Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

"Those would be the idiots, right?"

"I was raised to believe that those were the idiots, yes," I said. "But who knows?"

"Not fucking Grandma," said Fiona.

"Nobody can be sure," I said. "Have you ever heard of Pascal's wager? He said you might as well believe in God because if you don't, and God exists, you're screwed."

"Is that in the Pensees ?"

"The what?" I said.

"He sounds like a chickenshit," said Fiona.

My father lost his mind with grief for the wife he'd already lost. Then he found another wife. I guess I wasn't as welcoming to Wilhelmina as I could have been. Maybe I begrudged him his new stab at happiness. I'd gotten used to the shell of the man and didn't necessarily wish the man back. It all came to some kind of head, though I can't quite remember what kind. I do recall my father's hand on my neck and a sliver of boiled leek on his lip. It's that father-son stuff. So much moist, fierce quivering muddies the picture sometimes.

My father moved to Pittsburgh with Winnie and now I got cards in the card seasons, snapshots of his duplex, his new felonious brood. Sometimes Fiona would visit him, file reports.

"He's deeply involved with a pen nib collector's club," she told me once. "The club has religious overtones but he won't reveal them. His sons-these would be my uncles, I gather-drop cinder blocks from highway overpasses. Winnie, as you know, is much younger, Amway pretty. She told me I was a winter girl in autumn colors."

"Dad," I said. "Oh, Dad."

"That's just what I always say," said Fiona.

"Feels good, right?"

I hadn't told my father I was dying. I was afraid he'd say what he always said by the seawall.

"My dad didn't have anything like a punching board," I said to Old Gold now. "He tried to make me tough in other ways."

"Funny, I don't remember inviting you to compare our childhoods. Anyway, there's nothing to compare. I've been mothered by fire."

"Why do you keep saying that?" I said.

"Bears repeated repetition."

I looked out the window, watched the world unspool. Guardrails, guardrail rivets, mile markers, thruway kill. We were in high country and I was glad of it, patches of spruce and plowed fields in the valley below us, dark hills ahead. Up here, all this majesty, maybe you could just convince your flesh to reconsider.

I took out the brochure for the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption. The man who'd answered the phone the day before had been rather brusque. I heard wet noises, the snap of form-fitting rubber.

"Director here," he said.

We made vapid talk about upstate counties. Mostly I just listened to his voice. He had a good one, easy, kind of reedy, like a talk show host people go out of their way to persuade you is smart. I started to trust it, that voice, trust him. I wanted to fill up the void with my trust.

"Look," I said. "I don't know who you are or what you do, but I won't beat around the bush. You say you have the cure. If it's rat guts under my armpits, I'm willing to give it a whirl. Crystals and chanting, praying, tonal healing, whatever it is, I'll do it. I've read your brochure, and I've got to say, in my best days I'd be laughing my ass off. But things are a little different now. Good old Western know-how seems to have shit the bed. Everyone says I'm a goner but no one can tell me why. So, now, I ask you, a total stranger, what should I do? Tell me. Please. Consider me your willing victim."

"I think you have the wrong number."

"Is this Heinrich?"

"This is the director."

"May I speak to Heinrich?"

"You are speaking to Heinrich. You are doing nothing else but speaking to Heinrich."

"You wrote me a note."

"Yes, I did. I saw you on the E.T.E."

"The what?"

"The electronic thought eliminator."

"The electronic-"

"The television."

"You wrote me a note. Someone brought it to my house."

"That would be Naperton."

"Okay, Naperton brought the note. All I know is that you said you had the cure. I've got it right here. 'I have the cure.-H.' I deduced that the H stood for Heinrich."

"Wonderful deduction," said Heinrich. "You really are a wonderful deducer."

"I'll let that slide," I said.

"Of course you will."

"How about we get real for a minute," I said.

"I'd advise against that."

"What's the cure, Doc?" I said.

"I'm sorry," said Heinrich. "But I'm not a doctor, and, as I may have stated earlier, you have the wrong number. You seem to be in search of a miracle. I don't traffic in miracles. And I don't associate with victims."

"Then what do you do, if I may be so bold as to ask?"

"Bold? Don't be ridiculous. All I'm sensing from you is a man who doesn't want to die. That's the deadliest condition of all."

"I've had my fill of philosophers," I said. "I guess you're right, I do have the wrong number. I thought you wanted to help."

We hung there for a while.

"Wait," said Heinrich, finally. "It's not your fault you're so faulty."

"Thanks for that."

"There'll be a supply van coming back to the Center from the city tomorrow. You can catch a ride."

"How much is this going to cost me?" I said.

"Cost you?" said Heinrich. "Why, everything."

"Maybe I should tell you now, I'm broke."

"I understand," said Heinrich. "It's not a problem. Money helps, but it's not a requirement. I'm talking about everything else."

"Sounds like you've got a cult up there."

"Everything's a cult, son. If it's not a cult it's a man sitting alone in a room."

"And in return I get cured?"

"Possibly. Or perhaps what you get is a brief moment of recognition before you pass into nothingness, which technically one cannot really pass into, it being a nonstate, but which I phrase this way for practical reasons."

"Given a choice, I'll take the cure," I said.

"Given a choice, he says," said Heinrich.

Now the sun was just another money shot behind the mountain tops. Old Gold bore down on the wheel.

"I hate twilight," he said.

"How long have you been at the Center?" I said.

"Three years. I'm in the 'Lives' part of the Tenets , even. 'Old Gold Speaks.' Wrote it myself, except for the spelling. Estelle did the spelling."

"Three years," I said. "Long time."

"Is it? I wouldn't know. I know that if I blink I'll miss infinity."

"That's deep," I said.

"Mothering fire'll melt the smartass right off of you," said Old Gold.

"Can't wait. So, do you know Heinrich well?"

"I know him."

"What's he like?"

"Clementines."

"Excuse me?"

"He likes clementines."

It must have been near midnight when we hooked hard onto a gravel road. It had begun to rain and Old Gold hit the high beams, hacked the liquid dark.

"Almost home."

We drove up to a metal gate. A man in a wet suit fiddled with some padlocks. Old Gold rolled the window down.

"Brother Bob," he said. "At it again, huh?"

The man held up his hand.

"Might as well cut the bitch off," he said.

We drove on through the compound, pulled over by a rain-rotted cabin.

"This is you," said Old Gold.

"You sure?"

"The Virgin Suite."

The cabin was dry, lit low with a Coleman lantern. An old stove stood in the middle of the room, kindling in a basket beside it. Part of the cabin seemed claimed, the bedsheets mussed, boots and socks stuffed under the cot. Candle wax puddled thick on a card table, and on a notebook open to a blank page. A piece of hemp rope dangled down from a rafter beam.

My end of things was fairly bare. A blanket, a bath towel, a cot, a moldy bedroll with a book wedged in the twine. There was a note in the book, scrawled on a swatch of grocer's paper. The only cure is the cure.-H. I balled up the note. Cutesy tautologies would herewith be tossed beneath the cot. Now I took up the book, a dark hardback with embossed lettering: The Principles and Tenets of Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption , by Heinrich of Newark.