Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

"Dietz," I called to him.

He looked at me darkly.

"Dietz," I said. "Do you remember the message?"

"Who's that?" the woman asked him.

"A people," said Dietz. "A people who needs to relax."

"How's the clusterfuck?" I called.

"Cool it," said Trubate, slung me toward a patch of grass.

Now the porch door swung open and a man in a hunter's vest angled up to the rail.

"Naperton," I whispered.

"You know him, too?"

"He knows me."

Naperton drummed his clipboard, peered up at the sky.

"Good morning, morning!" he said.

"Good afternoon!" said the gathering. They spoke as one in a somewhat feverish singsong. Here and there, perhaps, were hints of sedition, or at least drill-weariness, but most of the Infortunate sounded sincerely joyful, near exultant, insane.

"Evening is upon us somewhere!" said Naperton.

"Good morning, evening!"

"The past is before us!"

"We're coming, past!"

"The future is gone!"

"Fare thee well, future!"

"Now is. ."

"Now!"

"Now is. ."

"Now!"

"Iam. ."

"Me!"

"Iam. ."

"Me!"

"And who are you?" called Naperton, pointed out to the crowd.

"I am me, me am I!"

Old Gold jammed his head into the earth, jerked himself up into some kind of ecstatic teeter. He stabbed out his hands and made banshee noises. Some clapped in time to his spasms, his war whoops. It was hard to tell if this was encouraged. Others pinched their eyes and puled. Dietz looked out from beneath his hat with an expression of bored expertise. Trubate rocked beside me, rapt. Old Gold tipped back to the grass, sunlit beads of spittle on his lips.

"I am me," he said. "Me am I. I ma me. I me ma. I ma me ma I."

"Well done!" called a voice.

There was a new man at the rail. He had hair of wavy silver, thick country arms, wore dungarees, a dirty dress shirt. He looked like a midwestern math teacher, a professor with a hobby garden. I knew at once it was Heinrich. Some calm of the high ordinary pulsed out of him, soft, metronomic, a charisma of reduced noise.

"People," he said quietly now, "I have something to impart to you. A fable, if you will. It concerns a lonely zookeeper and the beautiful, fiercesome tigress who fell into his charge. When I say lonely I mean lonely, okay? The zookeeper, I mean. So picture it, an anonymous little fellow, no friends, no family, no love. Nothing. Picture a poor little man whose most intimate conversations take place over cash registers, at salad bars, or in the bathroom mirror. Are you picturing it? It's important that you picture it. This is what we call in the biz guided imagery. It's still very big in the biz right now, this guided imagery thing. So, picture it, okay? Loneliness. Loneliness of the unrelenting variety. Understand, I'm telling you all this not to embarrass this man, who exists only on the plane of parable, anyway, but rather in what you would have to grant is an honest go at character development. Because I believe in character development. People, you should never consider me not in agreement with the idea of character-driven image-guided parable. But we're off the beaten track, here, really. We're far afield the ground-down path. What I want you to picture, really, for parable's sake, is this lonely zookeeper whose only companion is the beautiful and fiercesome tigress who has fallen into his charge. Because, and this is important, the motherfucker couldn't take his eyes off that cat. Motherfucker was in love with that stripey bitch. Unnatural? Okay, sure, unnatural. I don't even know what natural is, people. Not in this world. And I sure as hell am not going to lay a moral trip on you. Oh, I know, morality is so important these days. Our society, it's fracturing and fissuring and fragmenting and all the other f-words, too, all because of a lack of moral structure. Well, not on this mountain, people. You want slave morality, that's the next mountain over. This is Mount Redemption. This is my fucking mountain. Got it? Good. So, let's get back to our regularly scheduled parable. When last we left, our lonely zookeeper was lusting for the tigress who'd fallen into his charge. And let me tell you something, a lust like this makes room for calculation. So one night he shoots her with a tranquilizer gun and climbs into her cage. He gets down and holds her drugged-up head in his arms, kisses her, whispers in her ear, works himself up into a lather, a slaver. Do you like slaver better? Let me know. Drop your suggestions in the suggestion box. But in the meantime, listen to me. This zookeeper. He unzips his trousers, dig? He whips it out. He whips it out and does the deed. The deed. He does it. Dig?"

"We dig," called Old Gold.

"Okay, then," said Heinrich, his voice rising. "Deed done, the zookeeper sets his watch alarm to coincide with the duration of the sedative and snuggles up beside the cat. He sleeps a sleep he has never known before. A golden sort of sleep, the deep, dreamless slumber of the unvanquished. Unvanquished, as in yet-to-be-vanquished. Am I laying it on too thick? Maybe I'm laying it on too thick. But when, tell me people, when is it ever really thick enough? I've never once seen it thick enough. It's always too thin, isn't it? Too damn thin.

"Anyway, back to our sympathetic bestialist. Because a story like this depends on sympathy, so I advise you all to sympathize. Or empathize. Which is more sympathetic. Back to the zookeeper's frequent and clandestine mountings. Back to the unvanquished thickness of our golden empathy and the zookeeper's feline humps. Repeat once nightly for, oh, a week.

"So one evening the zookeeper is thrashed awake by the newly roused tigress, who lets loose a howl that could serrate the stars. You like that? Serrate the stars? I made that up. That's not in the original parable. But that's how these things work. Thousands of years of revision, refinement. I'm storytelling, here. We're gathered around the cookfire here. Fire, man. Pretty fucking exciting. Now the tigress, she howls, she leaps, and the zookeeper, he just barely rolls away from her wet snapping jaws, wriggles himself out of the cage. Just barely. Witness the zookeeper, bruised but intact. Intact, but scared out of his mind. Picture scared, people. Picture load-in-your-skivvies scared. Visualize, visualize.

"Whew! Can you say that, people? Whew? You can bet your ass the zookeeper said it. Whew!

"Never again, he vows. Never again. But the next day, hosing down her cage, she appears to him almost coy, lazing there in the afternoon heat, and it seems to him that with those sultry squints of her tigress eyes, those drowsy paw strokes on her smooth belly, that sexy way her feline spittle ropes out of her mouth, maybe she's. . well, it's just a hunch, but maybe, I mean couldn't she actually be acknowledging their tryst, or, can you believe it, assenting to it! Why not? thinks the zookeeper, which I say for the sake of fable, for in truth no man can say for sure what another thinks, especially someone who doesn't exist. Still, hell, why not? Their love is forbidden in her kingdom too, right? It's probably just as thrilling.

"The zookeeper, however, is not unwary, so that night he returns to her cage door with a double dose of cat tranks locked and loaded. He draws a bead on her exquisite rump, but finds himself unable to pull the trigger. He shudders to imagine the shock of the needle piercing her hide. He dreads that baleful look on her face as the chemicals creep through her system and shut her down in stages.

"We are lovers now, thinks the zookeeper, we have built a trust. Or at least a tryst. So Zoo-man tosses the gun away and strips off his uniform, enters the cage armed only with his otherworldly tumescence. Do you all know what a tumescence is?"

"A tumessens!" called Old Gold. "That's a boner!"