The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Stuffed animals, stray socks and shoes, and books—math textbooks, Moby-Dick, Harry Potter, Stephen King, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to fill in the blank. Bibles. Bedside clutter on low tables. Human detritus—mundane and fascinating. The way things accreted and gathered. Loose change, heaped or stacked neatly. Watches, matches, rings.

  The insider knowledge, routine his-and-hers smells. Everything you’ve seen so many times it’s basically invisible, or else it’s the one thing that you always notice but never mention. The way he holds me. Her neck mole. The humdrum fuck. A little bored, a little mad at each other, but it’s Friday night and . . . The calendar with tomorrow’s date circled—your doctor’s appointment, our concert tickets. A guitar on a stand against the far wall by the window. You never play anymore. Find me the time and I’ll play. A computer monitor, ancient, size of a microwave, eating up all available space on a beat-up black Formica corner desk. Discarded clothes, torn frenzied from the body—or is that laundry left undone? A framed photograph on the nightstand: child with beagle. I’m tired. But do you still want to? I mean, you do want to, right? Because we don’t have to. I want to do what you want to do. Digital alarm clocks. Record collections. Warn me before you come.

  This was my life. Length and breadth, scope and weft. Reflex action. An object in motion. I had let January’s official end of an already-dead-in-the-water relationship become an excuse for letting my grades go to hell, which resulted in my dropping the entire spring semester. Now it was the dead of summer. I had to re-enroll, sign up for classes, do the whole back-on-track bit. Problem was, the mere thought of stepping back onto campus, much less into the office of some admissions counselor, with her cat poster and candy dish, induced apoplexy. There would be forms to fill out. I would have to choose classes—be more interested in one thing than some other. I’d have to be interested, period. I couldn’t visualize that. All that I could generate, in fact, was TV static, accompanied by the rough white noise of the sea, as if a pair of conch shells were strapped to my head. It was enough to send me right back to my computer, for another protracted round of chafing succor. I was twenty-one years old.

  I had a one-bedroom apartment, five-eighths of a degree in the liberal arts and exactly one core conviction, which was that I would not move back to South Florida, where an unchanged childhood bedroom waited like an armed bear trap. And so I went to work.

  I was on the phone with an old woman. She had started out eager to tell me about her buying habits, but now she was getting flustered. This was my fault, in a sense. The royal me. It was the annual state consumer statistics survey and we had gotten onto a long sequence about driving habits and preferences in gasoline. Did she know the difference between super and regular? Did she care? About how much driving did she do in a given week? Month? There were literally dozens of questions in this line. It was a long survey that few people agreed to take.

  What kind of person, cold-called at six-fifteen in the evening on a Wednesday, agrees to sit for a forty-five-minute interrogation? We had established her widowhood earlier. I’d even bent the rules and indulged her in brief agreement on Earl’s having been a good man. Some three years gone now, she told me. She was in a small town in the west-central part of the state. She was horse country people: honest and openhearted and a little dumb, spending her golden years not in repose on some porch as she and Earl had dreamed, but instead in a modest trailer—that is, modest by the already modest standards of trailer homes. Fixed income in a truck-stop town, her eyesight failing. People and things were blobs to her, shapes without edges in a landscape of colorful mud. She had her neighbors, of course, and some people from the church. The kids come to visit when they can.

  There was a flaw in the programming of the survey. That much was clear. They were designed like choose-your-own-adventure stories, and the system should have offered me an option to tell it that she did not drive, period. Frequently, somewhat frequently, occasionally, or seldom. Those were my choices, or rather, hers—(A) through (D). Do you want me to repeat the choices I have listed?

  “I keep saying,” she said. There was a quaver in her voice. “I don’t drive no more. I can’t.” She was going to start crying. How many times would I make her tell me she was going blind?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Look, let’s just skip these.” I gave her (D)s for everything. Isn’t never a kind of seldom?

  When the survey finally wrapped up, nearly twenty minutes later, she wished me all the best of luck with my studies, because, she said, she could hear in my voice that I was a smart young man who worked hard. It was my turn to choke a little, but I thanked her for having hung in with me to the end and wished her all the very best. She told me to call her back with new surveys anytime, and even though the odds of her getting called by our company again were decent, the odds of me being selected by the system to be the caller were next to zero. And even if such a thing were possible it was almost certainly against some protocol or other. I told her I would make a note and be sure to. We thanked each other again and then I let her go.

  I took my headset off and paused the machine’s dialing mechanism, because I could feel that I was being watched. I turned around to face Steven, the shift manager. He was five nine, heavyset, broken out, and about my age, but somehow very grown-up looking. He wore ugly sweaters in all weather, to hide his man-boobs. Today’s was maroon.

  “Come on into the office, David,” he said.

  He spoke in an angry hush. His breath smelled, but not like anything. It just smelled. I followed him out of the calling room, a quick walk of shame.

  “You know what you did,” he said. “I assume you know.”

  “I know what I did,” I said.

  “Nobody here is out to get you,” he said. “We monitor our callers at random. This is nothing you don’t already know.”

  “To ensure quality, I get that. You have to do your job.”

  “And you have to do your job, David. Yes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You stopped reading the questions. You filled in answers. You tampered with results.”

  “If you were listening to that part of the conversation then you heard that woman’s voice. Did you hear her voice?”

  “David, people hire this company because they expect a certain level—”

  “Hey,” I said. “I wasn’t going to make an old woman cry. You can’t make me do that. Your survey’s all fucked.”

  “Don’t raise your voice, David,” Steven said.

  “Look,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “You look. The surveys come to us from tech. Copy produces the questions; tech does the coding and builds the survey. You conduct the survey. Processing processes the results. That’s what this job is. It might not be glamorous but that’s what it is.”

  “An old woman,” I said. “Crying.”

  “I’m sending you home for the day,” Steven said. “Go grab your stuff and then clock out.”

  “I broke a rule, I get it, okay. You want to send me home, okay. But at least tell me you heard that woman on the phone. You heard what I heard.”

  “I asked you to leave, David. And now I’m telling you.”

  He wouldn’t say it. I went back into the calling room to get my backpack, which didn’t have anything in it except the keys to my bike lock and the keys to my house. When I’d begun here I’d always brought plenty to read. When had that stopped, exactly? And why was I still bringing the empty bag? It didn’t matter, but then, not much did. I slung the weightless, shapeless thing over one shoulder. I left.

  I had some pictures of my own. Three, exactly—Polaroids of Becky. We started dating sophomore year, lasted through early junior spring. Ancient history now. She’d sent them to me the previous summer, when we were apart from each other. Not that we suffered and yearned so much. She went back to her parents’ place in Tallahassee, and I stayed in Gainesville. Three hours’ drive, more or less, from here to there. We spent most of our weekends together, in on
e town or the other, and though we obviously both preferred my very parentless apartment, I can honestly say that I didn’t dislike spending time with her folks, a pair of liberal do-gooder doctors who had met in the Peace Corps and were almost as still-with-it as they thought they were.

  Our only real separation occurred in the month of August, when Becky and her whole family left for three weeks in Europe to celebrate the happy combination of her parents’ thirtieth anniversary and her older brother’s entering medical school that fall. The weekend before her departure she had planned to come down to Gainesville. But then on that Thursday she’d accidentally backed into a light pole while parking her car at a movie theater. The damage was only cosmetic, she was sure, but her father wasn’t going to let her take the thing out on a highway until he’d had it looked at, and since they were leaving in just a few days it would not be looked at until after they got back. Neither would he let her have one of the other cars to make the trip with.

  I offered to come to her, but that wasn’t good, either. Her brother was home, and everyone was in a tizzy with packing, and it was just too much trouble, her parents felt. We settled for long daily talks on the phone, until she left the following Tuesday. Two days after that an envelope addressed from her to me arrived in the mail. Inside of it were the three Polaroids, with one word written in black marker on the back of each one. I’LL. MISS. YOU.

  When we broke up, better than half a year later—now nearly half a year ago—she did not ask me for them back. Probably, they had slipped her mind entirely, as they had for a long time mine.

  The first was a head shot: smiling, bare shoulders shiny, hair wet. The second picture was a right-facing profile of her torso. She had small breasts almost overwhelmed by her large dark areolae, but her nipples themselves were small, too, and flattish. They hardly stood up, even when she was at her most aroused. She had arched her back. I wondered—not for the first time—how many pictures she had taken before settling on these three. What had gone through her mind as she’d done it? And why this? I had never asked her to pose for me. It was all her own idea. She had one of those small sexy bellies that skinny girls have, the ones they’re always talking about trying to get rid of and you never know what you’re supposed to say back. It wasn’t even a belly, really; it was more like a slight grade—the organic slope of her torso out toward her belly button, that little jewel of space, that niche, and then back in toward her sex, which was not depicted. She was wearing a pair of my boxer shorts, the waist of which had been folded down several times so that they rode low beneath her prominent hip bones, and the very top edge of her pubic hair peeked out from the fabric. The third picture was a close-up. Her vulva held agape by the first and third fingers of her left hand—the nails had been recently manicured, but not painted any color, only glazed—and the middle finger dipped inside herself up to the second joint.

  I held the photographs in my hands and flipped through them. I spread them out on the computer desk in front of the keyboard. I plugged in my scanner.

  I was suddenly tired—exhausted, sick—of playing the vulture, the hyena of intimacy. Well, I had had a life too, once, and here was the evidence. Let some other lonely asshole debase himself over my artifacts, my souvenirs.

  I scanned all three photographs, opened the first one as a bitmap file in Paintbrush, drew a rectangle over Becky’s eyes, then filled that space in with solid black. I saved the file, converted it back to a JPEG, and then sent all three pictures out to the next list I found myself on. A little traveling pack.

  Two days later, on a different list, she came back to me. Someone had passed her along, billed as his own current girlfriend. What was interesting, though, was that the guy had sent only that first one, the one with no actual nudity. The bare shoulders, I guessed. The shiny skin. The blackout rectangle. Yes, I could see it now, how that was the most alluring, how it hinted at things no triple-X full-reveal ever could.

  Or maybe he was just a wheeler-dealer looking to pique interest and make trades. Hey man, I’ve never seen her before. You got any more where that came from? Yeah, man, but what do you got?

  I downloaded the picture. I had sent the images out as “exgf” 1, 2, and 3, so as far as cyberspace had known she was nameless. But her name was Ramona now, according to the file. I let the light that was her burn through me. I pretended she was someone I had never known and tried to scare up some plausible fuck fantasy about her, like I had gotten into the habit of doing with all the other girls. It wasn’t cunt I was interested in, not anymore. It wasn’t tits or the hot wet dark of her mouth. It wasn’t any of the things the lists or the sites wanted me to think about her—these things I already knew for certain and yet struggled to remember and then, remembering, could no longer believe because of who was telling them to me. I knew now they all were liars. And not just that they were, but how. The thick line across her eyes was everything. To have spared her that much, even if only just that much. But in so doing I had made her anybody—nobody. She was raw material now. She was YOUR FACE HERE.

  I stood up from my computer chair and kicked it away behind me. I throbbed, skull crown to toe tips, and bit through my lower lip and wanted to shut my eyes while I came but would not let myself so much as blink and stared into the black rectangle until it reversed itself. When I did look away, finally, the afterimage stayed at the center of my vision, a fiery brightness that dissipated slowly, like water down a half-clogged drain, and through that receding curtain I watched my slime slide down the bright screen and pool on the keyboard and seep in. I folded the laptop closed, unplugged it, and took it into the bathroom. I plugged the drain and turned the water on. I filled the tub to the brim. This took a few minutes and during this time I drummed my fingers on the lid of the machine. But I was not nervous. I had already done the irrevocable thing. This was just a showy finish, an improvised ritual of consecration. The machine thrummed in my hands, plastic hot to the touch where the battery and fan were. I dropped it in and stepped back from the splash. I shut the bathroom door behind me, hoping for a spark that would send the whole complex up, but knowing I didn’t have that much luck coming. I got dressed and left the house.

  But where to go?

  All the main roads in Gainesville are named for the towns that they lead to. Archer, Waldo, Williston, Hawthorne, Newberry. Nobody ever meant for here to be anyplace special. It exists because someone wanted the county seat on the new railroad line, which Newmansville wasn’t. So they founded this place, named for an Indian killer, General Edmund Gaines, and made it the new seat of Alachua County, itself named for the Indians that General Gaines slaughtered. That’s as much as I know about Gainesville, other than that these days it’s the closest thing to an urban center between Jacksonville and Orlando, if you don’t count Tampa, which is off to the west. That’s all because of UF, the University of Florida, which is one of the largest schools in the whole country. Fifty thousand students, give or take, nearly half the population of the city. The school is more than the main thing here. It’s the only thing. If you don’t go there or teach there, then you fix the cars of those who do, or you own a restaurant with a sign reading STUDENT DISCOUNT SHOW ID taped in its front window, or if you don’t own it then your uncle does, and you hate working for the SOB but who else is going to hire you? The school is inescapable, like the humidity, like every shadow points back to the sun, and the locals hate the way the kids drink and fuck shit up on the weekends, and the kids look down on the townies, but the football stadium holds eighty thousand, and every game sells out.

  I didn’t want to walk around campus, so I went the other way. East on University Avenue, past fast-food joints, a liquor store, a gas station, an office supply, the fucking Seagle Building, dim bars with muddy guitar washing from their propped front doors. I walked through the modest downtown, a couple of nice restaurants and frat-favored dance clubs, that’s about all it was, give or take a coffee shop and an art house movie theater. I walked past the library, out to where East
University becomes Hawthorne Road, and the sidewalk grew cracked and weed-split, and the homes needed paint jobs they wouldn’t get. I kept on Hawthorne to where it crossed Waldo Road, which bears northeast. I stood at this intersection, contemplating my choices—two places I didn’t know anything about, both of which were positively nowhere, and neither of which I had any business being. Waldo had the regional airport. I could watch planes land and take off, crop dusters or whatever it was they had. Not that any would be out at this hour. (Not that I was on some schedule.) My only real plan was to walk all night.

  I turned back, thinking maybe I’d end up at the school after all.

  Maybe I would find an unlocked hall to shuffle around in. Or I could stand outside the admissions building, have myself a little revelation about doing the right thing in life. At the very least there would be the empty campus streets, and the wooded paths between the clusters of buildings. The paths were paved, and, since the Danny Rolling murders, now almost ten years ago, garishly lit. I thought I might end up at the bat house, over at the far end of campus, by the lake. The bats were protected or researched or something, I didn’t really know, but I knew that watching the bats rouse at sunset and take to the sky was a popular evening activity—something everybody got around to doing, sooner or later, though so far I hadn’t. But didn’t it stand to reason that there would be a similar viewing at sunrise? I could walk around Lake Alice, then go to the bat house at daybreak and watch the dark thousands as they flooded back into their stilt-built wooden mansion, a black river in the bruised and brightening sky.