The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  I turned off University Avenue to walk down something that wasn’t sure if it was a street or an alley. The backyards of the houses that faced Southwest First were to my left side, and the back end of a strip mall that faced University was on my right. It was a rutted, potholed, gouged-out road—treacherous for bicycles, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other. If you didn’t want to park behind the strip mall, there was really no reason to be on this street, which as far as I knew didn’t even have a name. I had the whole dismal scene to myself. Or thought I did, until I came within range of the smallish green dumpster behind the Gyro Plus, and noticed its being attended by a pair of urgent-looking punks. I understood their concern. The alley was well lit and if a cop happened to pass by they’d be nabbed for trespassing, vagrancy—who knew what else?

  The one serving as lookout was a girl about my own age, though this in itself was nothing special in a college town. Everyone here is about our age, and anyone who’s not—you just see through them. I was at the approximate peak of my visibility. In a year you’d be able to read a street sign through me; in three years I wouldn’t register at all. In the meantime, however, here I was.

  The girl seemed scrappy, wore black jeans and boots, and a green-and-black band tee shirt underneath a beat-to-hell leather jacket that was probably supposed to make her look tough, but it was outsize, hung loose on her thin frame, and made her actually look a little bit like she had been rooting through her big brother’s closet, playing dress-up. Her pursed lips were nearly white, and her gaze was steely, cold; or she wanted me to think that it was. I could feel her sizing me up as I approached. I kept my own eyes cast down. I wanted her to know I was no threat. We were two ships. But I did look up for a second, couldn’t help stealing a glance, and saw her lean over toward the dumpster and whisper to the man who, I could now see, was half in and half out of the thing, headfirst, his legs bicycling wildly in the air in what I understood was only a parody of struggle. He’d posted her as guard and now would not heed her warning. Giving her grief was obviously part of the pleasure he took in this mission. They were already behind me when I heard him shout, “Score! Dining room bag!”

  I froze in my footsteps, then turned back.

  “Thomas?” I called, my voice louder than I’d meant it to be. The girl looked positively frantic now. There was a nasty clang from within the dumpster. He’d hit his head clambering out. In one hand he held a big white sack of garbage with a hole torn in it; with the other he rubbed a spot on the back of his head. We were maybe fifteen feet apart, staring at each other.

  “What the fuck?” the girl said. Thomas burst out laughing.

  “Maybe the crazy bitch is right,” he said to her. “This is two amazing scores in one night. Maybe there really is a God.”

  The girl’s eyes went to slits, as if she were zeroing in on a target, and Thomas seemed to change in an instant as well. His joke had stung her, clearly, but somehow her flash of anger, instead of putting him on the defensive, had stoked his own. He glared back at her, and something ugly and silent passed between them, like a shape in fog. The silence spooled out. We were all just standing there. As quickly as I’d been discovered, I felt forgotten, and thought I might say good-bye and get back to walking. Or maybe saying hello in the first place had been my mistake, and it was better now to simply go without another word. But then the girl conceded the staring contest and turned away from Thomas to me. Her lips eased out of their grimace, an act that seemed to require substantial effort. But she did it, and took a few steps forward, and stuck a filthy hand out toward me, and said, “Hi, I’m Liz. You guys know each other?”

  “We grew up together,” Thomas said, before I could say anything. I nodded as I closed the distance between us. I took her hand in mine. She had a firm grip, and for a moment squeezed very tightly, as if daring me to challenge her strength. I didn’t. We pumped, the grime on her hand squishing between our palms. “K through twelve,” Thomas continued. “The whole bit.” He was trying to put some distance between the three of us and whatever had just happened or nearly happened between the two of them.

  “It’s true,” I said. “We’re from the same neighborhood, down south near Miami. Our families even caravanned up here together on freshman drop-off day.”

  “Hah, yeah—I’d forgotten about that. The long shining line of station wagons. That was us.”

  “So why haven’t we met him before?” Liz asked Thomas.

  “We just—”

  “Lost touch,” I offered.

  “Yeah, that’s about right,” Thomas said. “I dropped out, a disgrace to all good and diligent bourgeoisie everywhere, and moved in with you assholes”—he gestured at Liz—“but David stuck to the plan like he was supposed to. Didn’t you? So you must be graduating this year. Gonna move back to Miami, flip the old law/medicine coin? Or did that decision already get made? You could have done some summer classes a few times, I guess, finished a year early. Why, you could be thinking about the bar right now, couldn’t you?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m on a br— I dropped out.”

  “No shit,” he said, seeming genuinely impressed. “For what? You go to India and find yourself or something?”

  “I’ve just been hanging around. Working. Except I quit my job, so.” I shrugged. This thing about the job was as much news to me as it was to Thomas, but as soon as I heard myself say it I knew it was true. Another part of my life gone, chunks of glacier broken off into sea ice.

  “Jesus, man,” Thomas said. The invective drew a sharp look from Liz, which Thomas ignored. “No wonder you’re wandering the streets all night. You look like shit, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m serious. Hey, are you hungry?” He reached into the bag and rummaged, then came out with a foil-wrapped parcel, which he handed to Liz. She took it without comment. He dug in again. “Classic fucking American waste,” he said. “But lucky us.”

  Liz was unwrapping the parcel. “See,” she said, “Gyro Plus packs every order to go, because that’s their like procedure or whatever, even though most people stay and eat there. So the pita sandwiches get double-wrapped in wax paper and then in tin foil, then they get paper-bagged. It’s amazing, actually. It’s like they think this shit’s getting shipped across state lines or something. But what happens is people eat at the restaurant, maybe half or three quarters of their meal, and then what do they do with the leftover? Take it home? Go give it to a bum on the street? No. They wrap it back up and chuck it in the trash. So after the employees take the trash out, you find the bags that are from the dining room and bingo—feast.” She smiled self-consciously, looked down at the ground then up at me, and then away again. “Not that you asked.”

  “It looks wet in there,” I said. “Why is it wet?”

  “Sodas,” Thomas said. “Or water. Burst packets of ketchup, tahini spills. Condensation. All that organic matter in a sealed bag. It gets humid. But that’s why this place is so great. With the way they do the packaging—I mean obviously it’s fucking wasteful like I said and disgusting and they shouldn’t, but they do, and all it means for us is that everything’s wrapped, clean and fresh.”

  “But it’s surrounded by all that filth. I mean, it’s a garbage bag.”

  “But it’s protected from all that.”

  “But still, the idea.”

  “Fuck ideas. It’s food.”

  “Half-eaten food. There’s bite marks. What about germs? It was licked.”

  Liz cut in. “Some people cut the bitten parts off, but I don’t bother.”

  “Me neither,” said Thomas, “and I’ve never gotten sick from it once.”

  “Do you even eat the meat ones?”

  “If it was a bag that smelled like it baked in the sun all day, I probably wouldn’t,” Liz said. “Your old friend here might”—she pointed a thumb at Thomas—“but he’s a pretty big asshole, as I guess you know.” Thomas was loving this; he nodded and grinned.

  �
�But in this case,” said Thomas, “that’s not an issue, because Gyro Plus is open late on weekends, and this is all the stuff from last shift. It can’t have been out here more than a couple of hours.”

  It was charming, I thought, this rhythm they shared, apart from the grossness of what they were actually talking about. The way they finished each other’s thoughts like an old married couple or a pair of middle school girls. But more than charming—it was hypnotic, practiced but not rehearsed, pat but not rote, it drew you in. I could see the broad contours of what was doubtless a thoroughly detailed and painfully earnest if not entirely consistent system of values. They clearly both believed in what they were doing. These were people, I thought, who knew who they were.

  “But you still haven’t answered the original question,” said Thomas to me.

  “Which was what?” I asked.

  “Are you hungry?” said Liz, and held out the food in her hand. It was a falafel pita sandwich with all the fixings. Anyway that’s what it had been. Was that what it still was? Or was it waste now? And if it was waste, did that necessarily mean it couldn’t be rehabilitated—recycled, perhaps—into food again?

  I took the thing from Liz and brought it close to my face for a look. There were diced tomatoes, hummus glops, tabbouleh in dry clumps, and the fried balls themselves, with their crunchy brown skins and soft green centers. I had eaten at this place, ordered this very sandwich, countless times. Liz had peeled back the foil with a surgeon’s care. I’d watched her, and now I understood why she’d been so cautious. The pita was bloated, a supersaturated mush. The tahini had soaked through, sponging it. The foil gave the sandwich a coherent shape that it could no longer have maintained on its own, as it might have easily done several hours ago when it had been a hot meal. The thing in my hand was not hot, but neither did it have the thoroughgoing and authoritative chill of leftovers fished from a fridge. It was the temperature of the night itself.

  Liz had taken one bite before handing it over. She had started where the long-departed diner left off. I tried to tell which exact bite had been hers, thinking that if I really was going to humor Thomas, I would at least curtail my risks by following close on the heels of his friend rather than some anonymous customer. But what was the difference? Liz was as much a stranger to me as whoever had bought this sandwich in the first place, and she was almost certainly less hygienic than that person. She and Thomas weren’t merely dirty, they were unwashed. Their clothes were stiff. They stank. And I didn’t know them—not her, not him. Not anymore.

  “Are you sure there’s enough to go around?” I asked. Thomas raised an eyebrow at me and hefted the white bag up.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “This’ll feed the whole house for two days.”

  I took the biggest bite I could and stood there dumbly, chewing and being watched. It was drier than I’d thought it would be, and sucked up the moisture in my mouth. I kept chewing. It tasted okay, other than not being an especially impressive falafel sandwich, which of course, having been a customer there, was no more and no less than I already knew. No rancid aftertaste, indeed no hint at all of its having turned. The punks were right. It was fine. I swallowed.

  We went back out the alley-street the way I’d come, but we crossed University instead of turning onto it. We went into the northeast part of town, up a few sleepy blocks, and only then took our left turn, around the back of El Indio, the drive-thru Mexican place that they told me had a dumpster also ripe for the picking. I nodded, as if filing this information away for later use. What could I say? We crossed Thirteenth Street, over into the northwest, the student ghetto, my neighborhood, and apparently theirs as well.

  I saw the squat hulk that was Gator Glen Apartments, where I lived. It was a four-story building on a block-size plot, surrounded by single-family homes and duplexes. It was a monstrosity, I realized, a gray-white blot like a thrush in the throat of the night. I thought of the food in my refrigerator, and the beer. We could swing by, pick up what I had, and bring it all over to Thomas’s, make the feast that much sweeter. But that would mean bringing them to my apartment, opening up to their judgment my sorry life. I knew what they would think of my white walls and white carpet and white counters. It was a sterile place, barely a home, and in a way I had always known that. I had moved there straight out of the dorms, and the truth was that the apartment was largely indistinct from a dorm. It had come furnished, all-inclusive. Moving there had been the beginning of my slow drift out of the world. I saw that now.

  But still, the food. And if not the food, the beer. They would appreciate the beer. They were scroungers and would excuse anything on account of the beer. So maybe it was less about them than about me—not what they could accept, but what I could bear to have them know.

  We walked on, and a block later turned north again. The building fell out of my sight line, and I focused on the oak limbs high overhead, crisscrossing over and under each other, so you couldn’t be certain where one tree left off and another began. The whole mass swayed in the night breeze, a single solid billowing thing. I had fallen behind my new friends. I quickened my pace and caught up. It was only another block and a half before we reached their house.

  The yard was dark and large, a sea of loose dirt and fallen leaves wrapping around the small house on all sides. It was a single-story cinder-block home, with flaking paint and a front porch with torn screens. I could see lights on in the living room. There was a chain-link fence with a latch gate, from which was hung a broken plank of finished wood, perhaps a former bookshelf, on which a single word had been painted in loping strokes of blue: Fishgut. An orange VW microbus was parked in the yard, like an island in the leaf-sea. A red extension cord snaked out one of the bus’s open windows, ran clear across the yard and into a living room window that had been left open just wide enough to admit the cord. Liz opened the fence gate and held it for me. Thomas closed it behind us. I made my way up the walk, or what I believed was the walk, though all I could make out beneath my feet were more dead leaves. The front door was ajar: an inch of light. Liz swung it wide.

  A pair of aging hippies were on the floor in the middle of the living room, even though there were two couches and nobody sitting on either one. A girl had her legs curled up under herself on a beat-up armchair. Her hair was the color of seawater, tucked behind her severally studded ears, though it stuck out in some places and was matted in others. She was reading a paperback book called Omens of Millennium. She put the book down splayed open on her knees and looked up at us. Her eyes were a warm brown, set close in her big round face. She had ruddy cheeks, a silver ring through her septum, and a smile that spread like a wonderful spill. When looking down at the book she had seemed to have a little chin roll, but it disappeared as soon as she’d tilted her head up. Though I hadn’t seen her standing yet, I guessed rightly that she was three, four inches taller than me. She was wearing a white tee shirt that someone had stenciled on. Her own work, I guessed (right again, as it turned out). The stencil was a little blurry because she hadn’t used fabric paint, but the work itself was finely detailed. A woman in a lacy, high-neck dress, her dark hair in a tight bun that rode low on the back of her head, appeared in profile, gazing off to the left. Underneath her, in stencil caps so crude I assumed the contrast must have been part of the point, it read HELEN KELLER WAS AN ANARCHIST.

  Liz approached Keller-girl and leaned in to give her a kiss. The girl took Liz’s hands in her own and pulled Liz downward, into the armchair, so Liz had no choice but to pull out of the embrace or else climb onto the chair herself, which is of course to say on top of her friend, and this is what she did. She first tried to straddle the chair, but that didn’t work so she flipped herself sideways—careful not to break their lip lock—and splayed across the tattered upholstery of its arms, then made a V of her body and sunk down into perfect ease in the sitting girl’s lap. The Millennium book was lost in the press between them, its spine no doubt scoliating as they continued to squirm and kiss. Thoma
s had gone straightaway to the kitchen with the food, to sort the spoils from the spoiled, as it were. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing, and so simply stood in silence, hands jammed in pockets, watching the kissing girls.

  When the kiss finally broke, Liz looked back my way, and the second girl’s gaze followed Liz’s own. “I’m Katy,” the girl said to me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You’re still standing in the doorway,” she said. “Aren’t you allowed in?”

  “I’m Thomas’s friend,” I said.

  “Then you must be allowed in,” she said. The hippies ignored us altogether. I entered the room. Against one wall, a big boxy TV with its face bashed in sat on top of a coffee table. A bouquet of papier-mâché roses sprouted out of the jagged black glass hole. Thomas came in from the kitchen. In the light I could see him clearly for the first time since we’d met in the street.

  He had round black plugs in his earlobes and a ring through one eyebrow. He had a thick neck and clearly spent time working out. He was jacked, is what I mean. With his hoodie off, wearing just an A-frame shirt and black jeans, his body looked like a weapon. He had a dirty-orange Mohawk. It was wide and short on his otherwise bald head. I had been to this kid’s bar mitzvah and remembered how he’d suddenly insisted that everyone stop calling him Tommy, because that was a kid’s name and now he was a man.

  “Dinner bell!” Thomas shouted, holding the e in bell like a town crier, and down the hallway came people in various states of undress, wakefulness, and sobriety. The living room filled with warmth and odor, bodies and nuked food, the buzz of conversation. Someone said we should put the stereo on and someone put it on, and then someone said come on, turn it up, and someone said okay, quit yer bitchin’. Noise flooded the room. I couldn’t figure out who lived there and who was hanging out. Obviously it didn’t much matter. I could hear beer cans cracking, and a bottle of Old Grand-Dad bourbon was making the rounds. When it came to Katy she swigged like a sailor, and Liz—still splayed in her lap—growled low in her throat and then matched her, and then they went back to tonguing. I was sitting on the floor at the foot of the armchair they were piled in (the couches were full now), so my neck was sort of craned back and up at them, the angle almost vertical, my body all twisted around.