The Subject Steve: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

idea:
    Call the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption and deliver back unto yourself your dying body and your dead soul.
    No malady, real or imagined, is too difficult to cure.
    Forget the scientific phonies and the quacks of holistic boutiques.
    Forget the false love of New Age shamans.
    Forget the false touch of healing retreats.
    Your health, your freedom, your salvation is a toll-free call away.
    Ask for Heinrich.
    All major credit cards accepted.
    Squeezed along the margin in fountain ink was this: "I Have the Cure.-H."
    I made of this inanity a nice coaster for my coffee mug.
    "They'll really be coming out of the woodwork now," I said.
    "What woodwork?" said Cudahy. "We're on an island of concrete."
    Walking back to the clinic for my next appointment a few weeks later, I saw what Cudahy had meant. I'd lived in this city long enough to forget the absurdity of the place, all these surfaces refracting us in shatters, this tonnage that bore down on us with hysterical weight.
    Someday sectors of this city would make the most astonishing ruins. No pyramid or sacrificial ziggurat would compare to these insurance towers, convention domes. Unnerved, of course, or stoned enough, you always could see it, tomorrow's ruins today, carcasses of steel teetered in a halt of death, half globes of granite buried like worlds under shards of street. Sometimes I pictured myself a futuristic sifter, some odd being bred for sexlessness, helmed in pulsing Lucite, stooping to examine an elevator panel, a perfectly preserved boutonniere.
    I'd be the finder of something.
    Now, walking along, I had only the sense of losing myself.
    Yes, I could perambulate unpestered, unthronged. My saga was stale. There were fresh griefs upon us. A beloved lip-sync diva had choked to death on a sea bass bone. The troops of our republic were poised on the border of a lawless fiefdom in Delaware. The Secretary of Agriculture had been exposed as a fervent collector of barnyard porn. Worse, he had a yen for the young ones, the piglets, the foals. Bestiality was one thing, opined the ethics community, but for God's sake, these were babies. There were wars and rumors of war and leaks of covert ops. There were earthquakes, famines, droughts, floods. A certain movie star had made box office magic once more.
    The
National Journal of Medicine
's scathing rebuke of the veracity of Goldfarb-Blackstone Syndrome, its excoriation of the ailment's namesakes as "freakshow impresarios," had barely made the back pages, the spot after the break.
    The air was out and I was glad of it. My fine fettle continued to obtain. Still, I somehow felt bound to these men, Goldfarb and Blackstone, the Philosopher and the Mechanic. They'd shocked me into keener living. I was brimming with bad poetry and never reading the financials. I can't say I knew what counted in life but I was beginning to glimpse what didn't. I had Fiona back, and Cudahy, too.
    I owed these doctors a courtesy visit.
    The Philosopher was sniffing something from a vial of handblown glass. Dark powder dusted his nose.
    "Want some?" he said. "It's a new synthetic."
    "Cunt's out of control," said the Mechanic. "Making his own yay-yo, to hell with the world."
    "Oh, piss off, Blackie," said the Philosopher. "Just a little pick-me-up."
    These were not the dashing scientists of the amphitheater. The Philosopher was unshaven and looked long unwashed. His lab coat was covered with cobalt smears. The Mechanic had developed a tic of the eye that might have seemed lewd had the psychic deterioration which motored it not been so plain.
    "Galileo," said the Philosopher through hinges of spit, "why have you forsaken me?"
    "Cunt's dreaming of Pisa," said the Mechanic. "Can't see the truth of the situation. We got busted. We ran a scam and we got busted. I told him the mammoth bit was too much. Stupid. We could have had our own disease. Now we have squat. You can't patent death, I told him. You can't copyright a fucking nonstate,