The Subject Steve: A Novel

by Sam Lipsyte

  Heinrich didn't end the meeting so much as abandon it, wander back into the porch shade. The gathering sat for a while, silent, like an audience savvy to the possibility of a trick ending. Then, in staggered waves of bravery, or boredom, they stood.

  Lem's mother took my arm.

  "I'm Estelle Burke," she said.

  "But are you you?" I said.

  "Don't take it so hard. When I was a little girl in ballet school the teacher was always toughest on the most promising students."

  "Is that where you learned not to take it so hard?"

  "I never learned," said Estelle. "I wasn't promising."

  "Your boy seems to have gotten himself into some trouble," I said.

  "Heinrich is Lem's father. Spiritually speaking, of course. He'd never do anything to harm Lem. Or me. I don't care what he says at First Calling."

  "Bark is worse than his bite?"

  "This has nothing to do with dogs," said Estelle.

  "It's a saying," I said.

  "Sayings say nothing," she said.

  We crossed the lawn to the dining hall. Sun spilled down on long pine tables. Some morose-looking sorts were busing breakfast trays.

  "Can I get some food?" I said.

  "You'll have to ask Parish."

  "Where's Parish?"

  "I was expecting who's Parish."

  "I'm on the quite-fucking-hungry side."

  "You've been assigned to kitchen duty."

  "Kitchen duty? I'm a sick man."

  "Take a number."

  "I'm not kidding."

  "Who's kidding? Chores are sacred."

  "What?"

  "Read the Tenets ."

  "Everyone's really recommending that book," I said.

  Parish the cook explained patiently that a missed meal was a meal missed. It was a fascinating theory. He was a hard little potato of a man in a tight pink T-shirt that read: There are no shit jobs, just shit people . His rhinestone-studded tool belt bristled with spatulas and slotted spoons. He pointed to a steel box bolted to the countertop.

  "That's your new girlfriend," he said. "Keep her hot and wet and we'll all be happy."

  The machine was easy, a push-pull job, just the kind of sweaty rote that maybe makes the doer dream of sickles on the Winter Palace steps, or cocoa-buttered asses in Daytona. I finished in about an hour, numbed by the slosh of water and tin. A steam rash ran from my hips to my neck. I worried it, another symptom. I stood there with my shirt open, clawing the spread.

  "It'll go away," said Parish.

  He handed me a plate with pita bread, some runny cheese.

  "Just this once."

  Out in the dining hall I took a table near a great stone hearth. Nailed above it was a double-handed saw, rusted, cracked in the grips. Flat on the mantel beneath it was a copy of the Tenets . I took it down and started to skim:

  In the beginning was the bird, rotating me back to the late great forty-eight. After that, more service to the state, Uruguay, El Salvador, Pepsi, Bell. But why bore you with corpses, the assassin's litany? Suffice it to say I was one of those who made you safe and warm and free enough to ruminate upon your pain, an activity formerly restricted to aristocrats, and thus helped you along your poison path. . . .

  And then it came to pass, late in the winter of 1982, that I met Notwithstanding "Notty" Naperton, ex-dairy farmer, in an upstate drunk tank. Upon release we reconvened at Ned's End Tavern for a breakfast of boilermakers, then retired to his room above a hardware emporium to wax incoherent about our disappointments, our regrets, our boats missed and doomed dinghies boarded. We were petty, hateful men and we both saw the world for the meaningless worm farm it was. We wondered what possible reason there could be to perdure. Now at this juncture Naperton confessed his clincher. The only thing that kept him on this earth, he told me, was the fact that an inoperable tumor had been detected in his brain. He was dying and he felt he had no right to intervene. Nonsense, Notty, I told him, we've been stripped of all possible actions save one. Suicide is the only uncompromised gesture left.

  Even wasting away from a grapefruit brain is a kind of complicity in the nightmare of life, I argued, not to mention the fact that all variety of scum profit from your illness. Naperton was soon swayed. I, myself, had been contemplating the act for a long time. I'd snuffed enough lives in the employ of democracy to know that any idea of the preciousness of my own was pure affectation. At dawn we drove up to the place you stand now with a pair of pistols, fully intending to vacate our fleshly premises, and with no delusions about tenancy in any afterworld, either. We sat on the forest floor amidst the spruce needles and the pine cones and stared down our respective barrels. I suggested a three-count. Naperton complained that he'd left no suicide note. He had an ex-wife he claimed to still love who deserved explication. I told Naperton that the shape his diseased brain matter took on the tree trunk behind him would serve as ample explication. I commenced my three-count and Naperton let me reach two before he stopped me again. Tears were streaming down his face. "Wait," he said, "what if we lived?" I admonished Naperton to stop delaying the inevitable. I began to grow frustrated, as when certain Honduran activists had resisted my offer of an easy and silent termination. I considered disposing of the three-count altogether, also aware of the possibility that Naperton was in no condition to live up to his end of the bargain. I was about to waste the poor fuck and then attend to my own mortal self-infliction when Naperton's query suddenly struck something deep within me. A chord, I think they call it. "What if we lived?" Such a simple, and yet infinite, question. I looked around, took in the trees, the moss, the fungus nestled in fallen timber. I heard the tittering of birds, the rustle of life in the brush. Everything seemed puny and the puny things true. You could take possession of yourself in the tiny and mindless movements of this earth. You could start all over again. You would have to be birthed anew, without fear, without belief, without state, without civilization. You could be redeemed! Philosophy? Never! The despair of the philosophers was correct, their correctives patently false. I knew then that we would build something here. I laid the gun down and watched Naperton do the same. "Do you feel it?" I said. "Feel what?" said Naperton. "Your tumor," I said, "it's gone." Behold, subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so!

  And later:

  dopefiends, drunks, nutjobs, fools, terminal cases, melancholics, paranoiacs, chronic onanists, rapers of pigs, bad poets, etc.: This is your home. We have made for you a home. To live in our home you must forsake all others. This should not be difficult. You would not be here if you were welcome elsewhere, if you flowed without incident or complaint through the global circuitry of want. The world is pain and early death for most, Slurpees for some, wealth and ease for a very few. And as for that business about passing through the eye of a camel, or a needle, or whatever, don't believe it. Even now the elite are developing the right nanotechnology for the job. The Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption was founded by Heinrich of Newark and Notwithstanding Naperton with the belief that the tired and the sick were getting a raw deal in our republic, sent off to the corner with a broken toy called God, or Goddess, or Higher Power, or inner peace. All modes have conspired against you. Take your place among us and deliver yourself unto yourself. We accept all major credit cards.

  Now came a page entitled simply "The Tenets."

  There is a vast gulf between those who have been mothered by fire and those who have not. Respect said gulf.

  Periods in the trance pasture are mandatory.

  Chores are sacred, prayers debased.

  Televisions, radios, telephones, or any other devices designed for broadcast or communication to or from the given world are expressly forbidden.

  God is dead. Godless man is dead.

  Violence will be met with decisive violence.

  You are you.

  To each according to his culpability, from each according to his bleed.

  We are spawn of woodland apes. No code has been undone. Nei
ther faith nor reason will deliver us. We must look to the trees.

  The given world has already calculated the potential worth of your unhappiness. No country, no religion, no corporation is your friend. No friend is your friend.

  Now something damp and tentacled was doing a dance in my hair.

  "It's your time to shine," said Parish.

  He handed me the mop, pointed to a bucket on wheels. The water stank of some chemist's idea of the woods. I mopped the dining hall, tried to picture a New-and-Improved Pine-Scented Forest. Antibacterial spatterdock was just sprouting near a lake of lye when my eyes began to sting. I went to the kitchen to rinse them, found Parish peeling a kiwi.

  "Good job," said Parish. "Don't forget to punch out."

  He showed me how, dropped a slice of rye into an Eisenhower-era toaster. We waited for it to pop. There was a corkboard near the door, a spotty hunk of pumpernickel pinned to it.

  "The problem," he said, "is that the punch bread rots."

  "That would be the problem with punch bread," I said.

  I hiked back up the dirt track to my cabin, found Heinrich lying on my cot.

  "Power nap?" I said.

  His eyes ticked past me toward the rafters.

  "See that rope?" he said.

  "Noticed it last night."

  "Guy name of Wendell. Bunked here for a while. Of course he figured the drop all wrong. Strangled. That's usually how the do-it-yourselfers go. No time to learn the craft."

  "Why did he do it?" I said.

  "That's the question of a child, Steve, but I'll try to answer it. Wendell was a slave. But half free. The pain is too unbearable for a man like that."

  "His family must have been upset."

  "We were his family. We were upset."

  Heinrich gripped the cot frame, vaulted off it.

  "Your bunkmate," he said, "that Bobby. He talks too much. I adore him, but sometimes I worry he will never reach continuum awareness. I'm not worried about you."

  "Maybe you should tell me what you're talking about before you decide not to worry."

  "It's no big secret, Steve. Just try to remember the one or two moments in your life when fear broke for lunch. Quite a feeling, right? Now imagine feeling that way all the time."

  "I don't think I have too much time left to feel anything."

  "That's what Naperton thought."

  "Behold," I said, "subsequent diagnostic procedures proved it so!"

  Heinrich's punch landed somewhere in the vicinity of my liver. Next thing, I was performing a sort of fetal waltz across the floor planks.

  Heinrich hovered near the door.

  "I'm not saying it's great literature," he said, "but we take the Tenets pretty seriously around here."

  I didn't hear him leave.

  Dinner that night was some lewd stew I'd watched Parish concoct, undercooked carrots and pulled pork in ooze. I believe he threw some kiwi in there, too.

  "All I know," he'd said, "is that there's got to be vat of something at the end of the day. That's all I know and all I need to know."

  I served myself from said vat.

  "Steve-o," called Bobby Trubate. "Join the kiddie table!"

  He was sitting with the woman in the wheelchair I'd seen at First Calling.

  "This is Renee," said Trubate.

  There was another man at our table, balding, with bad skin, and jowly, I thought, until I noticed the good-sized goiter under his jaw. He'd outfitted himself as some kind of eighteenth-century European infantryman, down to the britches and boots, the leather cartridge box.

  "That's DaShawn," said Trubate. "He's a Jackson White."

  "I told you," said DaShawn, "I don't approve of that term."

  I leaned in to Renee, pointed to where Dietz sat with Heinrich near the hearth.

  "Your boyfriend banish you?" I said.

  "My boyfriend?" she said. "Fuck you."

  "She bites," said Trubate. "But does she swallow?"

  "Fuck you, too, Bobby. Mr. Hollywood."

  "Fuck Hollywood," said Trubate. "I'm not Hollywood."

  "Let me try again," I said to Renee. "I'm-"

  "Please don't try again. I know who you are, and this isn't some fucking singles retreat."

  "Renee is muy sensitivo," said Trubate. "She knows guys like to hit on her because they think she's easy and they figure they're saints for doing it. And they can't help but wonder what it's like to ball a hot gimp. Hell, I wonder."

  "You've really got me all figured out, Bob," said Renee. "I'm so lucky to have a spokesman like you. Explaining my predicament can be so exhausting."

  "See, she's touchy," said Trubate.

  "She's right," I said.

  "She's about to puke," said Renee, rolled off with her stew bowl in her lap. We watched her bump a nearby table, swivel, swear.

  "They don't want your pity," said DaShawn. "They want ramps."

  "She wants tunnels," said Trubate. "Wet warm ones."

  "What?"

  "Let's just say she's leased some serious property on the Island of Lesbos."

  "Renee's gay," said DaShawn.

  "Go ahead, use the clinical term," said Trubate.

  "What's it to you?" I said.

  "Oh, it's a lot to me," said Trubate. "What, are you some kind of tolerance cop? Look, guys want to fuck each other, that's cool with me. That's the Socratic Method, for God's sake. But chick on chick? I find that exclusionary."

  "Exclusionary of you."

  "Dude, obvo."

  "DaShawn," I said, "where are you from?"

  The lance corporal looked up.

  "The Ramapo Mountains."

  "Is that how they dress up there?"

  "This is a replica of the uniform worn by Hessian mercenaries during your colonial war."

  "My war?"

  "I don't think the Founding Fathers had my kind in mind when they penned their immortal words of liberty. We descend from a mixed breed of runaway slaves, Indians, and Hessian deserters. All enemies of your glorious republic."

  "I don't remember signing anything," I said.

  "He's the only Jackson White that ever went to college," said Trubate. "The rest of them live in little shit shacks with broken antennas on top."

  "I'm not white and my name's not Jackson," said DaShawn. "They're cable-ready up there now."

  "What brought you to the Center?" I said.

  "What brings any of us?" he said.

  "I'm here for a cure."

  "DaShawn's here for that fucking egg on his neck."

  "Grave's disease?" I said.

  "Who doesn't have that?" said Bobby Trubate.

  "We're working on my thyroid," said DaShawn. "Among other things."

  "Good luck, pal," said Trubate.

  "Cease transmission of negative ionic force, please," said DaShawn.

  "He says that sometimes," said Trubate.

  "I'm saying it now," said DaShawn, and stood, made for the bus cart with his plate.

  "Why be such a pussy?" Trubate called after him. "You're already ugly and fucking insane. Why add to your problems?"

  "You have such a way with people," I said to Trubate.

  "I'm a truth-teller. That's how I ended up here."

  "Just that?"

  "Well, the speedballs, too. Don't you read the trades?"

  "Not your trades."

  "Right, I forgot. You're pretending I'm not a celebrity. Well, doesn't matter. I've been in and out of lots of joints. My problem is the enormity of my talent. My manager suggested this place. Saw an ad somewhere. I haven't heard from him since. Good riddance, though. I'm into deep meaning now. Like I'd ever bother to do television again. Unless it was quality television."

  Someone was tapping a water glass. I thought of all the flatware and silverware out here tonight I'd be on intimate terms with in the morning. Parish had been full of huzzahs for my hose work, said I possessed an intuitive form of the bubble dancer ethos: let no dirty or dirty-seeming thing pass through. Now the tapping got louder
and the room hushed down. Heinrich rose before the hearth.

  "People of recovery and redemption," he said, "I hope I speak for all of us when I say to our brother Parish in the kitchen, with regard to our fare tonight, well done, well done! But now we must move on to graver concerns, namely the execution of our sentence upon young Lem Burke for crimes against the community and egregious violations of the Tenets . Lemuel, if you will."

  The boy stood.

  "Please," he said softly. "Please, don't."

  Estelle Burke howled from the doorway. Old Gold hooked her under the arms, gagged her while she kicked.

  "Please," said Lem. "I promise I won't do it again."

  "Won't do what again?"

  "Those things."

  "I'm afraid," said Heinrich, "that you have yet to exhibit any comprehension of your transgressions. Harness!"

  It looked something like a rolling wardrobe rack. Naperton wheeled it into the room.

  Lem was weeping now.

  "Please, please don't."

  "Disrobe!" said Heinrich.

  Lem was a skinny kid, all rib cage. He palmed his crotch, looked out at his mother, still cinched in Old Gold's arms.

  "Up!" said Heinrich.

  They lifted the boy by the elbows, slid his feet into rawhide straps, tied his wrists down near the wheels. Lem swung there for a bit and Heinrich stooped to the floor, ran his fingers in the boy's hair.

  "People," said Heinrich, "it is only through a symbolic reenactment of our deepest secret, our darkest desire, our most monumental shame, that we can ever hope to transcend our own limitude. Now look at this kid. Fucking incorrigible. Breaks all the rules. Steals food from the kitchen. Sneaks into town without permission. Brings back controlled goodies with which to obviate himself in the trance pasture. Well, boys will be boys. But boys will also someday be men. Childish men. Narcissistic sheep. In young Lem's case, however, we have an opportunity to avoid all that. He was just a small child when his mother brought him here, and let me tell you, our beloved Estelle was in pretty sad shape. A tumor with shoes, you want to know the truth. But she found the strength to heal herself, my friends. Her body saved, she sought then to be truly nondenominationally redeemed. Young Lem, it was decided, would be raised here among us. But though he began in purity the boy has become much corrupted over time. Good as dead, really. What are we to do? How do we effect some sort of reversal? We must try, at any rate. He belongs to all of us, in a way, but he still belongs to his mother most of all. And it is she who must save him now."