The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Katy broke their kiss this time and whispered something in Liz’s ear. Liz passed the bottle back to Katy (“Hey, no fair!” shouted someone) but she didn’t drink. Instead she reached her hand down over the side of the chair: toward me. When our fingers touched around the long glass neck of the bottle, a skittering electricity passed between us. I took the bottle from her and turned my body around, so that I now rested my back against the side of the armchair, my head level with the armrests and therefore next to Liz’s own head. A searching hand, Katy’s, stroked Liz’s hair and mine together, like we were parts of the same great lazing creature. When she raked her nails lightly across my scalp, I shut my eyes tight and told myself don’t you dare cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been touched at all.

  “Come on already!” shouted someone. “It’s a bottle, not a math test.”

  My eyes still closed, Katy’s hand still in my—our—hair, I tipped my head and let the warm glass touch my lips. It was bad, bad bourbon and I had never been so glad to be anywhere. I held the bottle out and a hand took it. It went away and eventually came back, then went again and came. Katy’s hand played endlessly back and forth between my hair and Liz’s. It was unending movement, but belied no restlessness or wavering. It was tidal, her touch, possessed by an authority derived straight from nature, or so suggested her flittering fingertips when they brushed gently, and so insisted the full digits when they settled in for a longer moment, twining up a lock of mine, making my skin sing.

  Thomas took me on a tour of Fishgut, not that there was much to show. There were three bedrooms—his, Katy’s, and one outfitted with two sets of bunk beds as a guest room or travelers’ rest. They were all scenes from the same low-budget disaster movie. The linoleum in the kitchen was faded past pigmentation, but held on to a kind of hazy hangover memory of having once been green. It was spattered with paint of all possible colors, smears and stripes and streaks on the cabinets, counters, walls, ceiling, even stove. There were also designs and graffiti—people’s names and handprints. Dates. On the face of the fridge, a mud-colored all-seeing eye shot laserlike rainbows out from its pupil in the cardinal directions.

  “Housewarming party,” Thomas said.

  “How long ago?” I asked.

  “Six, seven months, I guess.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  “It’s a whole other story. I’ll tell you sometime.”

  We passed through the kitchen door and out into the yard. He pulled tobacco and papers from a pouch of Drum.

  “You want one?” he asked.

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “That’s a good boy. Your mother’s proud.”

  There were no chairs out back, not even a porch really, just a small slab of concrete on which we stood beneath a bug light while we stared at the dark and talked.

  “So how did the house get its name?” I asked.

  Thomas pointed across the yard, to a pup tent in the far back corner, a small thing visible mostly in silhouette against the high wooden fence. A red Catholic prayer candle in a tall round glass was half sunk in the dirt before it, lit. I hadn’t noticed this.

  “Parker,” Thomas said, his voice rich with disgust, like the name was bad milk in his mouth. “It’s got some kick to it at least. Fishgut. It’d be a sweet name for a band, too—except there’s already Fishbone, I guess. Still.”

  “A guy lives out there?” I asked. Thomas laughed nastily, I didn’t think at me.

  “Used to, kind of. Now just his tent does. Nobody knows where he is.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well anyway, what does the name mean?”

  “Stupid shit. Don’t get me started. Honestly.”

  “And these are your friends?”

  “Best friends in the world,” he said. He went down to one knee and gingerly crushed out his half-smoked cigarette on the concrete slab. He stuck the butt behind his ear for later—waste not want not, I guessed, but Jesus Christ. We went back inside to rejoin the party.

  What time was it? Later, late. Whatever. Who knew. The bottle was empty. Some happy punks went to smash it in the street. I didn’t follow them, and the shatter did not carry over the stereo, which still blared, though nobody was paying it much attention anymore. The strike team returned and reported success. They began to hunt around for what else to smash. Others began to drift off to wherever they’d come from, out the front door or toward the various bedrooms, or else stretched themselves out on the couches if they were staying but didn’t have beds or bedmates here.

  Owl and Selah, the hippies, retreated to the van in the yard, which I had learned they lived in. I didn’t know where Thomas was. A girl unfurled a sleeping bag from a beat-up backpack, laid it out on the hard linoleum floor, climbed in, and then rolled over so she faced the wall.

  Katy stood before her own bedroom door, peering back at Liz and me, and held the position a moment, making sure we saw how she was seeing us see her. Then she took a single step into the room and winked out of our vision. In her place was the long crack between her door and the jamb, dimly shining.

  “She doesn’t do good nights?” I said to Liz, trying to not sound hurt, but failing and knowing I’d failed.

  “You mean you’re not coming?” Liz said, sounding surprised if not precisely hurt herself, at which point I only for the first time understood that the last several hours had been one long invitation.

  I reached my hand out before I could doubt myself, and Liz took it. A loose grip now, not like before by the dumpster. She led me, flicking the light switch as we passed, so that darkness swept over the couches behind us, as if it were the fact of our exit that had driven the light from the room. The dim issue from Katy’s bedroom seemed enormous now. Liz didn’t knock, for as I was about to learn, and probably should have already figured out, it was her bedroom as well. Katy was sitting on the bed, holding a long match over the glassy O-mouth of a Catholic prayer candle, another one like the one I’d seen outside, in front of the weird tent. This one was decorated with a large sticker depicting a blue-robed, bald-pated man with a shiny, flowing beard. He had sad, knowing gray-green eyes and held a gilt-edged volume against his breast. White letters identified him as St. Jude, Patron of Desperate Cases.

  Katy touched the burning head to the wick, then pulled the long match back from the glass and blew it out even as the saint’s eyes brightened, backlit now. She rose from the bed and placed the candle in a corner of her window. Through the oak-leaf ceiling over the yard we could glimpse the sky, black still but stiffening with prelight. Katy took all this in, then turned away from it and toward her bed, where we curled, waiting for her to come meet us. A week went by.

  Sunday

  Katy wakes up early, but not earlier than Liz, who is somehow always one step ahead, bright-eyed and raring, ready to proffer her body, time, attention, whatever Katy wants that Liz can give. It’s a lot to handle, sometimes, to be responsible for that big a share of somebody’s happiness—of the hours in another person’s day. One great thing about David, he’s never a step ahead of anyone. Just look at him there in the bed between them, his head turned to one side (hers), mouth hung open like a tent flap, dead to the world. His beard’s coming in, a dark stubble that begins high up on his cheeks and trails off down his neck, just barely linking up with his chest hair, wisps of which reach nearly to his Adam’s apple. Splayed out like he is, covers pushed down below his waist—the heat’s already barely sufferable—you can see how his hair courses like a lazy river down his body: deltas into a vague eagle like a crude tattoo on his breast, then thins down his stomach, gathering again around his belly button in a whorl. From the belly button down to the nest of his pubic hair the pale skin is almost hairless, save for one wiry line down the middle, like a rope ladder flung between ships.

  What time is it, anyway? A few minutes past ten. Not bad.

  “We should wake him up,” Katy says.

  Liz thinks maybe t
hey should let him sleep.

  “Nah, come on, he’d want to go with us.”

  “I guess so, yeah.” This is what most arguments with Liz are like. Not that this is an argument by any stretch. Also, when do they ever argue? What could they possibly even have to argue about? So, conversations then. Anyway, this is how it is with her, and there are days when all Katy wants in the world is for Liz to want anything other than whatever Katy wants. But then there are all the days between those days, aren’t there? Katy smiles. Love is baffling. Isn’t that the best thing about it? Top three at least.

  Katy grabs the hem of the canary-yellow sheet they’re sharing and with an assured flick of her wrist whips it free of the bed, exposing all of their nakedness. She leans in and takes David in her mouth, goes to work while the sheet drowses groundward, transforming the heaped clothing on the bedroom floor to some anonymous mountain range smothered in sun.

  Not that she wouldn’t be doing this regardless—who needs a reason to screw, after all?—but a few nights ago when they were all really wasted, and in the sloppy process of stumbling to bed, David got this sort of crumpled look on his face and said he had to tell them something. Katy had one of those moments she sometimes gets where she doubts God’s abundant and everlasting grace. For like just a flash of a second, but still. That’s another way of saying that she thought he was going to tell them he had some fucked-up STD. But no, it was nothing like that—more like the opposite of that, if the word opposite makes sense here, which in terms of how Katy views the world, it does. David had for some reason felt compelled to make confession. He talked a lot about the Internet, which Katy knows nothing about; and porn, which bores her because there’s no reason to watch something you could be doing yourself; and about an old girlfriend, which interested her mightily—who doesn’t like to hear about their lovers’ lovers?—and these topics seemed to all relate, somehow, to one another as well as to a larger thesis about how much he had hated his life, for so long, without ever having consciously realized it until the night he met all of them. Drunk as she was, Katy couldn’t quite put all the pieces together, though as Liz pointed out the next day, given how drunk he was, it was distinctly possible that he’d left out whatever might have been the keystone idea. The upshot, basically, was that it was messing with his head to be living what—let’s be honest—is basically every straight guy’s number one jerk-off fantasy. Part of him couldn’t help but wonder if maybe he’d lost his mind—was in some institution, dreaming all of this, as if Katy and Liz were actually just vivid and resonant hallucinations, perhaps induced by acute pornography overdose.

  The girls hadn’t been sure whether that last thing was supposed to be a joke or not—or if David even knew—but Katy as usual followed her peerless instincts and took him in her arms like a mother and held him while he bawled, rocked him like a big drunk baby, and made pissy faces at Liz until she finally relented and hugged him, too. They hadn’t screwed that night, only held each other, and Katy had whispered over and over again that there was nothing to be ashamed of or angry about, that everything was bound to be okay, in fact already was okay. As she spoke, Katy hoped both her lovers were hearing this message and taking it right to each heart, where it could mean unto each as each needed, world without end, amen.

  But starting the very next morning, hangovers be damned, Katy began—and now, this morning, continues—a relentless campaign of fucking David, having David fuck Liz, him watching the two girls, and as often as possible all three of them in ecstatic triangles—anything Katy can come up with (and ply Liz into trying) in order to drive home the lesson she wants him to learn, which is that no light-box, no machine, can ever come within a country mile of the sweat-blind holy thing itself. This, this, is the truth and the life.

  So that’s the subtext to David’s morning hummer. Meanwhile, somewhere behind her, Liz is between Katy’s legs, making her feel perfect and loved, but Katy’s trying to stay focused on David, who’s awake now—she can tell it from the way he draws breath, and the fact that certain other parts of his body are now also beginning to stir. He says something she doesn’t catch, it might in fact be not-words, a yawn. Now his searching hands have palmed her swinging tits, steadying them, pointer fingers lazily circling round her nipples. Good morning, sunshine.

  Things have been nice this week, with David here. Katy hopes he stays and it seems like he’s going to. He doesn’t give the best head Katy’s ever had, but he can hardly be blamed for not being some magical outlier in what is a fairly substantial body of statistical evidence. And to give credit where it’s due, he’s somewhere in the upper-middle range of the bell curve, no mean feat in itself. What he lacks in pure skill he makes up for in determination and exuberance. Truth be told, there’s a way in which his earnest questing, be it hit or be it miss at any given moment, is actually more fun than getting it from Liz, the ace, the aficionado, who can play Katy like some video game, and bring her to the YOU WIN screen in record-setting time. Which is—whoa—basically what’s happening right now. Katy’s going to come in like a minute, and the gathering ache makes the world behind her closed eyes brighter, Dear God of Earth and Heaven I thank you for the orgasm I am about to receive, but there’s this other restless part of her that can’t help feeling like home again home again, jiggety jig—sigh.

  Katy decides to see if she can get David to come at the same moment Liz makes her come. That’ll be interesting, right?

  About twenty-five seconds later it turns out that the answer to both questions is yes. Katy wipes her chin and collapses theatrically on top of their boy. He’s breathing hard and stroking her hair. Liz lies down on her belly beside them, in the spot where Katy sleeps rather than in her own, and watches the two of them with these sort of moon eyes that Katy’s worried are maybe just a little too dewy to ignore. Why doesn’t Liz look as proud of herself as she usually does after making Katy come? Katy slaps her girlfriend on the behind. Playful, no pain, but the crisp rapport of the palm on the cheek says atten-TION. And like a bucket up from a well here’s Liz back from Neverland. Two blinks and the dew is gone, her eyes lasered on Katy’s, ready for instruction.

  “Flip over,” Katy says. “It’s your turn.”

  “Nah,” Liz says with a little shrug. “We have to get ready. We’ll be late.”

  “We won’t,” Katy says. “Come on.” Katy can feel Liz’s hesitation. On the one hand, she’s into the whole self-denial-as-sign-of-devotion thing. On the other, Katy obviously wants to do this for her, in the name of equality, anarchy, or just wanting to, and the prime directive of Liz’s life is whatever Katy wants.

  So she does it, flips her body over, full yield, take me, and tries to release herself into the feeling of being open to feeling good. David is kissing her and playing with her breasts while Katy is working on her downstairs—she loves Katy so much—and she’s starting to breathe a little heavy. She even makes a halfhearted play for David’s cock, expecting to find it limp, but it turns out he’s already ready to go again. Startled, she jerks her hand back. No thanks. A few minutes later her partners switch spots, and this, actually, is much better, because even though part of her doesn’t really want David inside her, at least now she’s getting to kiss Katy, and hug Katy, and grab at Katy’s breasts, which are bigger than hers—meaty and soft, like all of Katy; how unlike nubby, skinny tight-titted Liz—and she pulls Katy forward—smother me with you, lover—and pivots her pelvis so David pops out of her, and he gets the message and sticks it in Katy instead, Katy who is a blast furnace, dynamo, sun raging over and lighting up and making possible the world. Liz can feel Katy’s heat, radiation and rain, the raw and blessed pleasure her girlfriend takes and produces. God is both the knower and the thing known, as well as the act of knowing that unites them, unmasks the wholeness that always already existed and exists. This is a slice of infinity made manifest, reified, captured in Katy’s act of fucking and being fucked, by Liz, by David, by whoever and however many—and these thoughts elate Liz but als
o hurt her, in a certain sense, like in the sense of her maybe not mattering to Katy (though of course Katy always claims otherwise) or if she does matter, if she is loved, maybe it’s not enough (but what would, what could ever be enough for you, Liz, really, being in your own way as insatiable as tireless Katy?) or even when it is enough and she knows it, is it enough of the right kind of love (you bad anarchist, you Little-faith) but Liz, making the most of what faith she does possess, pushes these thoughts away, forces them out, replaces them with one, one alone, singular and all-encompassing like God is, one thought that makes her infinitely happy because it is the beautiful truth (this is what prayer is Lord she’s my altar may I worship You forever) and the beautiful truth is the thought of Katy’s pleasure, and thinking these words to herself over and over—Katy’s pleasure Katy’s pleasure Katy’s pleasure Katy’s Katy’s Katy Katy—a chant in unsprung rhythm, she blots out the chattering doubts of that demon her consciousness and there in that throbbing vacuum finds a space both limitless and impossibly close, where she is fearless and safe, prone in joy and trembling, the tremble that becomes the bodyquake, and even though she doesn’t want to break her mouth away from her lover’s, she simply must issue a strangled, triumphant cry through teeth gritted as if in tremendous pain.