The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  See them now on their knees in the leaves, dirt under their fingernails and racing eyes aglow, scalp-tickling sweat, bodies bunched in the tightest cluster, passing the revealed testament of their prophet from hand to urgent hand. Every moment of being is an apocalypse. Every instant the world is made anew.

  Sunday Night

  Here’s Thomas, right hand wrapped tight in a vodka-soaked paper towel. He holds it in his clenched fist, fast against his bloody knuckles, which shriek with the cleansing sting and turn the towel pink. He walks out the front door. It slams behind him. Then off the porch, whose screen door is hung at a broken-elbow angle by a single distressed hinge. Then down the walk, past the orange VW (Owl, lounging inside, says, “heya, brother,” but is ignored), and out the front fence and straight into the street. He crosses the street, the planting strip, and the opposite sidewalk, then up into the yard of the house there. There are lights on in the house, but the shades are drawn, and anyway it’s not like he’s up to something. All he wants is a little perspective. He walks as close to the neighbors’ house as he dares, then turns around to face Fishgut. He’s trying to pretend that he is somebody—anybody—else.

  The first thing is that it’s small. He’d forgotten that. Strange to say—after all, he lives there—but who doesn’t know that sometimes the truth is strange? With people always coming and going, and new chapters in the grand anarcho-soap of everyone’s hookups and alliances and ideologies ever being written and rewritten, it only makes sense that the place would grow outsize in his mind. Whole worlds rush up against each other in there, colliding in dark heat, or else separated by mere thin inches of concrete—not quite thin enough to punch through, as it turns out, but still, from the inside: epic. From even this minimal distance, however, this notion of magnitude is exposed for a fiction, a delusion if not an outright fraud. From the neutral zone of the across-the-road neighbors’ yard, the approximate view from these proximal strangers’ front window, you don’t see any of the things that make this place enormous to him. All you see is a small house, poorly kept up, set back on a decent piece of land—decent for in town, that is—enclosed by a chain-link fence that the twining leaves and limbs of bushes and nuisance plants have rendered basically opaque. The most visible part of the place is its low-rise roof, gravel-coated asphalt shingles dull beneath dunes of dried leaves. They gather like so much sand or snow in the valley where the main roof joins with the little one over the porch. During the day, sunlight streaming down through the oak canopy does this dappling, idyllic thing, but now, with sunset raging full bore, the trees cast long shadows eerie in their clarity on the roof faces. This only lasts a little while, magic hour, here and gone almost as soon as you realize, like Anchor poking her head out the front door, looking to see if someone is out on the porch (you, it’s you she’s looking for) and not finding him. She appears like a mirage in the break in the green, through the triple opening of fence gate, gaping porch mouth, and front door. So why doesn’t she see him, if he really is the one she’s after? Because even though the sight line between them is as clear and straight as a bowling lane, he’s beyond the edge of their universe, and hence not anywhere that Anchor would ever look. And now she’s turning in again—going and gone. So too the sunset. Dusk is come, the bright sky gone to lead. There’s a firefly rambling by the van now, an icky sports-drink green he can’t quite believe is natural, pulsing off-on-off, a lazy beacon adrift in smokelight.

  He crosses the street again, shuts the gate behind himself. He’s home.

  Thomas and Katy met through Parker, originally. This was back in ’97, when Thomas was freshly dropped out. Parker had been living in a big punk rock flophouse called the Palace of Zinn. Ah, punks and their puns. That house was a disaster. It was a bad scene. Everyone was an activist, and their various prized causes drove wedges left and right. There was a slight problem with herpes there, and a larger one with methadone. The place was run by consensus, of which there was almost none. Among all this black chaos and nihilistic disarray, it seemed that there was just enough solidarity left to unite the whole house against Parker, because he didn’t share their drugs or his body (neither took nor offered; neither gave nor received) and plus there was his spiritual tendency, which was almost certainly anti-anarchistic, they said, and anyway it wigged everyone out. They drove him from his house like Joseph Smith from Missouri. He was expelled by unanimous vote, himself abstaining.

  During this same time, Parker and his new friends, Thomas and Katy, who liked him just fine and anyway thought the Palace of Zinn scene was busted beyond repair, were all regularly partying together in this warehouse squat by the train tracks that an old punk named Rooster had opened up and nicknamed—wait for it—the Coop.

  Thomas knows that Parker looked up to Rooster—he’d been around, man; he was nearly forty—but he doesn’t know what Rooster thought of Parker, or of any of them, other than that it was cool if they came around to hang out as long as they brought beer along, and maybe some food. Then one day Rooster said he had decided to go hook back up with his ex, who supposedly had their two kids somewhere in Indiana. Or was it Illinois? Thomas doesn’t remember now, but it doesn’t matter. Christ, the idea of Rooster with kids! Anyway, the old bird flew the Coop, and just like that the place was theirs.

  It was during this transitional moment that they met Liz. She was a scrungy kid, maybe eighteen (maybe not quite), an ACR—Alachua County Resident; a townie—who hung out at Clasen’s, the combination punk venue slash indie rec-ord store slash vegetarian burrito place that was and still is the epicenter of the local scene (now more than ever, since the Covered Dish is out of business). Thomas works off and on at Clasen’s, as a cashier slash bouncer slash sound guy—whatever the occasion happens to call for on those weeks when he happens to feel like being employed. But Liz never lived at the warehouse; she just hung out. The actual chickens in the Coop were Parker, Katy, Thomas, and a junkie named Drake, another exile from the Palace of Zinn, who had been part of the anti-Parker voting bloc, but now begged for mercy. Parker gave it to him.

  Parker was raised in religion. Thomas knows that much. He ran away from home as a teenager, from some fucked sect of—what were they? Snake-handlers, Adventists, Baptists, speakers-in-tongues, Witnesses, maybe renegade Mormons; no way to be sure. He was long unchurched by the time Thomas met him, but the language, the forms of thought were stuck fast. They were who he was. Parker was a big-b Believer, he had a God-entranced vision of all things, but because of how Thomas grew up—secular atheist Jew, same as David—the very idea of belief was foreign to him, and he did not for a long time comprehend what it was he was dealing with.

  Thomas fashions himself a rationalist and, increasingly, a materialist as well. He believes in direct action, at whatever order of magnitude we’re talking—from the forcible liberation of the global working class on down to some brick through a cop car window in the anonymous night. He reasons: how is the state ever going to wither away if we don’t ever get around to pulling its roots up, salting the earth in which it grows? To him, a Marxist is just an anarchist who’s forgotten the third tenet of his own revolutionary program. He learned this from Parker, who at one time was true black and red: a master thief, filthy as a snot rag, yet able to disappear completely at will. Thomas used to swear that the guy could melt into a concrete wall. He taught Thomas everything he knew about expropriation and evasion, which are other ways of saying survival (he said)—as well as how to hop trains.

  The mystical stuff, the baffling Christ babble, was the one thing about Parker that Thomas was never able to comprehend—hell, could barely stomach—and from the beginning it was a wrench in the gears of their friendship. But he had the ugly example of the Palace punks to remind him of the constant dangers of prejudice, a closed mind, etc. Those miserable fuckers had really hurt his friend, who had only ever wanted one thing, which was to extend the concept of absolute freedom to include the free self’s freedom to explore faith free of oppression. What Parke
r objected to was throwing the whole notion of the spiritual out with the rancid bathwater of power’s general tendency to co-opt religion. Thomas didn’t agree, really, but he understood where his friend was coming from, and he furthermore recognized that his own position had—and ought to have—no bearing on Parker’s. That’s the beauty of anarchism, of anarchy. And that’s another way of saying that for Thomas, as long as Parker kept that shit to himself, which for a long time he did, the two of them got on like the brothers neither of them had ever had. Or like Thomas never had, anyway. Who can say what Parker’s family might or might not have been?

  One day the two of them woke up with an itch for travel, so they packed their backpacks with dumpstered bagels and gallon jugs of water, and kissed sleepy Katy good-bye. She didn’t mind them having a little boys’ time; she wouldn’t stay lonely long. Parker and Thomas wandered out to the tracks through a warm sunrise drizzle and caught the first thing that came their way. They’d thought they were headed for South Florida, Miami Beach, maybe a little visit to Thomas’s parents’ place if their supplies ran low. Instead they spent ten hours in the skull-numbing shake of the dark boxcar, and clambered out at their first opportunity into what turned out to be the Philadelphia yards. They spent a week there, swimming in Wissahickon Creek—slimy, and the banks needle-strewn, but gorgeous anyway—and sleeping in a dry culvert they found. They dumpstered expired feasts from the Safeway, snuck in to see Hot Water Music play the Electric Factory, and made their beer money from receipt scams at Walmart, or by stealing coffee-table books from one Barnes & Noble and then returning them at another. They were invisible, invincible outlaw princes; wild children, lost boys. To this day, it’s one of Thomas’s happiest memories. Sometimes he wonders what made them hitch back to Gainesville. Couldn’t they have just gone on?

  But Parker hungered for visions and trials, and there were limits on his ability to resist this urge. After Philly, he began to go off more frequently, but never again with Thomas. He sent himself alone on soul errands, into the woods now, and spoke vaguely of his travels as quests, though it was never clear what it was he quested for. Thomas nursed the hurt of rejection and consoled himself with the knowledge that, his more bizarre quips notwithstanding, Parker was still in open rebellion against the established church—every last one of them, whatever the denomination. That was good enough for Thomas, pretty much. Out there in the Coop, they led noble, satisfied lives of monkish poverty cut with the finest excesses a college town affords. But Parker’s troubled spirit was ever more difficult to ignore. He was both restive and inward-looking, and no longer wanted to go to shows or even get drunk. He allowed himself nothing but the various books he stole and all the time in the world to read them. He reread, highlighted, underlined, folded corners down, made marginal notes.

  The more Parker contemplated, meditated, delved within, the less interested he became in tearing down—much less forging a humane alternative to—the capitalist-imperialist system, the lie of the American dream, or anything lasting at all. All around them he saw things crumbling, as computers translated the foundational aspects of reality—distance, presence—into illusions of themselves, even as Marx had written that all that is solid melts into air. Parker believed every new technology brought about a new kind of disaster, and therefore some critical mass or terminal velocity was inevitably bound to be reached. It was the age of Late Capital; the core was rotten; the sickness was in the blood. He dreamed of entropy, but he dreamed awake. The world was hastening its own end, and he would welcome that ecstatic unraveling when it came, but in the meantime he would have them be utopians, stand apart insofar as they were able, and push themselves always farther, further away.

  Thomas already understood the basics: the capitalist war machine controls the world; voting changes nothing; democracy is a joke they keep playing on us, like the gym class bully who steals your underwear then dangles it above your head, just higher than you can reach. He knew—they all knew—that it didn’t matter which Republicrat you voted for, but Parker saw no more purpose in protest marches, peace group meetings, or whatever the campus left was hot and bothered about lately. Palestine, sexism, Greek-system domination of the student senate, union rights, Iraq sanctions, university contracts with weapons developers, or worse yet, with Nike—it would all come and go. They already lived outside capitalism’s kingdom, in the gutter that ran along the base of its fortified wall, not beyond but below the field of its vision—except of course when they got caught stealing, but they were pretty ace thieves by this point. We might be trapped in this fucked, fallen world, Parker said, but that is not the same as being of it. They were strangers passing through alien land. When Katy and Thomas professed themselves anarchists, Parker insisted that this meant they were already Christians, for in his mind the two were cut from the same cloth and together formed a single shining garment, the armor of faith.

  These were the teachings Thomas rejected, and which Katy adopted with her whole heart.

  The reason they live at Fishgut is Drake the junkie. He was essentially Parker’s first congregant, even before Katy. Drake was eager to pay back Parker’s kindness, besides which it didn’t take a whole lot of effort to shoot himself up and listen for however long until he nodded off. But then he went and OD’d. Wastoid. Moron. Sellout. He died right there in the Coop. Parker himself found the body: eyes open, residual warmth. And this of course brought the cops down, scattering the family to the winds.

  Katy stayed with Liz at Liz’s mom’s place, under the pretext of being just another local girl with a home life approximately as fucked-up as Liz’s own. Thomas meanwhile crashed on couches, here and there, or in the back room at Clasen’s, on nights he worked closing shift. Parker stole a pup tent—the very one that stands in the yard today—from a high-end sporting goods store down Thirteenth Street. Then he fled to the woods. He lived somewhere in or near the Paynes Prairie nature preserve, but they never knew exactly. He wouldn’t show anyone.

  All their situations were untenable, and several recon missions in search of fresh squats had come up empty, and living with Liz’s mom was driving both girls crazy (here they were, living together, and yet still having to sneak around), so they pooled their scrimpings and found this place. A small but necessary compromise of their values: to actually pay rent.

  The landlord’s a local. Jim Stuckins. Does it get more Gainesville than that? He actually grew up in this house and owns it outright, along with three or four other places he’s picked up over the years. He hates how the realty companies level whole neighborhoods, then replace them with whitewashed buildings with stupid-ass names like Looking Glass, Nantucket Walk, and of course David’s own Gator Glen. A company had been picking up houses on the block. The plan was—perpetual plan is—get ahold of all of them, then level, then rebuild. Make it like that Pete Seeger song about the little boxes, only these would be shoe boxes, stacked in rows. “Die before I sell to them sonsabitches,” Stuckins told them, and that was good enough for Thomas.

  Stuckins is a self-described libertarian, basically an anarchist from the other direction, though of course if Thomas ever said that to him he’d probably be answered with a boot to the head. (Nobody likes to hear the truth about themselves. Didn’t Jesus say that?) The rent’s low, almost stupid-low, and they pay it in cash, at Stuckins’s request, which is good because most of them don’t have checking accounts. Thomas used to, but he’s pretty sure it automatically closed after he drained it. Plus the cash thing makes Thomas think ole Jim’s a tax cheat, which he respects for all the obvious reasons. These were the terms of their agreement: “Money shows up in my mail every month, you’ll never see me over your house, less you call me ’cause something broke. It ever stops showing up is fine too, but then just don’t be in there when I get there.” In sum, renting this house is about as humane and nonexploitative as any transaction possibly could be while still taking place within the context of a capitalist mercantile exchange. It was, naturally, a handshake deal. />
  And of course Katy took this whole arrangement, when it was offered to them, as a miracle. Quote unquote.

  Right when they got the house, Parker reappeared in town. Miracles sure were in ready supply that week. It was the first time in months that any of them had seen him. Something had changed—happened or failed to happen—out there in the woods. Thomas didn’t know what that thing might have been, he wasn’t sure that he would want to know, but he was sure that something had. Parker was different now, closed-off, distant, and genuinely spooky. His head was often cocked to one side, like he was trying to listen to fairly complicated directions being whispered to him by someone none of the rest of them could see.

  It was over Thomas’s considerable objection that Katy offered Parker his own bedroom in the house. Since there were three of them splitting the rent, and Katy and Liz were sharing a bed, the idea had been that the third room would stay open, for an art studio or a practice room for the band they were always talking about starting, or a crash space for traveling kids. Whatever else they could think of. But Katy broke unilaterally with the consensus, an absolute betrayal, and she did it even though she knew that Parker had no money, and that that state of affairs would never change. She was prepared to take on his burden, though she herself was borrowing money from Liz, who had gotten it from her mother, who had given her daughter $387 as a moving present, then announced herself tapped out. Katy thought God would see them through, and of course it’s pointless to argue with anyone whose side God is on—though Thomas had been more than willing to give it his level best—but it turned out not to matter anyway, because Parker didn’t want to come.