The Subject Steve: A Novel (7 page)

"We dig," called Old Gold.

"Okay, then," said Heinrich, his voice rising. "Deed done, the zookeeper sets his watch alarm to coincide with the duration of the sedative and snuggles up beside the cat. He sleeps a sleep he has never known before. A golden sort of sleep, the deep, dreamless slumber of the unvanquished. Unvanquished, as in yet-to-be-vanquished. Am I laying it on too thick? Maybe I'm laying it on too thick. But when, tell me people, when is it ever really thick enough? I've never once seen it thick enough. It's always too thin, isn't it? Too damn thin.

"Anyway, back to our sympathetic bestialist. Because a story like this depends on sympathy, so I advise you all to sympathize. Or empathize. Which is more sympathetic. Back to the zookeeper's frequent and clandestine mountings. Back to the unvanquished thickness of our golden empathy and the zookeeper's feline humps. Repeat once nightly for, oh, a week.

"So one evening the zookeeper is thrashed awake by the newly roused tigress, who lets loose a howl that could serrate the stars. You like that? Serrate the stars? I made that up. That's not in the original parable. But that's how these things work. Thousands of years of revision, refinement. I'm storytelling, here. We're gathered around the cookfire here. Fire, man. Pretty fucking exciting. Now the tigress, she howls, she leaps, and the zookeeper, he just barely rolls away from her wet snapping jaws, wriggles himself out of the cage. Just barely. Witness the zookeeper, bruised but intact. Intact, but scared out of his mind. Picture scared, people. Picture load-in-your-skivvies scared. Visualize, visualize.

"Whew! Can you say that, people? Whew? You can bet your ass the zookeeper said it. Whew!

"Never again, he vows. Never again. But the next day, hosing down her cage, she appears to him almost coy, lazing there in the afternoon heat, and it seems to him that with those sultry squints of her tigress eyes, those drowsy paw strokes on her smooth belly, that sexy way her feline spittle ropes out of her mouth, maybe she's . . . well, it's just a hunch, but maybe, I mean couldn't she actually be acknowledging their tryst, or, can you believe it, assenting to it! Why not? thinks the zookeeper, which I say for the sake of fable, for in truth no man can say for sure what another thinks, especially someone who doesn't exist. Still, hell, why not? Their love is forbidden in her kingdom too, right? It's probably just as thrilling.

"The zookeeper, however, is not unwary, so that night he returns to her cage door with a double dose of cat tranks locked and loaded. He draws a bead on her exquisite rump, but finds himself unable to pull the trigger. He shudders to imagine the shock of the needle piercing her hide. He dreads that baleful look on her face as the chemicals creep through her system and shut her down in stages.

"We are lovers now, thinks the zookeeper, we have built a trust. Or at least a tryst. So Zoo-man tosses the gun away and strips off his uniform, enters the cage armed only with his otherworldly tumescence. Do you all know what a tumescence is?"

"A tumessens!" called Old Gold. "That's a boner!"

"Nothing but, young Avram," said Heinrich. "Nothing but. So here we got Mr. Lonely Zoo-man with his parable-derived, parabolic boner looking down on the object of his love, the winsome, ferocity-graced tigress.

"Come to Daddy, zookeeper coos.

"But does Tigress come to Daddy? Does Tigress bend to Daddy's whim? Fuck no! Tigress leaps! Tigress pounces! Bitch munches him up!

"And as the zookeeper lies bleeding to death, he sees it, his tumessens, if you will, now a pale tiny thing pinched in his pawed lover's maw.

" 'Why?' moans the zookeeper. But as he twitches there in the corner of the cage, he remembers another ancient and oft-cited ditty about a frog and a scorpion and a not dissimilar breach of trust, and suddenly he knows perfectly well why."

"It's a fable within a fable!" said Old Gold.

"Avram Cole Younger Gold, we have college boys here who aren't as sharp as you. You're damn right. Fables within fables. Wheels within wheels. Such is the way to wisdom. And to madness. But back to our story. The zookeeper remembers this other little number about a frog and a scorpion, or a tarantula and newt, or a salamander, it doesn't matter. And the zookeeper, now in his pulped puppety death throes, now in what the Teutons might call
der Todeskampf
, the zookeeper says, 'I understand, my love, I understand, I know why you did this. It's because you're a tiger. That's why, right?'

"Now the big cat leers at him, her flat eyes coins of a darker realm. You like that? Coins of a darker realm? I'm still tweaking that. But anyway, the tigress she looks at him, this dying zookeeper, she levels her leveling gaze at him.

"'Listen, punk,' she says, 'the fact that I'm a tiger's got nothing to do with it. It's just that you got stingy with the good stuff.' "

I laughed. It was hard to tell if it was okay to laugh. I guess it wasn't okay.

"People," said Heinrich, "I want to welcome a newcomer among us. His name is Steve. Get up, Steve."

"I'm Steve," I said, and stood.

I waited for welcome, for hugs, finger gongs.

Nobody said a word.

"I'm Steve," I said. "Provisionally, I'm Steve, and I'm dying of something. Nobody knows what it is, but it's killing me. I don't want to die. That's about it. Thanks."

"Sit, Steve," said Heinrich.

Trubate tugged me to the ground.

"Seen worse," he whispered.

"There you have it," said Heinrich. "Provisionally Steve. A provisional man afraid to confront the truth. Pretty damn pathetic, ask me."

"Hey!" I said.

"Hey, what?"

"Where do you get off with this shit?"

"The question is," said Heinrich, "where do you get on? Or here's another: who are you?"

"I am me," I said, approximating Old Gold's quaver.

"Not yet, you're not. You're not shit."

I barely took in the rest of the meeting, my first First Calling. There was something said about illicit speech acts in the trance pasture, a tentative scheduling of the next cheese run, a note or two about revisions to the chore board. A kid named Lem, the one I'd seen bickering with his mother, was singled out for various community infractions. Heinrich passed a sentence upon him which I did not understand. Others shuddered. I started to wonder if I'd made a major mistake. I'd read about places like this in my father's stroke books, back in the grand old days of investigative porn. Depressed kid joins up with a guru, empties his checking account, splits for parts unknown. Feds find him chunked for canning in a mackerel plant. Friends note he was always kind of a follower. "Fuckeroo'd," says his father, Vice President of the Nibs of Nod.

Heinrich didn't end the meeting so much as abandon it, wander back into the porch shade. The gathering sat for a while, silent, like an audience savvy to the possibility of a trick ending. Then, in staggered waves of bravery, or boredom, they stood.

Lem's mother took my arm.

"I'm Estelle Burke," she said.

"But are you you?" I said.

"Don't take it so hard. When I was a little girl in ballet school the teacher was always toughest on the most promising students."

"Is that where you learned not to take it so hard?"

"I never learned," said Estelle. "I wasn't promising."

"Your boy seems to have gotten himself into some trouble," I said.

"Heinrich is Lem's father. Spiritually speaking, of course. He'd never do anything to harm Lem. Or me. I don't care what he says at First Calling."

"Bark is worse than his bite?"

"This has nothing to do with dogs," said Estelle.

"It's a saying," I said.

"Sayings say nothing," she said.

We crossed the lawn to the dining hall. Sun spilled down on long pine tables. Some morose-looking sorts were busing breakfast trays.

"Can I get some food?" I said.

"You'll have to ask Parish."

"Where's Parish?"

"I was expecting who's Parish."

"I'm on the quite-fucking-hungry side."

"You've been assigned to kitchen duty."

"Kitchen duty? I'm a sick man."

"Take a number."

"I'm not kidding."

"Who's kidding? Chores are sacred."

"What?"

"Read the
Tenets
."

"Everyone's really recommending that book," I said.

Parish the cook explained patiently that a missed meal was a meal missed. It was a fascinating theory. He was a hard little potato of a man in a tight pink T-shirt that read:
There are no shit jobs, just shit people
. His rhinestone-studded tool belt bristled with spatulas and slotted spoons. He pointed to a steel box bolted to the countertop.

"That's your new girlfriend," he said. "Keep her hot and wet and we'll all be happy."

The machine was easy, a push-pull job, just the kind of sweaty rote that maybe makes the doer dream of sickles on the Winter Palace steps, or cocoa-buttered asses in Daytona. I finished in about an hour, numbed by the slosh of water and tin. A steam rash ran from my hips to my neck. I worried it, another symptom. I stood there with my shirt open, clawing the spread.

"It'll go away," said Parish.

He handed me a plate with pita bread, some runny cheese.

"Just this once."

Out in the dining hall I took a table near a great stone hearth. Nailed above it was a double-handed saw, rusted, cracked in the grips. Flat on the mantel beneath it was a copy of the
Tenets
. I took it down and started to skim:

In the beginning was the bird, rotating me back to the late great forty-eight. After that, more service to the state, Uruguay, El Salvador, Pepsi, Bell. But why bore you with corpses, the assassin's litany? Suffice it to say I was one of those who made you safe and warm and free enough to ruminate upon your pain, an activity formerly restricted to aristocrats, and thus helped you along your poison path. . . .

1. 1. 1. And then it came to pass, late in the winter of 1982, that I met Notwithstanding "Notty" Naperton, ex-dairy farmer, in an upstate drunk tank. Upon release we reconvened at Ned's End Tavern for a breakfast of boilermakers, then retired to his room above a hardware emporium to wax incoherent about our disappointments, our regrets, our boats missed and doomed dinghies boarded. We were petty, hateful men and we both saw the world for the meaningless worm farm it was. We wondered what possible reason there could be to perdure. Now at this juncture Naperton confessed his clincher. The only thing that kept him on this earth, he told me, was the fact that an inoperable tumor had been detected in his brain. He was dying and he felt he had no right to intervene. Nonsense, Notty, I told him, we've been stripped of all possible actions save one. Suicide is the only uncompromised gesture left.
         

Even wasting away from a grapefruit brain is a kind of complicity in the nightmare of life, I argued, not to mention the fact that all variety of scum profit from your illness. Naperton was soon swayed. I, myself, had been contemplating the act for a long time. I'd snuffed enough lives in the employ of democracy to know that any idea of the preciousness of my own was pure affectation. At dawn we drove up to the place you stand now with a pair of pistols, fully intending to vacate our fleshly premises, and with no delusions about tenancy in any afterworld, either. We sat on the forest floor amidst the spruce needles and the pine cones and stared down our respective barrels. I suggested a three-count. Naperton complained that he'd left no suicide note. He had an ex-wife he claimed to still love who deserved explication. I told Naperton that the shape his diseased brain matter took on the tree trunk behind him would serve as ample explication. I commenced my three-count and Naperton let me reach two before he stopped me again. Tears were streaming down his face. "Wait," he said, "what if we lived?" I admonished Naperton to stop delaying the inevitable. I began to grow frustrated, as when certain Honduran activists had resisted my offer of an easy and silent termination. I considered disposing of the three-count altogether, also aware of the possibility that Naperton was in no condition to live up to his end of the bargain. I was about to waste the poor fuck and then attend to my own mortal self-infliction when Naperton's query suddenly struck something deep within me. A chord, I think they call it. "What if we lived?" Such a simple, and yet infinite, question. I looked around, took in the trees, the moss, the fungus nestled in fallen timber. I heard the tittering of birds, the rustle of life in the brush. Everything seemed puny and the puny things true. You could take possession of yourself in the tiny and mindless movements of this earth. You could start all over again. You would have to be birthed anew, without fear, without belief, without state, without civilization. You could be redeemed! Philosophy? Never! The despair of the philosophers was correct, their correctives patently false. I knew then that we would build something here. I laid the gun down and watched Naperton do the same. "Do you feel it?" I said. "Feel what?" said Naperton. "Your tumor," I said, "it's gone." Behold, subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so!

And later:

1. 1. 1. dopefiends, drunks, nutjobs, fools, terminal cases, melancholics, paranoiacs, chronic onanists, rapers of pigs, bad poets, etc.: This is your home. We have made for you a home. To live in our home you must forsake all others. This should not be difficult. You would not be here if you were welcome elsewhere, if you flowed without incident or complaint through the global circuitry of want. The world is pain and early death for most, Slurpees for some, wealth and ease for a very few. And as for that business about passing through the eye of a camel, or a needle, or whatever, don't believe it. Even now the elite are developing the right nanotechnology for the job. The Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption was founded by Heinrich of Newark and Notwithstanding Naperton with the belief that the tired and the sick were getting a raw deal in our republic, sent off to the corner with a broken toy called God, or Goddess, or Higher Power, or inner peace. All modes have conspired against you. Take your place among us and deliver yourself unto yourself. We accept all major credit cards.