by Sam Lipsyte
Home, I called Jenkins, my agent.
“Nate stole my style,” I told him. “My wife.”
“Your agent, too,” said Jenkins.
“I feel the forlorn hum coming on,” I said. “It’s going to be the best book yet. I’ve really suffered this time.”
“It’s over.”
“What do you mean it’s over?”
“It’s Nate’s time.”
* * *
The bookstore was packed with Nate’s people. They’d been my people once. I knew their faces, their fears. The tortoise woman was there in something skimpy, predatory. She was maybe pretending one of us was invisible.
Nate vaulted to the lectern in parachute pants, a fluorescent dickey. The crowd cheered as he picked a scab near his nipple, flicked it.
“‘I was a homeless gay punk,’” Nate began. “‘I was a self-hating sick fuck, too. I beat up gay people. I set homeless people on fire. Maybe it was because of my uncle, Pete. We lived in Levittown, and when I was nine…’” Nate read on. I noticed Diana leaning against the remainder table, her eyes rolled up under her Greek fisherman’s cap, her hand frig-deep in her jeans. Behind her were stacks of my last book, going for a dollar a pop.
“‘Every time I looked up into the dirty night sky,’” Nate read now, “‘I thought of each star as one more glittering taunt I had to endure—’”
“This guy’s got nothing!” I shouted. “This isn’t suffering!”
Benches scraped the hardwood. Nate’s people whispered, strained to look.
“He was a homeless gay punk!” somebody called.
“He set homeless people on fire!” I said.
“It’s more complicated than that,” said another. “He was a self-confessed self-hating sick fuck!”
“But gay!” somebody shouted.
“The two are not related!”
“In a sense they are, but only in a metaphorical sense!”
“He’s not metaphorically gay,” said a woman in the back.
“Leave Nate be,” called the tortoise woman.
“He’s poking my wife,” I said. “And I have no idea why he qualifies as punk.”
“I don’t poke her,” said Nate.
“He doesn’t,” said Diana. “I only need to hear his voice to come.”
“Don’t you get it?” I said. “There are babies turning tricks on velveteen!”
“Those babies are homeless punks, too!” somebody shouted. “Nate speaks for all of us!”
“Damn straight!”
“Nate’s got arc!”
Now I felt them, the great arms bunching me up, the wisps of soft hair grazing my cheek. Next thing, I’m out on the sidewalk, staring up at that face, the one I’d never shaken from my dreams. He flashed an enormous steak knife.
“Why?” I said.
“Nate’s pain is now,” said the man in coveralls.
“But I have more I need to say.”
“That couldn’t possibly be true.”
“Who are you to decide?”
“I’m the guy.”
“What guy?”
“That guy. The guy out there. The guy with the pulse. When you put your finger on the pulse, it’s my pulse. It’s my heart. I’m the guy with the heart.”
“What are those stains?” I said, pointed at his coveralls.
“That’s the blood of my heart. And other hearts. Various hearts. Also, I had some berries for lunch.”
“You should tell your story. Write a memoir. If you let me live, I’d be happy to help.”
“I respect the genre too much,” said the man, and took some practice swipes with his knife.
the REAL-ASS JUMBO
This world would end. The brink beckoned. A bright guy might as well pick a date. Gunderson had. A revolution in consciousness, the peaceful dismantling of mankind’s cruel machinery was, according to Gunderson’s interpretation of an interpretation of a pre-Columbian codex, a half decade away. But that was merely one unfolding. Alternate finales included fire, flooding, pox, nukes. Homo sapiens had a few years to choose. Was that time enough? For Gunderson it was time enough for another book, some lecture tours, a cable deal. Time enough to sample all the yearning young hippie tang in questing creation.
Maybe too much time. A guy could unravel.
Gunderson hadn’t picked the date out of his favorite Alpacan hat. His zero hour was the culmination of a Mixtec prophecy. These bejeweled dudes had played their proto-basketball to the death, strolled the zocalo in the skins of foes. Probably they’d known something. Gunderson didn’t know much about them, really, but who cared? That their glyphs foretold an imminent global shift was sufficient for Ramón, the shaman mentor Gunderson had been visiting these last several winters. That’s all the convincing Gunderson needed. They’d suffered some false ends already, but you could always cite a misreading, push back the date.
Besides, nobody claimed the earth would crack open, just that something huge was on tap, and if we didn’t evolve our asses quick, it would be bad huge. A reasonable message, if vague. Surprising how many preferred not to hear it. These were maybe the same folk who figured crop circles for teen pranks, the fools who called him fool. Look around, he said, to gatherings in the many hundreds, to patchouli kids and home chemists and mind hikers, to, in short, all the non-fools, the excellent few willing to be deranged by their knowing.
“Look around,” he’d say, perched in loose lotus in a patron’s sunken living room, and his followers would, as though exemplars of encroaching gnarlitude did ghoulish waltzes in the very room. “Look at the world, what’s going on in the world. Oppression, repression, depression, the Middle This, the Western That, everything melting, burning, sick. It’s no coincidence. It’s prophecy, and prophecy is no joke, no matter what some cool shill for the corporations might tell you. Trust me, I used to be one of those shills. Until I got my head handed to me on a plate. Or, to be honest, in a bowl. A bowl full of the foulest soup you ever tasted. Vision gumbo. Best gift I ever got. Just a few years, people. We’ve got just a few years to find the better path. Or we are guaranteed one of the utmost, outmost shittiness.”
Once, one of the girls who invariably stalked him home from these gigs, a Gospel of Thomas fan named Nellie, now his current sintern, while getting positively gnostic on his fun parts with ballerina slippers she’d happened to have in her bag, asked Gunderson if he ever looked out on the crowd, thought, “Suckers.”
“Never,” said Gunderson.
“Never?” Nellie asked, her silk insteps rubbing him toward some murked glimpse of the Demiurge.
“You don’t get it,” said Gunderson, apant. “This is no con.”
It wasn’t. It was real, and he had to share it with the world. He had to hit eyeballs. A heads-up for species-wide calamity deserved eyeballs. So, yes, he was a little on edge, on brink. He stood at the counter of Gray’s Papaya waiting for a call from his manager, who was waiting for a call from his agent, who was waiting for a call from the TV people. He’d pitched them like some puma-headed god of pitching a few days before, laid waste to that conference room, but now there were concerns. They wanted to be certain Gunderson truly believed in his vision, that it wasn’t a gag. Otherwise the Untitled Gunderson Prophecy Project might make for lousy television. But how could a rad Siddhartha who roved the earth quaffing potions in its most sacred places and boning its most radiant creatures, not to mention rallying humanity for one last stand against its own worst urges, make for lousy television?
Bastards had insulted him, and Gunderson could feel that hunched, bile-sopped troll he’d been, that devolved little prick he’d purged with iboga root and Jung, burble up. The old Gunderson, he knew, would never really go away. He’d just have to be endured, like some incorrigible junkie brother everybody in the family hopes will finally get clean, or just die already.
Even now the old Gunderson hovered close, craved, for instance, those glistening turd tubes on the Gray’s grill rollers. Meanwhile the street stin
ker at the counter beside him—grease-stiff duster, foam-and-twine sandals—wolfed down a jumbo, gave Gunderson one of those poignantly exasperated looks certain nutjobs mastered, the one that asked, “Will the hologram ever cease transmission?” Bun crumbs tumbled from the man’s mouth. Orphaned schizo cast out by the corporate state? Avatar of an ancient sage? Both? You never knew, but plenty of avatars burned out anyway.
Some got as lost as the old Gunderson.
Now the new, improved Gunderson sipped his papaya smoothie. Fairly toxic, this stuff, too, but he gave himself a pass. During a recent DMT excursion in his ex-wife’s duplex, while Nellie wept and shivered in the linen closet, the machine elves, or this one other-dimensional ambassador in particular, a squat, faintly buzzing fellow with scalloped metallic skin and emerald eyes, a gnome in gold lamé who’d become something of a guardian to Gunderson, ordered him to ease up.
“Relax,” Baltran had said, slithering up from his usual sofa cushion crevasse. “You’re doing great. You’re on the verge of serious revelations. Highest clearance imaginable.”
“Really? That’s amazing. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s all your hard work. But really, relax. You’re wound too tight. Get a massage or something. Rolfing’s fun. Stay loose for the coming astonishments. Don’t be a fuckrod.”
He would not be a fuckrod. He would stay loose, stay on his toes, whatever Baltran and his glimmering ilk required. They looked like cartoons, sure, lacked sustained corporeality, and even had slightly squeaky voices, but they had chosen him. The message was too important to be left to anybody else, no matter how much he lectured at symposia about dialogue and communal deliverance. Also, no fuckrods could lurk in his vicinity. Maybe he should shitcan his manager. No sooner had he thought the phrase “shitcan my manager” than Jack’s name blinked in his hand. Coincidence was a concept for sheep.
“What have you got?” said Gunderson, stepped out to the sidewalk.
“Everything’s still in play,” said Jack.
Gunderson’s eyes strayed to the Gray’s sign on the building’s facade: WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY, OR BROKE, OR JUST IN A HURRY. NO GIMMICKS. NO BULL.
There was always a gimmick. The gimmick here was you ate factory-sealed pig chins and the hologram never ceased transmission.
“Everything’s still in play? That’s a good one for your tombstone.”
“Thanks. I’ll leave it to you to make arrangements with the engraver. Meantime, the series division is still meeting, but my guy there, my mole—don’t you love it—says there will be an offer by the end of the day. They no longer have the aforementioned concerns. They believe you believe.”
“Good.”
“More than good.”
“Do you believe I believe, Jack?”
“I believe in solid, serious offers.”
“Fair enough. Because I don’t care about the money.”
“I know, I know. How about you take my cut and I take yours?”
“I would, my friend. The money’s not for me. It’s for Carlos.”
“How is the boy?”
“He’s beautiful. A beautiful child.”
“Seen him lately?”
“Victoria nagging you again? I’m sorry about that. But you can’t listen to all her crap. I see him plenty.”
Now the reeker staggered out of Gray’s Papaya, waved his ragged arms.
“Hold on.” Gunderson dug in his coat for some loose bills. “Hey, buddy…”
“Keep your papes!” screamed the man. Particulate of frankfurter and a fine gin mist sprayed from his mouth. “I want your goddamn soul! Mean to munch it!”
“Pardon?” said Gunderson.
“Your soul wiener! That’s the real-ass jumbo!”
Doubtless on the astral plane, or even just an outer ring of Saturn, this man was delivering galaxy-beating sermons to sentient manifestations of light, but in this dimension, Seventy-Second and Broadway to be exact, Gunderson had to fucking go.
* * *
Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy. Victoria’s divorce lawyer probably hadn’t thought so when he brought Gunderson to ruin, or rather, to Queens. His studio in Sunnyside was suitable for the composition of prison manifestos, but Gunderson was long past garret-pacing histrionics. He’d already written his book. He’d been on the talk shows, the campus panels. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rock star kept inviting him up for a helicopter ride.
The Queens studio worked for hippie tang sessions, but it was not the apartment of a generational touchstone. Yet here he festered within the chipped stucco walls, beneath the hideous chandelier. He was lying on the futon after smoking some of the alpha weed, a gift, or tribute, from one of Nellie’s rich friends, when he felt an odd prodding in his spine. He stood, peeled back the mattress.
“Baltran.”
The machine elf’s head poked through the cheap slats of the frame. Most of him seemed morphed with the hardwood floor.
“What the fuck, Gunderson? It smells like sad, lonely man in here.”
Baltran’s buzzing was fainter than usual. His scallops bore an odd magenta tint.
“I need to catch up on laundry.”
“How about ass wiping?”
Things had, in fact, grown a wee degraded. That’s why he still spent as much time as he could at Victoria’s. Psychologists, probably, would offer negative explanations for Victoria’s failure to change the locks, but Gunderson preferred to see it as evidence of her personal evolution. Guilt for the skill of her lawyer, too.
“Look, buddy,” said Baltran, “we have to talk.”
“The TV thing? I’m close. I think it has a real chance to be a wake-up call for—”
“It’s about the prophecy.”
“What about it?”
“The math needs a little tweaking.”
“Same old same old.”
“But now it’s different.”
“Meaning what? It’s not a few years?”
“Not quite.”
“What do you mean not quite?”
Baltran fell buzzless for a moment. This happened sometimes. Though his image remained, it was as though the essence of the elf were no longer present. He was perhaps being called away for an important matter. He’d be back. Baltran always came back. But Gunderson wanted him back right now.
“What do you mean not quite?” Gunderson said again, lunged. His hand sliced through the hovering projection of his friend.
“Fucking watch it, pal,” the elf said, back again. “You know I can feel that. It hurts.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t mean to make you nervous. You’ve still got a few months.”
“A few months?”
“That’s time enough. Why don’t you patch things up with Ramón?”
“I’ve got no problem with Ramón.”
“Besides the fact that you don’t talk to him.”
“He doesn’t talk to me.”
“It’s your business, I guess. But you’ve got to get out there and effect some goddamn evolution. Do me proud.”
“How do I do that?”
But Baltran was gone again. He’d left Gunderson to worry all alone. How was Gunderson going to complete his mission with these new time constraints? He’d have to throw some money at the problem. You couldn’t fix every problem by throwing money at it, but you couldn’t fix anything without also throwing money at it. But where would he find the papes?
Sure, money came to you as long as you didn’t covet it, but there was still the distinct possibility that the old Gunderson, that greedy moron, coveted on the down low, screwing them both. Maybe it was this vestigial Gunderson who’d cut off Ramón when the shaman started asking questions about the television deal. Probably just wanted a new roof for his hut. Well, unless Gunderson got the message out, Ramón wouldn’t need a roof. Nobody would. There just wasn’t time to waste working out the licensing on a prophecy.
Victoria was in Lisbon for a fado festival and Carlos was wit
h his grandparents in Maine, so Gunderson had full run of the loft he’d traded in for penile liberation. Part of the excitement, the charge, of pending apocalypse, he understood, was knowing Victoria wouldn’t get to enjoy this square footage much longer.
Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy for other reasons. The treatise one of his acolytes at Oxford had just e-mailed him was dense going, especially in Victoria’s desktop’s antiquated text format. Here were Isaac Luria and Madame Blavatsky, there a text block of dingbats. Gunderson had barely skimmed his philosophy books in college. “I get the idea,” he would announce to his dorm suite after twenty minutes of deep study. “Pour me a drink.”
“Psychonaut” was a silly word (Baltran said only chumps uttered it), and Gunderson had detested most of the heavy trippers in college. He’d taken hallucinogens just a few times, passed those occasions frying flapjacks, staring at their scorched, porous skins. The only acid eater he could ever abide was Red Ned, a scrawny old Vietnam vet who appeared at most major burner parties and who, in return for some My Lai-ish confession and recitations from The Marx-Engels Reader, got free shrooms and beer.
Once, at a barbecue, Ned cornered Gunderson near the keg, stuck a bottle under the younger man’s nose, some filthy hooch he’d likely distilled in one of the bus station toilets.
“It’s absinthe,” said Ned. “The mighty wormwood. You will eat the devil’s pussy and suddenly know French.”
“Maybe later,” said Gunderson.
“Later.” Ned laughed. “Shit, kid, later? Later my platoon will be here. We’ll slit you at the collarbone, pour fire ants in. Then you’ll talk.”
“I’m happy to talk now, Ned.”
“You don’t have anything to tell me yet. You haven’t acquired the blind and pitiless truth. But I have a feeling about you. What do you think?”
“I just want to get laid.”
“I’m good to go,” said Ned, and gave Gunderson what might have been, during teethsome years, a toothsome smile. “You do tunnel rat zombie cock?”
“Got a rule against that.”
“Your loss, son.”
In short, until Gunderson had taken a magazine assignment, gone to Mexico to drink emetic potions with psychotropic turistas, his opinion of hallucinogens was that you had to worship jam bands, or believe the army had planted a chip in your head, to really enjoy them.