“I told Mirror I’d help her move stuff for the party.”
“Good. Me too. We can go together.”
“Do what you want.”
Outside, the rain had stopped for the moment. The sky was dark gray but there were bands of pale light on the horizon. Driven against the ground, they brightened under the compression and made everything slightly blue. A bald man’s head went by, vivid as a robin’s egg.
“We can walk from here,” Tamara said.
It was raining heavily again by the time we got to the Cycle. We crossed a muddy inner courtyard. Wet chickens walked in jerky patterns through rows of vegetables and rainwater barrels. Mirror had everything stored in an uninhabited part of the squat and we walked into a common area that was once a lobby. Posters of bands and demonstrations, black silhouettes of raised fists and barbed wire, devil horns and drag races covered the walls. In the center of the room around a table two men and a woman sat rolling cigarettes and drinking coffee. One man introduced himself as Black Francis. The other, with ashen blond hair and pale skin, was Jules, and next to him was Britta, who had short henna-red hair, gray eyes, and a wide flat milky face. I knew a hundred people who looked like her.
“Come on!” yelled Mirror from the corridor ahead. “We only have the van for a few hours.”
We loaded the van with props, tools and decorations at the Cycle then hopped in and drove to Mirror’s place to get some boxes she had there. The whole way there Tamara couldn’t stop going off about the bomb threats and how pathetic they were. We were coming down the stairs of Mirror’s apartment when I finally yelled, “What the hell do you care about Manifestation anyway?”
“Nothing! I don’t care about it at all. It was a hoax. There’s nothing to care about.”
I wanted to push her down the stairs but my arms were full of boxes. I’m a foot taller. If I hit her it would hurt. I thought about that going down the stairs.
“And how do you know it’s a hoax?” I said. “Half the town is still blocked off.”
“Because they haven’t found a single bomb. They don’t even think it’s related to the parking garage or dog track.”
“They don’t know. It could be related.”
“Well, do you believe it is?” She stepped in front of me to push open the front door. “Or do you think it’s a hoax?”
The rain was so loud I could barely hear. I tried to go through but Tamara was holding the door and blocking it all at the same time.
“Well,” I said jamming her against the doorframe as I passed, “I don’t think it was a joke. I would have been scared if I was there. If someone called and said they were going to blow the place up. I would have been terrified.”
Tamara grinned flashing her broken incisor and moved aside.
Mirror backed the van over the curb and honked. We ran the boxes in off the porch. It was a fucking downpour. I could see Mirror in the front of the cab talking to someone on the phone and eating a cupcake.
“In fact,” I said throwing some boxes into the back, “I like what they’re doing,” I slammed the van door, “someone should be drawing those lines,” I was shouting, “pointing that stuff out. People should have to think about their world and if no one gets killed, even better.”
“Right,” Tamara yelled, “think. Think about it. Not do anything about it. If you like that stupid group so much why don’t you go join up. It couldn’t be that hard. I’m sure they have a blog.”
“Oh yeah it would have been much better if they actually blew up the dog track.”
“So you don’t believe they did it either,” she laughed.
“I don’t care who blew up the dog track! It wasn’t exactly a call for class war, now was it? I mean who even goes to the dog track? Poor, stupid, white people. They need to be organized, not traumatized over the death of their favorite dumb fucking anorexic greyhound.”
I stomped back up the stairs and was about to make another point, a really good one about vanguards as a sub-cultural delusion, when Mirror came in behind us, freaking out because the eyehooks at the warehouse weren’t going to hold and she wanted slings and a trapeze.
“Hang plants,” I said.
“It’s supposed to be sexy,” she screamed, “not some hippy soft porn garden scene. Nobody wants to look up and see ferns.”
“And what you’ve got can’t hold a person?”
“Not with the kind of torque we’re going to be putting on it.”
“Post a weight limit,” I said.
“The fucking fat chicks would slay me. Slain. I would be dead. No more parties. Ever. I would actually have to slit my own throat to have an afterlife.”
She kicked a box of glassware.
“This rain sucks and I’m totally going to get a yeast infection if I keep eating this much sugar.”
She threw the half-eaten cupcake in the trash.
The phone rang and she asked me to get it. It was Devadatta.
“Turn on the TV.”
“I don’t think there is a TV.”
Mirror made devil’s horns with her fingers to signify television.
“No. No TV.”
“Well, they blew up that temp agency. You know the one out by the malls, Brass Ring? They blew it up.”
“That was a hoax,” I said.
“I’m watching it now. The blast took out the whole front.”
Once, I fell into a frozen river. It was like that. I held the phone away from my ear. Tamara saw my face and came around behind me so she could hear too.
“Were there others?”
My voice was so quiet I’m surprised she could understand what I said.
“Yeah, they found another bomb in the Olde Towne Mall. You know where all the high school kids hang out? But they got that one before it went off.”
Tamara turned on the radio. There were two more, one by the loading dock of Transcontinental and the other in a small pho place that served over 100 kinds of bubble tea. I thought I heard one go off somewhere nearby but it was someone closing a door. Car engines sound like low-flying planes and the woman clapping for her dog to come like hand grenades. I was an atom. My electron cloud awareness charged everything around me. I could feel a part of myself, way, way beyond the universe. I had done something terrible.
“I guess I was wrong about that group,” said Tamara quietly. “Maybe they are about something after all.”
I didn’t say anything. I was running over the list trying to figure out how many places I’d called.
We went to a bar with a TV and stared for an hour. Devadatta met us there. Bomb squads and cameras were trained on the New Land Trust building like it was a birthday cake with a stripper inside. Then they cut back to Brass Ring with its missing face.
“Man,” Mirror said, “just look at that.”
I couldn’t stop. I saw the buildings burn in live time. People were crying. They were scared. High school girls huddled together waiting for their parents to come get them. A little Vietnamese boy wailed in his mother’s arms. Oh god, I thought, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god…and I ran my shaking hands through my hair. With short sharp fingernails I scratched at my chest until it was red with crosshatches. What had I done?
Newscaster Ken’s Black Friend Garth was interviewing crickets.
“Chirp, chirp, rutuhtuhtuhtuhvrrrrrr… MANIFESTTION. Chirp, chirp, rrrhhhhtuhtuhvrrrrrr…”
Mirror got up. “Everything is going to be fucking closed for days.”
“Are you going to reschedule the party?” Devadatta asked.
“Fuck no! Letting the terrorists win and all.”
Devadatta pulled out a scrap of paper with a phone number on it and handed it to Mirror. “Oh! I forgot. I talked to Raina and she’s definitely coming. She’s even talking about leading a class there, you know, like an intermission. That way everyone can stay grounded. She said to call her. Most people never get to practice yoga naked. I really think it will help keep people in thei
r bodies more.”
“Whatever,” Mirror said, “just don’t make it too granola. Focus on stretching the perineum. Mula Bandha, that’s something people could use for sure. Remind me tonight and I’ll get mats.”
They left. I barely noticed. My eyes were on the Miracle Station. Every so often the feed went back to the news desk and anchors gave updates on some border skirmishes they were following. But I couldn’t tell which border, or whose. Then they went back to the bombs and the fires here, where it was all burning and no one had been hurt, not yet. New ejecta glittered in the terrorsphere.
“Come on,” Tamara said, “I’ll walk you home.”
She dragged me off the stool but I blocked traffic in the doorway because I couldn’t stop watching and she had to pull me out.
“Everyone’s fine, Della. Take a breath.”
The people on the street said it was a miracle. Not one person hurt. Tamara thought it was a miracle too. I started thinking about it. It couldn’t be an accident. Whoever did it must have been really careful. They must have meant for those other bombs to be found. It was my own flag waving back across the gulch. After walking a while, I saw the natural balance of cause and effect in play, karma created long before me. With every block, I grew confident. I hadn’t bombed those places. They deserved it but I hadn’t done it. I was sick of feeling responsible for other people’s decisions. Paying for other people’s wars. My muscles began to relax. And, instead of horror something else filtered through, the faint thrill of becoming. It was a miracle. The Saint with Black Tears passed me and waved, her children safe at home. Up the street I heard the jackhammers. They’re building a supermarket made of mud. It’s going to have valet parking, be completely organic and only fish that was inhabited by the souls of former rapists will be sold. Workers will get emergency room coupons and free coffee. I looked at the sky. Everything has a beginning, middle and end. The rain had stopped. Then it started again. It wasn’t personal.
We got to my door. Nobody was home. Tamara said she wanted to see the head of John the Baptist and when I showed it to her she laughed so hard I thought she was going to choke.
“The cheeks are made of sought after recommendations.”
My pride. Taking credit coming and going. Tamara was on her back, tears rolling down her face leaving little webs of eye makeup under her eyes. “What are we going to do with it?” she asked when she got breath.
“I was going to give it to my brother for his birthday zipped in a body bag with ‘For the Fairest’ written in Greek across the front and a My Pretty Pony inside.”
She didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t know what I was talking about. It didn’t matter. She sat up, flushed, looking about thirteen years old.
“Let’s take it somewhere and let some kids bash the hell out of it!”
We put the head in a pillowcase and caught a bus to the Ukrainian neighborhood out near the suburb of Pretty Little Hopes. The rain had let up a little but the sky was still dark. On the way we got bags of candy, a cheap baseball bat and some twine. Everywhere around us people were glued to their televisions or on the phone. Sirens sounded intermittently. A couple of times I wanted to turn back but she wouldn’t let me.
We found a tree near a middle school and strung it up. Kids started gathering even before we were done. I let a tall fat boy with an Ozzy patch on his jacket have the first go. We blindfolded him with his friend’s bandana and spun him around. His first swing missed but his second cracked the cheek of John the Baptist. Next up was a girl with stringy hair and new breasts. She crushed the Prophet’s chin. After her came two boys, one after another, each small and fast but neither of them left a mark on the head.
A sheet of sunlight came through the rainclouds and fell on the children, lighting up half a face, or the top of an ear. It made the gold crosses on their pale necks flash. Then it shifted and broke, streaming through the cracks in the dark gray sky, and played off the tips of reaching fingers. It turned the baseball bat white as it cut through the air.
A girl stepped into the pit and all the kids started yelling in Russian, trying to get her to swing one way or the other but she just stood there while the head of John the Baptist swayed above her. I swear to god she was listening to it move. She bent her knees slightly, wrapped her fingers around the bat and swung. The bat came down across his left eyebrow and split the head diagonally. Candy rained down around her and the kids started squealing.
“My kind of religion,” said Tamara.
The tall fat boy with the Ozzy patch jumped at the battered Prophet and got hold of an ear. He yanked and tore off the back of the head. A few more pieces of candy fell out and he dove for them leaving the papier-mâché skull shapeless on the ground. I walked over and picked up the piece. I recognized the handwriting on the inside of the brain case. It was a personal note from a council officer at the Paleontological Society asking me to attend an event. I threw it down and kicked it. I never felt so free in all my life.
Tamara and I began to walk. I folded the pillowcase up and stuck it in my bag. A large droplet of water splashed down on my scalp. Then another.
“Here it comes again,” she said but we didn’t walk any faster.
“That’s something I’d remember,” I wiped water out of my eyes, “if I was a kid. It would stay with me until the day I died. Do you think they knew whose head it was?”
“No. I don’t think they cared.”
“Would it have been better if I told them, do you think?”
“Probably not. By the way, I really liked the thumbtack eyes.”
“Thanks, I enjoyed pushing them in.”
“And the junk mail hair.”
“That was fun too.”
“Was your diploma in there?”
“No. I cut it up and gave it to a toddler who wanted to color.”
When we got on the bus we were drenched. Tamara buried her chin in her coat, “You should come out to the farm. Stay with us for a while. It’d be good for you to get a break from the city.”
“Yeah, I heard you got goats.”
She laughed, “That too. But more importantly people, we have people who think like you do. There’s a bunch of us out there. You should really come.”
She got off at the next stop and I watched her shrink as the bus rumbled down Colony of the Elect Boulevard. All the way home I hummed a song Grace taught me about soldiers and sailors and the shining North Star.
21 Geode
The next morning I crossed the river lit by smaller fires. In my bag were the remaining rat family cell phones. I went to the Central Transit station, which was full of displaced workers thrown from their schedules by the bombings and scrambling to adjust. I sat down on a long bench in a crowd of people and pulled out the phones. Busses came and went on either side of me. I picked up the grape cell phone belonging to Jupiter Rodere and set it aside without turning it on. Saturn, Poseidon and Uranus I switched on and programmed to call-forward to their targets. Then I sent them off on different busses and walked two blocks north to a busy shopping plaza.
My whole life I had held back. But at that moment, I threw myself into the arms of an invisible collective and with all my heart, leapt for the sea lion.
I called in the Happy Day Corporate Charity Center first because I felt the hand of Jupiter should strike it dead directly. Lightning bolts of hate. Then I called the strawberry cell phone, Saturn, which call forwarded to the Oldies Station, KGOD and told them they were going to be bombed. I didn’t explain past that. I figured that if they had to ask, they wouldn’t have understood. Next was the blueberry cell, Poseidon. It forwarded to the Central Library. Then Uranus, which hit the Cine-Tower. I did it fast then threw the Jupiter phone into the flatbed of a passing truck.
I crossed back over the river. On the water, the city upon the hill wavered, an inverted reflection, and broke into scallops of stuttering light as the sun set. I went to a de-paving party once and watched people tear up a parking lot. I cried and
cried because I’m a sap and it was so fucking hopeful I felt ashamed to even be there. I never let myself believe things like that can happen but I finally admitted that hidden in my scientist’s mind was a dancehall that I had kept shuttered. I forgot the prettiest fossils are worthless. All the important material eaten by crystals. I felt like that was what was happening to me.
Two days went by and no new bombs went off. The security subsided and people fell back into their patterns. During that time I saw Jimmy twice. Both times it was awkward. She was somewhere else. I was someone else.
The first I heard of it was from a woman walking her dog. She said, stay away from downtown. Three more bombs had gone off. I asked her if anyone was hurt. She said no. It was a miracle.
Over the next twenty-four hours more fires started. Some of it was organized and some of it was just kids throwing Molotov cocktails. And no one was hurt. I know. I asked several times and not just the same person. They all said it, Milagro! Milagro! I broke open like a geode.
I know someone whose gratitude practice is centered on appreciating every object from the day it comes into his possession until the dystopic collapse of society. Vacations (soon nobody’s going to be going anywhere, man), new cars (what the hell, we’ll all be walking before long), guitars (how else are we going to have music without electricity)—the guy was a Zen master. I walked in the golden autumn light thinking he was more right than not.
I stopped by Rise Up Singing and listened for a while to the coverage with everyone else, huddled around the kitchen radio. The Happy Day Corporate Center was decimated. Boxes of irregular Nike shoes melting like butter. KGOD went down, a burning bush, a sign for all to see. Look! A new star in the heaven under which we shall find the baby—oh, maybe not. What’s all this charred cinder block? The Cine-Tower, a lighthouse, a beacon on a hill.
The last thing I heard about were the two AM radio towers south of town. They exploded like timed fireworks, dancing around like sparklers on the Fourth of July. It was a beautiful thing about the towers but there was only one problem. I hadn’t called them in. The AM radio towers were on my original target list, not on my working one. They were alone on the border of town near the spinning cell phone and I decided there was no point calling them in because there was no one there. I had crossed them off my list days before but they were burning all the same.
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