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.
It was some sort of compendium of community rules-numerated, bulleted, with footnotes, appendices. Towards the back was a section called "Lives Lived and Redeemed," a brief table of contents: "The Ballad of Estelle Burke," "Dietz Versus Dietz," "Notes on Naperton." I flipped ahead to a chapter called "Old Gold Speaks":
Listen, I fought Clellon Beach in a Navy smoker and I can tell you that man was a huge fucking killer. It's a wonder I didn't die from his blows. Before Clellon I was just your average country Jewboy with tough hands from hitting the kitchen board and not thinking of all the things my daddy did to me mentally and on the physical side to prepare me for the world, but what world? His world? He had a sick one. When Clellon did up my skull the way he did with the quickest combos you've ever seen, or really that you've never seen (they were that quick), I spent a month in the base infirmary hooked to the life machines and it was here that all the poison gas seeped out of the safe part of my brain and poisoned me up through to the gills. I was a walking time explosion even before I could even walk again. Then I read this book (well, probably not the very copy you're holding) and I found in The Director's words something to live up to for. I went then to embark on my pupilage under him and have gone through the phases of awareness and have been mothered by fire and have delivered myself unto myself and I am a hero and a cloudwalker and I don't blame Clellon for my bad lives but he's a hero, too, and someday there will have to be a reckoning of us because that is the lost way of men and women from back in the age of continuum. Oh, and Old Gold was my Navy nickname only. My real name is Avram Cole Younger Gold."
Cloudwalkers? Continuum? This was the cure? I dimmed the Coleman down, stretched out on the cot, awaited my symptoms, what I now considered my symptoms. They tended to muster at night, those nervy shoots and shudders I used to figure for the natural rot of me.
I'd had a cancerous aunt who went to Guam for a medical miracle-it's how I knew about the rat guts-and she came back flush with remission. She died the next spring but I'm pretty sure her excursion bought her another season of precious decay. Maybe the difference was that they knew what was killing her. Me, I was dying of something no one had ever died of before.
Maybe Heinrich could name it.
Or at least write a new section of the Tenets called "Lives Lost."
Now I did something I hadn't done in a while. It felt good in my hand, throbbed there like some wounded bird you've just found in the woods. I cast Greta and Clarice in a stroke number based on material from another medium, pictured jets of gaudy lady juices piped out of Vegas fountains. Jennifer Applebaum, whose solitary nipple hair had enslaved my senses for a year of junior high, appeared now unbidden in a fur stole. Even Maryse had a caustic winning walk-on.
Harem arrayed, I came like Xerxes back from giving it to the Greeks. I let what spilled dry to a new skin on my fingers, fell off into a dream about figs.
"Somebody got some."
The man from the gate sat on the far cot in a paisley robe and a watchman's cap. He looked my age, a little younger. Boyish, worn by the linger of his boyishness. He pointed oddly at me now. It seemed I'd kicked away my blanket in the night. My pants were at my knees, my hand doing make-work down past my belly, some idle, half-asleep flippering.
"Bachelor habits," I said.
"Me," said the man, "I'll lie in bed, do it all day. Won't get up till the dinner bell. Then I get disgusted with my regression and I must impose strictures. Sign up for extra chores. Won't touch myself even to wash it. I'm Bobby. Bobby Trubate. The real one. Actual size."
"Glad to meet you," I said.
"You'd be Steve," said Trubate.
"That's not really my name," I said.
Trubate set his cap on the pillow, felt with his fingers along his skull.
"Ever take your hat off but then it feels like it's still on?"
"Nerve endings," I said.
"You a nervologist? What if it's some supernatural force pushing down on my head? Something your science can't explain."
"Anything's possible," I said.
"Oh, you think so?"
"Within parameters."
"Well, I guess it's my duty to welcome you to the land of the Infortunate. Come on, it's almost time for First Calling."
Trubate led me out into the mudshine, the morning. We walked past a row of cabins thrown up on either side of the rutted track. The walls were rough timber with some patches of plywood, tin. The compound stood partway up the mountain on a terraced clear. Below us, where the forest steepened to the valley floor, buildings sloped down both banks of a river, near a high steel bridge.
"That's Pangburn Falls," said Trubate. "The de facto town. Some of the old-timers used to go down to Pangburn, but not since Wendell died. Have you read 'The Wanderer Wendell' yet?"
"No."
"An inspiring text."
"I didn't see anything about a Wendell in that book," I said. "Or you."
"I haven't earned canonization just yet. I'm only in the early middle phases of continuum awareness. I haven't been mothered by fire. But I'm taking notes. I want my Life to be stylistically innovative. Like my work on the silver screen."
"I'm sorry," I said, "I'm not familiar with your work."
"Sure you are," said Trubate.
"I don't think so."
"You've seen me a million times. The junkie, the junkie car jacker, the corrupt senator's junkie son. I do them all. 'Who was that guy?' you wondered. 'He's good.' I'm that guy. I am good. I'm a fucking craftsman."
"I don't get to the movies much," I said.
"Yeah, you go read to the blind every night."
"I've done that."
"Sick fuck."
"What are you talking about?"
"You think they want to be reminded?"
Now the track curved down a bit.
"There's the dining hall," said Trubate, nodded down the hill at a clapboard building the size of a country church. "The chicks sleep in that wing sticking off."
"I didn't know there were any," I said.
"It's mostly dudes up here. It used to be all-dude. Because of our increasingly chick-run society and all. But Heinrich had an epiphany on that, so now there are exceptions. That's his crib, by the way, right down there."
Near the dining hall was another cabin, the only one I'd seen with a porch.
"Who built this stuff?" I said.
"Read the Tenets. Over there are the barns. We have a bunch of milking cows. Naperton runs the farm. We make a damn tasty organic cheese spread. Sell it down in the city. Have you ever put your hand in a newborn calf's mouth? It's amazing. Sensuous, yes. Erotic, sure. But not dirty. Not at all. And up there through the hill trail is the mothering hut. I wouldn't worry about that now. Your time will come. We're all very excited about the project."