Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,26

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,