It already was one big map.
I knelt by a series of Vietnamese nail salons and white suburban fitness centers. They were marked as a braided stream. At the mouth of the waterway was an enormous Asian market called Transcontinental. It never closes and inside huge HDL screens play karaoke videos with Filipinos running around Scottish castles. I marked it with a large red “U.”
I put another “U” by the box-mall-church and looked at the map again. Transcontinental, The New Land Trust Building, the box-mall-church—they were all unconformities, non sequiturs. I put a “U” by a cluster mall that ran a free bus service back and forth to the high schools. I put a “U” by Redbird Square for appropriating a public space as a billboard for a bank. I put a “U” by the central library, which was half empty of books and had black birds in the rafters. Such hollow hopes should be punished, shown for what they were. Biodiesel fueling station with an armored vehicle bay? Large red “U.”
I grabbed a copy of Vermeij’s Nature: An Economic History off the shelf, unfolded the cover and tossed the book aside. Spreading the dust jacket on the coffee table I wrote “Della’s Flag” across the top in red marker. At the bottom of my flag I drew a little Rat Queen Betsy Ross. The head of John the Baptist was drying on the coffee table and the nine rat cell phones lay on the bed unopened. It was now morning in the imaginary territory of New Honduras and I heard Annette and Credence come in downstairs. Opening my door, I leaned over the banister. She went into the bedroom and he went into the shower. I waited until I heard the water run then stuffed the maps and phones in my bag and left.
Outside, the dry bushes rattled and everything was tense like something hanging heavy was about to drop. The pressure was falling and the sky was the color of cement. I was halfway down Heritage Avenue before I realized that the windows of the neighborhood were black. Some were covered with cloth, some with construction paper. Some had coats strung across the panes on twine. It took me a second to realize that it was for the boys. Grace crossed my mind with her endless wake and I thought about texting Jimmy an apology but what was I to apologize for? Grace in general? The Great Onslaught itself? I tried to warn her. She signed up. Over the next few hours, funeral services would be arranged. Community groups would meet. Credence would try to get the unions to join the demonstrations. But whatever they came up with—an army of shiny jackets marching in phalanx and covered with buttons, a black rainbow invoking the mountaintop—it wasn’t going to work. It never does. It was just adding color to the sand painting. Oh look! I really like that streak of brown, so bold where you put it next to all that red. In early springtime a man was hanged off the Roseway Bridge. Someone saw the body on the way to work dangling like a blackened branch over the river. They had meetings then too.
I took the bus out to Four Points of Heaven mall and got off a stop early. In the parking lot of the Village of Light Towne Square I activated the nine baby rat cell phones. I was calling in bomb threats by noon. First, with the tangerine cell that belonged to Venus Rodere. She got the cluster mall and the biodiesel fueling station (with clever armored vehicle bay) and the Asian behemoth, Transcontinental—all of which deserved to be blasted to atoms, the terrible little minerals. I ditched the tangerine phone in some lush industrial landscaping and went on to the next.
On the lime cell phone I called Better Gods and Gardens, the New Land Trust building (as a reminder) and the yoga studio:
Yoga on the Hill, Devadatta speaking.
Get everyone out of the building—
Hold please—
Typing. Online trying to befriend the entire country of
Nepal.
—Sorry about that, how can I help you?
This is a bomb threat.
I think you have the wrong number.
I don’t.
Well, I can’t think of anyone who would want to blow us up.
I can.
Okay, well, I’ll let people know but there’s class going on right now and I think they’re all in Shavasana.
Perfect.
Then I called Naught, a raw food tapas bar, because the bathroom sink counter had the name of a different god/prophet painted on every fourth tile and “ALL IS ONE” inlaid around the basin. Then I called all the strip joints that charged a stage fee. Then after that, the human resources department of a popular Vietnamese restaurant chain, demanding an end to bubble tea as the hyper modern equivalent to absinthe and a barrier to real revolution because the equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism.
I threw that phone in the trash and boarded the Number 22 to Pretty Little Hopes.
Eartha Rodere
When the heart opens, the hands follow:
191292309.24
Up ahead was Brass Ring Employment Solution, a temp agency shaped like a refrigerator and built out of concrete and torque. Their motto was “Every little bit helps.” Flocks of men in white shirts, crisp sleeves rolled down over their tattoos, kissed ass daily just to work for nothing. Hostages taking each other hostage. Jazz hands. Out of respect for the relationship between war and commerce and the necessity of cheap labor for both to thrive, I let Aries Rodere make the call.
Good Afternoon! Brass Ring, where we know that every little bit helps…(maintain wage slavery).
How may I direct your call?
Bombs, I told them, blast coronas the size of Texas. Bone fragments like chalk dust staining the sidewalk and washing away in the rain.
I heard building alarms. The bus driver closed the doors. I got off at the next stop, leaving the raspberry cell phone under my seat pinging towers all the way to Pretty Little Hopes.
I was only halfway through my list. There were so many facets. Redbird Square for being named after a bank and recasting cultural geography as a proprietary object. The central library for being a defunded sham, a gutted shell, a hope crime. The Cine-Tower for having 20 theaters, 10 levels of parking and playing Christmas music year round. The golden oldies station KGOD for being a mask of Christianity formed from revisionist musical portraits of the past. And for sending nostalgia into the valleys of the scurrying poor to get them through the work day then giving them a god to go to at night when they’re tired. Me, third. 8, 8 and 8. The FM repeaters chattering like cats, selling bobbleheads, pushing mad cow meat and formula on babies so their mothers don’t have to keep up enough body weight to nurse. The Happy Day Corporate Charity Center? O let me count the ways… IKEA monkeys, urban yogis with real estate kriyas, manifest class destiny—each target was a jewel on the web, a dewy gem reflecting the Grand Ravage back to itself.
When it got dark I stopped to organize my notes and get food. It was raining by then and I was in line at a falafel stand with a newspaper folded over my head. A small radio was playing Egyptian disco. Suddenly it stopped and the emergency broadcast signal came on. The falafel man turned up the volume. Crackling, competing with the slap of raindrops on the tiny tarp, the words “explosion,” “dog track” and “panic” emerged. The woman next to me turned gray. The falafel man started packing up and dumping fry oil trays into the gutter. A bomb had gone off at the dog track and another at a parking garage downtown.
But I saw satellites in the terrorsphere and put my list away. No one had claimed the New Land Trust bombing. Superland™ was still generating bumper text even though nothing had happened. Is it safe to shop? And now with the new threats? If there was one thing I learned from Credence, it was how to redirect messages—the New Land Trust building, the dog track, the parking garage—their violence, reframed with a new message. Talking points for the Blackberry Massacre.
I was close to the cemetery on the border of New Honduras and that’s where I went, deep into the acres and tall trees, past the new gravestones in Chinese, Cyrillic and Tagalog, and into the oldest part where it’s nothing but flu babies and second sons by the statue of a mermaid. Under her bronze arms, I called in and
claimed the real bombs as mine.
“Cultural obsolescence impeding the flow of fresh commerce,” I told the police operator, “that’s why we blew up the dog track.”
I gave different reasons for the other bombs because Citizens for a Rabid Economy only described part of the ugliness. I needed a name for the unseen hand behind it all and I found it. When I dropped the lemon cell phone among the leaves at the base of the bronze mermaid the name of my new movement was spelled out on the LCD screen: MANIFESTATION. It glowed phosphorescent on the face of the phone, a little pool of light. Then went black on the forest floor.
18 Brahma
Above me were ribbons of stars. I no longer knew what time it was. The trees there are the oldest in the cemetery and their branches form a canopy under which it is always night. I went out through the iron gates to the east and cut across the lower part of the hill, walking parallel to Colony of the Elect. Several blocks from Credence’s someone yelled my name.
“Della!”
I looked up. It was Mirror. She was sitting on the fire escape of a newly renovated building smoking a cigarette.
“What are you doing?”
“Cat-sitting but the cat ran away. Come have a drink.”
I was nowhere near sleep, and so why not? She buzzed me in.
“We’re in the back,” she called down the stairs.
The apartment was spotless with white couches and white carpets and at least two Tom of Finland prints in every room.
“They’re originals,” said Mirror, “The guy’s dying of cancer and he won’t sell one of them. Not one. That’s some fucking principles.”
Sitting behind Mirror on one of the couches was the woman with the lavender hair from the party at the Glass House. She was winding a red ribbon around her wrist, unwinding it and winding it again.
“Della, this is Tamara. She thinks she’s only in town for a few days but she’s going to change her mind and stay for my party.”
“Maybe,” Tamara said.
“Shut up, Mara!” Mirror threw a towel at her, “You are so staying.”
“We’ll see. Either way I’d have to go back soon.”
“Mara lives on a collective farm out near Breaker’s Rise,” Mirror said, “They have chickens, goats—all sorts of shit. She’s pretending to be some neo-hippy chick but she’s just a big old faggot and…” she threw something else at Tamara, “she’s definitely coming to my party.”
“Will you be there?” Tamara asked, “or will you already be in Goa?”
She grinned and I saw that one of her incisors was partially broken off.
“Honduras.”
“That’s right, Honduras.”
Her eyelids were thin and this time she was wearing green glitter shadow. She was shorter than me and had on a dark gray t-shirt. They must have just dyed her hair because her fingertips were pale blue.
“So, Mirror says you’re a scientist.”
“I’m a waitress.”
“What do you study?”
“Patterns of extinction.”
“Important things to understand.”
I felt my pride burn and resented it.
Mirror got out some hummus and made Greyhounds.
“That stupid cat better come back on its own,” she dropped a bag of carrots on the coffee table, “I’m not making flyers. I already have to go to that stupid work meeting tomorrow. By the way, when can you get the van?”
Tamara shrugged, “I’ll ask when I get back to the Cycle.”
The Cycle was a squat turned urban farm collective on the other side of the river. Once a year police made a show of trying to close it down, anarchists threw bricks at them, and they left. Mostly because anarchist squatters are cheaper than fences and developers weren’t ready. I’m waiting for the headline that reads: HOWLING MAW ACCIDENTALLY SWALLOWS SQUATTERS LIKE PLANKTON IN PURSUIT OF REAL MEAT.
“More hummus?”
Yes, because a last meal should be vegetarian.
“So what are you going to do with all that education?” Tamara asked.
“My brother says education is what you make of it. I made a papier-mâché head of John the Baptist out of my school papers.”
She laughed.
“It’s a piñata.”
I started to smile slowly then I laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had. It felt like something was being lifted out of me.
We spent the next few hours talking about the bombs.
“I think the bomb threats are far more interesting than the actual attacks,” Tamara said, “I mean, Citizens for a Rabid Economy? It’s fucking brilliant.”
We made Greyhounds until we ran out of vodka. Tamara asked if I wanted to go out for more and I said yes. We left Mirror sewing some kind of bronze lamé shroud for the sex party.
On the corner in front of the liquor store I pulled out the fortune cookies I got at the Chinese restaurant. I offered some to Tamara.
“Sweet!” she said and grabbed a few.
“What do your fortunes say?” I asked.
“This one says…” she squinted, “You were never closer to reconstructing the world than you are now.”
“It does not say that!” I howled.
“You’re right,” she said, “but I do.”
Tamara ate the rest of her cookies without looking at a single fortune.
Daylight crossed the couch. Tamara and Mirror were both asleep when I left and stepped outside, still drunk. I unbraided my hair. Brown and crimped, it fell around me. I shook my head. A car started. I turned. Steam rose from the windshield as it warmed. It was Sunday. The street with its shuttered bistros and gated shops was half in shadow and where light struck the road, gray vapor shimmered. I walked out and set my feet upon the centerline and headed home.
I saw a group of pregnant women by the yoga studio. They rubbed their goldfish-bowl and snow-globe bellies. I could have gone around them but I walked until I was deep in the abyss of that winter aquarium. Annette and Jimmy. The Black Ocean and the baby rats. Credence, Grace and Miro. Everything, all of it, was on fire. The only thing to do was pass through cleanly. Everything would still burn. My cheeks would still blister and my hands blacken. The only thing that made any sense was the bomb threat because that’s where instinct met action, clarity.
I turned onto our street and leaves blew across my path and skittered sideways like crabs, rattling up the sidewalk and settling on the grass. They were all over our porch. I put some in my pocket walking up the steps.
Annette was hanging a black lace shawl over a mirror in the entryway. The rayon fringe angled down leaving a corner of the glass, splattered with yellow paint, exposed. She hung then re-hung the shawl but there was always one part of the mirror uncovered.
“It’s a Jewish thing anyway,” she said and let the shawl drape like a sash across the frame.
She sat down in a chair by the door. In her hand was a cordless phone. I stayed back because I smelled like vodka and didn’t want her to think I was out partying while she and everyone else she knew were getting ready for the funeral and police riots that were certain to follow. I tried to tack the shawl up again and finally got it to stay. Annette watched me the whole time but I wasn’t on her mind. I was just another thing in the distance. She wandered into the kitchen.
On my way up the stairs I thought about something Tamara said. She said the black community is our Lord Brahma and that every time we try to escape their gaze another head grows and looks down at what we’ve done. Then the conversation had descended into debates about exoticizing minorities and ended up somewhere on the banks with the rest of the mud bricks of the pyramid. I went to sleep and dreamt of tidal waves. When I woke, the world was washed clean and the streets empty of water. But then I realized it wasn’t over. It was only the drag of a great wave calling all of itself to itself, gathering. I looked at the dry road and knew that I was between moments.
19 Two Rivers
Annette left a black dress that belonged to her
grandmother draped over my computer chair and I put it on. The funeral for the boys would start at the church around 3 PM and be followed by a procession to the cemetery. After the eulogy some community leaders were going to speak. Then everyone was supposed to march to the Roseway Bridge and throw flowers in the river near where they found the boys. There had been chaos earlier in the morning when the city revoked the permit to march. They said it was because of all the bombings and the threats still hanging and that it was a matter of public safety. My plan was to go but leave early. I didn’t know how much I could take, all that sorrow just spinning out into nowhere.
On my way out the door Jimmy called to say that the staff meeting at Rise Up Singing was still on as scheduled. Apparently, Coworker Franklin had meditated on the idea of cancelling (due to the massive funeral) but his inner coin flip had come up Capitalism and he wanted to re-open as soon as possible.
“As a victim myself…”
—Coworker Franklin tries to equivocate the looting of Rise Up Singing with the slaughter of children—
“...I think the most important thing for the community is that we get back on our feet.”
A defiant cheek to the wind, cannon to the right, vegan sushi bar to the left—as an olive branch Coworker Franklin said we could talk about the shootings “as a family.” The first fifteen minutes of the agenda was set aside for that process.
“I was wondering if maybe we could talk,” I said.
“Maybe later. I just wanted to let you know the meeting was still happening in case you wanted to go.”
“Can we meet there?”
“I’m not going.”
“Isn’t it mandatory?”
“Fuck him, I’m leaving anyway. What’s he going to do,
fire me?”
Right. Queen of the Jaguars.
The streets around Higher Ground of Africa Baptist were packed with people. It took me twenty minutes to make it through a block. About halfway into the thickest part of the crowd, I saw Credence. He was jammed up against a side door of the church, which had been opened to let air into the building. A group of twenty or so, mostly younger men, stood next to him looking in. I worked my way there. He saw me and held out his hand and when I was in range pulled me through the crowd. He was about to say something when a chorus of shouts deafened us. Over the shoulders of the congregation I saw a man with stained-glass light on his face gesturing at the ceiling. He waved his arm across the crowd and then brought it back to his heart. I thought for sure he would catch fire. I almost heard the hissing of wet wood. Another cheer went up for Jesus but everyone near me was silent. They rustled impatiently in their suits and leaned in closer. The crowd inside began to move and the choir started up. People by the doors were telling us to get back, get back, and ushers lined up on either side of the main entrance. Through the side door, I could see them carrying out the coffins. People gathered around the pallbearers in front of the church. The coffins looked like driftwood in an eddy and I thought the crowd wasn’t going to let them through, but then two hearses drove slowly through the mass of people and the crowd parted, still, while the pallbearers slid the caskets into the backs of the cars, and silent until each door had slammed shut. Then a roar went up and the hearses began to roll down the street. People closed in around us. We passed the church in a torrent of bodies and poured out onto Heritage Avenue. At the cemetery the crowd split in two columns and peeled off to the side so that the hearses could drive through. I could see the statue of the mermaid and the garden by the older graves where I’d called in bomb threats only the night before. Someone next to me was talking about the latest police reports and how—a concussion grenade went off behind me. Something was wrong. People with the bullhorns trying to keep the crowd together but the roar was building. Riot cops were coming down the hill in formation. A bottle sailed over the divide between them and us and shattered. Then another. And the shiny black birds, they beat their plastic wings. Clattering, they hit their shields. Faster and faster, until they broke and charged the crowd and the march exploded into slivers under the impact. It was more than a riot and more than a funeral. It was the conjunction of those two, grief and fear, fueled by the bombs and media cycling, combusting all around us. People were getting pushed down toward the promenade by the river. I saw more bottles come down near some cops. One got hit and the bird-crickets fell like a pack on a person running up the hill. Tear gas was fired randomly into the crowd. A concussion grenade went off right beside me. When I got up, I couldn’t hear anything out of my left ear. A man who had been talking to Credence earlier stopped to see if I was okay. I asked him if he’d seen them. He said they had stayed up by the church and were probably still there. Then he picked up a forty-ounce bottle that was near my feet and hurled it. Run, he said and I did. Rubber bullets whistled by and blasted the bark off a tree. As I ran I could feel my blood vessels swell and my heart beat like it was underwater. I was halfway back up the hill before I realized no one was following me.
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