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