Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,12

says your parents are pretty fringe. Were they like total hippies? ”

“No. My parents blew up hippies.”

“For fucking real?” she threw the rest of the tofu into the trash. “Did they really blow up hippies?”

“No. But they would have if they thought it was necessary for the revolution.”

She thought about it for a second.

“Wow. That’s intense. What are they like now?”

“Pretty much the same.”

“That’s cool,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron, “I’d blow up a hippy if I had to too.”

Grace and Miro. The serrated edge of an ongoing revolution cutting its way through a thicket of injustice. Going out to their place once a year for the anniversary was the one thing asked of us. None of us ever said no, I’m not going. Which is what I told Credence that morning, which is why, without asking me, he called Jimmy and invited her to come. Being a good organizer is about manipulation after all. By the time Jimmy called me, Credence already had her committed to bring the vegan pineapple-lemon cake.

“Oh, Grace will love it,” he told her.

Grace hates veganism. She calls it an elitist enclave for white people to lie to themselves about their role in the cycle of consumption. But that didn’t matter. At the end of the day, Jimmy had taken the time off work, bought a book for Grace and Miro on permaculture, and wrapped it in re-plantable wildflower paper.

When I found out what Credence did, I slammed the door even though no one else was home. Way to drive turnout, Credence, you get a prize. What should it be? A papier-mâché head of John the Baptist? A tour map to the Rat Graveyard?

My cell phone buzzed and I didn’t answer.

I stared at the white flags pinned on my wall where I’d been tracking a wave of immolations along the coast of France. I adjusted a pin. The flags bothered Credence, but not like talk of the box-mall-church. A few months ago I got lost in an industrial field behind there. I was trying to map the social events and boundaries that had turned our architectural vocabulary into drive-thru Christianity and free checking. More than that, I was trying to prove there is an end to it, but there isn’t. It’s endless. I had hoped to make an Aerial Map of the Carnage but it was beyond me. That night a bomb woke me up. Credence said it wasn’t possible. That it was across the ocean and wasn’t even ours. But everything’s ours. The outside world is nothing anymore, just a franchise of nations.

I promised Credence I would never go to the box-mall-church again.

6 Aerial Map of the Carnage

On the bus out to the box-mall-church I counted rings of urban growth. Clouds burned off and new streets ticked by on my right, Car Parts Lane, Value Town Outlet Parkway, Pay Day Loan Road, Bank of Nations Plaza and Paul of Damascus Court. On my left was the long and windowless side of the box-mall-church. When it was built, a narrow road still ran between the mall and the church. But traffic bottlenecked so they built new roads and turned the old one into a covered pedestrian walkway connecting the buildings.

I was in school when the box-mall-church got finished. Which is part of why I worked on the Wal-Mart campaign. But Wal-Mart had already broken ground. Credence’s strategy was to organize around traffic impact and slow down the permit process. Meanwhile, we were supposed to educate the community (70,000 ex-loggers watch as Credence and Della go door-to-door to force discussion of worker dignity and the price of neo-liberalism out of a traffic light). I had just defended my dissertation and my plans were shaky. I had been told to avoid anything stressful, to volunteer somewhere, get a dog. Credence decided my getting involved in a cause would be better. He thought Wal-Mart would be perfect but I didn’t find the decimation of local economies all that relaxing. I tried to see the beauty in the flash of consciousness that passes over people’s faces right before the total absence of light, but somehow I couldn’t.

The bus pulled up to the first transit island by the service door of the box-mall-church. Russian and Vietnamese swing shift workers filled the aisles. Everyone else was staying for the round trip. Some had bus passes pinned to their shirts, wet brains and chatty paranoiacs talking about the gold standard. In the back row some high-functioning retarded teenagers were