Justin Taylor: The Gospel of Anarchy

Katy broke their kiss this time and whispered something in Liz’s ear. Liz passed the bottle back to Katy (“Hey, no fair!” shouted someone) but she didn’t drink. Instead she reached her hand down over the side of the chair: toward me. When our fingers touched around the long glass neck of the bottle, a skittering electricity passed between us. I took the bottle from her and turned my body around, so that I now rested my back against the side of the armchair, my head level with the armrests and therefore next to Liz’s own head. A searching hand, Katy’s, stroked Liz’s hair and mine together, like we were parts of the same great lazing creature. When she raked her nails lightly across my scalp, I shut my eyes tight and told myself don’t you dare cry . I couldn’t remember the last time I had been touched at all.

“Come on already!” shouted someone. “It’s a bottle, not a math test.”

My eyes still closed, Katy’s hand still in my — our — hair, I tipped my head and let the warm glass touch my lips. It was bad, bad bourbon and I had never been so glad to be anywhere. I held the bottle out and a hand took it. It went away and eventually came back, then went again and came. Katy’s hand played endlessly back and forth between my hair and Liz’s. It was unending movement, but belied no restlessness or wavering. It was tidal, her touch, possessed by an authority derived straight from nature, or so suggested her flittering fingertips when they brushed gently, and so insisted the full digits when they settled in for a longer moment, twining up a lock of mine, making my skin sing.

Thomas took me on a tour of Fishgut, not that there was much to show. There were three bedrooms — his, Katy’s, and one outfitted with two sets of bunk beds as a guest room or travelers’ rest. They were all scenes from the same low-budget disaster movie. The linoleum in the kitchen was faded past pigmentation, but held on to a kind of hazy hangover memory of having once been green. It was spattered with paint of all possible colors, smears and stripes and streaks on the cabinets, counters, walls, ceiling, even stove. There were also designs and graffiti — people’s names and handprints. Dates. On the face of the fridge, a mud-colored all-seeing eye shot laserlike rainbows out from its pupil in the cardinal directions.

“Housewarming party,” Thomas said.

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Six, seven months, I guess.”

“Where were you before that?”

“It’s a whole other story. I’ll tell you sometime.”

We passed through the kitchen door and out into the yard. He pulled tobacco and papers from a pouch of Drum.

“You want one?” he asked.

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“That’s a good boy. Your mother’s proud.”

There were no chairs out back, not even a porch really, just a small slab of concrete on which we stood beneath a bug light while we stared at the dark and talked.

“So how did the house get its name?” I asked.

Thomas pointed across the yard, to a pup tent in the far back corner, a small thing visible mostly in silhouette against the high wooden fence. A red Catholic prayer candle in a tall round glass was half sunk in the dirt before it, lit. I hadn’t noticed this.

“Parker,” Thomas said, his voice rich with disgust, like the name was bad milk in his mouth. “It’s got some kick to it at least. Fishgut. It’d be a sweet name for a band, too — except there’s already Fishbone, I guess. Still.”

“A guy lives out there?” I asked. Thomas laughed nastily, I didn’t think at me.

“Used to, kind of. Now just his tent does. Nobody knows where he is.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.”

“Well anyway, what does the name mean?”

“Stupid shit. Don’t get me started. Honestly.”

“And these are your friends?”

“Best friends in the world,” he said. He went down to one knee and gingerly crushed out his half-smoked cigarette on the concrete slab. He stuck the butt behind his ear for later — waste not want not, I guessed, but Jesus Christ. We went back inside to rejoin the party.

What time was it? Later, late. Whatever. Who knew. The bottle was empty. Some happy punks went to smash it in the street. I didn’t follow them, and the shatter did not carry over the stereo, which still blared, though nobody was paying it much attention anymore. The strike team returned and reported success. They began to hunt around for what else to smash. Others began to drift off to wherever they’d come from, out the front door or toward the various bedrooms, or else stretched themselves out on the couches if they were staying but didn’t have beds or bedmates here.

Owl and Selah, the hippies, retreated to the van in the yard, which I had learned they lived in. I didn’t know where Thomas was. A girl unfurled a sleeping bag from a beat-up backpack, laid it out on the hard linoleum floor, climbed in, and then rolled over so she faced the wall.

Katy stood before her own bedroom door, peering back at Liz and me, and held the position a moment, making sure we saw how she was seeing us see her. Then she took a single step into the room and winked out of our vision. In her place was the long crack between her door and the jamb, dimly shining.

“She doesn’t do good nights?” I said to Liz, trying to not sound hurt, but failing and knowing I’d failed.

“You mean you’re not coming?” Liz said, sounding surprised if not precisely hurt herself, at which point I only for the first time understood that the last several hours had been one long invitation.

I reached my hand out before I could doubt myself, and Liz took it. A loose grip now, not like before by the dumpster. She led me, flicking the light switch as we passed, so that darkness swept over the couches behind us, as if it were the fact of our exit that had driven the light from the room. The dim issue from Katy’s bedroom seemed enormous now. Liz didn’t knock, for as I was about to learn, and probably should have already figured out, it was her bedroom as well. Katy was sitting on the bed, holding a long match over the glassy O-mouth of a Catholic prayer candle, another one like the one I’d seen outside, in front of the weird tent. This one was decorated with a large sticker depicting a blue-robed, bald-pated man with a shiny, flowing beard. He had sad, knowing gray-green eyes and held a gilt-edged volume against his breast. White letters identified him as St. Jude, Patron of Desperate Cases.

Katy touched the burning head to the wick, then pulled the long match back from the glass and blew it out even as the saint’s eyes brightened, backlit now. She rose from the bed and placed the candle in a corner of her window. Through the oak-leaf ceiling over the yard we could glimpse the sky, black still but stiffening with prelight. Katy took all this in, then turned away from it and toward her bed, where we curled, waiting for her to come meet us. A week went by.

Katy wakes up early, but not earlier than Liz, who is somehow always one step ahead, bright-eyed and raring, ready to proffer her body, time, attention, whatever Katy wants that Liz can give. It’s a lot to handle, sometimes, to be responsible for that big a share of somebody’s happiness — of the hours in another person’s day. One great thing about David, he’s never a step ahead of anyone. Just look at him there in the bed between them, his head turned to one side (hers), mouth hung open like a tent flap, dead to the world. His beard’s coming in, a dark stubble that begins high up on his cheeks and trails off down his neck, just barely linking up with his chest hair, wisps of which reach nearly to his Adam’s apple. Splayed out like he is, covers pushed down below his waist — the heat’s already barely sufferable — you can see how his hair courses like a lazy river down his body: deltas into a vague eagle like a crude tattoo on his breast, then thins down his stomach, gathering again around his belly button in a whorl. From the belly button down to the nest of his pubic hair the pale skin is almost hairless, save for one wiry line down the middle, like a rope ladder flung between ships.