The Subject Steve: A Novel (9 page)

You've probably seen my work on billboards, on takeout coffee cups, between perfumed pullouts in those surveys of venality otherwise known as slicks. Somebody actually wrote this crap, you said to yourself.

You were absolutely right.

I was a droplet in the steady rain of crap.

I had, I guess, like my father before me, a naif's faith in words. When I was twelve, thirteen, I won the fire safety essay contest for a longish tract, "The Oil-Soaked Rags of Death." Captain Thornfield, he of the silvery sidewhiskers and exquisitely braided dress cap, lauded my genius to an assembly of my peers.

"You boys and girls should take some pointers from this young man," said the captain. "Most especially the part about how the family unit must establish a regrouping area a good distance from any hypothetical conflagration."

I took his praise to be the seeds of fervent tutelage. The next contest nearly a year away, I dashed off another treatise, "Five Alarm Soul: Studies in Hazard," delivered it to the captain at the borough fire station. Included was an appendix citing each instance of tire tower thuggery I'd suffered at the hands of his hoodlum sons. I wanted the poor man to forsake his blood for the purity of our flame-retardant enterprise, to rid himself of his progeny, take me under his sooty wing.

I never heard back from the captain.

Then it was all those English major essays, user manuals for the spirit's vaporware.

I was kind of a whiz at it, too. My father took pride in my hermeneutic seizuring. He wanted for his son anything but his mode, a poetics in the service of multispeed blenders. I shamed him soon enough, shilling for the silicon sultanates.

"Too Much? Too Fast? Tough Cookies-Deal or Die," I wrote when they wanted something Boom-punchy.

I got a raise, an options package, new digs.

I got a regrouping area in hell.

It'd be nice to know how long I've been here at the Center. Clocks and calendars do not abound. Heinrich says he won't turn tricks for time, that suns and moons and seasons are taunts enough. Sometimes I crave the old exactitude, daydream about the timepieces I threw away back when the Philosopher and the Mechanic first handed down my verdict, my suspended sentence, my frozen state. Now I live life in vague thick drift, my days something crated in Styrofoam, shipment on hold.

I got a phone privilege a while back, called Fiona, begged her to fetch me, her suffering pa. She said she was locked into her own emotional arc at the moment, couldn't afford the shift in trajectory.

She'll be fourteen in June.

"Besides, Daddy," she said. "What are you complaining about? You're alive, aren't you? You're riddled with PREXIS and you're defying all odds. Something must be working."

"I'm not riddled. I hate that. Riddled. Anyway, there's probably no such thing as PREXIS."

"Whatever, dude. I mean, Dad."

Every morning after First Calling I do my bubble dance while Parish preps, a vegetable slaughter. The man raves on between swipes of his Chinese cleaver.

"You're in the weeds now, skipper! You're in the weedy weeds! Look at all those spoons and saucers! They're so dirty!"

"I'm a crawling king snake," I say.

"You're nothing, babyducks. I'm the stewman and you're the stewboy. I'm your daddy in food!"

"Knock it off, Parish."

Which only induces him to start thwapping me with a slotted spoon.

"Baby! Babycakes!"

"Cut the shit, Parish."

"I'll cut your mother's shit. I'll eat it."

"Bet you will."

"Is that an insult?"

"Just let me do my job."

"You don't have a job, you have a chore. Read the fucking
Tenets
."

"I've read them."

"All you've read is the back of the tater tot box."

Thwap.

"Stop it."

"I'll stop when you admit to me that I'm the stewman and you're the stewboy."

"Okay, Parish, I'm the stewboy. But you're crazy."

"I'm in a healing process, yuppie fuck. I walk the high road."

Thwap.

"Violence will be met with decisive violence," I say.

"Very good. You
have
read the
Tenets
. That's a nice one, too. I'll make sure it's engraved on your tombstone, Skippy."

Thwap. Thwap.

Punch bread time, perchance?

Emancipated by the advent of Parish's inevitable dopamine downtick, I'll seek solitude in the trance pasture, or study the
Tenets
until dinnertime. Some nights Heinrich might have a word or two for the collective ear, a disquisition on the condition of our republic, the United Stooges of Moronica, he calls it, or, rarely, announce an evening of cabin visits. There's a weekly square dance called by Parish which enough of us boycott to render the event more amplified cris de coeur than hoedown. ("Bow to your partner," Parish will command, "now bow to your neighbor who was banging your partner while you were in the hospital with hepatitis.")

Mostly I look for lulls in the evening when I can slip off to the brush with Renee. Yes, Renee. Her initial bluff was hurt entreaty, I guess, because a few mornings after we met she wheeled up to my cabin door and announced she was curious about terminal cock.

"Seduction is a subtle art," I said.

"I'm not seducing you," said Renee. "This is a field study."

Now I'm always scouting for a clearing to which to wheel my voluptuous crip. Nippy nights are a hardship but I pack a quilt and we make our rough way up the hill trail towards the ever-so-mysterious mothering hut. Sometimes we ditch the chair and I bear her in a fireman's carry-look at me, Captain Thornfield!-over the roots and crags, lower us down behind some cold oak. Compensation is not the word for what Renee does with her hands and her mouth to triumph over her dead half. I've discovered marooned colonies of feeling down there, too. We'll lie under moonlight for hours, tell jokes, sing jingles, make puppets of our private parts. I'll kiss her breasts, kiss the blue vein in one of them that must flow to her heart, a quiet river running through a church.

Speaking of church, it was organized religion that stole my baby's legs away. Some soused bishop jumped a curbside in his El Camino. This was in her hometown, Neptune, New Jersey. Renee was just seventeen, window-shopping for a slutty top for school. She spent a year in bed and a few more trying to be a miracle of physical therapy, dreamed of the day she'd stagger through a cheering gauntlet of male nurse beefcake, but she never got past cod flops on the padded floor. She took to gin, launched a newsletter called
Gimp Snatch
. Heinrich found her doing wheelchair doughnuts in the parking lot of Arman's Adult Motel. He told her he was trolling for souls. She said she'd blow him for a ride home. That was years and years ago.

She says she's humped most everyone here except Parish and DaShawn, whose goiter and imperious manner drove her away. She says she'll do who she pleases, that no God or blitzed minion of Him, or, for that matter, any kind of cut-rate chariot will stop her from being the woman that girl on the sidewalk was outfitting herself to become.

I do worship her mostly paralyzed pussy and I am maybe in love.

She says she admires my hands, so ladylike.

I told her I'd let that slide.

"Of course you will," she said. "You're my lady."

This morning Naperton took the van down to the city to hawk our redemptive hoop at the farmer's market. I've shopped there myself in a former life, strolled rows of kiosks manned by suspicious Amish with their Lincoln beards and judgmental scones, tarried at fruit bins and herb trays tended by Wall Street dropouts, or runaway teens with tracts on bio-dynamism in their rucksacks.

Oversoul Spread, I understand, is big with the Sunday gourmands. There's a mail-order business, too. Sales, along with exhaustive donations from the Center's more moneyed brethren, keep us in Parish's improvisatory slops while we mother and trance ourselves to redemption. Only those with exorbitant levels of continuum awareness are permitted to make the trip. A cheese run is high honor.

We eat gobs of the stuff, too. It spreads thin, tastes a bit like a battery.

"It's what the city people crave, Skippo," Parish said. "They think the cheese will cleanse them of their sins. They're not about to be mothered by fire now, are they?"

"Are you?"

"I've been in the hut. I'll be in it again. I'll get it right."

Parish was a line cook in a Chapel Hill ribhouse until the day a customer died on his shift.

"So I put peanut butter in the chili. So what? It's a time-honored thickener. One in a million the bitch would be allergic, and her old man a goddamn state senator, to boot. There's a law named for her now. Ever hear of LuAnn's Law? It's a food safety bill. It's an anti-peanut-butter bill, really. Which, if you look at it historically, the peanut and its uses being the achievement of a black scientist, that would make LuAnn's Law a piece of racist legislation, ask me. But nobody does ask me. Nobody ever asks me. At least to cook for a living. Not anymore. Who'll hire the big bad chili killer? That's when it all started for me. Smack, whiskey, alimony, syph."

"Sounds like a song."

"Oh, it's a song all right. Now get on the stick, Stewboy. Papa's got a brand-new spatula. Spanky-spanky."

Funny how even the nutters get sane enough for the few minutes it takes to spill their guts.

Then it's the redeye back to Batshit Isle.

Today I sat in the trance pasture for a good hour after First Calling. I shut my eyes and made to enter that peaceful ripple of a kingdom Heinrich calls the shit-free zone. It was a nice place to visit until that wife-filcher William started bum-rushing my void.

Scamper, scamper.

I met William in the dorm rooms of higher yearning. He'd wormed a double for himself down the hall, a sumptuous bong chamber tricked out with batiks by spree killers and oil portraits of famous French Marxists he'd painted on black velvet. He fancied himself some kind of conceptualist at the time. Everything was a concept. Every concept was ripe for dismemberment. He liked to trace punk rock back to the age of Luther, don used toupees.

I once asked him who the hell he thought he was.

"A gangster of contingency," he explained.

He was my hero and for my worship I got first dibs on the women he'd bed and flee. My job, as I saw it, was to coddle them back to some sort of flummoxed spite, whereupon they'd jerk me around for a while, the William proxy, then give me the boot.

I thought it a commendable system at the time.

Someday William and his cruel, pretty face would be known to all the world, of that I was also convinced. Artist, philosopher, provocateur, such petty designations would merely constrict his force. I figured I'd best tag along and witness this bloom, be his blasted Boswell:
Behind the Scenes with William P; William P: A Life, an Art; The Packed Bowl: The Life and Times of William P.

Other fevers seized him, though.

Next thing, William's scoring callbacks from the leading investment firms in the country.

"Dudes are making scads," he told me, chopping down some crystal on a Baader-Meinhof pop-up book.

He'd taken to wearing twills.

"What happened to contingency?" I said.

"What could be more contingent than money?"

He looked almost priestly there at the snort end of his soda straw.

Make no mistake, I was happy to see him when I spotted him years later thumbing violently through Peruvian flute disks at a midtown megastore. He was a tad pastier now, pinched into some flashy tailoring, maybe a Milanese number. I noticed a kind of bleary epiphany in his eyes when he saw me, as though I were some object mislaid long ago with not a little remorse.

I kissed him, called him Billy, took him home to meet the family.

File it under fuckup, I guess. Warm and defeated as he'd seemed in the megastore, William came to merciless life over linguine and wine. Maryse was in his thrall well before the garlic loaf was out of the oven, and there was Fiona at the far end of the table, making nervous pokes at her head hole.

Poor dear, poor daughter, torn between deadbeat biology and this glad shimmer of a man. William was rich, toothy, world-luminous. He had tales to tell, wisdom to dispense. I was bitter and middling and whatever I dispensed tended to stain my shorts.

It was never much of a contest.

"You're shaking," somebody said.

DaShawn stood over me here in the trance pasture. His tunic was soiled. His goiter looked bigger.

"Shaking with solitude," I said.

"Sorry, then. I was wrong to disturb you."

"How's the merc trade? Kill any Continentals today?"

"Whoa," said DaShawn. "Let's get something straight here. I'm not some nutbin Napoleon. I know who I am and, more importantly,
when
I am. I have a degree in indigenous studies from Ramapo State College. I just prefer traditional dress."

"I'm sorry, DaShawn. You have to understand that I'm an asshole."

"I do understand."

I started to thank the man for such rare comprehension.

"Shhh. I want to show you something."

DaShawn led me out of the pasture and through some brush. We hiked our way up the hill trail through a steep rise of spruce.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"I told you, I want to show you something."

A burning scent was coming off the mountain, rich and dry, full of campfire cheer. We strayed off the trail and hacked our way up to a great forked elder. There in a clear was a tiny cottage built of thatch and brick. Smoke rifled out the tin flue.

"Ye Olde Mothering Hut," said DaShawn.

"I wonder who's in there," I said.

"Heinrich's in there. And somebody. We never know who it is until it's all over. That way there's no shame."

Now shrieks carried over the clear.

"Damn," I said.

"The Iroquois," said DaShawn, "in fact many of the eastern tribes, not to mention the plains tribes, prided themselves on their ability to bear torture. If you got captured by an enemy, you were already dead and disgraced. Your only recourse was to maintain dignity during the ordeal."