Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “I’m on time. The person training me is late.”

  “Who’s training you?”

  “Mirror,” I said.

  “These fucking names,” he said and shook his head.

  Ed pulled the cellophane off the Pall Mall pack, crinkled it into a ball and threw it on the ground where it blossomed into a clear plastic flower.

  Mirror was several blocks away biking up the center of the street, her pink ponytails fluttering behind as she pedaled. When she saw us she waved a friendly unhurried wave. I waved back.

  “Fucking Christ!” Ed said and turned away.

  Mirror coasted down to where we were and got off her bike.

  “Sorry I’m late, Ed.”

  “This place used to open at seven.”

  “So go back in time.”

  Mirror unlocked the door and we followed her in. She flipped the lights and started showing me around. The walls inside Rise Up Singing were red, pink and purple. It was like being inside a placenta.

  I got the bleach buckets out. Ed stood by the register locked in a staring contest with the unmanned grill. The cook came in, looked at Ed, and walked out back to have a cigarette.

  Mirror took out her pigtails and started brushing her hair with an Afro pick. Little pink fuzz balls gathered on the comb teeth and she balled them together and threw them in the trash.

  “Della, do you eat meat?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, don’t eat it here. All the cooks are vegetarian. They either burn it because they get grossed out or leave it totally raw on purpose, it’s disgusting.”

  Mirror threw another pink fuzz ball in the trash.

  “Franklin said you were a geologist or something. Did you like, study at volcanoes?”

  “No, invertebrate paleontology.”

  “Cool,” she said, “I saw a special on deep-sea vents once. There were all of these white octopuses living down there that turned out to be totally gay,” she rinsed the Afro pick off in the bar sink, “Probably not a great species survival plan, though.”

  Ed tapped his coffee cup with a spoon like he was an inmate but Mirror didn’t look up. She has a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward customers in general. When I went to turn on the OPEN sign she told me not to because, “If you do that, they’ll just come in.” Flawless logic.

  At the end of our shift Mirror dumped the tip jar out on the counter.

  “I hope Franklin told you we pool tips,” she said and began to separate the change. “He tries to pass it off as communism but it’s really so he doesn’t have to pay the cooks.”

  I adjusted the credit slips and Mirror counted the money into piles then went into the till and grabbed three ten-dollar bills. I thought she was going to make change but she just added one ten to each pile, “Slave tax,” she said and paid us out. Jimmy came in through the back door. Her arms were full of lettuce.

  “Hey you! I heard they hired you,” she hugged me. “I’m so psyched.”

  I hadn’t seen her for several years. Her hair was longer in the front and bleached out to a light orange. The back of her head was still clipped and brown. She dropped the lettuce on a nearby counter and came over. I could tell Credence had given her the update by the way she looked at me.

  Jimmy had me help her break down produce boxes and we went out to a fenced area adjacent to the restaurant that smelled of rotten yogurt and urine. I ripped staples out of the boxes and Jimmy folded them flat and threw them in a pile. We talked about school and Annette and the Bellyfish and my parents.

  “I always liked Grace,” she said, “I’d love to see them again sometime.”

  She asked about the Wal-Mart campaign. I told her it was social bloodsport, which sounded like I was trying to be funny but I wasn’t. Credence treats social justice campaigns like sand painting. Everything he does is a fucking seminar on impermanence.

  “So do you have any plans?” she asked.

  Hang out in the sub-cultural ICU with the free vegan donuts until my definition of the sparkling horror show matches everyone else’s?

  “See how it goes.”

  “Can you hold up the lid?” she asked.

  I lifted the green metal top of the recycling container. Jimmy threw the flattened boxes inside, then I let the lid fall with a deafening clang.

  “Well,” she said, “Either way I’m glad you’re here.”

  The way she smiled. I had this flash like it might be all right, like there might be a place for me and that I had maybe overlooked something, or lost some kind of perspective and that now it was going to get fixed. Her smile reminded me of my mom in this particular 1970s Polaroid where she’s a young woman bending over to play with a cat. Her hair is light brown and the backyard grass is dry like straw, cropped and short. All that day I felt like that, like the sound of future bombs might dissipate, become no more than white noise like the freeway or the sea, or that I might stop hearing them altogether. Sleep like who I was before I knew any better.

  I biked past the yoga studio on my way home. It was getting pretty dark but the streetlights weren’t on because they had just switched to the new schedule. I know it’s because of the war. Credence says it hasn’t started yet but he’s wrong. They’re rationing power and the TVs are on all the time.

  I pulled my bike up onto the curb by the yoga studio and leaned it against the trashcan. I watched the yoga class through the glass. The lights dimmed and everyone moved in amber. They flickered like votives when the teacher crossed back and forth in front of the window and I thought, that’s what we will all be one day, insects in sap, strange jewels.

  The following week Coworker Franklin scheduled me to open the restaurant alone. The first day I got there early and it was still dark. I turned on the light in the pie case and it lit the whole room. I wiped the specials from the night before off the board. Outside the world was blue.

  I went to get more bread from the back and was reaching into the pantry when I felt something near my foot. I jumped back and turned on the overhead light. On the ground in front of the pantry was a small brown rat. It was dying.

  The rat held itself still and waited. Its fur glistened and it had tucked its paws in close so that its belly bulged out from the sides. I wondered if it, if she, was pregnant like Annette. I got down on my knees and slowly leaned over so I could see her face. She didn’t move and didn’t look at me. Her breath quickened and she looked straight ahead. I felt her fear like a wave of nausea.

  Jimmy came in behind me.

  “Franklin puts out poison. I think he thinks it’s more humane than traps.”

  She leaned over.

  “Has someone shown you what to do?”

  “No.”

  She went into the walk-in and got a slice of cheese then had me scoop up the rat up with a dustpan and follow her outside.

  We walked along a garden path toward the back fence. The sun was just hitting the green wet vines and red tomato skins. I passed a cluster of sunflowers. Behind them stretching along the fence was a row of dirt mounds with tiny homemade crosses sticking out of them.

  “This is where we put them,” Jimmy said.

  I looked down a row of dew-covered twig crosses drying the morning light.

  “If the health department comes just pull the crosses out and say it’s squash.”

  “Squash? Really?”

  She laughed a little, “Yeah, or something seasonal.”

  Jimmy took the dustpan from my hands and laid the pregnant rat in the furrow between two graves. She pulled the paper off the cheese, tore it into little strips and left it beside her.

  “We’ll bury her later. She’ll be dead by the end of the shift.”

  The rat settled into the furrow of earth and tucked her paws underneath again. She put her nose down and shook. Jimmy pushed the cheese closer but the rat didn’t move. Again, I felt her fear come like nausea.

  Pregnant Rat

  Your thirst for knowled
ge will impress your enemies:

  563882981.23

  Rumors of a heart unburnt and preserved in mud, buried inside a cage of ribs (kept safe as a National Treasure). Basta! Rat Golgotha, Presente! All around me were small snapping sounds that only a mother rat would hear and maybe only if the air were very still.

  3 The New Haiku

  Up in my attic room the president came on the radio. Another special broadcast. Computers and digital cable hum in unison throughout the nation:

  War A is going well and no longer a threat, small and mature. Like a bonsai. War B is in full flower. Its thin green shoots reaching across the ocean floor like fiber optic cable. Our only defense is attack. We will hunt them in destroyer disguised as a whaling ship.

  Streaming the news is a signal of relapse.

  I muted the computer.

  Mr. Tofu Scramble says anyone who’s leaving the country should go now. He’s leaving in three weeks. It’s Bali for sure, he says, the sale of his house is pending and as soon as it all goes through, he’s gone.

  I imagine people who leave turn to pools of light when they’re over water. Circles of phosphorescent green appear and light up the Black Ocean then dissolve into silt and the silt turns to stone. We can now tell time by comparing the rates of people leaving—one thing always follows another—a timeline of events leading up and to and away from the central event, which in this case is the event of leaving.

  I signed up for yoga classes the week I found the rat. I got a six-month membership. Credence said the consistency would be good. The woman behind the counter was wearing a tank top that had “Namaste!” written across the front of it like the Coca Cola logo. Her hair was red and wrapped in an orange scarf. Her nails were pink glitter and she had a pendant of Guadalupe hanging from her neck.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Yes. I want to look like you. I want to be so thoroughly anchored into some sort of pop culture aesthetic that nothing can knock me over or wash me away or make me hate everyone. I want to sleep again.

  “I’d like to take some yoga classes,” I said.

  “Great! Let me show you around. My name is Devadatta.”

  She came around the counter and led me into a hallway that smelled of vanilla candles and dry leaves. She was like a beautiful collage, jagged and bright, and I thought I could be that, I could, but I can’t and didn’t know that then for sure but I thought it was probably the case. Still, I had some hope so I followed her down the hall.

  “We have a really wonderful studio,” she said and opened a door.

  The room was large and empty with floors made of salvaged hard wood. People walked by the window outside, disembodied. Their heads sank and rose like glass floats upon the ocean or seafoam or apples.

  “Do you prefer Vinyasa or Hatha?” Devadatta asked.

  I prefer sleep and loud blackberries.

  “I don’t remember what I used to do,” I said.

  “I’d recommend Raina’s class,” she said, “She has a lot of yin energy, very gentle, you’ll love her,” and I remember thinking, like I do now, that I would love to love something, especially if I could do it without feeling like I was watching it die right in front of me, “Okay,” I said.

  Raina’s class that day was full of women with quiet voices. I took a mat from the closet and set up next to two of them about my age. They were talking about the naturopathic school they were going to and how it was expensive but still worth it and how their parents didn’t think so but who cared ’cause they ate frozen dinners and jogged even though it was bad for their joints. Raina came in and we started.

  I slept through the night and didn’t go to the Asian market for fortunes the next day either. Instead, I stayed home and helped Annette work on a mosaic she’s laying down on the floor of the upstairs bathroom. She wants to finish it before the Bellyfish comes.

  I brought in the boxes of broken tile I’d been collecting and a map of the design I drew on graph paper and blew up to scale. Annette was on the floor with her legs stretched out in either direction, jars of colored chips in between. She’s gotten so big she can’t sit comfortably any other way.

  We were all shocked when Annette got pregnant. She’s famous for saying there are too many of us already, comes from being a public health nurse. I think the whole thing was an accident and they decided not to terminate. Then found it was twins. I was working with Credence on the Wal-Mart campaign at the time. The joy almost killed our parents. Not only were Credence and I to be the Bobbsey Twins of Labor Unrest (300 million Americans watch as Credence and Della try to shore up failing infrastructure while simultaneously reinvigorating common discourse on the subject of THE PUBLIC as a reflection of collective will, as in REPUBLIC and not as in BIG GOVERNMENT), but to also be gifted with actual black grandchildren? It was a miracle in dark times.

  Annette dumped the jar of red chips on the floor. We talked about the yoga class. She asked me what the new yoga studio looked like because it had only been open a few months. It used to be a shop that sold custom cut foam and had a huge bas relief foam flag in the window.

  “The building’s totally remodeled,” I said, “You’d never recognize it.”

  I took a piece of paper and started to sketch it but then in my mind, the foam flag disintegrated. Golden sun and full spectrum track lighting flooded the old shop. The man at the counter grew girlish and began practicing forward folds, clothed in hemp and other organic fibers.

  Map of Foam Store/Yoga Studio

  1) Foam flag area: territory of patriotic working class, which emerged vanguardless from the masses i.e., without our permission.

  2) Yoga studio: territory of micro-populists, who promise to make sure that everyone has forty acres and a mule upon which to build tiny rice paper houses which we shall call Jeffersons, like the democracy and not like a/the black family.

  2a) Subdivision of 2—Nowhere: territory of the indigenous black.

  Note: Patrons form the middle third, the scene of the battle, civilians and traitors. Torn between two visions of the future—

  1) joint-cracking crickets following lucky numbers in red and

  2) a glittering Popsicle stick palace, the architecture of a new revolution, tipping this way and that in the gentle breeze—they look at their shoes. Nice cement. Yeah, thanks. I poured itmyself. Have you ever insulated with straw? No, I’m a cob man.

  But that’s not the map I drew for Annette. Her map had a box with Xs where they tore down a wall and hatch marks for windows. The real map was just forming on the edges of my thoughts. Flashing before me were new index fossils, like Taco Bell and Payless Shoes. And beyond that a shifting cartography, not like a series of snapshots, but like a hidden camera that never stops, never plays back and goes all the time, a living map.

  Up in my room another presidential address came on the radio. It was just before dawn and contained no information. We were to be prepared, but not nervous, yet alert. They tested the emergency broadcast signal and I threw up. Is that prepared or alert?

  I finished the map, stuck it in my bike messenger bag and brought it to work. I spread it out on the counter in front of Mr. Tofu Scramble and Ed, Logic’s Only Son.

  Mr. Tofu Scramble: Did you draw that, Della? That’s pretty cool, I particularly like the, uh…uh.

  Ed, Logic’s Only Son: What the hell is that? A spaceman?

  Me: It’s a map of colonialism as a cottage industry.

  Ed, Logic’s Only Son: What’s that thing on its head?

  The cumulative weight of a dense cultural mesh that prevents us from understanding whether the foundational problem is really race, class or gender? A hat?

  Me: A hat.

  Mr. Tofu Scramble: Well, it does kind of look like a hat. Now that I follow the, uh...uh.

  Ed, Logic’s Only Son: It would float off his head.

  Mirror came in the door and walked over to us. She pulled off her knit cap and her pink hair, full of static electricity, crackled around her face.r />
  “Hey Della,” she said, “Franklin here?”

  Tiny strands, like pink thread, pink and as thin as a spider’s silk, stuck to her cheeks.

  “He was here earlier,” I said.

  “Did he say anything about the work meeting?”

  “Not to me.”

  Mitch, the morning cook, stuck her head through the food window, “He wants to talk about the future,” she yelled.

  Mirror handed me a flier for a sex party she was planning.

  “I don’t care what he wants to talk about. He scheduled the meeting for the day after my party and I’m totally not coming. No way.”

  Mitch came out of the kitchen and took some fliers. I looked at the one in my hand. It was a picture of an orgy drawn to look like a subway map with an arrow pointing to a tangle in the center that said You Are Here.

  “We’ll have lube, condoms and dental dams there. If you’re allergic to latex you should bring your own gloves.”

  Mirror reached in her bag and pulled out a few more fliers. Mitch took some.

  “You can take these and invite a couple of people but let them know that we’re asking all fluid-bonded couples to use condoms and dams too,” she said, “It’s just more respectful that way.”

  I saw a broken horizon. Huge, jagged slabs in the distance under which people met and danced as though it was an actual dancehall and not a crack in the pavement.

  Mirror grabbed a cookie from a basket by the register and unwrapped it. “When is Franklin going to fucking figure out that a chocolate chip cookie with milk chocolate is not vegan?”

  Mirror picked out the chocolate chips and put them on a napkin, “Oh, by the way, I found another rat. Thankfully, it was already dead.”

  “You sure?” asked Mitch.

  “Yeah. It had its head chewed off.”

  I went out to see where they had buried it.

  The rain made the upturned earth look black. I found a hole near the back fence but there wasn’t a rat in it. The other mounds had weeds growing out of them. Some of the crosses had fallen over in the rain but several were still standing. It had a miniature Buzz Lightyear lashed to it. I stepped around a rotten crate and went to the grave of the pregnant rat. I wondered if she was really in there and if I should have made more little white flags. I don’t know how many baby rats she would have had, or how many are in a litter or even if they’re called litters.