The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Now here are her lovers on either side of her, kissing her closed eyes, licking tears from her cheeks, stroking her all over gently, tracing lines on her slick skin. They’re all angels in Heaven; animals in some cave. Liz lets out this massive raggedy sigh. It sounds like a cartoon, she thinks, like a sound effect or something, and only now, in the moment of her hearing herself think the thought about her thought about the sigh, does she register the sad fact of her restoration to the fallen state in which she exists, her noumenal and bound existence, though this hurt is mitigated by the comforts of familiarity, home again home again, and isn’t it sort of wonderful to pull back from the infinite, withdraw into the skimpy little cosmos of the shuttered-up self? The demon already chattering again, and this torment not without some quotient of pleasure—Liz, you masochist, you head case—she berates herself for ever having doubted her lover, or the fact that she’s the luckiest girl in the whole wide world.

  Now they’re running late for church and there’s still this problem of what will David wear. The plain white tee shirt he had on when he came here would be pretty much acceptable, maybe, only he can’t find it. He’s scouring the heaps and piles strewn about the bedroom floor, flinging one wrong item after another from his search path. Nothing. He’s like a lawn mower with no catch-bag. For the past few days he’s been wearing the HELEN KELLER WAS AN ANARCHIST shirt that Katy had on that night they all met. Since then, she’s been wearing a sleeveless puke-green hoodie (he loves the brown shrubs of her hairy pits) and Liz only ever wears black. Except for today, apparently, when both girls are dressed up sort of like they decided to be librarians for Halloween. Well, wherever the white shirt’s got off to, it’s staying there. They need a backup outfit.

  Katy and Liz are rummaging together in the bedroom closet, the closet door eclipsing them from David’s view. They’re in there long enough that he begins to wonder if they’re getting up to something, and if so if he should join them—can they really be serious about this trip to church?—but then they emerge, exultant, bearing forth a man’s pale pink dress shirt that looks as if it hails from some dumb movie made in the early ’90s about corporate malfeasance in the mid-’80s. Where did it come from? A thrift store, an old lover, the trash—who knows? The point is it’s here. Now let’s see if it fits.

  David buttons it up and stretches his arms out to the sides, then forward. It’s baggy on him, but it’ll do. There’s a coffee stain like the map of a sandy island on one of the shirttails. He frowns at it. He’s standing in front of Katy’s full-length mirror, which she found by the side of the road some months ago, and which, despite a jagged forking crack like petrified lightning through its middle, is still more than adequate to their needs. David sees himself sliced and sectioned, all the angles slanting crazily and none quite adding up. Liz is behind him, a Picasso face peeking around his shoulder. She says he should tuck the shirt in to hide the stain. Also, it’ll seem less puffy that way. She reaches around his waist, opens his jeans up, pushes them down his thighs (couldn’t find his underwear, either, apparently), and smoothes the fabric of the shirt down all around. She pulls the jeans back up and closes them—all business—then fidgets with the fabric to make sure the row of shirt buttons lines up with the button on his jeans.

  You know what? He looks okay.

  And so off they go through the late morning sun, through soupy swamp air, past still-dark houses, bars with their faces veiled by metal pull-grates, toward St. Augustine Catholic Student Center on University Avenue. They slip quietly into the eleven-thirty mass, which has already begun, squeezed together in an otherwise empty pew in the dead-last row like the bad kids in class. Katy’s favorite part is the recitation of the creed, which they at least haven’t missed. She loves how they lay everything out in that blasé liturgical murmur, as if nothing could be more reasonable and mundane. The whole thing is teaching her something, but she isn’t sure what.

  David has never been to a church service before. Like really and truly: never. Not once. He’s on his knees during silent prayer. The kneeler, which folds out of the pew in front of him, has got a light ocher pad that looks like leather but feels more like vinyl. He’s unsure at first of whether it can bear his full weight—it looks kind of flimsy—but everyone else seems to be going for it so he does too and of course the thing holds. Relaxed now, sort of, he starts to think about how strange this all is, how unlikely—not his being here now but his never having been before—and what it says about the place he was brought up: something about Jews being clannish, closed off. Protective, his mother might say; and with good reason, his father would undoubtedly add. Weirdly, sitting here, he can for the first time in his life understand what it is they’re so afraid of.

  The priest with his shepherd’s crook, or whatever you call it. Wisps of pungent smoke from the swinging censer. Mother Mary ablaze in east-facing stained glass. A boy in a white smock-thing ringing a small gold bell. And above it all, mounted high, close to the vaulted ceiling with its long wide ribs like the hull of an overturned ship, hangs the Man. He gazes down with His weary eyes, blood running from the thorn wounds in His scalp, the gash in His side. And yet His countenance is steadfast. He emanates endless love from the very heart of His endless pain.

  This shit’s kind of amazing.

  He glances over at Katy, who has been watching him approvingly and now meets his gaze with one of her signature incomparable smiles. It’s like she can’t help but beam all the time. Though maybe that smile was for Liz, who is on his other side, looking over his bent neck to watch Katy watching him. But really, what’s the difference? Katy is inexhaustible, she’s a wellspring, her reserves don’t run dry. There’s enough of her for both of them. (And then some, no doubt.) He puts a hand on each of their thighs and squeezes. Not sex now, but something both deeper and more elemental: intimacy, proximity. From each girl comes an answering hand.

  There they all are: look at them, on their knees, heads bowed but eyes wide open, joined. A veneration of presence, the breaking down of the walls that make each of us one and one alone. A thing that is three that is also one. Godhead. He understands now why Katy wanted for them to come here.

  After mass there’s a reception in St. Augustine’s sunny limestone courtyard, which sits beside the—rectory, is it? Katy can never keep all the names for things straight. It’s part of what she likes about Catholics, all that wonky terminology and structure. Trying to make heads or tails of it, and pick out the best parts, is like being set loose on a shopping spree.

  “Rectory, right?” she stage-whispers to Liz as the three of them make their way toward a folding table set with lemonade and butter cookies on top of a white plastic tablecloth. But Liz doesn’t know, and David just laughs when she asks him, as if the very idea of him being able to answer her is the best joke he’s heard yet today. (In fact it is.) The tablecloth flutters and snaps in the hot, hard breeze. They stand in a tight triad, together apart in the midst of the larger gaggle, letting the happy chatter of the worshipers rise up like a fence hemming them in. The lemonade is warm, and too sweet; the butter cookies are already soft with humidity. Still. If the first rule of anarcho-mysticism is Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, the second rule is Whatever’s not nailed down.

  Katy notices they’re being eyed by a pair of student volunteers. The volunteers have white name tags on their crisp white clothing: her blouse, his polo. They glance over, then turn back to each other, then glance, then turn again. Katy feels an attack of self-consciousness, a moment of crushing doubt, like the other night. It comes from nowhere, the cold hand of despair grasping her heart.

  The three of them stink to hell, their grimed bodies and clothes in this merciless sun. And their attempt at dress code, the thrift store regalia, Katy’s parrot-green mop not even brushed—who are they kidding? Their best attempt at appearing civilized is basically indistinct from parody. Not their intention, of course, but try telling that to the morality squad over there. Katy shifts her weight
from one leg to the other, like a kid who has to go potty. Nervousness flashes over her whole body like the cold blast that greets you at the door of a walk-in freezer. It makes her breath short. She dry-swallows her butter cookie. Her lemonade’s all gone but she can’t refill her glass—won’t, anyway—because she knows they’re watching her, all three of us, thinking how we’re just dirty punks here for a free snack, freeloaders, which of course is a part of the truth, but not even close to the whole. Hell, not even the half.

  She’s about to announce that it’s time to bolt when the student volunteers start heading over. Too late to run now that there’s been eye contact. Got to deal with whatever it is. She can read the name tags now, so it’s not just anyone, it’s SARA and ZACHARY with the big smiles fixed to their faces. They’re young, freshmen probably, or maybe he’s a sophomore. But this girl, yeesh, she’s got braces. “Hi,” she says, and puts her hand out for any of the three of them to take. Liz and David expect Katy to take the lead here, but after a long second it becomes clear she’s not going to, so David reaches out and shakes hands with Sara, who beams. Liz says hello to Zachary; he nods at her.

  “Welcome to St. Augustine,” Sara says. “Is this your first time with us?”

  “Why yes,” David says. “Today’s the day.” Big dopey smile. Katy can’t tell whether he’s making fun of the girl and she doesn’t get it, or if he’s actually meeting her on her own level, somehow, and she’s thrilled to have him there.

  “Well, it’s great that you’ve decided to join us,” Sara says, addressing the empty space between David and Liz, ignoring Katy altogether, presumably because Katy declined to introduce herself. “Let me tell you a little bit about what goes on here. Are you students?” Zachary stands a few steps behind Sara, supervising or else trying to watch and learn. He could be her boss or he could be her trainee. Katy’s taken a couple of steps back herself, is sort of off to one side now, adjunct to the circle but not part of it. She feels miles away. David looks at Katy—she gives him nothing—then turns back to Sara and says, yes, they’re students. “Great,” Sara says, her happy voice rising to a bona fide chirp. “We have all kinds of activities and groups for our Catholic Gators.”

  Katy wanted to be the one to take the hand. So why did she freeze? Not because she really thought they were going to be asked to leave—she’s been here enough times to know that their whole thing is to be all-embracing. At St. Augustine they strive to break the stereotype of the church as some medieval behemoth burning the last candle for a geocentric universe. That whole thing about being thrown out was just her panic talking.

  Truth is, these Catholics’ moderateness, and more generally their modernity, is at the heart of what spooks her about them. How the archness and archaism of their faith seems to fit so snugly in with the regular lives they’re all living right now. What can the gilded crucifix, and the Man hung thereon, mean to the boy who buys sweatshop-produced Nikes at the mall by the highway? To the girl with the sorority pin, or anyone behind the wheel of an SUV? She knows these are cliché questions, straight out of Anticapitalism 101, but cliché or not, the questions are earnest. How can it be that the crucified Christ means so many different things to so many different people, all at once? How can He contain it all?

  Katy hears David and Liz thanking the two student volunteers, though all the boy did was stand there. The good-byes bring her back to earth. She sees that David now has a trifold pamphlet in his hand: Catholic Living and Today’s College Student. They crunch up their paper cups and toss them in a blue plastic garbage can the size of an oil drum. It’s about three-quarters full. They walk out of the courtyard onto University, then take the first available left off the main road. David tosses the pamphlet in a metal wastebasket on a corner. They’re back in the student ghetto now, on oak-shaded streets lined with run-down houses filled with nonnuclear families of all varieties and kinds. Safe now from the tractor beams of the horrible good Christians, they’re together in a place where they can be themselves, free as the day God made them, headed home.

  Their route happens to take them by David’s apartment building. It took a few days to get the information out of him, and when he finally told them where he lived he actually apologized. Unlike with the porno thing, a subject they haven’t broached again and won’t, this they took him lengthily to task on. They made him understand exactly how and why corporate real estate is destroying the student ghetto, and more generally, the town. That was a good exchange; by the end of it they’d had to talk him out of burning the damn complex down.

  “High style,” Liz says, with a nod toward the building, obviously relishing the chance to give him grief. It’s basically good-natured ribbing, David knows, but still, when he thinks about his life up until a week ago—how lost and miserable he was, how he barely even understood what he was feeling—he has a hard time holding it together. The alienation from the self. The—is ennui the word? Soul-suffering? Despair? Since he met them, life has been one unrelenting miracle. He’d like to blot out everything before last Sunday and believe himself newborn, reborn, in a world itself newly established, exactly one week old.

  “Forget it,” Katy says, seeing the shadow over his face, lips pursed in the international language of not handling this well. “Seriously.” She laughs again.

  “I bet you’ve got all kinds of cool shit in there,” Liz says. “Big-screen TV, right?”

  Katy gives Liz this complex-sentence look that says, Do me a favor and lay off him; I’ll make it worth your while later. But, interestingly, it’s Liz’s remark that seems to have perked David up.

  “Well, it’s not a big screen but—yeah, there’s a TV. Other stuff, too.” He pauses. There’s a thought forming. They’re about a half block past his building, paused on the sidewalk, Katy’s hand in the space between his shoulder blades, rubbing. He’s looking back at the complex. They’re looking at him. He turns to them again, eyes big.

  “What we need is a, like, raiding party.”

  They all let that hang there a second.

  “Got your keys?” Liz asks.

  “They’re back at the house somewhere.”

  “Anyway, it makes more sense to come at night,” Katy says.

  “Why?” says Liz. “You don’t have to sneak around when it’s your own shit you’re stealing.”

  So they book it back home and start digging around in the couch cushions and the piles of crap on the bedroom floor, looking for the keys. David remembers now: he slipped them out of his pocket, along with his wallet, that first night. He’d put both items on the nightstand, Liz’s side, because at that point he’d known her longer. The wallet’s still sitting right where he left it, but the keys are gone. Amazing to think he could live a full week of life without needing to use or even see any money, his driver’s license, the keys to his own house. These people know what freedom means. He is so lucky and grateful to have been found. And sure enough here the keys are, underneath the nightstand, where they must have fallen. All the way back by the wall.

  He goes out to the living room and reports success. Thomas says Owl says that if David wants, they can drive the van over to Gator Bait Apartments and load it up. It’ll be easier than hauling everything by hand. “This is gonna be a riot,” Thomas says. “Bunch of punks loading a whole yuppie apartment into a fucking microbus.”

  The raiding party is as follows: David, Liz, Owl, Thomas, and Anchor, this girl who’s been coming around a lot lately. She’s always wearing this one black hoodie, never mind that it’s the middle of the landlocked Florida summer, hardly ever below ninety, even at night. She’s a spindly five foot three, pasty-faced, broken out around her chin. She lives in the dorms, is taking summer classes, and will be a sophomore when the fall comes, that is, if she doesn’t drop out like all her awesome new friends have. She’s got this incredible laugh, if you can get her to laugh, though so far it seems that only Thomas can, which is amazing in itself given that his reputation is as the overearnest, humorless one. But try
telling that to Anchor, who’s so crushed out on Thomas she’d eat glass for him, and probably wishes he’d ask her to, so she could prove it. All in all, a sweet kid.

  Katy begs off the trip. “You’ve got plenty of hands already,” she says. “I’d be getting in the way.” This makes perfect sense to Owl and the rest of them—even Liz doesn’t bat an eye—but David gets kind of weird. Everyone’s ready to go and waiting for him, but he’s pulled Katy aside. They’re in the bedroom. Are things okay? Should he not be doing this? He’s worried that her sitting out the raid means she doesn’t really want him to live here. Or maybe Liz has said something.

  “Look,” Katy says. “Part of sharing your love with more than one person means needing more alone time than you would in a one-on-one monogamous relationship. It’s about balance, and you’ll see what I mean soon enough.” She kisses him, gives him a squeeze through his jeans. “Besides,” she says. “I need to spend some time getting ready for tonight. But listen: I love you, Liz loves you”—he raises his eyes a little—“come on, you know she does. She’s in the van, isn’t she?” As if on cue, the horn bleats in the yard. He’s holding this whole thing up. “We both love you, and you love us. Now go already, so you can get your ass back here.” Another hearty squeeze—it’s a miracle anyone ever gets out of this bedroom—then he kisses her one last time and then he goes.

  She follows him to the front porch, where Selah, on a dirty plastic patio chair, looks up from the hemp necklace she’s twining to watch him pass by. David walks out to the van and climbs in the open side door. Thomas shuts it behind him. Owl, in the driver’s seat, sticks his hand out the window and waves at her, a rollie between his first two fingers. Selah smiles, sending him good vibes. The cherry of his cigarette falls out, a weak streak of orange-red through the blue afternoon. It lands on the leaf carpet and smolders, but does not ignite.