The Gospel of Anarchy
A Novel
JUSTIN TAYLOR
For Abraham
For what else should we pursue, if not happiness? If something isn’t valuable because we find meaning and joy in it, then what could possibly make it important? How could abstractions like “responsibility,” “order,” or “propriety” possibly be more important than the real needs of the people who invented them? Should we serve employers, parents, the State, God, capitalism, moral law, causes, movements, “society” before ourselves? Who taught you that, anyway?
—The CrimethInc. Collective, Days of War, Nights of Love
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king.
—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Summer, 1999
The Confessions
Sunday
Sunday Night
The Leaving Kind
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
Anchor
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
About the Author
Praise for Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor
Also by Justin Taylor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Summer, 1999
The Confessions
I worked at the survey center in the Seagle Building, which stands eleven full stories on the north side of University Avenue, halfway between the eastern edge of campus and downtown. Excepting the Beaty Towers, a pair of Soviet bloc–style dorms built in the late ’60s, it was—and still is—the tallest building in all of Gainesville. Our offices were on the ground floor. We contracted with government programs and private insurers. We wore headsets, hooked into desktop computers; we felt the heat of the machines through our pant legs, even as their cooling fans keened louder, quickening their endless spin. We stared into boxy monitors with dull green screens, sat tucked behind half-height cubicle walls of coarse gray fabric flecked with colored bits like tiny festive mistakes.
The machines autodialed while we thumbed magazines. Junk stuff, mostly—Vogue, Spin, Esquire, maybe a Newsweek now and then, or Time. The magazines, page-worn and out of date, were supplied by the office, piled on a counter in the break room. Management didn’t want us reading books, or anything assigned. So no Norton Anthology, no sheaf of double-sided runoffs held together with a worry-bent staple. If you had a highlighter out, you were busted. (A dropout, none of this was a problem for me.) We had to be alert, poised, ready to get on the line and start talking to whoever answered the phone we’d dialed, or else cut the call off if a machine clicked on. We could not, therefore, afford the distraction of anything with depth.
It was a roomful of students and ex-students, managed by listless postgrads with timorous seniority. Our job was to wait for a live human voice and when we got one, to read to it the information on the screen. We were selling nothing, asking only for time and honesty.
We spoke to retirees, recovering addicts, people on the welfare rolls, on parole; recent hospital releases eager to rate their inpatient experience—seven, no, no, six, I guess, okay, is there a six and a half? I’m sorry, ma’am, but there is no six and a half. They asked us questions we could not answer, say, about the status of their claim, or what this information will be used for. Statistical purposes. We reassured them. We assuaged. Your anonymity is safe. We add your numbers to the great database.
We used a modulated tone, a cool-to-the-touch tone. The voice of condolences offered on behalf of an absent friend. We only had jobs because it was understood that these people would not take calls from robots. You hear an automated voice and assume someone is trying to get you into a timeshare, raise money for a congressman, sell tickets for a cruise. And also because someone had to log all the answers. The people, it was felt, could not be trusted to correctly punch in the numbers corresponding to their choices on their touchtone phones.
I didn’t read while I worked, not even the magazines. I just sat and watched—the screen, or the other callers. I peeked around my gray walls. I gazed and surveyed. Here was a girl with a Pantene-sleek ponytail that started high on her head and went halfway down her back; sorority Greek on a thin gold chain, the characters perfectly centered in the scoop neck of a pale pink shirt. A gangly freshman guy, acne-scarred, five eleven, perpetually anemic-seeming in black jeans like burnt sticks. The fat girl with Coke-bottle glasses and a torn blue windbreaker; she never brought anything to read, either. She just sat there, silent and still, Zening out on her green screen. I wondered what she did when she got a call through—if she could rouse herself from those green depths and actually speak—but I never sat close enough to listen. A whole roomful of us. Rooms, actually. There were three full rooms. You got a different station every time. Some people, I imagine, made friends.
If you don’t unmute the headset right when you hear the phone pick up, then the person you’ve called hears the little click of you clicking the unmute button and then that person thinks you are a robot whose recording has just clicked on. They played the same game with us that we played with their answering machines: if it sounds automatic, dump it.
The people we were calling didn’t have vacation days piling up. They did not wish to be selected for a special offer, four nights five days, continental breakfast, Disney World, whatever it was. They were looking for overtime, not time off. We had to let them know right away that quote this is not a sales call. We were people just like them, going about our business, collecting only that which we needed, and which was free to give, which is not to say it was often given freely.
People resented us, and rightly. We were wound-pokers, interlopers in their shattered lives, and the untone in which we probed was a compounding offense. We asked them about the last time they’d had steady work. How long since the coverage ran out? Your anonymity, we said, again, is assured, though if they’d thought about it they’d have realized that implicit in the set of questions and the fact of our calling was how much we already had on them. They were angry; they were outraged. They yelled at us, called us things.
We were forbidden to be provoked by them, or say anything at all not printed on our screens. Don’t get baited. Don’t engage. And some hung up, but these were relatively few. Surprisingly few, or maybe not so surprisingly. We spoke, after all, with a vague but convincing air of authority, and people suspected that we had no actual power over them (we didn’t), but they weren’t prepared to test that theory and be wrong. These were people who were behind on payments, who patronized check-cashing stores. Some were gracious, decent to us, even kind, maybe pleased to have been asked to share or just to have someone to talk to. These were also few. Everyone else said we were interrupting dinner. They said we had no business, no right. They sputtered and swore. And then they told us everything we asked.
At home there was no conversation. No back and forth. No feigned ease, no modulated voice. No voice, period. Silence reigned. Quiet clicks. The world opened up to me through a small bright window, my personal laptop computer, which was of course too heavy and ran too hot to actually keep on my lap, not that I wanted it there. I had to use a plug-in trackball mouse because I couldn’t get the hang of the touchpad thing. The laptop was barely a year old, still more or less state-of-the-art, and had pride of place on the desk in my living room, where I sat and surfed a wave that never crested, climbed a mountain that never peaked. Curved, oiled, chesty, slick, spread; sometimes I imagined the girls in a kind of march, an endless
parade celebrating—what? Themselves, I guess, or me.
They bit their lower lips and looked away from the camera. Soft-focus, standing half behind a gauzy white curtain through which a clump of pubic hair is basically an idea about itself. Or harsh light on razor rash. Or a sequence in which three short-haired, flat-chested Russians swim in a shallow pond, then towel each other off in tall weedy grass. Thick rugs on hardwood floors. Women relaxing and relaxed. Natural breasts, floppy and pale on a tanned body: she stands next to a palm tree, one hand on the trunk, she’s leaning—this is the relaxed part, a woman is taking it easy—the other hand on her hip, thumb inside the waist of her bikini bottom, like who knows what she might do next? But I know what she might do next. What else is there to do next?
A girl wearing reading glasses, a backward baseball cap, and nothing else. Her eyes are squinched shut, mouth wide open and stuffed full, nose half disappeared into some guy’s auburn bush, in what appears to be one or the other of their dorms—UMass Amherst, if the pennant on the wall is to be believed.
Rooms washed in evening, in morning light. In full ugly Texas sun. Asians in stilettos. Blacks in nurse uniforms.
Every image was a whole world, complete, unfolding. But the sites were always trying to tell me what I was seeing, frame my experience with narrative, override or manage it somehow. They—the sites—were heavy on text; lousy with it, in fact, and choked with ads. It was worse than cable. Hell, it was worse than talk radio. I hated all of it: the captions, backstories, scene-setting, conceits and premises, banners that flashed. And the cartoonish language, the gleeful gilding of the filth. The sites spoke only of miracles. They told me that what I saw was even hotter, dirtier, stranger, than I already thought it was. And they told me I hadn’t seen the half of it. They told me I was about to get my mind blown—better, faster, again—around the next digital bend. There was more, always more and better, just waiting. It was one big medicine show.
Some of the sites were in Spanish, or Russian, and that was better, because I didn’t know those languages. The text became less like an interruption then, more like background noise, patterned wallpaper. The text tried to reach you but couldn’t, and so you remained free.
Eventually I made my way to message boards, AOL chat rooms. These were of two kinds. Public rooms were established, maintained, and moderated by the company. “Automotive.” “Singles.” “Baltimore.” Private rooms were unlisted, and anyone could make them. They weren’t password protected, but in order to get to one, you had to know its name. All the rooms—public and private—capped at twenty-two users at a time. If a public room had no users, it just sat there, but a private room would disappear. Of course the very next time somebody typed that name in, the room would reinvent itself, and there that guy would be in it, all alone.
Think of a likely-sounding name—“nakedgirls,” let’s say, or “amateurs,” or simply “pics.” Then throw a number behind it—“jpeg14”—because dozens of these rooms ran at once, and the low numbers almost always had the virtual equivalent of lines around the block. Most people used the chat room to shout out what they had or what they wanted: “cheerleaders,” “double-team,” “teens.” Then the like-minded would work their trades out in private, over IM.
I didn’t do any of that. It was more noise, the opposite of what I required. What I did was fight my way into a room, any room was fine, and then I sat there in silence, waiting for the hackers.
The hackers had homemade programs, which they called proggies, and each proggie had some stupid scary-sounding name that paid homage to the miasma of gangsta rap and Mountain Dew from which it had been born. HaVok, AOHell, Fate X. The proggies enabled the hackers—or any kid who got hold of the software—to log on via fake and therefore untraceable screen names. They wielded godlike powers; for example, they could boot users out of chat rooms and usurp the freed-up space themselves. The hackers would go from room to room, recording all the names of all the users in each room. When they felt that they had enough names, they’d send out a mass email with a picture attached. The idea was that if everybody on the list replied with one picture, then everybody on the list would get however many free pictures. Of course not everybody responded, and some people only offered their “commons” to the share lists (sometimes the hackers tracked these people down and punished them for being skinflints), but there would be hundreds of names on each list. The Amway logic of the thing actually worked, and the result was cornucopia. It was the prosperity gospel. My apartment building had just installed broadband, complex-wide. I had never seen anything like this speed. It was a state of perpetual overload, and there was no reason—no way, in a sense—to ever stop. A single list might linger on for days.
With my name affixed to a list—or several—and the first fruits of the harvest starting to tick in, I would minimize (though never exit) the chat room window, maximize the mailbox window in its place, and begin.
A girl with a perfect, pale ass like an upside-down heart is standing in the doorway of a bedroom. Her own, it seems fair to assume. Her hair is tied back, appears wet. The picture is cockeyed, suggesting that the photographer was a little off balance, maybe snagged the shot while in motion, snuck it on the fly. We can see into the girl’s room, somewhat, around her shape and through her legs. There’s a loud pink bedspread, mussed. All kinds of stuff on the floor.
Every single one of these images was a betrayal. Privacies violated, trusts broken. That was the real frame narrative, the superstructure, and this knowledge made them so much more powerful. They stank of aura.
Except that wasn’t always the case, was it? A woman sitting in a rolling chair in a home office, a converted den, wearing a tank top only, tipping the chair back, legs spread wide, playing with herself with one hand and holding up a sign with the other: the name of some Usenet group, the date of the picture, the words #1 Fan. Swingers. Exhibitionists. Baby, you know how many people are gonna see this and get themselves off to it? No, baby, tell me, tell me all about it. Okay, baby. Now tell me again.
So there were two narratives, actually, of equal but inverse and irreconcilable power. It was either She never wanted this, or else it was She got exactly what she wanted. You had to decide for yourself. You had to make it up as you went along.
Topless girls in front of sinks, their own or that of some hotel room, blowing their hair out, brushing teeth, looking away from the camera or sidelong into it with an expression like Seriously, Anthony, would you knock it off?
In bed, fully nude, reclining, dark hair in a bun and a deep natural tan, legs crossed at the ankles, blanket scrunched down by her feet, weirdly demure, a single dollop of jism near her pierced navel like a pale moon orbiting a silver-ringed planet, one hand behind her head. In the other hand, a bulky gray cellular phone, which indicated that the image was from at least four or five years ago. And where was this girl now? Still with the guy who’d snapped the photo, or had their breakup been the trigger for his sharing?
I copied and saved my favorites so I could look at them again later. One folder, holding all I’d culled from the sites and from the lists. A window on my own desktop. No interference. No connection at all required. I could unplug the broadband, if I wanted, and just cycle through the thousand favorites I already had. But of course I didn’t do that. I minimized the whole AOL window, but inside it, tucked away, the mailbox was open and the chat was still logged on. I changed my desktop background to pure white. I hid all the other icons, and the toolbar, too. I opened the image browser. I pressed the little box that maximizes.
Here they were, surrounded with plain white pixels, pure radiance, mystic roses at the center of my heaven, burning bushes (I mean no pun). I stared until I saw clear through them and into their constitutive brightness. I aimed back at my own chest, and cleaned up with tissues that saturated and wept apart. As my frequency increased, so did my stamina, and my issuance came in watery, thin ropes. There were paper fibers spun up in the hair on my stomach.
I discov
ered the slide show option in a pull-down menu in the image browser. Click. It was synesthetic, full frontal sex light the color of the feeling of office air, white recirculation, bodies made of light, ever present for endless consumption yet never themselves consumed—skin that looked sweat-slick but was in fact cool to the touch, or would have been if it had been in fact touchable, made of something other than computer glass and unconsummated light. Skin smooth as keyboard keys, dry and noiseless as the planetlike spinning of the trackball in its cradle.
What had been born of boredom and curiosity, then mutated into enthusiasm and honest perversion, then refined itself further into a kind of connoisseurship, now seemed to have transcended all these things and become something else, which delivered neither pleasure nor its opposite. Its only truly novel aspect, at this point, was the sheer monstrosity of its breadth—the perpetual beckon of more and more. Even to call it compulsion would be to make it seem more dire, and thus significant, than it actually was. I had a habit. That was all.
Rock star head shots plucked from the pages of glossy magazines. They taped these to their walls. Or rappers. Inspirational posters in cheap frames. A lot of people don’t shut their TV off. They get caught up in the excitement and, forgotten, ignored, on it blares. Or maybe it’s muted. How could the image tell you? Or maybe they’ve got the volume turned way up so whoever is in the next room can’t hear. These are just for me, he told her, just for us. She gave him that look. He thought she wasn’t going to, but then she tugged at her blouse hem, tentative, testing, a toe dipped in water, and he knew she would. She did. Girls who squinch their eyes shut. Girls who stare back up at you, staring you down. “You.” Shaved or unshorn, or better still—shaving. Caught in the act. Process and method. So drunk she can’t stand. Here’s the two of us in Cabo. Okay, now here’s one of just her. Took this while she was sleeping. Shoulda thought twice, you cheating bitch. You slut. I love it when you call me that. Girls in showers, one arm across the breasts and the other waving away the camera, but smiling—exasperated, tolerant. Are you fucking kidding me, Anthony? Baby, it’s cool, just be cool.
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