Zazen

  At a kiosk in an ancillary shopping park near Four Points of Heaven I bought nine prepaid cell phones. One for each child the Rat Queen might have had. I named them after the planets. In keeping with the inclusiveness of my new movement, I counted Pluto. I even got shared minutes. The lady at the kiosk called it the Hive Plan. The receipt had little bees all over it.

  “The high school girls just love it,” she said.

  Because they need to coordinate their torture of each other? Or because it has bees?

  “They just think the bees are adorable. And…”

  They need to coordinate their torture of each other.

  “And it comes in all these colors,” she spread cell phones like cards on the counter. “Like lollipops.”

  And condoms.

  “Or sweet tarts.”

  And handguns.

  I paid for it all with cash pulled off my Grand Canyon Visa and spent the rest of the morning looking up FCC cell phone towers online and adding them to my maps. Little colored dots, like lollipops or condoms.

  I got to the box-mall-church by late afternoon and the raffle hadn’t started. The shiny red truck sat on the dais behind the velvet ropes like I’d seen it several days before, the coveted Aries Geo Killrover Conquistador. People gathered by its wheels and girls with clipboards circled the perimeter.

  “Have you applied for a mall-wide Superland™ credit card yet? You’re automatically entered.”

  I signed up the baby rats. Everyone deserves a chance.

  The Piazza filled. I made a list of possible terrorist groups. I decided that it’s only fair that with a personal savior you get a personal destroyer, niche terrorism being the obvious next step in identity politics. Narcissism meets the rest of the world. Hi! Howdy do? The market rallies. Satin-covered bullet cases? First-responder kits with your astrological sign etched on the front plate? I spent an hour in the food court by Mandarin Village watching a teenager serve fake rice and fantasizing about the Blackberry Apocalypse.

  Just after 5 PM the Pastor of the box-mall-church stepped up on a riser next to the truck and took the microphone from the Human Resource Director who was making announcements. He jangled the key to the truck.

  “Now, how come I haven’t seen this many of you in church?”

  Grace and Miro say fatherly admonishment is the sand in the cement of patriarchy.

  The Pastor moved toward the huge glass barrel where the raffle entries tumbled. The crowd quieted. He put his hands down together in prayer and looked up. They burst into laughter.

  I imagined his hand falling on a rat ticket, Venus Rodere. No single mother sobbing on stage about how she could now get to her second job. No honor student with gleaming eyes. No football star. No thankful soldiers whispering the prayers in Spanish.

  She moved toward the tumbling barrel, a collective construction of fear and desire. A sexy black rat with vague family loyalties and an enhanced ability to survive on less? The sleek carrier of change and possible disease? The eldest daughter of the Rat Queen, a tall black woman with violet and copper extensions in a tight bronze miniskirt with a GPS in one hand and a machete in the other

  Venus Rodere

  You redeem others with your strength:

  191292709.24

  The backs of my hands quivered. I could feel the tiny hairs on my cheeks move like cilia.

  It was about to start.

  The Human Resources Director tumbled the barrel one final time and the Pastor reached in and pulled out the ticket. He cleared his throat and held it up.

  A thousand people stopped moving but for the rustling of plastic bags.

  I walked over to a pay phone, dug out a handful of change and called in a bomb threat. It was the easiest call I ever made. I told them I was with a group called Citizens for a Rabid Economy and that we were going to blow up the box-mall-church to stimulate local job growth. I also told them that we believed the creation of a media event would cause the increase in consumer spending necessary to economic expansion. And that they had twenty minutes to get everyone out of the building.

  I hung up and sat down on a bench under some plastic palm trees. The Human Resources Director was making a short speech on the importance of community.

  Two security officers ran past me. Then a voice came over the PA system: “This is an emergency. Please leave any shopping bags you have and move quickly to your nearest exit. This is not a test. Head to the nearest exit immediately. This is an emergency.”

  At first people were more annoyed than scared but after the second and third announcements, they began to rush the doors. I jumped in with the crowd. We were jammed through a side door and ended up out in the south parking lot. A couple of fat crickets with bullhorns ushered us toward a transit island in the center of the lot. People were asking them what was going on but they wouldn’t say anything.

  “I heard it’s a bomb threat,” I said.

  “A bomb threat?” said the man next to me.

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard a cop say. Bomb threat.”

  And it bubbled through conversations, bomb threat, bomb threat, bomb threat, until it pattered out of earshot. Camera crews arrived in trucks and turned on the bright lights. All eyes on the box-mall-church. Police, reporters, shoppers—waiting, hanging on each tick of a second and nothing happened. Not a thing. People got restless. It was perfect. For the second time in an hour I snatched it from them.

  Bomb squads were sent in to sweep the mall. Reporters went live with pictures of Rusty, the bomb-sniffing dog and asked viewers to pray for his safety. I didn’t really think the day could get any better. But it did. Once it became clear that the police weren’t going to let anybody back inside the mall and that it wasn’t going to blow up, people began to leave. They got into their cars, thousands of them, but they couldn’t get out of the parking lot. That took too much cooperation. They gridlocked themselves instantly.

  I was laughing so hard my jaw hurt. Tears streamed down my face and every time I tried to get a handle on myself and calm down, I lost it again. It was better than being fourteen on mushrooms in a Denny’s. At one point I actually had to sit down. Two hours into the fiasco they declared a city emergency and my ribs were so sore from convulsive laughter that I felt like I’d been beaten. I climbed up onto a ridge of new row housing that overlooked the city. Down below fire trucks and emergency vehicles flashed.

  I lay down on my back in the lifeless dirt and stared at the sky. An hour later the first wave of street lamps went out in the valley. Under the new system they have to be off by 9 PM. I watched the neighborhoods go dark. From above with only the emergency lamps and chain stores visible, the grid system is gone and we are nothing but an aggregate of lights. Each gas station, fast food restaurant or all-night office supply store burns like an orange coal in the dark.

  I started to walk. On either side of me were vacant, half-built houses. Their peaked roofs dipped with the angle of the road cut. Everything was wet from light rain but it was more like dew. I wandered through the new streets. I didn’t know what I was doing. I did and I didn’t. If I was really leaving I wanted there to be some kind of record showing exactly which side I was on, even if I was the only one who knew about it. The box-mall-church disappeared as I slipped over the backside of the rise. It had been a remarkable day and I was happy walking in that chilled, acid night.

  13 The Church of Enlightened Capital

  By 10 PM I reached the old Asian business district. It had been shuttered and warehoused by developers. Cracked signs in Vietnamese, Korean and Mandarin hung unlit over vacant storefronts. There were no emergency lamps on the street at all. Light from the few apartments still occupied shone down in squares on the sidewalk. I felt like I was underwater. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a cephalopod swam past.

  The elation was dissipating. Currents of fear were starting to run through me but I couldn’t place the source. No one had been hurt and I didn’t care about their stupid traffic jam. Still, the fear was there, b
ordering on panic, flickering and then gone completely like a memory I could feel but not locate.

  On the corner was a blinking sign with two neon Chinese children bowing to each other over a bowl of noodles. Underneath was some kind of bar. My legs hurt and I wanted to sit for a while. I walked down the wet stairs into the basement.

  The restaurant was empty. I looked around, pink tablecloths, red carpets and video poker. On one side was a bar with a mounted television in the corner. A woman came out of the kitchen and walked up to the register. She set her hand down on the glass counter next to a fat jade Buddha and told me they were closing in half an hour. She was wide and unfriendly and when she brought my tea, she set the pot down so hard it splashed over the table. I watched the tea soak half the zodiac placemat. I read somewhere that the Buddha called all animals to enlightenment but only twelve showed up. The rat was first in line.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Fortune cookies and a rum and coke.”

  She brought my drink and set down a black plastic tray with my bill and a white paper bag of fortune cookies next to it.

  I turned my cell phone on to check the time and it rang immediately. It was Credence. I let it go to voicemail. He was calling about the anniversary. I was sure of it. It was tomorrow and the last thing I wanted to think about. A minute later the phone rang again. When he called the third time I sent him a text: CLIMBING RAT GOLGOTHA (GREAT VIEW). DON’T NEED ANY HELP. SEE YOU LATER, D. and turned the phone off.

  I took the ticket to Tegucigalpa out of my bag and set it on the table. The cream envelope was getting worn and the corners were going, probably because I pulled the ticket out at least four times a day to make sure that nothing had changed—the dates of departure, the flight number, the destination, or my feelings about it. And three out of four was good enough. I held it for a minute then tucked back into the Velcro pocket of my bike messenger bag.

  A few minutes later a man came out of the kitchen and sat at the far end of the bar with his back to me. He turned on the television. They were showing the box-mall-church and I felt that thrill return but only for a second because they cut away from it. Two, black faces appeared on the TV in split-screen. Yellow crime scene tape stretched behind a reporter at the base of the Roseway Bridge. The boys, who were wanted in connection with a robbery, had been shot by police near the Roseway Bridge the night before. A cricket with a face pink as a ham swore one had pulled a gun. It turned out to be some kind of robot or space doll, though. They showed the bridge again. It must have been going on while Devadatta and I sat by the storm drain. Can you cause something just by being near it? I let that thought vanish. The station went to a commercial and the man at the bar shouted something at the screen in Chinese. When they returned it was to a prerecorded show, Newscaster Barbie interviewing the head of the Church of Enlightened Capital, chatting intimately on studio couches. I’d seen him speak before down at Davis. It was pouring rain and the auditorium was packed with students, pressed heart to spine waiting for him to start. Steam rose from the audience.

  “God is a broker!” he yelled. “We are his clients. We each have a role to play in this free market. Because the Lord Jesus gave us free will. We decide our destiny. How will we invest?” he shouted. “Who will we choose to be our broker?”

  A guy next to me with a mohawk and a Celtic cross tattooed on his neck started crying like a little boy. The next week the cafeteria everyone was wearing t-shirts that said, “I’m a client.” It was my first year at Davis. I hadn’t made any friends yet and I didn’t want to talk to anybody at school for months. All that felt like it had happened to someone else.

  The head of the Church of Enlightened Capital looked exactly the same as he had nine years ago. Tan. Rolex crucifix as big as a human hand around his neck. Newscaster Barbie asked him questions on the couch. Numbers ran across the bottom of the screen and I couldn’t tell if it was the Dow rising or the death toll or the temperature. I started thinking maybe I’d gone a little further out on the wire than I’d meant to and that it was time to inch my way back. Only a thin film separates God and commerce or environmentalism and colonialism, a film as thin as a cell wall, but that separation is everything and I could feel it dissolving.

  The box-mall-church came on the TV again. Newscaster Ken’s Black Friend Garth was interviewing the shoppers. Bringing a human face to the people trapped in the SUV line. A woman with red eyes was talking about how she’d gone to the mall to get a Pro-Life Penny Doll for her daughter, the one that comes with a little stack of blank birth certificates, and how she’d spent her yearly bonus on the doll and was going to surprise her daughter but it got lost in the panic.

  I felt that horrible empathy again like a skin fever. I could feel the woman’s grief at disappointing her daughter and her self-hatred at letting go of the shopping bag because she didn’t have any money and it was a hard choice to buy the thing in the first place. And I could feel her daughter’s desire for the doll and her attempts to hide that desire so it wouldn’t make things worse and her overwhelming guilt for having mentioned it in the first place. I could feel it all. It was all suffering, all torque, a seamless garment of misery. Everything started to turn into little dots and I felt myself slipping. But it passed. My head cleared and I could see the wood of the bar in front of me. I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought. But I knew I didn’t mean it about the gun. I know I’d never be able to shoot anyone. I wish I could. I wish I could blow up things for real. Not really, but I do. Then the Roseway Bridge with the crime scene tape came back on and I got up and paid. After all, two black boys from Heritage Avenue getting shot by cops is the kind of thing that happens all the time. If I gave it one second of real attention, I would be lost.

  I walked straight up the hill back to New Honduras where the simple natives were building cornhusk huts and hoping parasols would keep them safe in the catastrophic hurricane. Paradise under the emergency lamps. The box-mall-church, the boys, and the impending anniversary swirled around me. I tried to shut it out but couldn’t.

  Colony of the Elect Boulevard. I reached it at last. Rise Up Singing on my right, galleries and vegan sushi. It’s a riverbed and there are two banks. One is green and the other is brown. The way the current goes the trash all washes to one side. Broken wheels with bent rims gleaming, white cardboard boxes stained with grease and filled with crumbs, thirty-two-ounce Princess of the World drink containers, all strewn upon a single shore. And, on the other, side ghost mothers roll armies of IVF twins down the street. Carefully, wheeling their strollers around the mud and straw bricks of a pyramid that lie scattered and dissolving in the lapping water.

  I passed by the storm drain where Devadatta had thrown up the night before and remembered the police lights down by the bridge. The shootings must have happened around then, right when we were talking about Mercury going retrograde. I thought about the dead boys and I thought about the box-mall-church. I put the image of the woman crying in the parking lot, the one with the daughter who lost the doll at Superland™, I put her face next to that of the two dead boys. They looked the same to me. The more I tried to see them as separate, the more they blended into a single face. The image came to me like a sending: a light-skinned black man with large red freckles and a bad perm crying for his lost doll while he bled to death from a gunshot wound. Behind him was the faint outline of a woman in a bronze miniskirt, a machete glinted in her hand, and over them all the Rat Queen stood, sniffing the air. Who cares? In three weeks I would be gone. This was all someone else’s karma, the five zillion people before me who fucked everything up. It had nothing to do with me.

  I was two blocks away from Jimmy’s and there was one more thing I
had to do that night. It’s not fair to let someone you care about walk into all that history unprepared. When I got to her place the door of her apartment building was propped open with a brick. I heard katydids in the bushes as the door swung closed and I stepped into the black hallway. The carpet smelled like smoke. I crept up the creaking stairs to her apartment. There was no light under her door but that didn’t mean anything. Jimmy doesn’t like to use electricity. She says all this is just a war for resources and she doesn’t want any part of it. I listened. It was silent. Amber light from the lamps came through the window at the other end of the hall. I pulled a sheet of paper out of my notebook.

  Dear Jimmy:

  My mom and dad have always believed that you should face hard things head on. That’s how they taught the three of us, Credence, Cady and me. In case you didn’t know, Cady and Credence were twins. She was the one holding my mother’s other hand that day in Redbird Square when the people were chanting and I was scared and wrapped myself in Mom’s wool coat. (Have I ever told you that when you smile you remind me of her?) Credence was on Dad’s shoulders.

  On the anniversary of her death, Mom decorates the house with pictures of Cady and drawings she made. She makes Cady’s favorite food, Frito pie, and we tell stories about how she was. Do you still want to come?