Quicksand by Steve Toltz

report. Finally! My natural subject.
    â€œYou OK?”
    I stood blinking at Aldo’s note, trying to memorize it, eyeing the photocopier under the bulletin board in the adjoining alcove.
    â€œConstable? What do you make of it?”
    I’ll tell you what I’ll make of it! Insomuch as a friend is an exploitable resource, and since I can’t, it seems, help him anyway, I’ll mine Aldo for everything he is, and write about all the terrible things that have happened to him, a small, inoffensive human being who can’t catch a break, and how he is somehow complicit in the worldly and supernatural crimes perpetrated against him.Preliminary title: Woe is He . Or Jokers of the Fall . Or Between the Water and the Clay.
    â€œDo you mind giving me a moment?”
    I went to the men’s room; the reflection of my rapacious face was jarring. My inner voice’s faint excited whisper: This is it. This is it. Was this it? Was I sure? Morrell says: Muses lay traps and conjure mirages. On the other hand: Some women you have to bed before you can reject them. OK, I know Aldo told me untold things in absolute confidence but this was minimal compensation, the least I could recoup for my efforts. Besides, his life could benefit from close reading. The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, so I would examine it for him. Who else but a best friend could do that?
    I opened my notebook and with hardly a moment’s thought or hesitation, I wrote: The weird truth is I’ve often become good friends with people I originally disliked, and the more I downright loathed the person, the better friends we eventually became. This is certainly true of Aldo Benjamin, who irritated me at first, then infuriated me, then made me sick, then bored me senseless, which led to his most unforgivable crime—occasionally, when in the process of boring me, he’d become self-aware and apologize for being boring. “No no,” I’d have to say, feigning shock at the suggestion, “you’re not boring me, please go on.” I sometimes had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.
    I stared at that paragraph, and allowed myself a brief shiver of admiration for having expressed something true. The pen was still wriggling in my hand. I had more to say, much more. I closed my eyes and contemplated the daunting task ahead. To write this story would automatically throw me into a head-on collision with the meaning of fate, humanity’s, sure, but Aldo’s strange specific one too, for I could finally admit what I always knew to be true: He is unique, he who seems hell-bent on falling into the same river not twice but innumerable times.
    And I could unravel, permeate, explain him.
    Senior Detective Doyle gazed at me with a cool, suspicious eye when I came to his desk and asked to personally conduct the interview. Everything about me had become sinister, and he spotted that. “Your mate’s having a manic episode,” he drawled, as if being manic was evidence of his guilt.
    â€œI will get him to speak,” I said, and Doyle looked baffled and annoyed.
    â€œYou’re not hearing me. He’s already speaking, Constable.” Doyle againmade references to a manic episode; Aldo was either coked up or on methamphetamines or simply out of his mind. Yes, he was talking, he repeated, but not about the crime per se, this wasn’t a confession, and he wasn’t saying anything incriminating, though what he was saying was certainly very disturbing, and Doyle had left Sergeant Oakes in there to keep an eye on him. “In any case, Mr. Benjamin has been specifically asking for you to be present for the interview,” he said with a light snarl.
    â€œThanks for mentioning it,” I responded, then moved briskly to the interview room, as if all the nation’s novelists were hurrying to beat me to it.
    I entered to see Aldo, greyhound-thin, gripping the undersides of his chair as