Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

"I could go to prison for lots of stuff," said Heinrich.

Dietz called me over from his doorway. He said he had some bourbon, a little weed. Lem was building a customer base. Dietz's cabin was small and stank of Dietz. Books and torn parts of books and chunks of cinder littered the floor. There was a doorless mini-fridge in the corner. Pasted over the opening was a poster of a well-stocked ice box-pickle jars, milk jugs, wrapped steaks, fruit. Dietz sat on a steamer trunk with his derby in his lap. He was pinching out the creases in the brim. His Coleman threw light up on his berry stain. He caught me staring at it.

"Mark of Cain," he said. "Born with the thing."

"I like it."

"I don't care so much about it. When I was a kid, sure. Girls, before I met the right kind. But it's hard to get people to look you in the eye. Look me in the eye."

"I'm looking."

"Yes, you are."

"What do you want, Dietz?"

"What do I want? What a question. I remember when I was a child my folks took me out to the beach. I hadn't said a word yet. Mute little fucker. Far back on the baby curve. But it so happened that on that day I saw something out on the water. Something that appealed to me. It appealed to me enough to summon language in me. Language was called up from my tiny toddler database for the first time in my tiny miserable life. What do you think I said? Remember, I saw something that appealed to me."

"Seagull," I said. "See the seagull."

"That would be grand, Steve. See the seagull. I'd be a fucking poet now, wouldn't I? No, I did not say see the seagull. What I said was, I want boat. That's all I said. I want boat."

"You knew what you wanted."

"My mother was amazed. She cried, she says. She says she cried."

"Did you get boat?"

"They took me out on a day cruise. Bought tickets, bundled me up. They were not wealthy people, Steve. Vermont syrup trash, tell the truth. But, like I said, they bought tickets, bundled me up, walked me up the gangway. We're out five minutes and I'm a goddamn disaster area. Or so I've been told. Five minutes sounds like an exaggeration, an embolism, not an embolism, you know what I mean."

"An embellishment."

"Point is, I'm a wreck. Puking, weeping. Sea sickness. The sickness of the fucking sea. And it's at this moment in the experience I make utterance once more. Once more language is called upon to do my bidding. What do you think I said?"

"There are so many possibilities."

"No, there aren't. You're missing it. Think about it logically. What could I have said? Okay, I'll tell you what I said. No more boat. That's what I said. No more boat. Now, I'm a dude, I'm the kind of dude that can babble on and on. To anybody. About anything. How many times, for instance, do you think I've said a word like anybody, or anything, in my life? Millions, probably. How many times have I said the word probably? How many times have I used my gift of language to explicate myself out of this or that shit-fucked situation?"

"Extricate."

"How many times have I said shit-fucked, or situation? Brother, it's all language. Dope, cars, finger-banging, rock 'n' roll. It's all just language. You think it's not, buddy, but it is, trust me. You think the ultimate is out there somewhere, beyond language, but it's not. It's just totally not. For example, what's the ultimate, anyway? It's a fucking word. But here's my final point, Steve. For all those goddamn words, for all those combinatory combinations of words, for all their various shades and schadenfreudes of meaning or unmeaning, it just comes down to two basic things. I want boat and no more boat. That's all there is."

"I know what you mean."

"You have no idea what I mean. Do you really like my stain? Or do you mean to say you like to look at it?"

"What's the difference?" I said.

"That's a good question. I wish I had the answer. But I'm just a dumbfuck. I'm just trying to keep it together."

"Did you know Wendell?"

"I knew Wendell."

"What happened to him?"

"He couldn't find the language," said Dietz. "Hungry?"

He pointed to his picture of food.

Bobby Trubate was back in his cot, hooked to a drip, wrapped in loose gauze. His face was bruised and runny, his mustache singed down to a ridge of hairy blisters. He looked like some formerly majestic bird pulled from a crash site fuselage.

"Jesus, Bobby," I said. "What'd he do to you?"

"Saved me," said Trubate.

Estelle lounged in the corner with a magazine from the Johnson administration. There were stacks of these around, good for pop scholarship, kindling. I don't know who collected them, but paeans to the sexual revolution and tawny sideburns abounded. I tended to pore over the ads myself, stereos like space bays, secret sodomy in the Rob Roy ice.

"Funny to read this crap, now," she said. "It's like inscriptions in your yearbook. Remember me when you're a movie star. Send me a postcard from Paris."

"We need to get him to a hospital."

"He'll be fine. I've been looking after him."

"They took his stuff."

"There's a laundry run."

Trubate began to moan. His body sputtered under the sheets.

"Did you know," said Estelle, "that before this was the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, it was a POW camp?"

"A what?"

"Simulated. For executive types. They'd come up here for a huge fee and Heinrich would keep them in cages, torture them."

"Didn't read that part in the Tenets ."

"Editorial discretion."

It looked like Bobby wanted to speak. His lips split their scab caulk and sound dribbled out.

"Maa. .Faa. ."

"Ma?"

"What is it?" said Estelle.

"Maah. . Faah. ."

"Mother," I said. "Father."

"No," said Estelle. "Mothered by Fire. He's acknowledging his passage."

"Maah. ."

"What is it, Bobby?" I said.

Trubate strained up from the bed.

"My face," he said. "My fucking face."

Estelle was tired. I told her I'd watch Trubate for a while. He slept like a stone, or a stoned man. Maybe there was some morphine in his drip. His wounds, I saw now, were mostly superficial, show-biz gashes. Character-building for the character actor. Maybe he could ride the crest of the next disfigurement fad to stardom.

Me, I was going to ride the hell out of here. There was nothing for me here, nothing shit-free. Organized psychosis had its rewards, but I was pretty sure you needed a future to reap them. I was a dying man, futureless. A lone wolf. A lone wraith.

I dozed at Trubate's bedside, got up near dawn, walked back to Heinrich's window. He was asleep at his desk when I tapped on the pane. Heinrich didn't wake so much as boot up. You could almost sense the circuits firing, the cautious ascent to speed.

"I need to talk to you," I said.

"Your need is your demand," said Heinrich, waved me in.

We sat in wicker, sipped root tea. Books, bales of them-paperbacks, hardbacks, chapbooks, manuals, sheaves-spilled out the rough pine shelves. There were survival guides and bird guides and bound sets of American Transcendentalists, but also computer manuals and some simulation theory I recalled my pal William flogging himself to ecstatic bongstates with in college. Heinrich set his tea mug down on an upturned clementine crate. He followed my gaze to the encrusted Esperanto phrasebook beside it.

"Since the misfortune in Babel it has been a dream," he said. "I think it's folly, myself. Everyone should sing his own incomprehensible, inconsolable song. What I want to do here is help people find it."

"Is that why you ran a POW camp?" I said.

"That was a business proposition."

"Clearly not a very lucrative one."

"I did okay. Look, Steve, I'm a soldier. I've been all over the world hurting people. I don't apologize. Who am I to apologize? But this, all of this, it's a surprise to me. What I. . what we have done here. What we've made. You've heard me make my crazy speeches to them. My beast-tales. Maybe I have fuck's clue what I'm talking about, but at least I am talking. And maybe we're getting somewhere, too. The mothering hut. Who could have known the power of such a thing? It just came to me one day. I thought it was an interrogation facility. It was an interrogation facility. We used it for a sweat lodge in the off-season. Naperton said it first. Like giving birth to yourself in there."