Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

Here they were, surrounded with plain white pixels, pure radiance, mystic roses at the center of my heaven, burning bushes (I mean no pun). I stared until I saw clear through them and into their constitutive brightness. I aimed back at my own chest, and cleaned up with tissues that saturated and wept apart. As my frequency increased, so did my stamina, and my issuance came in watery, thin ropes. There were paper fibers spun up in the hair on my stomach.

I discovered the slide show option in a pull-down menu in the image browser. Click. It was synesthetic, full frontal sex light the color of the feeling of office air, white recirculation, bodies made of light, ever present for endless consumption yet never themselves consumed — skin that looked sweat-slick but was in fact cool to the touch, or would have been if it had been in fact touchable, made of something other than computer glass and unconsummated light. Skin smooth as keyboard keys, dry and noiseless as the planetlike spinning of the trackball in its cradle.

What had been born of boredom and curiosity, then mutated into enthusiasm and honest perversion, then refined itself further into a kind of connoisseurship, now seemed to have transcended all these things and become something else, which delivered neither pleasure nor its opposite. Its only truly novel aspect, at this point, was the sheer monstrosity of its breadth — the perpetual beckon of more and more. Even to call it compulsion would be to make it seem more dire, and thus significant, than it actually was. I had a habit. That was all.

Rock star head shots plucked from the pages of glossy magazines. They taped these to their walls. Or rappers. Inspirational posters in cheap frames. A lot of people don’t shut their TV off. They get caught up in the excitement and, forgotten, ignored, on it blares. Or maybe it’s muted. How could the image tell you? Or maybe they’ve got the volume turned way up so whoever is in the next room can’t hear. These are just for me, he told her, just for us . She gave him that look. He thought she wasn’t going to, but then she tugged at her blouse hem, tentative, testing, a toe dipped in water, and he knew she would. She did. Girls who squinch their eyes shut. Girls who stare back up at you, staring you down. “You.” Shaved or unshorn, or better still — shaving. Caught in the act. Process and method. So drunk she can’t stand. Here’s the two of us in Cabo. Okay, now here’s one of just her. Took this while she was sleeping. Shoulda thought twice, you cheating bitch. You slut. I love it when you call me that. Girls in showers, one arm across the breasts and the other waving away the camera, but smiling — exasperated, tolerant. Are you fucking kidding me, Anthony? Baby, it’s cool, just be cool.

Stuffed animals, stray socks and shoes, and books — math textbooks, Moby-Dick , Harry Potter, Stephen King, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to fill in the blank. Bibles. Bedside clutter on low tables. Human detritus — mundane and fascinating. The way things accreted and gathered. Loose change, heaped or stacked neatly. Watches, matches, rings.

The insider knowledge, routine his-and-hers smells. Everything you’ve seen so many times it’s basically invisible, or else it’s the one thing that you always notice but never mention. The way he holds me. Her neck mole. The humdrum fuck. A little bored, a little mad at each other, but it’s Friday night and… The calendar with tomorrow’s date circled — your doctor’s appointment, our concert tickets. A guitar on a stand against the far wall by the window. You never play anymore. Find me the time and I’ll play. A computer monitor, ancient, size of a microwave, eating up all available space on a beat-up black Formica corner desk. Discarded clothes, torn frenzied from the body — or is that laundry left undone? A framed photograph on the nightstand: child with beagle. I’m tired. But do you still want to? I mean, you do want to, right? Because we don’t have to. I want to do what you want to do. Digital alarm clocks. Record collections. Warn me before you come.

This was my life. Length and breadth, scope and weft. Reflex action. An object in motion. I had let January’s official end of an already-dead-in-the-water relationship become an excuse for letting my grades go to hell, which resulted in my dropping the entire spring semester. Now it was the dead of summer. I had to re-enroll, sign up for classes, do the whole back-on-track bit. Problem was, the mere thought of stepping back onto campus, much less into the office of some admissions counselor, with her cat poster and candy dish, induced apoplexy. There would be forms to fill out. I would have to choose classes — be more interested in one thing than some other. I’d have to be interested, period. I couldn’t visualize that. All that I could generate, in fact, was TV static, accompanied by the rough white noise of the sea, as if a pair of conch shells were strapped to my head. It was enough to send me right back to my computer, for another protracted round of chafing succor. I was twenty-one years old.

I had a one-bedroom apartment, five-eighths of a degree in the liberal arts and exactly one core conviction, which was that I would not move back to South Florida, where an unchanged childhood bedroom waited like an armed bear trap. And so I went to work.

I was on the phone with an old woman. She had started out eager to tell me about her buying habits, but now she was getting flustered. This was my fault, in a sense. The royal me. It was the annual state consumer statistics survey and we had gotten onto a long sequence about driving habits and preferences in gasoline. Did she know the difference between super and regular? Did she care? About how much driving did she do in a given week? Month? There were literally dozens of questions in this line. It was a long survey that few people agreed to take.

What kind of person, cold-called at six-fifteen in the evening on a Wednesday, agrees to sit for a forty-five-minute interrogation? We had established her widowhood earlier. I’d even bent the rules and indulged her in brief agreement on Earl’s having been a good man. Some three years gone now, she told me. She was in a small town in the west-central part of the state. She was horse country people: honest and openhearted and a little dumb, spending her golden years not in repose on some porch as she and Earl had dreamed, but instead in a modest trailer — that is, modest by the already modest standards of trailer homes. Fixed income in a truck-stop town, her eyesight failing. People and things were blobs to her, shapes without edges in a landscape of colorful mud. She had her neighbors, of course, and some people from the church. The kids come to visit when they can.

There was a flaw in the programming of the survey. That much was clear. They were designed like choose-your-own-adventure stories, and the system should have offered me an option to tell it that she did not drive, period. Frequently, somewhat frequently, occasionally, or seldom. Those were my choices, or rather, hers — (A) through (D). Do you want me to repeat the choices I have listed?

“I keep saying,” she said. There was a quaver in her voice. “I don’t drive no more. I can’t .” She was going to start crying. How many times would I make her tell me she was going blind?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Look, let’s just skip these.” I gave her (D)s for everything. Isn’t never a kind of seldom?

When the survey finally wrapped up, nearly twenty minutes later, she wished me all the best of luck with my studies, because, she said, she could hear in my voice that I was a smart young man who worked hard. It was my turn to choke a little, but I thanked her for having hung in with me to the end and wished her all the very best. She told me to call her back with new surveys anytime, and even though the odds of her getting called by our company again were decent, the odds of me being selected by the system to be the caller were next to zero. And even if such a thing were possible it was almost certainly against some protocol or other. I told her I would make a note and be sure to. We thanked each other again and then I let her go.