The Subject Steve: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

play. Who doesn't? you ask. Some doesn't, I reply. Me, I'd been there before, the brink, the brink of the blank. I'd come close with Maryse, closer by my lonesome. I'd practiced noose knots, stocked up on pills and gin. Maybe I wasn't the most likely candidate, but I definitely rated dark horse in the auto-snuff sweepstakes. I'd lived enough days when the days didn't end fast enough, days so chock full of me.
    But now all I could think was: Let me live! Banish me, shun me, shoo me away, argue me off, but let me fucking live!
    Already I was nostalgic for my sorrows. I wanted to savor heartsmash again, desertion, distraction, desolate nights, all the aches and bruises, love's bunions, the mind's bum knee. My mouth watered for bitter fruit. My belly panged for crow. There were no disaffected daughters in the patent-pending nonstate, no wife-pilfering Williams, no medallions of pampered meat. There were no tax forms to fudge, no binges to regret, no sweet depletions of the soul. There was nothing save a nothingness shot through with utter nothingness.
    I wanted to keep myself in the realm of somethings, even all the awful somethings.
    I wanted the cure.
    I got curatives. I got pills, chemical injections, cautious portions of radiation served up by aproned technicians, junior chefs in the kitchens of deep frequencies. I got everything everyone got for dying of everything else, of known killers, named decimations.
    I was still insured and they had all sorts of notions at their disposal, long shots, Hail Marys to spare.
    "Nothing to lose," was their mantra. "Everything to be gained."
    Loss gained. Loss never paused. Nothing took. The pills, the shots, rays, they made me sick. The symptoms! The symptoms had arrived! I thinned, I curdled, I shed.
    Cudahy nursed me, nurses doctored me, and all seemed for naught. I was some sort of deliquescing human unit shuttled between home sofa and hospital cot. I sipped nutritional shakes from tin containers, dribbled them out on bathroom tiles, Cudahy's shoes. It was Cudahy who stood by me, truly, in toilet stalls, in taxi lines, in vestibules of vague stink. Maybe we were bound together by the beet fields of our boyhood, or the sweaty secrets of our fathers. I didn't think too hard about it. I was too weak, too grateful. I'd sent Fiona home. I required a secret fiefdom of shamelessness now.
    The Further Opinions admitted to varying degrees of bewilderment. A surgeon named Lovinger wanted to cut. She just appeared one day, a voluptuous phantom there in x-ray where I loitered in my paper smock.
    "I want to gut you," she said, "get a look-see. I've got a hunch. I'm a good huncher. This conversation is just between us. I can cut like nobody's business. Can I cut you?"
    "I don't know," I said.
    "I'm your last best hope."
    Lovinger laid her hands on my shoulders. Supple, milky hands. A tiny Hebrew letter on a chain swung above the slope of her breast. She said it stood for life. It looked like a little ski-lift chair. I pictured us in it, an Alpine idyll with my surgeon-lover, Lovinger.
    "Okay," I said. "Let's cut."
    I was borne off in a whirl of orderlies to the new meat ward. My suitemate was an old man, a warren of tubes, puffs of rotted hair. The skin on his face looked blasted underneath, blood bombs gone off in secret detonations. The Los Alamos of all of us. Other men, younger men, slightly less ravaged versions of him, sat grave and dainty on the edges of his bed.
    "You're just here for the money," the man said. "Save your breath. It's all going to the Elks. And the black kids. I promised scholarships."
    "Dad, we really should discuss this."
    The old man turned to me. I saw arid eons in his eyes.
    "Fathers and sons," I said.
    "The daughters killed me, too. And the daughters-in-law. All of them. Everybody. Except the Elks. I extend my gratitude to the Elks. They made a place for me. Saturday nights, some cards, some laughs. I'm a businessman, but I never forgot where I came from. I used to go