Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

Selah offers him a small round orange-and-brown throw pillow. He takes it without a word, lets his slouch slide farther into full-on lying down, fixes the pillow behind his aching, swimming head.

Thomas has his eyes closed but is not sleeping. He’s listening to the wonderful strange cadence of Owl, who is babbling to his lover about their future.

“Selah, baby. Baby, it’s just like that song says. That song says it and it’s so. ‘Open up your eyes little darling. Been here for ’bout too long.’ How long can we keep living in this van? We need to find ourselves a — a place in life, man. We need like a — room. You know? I know you know. But listen. It isn’t going to happen here. That’s sure. I mean there’s just not enough here to make anything off of. There’s not enough coming through. What we need is a plan. We need a plan and we’ll be golden. We’ll think of the perfect plan.

“Can we put that song on, actually? I sure wouldn’t mind hearing that song again. You know it’s my favorite song there is. After I hear that song I just won’t care about anything, but hearing it will help me think. I’ll think of our new plan while I listen to it. It’s on, um, second disc of Shining Star I think. I don’t think we even have another recording of that one, actually. It wasn’t one of the ones he ever played very much. I don’t think I ever even saw him play it, and I went to forty-eight shows.

“Selah, baby, how about Asheville? We could make it in Asheville. I think so. There’s plenty of music, and the people are right. I know someone in Asheville. I think he’d let us stay. We could sell the van and save the money. We could figure something out. I feel it, man, I mean I really do. It’s like this twinkling light in my mind that knows what the truth is. Now if I could just remember that motherfucker’s name. I mean if I could just sort of get my head on straight for a second, put on my, you know, thinking cap, and remember the name of the guy who. Hang on. Okay.

“Okay.

“Okay, it’s on the tip of my tongue.

“Okay okay okay okay. Come on now. Come on now, old brain, time to be a genius.

“Fuck.

“Okay let me just not think about it a minute and then it’ll come. Too much pressure, you know? Too much pressure which never did anybody any good. God I love this song. I mean I could just listen to it again, and then the whole rest of this album. All Jerry’s good Jerry to me, man. But I know you don’t really like the nineties stuff. How you say his voice just sounds so old that it makes you sad. I mean I respect the way you feel about that. I can see how a person would feel that way. I mean, actually, in a certain sense, like in the objective sense of whatever, I mean I even feel the same as you, I guess. I mean you put the music on and it’s not like we’re hearing different music. I hear what’s coming out of the speakers, same as anyone. It’s just, you know, it’s not objective when it comes to him. Music is my religion, baby, and I know you know that, and I know it’s yours, too. And that we’re the same — denomination, isn’t that right? Selah, baby, you know how it is. It’s us in this thing together and we’ve got every good thing coming.

“Hah! I knew I’d get it. I got it. Here it is. Ted, Ted from Asheville. Ted’s a real buddy. We go way back. He’s true blue. He’s gonna be waiting for us when we get there. He’s gonna hear my brain waves and know we’re coming. He always said if I was ever passing through to stop off and see him. He always said if I ever needed anything at all. Well we’re gonna have us a time at old Ted’s, Selah baby. Ted is the name that means every little thing will be all right.”

Thomas sits up and the world’s swirling. He puts a hand out as if to steady himself on a badly shaking train, though of course nothing is in motion. Just him, his head. “Okay, fuck,” he says. “Hey listen, thanks so much for the smoke. You guys really saved me.”

“Anytime, man,” says Owl. Selah says nothing. Now that he can focus his eyes again, Thomas sees that she’s rolled over on the bench, asleep. Has Owl been soliloquizing this whole time to nobody? Christ, but they really are made for each other, this poor pair. It’s like epically tragic and beautiful, in a kind of white-trash way, how they’re always leaving but never actually going, always still just right here. They’ll grow old in this van, Thomas thinks, if they don’t accidentally drive it off a bridge.

The party peaked, apparently, while he was hanging out with the hippies. Mission accomplished. There are some couch-crashers, plus the requisite last nighthawks out back by the bug light, but basically things have died down. Except in the back bedroom. He can hear punk music of indeterminate vintage and middling quality coming from in there, and below that, the awkward moans and grunts of, say, a half dozen wasted people attempting some miscarriage of human geometry. Thomas stands in the hallway before the door, listening. He of course, like them, believes that marriage is a form of oppression, and that monogamy itself is a patriarchal conspiracy to outfit a politics of domination with the pretense, the mask, of moral virtue — but he’s never been able to get into the whole group thing. It seems dangerous, for one, but that’s not even the issue. Really it just weirds him out.

The door opens and out stumbles cake girl. She’s wearing a different tee shirt than earlier, with no bra beneath it and nothing at all on her bottom half. From her shaved sex dangles a small white string. A sheen coats her pale skin. “I’m just— the bathroom,” she says to Thomas as she lurches by. As if he’d asked. Thomas says nothing to her, only looks, gawking, into the orgy room, where it’s a thousand degrees even with the window open, and the pit-crotch stink is stunning, and shapes grind in and out of panting shadow. Someone is splayed out on the lower bunk of the nearer bunk bed. Katy is sitting on his face and making out with Liz, who’s kind of haunch-crouching over the body. There’s a hand in her, but it’s unclear whose. Splayed guy’s cock is in the mouth of the kid Thomas met earlier (what was his name?) who said he’d heard things were amazing here, but also kind of pretty fucked-up.

If you will it, it is no dream, kid.

Could that supine body they’re all working on belong to his old friend David? Prude, private David, the bane of whose middle school years was those five naked seconds while changing in the locker room before and after PE class? David whom he’s barely caught sight of all night? Could that be him on this filthy mattress, neck-deep in Katy’s nethers even as his own spit-shined cock now fills some random punk’s relentless mouth?

The body on the bed begins to spasm, powerful ripples that seem to originate at the belly button and work their way outward: up and down the body at once. The boy on the floor adjusts himself to allow clearance for the splayed body’s legs, which now flail on either side of him, as he leans in closer, deeper, and swallows and swallows and still doesn’t get it all.

Is this David? Thomas feels like he has to know.

“Hey!” shouts an unfamiliar male voice from the top bunk. “In or out, dude.”

“Yeah, no audience, thanks,” seconds an equally alien female voice. “Shut the door.”

Jolted from his — ahem — reverie, he does what they ask him: shuts the door on the first roar of what sounds like Katy’s orgasm, coming close on the heels of the guy’s — David’s, if it is him, and really, if so then so what? He turns away from the back bedroom to the door of his own room. This doesn’t actually require walking anywhere. The two rooms share a wall. And why is his door cracked open? Swear to God, if there’s anyone in there. If it’s that fucking cake girl—