The Fun Parts

by Sam Lipsyte

  He’d flown to Oaxaca with a glib lede to that effect in his laptop. He returned a converso. The tales of Hofmann, the stern brain play of Huxley had never enticed him, but puking and shitting on a dirt floor while Ramón kicked him in the balls and, later, sobbing while his dead grandfather Gilbert hovered nearby in a beer-can cardigan and told Gunderson why he, Gunderson, had such a tough time being faithful to women (Gunderson’s mother had hugged him too much, and his father was always on his high horse, and there was something about Gil’s side of the family being related to Barry Goldwater)—all this, in aggregate, did the trick. Later he discovered the crotch kicks were not traditional, but Ramón’s twist on the ritual. Didn’t matter, Gunderson was hooked. A few more doses over the next several months and he knew his place in his family and his place in the infinite, at least provisionally.

  He also had a vision of the world in a few years’ time if the current course was not corrected. More precisely, it was a vision of North America, oil starved, waterlogged, millions thronged on the soggy byways, fleeing the ghost sprawls of the republic. He saw his sister gang-raped in an abandoned Target outside Indianapolis. The local warlord, nicknamed Dee-Kay-En-Wye for the runes on his tattered hoodie, cackled as he watched his clan work. They’d lived in Home Appliances their entire lives. Strangest of all, Gunderson didn’t have a sister. This added urgency to his vision. It wasn’t just about him, or his sister.

  When he’d recovered and told the shaman what he’d seen, Ramón led him to a stone hut at the edge of the village. A satellite jutted from the woven roof. Inside was a sleeping cot, a computer, a bookshelf full of French Symbolists. The shaman, who to Gunderson resembled one of those carved-down distance runners he’d watched train near his father’s house in Oregon, slid out a large cardboard box with copper hasps from beneath the cot. Inside was a crumbling facsimile of the storied codex. He showed Gunderson the jaguar, the sickle, the long, solstistic loops. He pointed to where the reeds ran out.

  “I thought the Maya had the calendar,” said Gunderson.

  “Fuck the Maya,” said Ramón.

  * * *

  Gunderson had never been much for the astronomy, the math. His colleagues, his rivals, could offer the proofs, the ellipticals, the galacticals. Most of them used the Maya Tzolkin, and Gunderson suspected that Ramón’s insistence on this Mixtec forecast was just an intellectual property maneuver, but he didn’t mind. He was trying to save the world, and that included not just the plants and the animals and the majestic rock formations but the people, those meat-world parasites who’d built pyramids and written concertos and enslaved their brothers and sisters and performed clitoridectomies and gone to the moon and gorged themselves on war and corn syrup. Gunderson was a people person. We just needed new kinds of people. We had to start making them right now.

  The other thing that had to start being made right now was a serious offer from the TV people. Gunderson was back downtown at his favorite organic teahouse, e-mailing a fiery message to his network, hinting there might soon be an announcement about a new interpretation of the codex, a revised time frame for the Big Clambake. That would light up the boards. His people didn’t need much prompting. Many were lonely sorts pining for genuine human connection or, short of that, a flash mob.

  So if the series division kept wavering, maybe Gunderson could get some grass roots going. Grass roots. That had been a big word with his father. Still was, Gunderson guessed. He hadn’t talked to the man in years. Why? Ask the Jaguar. Gunderson didn’t know, except that maybe it was hard for men to talk to each other, especially fathers and sons, at least in this dimension. Jim Gunderson was handsome, brave, beloved, righteous. How did you talk to a father like that, a legendary activist, a lawyer for the downtrodden, ask him to read your magazine profile of a sitcom star, a charismatic CFO? Of course, Gunderson’s hack days were behind him. Why didn’t he call now? Because Jim Gunderson fought for a better tomorrow while his son, despite all his talk of collective action and personal evolution, was maybe just another doom pimp betting on no tomorrow at all? No, it was probably just the father-son stuff. The new times would not be so burdened. We’d be too busy line dancing with alien life-forms for patriarchal agon. Gunderson glanced up, tracked the dreadlocked teen behind the counter.

  “Can I get more of this beetroot crush?”

  “Of course,” said the girl. “I’ll bring some right over.”

  “That’s not all you can bring.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Damn, sister. Look at you.”

  Gunderson had always subscribed to the practical man’s theory of seduction: hit on everybody and everything, crudely, constantly. His percentages astonished even him.

  “Yeah, you know something?” said the girl. “I’ve heard about you.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “That you’re, like, a genius. But also a total pigdog. I don’t need that in my life right now.”

  “You don’t need complete physical and spiritual liberation?”

  “I need health insurance.”

  “That’s the hologram talking,” said Gunderson, handed her his card.

  * * *

  Outside, the sun was nearly licking him. It really felt like that, the sun the tongue of a loyal dog. Extraordinary. He stood on the curb with his eyes closed, face tilted up. This was life, its only conceivable acme. Little Carlos knew. Sweet Carlos, who had once stared up at some darkening clouds and shouted, “Don’t rain, little sky!”

  Gunderson was about to call Victoria’s folks in Maine, something he would normally never consider, but here was this sudden surge of Carlosity. He had to talk to his son on the phone. But as soon as he thought the word “phone,” the damn thing started to vibrate again.

  “Jack,” said Gunderson.

  “They’re pulling out for now. They want you to pitch again in a few months.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Who knows? They say they’ve got too much in development, but it’s anybody’s guess. Quality television works in mysterious ways.”

  “Look, things are a little more complicated. We don’t have a few months. We’ve got to do this thing now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The prophecy. There’s been a change of date. A little timing snafu.”

  “I didn’t know that happened with prophecies. Aren’t they written in stone? Wasn’t this prophecy, in fact, written in stone?”

  “This isn’t funny, Jack. This is real. I’ll do it all myself. I’ll get on my knees and beg Victoria for the cash. This has to happen right now. I’m through screwing around. I’ll get grass roots going. This is not about a television show. This is about life on earth. Hell, I don’t even know why I care anymore. Maybe it’s better if we all go up in flames.”

  “Will you calm down? Let’s just wait and see what the series division has to say in a few weeks and then—”

  “And then you can tell those pigdogs to shove it up their—”

  “Jeez, will you relax? Pigdogs?”

  “Relax? Are you telling me to relax? You sound like fucking Baltran.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “He’s not that little jerk repping at—”

  “No, Jack.”

  “I hope you’re not talking to him.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  Gunderson had an appointment with Nellie at the loft. They were supposed to go over scheduling. Whenever they went over scheduling, they tended to wind up naked on the carpet Victoria had bought in Tehran. Gunderson worried that their juices might agitate the dyes. Given all he’d already perpetrated upon her dignity, Victoria would probably have him jailed.

  After the scheduling meeting he was supposed to meet the rock star for dinner and a helicopter ride. He’d get a call at the last minute regarding location. That’s how rock stars handled scheduling. This one, an arena king from the 1980s who’d traded in his coke spoon for a yoga mat, had attended one
of Gunderson’s talks at an illegal ayahuasca retreat in Santa Fe and had stalked Gunderson ever since. People sneered at the rock star, his silly spiritual cant, his new music that was a parody of his old music. The man spewed platitudes, certainly, was a font of phoniness, but Gunderson sort of liked him. Or maybe he just liked being fawned over by a superannuated icon.

  What you couldn’t sneer at was the man’s portfolio. He’d invested his money in silicon chips back when it counted. His petty cash could probably feed the world. Would he spare some change to save it?

  * * *

  That Victoria was not in Lisbon, but back in what was now—and, truthfully, had always been—her magnificent home, seemed a vicious ripple in the continuum, something no blood-streaked, rainbow-feathered priest, tripping his balls off on some sun-cooked ziggurat, could ever have predicted. That she stood now on the potentially juice-marred Persian with Carlos in her arms, both of them bawling at a nearly naked Nellie, who had obviously let herself in with Gunderson’s spare key and, in a perhaps-not-humorous-enough surrender of pretense, shucked off most of her wardrobe in anticipation of their scheduling meeting, signaled some kind of cataclysmic rupture in dark matter’s latticework.

  Not that Gunderson really knew what that meant.

  “What the hell?” said Victoria as Gunderson came through the door. “This is where you bring your end times whores?”

  “What happened to Lisbon?” said Gunderson.

  “What happened to your self-respect?”

  “What happened to knocking?” said Nellie.

  “Knocking?” said Victoria. “It’s my house! I’m supposed to know my ex-husband is meeting a naked slut in my house?”

  “End times is more of a Christian thing,” said Gunderson. “You know I don’t subscribe to—”

  “What exactly makes me a slut?” said Nellie. “Because I have sex? That’s totally retrograde.”

  “Look at you,” said Victoria. “The secretary. The home office screw. Except it’s not even his home anymore. Talk about retrograde. I bet you think being practically a hooker is empowering, too. Is that what you think?”

  “I think you’re a shrill narcissist who couldn’t keep pace with your husband’s spiritual growth.”

  “Is that what he said while he rammed you with his world changer? Or did he just make you stick a ballet shoe up his butt?”

  “Hey, kids!” said Gunderson. “How about both of you stop it. This is ridiculous.”

  “Damn straight,” said Nellie. “I quit.”

  Nellie scooped up her clothes, seemed about to bolt, but then just stood there, quivering. Carlos squirmed out of Victoria’s arms, ran to Gunderson, clutched his knee.

  “Daddy!”

  Gunderson squatted, squared the boy’s shoulders. His son, he saw now, had the most chaotic green eyes he’d ever seen.

  “I love you, Carlito,” Gunderson said, sniffed sharp diaper stink. The boy was long past due for potty training, and Gunderson wondered if it was his fault, all that trauma he’d visited upon his son’s developmental years. “I think he needs to be changed.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Victoria. It was the old challenge. Gunderson knew he wasn’t up to it. He wasn’t squeamish, but he’d always preferred changing Carlos when it felt like something fun, a larkish deployment of diaper and wipe, best with an audience. So here was the deal. He’d never be a good man, a stand-up guy, a pillar, his father. His absence would have to be the honesty from which the boy could draw strength. Besides, Gunderson was a prophet, a prophet on the clock, a very scary fucking clock. Didn’t that count for something?

  “Yeah,” said Gunderson, walked out.

  * * *

  High above the night city, he knew he’d done right. While the rock star worked the stick and hummed his old hit, Gunderson looked through the chopper’s bubbled glass at the lit grid below. His strife seemed so squalid up here in the heavens, and gazing down on the bright, sick city stirred him. Maybe we were doomed fools on a dying fluke of a planet, but we’d had a damn good run. Mostly we’d murdered, tortured, razed, but once in a while we’d made something beautiful. We’d tried so hard to love.

  “Thus spake Hallmark,” came a voice through his headset. “Cut the humanist rah-rah, friend.”

  Gunderson was embarrassed the rock star had heard him get so sentimental, not to mention talk to himself.

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” said Gunderson.

  “What’s on your mind, lad? You seem perturbed.”

  “Do you really want to know what I’m thinking?” said Gunderson.

  “Hell, no,” said the rock star. “Just name the number.”

  “You’ve mastered telepathy.”

  “Something like that. Or maybe I can just tell that you need my help and I believe in your message enough to want to give it. I’ll write the check. You lead us back from the abyss.”

  Screw Jack. Screw the deal. What had to be done would be done by the secret society, his brothers and sisters in vision, like this ludicrous geezer with the thousand-dollar T-shirt and spiked white hair.

  Gunderson turned to thank him, to tell him of the long march ahead and the beautiful bond they would forge, but discovered the rock star slumped in his straps, stick hand listing. It was difficult to tell exactly when the spin had started or how fast the buildings roared up. The rock star was definitely dead. Maybe it was all the cocaine he’d been sneaking off to snort during dinner. Maybe it was everything he’d sniffed and jabbed and swallowed for the last forty years. Rock stars made millions singing about their broken hearts, and then their hearts actually exploded. This guy was going blue in his helmet. And he was not being a very good pilot.

  Gunderson shut his eyes, saw the strewn green of his son’s. He felt strange pressures on his body, was a boy again himself, waking slowly between his mother and father on their flannel sheets in Eugene, a happy little boat bumping up on warm, sloped isles. Pleasant, primal enough, this memory, suitable for the closing clip, though didn’t Gunderson rate revelation, every artifice fallen away, the cosmos unmasked and Gunderson receiving the supreme briefing via transcendental brain beam? He deserved that much, didn’t he? Apparently not, for here rushed the rooftops with their colossal vents, their transnational signage, penthouses lush with light and hanging gardens. Gunderson grew dizzy in his bubbled tomb. Death’s smash and grab was upon him, he could feel a hand grip his arm, though it didn’t seem to be the Reaper’s.

  “Sorry about this. Not what we were expecting, is it?”

  Light twirled in the gold weave of Baltran. The elf’s shimmer steadied Gunderson.

  “So, it’s bullshit? The calendar? The prophecy? Dimensional interface? You?”

  “No, it’s not bullshit,” said Baltran. “It can’t be.”

  “Are you just a figment of my imagination?”

  “Fuck you. Figment.”

  “You told me to do you proud.”

  “You did do me proud, kid. I saw what you accomplished. It won’t be forgotten. Not by me.”

  “And now what?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. The beat goes on?”

  “The beat,” said Gunderson, and he felt his phone vibrate, read the backlit text: Serious offer.

  “Hey, shouldn’t I be dead yet?” said Gunderson, looking over at Baltran. “This thing’s been crashing for a while.”

  “Not really. That’s just how you’re experiencing it. Okeydokey, here it comes, baby.”

  “I can feel it,” whispered Gunderson. “I can taste it. It’s coming on sweet.”

  “That might be your lozenge. See, really, there is no sweetness. What comes is pitiless, blind to you.”

  “Aren’t we all connected?”

  “Yes, we are all connected,” said Baltran, “but that’s not really a good thing. For the record, I always liked you, Gunderson. Breathe easy.”

  Gunderson watched his friend’s form collapse into a sprinkly nimbus.

  “Connected how?” cried Gunderson. “To what?” But he
knew what, had known for some time, a few thousand years at least, back before his own shaman days on the shores of Oaxaca, longer, much longer, back before his human days, his golden molting days, his wailing vapor days, back before anything you could call a day, when he was just another stray vector shooting through great jagged reefs of anti-space. He’d known, but had he believed? Had he ever believed? Did it matter? Beyond the seal of the multiverse was a wet, blazing mouth. It slavered. It meant to munch. It had journeyed through many forevers to reach what it existed to devour: the real-ass jumbo.

  Gunderson began, or ceased, to dream.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the editors who first worked with me on these stories, including Willing Davidson, Deborah Treisman, Amy Grace Loyd, Jeff Johnson, Lorin Stein, Rob Spillman, Hunter Kennedy, Jason Fulford, Michelle Orange, Tom Beller, and Joanna Yas. Thanks to Eric Chinski, who helped me make a book out of them. Thanks to the late George Kimball, whose book Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing proved a valuable source in the writing of “The Worm in Philly.” Thanks to Ira Silverberg and Eric Simonoff. Thanks to Ben Marcus. Thanks to the MacDowell Colony, where several of these stories were begun. Thanks to Ceridwen Morris, who encouraged me to finish them.

  ALSO BY SAM LIPSYTE

  The Ask

  Home Land

  The Subject Steve

  Venus Drive

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2013 by Sam Lipsyte

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2013

  These stories previously appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: J&L Illustrated (“Ode to Oldcorn”), Jane (“Snacks”), McSweeney’s (“Peasley”), The New Yorker (“The Climber Room,” “The Dungeon Master,” “Deniers,” “The Republic of Empathy”), Open City (“Nate’s Pain Is Now”), The Paris Review (“The Worm in Philly,” “This Appointment Occurs in the Past”), Playboy (“The Real-Ass Jumbo” as “The Gunderson Prophecy,” “The Wisdom of the Doulas”), and Tin House (“Expressive”).