The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  Around Lake Alice, where turtle heads peep from murkwater and tame gators laze on the shore. Past the nondenominational meditation center (a lakeview pavilion with stained glass; available for weddings, etc.; inquire for rates). Past the acres of student garden plots by the plant science buildings, where I had encouraged Anchor to make at least some use of the fact she was still a student and take an elective that might teach her organic gardening which would be essential after the country’s infrastructure collapsed—when the good times came—but she, selfishly, had chosen a creative writing course instead. A small softball diamond and bleachers, side by side with a soccer field. A water purification plant that stank like eggs. The Harn Museum of Art. Still more outbuildings and open spaces of indeterminate university function. Eventually, depending which way I went, I exited the campus to find myself either on Archer Road or on Thirty-fourth Street—each a miserable strip of fast-food chains and big-box stores, Blockbusters and Office Depots, Ruby Tuesdays and Olive Gardens. Ah, glory of the free market! Ah, surfeit of choice!

  I liked taking Archer because it hooks back around the south side of campus, past the Beaty Towers, and meets up with Thirteenth Street, one of the border roads of the student ghetto, which I could take nearly all the way home. Or, if I took Thirteenth the other way, I could ride out to Paynes Prairie, the so-called Alachua Savannah, where you could glimpse horse herds and buffalo at sunrise and evening, and the walking trails were dotted with signs warning of wild boar. It was to this prehistoric place that Parker had fled, like John the Baptist in the wilderness, I imagined. I could see him out there, how his presence was like a bolt of pure spirit-lightning streaking through the sweep of God’s untroubled creation, how scope is its own wisdom, how truth is the only thing that lasts.

  But I saw construction sites also. Not on the prairie, of course—which was a protected nature preserve—but on the long road leading to it, as well as all throughout town. More and more always, single-family homes demolished, stands of trees cut down. They were making way for apartment complexes like the one I had lived in. Everywhere I went I saw the cancer, the devastation, as Parker himself had seen it, and my heart was sick to look upon these things, and I wanted to somehow get involved, not stand apart and watch. But what would I do? Join some group? Write a letter? Paint a sign and hold it up? Let the dead bury the dead, I thought. Let the world solve the problem of the world.

  Our house became a beacon, even as the other houses on our block were emptied out, went dark. Consolidated Properties was moving in like the land sharks they were, but our man Stuckins stuck fast, and our autonomous zone was safe and we were safe inside it; indeed we were flourishing, a desert orchid in flower, as up and down the block buyout prices were reached, and the street became such a ghost town there might as well have been tumbleweeds.

  There was nobody left to call in noise complaints on us and we rejoiced in the awesome power of the Lord.

  Word spread of us, rumors of what we preached and who we were. People wanted to see and to know. We were sought out. Our travelers’ rest was full now, and Thomas’s old room, which had become another one, was, too. We were a hostel, sort of, but that was only the beginning of what we were. There were a dozen people living at Fishgut—auspicious number!—and numbers untold passing through and dropping in. It was not unusual at any given hour to see one or a few punks in contemplative silence or loud slurred professions of devotion about Parker’s shrine. Services ran every Sunday night now and were followed by staple-and-fold sessions. Copies of the Good Zine were stacked up in piles, slipped into newspaper machines, stuffed into the backpacks of our departing guests. They left with as many as we could copy, as many as they had space to take. All bound for distribution—anywhere, everywhere, wherever. Our book was dandelion fluff; windborne spore. Our devotion was repaid a thousandfold. People brought us or sent us all kinds of things we never asked for: money, gifts, whatever they had. We always had more than we needed, and gave as much as we could of it away again—to our congregants, the local homeless, curious college kids who happened by. We were a small blazing light in the distance on a darkling plain. We were a mystery cult, attuned to the necessity of eternal pursuit, perpetual perfecting, and the violent, transformative Grace of our lawless God.

  Winning converts. Like the door guy at Clasen’s, Shrike was his name; a veteran scenester who did tattoos. We could get into shows for free now, and he brought his equipment over on Sunday nights when he wasn’t working, and during the reveries that followed our services he offered up Parker’s Mark at ink cost to anyone who felt themselves ready. The labor itself he gave out of love. I took a big swig of something clear that burned my throat, handed the bottle off to someone, and got in Shrike’s line. He was sitting on a small stool he’d brought. I sat in Katy’s favorite chair.

  I am a book, I remember thinking, as the needle seethed over my flesh—my teeth clenched and Lord give me strength my eyes shut tightly and trying not to jerk away or wince too much—I am a book and this is my inscription. I am dedicated now and for all time.

  We circled round the hate-breathing evangelists who haunted Turlington Plaza, a large outdoor gathering place on campus, who shouted about hellfire and chastity and faggots and otherwise made a brutal spectacle of their miscarriage of God’s love. They stood in the lumpy shadow of a great gray-brown abstract sculpture that everyone called the Potato. It was ringed by wooden benches and you weren’t supposed to climb it, but you could, and some of us did, while others gathered close, cinching the preachers in our snare—whoever it was on that day, whichever denomination, the exact ones changed. A Baptist sweating through a cheap suit, a Chinese Adventist in an ankle-length dress with long sleeves, a suited-up Witness with an armload of pamphlets not so different, in the end, from our own. Being wrongly dressed for the weather seemed essential to all of their programs. From wherever we were—up above him, all around her—we raised our voices and preached back, louder: the good gospel of anarchy in a raucous eruption of joyful noise. There we were, Legion-like, earnest and bonkers in torn tee shirts and paint-spattered shorts, louder and more interesting than whatever it was we were disrupting, a source of endless envy and nuisance to the straitjacketed, sad-eyed world.

  At night, in the rooftop pool of the hotel across from campus, doing cannonballs or diving down and hugging bottom till our chests burned, thinking The body is the site of all experience in this world, swimming up against some other body, Now we see each other face to face, a hand reaching for the slippery neck of a bottle, Joy is a better form of prayer than prayer, playing chicken or running where you weren’t supposed to, bright flashes of pale flesh in moonlight—see we weren’t always serious, and knew how to have fun like kids do, like everyone should, like humans were made and meant to: exultant, dirty innocence; hellbent pleasure; Zerowork. The biggest, hairiest kids you ever saw.

  We spread out across town—paired off or by our lonesomes or in freewheeling squads—to open dumpsters and the unalarmed back doors of stores. We barely distinguished between products and trash any longer—there was only what we needed or wanted or could get. If it was available, our opinion of its worth was no longer a relevant consideration, or, better put: availability itself was a strange attractor and bestowed value, Midas-like, on all that it touched.

  When the thefts, scroungings, and donations yielded more than we knew what to do with—four toasters, ten lamps!—we held yard “sales,” great giveaways, where everything was free. We stapled fliers to utility poles and filled our front yard up with stuff. Little old lady bargain seekers turned dumpstered serving plates upside down in the vain search for a price tag. “Just take it,” we said. “It’s yours.” A deal, and they would have been happy. But free? They only stared at us, lips pursed in grim suspicion, both hands clutching the pocketbook, looking us up and down. “I’ll have to think about it,” they said, and walked away; wary glances back over slumped shoulders—what did we care? We had done our best by them. Anything we couldn’t
get rid of we gleefully destroyed, and made raw materials of the gleaming rubble—splintered wood and glass chips, perfect for bricolage, for conceptual sculpture! Whatever anyone wanted or could dream up, and this is not to suggest that the generative acts of destruction weren’t regarded as artistic expressions in and of themselves.

  There were only a few things we found impossible to forage for or steal: hard liquor, illegal drugs, the rent, and photocopies. At the Bullseye Copy Center on Thirteenth Street they trusted you to keep your own count, and so you could lowball the final figure easily by half, even three quarters, and the cashier wasn’t going to argue; he wasn’t getting paid enough to care. These few facts of life were all that kept us contributing to the American imperium and its blood economy—these plus the modest costs associated with the house itself, electricity for example, but we were working on cracking the power meter. Nothing had availed yet, but that didn’t mean that nothing would.

  We kept a General Fund, to which all contributed as they could. There were three main ways to raise money—by stealing things from chain stores and then returning those items to other locations of the same chain, by busking for change in the streets (this was the riskiest, as well as the least effective; nobody’s less generous than college students), or by “donating” blood plasma for cash.

  We prayed over the money orders we sent to pay the rent and other bills before we mailed them, and for the spirits of whoever was going that week to The Life You Save—that was the plasma center’s name—Lord and Parker, we lament the sin of this our participation in the system. They were prayers of apology, but not, note, pleas for forgiveness. That would have been madness, naturally, since we knew from the teachings of our own Good Zine that God held us in no soul debt; our devotion to Him was given freely, as His love was to us. We owed Him nothing.

  I rode down University Avenue to the strip mall at the corner of Sixth Street. It was a short enough ride but afforded me a clear view the whole time of the Seagle Building, which I would have rather not had. Whenever I saw that shape, that white blot on the blue horizon, my mind flashed to thoughts of my old life, my dead life, pre-life, life of living death—computer warmth, rented furniture, flawless carpet, office light. It took everything I had to shut these images out. Purity of heart is to will one thing, I thought.

  What was the one thing that I willed?

  Everything.

  The one thing I wanted was it all.

  The strip mall was run-down, six or seven storefronts, mostly vacant, with a parking lot that could have held a hundred cars and hardly ever held ten. The asphalt was sun-savaged and weed-choked, white-gray and fissured, jagged chunks of stone upturned or missing. I dismounted the bike and walked it.

  The mall boasted exactly two operational businesses. The first was a locally owned office supply store that struggled, but so far had held on, against Office Depot, Walmart, and all the rest. The second business was The Life You Save.

  I was led to a small white cubicle in a big white room and told to sit down on a strip of butcher paper, in a chair like at the dentist. They had my information in the file already—this was not my first visit—and so certain preliminaries were dispensed with. We skipped straight to the questions about developments in my personal life. Were there any new additions since the last visit to my track record of sexual partners, intravenous drug use, or tattoos? The still-tender skin on my chest tingled and buzzed as I lied to the attendant—over the right breast, exactly opposite my heart—and as the sensation increased in intensity I became certain that Parker’s Mark was actually lit up on my body, my sacred heart aflame and shining through the thin fabric of my plain black tee shirt, announcing my true faith to the world.

  This idea was so powerful that I actually glanced—quickly, furtively, worried they’d notice—down at my chest. I was only slightly disappointed to see that there was no light there. But at least I was able to put the weird notion to rest and finish giving the attendant the answers she wanted, that we both needed (“no, nothing new to report”) in order to get her to recline the chair, hook me up to the boxy white machine.

  The attendant was a middle-aged black woman with her mind on something else. She wore pale pink scrubs, a nurse uniform, though she wasn’t a nurse. She did the first arm all right but couldn’t find the vein on my other arm. I’d thought that after the tattoo, one prick ought to be a breeze for me, but it turned out that I really just didn’t like needles, or pain, period. The third time she stuck me I let a little startled whimper escape, and that was the time she finally nailed the target, as if my crying out had been an essential step in the process. She flipped a switch and the machine buzzed awake. She messed with knobs, set levels, then said she’d be back to check on me in about an hour. I shut my eyes against the fluorescent battery above, the miserable office-white wash, tried to slink into the deep and original soul-self, as my blood slunk out of my body and into the white machine that no longer buzzed but now, working, clunked and hummed. I called up into my mind the image of Parker’s Book—not the Good Zine, now, but the original, the Mead—and saw its cover open and its pages fan, and recited lines to myself from memory and meditated upon their true meanings’ flowering forth.

  Let our lives be our politics and not our politics our lives.

  This was just a warm-up, really. The line was clear, direct, and applicable presently. My drained blood was spun apart in a centrifuge. The plasma was separated out and collected—yellow, transparent, gelid—in an IV bag that hung from a pole that jutted up from the machine. When the not-nurse returned she would collect the bag and take it for flash-freezing, and in that paused form it would enter the global capitalist economy, sold and resold on private markets by specialty brokers who kept their identities concealed, until finally it ended up in some research lab, or a Japanese hospital, or who the hell knew. The blood was pumped back into my body through my other arm. What they gave back was depleted, a nearly waterless slurry of cells. For letting them do this they would give me forty dollars. I was a hypocrite today, pimped out to them, but this small compromise of my values was part of the larger work of preserving them the rest of the time, and so in a certain sense no compromise at all, and here seemed to be the crux of it, the heart of the paradox, paradox as the thumping heart of the living prospect—thumping like my own heart thumped, as the white machine sucked like an undertow and my red life darkened the clear thin tubes.

  He stood at the foot of my chair and was smiling at me. He was taller than I was, but I wasn’t sure by how much. Half a foot, perhaps. It was hard to tell, and also seemed, sometimes, to change. He wore cleanish blue jeans gone to shreds at the ankles and a plain black tee shirt like mine. He was barefoot. At his neck he wore a small, tasteful silver cross on a black cord—not quite a choker, but close. I could not describe his face, though I saw it perfectly clearly.

  “All this,” I said, and gestured with my head at my splayed, cathetered arms, “is for your glory.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re doing really good.”

  “We pray and wait, Parker. We pray so hard.”

  “Keep it up,” he said. “Desire is a strange attractor. But you know that already. Now listen to what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Yes, Parker.”

  “This machine infuses your blood with something called citrate, which keeps it from clotting inside the lines. It does this by binding to calcium, so when you finish here you should find a tall glass of milk, or an ice cream cone. If you can’t steal any, take a few bucks out of the General Fund.”

  “Are you sure? What if somebody asks me about it?” He had admonished me not to tell the others about our conversations. These visions were personal, and private, he’d said—a secret, and when I asked him why, he would say only that the reason for the secret was a secret, too.

  “They won’t ask. It’ll be okay.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “All glory be to your name.”

  “Not my name, but the one who named u
s. Our souls are our names,” Parker said. “You already know this. Every moment of our living is us hearing God speak our names, and our listening to him speak is us knowing ourselves.”

  The not-nurse stuck her head into the cubicle, the little not-quite room.

  “Doin’ okay?” she said.

  “Better than just okay,” I replied. She shrugged—what was it to her?

  “Okay then,” she said. “I come back in another half hour and unhook you.”

  She went away and I looked back to where Parker had been, knowing he would no longer be there, but hoping anyway, then sinking into disappointment, then berating myself for that disappointment, because I knew how he would have despised it. I should have been grateful he had come at all.

  I was light-headed now. My thoughts were drifting; they floated easy over the past few months, which laid themselves out before me, like a landscape painting. Through Parker’s grace I had been given the boon of Sight, and as I lay back in my chair, I allowed my body’s eyes to shut, slowed my breathing down, so to let the eyes of my heart blink open, and my spirit dreamed expansively beyond its gilded cage of flesh. Even in this moment, I thought, I can hear God speaking my name! I saw scenes and visions of those whom I loved.

  I saw Thomas in his adopted home, Seattle, holding a black laundry marker, writing the number of the free legal aid hotline upside down on his stomach, so that later, after he got arrested during a protest and had all his belongings taken, he’d be able to simply lift his shirt and know who to call.

  I was seeing the future, I realized. I was seeing the shape of things to come.

  Owl and Selah at the New Year’s Eve camp-out concert in Big Cypress, way down south, which that goofy band Phish was throwing. For all Owl’s talk about Asheville, old friends, and new prospects, everyone who knew them knew they would go the other way, farther down into the cul-de-sac of Florida, and drink mushroom tea with their fellow travelers and worship nonsense and noodly guitar. Somebody’s toddler running wild through the crowd, all the legs like a forest to him.