The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Parker would return when I returned, and I was coming.

  I was almost Here.

  Anchor

  When she first sees David he’s aloft, above the crowd, arms and legs akimbo, face twisted into a vaguely painful-looking but mostly ecstatic mask. He floats closer and she thinks first how good it is to see him, then how glad she is, specifically, to see him here. She’s always liked David. He’s cool, and super dedicated to his scene, and it’s kinda funny that he’s come out tonight, actually, because she’s been thinking about him. Ever since—what was it, Tuesday? Wednesday? Anyway. Since she wrote this poem that she thinks he’ll like. A copy of it’s folded up in her pocket. She had been planning to swing by the house after the show, have a beer with whoever was around, and either give David the poem or leave it for him—though of course she fully expected him to be there, since he basically never goes out. Which is why it’s so cool that he’s here. The poem isn’t supposed to be anything special, or maybe it’s a little special, okay. Just a Hey man, been thinkin’ of you. But now here he is at Clasen’s, kicking ass in the Dust Biters pit, which is no mean feat—for a pair of folkies, these guys fucking bring it—so maybe there’s something after all to that weird book she helped the Fishgut kids do the layout on. What was that saying they had? Desire brings your something something to the truth . . . Fuck, she can’t remember how it goes. She can hear the rhythm of it in her head, the familiar intonations of the absent words like silhouettes on a screen. Oh well. She’ll have to flip through a copy when she’s over there. Of course she could also always check the master file on her hard drive when she gets home.

  As the song ends, David drops—is dropped—back into the crowd. The greatest things in life really are free, aren’t they? She’s nudging her way through the audience to go throw her arms around him, but then there’s shouting up ahead, a scuffle breaks out, and now there’s chaos: some people are surging forward, looking to get in on whatever it is, while others are scrambling backward, wanting no part. Anchor is caught between two groups headed in opposite directions, nearly loses her feet in the crash and sweep. By the time she realizes that it’s David at the center of it all, the situation has reached its climax; they’re throwing him out. She strains, short girl amid the gawking throb, to see him, and thinks he catches her gaze but can’t be sure. What did he do exactly? It must be a misunderstanding. He’d been shouting something, but she couldn’t make out what. Anyway, the whole thing’s over and done now. He’s been booted. Removed. Ejected. Tossed. Good-bye.

  She’s about to go after him, but the singer is starting to say something and she pauses to listen.

  “Goddamn, Gene,” the singer says, theoretically to the drummer though he’s talking into the mic and looking out at the audience. “Some weird shit goes down every time we play this fucking town.”

  “Ain’t that why we keep coming back?” the drummer says.

  “Yer fuckin’ A,” says the singer. “Gaines. Ville. Yer fuckin’ A.”

  The crowd goes nuts—just totally apeshit—and the band launches into their take on “Joe Hill’s Casey Jones,” which sets the whole room churning. Fists piston the air, a hundred drunk, sweaty kids shouting themselves hoarse, each believing in their heart that these guys will be so fucking famous soon, and how cool it will be to be able to tell people about having seen them, back when. And Anchor knows these things as well as anyone, but she also knows that if she were in David’s position he’d be going after her right now, so she turns her back on the best punk rock band in the whole Southeast, walks out of the cramped, hot room, wipes sweat from her face with the back of one hand. She looks out the big front windows of the main room for any sign of David in the street. Not seeing him—it makes sense that he wouldn’t stand right in front of the place—she gets a stamp from the bouncer and steps out into the crisp night, looks up and down the road for him walking. Nobody. Nothing. He’s gone. What can she do? Back to the original plan, then; she’ll see him later—after the show ends, and it’s probably almost done. She should go back in and catch the rest of the set. Okay.

  Two kickass encores, then the show’s really over. Anchor’s, you know, standing around smoking cigarettes or whatever, when the drummer walks up to her. To her! “Hi,” he says. “I’m Gene.”

  “I know,” she says, deadpan—God, she can be a doofus!—and he stares at her, but only for like a second, because then she gets it, says: “I’m Anchor.”

  “Where’d you get that name?”

  “It’s something my mom used to call me when I was a kid. It just, I don’t know. Stuck.”

  “I think it’s cool.”

  “Thanks. Great show.”

  “Thanks. You coming to the party?”

  “What party? Now?”

  “Yeah, we have some friends who have this house. On Eighth and Fifth. They call it the Palace of Zinn. Do you know the place?”

  “I’ve—heard of it.”

  “Well, you should come. I think some other bands are gonna play.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want to ride with us?”

  “Sure.”

  So you really can’t blame her for not swinging by Fishgut. There are like a million people there who can take care of David, and she’ll go by tomorrow or something. Everyone knows you don’t pass up a chance to party with the band.

  There was this thing that Thomas used to say all the time—quoting someone, she’s pretty sure: You can’t be neutral on a moving train. And how easy would it have been to board that train and go with him? How wonderful and wild and great to just take off? Freedom and danger, a life together, itinerant farm work in the plains states; rail yards and freezing rain.

  But when Thomas told her about his plans for them, Seattle, she had known instantly that she wasn’t going with him, that it wasn’t for her. And she’d known, furthermore, that this scheme was his way of offering the love she’d been trying to draw out in him all along, but now that it was hers for the taking she wasn’t sure what to do with it, or if she even wanted it at all. And what did he want from her, anyway? She wasn’t even twenty! She needed time, she said, to figure things out. There’d be other protests, plenty: the national party conventions, the G7, who knew what else. The movement was just getting going; it was going to be around a long time. And also, she was embarrassed to admit it, but what the hell: she liked school.

  Poor Thomas! So reticent with his emotions (between explosions, that is), so guarded and exposed at once, so brusque yet so easy to wound. He was inconsolable, and to be honest a little bit scary, stomping his feet, shouting how he was going with or without her; but when she told him that she understood his decision and supported him, he bawled. He doesn’t want my admiration, she remembers thinking. Which was a real shame, because it was all she’d had left to give him, except for farewell sex, which he first turned up his nose at, but in the end wasn’t too proud to accept, and then they were both crying, and then first light punched through the tree cover, and he slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked away in the direction of the highway, leaving her behind, alone in his bed, where she rolled over and drowsed again—the last time she would ever sleep at Fishgut. Summer love!

  She had worshipped them—all of them—sort of; what they seemed to stand for, who they seemed to be. She hadn’t wanted to be them, exactly, but had hungered to feel things as powerfully as they did. And then that day came when she shared a dream with Katy, and they found the book and everything, and she actually felt like she had achieved the level they were at, however briefly. And it wasn’t that she hadn’t liked what she found there, or that she retreated out of fear. It was more like—how to phrase this?—even as she had given herself over fully to the experience, there was this other part of her that understood on some deeper level that the experience of the experience was a kind of capstone, not the dawn of a new era, as it clearly was for them. It was for her something fleeting and unknowable glimpsed on the horizon, a trick of the sunset light.
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br />   Helping out with the zine had been her going-away present to them, for everything they’d done for her, and because, truly, she wished them only the best. (Also, a good way to work on her design skills. The zine is in her portfolio now.) She loved them: Katy, David, Liz, and the whole messy rest, all the randoms and unknowns, the passers-through and the passing-through itself. She loved the way they talked, especially—how they gave full credence to ultimate concerns, the rhetoric a little windy, sure, but the passion undeniable, the attraction intense. They lived as if the fate of the very universe were perpetually at stake and in their hands.

  Earnest Thomas on the one hand with his politics, the holy power trio and their minions on the other. It didn’t take an Introduction to Dialectics (though she happens to be enrolled this semester in a class where they’re giving her one) to see their antithetical positions as halves of a larger singularity: the desire for an encompassing horizon, a totalizing vision, an epistemology sufficient to enclose the whole known world, and account for everything unknown, too. A beautiful dream, impeccable and doomed, but honest—except in that it could never know itself as the parable, the myth it truly was.

  But that was all so long ago. A lifetime, twelve months—eons! Think how much has happened since then. The Seattle protests, for example, were a huge success, with rioting and everything. Thomas was arrested on the very first day. He was masked up and helping direct some people who were trying to drive a dumpster through a Starbucks window. They held him for ten days and refused him treatment of a bruised rib and a badly sprained ankle, both courtesy, he said, of an aggressive paramilitary police force in full storm trooper regalia. The charges were dropped for whatever reason—he was small potatoes, or the fact that they had no evidence against him. He was too banged up to try freight-hopping, but managed somehow to stow away on Amtrak, where he befriended a retired couple in the dining car. They bought him all his meals for three straight days while he regaled them with stories, then, when the train rolled into Atlanta, gave him money to buy a Greyhound ticket to “go honest” for the rest of the way home. He thanked them, even hugged them, but pocketed the cash and snuck onto the Greyhound, too, because not taking full advantage of the obliviousness of disgruntled wage slaves was truly an insult to their alienation from their labor. He finally got back to Gainesville on the twentieth of December and hobbled home from the bus station. When he got there he found a burned-out hulk with its fence wreathed in yellow police tape, a Consolidated Properties sign out front, because not even a world-class SOB like Stuckins was going to rebuild from the ground up.

  From the back room at Clasen’s, he called all the people with her last name in the St. Johns County phone book and eventually reached her father, who sounded none too pleased to provide him with his ex-wife’s phone number—but he did, and Thomas finally got hold of her, and she told him what she knew about what happened. It was five days till Christmas. What could she do? She invited him to her mother’s, which was a whole fiasco in itself, the upshot of which was that she cut her visit short and the two of them spent NYE2K blowing the kindly train couple’s money (and some of Anchor’s father’s) on a twenty-five-dollar-a-night road motel in Waldo, for all intents and purposes off the map, if not the grid.

  After the world didn’t end, Anchor said it was stupid of her to have left it like that with her mother, and she wanted to go back to Ponte Vedra and patch things up. Thomas, who wasn’t exactly not invited, but whose presence certainly wouldn’t make things easier, said he thought he’d go back to Gainesville and check on Liz, who was living with her mother again. Not long after school was back in session, he started crashing with Anchor at her dorm, which was okay until her roommate’s boyfriend dumped her, because then Sheila started to pick up on how Thomas hung around even when Anchor was at class. Not wanting to seem uncool, Sheila held her peace for as long as she could stand to, and by the time she finally confronted her roommate, Anchor was actually relieved, even grateful, because her reunion with Thomas was way past its sell-by date, and the only thing keeping them together was inertia plus the fact that he had nowhere to go. Now he would have to figure something out, a new plan. Fuck it, he said, he was the king of new plans. She encouraged him to go see his family, and/or David’s. He said he’d see where the wind blew him—some dumb shit like that.

  But then he never went anywhere. He got his old job at Clasen’s back, and a room opened up at the Palace of Zinn. They run into each other sometimes, and either say hello or don’t.

  In August she cut her dreadlocks off and dyed her buzz cut red.

  Around that same time she started volunteering two afternoons a week at Bread and Roses, a local not-for-profit women’s health center. She helps out with paperwork and takes phone calls. Anti-choice fanatics crowd the sidewalk out front, holding up posters of mangled fetuses and shrieking like campus evangelists, which, she assumes, some of them also are. The women come in stone-faced and spooked, lower lips quivering, or else cursing blue streaks. Anchor talks to them, sometimes about what they’re going through but usually not; usually it’s just, “Hey, how are you” and whatever. Mundane chatter calms them down.

  It feels good to be part of something. To know you are doing right, not for the whole world, maybe, not all at once, but for this woman, for that one, for yourself. It was hard at first to balance the volunteering with her classes, but she’s gotten the hang of things, made it over the hump of midterms, and is pretty much cruising along.

  It is November, another November. Today is election day.

  It’s dark in her dorm room, but bright outside. A sun-line limns the borders of the heavy shade. Anchor’s first class is at 11:05, which is in an hour and a half. After class she’s going straight to the clinic, so if she’s going to vote, she should really go do it first thing. There’s a polling place right in Turlington Hall.

  Despite all their personal drama, Thomas is still basically her model of an Authentic Anarchist, and he would say—indeed, has said—that voting is more than merely a waste of time, it’s irresponsible, which is the worst thing an anarchist can be. By engaging with the system on its terms, by believing the lie, you help legitimize and perpetuate something fundamentally illegitimate. He says. And, who knows, on some level it might even be true. On the other hand—and this, for her, is the kicker—it’s the first election she’s ever been eligible to vote in, and it’s one of those things you grow up imagining yourself doing, and now she wants to do it. That might not be the greatest, most ethically sound reason, but it’s hers.

  She wants to see if the booth will actually look like she imagines.

  It doesn’t.

  She always thought of it as a quiet space, sealed off, maybe like an old-timey phone booth, but this thing is a gray plastic table—like from a Fisher-Price set—standing on spindly metal legs in the bustling ground-floor lobby of Turlington Hall. The privacy curtain is blue and looks like it should be dividing first class from coach. It doesn’t even hang as low as her waist. But she’s in there, pen in hand, looking over the list of mostly strange names. All politics is local—they’re always saying that at the clinic—but here she is not knowing who most of these people are or what they stand for. As a kid she never thought about all the minor stuff, ballot measures and constitutional amendments and whatnot. What does a comptroller even do? She always imagined the ballot as a single question written in direct address. ANCHOR, WHO DO YOU WANT THE PRESIDENT TO BE? So okay, forget the whole rest of it. This one at least is a no-brainer; she may be wrong to be here at all but she can at least mitigate the damage by voting her conscience. And anyway she isn’t sure that Thomas is right about this. Refusal too is action; there is no way to be in the world without being part of it.

  She remembers how David and Katy didn’t want a website. What would they say if they could know that there are five sites now? Anchor doesn’t involve herself, doesn’t post on their boards or check regularly for updates, but she knows what’s out there, more or less. Splinter sect
s have emerged, with conflicting creeds and tenets, mostly centering on the one question Parker seems never to have considered: that of who the “real” prophet is, or was, and how to choose one over the rest, or else the whole holy rabble en masse. Some see Parker as Christ’s agent, therefore underling; others say Parker was (or is, since he’s still MIA) Christ’s successor, therefore supplanter; and others still identify David as the true and chosen exponent of the gospel of anarchy, all the more pure for having left behind no book and no body, nothing but rumors and ash.

  A thought passes through her mind—Desire is a strange attractor. Your longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth—as she darkens the bubble for Nader, slips the ballot into the slot, exits the booth, and walks off to have her day. She does all the things that she planned to do, then heads from Bread and Roses to Leonardo’s, the hipster pizza place that they always used to dumpster from. She’s meeting this guy there. After dinner, they decide to take a little walk, and end up at this record store where she picks up the new Radiohead album, which she heard playing at a coffee shop a few days ago, and even though she doesn’t usually go in for electronica, there’s something . . . different about this. She can’t say what exactly, but there’ll be plenty of time to figure it out, because she owns it now. It’s in her purse. Since they’re basically next door to the Shamrock already, they decide to have a couple of drinks, and then it’s getting kind of late, so.