Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

There were only a few things we found impossible to forage for or steal: hard liquor, illegal drugs, the rent, and photocopies. At the Bullseye Copy Center on Thirteenth Street they trusted you to keep your own count, and so you could lowball the final figure easily by half, even three quarters, and the cashier wasn’t going to argue; he wasn’t getting paid enough to care. These few facts of life were all that kept us contributing to the American imperium and its blood economy — these plus the modest costs associated with the house itself, electricity for example, but we were working on cracking the power meter. Nothing had availed yet, but that didn’t mean that nothing would.

We kept a General Fund, to which all contributed as they could. There were three main ways to raise money — by stealing things from chain stores and then returning those items to other locations of the same chain, by busking for change in the streets (this was the riskiest, as well as the least effective; nobody’s less generous than college students), or by “donating” blood plasma for cash.

We prayed over the money orders we sent to pay the rent and other bills before we mailed them, and for the spirits of whoever was going that week to The Life You Save — that was the plasma center’s name— Lord and Parker, we lament the sin of this our participation in the system. They were prayers of apology, but not, note, pleas for forgiveness. That would have been madness, naturally, since we knew from the teachings of our own Good Zine that God held us in no soul debt; our devotion to Him was given freely, as His love was to us. We owed Him nothing.

I rode down University Avenue to the strip mall at the corner of Sixth Street. It was a short enough ride but afforded me a clear view the whole time of the Seagle Building, which I would have rather not had. Whenever I saw that shape, that white blot on the blue horizon, my mind flashed to thoughts of my old life, my dead life, pre-life, life of living death — computer warmth, rented furniture, flawless carpet, office light. It took everything I had to shut these images out. Purity of heart is to will one thing, I thought.

What was the one thing that I willed?

Everything.

The one thing I wanted was it all.

The strip mall was run-down, six or seven storefronts, mostly vacant, with a parking lot that could have held a hundred cars and hardly ever held ten. The asphalt was sun-savaged and weed-choked, white-gray and fissured, jagged chunks of stone upturned or missing. I dismounted the bike and walked it.

The mall boasted exactly two operational businesses. The first was a locally owned office supply store that struggled, but so far had held on, against Office Depot, Walmart, and all the rest. The second business was The Life You Save.

I was led to a small white cubicle in a big white room and told to sit down on a strip of butcher paper, in a chair like at the dentist. They had my information in the file already — this was not my first visit — and so certain preliminaries were dispensed with. We skipped straight to the questions about developments in my personal life. Were there any new additions since the last visit to my track record of sexual partners, intravenous drug use, or tattoos? The still-tender skin on my chest tingled and buzzed as I lied to the attendant — over the right breast, exactly opposite my heart — and as the sensation increased in intensity I became certain that Parker’s Mark was actually lit up on my body, my sacred heart aflame and shining through the thin fabric of my plain black tee shirt, announcing my true faith to the world.

This idea was so powerful that I actually glanced — quickly, furtively, worried they’d notice — down at my chest. I was only slightly disappointed to see that there was no light there. But at least I was able to put the weird notion to rest and finish giving the attendant the answers she wanted, that we both needed (“no, nothing new to report”) in order to get her to recline the chair, hook me up to the boxy white machine.

The attendant was a middle-aged black woman with her mind on something else. She wore pale pink scrubs, a nurse uniform, though she wasn’t a nurse. She did the first arm all right but couldn’t find the vein on my other arm. I’d thought that after the tattoo, one prick ought to be a breeze for me, but it turned out that I really just didn’t like needles, or pain, period. The third time she stuck me I let a little startled whimper escape, and that was the time she finally nailed the target, as if my crying out had been an essential step in the process. She flipped a switch and the machine buzzed awake. She messed with knobs, set levels, then said she’d be back to check on me in about an hour. I shut my eyes against the fluorescent battery above, the miserable office-white wash, tried to slink into the deep and original soul-self, as my blood slunk out of my body and into the white machine that no longer buzzed but now, working, clunked and hummed. I called up into my mind the image of Parker’s Book — not the Good Zine, now, but the original, the Mead — and saw its cover open and its pages fan, and recited lines to myself from memory and meditated upon their true meanings’ flowering forth.

Let our lives be our politics and not our politics our lives.

This was just a warm-up, really. The line was clear, direct, and applicable presently. My drained blood was spun apart in a centrifuge. The plasma was separated out and collected — yellow, transparent, gelid — in an IV bag that hung from a pole that jutted up from the machine. When the not-nurse returned she would collect the bag and take it for flash-freezing, and in that paused form it would enter the global capitalist economy, sold and resold on private markets by specialty brokers who kept their identities concealed, until finally it ended up in some research lab, or a Japanese hospital, or who the hell knew. The blood was pumped back into my body through my other arm. What they gave back was depleted, a nearly waterless slurry of cells. For letting them do this they would give me forty dollars. I was a hypocrite today, pimped out to them, but this small compromise of my values was part of the larger work of preserving them the rest of the time, and so in a certain sense no compromise at all, and here seemed to be the crux of it, the heart of the paradox, paradox as the thumping heart of the living prospect — thumping like my own heart thumped, as the white machine sucked like an undertow and my red life darkened the clear thin tubes.

He stood at the foot of my chair and was smiling at me. He was taller than I was, but I wasn’t sure by how much. Half a foot, perhaps. It was hard to tell, and also seemed, sometimes, to change. He wore cleanish blue jeans gone to shreds at the ankles and a plain black tee shirt like mine. He was barefoot. At his neck he wore a small, tasteful silver cross on a black cord — not quite a choker, but close. I could not describe his face, though I saw it perfectly clearly.

“All this,” I said, and gestured with my head at my splayed, cathetered arms, “is for your glory.”

“I know,” he said. “You’re doing really good.”

“We pray and wait, Parker. We pray so hard.”

“Keep it up,” he said. “Desire is a strange attractor. But you know that already. Now listen to what I’m about to tell you.”

“Yes, Parker.”

“This machine infuses your blood with something called citrate, which keeps it from clotting inside the lines. It does this by binding to calcium, so when you finish here you should find a tall glass of milk, or an ice cream cone. If you can’t steal any, take a few bucks out of the General Fund.”

“Are you sure? What if somebody asks me about it?” He had admonished me not to tell the others about our conversations. These visions were personal, and private, he’d said — a secret, and when I asked him why, he would say only that the reason for the secret was a secret, too.