Quicksand by Steve Toltz Page A

if he and the chair were hurtling through space. His hair was wet and combed back and looked like a kind of mold, and he was emitting an uneasy vigor and chattering like a small mob, explaining how he was ashamed of his long-held desire to see a mounted policeman thrown by his own horse. He turned away from Sergeant Oakes to give me a furtive hand gesture that looked like an aborted thumbs-up, but his eyes only lingered on my face long enough to convey vague disappointment, as if for a split second he thought I was coming in to tell him his bath was ready. Though the room was ice cold, and Aldo was in short sleeves, his face was sheened with sweat. Now he was saying he was tired of thoughts so self-pitying he believed he could hear God throw up in His mouth.
    Sergeant Oakes busted out a nervous laugh. Talk about your captive audience; Aldo knew we had to listen to everything he said in case it could be held against him in a court of law. He was disgusted at all the horrible pretend laughing he’d done in his life, he said now, and was upset that he could derive pleasure only from the sight of the dogs of two introverts attacking each other in the street. Whether he was in the grip of a methamphetamine high still in its ascendance or having some kind of manic episode, he was shifting in the chair and shaking violently and picking at the skin on his forearm as if ants were strutting on it, seemingly set upon the herculean task of emptying his head, like in some mental stock-clearance sale where everything must go. He said he was depressed that if we ever advanced to a one-world government it would only mean that national wars became civil wars, and he was enraged how nobody admitted that the single most irritating thing in our whole society was being the captured person in a citizen’s arrest.
    He tilted his chair backward and said it was a further annoyance that a life strategy of minimizing regrets only winds up guaranteeing you suffer the maximum. I wanted to carry him out of there and put him to bed, and I wondered how far I’d get if I picked him up in my arms and made for the exit. Now, as he tilted back so far the chair looked like it would topple over, he said he was sick of watching so much porn it was affecting his genome. He brought the chair slamming down on the cement floor. He was revolted, he said, at how he was so impatient for the population to drop below replacement level he could barely contain himself. And he was grossed out that our only evidence of moral evolution was how we’d learned to forgive ourselves during the sins we committed, and not wait until after.
    It was at this moment I noticed that he’d fixed his eye on some point in the room. What was he looking at? He was saying that it was very telling that the only time people looked serious was when they were counting money or watching their child vanish around a corner. Sergeant Oakes nodded at me morosely and I had the impression he’d developed a stoop since I’d first entered. I thought: It is us, not Aldo, who will crack under interrogation. Aldo swiped vaguely at his own face. I traced his focal point to either a tiny crack in the plaster on the wall or the fly beside it. He said there was a reason that “the kindness of nature” isn’t a saying in any language. That people mistreat dogs because they can’t handle that type of devotion. That we’re not the worst civilization ever to blight the earth, but we’re the most sensitive.
    It struck me that every time he slammed the floor after titling backward, he edged the chair a few millimeters forward. He was saying that history isn’t a litany of peoples and civilizations, it’s a series of clinical trials. That the first sign of madness is inattention to Don’t Walk signals. That the most significant impact of the digital world on our lives is we no longer wait for people to take their photographs when we want to pass in front of