Sam Lipsyte: The Subject Steve

"How do you?" I said.

Both men nodded, made noises in their mouths, scribbled on the notepads in their laps.

"What?" I said. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know what he's doing," said the Philosopher. "I'm just jotting down some top-secret notes."

They were both bastards, but at certain moments I got the feeling the Philosopher was also a prick.

"Did you run those tests yet?" I said.

"Which tests would those be?" said the Mechanic.

"The ones you said you were going to run to get a better idea of how much time I had left."

" Have left," said the Mechanic. "You're not dead yet."

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Fascinating," said the Philosopher.

"We conducted the tests," said the Mechanic. "Frankly, they left us more baffled than before. Honestly, I can't tell you anything more than we've already told you. You're dying. You're dying quite quickly. The rest is a mystery better explored in our upcoming book."

"Your book," I said. "I don't give a rat's ass about your book. What about the cure?"

"Cure for what?" said the Mechanic.

"You know damn well it doesn't have a name," I said. "You're the ones who didn't name it."

"You see our problem," said the Philosopher. "Who's going to grant us the time, the money, the facilities to research a cure for a nameless ailment from which one person presently suffers? What are we going to do, mount gala events to raise funds for the Fight to Save Steve from Whatchamacallit? By the way, how's the hooch? The speed gives it a nice bite, right?"

"My name's not Steve."

"No, but my point stands."

"We need more clients," said the Mechanic. "Or patients, if you prefer. Until then, I don't know what to tell you. We'll do what we can."

"What's in our powers."

"Our purview."

"Our ken."

My daughter disaffected, my ex-wife whisked, me dying quite quickly of radically accelerated Whatchamacallit, I decided, here in the grips of aimless urgency, to sin.

By sin, I mean fun, harmless.

I got a deal on some pharmaceutical-grade cocaine from the Philosopher. The Mechanic gave me a phone number, instructed me to ask for either Greta or Clarice.

I got Greta.

Greta brought Clarice.

Both of them were tall and bony with bone-colored and ash-colored hair.

Both of them were professionally, abnormally delicious.

"Kiss the dead man!" I said, throwing off my robe. "Fondle his fettle!"

We passed some days this way, prancing, sucking, snorting, heaving, shrieking. We ordered in dinner, Indian, Chinese. Greta, an aspiring dramaturge, directed us in choice bits of Aristophanes. Clarice hand-tinted my knees for a ritual dance of our own device. We built cities with popsicle sticks, baked peanut brittle, fudge. We invented a game whereby each woman pissed down my throat and I, blindfolded, guessed by odor alone whose water it was.

Easy, what with Greta's penchant for wheatgrass juice.

When the sun rose on the last day Clarice shook me awake.

"Time to settle up," she said.

I figured it was money well spent. What's seventy-three thousand dollars to a guy with Whatchamacallit?

I sat there the rest of the morning wondering how to tell Fiona she was now officially a hardship case.

Then someone was knocking the knocker on my door.

"You'll feel better once they come up with a name for it," said Cudahy.

He stood in my kitchen and stirred his tea, an enormous man in a neon-flecked track suit.

He'd once captained the national shot-put team.

"I don't give a damn about the name," I said. "I just want to live."

"I want you to live, too, buddy," said Cudahy. "Believe me."

"I do believe you," I said.

Cudahy was my best and oldest friend. Best and boon. Maybe we'd drifted apart at times, I into the smoked-glass murk of corporate life, Cudahy into his far-flung entrepreneurial endeavors, which included a stint in foreign bride importation, but we'd never let the thread of our friendship snap. There was too much truth and not enough language between us for that.

We'd run the beet fields and subdivision lots of our boyhood together, slept under the yard stars, stolen off with the family whiskey into the wooded night. We'd scorched town birches with our homemade flamethrowers, burned out all the gypsy moth cocoons. Moth-O-Caust, we'd called it. We'd stood behind the toolshed and listened, amid the clatter of rake tines and paint tins, to our fathers make shuddering men of each other.

This last we'd never discussed.

"You know," said Cudahy now, "you should have called me after Maryse left. I could have gotten you a new missus for less than ten grand. Tits, an adorable accent. Grateful to be free of the emerging-market yoke."

"What's done is done," I said.

"That's the attitude," said Cudahy. "That's the attitude of a man who wants to live!"

"Don't saw the pine for me yet," I said.

"That's it, baby!" said Cudahy. "No pine, no crepe, no wreaths!"

He spun a hard orbit on the linoleum. Tea ribboned out of his cup. The cup shattered on the wall.

"Shit," said Cudahy.

"Nice put," I said.

Cudahy took the spare room, kicked in expenses from the fat roll in his track suit pocket. We cooked lavish meals from newspaper recipes-veal marsala, rack of lamb-played blackjack past midnight, watched old westerns on the VCR.

Every time there was shoot-out Cudahy would recount his own days of gunplay, usually some kind of pimp jump in the lime-colored corridors of a formerly Socialist apartment block.

"They got my driver Vlad in the head, point-blank," he said one night. "I figured I was a goner until I stumbled across a ventilation duct. Hard to believe I fit, but I did. And so here I am. And here you are. Death's luck goes south, too, you know. Hit me."

"I think the reaper's due for a run."

"Don't talk that way," said Cudahy. "This living and dying shit, it's all a matter of attitude. It's like you're at the Worlds with a couple of fouls and you need one clean put to qualify. The Swedish judge is gunning for you and you're thinking, 'I will stay in the circle, there is nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia.' "

"What are you talking about?"

"Say it: There's nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia."

"There's nothing for me outside the circle. Fuck Scandinavia."

"Exactly," said Cudahy. "Worked for me. I silvered. Then I got out of the shot-put racket for good. I mean, chucking a steel ball over and over again. For what? The travel, sure, but all in all it was a waste of time. And you know what else? When you're a great shot-putter, they hate you for it. They really do. Not true of, say, the discus. The discus-throwers have a feeling of community. They have that statue. Hit me. Fuck, busted."

When I phoned the clinic to confirm my next appointment, the Mechanic took the call himself.

"We've got some exciting news," he said. "A breakthrough. I can't tell you over the phone, though."

Cudahy popped a bottle of raisin schnapps.

"To beginnings, breakthroughs, fresh starts," he said. "May the upshot of all this be nothing more than a beautiful new-found invigoration that informs your long years ahead."

"That's nice," I said.

"It's an old peasant saying," said Cudahy. "The literal translation is 'Better you fuck yourself than they fuck you.' Good luck tomorrow. I'll be waiting with some coq au vin."

The next day the nurse led me past the Special Cases Lounge and through a slim metallic door. We stepped into a bright amphitheater, a room like a grooved well. The Philosopher and the Mechanic stood down at the bottom of it behind a semi-translucent scrim. Dozens of others filled the raked seats. Some craned back to catch my eye, nod, enact hopeful semaphore with their thumbs. The Philosopher stepped out from behind the scrim. A lectern rose into his hands from some hushed hydraulics in the floor.