Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

But it’s only Anchor, asleep in his bed, curled up, the sheets twisted and kicked off in the heat, the pale freckled curve of her back in the moonlight just about the sweetest thing he’s ever seen. She’s all angles, elbows and boy hips, every notch in her spine visible. She doesn’t go in for that other-room shit, either. It weirds her out, too. She’s said so.

My God, this day! This girl— his girl, if that’s not too fucked-up to say, just once, when nobody’s around and he’s not even saying it aloud. His sweet girl. What has she gone and gotten herself tangled up with? They still haven’t had a chance to talk at all. In the morning, in the morning. He’ll tell her about what he’s decided — Seattle — and they can figure out what makes sense to do. He’ll tell her things like what he heard Owl telling Selah, only it won’t be bullshit when he says it, because they’re not a couple of addle-brained hippies. And because they’re not old. Anchor won’t be in school this fall. She’ll be on a train somewhere, or hitching, or hiding out from the Oklahoma rain in an abandoned barn like a desert island in the middle of the golden wheat-sea. And wherever it is, she’ll be with him and he’ll be with her. And who knows? Maybe they’ll want to try monogamy; see where it gets them. It’s not like committing to a person means you automatically become some sellout. People have the right to do whatever works for them. The anarchist as monarch of the freed self, right? That’s a Parkerism. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

He can’t wait to start making their plans. In fact, he’s half tempted to wake her up right now — but no. That’s no good. She’s had a hard enough day, beguiled or whatever by Katy, tricked into thinking she’s part of some divine fucking mystery. Let her sleep it off. It’ll all make sense in the morning.

But instead of climbing into the bed, he steps back into the hall. He heads for the living room, where it’s dark. He pads past the sleepers wheezing in their alcoholic oblivion, over to the bookshelf where Katy keeps Parker’s precious library: all the books he collected when they lived at the Coop and left behind when the squat got broken up. Katy saved them. A whole suitcase full of Christian gobbledygook and anarchist theory — as if any book could teach a person how to live.

Thomas finds the notebook just where he thought he would: face out, propped up by earmarked-to-shit copies of Future Primitive and the Summa Theologica . That is: Zerzan and Aquinas, dead center of the bookshelf, the fault line where anarchy and Jesus meet.

What did Parker do out there in the wild, alone for so long? Did he eat nothing but berries until his waste slid out of him like water, not even worth digging a hole for? Did he eat carrion? Hunt game? Did he sneak into town and raid dumpsters? Surely he was too filthy, stank too bad, to pass unnoticed in any store. Did God give him manna? Did he simply sit in his tent and meditate on the terrible memory of Drake’s corpse, while the sun and moon wheeled in and out of the sky unseen above his weather-resistant polymer roof? Was he writing this book the whole time? Did he starve himself mad?

Thomas takes the notebook to the kitchen. He opens it and starts flipping pages. He’s looking to see if there’s any consistency to Parker’s writing style, or if he always used the same kind of pen. Anything telling. But no, the journal’s a mess. Some entries are dated, others not. There are all kinds of ink colors — blue, black, a good bit of purple. Some of it is his own writing, some of it is quotes he saw somewhere and copied over. Sometimes there’s just a few lines on a whole page, like he was going to come back to it later but never did, like here:

Why should religion be useful in your everyday life? Why should politics be pragmatic, or worse yet, practical? True religion, like true political will, seeks nothing less than the destruction of the everyday, the eradication of the normal and the usual — the call to Stand Apart is, in the end, not a permanent injunction. When your Action doesn’t merely take a side or tip a scale, but actually alters or overturns the terms and conditions of the false oppositions that govern the everyday, then and only then is it Right. There will come a time for Right Action.

What a fucking joke this whole thing is. What he should do is take the notebook outside right now and burn the son of a bitch, nip this thing in the bud.

But Thomas has other, bigger plans. He opens the kitchen’s random-shit drawer and fishes out a blue Bic pen. Weird how those are the two main things the company makes — lighters and pens. What’s that about, anyway? Okay, Thomas, time to focus. He figures it’s not worth it to try to imitate Parker’s handwriting. He’s better off just trying to do a quick, nonspecific scrawl and hope that it blends. Not like Parker’s handwriting is so unique. It’s erratic and loping, rather childish, actually.

Thomas laughs under his breath, a hushed and ugly sound. In the notebook he writes:

Desire is a strange attractor. Your longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth.

He puts the notebook back on the shelf where he found it. He goes to the bathroom, where he finds cake girl passed out in the tub. Turning the light on doesn’t seem to disturb her at all, but he’s careful to pee on the porcelain so the water doesn’t burble and when he’s finished he doesn’t flush. He shuts the light on his way out. “Huh?” he hears her say to no one in particular, apparently roused by the resurgent dark. Absolutely not his problem. He goes back into his bedroom, closes the door gently behind himself, so quietly it doesn’t even click. He locks it. He strips down, conscious of the explosive thumping of his heart in his chest, and beyond that the muffled music from the madhouse next door. The gravity of what he’s done is beginning to set in. Okay, come on now. Just a practical joke. It’s late, and you’ve got a lot to do tomorrow. He tries to think happy thoughts, like how after him and Anchor are set up in Seattle, probably after the protests, he’ll want to start a band. Anchor doesn’t know how to play anything, but he’s pretty sure she’d be willing to learn. Or she could always just sing. So much possibility. He takes a few deep breaths, does a couple of neck rolls, then climbs gingerly into the bed and eases up next to his girl. She stirs but doesn’t wake as he presses his front against her back and wraps his arms around her, his good hand on her bony hip, and the fingers of that hand splayed out across the warm flat of her belly. For the second time today Anchor is somebody’s little spoon.

The great enemy of strong faith is not faithlessness, no. It is weak faith.

But what is faith? We don’t ask this enough — ever, really. What does it mean to have it? To keep it? What are its limits and what — if anything — lies beyond? From Parker they know that faith is rooted in what Chesterton called the scandal, and Kierkegaard the absurd. They prefer the latter because it makes for easier conflation with the injunction to “ be realistic: demand the impossible! ” as Peter Marshall has it in the frontispiece to his History of Anarchism —also quoted in Parker — besides which, Chesterton is such a petit bourgeois prig.

Okay, let’s try it. The paradox of faith is the wellspring of its bounty. The unbridgeable gap is a blessing; from it is born the promise of flight. If we could prove these things we believe, that is, if we were able to know them rather than believe them, then our belief would be extraneous, vestigial, our faith pointless. It is not soul competency that makes our hair grow, or pours the eye-brightening whiskey into the river of our thrumming blood. It is not the priesthood of all believers that raises the sun up in the sky of a Friday morning; neither the muezzin nor the minyan that sends it back down at night.