Zazen

  —I am leaving. I don’t want to watch anymore. I can’t stop the bus from running off the cliff and the sea is already filled with lights. I don’t know why I can’t be one. I’m going to try. If I stay here I won’t be anything the Bellyfish could lean on, I’ll just be something they have to prop up—

  “How was the benefit?” asked Credence.

  “The benefit?”

  “At the Glass House.”

  Again, the girl with the lavender hair.

  “Fine.”

  Annette stepped through the doorway. “Are you and Jimmy going to drive up to the anniversary in her truck?”

  I couldn’t tell them, not in that moment.

  “In the truck.”

  “Lesbians in a truck!” laughed Annette, “Grace will love it,” and, grinning like a dingo, she walked down the hallway, swaying and humming with the Bellyfish darting and snapping inside her.

  Credence handed me a chisel.

  “See if you can get the stuff off by the lock without gouging the wood.”

  I would tell them tomorrow. I would say: I am a pool of light, then flicker like sun on a swimming pool. I would say: It has already erupted. And then, dancing through the braided shadows on the basin, wait for the foliage to land in the pool water and make galleons and cutters out of oak leaves and elm. Then they would have to understand.

  The next day a second bomb went off at an auto shop down the street from Rise Up Singing. Everyone was running. But you can’t outrun it. I know. I’ve tried. You just come to the same place again and again. The return is so fast now for me that from the outside it looks like stillness. Like nothing is happening at all. But beyond that stillness is an unmappable topography, an endless stream of content.

  10 The Rat Queen

  I was at work when the bomb at the auto shop went off. At the time, everybody was focused on a different drama. That morning Mirror had come in, thrown her bag down on the counter, and said, “They’ve totally sold the restaurant.”

  The cook, Mitch, came out of the kitchen. She was wearing a t-shirt of a pregnant woman carrying an assault rifle and her face was red from working the grill.

  “No way. Franklin would never sell without giving us chance to buy it.”

  “I am so fucking serious it’s not even funny,” said Mirror. “It’s a done deal. Everyone in the neighborhood already knows. That’s what that stupid work meeting’s about.”

  Mitch shook her head. “It’s a rumor.”

  “Actually,” said Mr. Tofu Scramble with his mouth full of potatoes, “I heard about it last week. A real shame. Well,” he swallowed, “I guess things have to change. One less thing to miss about this country, right? Hey Mitch, tell Franklin thanks for getting the spelt. Can I get another order when you have a chance?”

  Mitch’s cheeks ticked. A pancake started to smoke on the grill.

  “I just don’t think he would.”

  “The new owners have been in here twice,” said Mirror. “Kelly waited on them. They’re from California. They’re not even vegetarian.”

  Mitch stared at the toast crumbs on Mr. Tofu Scramble’s plate. Then she went to the walk-in, pulled out a bottle of wine, and stomped back into the kitchen. Seconds later a two-pound whisk hit the corkboard with the minimum wage standards.

  Word of the sale spread and took over the New Land Trust bombing as the favored topic. Everyone had an opinion:

  Ed, Logic’s Only Son: You’re all going to get fired.

  Mr. Tofu Scramble: Change often leads to transformation. Who would have thought I’d end up on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world?

  Ed, Logic’s Only Son: None of you are getting welfare either.

  Mr. Tofu Scramble: You know the Balinese women are so graceful because they balance things on their heads.

  It turned out Coworker Franklin had already put most of the kitchen equipment and all the decorative art pieces up on eBay. Half the neighborhood had been bidding on the Indonesian garden lattices for a week. Every time the outrage died out and Mitch calmed down, someone new walked through the door.

  “Did Franklin really sell the restaurant?”

  A loud crash in the kitchen as a heavy colander hit a row of hanging pots.

  “Hey, can I see the Javanese batik screens? They look small on the computer.”

  Glasses smashing against the metal rim of a trashcan.

  “You know, I always thought this place would make a nice tapas bar.”

  Mitch pours a bottle of wine into a pan and a huge fireball engulfs the stove.

  As the shift progressed Mitch got more and more liberal with the portions until she was slicing a whole salmon or vegan chocolate cake into quarters and dropping them randomly on tables as gifts. Mirror made everyone free mimosas. By 4 PM we were all drunk and Mirror was raiding the lost and found box for clothes. She pocketed a couple of cell phones and put on a sparkly, red mesh top. Mitch asked her to get some things out of the shed but she refused, “I’m sick of burying rats.” She walked over to a table of her friends and sat down. They were talking about the upcoming sex party and Mirror started to draw plans, “We’ll put the stage over here, the DJ over there and upstairs…” But Mitch needed rice to plug the drains and cups for the free wine so I said I’d get them.

  The shed has a padlock but no one ever uses it. That’s how the animals get in. I opened the doors and stepped back to give them a chance. Nothing happened so I went in. Franklin orders rice from an Indonesian catalog and they come in these forty-pound canvas bags with red script and third eyes all over them. I grabbed one for Mitch. Everything had been eaten into. Egg noodles, salt crackers and buckwheat pancake mix. I found a bag of marshmallows cut open lengthwise. I pulled down a sack of paper cups. Behind it was a folded red bandana.

  Carrying the trash to the dumpster, I passed the Rat Graveyard. Most of the twig crosses had been stepped on and what was left leaned sharply and dipped towards ground. Someone tied the Buzz Lightyear doll to a new cross, the cross of the pregnant rat. Under Buzz Lightyear’s dangling feet were blue marbles and around the mound a circle of pennies. I stopped and sat on the half-tilled soil. The sun was low and across Buzz Lightyear’s helmet tawny light fell. Water soaked into my underwear. On the grave itself someone had pressed beads into the dirt. Hundreds of them sprinkled, set and flashing like pyrite in a creek. It must be a Rat Queen, I thought, what else? A Rat Queen, the natural symbol of New Honduras. Basta! I saw flags. Basta! On a field of red and yellow she towered over the computer-generated superhero, her belly full with the earth and at her feet pennies, marbles and beads like a thousand broken necklaces thrown in her path. Basta! I took the red bandana I found in the shed and tied it around Buzz Lightyear’s plastic feet. Then I opened the front of his space helmet and left him there to die. A final act before the Black Ocean. I brought the bag of rice and the cups back to the kitchen.

  Seconds later a large blast shook the building.

  “What the fuck was that?” shouted Mitch.

  Another blast came and I heard breaking glass. Everyone got down. The street filled with black smoke and people were running out of shops. We ran too. The guy who owned the vintage clothing store next to us was dialing frantically on his cell phone and there was a dog freaking out and barking at everyone.

  The explosions came from the auto shop on the corner. It was on fire. We ran towards the end of the block where people were gathering. The blast had come from a truck in the center of the auto shop lot. By the time we got there it was nothing but a charred skeleton. A huge, bright tongue of flame had swallowed it. Reaching up into the sky it bellowed and snapped.

  “That garage is going to go,” said a woman next to us.

  She worked at the salon across the street and still had hair clips in her hand. The orange light from the blaze reflected faintly on her cheeks and sweat cut fine pathways in her foundation.

  “It’s going to hit the kiosk first,” said another man. “See how the wind’s blowing?”
r />   He was right. The paint on the side of the kiosk was bubbling and the blaze mirrored in the windows splashed like lava. A large gust of wind came up and blew it all back the other way and the sky opened before us. Stars pricked the approaching night, clear and cloudless over our heads. Then it all went black and the fire roared to new life devouring the kiosk. It exploded and pieces of the flaming roof rained down like comets. They landed on cars and sidewalks. A piece landed right in front of me, burning and vivid. I could hear the tar cracking.

  “That auto shop was the last black-owned business on the street,” said the man.

  Everyone watched like they had somehow done it. More pieces fell hissing to the ground. People moved back as the great blaze shot sparks and embers into the sky. I saw the Rat Queen rise behind the gutted kiosk, her fur glistening with beads, and wearing a crown of broken marbles. Before me Old Honduras burned and New Honduras rose. Where once an old auto shop stood, now was raised a Popsicle stick palace, barely visible but there all the same. From one angle it was a bistro, from another a high-end knit shop. When I stood back it was a multi-use facility with a tattoo parlor above and a naturopathic clinic below. The sirens came at last but they were far too late.

  11 Blackout Stars

  A policeman with a wide nose and an oily forehead grabbed my arm.

  “No one is leaving this block.

  The woman who ran the salon started crying because she had to pick-up her kids and there was no one else to do it and I don’t know if the woman was tired or just scared but she went into hysterics, sat down on the curb, and wailed. Black tears poured down her face as her mascara ran. Thistles of kohl, briery eyes, she looked up and I saw the face of a saint martyred at the boundary of old and new. A patroness of New Honduras who would someday perform miracles for women stuck at work who could not pick up their kids from daycare in time.

  “I can’t just stay here,” she sobbed.

  “Nobody is leaving,” said the cop and walked away.

  The Rat Queen shook her head in a shower of pennies and beads and scratched at the cinders of Old Honduras looking for her children too.

  Police set up a barricade at one end of the street and another several blocks down in the other direction. Mirror hauled the Saint with the Black Tears back to the restaurant. I followed a few minutes later, walking through gusts of smoke. Chips of flaming auto shop whizzed by my head, most of them no bigger than a quarter. There was still some pink on the horizon but mostly it was night now. Above us stars were hidden in the haze.

  Rise Up Singing was packed. The whole block was standing around eating vegan doughnuts waiting for a chance at the landline. Gangs, they said. But not everyone agreed. Insurance, some thought. One guy said developers but nobody believed him because that would just be too obvious. Mitch was giving away more food. Mirror was taking advantage of the situation to drive turnout for the sex party. “I’m gonna need a warehouse,” she said opening another bottle of champagne.

  Jimmy called. I don’t know how she got through. She said it was getting live coverage. We could see the news trucks but the police told us they would give the interviews. Jimmy said barricades were going up all over the north part of town. Time of the Crickets. I asked her to call Annette and let her know I was okay.

  The cops weren’t telling us anything and after a few more hours people had all kinds of dumb theories—bio-warfare testing site, elaborate casting call (we’re all going to be in a movie!), or my favorite, foreign invasion. Like some kind of maquiladora Kindertransport had gone rogue and taken a beachhead. But around 2 AM the cops let us go. It happened all of a sudden. There was a radio communication and they packed their bullhorns and their sawhorses, took down the barricades and left. When we walked outside the auto shop was a cinder and everything had a film of greasy smoke on it. People wandered off drunk and stunned.

  “Just leave the doors unlocked,” said Mitch, “it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Mirror’s friend Jolie showed up in a Ford Econoline and they started packing up the dry goods and what was left of the food in the walk-in. Mitch gave me some white wine and an untouched vegan pineapple-lemon cake, both of which I put in my bike basket.

  Devadatta was asleep in a booth with her mouth open. She was wearing a t-shirt that said “Reincarnation—You Asked For It.” Her scarf was on the ground and the tips of her long red hair lay like wet paintbrushes in a puddle of beer.

  “Someone’s got to take her home,” said Mirror and woke her up.

  But she was too drunk to stand on her own.

  “I’ll take her,” I said.

  Mirror helped me get Devadatta on her feet and we left.

  I rolled my bike down the sidewalk with one hand on the handlebars and the other on Devadatta. I had to sidestep debris that was still hot and smoking faintly. Every now and then a little piece would pop and crack open near us and we’d jump. After a few blocks she began to get more lucid.

  “You know, Devadatta isn’t my real name.”

  We passed under the emergency lamp near the post office and she stopped, swaying slightly.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, I picked it out when I was in high school,” she stopped to pant then got it together again, “My real name is Galaxy.”

  “Galaxy?”

  “Yeah. I wanted something less obvious. Devadatta was a disciple of Buddha.”

  “The one who slandered him and took over his monastery?”

  “That’s him,” she said, and threw up on the leg of a mailbox, “He wasn’t a very good disciple.”

  She tilted her face up and closed her eyes. The moon was thin and her skin was green. I saw vines and coins growing up around her. She smiled and started to walk again.

  “So you just liked the sound of it?”

  “No. I like Devadatta. Can you imagine fighting Buddha?”

  She dug in her bag and pulled out something wrapped in a napkin. It was a chocolate doughnut.

  “I think it was a punk rock thing,” she said, taking a big bite, “I used to shave my head. Total straight-edge.”

  A minute later she threw up in a storm drain and sat down. I sat on the curb beside her and opened one of the bottles of white wine. Devadatta rocked back and forth on her haunches with her head hanging down.

  “Malasana. Deep squat,” she said, “Raina says it’s good for the root chakra. I think it’s helping.”

  “Have you ever washed your hair with wine?”

  “Beer. And eggs.”

  “I’m going to try it,” I said.

  I hung my head over the gutter and poured wine on my head. I twisted my hair around my hands and wrung the excess out. I shook my head. Drops of Chateau Montaigut went everywhere.

  “Oh my god. I’m gonna throw up,” she said.

  It was the smell of the wine, of course, but I had to get the dust of Old Honduras off of me otherwise I would never make it. I’d go extinct at the boundary like the rats and the blackberries and the blacks.

  “Wait,” she put her hand up, “I’m okay.”

  “Yeah,” I said wiping wine out of my eyes, “me too.”

  Above us the night changed. Clouds from the south came in low. Devadatta pulled her sweater out of the bike basket and put it back on.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird how the cops left like that?”

  “It certainly wasn’t a gang thing.”

  Devadatta looked down the street. The Roseway Bridge was about a mile off. Police cars were parked there. Something was going on. Spinning blue and red lights reflected off the girders and dark water. I felt like I could almost see it on her skin. Her eyes cleared and, for a second, I saw the diamonds in them just before a murky film shaded her irises.

  She turned back to me. “Is Mercury retrograde?”

  A hole in the clouds appeared right behind her and there were the stars bright as anything.

  “Yes,” I said, and why not?

  “Thought so. Feels like it.”


  Devadatta stood. “I’ll be fine the rest of the way on my own. I’d give you a hug but you smell like wine and I might barf.”

  It was 3 AM. The emergency lamps were behind us. Ahead was the next barricade. Devadatta started walking down the street singing something about blackout angels but I couldn’t tell what it was because she was facing the other way. I turned back to the kaleidoscope of police lights down by the bridge.

  Once, I asked Raina if she thought she could sit still on fire.

  “I mean if you were trained to do it,” I said, “like those monks.”

  “Well, I think if I were really convinced that I was done with this lifetime I could. But I think we make our own reality and that’s just not the kind of reality I would make.”

  Yeah, well, I thought, the kind of reality I would make doesn’t have people on fire in it either. Hey Raina! How do you say chardonnay in Sanskrit? I felt like a bullet in a gun. Like whatever was inside me was going to come out, like I had no control over it at all. I thought about the auto shop and the New Land Trust Building and all those people trying to figure out who bombed them. Not why, but who. Who exactly. As if by knowing, they would earn the right to forget about it. When I called the bomb threat into the sports bar near the Asian market, I did it because I wanted them to feel like I did, to cry over nothing and see bodies in the video aisles. It was only fair after their stupid silent wars, their reality shows and fake rock. They deserved some reflection on fear and the nature of impermanence. But it didn’t work. It didn’t work because they weren’t already scared. If I had done it after the New Land Trust they would have been. Timing.

  Walking home it occurred to me that the great thing about a bomb threat is how much it leaves to the imagination. Like your mom saying you’re in trouble but not telling you why, you go over everything it could be in your mind. There were hidden rivers of guilt running underneath. There had to be.

  12 Venus Rodere

  In the morning I took a bus out to Four Points of Heaven Mall. We passed the smoking auto shop on the way. Brown figures wandered through the debris. They bent, turning over one object then another, before throwing them onto a pile in the center of the lot. The garage floor was strewn with flowers. Behold the shrine of the last black-owned business on the street! Scorched framing stuck out of the ground like whalebone and notes weighted with charred brick fragments fluttered in the morning breeze. The bus took a left at the light and it was gone. Beyond New Honduras, the avenues widened and bamboo blinds hung in the windows. Cats ran over welcoming porches. A woman trimmed a fuchsia in a light raincoat.