Liz’s own faith, given to wavering at the best of times, has been lately pushed to the breaking point, beyond it, in fact, which is to say: it’s broken. Their devotion is as a scourge to her. The doubt she so callously accused Thomas of was really her own all along, and now, finally, it has burnt her up from the inside out. She’s a soul-scorched shell.
And if Katy in all her glorious intuition and godliness could only see what’s right there in front of her face, she would confront Liz, call her betrayer, denounce her once and for all. But Katy doesn’t do that, because she has no discerning vision. She is a believer, period; eternal optimist, half blind. She can’t see Liz for what Liz is—deceiver; pathetic—which is, finally, the failing that Liz cannot forgive her lover for, or bear another instant. Katy’s failure to see the worst in her registers as a failure to see her at all.
So here’s Liz loading up a blue duffel till it’s full with clothes and books—all her stuff, what little she has. A few caseless CDs; she wraps looseleaf pages over them for protection, double-folds the corners down. Her one pair of sneakers (she’s wearing the boots) tied together by their laces and hung from the duffel strap. Now she’s struggling to get the zipper shut. A stitch pops but no seam bursts, thankfully. Okay. It’s going to hold.
Katy’s on the edge of the bed, beet-faced. David’s somewhere behind her, fidgeting, unsure of what to do or say—if anything. He wishes he could be invisible, here but not here. He knows that he should just get up and walk out, leave the room. This thing is older than him; he is a small, late epoch in their long, rich history. He should give them their moment.
Should, but can’t. Who, granted witness, could possibly turn his back on the end of history?
Liz keeps herself strong by going over a mental list of every single bit of shit she’s ever put up with for Katy’s sake: every false assurance given or accepted, every smile faked and male partner welcomed into bed, all in the service of what? A larger and—she thought—transcendent truth: her love for Katy, their love for each other. Is that love really gone now, sacrificed on the altar of Parker? Or has it merely warped into its inverse—this aching rage she feels?
Thomas had the right idea all along. Liz should have left when he did, a month ago, as soon as the book was unearthed. Liz sees now how it was Thomas alone who saw Katy for what she is—pseudo-revolutionary, wannabe Brigham Young. And beneath it all? Just another fucking college dropout dabbling in the sweaty pleasures of the underclass. Barely distinct, in the end, from the men she brings home.
But of course it’s not Katy she hates. Not really. Her true fury is—as always, poor girl—aimed inward, directed at herself for having reached her limit. Because why can’t she keep up appearances like usual? Why can’t she smile wide like before, say the words? Katy wants to pray to a tent—fine. Parker, servant of God—they’ve been saying that for a year now, give or take. So what’s the difference whether or not they’re kidding? And though nearly as faithless as Thomas, Liz sees the purpose, even finds joy and comfort, in the ritual and romance of religion. If anything, she’d prefer more structure and custom, perhaps even—God save us—a Law or two; just little ones. Something to learn by heart and follow. Because for her, sharing Katy’s connection to God is not about God, it’s about Katy. The body of ritual—practice and language and gesture—is a vessel, a form, to be filled with genuine faith at some future point, maybe, and if not then not, and that’s okay, too. Let that secret emptiness abide as a secret, shared between her and the silence.
Even God’s absence is His presence. His silence is His thunder.
There are times that she’s almost believed that. There could, or would have been, more.
But then here’s David. He’s the problem, because he really does believe. His faith is enormous and ever expanding. She’s a candle to his furnace—what’s that Dylan line? A fire in the sun. He outshines her. Not in Katy’s eyes, necessarily, but in Liz’s own. His plain and bountiful certainty in the book, the Revelation, Katy’s prophecy of Parker’s Promise to return to them; it’s all a slap in the face to her, a rebuke to her own faithlessness and the thin mask behind which she hides it, plus the constant fear that that mask will fall away, or be stripped from her. She might as well have the number of the beast emblazoned on her forehead, or MYSTERY scrawled scarlet on her thigh.
“Baby,” says Katy to Liz, who is leaving, “think a minute. Hang on.”
“Don’t be angry you weren’t chosen for the Dream,” David says. “I wasn’t either. He has other plans for us.” Liz wheels around, eyes wild, gritted teeth flashing in the light.
“Parker was at least an original,” she says, and oh boy now here comes the soliloquy. She had promised herself she wouldn’t do this, but really who gives a shit anymore? “He was crazy, but at least he was real. And he would have been disgusted by you. By both of you. By this whole thing. If he was here he wouldn’t stand for it. He’d turn everyone against you, and it would be easy, and then he would turn on them. Because he didn’t care about having followers, or even about being right. He just wanted to do whatever he wanted, and be alone. And if he ever does come back, when he sees this he’ll just leave again. You’re preparing for nothing. You’ll never even know he was here.”
“Get out!” Katy screams at her lover in a shattered-glass growl, a raked-coals roar, and hearing this, something in Liz dislodges. A weight is cut free. This anger of Katy’s—it’s a marvel; this and this alone is the true miracle; the only one. It’s everything she ever wanted and more. To be the focus of her lover’s complete attention, the lightning rod, even if it means being absolute Judas. Deep within the devastated landscape of her heart there blossoms a small bright rose of happiness, the bitter satisfaction born when something precious and long-coveted is finally obtained.
The duffel shouldered, sneakers swinging, she leaves the bedroom. They don’t go after her. There are people hanging out in the living room, duh, and she knows maybe half of them. They eye her, this figure in the hallway, and she stares at the linoleum, unable to meet their collective curious gaze. They heard the screaming, of course, and so as far as they’re concerned she is not leaving of her own volition, but has been exiled, thrown out. She shuffles into the kitchen, meaning to go out the back, and sees David’s knife block lying on the counter on its side. Without thinking, she rights it, and while so doing notices a small oval rust-sore, herpetic, low near the handle of the carving blade.
These knives are like triple stainless steel—how is this even possible?
Put another way: is there anything that Fishgut won’t turn to shit?
She tucks the block up under her arm, like she did on the day she took it from David’s apartment. That bad spot notwithstanding (and who knows, maybe it’s fixable) the knife set will make a great gift for her mother, and hopefully help smooth things over in terms of her showing up, surprise, to move back home.
They mourn the loss of Liz, yes, but not deeply, because they’ve got a more practical problem to deal with and nothing should slow them down. They understand that the Giving of the Book unto them has meant their being charged with a sacred Duty. They wish and are determined to disseminate Parker’s Teachings, and it seems like they ought to do this by publishing an edition of his Book.
How does one do that, exactly?
Katy and David are lying on their bed; Anchor’s kind of half leaning at its foot, at ease but not fully. It’s night. The dim light of candle-saints softens all their faces as usual; between that and a joint they shared earlier, everyone’s looking positively blessed. But hang on—focus. What was it Anchor just said? Could she repeat that please?
“What I said,” Anchor says, “is why don’t you make a website?”
“Why would we want one of those?” Katy asks.
“Because,” Anchor says, “it would just, like, be there. Anyone could get to it, and it’d be free.”
“But getting people to sit plugged in to some machine is everything we don’t want,” David
says. “It’s like the opposite of everything Parker stood for.”
“Stands,” Katy says.
“What?”
“Stands. You said ‘stood.’ ”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
“Anyway,” Katy says, “none of us knows how to even do that. Do you?”
“I could probably figure it out,” Anchor says. “I mean, enough people do it, right? And there’s programs you can get to help . . .” But she knows, just from looking at their faces, that this ship is never going to sail, has in fact sunk in the harbor already. They’re quiet awhile, watching the candles flicker, or whatever. Katy and David reading the tea leaves of Anchor’s body language for any kind of sign.
“Oh fuck, I’ve got it!” Katy says. “We should do it as a zine.”
“But how could we fit the whole journal in a zine?” David says.
“Well,” Katy says, “what if it didn’t have to be, you know, all of it at once? It could be just enough to get people interested—so they wanted to come over and learn more.”
Anchor says she can do the layout, easy, once a manuscript is drawn up. They’re still wary of the whole computer thing—David especially, it seems—but inasmuch as they don’t have to use one themselves, or establish any kind of cybernetic presence, they’re willing to let Anchor make their lives easier. They tell her she’s really doing them a solid. They’re so grateful for her devotion, and this favor, and hell just everything about her, and why doesn’t she do more than just the layout; why doesn’t she help them edit the book? She shared in the Dream, after all, and is in every sense one of them, which they sincerely hope that she knows.
She says that, yes, she knows, and thank you for saying so.
And yet she recuses herself from the culling process, says she doesn’t believe herself qualified to make those kinds of judgments—it’s beyond her and they can’t convince her otherwise. They should just let her know as soon as they’re ready with a manuscript; she can’t wait to get started. And then she says it’s getting late, and they invite her to stay, as they always do, in the bed with them, if she’d care to, or else wherever she likes in the house, and she, as always, says thanks but no thank you; in fact hasn’t spent a night at Fishgut since Thomas left; insists on returning to her dorm room; they never can understand why.
It’s hard to be an editor! They pore over the Book page by page, the two of them, line by line, compare and contrast, trying to figure out—what, exactly? The Book is tangled and scattershot and sprawling. Parker repeats himself, reconsiders, goes back later and makes addenda or scratches things out. It’s a personal journal; deep thoughts share page space with scribbled-down phone numbers, train schedules, shoplifting to-do lists, thumbnail sketches of places traveled and people he met there.
Also, the journal is in large part a record of struggle, his own, with theology, theodicy, the flux and waver of belief. David thinks that this is an essential component of the Book, this proof of unending trial—how salvation is lived moment to moment, and grace is a precarious precipice, from which even the righteous may fall at any moment, and fall further yet for the height at which they once stood. Cf. Liz.
But Katy thinks no, this is no way to generate interest, no way to draw people in, get them pumped up and intrigued. Aroused is a word she also uses. “When Christians want to put something on a billboard,” Katy says, “they don’t choose Matthew 27:46, or 1 Corinthians 13:13. Because those things are too complex for a billboard. So what do they go with?”
“John 3:16,” David says.
“Right,” Katy says. “Why?”
“Because it’s easy,” David says. “And it’s the whole, like, thesis, right there.”
Which for David is exactly the problem. He believes that their extraction from the Book should be at least as difficult as the full work itself. He wants this thing, which they have come to refer to as the Good Zine, to be a kind of stumbling block. A challenge. Will you come and try this? Are you worthy of application? He is a maximalist. He wants to include as much material as possible—however many pages a saddle staple can accommodate, and as much text as each page can take. He wants small fonts and no margins. Here, too, Katy has a very different vision. Economy, essence, invitation. These are her watchwords. She is a zealous condenser and extractor, a cutter-away of contexts, generous only with white space—she wants fewer words, large, bold-faced, the right and best ones (she says) set in the page field like gemstones in a ring. Once people come to us, she assures him, they will have all the time in the world to wrestle with the finer points of Anarchristian—the term is Katy’s own—exegesis and praxis. The goal of the Good Zine is limited and simple. “Asses into seats,” she says.
“We don’t have seats,” he says, glumly. “We have a backyard with a fire pit and a tent.”
“Into dirt, then,” she says, smirking.
• • •
Here is a passage in which Parker considers three interrelated problems: those of subjectivity, doubt, and the physical body.
Can’t tell what is belief, or practice, and what is simply my own preference or character traits. I think of how Kierkegaard’s whole system is so clearly born of and shaped by his fundamental intolerance for the human. His abhorrence for the established church works as an argument for anarchist principles, and for the idea that the highest level of spiritual perfection is the standing-alone before God, but it seems like that vehemence also refracts backwards, shines on the physical body, as if in an attempt to burn it up. The body is the site of all experience in this world. It is through it that we know anything, everything, and certainly God. Why would God wish for us to hate that of which we are shaped, and through which we know the world He made? It doesn’t make sense at first. And yet, it begins to almost come together as I find that there is something ineluctably devastating in the idea of a body, the fact of it, that I am it and it is me, entirely, or stranger still the idea that it is not, and that something which is not this body but which “I” still know as “me” shall one day leave it behind. I hate to be this thing that spits and shits and grinds its teeth and yearns for a fuck. Is it possible that the abhorrence of the body is the path to finding comfort in becoming spirit, and is this what is meant by “salvation”? But why, then, if I was spirit before and shall be spirit again, should I suffer to be flesh now? There must be a reason that I cannot know, but the not-knowing feels like punishment, and this feeling fuels doubt and pain. Considering these questions drives me into a kind of impotent, childish rage; rage that I should have to wrestle with this question, despair at having to be anything at all. Are we not all crucified on the crosses of our bodies every moment of our breathing lives?
Katy, the sensualist, the inexhaustible, who so far as David can tell has never begrudged, questioned, or regretted either the fullness or the limits of her own physicality, finds this whole meditation off-putting and bleak. Parker must have been having a bad day when he wrote that, she says, because he wasn’t always like this—not even close. She laughs then in a way that alludes to experience, and David is forced to remember that she—unlike he—has actually known Parker (had she ever known Parker?) and he has not. His faith is belated! He’s come too late! But what had even Katy’s faith looked like before Parker’s departure? They had known he was special, but they hadn’t had ears yet to hear him or eyes to see. Their faith, in its fully realized form, had sprung up only after his leaving them, and so in a sense they are belated, too. They knew less, it seemed, for having known him, than he does, for having never. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed . . . That’s one of Katy’s favorite Bible verses. He understands now how it applies to her as well as to him. None of them has yet seen Parker and known him for who he is. When he returns to them, they will all greet him together, as if for the first time: face to face.
The body is the site of all experience in this world. It is through it that we know anything, everything, and certainly God. Why would God wish for us to hate that of
which we are shaped, and through which we know the world He made?
“Doesn’t this get at the heart of it?” says Katy. “Isn’t this the crux of what he meant?”
It isn’t. At least David doesn’t think so. He thinks that she has edited an honest, earnest question into a rhetorical one that now seems to have been posed ironically, which it hadn’t been. She wants a book of aphorisms, it seems to him, might yet prefer a broadside. He tells her he is worried she is remaking Parker in her own image, that she is forging an idol in the fire—carving the easy prophecies that she wants out of the difficult gift they’ve been given.
She turns away from him, furious and hurt, not the den mother now, not the earth spirit or the sex priestess or the good-times punk. She is his lover, whom he has wounded, caught off guard and stung. He feels terrible and sick. He doesn’t know what time it is or what day. It’s dark out. He’s hungry, sober, and ticked off. The bedroom smells like old coffee; he’s grinding his teeth. When did they last eat? How long has it been like this, the two of them pitted head to head, huddled over the holy notebook, doing the most important work in the entire world, and how much are they willing to sacrifice to get it done? Are they going to blow apart, get sick of each other like Liz got sick of them?
He goes to hold her and she lets him.
They stay that way awhile, for however long.
Then they set to work again.
They bicker and make up, take ground and give it, read closely and argue over meaning and intent; whole days swallowed up, hands shrieking their way around a clock face.
The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel Page 12
