Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

“Don’t be angry you weren’t chosen for the Dream,” David says. “I wasn’t either. He has other plans for us.” Liz wheels around, eyes wild, gritted teeth flashing in the light.

“Parker was at least an original,” she says, and oh boy now here comes the soliloquy. She had promised herself she wouldn’t do this, but really who gives a shit anymore? “He was crazy, but at least he was real. And he would have been disgusted by you. By both of you. By this whole thing. If he was here he wouldn’t stand for it. He’d turn everyone against you, and it would be easy, and then he would turn on them. Because he didn’t care about having followers, or even about being right. He just wanted to do whatever he wanted, and be alone. And if he ever does come back, when he sees this he’ll just leave again. You’re preparing for nothing. You’ll never even know he was here.”

“Get out!” Katy screams at her lover in a shattered-glass growl, a raked-coals roar, and hearing this, something in Liz dislodges. A weight is cut free. This anger of Katy’s — it’s a marvel; this and this alone is the true miracle; the only one. It’s everything she ever wanted and more. To be the focus of her lover’s complete attention, the lightning rod, even if it means being absolute Judas. Deep within the devastated landscape of her heart there blossoms a small bright rose of happiness, the bitter satisfaction born when something precious and long-coveted is finally obtained.

The duffel shouldered, sneakers swinging, she leaves the bedroom. They don’t go after her. There are people hanging out in the living room, duh, and she knows maybe half of them. They eye her, this figure in the hallway, and she stares at the linoleum, unable to meet their collective curious gaze. They heard the screaming, of course, and so as far as they’re concerned she is not leaving of her own volition, but has been exiled, thrown out. She shuffles into the kitchen, meaning to go out the back, and sees David’s knife block lying on the counter on its side. Without thinking, she rights it, and while so doing notices a small oval rust-sore, herpetic, low near the handle of the carving blade.

These knives are like triple stainless steel — how is this even possible?

Put another way: is there anything that Fishgut won’t turn to shit?

She tucks the block up under her arm, like she did on the day she took it from David’s apartment. That bad spot notwithstanding (and who knows, maybe it’s fixable) the knife set will make a great gift for her mother, and hopefully help smooth things over in terms of her showing up, surprise, to move back home.

They mourn the loss of Liz, yes, but not deeply, because they’ve got a more practical problem to deal with and nothing should slow them down. They understand that the Giving of the Book unto them has meant their being charged with a sacred Duty. They wish and are determined to disseminate Parker’s Teachings, and it seems like they ought to do this by publishing an edition of his Book.

How does one do that, exactly?

Katy and David are lying on their bed; Anchor’s kind of half leaning at its foot, at ease but not fully. It’s night. The dim light of candle-saints softens all their faces as usual; between that and a joint they shared earlier, everyone’s looking positively blessed. But hang on — focus. What was it Anchor just said? Could she repeat that please?

“What I said,” Anchor says, “is why don’t you make a website?”

“Why would we want one of those?” Katy asks.

“Because,” Anchor says, “it would just, like, be there. Anyone could get to it, and it’d be free.”

“But getting people to sit plugged in to some machine is everything we don’t want,” David says. “It’s like the opposite of everything Parker stood for.”

“Stands,” Katy says.

“What?”

“Stands. You said ‘stood.’ ”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

“Anyway,” Katy says, “none of us knows how to even do that. Do you?”

“I could probably figure it out,” Anchor says. “I mean, enough people do it, right? And there’s programs you can get to help…” But she knows, just from looking at their faces, that this ship is never going to sail, has in fact sunk in the harbor already. They’re quiet awhile, watching the candles flicker, or whatever. Katy and David reading the tea leaves of Anchor’s body language for any kind of sign.

“Oh fuck, I’ve got it!” Katy says. “We should do it as a zine.”

“But how could we fit the whole journal in a zine?” David says.

“Well,” Katy says, “what if it didn’t have to be, you know, all of it at once? It could be just enough to get people interested — so they wanted to come over and learn more.”

Anchor says she can do the layout, easy, once a manuscript is drawn up. They’re still wary of the whole computer thing — David especially, it seems — but inasmuch as they don’t have to use one themselves, or establish any kind of cybernetic presence, they’re willing to let Anchor make their lives easier. They tell her she’s really doing them a solid. They’re so grateful for her devotion, and this favor, and hell just everything about her, and why doesn’t she do more than just the layout; why doesn’t she help them edit the book? She shared in the Dream, after all, and is in every sense one of them , which they sincerely hope that she knows.

She says that, yes, she knows, and thank you for saying so.

And yet she recuses herself from the culling process, says she doesn’t believe herself qualified to make those kinds of judgments — it’s beyond her and they can’t convince her otherwise. They should just let her know as soon as they’re ready with a manuscript; she can’t wait to get started. And then she says it’s getting late, and they invite her to stay, as they always do, in the bed with them, if she’d care to, or else wherever she likes in the house, and she, as always, says thanks but no thank you; in fact hasn’t spent a night at Fishgut since Thomas left; insists on returning to her dorm room; they never can understand why.

It’s hard to be an editor! They pore over the Book page by page, the two of them, line by line, compare and contrast, trying to figure out — what, exactly? The Book is tangled and scattershot and sprawling. Parker repeats himself, reconsiders, goes back later and makes addenda or scratches things out. It’s a personal journal; deep thoughts share page space with scribbled-down phone numbers, train schedules, shoplifting to-do lists, thumbnail sketches of places traveled and people he met there.

Also, the journal is in large part a record of struggle, his own, with theology, theodicy, the flux and waver of belief. David thinks that this is an essential component of the Book, this proof of unending trial — how salvation is lived moment to moment, and grace is a precarious precipice, from which even the righteous may fall at any moment, and fall further yet for the height at which they once stood. Cf. Liz.

But Katy thinks no, this is no way to generate interest, no way to draw people in, get them pumped up and intrigued. Aroused is a word she also uses. “When Christians want to put something on a billboard,” Katy says, “they don’t choose Matthew 27:46, or 1 Corinthians 13:13. Because those things are too complex for a billboard. So what do they go with?”

“John 3:16,” David says.

“Right,” Katy says. “Why?”

“Because it’s easy,” David says. “And it’s the whole, like, thesis, right there.”

Which for David is exactly the problem. He believes that their extraction from the Book should be at least as difficult as the full work itself. He wants this thing, which they have come to refer to as the Good Zine, to be a kind of stumbling block. A challenge. Will you come and try this? Are you worthy of application? He is a maximalist. He wants to include as much material as possible — however many pages a saddle staple can accommodate, and as much text as each page can take. He wants small fonts and no margins. Here, too, Katy has a very different vision. Economy, essence, invitation. These are her watchwords. She is a zealous condenser and extractor, a cutter-away of contexts, generous only with white space — she wants fewer words, large, bold-faced, the right and best ones (she says) set in the page field like gemstones in a ring. Once people come to us, she assures him, they will have all the time in the world to wrestle with the finer points of Anarchristian — the term is Katy’s own — exegesis and praxis. The goal of the Good Zine is limited and simple. “Asses into seats,” she says.