Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  I was alone. My lungs hurt and I still couldn’t hear anything out of my left ear. I pulled out my phone. There was no reception. I couldn’t get back home without crossing the riot so I decided to try to make it to Rise Up Singing and call Credence and Annette from a landline. Concussion grenades still went off in the distance but only three blocks from the cemetery the day was filled with normal Sunday sounds. A little boy played in the yard of a partially remodeled house, balancing a rock on a can of Jasco and knocking it off again. Everywhere on Colony of the Elect were kids, sun wheels spinning in the breeze and hearty blonde neighbors helping each other out. The Dawn of Compassion had come. Suffering had ended. There were traffic circles and recycling bins. At one point the trees broke and I could see the river again. Puffs of tear gas like a gentle mist appeared then dissipated along the promenade.

  Duct-taped to the door of Rise Up Singing was a proclamation from Coworker Franklin. It expressed regret at the recent bombing of the auto shop and begged people not to steal from COWORKER FRANKLIN because he was a PARTNER and a FRIEND of the COMMUNITY and often made them MACARONI AND CHEESE. At the bottom was a stick figure with open arms.

  The meeting was in the garden. When I came through the gate the entire staff except Jimmy was standing around a table full of donuts and shots of Cuervo. Coworker Franklin looked nervous. No one was drinking or eating and sun made the glaze on the doughnuts shine.

  I asked Mirror if I missed anything.

  “Just fucking Franklin admitting he’s a sellout who should die, which we already knew. What time did you leave?”

  “Around dawn. You were both asleep.”

  “You know, that stupid cat never came back. I spent the whole morning shaking a bowl of Meow Mix like a fucking shaman.”

  Coworker Franklin was talking about the sale of the restaurant, assuring everyone that a great new era was coming. That the people who bought the restaurant were enlightened. That there would be lotus chairs made by Real Tibetans and distressed wood platters of hewn hemp. The latest in neo-colonial fusion cuisine. A patio. Orchids. A bocce court and a koi pond where now there was only a rat graveyard.

  “In this time of change,” Coworker Franklin waved vaguely at the world of bombs, malls and riots outside the garden, “it’s all the more important that we stay together, even if we’ve chosen to walk in different directions.”

  Mirror passed me a folded up sheet of paper. Inside was her rendering of the figure from Franklin’s sign. Next to it was a huge salmon about to tear it in half over which she’d written “Stick-Franklin in the Afterlife.” Mitch took it and drew a four-panel strip of Stick-Franklin dissolving in lye.

  “But like any birth process,” said Coworker Franklin, “it’s going to be hardest during the transition. There are going to be some new rules,” he looked around anxiously. “To start with you are all going to have to get your food handler’s cards.”

  Mirror rolled her eyes, “No way, dude, waiting in that line sucks.”

  “And…” said Franklin, “just so you know, they’re going to shorten the name to ‘Rise.’ Which I think is really very cool. I saw it on the new menus. They look great. Copperplate. It’s a nice font.”

  I was the first to hear it. Tiny popping sounds in the distance, a quiet siren. Some dim chirping and a ripple of adrenaline went through the staff. What was it? One or two people glanced over the garden fence. More sirens and then I could feel the lift in energy. There wasn’t any fear, only excitement. Again I saw two rivers, each flowing through the same place, irreconcilable geographies. Reaching deeper, though, I found a third, cutting ever downward and pooling beneath the mermaid garden.

  Coworker Franklin was talking about the schedule.

  Police cars pulled around the corner and raced down the side street. Their blue and red lights reflected off the windows of the apartment buildings nearby and I saw it all differently. I saw the scene as it would be on another night. The same blue and red lights dancing on the koi pond, turning to rose and violet the white arbor trellis with its bending boughs to come. Occasional explosions like fireworks and the sky.

  Coworker Franklin was talking about the robbery on the night of the shootings. How he got to the restaurant around 3 AM, and had seen a man by the shed, probably someone from the neighborhood who knew we didn’t lock the side gate. And how the man was wearing a red bandana, and had something in his hand, probably a gun. And how he had called… My breath started to slow and I couldn’t feel my hands because it seemed like the whole world was dipped in nitrogen and the slightest shift could shatter it…with all the gang stuff going on, and given the police a description of the man.

  My eyes moved over to Mitch, who was standing between me and the Rat Graveyard. Don’t move, I thought, stay. Stay right there. But Mitch moved and behind her I saw the beaten sunflowers and the trampled graves. The Buzz Lightyear and the red bandana tying him to the twig cross were gone.

  “Truthfully,” said Coworker Franklin, “I don’t expect much will come of it…”—but of course something had—“and as you know, I’m not big on consequences…”—like what happens when you tie a toy to a twig cross? Or call in a description of a black man with a red bandana and a gun?

  Or when you walk down an empty street drunk and wash your hair with stolen wine? Or tie a Buzz Lightyear to a cross? I didn’t say it. I didn’t say: The red bandana you found hidden in the shed belonged to the boy who was shot.

  Or, the Buzz Lightyear you tied to the cross got him killed. Or, the reason Coworker Franklin called in the description of the boy in the first place was because the restaurant had been looted and he thought the boy was involved, but it was only we. I looked at the faces around me, the sweating doughnuts and the Cuervo, and I thought, these are charnel grounds and even though I hate it, I am as entangled as everyone else and part of how one thing led to another. Pollen, butterfly wings, I tried but you can’t see it. You can’t round off the small numbers because there are universes inside them. I thought I could stay above it, walk cleanly through, but you can’t. Even my bomb threats, which I’d thought of as commentary, weren’t. They were also universes. I had been lying to myself.

  After the meeting I called Jimmy a couple of times but she didn’t answer so I went over to her apartment. She was annoyed but let me in.

  “So I heard there was a police riot.”

  “Sorry about all that stuff at Grace’s. I didn’t know what it would look like from the outside.”

  “You guys do that every year?”

  “No. That was the last. I mean for me.”

  Another little spider crack because like the two rivers with the third hidden underneath, the bandana and the boy, I saw now that there wasn’t a single move I could make that had no effect. There is a freedom in that too.

  I stepped closer and put my hand against her ear. I still couldn’t hear out of mine. She relaxed. More cracks lacing the ice. We talked about Honduras and what we could do there. She grew animated but I could feel it all coming apart in my hands. Let’s get out of here, I said. Let’s take a cab across the river and go somewhere where there aren’t funerals and koi ponds, and she agreed. We went salsa dancing at a Latino bar near the old international district. We told them we were sisters so that they’d let us dance together. Then, when we were leaving, I kissed her in front of all of them outside on the street with the light of the Salvation Army sign falling down all around us.

  On the way home I wondered how many chances we get. According to Devadatta the reason things are so fucked up is that so many people are human for the first time. I put my key in the door and turned it as quietly as I could. That’s the problem with me. I want to believe in a world of endless second chances but I can’t.

  20 The Head of John the Baptist

  I have two recurring nightmares. In one, I am out of control on a river filled with Nikes, bulk tampons in twenty-pound bags and Indonesian patio furniture. In the other, I see the Statue herself gather her gowns and step off the
island. Liberté! Liberté! Hairpins falling like cluster bombs in the harbor and a bustle of chattering soundbites—she wades in. And I think I could take having these dreams if I knew when they would stop. If someone said, you will have the first one two hundred and thirty nine more times and the second one six times, I could be okay and get used to it because I would know that it wasn’t forever. The problem is that I will never know, not until the day I die and look back and say, oh! that was it. February 22, 20— that’s when they stopped. Likewise, I don’t know when all this will stop. It’s a strange thing to be god of someone else’s terror, even minor god, because I knew I was harmless. People were figuring that out but there was a shining moment in between, a strawberry on the cliff, passing, it still shimmered.

  The phone rang. It was Tamara. She wanted to meet for brunch at Naught. I liked the idea of eating somewhere I had recently threatened to bomb. Besides, I heard they had an ice sculpture there of Leda and the Swan, but that was probably just wishful thinking. Tamara said she had a friend in the kitchen that could hook us up—cashew hummus, seed crackers and probiotic gin—whatever we wanted. I walked into the restaurant right before the rain started. The group of men that came in behind me turned when they heard the thunderclap. “Just in time,” said one of them as the door shut. No, you’re not, I thought. Someone turned up the bossa nova.

  Tamara was in the far corner with her face in a book. I walked over and sat down. Her hair was in short pigtails and she was wearing a green t-shirt with owls on it, light freckles over the bridge of her nose and her fair skin almost violet under her eyes.

  “So, do they really make probiotic gin?” I asked.

  “Yes. I always get it. It’s disgusting.”

  She handed me a glass. It tasted like the bottom of a planter.

  “Guess what I saw on the way down here?” I said. “‘Superland. We will never forget!’ sprayed right the a wall by the bus station.”

  Tamara picked up her menu, “Do you like nori?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Like nori. I like dulse.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “About what?”

  “Superland. We will never forget?”

  “That’s the problem they already have,” she flipped the menu over. “Do you know what makes something a sea lettuce?”

  “Come on, it was cool. Citizens for a Rabid Economy? What was the other one, Manifestation?”

  “All I’m saying is that it’s a fucking lovely day to buy more IKEA. They’re already out shopping.”

  “Two days ago you said it was brilliant.”

  “Yes,” she shrugged, “but it was a wink, wasn’t it? It didn’t really change anything.”

  “Oh right, it would have been much more effective if they lit a trashcan on fire and spray-painted anarchy on the wall.”

  The waiter set a small glass dish of sprouted lentils on the table.

  “Not saying that.”

  “So it doesn’t count because no one torched the parking lot?”

  “No one did anything. It was more like a joke, right? Just like all the other threats. And,” she leaned across the table, “you’re right, a lot of people claiming to be anarchists are pathetic suburban kids that just don’t want to clean their rooms, but I’ll give them one thing, they’ve got it right about property destruction. It isn’t violence, war, poverty, now that’s violence. Blowing up someone’s SUV when no one’s around it is just a good idea. Either way, don’t lump me in with them.”

  Tamara’s face was inches from mine. I could see gray lines in the blue of her iris, her cornflower fingertips on the gin glass. She was a bully but we were more alike than different. I might be too chicken to set an SUV on fire but I wasn’t really against it. In fact I loved reading about things like that because I knew the people who did it were on the same side I was. Even if they didn’t know about me, I knew about them and that made all the difference. I began to think that maybe what I viewed as sensitivity and compassion had just been squeamishness all along.

  Tamara settled back and called the waiter over.

  “I’m going to have the sea lettuce,” she turned, “and you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “My friend will have nothing.”

  Tamara handed him the menus. She sipped her green gin and read the local produce roster on the chalkboard by the bar.

  “Squash, garlic, cilantro. Good, I like cilantro, kale, also very good.”

  “If you’re such a revolutionary what’s your suggestion?”

  “Chard, apple... Don’t know what I’d do. Have to think about it. Pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with committees and talking points. Fingerling potatoes. Aren’t they poisonous raw? You’re a scientist, Della, you should know.”

  “Oh, you must be part of the underground no one’s ever heard about.”

  “I don’t belong to any group outside of my friends.”

  “That’s a real bridge builder.”

  But it was a pretty hollow response. I wasn’t part of any group either, and not just because my wiring was shot and I cried all the time, but because I had never met anyone in any political organization that I liked. “Eat with your hands like the African people,” that’s what this one girl I knew used to say. Someone told me she referred to a fork as fascist. And they were all like that, macrobiotic Belgian trust-fund junkies, park bench anarchists, mean white lesbians in canvas clothing and dreadlocks—each ready to denounce you as a cop at the slightest sign of dissent. My dirty little secret was that I only liked militants at a distance. Up close I couldn’t stand them. Their targets were always the same, a cow path from the cell to the Great Reactionary Dawn. I wanted something more creative than dead clerks.

  “So Della, on a similar note, what do you think will come from the demonstrations around the shootings? An editorial? An oversight committee? Constructive public outrage? ’Cause I’m betting on nothing.”

  She took a bite of the seaweed the waiter brought.

  “This is the grossest thing I’ve ever had. Try some.”

  She pushed it toward me. I pushed it back.

  Fucking Delphi of Gnostic Anarchism. Gatekeeper. Hey, I have to go now. I’m late for a hanging. Gonna celebrate the eight-hour day with some friends, you should totally come. Fucking elitist. Assuming I hadn’t thought about these kinds of things. But inside me something quivered. It was a road I had never gone down. My family has no patience for anarchists. Grace sent me to a Marxist reading group when I was sixteen so that I wouldn’t be tempted to become one. Credence didn’t have to go, the little loyalist. I remember when I showed up, this really sweet, old communist thought I was part of a youth brigade that didn’t exist. He’d talk for hours about revolutionary strategy. His analysis was flawless but it was like being forced to watch a starving polar bear clamber over breaking ice after a fat and agile sea lion. Nice left! Shame about all that saltwater. Ever thought about hunting in packs?

  I was the polar bear. I got up.