The Subject Steve: A Novel (6 page)

"Mothering fire'll melt the smartass right off of you," said Old Gold.

"Can't wait. So, do you know Heinrich well?"

"I know him."

"What's he like?"

"Clementines."

"Excuse me?"

"He likes clementines."

It must have been near midnight when we hooked hard onto a gravel road. It had begun to rain and Old Gold hit the high beams, hacked the liquid dark.

"Almost home."

We drove up to a metal gate. A man in a wet suit fiddled with some padlocks. Old Gold rolled the window down.

"Brother Bob," he said. "At it again, huh?"

The man held up his hand.

"Might as well cut the bitch off," he said.

We drove on through the compound, pulled over by a rain-rotted cabin.

"This is you," said Old Gold.

"You sure?"

"The Virgin Suite."

The cabin was dry, lit low with a Coleman lantern. An old stove stood in the middle of the room, kindling in a basket beside it. Part of the cabin seemed claimed, the bedsheets mussed, boots and socks stuffed under the cot. Candle wax puddled thick on a card table, and on a notebook open to a blank page. A piece of hemp rope dangled down from a rafter beam.

My end of things was fairly bare. A blanket, a bath towel, a cot, a moldy bedroll with a book wedged in the twine. There was a note in the book, scrawled on a swatch of grocer's paper.
The only cure is the cure.-H.
I balled up the note. Cutesy tautologies would herewith be tossed beneath the cot. Now I took up the book, a dark hardback with embossed lettering:
The Principles and Tenets of Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption
, by Heinrich of Newark.

It was some sort of compendium of community rules-numerated, bulleted, with footnotes, appendices. Towards the back was a section called "Lives Lived and Redeemed," a brief table of contents: "The Ballad of Estelle Burke," "Dietz Versus Dietz," "Notes on Naperton." I flipped ahead to a chapter called "Old Gold Speaks":

Listen, I fought Clellon Beach in a Navy smoker and I can tell you that man was a huge fucking killer. It's a wonder I didn't die from his blows. Before Clellon I was just your average country Jewboy with tough hands from hitting the kitchen board and not thinking of all the things my daddy did to me mentally and on the physical side to prepare me for the world, but what world? His world? He had a sick one. When Clellon did up my skull the way he did with the quickest combos you've ever seen, or really that you've never seen (they were that quick), I spent a month in the base infirmary hooked to the life machines and it was here that all the poison gas seeped out of the safe part of my brain and poisoned me up through to the gills. I was a walking time explosion even before I could even walk again. Then I read this book (well, probably not the very copy you're holding) and I found in The Director's words something to live up to for. I went then to embark on my pupilage under him and have gone through the phases of awareness and have been mothered by fire and have delivered myself unto myself and I am a hero and a cloudwalker and I don't blame Clellon for my bad lives but he's a hero, too, and someday there will have to be a reckoning of us because that is the lost way of men and women from back in the age of continuum. Oh, and Old Gold was my Navy nickname only. My real name is Avram Cole Younger Gold."

Cloudwalkers? Continuum? This was the cure? I dimmed the Coleman down, stretched out on the cot, awaited my symptoms, what I now considered my symptoms. They tended to muster at night, those nervy shoots and shudders I used to figure for the natural rot of me.

I'd had a cancerous aunt who went to Guam for a medical miracle-it's how I knew about the rat guts-and she came back flush with remission. She died the next spring but I'm pretty sure her excursion bought her another season of precious decay. Maybe the difference was that they knew what was killing her. Me, I was dying of something no one had ever died of before.

Maybe Heinrich could name it.

Or at least write a new section of the
Tenets
called "Lives Lost."

Now I did something I hadn't done in a while. It felt good in my hand, throbbed there like some wounded bird you've just found in the woods. I cast Greta and Clarice in a stroke number based on material from another medium, pictured jets of gaudy lady juices piped out of Vegas fountains. Jennifer Applebaum, whose solitary nipple hair had enslaved my senses for a year of junior high, appeared now unbidden in a fur stole. Even Maryse had a caustic winning walk-on.

Harem arrayed, I came like Xerxes back from giving it to the Greeks. I let what spilled dry to a new skin on my fingers, fell off into a dream about figs.

"Somebody got some."

The man from the gate sat on the far cot in a paisley robe and a watchman's cap. He looked my age, a little younger. Boyish, worn by the linger of his boyishness. He pointed oddly at me now. It seemed I'd kicked away my blanket in the night. My pants were at my knees, my hand doing make-work down past my belly, some idle, half-asleep flippering.

"Bachelor habits," I said.

"Me," said the man, "I'll lie in bed, do it all day. Won't get up till the dinner bell. Then I get disgusted with my regression and I must impose strictures. Sign up for extra chores. Won't touch myself even to wash it. I'm Bobby. Bobby Trubate. The real one. Actual size."

"Glad to meet you," I said.

"You'd be Steve," said Trubate.

"That's not really my name," I said.

Trubate set his cap on the pillow, felt with his fingers along his skull.

"Ever take your hat off but then it feels like it's still on?"

"Nerve endings," I said.

"You a nervologist? What if it's some supernatural force pushing down on my head? Something your science can't explain."

"Anything's possible," I said.

"Oh, you think so?"

"Within parameters."

"Well, I guess it's my duty to welcome you to the land of the Infortunate. Come on, it's almost time for First Calling."

Trubate led me out into the mudshine, the morning. We walked past a row of cabins thrown up on either side of the rutted track. The walls were rough timber with some patches of plywood, tin. The compound stood partway up the mountain on a terraced clear. Below us, where the forest steepened to the valley floor, buildings sloped down both banks of a river, near a high steel bridge.

"That's Pangburn Falls," said Trubate. "The de facto town. Some of the old-timers used to go down to Pangburn, but not since Wendell died. Have you read 'The Wanderer Wendell' yet?"

"No."

"An inspiring text."

"I didn't see anything about a Wendell in that book," I said. "Or you."

"I haven't earned canonization just yet. I'm only in the early middle phases of continuum awareness. I haven't been mothered by fire. But I'm taking notes. I want my Life to be stylistically innovative. Like my work on the silver screen."

"I'm sorry," I said, "I'm not familiar with your work."

"Sure you are," said Trubate.

"I don't think so."

"You've seen me a million times. The junkie, the junkie car jacker, the corrupt senator's junkie son. I do them all. 'Who was that guy?' you wondered. 'He's good.' I'm that guy. I am good. I'm a fucking craftsman."

"I don't get to the movies much," I said.

"Yeah, you go read to the blind every night."

"I've done that."

"Sick fuck."

"What are you talking about?"

"You think they want to be reminded?"

Now the track curved down a bit.

"There's the dining hall," said Trubate, nodded down the hill at a clapboard building the size of a country church. "The chicks sleep in that wing sticking off."

"I didn't know there were any," I said.

"It's mostly dudes up here. It used to be all-dude. Because of our increasingly chick-run society and all. But Heinrich had an epiphany on that, so now there are exceptions. That's his crib, by the way, right down there."

Near the dining hall was another cabin, the only one I'd seen with a porch.

"Who built this stuff?" I said.

"Read the
Tenets
. Over there are the barns. We have a bunch of milking cows. Naperton runs the farm. We make a damn tasty organic cheese spread. Sell it down in the city. Have you ever put your hand in a newborn calf's mouth? It's amazing. Sensuous, yes. Erotic, sure. But not dirty. Not at all. And up there through the hill trail is the mothering hut. I wouldn't worry about that now. Your time will come. We're all very excited about the project."

"What project?"

"Sorry, that's the old me talking."

"I don't see the fence," I said. "Where's the fence?"

"What fence?"

"You were there last night. At the gate. With a lock."

"Yes, I was. I signed up for gate duty last week. Penance, I guess. Not that I'm religious, just a fucking pig."

"So," I said, "if there's a lock, and a gate, where's the fence?"

"Why in the world would there be a fence? We're not convicts."

"But there's a gate."

"You've got to have a gate. What else are you going to arrive through?"

Down below us the dining hall door skidded open. People made their way across the lawn to Heinrich's porch. We jogged down the slope to join them, fell in with Old Gold. Nearby a woman and a teenage boy who shared enough odd jut of nose and jaw to pass as mother and son talked heatedly. Others poured in now from all parts of the compound, some limping, some severely bent. The Infortunate seemed to specialize in warped bones and voided stares. They rolled out straw mats on the grass or just squatted there, diddling the moss, decapitating dandelions, muttering at the sky. A man in a derby kneaded the neck of a young woman in a wheelchair. She was fat and beautiful with a swoop of henna'd hair. The man caught me staring, tipped his hat brim up. I saw the berry-colored stain on his cheek.

"Dietz," I called to him.

He looked at me darkly.

"Dietz," I said. "Do you remember the message?"

"Who's that?" the woman asked him.

"A people," said Dietz. "A people who needs to relax."

"How's the clusterfuck?" I called.

"Cool it," said Trubate, slung me toward a patch of grass.

Now the porch door swung open and a man in a hunter's vest angled up to the rail.

"Naperton," I whispered.

"You know him, too?"

"He knows me."

Naperton drummed his clipboard, peered up at the sky.

"Good morning, morning!" he said.

"Good afternoon!" said the gathering. They spoke as one in a somewhat feverish singsong. Here and there, perhaps, were hints of sedition, or at least drill-weariness, but most of the Infortunate sounded sincerely joyful, near exultant, insane.

"Evening is upon us somewhere!" said Naperton.

"Good morning, evening!"

"The past is before us!"

"We're coming, past!"

"The future is gone!"

"Fare thee well, future!"

"Now is . . ."

"Now!"

"Now is . . ."

"Now!"

"Iam. . ."

"Me!"

"Iam. . ."

"Me!"

"And who are you?" called Naperton, pointed out to the crowd.

"I am me, me am I!"

Old Gold jammed his head into the earth, jerked himself up into some kind of ecstatic teeter. He stabbed out his hands and made banshee noises. Some clapped in time to his spasms, his war whoops. It was hard to tell if this was encouraged. Others pinched their eyes and puled. Dietz looked out from beneath his hat with an expression of bored expertise. Trubate rocked beside me, rapt. Old Gold tipped back to the grass, sunlit beads of spittle on his lips.

"I am me," he said. "Me am I. I ma me. I me ma. I ma me ma I."

"Well done!" called a voice.

There was a new man at the rail. He had hair of wavy silver, thick country arms, wore dungarees, a dirty dress shirt. He looked like a midwestern math teacher, a professor with a hobby garden. I knew at once it was Heinrich. Some calm of the high ordinary pulsed out of him, soft, metronomic, a charisma of reduced noise.

"People," he said quietly now, "I have something to impart to you. A fable, if you will. It concerns a lonely zookeeper and the beautiful, fiercesome tigress who fell into his charge. When I say lonely I mean lonely, okay? The zookeeper, I mean. So picture it, an anonymous little fellow, no friends, no family, no love. Nothing. Picture a poor little man whose most intimate conversations take place over cash registers, at salad bars, or in the bathroom mirror. Are you picturing it? It's important that you picture it. This is what we call in the biz guided imagery. It's still very big in the biz right now, this guided imagery thing. So, picture it, okay? Loneliness. Loneliness of the unrelenting variety. Understand, I'm telling you all this not to embarrass this man, who exists only on the plane of parable, anyway, but rather in what you would have to grant is an honest go at character development. Because I believe in character development. People, you should never consider me not in agreement with the idea of character-driven image-guided parable. But we're off the beaten track, here, really. We're far afield the ground-down path. What I want you to picture, really, for parable's sake, is this lonely zookeeper whose only companion is the beautiful and fiercesome tigress who has fallen into his charge. Because, and this is important, the motherfucker couldn't take his eyes off that cat. Motherfucker was in love with that stripey bitch. Unnatural? Okay, sure, unnatural. I don't even know what natural is, people. Not in this world. And I sure as hell am not going to lay a moral trip on you. Oh, I know, morality is so important these days. Our society, it's fracturing and fissuring and fragmenting and all the other f-words, too, all because of a lack of moral structure. Well, not on this mountain, people. You want slave morality, that's the next mountain over. This is Mount Redemption. This is my fucking mountain. Got it? Good. So, let's get back to our regularly scheduled parable. When last we left, our lonely zookeeper was lusting for the tigress who'd fallen into his charge. And let me tell you something, a lust like this makes room for calculation. So one night he shoots her with a tranquilizer gun and climbs into her cage. He gets down and holds her drugged-up head in his arms, kisses her, whispers in her ear, works himself up into a lather, a slaver. Do you like slaver better? Let me know. Drop your suggestions in the suggestion box. But in the meantime, listen to me. This zookeeper. He unzips his trousers, dig? He whips it out. He whips it out and does the deed. The deed. He does it. Dig?"