The Subject Steve: A Novel (12 page)

Dietz walked out of the crowd doing paradiddles on a fur-bound Indian tom.

"This isn't a fucking Krupa show," said Heinrich. "Slow it down."

Now Old Gold stepped out to the porch, shirtless, in festive pantaloons. He gripped his terrific knife. Bobby was there, if he was still Bobby, pulped a bit around the eyes, the
Tenets
open in his hands and him nearly davening as he recited: "Behold, subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so, and subsequent forays into the abyss revealed these things to me: Your soul is made of deeds. Your thoughts, your fears, your whims, your doubts, are sand. Moreover, you can't make an omelet without perpetrating some serious fucking atrocities. Mama, Papa, Caca, Pee-Pee. You are you. Article Seven, Redemption Tip Number Five."

"Don't go off book," snapped Heinrich.

"I am book," said Trubate.

"I am me," shouted Old Gold. He bounded down to Beach, cut his cuffs away, chased the air with elegant swipes of his knife. He had the bearing of some highborn reaper, a cruel dandy. He caught a piece of Beach's face and Beach snatched his wrist, judo'd his arm around, bent it to some inhuman parameter that got Old Gold howling. Beach took the knife now, put the blade to Old Gold's neck. Was he awaiting thumbs from Caesar's skybox? What a soldier, sailor. A shot boomed down from the porch, spun Beach, put him on his knees. He pawed at the hole in his shoulder, the wet epaulette of blood blooming there.

Old Gold laid his boot on Beach's back.

"Look at my fucking demon now!" he said. "Little Sissy demon! I am a cloudwalker and I rain my rain of piss down on your meek inheritor ass!"

Old Gold took his cock out, pinched it down towards Beach's skull. We waited for a while.

"No flow," said Old Gold.

We heard another shot and tiny flecks of Old Gold's ass went twirling into the lights.

"For real?" he said, and fainted. Heinrich tucked his pistol in his dinner jacket, started down the steps.

"And the moral of the story," he said, "is never mock your demon. A corollary to that moral would be never postpone square dance night. Now let's put this fiasco behind us. Tend to the wounded. Beach will be our brother, if he so chooses."

Most of us made to leave.

"You," said Heinrich. "Come walk with me."

We walked out toward some power lines. Past the lit perimeter was a night of huge near stars. They were greening themselves up there like those stick-on galaxies my mother used to buy for my bedroom ceiling, those stars that came with charts I was too lazy to learn.

"That's okay," she'd said, "just use your imagination. Make your own constellations. Gods and animals. Heroes and bears."

I had no idea what she could mean. I scattered the decals around in a way I thought looked natural, random, skylike.

"Just want to stretch my legs a little," Heinrich said now.

We walked out past the last of the cabins to the treeline. A breeze blew over the field. I wanted to hear ghost voices on it, bog plaints, heath pleas. Please Note, Please Note. A serious fucking prizewinner, that. But Wendell was still dead. And I was still dying, wasn't I? Who would note? What had
I
ever noted? I'd taken my pleasures, of course, I'd eaten the foods of the world, drunk my wine, put this or that forbidden particulate in my nose until the room lit up like a festival town and all my friends, but just my friends, were seers. I'd seen the great cities, the great lakes, the oceans and the so-called seas, slept in soft beds and awakened to fresh juice and fluffy towels and terrific water pressure. I'd fucked in moonlight, sped through desolate interstate kingdoms of high broken beauty, met wise men, wise women, even a wise movie star. I'd lain on lawns that, cut, bore the scent of rare spice. I'd ridden dune buggies, foreign rails. I'd tasted forty-five kinds of coffee, not counting decaf.

I hadn't put things off, I'd done them, just done them blind. Steady rain of ruin. Steady dark. You see too much and you can't see anything at all. You lose your beautiful wife to your cousin, or the sun. You beget hooligans. Or maybe you're the old man in the hospital, giving thanks to the Elks, the Black Kids, pressing the button, pressing it, but the girl never comes.

All my pretty ones.

Fuckeroo'd.

"Have you changed your mind about leaving?" said Heinrich.

"No," I said.

"No, he says," said Heinrich.

I heard noises behind us. Someone was squeezing me to the dirt. Someone was stuffing my head into a sleeve.

"Wait," I heard Heinrich say.

Wires poked my neck, my ears.

"What are you doing?"

"Notty, look how funny he looks with the beard."

Naperton stood near me while I stripped.

"Wish we had a boilersuit," he said. "We used to have a boilersuit. I don't know where the hell it's got to now. Can you see through the hood? Be honest."

"No," I said.

Something cracked at the back of my knee.

"Can't fault your honesty."

I curled up to the thatch.

"Have you ever seen those pictures of Chet Guevara all shot up to shit?"

"Che," I said.

"What?"

"Che Guevara."

"I'm not talking about him."

"Is this part of the mothering process?"

"This would be idle chatter," said Naperton. "Get up."

He bent my arms around a pole, cinched my wrists. I heard the thatch swish, a new pair of boots in the room.

"I'll take it from here, Notty," said Heinrich. "Better get on the road, beat traffic."

"Right."

I hung there sucking hood, listened to Heinrich putter around the hut. He moved quietly, methodically, like some neighbor in the next apartment on a Sunday afternoon. Tin pots, the dull hammering of picture hooks. I heard Heinrich stab at the fire, spread something out in the dirt, a tarp, perhaps, lob what sounded like a sack of metal on it.

"They sure were big on gadgets back in the bubonic days," said Heinrich. "The Breast Ripper. Purpose self-evident, I guess. Or the Branks. A sort of pierced tongue brace for the nagging missus. The Pear. Goes up your ass like a piece of fruit, splits open in your prostate. What I wish we had is a Judas Cradle, but those are a bitch to rig."

"What are you going to do to me?" I said.

"Judas Cradle. Sounds like one of those rock bands."

"Don't," I said. "Please."

"Don't what?"

"Please," I said.

The hut was a furnace now.

"Falanga," Heinrich said. "I love that word. Falanga. The beating of the soles of the feet. Submarino is water torture, near drowning. Very big in Uruguay when I was down there. Fellow up at Harvard or someplace, he did a study, took regular people, housewives, students, told them to shock someone in the next room. He'd have actors in there pretending to be in agony. Most of them kept turning up the volts. Even with the screams, the pleas. What do you think of that?"

"Doctor's orders."

"That's right," said Heinrich. "But now it's all about deprivation. That's the thing nowadays. No light, no air, no sleep, no food, no water. Or just food. Dry food. Stale peanuts. Stale saltines. No water. Cotton mouth. Or kick a blindfolded man off a chopper. How could he possibly know he's only a few feet off the ground? The complex of emotions when he hits, that's what breaks him. These are the techniques. The state of the art. Make somebody stand for days. Fluids collect in the feet. Believe me, you can't conceive of the pain. You can't conceive of the fluids. It's not about violating the body anymore. It's about putting the subject in a situation whereby the subject's body violates him. Betrays him. Do you get this distinction? It's kind of subtle."

"It's not so subtle."

"You're a subtle man. How did you like tomorrow? I used to see that on billboards when we made cheese runs. Somebody wrote that crap, I always said."

"Me."

"Yes, you."

"So, that's the deal?"

"What's that?"

"Deprivation?"

"No," said Heinrich. "You've already been so deprived."

What he did to me now he did for a good long time. He did it maybe with some of the tools he'd talked about, the ones from the tarp, the grand antiques, the hooks and prongs and pincers I heard him pull from the fire. Sometimes he did it with his hands. The lulls were the worst part. Too much time to smell the cook stench.

I blacked out, came up into some throb of wakefulness. My hood was slipping and I saw pieces of the room. Heinrich knelt in the corner with an old Army-issue hand crank telephone. He clipped leads to it, ran the wires back to where I hung.

"Steve," he said, "I'm really thinking you've earned a phone privilege."

He went back to the corner and turned the crank.

I woke up next to the dead fire, my cuffs cut away. There was a note in one of my shoes: "Welcome to the World of Self-Born Men. P.S. Given your condition, you are relieved of kitchen duty for the rest of the week."

I stumbled out of the hut, fell a few times running down the hill trail, ripped my shins on roots and stones. My bones were making soft, sifting noises. I had to blow blood from my nose to breathe.

Old Gold stood at the gate. He'd gotten his knife out, and by his expression appeared to be already picturing some triumphal display of my pancreas.

"Come to keep me company?" he said.

"I'm walking through this gate, Gold."

"My job will be to stop you."

"Fair enough," I said. "But there's something you should keep in mind. I have nothing to lose. I'm a fucking terminal. Doesn't that resonate with you?"

"Folks who really got nothing to lose, they just go ahead and do the stuff they want to do, Steve. They sure as shit don't make speeches about it."

"All right," I said. "What if I forget about the gate? What if I go through the trees?"

"Trees is fine," said Old Gold. "My thing is here at the gate."

"Bless you for your thing," I said.

I cut back around the dining hall, hacked through some poison sumac to the road. Now I'd have rashes in my wounds. Well, sure, why not? What kind of hellishness stinted on rashes? I stood out past the gate, looked back towards the compound, the blunted cone of Mount Redemption rising up behind it. I'd never found out if it was the cure or the disease that would cure me of my disease. Fat chance I ever would. I watched Old Gold punch the gate post for a while. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight.

He saw me, waved.

Pangburn Falls was a ghost of itself, a dead old barge town. I walked the main drag, boulevard of broken riverine hope, decrepit colonials, clapboard rot. Ancient porches slid down to junkyard lawns. Bent bicycles, rusted barbells, bladeless fans. All my father's owner's manual agon ended in this place. Here rested the gadget dead. I heard a whinny, a snort. Down the street a palomino drank from an inflatable kiddie pool.

There was a gas station up ahead, warm window neon, a lit sign spinning in the mist. They were advertising something called half-serve at the pumps. Some men stood near a tow rig with hot coffee and crullers.

"Hey, look," said one in coveralls. "It's a bust-out."

I readied for flight. I wondered if I had it in me for sustained fleeing. There was a shopping mall on the other side of the river. Parking lot, pink stucco, brick. What would I do if I got there? Hide behind a rack of sport coats? Beg the grill cooks for a fry boy hat?

One of the men by the tow rig made a hard fart.

"Dragon tail," he said, darted into the repair bay.

"How's the freak life, freak?" said a kid with long hair and T-shirt that read:
I Skull-Fucked Your Dead Mother Today, What'd You Do?

Must share a mail-order club with Parish, I thought.

"I'm tired of the freak life, tell you the truth," I said.

I tried to coo it country.

"Where you from?" said the man in coveralls.

"South of here."

"South you mean the city?"

"Yeah."

"I got a daughter there."

"Doubt I know her."

"What, you think I'm some kind of moron?"

"No."

"I'm just letting you know that I sympathize."

"Sympathize?"

"Fish out of water," he said.

"Fish a-floppin'," said the kid with the T-shirt. "Ready for the blade de filet."

"Blade de what?" said the first man. "Don't mind Donald. He's stifled. My name's Steve."

"They call me that, too," I said.

Steve led me back through the repair bay.

"Take a load off. I'll get some coffee. Cream?"

"Thanks."

I fell asleep in the chair. Later someone was shaking me awake. Steve handed me a mug of coffee, leaned back on a gunmetal desk littered with invoice slips. I checked the cup for advertising slogans. Ancient reflex, I guess.
Steve's Auto Repair
, it said,
Fixin' Since Nixon
.

Rookies.

"We got one of you guys a few years ago," said Steve. "Looked like hell. Told us some crazy shit about how he'd failed to be a good mother, something like that. What's that about? It sounded somehow faggot-related. Like from the urban gay subculture."

"I'm not sure what it's about," I said.

"I'm not a homophobic, you know."

"I didn't know that," I said.

"Got a brother in the bi-lifestyle."

"Look," I said. "I'm not sure what it's all about. All I know is I've got to get back to the city."

"Reminds me of before. When old Heinrich had the prison camp. Better than a real prison, far as business around here went. Too bad he got all artsy fartsy. Though it looks like he's still getting his licks in. Boy, are you a sight. You know, my pops was on the march to Bataan."

"Can I use your phone?" I said.

"You know about Bataan?"

"I saw a movie."

"The movie captured about one percent of the horror, my friend."

"I got the idea, though."

"And about three percent of the idea."

"I'm sorry about Bataan. Tell your father I'm sorry about it."

"I will. That's kind of you. Guess I'll go over to the cemetery this afternoon and inform him of your concern. Want to come, asshole? Phone's right there."

I called Fiona.