Quicksand Read Free

jeans I suspect never fitted even when they were new. Aldo greets each newcomer with a prison-haunted stare. They sit at the long bar, breathing like stampeding animals at a wallow, pretending to ignore Aldo’s joggling foot, his alarming leg spasms, the incremental rocking back and forth. He has never been sedentary, although these days most of the motion and turmoil take place under the skin, at the level of his nerves: beads of sweat form irrespective of air-conditioning and without exertion; his hand perceptibly trembles when he holds something; he has constant goose bumps on his arms and legs, unrelated to external stimuli, and an overproduction of saliva that he slurps from his lip back into his mouth. He’s stunted and subtracted, his central nervous system has gone feral, his bowels are on the back foot. He has a lifetime of sitting ovations, cloudy urine, and skullaches ahead of him. He’s musculoskeletally fucked. I write: Aldo’s experience of time. His version of “past,” “present,” and “future” is “the memory of pain,” “pain,” or “the anticipation of pain.” Poor Aldo. The first half of his hair fell out in hospital, the rest fled his cranium in prison. Why couldn’t God let him at least keep his hair?
    I say, “I’m sick of looking at you and perceiving a smaller, meaner universe.”
    He laughs and says, “Tough,” then starts telling me about the guys he met in hospital, a quadriplegic who risked breaking a rib if he sneezed and had to be on constant vigilance against pollen and pepper and sunshine, another with a malignant melanoma on his spinal cord, and yet another who’d dived into anunseen sandbar and whose fusion of broken vertebrae was now a centimeter off, and how it was both unbearable and heartbreaking to be stuck in the smoking area with these unfortunate bastards who were already doing one-handed wheelies by the time Aldo had only learned to transfer to a toilet seat. I turn my gaze downward, stifle a groan, and write: I can’t imagine a sadder thing in the whole world than putting socks and shoes on those useless feet.
    â€œWhat are you writing now ?”
    I show him. Anger is not one of Aldo’s usual go-to emotions, so I am taken aback when he bangs his fist on his chair’s tubular armrest and shouts, “I’ll make your publisher pulp it while your daughter watches!”
    The bartender leans forward and says, “I said , keep it down,” then turns up Van Morrison disagreeably loud.
    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?”
    â€œYeah. And?”
    â€œNever 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.
    â€œYou’re supposed to have a handicapped toilet.”
    â€œIt’s out of order.”
    â€œIt’s the law!”
    â€œIt’s out of