Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

The boy walks the snowholes of his running brother, a mittened form between the bends of birch.

“Deepies,” Martin says. “Don’t tell Lucy. Don’t tell her a thing.”

Some days we’re up there smoking on the prayer rock off the hill trail, smoking on the big slab facing east. Martin says the local braves used to sit here a few hundred years ago to watch the sun go up, watch the wagons roll by, beseech the Great Spirit to kick Manifest Destiny’s ass.

“But the only way to win,” says Martin, “is to organize people.”

“What people?” I say, wave out to the half-stump woods.

“They’re coming over tonight.”

“Tina, too?” I say.

Tina is my lady of the revolution. She was a daughter of Midwest mansions, come to university to study slides of the paintings that hung in her father’s halls.

Then she took Martin’s elective, “Introduction to Resistance: Semiotic to Semi-automatic,” and he saw in her the makings of a revolutionist. This was just before the graduate-school dean kicked Martin out for “beliefs antithetical to the pursuit of happiness.”

Martin took Tina home to the compound, to Lucy and me. We ate rabbit cassoulet. It was Martin’s specialty. We drank a case of beer, then laid into some good port. For the sake of function I had given up shooting speed.

Tina came upstairs to see my Kronstadt, to kiss it.

“Martin really loves you, you know.” she said.

There are certain reasons why women tell you of another man’s love for you, but I did not know them then.

“Pledge allegiance to me,” I said.

“Martin says we will eat in communal kitchens,” she said. “Thousands at a time. Everyone will work three days a week. No surplus.”

“We’ll get married in a tank,” I said. “We’ll win over the army and they’ll give us a tank. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”

“Forget it,” said Tina. “When the state withers away so will monogamy and marriage. Good riddance. Besides, I’ve only been with four men so far. Only one without rubbers.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Martin thinks the house is bugged. Do you think so?”

“Assume surveillance, rest assured,” I said, quoting my mentor.

We are scrap-whacking in the yard, all business, when Lucy drives up. She gives us her don’t-we-have-enough-wood look, cluckety-cluck.

“Don’t even,” says Martin. “It’s been a long day.”

“A long day of what is the question,” says Lucy. She can be sitcom mom when she isn’t technician-white lady, or Rosy-Lucy Luxemburg.

“Oh, Lucy,” says Martin.

“Crazy bitch,” I say.

“Hey,” says Martin. “Watch it.”

“In a good way,” I say.

Martin does some whacking. He always lets me slide, slither out from what I say. Maybe he feels guilty, being my teacher once, and me still a little slow. Maybe it’s our fabric-softener softened shirts. We are from the same kind of towns. We both know the sound of swivel-head spray at midnight on a summer lawn. We both know the weak secrets of us.

“Bronstein came from a farm-owning family, you know,” says Martin.

“About the ice pick incident,” I say. “Was he wearing his glasses?”

“Every day with you. Enough.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s being in the hills like this, with people down in town doing good and evil, and us just having to wait.

When Martin brought me here to meet Lucy I knew from the first moment that there was something between us. Call it chemical, call it mineral. It’s vegetable when she is out in the garden in her morning robe, picking radishes for dinner. Somehow, though, without even a kiss, I suddenly became their son, the sulky one, the wild one, all the ones they vowed to never bear.

I made peace with my lust as a matter of priority.

Lucy is our rock, our reason.

Martin is the teacher, but it’s Lucy who will set us free.

Still, the meals the man cooks! My God, if he were not the Bronstein of his age, he could have gone to New York City, been master chef to the ruling class.

“The idle’s aproned idol,” Martin said.

Tonight is Greek night, lasagna.

“A popular peasant dish,” says Martin.

Lucy drinks off her wine.

“I couldn’t find this poor woman’s vein today. They give you three tries, then someone else takes over.”

“You’ll feel better at the bonfire meeting,” says Martin.

“Tina’s coming over with some new recruits,” I say.

Lucy lifts up the wine bottle as though to examine the label. It’s the usual vineyard scene, happy serfs up to their hips in grape.

“Christ, how did this happen to me?” she says. “I tell them about all this at work and they think you should be committed.”

“What did I say about that?” says Martin. “At work, you never heard of me.”

Lucy bangs the bottle on the table edge. In the biopic of Lucy it will break, but now it only bounces.

“I’m going to kill someone,” she says.

“That’s silly,” says Martin. “For now, I mean. It’s anarchic, futile. We must build a base of—”

“Fuck your futility,” says Lucy. “I’m going to fire a bullet into somebody’s ear.”

“That’s nice talk for a nurse,” says Martin.

“I’m a blood technician, my dear. I have a job. Did you get this month’s check from mommy yet? You’re thirty fucking years old. And your little moron friend here. Can’t decide whether he wants to do you or me.”

It hurts, but I forgive each sentence before the next hisses out.

“You know,” says Martin slowly, “Bronstein did not rise out of destitution, either. It’s not a requirement. Would you rather my mother give the money to the Policeman’s Benevolence Association?”

“Fuck Bronstein,” says Lucy. “I’d waste him with an ice pick in half a second.”

“You need a nap,” says Martin. “But first, how about a little surprise?”

“I’ll get it,” I say, go to the kitchen for the key lime pie.

The new recruits drive up in a rusted sedan, a classic suburban bougiemobile, the kind my father used to drive me around in to show off all those atrocities of the state, the natural man-made wonders that always have those splintery benches nearby to drink warm root beer on. Put a quarter in the bughead metal scopes and maybe you can see the blood of workers drip-dried on the dam walls.

They pile out, girl after girl, stringy hair, parkas and hats, bundled, fevery sweetnesses who believe what I believe.

Here comes Tina with her deathmarch boots and mansion-colored hair, a deep-tongued angel like a painting from before Mister Marx was born. Sometimes when I see her I worry our cause is real, that we will die in low rooms with buckets and wires and sponges. State men will spaz me with volts, goad me into informancy. I have a low treachery threshold. Then the hummer days will be a faraway dream.

There are some new boys here, too, the kind who read French in the original and trick you into thinking their hearts are pure. These types prey like mantises on the kind and curious. There is one named Floyd I have seen doing deep stares at my Tina. It may be time for a cadre-to-cadre chat.

Lucy feeds the fire with our busy scraps. We lean into the light and say our names.

“Greetings from the campus branch,” says one boy, so gallant with a zit-scorched chin. I raise my beer to him.

“Smash the state!” calls a sweetness, and giggles, as though goosed by the dark.

“Welcome all,” says Martin. “Tonight is a special night for me. It is exactly ten years since I came to the conclusion that human life makes sense only insofar as it is lived in servitude to the infinite. You may ask what I mean by that. Look around you. See the moon? The outline of the trees against the night? Is that what I mean by infinite? Well, I could cut those trees down tomorrow. I probably will. I could detonate the moon. That’s not what I mean by infinite. Certainly we are not infinite. We are flesh and blood, minds full of the rot of capitalism. Born dead, really. No, comrades, what I mean by infinite is…”