught Morrell’s eye and he froze in front of it and said something I’m almost positive was: “Unused talent exerts downward pressure on the spirit.” My uncertainty was due to the grating transportation soundscape—the school being situated by a train station on the intersection of a busy highway underneath a flight path—which meant I had to use all my concentration just to hear him. And I wanted to hear him. While traditionally our Zetland High art teacher was depicted in toilet-stall graffiti as a talking anus, I liked the guy; other than the burst capillaries on his nose, and the creases ironed into his clothes at random angles, he was a relatively well-preserved and mostly calm man, keyed up only by absenteeism, pigeon feeding, obtrusive yawning, his own sinus infections, and the creative spirit. Morrell paced the classroom like he wanted to give me a guided tour of it. He said, “We create for the same reason we do anything: fear of the alternative,” then pirouetted on the threadbare carpet and scooped from his desk his own book—Artist Within, Artist Without (that he’d snuck onto the syllabus to the chagrin of Mr. Hennelly, our weedy, terse headmaster)—and copied onto the blackboard, in perfect yet minuscule handwriting I had to squint to decipher, the following lengthy passage:

  Shamefully, doctors neglect to tell new parents that an increasingly common postnatal complication is that a small percentage of babies will grow into anthropologists in their own homes, as if they’d been conceived in order to study and then record the dreadful failings of their mothers and fathers, who’ve no idea they’ve invited this cold-hearted observer into their lives. All these parents wanted was to produce cuter versions of themselves, poor bastards; instead they’re saddled with an unsympathetic informer who won’t hesitate to report them to the lowest authority—the general public. In other words, it is as the poet Czeslaw Milosz once said: When a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed! (Exclamation mark mine.)

  To give the paragraph time to sink in, he nudged a discarded Vicks inhaler with his boot and flipped on a single-setting exhaust fan that blew his own musty odor around the room. I sat impassively in the plastic orange chair, trying to remember how I act when genuinely fascinated. Amber dusklight fell across the ordered row of desks. Outside, the parking lot was emptying. Drafts were coming up through a rough join in the floor. Morrell stared out the window and yelled, “Don’t feed the pigeons, Henderson!” then swiftly moved back to the blackboard and wrote: It’s important to always take sides. Both sides, before he turned to check my face for rapt attention. “You OK?” he asked. I looked down at the kind of carpet you wouldn’t want to bring into contact with exposed skin. He stepped closer, and for a second I thought he was going to reach for my hand or pat my shoulder. “I know what it is to lose someone,” he said. My jaw tightened. I was close to tears, sniffling prematurely. There was nothing I could do, a
pparently, to hide the hairy goiter of loss and acute sadness emanating from my person.

  The previous year, my big sister Molly had been crossing the street when she was struck and killed by a junior police officer during a high-speed chase on the Shortland Esplanade in Newcastle’s East End. The judge asked if we wished to prepare a victim impact statement, but my mother had difficulties expressing herself without plagiarizing another mother’s grief. Since we all wanted Probationary Constable John Green to suffer the way we had—or at least receive the harshest possible sentence—I agreed to try my hand at writing the statement. Over a long, queasy night I wrote how Molly’s death constituted an anti-miracle and that we had become axes and wood, chopping ourselves to death and since the hit-and-run, we felt ashen, hexed, skewed, exploded and downsized in heart and soul, and feared roads, cars, telephones, rain, birds and had full-blown panic attacks in the presence of sirens and police strobes and fading taillights and dreaded the sight of braids, orthodontics, low-set ears, anything that reminded us of Molly: halter tops, out-of-date perms, women, and those men she would never marry—that is to say, all men . . . It occurs to me now that Probationary Constable John Green’s eight months’ minimum security sentence—my earliest taste of success—solidified me on the path of the artist (or, as Morrell often writes it, the artist, with a very small—8 point—lower case a). It was in a naked bid to prolong the limelight that I’d shown Morrell my statement with the proclamation that I was thinking of turning it into a short story for the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year competition—that’s what had excited him into this impromptu unsolicited after-class master class. (My statement also, incidentally, won me my parents’ grudging approval. Prior to the constable’s conviction, they had been less than encouraging of my early teenage creative efforts: short stories on my father’s same-sex infidelities, then on Molly’s body dysmorphia, and finally a one-act play in which I portrayed them as rapists and made them play themselves in the production.)

  Morrell continued. He wrote: Forget the pram in the hallway—the only enemy of art is unrelenting sexual thoughts. And: The first step is admitting all your novel-writing fantasies begin with you typing the words “The End.” And: The good thing about being a beginner is you know precisely the value of your work (zero cents). He suddenly lurched and fondled the louvered shutters that hung by a thread, in order to intercept Aldo, who was peering in through the smeared window, doing a masturbation pantomime. Morrell waved at him as if from a parade float, and wedged the window open slightly to allow his voice to carry outside. Aldo leaned his elbows on the sill and made a disdainful face I studiously ignored. In truth, I felt grateful and flattered to be the focus of Morrell’s attention in the semester before he quit teaching to pursue his painting career, as he always threatened to do, even when I had to endure an advice spree taken verbatim from his own 211-page, single-paragraph hectoring screed, that Aldo thought impenetrable and hypnotically dull but I appreciated and not just because the word “masturbatory” occurred twenty-seven times, and that he now copied from onto the blackboard, writing to not freak out when your one-trick pony dies, and that a writer, if that’s what I was to become, needs a sniper’s awareness of landscape + a sinister impulse to show reality its own face + a hunter’s sense of hearing + a bedridden personality type + a consumptive’s reading habits + an interior life like an iron lung + an open mind in regards to lumbar support + a visceral connection to the written word + a keen interest in capitalizing on the tragedies of your time + a capacity to live without exterior validation + an irresistible curiosity that gives you the moral right to eavesdrop or stalk almost anyone on the planet earth. Each phrase he aggressively underlined until the blackboard made the classroom look like the situation room in a madman’s HQ.

  All this time I was inert, with an increasingly befuddled grin. From the window Aldo said loudly, “Jesus Christ Almighty,” and walked away. Morrell now began to write aphorisms I didn’t understand. You can be wounded by applause but some standing ovations are lethal. And: There but for the grace of God goes God, as well as explicit warnings that seemed to prod and twang my entire nervous system: As soon as you’ve found yourself a fallback career, you will fall back on it. Whatever you do, don’t gain an unrelated skill or gather specialized knowledge or master any kind of profession—once you’re “qualified” you’re on the hook for life. His gluey eyes seemed to hold melancholy secrets when he said, “Most importantly, Liam, you have to find your natural subject.” “What’s that?” I asked. He smirked, slapped a nicotine patch on his arm, and said, “That’s for God to know and you to find out.” This was the last thing he said that afternoon. I remember Morrell stepping on his polarized sunglasses, which had tumbled from his top pocket when he’d bent down, and then doing what looked like calf stretches as he examined the blue bucket brimming with old rainwater that had leaked through the black mold in the cork ceiling, that the Parent Teacher Association was up in arms about. The most dominant aspect of this memory, however, was how strangely at ease I felt alone with Mr. Morrell that afternoon, so devoid of my usual acute paranoia of authority figures I didn’t once hallucinate the sound of a zipper when my back was turned.

  II

  In the decade after high school, on the hunt for my elusive natural subject, I wrote copiously about my childhood fascination with spontaneous combustion, quicksand, piranhas, the bubonic plague, time capsules, the equator, stowaways, giant squid, narcolepsy, and a mission I undertook when I was seventeen to seek out our city’s hunchbacks (we have two). I also wrote about my several love affairs with bisexuals of both genders, and how I wound up doing the kinds of jobs usually taken by illegal immigrants or prisoners on day release—that is, how I started at the bottom and worked my way sideways, from dishwasher in an Italian restaurant to dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant, from cashier in a sporting goods store to cashier in a pet store, and on and on, manning hotlines, donning fast-food uniforms, turning back people who’d wandered in to use the restroom, waiting for customers to ask directions to our competitors, barely tolerating my coworkers’ we’re-all-in-the-same-boat faces, and following the orders of bosses who seemed to have no stomach for nooses or razor blades so were trying to kill themselves by their general attitude. The problem was twofold: Nothing I wrote was any good, and living my own life vicariously had a cool, distancing effect. Instead of relationships I had exploits; instead of affairs I had escapades. I began to suspect that in my soul, something sinister and carnivorous had replaced curiosity, and I had purposely sought out an itinerant work life and found inappropriate men and women to fuck and nuzzle in cheaply decorated bedrooms just for the material. The unexpected exclamation point to this era came the morning after a one-night stand with a pale-skinned waitress with a barcode tattoo who called me a star fucker as I tried to sneak out the door. I turned and said, “What does that mean? Who’s a star, you?” Apparently she’d been on a TV soap for a season and assumed my interest was based on her “celebrity.” When she realized I didn’t know who she was she cracked up laughing, which I thought was pretty irresistible. Her name was Tess, and eleven months later I found myself a married man in a delivery room tensely gripping her hand in a too-late-for-an-epidural situation as she was upstaged by the real star’s grand, urgent entrance. As Tess wept, holding our brand-new raging red baby, Sonja, I remember detecting underneath my love, shock, and awe a well of pressure in my chest and the certainty that if I didn’t succeed in my writing now, it would forever remain a hobby.

  My signed copy of Artist Within, Artist Without had become my veritable bible and gave me plenty of conflicting advice, such as: Muses inspire but also violate—innocently, like the kissing bandit; or horrifyingly, like the granny rapist, and: “Inspiration of the muses” is the “only following orders” of the creative act, and: When you’re looking for Ideas just remember: People often die straining on the toilet. It was in this confusion that I decided to take as my subject this three-pronged family of mine,
that moved to an industrial suburb and into a small apartment with a rusting two-door Celica in the grassy yard and flying cockroaches in the living room and a Juliet balcony haunted by wet crows. Yet as the years passed and I wrote about the sour, stubborn screams of early childhood or the dripping tap of marriage or anything else for that matter—my nation’s catastrophes and blood-orange sunsets; its old-timey genocides and Salvation Army bin fires; the New Australia, how there hadn’t been a stoic among us for fifty years—I knew I still hadn’t found the holy grail, my natural subject.

  Moreover, whenever I was in mid-creation, a phrase from Artist Within, Artist Without would eviscerate me; I had repeatedly failed to structure an invented story in a convincing or original manner, and I could not, no matter how I tried, come up with engaging plots, write realistic dialogue or convincing characters, therefore when I decided that the traditional, conventional novel was a contrived and predictable anachronism and I should no longer waste my time with it, Morrell’s work snidely castigated me: An artist’s theory of art is always founded on his shortcomings as an artist, his passion for that theory in direct proportion to the severity of his failures. When I tried my hand at disrupting expectations of linear narrative and wrote one hundred pages of fragmentary scraps, random paragraphs that could be arranged in any order, I came across this quote: Only when one is disappointed with the quality of one’s content does one develop an exaggerated interest in form. I had told myself I was being extraordinarily daring, but Morrell’s book said: Most times people talk of artistic risk, they are referring to commercial risk. Not “Will this succeed?” but “Will this be purchased?” When out of pathetic desperation I attempted a pastiche of my favorite writings, often drifting into outright plagiarism, I found the putdown Only those with no personal stamp do not believe in copyright.

  My future lay behind me. I was thirty years old and had been unspooling for more than a decade and was in the perpetual doldrums about my not-for-profit days and nights, envious of Tess’s actor friends who had already abandoned their dreams and “grown” and “changed” while I watched myself metamorphose annually into the same thing I was the year before. To make matters worse, the relentlessness of parenthood—the unending string of sunrises, interminable housework, and separate schedules—seemed to be getting the better of us. Maybe that was why, when our paths did cross, and not just when I came home to find I’d been tried in absentia for some domestic crime or another, it was my impression that Tess had started luxuriating a smidgeon in my failures. Maybe I was just hypersensitively overinterpreting clues, but everything suddenly became deeply significant: the night she coerced me to plug my nostrils with Snore Less Nasal Cones; the day I asked her to scratch my back, and she left scars. And I’m pretty sure, though I can’t prove it, that she stole my wedding ring in order to accuse me of losing it. At the same time, Tess’s aura of self-sufficiency strengthened. Her Pilates classes, intended to rid herself of her pillowy post-baby body, turned her into a certified-organic fitness junkie; she weaned herself off shoplifting, made new friends, returned to university. It was like we’d boarded the same train but I’d wound up on an uncoupled carriage, stationary on the tracks. My grip on her was loosening and the more she slipped away, the more I realized I loved her; and the more I loved her, the more she seemed to lose interest in me. On the night of my thirty-first birthday I got so drunk I couldn’t find my own mouth, and tiptoeing into a household of light sleepers, I slipped into the guest bathroom where I often went during dinner for a minute of mute howling. Through the window, a piebald moon cruised the sky. I fished Artist Within, Artist Without from the wastebasket where Tess had thrown it, accusing me of being unnaturally attached to this old teacher “with no pedagogical value” who lectured about art but had never produced a body of artistic work. I could see her point; Google told me that Morrell had still not followed up on his threat to quit teaching in order to paint, but I was reluctant to relinquish this textbook that I used as a kind of alternative I Ching. I desperately flicked through, looking for a lit path through the darkness. And on page 86 I found this: When you begin a work, keep expectations low. Anticipate that you will be like the new groom who unexpectedly returns home from his honeymoon a widower. That advice was a windfall; as always the book seemed to speak directly to my particular psychological impediments, this time my debilitating perfectionism. It inspired me to begin again. One last shot. But what would I write about?