Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

  Mirror quit outright.

  “Fuck Franklin. That fucking fish killer. And fuck the new owners. If I wanted to have a food handler’s card, pull micro beer and listen to Enya, I’d go to fucking college.”

  Mirror didn’t seem too broken up about Tamara going to jail either.

  “Whatever,” she said, “she’s always been a little faggot. I’m just glad she’s not as much of a hippy as I thought, you know, with that farm and the goats and all.”

  I don’t know for sure why Tamara and Jules didn’t take me down too except that “whoever did it” was getting a lot of credit in the subculture, mostly for the urban targets and names of the terrorist groups, my tattered little flag. I don’t think they wanted to share the attention. When Tamara and Jules actually got charged, it was Bastille Day in the squats. Better than a police riot. I personally know of at least three vegetarian restaurants and a record store where they were gods. I even heard a coffee shop in the Midwest. The Breaker’s Rise Two. Free vegan cornmeal blueberry muffins for life. Credence says there are even t-shirts with them looking all punk rock on the front with the bombing sites listed like tour dates on the back. I haven’t seen them. It’s the kind of thing I would normally wear. Not in this case, but in general.

  I told Credence that and got a lecture on the difference between strategies for political change and merchandising.

  “I’d still wear it, if I didn’t know them. I’d wear it.”

  “It’s moronic.”

  “It’s the purest form of communication.”

  The t-shirt, the bumper sticker, the bomb. The undifferentiated ocean of brutality I had been drowning in had undergone a change. It was as violent as it had ever been but it wasn’t personal. The waves were not random. They were simply the rocking back-and-forth of actions and reactions. The slogan, the talking point and the bullet were all elements, atoms, leaving behind banded marks. It ebbs and crashes, pulling grass, sand and small animals into the sea. I know shouldn’t care, that it’s just erosion and happens to everything. But I do, I still care, I still cling to the shore.

  Credence and Annette painted my room pale gold for the Bellyfish and hung mobiles, stars and birds that circle across the skylight. I lie in bed and I watch them for hours. I still stay awake and listen to the world at night.

  Mirror suggested I try cranial sacral therapy.

  “You should totally do it. I also know this dude who did it after a really bad head injury. He said it made him dream in magenta.”

  Instead of retributional geology?

  Mirror said when she first met me she thought I was a little out of my mind. I told her it was true. I hadn’t watched a school full of children get blown up a thousand times. I was less settled than I am now.

  As a local celebrity, I was asked by a teacher at an alternative high school to come speak to his class about the history of the earth. About how we think the moon was made. About comets and asteroids and extinctions and how the sea was filled with ammonites and how there wasn’t any grassland and that planets die like everything else—babies, continents, solar systems. I don’t have the part after that. Just like with the skateboard-goth boy down by the river, I don’t have a god or a country hiding in my hands. I don’t even have a saying or some kind of joke. Consider the lilies…(voiceover to be drowned in howling winds of the holocaust). So I decided to bring in a bunch of concretions and some rock hammers and let the kids bash the hell out of them. It seemed like as good a finale as anything else.

  The principal stopped us in the hall. Behind her were construction paper flowers and soccer trophies in a glass case under a banner that said “Welcome Home, Birds of Prey.” I was momentarily sorry the school had not been on my target list.

  The teacher introduced me as Professor Mylinek, eminent geologist and former terrorism suspect, which she didn’t think was funny. They wanted to see my notes and have me sign a waiver so they could videotape the class in case they needed to turn it over the FBI. They also confiscated the rock hammers so we had to have the kids take the concretions outside and smash them on the sidewalk. They looked like a bunch of angry seagulls. Which was pretty great too. Any fossils inside those rocks were destroyed but it felt good and the principal got it all on camera through the window of the science lab. The teacher said that’s what the kids liked best, feeling dangerous. But I still saw the gulf between us, a short lifetime of thoughts. Future soldiers and tiny liver hearts, universes. Atoms.

  30 Tiny Liver Hearts

  The day before the war started, Annette accidentally knocked over a metal bookshelf in the basement. She was trying to kick some heavy boxes across the room because she couldn’t lift them and one of them got stuck. She got mad and shoved with her foot and the whole shelf came down. I heard the noise from upstairs and ran.

  “Annette!” I yelled. “Annette!”

  When I opened the basement door, she was crying. The bookshelf was on its side and medical reference books were everywhere. She was back up against the wall in the corner with her arms crossed trying to hold still. She was okay, but as I moved closer she shivered.

  That morning I’d gone with her to the doctor to look at the Bellyfish. They put us in a dark room and the radiologist coated her belly with clear jelly.

  “It helps get better pictures,” she said.

  I sat down and looked at the monitor. It looked gray and pixilated like an old TV.

  “Well that’s one of their heads,” the radiologist said. “They’re big babies.”

  Annette’s face looked blue in the monitor light as she watched the Bellyfish.

  “See that, Della?” her voice was soft and crackly. “That’s her little arm.”

  A little starfish arm moving like every direction was forward.

  Annette took the bus home and I walked. I looked back at her standing at the bus stop. She’s like one of those women on the posters in the Ethiopian restaurants, the ones the North African tourist bureau puts out. Noble and frightening. I could see her throat and fingers wrapped with gold raising her arms. Teff blowing like sand from her clenched fists.

  The light changed and I crossed the street, cutting through Redbird Square down to the river. It was Friday and the beginning of a three-day weekend. Normally it would have been busy but it wasn’t and busses passed half full. Taxis waited in line.

  All week they had been showing maps on TV. Newscaster Ken was finally learning how to pronounce the names of smaller nation states that had long been on the periphery. The stores sold out of water and the city was emptying. I walked to work and counted the vacant houses, all with kitchen lights on, all with the original trim restored.

  Mr. Tofu Scramble said when they took the bars off the windows in Old Honduras there was a big party. They roasted a soy pig and the first hundred through the door got a house. He did, anyway. Told me he could live for ten years in Bali off the sale. I told him I hoped he wouldn’t have to. He was right about the time to get out, though. It had passed. You could feel it.

  When I heard the bookshelf crash, I thought it had finally started. So did Annette. She couldn’t stop crying. The impact of the encyclopedias and reference books and that heavy metal shelf, all hitting the cement floor at the same time, made the house shake. I thought it was a car bomb going off somewhere nearby. Annette didn’t say what she thought it was.

  When the shelf went over it hit a hanging lamp that I’d rigged up to make it seem less like an interrogation chamber down there, mostly because that’s where I would be living. The lamp was still swinging back and forth when I opened the basement door, which was another reason I thought something else had happened. Annette stared at it, transfixed. I couldn’t get her to look at me.

  I remember telling Jimmy about how it was when I first met Annette. How she’d scared me because I didn’t really know any black people. I only knew how I was supposed to feel about them—Now, Della, when you meet a Person of Color, make sure you look them in the eye and open your palm so they can see that
it’s only a sugar cube.

  “It’s like that everywhere in one way or another,” she’d said. “It was the same for me. You can live in one valley and think the people in the next are a totally different species.”

  Annette constructed of tiny mirrors.

  Miro told me when he was a boy he had a pet rabbit. They moved into a neighborhood where it was all Slovenians and the first week he was there some boys ripped open its chicken wire cage in the yard and killed it.

  “My parents told me it was a dog.”

  “What did you do when you found out?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s not really any different, people, dogs, when the thinking is that way. It’s the same isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but how can you even sit there knowing people are like that?”

  “They were kids too. I’m sure they’re different now.”

  “Yes, but how can you fucking stand to live in this world?”

  “Della…”

  I was at work the next day when the war officially started. There were planes and sirens and traffic jams. It was just after the lunch rush, which was mostly tempeh reubens and carrot-ginger soup. The new owners were falling all over themselves trying to make friends with the staff, who were working like they’d been pressed. The restaurant was busy because carrot-ginger is the only soup of the day we have that isn’t gross and everyone gets real excited about it. One guy calls every day at 11 AM when the soup goes up to see what it is. When I told him it was carrot ginger, he acted like I had found him a kidney match.

  The construction on the patio was almost complete. Broken bricks and recycled concrete glued into green resin so that in the rain it would look like river rocks. Chains of colored lanterns dipped across the courtyard and crisscrossed high and off-center over where the shed had been.

  The siren went off about 3 PM and no one knew what to do. There wasn’t a basement. Someone said to get under the tables and stay away from the windows but no one did, not even the person who said it. When the first blast hit, everyone ran. Mitch was standing in the street looking up at something and pointing. I could see her green eyes staring straight into the sun when the second blast hit. Then I saw her running too.

  I ran out the side door and made it into the doorway of a brick building across the street. A bus trying to veer away from a collapsed wall of an apartment complex hit a telephone pole and it went down. Sparks shot into the sky as cables snapped and whipped around etching electric meanders in the sky. Some hit water and blue light shot up the poles and across the sidewalks that were wet from an earlier rain.

  I crouched in the doorway, pressing myself back into the corner, but I could still see the street. There was a large crack as a bolt of white current shot laterally through the air and contacted the metal streetlight on the other end of the block, blowing it to pieces and engulfing a car underneath in lavender flame. Particles oscillated faster and faster as the heat rose and I thought for a second I could see the real shape of things, the radiating blackbodies incandescent and brilliant, the seamless stream. The Rat Queen shook her fur free of beads and pennies and the Saint with the Black Tears lifted her robe. Thousands of new planets spun out from underneath, filling the sky like clouds of fireflies.

  Annette says I’m too hard on the world, that I only see one side.

  Grace says I’m afraid of my own longing.

  I looked around at the smoke and people. I couldn’t find any hate in me anywhere. The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.

  I decided to love it anyway.

  Acknowledgements

  I imagine that every writer hopes to someday be able to publicly thank those who made their work possible. I am fortunate enough to get to do that here. The list is long, I ask you to bear with it. Each one of these people deserves to have their name shouted from the rooftops but this is the only the soapbox I got so here goes…

  While working on the first draft of Zazen I received enough food, printer ink, and cash from friends to support me for five months. These months were essential to the creation of this novel. No first-time novelist knows for sure if they can finish a novel until they do and without that time I might have stopped halfway. There are periods when it’s easier to wait tables with part of a novel in the drawer than to try to break through your own mediocrity. But, because of the remarkable gifts of my friends, I had no excuse for not trying. Thank you. Now I can say I am a novelist. Angus Durocher, Geov Parrish, Sascha Krader, Laurel Hoyt and the Salathaus folks, Doug McMullen, my parents, Christian Fennesz, Tess Lotta, Bill Ferrell, Dennis Shaw, and Lamalani Siverts—you have made my life better.

  I would also like to thank Beulahland and Staccato Gelato for letting me sit for hours and hours while I wrote. If you’re in Portland, Oregon, give them lots of business. They deserve it for putting up with people like me.

  And… (deep breath) another thank you to these writers, readers, and editors for their kind encouragement—Mike McGonigal, Mike Daily, Jon Raymond, Pete Rock, Michael Kroetch, Jeff Gordinier, Jay Babcock (who published Zazen online before anybody at Arthur Magazine), Laurent Blain, Jason Waugaman and all the Godless Moravians. In particular, I would like to thank Alex Ney who took the photo for the cover and read each version of Zazen. Because of his dedication, I was never truly alone with the manuscript. It was a phenomenal gift. I want to thank Karin Bolender, who talked both Jay Babcock and Laurent Blain into reading Zazen in the first place. And, of course, my profound thanks to my editor Richard Nash, a man whose faith in both the future and the future of the novel is boundless.

  And last, my family: Blake Wright, Stefan Jecusco, and Violet Veselka. Blake, who, first as my husband and then as my friend, never stopped backing me up and moved his schedule to take Violet with little or no notice so that I could keep writing. And Stefan, who sacrificed his own artistic time for mine. While always a believer in art first, during the four and half years on Zazen it was my art that came first. I owe the world a debt for what he did not get to make in that time. My world has been entirely changed by his presence.

  Finally, love to my daughter Violet who lost many evenings of my attention. Sitting next to me on the bed while I wrote, she watched more Miyazaki films and Justice League episodes than any child should. Once, when Violet was five, she asked me about Della and what she was like. I said Della was afraid that the world was full of sadness and that everything beautiful just got hurt. Violet looked at me for a second then said, “Yeah, but Della’s wrong.”

  Della is wrong. Violet’s right.

  I am in awe. Thank you all.

  Vanessa Veselka has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in Arthur, Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’N’ Roll, Tin House, and elsewhere. Zazen is her first novel.

  Photo by: Heather Hawksford

  Dear Reader,

  This is a Red Lemonade book, also available in all reasonably possible formats—limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community: http://redlemona.de

  A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: yes and above all the writers, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors th emselves.

  So I started a company called Cursor, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come—for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor website at http://thinkcursor.com.

  For more on how to participate in the Red Lemonade publishing community, including the opportunity to share yo
ur thoughts about this book, read what others have to say about it, to learn more about Lynne Tillman and her novels all of which we now have back in print, as well as to share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade website: http://redlemona.de.

  Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.

  Let me also note the following editorial credits. I edited this book, Nora Nussbaum copy-edited it, and Daniel Schwartz proofread it. Matthew Chase Whittemore prepared this eBook file.

  Regards,

  Richard Nash

  Publisher