The Subject Steve: A Novel (8 page)

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. Neither 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."

"No!" said Lem.

"Saw!" said Heinrich.

Naperton and another man slipped the hideous thing off its hooks, slid it down into the crack of the boy.

"Bad wiper," Naperton mouthed to the crowd.

"Now," said Heinrich, "when I say symbolic I don't mean that something very real isn't going to happen in a moment. Here's the deal: we're going to saw this little shitbird right the fuck in half unless his mommy sucks him off to big jiz. Big jiz! Them's the rules. I think fifteen minutes is fair. I mean, she's a mighty handsome woman. So, what do you all think? Pretty nifty, right? Lem, I figure you get through this, what in the whole wide fucking world is there left to fear? Rest easy, kid, in a little while you'll either be dead or a god. I only wish someone had done this for me. Estelle, my sweet, come on down!"

Old Gold wrestled the woman towards her son. Benches scraped the floor and tipped. Brethren scurried, parted.

I stood, shook Trubate's hand off my arm.

"This is fucking crazy!" I shouted. "Stop this now! Take him down!"

"Or what?"

"I'll call the police. They might be interested in your idea of dinner theater."

"Steve," said Heinrich, "darling Steve, that there is the threat of a victim, not a hero. A phone call? You're going to make a phone call? Man, are you neck deep in the big dark darkety dark."

"Take him down now," I said.

I saw heavy movement in my periphery. Heinrich bore down on me with glittery eyes.

"Hey," he said. "It's just a hummer."

Heinrich said, "Start anywhere."

Heinrich said, "Let memory scamper to the glades of the now."

It's hard to believe people buy this brand of tripe. But then you picture the very same man pressing a SIG Sauer barrel to the brow of a sleeping Indian, a trussed nun.

You let it slide.

Heinrich gave me a ballpoint pen, a notebook with a Velcro flap. The Velcro, he said, was so I'd feel safe.

"Like a seat belt?" I said.

It was a good pop, spleen region. Put me on my knees.

"Like a seat belt," he said. "That's humorous."

It's hard to know what's humorous anymore.

I started the first notebook soon after my head wound healed, the one I received the night Estelle Burke publicly pleasured her son. Sorry to say I missed that particular spectacle. It was Parish, I later discovered, who did me my concussive honors, employing what he termed the "old cast-iron hat."

I've been writing, or itemizing, as they call it, ever since.

Heinrich says I'd better get it all down. He believes I'm really dying. Sees it in my eyes, he says. Dimness and some flickering. It's nothing any doctor could detect.

"What if I'm not dying?" I say.

"God forbid," he says.

"Itemize, itemize," he says.

I haven't written anything like this in years. The copy I confected for a living was never more than a line or two, designed to capture the allure of the new, to shimmer with efficient leisure and sumptuous toil, the ongoing orgasm of the information lifestyle: "Software with a Soft Touch," I wrote, or "Reality for Those Who Dream," or, simply, "How Did You Like Tomorrow?"