Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

"Just my detonator," said Dietz.

The kid laughed, waved us through.

"Realm it up!" he called.

"I use Phaethon for most of my travel. They're fans."

We boarded, found our seats. We'd been assigned to something called urbane class. There was little in the way of leg room and no magazines, just old foreign affairs journals, some soft sculpture catalogues. The pipe racks fitted in the seatbacks were filled with posies and incense sticks. Stuffed in the pocket webbing, alongside some sick bags, were blank diaries with embossed covers that read: Reflections Aloft . The inflight movie, according to a typed index card, would be a series of experimental shorts produced at McGill University in the seventies.

"What I love about this airline," said Dietz, "is that they know their niche and they work it."

The pilot's voice came over the speaker to announce we'd be taking off shortly.

"I'm feeling good about the whole takeoff thing right now," he added. "I mean, why not? Pilot error is all in the head."

A steward came by with hot towels and vodka shots.

Dietz lit up an enormous spliff.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the steward, "you can't smoke that in here."

Dietz winked a bloodshot eye, gave the guy a hit.

I looked around for signs of censure but nobody seemed to notice. There were about a dozen people on board. Some were in leather and all were asleep.

"Kiwis," said Dietz. "Crazy motherfuckers."

"What's their niche?" I said.

"Okay," said Dietz. "I lied to you. This isn't really an airline. But you'll thank me when you taste the lemon chicken."

I spotted a few more passengers under blankets in the back of the plane, tiptoed past them to the bathrooms. The lock plate in one of the doors said Need. The other said Want. I went for Want. The door whacked up on a pair of knees.

"Sorry," I said.

"Come in."

I slid through the door, leaned up on the sink.

"Dropping some friends off at the lake," said the Rad Balm girl.

"So, you wanted company?"

"I didn't know it was you, fuckstick."

"Right."

The exit was a bit trickier, requiring a sort of high hurdle kick to clear. I leaned on Need. Need was not occupado. I locked myself in, sat down. The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom.

"Steve, you're all flustered. Over."

"My name's not Steve," I said.

"It's so tiring, your denial. Over."

"Your voice is really crackling," I said. "Over."

We touched down a few hours later. I looked out the window as we made our approach, saw blasted earth and cracked desert roads looping into emptiness. I didn't see any airport. Dietz had nodded off next to me, spliff stub poking cold from his knuckles. Some of the leather men were playing hacky sack in the aisle, shouting in strange English. Something about a wingeing sod off his tits in Auckland, a bunch of silly cunts. The pilot announced that he'd lowered the landing gear, requested that we please refrain from dread. I shook Dietz awake.

"Where the fuck are we?"

"We're in the land of dreams. Sunny California. Hollywood, to be exact."

"This is the desert," I said.

"Mulholland Drive," said Dietz. "Sunset and Vine. Betty Grable. Fatty Arbuckle. Bad fatty. Hollywood Walk of Fame. A star for Steve. A star for Dietz. We'll marry Brazilian models. We'll battle addiction."

"This is the desert," I said. "This isn't even the desert where people go and say, Oh, I went to the desert, I lost eighty bucks on the slots but I found this skull. This is actually the fucking desert."

"Okay," said Dietz, "I lied to you. It's the desert."

We had to wait for the emergency chutes to inflate. Dietz said the deplaning platform was on the fritz. The New Zealanders were having chicken fights in the rear of the cabin. A great cheer went up as one man split his head on the luggage bin.

Layover fever, Dietz said.

We slid down to the desert floor, walked out across the waste. We walked for a while. The Rad Balm girl and some of her friends were with us, a few of the New Zealanders, too. There were some kids in skate pads who said they were from St. Louis. The going was slow. Every few feet there was a blindside tackle, a tussle in the sand. The man who'd injured himself on the luggage bin was beaten severely again. His mates laughed and called him a poof. The skate kids spit on his head. It appeared he'd been sacrificed by the Kiwis to the greater glory of international goodwill.

"Violence will be met with decisive violence," said Dietz, but nobody paid him any heed.

We passed the remnants of an encampment. Empty water bottles, tattered tents. Sun-browned business cards lay strewn with charred bones in a fire pit. There was a jar of glitter on a rock, a cell phone wedged in the crook of a cactus. Signs and pseudo-signs. Sense and sensimilla. Goofball shit.

"Thought they were the new Dionysians," said Dietz. "They're all dead now."

"They're not dead," I said. "They got downsized."

"You tell your story, I'll tell mine."

Just past the next rise we caught sight of a huge metal-skinned hangar. It could have been the hull of some alien ship, sunk belly up in ancient sea boil. More likely it was something the feds had pawned off in the last budget crisis, or forgotten about entirely, abandoned to the war nerds who sneaked inside to jot maps, jack soda machines.

The glare off the hangar was strong. Dietz handed me a pair of aviator glasses. As I put them on I heard the plane start to taxi behind us.

"Don't look back," he said. "You'll turn into All-Spice."

"Right," I said.

"There are a lot of little shits where we're going," said Dietz. "Don't let it get to you. Remember who you are. You're the Subject Steve."

"Right," I said.

We swung down a high ridge to the hangar. Dietz called to some men lounging near the enormous door. It took them a while to slide it back. There were shapes there in the darkness, lit hives receding into the vast cool of the room. Varnished deskpieces in workstation clusters spiraled out of a raised hub. Kids, dozens of kids in bughead earphones tapped away at consoles in low golden light. There was a kind of liquid quiet in the room, a strange drone joy. People tapped each other, whispered, giggled softly over the tidal click of keypads.

Most of the workstations included a shelving unit for extra drives, office swag. Exhibits in kiddie kitsch abounded. TV tie-in lunchbox collections, Matchbox cars, bandoleer'd action figures. They seemed to be the same order of artifact my peers had hoarded, though I had only the vaguest sense of these versions. They'd probably reigned the schoolyards about the time I was blowing dormroom snowcaps with William. Dietz led me past a set of plastic poodles hanging on a wire. The dogs lit up and yapped.

"I me ma," they said. "I ma me."

We cut through a row of cube dividers to the hub area. Bobby Trubate sat with his feet up in a white leather easy chair. He wore rope sandals, a mesh robe with platinum trim, the outfit of a man who goes to court to have his name changed to a prime number. Bits of the mesh were dark with sweat. He flipped his ring binder shut.

"Steve-o. Get up here, buddy!"

He hoisted me up to his dais, bent me in a tender headlock.

"Nice place," I said, ducked loose from his robe folds.

"Should of seen this dump before I leased it. Brought in the best industrial decorator around. My investors went nuts, but fuck them. They invested in a visionary so they should expect vision. Dietz, you old fuck, hold the fort."

I followed Trubate through a side door into a wide wood-beamed room. It was skylit, full of lush rustic comforts, animal skins, teak. A bank of monitors was mounted in the wall. Some screens showed Realms locations, the soil room, the hospital bed. Others scrolled pages from the Realms website, or surveilled the workers in the hangar. A few pulled in random programming, soccer games from South America, Polish soaps. The thatch hut logo blinked from every corner.