Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

Fuck it.

I book.

I’m coming home to a beat-down either way, so why procrastinate? I’m standing outside the kitchen door looking in, and now it’s like the third time tonight I’m sneaking around windows like a perv. Dad’s on the phone, probably with the Big Chief himself. Dad’s leaning up on the refrigerator — and I swear to God I catch him pulling one of those stringy boogers out of his nose, the kind with the dry handle and the gooey tail. He pulls it all the way out, holds it up for inspection, and then, I swear on Dana’s dad’s missing eyes, my fucking progenitor reaches under the edge of the Formica and deposits the snot jewel.

When I was a crawling babyboy, I used to hang out under that Formica, tagging the cabinets with my orange crayon, and whenever I looked up, I always saw these dried snots like tiny cave spikes dangling down. Once Mom found them there and chewed my ass but I denied it, which just got her madder, and Dad was sitting there the whole time shaking his head even though we both knew they were his boogers. I remember a look on his face like it’s a shame the world is like this before he got up with his belt.

Not to say this event was some big revelation, like before this he was taking me to the hobby shop on Saturdays and teaching me how to fly kites and shit, and then suddenly everything changed. It’s just another point on the time line.

So I go around to the garage door, hoping to get in that way — but Dad must have cloned himself, or built replicants, because by the time I get there I see another one of him through the garage window standing under the lightbulb with the only sound the hum of the meat freezer. He’s surrounded by all his tools, his hands on his hips like he’s the royal torturer taking a moment to reflect on the hot debate of the day, the rack versus the thumbscrews.

I guess this occurs to me because for Ms. Fredericks’s class I made that report on the Spain Inquisition situation. “A bit over the top, but informative,” was how Ms. Fredericks described my report, because I went into detail about the various devices any good torturer was familiar with, like the special skillets to fry up your testicles and the two-handed saws they wedged up your ass to saw you in half with.

Some of the Jervises in my class were all offended or something, like I approved of the whole thing (though no doubt Steve Redillia, if he hadn’t been expelled, would have), like I wasn’t fucking going out with a Jewish girl anyway, wasn’t sensitive to what her feelings might be in regards to Torquemada, if anybody were to tell her what the man thought of her, instead of seeing that I was just trying to do what any decent historian would try to do, too, namely to describe all the sick shit that went down, which Ms. Fredericks says must be done so we learn from our mistakes and so history doesn’t keep happening again and again. But I have my doubts about that theory. Because like remembering or not remembering your last beat-down has shit to do with the next one coming at your ass. And what help is a skinny black line with dots on it besides just to say this sucked, and that sucked, and do not doubt it all will suck again?

Out on the street I’m thinking, “Who needs life, people?” I stop off at Gupta’s to buy cigarettes. I’ve quit quitting them again.

“Two?” says Gupta, goes to the carton on the shelf, my carton, the soft-packs, lays them on the countertop. Forty sticks of friendship there.

“How’s your brother?” I say.

“Doing the same as you,” he says, pinches thumb and finger to his lips. Gupta was a journalist somewhere where it’s okay to torture one for prying. Lucky he had a brother set up in America. Now he sells Salems and bongs and screw-top one-hitters to the kids cutting trig at the prep school down the block.

“Your brother and I,” I say, “we must have a death wish.”

“Don’t be a fool,” says Gupta, “no one really wishes it.”

First smoke in a week. My lungs are good and rested, strong and wet. One drag, another, and the great dense mist of things — the company, Katrine — drifts up, away. When the butt burns down to my fingers I’ll flick it into the street, light another for the short walk home. I’ll put on some records, reread my junk mail, scour the clause minutia in the sweepstakes offers, call Katrine’s machine. I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke.

Smoking at work, that’s another story. We are outlaws of the state. We have a hideout, a floor forsaken partway through remodeling. Ghost cubes, glass-walled tombs. We all found our way here somehow. Martha runs the newsstand in the lobby. Mikhail is the Russian super’s lackey, possibly his son. Rich teaches real estate a few floors up. I do ad sales for an on-line magazine. I let them think I’m some kind of player, a silicon prince on the make, but Rich knows enough to see the fear in my eyes. I’ve been tracking numbers of doom these days.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me, “maybe you’ll fail upwards.”

Comments like this are why I’m always encouraging Rich to quit smoking. Who needs a smart-ass during your moments of stress-reduction?

Here’s Mikhail in a busted chair, some ergonomic locus of swivel and command. He flicks ash into a plastic cup. It’s a corner office, nothing here but dead carpet. I think of Gupta, wonder if it was a room like this where they did what they did to him, whip and wire and bamboo shoot, a rubber bucket for the human run-off of him.

Mikhail is runty in the big chair.

“Yo, I’m the CEO,” he says. “Your ass is fired!”

“You’re going to have to buy my shares, Mike.” I tap a cigarette out of the pack and tug it free with my teeth. Mikhail does silver magic with his Zippo, cups me flame. A team. A family.

“How’s the boss treating you?” I say. “Working hard or hardly working?”

Up here, I’m only good for pleasantries, the national patter.

“Work is for bitches,” says Mikhail, puts two fingers out, ash tweezed between them. His thumb is hammer-cocked. “A cap to the motherfucking dome. Know what I mean? Fuck toil, bro.”

“I’m with you,” I say, my words weak, unmeant, me here in French blue, an office-brightener tie. There’s grit in the combs of his thermal shirt, dull smears in his pants. His father, the super, sends him crawling through the ducts and tunnels of this heap. Asbestos hunts. The job, he told me, is to tack up false partitions, fool the Haz-Mat guys.

“I should learn computers,” says Mikhail, “they use them in the big buildings, niggers like me be using them for air-conditioning and shit.”

“Niggers?”

“That’s right.”

Mikhail gets up on the window sill, chops the air, slips a wire back into the smoke alarm.

“What about me?” I say.

“Guess you done slid the python eyes, G.”

We bump fists like ballplayers do.

I’m down.

Every few months I get another newsletter from the National Smokers’ Brigade. How do they know? An eye in the sky? An intercepted e-mail? Each time I have to remember the last time I was drunk, the last time I ever even drank. There was a guy at the bar, goatee and a patriotic T-shirt, “Don’t Tread on Me,” that colonial snake. He had a clipboard with a pen on a string. He rambled on about Jefferson, Rousseau, jabbed that pen around. I guess I must have signed the form. This was years ago. I don’t remember much. The night ended the next morning in the emergency room, a doctor with another clipboard, a metal one, hinged.

“Why do you do it, son?” the doctor asked.

“Go shoot a speedball,” I told him, “and you’d never ask anybody that question again.”

Some people give up the cigarettes with everything else. Me, I was pretty sure that without nicotine I’d be swinging from the shower nozzle in no time. You have to keep something between yourself and the truth of yourself or you’re dead, was how I figured it. Still do.