The Subject Steve: A Novel (11 page)

"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 while. 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."

"Sounds like kitchen duty."

"Hardly."

"I guess I'll have to ask Bobby about that."

"Mister Fucking Melodrama. You love this stuff, don't you? You loved it when those quacks told you you were dying and you love thinking I have some awful plan for you. And here I was banking on the idea that your cowardice was just a surface ploy. You really are addicted to your existence, aren't you? You'd be better off strung out on smack."

"I just came to say goodbye."

"Goodbye."

"And thank you."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

"There's going to be a reckoning tonight. Old Gold will face his demon. I think you should stick around. Maybe you'll change your mind about all of this. If you don't, wait outside your cabin. Naperton's making a cheese run tonight. He'll give you a ride."

"I'll be there."

"It's too bad," said Heinrich.

"What's that?"

"I was hoping you'd be my entree into a whole new market."

"I'll recommend you at the racquet club."

I did the day. I did the rest of the day. I went to the kitchen for my bubble dance. I did big hellos.

"What are you grinning about?" said Parish.

"These all the dishes?" I said. "Bring it on! Greasy platters, gunked spoons, the dried ketchup of martyrs! Bring the shit on, Parish! I am the cleanser."

"Who gave you permission for giddiness, you little shit? Listen, I'm in a funk. I'm in no mood."

"I'm all moods," I said. "In and out of them."

"I'm the boss of you," said Parish. "I set the mood."

We squared off. I got up on boxer's toes, popped Parish in the tit. He dropped me with a whisk handle to the mouth. I got up, got quiet, rubbed my teeth.

"Oh, don't be sulky," said Parish. "I think you're charming. I'm just having a day. Too many peepers on the potatoes. I don't like to be so seen by tubers. I'm sorry. You're the cleanser, okay?"

"I'm the cleanser," I said.

"That's my boy. Now don't forget to punch out."

My rye'd gone green.

I went back to the cabin to check on Trubate. The room was dark and stank of balm. He was sitting up, the drip ripped from his arm. He stared up at the rafter beam.

"Bobby?" I said.

"Bobby died in a fire," he said.

I walked out to the trance pasture, saw Lem Burke sitting in the punk weeds, smoking a joint, gerrymandering an ant colony with a stick.

"Got some of those in my cabin," I said.

"What?"

"Ants."

"What kind of ants?"

"I don't know. Black ants."

"These are red ants."

"Communists."

"I wouldn't say that," said Lem. "They just do what seems right."

Lem whipped the stick. It careened off my knee.

"Sorry," he said.

The weeds were high. I could only make out the top of the kid's head. He was so long and scrawny, weedlike himself. It seemed like he'd always been here, sitting, dreaming, playing Hitler with dirt life.

"Hear about Old Gold?" I said.

"Poor fucker," said Lem.

"You don't like it here, do you?"

Lem said nothing.

"How's your continuum awareness coming?"

"Why do you ask so many questions?" said Lem. "What are you trying to hide?"

"Sometimes people ask questions just to find out things."

"My continuum awareness is coming along fine," said Lem. "The past present and future are entirely saturated with one thought, one image, one sensation. My mom knew what she was doing, tell you that."

Smoke was rolling off the ridge. Both of us sniffed at the sky. Wolves, I thought. Rabbits, I revised.

"That man Wendell who had my cabin," I said. "What happened to him?"

"He died."

"Heinrich says he hanged himself."

"You know you splooge in your pants when you do that?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Guess everyone knows. I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge."

"That's a good way of putting it."

"Don't condescend."

"I'm not."

"Don't deny your actions."

Lem was truly a child of this place.

"Did Wendell leave a note? An explanation?"

"Yeah. There was a note. It said, Please note."

"Please note?"

"Please note."

"Damn," I said.

"That's what I said. Want some of this?"

"Yes," I said.

I hardly noticed Lem leave. I hardly noticed anything except the helium panic of the pot, the warp of the world, the fissuring. I decided to give the shit-free zone one more shot. No more boat. No more no-more-boat. I thought about nothing. I zeroed in on nothingness. Nothingness rose out of the ether to greet me, to embrace. I heard music now, horns, a brassy vamp. Flashpots, fireworks. The nothingness dancers chorus-kicked through smoke.

"Please note! Please note!" they sang. Kick-turn. Kick-turn. Balcony gels, leotards, hip jut. This was not for nothing, I thought. Then the weed wore off. The garter belts fell from the trees. The sun was going down.

I did not hate twilight.

I went to fetch Renee.

I rolled her out to the milk barn to see the calf twins born last week. Romulus and Rimjob, Old Gold had named them. They were dark and frisky in the moonlit pen, big sweet pups. They nuzzled our knees at the rail. Renee put her hand out and one of them took it with a soft sucking sound up to the wrist.

"Oh, my God," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said, "about those things I said the other night."

"You have to try this," said Renee.

"I need to tell you something," I said.

"You really have to try this."

I stuck a loose fist out for the other calf. It made a rough warm womb of its mouth for me.

"Jesus," I said. "That really is something."

"Isn't it? No wonder cows are sacred in Japan."

"I don't think it's Japan," I said.

"I hate you," said Renee. "Let's have a hate fuck."

"Over there, then," I said, "behind the hayrick."

"That's called a hayrick?" said Renee.

"Sure," I said.

"Sounds like Heinrich," said Renee.

"Don't say that," I said.

There were no dessert speeches that night. We bused our plates and marched out of the dining hall. Portable lights lit the lawn outside, night-game bright. There was a chop in the air and the lamp casings hummed. Somewhere behind us an engine gunned. The glow of brake lights parted us.

Naperton slid down from the van, popped the hatch, reached in to struggle with some kind of ungainly parcel. The thing seemed to twitch in its plummet and when it hit the lawn we saw what it was-a man. He wore a blindfold, handcuffs of clear plastic. Blood had dried on his shaven head. Naperton pulled the blindfold off. The man just stood there and blinked for a while. The lights were probably putting a wildness in his eyes but he looked a tad touched anyway, the type who spends his childhood plucking butterflies apart, or Scotch-taping patriotic ordnance to gerbils, only to make his way up the living chain in a great pageant of abuse.

But who am I to talk, mastermind of the Moth-O-Caust?

He had tattoos. A steely anchor on his sternum tipped into a fat black heart. A target spiraled out from the top of his skull. The bull's-eye read "C.B." There was a logo on his shoulder that looked familiar. I nearly retched when I read the legend beneath it:
Tough Cookies-Deal or Die
.

Now we all watched as Clellon Beach rolled to his knees and made to somehow stand.

Naperton kicked him in the hip.

"Fuck you," said Beach.

"Fuck me?" said Naperton. "I'm old enough to be your grandfather. You wouldn't want to fuck me."

Naperton kicked him in the mouth. Tooth bits stuck to Beach's lip.

"That all you got?" he said.

"For now," said Naperton. "Try our sales representative tomorrow. Unless you'd be interested in this."

Naperton kicked him in the stomach. Beach puked through his teeth.

"Picador," said Heinrich from the porch, "I think the bull is ready."

He stood at the balustrade in a stained dinner jacket and a wire-fastened beard, Odin emceeing a varsity football banquet.

"Dig the beard?" he said. "Had the thing in my closet for years. I was God one Halloween, if you can believe it. Costume contest. Some Little Orphan Annie cunt won. Mr. Beach, it's an honor to finally meet you. You're a storied figure in our later gospels, so it really is a privilege. 'A huge fucking killer,' if I remember the text correctly. Well, maybe not so huge. What do you go, one-forty, one forty-five? But then again, Abraham didn't live hundreds of years, either, did he? Mythology is beyond fact-checking, I'd say. Wouldn't you? Did they tell you why you're here?"

The man moaned.

"I didn't hear you," said Heinrich.

"I told them," said Beach. "There was nothing in the container, I swear. I went on board myself. It was empty."

"What container?"

"The container."

"All day," said Naperton, "about the container. The foredeck container, he says."

"Thank you, Notty. I do believe I understand. Clellon, are you thinking you're here because of some dirtbag job you botched? Some double-cross you cooked up in a Norfolk flophouse? These are things of Clellon Beach the man. We don't give a rat's ass about him around here. We are solely concerned with myth. And you are myth, Mr. Beach. You are the demon who stalks our beloved Gold. Through no fault of your own, I might add. Nonetheless, now there must be a reckoning. Can we get some drum?"