The Subject Steve: A Novel

by Sam Lipsyte

  "People, I have an announcement to make. It concerns our very own Bobby Trubate. Today was an extra-special day for him. You know of what I speak. It's uncertain if we'll ever see him again, but suffice it to say he has finally tasted truth. Trubate. Perhaps name is destiny, after all."

  "You hear that, Spanky?" Parish whispered into my ear.

  I nodded, spooned up some pear.

  Back at the cabin Old Gold was stuffing Bobby's clothes into a duffel bag.

  "Did he go home?"

  "I don't know," said Old Gold.

  "What happened?"

  "I don't know. I guess he was no match for mothering fire."

  "He's a good guy."

  "Avram, has it ever occurred to you that a lot of this stuff might be figurative? That really the idea of life is just to get along as best we can under the circumstances?"

  "Oh, you mean like Nazi Germany?"

  "Don't pull that Nazi shit with me. I'm a Jew, too."

  "Who said I was a Jew?"

  "I read it in your story in the Tenets ."

  "Maybe I just meant that figurative."

  Old Gold left and I lay in my cot for a while. My classical kindergarten education had trained me to always take a few moments before sleep to review my day, ruminate on any schoolyard atrocities the banality of evil or banality may have glossed. Pigtail tuggings. Marble-maimings. Bastard shot at me, was all I could think. My day, for the most part. There was a knock at the door and Heinrich capered in all soft-shoe, twirled a phantom baton.

  "Cabin visit."

  "Are you going to tuck me in?"

  "I could, but then you'd just get up again to proceed with your wheelchair assignations."

  "No secrets around here, huh?"

  "Renee," said Heinrich. "Poor kid came here thinking about miracles. Just like you. People get crazy ideas. Even smart people like Renee. They think they're going to overcome their personal tragedies. They employ the phrase 'personal tragedy.' But I have deep feeling for Renee, I do. Marooned colonies of feeling, even."

  "No respect for Velcro, either."

  "Privacy's a dead end, Steve. What's the saying? Last refuge of scumbags?"

  "Do you read everyone's items?"

  "I paid for the pen, man. And the paper. So, how did you like being shot at today?"

  "Is that what that was?"

  "Toughie. How's your mysterious rot going?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "That's a good sign."

  "The symptoms come and go."

  "As they will."

  "It's not all in my head."

  "Hey, if it's in your head it's in you."

  "I'll try to remember that," I said. "Or my head will. What were you doing to Trubate in the mothering hut?"

  "Midwifery."

  "What happened?"

  "You were there."

  "Is he dead?"

  "Why would he be dead?"

  "Because his things were still here. Because I heard those screams. Because you-"

  "Careful now. I what?"

  "I don't know."

  "No, you don't, do you? You're deducing again."

  "I want to leave here."

  "And go where?"

  "Home."

  "Where would that be?"

  "Shit," I said, "you tell me."

  I threw a fit. I decided to throw a fit. It was a technique I'd honed at the agency. Sometimes, uncertain times, it proved judicious to appear unhinged. A timely spaz bespoke passion, salary-worth. Mine were maybe tantamount to office culture, too, like the late-night car service or the Monday massage. Don't pitch a Steve, people would admonish, except they said something else because as I may have mentioned, my name isn't Steve. Now I careened around the cabin looking for props. Swipes and kicks were a crucial part of the show. I started for the Coleman, dreaming of a drywood blaze. Heinrich stuck his foot out. There was time to clear it but I tripped anyway. The finish is the hardest part of the fit. That foot was a gift.

  "Calm yourself," said Heinrich.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Are you calm?"

  "Extremely fucking calm."

  Heinrich put his hand out.

  "Listen," he said. "This is your home. You have to accept that fact. Acceptance is the key to everything. I need you to be the hero of your own life, Steve. Also, I need your help."

  "My help."

  "Work for me, son. Don't be embarrassed. The dependence of a great man upon a greater is a subjection that lower men cannot easily comprehend."

  "Who said that?"

  "Halifax."

  "I wouldn't know him."

  "I read his maxims on the can. The cheese spread has real possibilities. We need some snap. We need some pop. Soft cheese for a soft touch."

  "Now you're quoting me quoting myself."

  "Too heavy for me," said Heinrich. "The levels, the levels. But I know you'll do us proud. One more thing. Don't ever sneak up on me at the hut again. I'll put one in your neck. Now, let me see your eyes. That's what I thought."

  "What?"

  "More dimness. Less flickering."

  The ant trundling a piece of thread across my windowsill had a brain punier than the blackhead I was teasing out of my nose with opposed thumbnails, but he must dream, mustn't he? Of what? Love? Work? Popcorn skins? Bolts of lint? Maze rats dreamed of mazes, according to the latest studies. Maze rat scientists dreamed of rats. I was dreaming of cheese.

  I scoured my corporate memory for all those phrases we used to bat around in lieu of competence. Brand leverage, brand agility, viral replication of the core brand identity. How about isotopic marketing? Meme buzz? Meme juice? Brand spill? The older types, the so-called salesmen, they'd laugh at us, go on about how there was no difference between hawking a webcasting network and an oatmeal cookie. Then they'd beg us for cocaine. Me, I was never much of a salesman. Sometimes, in my cups, or in a moment of weak arrogance, I called myself a court poet in the multinational kingdom. Better days I'd just call myself a hack and get on with the work.

  Renee lay beside me in my cot, the Tenets tilted on her belly.

  "Don't pop it," she said.

  "Why not?"

  "I want to."

  I tendered my nose to the lamplight.

  "Go ahead."

  "Hey," said Renee, "did you know Heinrich has a son? Or had a son?"

  "It says that in the book? I missed it. Ow!"

  "There," said Renee, held out the dark squiggle, my coagulated essence, in her palm. "It's vague, towards the end of the preface: 'My only issue emerged somewhat amphibious, due to pharmaceutical miscalculation on the part of his mother. He lived for a while in a ventilated, see-through tube. Then he returned to precellular nullity.' "

  "That's not so vague. How could I have missed that?"

  "I think I have an older edition."

  "Why would he take it out?"

  "Why would he put it in?" said Renee. "At least like that?"

  "That's part of his appeal."

  "Appeals to you, maybe."

  "What aspect of the master most pleases you, young novice?"

  "His shoulders. From behind he looks like my father."

  "Women and their fathers," I said.

  "Is that supposed to be insightful?"

  "It's a saying," I said.

  "You have a daughter, don't you?"

  "I did. I definitely did."

  "You're breaking my heart. I feel my heart actually cleaving. Is cleaving the word?"

  "We thought the school was a good idea."

  "I'm sure it was. It's you and your wife that weren't such a good idea."

  "We tried."

  "That's what I mean."

  "Lay off, okay? I want to ask you something. Did you know Heinrich reads our item books?"

  "We give them to him. Before we're mothered by fire."

  "I mean all the time."

  "I don't think so."

  "He read mine."

  "He must like you."

  "I do
n't trust the bastard."

  "Don't talk that way, Steve."

  "I'm not Steve."

  "You keep saying that. I'm all for mantras, but really, the trick is to find one that isn't so rooted in negation."

  "Listen, why don't you drag your numb ass back into your little fucking go-cart and get lost. I have work to do."

  The compound was quiet tonight, lit low by a pale slice of moon in the sky. The wind carried moans of milk cows in their stalls. Renee wheeled off near the dining-hall door without a word. She'd been crying. I'd thought she'd been sneezing but she told me through snot-wet bursts that this was how she cried. Wires crossed up after the accident. Not that I would care. Now I looked over towards Heinrich's cabin. He sat near the window, reading by candlelight. Strains of some cantata poured through the crevices of his home. His sloped shoulders bucked with what looked to be spasms of amusement. Maybe Renee's father laughed like that. I sneaked up to the sill. Let him put one in my neck, I thought.

  Heinrich saw me, cracked his window.

  "Evening," he said. "Out for a stroll?"

  He laid the pamphlet he was reading on the sill. Adult Children of War Criminals : A Copebook .

  "Cheese to Ease the Disease," I said.

  "Not bad," said Heinrich.

  "It's terrible," I said.

  "Yes," said Heinrich, "it is."

  "I don't have to help you, you know."

  "It's a free country. A dry county, but a free country."

  "I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here. I think it's some bizarre belief that the more ridiculous the situation is, the better the chances of something good coming from it."

  "That is bizarre," said Heinrich.

  "You don't have the fucking cure," I said.

  "Good night, Steve."

  "You know, you could go to prison for what you're doing here."

  "I could go to prison for lots of stuff," said Heinrich.

  Dietz called me over from his doorway. He said he had some bourbon, a little weed. Lem was building a customer base. Dietz's cabin was small and stank of Dietz. Books and torn parts of books and chunks of cinder littered the floor. There was a doorless mini-fridge in the corner. Pasted over the opening was a poster of a well-stocked ice box-pickle jars, milk jugs, wrapped steaks, fruit. Dietz sat on a steamer trunk with his derby in his lap. He was pinching out the creases in the brim. His Coleman threw light up on his berry stain. He caught me staring at it.

  "Mark of Cain," he said. "Born with the thing."

  "I like it."

  "I don't care so much about it. When I was a kid, sure. Girls, before I met the right kind. But it's hard to get people to look you in the eye. Look me in the eye."

  "I'm looking."

  "Yes, you are."

  "What do you want, Dietz?"

  "What do I want? What a question. I remember when I was a child my folks took me out to the beach. I hadn't said a word yet. Mute little fucker. Far back on the baby curve. But it so happened that on that day I saw something out on the water. Something that appealed to me. It appealed to me enough to summon language in me. Language was called up from my tiny toddler database for the first time in my tiny miserable life. What do you think I said? Remember, I saw something that appealed to me."

  "Seagull," I said. "See the seagull."

  "That would be grand, Steve. See the seagull. I'd be a fucking poet now, wouldn't I? No, I did not say see the seagull. What I said was, I want boat. That's all I said. I want boat."

  "You knew what you wanted."

  "My mother was amazed. She cried, she says. She says she cried."

  "Did you get boat?"

  "They took me out on a day cruise. Bought tickets, bundled me up. They were not wealthy people, Steve. Vermont syrup trash, tell the truth. But, like I said, they bought tickets, bundled me up, walked me up the gangway. We're out five minutes and I'm a goddamn disaster area. Or so I've been told. Five minutes sounds like an exaggeration, an embolism, not an embolism, you know what I mean."

  "An embellishment."

  "Point is, I'm a wreck. Puking, weeping. Sea sickness. The sickness of the fucking sea. And it's at this moment in the experience I make utterance once more. Once more language is called upon to do my bidding. What do you think I said?"

  "There are so many possibilities."

  "No, there aren't. You're missing it. Think about it logically. What could I have said? Okay, I'll tell you what I said. No more boat. That's what I said. No more boat. Now, I'm a dude, I'm the kind of dude that can babble on and on. To anybody. About anything. How many times, for instance, do you think I've said a word like anybody, or anything, in my life? Millions, probably. How many times have I said the word probably? How many times have I used my gift of language to explicate myself out of this or that shit-fucked situation?"

  "Extricate."

  "How many times have I said shit-fucked, or situation? Brother, it's all language. Dope, cars, finger-banging, rock 'n' roll. It's all just language. You think it's not, buddy, but it is, trust me. You think the ultimate is out there somewhere, beyond language, but it's not. It's just totally not. For example, what's the ultimate, anyway? It's a fucking word. But here's my final point, Steve. For all those goddamn words, for all those combinatory combinations of words, for all their various shades and schadenfreudes of meaning or unmeaning, it just comes down to two basic things. I want boat and no more boat. That's all there is."

  "I know what you mean."

  "You have no idea what I mean. Do you really like my stain? Or do you mean to say you like to look at it?"

  "What's the difference?" I said.

  "That's a good question. I wish I had the answer. But I'm just a dumbfuck. I'm just trying to keep it together."

  "Did you know Wendell?"

  "I knew Wendell."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He couldn't find the language," said Dietz. "Hungry?"

  He pointed to his picture of food.

  Bobby Trubate was back in his cot, hooked to a drip, wrapped in loose gauze. His face was bruised and runny, his mustache singed down to a ridge of hairy blisters. He looked like some formerly majestic bird pulled from a crash site fuselage.

  "Jesus, Bobby," I said. "What'd he do to you?"

  "Saved me," said Trubate.

  Estelle lounged in the corner with a magazine from the Johnson administration. There were stacks of these around, good for pop scholarship, kindling. I don't know who collected them, but paeans to the sexual revolution and tawny sideburns abounded. I tended to pore over the ads myself, stereos like space bays, secret sodomy in the Rob Roy ice.

  "Funny to read this crap, now," she said. "It's like inscriptions in your yearbook. Remember me when you're a movie star. Send me a postcard from Paris."

  "We need to get him to a hospital."

  "He'll be fine. I've been looking after him."

  "They took his stuff."

  "There's a laundry run."

  Trubate began to moan. His body sputtered under the sheets.

  "Did you know," said Estelle, "that before this was the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, it was a POW camp?"

  "A what?"

  "Simulated. For executive types. They'd come up here for a huge fee and Heinrich would keep them in cages, torture them."

  "Didn't read that part in the Tenets ."

  "Editorial discretion."

  It looked like Bobby wanted to speak. His lips split their scab caulk and sound dribbled out.

  "Maa. . .Faa. . ."

  "Ma?"

  "What is it?" said Estelle.

  "Maah . . . Faah . . ."

  "Mother," I said. "Father."

  "No," said Estelle. "Mothered by Fire. He's acknowledging his passage."

  "Maah . . ."

  "What is it, Bobby?" I said.

  Trubate strained up from the bed.

  "My face," he said. "My fucking face."

  Estelle was tired. I told her I'd watch Trubate for a wh
ile. He slept like a stone, or a stoned man. Maybe there was some morphine in his drip. His wounds, I saw now, were mostly superficial, show-biz gashes. Character-building for the character actor. Maybe he could ride the crest of the next disfigurement fad to stardom.

  Me, I was going to ride the hell out of here. There was nothing for me here, nothing shit-free. Organized psychosis had its rewards, but I was pretty sure you needed a future to reap them. I was a dying man, futureless. A lone wolf. A lone wraith.

  I dozed at Trubate's bedside, got up near dawn, walked back to Heinrich's window. He was asleep at his desk when I tapped on the pane. Heinrich didn't wake so much as boot up. You could almost sense the circuits firing, the cautious ascent to speed.

  "I need to talk to you," I said.

  "Your need is your demand," said Heinrich, waved me in.

  We sat in wicker, sipped root tea. Books, bales of them-paperbacks, hardbacks, chapbooks, manuals, sheaves-spilled out the rough pine shelves. There were survival guides and bird guides and bound sets of American Transcendentalists, but also computer manuals and some simulation theory I recalled my pal William flogging himself to ecstatic bongstates with in college. Heinrich set his tea mug down on an upturned clementine crate. He followed my gaze to the encrusted Esperanto phrasebook beside it.

  "Since the misfortune in Babel it has been a dream," he said. "I think it's folly, myself. Everyone should sing his own incomprehensible, inconsolable song. What I want to do here is help people find it."

  "Is that why you ran a POW camp?" I said.

  "That was a business proposition."

  "Clearly not a very lucrative one."

  "I did okay. Look, Steve, I'm a soldier. I've been all over the world hurting people. I don't apologize. Who am I to apologize? But this, all of this, it's a surprise to me. What I . . . what we have done here. What we've made. You've heard me make my crazy speeches to them. My beast-tales. Maybe I have fuck's clue what I'm talking about, but at least I am talking. And maybe we're getting somewhere, too. The mothering hut. Who could have known the power of such a thing? It just came to me one day. I thought it was an interrogation facility. It was an interrogation facility. We used it for a sweat lodge in the off-season. Naperton said it first. Like giving birth to yourself in there."