Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

"Can I get you something?" said Trubate. "Vodka frappe? A frosty rail?"

"Is that the road to redemption?"

"Things have changed a bit."

"They seemed to have changed a lot for Heinrich," I said. "Unless it's your makeup team that's made him look like death."

"No," he said, "that's death."

Trubate squinnied his eyes. There was something scooped-out about him, I saw now, sick. A thin vein in his temple was thumping hard. I wondered what dregs of goodies it was bearing from his brain.

"I don't know," he said softly. "It's so fucked. I almost feel like it's my fault. He wasn't strong enough for the relocation. The tumors moved fast."

"So did you."

"The hut did some shit to me," he said. "Maybe not what Heinrich had in mind. The branks. The breast ripper. I saw it all so plain after that. I'd been such a child. They say actors are children."

"So you wanted to direct."

"Don't be snide. Snidery is the last refuge of dickwads. The Center was no longer viable. It was time to take things to the next level. I couldn't run away from my talent. I am Hollywood, after all. I am more than Hollywood."

"Old Gold, too?"

"Hey, everyone was welcome. Heinrich was sick . The bills were piling up. The marshals were coming. I made some phone calls. Saved the fucking day. We have a new home for you, Steve. But you've got to earn your keep."

Trubate batted something out of my hair.

"Ladybug," he said.

"Let's see it."

"Maybe not a ladybug," said Trubate, pinched something in his fingers to a smear. "I've got to scram. Goddamn investor teleconference. They don't like the figures. Fuck the figures. They want their money. Fuck them. Do I look like I have the money? If I'd spent it on speedballs and pussy they'd understand. That they can get their heads around. But a glimpse of the truth? No fucking way."

Trubate cut loose with a cackle.

"I'm working on the cackle," he said.

I milled around the room, inspected the mail-order baubles. There appeared to be some sort of nautical motif in effect, solid gold sextants, diving bells that doubled as ice buckets, stereo speakers mounted in the galleon wood. A lot of it looked culled from those old magazines at the Center, Estelle Burke's yearbooks. Don't forget the postcard from Paris. Remember me when you're a crazed futurist.

A stack of coasters on the coffee table bore the hut logo in safety orange. The Realms Is Real, they proclaimed. I found a leather binder with some hole-punched pages. It was a business plan, a pretty primitive-looking one at that, some smudged graphs, a brief budget breakdown whose figures didn't add up. One section was entitled the Trubate Brand, another the Heinrich Time-Sensitivity Factor. A list of future projects included the Daddy Chair, the Gimp Snatch Miracle Hour, and the Subject Steve. A parenthetical following this last noted that the executive producer credit had been "preguaranteed" to one Leon Goldfarb.

Now one of the monitors in the wall fired off a series of high squawks. Heinrich leaned into frame, his face puckered, papery. He lay supine on his counterpane in bikini briefs, his nipples blacked with cork. The bed was heaped with toys, baby dolls, wind-up robots, Scrabble chips.

"Hey, kids," he said. "Welcome to Heinrich's Story Bed. Looks like I'm going to tell you kids another story. Looks like all I'm good for these days is telling stories, at least according to your buddy Bobby. Bobby can't wait for me to die. Neither can I, tell you the truth. Cancer's eaten clear through me. It'll get you, too, don't worry. Meanwhile, prepare for some allegorical instruction. Do you know what that means? It means shut the fuck up and listen, because here we go. Once upon a time there was a big game hunter. This was in the time when there were big game hunters with big fucking guns and everyone understood it was a natural thing, a man versus beast thing. That's a modality that people conveniently forget these days, but it's still out there, every day, man versus beast, whether you like or not. Now this big game hunter, who happened to be from Cleveland, which is not important, but I want to make it clear he was from a highly esteemed smelting dynasty in Cleveland. ."

There was someone else in the room. I turned and there she stood, hair up, pale arms tucked in rubber crutch locks.

"Renee."

"Look at him," she said.

"You're standing," I said. "You're walking."

"Look at the man," she said. "Saddest thing I've ever seen in my life."

"They said you'd never walk again."

"They never actually said that."

"You're walking," I said.

"Injections," she said. "Incisions. Experimental stuff. Animal cells. I have some antelope in me. Some silverback."

"Gorilla?"

"Very avant-garde. It's not the animals, though. It's the chip."

"The chip?"

"A chip in my gut. Electrodes in my legs. Bobby paid for it. Look at my crutch handles. See the buttons? I'm remote-controlling myself."

Renee twitched towards me, her crutches buzzing. Heinrich's voice careened around the room.

". . and the hunter felt the tusk slide through him, and I'll put it bluntly, kids, the cold, sharp tusk slid through him from behind, through his anus and curving upward, just tore right through his guts and punched out his chest. Skewered, he was. Completely, irrevocably skewered. Yet even then, wriggling with the last of his life on that great bloody ivory shaft, even as the elephant lifted his head and the hunter felt the hot rank breath of the beast blanket him and its horrendous trumpet blast shatter his ears, the hunter could not understand it, and with what was left of his strength he said to the elephant, 'Why? Tell me why? You called me brother.' And the elephant blinked once and nodded, and with his trunk pushed the gored hunter to a mangled heap on the jungle floor. 'I know I called you brother,' said the elephant, shrugging his great white shoulders. 'My mistake. I must have had you mixed up with somebody else.' "

Pink pinwheels spun in Heinrich's eyes.

"Needless to say, children," he said, "Cleveland is not the manufacturing center it once was."

There were more squawks and the screen went white.

"Christ," I said.

"This is content," said Renee.

"I heard on the radio. Your big multimedia deal."

"PR bullshit. This kind of idea has been dead for a long time. We were out in the forest, what did we know? We're fucked. We're the fuckers and we're fucked."

"I've met fans."

"Like I said," said Renee.

"Renee."

"What."

"You're walking."

"This isn't really what I had in mind."

She hit the button on her crutch, just stood there, buzzing. Then she jerked away.

Everyone had gathered around Trubate's hub, a sea of wet haircuts and ghosted skin. The Rad Balm girl sat in back with a boy who'd come off the plane with us. He had lime-colored muttonchops, a denim jacket in his lap. Apparently he was getting some sort of handjob.

"Yo," I said.

"You," said the Rad Balm girl, slid her hand away.

"Get your jollies, geezer?" said the boy.

"Nice sideburns," I said. "They remind me of my father's. He was a fire captain."

"That's the most engrossing story I've ever heard."

"Better watch it," said the Rad Balm girl. "Warren's a writer, you know. That sounds so stupid. Of course you know that."

"I do now," I said.

"He's like the most famous writer in the world. The spokesman of our generation. I mean that in quotes. Spokesman in quotes. Generation, that's just generation. Whatever that means."

"Hey," said Warren. "I just do what I do. If people like it, that's cool."

"How's the fish?" I said to the Rad Balm girl.

"Fish?"

"Musician talk."

"Yeah, okay."

"Don't you remember?"

"What, do you have a photographic brain thing?"