The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Katy begged him. They were at Clasen’s, Thomas was working, and she’d already strained Parker’s patience by bringing him here. Thomas watched them go back and forth for nearly an hour, thankful he couldn’t hear a word either one was saying. Eventually Parker relented and agreed to go with her, but when they got to the property he wouldn’t set foot inside.

  He never left any evidence of his campsite when he wasn’t actually in it—security culture, he said—so he had the tent with him, in his backpack, when he came over. He set it up in the yard, as far away from the house as he could stake it. Then he christened the house after the site of Jonah’s perdition, a rebuke that could hardly have been lost on Katy, but it had been her bright idea to give him the honor of blessing the place with a name. Thomas thought, personally, that as far as names went, “Fishgut” was a pretty good one, and he liked to think that they’d all learned a valuable lesson about playing with fire and getting burned. Heartbroken, but unflinching in her loyalty, Katy herself painted and hung the sign.

  Then, on the morning of the third day, they found the tent flap open, the tent itself abandoned. He was gone.

  That was seven months ago. Where he went, and why, remains a matter of contention between Katy and Thomas. They agree that Parker must have reached a critical juncture in his spiritual development. He’s a true knight of faith now, Katy says, a full-sprung saint. She believes he’s left the tent here as a covenant of his promise to return to them. In the meantime, she’s filled the tent with all the glass husks of her prayer candles after the candles themselves have burnt away. If Parker ever really does come back here he’s going to have to enter the house, finally, or else sleep in the leafy dirt, because his tent is not habitable in its present condition, having been turned by Katy into the world’s first and only anarchist shrine.

  Thomas has a somewhat different interpretation of Parker’s flight. He thinks that a basically good punk finally let his own bullshit get the best of him and lost his fucking head. He likes to think that Parker will come to his senses, develop some genuine revolutionary consciousness in place of all this hoodoo. Or that maybe he did, and that that was what set him running—escape from the tyranny of Katy’s eager discipleship. He could be out there doing stuff with Earth First! or something else awesome. He could be with the Ruckus Society, getting ready for Seattle in November. But that’s probably just Thomas’s romantic streak talking, because it’s where he wants to be—putting his skills, himself, his body, to some use in this world, instead of hiding out here in this sleepy college town, praying for rain. Even an atheist Jew like him knows that old spiritual about how it’s gonna be the fire next time. Thomas wants to be kindling, or better yet, a STRIKE ANYWHERE match.

  Realistically, Parker probably played the long odds once too often and is in jail somewhere for shoplifting and/or vagrancy. Or if he’s still free he’s probably the same as ever, only worse—out in the Southwest maybe, ranting at the crazy-making moon. One way or the other, Thomas doesn’t think they’ll ever see him again. Though God knows he’s been wrong before.

  For example, he assumed that after Parker left, Katy and Liz would start to get over all his horseshit. How could they not, right? The guy sold them out like a million different ways. Thomas stopped arguing with Katy about Parker because it seemed QED to him that she’d let the thing die, find something else to project all her passion onto—hell, he thought they’d be a Food Not Bombs house by now. It astounds and disgusts him that instead Katy has continued Parker’s work and developed this weird little following within the community of Gainesville anarcho-punk: a sub-sub-subculture. And never mind that its very existence puts to question the ethos it ostensibly champions. Nobody hated crowds and groups like Parker. He could barely stand to have friends. Well, perhaps twisting Parker’s call to radical solitude into the pretext for punk rock love-ins is Katy’s true and lasting revenge on her AWOL master, though Thomas does wonder if the perversion is conscious. Anyway, don’t most disciples wind up turning their masters’ work inside out? So isn’t this really like the most typical, banal thing imaginable? The pattern is the breaking of the pattern—or whatever the fuck it was Parker used to say. Who has time for this Deleuze and Guattari meet Kierkegaard shit?

  They gather at Fishgut on Sunday nights, biweekly, to get wasted and talk about their socio-spiritual development. They trade shoplifting tips and talk about energy projection and polyamory, or worse yet, read their poems to each other. Sloppy orgies break out on the living room couches, or the far dark corner of the porch. Someone invariably remembers there’s paint under the sink and then more New Age neo-Pagan pseudo-Gnostic (who can tell the difference at this point?) drivel sprouts up on the walls like bright stupid flowers. Thomas could, maybe should make a point of being elsewhere when they come over, but then it’s like who the fuck are they to run him out of his own house? Plus sometimes someone brings a guitar, or he gets his cock sucked. The main thing is to hide in his room during Katy’s homily, and/or, Jesus save us from ourselves, the open mic.

  But tonight is different from all other nights, because something has happened that he can’t explain. Katy’s never been a liar, but if there’s one thing he’s learned during his accidental fieldwork among the true believers, it’s that you can’t account for the lies people tell to themselves and then believe. If it had been Liz, he’d have said she made it up to please Katy, because that’s the kind of bug-eyed follower, pushy bottom that Liz is. Hell, even if it had been David—his old friend found then lost again so quickly this whirlwind week—he would have seen right through it. Wayward soul punch-drunk on double helpings of pussy, more than willing to play the mark in this dyke conspiracy, totally unconcerned with whatever the big picture is actually a picture of.

  But Anchor wouldn’t let Katy put her up to something like this. She just wouldn’t. And even if she had—which she didn’t, because she wouldn’t—Thomas would know it, because Anchor has tried to lie to him before (about not coming from money, or where she was last night) and he can always tell. He doesn’t call her out, because they’re not into that kind of reproach and contest. Hell, they’re not even exclusive—just in love. And he gets why she wouldn’t want to share certain things. Liz is genuine working-class trash, as are Owl and Selah. (Katy and Parker he’s not sure about—their pasts are unknown to him, their respective personas cut from whole cloth. It would surprise him zero to learn that one of them was a trailer park brat and the other a Trustafarian; what he can’t decide is which one might be which.) But Thomas, David, Anchor—their parents don’t punch time clocks. They came to Gainesville through the VIP door, i.e., the college, and it’s a very hard thing to be fresh from that, or still partway in it, like Anchor is, and have to figure out how to look these truly fucked people in the eye and call yourself kin with them—brother, sister, ally—and not secretly believe you’re just a lifestyle tourist, an interloper, a piece of duplicitous shit like the girl in that rad Tilt song “Molly Coddled,” or that Pulp song “Common People,” the latter of course being too techno-ish to ever cop to having listened to, much less enjoyed, but still. Anyway, what’s the solution? All you can do is live in contradiction—a state of faith, basically—until the pressure sends you screaming back to campus or else the lie becomes true. As for Thomas it proudly has.

  As for Anchor, he’s sure, it will.

  So he knows that what Anchor says happened is what she really does think happened, though he hasn’t had a chance to actually talk to her, only listened in a little on them fawning over their dug-up book, then cranked his music up again to drown them out. Apparently Parker kept a diary, or something. Wonders truly do never cease. In any case, what actually happened may be—has, in fact, got to be—something else again from what they all seem to be claiming to each other (visions! prophecy!) but knowing that she isn’t lying is a start. He isn’t sure what kind of subconscious autosuggestive X-Files shit might be going on here, but he knows he’s never going to figure anything out sulking
off by himself. Which is why he’s in the bathroom now, checking beneath the mostly dried pink paper towel to see what kind of condition his knuckles are in. The bleeding has stopped. That’s good. He tosses the towel in the trash, then goes back to his bedroom to get dressed for the evening service.

  They come trickling through the wide back gate, not two by two like you’d imagine, but in ones and threes, clusters that seem somehow isolate, tripartite bodies straggling through the steam-close Floridian dark. They gather about the fire pit, flasks unsheathed from pockets, three or four rolling smokes from a communal pouch of shag. One kid wants to use the bathroom, and so breaks off, lets himself in through the kitchen door—nobody knocks here, nothing’s locked, everything is permitted—and Thomas takes a step aside, his back pressed against the fridge, out of the path of the kid’s ingress.

  “Hi,” Thomas says.

  “Oh hey,” says the kid. “I’m Aaron. Is it your first time here, too?”

  “Yeah,” Thomas says. “You could say that.”

  “Cool, man. Very cool. I’ve heard it’s like amazing and also like—kind of pretty fucked-up.”

  “Weirder the better, right?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Aaron says, and then is onward again to the bathroom, except there’s already a line for the bathroom three people deep, so they’re backed up to the edge of the kitchen, so actually Aaron doesn’t go anywhere at all. He’s stuck right where he is. To keep things from getting awkward, and also because it was the original goal anyway, Thomas walks out through the still-open door.

  Katy isn’t out here. She always stays secluded in her room for the hour or so before she goes on. Preparing, she says, emotionally and spiritually—meditating or jerking off or whatever it is she does. Thomas thinks the whole thing stinks of theater, though on this day of all days it makes a kind of sense. Probably she’s holed up with the precious Book of Parker, poring over its rambling pages, fretting how there’s hardly enough time to cobble together anything like a coherent homily—not that her regular homilies are anything close to coherent, in the traditional sense of that word. Though in fairness, that’s an assumption; he’s never bothered to sit through one since they’ve moved here. Perhaps she’s gotten better—it’s possible—though the next thing that occurs to him is: better at what?

  He walks through the crowd of kids, counting heads and, at the same time, familiar faces. He figures about fifteen attendees, including the handful inside. But that’s not counting Owl and Selah, who are here because they know there’ll be food after and are too polite to hide out in their van until it’s served. Besides which, as hippies, they have a basically limitless capacity for suffering bullshit. In fact, except for the blessed absence of heroin, they’re kind of collectively Drake the junkie all over again.

  Thomas is also not counting himself, or any of the other housemates. So the total number of people present is higher—probably twenty or twenty-two.

  Of the nonresidents assembled, figure about three quarters of them are friends, or at least faces he knows from the scene. People he’s done sound for, served food, or had to for whatever reason forcibly eject from some show. These are the ones he walks past, wordless, nodding curtly back at the ones who acknowledge him, which are several. And why not? In a tight scene like theirs in a small town like this, he’s basically a celebrity, only half a rung down from the local gods who are actually in bands.

  Thomas is headed toward the tent where, apart from the group, stand Anchor and Liz. The girls are not talking, or even looking at one another. Each has her attention focused on an object—Liz on the shade-drawn window of her and Katy’s and David’s bedroom; Anchor on the dull dumb tent, restored immediately after the excavation project to its exact original plot. The general congregation might as well not even be here. Ah, elders and acolytes, you can see it already, how they’re just like every other sicko cult in history. At least that’s how it looks to Thomas, but then again, it’s early yet. Barely past nine o’clock.

  The girls register his presence more or less at the same time. Anchor breaks out this grin that lights her whole face up like a jack-o’-lantern. Liz, however, has the opposite reaction; there are storms out on the waters in her flashing eyes, and she steps forward, boldly putting her body between the tent and Thomas, as if she expects him to attack it—as if she thinks she can stop him if he does.

  “Listen,” he says, but the words aren’t coming. “Chr—fuck. I don’t know, okay? I’m here.”

  Anchor brushes past Liz, throws her arms around his neck and herself into his arms. Hot-blooded thin girl, wild with both vicious independence and seething need, pooled sweat ever present at the nape of her neck, beneath the tied-back thicket of her high-density dreads, the secret nest where he has his face buried. He squeezes her tight enough to break her, to make sure that she knows that he knows that she won’t.

  But of course their little moment isn’t happening in some vacuum. Guarded, nervy, edgy Liz is here, watching and processing and just having to cut in.

  “Your name means doubt,” she tells Thomas in a dead voice. He pulls his face away from his shuddering girlfriend’s neck.

  “Like, etymologically?” he asks, knowing damn well what she actually means but betting she won’t know what he does. It sure is nice to be smarter than people.

  But their war or whatever is going to be delayed yet again, because a hush falls over the neglected crowd behind them, and this booming silence can only mean one thing.

  They part for her like curtains, the throng, as she approaches. She wears a plain black tee shirt missing its left sleeve, and a dirty-white ankle-length skirt with small floral embellishments at the hem. She’s barefoot, and there’s something different about how she’s walking. It’s not tentative, exactly, but it’s slow. She moves as if through an atmosphere of high viscosity, overlaid upon or coterminous with the plane of being the rest of them are in, but accessible to Katy alone. Her face is purposefully rid of expression, she’s a blank screen, and despite her having napped she looks beleaguered, worn down, as if this thing she’s so long hungered for and expected has turned out to be more burden than she can bear.

  Is there anything more terrifying than a dream come true? If so, it’s almost certainly an answered prayer.

  After she passes through their ranks they regather. They bunch up and follow behind her like a wedding train.

  These “services” began as a joke. One Thomas personally never thought was funny, but still. It was a pointed heresy, an excuse to party on schedule. The model is the Jewish Sabbath, beginning after instead of at sundown, and set on Sunday/Monday, as both an affront to traditional Christianity and as an affirmation of the anarchist principle of Zerowork. Monday as the official Day of Rest—isn’t that hilarious?—to be spent lazy and hungover or else drunk again, while the rest of the zombie world slouches off to another degrading week at the office, the big-box store, the corporate chain restaurant, the capitalist workhouse in all its manifold and secret forms.

  The reverence for Parker—not his teachings, but him as a person, this idea of him as a holy man—began as a kind of joke, too. His earnestness, implacability, and penchant for disappearance—Katy respected these things immensely, and yet could not help but laugh at them sometimes. When he was gone in the woods (or on the prairie; whatever it was) Katy had sometimes referred to him as the Hidden Imam of Anarchy. Then he came back all grave, mumbling gnomic “wisdom,” then left again so soon and in his absence the myths resurged, only Katy wasn’t sure she was kidding anymore. And Liz of course was only too eager to salute whatever flag Katy might fly.

  Over the months they’ve been holding these meetings, the energy has more than merely maintained itself. The revelry has intensified by exponents, and though the congregation’s numbers creep rather than surge, its growth is consistent. When exactly, during all of this, did the irony begin to dissipate? Was the shift steady, or was there a tipping point? Thomas doesn’t know, because up until today he’s made a mos
tly successful career of ignorance from all this. If Anchor hadn’t gotten caught up, he wouldn’t even be here now. Ah, but she has been, and so he finds himself beside her, his injured right hand grasping her left one, the two of them stepping back in unison to one side—Liz, alone, steps to the other—so Katy can pass between them and approach the tent.

  Katy carries a prayer candle, yet another, from the cache in her closet. This one, Thomas notes, honors St. Sebastian, who was shot full of arrows and yet lived, so they had to kill him twice. The candle is new, virgin wick still white and waxed over. Katy glances at Liz, who steps forward and silently proffers a red Bic. Katy kisses her girlfriend’s hand, then nods at her. Liz steps back to her place. The crowd is gathered close about them in a half-moon. Thomas for the first time notices David among the congregants, wearing a pair of tattered denim shorts and a red tank top. In this getup, and newly bearded, David could be a total stranger. In fact, Thomas thinks, he basically is.

  Now Katy turns to Anchor, who squeezes Thomas’s hand once (he winces but says nothing; she doesn’t know about him punching the wall) then releases it and steps forward. The women get close together and lock eyes.

  If this isn’t choreographed then what the fuck?

  They’re all just on some level.