The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Selah offers him a small round orange-and-brown throw pillow. He takes it without a word, lets his slouch slide farther into full-on lying down, fixes the pillow behind his aching, swimming head.

  Thomas has his eyes closed but is not sleeping. He’s listening to the wonderful strange cadence of Owl, who is babbling to his lover about their future.

  “Selah, baby. Baby, it’s just like that song says. That song says it and it’s so. ‘Open up your eyes little darling. Been here for ’bout too long.’ How long can we keep living in this van? We need to find ourselves a—a place in life, man. We need like a—room. You know? I know you know. But listen. It isn’t going to happen here. That’s sure. I mean there’s just not enough here to make anything off of. There’s not enough coming through. What we need is a plan. We need a plan and we’ll be golden. We’ll think of the perfect plan.

  “Can we put that song on, actually? I sure wouldn’t mind hearing that song again. You know it’s my favorite song there is. After I hear that song I just won’t care about anything, but hearing it will help me think. I’ll think of our new plan while I listen to it. It’s on, um, second disc of Shining Star I think. I don’t think we even have another recording of that one, actually. It wasn’t one of the ones he ever played very much. I don’t think I ever even saw him play it, and I went to forty-eight shows.

  “Selah, baby, how about Asheville? We could make it in Asheville. I think so. There’s plenty of music, and the people are right. I know someone in Asheville. I think he’d let us stay. We could sell the van and save the money. We could figure something out. I feel it, man, I mean I really do. It’s like this twinkling light in my mind that knows what the truth is. Now if I could just remember that motherfucker’s name. I mean if I could just sort of get my head on straight for a second, put on my, you know, thinking cap, and remember the name of the guy who. Hang on. Okay.

  “Okay.

  “Okay, it’s on the tip of my tongue.

  “Okay okay okay okay. Come on now. Come on now, old brain, time to be a genius.

  “Fuck.

  “Okay let me just not think about it a minute and then it’ll come. Too much pressure, you know? Too much pressure which never did anybody any good. God I love this song. I mean I could just listen to it again, and then the whole rest of this album. All Jerry’s good Jerry to me, man. But I know you don’t really like the nineties stuff. How you say his voice just sounds so old that it makes you sad. I mean I respect the way you feel about that. I can see how a person would feel that way. I mean, actually, in a certain sense, like in the objective sense of whatever, I mean I even feel the same as you, I guess. I mean you put the music on and it’s not like we’re hearing different music. I hear what’s coming out of the speakers, same as anyone. It’s just, you know, it’s not objective when it comes to him. Music is my religion, baby, and I know you know that, and I know it’s yours, too. And that we’re the same—denomination, isn’t that right? Selah, baby, you know how it is. It’s us in this thing together and we’ve got every good thing coming.

  “Hah! I knew I’d get it. I got it. Here it is. Ted, Ted from Asheville. Ted’s a real buddy. We go way back. He’s true blue. He’s gonna be waiting for us when we get there. He’s gonna hear my brain waves and know we’re coming. He always said if I was ever passing through to stop off and see him. He always said if I ever needed anything at all. Well we’re gonna have us a time at old Ted’s, Selah baby. Ted is the name that means every little thing will be all right.”

  Thomas sits up and the world’s swirling. He puts a hand out as if to steady himself on a badly shaking train, though of course nothing is in motion. Just him, his head. “Okay, fuck,” he says. “Hey listen, thanks so much for the smoke. You guys really saved me.”

  “Anytime, man,” says Owl. Selah says nothing. Now that he can focus his eyes again, Thomas sees that she’s rolled over on the bench, asleep. Has Owl been soliloquizing this whole time to nobody? Christ, but they really are made for each other, this poor pair. It’s like epically tragic and beautiful, in a kind of white-trash way, how they’re always leaving but never actually going, always still just right here. They’ll grow old in this van, Thomas thinks, if they don’t accidentally drive it off a bridge.

  The party peaked, apparently, while he was hanging out with the hippies. Mission accomplished. There are some couch-crashers, plus the requisite last nighthawks out back by the bug light, but basically things have died down. Except in the back bedroom. He can hear punk music of indeterminate vintage and middling quality coming from in there, and below that, the awkward moans and grunts of, say, a half dozen wasted people attempting some miscarriage of human geometry. Thomas stands in the hallway before the door, listening. He of course, like them, believes that marriage is a form of oppression, and that monogamy itself is a patriarchal conspiracy to outfit a politics of domination with the pretense, the mask, of moral virtue—but he’s never been able to get into the whole group thing. It seems dangerous, for one, but that’s not even the issue. Really it just weirds him out.

  The door opens and out stumbles cake girl. She’s wearing a different tee shirt than earlier, with no bra beneath it and nothing at all on her bottom half. From her shaved sex dangles a small white string. A sheen coats her pale skin. “I’m just— the bathroom,” she says to Thomas as she lurches by. As if he’d asked. Thomas says nothing to her, only looks, gawking, into the orgy room, where it’s a thousand degrees even with the window open, and the pit-crotch stink is stunning, and shapes grind in and out of panting shadow. Someone is splayed out on the lower bunk of the nearer bunk bed. Katy is sitting on his face and making out with Liz, who’s kind of haunch-crouching over the body. There’s a hand in her, but it’s unclear whose. Splayed guy’s cock is in the mouth of the kid Thomas met earlier (what was his name?) who said he’d heard things were amazing here, but also kind of pretty fucked-up.

  If you will it, it is no dream, kid.

  Could that supine body they’re all working on belong to his old friend David? Prude, private David, the bane of whose middle school years was those five naked seconds while changing in the locker room before and after PE class? David whom he’s barely caught sight of all night? Could that be him on this filthy mattress, neck-deep in Katy’s nethers even as his own spit-shined cock now fills some random punk’s relentless mouth?

  The body on the bed begins to spasm, powerful ripples that seem to originate at the belly button and work their way outward: up and down the body at once. The boy on the floor adjusts himself to allow clearance for the splayed body’s legs, which now flail on either side of him, as he leans in closer, deeper, and swallows and swallows and still doesn’t get it all.

  Is this David? Thomas feels like he has to know.

  “Hey!” shouts an unfamiliar male voice from the top bunk. “In or out, dude.”

  “Yeah, no audience, thanks,” seconds an equally alien female voice. “Shut the door.”

  Jolted from his—ahem—reverie, he does what they ask him: shuts the door on the first roar of what sounds like Katy’s orgasm, coming close on the heels of the guy’s—David’s, if it is him, and really, if so then so what? He turns away from the back bedroom to the door of his own room. This doesn’t actually require walking anywhere. The two rooms share a wall. And why is his door cracked open? Swear to God, if there’s anyone in there. If it’s that fucking cake girl—

  But it’s only Anchor, asleep in his bed, curled up, the sheets twisted and kicked off in the heat, the pale freckled curve of her back in the moonlight just about the sweetest thing he’s ever seen. She’s all angles, elbows and boy hips, every notch in her spine visible. She doesn’t go in for that other-room shit, either. It weirds her out, too. She’s said so.

  My God, this day! This girl—his girl, if that’s not too fucked-up to say, just once, when nobody’s around and he’s not even saying it aloud. His sweet girl. What has she gone and gotten herself tangled up with? They still haven’t had a chance to t
alk at all. In the morning, in the morning. He’ll tell her about what he’s decided—Seattle—and they can figure out what makes sense to do. He’ll tell her things like what he heard Owl telling Selah, only it won’t be bullshit when he says it, because they’re not a couple of addle-brained hippies. And because they’re not old. Anchor won’t be in school this fall. She’ll be on a train somewhere, or hitching, or hiding out from the Oklahoma rain in an abandoned barn like a desert island in the middle of the golden wheat-sea. And wherever it is, she’ll be with him and he’ll be with her. And who knows? Maybe they’ll want to try monogamy; see where it gets them. It’s not like committing to a person means you automatically become some sellout. People have the right to do whatever works for them. The anarchist as monarch of the freed self, right? That’s a Parkerism. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

  He can’t wait to start making their plans. In fact, he’s half tempted to wake her up right now—but no. That’s no good. She’s had a hard enough day, beguiled or whatever by Katy, tricked into thinking she’s part of some divine fucking mystery. Let her sleep it off. It’ll all make sense in the morning.

  But instead of climbing into the bed, he steps back into the hall. He heads for the living room, where it’s dark. He pads past the sleepers wheezing in their alcoholic oblivion, over to the bookshelf where Katy keeps Parker’s precious library: all the books he collected when they lived at the Coop and left behind when the squat got broken up. Katy saved them. A whole suitcase full of Christian gobbledygook and anarchist theory—as if any book could teach a person how to live.

  Thomas finds the notebook just where he thought he would: face out, propped up by earmarked-to-shit copies of Future Primitive and the Summa Theologica. That is: Zerzan and Aquinas, dead center of the bookshelf, the fault line where anarchy and Jesus meet.

  What did Parker do out there in the wild, alone for so long? Did he eat nothing but berries until his waste slid out of him like water, not even worth digging a hole for? Did he eat carrion? Hunt game? Did he sneak into town and raid dumpsters? Surely he was too filthy, stank too bad, to pass unnoticed in any store. Did God give him manna? Did he simply sit in his tent and meditate on the terrible memory of Drake’s corpse, while the sun and moon wheeled in and out of the sky unseen above his weather-resistant polymer roof? Was he writing this book the whole time? Did he starve himself mad?

  Thomas takes the notebook to the kitchen. He opens it and starts flipping pages. He’s looking to see if there’s any consistency to Parker’s writing style, or if he always used the same kind of pen. Anything telling. But no, the journal’s a mess. Some entries are dated, others not. There are all kinds of ink colors—blue, black, a good bit of purple. Some of it is his own writing, some of it is quotes he saw somewhere and copied over. Sometimes there’s just a few lines on a whole page, like he was going to come back to it later but never did, like here:

  Why should religion be useful in your everyday life? Why should politics be pragmatic, or worse yet, practical? True religion, like true political will, seeks nothing less than the destruction of the everyday, the eradication of the normal and the usual—the call to Stand Apart is, in the end, not a permanent injunction. When your Action doesn’t merely take a side or tip a scale, but actually alters or overturns the terms and conditions of the false oppositions that govern the everyday, then and only then is it Right. There will come a time for Right Action.

  What a fucking joke this whole thing is. What he should do is take the notebook outside right now and burn the son of a bitch, nip this thing in the bud.

  But Thomas has other, bigger plans. He opens the kitchen’s random-shit drawer and fishes out a blue Bic pen. Weird how those are the two main things the company makes—lighters and pens. What’s that about, anyway? Okay, Thomas, time to focus. He figures it’s not worth it to try to imitate Parker’s handwriting. He’s better off just trying to do a quick, nonspecific scrawl and hope that it blends. Not like Parker’s handwriting is so unique. It’s erratic and loping, rather childish, actually.

  Thomas laughs under his breath, a hushed and ugly sound. In the notebook he writes:

  Desire is a strange attractor. Your longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth.

  He puts the notebook back on the shelf where he found it. He goes to the bathroom, where he finds cake girl passed out in the tub. Turning the light on doesn’t seem to disturb her at all, but he’s careful to pee on the porcelain so the water doesn’t burble and when he’s finished he doesn’t flush. He shuts the light on his way out. “Huh?” he hears her say to no one in particular, apparently roused by the resurgent dark. Absolutely not his problem. He goes back into his bedroom, closes the door gently behind himself, so quietly it doesn’t even click. He locks it. He strips down, conscious of the explosive thumping of his heart in his chest, and beyond that the muffled music from the madhouse next door. The gravity of what he’s done is beginning to set in. Okay, come on now. Just a practical joke. It’s late, and you’ve got a lot to do tomorrow. He tries to think happy thoughts, like how after him and Anchor are set up in Seattle, probably after the protests, he’ll want to start a band. Anchor doesn’t know how to play anything, but he’s pretty sure she’d be willing to learn. Or she could always just sing. So much possibility. He takes a few deep breaths, does a couple of neck rolls, then climbs gingerly into the bed and eases up next to his girl. She stirs but doesn’t wake as he presses his front against her back and wraps his arms around her, his good hand on her bony hip, and the fingers of that hand splayed out across the warm flat of her belly. For the second time today Anchor is somebody’s little spoon.

  The Leaving Kind

  The great enemy of strong faith is not faithlessness, no. It is weak faith.

  But what is faith? We don’t ask this enough—ever, really. What does it mean to have it? To keep it? What are its limits and what—if anything—lies beyond? From Parker they know that faith is rooted in what Chesterton called the scandal, and Kierkegaard the absurd. They prefer the latter because it makes for easier conflation with the injunction to “be realistic: demand the impossible!” as Peter Marshall has it in the frontispiece to his History of Anarchism—also quoted in Parker—besides which, Chesterton is such a petit bourgeois prig.

  Okay, let’s try it. The paradox of faith is the wellspring of its bounty. The unbridgeable gap is a blessing; from it is born the promise of flight. If we could prove these things we believe, that is, if we were able to know them rather than believe them, then our belief would be extraneous, vestigial, our faith pointless. It is not soul competency that makes our hair grow, or pours the eye-brightening whiskey into the river of our thrumming blood. It is not the priesthood of all believers that raises the sun up in the sky of a Friday morning; neither the muezzin nor the minyan that sends it back down at night.

  In the situation of contemporaneousness, remarks Kierkegaard, signs and wonders are an exasperatingly impertinent thing. And this, Katy reasons—check that: believes—tells them not merely why so few miracles are visited upon the world, but also why some, sometimes, still are.

  When the expectation is absence, what could be more impertinent than appearance?

  So God has seen fit to grant them a vision, okay. Why not? Their hearts and souls are open, uniquely primed, and truly, what would make less “sense”—more perfectly evidence and manifest God’s sublime impertinence, His perfect refusal of perfection, His holy rebel-king spirit—than this? Bunch of drunkpunks in the armpit of Florida, the self-declared children of two traditions that both refuse parentage. Heretics, nobody will have them; nobody will believe in them—yet—but Him. They are His and He is theirs and there for them. The strength of the absurd.

  And of course there are problems already. Errors, shortcomings, flaws, limits, gaps. Inconsistencies and contradictions unresolved and perhaps beyond resolution.

  Given the opportunity, Flannery O’Connor might have described Parker as a comp lit grad student gone wrong. And
Katy, holy shit—where to start? She’s this like Ren-fair refugee turned New Age sexaholic gone all too frighteningly right. A lot of the time, he seemed to be barely putting up with her (or any of them) but the fact remains that he did, and Parker was never one to suffer fools—or anything much—gladly. So there must have been something there, right? Something that made them real to each other—the God in each calling out to the God in the other.

  Or whatever. Sometimes Liz thinks the real miracle wasn’t when Katy and Anchor dreamed of the book, but that it actually occurred much earlier, when Katy got Parker to come over to the house in the first place. It was the only time she ever tested her will against his and won.

  Katy’s longing for Parker is so intense that it can seem like a put-on, a weird protracted role-play, some kind of shuck and jive. In our wink-and-nod culture, the era of the post-everything, nobody speaks like this—without irony, without cynicism, in and of universals, absolutes—unless they’re working an angle. Right? Maybe. But the fact is that for better, worse, or weirder, Liz knows, Katy’s yearning is as honest as it is fierce. Katy means what she says. She believes herself.

  Privately, however, Liz thinks that Katy’s longing for their prophet is based on the deep knowledge (i.e., not faith, but the presumptive fact) that said longing will never be relieved. What Katy worships is not Parker so much as Parker’s absence, and she herself fills the space she has carved out for him, the role he perpetually declines to appear and assume. Liz doubts that Katy knows that she “knows” this. The knowledge is so fundamental that it does not register as information; it is completely integrated into Katy’s reality, not a fact of life on the ground but of the ground on which life takes place, an unknown known.