Quicksand by Steve Toltz Page B

this guy; I didn’t care how far back our friendship went, how much history we shared. I was sick of being obliging. Aldo had now spent all his friendship tokens, and unless he had some ingenious scheme to get a fresh supply, we were fucking done.
    I snatched the joint out of Doc Castle’s hand and tossed it over the balcony. “You know what I’ve just realized, Aldo? I’ve had enough of you.”
    Aldo blinked, and Doc Castle and the rest of the professionals awkwardly edged backward as I went on a verbal rampage about how Aldo and I might have been genuine friends in the past but he had been using me for years. I even repeated Tess’s fear that Aldo’s most toxic, corrupting influence was not on my behavior, but on my destiny, and now I feared she was right; there was something contagious about his shit luck, and in his orbit one had a tendency to give oneself bad advice. It started to drizzle, affording the spectators the perfect excuse to return inside. Aldo hadn’t moved; his head was cocked and he wore a strange sad smile, a practiced smile, as if he’d heard this speech before from others. Maybe he had.
    â€œI know I’m a pain,” he said. We stared silently at each other. A pulsing light from the nearby telecommunications tower went off. That seemed to be my cue. I stormed inside.
    â€œLiam, wait,” Aldo said as I tramped through the party into his bedroom, where I ejected the copulating couple and turned over magazines, tossed self-actualization tomes and dry psychology textbooks to the floor, methodically ransacked his cupboards, swung my arm in a loose arc underneath his bed, gathering socks and T-shirts and shoes I’ll bet Aldo assumed he’d lost. His guests gathered at the doorway to make snarky asides and take photographs on their phones, but I doubted they could perceive the tendrils of Aldo’s psyche twined around mine. They certainly couldn’t have caught all the nuances of intimacy I felt while touching his things, nor seen the angry tears in my eyes. This was a friendship of nearly twenty years I was throwing away here. I rifled through his drawers, charged by the spasms of rage I’d ceded control to, and aware of the frightening effect an armed uniformed maniac must be having on spectators. It was in a white Nike sport sock that I found it: an opaque bottle with a stopper and an acrid odor rising out of it. I went into the kitchen, waved it in the air in prosecutorial triumph at Aldo, who didn’t respond in any visibleway. My plan was to pour it down the sink, but Aldo’s non-reaction forced a melodramatic act; I smashed it on the kitchen tiles, and almost immediately the cat went to lick it up. I removed the cat, found a mop, and cleaned up the Nembutal before the animal could get to it and die violently in front of the whole party. Aldo watched all this with a compelling look of genuine, haunted sadness. I had robbed him of his last resort, seized his suicide from his actual hands. I thought: One man’s tragedy averted is another man’s fantasy deferred. I wrapped the broken glass in newspaper and stepped into the cold hallway without a word.
VI
    For several months I took a well-deserved hiatus from my old friend, stopped returning his messages, resisted the temptation to call, slid the idea of him into a compartment with a hidden bottom. On Sonja’s eighth birthday he sent a musical-ballerina jewelry box; that it was his first gift since her christening only exacerbated my annoyance and strengthened my resolve. At the same time I stopped writing. Outnumbered by bad ideas, I tossed it in, and this new commitment to personal and artistic failure somehow felt in concert with my sad abandonment of my hopeless friend. Once I almost weakened: his histrionic voice on my answering machine sounded like it came from the inside of a metal pipe, whispering harshly and cryptically about deep trouble. Sonja was playing on the