Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,44
and violet the white arbor trellis with its bending boughs to come. Occasional explosions like fireworks and the sky.
Coworker Franklin was talking about the robbery on the night of the shootings. How he got to the restaurant around 3 AM, and had seen a man by the shed, probably someone from the neighborhood who knew we didn’t lock the side gate. And how the man was wearing a red bandana, and had something in his hand, probably a gun. And how he had called… My breath started to slow and I couldn’t feel my hands because it seemed like the whole world was dipped in nitrogen and the slightest shift could shatter it…with all the gang stuff going on, and given the police a description of the man.
My eyes moved over to Mitch, who was standing between me and the Rat Graveyard. Don’t move, I thought, stay. Stay right there. But Mitch moved and behind her I saw the beaten sunflowers and the trampled graves. The Buzz Lightyear and the red bandana tying him to the twig cross were gone.
“Truthfully,” said Coworker Franklin, “I don’t expect much will come of it…”—but of course something had—“and as you know, I’m not big on consequences…”—like what happens when you tie a toy to a twig cross? Or call in a description of a black man with a red bandana and a gun?
Or when you walk down an empty street drunk and wash your hair with stolen wine? Or tie a Buzz Lightyear to a cross? I didn’t say it. I didn’t say: The red bandana you found hidden in the shed belonged to the boy who was shot.
Or, the Buzz Lightyear you tied to the cross got him killed. Or, the reason Coworker Franklin called in the description of the boy in the first place was because the restaurant had been looted and he thought the boy was involved, but it was only we. I looked at the faces around me, the sweating doughnuts and the Cuervo, and I thought, these are charnel grounds and even though I hate it, I am as entangled as everyone else and part of how one thing led to another. Pollen, butterfly wings, I tried but you can’t see it. You can’t round off the small numbers because there are universes inside them. I thought I could stay above it, walk cleanly through, but you can’t. Even my bomb threats, which I’d thought of as commentary, weren’t. They were also universes. I had been lying to myself.
After the meeting I called Jimmy a couple of times but she didn’t answer so I went over to her apartment. She was annoyed but let me in.
“So I heard there was a police riot.”
“Sorry about all that stuff at Grace’s. I didn’t know what it would look like from the outside.”
“You guys do that every year?”
“No. That was the last. I mean for me.”
Another little spider crack because like the two rivers with the third hidden underneath, the bandana and the boy, I saw now that there wasn’t a single move I could make that had no effect. There is a freedom in that too.
I stepped closer and put my hand against her ear. I still couldn’t hear out of mine. She relaxed. More cracks lacing the ice. We talked about Honduras and what we could do there. She grew animated but I could feel it all coming apart in my hands. Let’s get out of here, I said. Let’s take a cab across the river and go somewhere where there aren’t funerals and koi ponds, and she agreed. We went salsa dancing at a Latino bar near the old international district. We told them we were sisters so that they’d let us dance together. Then, when we were leaving, I kissed her in front of all of them outside on the street with the light of the Salvation Army sign falling down all around us.
On the way home I wondered how many chances we get. According to Devadatta the reason things are so fucked up is that so many people are human for the first time. I put my key in the door and turned it as quietly as I could. That’s the problem with me. I want to believe in a world of endless second chances but I can’t.
20 The Head of John the Baptist
I have two recurring nightmares. In one, I am out of control on a river filled with Nikes, bulk tampons in twenty-pound bags