The Subject Steve: A Novel

by Sam Lipsyte

  I hit the tuning scanner, found some old-time Muzak. It was the purest, truest thing I'd heard in a while. I pictured the viola section in loose-fitting Hawaiian shirts, listened to them ride the chordal swell. They were doing a rendition of something once regarded by rock magazine capsule reviewers as cruelly melodic and teeming with surplus malaise. These fiddle boys were bowing such sweetness back into it. I wept on past the Ohio state line.

  The question of why William's credit card was still valid tender continued to gnaw when I heard the birdsounds in the glove box. Glad chirp of sparrow on a microchip. I dug around for the phone, found it, flipped it.

  "Go," I said.

  Goddamn, it was good to say that.

  I got the buzz of bad frequency, a harried satellite.

  "Hello?" I said. "William?"

  "It's Bobby. Can you hear me?"

  "In and out."

  "Good . . ."

  "I missed that."

  "Now?"

  "Yeah."

  "How do you like Indiana?"

  "Are you tracking me?"

  "Drama queen."

  "What happened to the freedom of the open road?"

  "You're free to stop at any roadside concession. There's a Stuckey's coming up. I recommend the candied almond log."

  "Is that my password?"

  "No, it's just totally tasty."

  The redemption van crapped black smoke in the Stuckey's parking lot. I pulled William's convertible up beside it, got out. The van door slid open and Dietz smiled down. His ponytail was tucked inside his derby. The loop hung down like a silky noose.

  "Brother in fire," said Dietz, giggling. "Welcome to the whirligig."

  "I've got a ride," I said. "But thanks."

  "I don't think you're going to get too far," said a voice behind me. It was Old Gold. He was tearing up packets of diner sugar, pouring them into William's gas tank. Dietz grabbed me by the arms. His grip was tremendous. We had to wait for Old Gold to tear up all the packets, dig for more in his pants.

  "I told you we should have gotten the fucking box," said Dietz. "Eighty-nine cents."

  "That's a rip-off," said Old Gold.

  "We expense it."

  "Then we have to explain it."

  "Just cut the tires."

  "Radials," said Old Gold. "Bad for the knife."

  Old Gold drove. Dietz sat in back with me. There was a shovel there, the bed of it shiny, the blade edge blacked with oil. Dietz picked it up, poked at some bright netting torn loose from clementine crates.

  "My mother used to wear ones like these," he said. "Slut hose."

  "No more boat," I said.

  "There's always more boat."

  "Shut up back there," said Old Gold. "Dietz, did you drop those tabs? That's all I need. I'm commander of this operation."

  "What, nobody ever did a magic dance on your Navy SEAL Team?"

  "I wasn't no SEAL," said Old Gold. "I was an intelligence."

  Dietz fell back laughing, hugged the shovel blade.

  "Good stuff, Dietz?" I said. "See anything special?"

  "I don't have visions anymore, man. Too many golden fucking arches obstructing the view. Lookie there. Death burgers on both sides of the road. Motherfuckers get you coming and going."

  "It's your peers that are responsible, Dietz," I said. "They made this world."

  I pointed out the window to the world.

  "My peers? My peers been dead since '73. Don't lay that trip on me, man. Those people you're talking about, they were pigs all along. Pigs with beards, pigs on skag, little sows with blond hair down to their asses and sweet little piggy tits. Must I give you a lesson in cultural . . . cultural . . . oh, shit . . ."

  Dietz began to wriggle, beetle-like, batted his arms in the air.

  "Good morning, evening!" he said.

  "Don't mock the rituals," snarled Old Gold. "It's bad karma."

  "Karma?" said Dietz. "You moron. Hey, pull over. Let's get a burger. They make them with fetus meat now."

  "Can it, Dietz," said Old Gold. "Or I'm going to do something evil."

  "Evil?" said Dietz. "You don't have the sensitivity for evil. All you're capable of is mean. Man, if Heinrich was still Heinrich he'd show you a thing about-"

  "I said can it," said Old Gold.

  "Indiana," said Dietz, after a while, as though it might be a disputed philosophical supposition.

  "This here is downstate Illinois," said Old Gold. "They have signs about it for people like you who can't tell the difference."

  "Mind if I ask you guys a question?" I said.

  "Mind," said Dietz. "How many times do you think I've said the word mind?"

  "Where are you taking me?" I said.

  "To your rightful place," said Old Gold.

  We took a turnoff, sped up a ramp. Withered fields whipped by. I looked down at the shovel, up at Dietz. I wondered if I'd have to dig my own grave like some mob saga hood. I could storyboard the whole thing if they wanted.

  "Turn here," said Dietz.

  I peered out the window for a peek at my last location, but the only sights I saw were airport signs, a tinted tower by a pond.

  We flew out on a cheapo line, Phaethon Air. Dietz flourished tickets and we charged through the gate. Old Gold drove off with the van. Phaethon security was a coke-shaky clubkid with a billy bat. He wanted to know if we'd left anything unattended in the terminal.

  "Just my detonator," said Dietz.

  The kid laughed, waved us through.

  "Realm it up!" he called.

  "I use Phaethon for most of my travel. They're fans."

  We boarded, found our seats. We'd been assigned to something called urbane class. There was little in the way of leg room and no magazines, just old foreign affairs journals, some soft sculpture catalogues. The pipe racks fitted in the seatbacks were filled with posies and incense sticks. Stuffed in the pocket webbing, alongside some sick bags, were blank diaries with embossed covers that read: Reflections Aloft . The inflight movie, according to a typed index card, would be a series of experimental shorts produced at McGill University in the seventies.

  "What I love about this airline," said Dietz, "is that they know their niche and they work it."

  The pilot's voice came over the speaker to announce we'd be taking off shortly.

  "I'm feeling good about the whole takeoff thing right now," he added. "I mean, why not? Pilot error is all in the head."

  A steward came by with hot towels and vodka shots.

  Dietz lit up an enormous spliff.

  "I'm sorry, sir," said the steward, "you can't smoke that in here."

  Dietz winked a bloodshot eye, gave the guy a hit.

  I looked around for signs of censure but nobody seemed to notice. There were about a dozen people on board. Some were in leather and all were asleep.

  "Kiwis," said Dietz. "Crazy motherfuckers."

  "What's their niche?" I said.

  "Okay," said Dietz. "I lied to you. This isn't really an airline. But you'll thank me when you taste the lemon chicken."

  I spotted a few more passengers under blankets in the back of the plane, tiptoed past them to the bathrooms. The lock plate in one of the doors said Need. The other said Want. I went for Want. The door whacked up on a pair of knees.

  "Sorry," I said.

  "Come in."

  I slid through the door, leaned up on the sink.

  "Dropping some friends off at the lake," said the Rad Balm girl.

  "So, you wanted company?"

  "I didn't know it was you, fuckstick."

  "Right."

  The exit was a bit trickier, requiring a sort of high hurdle kick to clear. I leaned on Need. Need was not occupado. I locked myself in, sat down. The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom.

  "Steve, you're all flustered. Over."

  "My name's not Steve," I said.

  "It's so tiring, your denial. Over."

  "Your voice is really crackling," I said. "Over."

  We touc
hed down a few hours later. I looked out the window as we made our approach, saw blasted earth and cracked desert roads looping into emptiness. I didn't see any airport. Dietz had nodded off next to me, spliff stub poking cold from his knuckles. Some of the leather men were playing hacky sack in the aisle, shouting in strange English. Something about a wingeing sod off his tits in Auckland, a bunch of silly cunts. The pilot announced that he'd lowered the landing gear, requested that we please refrain from dread. I shook Dietz awake.

  "Where the fuck are we?"

  "We're in the land of dreams. Sunny California. Hollywood, to be exact."

  "This is the desert," I said.

  "Mulholland Drive," said Dietz. "Sunset and Vine. Betty Grable. Fatty Arbuckle. Bad fatty. Hollywood Walk of Fame. A star for Steve. A star for Dietz. We'll marry Brazilian models. We'll battle addiction."

  "This is the desert," I said. "This isn't even the desert where people go and say, Oh, I went to the desert, I lost eighty bucks on the slots but I found this skull. This is actually the fucking desert."

  "Okay," said Dietz, "I lied to you. It's the desert."

  We had to wait for the emergency chutes to inflate. Dietz said the deplaning platform was on the fritz. The New Zealanders were having chicken fights in the rear of the cabin. A great cheer went up as one man split his head on the luggage bin.

  Layover fever, Dietz said.

  We slid down to the desert floor, walked out across the waste. We walked for a while. The Rad Balm girl and some of her friends were with us, a few of the New Zealanders, too. There were some kids in skate pads who said they were from St. Louis. The going was slow. Every few feet there was a blindside tackle, a tussle in the sand. The man who'd injured himself on the luggage bin was beaten severely again. His mates laughed and called him a poof. The skate kids spit on his head. It appeared he'd been sacrificed by the Kiwis to the greater glory of international goodwill.

  "Violence will be met with decisive violence," said Dietz, but nobody paid him any heed.

  We passed the remnants of an encampment. Empty water bottles, tattered tents. Sun-browned business cards lay strewn with charred bones in a fire pit. There was a jar of glitter on a rock, a cell phone wedged in the crook of a cactus. Signs and pseudo-signs. Sense and sensimilla. Goofball shit.

  "Thought they were the new Dionysians," said Dietz. "They're all dead now."

  "They're not dead," I said. "They got downsized."

  "You tell your story, I'll tell mine."

  Just past the next rise we caught sight of a huge metal-skinned hangar. It could have been the hull of some alien ship, sunk belly up in ancient sea boil. More likely it was something the feds had pawned off in the last budget crisis, or forgotten about entirely, abandoned to the war nerds who sneaked inside to jot maps, jack soda machines.

  The glare off the hangar was strong. Dietz handed me a pair of aviator glasses. As I put them on I heard the plane start to taxi behind us.

  "Don't look back," he said. "You'll turn into All-Spice."

  "Right," I said.

  "There are a lot of little shits where we're going," said Dietz. "Don't let it get to you. Remember who you are. You're the Subject Steve."

  "Right," I said.

  We swung down a high ridge to the hangar. Dietz called to some men lounging near the enormous door. It took them a while to slide it back. There were shapes there in the darkness, lit hives receding into the vast cool of the room. Varnished deskpieces in workstation clusters spiraled out of a raised hub. Kids, dozens of kids in bughead earphones tapped away at consoles in low golden light. There was a kind of liquid quiet in the room, a strange drone joy. People tapped each other, whispered, giggled softly over the tidal click of keypads.

  Most of the workstations included a shelving unit for extra drives, office swag. Exhibits in kiddie kitsch abounded. TV tie-in lunchbox collections, Matchbox cars, bandoleer'd action figures. They seemed to be the same order of artifact my peers had hoarded, though I had only the vaguest sense of these versions. They'd probably reigned the schoolyards about the time I was blowing dormroom snowcaps with William. Dietz led me past a set of plastic poodles hanging on a wire. The dogs lit up and yapped.

  "I me ma," they said. "I ma me."

  We cut through a row of cube dividers to the hub area. Bobby Trubate sat with his feet up in a white leather easy chair. He wore rope sandals, a mesh robe with platinum trim, the outfit of a man who goes to court to have his name changed to a prime number. Bits of the mesh were dark with sweat. He flipped his ring binder shut.

  "Steve-o. Get up here, buddy!"

  He hoisted me up to his dais, bent me in a tender headlock.

  "Nice place," I said, ducked loose from his robe folds.

  "Should of seen this dump before I leased it. Brought in the best industrial decorator around. My investors went nuts, but fuck them. They invested in a visionary so they should expect vision. Dietz, you old fuck, hold the fort."

  I followed Trubate through a side door into a wide wood-beamed room. It was skylit, full of lush rustic comforts, animal skins, teak. A bank of monitors was mounted in the wall. Some screens showed Realms locations, the soil room, the hospital bed. Others scrolled pages from the Realms website, or surveilled the workers in the hangar. A few pulled in random programming, soccer games from South America, Polish soaps. The thatch hut logo blinked from every corner.

  "Can I get you something?" said Trubate. "Vodka frappe? A frosty rail?"

  "Is that the road to redemption?"

  "Things have changed a bit."

  "They seemed to have changed a lot for Heinrich," I said. "Unless it's your makeup team that's made him look like death."

  "No," he said, "that's death."

  Trubate squinnied his eyes. There was something scooped-out about him, I saw now, sick. A thin vein in his temple was thumping hard. I wondered what dregs of goodies it was bearing from his brain.

  "I don't know," he said softly. "It's so fucked. I almost feel like it's my fault. He wasn't strong enough for the relocation. The tumors moved fast."

  "So did you."

  "The hut did some shit to me," he said. "Maybe not what Heinrich had in mind. The branks. The breast ripper. I saw it all so plain after that. I'd been such a child. They say actors are children."

  "So you wanted to direct."

  "Don't be snide. Snidery is the last refuge of dickwads. The Center was no longer viable. It was time to take things to the next level. I couldn't run away from my talent. I am Hollywood, after all. I am more than Hollywood."

  "Old Gold, too?"

  "Hey, everyone was welcome. Heinrich was sick . The bills were piling up. The marshals were coming. I made some phone calls. Saved the fucking day. We have a new home for you, Steve. But you've got to earn your keep."

  Trubate batted something out of my hair.

  "Ladybug," he said.

  "Let's see it."

  "Maybe not a ladybug," said Trubate, pinched something in his fingers to a smear. "I've got to scram. Goddamn investor teleconference. They don't like the figures. Fuck the figures. They want their money. Fuck them. Do I look like I have the money? If I'd spent it on speedballs and pussy they'd understand. That they can get their heads around. But a glimpse of the truth? No fucking way."

  Trubate cut loose with a cackle.

  "I'm working on the cackle," he said.

  I milled around the room, inspected the mail-order baubles. There appeared to be some sort of nautical motif in effect, solid gold sextants, diving bells that doubled as ice buckets, stereo speakers mounted in the galleon wood. A lot of it looked culled from those old magazines at the Center, Estelle Burke's yearbooks. Don't forget the postcard from Paris. Remember me when you're a crazed futurist.

  A stack of coasters on the coffee table bore the hut logo in safety orange. The Realms Is Real, they proclaimed. I found a leather binder with some hole-punched pages. It was a business plan, a pretty primitive-looking one at that, some smudged graphs, a brief budget breakd
own whose figures didn't add up. One section was entitled the Trubate Brand, another the Heinrich Time-Sensitivity Factor. A list of future projects included the Daddy Chair, the Gimp Snatch Miracle Hour, and the Subject Steve. A parenthetical following this last noted that the executive producer credit had been "preguaranteed" to one Leon Goldfarb.

  Now one of the monitors in the wall fired off a series of high squawks. Heinrich leaned into frame, his face puckered, papery. He lay supine on his counterpane in bikini briefs, his nipples blacked with cork. The bed was heaped with toys, baby dolls, wind-up robots, Scrabble chips.

  "Hey, kids," he said. "Welcome to Heinrich's Story Bed. Looks like I'm going to tell you kids another story. Looks like all I'm good for these days is telling stories, at least according to your buddy Bobby. Bobby can't wait for me to die. Neither can I, tell you the truth. Cancer's eaten clear through me. It'll get you, too, don't worry. Meanwhile, prepare for some allegorical instruction. Do you know what that means? It means shut the fuck up and listen, because here we go. Once upon a time there was a big game hunter. This was in the time when there were big game hunters with big fucking guns and everyone understood it was a natural thing, a man versus beast thing. That's a modality that people conveniently forget these days, but it's still out there, every day, man versus beast, whether you like or not. Now this big game hunter, who happened to be from Cleveland, which is not important, but I want to make it clear he was from a highly esteemed smelting dynasty in Cleveland . . ."

  There was someone else in the room. I turned and there she stood, hair up, pale arms tucked in rubber crutch locks.

  "Renee."

  "Look at him," she said.

  "You're standing," I said. "You're walking."

  "Look at the man," she said. "Saddest thing I've ever seen in my life."

  "They said you'd never walk again."