The Subject Steve: A Novel (20 page)

"Sweetie," she said. "Feeling the magic?"

"I guess," said Renee.

"Hey, honey, you got a problem tonight?"

"No problem."

"Goody."

The Rad Balm girl smeared some ointment on her mouth.

"Where's the Spokesman?" said Renee.

"Warren? He's in makeup. I'll get him."

A few minutes later the kid with the muttonchops stepped bare-chested through the set door. He wore white, therapeutic-looking trousers, nurse shoes. He took a seat on the stool, started to knead his crotch.

"Places," said the Rad Balm girl.

Renee handed me her crutches, slid down to her belly at the lip of the stage.

"Action!"

Some song started pumping through the PA, the one I'd heard on the radio in Indiana, the authentic version, pre-viola. It sounded derivative now.

"I love my dog," Warren began, still fondling himself. "My dog loves me. That's all there is in life. I raised my dog from infancy. Puppyhood. Whatever. Both his parents were put down, so I had to do it myself. No help. Nobody gave a shit whether my dog lived or died. So I took it upon myself to give a shit. He was my dog. There are beautiful things in this world, and if you can escape your narcissism, or the collective hallucination of the media, or the singular hallucination of your narcissism, you might get to see them sometime. But it's like you're encased in some kind of fucking titanium pod cruising through the atmosphere, you're not quite the pilot but there's a joystick in your hand, and it feels like you're steering but you've never been steering, never in your life have you been steering, not when your dad remarried for the seventh time, not when your mom got weird and distant, not when your brother tried to butt in with the raising of your dog that you alone were raising from puppyhood, you've never been steering anything, really, you've just been cruising along in this pod with all these gleaming buttons on the control panel but they don't connect to anything, and you're just whistling along through the dead air, dead space, through the nothingness of the world's chatter and the nothingness of your own-most you jabbering away in your head, and you just have to get out of that pod, you must eject from the fucking pod, and you're like, Oh fuck, I must fucking eject, I must, I must fucking. . . and then you notice a little button that's gleaming, that's glowing a little differently from the others, and it's got a big E on it and it's glowing and it's even kind of like blinking as though maybe this button, as opposed to the other buttons, maybe this button actually fucking works, so you hit it, you hit it hard . . ."

Warren's cock popped out of his pants. Renee stabbed towards him on her elbows. Her legs swayed dead behind her. Occasionally, and with a terrible grunt, she'd put out her hand as though to grip air.

"Punching out," said Warren, his voice gaining velocity, "that's what they call ejection in all those jet pilot movies, where they're always going on about how you have to be careful punching out because you hit the wrong angle, boom, you lose an arm, you lose a head, you lose
your
head. But fuck it, I mean you can't go on in this pod, this little self-contained smugness apparatus of yours and-"

"Cut!" said the Rad Balm girl.

Renee collapsed near the tips of Warren's shoes, weeping.

"What?" said Warren.

"The dog," said the Rad Balm girl. "What happened to the dog?"

"I was looping back around to it."

"Renee was at her mark."

"I had a few seconds."

"Bullshit you did. Look at her. She's practically at your feet. Warren, this show isn't about you, it's about her. You have to be more generous."

"How is it about her? I'm the one talking. I'm the one beating off."

"That's the point. It's from a dyke's perspective."

I ducked out of there.

I wandered awhile, found a vault crammed with winking circuit boards, lay down and dozed on a hump of cable there. Maybe I dreamed. When I woke, somebody's boot tip nuzzling my ear, I did have that sense of being led out of some kind of subterrain, me discombobulated, a bit embarrassed, a tourist nearly lost in some regionally famous cave.

It was Desmond's boot. I studied the palisades of grain in the leather.

"He's up now. He'd like to see you."

Desmond walked me out to my mark, took my arm as I went to open the thin pine door.

"Just be yourself," he said.

"Just let go of my arm."

Heinrich sat up in his hospital bed, tissue balls and clementine peels spilled out on the counterpane. The sky on the wallpaper was paler than I'd seen on TV, the desert darker.

"Steve-o!" called the studio audience. You could hear the tape hiss as the cries died down to some stray handclaps, a few knowing hoots.

Steve-o devotees.

"Do my tumors understand that when I go, they go, too?" said Heinrich.

I looked around for cue cards. Spotlights popped.

"Tumors," I said. "Tumors shmoomers."

"Cut!"

Trubate bobbed up out of the darkness.

"What the fuck was that?"

"Ad lib," I said.

"Ad lib," said Trubate.

"That's right."

"Listen," said Trubate, "don't wait for the laugh track. Makes you look like an amateur."

"I am an amateur."

"Point taken. Just don't ruin my show."

"Or what?"

"I'm a sick man," said Trubate. "And I don't have the luxury of dying, like you do. I have to live with my sickness. I have to take it out on other people. Or the people other people care about."

"Is that a threat?"

"Vague. Veiled."

He stuck an old light meter under my chin. The dial didn't move, looked busted, and Trubate didn't check it anyway.

"Let's take it from the dead dad speech," he said.

Heinrich coughed, pulled a clementine from a sack that hung on his bedpost, started to peel it down.

"You know," he said, "I watched my old man die. Kind of like this. He gathered us all to him. He said he had something to show us. When we were all there in the room he lifted up his blanket, pointed down to his bedpan. To what was in the bedpan. 'There it is,' he said. 'I wish I could leave you more.' He was dead by dusk."

"I don't believe that story," I said.

"Jeez, you want a gazelle?"

He had his tongue out. It was hard to tell if he was razzing me, or just gagging, dry.

"Can I get you some water?"

His eyelids were caked with paste. Beige fluid frothed at the hems of his mouth. He shuddered like some piece of overheating machinery.

"Hey," called Trubate from the darkness, "Code Blue Man!"

The Philosopher leaped through the door in his Lycra hood, a heel of French bread in his hand. The recorded applause was a concert-hall roar, maybe something bootlegged from a diva's farewell. The Philosopher did some bug-eyed business to the camera, a vampy strut to the bed. He sopped up Heinrich's froth with his baguette.

"Won't be long now," he said. "Vitals are locking down. Big choo-choo's comin' round the bend. All aboard!"

"This is a man here," I said. "A man dying. Have some respect."

Heinrich made more noises. Froth fluttered up.

"Meat, meat, meat," said the Philosopher. "You, too, pal."

"I'm in fine fettle," I said.

"That's how you're supposed to feel in the final stages of PREXIS. Haven't you heard the news? How I discovered virulent Goldfarb clusters within the original PREXIS protein model?"

"PREXIS schmexis," I said.

Laughter boomed out of the walls.

The Philosopher fell on me. We pitched down to concrete. I kicked, caught him with my knee, flew at him with both fists, windmilling. Rain of blows. Steady rain of blows. My knuckle came up with a piece of blue-stained tooth.

Now Heinrich started to stir, thrash, blow froth, a sea beast sounding. I went to him, took his hand.

"Herodotus," he whispered, "writes of an army that went away to war for twenty-eight years. When they returned home they found themselves locked out of their city. Their wives, you see, had married their slaves. A new generation had grown up and seized power. The last thing these slave sons wanted was the masters of their fathers back in town. Day after day the old army stormed the city. Day after day the slave sons drove them back. At last one of the wizened old generals said, 'If we keep attacking them with swords and spears they will consider themselves our equals and they will keep beating us back. We must go to them with whips.' And so they did. And when the slave sons saw the masters of their fathers come to the city walls with whips, they fled."

Heinrich's hand drooped down along the bed skirt. I thought it a sign, some finality of musculature, a swoop death-ward. But he was just strumming the fabric down there with his thumb. Boredom, itch, even now.

"I genuinely prefer tangerines," he said, turned to the wall dunes, died.

"Cut!" called Trubate from the darkness. "That was dynamite."

Someone scurried up to cover Heinrich with a sheet. The Philosopher was kneeling on the floor, feeling around for his teeth.

"Goldfarb what?" I said to him.

"Cluthterth," he said through his ruined mouth.

"I believe you."

"Fuf nath ta beleef?"

The Digger and I dug the hole at daybreak. We dug it near the rockpile behind the hangar. The clouds were the color of our shovel blades. The Digger looked to be suffering under his ski mask.

"Why don't you take that thing off?" I said.

He stared at me through slits in the wool.

The rest of them stood in a ring around us. Trubate, Desmond, Warren, Dietz, all the Realmers, dozens of them, most dozing in the heat. The Philosopher sat a little ways off, his mouth stuffed with gauze.

They'd carried Heinrich out on a battered boogie board, shrouded him in counterpane. A pair of mint-condition quarter pieces commemorating the statehood of New Jersey rested on his eyelids.

"Coins of a darker realm," said Desmond.

They slid Heinrich into the hole.

"That's it?" said Renee.

"What else is there?" said Trubate.

"When my dog died," said Warren, "we buried him just like this. And we all threw something in that reminded us of him. Dog toys, dog biscuits, essays in which I'd mentioned my dog."

"That's so beautiful," said the Rad Balm girl.

"Oh, is it?" said Renee. "Why don't we just throw you in."

"Go ahead," said the Rad Balm girl. "See if you can find another technologist who'll work for stock options these days."

"Cunt," said Renee.

"Silly cunt," called one of the New Zealanders.

I started to walk away.

"Where are you going, Steve?" said Trubate.

"I'm leaving."

"You can't leave. Don't you get that? Damn, you of all people."

I walked off in the direction I'd come with Dietz. Somewhere up ahead was the abandoned campsite. Past that was the runway. I could wait for the plane. Maybe the plane was due back. Doubtful, but possible. What wasn't possible?

I'd gone in for a checkup.

I could hear Trubate shouting down his people behind me. I kept walking, walking through the pain, walking it off, moving through my moist crackle and burst. I pictured each step shucking those Goldfarb clusters loose, little protein deathsquads bouncing along in miniature humvees through the bleak ravines of me. They had names like Reynoldo, Spider, Wideband, wore paramilitary underwear manufactured in Rhode Island. Ever since the Philosopher had told me about the clusters I'd been feeling them on the move. Psychosomatic? Later, towards the end, I asked him.

"Psychosomatic like a heart attack," he said.

Now Dietz caught up with me.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"What do you mean?"

"He'll shoot you."

"Paranoid hippie fuck," I said.

I heard the crack, the whistle, felt the punch in my spine.

Why does Steve deny his name is Steve?

He hated his name. There was nothing to his name. There was taunt built into it because of its nothingness. It sounded like something you wiped off your shirt. Everyone was supposed to be special but how could you be special if your name was tantamount to lint? He stayed in his room and read books. He stayed in his room and read the beginnings of books, until there was mention of a breast heaving, or a groin tightening. Then he'd put the book aside for a few minutes. He could do it over and over again, for hours. He'd skip school to do it.

He knew what was special.

His mother said he was too shy. His only friend was Cudahy. They used to burn trees. Sometimes he'd sit by himself in his father's toolshed, study the lawn mower blade in his lap. He'd run his thumb over the rust, up to the toothy crack near the tip. Something might scuttle in the rake bin behind him. Field mice, his father called them. Field mice ran free in the fields. They had freedoms we couldn't dream.

They had no names.

What he'd seen his father do with Cudahy's father, there was a name for that. That wasn't anything, though. Kids did stuff like that all the time. It was weird, was all, like seeing your old man on a moped.

He got more Steve years on him. It was time to be in the world. The world was like God or some fucked-up dragon. You couldn't look at it all at once or you'd go nuts.

He fell in with a woman who believed in falling in love. They made a creature together. People made creatures to pass themselves onward, but that's not how he saw it. He wanted to stop the Steveness. He needed a family to destroy him, his Steveness. Someday he'd make a new name for himself. Before he died he'd have a new name, or no name.

It wouldn't be the name his mother used to call him when she called him in for dinner from the stoop.

"Stee-eeve!" she used to call.

Once, his buddy Cudahy grinned.

"Tell her fuck you."

They'd been wrestling in the grass. Greco-Roman. American. Fake American.

"Fuck you, Mom!" he called across the yard.

He had to eat dinner on his bed. The penalty for insolence is room service. He couldn't eat, though. He couldn't get it down. It was because of the guilt. He said it was because of the broccoli.