The Subject Steve: A Novel (3 page)

I fell asleep, woke to a bowl rim at my lips.

Fiona.

Dimly, men in Stetsons rode past boomtown facades and out onto a pixilated plain.

"I love this part," I heard Cudahy say, dimly.

"Fennel soup," said Fiona. "Drink."

"They're doomed," said Cudahy. "They know they're doomed, and they also know their only shot at grace is precisely in that knowledge. There's an army of vicious Mexicans out there waiting to shoot them to pieces."

"I'd like to see the Mexican side of the story," said Fiona. "I'd like to read an oral history from the Mexican perspective."

"An oral history," said Cudahy. "I bet you would, honey."

"Gross."

"What's going on?" I said. I figured they needed a chance to adjust, to my state, to their consideration of my state. My worry was that I could sleep too much. A dying man sleeps too much, maybe his power slips away.

I needed all the power in my purview, my ken.

Cudahy muted the doomed hooves.

"Daddy," said Fiona.

"So," I said, "you heard. You came."

"PRAXIS," said Cudahy.

"PREXIS," said Fiona.

"You didn't seem so worried before," I said.

"I didn't know how serious it was."

"Baby, I have some bad news. About your educational opportunities."

"It's okay. Uncle Cud told me. I hope the fucking was worth it."

"Only time it's not worth it is when it's free," said Cudahy.

"Daddy, I want you to know I'm going to be here for you. That part is settled. Don't argue with me. It's what I need to do now. For me as much as for you."

"Thank you, baby," I said, and sang to her, weakly, the song about aardvarks I had sung to her in the days before her disaffection.

Then I spit up some fennel shreds.

The next morning Cudahy went out for food, the early papers. I watched him pilot his bulk down the stoop, disappear behind a satellite truck. My good Cudahy, back from the wide strange world.

My fondest Fiona.

"You'll ruin the paint with all this tape," she said, pulling my scrapbook mural down.

I thought back to the time Fiona was six, seven, caught a double zap of chicken pox and scarlet fever. She got so quiet there on the living room carpet playing divorce with her Barbies. The sores spread and her blood boiled. We watched her body take on the silken deadness of her injection-molded friends. It all came to high drama, or my high dramatics, me running crazy through the neighborhood with my doll-daughter in my arms, Maryse screaming for me to come back.

"I've got us a cab, schmuck!"

The doctors shamed us for our delay. Maryse and I, we'd been inches from the abyss of nefarious parentage, practically Christian Scientists, but Fiona would live. It must have been our luck that got us so hot, basted us both in visions of hump and dazzle. Or maybe it was some awful need to screw within wad's shot of the abyss. Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts. We gripped each other's privates and started to kiss, but our mouths were pruned things, insipid divots. My wife's wetness was all for William the Fulfiller now. We conked out drunk on the carpet, woke up around dinnertime, checked in on our baby. Fiona was bent up in her fever's waning. Maryse and I held hands beside the little plaid bed.

"I'm leaving you," said my wife.

"I know," I said.

Fiona claimed she remembered none of it, but she still bore a mark from those days, a pock where a scab must have flaked, smack between her dry green eyes.

It was about the size of a sunflower seed.

Cudahy came back with cabin food. Siege supplies. Soup cans and sandwich meats and bouillon cubes in silver foil. He pulled a newspaper from the grocery sack, folded to an item: "Doc's Prog for Our Kind: Game Over." Beneath my ex-wife's picture was a caption: "Ex-Hubby the New T. Rex."

"Where'd they get the photo?" I said.

"Eye in the sky, probably," said Cudahy. "Or the DMV."

"Mom gave it to them," said Fiona. "She left a message on my cell. She's getting calls from talk shows. She wants to know how you feel about her speaking publicly on the matter."

"You mean whoring herself."

"Sharing her experience, hope, and strength."

"Tell her she can do whatever the hell she wants."

"I knew you'd say that so I already said that."

"There's a guy out there," said Cudahy. "He's offering his help."

"Reporter?" said Fiona.

"Don't think so," said Cudahy. "He told me to give you this."

It was a mimeographed brochure, lettered in splotchy monastic script.

Have you been left for dead?

Do you number among the Infortunate- shrugged off by family, friends, physicians, priests?

Have you been told you're beyond all hope?

Are you incorrigible, inoperable, degenerative, degenerate, terminal, chronic, and/or doomed?

Are you lost, are you crazy, or just plain sick?

Maybe you should snuff it, friend.

Go ahead.

Pull the Trigger.

Turn up the Gas.

Do it.

Do it, coward.

Did you do it?

You didn't, did you?

Okay, don't do it.

You're not worth the mess you'll make. Not yet.

Here's a better idea:

Call the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption and deliver back unto yourself your dying body and your dead soul.

No malady, real or imagined, is too difficult to cure.

Forget the scientific phonies and the quacks of holistic boutiques.

Forget the false love of New Age shamans.

Forget the false touch of healing retreats.

Your health, your freedom, your salvation is a toll-free call away.

Ask for Heinrich.

All major credit cards accepted.

Squeezed along the margin in fountain ink was this: "I Have the Cure.-H."

I made of this inanity a nice coaster for my coffee mug.

"They'll really be coming out of the woodwork now," I said.

"What woodwork?" said Cudahy. "We're on an island of concrete."

Walking back to the clinic for my next appointment a few weeks later, I saw what Cudahy had meant. I'd lived in this city long enough to forget the absurdity of the place, all these surfaces refracting us in shatters, this tonnage that bore down on us with hysterical weight.

Someday sectors of this city would make the most astonishing ruins. No pyramid or sacrificial ziggurat would compare to these insurance towers, convention domes. Unnerved, of course, or stoned enough, you always could see it, tomorrow's ruins today, carcasses of steel teetered in a halt of death, half globes of granite buried like worlds under shards of street. Sometimes I pictured myself a futuristic sifter, some odd being bred for sexlessness, helmed in pulsing Lucite, stooping to examine an elevator panel, a perfectly preserved boutonniere.

I'd be the finder of something.

Now, walking along, I had only the sense of losing myself.

Yes, I could perambulate unpestered, unthronged. My saga was stale. There were fresh griefs upon us. A beloved lip-sync diva had choked to death on a sea bass bone. The troops of our republic were poised on the border of a lawless fiefdom in Delaware. The Secretary of Agriculture had been exposed as a fervent collector of barnyard porn. Worse, he had a yen for the young ones, the piglets, the foals. Bestiality was one thing, opined the ethics community, but for God's sake, these were babies. There were wars and rumors of war and leaks of covert ops. There were earthquakes, famines, droughts, floods. A certain movie star had made box office magic once more.

The
National Journal of Medicine
's scathing rebuke of the veracity of Goldfarb-Blackstone Syndrome, its excoriation of the ailment's namesakes as "freakshow impresarios," had barely made the back pages, the spot after the break.

The air was out and I was glad of it. My fine fettle continued to obtain. Still, I somehow felt bound to these men, Goldfarb and Blackstone, the Philosopher and the Mechanic. They'd shocked me into keener living. I was brimming with bad poetry and never reading the financials. I can't say I knew what counted in life but I was beginning to glimpse what didn't. I had Fiona back, and Cudahy, too.

I owed these doctors a courtesy visit.

The Philosopher was sniffing something from a vial of handblown glass. Dark powder dusted his nose.

"Want some?" he said. "It's a new synthetic."

"Cunt's out of control," said the Mechanic. "Making his own yay-yo, to hell with the world."

"Oh, piss off, Blackie," said the Philosopher. "Just a little pick-me-up."

These were not the dashing scientists of the amphitheater. The Philosopher was unshaven and looked long unwashed. His lab coat was covered with cobalt smears. The Mechanic had developed a tic of the eye that might have seemed lewd had the psychic deterioration which motored it not been so plain.

"Galileo," said the Philosopher through hinges of spit, "why have you forsaken me?"

"Cunt's dreaming of Pisa," said the Mechanic. "Can't see the truth of the situation. We got busted. We ran a scam and we got busted. I told him the mammoth bit was too much. Stupid. We could have had our own disease. Now we have squat. You can't patent death, I told him. You can't copyright a fucking nonstate, let alone the extinction of a species. Especially ours. Didn't I say this? I said this."

"So, am I dying or what?" I said.

"God revealed it to me," said the Philosopher, "yet now I must defy God to appease the church. I shall perish from the hypocrisy . . ."

"That film, that idiotic film," said the Mechanic. "Somebody's cousin with an educational library. Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. So now we have what? What do we have now? The answer is C: Squat. Squat is the correct answer. We had everything going for us. The two names, perfect. You need two names for a good disease. Goldfarb-Blackstone. A Jew and a white guy. What's not to trust? Can't be a conspiracy, right? I mean, sure it could be for some people, but we weren't planning on this being a black disease. They have no insurance, by and large. I mean, well, what I mean by that is by and large. I'm not a racist, you know."

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

"It's true."

"But what about me?" I said.

"What, you?"

"Yeah, me."

"Oh, you. No, you're dying. Sorry, kid. Hate to say it."

"Dying of what?"

"I don't know. We haven't figured it out yet. What did we call it? Whatchamacallit. Good enough name as any, I guess."

"But you said it was a scam."

"The scam was everything else. See, we just wanted to stick out from the others. What's wrong with that? A brand, you know? Brand recognition. Brand-what's the word-leverage. Something for people to worry about on the drive to work. Something for the pharmaceuticals to jump on, the comedians to joke about. PREXIS dot net. Lots of people die all the time from nameless, mysterious diseases. What, do we deal with even a fraction of the shit that goes on? The answer, by the way, is D: Less than a fraction of the shit. It's like all those murders. Most go unsolved."

"What murders?"

"Exactly."

"So, what am I going to do?"

"I don't know. Cry. Pray. Go see the castles of Scotland."

The Mechanic's eye began to spasm anew, as though straining to vomit some abominable vision. The Philosopher fondled himself on the sofa.

"Doctor, doctor," he sang, "gimme the news . . ."

"Consider yourself the luckiest guy in this room," said the Mechanic.

"But I'm dying," I said.

"But nothing."

I found new doctors, furnished myself with further opinions. They slid me through tubes, onto tables, gurneys, toggled instruments that seemed forged in sterile smithies somewhere, cold bays carved deep into germless rock. They siphoned me, decanted me, bottled and labeled me, my blood, my snot, my waste, whatever coursed through me or sat in me, vatted, casked, the distillations of the guts, the body's gurgling treatment plant. They called me back, called me in, peeked into the corridor, closed the door.

The one with the eyeglasses sighed as she slid them off.

The one with the mustache stroked the bristles into place.

The fat one farted, made a meek look.

"Who can be certain?" they all began. There was concurrence about the uncertainty of certainty. There was concurrence about me.

I was dying of something.

It had no name.

Nobody wanted to venture one now.

I thought about Greta. I daydreamed about Clarice. I wondered if their industry had a tradition of charity work. I sat at home with Cudahy waiting for the symptoms to declare themselves. There had to be symptoms. Death could not precede the symptoms. My symptoms were late bloomers, but bloom they must. They owed me that much, whatever tribe of misery they hailed from: trembling, confusion, amnesia, aphasia, fevers, nomas, blebs. Dizziness, fatigue. Labored breathing. Loosened bowels. Blindness, boils, bedsore'd ravings, sears, flares, wens. Who knew? Nobody had ever done this kind of dying. Oh pioneer, the Patient Zero, the Subject Steve, the me of my given name, the me of my given fate, the chump of mysterium, the presymptomatic simp.

Did I deserve it?

Sure, like you deserve it.

Maybe only for being born.

Maybe only for wanting to be.

Because I did want to be. I wanted to stick around, stay in play. Who doesn't? you ask. Some doesn't, I reply. Me, I'd been there before, the brink, the brink of the blank. I'd come close with Maryse, closer by my lonesome. I'd practiced noose knots, stocked up on pills and gin. Maybe I wasn't the most likely candidate, but I definitely rated dark horse in the auto-snuff sweepstakes. I'd lived enough days when the days didn't end fast enough, days so chock full of me.

But now all I could think was: Let me live! Banish me, shun me, shoo me away, argue me off, but let me fucking live!