Read Online The Subject Steve: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte - Free Book Online

Heinrich, "where do you get on? Or here's another: who are you?"
    "I am me," I said, approximating Old Gold's quaver.
    "Not yet, you're not. You're not shit."
    I barely took in the rest of the meeting, my first First Calling. There was something said about illicit speech acts in the trance pasture, a tentative scheduling of the next cheese run, a note or two about revisions to the chore board. A kid named Lem, the one I'd seen bickering with his mother, was singled out for various community infractions. Heinrich passed a sentence upon him which I did not understand. Others shuddered. I started to wonder if I'd made a major mistake. I'd read about places like this in my father's stroke books, back in the grand old days of investigative porn. Depressed kid joins up with a guru, empties his checking account, splits for parts unknown. Feds find him chunked for canning in a mackerel plant. Friends note he was always kind of a follower. "Fuckeroo'd," says his father, Vice President of the Nibs of Nod.
    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