Quicksand by Steve Toltz Page B

their cameras. “We just fucking go.” Aldo rocked back and forth with metronomic rhythm and slammed the chair again, inching forward. Now I understood. He was in all probability aiming to lunge for the gun in Sergeant Oakes’s holster in order to turn it on himself. Would he know how to take the safety off? If we intercepted him in time, would it be misinterpreted as an attempt on our lives? He said it was downright inscrutable that most people he met were as self-defeating as child pornographers who put their incriminating hard drives in for service.Now he seemed about to make a move. He said we are always exaggerating when we praise someone’s integrity, and that when you have poor intuition, everything is counterintuitive. Aldo’s chair was less than a half-meter from Sergeant Oakes, who hadn’t noticed, busy as he was kneading his own left shoulder. Aldo said he was sickened that he only fell into lockstep with his fellow man during earthquakes and when the Olympics were held in his home city, he was sad that a return to naiveté would require substantial damage to his prefrontal cortex, and thought it plainly weird that nobody but him realized that Islamophobia is merely repressed harem envy. His voice, I thought, was now communicating nausea and transmitting it directly to the listeners. He was sorry he couldn’t articulate if pressed why he was so sure his life was superior to the life of a cow, and loathed the phrase “a serious, but stable condition,” which implied a generally positive outcome while in reality meant someone’s life was probably ruined, that they were to be a paraplegic, or a quadraplegic. “Take it from me. Serious but stable is nothing to cheer about.”
    Aldo’s incremental inching had now put him in arm’s reach of Oakes’s holster, and when he made his move I intercepted him with a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back into his seat. Oakes wasn’t sure what had just happened, and stood up at high alert with one hand balled into a fist and the other on his weapon, signaling me with urgent eyes his readiness to lend a hand in physically subduing this bona-fide danger to society.
    I sat opposite Aldo and said I was going to conduct the interview, and that while the recording device was active he should remain still.
    A long, distressing moment followed where his lips were sucked into his mouth and he trembled with intense concentration, as if he were trying to hold in his own odor. Aldo toasted me with his Styrofoam cup of water and spilled most of it down his chin, and in one long breath explained that what was worse than being treated like a statistic was being treated like a statistical anomaly. He insisted he had always felt, on any given day, that his worst fears would be realized, not the grave, but an automated bed or a cell. Not a shroud, but bandages or a uniform. Not death, but physical suffering or imprisonment. Nothingness was nothing to get excited about, but agony and incarceration were. That is to say, he had always felt extravulnerable to the whimsy of the microbe, or to damning circumstantial evidence, as in, he said, the results are in, the jury is back, the tests are positive, you’ve been found guilty, I recommend a course ofchemotherapy, I sentence you to seven years’ maximum security; because for him, he said, there had always been two totally separate and more or less autonomous civilizations existing parallel to regular society—the prison society and the hospital society—and he perceived regular society as a narrow bridge with the other two lying on either side, and he’d always been terrified of losing his footing and falling into one or the other, into a world of solitary confinement or of burn wards, of laundry-room rapes or skin grafts, and where he would finally fall—into the horror of the prison, or into the horror of the hospital—was his greatest