Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  And I ran at the crowd but they grabbed me again and said to leave or they were calling the cops but I didn’t want to leave the little liver hearts because you shouldn’t be afraid like that, not when someone needs you, you should be able to look them in the eye, even if they’re dying and you’re scared and you can’t do anything, you shouldn’t run even if they’re howling and bleeding, you should stay and sit with them while they go because someone should and you just shouldn’t be afraid like that, enough to leave them alone like that when they only have a few minutes left, you should be there.

  So I ran back up to where I was and sat down with the fear like acid inside me, on fire with tears streaming down my face and duct tape wrapped so tight around my hands they were numb. I sat there because there was nowhere left to go. I was at the spine of the world. Turning away was as bad as leaving, or hiding in a college, or a restaurant, or clutching the torn shred of a failed movement or pretending to build one out of spectacle. It was all the same. I turned to the store, fixed my eyes on a patch of cement that ran along the front and waited. I knew what was coming. I saw it every night. People filled their carts and packed their trunks and every time a bus pulled up and kids ran out I made myself stay because even though I knew there was a timer on the bomb, I didn’t know when it was set to go off and I didn’t want to look away.

  The sky changed color and the variegated tones of the cars in the parking lot shifted every few hours. I sat there all day, burning. I saw Tamara across the lot. She was watching too but I didn’t care anymore and she went away. She was just there to see if I still was. I know her. She’s like that.

  It got dark and the crowds thinned. The streetlights turned off and the emergency lamps came on and the Wal-Mart was still lit, bright and white, as the employees walked out to their cars and drove away. The tall manager came out last and locked the doors and left and I sat there listening to the quiet. I thought I heard the trickle of water in a culvert but I don’t know.

  28 The Skateboard Sutta

  I’m not sure how long I was there before I realized nothing was going to happen. Nor do I know how many times that thought came to me before it stayed. It would hit me, suddenly; Tamara’s not going to do it. She never was. She wouldn’t. And then that thought would get replaced by slivers of her speech glued into a new constructed meaning and I could see that we had only seconds, that she would do it, and then I would know beyond any doubt that the Wal-Mart was about to explode with all those kids inside. I’d wait with every muscle tense, my heart splayed helpless, a jellyfish on the sand. And then nothing would happen and I had no idea why.

  Tamara might have planned to bomb the Wal-Mart and run into a technical snag. Or she might have changed her mind. Maybe she was just buying rope and forgot her bag inside. Maybe it was all going to happen tomorrow—I sat through every possibility, each a wild universe, a bomb threat? A Buzz Lightyear? O my monks, all is burning… The fear dissipated and the shame rose then it went the other way. Countless times, when I was on the verge of leaving, my thoughts would take a new form, new sight or sound or feeling or just a desire for it all to be true and the whole thing to blow up so that I wouldn’t have to wait like that anymore. And all of it would come back, the terrible conviction, and I’d run after it until it vanished again and I fell clutching, and what was the all that was burning? I saw a thousand specters and grabbed at 999 of them.

  Hours after the store closed, a station wagon drove out onto the empty lot. It slowed to a stop in the middle and a man got out of it. He was in his forties, stout with thin hair. He came around the other side of the car and waited. A young girl climbed out and he handed her the keys. She got in the driver’s seat and he looked around, probably because it was past curfew. Then he got in beside her. She tried to start the car but it stalled. She tried it again and it went a few feet and stalled. Finally she got it going and lurched forward. She drove in a shaky line, then slammed on the breaks and stalled it again. I watched her like there was nothing between us, like we were inside each other.

  At the end of an hour she could keep the car going. She drew lazy circles on the grid of the lot before pulling into a parking space and getting out.

  After they left I was alone. I heard bullets and felt deep tremors in the earth but I didn’t move. Cady sat beside me and I was afraid that if I stirred for even a second, she would be gone. I stayed that way all night and let her leave on her own. Some things are so sad that they have no name. I have tried to name them and I can’t. I sat there and watched those things dissolve into that wasted land.

  People will do anything. Smash a kid’s head against a rock. Maim silverbacks and drag them across a square. Run through landmines to protect someone they’ve never met. Waste their bodies on grace. A high wire, a hurdle, a diving plane. It’s chemistry and people are shifting compounds, not elements like I thought. Sitting up all night, watching the Wal-Mart fail to blow up, I saw an endless spectrum. I don’t mean some soft sell about life on the banks or shades of gray. What I saw was a spectacle. A death chamber. A chandelier. A thousand rooms. By the edge of an industrial park with my face burnt and my swollen duct-taped hands, I finally joined the human race. I became a tenant in that house.

  I was not afraid of horror, I was afraid of beauty, of what it could do to me if I let it. I felt like a sun, expanding and brighter than anything. My fingertips burned and my red eyes looked over the emptiness. I cut the tape off my hands and watched the skin turn from white-blue to pale pink as blood flowed back into them.

  The parking lot glistened, a black frozen lake. There was light atop the subdivisions. I stood up and fell over, scratching my face and neck on the clipped branches of the tangled shrubs. When I got back up my legs were on fire. I stamped my foot and millions of nails went through my sole fast enough to shatter my clay femur and I fell again.

  There was a trickle of water. I hadn’t imagined it. It was quiet enough for me to hear it and I followed the sound. I climbed over a mound of bark chip landscaping. On the other side was a drainage pipe through which clear water ran. It was a culvert under some kind of utility road. But the road had moved, curving now to the left and wider. The old cement was torn away and the ribs of the pipe left exposed, oxidizing in the open air.

  I limped over to it and knelt down to get some water on my forehead. I was in a land between, not over the Black Ocean, not on the shores of New Honduras, not in the forests of Grace Mountain. A ghost on the site of the Blackberry Massacre.

  I unbraided my hair and combed it with my fingers then washed my face for real. My sweatshirt was filthy so I took it off and held it in the icy water until it was soaked then used it as a rag to clean my calves and arms and to wipe my boots. Then I left it there at the mouth of the drainage pipe and walked, bare-armed, out onto a side road that fed into Value Town Outlet Parkway.

  There were a few cars on the road and some busses. People were going to work. I stood around at a bus stop for a while listening to people talk. Some kind of Southeast Asian language, Cambodian maybe. They were dressed like Mexicans and had hard plastic names tags. Señor Chankrisna. Señor Nath. Señoritas Boupha and Thirith with their lemon and cherry striped ponchos, their black pants and passing around a pack of Cambodian cigarettes with a white hawk on it. I watched the bus doors open and fold shut behind them. I didn’t get on. I waited as groups came and went.

  I saw men in satin union jackets, hungover and red. I saw bleached blonde Latinas with fake violet nails embedded with rhinestones tapping their fingers, clicking them against hard vinyl purses. I saw black, white and Filipino nursing assistants in Hawaiian scrubs, tall and wide with bent backs and thin gold crosses laying like silk over their clavicles. I can’t say what I saw. I saw mean children and scared men and disoriented women in wigs from costume stores and pressed and shaven Arabic men with wedding rings and polished shoes and groups of teenagers swinging themselves into place, throwing back their heads with their mouths open, their arms along the seat backs as the
y passed, stuttering out of sight.

  I got on the bus at noon and rode it into the older part of the city. I walked down the street with all the pawnshops, looking in the windows. I saw a whole wall of burning TVs. Fire on every screen. And I saw my own face flash by, a person of interest. But that was just another storyline too so I kept walking.

  I ate lunch at a burrito cart on the south side of town near the water. That’s where I saw the paper with my face on it. In the picture I was blonde and my hair was tied back. It was my ID photo from Davis. It didn’t say much, just that they wanted to talk to me in connection with the bombings. I thought that made a lot of sense. I would want to talk to me too if I were them. But I wasn’t and sat on a bench near the water and thought about other things.

  I walked further south along the new promenade under the sweet gum and crape myrtle trees until it dead-ended by a convenience store. A boy with a skateboard was hanging around by the dumpster talking to people when they came out. He had on a plastic trench coat and a t-shirt with a big white skull on it. I went over to him and asked him what he was doing.

  “You want to buy me some beer?”

  “Sure,” I said and he started to hand me money but I said I’d pay for it.

  He shrugged and inclined his head toward the store. He was maybe fourteen. His face was bony and his hair was dyed black and growing out strawberry blond at the roots.

  I got the beer and we went down by the river.

  “Do you like The Misfits?” I said, pointing to his shirt.

  “I just like the shirt,” he said and opened his beer, “don’t really know the band.”

  His skateboard was tipped up, pivoting gently beneath his two forefingers.

  I pulled out a beer and opened it.

  “What are you going to do tonight? I don’t mean it in a weird way. I’m just curious.”

  “Get drunk. Skate around.”

  “Will you go home?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why? Do you like being there?”

  “My dad sucks.”

  “Does your dad suck worse than all this?”

  I waved my arm across the water and the city and everything I saw.

  “Maybe,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  I took one more beer and let him have the rest. The sun was setting and I wanted to say something helpful but I knew he wouldn’t understand so I said something stupid that made no sense because I had been thinking things all day and there was no way I could explain them and I shouldn’t even have tried.

  “Everything’s on fire,” I said. “The guy who won’t sell you the beer, your dad, the Ravage all around us, your feelings about the music you like, it’s all on fire.”

  “Well, I wish it was on fire for real,” he said and kicked his board down, “because this all sucks.”

  “Yeah, well, me too. I wish it had all burned away so I wouldn’t have to watch.”

  He put the beer under his arm and headed off in one direction toward an apartment complex that I’d passed on my way down. I headed off in another.

  It took me an hour to find a pack of crickets imaginative enough to believe that I should be taken in to custody. It wasn’t penitence. It was just a lack of options.

  29 Della’s Mosaic

  By the time I turned myself in I was pretty run down. No electrolytes at all. My hands and face were chapped and I had a lot of scratches but I was as lucid as I have ever been, clear and attentive. I watched each person who came and talked to me and could almost see the flames licking up around them.

  I was held as a possible terrorism suspect. Grace and Miro were so proud they could barely stand it. Like it was lefty Christmas just for them. Viva North Pole Libre.

  There was a lot of debate about the timeline of events and my whereabouts. Some of which could have been solved earlier if anybody in my family talked to cops. But they don’t. Years of training. They said Grace wouldn’t even tell them my middle name.

  “It’s Rachael,” the FBI guy kept saying, “we know it’s Rachael. It’s a matter of public record. You’re not keeping anything from us. Della Rachael Mylinek. I’m holding her ID right here. Public record.”

  Credence said she made him cry but he probably just said that to cheer me up. He said every time they’d ask Miro a question, he’d get that look like he was watching snowflakes fall. Credence gets that look too sometimes.

  I saw Grace for a few minutes. My mother is beautiful. Her hair was the color of late fall when all the red and brown leaves are turning black but haven’t yet, should have and haven’t. I bet she did make those crickets cry.

  The papers said I was a scientist, which was media code for Nuclear Secrets so everyone had to watch computerized models of mushroom clouds on TV for days. There was even a site where you could type in your zip code and see a model of your local fallout patterns under the current weather conditions. Which were changing.

  “I’m wanted in connection with a series of terrorist attacks,” I told the guy who brought me my Gatorade. “You should be scared of me. I’m a geologist.”

  Grace always said I was good at entertaining myself.

  They put me in alone so that I didn’t convert the masses.

  I didn’t ask why they thought I was a terrorist. And I didn’t answer when they asked why I didn’t ask. In one particularly intense interrogation I decided to give them a brief history of the planet. Starting at about 4.6 billion years ago and sweeping gracefully up to the present. My favorite part is the 2 billion years between the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell. It’s riveting, really. I get excited. I did it once when I was drunk at Davis and nobody talked to me for a week. But the FBI loved it. I could tell.

  What became clear after several meetings with the agents was that they didn’t really have anything. It was mostly the panic I caused in the airport when I failed to board at the gate. Apparently, they pulled my bag off the plane to Laos and blew it up on the Tarmac to just make sure there wasn’t a bomb in it. Then the terminal went into a security shutdown and the cameras went live and my face was everywhere.

  Over the next two weeks a lot of people came to my defense. Coworker Franklin said I always showed up to work on time. My professor from Davis flew up with copies of the Journal of Paleobiology for everyone and talked about the rigors of academia and the immense pressure on doctoral students. Mirror denied that I was antisocial and went into elaborate detail about my behavior at the party. She even dragged the Russian guy to sign an affidavit saying I was with him that night. They asked if anyone else had seen us together, which I thought was pretty funny.

  In the end they didn’t release me because of any of that. Some apartment manager caught Jules and Tamara rifling through people’s mail and they got busted for identity theft. They were awaiting arraignment at the county when the bag I threw in the river washed ashore south of the city. Finding the last of the Hive phones sent the crickets into a chirping frenzy. The wireless company’s records showed that the phone had been used near Breaker’s Rise, which matched with my stolen credit card report. Tamara’s face was on security camera footage from the dog track and that, along with the lack of alibis for the time of the bombings, pretty much sealed it.

  I suppose I could have jumped up and down and claimed to be the art director of the consumer apocalypse. Gone down with ship and all. But I wasn’t the one who bombed those places. I just thought they looked pretty on fire. Sort of. Now that everything is it means less.

  When I got out I spent a few days with Grace and Miro up on the mountain. They never asked me what my role was in the bombings or about Jules or Tamara. That way they could pass a lie detector test. They’re still secretly hoping I am a terrorist with a more far-reaching plan. Something vast, tied to a huge underground of new Internationalists. Mostly though, we talked about Credence and Annette and the soon-to-be-here Bellyfish. And about Southeast Asia because of my ticket to Laos. There was a substantive discussion about the transition of former colonial province
s to fledgling communist governments without a stable economy or adequate cultural reference points to sustain them.

  “You can’t expect a thousand years of oppression not to result in rage when the power dynamic shifts,” said Grace.

  “I don’t,” I said. “If it shifted now I’d probably want to blow up a small star.”

  She kissed me on the forehead like I was ten.

  Coworker Franklin said I could have my job back. He’d cut some deal with the new owners to keep on any employee who could get it together enough to get a food handler’s card and I already had one. So, despite being recently held as a terrorist, I was a model employee.

  My first day back in town and out of jail, I went down to Rise Up Singing to see what it was like. The sign over the door said RISE in fatigued metal and there was a new mural, a big social realism piece with a remodeled house in the center and a thick red line over the top that turns into dashes then disappears into an endless sunlight. But it was all one big ember so I started working there again. I didn’t care which little piece of orange carbon popped out and cracked at my feet. Hello! Imbue me with meaning! I’m a little piece of gender identification. Crack! I’m a down-in-the-gutter art intellectual. Thwizzz… (the tiniest of voices) I’m a nineteenth century neo-classical vagabond. Phit. I’m a spaceship. It just didn’t matter.