Talk about your cultural imperialism; talk about plain old fucked-up. And yet. There’s something beautiful about it also, sort of running concurrently with the monstrosity. She can’t put her finger on it exactly, but it has to do with ideological miscegenation, how all cultures are just hodgepodges, collages, patch jobs. Try putting it this way: the monstrosity is the beauty.
Katy’s about halfway down the staircase, a series of steep flights linked by switchback landings. She’s paused on one of these, surveying all she sees before her: trying as always to really and truly open her eyes, heart, and spirit to this experience. Her self-articulated goal is to take everything in. She’s even breathing deeply, gulping swollen lungfuls of wet air and holding them until the wonderful burning in her chest lets her know she’s absorbed every last whisper of oxygen. May the air she releases be pure carbon dioxide; let it be as a blessing to the trees.
If you stuck the Statue of Liberty in the Devil’s Millhopper, only its torch would stick out. (That’s not counting the base, but still.) The vibe here is ancient and wild, soul-memory stirred in deep time. Primeval, if that’s not too cheesy to say—and shit, Katy thinks, if it is then so what? Look around. Positively Precambrian. It’s Edenic—no, no, scratch the adjective form; this is Eden. Everywhere she looks: life! Live oaks and longleaf pines. Berry bushes buzzing with attendant insects, countless ferns, plus a plenitude of lesser scrubs, shrubs, and grasses, all nameless—at least to Katy—but what do names matter? Everywhere they rise up from the soaked brown ground. Lichens blooming wintergreen-pale on trunks and branches. Arm-thick vines strung tree to tree like power lines. Who can say where they start or end? Who says they ever do? Water burbling through stream beds, or spinning free from fissured rock face into space, falling and then splashing down, sucked up with eager, greedless relish by the soil and porous lime. She’s not deep enough down yet to see the Indians’ tears but she can hear their burbling, can picture the vermilion mosses coating the wet black faces of stone. Spindly limbs hang low over the stair path; tiny spiders swing on threads of sticky silk so thin they’re invisible until they catch the light. And lizards on the topsides of those same branches, flashing fiery speckled dewlaps, ready to mate. Squirrels giving chase up and down trunks broad and gnarled and impossible with age, and the rodents’ chittering lost in the high chorus of a million cicadas, and this ceaseless noise pierced by bird squalls or some lone woodpecker’s sporadic tattoo.
Everything throbbing together, and all of it holy—each single thing, and the unity of all things, and the throb itself.
Katy rushes the rest of the way down the stair path. At the bottom, on the bench, she slings her backpack off, unzips it, scrambling for her journal and pen. Got to get this all down while it’s fresh. Before the ecstasy of God’s abundant grace—always present, always boundless, but only ever revealed in fragments, in glimpses—starts to fade. She’s flipping past unsent letters, poems in progress, sketches of Liz. It’s mere seconds till she arrives at the blank page, cracks the spine of the journal for luck, sets it down in her lap, uncaps the pen, and sets nib to paper, but she can already feel the revelation draining out of herself. Trying to focus her mind, trying to snatch shreds of it back, only makes it fade faster. Why does she keep doing this? There are things that exist beyond the limit of what can be described, captured, written, or even communicated. They can only be experienced, it seems, and all the mystics she’s ever read are in agreement on this one point. Does she really think she can succeed where Ibn Arabi, Isaac Luria, Aquinas, Crowley, and the anonymous monk who wrote Cloud of Unknowing all failed?
She puts the journal away and just sits there, a little pissed at herself but still more or less enchanted with the beauty of the place, etc. A few minutes go by, then she gets the journal back out, just to doodle or whatever. She draws a black widow, a rose, and on its own page, the A for anarchy inscribed in a heart shot through with an arrow that is also the crossbar of the A: Parker’s symbol, and the unofficial “logo” for their group of friends.
It’s getting on toward the time when the park closes. Probably she could stay if she wanted to—is the ranger really going to come all the way down here and check that it’s empty?—but it’ll be a long ride home, and there’s people coming tonight, and her still without anything to say to them. Plus she’s curious what happened with David and the raiding party. Better then that she doesn’t dawdle. She puts the journal and pen away, starts back up the stairs. It’s always such a drag having to leave this place.
It’s a few minutes before six and the living room is filled with the salvage of David’s life. Everyone’s sitting around on the floor, picking out what they want, or what’s salable. Liz is methodically checking the backs of about four hundred CDs for scratch marks. Open the case, pop the disc out, hold it to the light, put it back in the case, decide which pile it goes in. Katy enters, a sweaty mess. She’s tired from her ride, plus sapped by the heat of the day, so she gives perfunctory kisses to her girlfriend and her boyfriend then makes for the shower, which is in Fishgut’s only bathroom, which is at the head of the small hallway and shares a wall with the kitchen.
When she’s done she dries herself off with one of the four or five towels crammed on the rack, a royal blue one, fixes it around her waist, walks topless into the living room and announces that she’s taking a nap, if that’s cool with everyone. Anchor, supine on the couch, peeks out through the keyhole in the hoodie drawn tight over her face. “Huh?” she says, in this totally cute voice, like a puppy yawning.
“Aw, honey,” Katy coos. “What did you do last night?” Anchor shrugs. “Honey, why don’t you come lay down in a real bed?”
Without a word, Anchor negotiates herself up off the couch and sort of gingerly stumbles between the stacks of CDs, past Katy, and straight into the bedroom. Thomas and Liz, meanwhile, are sharing a look about five pages long. It amazes Thomas—not Katy’s audacity, which he’s long since accustomed himself to, but the weird way in which he and Liz are allies. If any of this registers with David, he doesn’t let on. Katy, of course, catches all of it, but she honestly just wants to curl up with Anchor and sleep—she’s in her nurse mother mode now—not that she’s going to explain herself to these two, and furthermore, not that it would be any of either of their business if she did have her mind on the other thing. Let them wallow in their negative energy, if that’s what suits them; we’re all freemen and freewomen here. “So okay,” she says to whoever’s listening, presumably David, though Selah—on the opposite couch from where Anchor was, at work on a new hemp necklace—might be giving her half an ear. “Somebody wake us in like, an hour and a half.”
In the bedroom, she takes the towel off, gives herself a once-more-over with it, then lets it fall to the floor. She climbs into bed naked and sidles up against fully clothed Anchor, who will be the little spoon. The women drift to sleep, together, almost immediately, and find themselves still together in a dream where they’re both standing—more like floating, actually—in some directionless, depthless, pitch-dark nowhere.
“Are you okay?” Katy asks.
“Yeah, I think so,” Anchor says. Katy reaches out through the nothing and squeezes her friend’s hand.
A faint light appears in the ungaugeable distance. Or has it been there and they’re only now noticing? And what is that small bright thing that wobbles but does not waver? It’s like a pinprick in a sheet at first, but then it’s more like a small coin. Before, Katy felt like they were steady, or at a mild drift, and thought that the dark was water or it was space or it was solid—that it held them, in any case. Only now does she realize, in the moment that she thinks to herself that they could start running (or is it in fact the moment before she thinks it? or is it in fact the moment after, as if wanting made it so?)—only now does she realize that they are not afloat, nor suspended, nor buoyant at all, but rather standing on warm ground.
Anchor squeezes back and Katy knows they understand each other. They release hands and st
art to run.
How long have they been running for? Anchor doesn’t know. She doesn’t get winded easily, and running in this world is so much easier than running in the other—the one she knows is her world, i.e., the real one—even though right now she can’t exactly picture it. From where she’s presently at, actual life is as hazy and scattered a memory as the last hour of last night’s dumb party. Right now it’s like only this running is real. She can feel sweat beads forming at her hairline. She could run forever, she thinks. The light doesn’t get closer or farther away. It doesn’t flicker or change again.
The laws of this place operate—and she’s sure that there are laws here—in a way that Anchor cannot grasp. But she’s got an inkling that she trusts: this world may be a dream, but the ground isn’t. It is real. Maybe it wasn’t before but now it is. It’s getting more real, in fact. Not just dirt now; sometimes the crunch of a leaf, and dull bursts of pain when she comes down hard on a small rock. She has no shoes on and is pretty sure Katy doesn’t, either. She thinks they’re in some kind of forest. She worries: What if there’s a hole or something? What about animals? What if one of them slams into a tree? Oh, but the trees all seem to be far from them. They are dim shapes. She sees them coming and skirts them easily. She does not, of course, stop running, or take her eyes off the light. Somewhere behind her Katy is wheezing and puffing, struggling to keep up with her faster, fitter friend.
What made her think this was a forest? It’s not anymore, if it ever was. Those trees, or those shapes she thought were trees, are gone now, replaced by shrubs and outcroppings of rock. The ground is different, too. The dirt is getting sandier, soon will be sand. There are hills in the close distance, mountains farther off. Desert again? She still doesn’t know much about where they are, the world is still mostly shadow, but she knows this: the forest has given way to the valley.
So the obvious question is: where does the valley go?
On and on they run, and she can feel it in her lungs now. The air has a crispness to it, a chilly bite. Her legs are getting tired: thigh muscles, calves. So there are limits, even in this world. And so how must Katy be feeling? When she next steps down, Anchor’s feet plunge into wet sand. She keeps her eye on the dime of brightness that sits so low on the horizon, as if balanced on that thin dark line. Is it alone the thing that lights this place up—what meager, miserly light that there is? What’s that sound she hears? That rushing. That crash that repeats and repeats, instances of crash and rush running into one another, becoming indistinct auditory mush: an unending roar.
The salt in the air makes Katy feel alert. Her legs are screaming for mercy; her lungs are tied in bows. This night feels as if it’s lasted a thousand years already. It may last another, could keep going on and on. Or it may end quite suddenly. Either—any—way would make sense. There will be some confusion and then they’ll be—well, somewhere familiar. Wherever they were before here. She can’t remember it just now, but she knows it was somewhere, and furthermore that they’ll know it when they see it, i.e., when they get back. Katy’s certain. But here they need to focus, because dream or no dream, whether time is short or long, they have run out of land, are inside of the tide line, down in the runny stuff, where pools gather and fill with colorful inchfish that wash in to feed and then back out again, tiny aquaverses existing for mere seconds, lifetimes on lifetimes, obliteration and rebirth.
Katy stumbles. One arm flails, wild. She goes to her knees, which sink in. Waves wash water over her legs.
Though the sea is frigid, positively North Pacific, she reaches down with cupped hands and draws some up. She points her face up at the dark empty sky, closes her eyes and spills ocean down upon herself. There’s no explaining how good this feels, even though the water is incredibly salty—so salty it burns. Merely closing her eyes wasn’t quite enough; she should have squeezed them shut. But she brings the cup of her hands back down to the water. Again. Again.
A bigger wave sweeps in and she’s knocked nearly over. The waves are getting bigger all the time now. Perhaps a storm is coming. And again as if thinking made it so, there’s a rumble of thunder. She looks around for lightning but sees nothing: no flash in the distance, no cloud-muted jag. Maybe she only imagined the thunder, but better to be safe. She stands up and walks out of the water, up the beach.
On a dune, Anchor is sitting cross-legged, the way that when she was a kid her teachers used to call Indian-style, holding a leather-bound book about the size of an encyclopedia volume for a second-rate letter, maybe K. She hasn’t opened it yet. The book has no writing on its front, back, or spine. It is shut with a metal clasp—brass, she thinks—but instead of a lock on the clasp there’s a button in the shape of a heart. She’s pressing it but it’s stuck and won’t budge. She looks up and sees Katy approaching, back from whatever it was she was doing down at the water’s edge. She’s glad to see her friend, and stands up in greeting.
“Maybe you’ll have better luck,” she says. Katy shrugs, gives her this weird wan smile, takes the book. She presses the heart-button and it pops right open—of course. This is fairy princess spirit mother pagan priestess Katy we’re talking about here. Who else should the enchanted book open for?
“What does it say?” Anchor asks, but Katy either doesn’t hear her or can’t answer; maybe can’t make words. It is brightening in night beach world, as if the moon had risen, and indeed it has. That dime light in the distance—she’d forgotten all about it, they both had—is centered in the sky now, larger by several orders of magnitude and blazing like an oculus at noon. It’s the brightest moon that Anchor’s ever seen. It burns her eyes even to glance. She looks away, back down at Katy, who is still staring at the book, though not, Anchor notices, turning pages. She walks around Katy and peers over her shoulder.
There are no pages in the book. It’s an unbroken surface, the inside, with no gutter in the middle, no valley where leaf curves in to spine. The inside of the book is a mirror.
When Anchor’s face enters the image in the mirror, Katy’s trance or whatever is broken. How long was she staring at herself like that? She snaps the book closed, holds the volume close against her body, and looks up at the moon, a disc of clean white fire, waxing huge. She feels Anchor draw close up beside her, afraid. The moon looks, Katy thinks, like the widening mouth of a tunnel, but she knows that what she sees is not an empty space, but rather a solid object or even a living thing. And of course they’re not approaching it—they’re not moving. It is the moon that moves, screaming silent down to greet them with its radiant kiss.
Anchor, bolt upright in the bed, crying: What the fuck oh my God Jesus fuck.
Katy, sleepily: What? Hey, don’t take His name—
Anchor, screaming: Fuck you what the fuck was that?
Thomas, kicking the unlocked door open: Katy, what did you fucking do to her?
Katy: I didn’t do anything. We had a dream.
Anchor: Shut up.
Katy: The same dream—right?
Anchor: What the fuck.
Liz, trying to get past Thomas, but failing: Katy, are you okay?
David, casually, from the living room: Hey, what’s going on?
Katy, to Anchor: We were there together.
Anchor: I, I—
Katy: And so you must know the same thing I know now.
Thomas: Katy, leave her the fuck alone.
Anchor, to Thomas: Hey, dude, you’re not my fucking father, okay?
Thomas: I just—
Anchor: No.
Liz: Thomas, let me through.
Thomas, hands in the air: You know what? Fuck every last one of you.
Liz, passing through the door space vacated by Thomas: Katy, are you okay?
Katy: I’m amazing. We both are.
Anchor, voice shaking: That was so fucked.
Katy, taking Anchor’s hands in her own: It’s okay. I know it’s scary, but it’s not a bad thing.
Liz, whining: What are you guys talking about?
David, from the living room: Everything cool in there?
Liz, to David: Fuck you.
Liz, to Katy: Baby, can you please let me in?
Katy: I’m sorry, but it’s up to Anchor.
Anchor: Fuck it. Let’s go look and see.
Here they come from the bedroom in a gosling line, Anchor out front, Liz behind her like a warden, and Katy—dressed now—behind Liz. David joins the procession and follows them out back.
(On the front porch, Owl and Selah are doing their best to pretend that none of whatever this is is actually happening, while Thomas, furious, has locked himself in his bedroom with the stereo cranked all the way up. Maybe this Propagandhi record will just blot everything out until he’s capable of dealing with his friends and/or lover without wanting to punch all their faces in. He punches the wall instead, which seems like it ought to be cathartic but isn’t, and now his fucking knuckles are bleeding.)
David and Liz have unstaked Parker’s tent and are dragging it off its plot of ground, trying to jostle as few of the items inside as possible in the process. Anchor is directing them in their work, her eyes growing wide as the newly exposed rectangle of earth is revealed to contain a small dark square that at some point was dug up and then refilled. “Fuck me,” she says, awestruck. The fear and anger that accompanied her awaking are apparently in recession now, or are maybe even gone. Her tears are dry. She looks excited, expectant, pumped.
“Should I look for a shovel?” Katy asks. “I don’t know if we have one.”
“I think we can do it with our hands,” Anchor says. “Shouldn’t be hard for all of us. It’s not in deep.” Katy is proud of the conviction in Anchor’s voice. They awoke from their vision both knowing this, and each knowing the other knew it, but Katy feels that she can’t be the one to lead here, so it really is all up to Anchor. She’s the key.
The four of them go to their knees around the patch and start to dig in the loose dirt. It doesn’t take long before they hit it. Liz’s fingers touch down on takeout bag plastic—they all hear it crinkle—and she digs a few more handfuls out, then grabs the bag and pulls. The bag is white and says THANK YOU 24 HOURS on it in red, with smiley face wingdings flanking the declaration on both sides. Its handles have been tied together to seal it off, keep the dirt and bugs and rain out. Liz does not attempt the knot at the top of the bag; she tears through the plastic. (This causes Katy to suck breath sharply in—she herself would have taken pains to preserve the artifact.) Inside the bag is a Mead composition notebook with a black-and-white marble cover. On the part where you’re supposed to write your name and what class you’re in, there’s a purple-Sharpie’d doodle. The A-inscribed arrow-shot heart they all know so well. Parker’s mark.
The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel Page 7