Quicksand by Steve Toltz

left the house on foot.
    â€œConstable Wilder?”
    â€œSpeaking.”
    â€œThis is Detective Garnick, drug squad. We met at the trial of Norman Lester. I don’t know if you remember.”
    â€œOf course. How’s your eye?”
    â€œI look like a fucking Chinaman.”
    â€œCan I do something for you, Detective?”
    â€œThis is just a courtesy call to let you know I’ve arrested a vet for selling Nembutal at the Montefiore, the Jewish retirement home down Gladesville way.”
    â€œWelldone, you.”
    â€œIt’s a euthanasia drug. Also used to kill horses.”
    â€œAnd that’s relevant to me because . . . ?”
    â€œAldo Benjamin’s your mate, isn’t he?”
    My heart tightened, a palpable dread. What now?
    â€œWe got a list of clients. It seems your boy bought himself two bottles last week.”
    Nembutal?
    Was Aldo finally going to do it? Ever obsessed with taking his own life, something that could be traced back to his father’s suicide, had he succumbed to the cumulative effects of his long string of professional failures and the permanent loss of Stella? Was this his ultimate dramatic suspension of judgment? Had he decided to listen to the voices in his head, always with the bad advice?
    I thanked the detective and hung up. The cars came in an endless stream, the whoosh and screech of traffic in my ears grew louder, and everyone was over the limit—everyone!—and for hours I booked citizen after citizen after citizen, feeling like the last sober man in a crazed nation that ran on booze. In every remorseful driver I saw Aldo’s suicide, the agony of him second-guessing himself too late, and I was afraid I wouldn’t catch him in time, that I’d walk in to see him flapping like a fish on the deck of a boat. These thoughts made me whimper, tear up, knowing Aldo’s abject terror of physical pain. Yet for some reason I can’t account for, I waited until nine p.m., after my shift, to drive over to Phoenix Court. There was a proliferation of abandoned mattresses on the rain-slicked footpath and every parked car seemed to have its own gang of youths perched on its hood.
    Even from the elevator, thumping music could be heard that, as it turned out, was coming from Aldo’s apartment. A party was in progress and I felt the vague sting of the uninvited as I made my way inside to see guests drinking, upper-torso dancing, and loud-talking over the music. Thin traces of cocaine were on the glass coffee table, next to bowls of guacamole brown at the edges. The heavy smell of hydroponic pot. There was something perfectly ordinary and yet unaccountably strange about this party, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Aldo was standing by the flat-screen television with glitter on his face, chatting to a pale, scarfed woman with a theatrical voice that carried across the smoky room. “And I wasn’t thinking,” I heard her say, “so I accidentally signed my porn name.” He hadn’t seenme, so I started surreptitiously checking in cupboards for the Nembutal while reassuring guests either visibly spooked at the sight of my uniform or overly excited, mistaking me for a male stripper. As I mingled, it dawned on me, the source of the weirdness: about every third guest I encountered was sick in some way. I spoke to a double amputee, a woman with an incurable liver disease, a recent testicular cancer survivor, gaseous men and women who smelled like the slick coating on vitamins, people who had wasted legs or moony faces or who seemed to have been born into their dotage. Something implausible was going on. People who needed emergency mollycoddling skittered around the party discussing various treatments, the efficacy of this drug over that, superbacteria horror stories. They were all prototypes of a human being in God’s workshop—strictly first drafts.
    I marched over to Aldo, interrupting him mid