Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  I was in school when the box-mall-church got finished. Which is part of why I worked on the Wal-Mart campaign. But Wal-Mart had already broken ground. Credence’s strategy was to organize around traffic impact and slow down the permit process. Meanwhile, we were supposed to educate the community (70,000 ex-loggers watch as Credence and Della go door-to-door to force discussion of worker dignity and the price of neo-liberalism out of a traffic light). I had just defended my dissertation and my plans were shaky. I had been told to avoid anything stressful, to volunteer somewhere, get a dog. Credence decided my getting involved in a cause would be better. He thought Wal-Mart would be perfect but I didn’t find the decimation of local economies all that relaxing. I tried to see the beauty in the flash of consciousness that passes over people’s faces right before the total absence of light, but somehow I couldn’t.

  The bus pulled up to the first transit island by the service door of the box-mall-church. Russian and Vietnamese swing shift workers filled the aisles. Everyone else was staying for the round trip. Some had bus passes pinned to their shirts, wet brains and chatty paranoiacs talking about the gold standard. In the back row some high-functioning retarded teenagers were flirting with each other. I thought the one girl was going to take her dress off.

  Walking into the box-mall-church always feels the same. Like something really bad has happened and no one inside knows. I entered on the side by the Cineplex. A kid ran in front of me pretending to be a commando. He hid behind a fake tree and took cover from an imaginary bomb blast. His parents were holding his ice cream and laughing while he ducked and dived through the indoor jungle. Chocolate ice cream trickled down in between his mother’s fingers and she licked the back of her hand.

  “Have you signed up for our raffle?”

  It was a girl with lip gloss. I could smell the alcohol in her perfume. She turned and pointed to a shiny red truck about forty yards away. Big as a tank, raised dais and penned in by velvet ropes. Under its great wheels, long plastic fronds of coastal grass were matted flat.

  I decided to start in the parking lot. It might be the center of the formation and the box-mall-church, or only a calcification or a reef built up on all sides of a cement lake. It may also have been that I couldn’t take the glossy-lipped girls with the clipboards, the graduating class of None of Us Are Getting There Anyway, milling and spraying themselves with tester bottles off the cosmetic counters because nothing masks the blood and fear like Jubilant Day and Rapture, each with proprietary blends of torrential oils and myrrh. I went straight out the side door into the west lot and started mapping it in my field journal, walking it in ten-foot sections.

  Map of Carnage

  Notes on the Geomorphology of the West Parking Lot

  The west parking lot stretches from the foothills of the box-mall-church to the edge of the Batholith, Wal-Mart. It is an arid basin shaped like a T and dotted with express banks. Across from the basin is a range of ancillary sub-malls. The cultural micro-ecology of the lot itself is clear: mobility through the social isolation of cars—oil wars, climate control, our primary method of civic discourse, the bumper sticker—are all factors in its evolution.

  Lithography of the West Lot Basin: An Analysis of Sections

  1) What Would Scooby Do?

  A social-cultural laccolith of sanitized pot-smoking van kids, intruding laterally and prying apart two planes—a narrative mythologizing California beach life in the wake of the pill (below) and the Jesus freak movement the early 70s (above), which trended toward communism and anti-war sentiment as an example of first-century Christianity.

  2) Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask An Indian:

  The statement then refers to a revised history that aligns “The Land / Noble Savage” with the values of the “Frontier / Frontiersman” creating a platform from which to promote the sale of semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles.

  I tore out a sheet of paper and started over.

  Notes for Further Consideration

  1) Maybe the box-mall-church is the Piazza?

  2) Maybe that road to Wal-Mart is the grand avenue leading to the gates of the castle. A new city set upon a new hill.

  At that exact moment, a bomb went off downtown. A real bomb, in real time, that everybody heard. It destroyed the executive bathroom of the New Land Trust building. The whole area was evacuated. First responders surrounded the New Land Trust. There were no casualties but security measures were being implemented. Public transit switched to snow routes and on every TV screen in the country smoke from the executive bathroom curled up and out of the frame.

  I heard about the bombing on the bus ride home. When the man told me about it, I thought he was lying. Then I knew he wasn’t. My spine felt like a seismograph. I couldn’t breathe. I might have screamed something. Someone handed me an inhaler. Someone else told me to shut up. I took deep breaths and thought of marine deposits. Everything falls silently to the seafloor. It’s nothing personal at all.

  Only the day before I’d been to the yoga studio and taken my place in the realm of rising home equity. It was so full I could barely move. The flower of gentrification, lotus spinning downstream. Raina walked to the front of the room.

  She stood for a second by the window with the sun coming in on her, turning her face gold and her hair auburn. And in that stream of light I watched a million particles of fiber unwoven and unmeshed, freed from what we’d made of them—cars, rubber bands, backpacks, bombs and baby teeth—a gilded dust in a quiet room, they floated weightless. She reached behind her head, twisted her hair into a bun and clipped it at the nape of her neck.

  “Let’s take a moment to come into our bodies,” she said.

  She seated herself and took several deep breaths.

  “Breathing out the day as we’ve known it until now and creating space for something new to arise. I invite you to let go of the expectations you came with and open to the experience of your body on the mat. Imagine a golden light coming in through the crown of your head with each breath, drawing it deeper into you and letting it go on the out breath.”

  My shoulders quivered. I saw Credence sitting in a field surrounded by katydids. They looked like leaves but when I ran over to him they all flew away. I thought this must be how it feels to speak in tongues. Right before, when no one knew you were about to.

  “Letting it fill up each place that speaks to you.”

  Like abandoned airfields broken by weeds and baking in the sun.

  “And bring special attention to those areas that may need noticing. Your hips, or your belly, or maybe a part of you that needs forgiving, that part of you that needs gentleness. And create a space for that gentleness to come in with your breath.”

  Mom used to say you have to look sadness right in the eye but I’m done with that. My body came alive. My fingers tingled and I could taste the salt in the air. I held my arm up and where once a sharp outline delineated me from the rest of the world there was a gradation. I was still myself, but my edges faded and when I moved I felt the Black Ocean give.

  7 New Honduras

  Everyone at Rise Up Singing knew who had bombed the New Land Trust building. Mr. Tofu Scramble said it was an intra-governmental squabble. Ed, Logic’s Only Son said it was immigrants.

  “They got their own radio station with fucking tubas and everything.”

  Mirror said she had a friend who applied for an admin job with New Land Trust and was denied an interview for refusing to claim a gender on the application.

  “She could have totally done it.”

  Mitch, the cook, thought it was eco-terrorists for sure. Kelly, the fill-in dishwasher, agreed but then they split over whether it was an anarcho-primitivist cell or the Redwood Action Collective. That’s how the betting pool got started. Mirror put each theory up on the “Specials” board as it came in and collected the money. By dinner she had erased the board twice, each time, writing smaller so it would all fit. As the list grew, I began to notice something. Everyone had
a pretty good reason to blow up a building. I agreed with most of them. The names on the board might seem disconnected but there was a structural logic if you knew how to look.

  We listened on the kitchen radio. A whole cast of heroes emerged. The janitor who could have been killed in the blast and wasn’t. The junior executive who said he would continue to use the bathroom when it was rebuilt. The woman who was the first to see the smoke. Each of them, a bright star.

  Meanwhile, customers congregated by the cash register, laughing as more possible terrorist groups went up on the board. Martyrs, bullies and causes in demographic filigree entwined in unpredictable ways. And where others saw fragmentation, I saw a terrible unity. The truth was that anybody could have done it. I could have done it if I didn’t shake every time someone slammed a car trunk shut or think the birds were children screaming and garbage trucks were tanks. If I wasn’t that way, I could have blown it up. It’s not like I hadn’t seen blast coronas paint the sky orange, devouring walls of flame. I see it in my sleep and sometimes behind the heads of people I love like a B movie backdrop. I was glad in a way that other people had to see what I’d been seeing. Even if the New Land Trust bombing was so much smaller than what was in my head, I was glad. They should have to see. In any case, it was another good reason to leave the country. If you were the type. I wish I were.

  Credence says it’s like leaving the scene of the crime.

  “So have you ever thought about leaving?”

  “No. Never,” I lied.

  “Good,” he slaps my shoulder, “there’s been enough of that,” and with jail solidarity reconfirmed, Credence sets his coffee cup in the sink where it turns into a silk moth, flies into a light fixture, and rains down in a cascade of ash.

  That evening I got a text message from Jimmy asking me to meet her at a party in the industrial district down by the water. I don’t know if it was her idea or if Credence asked her to keep an eye on me. He probably thought a warehouse full of dystopic urban hippies was safer than any padded room. Nothing but the dull thud of zero contact.

  “Come on,” said Jimmy. “You’ll meet people. It’ll be good.”

  Because meeting people is always good.

  The Glass House was a single-story factory between grain elevators where they used to make art glass in the 40s. Two summers ago when I was home from school I’d gone to a bunch of parties there. Mostly noise bands. It was down by the water where all the roads were industrial gullies and loading zones. Most of the windows of the Glass House were blown out and the electrical was badly patched because the copper wire got scavenged from the boxes every few months and sold. Someone told me there was a fleet of meth-heads in homemade boats crossing the river at night, sailing right up under the docks and stripping copper from the conduits. A Dunkirk of tweakers. I imagined them building a penny-colored palace in the hills with exploding processing plants and Guitar Hero going all the time.

  I chained my bike to the side rail. Music came through the windows, some brown Goth thing with cellos and keyboards. By the door was a girl in a pink dress with a vintage apron tied around her waist. Her arm was tattooed with cherry blossoms and her hand was on a glass vase full of dollar bills. I didn’t see Jimmy’s truck anywhere. I asked the door girl if she knew Jimmy but she didn’t.

  Inside, sheets of colored glass hung from ceiling like guillotines and I could hear the words “New Land Trust” pattering through the room.

  The event was a benefit for a media collective that taught underprivileged kids how to make chapbooks. On a table next to me were some of the books the kids made. I looked through them. They were full of basketball stars with guns and Spiderman cars, kids with blood drawn like tears. Slanted houses and sagging rainbows buckling in the blue sky. I couldn’t take it. Everyone was eating almond pâté.

  Jimmy said on the phone that she was bringing vegan cupcakes so I went over to the food table but it was all nut paste and tabouli. Behind me someone was talking about leaving the country and I glanced behind me. It was some neo-tribal Goth chick with thick silver jewelry and henna tattoos. She had a ticket to Mexico. A man with a thin beard spreading nut paste on a cracker asked her where she was flying into—Mexico City—and they compared notes. I thought about Jimmy in Honduras and an aching swell like nausea hit me. I wanted to go. I wanted to go and never come back. Honduras, Mexico, Bali, anywhere, I don’t care.

  “I’ll start in the north and work my way down to Chiapas,” the girl said.

  Her Nepalese bracelets clanked together as she reached for the tabouli.

  Another woman laughed.

  “It won’t matter where you go,” she said, “it’s all going to happen here.”

  The woman who spoke was older than me, not by much, maybe in her thirties. Most of her hair was dirty blonde but the hair closest to her face was lavender.

  “It’s already started,” she said and leaned across me to put some tabouli on her plate. “Look at the New Land Trust building. You knew someone was going to try to take that thing down. It was just a matter of time.”

  She put a forkful of tabouli in her mouth and chewed.

  “So what,” the other girl said, “They can blow up all the buildings. It’s still going to be the same stupid people walking around.”

  The woman with the lavender hair put her fork down, staring blankly across the crowd. Her eyes were bright blue and she had on gray glitter eye shadow that was creased and rubbing off. Faint streaks of it sparkled under her eyes and across her cheekbones. Swallowing, she turned slightly and looked up at me.

  “Well,” she said, “What do you think? I’m taking a poll.”

  “About what?”

  “Should we all just become eco-tourists until the sun shines down?”

  She reminded me of someone. I couldn’t think of who it was. I wasn’t sure it was someone I liked.

  “People should do what they want,” I said.

  My voice sounded thin and she caught it.

  “Oh come on!” she laughed, “You can barely even get the words out.”

  “I’m just saying that, a lot of times when people leave, it’s no loss.”

  “Like?”

  Like me.

  “Like I went to a party at an anarchist house with some Food Not Bombs guy. They had an old-time band in the basement and like six hundred crusty punks square dancing. I figure they can do that just about anywhere. There are a lot of islands in Micronesia.”

  The woman laughed abruptly. For a second I saw her real intelligence blaze out over the world like something that had escaped. It hit me again, that feeling that I knew her. She took another bite of tabouli.

  “What about the New Land Trust building? Would you have blown it up?”

  A couple of people smearing pâté on their seed crackers stopped. Everyone likes a bomb, I guess.

  “No.”

  “No one got killed.”

  “Could have.”

  “What if no one got hurt?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “In theory.”

  “What if one person got hurt?”

  “Then no.”

  “What if they just hurt? Time off with pay.”

  “And I was a psychic and knew for sure? Maybe.”

  “And he was an asshole. Like he beat his wife or molested kids?”

  “I wouldn’t be sad but I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Oh,” she said smiling, “so it’s a matter of degree. Injuries are fine. And if an asshole gets killed you don’t really mind as long as you don’t have to do it yourself.”

  Some guy getting cashew butter laughed and the woman with the blonde and lavender hair grinned.

  “They blew up a bathroom,” I said, a little too loudly. “Not the fucking space station. They’ll probably build the new one out of 800-year old cedar and elephant tusks. Blowing it up was fucking pointless.”

  Apparently you can be a terrorist as long as you don’t raise your voice because everyone started looking at the ground, which is code
for “You’re dead to us now.”

  “So what’s your great plan?” I said.

  “To begin with I’m not leaving.”

  “I might,” I snapped.

  “Yeah, that will really change things for people.”

  “It’ll change things for me.”

  My cheeks were on fire. If didn’t get away I was going to start crying tears of hateful rage all over myself. Across the room by the door I saw Jimmy. She waved. The woman with the lavender hair glanced over her shoulder then put some more tabouli on her plate.

  “I hear Goa has nice beaches,” she said.

  Jimmy came up, mild and oblivious. She’d dyed her hair tangerine and was holding a tray of pink frosted cupcakes.

  “I put Red Hots on them. Want to help me frost the rest?”

  “Well,” said the woman, “I guess you can do what you’re doing just about anywhere.”

  Jimmy handed me a cupcake. I wanted to throw it at the wall. The Goth chick wanted to know if Red Hots were vegan.

  Outside they started setting off fireworks. I could feel them in my spleen. People pressed against the windows. Jimmy went over too. Explosion after explosion in a cascade of storylines, spiders and chrysanthemums, cakes and candles, beautiful showers of green and fuchsia rained down and all I saw was war.

  Across the room I saw a guy who was the homeless boyfriend of a girl I used to know. Someone said he wrote a banjo retelling of the Divine Comedy. It was supposed to be good but I never heard it. What I did know was, if he was there, everyone else I knew for the past ten years was going to show up too. I went outside, told Jimmy I needed air.

  Smoke from the fireworks drifted between the wheels of biodiesel trucks. On the other side of the water tiny campfires glowed. Abandoned cars parked along the frontage road with people crouched inside. Every now and then a lighter flared and car windows flashed like fireflies on the banks. On our side of the river were dancehalls and lit windows flickering like a net of stars. But it wasn’t going to stay like that. The whole area was about to get a huge development grant. We were only there because we were cheaper than security. And, look! An art district! A cobbled bohemia between the packed earth and the leathered sole of the descending boot, a chapel of freedom.