Quicksand Read Free Page A

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.”
    â€œSo true!” I write that down and say, “This is going to sound gay . . .”
    â€œSay it.”
    â€œYou are my muse.”
    â€œWill you carry me to the toilet?”
    â€œOf 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.”
    â€œYou’ve outlived yourself.”
    â€œI never wanted anyone to say of me, ‘He’s breathing on his own now.’ ”
    â€œNow do you understand why—”
    â€œYou do not have my permission!”
    â€œDo 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, bubblewrapped, 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.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œA bourbon and Coke.”
    As the bartender pours, I light a cigarette.
    â€œGo outside,” he says.
    I keep the cigarette going, sucking deeply.
    â€œI’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
    W E 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