Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

The girl’s eyes went to slits, as if she were zeroing in on a target, and Thomas seemed to change in an instant as well. His joke had stung her, clearly, but somehow her flash of anger, instead of putting him on the defensive, had stoked his own. He glared back at her, and something ugly and silent passed between them, like a shape in fog. The silence spooled out. We were all just standing there. As quickly as I’d been discovered, I felt forgotten, and thought I might say good-bye and get back to walking. Or maybe saying hello in the first place had been my mistake, and it was better now to simply go without another word. But then the girl conceded the staring contest and turned away from Thomas to me. Her lips eased out of their grimace, an act that seemed to require substantial effort. But she did it, and took a few steps forward, and stuck a filthy hand out toward me, and said, “Hi, I’m Liz. You guys know each other?”

“We grew up together,” Thomas said, before I could say anything. I nodded as I closed the distance between us. I took her hand in mine. She had a firm grip, and for a moment squeezed very tightly, as if daring me to challenge her strength. I didn’t. We pumped, the grime on her hand squishing between our palms. “K through twelve,” Thomas continued. “The whole bit.” He was trying to put some distance between the three of us and whatever had just happened or nearly happened between the two of them.

“It’s true,” I said. “We’re from the same neighborhood, down south near Miami. Our families even caravanned up here together on freshman drop-off day.”

“Hah, yeah — I’d forgotten about that. The long shining line of station wagons. That was us.”

“So why haven’t we met him before?” Liz asked Thomas.

“We just—”

“Lost touch,” I offered.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” Thomas said. “I dropped out, a disgrace to all good and diligent bourgeoisie everywhere, and moved in with you assholes”—he gestured at Liz—“but David stuck to the plan like he was supposed to. Didn’t you? So you must be graduating this year. Gonna move back to Miami, flip the old law/medicine coin? Or did that decision already get made? You could have done some summer classes a few times, I guess, finished a year early. Why, you could be thinking about the bar right now, couldn’t you?”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m on a br— I dropped out.”

“No shit,” he said, seeming genuinely impressed. “For what? You go to India and find yourself or something?”

“I’ve just been hanging around. Working. Except I quit my job, so.” I shrugged. This thing about the job was as much news to me as it was to Thomas, but as soon as I heard myself say it I knew it was true. Another part of my life gone, chunks of glacier broken off into sea ice.

“Jesus, man,” Thomas said. The invective drew a sharp look from Liz, which Thomas ignored. “No wonder you’re wandering the streets all night. You look like shit, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious. Hey, are you hungry?” He reached into the bag and rummaged, then came out with a foil-wrapped parcel, which he handed to Liz. She took it without comment. He dug in again. “Classic fucking American waste,” he said. “But lucky us.”

Liz was unwrapping the parcel. “See,” she said, “Gyro Plus packs every order to go, because that’s their like procedure or whatever, even though most people stay and eat there. So the pita sandwiches get double-wrapped in wax paper and then in tin foil, then they get paper-bagged. It’s amazing, actually. It’s like they think this shit’s getting shipped across state lines or something. But what happens is people eat at the restaurant, maybe half or three quarters of their meal, and then what do they do with the leftover? Take it home? Go give it to a bum on the street? No. They wrap it back up and chuck it in the trash. So after the employees take the trash out, you find the bags that are from the dining room and bingo — feast.” She smiled self-consciously, looked down at the ground then up at me, and then away again. “Not that you asked.”

“It looks wet in there,” I said. “Why is it wet?”

“Sodas,” Thomas said. “Or water. Burst packets of ketchup, tahini spills. Condensation. All that organic matter in a sealed bag. It gets humid. But that’s why this place is so great. With the way they do the packaging — I mean obviously it’s fucking wasteful like I said and disgusting and they shouldn’t, but they do, and all it means for us is that everything’s wrapped, clean and fresh.”

“But it’s surrounded by all that filth. I mean, it’s a garbage bag.”

“But it’s protected from all that.”

“But still, the idea.”

“Fuck ideas. It’s food.”

“Half-eaten food. There’s bite marks. What about germs? It was licked .”

Liz cut in. “Some people cut the bitten parts off, but I don’t bother.”

“Me neither,” said Thomas, “and I’ve never gotten sick from it once.”

“Do you even eat the meat ones?”

“If it was a bag that smelled like it baked in the sun all day, I probably wouldn’t,” Liz said. “Your old friend here might”—she pointed a thumb at Thomas—“but he’s a pretty big asshole, as I guess you know.” Thomas was loving this; he nodded and grinned.

“But in this case,” said Thomas, “that’s not an issue, because Gyro Plus is open late on weekends, and this is all the stuff from last shift. It can’t have been out here more than a couple of hours.”

It was charming, I thought, this rhythm they shared, apart from the grossness of what they were actually talking about. The way they finished each other’s thoughts like an old married couple or a pair of middle school girls. But more than charming — it was hypnotic, practiced but not rehearsed, pat but not rote, it drew you in. I could see the broad contours of what was doubtless a thoroughly detailed and painfully earnest if not entirely consistent system of values. They clearly both believed in what they were doing. These were people, I thought, who knew who they were.

“But you still haven’t answered the original question,” said Thomas to me.

“Which was what?” I asked.

“Are you hungry?” said Liz, and held out the food in her hand. It was a falafel pita sandwich with all the fixings. Anyway that’s what it had been. Was that what it still was? Or was it waste now? And if it was waste, did that necessarily mean it couldn’t be rehabilitated — recycled, perhaps — into food again?

I took the thing from Liz and brought it close to my face for a look. There were diced tomatoes, hummus glops, tabbouleh in dry clumps, and the fried balls themselves, with their crunchy brown skins and soft green centers. I had eaten at this place, ordered this very sandwich, countless times. Liz had peeled back the foil with a surgeon’s care. I’d watched her, and now I understood why she’d been so cautious. The pita was bloated, a supersaturated mush. The tahini had soaked through, sponging it. The foil gave the sandwich a coherent shape that it could no longer have maintained on its own, as it might have easily done several hours ago when it had been a hot meal. The thing in my hand was not hot, but neither did it have the thoroughgoing and authoritative chill of leftovers fished from a fridge. It was the temperature of the night itself.

Liz had taken one bite before handing it over. She had started where the long-departed diner left off. I tried to tell which exact bite had been hers, thinking that if I really was going to humor Thomas, I would at least curtail my risks by following close on the heels of his friend rather than some anonymous customer. But what was the difference? Liz was as much a stranger to me as whoever had bought this sandwich in the first place, and she was almost certainly less hygienic than that person. She and Thomas weren’t merely dirty, they were unwashed. Their clothes were stiff. They stank. And I didn’t know them — not her, not him. Not anymore.