Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  “She says you’re a big old faggot and you’re off the party list forever,” I said.

  Tamara smiled and blew into her hands.

  “Good. I like Mirror. She’s stubborn.”

  Tamara cut off a couple of bigger pieces of fish. A roll of wax paper was strung up on the door and she wrapped the salmon.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “They drove into Breaker’s Rise to pick up Astrid, Britta’s girlfriend. You’ll meet her later,” she closed the smokehouse door, “Astrid’s kind of like Mirror, a little overzealous about details. She’s okay. I think I like Mirror better.”

  There was a sharp, faint glare in the east but it didn’t look like the sun was going to break. We came around the other side of the smokehouse. A cord of wood was covered with a blue tarp and tied with bright yellow twine. Tamara got down and cinched it tighter.

  “Want to see something?” she said.

  She took me around by the woodshed. Under a tin overhang next to some baskets of kindling was the beginning of an elaborate Nativity scene on a platform of baled hay. It had a cob manger with little tin foil solar panels and a computer chip star.

  “We do something like this every year but this time it started early,” she looked up at the sky and blinked. “I think it’s the war. People feel it coming.”

  She flipped a switch and tiny white and red lights lit the crèche.

  “Astrid wants to put the three kings up against the manger wall with a firing squad of PETA Barbies in orange faux fur bikinis. Can’t you see Mirror doing something like that?”

  “Why do you say it’s the war?”

  “Because that’s what’s driving everything right now.”

  “Yeah, but when I talk about the war people act like I’m delusional and just trying to ruin their 70s t-shirt glitter decal fantasy march.”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “That’s because you talk about the war all like it’s already happening. It’s not happening for most people. Some of us, yes, but not for everyone.”

  “Because they’re fucking desensitized automatons that reproduce through violence?”

  “People are on their own learning curve and outrage is a personal thing. We’re short on it already.”

  She pulled a box off a shelf.

  “And,” she said, “when people do figure it out, they need something on the other end that they can be a part of.”

  “Like a tableau of horrific understanding?”

  She stopped.

  “You know, Della, you’re funny but you’re like a switch that’s stuck open.”

  A thousand answers went through my head but mostly I just wanted to leave. Turn around and walk off. But what was I going to do? Hide behind the nearest goat? I stood there on the verge of tears feeling like I wanted to punch a wall. Tamara plunked the box on the thatch next to the manger.

  “Britta’s mom sent these.”

  She opened the box. It was full of Barbie and Sailor Moon dolls.

  “We’re using them for the nativity scene. I originally envisioned the Virgin as some sort of homemade Valerie Solanis action figure but I got out-voted,” she picked up an anime vampire in a biohazard suit. “I’m trying to adjust.”

  She waggled the doll at me.

  “No gods! No masters!” she said in a toy voice. “Hi! I’m Della,” she squeaked, “I like dinosaurs!”

  “I hate dinosaurs, ” I mumbled.

  The doll danced in front of me. I tried to ignore it.

  “I like Pterosaurs!”

  She was too stupid to look at.

  “I’m an invertebrate paleontologist.”

  “No. You’re a pussy who can’t take criticism.”

  “Fuck this!” I said and shoved the box.

  “Oh relax,” she said, “we’re all a little like that.”

  I felt that part of me that couldn’t be moved, moving, a glacial shift in all my horrible pride.

  Tamara put the doll back and turned off the manger light. I stepped out from under the tin roof. Two dog-sized goats wandered toward a covered stall. Tamara blew on her hands again. Her lavender hair was vibrant against the whitening sky.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you around.”

  The temperature was dropping and the sounds were changing as the layer of snow crunching underfoot began to freeze. Barn swallows rushed the sky and their chattering calls echoed on the dormant landscape. Not all the people who lived on the Farm were there. Some were travelling and some were in the city. We passed empty bedrooms and I saw yurts and straw bale shelters tucked in the woods. I heard their names as I went: Coryn, Marco, Daria, Asher, Miranda, and the one I met at The Cycle, Black Francis.

  We took a trail through the pine trees where a creek cut, jagged and half frozen through the new snow. Tamara pointed to a small hutch covered in tarp with lines running to it.

  “Most of our power is solar and we pull the rest out of the creek. The batteries get charged there and we run it into the house.”

  She led me back up through the woods past where the yurts and tree houses were. We talked about being teenagers. She grew up near Los Angeles in some suburban corridor between a mall and a freeway. She got pregnant halfway through high school by some skater kid who bussed tables at the Olive Garden and had an abortion.

  “I’m sure we did it just to have something to do,” she said, “Nothing ever changed there, nothing ever happened. I swear time doesn’t even fucking exist in those places.”

  We ran over the names of some of the bands that were around then and I knew some of them, they were mostly political hardcore.

  “I was super vegetarian then and used to go to the Krishna house feeds all the time but I never believed in reincarnation.”

  She opened the wax paper took a piece of salmon, wrapped it in its metallic skin and ate it.

  “I loved LA though,” she said.

  I hate LA. I’m all for the earthquake.

  “It’s nothing but cement and razor wire,” I said.

  “Right and I felt like if I could be alive there, nothing could kill me. It was exhausting though. I lived in a house with fifteen other people then. All the bands stayed with us when they came through on tour. A lot of Italian political hardcore bands, some Dutch. There were a lot of fights with the police then. They would come down to whatever demonstration we did in riot gear and we’d throw bottles at them. A few people would get arrested, a few would get stitches and everyone walked around the next day acting like heroes. It got pretty ridiculous sometimes. We had to fight the skinheads at the benefit shows and it would go on the news as a riot like we were all the same people. It seemed for a while, though, like something was coming to a head. Riot cops were shutting all the stores and marching through the streets in the thousands. I really thought that we were close to some big shift and that it was all about to happen but it didn’t. That winter one of my best friends killed herself and like half the house started shooting dope. By spring there was nothing left of it and the bands coming through were more like jocks than anything else. It was like the whole thing dissipated worldwide at once. That’s how I met Mirror. She was part of a younger set that was all into queer politics and being vegan.”

  Tamara put away the remaining salmon and smiled.

  “You know, she would kill me for telling you this,” she said, “but when I met Mirror she was a brown-haired runaway hippy chick who listened to Ani Difranco.”

  “I am so glad you told me that.”

  “You should definitely tell her.”

  Tamara pulled off a glove and shook it. There were small chunks of snow in the weave and she picked them out.

  “I still can’t imagine you with the Olive Garden skater boy but I can see you in Los Angeles.”

  “Yeah, when I came here it was shock, all the cold and gray. I went out to the coast and the water was freezing. The beaches were rocky, black and sharp and it seemed like everyplace I’d felt strong and free and alive was
gone forever. I felt like someone else completely.”

  I also knew what it was like to be somewhere foreign, waiting for the person you used to be to show up. It was something that connected us.

  We came out of the woods and followed the creek back down to where we started. She took me through the outbuildings near the smokehouse. Inside one were several fifty-five-gallon drums with lines running out the bottom into five-gallon containers. It looked like a still. There were small electric heaters on the ground. Clean white t-shirts hung on nails.

  “This is where we store and filter the fryer oil to make the low-grade biodiesel. We pick it up from the restaurants and run it in the secondary tanks.”

  I followed her to the garage where another old Mercedes was being converted to run on fryer oil. The work areas were immaculate. Every tool had a place and every drawer was labeled.

  We talked about the war and people we knew in common. Who was leaving and wasn’t. She said if she had to go anywhere it would be Columbia or Chiapas. We decided that the general consensus in our demographic was Nepal or Costa Rica. I told her about Mr. Tofu Scramble and how he wanted Sri Lanka for the curry but couldn’t take the monsoons.

  “Yeah. I don’t really mind people like that leaving. They’re all born landlords anyway. I mean have you ever had a your rent raised more often than when a hippy owns the building? ‘I’m sorry but I got to, man.’ They should have it on their fucking tombstones.”

  We walked out onto the dirty snow in front of the garage.

  “People like you, though, it’s different,” she said. “Are you really going to leave?”

  “No.”

  I felt ashamed for even thinking about it.

  “Well, if you are staying, you can’t just be out alone or you’ll go crazy. For instance,” she paused, “one person could never have set off those bombs in town, not without casualties. It took lot of people working smart together to pull that off.”

  The air electrified. It was the closest she’d come to admitting involvement. I wasn’t sure what to say because I realized then that I didn’t actually want to know.

  Tamara looked out over the gray and white land.

  “It’s just something you’ll need to think about sometime,” she said and started walking again. “For your own sanity.”

  We spent another hour going around the property and looking at all the stuff they built or were working on. They made their own beer, jam and goat cheese. There was a slaughterhouse several hundred yards away where the creek turned south, a one-room brick building flush with the horizon line. Tamara said they butchered and skinned whatever they shot hunting right on the property. Deer mostly, and used everything but the teeth, which they kept in Mason jars over the fireplace.

  “Britta says she’s going to do some big art project with them but I don’t think she’s going to get around to it for a while. Here.”

  Tamara held out a jar of grooved yellow teeth.

  “No thanks.”

  She didn’t move. I thought she was joking.

  “No really, no thanks.”

  She didn’t move. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing or what she wanted from me. She just kept standing there with the deer teeth. Maybe I was tired, or just confused but I started to think that it might all be a test. Like she was the freaky homeless woman on the road with the magic charm that I don’t know I’ll need later but only get it if I do what she says now—TAKE THE DEER TEETH, DELLA! —And if I don’t it all vanishes, the goats, the crèche, the idea that something different is possible, all of it—TAKE THE DEER TEETH, DELLA! —And I’ll wake up in a convenience store parking lot. Blazing patio furniture on the traffic island and wearing nothing but my finest identity, a nosegay of slivered contrast unified by the ineffable mist of personhood. It was too much. In that moment I wanted to be on the farm and nowhere else. Tamara shook the jar at me.

  I snatched the teeth out of her hands and opened it. They smelled like acrid leather. I think it was the iron in the blood.

  Britta walked in. I felt instantly guilty. Like she was going to ask what I was doing with her deer teeth. But she didn’t fucking care. No one does. I live in my own goddamned world. I screwed the lid back on the jar and stomped upstairs embarrassed. I grabbed my rock hammer and notebook and went out over the snowy field, walking towards the bitterbrush. I stopped at every ridge that might be exposed rock. Anything I found that looked like it wasn’t mud I smashed with my hammer.

  25 Disco

  “All I know is I don’t want to be part of it. Not their power, not their plastic, not their food—fucking gross slavery meat.”

  Astrid dropped her dishes into the soapy water. Her thin blonde hair was in pink plastic barrettes and she wiped her forehead on her upper arm.

  Tamara laughed.

  “Oh fuck primitivism!” she said, “Fuck Zerzan, Jensen and all those guys. I don’t see them taking down elk with a spear or foraging the roadside between speaking engagements.”

  Britta turned into a blowfish and floated towards Astrid spiny and offended. Astrid sponged the back of a silver bowl.

  “I don’t want to be on their grid, that’s all,” she said.

  “Well, that’s fine but a lot of people do and we’re going to have to stop pretending Hippy Easter is coming and everyone’s going to just wander into the wild and live polyamorously.”

  Astrid darkened and her large freckles stood out.

  “Yeah, well you know, when the shit comes down and their whole world’s nothing but blowing ash, then they’ll fucking ‘wander into the wild,’ as you put it.”

  Tamara slipped a stack of plates into the water.

  “No,” she whispered, “they’ll wander over to the next town and they’ll take whatever they can take through force until someone takes it from them.”

  The blowfish, Britta, floated away from the sink.

  It was like watching a leftist soap opera. I liked the girl with the purple hair but she was kind of a bitch. I thought the blonde one might be up to no good and I didn’t care about the other because she was part of a boring subplot. But it was no different than hanging out in the kitchen at Rise Up Singing and I no longer knew why I was there. I was beginning to think what Tamara meant by saying there were “people like me” in Breaker’s Rise was no deeper than Barbie doll humor. We hadn’t talked about the bombings at all and every time there was an opening in the conversation for it to come up naturally, she changed the subject. I felt lost at the Farm. They weren’t interested in what I was interested in. I tried to open up new lanes of discussion, anything other than baking without yeast or how funny the strip mall chains would look with grass growing on them and beetles everywhere, but I failed. I could no longer see why they wanted me there at all.

  On the fourth night it changed. Jules was setting up a Go game in the living room. Astrid and Britta had gone into town to do laundry. I was in the kitchen explaining the possible causes of the Permo-Triassic extinction to Tamara.

  “Changes in glaciation, feasible but boring. Comets and supernovas, which I like better, but then I lean toward catastrophism, and my personal favorite—”

  Britta walked in, excited.

  “Someone tried to take out a transmission line going into the city.”

  “—killer methane bubbles the size of North America.”

  “It was stupid,” said Astrid, coming in behind Britta. “They tried to drive a car into it.”

  I thought about saying it again but no one was listening.

  “At least he tried,” said Britta. “I remember when I was in high school a line went down in the river and the surge blew out like half the televisions in the city. It was fucking awesome!”

  “Oh, come on,” Astrid laughed, “it was stupid. He tried to drive his car into the base of the tower and some dumb guard threw himself in front and he swerved. If you’re going to do something that pointless with your life you should at least be willing to take out the stupid guy who jumps in front of you.
Instead, he didn’t hit the tower and still killed the guard.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Tamara.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the guard or the transmission line. I was still looking for a polite way back to the Permian Extinction.

  “Can you believe somebody would do that for minimum wage?” said Britta. “Hmmm… serve nachos at a fucking Mexi-kiosk? Or stand by a phallic symbol of resource enslavement waiting for someone to drive into it so you can leap in front of the car.”

  “Does anybody know the name of the guy in the car?” asked Tamara.

  Astrid knelt by the wood stove. “Do you know how much power runs through the main lines going south?” she said. “About 4200 watts at full capacity. That’s like, three nuclear power plants.”

  “Suicide by transmission line,” said Jules.

  Astrid put more wood in the stove belly, her cheeks fuchsia in the heat of the open firebox. She closed the latch. I wasn’t paying that much attention to the conversation. It was the kind of talk you could get anywhere over spelt cookies and a microbrew but Astrid was stuck on the idea.

  “Yeah, but if you did take out some of those big lines out it would be a total mess.”

  “Well sure,” said Jules, “but they’re all gated now. You’d need a car or truck filled with explosives to get through.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I said.

  I was thinking about Holocene deposits and how I had never really given the Cenozoic much of a fair chance. Mostly because I’m anti-mammal.

  Jules was annoyed.

  “Yes, you would,” he said, “even if you jump out, a truck or a car is not going to get through the gate with enough momentum to knock the tower over. You’d need explosives.”

  The blaring subtext broke my train of thought… Hi, I’m Jules. I’m the Know-How Guy of the Group. Sitar music fades… It was just bunch of residual pre-feminist hat-doffing and it was irritating because I wanted to explain methane clathrates to Tamara.

  “You don’t want to take out multiple lines running south anyway,” I said. “You’d want to take out one big line going south so the others lines stay open and carry the overload. That way you might even blow a substation if an HV fuse opened too slowly.”