Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  Inside the directions were folded up into a little swan. I turned it over. For that one moment there was no pull in any direction. I let out a breath. Nowhere for me to be this night but here. I unbraided my hair and shook it out. I had been waiting for something and not known what. Unpinned from all the things to which I was beholden—Grace in the hall of mirrors, Credence in the candlelight, Jimmy, the box-mall-church, the head of John the Baptist—I felt my body like I owed it to no one. Loosening the strap on my bag, it fell to the ground and for the first time in forever I let everything slip. Soon I might be in a foreign country, or maybe in jail, but right then I was under that broken slab of concrete with everyone else.

  Steam rose from people in the Big Tent, condensed on the metal rafters and rained back down on the crowd. Raina was in the corner, her long auburn hair falling over her naked body, moving through her Vinyasa. Several people followed her and more were coming and going. She led the asanas, flowing through the warrior stances, lowering each time to the ground and arcing back then down again in a metered dance half time to the industrial buzzing of the DJ loops. I walked past them all and up a narrow, metal stairway. At the top was a door with the word MOTEL written in small black letters over the door handle. I opened it. A long carpeted hallway stretched ahead with rooms on either side. They must have been clerical offices a long time ago. Mirror had painted numbers on the doors. The one closest to the stairway was empty and I could see in. There was a ratty bed, a chair and an end table with a lamp that gave off yellow light. Mirror put a Bible next to the lamp and covered the window with a dark sheet to block any light from outside.

  I took a few more steps in. It was cold in the Motel. I could hear beds creaking and soft moaning. It was full of people. Down the hallway a woman cried out and I heard the door slam shut. The hallway was dark. Some had kept their lights on and others had them off. At the end of the hallway there was a room with the door open and the light off. I went in.

  A man was sitting in a chair.

  “Claire?” he said and turned.

  He couldn’t see me. The end of the hallway was black.

  “No. Not Claire.”

  He went back to looking out the covered window. Through the green flannel sheet the outline of Public Utility with its dormered windows and gabled roof could be seen. I walked over to him until the arm of the chair was pressed against the front of my thigh. His skin was pale and his chest smooth and I could see my breath under the dim light of the window. I wondered why he wasn’t cold. His hair looked black in the room and the way he said Claire sounded like he was from somewhere else.

  “Are you Russian?”

  “Yes. Mostly.”

  After a few minutes he stood up. We were inches apart. His skin smelled like wood oil. I felt for his wrist and pulled it towards me. He laughed. I held it to the faint light. A red bracelet dangled.

  I liked the sound of his voice. The shape of his hip and the way his hairline feathered at the nape of his neck. I liked that he was tall. I liked the combination of being cold and then too hot but never warm and never any one feeling all over. Sometimes I saw people in the doorway, standing shadows. Then later they would be gone, as if they had been looking for something and found it. Other people came in at one point and I bowed out for some of it. I took my turn in the chair staring out the green window and sat like he had, naked from the waist up, to see what it felt like and watched my breath dissolve in the muted light.

  I stayed in there until daybreak. He was sleeping when I left. I wandered down the hallway and into another part of the building where there was a landing and a back staircase and down to the main floor. Gray light came through the high windows of the warehouse. There were people everywhere tangled and twisted like a photograph of a crash site. Behind hanging blankets, some lamps were still lit and I heard groans and the movement of bodies.

  I found my things and walked down another hallway, constructed of corrugated tin, to a makeshift kitchen where a sink was. A staging room of some sort. Pallets of bottled water were stacked in the corner and towels and first aid kits sat on chairs beside them. I opened a bottle of water and walked out the back door down some rotted steps into a field of beaten yellow weeds. It was much colder than the day before but not raining.

  There was a fire pit several yards in front of me and I watched gray ashes, bright as stars, get swept upwards by the wind and fall to the ground, settling on the trampled grass. I took a seat on some cinder blocks near the back steps and looked up into the white sky.

  The Russian man I had spent the past few hours with came down the steps and sat beside me. He had a tin can full of water and some pliers. I helped him start a fire in the pit and we set the can in the middle of the flames on a brick. It felt like field camp. The air smelled of snow. There was a tree up against a fence and its limbs raked the sky. When the water was hot and the sides of the can were scorched black, the man took a plastic bag full of coffee and poured it into the water. He smiled like a soldier, the way you would at a stranger you passed. A tiny spider crack, infinitesimal, reminded me again that there was no clean way through this. My scientific training was all about prediction but there is no prediction. I had called in bombs and no one was hurt. I had tied a Buzz Lightyear to a twig and driftwood caskets swirled in eddies. Both were universes and there were millions more, smaller than anything I could imagine.

  I kept looking at the sky. Then at the Russian’s black hair, his gray sweater, the poisoned industrial field, trampled and soaked, then back at the white, white sky.

  “What do you think about all the bombs?” I asked.

  “Manifestation?” he laughed and pulled the coffee out of the fire then set the blackened can down on another brick. “Doesn’t change much. More cute, I think. Meaningless, really.”

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a thick porcelain coffee cup. He dipped the cup into the boiled coffee and handed it to me, “The fires will go out. Something else will take its place.”

  I drank the coffee. The tree behind him had such fine leaves on it that they seemed to belong to another tree all together. They were crumpled and the color of dried roses. The man stood.

  “I have to go. Do you have a pen?”

  I found one that had slipped down into the torn lining of my coat. He squatted down in front of me and pulled my free hand toward him.

  “This way, if you want, you can always claim it washed away,” he said and wrote his number across my palm.

  I looked at it several times that day. Each time I washed my hands, it faded more until it was only visible to me because I knew it had been there.

  I was going to the Farm and I knew it.

  23 Into the Snow

  Two days later I caught the bus to Breaker’s Rise with Tamara’s folded swan in my pocket. I didn’t tell her I was coming. Creeping past my hidden desire for things not to be fucked, to belong somewhere, I made up other reasons for my trip—It’s a lovely time of the year to see the coastal range; I heard they’ve got raw goat’s milk kefir. It was as if I actually believed that none of my violated hopes were real if no one else knew about them, just like how someone’s not dead until you say it on the phone.

  The Blackberry Apocalypse was settling into a traffic menace and the maybe the Russian was right that not much had actually changed but I saw it differently. Over the digital streams and dammed expressways, my flag like gauze in front of the stars.

  I packed like I was going to sea. I took my maps, my rock hammer, and the last Hive phone. In my PO box was the actual issue of Paleobiology featuring my name in black script on the yellow peach cover. Out of sentimentality I took that too.

  Credence got the morning off and drove me up to a small town north of the city so I could catch the bus there and avoid the long security lines downtown, which was an all-around good idea. The rains started again but it was colder and I heard there was snow in the pass. We talked a lot about the candlelight march. They never even got across the bridge. The po
lice came in from both sides and started arresting people. One girl got so scared she jumped. Broke her leg in three places. Before if I had said I was leaving town after something like that he would have called me a coward and accused me of exercising white privilege in the face of the real costs of gentrification. But when I told him I was going out to a friend’s farm he seemed relieved. Lowering expectations being the secret to my success.

  Credence bought me lunch in a Mexican restaurant near the Fallon City station and waited with me until the bus came. We talked about the babies. Annette had picked a birthing center and he had negotiated his time off with the union. They were going to go in for another ultrasound the following week.

  “Got any good twin names?” he asked.

  “Romulus and Remus?”

  He smiled, ordered an horchata, and stared out the window, the parking lot reflected in his eyes.

  It was raining harder when the bus came. An older man with matching luggage got off and they switched drivers. Two women who got out to smoke were complaining about being late. I was standing in the aisle when we pulled out and Credence flickered away. Dog salmon super 8. The bus moved north then east along a river. We stopped in a few other small towns before turning onto a long stretch of road that ran parallel to an old railway line. I looked at the bedding planes of the road cut. My mind ran between riots and Rat Queens. I’d remember the Russian man, stark in the green of the Motel, and suddenly see Grace, her dark hair streaming over an aquamarine dress and tiny creeks flowing from her fingers. There were no anchor points to my thoughts at all.

  I laid my head on the glass. A wave of nausea swept through my body when I thought about the bombings and what I had done. But eventually, lulled by the vibrations of the bus and the passing geology of my childhood summers, my mind cleared. Nobody was dead. I didn’t need to know what happened. And living in the center of that thought the vertigo and nauseous fear came and passed. Twice I had to stop looking out the window, fix my eyes on a single point.

  The bus pulled sharply to the side and the engine made a loud stuttering sound. People who were dozing woke up and looked around as the driver edged us onto the shoulder. We were there for about twenty minutes then the driver got back in and said we were going to have to find somewhere to stop for a while. He limped the bus a couple of miles ahead to a truck stop right off the main highway and tried to fix it there but he couldn’t so we had get out and wait for a new bus. People started calling their friends and trying to get rides. The rest of us set up camp in the truck stop.

  The Farm was only about four hours away but it was on the other side of the mountains and the woman behind the counter said the pass was getting worse and would probably close by nightfall. The cell reception was bad and I had an address not a landline number so I couldn’t have called anyone at Breaker’s Rise anyway. I found a place near the showers on the driver’s side of the truck stop, a waiting room with black vinyl seats, a television and three courtesy phones. I curled up there near a window and watched as the rain turned to flurries, a white line moving down the mountain.

  There were tanks on television rolling through the snow somewhere far away. It was night there and everything looked green on camera except the icy ridge they were climbing. Tanks disappeared over it like seals into water. Then there was an explosion. I could tell by the way the sky lit up. After that they just showed maps.

  I got up and got a cup of coffee. The snow was falling thickly. I looked out at the bus parked at the far end of the lot. Soon the wheels would be buried. Already the roof and windows were covered. I sat back down and pulled out my notebook. A man with a belt buckle the size of a steak got up and switched the channel for a weather update. More snow. Early for this time of the year. Pictures of flooding roads in the valley. Pictures of giddy jocks on the slopes. A reporter in a pink fleece with a cup of hot chocolate. The trucker changed it back.

  They were showing footage of the fires for anyone who missed it and then Newscaster Ken’s Black Friend Garth interviewed the minister of Higher Ground of Africa Baptist, then back to the fires. For a second I couldn’t tell if it was really happening or not. Like the first time I ever heard a bomb when I was four and I didn’t know what it was. It was on TV but there was no screen between the fire and me. There were all these apartments burning and I couldn’t understand where it was because the newscaster kept saying Philadelphia but then people talked about how they bombed Africa. I couldn’t sleep. Grace and Miro stayed with me. I remember Grace talking. She walked back and forth trying to explain something. Some things she said again and again but it didn’t get any clearer. We were in a war, but not really a war. Not everyone knew about it. Some people did but pretended they didn’t. But it was going on all around us all the time and we must never forget or we’d lose. Everything depended on that. Miro sat on the bed while she talked with his heavy hand on my leg. I woke up in the afternoon. I’d been dreaming of dead birds.

  A man nudged me.

  “Hey, are you Della?”

  Then I heard the page.

  “Della Mylinek. Della Mylinek. Please come to the convenience store counter. Della Mylinek.”

  “Never mind,” someone said, “I see her.”

  Tamara tromped in wearing a big green coat with a fuzzy hood. There was snow on her shoulders and boots.

  “Come on, quick. The others are in the car. We’re going to try to make it back through the pass before it closes.”

  She grabbed my bag and we ran out the back and climbed into the car. There was a guy in the front passenger seat and a girl in the back. We took off with the chains ticking as they dug into the snow.

  “I called Mirror to see how the party went,” Tamara yelled over the rattling engine, “she said you were coming,” she looked back at me and grinned. “There aren’t too many busses that go all the way out to Breaker’s Rise.”

  In the car were two of the people I’d met at the Cycle. The man with the light hair, Jules, was in the front seat, and the woman, Britta, was in the back. Jules watched me get in but said nothing. I climbed in next to Britta. When I got settled, she handed me a thermos of yerba mate and we pulled out onto the highway, now a white alley where the sky and road met. Steering between the dark underbellies of trees shrouded in snow and the hazard lights of stranded trucks, we headed for the pass. Tamara’s hands were the color of bone on the ochre steering wheel.

  “I told them all about you,” Tamara said when the pitch of the road lessened.

  Jules glanced away. I could see freckles faint on his cheeks and his blond hair was ashen in the snowlight. Tamara slapped him in the stomach and he smiled. They had the same bone-colored hands. I wondered if they were related. Britta pointed to an abandoned DOT truck on the shoulder.

  “That’s a bad sign.”

  Jules rolled his window down to wipe more snow off the side mirror and I thought I heard a dog yelping but it was just a harmonic created by the wind and it went away when he rolled it up.

  Closer to the pass were more parked state vehicles, ploughs and salters buried in the whiteness. I closed my eyes. Tamara was telling a story about some guy she knew who was so afraid of snakes that he broke up with his girlfriend because she got a snake tattoo.

  “What a fucking coward!” Britta said.

  I went to sleep wondering what tattoos scared me that much.

  We came through the pass when I was only half-awake. It was dark and they were talking about what to do if we got stuck and had to make it through the night. I raised my head. The dashboard was a constellation of vectors and points and the view through the windshield was a gray parabola. Tamara said it would be fine as long as no one got out to go to the bathroom. Jules said it would be fine even if they did, just colder. Britta laughed and said she’d rather use the thermos. Their lips were teal. They might have been speaking Yupik or Estonian. That’s how foreign I felt among them.

  Grace once told me that the easiest way to radicalize someone is to isolate them and that I s
hould make sure that never happened to me. It might be that what she said was true. But I didn’t really mind being cut off from everything.

  24 Deer Teeth

  I woke up in a wooden bed under layers of quilts with the idea in my head that something was about to change. I sat up and looked out the window. Everything was covered by a thin layer of snow except for where the goats had beaten muddy paths into the ground. There were several outbuildings, rounded cob structures with embedded color tiles in geometric patterns. One looked like a woodshed and to the left of that was a brick structure with dark gray smoke curling up into the sky. I put on my clothes and went downstairs. The kitchen was empty. A bag of coffee sat on a large oak table and someone had been baking bread. There was a note from Tamara saying that she was out back and to come find her.

  I set the note back down and got some water. I had been with Grace and Miro in a hundred kitchens like that. Everything was wood, metal, paper or glass; nothing was disposable. I knew where to look for cloth filters, tea, compost buckets and co-op containers of peanut butter, honey and tahini. I knew how the bread would taste, how the clay mugs would feel and how cold the kitchen would be until people came and it got warm from the bodies. I knew someone would have to boil the water for the dishes and someone would have to bury the trash at night so the bears didn’t get it. And if you couldn’t feel the despair that was in everything, if you were numb to the intense loss at the center of it all, it was like stepping right into a children’s story. Fresh milk and cozy fires on the cusp of a wild wood.

  I walked out back to where I had seen the cob buildings. A goat bleated at me. Tamara was over by the smokehouse. She waved me towards her.

  “Want some smoked fish?”

  “I thought you were vegan.”

  “No, Mirror only speaks to me because she considers my conversion a life goal.”

  She handed me a pink strip of salmon jerky.