Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

He goes out to the living room and reports success. Thomas says Owl says that if David wants, they can drive the van over to Gator Bait Apartments and load it up. It’ll be easier than hauling everything by hand. “This is gonna be a riot,” Thomas says. “Bunch of punks loading a whole yuppie apartment into a fucking microbus.”

The raiding party is as follows: David, Liz, Owl, Thomas, and Anchor, this girl who’s been coming around a lot lately. She’s always wearing this one black hoodie, never mind that it’s the middle of the landlocked Florida summer, hardly ever below ninety, even at night. She’s a spindly five foot three, pasty-faced, broken out around her chin. She lives in the dorms, is taking summer classes, and will be a sophomore when the fall comes, that is, if she doesn’t drop out like all her awesome new friends have. She’s got this incredible laugh, if you can get her to laugh, though so far it seems that only Thomas can, which is amazing in itself given that his reputation is as the overearnest, humorless one. But try telling that to Anchor, who’s so crushed out on Thomas she’d eat glass for him, and probably wishes he’d ask her to, so she could prove it. All in all, a sweet kid.

Katy begs off the trip. “You’ve got plenty of hands already,” she says. “I’d be getting in the way.” This makes perfect sense to Owl and the rest of them — even Liz doesn’t bat an eye — but David gets kind of weird. Everyone’s ready to go and waiting for him, but he’s pulled Katy aside. They’re in the bedroom. Are things okay? Should he not be doing this? He’s worried that her sitting out the raid means she doesn’t really want him to live here. Or maybe Liz has said something.

“Look,” Katy says. “Part of sharing your love with more than one person means needing more alone time than you would in a one-on-one monogamous relationship. It’s about balance, and you’ll see what I mean soon enough.” She kisses him, gives him a squeeze through his jeans. “Besides,” she says. “I need to spend some time getting ready for tonight. But listen: I love you, Liz loves you”—he raises his eyes a little—“come on, you know she does. She’s in the van, isn’t she?” As if on cue, the horn bleats in the yard. He’s holding this whole thing up. “We both love you, and you love us. Now go already, so you can get your ass back here.” Another hearty squeeze — it’s a miracle anyone ever gets out of this bedroom — then he kisses her one last time and then he goes.

She follows him to the front porch, where Selah, on a dirty plastic patio chair, looks up from the hemp necklace she’s twining to watch him pass by. David walks out to the van and climbs in the open side door. Thomas shuts it behind him. Owl, in the driver’s seat, sticks his hand out the window and waves at her, a rollie between his first two fingers. Selah smiles, sending him good vibes. The cherry of his cigarette falls out, a weak streak of orange-red through the blue afternoon. It lands on the leaf carpet and smolders, but does not ignite.

Katy stands next to Selah, kneads her friend’s shoulders as the two women watch the raiding party set out. The hardest part comes first — navigating the bus around the house, through the narrows of the side yard, to the back where the vehicle access gate is. “Oh,” says Selah softly. Katy’s still kneading, improvising a deep-tissue sort of thing. Is this the chance — finally — for her and Selah? Not that she’s been nursing some secret lust all this time, but once you have your hands on somebody, isn’t that just like the next obvious thing? The hippie gazes up at the punk. “Thanks,” she says, wriggling free of Katy’s hands. “Do you think they’ll hit the liquor store on their way back?”

The bus is nosing out of the yard now, coming back up the street and passing them. “Hey guys!” Katy bellows at the bus. It jerks to a stop in the middle of the intersection at their corner. The reverse lights come on.

The raid takes about two hours. There are myriad small scores — a bedside clock, one of those little wooden handheld back massager things — but the standout plunders are the TV, the stereo, the CDs, and the pillows from David’s bed. He rented the place furnished, so they can’t take any of the furniture, not that they want it. What about the scanner? Well, there’s no computer here to take — when they ask him, he says it broke and he never replaced it; nobody checks the tub — so what good is a scanner? Might be worth some cash, though not all that much, probably, certainly not as much as you might think if you didn’t know about these things, which Owl doesn’t. It was probably what, a hundred bucks new, Liz figures. Maybe less. Not that she knows, either. She’s sort of a technophobe, an aspiring Luddite. She just doesn’t want to deal with the thing, period. Owl, on the other hand, with typical hippie pragmatism, thinks money is money. So okay, let’s say it’s theoretically worth half whatever the original price was. Whom do they sell it to? A pawnshop. Would a pawnshop want computer stuff? There ought to be one out there that does; it’s a growing market, after all. Yeah, but now this is starting to sound like a lot of work.

David’s in his bedroom packing himself a duffel’s worth of clothing, careful to leave behind anything with a prominent logo on it: Nike, A&F, Tommy. Fuck that shit. He can hear Owl and Liz arguing. Thomas, in the kitchen with Anchor, can hear them, too. Thomas has his head in the fridge. The milk’s turned, but everything else is still mostly good. There’ll be feasting tonight, that’s for sure, plus the long-term gains in staples and condiments. All this and a twelve-pack. Life is grand and the Lord provides, as Katy or Liz might say.

But fuckin’ A, man, those two are still going back and forth about that stupid computer thingie.

Thomas leaves the fridge door open and the twelve-pack on the kitchen table. He goes out into the living room, pushes past his quarreling friends. He knocks the scanner clean off the desk. It lands on its side on the carpet. He flips it upright with his boot then puts that same boot through its lid and face, shattering the plastic top and beneath that, the glass of the scanning bed. Problem solved.

David, still in the bedroom, hears the dull crash and then the shatter, but he doesn’t stop what he’s doing or even call out to ask. Given that nobody’s screaming, it follows that nobody’s hurt, so who cares?

Thomas walks back into the kitchen and finds Anchor sitting on the floor, chin in hands, staring at nothing.

“Hey, what’s up?” he says. “You seem, like, off today.”

“Yeah,” she says, “I don’t know, I didn’t really sleep last night. And my period maybe.”

“You’re not on your period.”

“No, I mean yeah, of course. I mean I think that it’s coming,” which is technically true since isn’t your period always coming anytime you’re not actually on it?

“Oh,” Thomas says, hoping to convey that he’s a guy who gets what she’s going through, or gets that he can’t get it, or whatever the thing is he’s supposed to be letting her know he feels.

Anchor’s not going to say this, but last night, instead of going over to Fishgut as planned, she let her dumbass roommate talk her into checking out this party that the roommate’s boyfriend’s frat was throwing. And there was fancy tequila there, and a bong, and it went the way these things go, and then she was somehow back in her dorm room — alone, thank God — throwing up a pizza she didn’t exactly remember ordering. How pathetically bourgeois. And now here she is being a drag, barely sentient, while this amazing thing is going on in front of her. She’s truly envious of David’s courage. He’s a role model, that’s for sure. David the hero! So okay, Anchor; time to pull your shit together. Get back out there on the field. She lifts herself up off the kitchen floor by pure fiat, too quickly and so her vision swims, but she doesn’t stick out a hand for balance. In fact, she doesn’t let on at all. She just stands there, giving Thomas her best blank face, praying he doesn’t press her any further. A few seconds later and she’s recovered, is ransacking cabinets, keeping herself alert with a little fantasy about how it’s gonna be when it’s only her and Thomas doing this exact same kind of looting at her father and stepmom’s place in Ponte Vedra Beach.