The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  I saw Anchor at home in her dorm room—could this be the present now?—stretched out on her belly across her unmade twin bed. There was a Bob Marley poster on the wall on the roommate’s side. Anchor’s own wall was bare, her socked feet bobbing in the air as she composed a poem for her creative writing class.

  Song

  We stand apart and are beautiful

  Even when most ugly. We are furious

  With anything that hums, clanks—how

  Many greasy gears have ground us down,

  Axled dumb as the sun to the years?

  We say better destroyed by

  Than to become; better die

  In opposition than live mastered.

  We love to fertilize: each

  Unto each and all, in time, the grasses.

  The worst injustice is being named

  For what we stand ever against

  And standing ever against it, ever fall.

  We are originals. The world has lost

  Its way and you know what we mean.

  You don’t prefer, indeed refuse

  To hear first principles and origin

  Myths. Neither the screaming

  Nor the stifled screaming

  Of your victims and constituents.

  Nobody builds us monuments. We lose

  No faith, no war, only blood and battles.

  We prove Grace, and the limits of Grace.

  Together alone is our true song ever sung.

  We were old when the world was young.

  I thought that was a pretty good poem—but of course it wasn’t really Anchor’s. It was my own creation. I had made it up from the strength of my vision of her. My love for the truth and for my friends was so strong that even as she pulled away from us I could see her more clearly in my mind, as though she sat right across the room from me, as if she stood as close to me as Parker had only moments ago.

  But I was confused by my poem. I didn’t understand what I had meant by “most ugly.” By “the limits of Grace.” Ugliness, after all, was impossible in a world where all was permitted and beautiful, constituted by the fact of its inherent Grace, which was—would be—unending. But perhaps I had simply meant something about the way in which Grace manifests, or is bestowed. It was worth thinking about. I was teaching myself, it seemed, or wasn’t it possible that Parker was speaking through me? That the eruption of these verses was a reverberation, an aftereffect, an echo, of the gift of his having come? But what if I were to forget the poem? I needed to preserve it! If I were to call out for a pen and paper, would the plasma people bring me these things? Could I commit my poem to memory? I would finally have something of my own to share at the open mic! But then I thought how Desire is a strange attractor. Your longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth and I saw that Parker had come to show me something, if I would only have ears to hear him and eyes to see. Strange attractor, yes. My desire as right action in the world. I would not write the poem down, but instead concentrate all my spirit on the vision in my mind of Anchor writing it. By the sheer force of my longing, she would compose it herself.

  The knife edge of heat dulled even as the greens of the trees did—we had cooling, and then cool, and then cold rain, and didn’t break in anymore to the hotel pool—and the days grew short, and shadows lengthened. November came and we switched the clocks back. The snowbird-punks began to appear. These were a strange breed, reverse jet-setters, people who’d been living outside or in raw squats all around the North-east and were now looking to scout new homes in warmer climates, spend their winters bumming around the snowless South. I can’t say who came and went when, exactly, but I can picture all of their upturned faces—smudged with dirt, or else fresh after a grateful turn in our shower—while Katy and I sermonized. I remember dumpster runs they helped us with, or things we talked about sitting around the living room: how it would be after the state fell and we lived in the eternal revolution and walked with God, or nights they spent in our six or four or two or ten arms. I remember only fragments of their stories, or else fragments were all I ever knew.

  Dennis was a pro-bicycle, anti-car activist from Arizona. He taught us how to fix and replace our own brakes and gears.

  Heidi, a German girl touring the States on her gap year. An astonishing blonde, for whom Aaron fell hard. She took him to hop his first train and they made it as far as Louisiana, where they got arrested for skinny-dipping in a private pool, trying to soothe nasty doses of poison ivy they’d picked up in a hobo jungle in Alabama, waiting for a train. They explained about the poison ivy to the cop who busted them (leaving out the part about the train) but he misheard what they said and by the time they went before the judge for trespassing two days later it was generally known about the precinct and the courthouse that both the hobos had HIV. The backwater judge threw their charges out on the condition that they get straight out of town—he didn’t want that kind of shit in his district, not even locked up. Was this not an example of God’s abundant grace? Aaron came home; I don’t know where the girl went next.

  Jackie Jazz—so many of them named themselves!—wore a porkpie hat that was no less dashing for how bad it smelled, and traveled with his best friend, a mongrel dog (about which, ditto).

  Byron was a black secessionist. He believed that if the South had won the Civil War, the institution of slavery would have inevitably collapsed in short order, and that this sea change would have spread to the white working classes as well, triggering a socialistic awakening throughout the whole region. Without the humiliation of defeat and the economic colonialism of the Northern carpetbagging industrialists, the whole modern history of Southern race relations would have been entirely different, trending toward a universal equality that would have by now been long since achieved. No miscegenation laws, no lynchings, no separate but equal, no Jim Crow. Plus, a defeated and weakened North would never have managed to complete their seizure of the American continent, or even to hold on to what they had. Byron sported a Confederate flag on his guitar case and held in his head an alternate map of the country, where the Southwest was part of Mexico, the Northwest was a sovereign unified Indian nation, California was the Bear Flag Republic, the Northeast was something like Eastern Europe, and we all lived in the Socialist Confederacy, which thrived. Moreover, in this formulation, there would have been no American Empire to replace the already-ailing British one, and the entire Age of Empires would have hastened all the more rapidly toward its end. So really, he said, the whole world would have been different, and better, if only the South had triumphed. Was this really so wild a notion? We begged him to start over from the beginning; take us through it again.

  Paolo brought his own tent and pitched it in the side yard—the other side—between the far end of the house and the chain-link fence, a weedy lane where nobody ever went. Paolo had a thick black head of hair spilling out from beneath a Florida Gators ballcap that might have been ironic, earnest, or just the first thing he’d grabbed. He was short, five three maybe, with a narrow, almost girlish waist, but there was nothing else feminine about him. He was fatless, compact rather than petite, and when he walked around with his shirt off (a nature kid, he usually did) it was impossible not to pause in whatever you were doing, swept up in gawking admiration of this specimen of optimum design. His body was hypnotic, his movements leopardlike, every muscle stood out in relief beneath his olive-gold skin. He could scramble ten feet straight up the trunk of a tree. Katy spent nights out in the tent with him, sometimes, but never did coax him into our room. Or maybe, I thought sometimes, she never tried.

  Todd was an ecstasy freak who loved trancey jam bands. He rolled into town following the Disco Biscuits on their Southeast run, met Owl out in front of the library downtown, where they were both busking, and came back to the house with him so they could trade Dead tapes. He liked it at Fishgut so much he decided to skip the Tampa-Orlando-Miami leg of the tour, and we spent the next week so stoned we couldn’t speak—his pot had been dusted with
something, but he never said what—and then one day some buddies of his came by in a beat-up station wagon with bug dots all over the windshield and a bumper sticker that said TREY IS A JEDI (we didn’t ask). He left, but took with him an entire box of Good Zines, and promised to distribute them over the next leg of the Biscuits’ tour: a three-night stand at a club in Athens, and then points north. He and his buddies had a little gas grill and were planning to pay their way selling grilled-cheese sandwiches (as well as a few sheets of acid) in the parking lots outside the shows. We reminded him the Zines were never—ever—to be sold, only given away freely. It was printed right there on the cover. Did he see? “Yeah, man, yeah,” he said. “I get it. I’ll give one away with every purchase—how’s that?” Good enough, or it would have to be. They left.

  All these places, names of cities, train routes and state lines and destinations and rendezvouses. I didn’t believe in them. They explained the movements of bodies through space, sure, their passage in and out of view—Aaron gone, then an interval, then here again—but ultimately, what were they except useful fictions? Fishgut was what was real to me. The house was a planet, the city the solar system in which we spun. These people, travelers, always sounded so tiny when they described their movements across the country or the world, like grains of rice skittering in an oil drum. Those of us who stayed, who were the unwavering center, the rock-solid core of the house, saw that they suffered from a reversal of perspective, one that impeded their spiritual progress. The world was within us, every person a planet and the house the solar system, and the city—I don’t know, not the universe exactly; maybe Gainesville was the sun. Parker spoke of Gainesvilles flung out across the country like stars in the night, and what was the sun but a star? For us there was only here, plus wherever Parker was, which could have been anywhere and so was essentially nowhere. So there was Here and not-Here. And when he returned to us there would be Here alone.

  Cassidy and Robot had been married in some sort of pagan ritual that the state didn’t recognize, which was fitting, they said, since they themselves did not recognize the state. They had a toddler with them, a bright-eyed and slightly underfed boy named Lincoln, for the place where he had been conceived, on the very day that the two had met at a Greyhound station. They had come down to Florida for a Rainbow Gathering, and had been wed in the forest, with the tree sprites and tripping hippies all bearing happy witness, but their ride had left without them and now they were adrift.

  “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is hitching with three people,” Cassidy said. “If it was just me and the kid, it might be easy—people take pity on a woman in trouble. A single mom, you know. But with him”—she forked a thumb at Robot and clucked her tongue—“forget it.”

  “You never gettin’ rid of me, baby,” Robot said to her, grinning. Cassidy grinned back at him. She was trying to fix her ratty hair up in a bun.

  “Don’t I know it, baby?” she shot back, and then they both broke up laughing like this was just the funniest thing. Couples.

  They were on opposite sides of the living room. It was late. Who knew what time, exactly, and what did it matter? We were working our way through the last of Todd’s parting gift to us—two blunts rolled with that mystery weed—and everyone was pretty much zonked. Katy was in her favorite chair, holding Lincoln and bouncing him on her lap. I was on my knees on the floor in front of the chair, eye level with the kid, making silly faces at him so he laughed and clapped his hands, each slap of his palms filling the air with showers of silver light like sparklers make. And the faces I made at Lincoln were making Katy laugh, too, and when she laughed I could see her aura brighten, and I wondered what she would look like if she laughed forever, which was an absurd thought, actually nightmarish in its way. Wasn’t there something neurotic about the entire concept of the eternal? This had never occurred to me before. The thought was a sudden alien, absurd, and far too much to wrap my head around; it spooked me badly, but then my perception of its absurdity began to seem like the thing that was truly absurd, and the meta-absurdity of that sort of shoved the absurdity proper out of the way, and in the course of think-watch-feeling all of this happen inside my head—while still, the whole time, goggling at the baby, to his continuing amusement—I realized that I was way more fucked-up than I had thought I was, and maybe shouldn’t actually be around a child—and I looked around the room and wondered who else this might be true of, umm everyone, and thought: who were all these people, these people who were us, who were sitting around pickled to the gills on whatever day of the week this was and why hadn’t we made sure the child got to bed on time—not that he or we had anything in particular to be up for the next day, but wasn’t there like a general idea out there that kids should get their rest? The breadth and depth of God’s trust in us seemed in this moment so vast as to be crushing, suffocating—or else, the more terrifying thought, it was entirely absent, there was no God and He had no trust to place in us, and we were just there, alone, fuck-ups and dropouts playing in the sandbox of our own tinfoil-hat ideas, while the kid’s parents had their bottom-shelf love affair and the kid himself was probably not getting enough vitamins or exercise, was going to grow up chunky, with short, weak bones.

  The man who said, “Lord, make my faith stronger” was already a believer.

  I had stopped making faces at the baby—moments or minutes ago, I had no idea. Hot, silent tears ran down my face, which Lincoln reached out to touch, and Katy no doubt assumed that these were tears of joy (I had become, in my advancing faith, rather prone to crying jags) so she held him forward so that he could. Small grubby fingers played across my wet cheeks, then down, where they found my beard and, fascinated, grasped then gave a little tug. “God is love,” I said, in a voice that sounded strange to my own ears. I sounded as if I were defending a position in an argument, rather than simply stating a fact. And I had shouted at the kid, who was staring at me in stunned silence, perhaps about to cry himself. I wriggled free of his little hand and stood up. My knees ached. How long had I been kneeling, frozen in the bodily grammar of supplication, the soul-seared plea? I walked out of the living room, reminding myself that we all experience paroxysms of doubt from time to time, and that the struggle to believe only made my faith stronger. Perhaps, at some level, if considered in this way, I had in fact been crying tears of joy.

  In the kitchen, I filled a tall glass of water from the sink, drank it all, then poured another. With this second glass in hand, I meant to return to the living room. I was almost sure that nobody besides Katy had seen me crying, or had any inkling at all of what had gone on. Only she had witnessed my disturbance, and so it was not surprising that when I turned around she was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and without speaking gestured toward our room. The child was back in the care of its wasted mother. I followed my lover down the short length of our hall. Both guest rooms had their doors cracked; light and noise spilled from one, darkness and quiet abided in the other. Whatever anyone wants or desires. Everything, anything, all the time. Our room was dark. No candles were lit. The bed was empty. I sat down, facing myself in our broken mirror. Katy stepped between me and it.

  “Where’s Anchor?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “She should be here. Why did she help us make the Zine if she wasn’t going to ever be here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She wrote a poem but she won’t show it to me because she can’t accept what it says.”

  “Did you ask to see it?”

  “How could I? She hasn’t been here.”

  “Then how do you know she wrote it?”

  “I saw her.”

  “David, what are you talking about? You can tell me.”

  But I couldn’t. Parker was behind her, looking out at me from within the mirror, his visage sharded and off-angled by the forking cracks. His wings were folded up but I could see them trembling. He was giving me a meaningful look. So I just said, “I’m sorry. I guess I’m
pretty fucked-up. Like, stoned, I mean, but Anchor is supposed to be one of us. We need her. That’s all.”

  “Well, you know I’d like that, too, but it’s really up to Anchor.”

  “The truth moves through her but she denies it.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean, but if so, that’s her own choice. I think you should sleep, David.”

  “I want to take a walk, I think.”

  “I wish you’d stay here.”

  “No, it’ll be good for me. It’ll clear my head. Please.”

  “You don’t need my permission, David, for this or for anything.”

  “I know that, but I still want it. Will you just say it for me?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Just this once.”

  Her lips twisted into a grimace, her eyes cast down, me waiting as she weighed the absolute force of my need against the equal and opposite force of her beliefs, our shared faith, which stated that no one had power over any other, so how could permission ever be given, if authority was not held? I had no right to ask this thing of her, but her love for me was without limits, was the constitutive fact of the world even as the founding gesture of law always must lie outside the system of law that it establishes, which is why there is no such thing as legitimate law of any kind.