Quicksand by Steve Toltz

head.”
    â€œYou don’t understand. When I write about a character, it’s like getting a tattoo of them on my arm, and when it doesn’t work out I carry the failure of the relationship around with me forever, like some celebrity—”
    â€œLoser.”
    â€œThe man just arrested for wasting police time is not calling me a loser.”
    â€œThat’s not how it went down.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    As we stuttered along in the peak-hour nightmare, Aldo told me the whole story.
    Earlier in the day, he’d convinced Stella to return to Luna Park with him in the hope of rekindling their romance, a dud idea that misfired almost as soon as they got through the turnstiles. He had blurted out the whole spiel about them giving it one more shot. “She said, ‘Face it, Aldo, the marriage wasa failure.’ I said, ‘The relationship isn’t a failure merely because one of us didn’t die, and despite it being the gold standard for our whole stupid civilization, my death or your death is actually a ghoulish barometer for marital success.’ Then we talked about the state of our union in those final months. She said it was rusted, leprous, and there was no wind left to harness. She said, ‘A love drawn taut snaps eventually.’ She said, ‘Maybe our youths ended at different times, did you ever think of that?’ I said, ‘Let’s lay all our cards on the table,’ and I proceeded to tell her that somewhere affairs were had, by me, just two minor indiscretions that any competent marriage counselor would have recommended to couples staring down a commitment that stretches interminably into the future. Get it out of your system, I imagined the marriage counselor advising.”
    â€œThe imagined marriage counselor?”
    â€œHey, my conscience is clean: I change it every week.”
    â€œThat doesn’t mean anything.”
    Aldo laughed loudly, then bit his lip as if he’d revealed something he had set out to conceal. “Anyway, I told her how deeply and permanently and profoundly hurt I was by the way she left me.”
    This I knew. One night Stella had pretended to talk in her sleep in order to confess to Aldo that she was in love with another man. “Aldo, Aldo, I’ve met someone,” she murmured. She had hoped, he supposed, that he would feel as though she had left herself ajar and he could peek in when her mind was turned. She murmured, “Slept with him.” And, “Leaving you.”
    At Luna Park Aldo ceremoniously forgave her, but it was irrelevant. Stella dropped the bombshell about her upcoming nuptials to Craig. This hit him hard. They stood like two mutes; he felt like a removed tumor that was trying to graft itself back on. He yelled into her eyes and nose—fuck you, you fucking fuck—and stormed off and wound up between the pavilion wall and the back of the Rotor, a narrow corridor that smelled of popcorn and urinary tract infections, where he stood sobbing, for just a couple of minutes, he said, when two lean, muscular teenagers, one in oversized sunglasses, or maybe safety goggles, put him in a headlock and escorted him at knifepoint to an ATM where they forced him to withdraw, in their words, “the maximum daily amount.”
    I laughed at the cold precision of that term. “What then?”
    Stepping up to the bank machine, Aldo whispered to himself not to forget his PIN,and promptly forgot his PIN. The teenagers’ eyelids twitched erratically and their pupils were dilated; their brownish teeth and broken skin suggested methamphetamines, Aldo noted, and they looked to be no strangers to violence, nor to fault-finding parents, low grades, truancy, nil self-esteem, and a dissociative loss of control, and Aldo thought about how stabbing was extremely high on his list of fears—to be slashed , while dangerous to muscle, would be bearable, a wound he imagined to be hot and biting yet