The Subject Steve: A Novel (2 page)

Every time there was shoot-out Cudahy would recount his own days of gunplay, usually some kind of pimp jump in the lime-colored corridors of a formerly Socialist apartment block.

"They got my driver Vlad in the head, point-blank," he said one night. "I figured I was a goner until I stumbled across a ventilation duct. Hard to believe I fit, but I did. And so here I am. And here you are. Death's luck goes south, too, you know. Hit me."

"I think the reaper's due for a run."

"Don't talk that way," said Cudahy. "This living and dying shit, it's all a matter of attitude. It's like you're at the Worlds with a couple of fouls and you need one clean put to qualify. The Swedish judge is gunning for you and you're thinking, 'I will stay in the circle, there is nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia.' "

"What are you talking about?"

"Say it: There's nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia."

"There's nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia."

"Exactly," said Cudahy. "Worked for me. I silvered. Then I got out of the shot-put racket for good. I mean, chucking a steel ball over and over again. For what? The travel, sure, but all in all it was a waste of time. And you know what else? When you're a great shot-putter, they hate you for it. They really do. Not true of, say, the discus. The discus-throwers have a feeling of community. They have that statue. Hit me. Fuck, busted."

When I phoned the clinic to confirm my next appointment, the Mechanic took the call himself.

"We've got some exciting news," he said. "A breakthrough. I can't tell you over the phone, though."

Cudahy popped a bottle of raisin schnapps.

"To beginnings, breakthroughs, fresh starts," he said. "May the upshot of all this be nothing more than a beautiful new-found invigoration that informs your long years ahead."

"That's nice," I said.

"It's an old peasant saying," said Cudahy. "The literal translation is 'Better you fuck yourself than they fuck you.' Good luck tomorrow. I'll be waiting with some coq au vin."

The next day the nurse led me past the Special Cases Lounge and through a slim metallic door. We stepped into a bright amphitheater, a room like a grooved well. The Philosopher and the Mechanic stood down at the bottom of it behind a semi-translucent scrim. Dozens of others filled the raked seats. Some craned back to catch my eye, nod, enact hopeful semaphore with their thumbs. The Philosopher stepped out from behind the scrim. A lectern rose into his hands from some hushed hydraulics in the floor.

"Good morning," he said. "Shall we begin? Now as some of you from the press may be unfamiliar with medical jargon, I'll try to stick to layman's terms. But first, a small caveat. While our tests can't be considered foolproof, the sheer quantity of data and the unequivocal agreement of it cannot be wished away. Since we have nothing comparable by which to judge the subject's condition, there is, to be quite candid, some element of faith involved, but I would by no means refer to it as a
leap
of faith. Consider it more on the order of a small hop. Or perhaps even a skip. Okay, then, on to the main presentation of our body, or rather, well, you know what I mean . . ."

There were giggles in the gallery. The lights dimmed. The Mechanic slid a videocassette into a dark notch in the wall. Out of speakers mounted in the ceiling came the whir and sputter of an old film projector. Nice touch, I thought, listened as a chimey melody, familiar somehow, seeped into the room. It was American educational music, that old warped hope in major chords, and it bounced along to the vistas skating by on the screen: mountains and mountain valleys, jungles and jungle clears, lakes, rivers, streams, each yielding to the next in a bright ceremony of splice and dissolve.

Last was a light-filled forest, where all manner of creature began to stir, make their first nervous pokes from burrow and mound. I'd seen footage like this before, felt fourteen again, dozing in my snowboots, waiting for the afternoon bell. How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

No expectations down there.

Now the shot pulled out a bit. Here a stunted horse drank from a creek. There an odd bird jerked worms from the earth. Here came a rustle in the brush, a gentle tremoring that sent bugs the size of bullets to wing. Something huge burst into view, a shambling immensity I knew from coloring books, dioramas of yore. The woolly mammoth. Hairy-hided. Shovel-tusked. A great shaggy thingness. It looked about with what could have been innocence and not a little fear in its eyes. I wondered how much it cost to rent a toothless elephant, trick him out for another geological age. There wasn't much time to wonder. The music tripped into a darker key, some molester-on-the-carousel lilt. It was the end of innocence, or the end of something.

It was bum luck for the mammoth.

A band of humanoids lumbered up, a hunting party, crude men with crude spears in their tufted fists, loud language on their tongues. They whooped and hollered, circled the beast, rushed in and out and in again, stabbed until the mammoth's hide blew bright spouts of mammalian blood. The woolly fellow thumped to his knees, bellowing, bellowing, us thrust up now into the black pain of his mouth. His cries and the taunts of the hunters started to fade. There was darkness now, silence. There was darkness with a few faraway pricks of light. The universe. Universal shorthand for the universe.

We were moving through it now. We were gliding toward a greenish-bluish ball. Our ball, the home sphere. Sea and tree and all those organic shenanigans, all that fluke life. We were flying right smack into the middle of the fucker, flying and flying until it wasn't flying anymore, it was falling, and we were falling now through clouds and sky and down upon the body of a city, row house bones and market hearts and veins of neighborhood, arterial concretions of highway and boulevard and side street, falling now to a low float over pavement, a hover here in some lost alleyway, a superannuated little gland of a place, where a solitary figure walked with his hands stuck in his windbreaker. The figure began to glow, as though suddenly sensor-read, his organs swirls of grained color, his skull a glassy orb of dim pulses and firings, the lonely weak electrics of homo erectus. The man stooped for his shoelace. The picture froze at the beginnings of a bow knot. Through the speakers came the sound of sprocket jump, the flutter of reel's end. The screen swiped to test bars. The music leaked away. The lights went up.

The Mechanic took the lectern, spoke into a thimble he'd slipped upon his thumb.

"Any questions?"

There were questions.

"Should we assume the figure, the visible man, as it were, is the subject?" called a woman with a series of laminated cards clipped to her pantsuit.

"What's with the woolly mammoth?" said a kid with a video rig strapped parrot-like to his shoulder.

"Forget that," said an old man in a hunting vest. "What is the point of any of this? Is this some kind of gag?"

"I assure you," said the Philosopher, leaning into the Mechanic's amplified thumb, "this is no gag. Nor could it be construed as a bit. The visual aid is merely meant as a tool to help you better understand the scope of what we're about to tell you. Ladies and gentleman, the subject, who, as some of you may already have ascertained, is seated here among us, which I note as a precaution against insensitive comments regarding his condition, this subject is the first known sufferer of what I believe will and should be referred to from now on as Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, named, I might add, for its discoverers, Dr. Blackstone and myself."

"Without being technical," said the kid with the parrot cam, "what exactly is the nature of PREXIS? PREXIS for short, right? I mean, what's the deal, nontechnically speaking? And why should we care, given all the diseases out there right now?"

"To put it bluntly," said the Mechanic, "those other diseases already have a name. And with it, a cause: viral infection, chemical compromise, cellular glitch, inheritance on the genetic level. This syndrome, though now named, still has no identifiable cause, which does not mitigate its unquestionable fatality. This man is going to die. But here's the kicker: he's going to die for no known reason. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, and irrevocably. He may show no signs of it yet, but he will, trust me. And though he may be the first, I assure you he is not alone. Like the beast in the film, and the prototypical bipeds who felled it, all of us here, too, will someday be extinct. And not from nuclear catastrophe or chemical weaponry or environmental collapse, but from something else entirely. Who knows? Perhaps the cause is sheer purposelessness. At any rate, be advised, this subject, Steve, this mild-mannered thirty-seven-year-old ad man, is but the first in line. Maybe you've been lucky enough to dodge everything else, the cancers, the coronaries, the aneurysms, but do not consider yourself blessed. Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, if you will, is guaranteed to claim us all."

"Aren't you just talking about death?" said the old man.

"Unfortunately, yes," said the Mechanic.

"But don't we already know about death?"

"What do we know? We know nothing. Now at least perhaps we have what little light the work of Dr. Goldfarb and myself can shed on it."

"I'm interested in what you mean by purposelessness," said the woman in the pantsuit. "Do you mean boredom? Do you mean to say this man is actually going to die of boredom?"

"That's one way of putting it, yes," said the Philosopher.

"Dynamite," said the woman, darted out of the room.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I said, back in the Special Cases Lounge.

"We weren't sure."

"We couldn't be certain."

"All the data accounted for."

"All the numbers in."

"Sorted."

"Crunched."

"Mashed."

"Mealed."

"Until a granular quality obtained."

"Then checked and counterchecked against findings in our database."

"Adjusted for error."

"Baseline error."

"Human and otherwise."

"Human and counterhuman."

"We had to be precision-oriented on this one. Or orientated."

"Either way."

"We had to be scientists about it."

"If we're not scientists, what are we?"

"If we're something else, who are the scientists?"

"So," I said, "how long have I got?"

Cudahy was waiting on the corner near my building. It looked like there'd been some sort of accident. News trucks and radio cars cordoned off the better part of the block. Cudahy threw a parka over my head, guided me up a hillock of root-ruptured pavement toward my door.

"Don't answer the vultures," said Cudahy.

"Which vultures?" I said.

Here they were upon us, pressing, pecking through my fuzzy sheath.

"How does it feel to be dying?"

"Do you believe you are bored to death?"

"Have you had any further contact with the mammoth?"

Cudahy shouted them all down. I felt his huge arms wrap around my head.

"Scum," said Cudahy, bolted the door behind us. "Wish to God I had Vlad with me. That guy sure knew what to do to a journalist."

I let the parka slip to the floor.

"What's happening to me?" I said.

"Hell if I know," said Cudahy. "Why can't they let a man die in peace?"

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

"Sure you are."

"All I did was go in for a checkup."

"That's how they get you," said Cudahy.

He cracked a bottle of beef-flavored vodka, turned on the TV. The woman in the pantsuit beamed up from my stoop. She fiddled with a coil of metal in her ear.

"Yes, Mike," she said, "he appears to be barricaded in this building you see behind me. And, truthfully, I can't say I blame him. Who wants to be the pace car in the race to oblivion? But there's another question, Mike, which I think you broached, or maybe breached, earlier. How do we know he's the only person on the planet with Goldfarb-Blackstone, or PREXIS, as it's so rapidly come to be known? It's hard to believe that this man, this so-called Subject Steve, is even the only victim of terminal ennui in this city. And if there are others, are they dying, too? Are we all, perhaps, dying? Have we, perhaps, always been dying? It's too early to tell."

"This is insane," said Cudahy. "A mass hallucination. I've read about this kind of thing. You do a lot of reading on the track and field circuit. Downtime. Cafes. You get educated. History is full of this phenomenon. It'll blow over."

"I don't see it blowing over," I said.

"It's just started to blow, buddy. There's a whole blowing-over process. Anyway, you've got more important things to think about. You're still, on a personal level, dying."

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

"Fettle is irrelevant," said Cudahy. "Science has proven that much."

Now a man I knew appeared on the screen. He sat at an office workstation, his thin hair blending with the fabric of the cube-wall weave.

"One thing I can tell you about the subject," said the man, "he always bought doughnuts for his team."

"Pastries!" I said. "Better than doughnuts!"

"It's okay," said Cudahy. "Calm down."

"It wasn't doughnuts."

"It's okay," said Cudahy.

"What are they talking about, boredom?" I said. "I've never been bored. Lonely, tired, depressed, of course. But not bored."

"I think they mean that as a euphemism," said Cudahy.

"A euphemism for what?"

"I'm not sure I follow," said Cudahy.

This was about the time I started to weep. This was the kind of weeping where after a while you're not quite sure it's you who's still weeping anymore. Some wet, heaving force evicts your other selves. You're just the buck and twitch, the tears. You fetal up and your thoughts are blows. Phrases drift through you. Rain of blows. Steady rain of blows. There's no relent. There's no relief. The hand of a comforting Cudahy is a hunk of hot slag. The world is a slit through one bent strip of window blind. The noise of the city, the hum of the house, the hiss of the television, is wind.