Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

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. 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.