The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Katy stands next to Selah, kneads her friend’s shoulders as the two women watch the raiding party set out. The hardest part comes first—navigating the bus around the house, through the narrows of the side yard, to the back where the vehicle access gate is. “Oh,” says Selah softly. Katy’s still kneading, improvising a deep-tissue sort of thing. Is this the chance—finally—for her and Selah? Not that she’s been nursing some secret lust all this time, but once you have your hands on somebody, isn’t that just like the next obvious thing? The hippie gazes up at the punk. “Thanks,” she says, wriggling free of Katy’s hands. “Do you think they’ll hit the liquor store on their way back?”

  The bus is nosing out of the yard now, coming back up the street and passing them. “Hey guys!” Katy bellows at the bus. It jerks to a stop in the middle of the intersection at their corner. The reverse lights come on.

  The raid takes about two hours. There are myriad small scores—a bedside clock, one of those little wooden handheld back massager things—but the standout plunders are the TV, the stereo, the CDs, and the pillows from David’s bed. He rented the place furnished, so they can’t take any of the furniture, not that they want it. What about the scanner? Well, there’s no computer here to take—when they ask him, he says it broke and he never replaced it; nobody checks the tub—so what good is a scanner? Might be worth some cash, though not all that much, probably, certainly not as much as you might think if you didn’t know about these things, which Owl doesn’t. It was probably what, a hundred bucks new, Liz figures. Maybe less. Not that she knows, either. She’s sort of a technophobe, an aspiring Luddite. She just doesn’t want to deal with the thing, period. Owl, on the other hand, with typical hippie pragmatism, thinks money is money. So okay, let’s say it’s theoretically worth half whatever the original price was. Whom do they sell it to? A pawnshop. Would a pawnshop want computer stuff? There ought to be one out there that does; it’s a growing market, after all. Yeah, but now this is starting to sound like a lot of work.

  David’s in his bedroom packing himself a duffel’s worth of clothing, careful to leave behind anything with a prominent logo on it: Nike, A&F, Tommy. Fuck that shit. He can hear Owl and Liz arguing. Thomas, in the kitchen with Anchor, can hear them, too. Thomas has his head in the fridge. The milk’s turned, but everything else is still mostly good. There’ll be feasting tonight, that’s for sure, plus the long-term gains in staples and condiments. All this and a twelve-pack. Life is grand and the Lord provides, as Katy or Liz might say.

  But fuckin’ A, man, those two are still going back and forth about that stupid computer thingie.

  Thomas leaves the fridge door open and the twelve-pack on the kitchen table. He goes out into the living room, pushes past his quarreling friends. He knocks the scanner clean off the desk. It lands on its side on the carpet. He flips it upright with his boot then puts that same boot through its lid and face, shattering the plastic top and beneath that, the glass of the scanning bed. Problem solved.

  David, still in the bedroom, hears the dull crash and then the shatter, but he doesn’t stop what he’s doing or even call out to ask. Given that nobody’s screaming, it follows that nobody’s hurt, so who cares?

  Thomas walks back into the kitchen and finds Anchor sitting on the floor, chin in hands, staring at nothing.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he says. “You seem, like, off today.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “I don’t know, I didn’t really sleep last night. And my period maybe.”

  “You’re not on your period.”

  “No, I mean yeah, of course. I mean I think that it’s coming,” which is technically true since isn’t your period always coming anytime you’re not actually on it?

  “Oh,” Thomas says, hoping to convey that he’s a guy who gets what she’s going through, or gets that he can’t get it, or whatever the thing is he’s supposed to be letting her know he feels.

  Anchor’s not going to say this, but last night, instead of going over to Fishgut as planned, she let her dumbass roommate talk her into checking out this party that the roommate’s boyfriend’s frat was throwing. And there was fancy tequila there, and a bong, and it went the way these things go, and then she was somehow back in her dorm room—alone, thank God—throwing up a pizza she didn’t exactly remember ordering. How pathetically bourgeois. And now here she is being a drag, barely sentient, while this amazing thing is going on in front of her. She’s truly envious of David’s courage. He’s a role model, that’s for sure. David the hero! So okay, Anchor; time to pull your shit together. Get back out there on the field. She lifts herself up off the kitchen floor by pure fiat, too quickly and so her vision swims, but she doesn’t stick out a hand for balance. In fact, she doesn’t let on at all. She just stands there, giving Thomas her best blank face, praying he doesn’t press her any further. A few seconds later and she’s recovered, is ransacking cabinets, keeping herself alert with a little fantasy about how it’s gonna be when it’s only her and Thomas doing this exact same kind of looting at her father and stepmom’s place in Ponte Vedra Beach.

  When nobody’s paying attention, Liz pokes into the ruin of the scanner and finds the last of the three Polaroids, the close-up, which David apparently never bothered to put back in whatever shoe box with the other two. It’s bent but not torn. She’s got an idea now about what he said the other night. The big confession. What a prick, to have done this to this poor girl, doubtless without her knowing, much less consenting, and after the way she—that is, the girl, not Liz—put herself out there to please him. Men. And yet, doesn’t it sort of put his whole life in a kind of instant perspective for her? For repentance to emerge, a person first must despair with a vengeance . . . She could pocket the picture, show it to Katy. Or she could keep it to herself, a little ace in the hole in case of—well, she can’t think of an example, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be one. Isn’t that the whole point of in-case-of? But then her fingers pause mid-reach; she feels a stirring, an upswell of something within herself, this difficult and not quite nameable emotion, one that rarely visits her and that she always associates with the way she imagines Katy feels, effortlessly, all the time. The translation by grace of rage into mercy. Is compassion the word?

  She leaves the Polaroid where it is.

  Now the van’s loaded. They’re pretty much ready to go. Owl, Anchor, and Thomas are in the bus; David and Liz are making one last sweep. She’s looking at the block of knives on his counter. They’re Henckels, which is seriously high-end cutlery. He says it was a housewarming present from his parents, or some aunt. He doesn’t remember now. Anyway, he doesn’t even cook. Liz was going to take them earlier, then didn’t, but is now on the fence again. It’s like, salvaging is very anarchist, but coveting and owning and pack-ratting are not. Point, counterpoint. So what to do?

  “I guess I could always swing back by,” she says, meaning if she breaks down in a day or two and wants them after all, maybe as a little self-reward for not swiping the picture. Unless of course she were to come back by for the knives, and end up grabbing both, which is also possible. The thing about compassion is it rots like fruit.

  “No,” David says. He doesn’t raise his voice, but there’s a conviction in it that startles her. He’s shaking his head; weird look on his face she can’t read. Or else its sad unreadable muddle is itself the message, plain as day. “Take them now if you want them. I never want to see this place again.”

  Oh-kay, Liz thinks, tucking the block up under her arm. He sounds so sure of himself. She wonders how long he’s going to last at their house, before whatever head trip he’s on runs its course. Or he gets tired of Katy, which is what always happens with these thirds they pick up, these men Katy attracts, desperate young men lost at sea in their own too-easy lives, and Katy the captain of the steamer that plucks them from the yachts they take for leaky life rafts. Which makes Liz, what, skipper or something? Or better yet, first mate? A terrible pun, and moreover: not the point. The point is that afte
r all the succor and safe passage, the spirituality and the sexual healing and rocking each other like ocean waves, comes landfall. And when that happens, he goes. Whoever he is, whatever he might have promised to her—to them—in the heat of whatever, is forgotten or denied. He’s healthy now, well rested, ready for the world again. No more need for big ideas about a God who loves you without conditions, or the way we were meant to really live; he’s thinking about getting his old job back, maybe patching things up with Betty Sue. That’s the pattern, and David fits it, though admittedly not as snugly as she’s used to, which is to say, as she would like. His going nuclear on his life like this is something she’s never seen before, and truth be told she actually sort of pities him. He’s drunk on the discovery of how easy it is to drop out of the world. What he doesn’t yet know is how fucking hard it’s going to be to get back in, but that’s because right now he believes he’ll never want to. And there’s no way she could explain it to him, convince him of all this—he’d only think she was trying to get rid of him—so why not make the most of the situation? In a week or a month or whatever, when he realizes the scope of his disaster, he’ll probably want a lot of this shit back. So she’ll return the knives to him, if and when he asks. She promises this to herself, because despite his scuzzy secret, despite herself, really, she’s genuinely growing to like him, which is a lot more than she can say for some of the people Katy’s brought home. And yes, she knows that she, technically, is the one who brought him into the house, her and Thomas, but that’s not what she means at all. His coming into the bedroom, into their lives, was all Katy’s doing, and it’s just a fact that, like God, sometimes Katy works her will through Liz. Ah, Katy, Katy, Katy. Even the name knocks chinks in Liz’s angry armor, so the light shines through. A smile on her face now, a smile David thinks is for him. Well, why not let him? He tries hard enough to please her, after all. Hell, why not kiss him? Right here, amid the ashes of the life he’s immolated—this empty kitchen, that broken glass, and these superior knives—and let this be the seal of their truce, their alliance, in the name of the one who links them, the head of their triangle, the one who isn’t here. This kiss Katy won’t witness is for that very reason the ultimate testament to the depth and perfection of Liz’s devotion. Never am I more yours than when I am apart from you, doing those things of which you will never know.

  He tastes good, he holds her right, but still, the only thing making this possible is that in her heart she knows he’s only a ghost. She’s thinking ahead to the days and weeks after his inevitable departure, when Katy will be wounded by the loss, weakened and needful—she so rarely is—and Liz will get to tend to her and the two of them will be in utopia for however long. Until the cycle starts up again. The only person who never gets tired of Katy is Liz.

  They’re probably getting back to the house about now, Katy thinks. She’s riding her bike up Northwest Twenty-third Street, to Devil’s Millhopper Geological State Park, which is basically a thick ring of trees around the mouth of a hundred-twenty-foot sinkhole on the edge of town. Or maybe technically the Millhopper is part of the next town, Micanopy, Katy’s not sure, but in any case she thinks of it—the sinkhole—as her favorite place in all of Gainesville, outside of her own house. Her bike is an all-black fixed-gear, brand and model unknown, a good-bye gift from a girl she was lovers with a few years back, Sienna, a butch who worked at the used-bike shop on University and Sixth Street. Where is Sienna now? Katy thinks Providence, maybe. She remembers Sienna saying something about an anarchist bike collective there. Spots on the frame where the black paint’s flaking reveal a buried coat of neon green. Probably the bike was owned by a student, stolen by a crackhead, and sold to the bike shop, who repainted it, then stolen by Sienna and gifted to Katy. Cycle of life, Katy muses, and hey, wouldn’t that be a rad name for a bike shop?

  She turns left onto Northwest Eighth Avenue, a pretty steep hill, at least by local standards. If she had a geared bike and/or was in better shape, this could be a twenty-minute ride. As things stand, it’ll take closer to twice that long, but no matter. More time to think is all.

  Now she’s riding past the first of the planet sculptures: Pluto. This is really cool; in fact it’s why she chose this route. Some artist got a bunch of public funding to install the sun and all the planets in a “solar walk” down this mile-long stretch of Northwest Eighth, with all the distances between them proportional to the real distances, at a scale of like four billion to one. It’s amazing, the spaces between the back four, compared with how the first six are all packed in. What a strange, mind-blowing thing outer space is. The magnitude, cold waste between clusters of energy; this knowledge that staggers and stuns. Hard to imagine how God’s grace shines over all of it, out from it, how His presence infuses and blesses and sustains every cubic inch, every micrometer, every light year and galaxy and void. The atoms and subatoms that comprise this world, this reality, those planet statues (past Uranus now, approaching Saturn), the road below her, the trees overhead, the bike she’s riding, and—of course—her. Vast black gulfs between stars and planets, between each nucleus and the electrons hurtling in their orbits. It’s not a question of belief—she does believe, with her whole self—but rather one of processing power. She can comprehend these ideas, as ideas, but she can’t see them, can’t envision the fullness, the totality of the thing as the thing itself. What’s that verse in John? She’s passing Mercury, coming up on the sun statue now. The sculptures themselves are not especially impressive, but like so many other things in this world, their value is not in what they are so much as in what they represent, or better—point toward. A not grand thing may yet be a quite grand sign. Is this why God took the shape of a man? She imagines Jesus Christ, a blazing chalk outline mapped over a galaxy, ours, complete with connect-the-dots constellations. See Him drifting through the dippers, past Orion. Her Christ is not the crucified, but the resurrected Son of Man. He who lived and Lives and, Living, delivers life and life everlasting, in the form of those glimpses of the eternal that rupture our individuality, our confinement in time. He is the archetype in triumph, a man-shaped hole in existence, the eye of the needle of the world.

  Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. John 20:29. She knew she’d get it.

  By the time she arrives at the Millhopper it’s four o’clock, and the park is only open till five. That’s okay. Since she’s not driving a car, she technically doesn’t have to pay the four-dollar entry fee, and the whole thing is honor system anyhow—there’s nobody watching—but this is one place she likes supporting, no matter that it’s government-run. She fishes around in her jeans pocket and comes up with two singles, a quarter, a dime, and, weirdly, a Canadian coin the exchange value of which she couldn’t so much as venture a guess about. Oh well. She pushes the whole mess through the slot cut into the top of the wooden box, then walks her bike over to the rack and secures it with her chain and a Master lock that she expropriated from the Walmart on Thirteenth Street. Have a nice $9.95 worth of economic sanction, you union-busting sweatshop-loving fucks.

  She’s got the whole place to herself. Lucky! Though it’s not that surprising if you think about it. Summer Sunday like this, hot as hell and twice as muggy, though it’ll be cooler inside the sink, under all that tree cover, where a sweet breeze always blows. There’s this wooden staircase you walk down. At the very bottom there’s a viewing platform with some benches.

  As per the informational placards, the Millhopper’s unique formation has resulted in something like a miniature rain forest. You can find plants in the sink that you’ll hardly see anywhere else around this part of Florida, which is mostly swamplands and plains. There are several small streams and tiny falls formed by rainwater. Home to a startling variety of insect life, and so on. Katy knows all this, and isn’t interested anyway. She’s not exactly a nature buff. What she likes about the Devil’s Millhopper is the fact that from the bottom, looking up, all you can see is a round patch of sky ringed by the top
s of trees that rise fifty and seventy feet up from ground level. That plus the depth of the sink means almost two hundred feet between Katy on the viewing platform (once she gets there) and the treetop crown swaying up in the blue. It’s like she’s standing in the cradle of life, looking straight up at the eye of Heaven, or better yet, being looked down upon by It. Or both, actually. Why not?

  She also likes the legend, the story of how it got its name. That’s on a placard, too; the one sign she always makes a point of reading when she visits though she’s long known the tale by heart. It goes like this: Once there was an Indian princess living here, and the Devil wanted to marry her, but she wouldn’t. So, being the Devil, he kidnapped her, and all the braves in her tribe went to go fight the Devil and get her back. As they were closing in on him, the Devil made the sinkhole for them to fall in, which they did, but it didn’t stop them, and they started to climb out, so the Devil turned them to stone so they couldn’t, which is why there’s so much water coming out of the rock faces inside the sink—it’s the endless weeping of the turned-to-stone braves, and they cry not for their own sad fate but for that of their princess.

  The reason Katy likes this story isn’t obvious. In fact, she didn’t understand it herself for a long time. The Devil is the key element. At first it seems like a pretty cool Indian legend, and okay so what, but here’s the thing. The story assumes the existence of a classical Christian Devil, with the capacity for action in the world. But the Indians didn’t believe in any Devil, much less that one, and so you eventually realize that this isn’t an old Indian legend, it’s a white people’s legend about Indians. And if you extrapolate further, doesn’t it seem like the real “moral,” beyond the just-so story aspect of how the sinkhole formed, is that if the Indians had been Christians they might have been able to better resist the black magic of the Christian Devil, and therefore might have gotten their princess back and not been turned to stone?