The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

  “Okay,” she said, her voice slivered and raw. For the sake of my love she sinned. I kissed her lips, which did not open for me or move at all; she was a figure of infinite resignation, and received my sin into herself. I brushed past her and out of the bedroom, the kitchen door, the backyard, the house. I left. It was easy, really. I just disappeared into the dark.

  Where was our prophet, and why did he not come?

  He could not, I reasoned, have been waylaid or detained. And so I began to wonder if it was us ourselves, somehow, who delayed him. Wherever he was, and even as by his Grace I saw visions and into hearts, so he saw us, into our hearts, and there was something that displeased him, or anyway, gave him pause. He would return when we were worthy—I mean ready, I guess; it’s hard to keep the language straight so you are really saying what you mean. Worthiness of course is tied to hierarchy, standards, ratings, merit, and so could not have possibly been what I meant.

  Where was Parker right now? Like, where was he actually in the world? Was he still in the state of Florida? In Alachua County? Had he left us (them) to return to the Prairie—was he a pile of swamp bones? Or was he truly Elsewhere? Squatting in Alphabet City with some new crew of wild boys, or a Krishna now, or a Trappist monk. Or had his spirit finally blown like an old tire or an eardrum, so that the voice of God was as silence to him? Did he work a straight job—the night shift at some gas station in southeast Texas? A father-to-be in Carson City? Was he headed to Seattle himself, and would he march in the Black Bloc with Thomas, brave through clouds of tear gas, and would their streaming red eyes peek out from the thin smiles in their balaclavas, and would those gazes catch in the midst of the crush, amid bodies and swung batons and concussion grenades, and would they see one another face to face, as if in Heaven, and if they did then so what?

  How old was Parker?

  Had he turned thirty yet?

  Was his hair grown thin?

  Was he with Terry?

  Terry and Terry and Terry. He or she and who. Who was this person with whom Parker had traveled through the Badlands—and who knew where they had been before that, or where they had gone after. Who was Terry? Male or female? Lover of Parker’s, or friend? The entry was undated, and even Katy didn’t know who Terry was. Parker had never mentioned any Terry; so far as she knew he had had no friends but her and Thomas—even Liz had had to admit that she’d barely known him. There was more to Parker’s life than the Book recorded. That much was to be expected. But the idea of this Terry—of Terry’s tremendous effect on our Parker—arrested my attention and disturbed my mind. I had argued against including the Terry section in the Good Zine, but Katy had insisted. In fact, on the point of this particular passage, Katy’s and my respective positions had been inverted—we switched sides.

  Every college town is heaven, each one different but the same, like hoboing from Gainesville to Gainesville to Gainesville, a hundred Gainesvilles flung across the country, like stars in the sky.

  “This is the heart of it, right?” I had said to Katy, hoping that if I threw her own words back at her she would have to accede. But Katy wanted to include the whole entry; that Parker was capable of receiving and giving love, that he was willing to open himself to—that he was even capable of—intimacy on strictly human terms (“That’s it”) seemed to fully realize him for her. He was all too human as much as he was all too holy, and this vision of double excess was for her the highest manifestation of Parker’s own notion of the joyful paradox, the conscious dwelling in the mystery of the heart and the heart of mystery. She saw in the Terry episode a validation of our (or was it really just her?) particular interpretation of Parker’s teachings. This text was the essence of the Book, she said, essential to include, and she had been willing to trade me any passage I wanted in exchange for my backing down. And so she got to include Terry, and I got to include the meditation on the Kierkegaard quote, which she had been pushing to cut.

  The Book is in the world to be read by the world.

  When you read the Book the Book reads you back.

  The Book multiplies the Book.

  What is there to do in the world but read the Book?

  And be read by the Book in turn.

  Anarchism allows for the notion of Legitimate Authority. After the Revolution, even though everything will be different and more honest and better, we won’t make the Soviet mistake of pulling jobs out of hats so that electricians are doing surgery and chefs are fitting pipe. Parker was a Legitimate Authority, which was why we spread his ideals and followed his model, antimodel though it was. But being against all authority, even his own, he would necessarily wish to redistribute that knowledge—this is what we were doing for him with the Good Zine—so that his own Legitimate Authority would no longer be required, or else would be indistinguishable from the equally legitimate authority of everyone else. Was it possible then that it was our yearning itself that delayed him? Was the force of our longing acting as a barrier instead of a draw? Perhaps he would only return to us when he himself was no longer necessary, when he could stand in the Fishgut dooryard and declare, “Behold, I am your prophet!” and have us answer him in one voice, “We are all prophets here!”

  Or was that heresy?

  And if so was it necessarily a problem? Could heresy possibly be the point?

  What was he trying, in the pressing weight of his absence, to show us and why were we failing so utterly to see?

  I could feel every eye upon me as I entered Clasen’s. Even the ones looking away had me in their attention. All the cliques and subcliques. Skinny girls, deathpale, with short black bangs and star tattoos; activist kids with red bandanas tied loose at their bearded necks. To some of the people here I was, no doubt, a legend. To others, doubtless too, a lunatic, part of the filthy insurgent faction that had forced a gaping split in the scene. Such limited vision, these people—no sense of gravity; no scope. But they were yet all of them right—paradox, faith, mystery—for Parker preached Right Action, even as before him Christ had foretold that brother would turn against brother, because the Word He had brought them was a sword.

  I was hungry, but the guy working the counter wasn’t one of Ours. Later I would stick my hand in the garbage, see what some wasteful punks had failed to finish and likewise failed to save. These people who thought that they were better, who believed that they were already living the truth of their ideals!

  I wove my way through the crowd to the back room, where there was a second and denser press. I was just in time for the headline act, who were working their way through the audience ahead of me, because Clasen’s had no greenroom, no backstage at all. I heard a guy in front of me tell his friend that the next band was called the Dust Biters, and that they played folk songs, but like differently.

  The band was only two guys: a drummer and a guitar player. The drum kit was homemade, paint cans and gray plastic buckets; one golden Zildjian cymbal the only object in the setup serving the purpose for which it had been made. The singer wore clean black jeans and a black tee shirt, like mine and Parker’s. He was pasty-pale and had close-cropped brown hair. A generic, guy-looking guy. He seemed nervous and kept his gaze fixed on the acoustic-electric guitar he held, first because he was tuning it, and then after just to have somewhere to look. The drummer knocked off a few rolls, then did a rim shot. We, the crowd, hushed. The singer looked up at us, then turned back to face the drummer. If they exchanged words, we didn’t hear them. The singer nodded, then turned back to us, but seemed not to see us now. His lips brushed up against the microphone, and a woolly swoosh swept over the room.

  “Fuck Bob Dylan,” he said quietly, then struck a chord so loud my knees actually buckled, and the drummer followed like hell on his heels and the room dissolved into a marvelous frenzy of limbs and sweat and noise, and my body was swept up and I felt freed of myself, like my soul was loose, and I rose up to the ceiling of that sweltering room and looked down at all of us, and saw my head whip and body flail as I moved toward the center of
the gyre, where the big punks were spinning like planets and colliding like tectonic plates, I was crushed and nearly trampled but then quick hands slid under my arms and lifted me—I did not feel these things, I saw them—I went to my feet again, then higher still, dozens of hands on my body, lifting me till I rose to the top of the crowd and they held me aloft and passed me around, I was inches from the old pressed-tin ceiling, my arms thrust out like Christ’s and my eyes shut tight, rolling on the surface of the fray, and in the midst of this ecstasy I heard the words that the singer was singing—

  In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

  There’s a land that’s fair and bright

  Where the handouts grow on bushes

  And you sleep out every night

  —he was screaming to be heard over the volcano of his own guitar, and behind him the drums were a war zone, but when I heard these words it was as if everything else fell away—

  In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,

  The jails are made of tin

  And you can walk right out again,

  As soon as they put you in

  —and the singer and I were the only beings in existence, and there was nothing in creation but his voice singing and my ears hearing him, and the fact of our relating in this way was the fact of existence—

  There ain’t no short-handled shovels,

  No axes, saws nor picks,

  I’m bound to stay

  Where you sleep all day,

  —and every word he sang felt true to me, but there was something devastating about this vision, where cops and jails and bosses and dogs—that awful and immortal they—still figured so powerfully, foregrounded even in utopia, in Heaven—

  Where they hung the jerk

  That invented work

  In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

  —and I realized with shuddering clarity that the song stirred my spirit in the same way that Holy things did, only the song was a liar because it lied about Heaven and therefore it was a disruption of Grace, the Devil’s work, a limit, and the hands that held me set me loose as the song finished—

  I’ll see you all this coming fall

  in the Big Rock Candy Mountains

  —and I landed uneasily on my feet, fell to my knees, face hot—how many tears would I cry tonight? How much sorrow is required of one who would bear the weight of the fallen world?—and stood up screaming—I don’t know what I said, exactly—and pushing and shoving my way toward the front of the room, I needed to get to the microphone, had to tell them—what? I would know when I said it; Parker would speak through me and anything I said would be the right thing, but I had to get there—but people weren’t getting out of my way anymore and somebody hit me with a closed fist and I reacted without thinking and struck back at that person but I missed him and hit somebody else and the whole place erupted and I was being martyred and my message—I was still screaming—swallowed and then a bouncer stood over me—I was on the floor again, there was some blood in my eyes—and it was his hands alone that were lifting me up, then held my hands fast behind me, I was stumbling, being frog-marched, angry faces cursing and spitting at me and leaning in close so I could hear them (I saw Anchor, a face in the crowd) and they were calling me things and I screamed back at them but couldn’t hear, never knew, what it was that I said—

  Then I was wandering the streets, bloody, alone as I had been on the night I was first saved. I could feel the punches I’d taken settling down from their fresh pain into an abiding soreness, bruises I felt no need to look at right away. Let Katy fret over them later. She surely would. My head was not clear so much as empty now; I felt hollowed out, a vessel, cored. Lord, Parker, fill me up with your righteousness, I thought. Then I thought that maybe the best thing would be to try and for a while think nothing at all.

  Thirteenth Street, then Eleventh, Ninth, Eighth, First, Main. Side streets. Alleys. Everything is a way station. Turnarounds. Cul-de-sacs. Access roads. Churches. Dark storefronts, the post office, the offices of the Independent Florida Alligator newspaper, a record store, the Masonic Temple, a couple of banks. Frat bars lit up in screaming neon or a lone light in the back of Emiliano’s Italian restaurant by which the busboy mopped between tables now set only with their own flipped-over chairs. At the edge of the famous duck pond, where no fowl stirred on the face of the black water, and the bright bauble-moon was as clear below as above. Back on University Avenue—the lesbian bookstore, the drive-thru Taco Bell—where free shuttle buses provided by the school lurched up and down the street, to and from downtown, standing-room only and the aisles packed too with kids who sang fight songs and copped feels and filled that rolling drunk tank with their stinking puke. Construction sites. Angular skeletons of apartment buildings and planned communities, wired for broadband and satellite. The Life You Save, indeed, I thought, as I walked past it, headed vaguely back toward campus and my neighborhood but not yet ready to go home. Across the street from the plasma center’s strip mall was a rent-to-own furniture store. I walked over to it, drawn like a bug to a porch light, though the store and its sign were both dark. I felt like I was really seeing it for what it was, this wellspring of human misery, the working poor shackled to monthly payments, usurious rates, it was a suitable analog to the plasma center, and the intersection wanted only for a check-cashing store to complete the unholy trinity. I sat down on the sidewalk with my back against the white stone façade of Planned Furnishings, across the street from an empty lot marked only by a billboard that read CONSOLIDATED PROPERTIES. What could be said of a God that allowed such horror in the world?

  I wept.

  The path of faith is a gravel road that spirals up a mountain whose peak is lost to view. The sky is always gray on this mountain, leaden and vast, marked only by the fog that obscures the peak, but subtly infused with the bright light of God’s loving presence, which awaits those who make it to journey’s end. The path passes through a country so austere it appears almost blighted, but this is because everything unnecessary has been cast away—all the horrors of the world as well as the dulcet delights of our utopia, that secret and special place that God blesses but does not deign to visit. The first stage of the journey had been to realize that there was a world worth living in. The second stage had been to actually come to life. The third and final stage was to give all that up, of one’s own righteous volition, for the only thing that could possibly be better, which is to say, the only thing in the universe that really existed at all.

  From a certain windswept plateau, a resting place on the path, I beheld the totality of Parker’s vision: its scope and magnificence matched that of this very mountain on which I stood, and yet, unlike with the mountain, I could see the fullness of what Parker had done. Through study and dedication I had reached his limit, and if I continued in my pursuit—as he was willing me to do, and as I, with all the purity of my longing heart, willed to do for him—then I would surpass him. Could this have been his intention all along? Was it the force of his desire that had brought me here?

  In the distance above the summit of the mountain disappeared into more of the same gray, as if the sky were the skin of some great slain animal, hung up to dry. But I knew there was the golden-crimson firelight of eternal truth burning at the top for me, and that a shaft of flame fallen from that original pyre was what burned inside my own heart, and that this would draw me to the apex, the terminus of the lonely and faithful path. Likeness called out to rejoin with larger likeness, as all water flows to the ocean and—say it again, say it again—purity of heart is to will one thing, even as I walked down sidewalks lit sickly by streetlamps, a river of shadow dotted with islands of anemic orange light, in and out of traffic, horns and curses, the well-traveled route home overmapped with the lonely faith path, two places at once, Here and not-Here, as the Pattern is the breaking of the Pattern, left turn right turn the path is always straight and narrow, through the fence gate and up to the porch—the last door hinge since broken and the screen door junked in a tal
l green bush like a knife sticking out of a head—but I did not pass through the portal—I paused before the doorway, frozen, one foot extended, pressing forward on open, empty air as if on a face of stone, exerting pressure on nothing, and this nothing unyielding, it rebuffed me, and so finally I put my foot back down on the ground and just stood there, unable to cross the threshold and step onto the porch. I put a hand forward, palm out, but it would not go through, either. I could feel a heightening of my senses, a quickening in my blood.

  The living room was dark, and the VW, too. I could have called out, roused them up, but I stayed silent, and my silence was the secret of the secret, the silence of the mystic rose that was fully blossomed within me, the silence of the paradox at the heart of faith.

  I walked around the side of the house—the far side—where Paolo’s tent had been. When had he left us? How long had he stayed? What time was it now? I tried the back door. The knob was cool in my hand. I held a big breath, turned it, and swung the door wide open. I stood in the warm sweep of air as if in a tide pool, keeping still as it washed over me. Then I stepped forward and once again the house wouldn’t have me. I could go no farther than the concrete slab on which I stood.

  Fishgut.

  I turned away from the house, and at the moment I beheld the tent felt a wild and elating warmth rising up from my chest. Looking down I saw that a prophecy, one of my own, finally, had come to pass. The mark of my faith was radiant, and had set my thin tee shirt aflame. I reached into the embered ring and unmindful of the heat-bite pulled hard with both hands and the garment, rent, fell away from my body; glowing cinders of fabric free-fell onto the carpet of dead leaves, so that soon the whole yard was lit up like a movie set, but my faith shined brighter still; I was a lighthouse, and lit my own way down the final steps of the Path; it led to my tent of course, where a candle was lit for me, its weak light pitiful compared to the light I was bearing, and when I reached it—only a few more steps now—I would snuff it out or else it would be absorbed into me—was there a difference?—and then I would zip the flap open and expel all the dead husks of the candles stored within, and leave behind a heap of broken glass humped like dirt on a refilled grave.