The Subject Steve: A Novel

by Sam Lipsyte

  It was bum luck for the mammoth.

  A band of humanoids lumbered up, a hunting party, crude men with crude spears in their tufted fists, loud language on their tongues. They whooped and hollered, circled the beast, rushed in and out and in again, stabbed until the mammoth's hide blew bright spouts of mammalian blood. The woolly fellow thumped to his knees, bellowing, bellowing, us thrust up now into the black pain of his mouth. His cries and the taunts of the hunters started to fade. There was darkness now, silence. There was darkness with a few faraway pricks of light. The universe. Universal shorthand for the universe.

  We were moving through it now. We were gliding toward a greenish-bluish ball. Our ball, the home sphere. Sea and tree and all those organic shenanigans, all that fluke life. We were flying right smack into the middle of the fucker, flying and flying until it wasn't flying anymore, it was falling, and we were falling now through clouds and sky and down upon the body of a city, row house bones and market hearts and veins of neighborhood, arterial concretions of highway and boulevard and side street, falling now to a low float over pavement, a hover here in some lost alleyway, a superannuated little gland of a place, where a solitary figure walked with his hands stuck in his windbreaker. The figure began to glow, as though suddenly sensor-read, his organs swirls of grained color, his skull a glassy orb of dim pulses and firings, the lonely weak electrics of homo erectus. The man stooped for his shoelace. The picture froze at the beginnings of a bow knot. Through the speakers came the sound of sprocket jump, the flutter of reel's end. The screen swiped to test bars. The music leaked away. The lights went up.

  The Mechanic took the lectern, spoke into a thimble he'd slipped upon his thumb.

  "Any questions?"

  There were questions.

  "Should we assume the figure, the visible man, as it were, is the subject?" called a woman with a series of laminated cards clipped to her pantsuit.

  "What's with the woolly mammoth?" said a kid with a video rig strapped parrot-like to his shoulder.

  "Forget that," said an old man in a hunting vest. "What is the point of any of this? Is this some kind of gag?"

  "I assure you," said the Philosopher, leaning into the Mechanic's amplified thumb, "this is no gag. Nor could it be construed as a bit. The visual aid is merely meant as a tool to help you better understand the scope of what we're about to tell you. Ladies and gentleman, the subject, who, as some of you may already have ascertained, is seated here among us, which I note as a precaution against insensitive comments regarding his condition, this subject is the first known sufferer of what I believe will and should be referred to from now on as Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, named, I might add, for its discoverers, Dr. Blackstone and myself."

  "Without being technical," said the kid with the parrot cam, "what exactly is the nature of PREXIS? PREXIS for short, right? I mean, what's the deal, nontechnically speaking? And why should we care, given all the diseases out there right now?"

  "To put it bluntly," said the Mechanic, "those other diseases already have a name. And with it, a cause: viral infection, chemical compromise, cellular glitch, inheritance on the genetic level. This syndrome, though now named, still has no identifiable cause, which does not mitigate its unquestionable fatality. This man is going to die. But here's the kicker: he's going to die for no known reason. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, and irrevocably. He may show no signs of it yet, but he will, trust me. And though he may be the first, I assure you he is not alone. Like the beast in the film, and the prototypical bipeds who felled it, all of us here, too, will someday be extinct. And not from nuclear catastrophe or chemical weaponry or environmental collapse, but from something else entirely. Who knows? Perhaps the cause is sheer purposelessness. At any rate, be advised, this subject, Steve, this mild-mannered thirty-seven-year-old ad man, is but the first in line. Maybe you've been lucky enough to dodge everything else, the cancers, the coronaries, the aneurysms, but do not consider yourself blessed. Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, if you will, is guaranteed to claim us all."

  "Aren't you just talking about death?" said the old man.

  "Unfortunately, yes," said the Mechanic.

  "But don't we already know about death?"

  "What do we know? We know nothing. Now at least perhaps we have what little light the work of Dr. Goldfarb and myself can shed on it."

  "I'm interested in what you mean by purposelessness," said the woman in the pantsuit. "Do you mean boredom? Do you mean to say this man is actually going to die of boredom?"

  "That's one way of putting it, yes," said the Philosopher.

  "Dynamite," said the woman, darted out of the room.

  "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I said, back in the Special Cases Lounge.

  "We weren't sure."

  "We couldn't be certain."

  "All the data accounted for."

  "All the numbers in."

  "Sorted."

  "Crunched."

  "Mashed."

  "Mealed."

  "Until a granular quality obtained."

  "Then checked and counterchecked against findings in our database."

  "Adjusted for error."

  "Baseline error."

  "Human and otherwise."

  "Human and counterhuman."

  "We had to be precision-oriented on this one. Or orientated."

  "Either way."

  "We had to be scientists about it."

  "If we're not scientists, what are we?"

  "If we're something else, who are the scientists?"

  "So," I said, "how long have I got?"

  Cudahy was waiting on the corner near my building. It looked like there'd been some sort of accident. News trucks and radio cars cordoned off the better part of the block. Cudahy threw a parka over my head, guided me up a hillock of root-ruptured pavement toward my door.

  "Don't answer the vultures," said Cudahy.

  "Which vultures?" I said.

  Here they were upon us, pressing, pecking through my fuzzy sheath.

  "How does it feel to be dying?"

  "Do you believe you are bored to death?"

  "Have you had any further contact with the mammoth?"

  Cudahy shouted them all down. I felt his huge arms wrap around my head.

  "Scum," said Cudahy, bolted the door behind us. "Wish to God I had Vlad with me. That guy sure knew what to do to a journalist."

  I let the parka slip to the floor.

  "What's happening to me?" I said.

  "Hell if I know," said Cudahy. "Why can't they let a man die in peace?"

  "I'm in fine fettle," I said.

  "Sure you are."

  "All I did was go in for a checkup."

  "That's how they get you," said Cudahy.

  He cracked a bottle of beef-flavored vodka, turned on the TV. The woman in the pantsuit beamed up from my stoop. She fiddled with a coil of metal in her ear.

  "Yes, Mike," she said, "he appears to be barricaded in this building you see behind me. And, truthfully, I can't say I blame him. Who wants to be the pace car in the race to oblivion? But there's another question, Mike, which I think you broached, or maybe breached, earlier. How do we know he's the only person on the planet with Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, as it's so rapidly come to be known? It's hard to believe that this man, this so-called Subject Steve, is even the only victim of terminal ennui in this city. And if there are others, are they dying, too? Are we all, perhaps, dying? Have we, perhaps, always been dying? It's too early to tell."

  "This is insane," said Cudahy. "A mass hallucination. I've read about this kind of thing. You do a lot of reading on the track and field circuit. Downtime. Cafes. You get educated. History is full of this phenomenon. It'll blow over."

  "I don't see it blowing over," I said.

  "It's just started to blow, buddy. There's a whole blowing-over process. Anyway, you've got more important things to think about. You're still, on a personal level, dying."

 
; "But I'm in fine fettle," I said.

  "Fettle is irrelevant," said Cudahy. "Science has proven that much."

  Now a man I knew appeared on the screen. He sat at an office workstation, his thin hair blending with the fabric of the cube-wall weave.

  "One thing I can tell you about the subject," said the man, "he always bought doughnuts for his team."

  "Pastries!" I said. "Better than doughnuts!"

  "It's okay," said Cudahy. "Calm down."

  "It wasn't doughnuts."

  "It's okay," said Cudahy.

  "What are they talking about, boredom?" I said. "I've never been bored. Lonely, tired, depressed, of course. But not bored."

  "I think they mean that as a euphemism," said Cudahy.

  "A euphemism for what?"

  "I'm not sure I follow," said Cudahy.

  This was about the time I started to weep. This was the kind of weeping where after a while you're not quite sure it's you who's still weeping anymore. Some wet, heaving force evicts your other selves. You're just the buck and twitch, the tears. You fetal up and your thoughts are blows. Phrases drift through you. Rain of blows. Steady rain of blows. There's no relent. There's no relief. The hand of a comforting Cudahy is a hunk of hot slag. The world is a slit through one bent strip of window blind. The noise of the city, the hum of the house, the hiss of the television, is wind.

  I fell asleep, woke to a bowl rim at my lips.

  Fiona.

  Dimly, men in Stetsons rode past boomtown facades and out onto a pixilated plain.

  "I love this part," I heard Cudahy say, dimly.

  "Fennel soup," said Fiona. "Drink."

  "They're doomed," said Cudahy. "They know they're doomed, and they also know their only shot at grace is precisely in that knowledge. There's an army of vicious Mexicans out there waiting to shoot them to pieces."

  "I'd like to see the Mexican side of the story," said Fiona. "I'd like to read an oral history from the Mexican perspective."

  "An oral history," said Cudahy. "I bet you would, honey."

  "Gross."

  "What's going on?" I said. I figured they needed a chance to adjust, to my state, to their consideration of my state. My worry was that I could sleep too much. A dying man sleeps too much, maybe his power slips away.

  I needed all the power in my purview, my ken.

  Cudahy muted the doomed hooves.

  "Daddy," said Fiona.

  "So," I said, "you heard. You came."

  "PRAXIS," said Cudahy.

  "PREXIS," said Fiona.

  "You didn't seem so worried before," I said.

  "I didn't know how serious it was."

  "Baby, I have some bad news. About your educational opportunities."

  "It's okay. Uncle Cud told me. I hope the fucking was worth it."

  "Only time it's not worth it is when it's free," said Cudahy.

  "Daddy, I want you to know I'm going to be here for you. That part is settled. Don't argue with me. It's what I need to do now. For me as much as for you."

  "Thank you, baby," I said, and sang to her, weakly, the song about aardvarks I had sung to her in the days before her disaffection.

  Then I spit up some fennel shreds.

  The next morning Cudahy went out for food, the early papers. I watched him pilot his bulk down the stoop, disappear behind a satellite truck. My good Cudahy, back from the wide strange world.

  My fondest Fiona.

  "You'll ruin the paint with all this tape," she said, pulling my scrapbook mural down.

  I thought back to the time Fiona was six, seven, caught a double zap of chicken pox and scarlet fever. She got so quiet there on the living room carpet playing divorce with her Barbies. The sores spread and her blood boiled. We watched her body take on the silken deadness of her injection-molded friends. It all came to high drama, or my high dramatics, me running crazy through the neighborhood with my doll-daughter in my arms, Maryse screaming for me to come back.

  "I've got us a cab, schmuck!"

  The doctors shamed us for our delay. Maryse and I, we'd been inches from the abyss of nefarious parentage, practically Christian Scientists, but Fiona would live. It must have been our luck that got us so hot, basted us both in visions of hump and dazzle. Or maybe it was some awful need to screw within wad's shot of the abyss. Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts. We gripped each other's privates and started to kiss, but our mouths were pruned things, insipid divots. My wife's wetness was all for William the Fulfiller now. We conked out drunk on the carpet, woke up around dinnertime, checked in on our baby. Fiona was bent up in her fever's waning. Maryse and I held hands beside the little plaid bed.

  "I'm leaving you," said my wife.

  "I know," I said.

  Fiona claimed she remembered none of it, but she still bore a mark from those days, a pock where a scab must have flaked, smack between her dry green eyes.

  It was about the size of a sunflower seed.

  Cudahy came back with cabin food. Siege supplies. Soup cans and sandwich meats and bouillon cubes in silver foil. He pulled a newspaper from the grocery sack, folded to an item: "Doc's Prog for Our Kind: Game Over." Beneath my ex-wife's picture was a caption: "Ex-Hubby the New T. Rex."

  "Where'd they get the photo?" I said.

  "Eye in the sky, probably," said Cudahy. "Or the DMV."

  "Mom gave it to them," said Fiona. "She left a message on my cell. She's getting calls from talk shows. She wants to know how you feel about her speaking publicly on the matter."

  "You mean whoring herself."

  "Sharing her experience, hope, and strength."

  "Tell her she can do whatever the hell she wants."

  "I knew you'd say that so I already said that."

  "There's a guy out there," said Cudahy. "He's offering his help."

  "Reporter?" said Fiona.

  "Don't think so," said Cudahy. "He told me to give you this."

  It was a mimeographed brochure, lettered in splotchy monastic script.

  Have you been left for dead?

  Do you number among the Infortunate- shrugged off by family, friends, physicians, priests?

  Have you been told you're beyond all hope?

  Are you incorrigible, inoperable, degenerative, degenerate, terminal, chronic, and/or doomed?

  Are you lost, are you crazy, or just plain sick?

  Maybe you should snuff it, friend.

  Go ahead.

  Pull the Trigger.

  Turn up the Gas.

  Do it.

  Do it, coward.

  Did you do it?

  You didn't, did you?

  Okay, don't do it.

  You're not worth the mess you'll make. Not yet.

  Here's a better idea:

  Call the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption and deliver back unto yourself your dying body and your dead soul.

  No malady, real or imagined, is too difficult to cure.

  Forget the scientific phonies and the quacks of holistic boutiques.

  Forget the false love of New Age shamans.

  Forget the false touch of healing retreats.

  Your health, your freedom, your salvation is a toll-free call away.

  Ask for Heinrich.

  All major credit cards accepted.

  Squeezed along the margin in fountain ink was this: "I Have the Cure.-H."

  I made of this inanity a nice coaster for my coffee mug.

  "They'll really be coming out of the woodwork now," I said.

  "What woodwork?" said Cudahy. "We're on an island of concrete."

  Walking back to the clinic for my next appointment a few weeks later, I saw what Cudahy had meant. I'd lived in this city long enough to forget the absurdity of the place, all these surfaces refracting us in shatters, this tonnage that bore down on us with hysterical weight.

  Someday sectors of this city would make the most astonishing ruin
s. No pyramid or sacrificial ziggurat would compare to these insurance towers, convention domes. Unnerved, of course, or stoned enough, you always could see it, tomorrow's ruins today, carcasses of steel teetered in a halt of death, half globes of granite buried like worlds under shards of street. Sometimes I pictured myself a futuristic sifter, some odd being bred for sexlessness, helmed in pulsing Lucite, stooping to examine an elevator panel, a perfectly preserved boutonniere.

  I'd be the finder of something.

  Now, walking along, I had only the sense of losing myself.

  Yes, I could perambulate unpestered, unthronged. My saga was stale. There were fresh griefs upon us. A beloved lip-sync diva had choked to death on a sea bass bone. The troops of our republic were poised on the border of a lawless fiefdom in Delaware. The Secretary of Agriculture had been exposed as a fervent collector of barnyard porn. Worse, he had a yen for the young ones, the piglets, the foals. Bestiality was one thing, opined the ethics community, but for God's sake, these were babies. There were wars and rumors of war and leaks of covert ops. There were earthquakes, famines, droughts, floods. A certain movie star had made box office magic once more.

  The National Journal of Medicine 's scathing rebuke of the veracity of Goldfarb-Blackstone Syndrome, its excoriation of the ailment's namesakes as "freakshow impresarios," had barely made the back pages, the spot after the break.

  The air was out and I was glad of it. My fine fettle continued to obtain. Still, I somehow felt bound to these men, Goldfarb and Blackstone, the Philosopher and the Mechanic. They'd shocked me into keener living. I was brimming with bad poetry and never reading the financials. I can't say I knew what counted in life but I was beginning to glimpse what didn't. I had Fiona back, and Cudahy, too.

  I owed these doctors a courtesy visit.

  The Philosopher was sniffing something from a vial of handblown glass. Dark powder dusted his nose.

  "Want some?" he said. "It's a new synthetic."

  "Cunt's out of control," said the Mechanic. "Making his own yay-yo, to hell with the world."

  "Oh, piss off, Blackie," said the Philosopher. "Just a little pick-me-up."

  These were not the dashing scientists of the amphitheater. The Philosopher was unshaven and looked long unwashed. His lab coat was covered with cobalt smears. The Mechanic had developed a tic of the eye that might have seemed lewd had the psychic deterioration which motored it not been so plain.